Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance (4 page)

He was a large man in his
late thirties, thin but muscled, nearly a foot taller than I. He
wore a cream-colored shirt with a dark blue jacket, brown pants,
and brown leather boots. He had a long nose and black hair, close
in color to Anna’s.
Anna!
Fear rose in me again and twisted to see if she
was on the bed.

“
She’s
asleep by the fire,” the man said, reading my mind. He followed
this statement by more unintelligible words, except for, “You say,
‘Meg’, but you mean,
Marged
?”

I nodded. Marged was my
formal name, though I never used it. Now more afraid for Anna than
afraid of him, I swung my legs to the floor and ran to where he
pointed. Anna was indeed asleep in a cradle set against the far
wall, with large rockers on the bottom to keep a child
asleep.

Someone had changed her
clothes too. She wore a white nightgown that was a match to mine
and was covered by a brown woolen blanket that was incredibly soft
to the touch. Though my arms ached to hold her, I was afraid to
pick her up in case I needed two hands to fend off the man, and was
loathe to wake her needlessly. Instead, I stroked the hair away
from her face.

I sat back on my heels,
still watching her. As I settled there, my surroundings seeped into
my consciousness more clearly: the tapestries on the walls; the
handmade chair and table between the bed and the fire; the clothes
we wore. All forced me to face the no longer ignorable
questions:
Where am I? What is this
place?

“
Who are
you?” I asked again in English, and at the man’s look of
puzzlement, repeated his words back to him.
“
Beth ydy'ch enw chi
?”

“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, Tywysog o Cymry,” he
said.

Both hands flew to my mouth.
Llywelyn ap
Gruffydd, Prince of Wales
, he’d said.

Every Welsh child ever born had been told
stories of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last Prince of Wales, a man
who’d died on a cold, snowy day in history, lured away from his
companions by the treacherous English. Why was he telling me he was
a thirteenth century Prince of Wales? I glanced around the room
again. Had he constructed a thirteenth century house to go with his
fantasies? Why had he brought Anna and me here?

“You can’t be.” I dropped my hands to my lap
as reason reasserted itself in my brain.

“
Englisch?
” His face suddenly
reddened. He took a step towards me but I hurried to forestall him,
leaning forward with one hand on the floor and the other held out
to stop him.

“No! No!” I said, then switched to Welsh at
his fierce expression.
“Na! Na!
Os gwelwch yn
dda!” Please, no!

Llywelyn stopped and I took in a shaky
breath, the fear of before filling me more than ever. I knew enough
of violent men to see it in him. My heart raced, but he studied me,
not raising his hand or making any more threatening gestures, and
gradually it slowed. I glanced at Anna, unsure if I should pick her
up to keep her safe, or if it would just draw his attention to her
and put us both at risk.

I dropped my hand, eased back onto my heels,
and let out a steadying breath. Llywelyn took his chair, both of us
more composed. My plea had diffused whatever emotion had been about
to explode in the room, and for the first time I was glad I’d had
Trev to deal with all those years. At times, I’d been able to say
the right thing to calm him down, and weeks where I’d managed to
tiptoe around him without upsetting him.

Unfortunately, there’d also been those days
when Trev hadn’t listened whether or not I’d held silent or begged
him to stop, allowing his own inner demons to overcome him without
regard to me. Now, with Llywelyn settled, I wanted to ask him more
about where I was, but didn’t know how to begin, and was afraid to
set him off again. In a way, the fact that he was pretending to be
a centuries dead Welsh prince didn’t even matter. He could think he
was a purple hippopotamus for all I cared. I just wanted to get out
of the room in one piece.

Llywelyn, perhaps trying to be helpful,
tried again. “
Français
?”

Relief flooded through me. “
Oui!”
If
he refused to speak English and I didn’t know enough Welsh, at
least we could communicate in some fashion. It struck me that his
fantasy was remarkably consistent, in that the historical Llywelyn
would also have spoken French since it was the primary language of
the English court in the thirteenth century, as well as the French
one.

