The Pendragon's Challenge (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 7) (16 page)

“Go, Penda,” Cade said with far more magnanimity than Bedwyr was currently able to muster. “Live in peace for the few months you have left.”

For a heartbeat, Penda’s face showed no expression. Then, before the fire in his eyes could return, Goronwy came out from behind a tree a few paces from Peada, hooked his arm around Peada’s neck, and drew him back against him with a knife to his throat. “I’m tired of your games, Penda. When you and your men have disappeared into the tunnel, I’ll let your son go and not before.”

“Coward!” Penda spat on the ground, though he didn’t move from where he stood.

Goronwy laughed, not at all offended. “Did you miss the part about the Welsh being pragmatists? Besides, I’m not the one who betrayed the High King of the Britons. Cadwaladr’s name will live on forever, while your name will fade into nothingness within days of your demise. You have sealed your fate. Go.”

Bedwyr wasn’t the only one gaping at Goronwy, who never gave speeches. His old friend seemed to glow with a hint of the power Cade himself wielded. And though Goronwy’s words angered Penda, in the end the Mercian king had no choice but to comply. He motioned jerkily with one hand, and his men retreated behind him into the basement that would take them to the tunnel’s entrance.

Cade watched them go, and then gestured Goronwy forward, still with Peada as his prisoner. When they reached him, Cade tipped his head to let Goronwy know that he could release Peada. Goronwy obeyed and stepped away.

Penda was beyond words and simply shook his fist at Cade, but Peada said, “This isn’t over, cousin.”

“It is, Peada. You just don’t know it yet,” Cade said.

The moment the two Mercians disappeared into the basement, Cade turned to his men, “Go! Go! Follow Hywel.”

Hywel whipped off the cloak, tossing it to Cade as he went by him and heading for the woods. As one, the Welsh company followed. Even as Cade bundled the fabric under his arm, he walked backwards after them while at the same time making a hurrying motion with his hand. Rhiann bounded down from the mound, fleet as ever despite her pregnancy. Goronwy waited until she reached where he was standing and then jogged beside her, leaving Bedwyr and Cade to bring up the rear.

They were several dozen strides into the woods, heading south, before Bedwyr spoke. “They will pursue us, don’t you think?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Cade said. “Penda is a gravely disappointed man. I hate to think what bargain he struck with Oswin such that he let him into Chester unchallenged.”

“He was going to lose anyway. To him, it was worth the risk to acquire a Treasure or two. With them, he could have taken it back. Who would there be to stand in his way once you—and all of us—were dead?”

“What I want to know,” Rhiann said breathlessly as she leapt over a fallen branch, “is if Taliesin foresaw this, and if so, why didn’t he say anything?”

“Taliesin wasn’t seeing very clearly when last I saw him,” Goronwy said.

“Speaking of the bard, where is he?” Bedwyr said.

“He didn’t return with Catrin and me. It’s a long story,” Goronwy said.

Then the thunder of horses’ hooves reached them. At first Bedwyr thought it was Penda bringing reinforcements. Then when this proved not to be the case, he assumed it was Taliesin’s doing, which would have been the real answer to his question to Goronwy. But a moment later, as they came out onto a road, he realized he was wrong on all counts. It was Dafydd, riding at the head of a company of men. He had brought their horses and was accompanied by a golden chariot which rolled so smoothly along the road it didn’t even seem to be touching the ground. It was pulled by a black horse and driven by Catrin.

The chariot settled to a stop in front of Goronwy, who casually stepped onto the platform beside Catrin and took the reins from her.

Along with a kiss.

“Apparently, I missed more than one story.” Bedwyr halted near Cade, who threw himself upon one of the horses Dafydd had brought and pulled Rhiann up behind him. He looked up at Cade. “Where is Taliesin, really?”

 “I don’t know exactly,” Cade said. “I do know that our next task is to find him.”

