Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (24 page)

In 1272, Llywelyn had paid Rhodri a large
sum of money to relinquish his inheritance in Wales, an amount
which by all accounts Rhodri had gladly taken. Dafydd had always
meant to meet this uncle, and had even invited him to his
coronation last December. Rhodri hadn’t come, and Dafydd had, in a
way, respected him for it. When Rhodri said that he didn’t want to
involve himself in politics, he’d meant it, even if it meant not
taking advantage of his blood relationship to the new king of
England and, effectively, forgoing the new king’s favor.

That he would come out of the woodwork now,
however, and bring fighting men with him, defied all
expectation.

Bevyn bowed. “You understand our reluctance
to admit you to Windsor.”

“
Y Ddraig Goch ddyry gychwyn
.”

Lili laughed in surprise at Rhodri’s words,
spoken loudly in fluent Welsh: ‘The Red Dragon will show the way’.
The phrase had been cropping up here and there over the past few
years in reference to Dafydd himself. Lili wouldn’t have expected
Rhodri to even know Welsh, much less declare his loyalty so
starkly.

“If you will admit me, I will leave my men
to fight alongside yours. I will be your hostage.”

Bevyn glanced up at Carew, who nodded his
agreement, though with narrowed eyes as he observed the former
Welsh prince.

“I should greet him,” Lili said.

By the time she reached the bottom step,
Rhodri’s men had joined Bevyn’s, more than doubling the number
defending the gate, and Bevyn had brought Rhodri inside Windsor.
Rhodri bowed as Bevyn gestured to Lili. “Our queen, my lord.”

“You fight, my lady?” Rhodri indicated her
bow.

“We all must do our part,” Lili said.

Rhodri bowed again. “I will stand with you
on the battlement.”

Lili led him up to the wall-walk, accepting
Carew’s offered hand that steadied her at the top. He glowered past
her to Rhodri. “Why have you come?”

Rhodri waved a hand in a dismissive gesture.
“I was raised by my mother to hate my brother, Llywelyn, but hate
isn’t in my blood for anyone but that bastard, William de
Valence.”

Carew blinked.

“How is that?” Lili said. Rhodri’s frankness
was disarming.

“My brother, Dafydd, and the late King
Edward were brothers in all but name. When Edward’s father brought
Valence to England, over time he displaced Dafydd in Edward’s
affections. I could have abided that fine, since their circle of
trust never included me. But Valence went out of his way to
persecute me at every turn.” Rhodri leaned closer, tapping the
spectacles that rested on his nose. “I am no fighter. Never have
been. I was a great disappointment to my family.”

Lili could see how that might have been.
She’d never met Senana, Llywelyn’s mother, but by all accounts she
had been fiery and opinionated. She’d ruled her family like a
general, all but Llywelyn, who’d made his own way and refused to
come to heel.

Carew was still looking daggers at Rhodri.
“When you didn’t come to the king’s coronation—”

“That was my failure,” Rhodri said. “The
hate in me for Llywelyn is long gone, but the distrust remains. He
bought me off, you know.”

Lili and Carew both nodded.

“It was in my mind that if I put myself in
the king’s hands, I would find myself clapped in irons in the Tower
of London.”

“What changed your mind?” Lili said.

“We’re not in London, are we?” Rhodri
actually laughed. “But that’s not it. The king has ruled with a
fair hand since he took the throne, far more than any king in my
experience in any land, past or present. I am neither a fool nor
blind. It was time we mended this family. He tried, and I scorned
his offer of peace. This is mine.” He gestured beyond the
battlement to his men.

“How far behind you were Valence’s men?”
Carew said.

“Not far. A half mile, no more.” Rhodri
rubbed his hands together in overt glee at his expectation of
Valence’s ultimate defeat.

And then men’s voices roared into the
darkness on the other side of the Thames River. Valence had finally
come.