Llywelyn smiled too. “You may not remember,”
he said, now in strangely accented but intelligible (to me) French,
“but your chariot ran aground in the marsh below the castle.
Moments after I retrieved you from the wreckage, it sank and
disappeared.”

“Marsh? Castle?” I said. A befuddled fog
rose again to drive away my moment of clarity. “I was driving my
car to buy ice cream . . .” I stopped at the look Llywelyn wore on
his face—a look that said, ‘
your what to buy what?’

“My vehicle,” I amended, hoping that the
word existed in medieval French.

Llywelyn stood abruptly. “I won’t question
you more tonight. You must be hungry.” He strode to the door,
opened it, poked his head out, and waved one hand. Immediately, a
man hurried into the doorway and saluted.

“
Mau Rhi?”
the man said.
My
lord?

Llywelyn spoke words I couldn’t understand,
but I was only listening with half an ear anyway because this time
I was staring at the man who’d just appeared. He wore mail armor,
the little links catching the light with every shift of his body.
Over that, a white tunic adorned by three red lions decorated his
chest. He wore no helmet, and like Llywelyn, was clean shaven. He’d
clearly bought into—or was humoring—Llywelyn’s delusions.

I crouched next to Anna’s bed, uncertain
what to do. It didn’t look like the door would get me very far, not
with a guard outside it. I checked the room for windows. It had
two, both covered with wooden shutters, though a light flashed
every now and then through the chinks between the wood and the
frame. In watching for it, I missed the rest of the men’s
conversation. Llywelyn shut the door. He returned to his chair, but
not before gesturing to me to sit again on the bed.

“You must be tired,” he said, back to
French. “You can eat and it will make you feel better.”

I couldn’t bear to just obey him. Yet, I
looked at my baby Anna, still sleeping, and didn’t dare disobey.
She lay quiet and desperately beautiful, a hostage to my good
behavior. Not knowing what else to do, I stood and walked past him
to the bed.

I sat on its edge, more awkward than ever.
Neither of us spoke. I smoothed my nightgown over my thighs. Even
as I shivered, my palms sweated. I reached behind me to tug at one
of the blankets, wanting more warmth. Llywelyn leaned forward to
pull the blanket over my shoulders, before settling back in his
chair with a nod.

“I’ll stoke the fire again before we sleep,”
he said.

A sickening lump formed in my stomach and it
wasn’t because I was hungry. A rushing in my ears threatened to
overwhelm me and all I could think was
oh my God; oh my God; oh
my God.
My worst fears were abruptly out in the open. I could
only gape at Llywelyn without trying to contradict him, as if my
mind had gotten hung up in overdrive and was revving with the
clutch out and nowhere to go. He seemed so utterly unconcerned,
sitting as he was with one ankle resting on the opposite knee, his
hands folded across his chest. What was I going to do?

The soldier from the hallway returned with
food and drink. I stared at him blindly while Llywelyn indicated
that he should set the tray on the table beside the bed. Llywelyn
moved the candle to the mantelpiece above the fire to give him
room.

When the man left, Llywelyn gestured to the
food. “It isn’t much, but should tide us over until morning.”

I nodded, stone-faced, the lump in my throat
preventing me from speaking. Llywelyn poured two glasses of wine
from the carafe and handed one to me before taking the second for
himself. I didn’t want to drink it, not only because I was afraid
to take anything from him, but because I normally didn’t drink wine
at all. It had never seemed like a good idea with Trev
around—either because it would tempt him or because I didn’t dare
lose control over myself. I also wouldn’t be twenty-one until
April.

I took the cup but simply sat on the bed
with it in my hand. Llywelyn raised his eyebrows at me then lifted
the cup as if in a toast and took a sip. “There’s no poison in it,
if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

Under his curious gaze, I didn’t dare refuse
it any longer, even as I cursed myself for being so passive. I took
a sip. It tasted bitter on my tongue—far more than the cheap, sweet
wine Mom usually drank. I set the cup on the table and Llywelyn
handed me a hunk of cheese and bread he’d cut with his belt knife.
I drank and ate while Llywelyn watched. He seemed so
believable
in his stillness. He took the moment when my
mouth was full of food to begin asking the questions he’d said he
wouldn’t earlier.