* * * * *

In the quiet of Caer Gwrlie’s hall that evening, Bedwyr lay on his too-soft pallet and gazed up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. They’d left the dish in its stone cupboard just inside the tunnel, rather than sending Bedwyr back in the cloak to retrieve it. Cade had looked at him curiously when Bedwyr had insisted that it was too risky to return to Chester so soon right under Penda’s nose. But because he’d been adamant, Cade had given way.

In the darkness of the hall, Bedwyr raised his hands before his eyes. They were trembling. He had longed for a way for himself and his men to survive the confrontation with Penda, and almost as he’d wished it, Cade had come from nowhere and rescued them. Maybe, if Bedwyr were to ask Taliesin about it, Cade would always have been there to rescue them.

But maybe not.

Was it Fate? Or was it the Hand of God, reaching down and touching him because he’d touched the dish?

He clenched his hands into fists to steady them, understanding for the first time what it might be like to be touched by the
sidhe
. Then he sighed and rolled over, his eyes on the fire crackling in the middle of the hall. He consoled himself with the knowledge that they’d acquired three more Treasures, at least in a manner of speaking, and none of his companions had died. It wasn’t the ending any of them had hoped for, but it was a kind of ending, and one of which Bedwyr thought his grandfather could be proud.

__________________

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Read on for the first chapter of Footsteps in Time, the first book in the
After Cilmeri
series, available at
all Amazon stores
.

Sample: Footsteps in Time

Anna

“
D
o you want me to come with you?”

Anna looked back at her brother. He’d followed her to the door, his coat in his hand.

“Okay.” She tried not to sound relieved. “You can hold the map.”

The clouds were so low they blended into the trees around the house and Anna tipped her head to the sky, feeling a few gentle snowflakes hit her face. They walked across the driveway, the first to leave tracks in the new snow.

“You’re sure you can handle this?” David eyed the van. It faced the house so Anna would have to back it out.

“Christopher’s waiting,” Anna said. “It’s not like I have a choice.”

“If you say so.”

Their aunt had asked Anna to pick up her cousin at a friend’s house since she had a late meeting and wouldn’t make it. Ignoring David’s skeptical expression, Anna tugged open the door, threw her purse on the floor between the seats, and got in the driver’s side. David plopped himself beside her with a mischievous grin.

“And don’t you dare say anything!” She wagged her finger in his face before he could open his mouth. He was three years younger than she, having just turned fourteen in November, unbearably pompous at times, and good at everything. Except for his handwriting, which was atrocious. Sometimes a girl had to hold onto the small things.

“Which way?” Anna said once they reached the main road. The windshield wipers flicked away the new snow, barely keeping up. Anna peered through the white for oncoming cars and waited for David to say something.

David studied the map, disconcertingly turning it this way and that, and then finally settled back in his seat with it upside down. “Uh ... right.”

Anna took a right, and then a left, and within three minutes they were thoroughly lost. “This is so unlike you.”

“I’m trying! But look at this—” He held out the map.

Anna glanced at it, but one of the reasons she’d accepted his offer to come with her was because maps confused her under the best of circumstances.

“The roads wander at random, and they all look the same,” he said. “Half of them don’t even have signs.”

Anna had to agree. Identical leafless trees and rugged terrain faced them at every turn. She drove up one hill and down another, winding back and forth around rocky outcroppings and spectacular, yet similar, mansions. As the minutes ticked by, Anna clenched the wheel more tightly. She and David sat unspeaking in their heated, all-wheel drive cocoon, while the snow fell harder and the sky outside the windows darkened with the waning of the day. Then, just as they crested a small rise and were taking a downhill curve to the left, David hissed and reached for the handhold above his door.

“What?” Anna took a quick look at David. His mouth was open but no sound came out, and he pointed straight ahead.

Anna returned her gaze to the windshield. Ten feet in front of them, a wall of snow blocked the road, like a massive, opaque picture window. She had no time to respond, think, or press the brake before they hit it.

Whuf!

They powered through the wall and, for a long three seconds, a vast black space surrounded them. Then they burst through to the other side to find themselves bouncing down a snow-covered hill, much like the one they’d been driving on but with grass beneath their wheels instead of asphalt. During the first few seconds as Anna fought to bring the van under control, they rumbled into a clearing situated halfway down the hill. She gaped through the windshield at the three men on horseback, who’d appeared out of nowhere. They stared back at her, frozen as if in a photograph, oblivious now to a fourth man, who’d fallen on the ground.