September, 2017

David

S
eeing Cassie at
the door and then Callum come through it with a gun was possibly
the best moment of David’s life. That was saying something, since
he’d led a mostly charmed existence, and he’d had plenty of great
moments. Among them were the day Lili agreed to marry him, the day
his son was born, the morning his mother returned to the Middle
Ages, and the day his father had told him that he was his father.
At those times, however, David hadn’t felt his life to be in
danger. Today, from the scarlet fever, to his up-close-and-personal
acquaintance with a stretcher, to his apparent abduction by a
kindly-eyed American in a run-down apartment on the outskirts of
Cardiff, David thought he’d give the day’s events a slight
edge.

David had tried to let Cassie know that he
appreciated her rescue of him, but it seemed that his entire body
had been covered with lead weights. With the little strength he
possessed, he reached over with his right hand and tugged on the
lead to the IV.

“Hey!” Cassie grabbed his wrist before he
could pull the needle out of his vein. “It’s okay. I turned it
off.”

“Oh.” David closed his eyes, exhausted by
that small effort, but glad to know that whatever poison they’d
been giving him wasn’t continuing to drip into his system. Before
the ambulance had come and he’d been taken out of MI-5, he’d been
feeling sick but functional. Since they’d strapped him to the
stretcher and all hell had broken loose, he’d been unable to rise
or he would have unhooked himself sooner.

“You’re going to be okay,” Cassie said.

“You’re sure of that?” David said.

She gave him a quick smile. “Now I am.”

David closed his eyes, listening to the
rumble of the engine and the sudden onslaught of rain on the roof
of the car. Both were incredibly comforting, making him feel safe.
He also liked that night had fallen. Hiding was easier in the dark.
“Where are we going?” he said.

“While we have a mystery to solve and
treachery within MI-5, my first priority is your safety, my lord.
I’d love to take you to Chepstow, but I’m worried about getting
that far without my colleagues intercepting us. An all-points
bulletin must be out by now on this SUV, even if Jones will try to
protect us as long as he can,” Callum said. “Do you know if any
castles around here have a moat?”

David coughed a laugh, feeling more upbeat
by the minute, just to be in motion and with his friends. “Our
world shifting occurs when my life is in danger. I’m not sure that
jumping tamely into a moat is going to cut it.”

“I knew it couldn’t be that easy.” Callum
turned his head so his voice would project to Cassie and David from
the front seat. “Did your abductors tell you anything about
themselves?”

“No. My sense is that they weren’t MI-5,
even though they were working with MI-5 agents,” David said.

“Whoever they are, they have infiltrated the
Security Service to the extent that they not only could evade
detection as we did leaving MI-5, but entering it too,” Callum
said. “Before we rescued you, Director Cooke claimed not to know
where you were. Every ambulance has a tracking device built into
it. Even if the men who abducted you turned it off, it can be
turned on again remotely. The Security Service couldn’t.”

“Maybe David’s abductors disabled it,”
Cassie said.

“Then the engine isn’t supposed to start,”
Callum said.

“Maybe it wasn’t a real ambulance,” Cassie
said.

Callum was silent for a moment. “I should
have thought of that.”

David felt he should have thought of that
too, if his brain hadn’t been currently made of mush. “What
happened to Natasha? Are you saying that she’s one of them?”

Callum sighed. “I don’t know. We have too
many unanswered questions, my lord, not the least of which is why
everybody seems to be lying to me, even those people I thought were
my friends.”

“Welcome to my world,” David said.

“Yes … well … I’m not saying that your life
hasn’t been in danger before from all those conniving barons back
at home, but what happened today is outside of my experience,”
Callum said.

“Before you came to the Middle Ages, you
were in charge of the Office,” Cassie said. “Now you’re on the
outside looking in, and it looks different.”

David thought Callum might take that as an
insult, but instead he laughed. “Are you implying that I’m naïve,
cariad?
”

Cassie looked startled. “No-no-I didn’t mean
that; what I meant to say is that navigating all the politics and
the lies and the shenanigans was second nature to you when you
worked for MI-5. You saw the political maneuvering in Scotland a
few months ago for what it was too. But this … this is different,
and maybe what is so confusing is that we are dealing with another
organization in addition to MI-5.”

“Natasha is an agent,” Callum said, “and I
don’t understand her at all.”

