Anna looked away from him and into the fire. No ... No more than you do. “You’re thinking time travel, aren’t you?”
“Time travel is impossible.”
“Why do you say that?”
Anna’s abrupt question made David hunch. Then he straightened. “Okay. If time travel is possible, why don’t we have people from the future stopping by all the time? If time travel is possible, all of time itself has to have already happened. It would need to be one big pre-existent event.”
“That doesn’t work for me.”
“Not for me either,” David said. “It’s pretty arrogant for us to think that 2010 is as far as time has gotten, but these people’s lives have already happened, or else how could we travel back and relive it with them?”
“So you’re saying the same argument could hold for people traveling from 3010 to 2010. To them, we’ve already lived our lives because they are living theirs.”
“Exactly,” David said.
“Then where are we? Is this real?”
“Of course it’s real,” he said, “but maybe not the same reality we knew at home.”
“I’m not following you,” Anna said.
“What if the wall of snow led us to a parallel universe?”
“A parallel universe that has gotten only to the Middle Ages instead of 2010?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve read too much science fiction,” she said.
David actually smiled. “Now, that’s not possible.”
Anna put her head in her hands, not wanting to believe it. David picked up a stick and begin digging in the dirt at his feet. He stabbed the stick into the ground between them again and again, twisting it around until it stuck there, upright. Anna studied it, then reached over, pulled it out, and threw it into the fire in front of them.
“Hey!” David said.
Anna turned on him. “Are we ever going to be able to go home again? How could this have happened to us? Why has this happened to us? Do you even realize how appalling this all is?”
David opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to protest that she shouldn’t be angry at him, but at that moment a man came out of the far tent and approached them. Instead of addressing them, however, he looked over their heads to someone behind them and spoke. At his words, two men grasped David and Anna by their upper arms and lifted them to their feet. The first man turned back to the tent, and their captors hustled them after him. At the entrance, the man indicated that they should enter. David put his hand at the small of Anna’s back and urged her forward.
She ducked through the entrance, worried about what she might find, but it was only the wounded man from the meadow, reclining among blankets on the ground. He no longer wore his armor but had on a cream-colored shirt. A blanket covered him to his waist. Several candles guttering in shallow dishes lit the tent, and the remains of a meal sat on a plate beside him. He took a sip from a small cup and looked at them over the top of it.
The tent held one other man, this one still in full armor, and he gestured them closer. They walked to the wounded man and knelt by his side. He gave them a long look, set down his cup, and then pointed to himself.
“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd.”
Anna knew she looked blank, but she simply couldn’t accept his words. He tried again, thinking that they hadn’t understood. “Llywelyn—ap—Gruffydd.”
“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd,” David and Anna said together, the words passing Anna’s lips as if they belonged to someone else.
Llywelyn nodded. “You understand who I am?” Again, he spoke in Welsh.
Anna’s neck hurt to bend forward, but she made her chin bob in acknowledgement. She was frozen in a nightmare that wouldn’t let her go.
David recovered more quickly. “You are the Prince of Wales. Thank you, my lord, for bringing us with you. We would have been lost without your assistance.”
“It is I who should be thanking you,” he said.
Anna had been growing colder inside with every sentence David and Llywelyn spoke. Llywelyn’s eyes flicked to her face, and she could read the concern in them. Finally, she took in a deep breath, accepting for now what she couldn’t deny.
“My lord,” she said, in half-remembered and badly pronounced Welsh, “Could you please tell us the date?”
“Certainly. It is the day of Damasus the Pope, Friday, the 11th of December.”
David’s face paled as he realized the importance of the question.
Anna was determined to get the whole truth out and wasn’t going to stop pressing because her brother was finally having the same heart attack she was. “And the year?”
“The year of our Lord twelve hundred and eighty-two,” Llywelyn said.
“You remember the story now, don’t you, David?” Anna spoke in English, her voice a whisper, because to speak her thoughts more loudly would give them greater credence. David couldn’t have forgotten it any more readily than she could. Their mother had told them stories about medieval Wales since before they could walk—and tales of this man in particular. “Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was lured into a trap by some English lords and killed on December 11, 1282 near a place called Cilmeri. Except—” Anna kept her eyes fixed on Llywelyn’s.
“Except we just saved his life,” David said.
____________
Find Footsteps in Time at all Amazon stores.
The Pendragon's Challenge (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 7) Page 14