All four men held swords.

“Anna!” David finally found his voice.

Anna stood on the brakes but couldn’t get any traction in the snow. All three horses reared, catapulting their riders out of their saddles. Anna careened into two of the men who fell under the wheels with a sickening crunching thud. Still unable to stop the van, she plowed right over them and the snow-covered grass into the underside of a rearing horse.

By then, the van was starting to slide sideways, and its nose slewed under the horse’s front hooves, which were high in the air, and hit its midsection full on. The windshield shattered from the impact of the hooves, the horse fell backwards, pinning its rider beneath it, and the airbags exploded. By then, the van’s momentum had spun it completely around, carried it across the clearing to the edge, and over it.

The van slid another twenty feet down the hill before it connected with a tree at the bottom of the slope. Breathless, chained by the seatbelt, Anna sat stunned.

David fumbled with the door handle. “Come on.” He shoved at her shoulder. When she didn’t move, he grasped her chin and turned her head to look at him. “The gas tank could explode.”

Her heart catching in her throat, Anna wrenched the door open and tumbled into the snow. She and David ran toward a small stand of trees thirty feet to their left and stopped there, breathing hard. The van remained as they’d left it, sad and crumpled against the tree at the base of the hill. David had a line of blood on his cheek. Anna put her hand to her forehead, and it came away with blood, marring her brown glove.

“What—” Anna swallowed hard and tried again. “How did we go from lost to totaled in two point four seconds?” She found a tissue in her pocket, wiped at the blood on her glove, and began dabbing at her forehead.

David followed the van tracks with his eyes. “Can you walk up the hill with me and see what’s up there?”

“Shouldn’t we call Mom first?” Their mother was giving a talk at a medieval history conference in Philadelphia, which is why she’d parked her children at her sister’s house in Bryn Mawr in the first place.

“Let’s find out where we are before we call her,” David said.

Anna was starting to shake, whether from cold or shock it didn’t really matter. David saw it and took her hand for perhaps the first time in ten years. He tugged her up the hill to the clearing. They came to a stop at the top, unable to take another step. Two dozen men lay dead on the ground. They sprawled in every possible position. A man close to Anna was missing an arm, and his blood stained the snow around him. Anna’s stomach heaved, and she turned away, but there was no place to look where a dead man didn’t lie.

But even as she looked away, her brain registered that the men weren’t dressed normally. They wore mail and helmets and many still had swords in their hands. Then David left her at a run, heading along the path the van had followed. Anna watched him, trying not to see anyone else. He crouched next to a body.

“Over here!” He waved an arm.

Anna followed David’s snowy footprints, weaving among the dead men. Every one had been butchered. By the time she came to a halt beside David, tears streamed down her cheeks.

“My God, David.” She choked on the words. “Where are we?” Heedless of the snow, Anna fell to her knees beside the man David was helping to sit upright. She was still breathing hard. She’d never been in a car accident before, much less one that landed her in the middle of a clearing full of dead men.

“I don’t know.” David had gotten his arm under the man’s shoulder and now braced his back. The man didn’t appear to have any blood on him, although it was obvious from his quiet moans that he was hurt.

The man grunted and put his hands to his helmet, struggling to pull it from his head. Anna leaned forward, helped him remove it, and then set it on the ground beside him. The man looked old to have been in a battle. He had a head of dark hair, with touches of white at his temples, but his mustache was mostly gray and his face was lined. At the moment, it was also streaked with sweat and dirt—and very pale.

“Diolch,” he said.

Anna blinked. That was
thank you
in Welsh, which she knew because of her mother’s near-continual efforts to teach her the language, although Anna had never thought she’d actually need to know it
.
She met the man’s eyes. They were deep blue but bloodshot from his exertions. To her surprise, instead of finding them full of fear and pain, they held amusement. Anna couldn’t credit it and decided she must be mistaken.