“What if that’s because she’s working for
this other organization, one with no rules, one which would abduct
David and give him drugs to question him—” Cassie broke off,
swallowing hard. “You didn’t hear Anders—” She poked David in the
shoulder, “—that’s the guy who was helping us back at the
apartment. He told me that the man who rented the apartment had a
badge.”

“What kind of badge?” Callum said.

“He didn’t get a good look,” Cassie said,
“but Anderes thought he was ‘one of you’, meaning MI-5.”

“He could have intended Anders to see his
badge and think exactly what he did think. That way, he wouldn’t
ask questions or tell the apartment owner,” Callum said.

“I suppose,” Cassie said.

“I suggest it because, to my eyes, this is
too haphazard to be government sanctioned,” Callum said.

“But what if Anders is right at least a
little?” Cassie said. “What if the guy was working for an American
spy agency? There are enough of them these days that it could be
any of a dozen. And Jones did say that the Americans wanted
in.”

“In?” David felt like he was walking into
the middle of a conversation he’d never had but was expected to
keep up with anyway.

While Callum drove steadily north, ducking
around corners and pulling over to the side of the road every few
hundred yards to make sure they weren’t being followed, Cassie gave
David a quick summary of what she and Callum had been doing and
what they’d discovered since they were separated. When she
finished, he related what had happened on his end, which felt like
very little indeed compared to what they’d been doing.

“Let me get this straight,” Cassie said.
“You really do have scarlet fever, but you made it seem like you
were sicker than you were to get them to take you to a hospital.
They gave you a huge shot of antibiotics—”

“—it was a big one. Hurt like nobody’s
business.” David knew he was interrupting, but he couldn’t seem to
control either his brain or his mouth, which kept firing off at
random.

“I’m really glad they did that,” Callum
said, “even if it hurt.”

“How would you know how to treat scarlet
fever?” David said. “It isn’t common in the modern world any
more.”

“All agents know about contagious diseases,”
Callum said. “Besides, if I didn’t know from my work, we were given
a lecture on them when I was in Afghanistan, where scarlet fever
and many other infections like it are still common. The cure is one
shot. You should be on the mend.”

“I hope so,” David said. “I feel like
crap.”

“You have strep throat, too. I had it once,
and I remember it.” Cassie, very kindly, didn’t smack either of
them for interrupting her, but now that they’d covered his illness,
she picked up the thread of what she’d been saying. “To continue,
on the way to the hospital, your ambulance is hijacked by rogue
agents in MI-5 or a third party. Either way, the culprits had maybe
half an hour to implement this plan.”

“Half an hour, tops,” David said.

“Thank God for that,” Callum said. “It’s why
we were able to rescue you so easily.”

“That was easy?” Cassie said.

David liked listening to his friends’
banter. When Callum had first arrived in the Middle Ages, David had
seen him as stiff and sober, which wasn’t his true personality at
all. In retrospect, it would have been hard for Callum to have been
anything but awkward and uncomfortable, given that he’d been thrown
into the deep end of the proverbial pool, what with the various
murders, weddings, and coronations going on at the time and the
fact that he didn’t speak any language that anyone but a handful of
people understood. Callum had also been suffering from PTSD, which
had initially been made worse by suddenly finding himself in 1288
Britain.

“Suppose the man—the American—really is CIA
or NSA or even Homeland Security,” Callum said. “Suppose he
convinced Natasha to work with him. Just because we arrived in the
twenty-first century today doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been
planning how to get his hands on David, or whoever came here next,
for months.”

“Point taken.” David rubbed both eyes with
the heels of his hands. Callum’s obvious concern was causing his
own heart to beat faster. “Isn’t that what you said MI-5 had done,
Callum? That they’ve been working on how to deal with one of us
ever since Mom and Dad returned home with you?”

“Yes,” Callum said.

“I like the Americans for your abduction,
though,” Cassie said.

“You’ve watched too many movies,” David
said. “Governments, especially the American one, are rarely shown
in a positive light.”

“True. But that doesn’t mean the CIA isn’t
involved,” Cassie said.

“Why would Natasha betray her country to the
CIA?” Callum said. “What could they possibly offer her?”