“Who’s Anna’s father?”

I took a swig of wine and swallowed hard.
“He’s dead,” I said, glad that in this at least I could tell the
truth.

Llywelyn nodded, accepting my words at face
value. “And your father?”

“He’s dead too,” I said.

Llywelyn made a ‘tsk’ noise through his
teeth. “I was asking their names.” I didn’t respond and he began
work on cutting up a small apple. “My man included the apple only
after I told him that you possessed all your teeth.”

His words were so incongruous to the fear
I’d been feeling, I choked on the next sip and barely stopped
myself from spewing the wine across the floor. I coughed and then
found hysterical laughter bubbling up in my throat. I could barely
see him through streaming eyes as I fought it back. His mouth
quirked as he started to smile too, though I didn’t think he knew
he’d made a joke at first—it probably hadn’t been a joke to him.
Then he laughed outright.

I took his half-second of inattention to
lunge for the knife.

I rammed my shoulder into his arm and
overbalanced him, getting my hand on his knife as he released it in
surprise. I had intended to take the knife from him and hold him
off with it, but instead, he spun with me, grabbing my arm as he
went down and pulling me off balance too. I fell sideways, stunning
myself by landing hard on my left hip and then clonking my head on
the floor, my legs tangled up in my long nightgown. Llywelyn
recovered more quickly than I and threw himself on top of me,
pinioning each of my wrists to the floor with his big hands, the
knife skittering away from me into a corner of the room.

He loomed over me, his nose only inches from
mine and the full weight of his body resting on my torso, holding
me down. “Who sent you?” he hissed into my face. “What devil’s
bargain did you make?”

I stared up at him, my vision blurring from
the pain in my head as the ache from before roared back and
darkened my vision around the edges. I knew what was going to
happen next because it had happened once with Trev. Only once, and
then I’d taken Anna and left.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” I said, my voice
little more than a whisper. “I just want to go home. My mother will
be worried about me. I wasn’t going to use the knife. I wouldn’t
even know how.”

Llywelyn studied me, the urgency in his eyes
lessening, though he didn’t loosen his grip on me at all. Tears
welled in my eyes and trickled down the side of my face to get lost
in my hair, much of which had come loose from its braid. Though his
eyes never left mine, he eased away, got to his feet, and retrieved
the knife. He straightened his chair and sat. When his weight came
off me, I rolled onto my side, curling my knees up to my chest and
pressing my face into the cool of the floor.

Llywelyn sighed. “Did you think I would
force you?”

“Yes.”

I lifted my head to look into his face. He
rubbed his eyes with his fingers and then rested his elbows on his
knees and put his chin in his hands. “I’m too old for this,” he
said.

Then he stood suddenly and took one stride
toward me. I almost managed to hold in a shriek before he crouched
beside me, got one arm under my neck and the other under my knees,
and hoisted me in his arms. He brought me over to the bed and
dropped me, unceremoniously, onto the spot I’d been before.

“I’ve never taken a woman against her will
and I don’t intend to start with you.” He grunted as he
straightened the pillow under my head. Then he grabbed a blanket
from the foot of the bed and threw it over me. I curled up,
cradling my head in my hands. I’d been so sure he would hurt me and
that I wouldn’t be able to stop him. I was having a hard time
understanding he was leaving me unharmed.

“Where’s your mother?” Llywelyn demanded,
his feet spread wide, hands on his hips.

“R-r-r-radnor,” I said.

Llywelyn’s eyes narrowed. “That’s days away.
How did you plan on getting there?”

“I . . .” I couldn’t continue, at a loss for
an answer.

Llywelyn tipped his head to one side and
relaxed his arms, letting them fall loose at his sides. “Where did
you come from, Marged?”

It seemed like he wasn’t asking for the town
I lived in, or how far I’d driven today, but something else
entirely; something to which I had no more answers than he did.

I shook my head. “Nothing is clear to me
right now.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “How’s your
head? That’s twice you’ve cracked it today.”