I looked to the doorway; Anna and I were alone again. I’d grown cold—and unsettled. I didn’t want to stay up here alone any longer. I took one last long look at the mountains and the sea and then, with Anna on my hip, headed for the door to the stairs. Before I could reach it, however, another man came through it, the same one I’d seen talking to Llywelyn on the stairs to the keep.
“Madam,” he said, with a slight bow, speaking in French. “I am Goronwy, counselor to the Prince. He asks that you come inside. Plans have changed and we will leave before the noon hour.”
“Where are we going?” I felt really disoriented now.
“Brecon,” he said.
A chill settled in my stomach that had nothing to do with the air around me. I knew what Brecon meant to me—a dorm at Bryn Mawr College where my sister went to school—but Goronwy meant the real thing: Brecon, Wales.
“May I ask where I am?”
“You don’t know?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have a good memory of last night.”
“Mine is very clear. Lord Llywelyn has some questions for you on that score, but they will keep. For now, I can tell you that we are at Castell Criccieth, in Gwynedd.”
I’d never heard of it. “How long will it take to get to Brecon?”
“At least a week,” Goronwy said. “Lord Llywelyn wishes to depart before the rains come. If we ride inland, we can reach his manor in the forest of Coed y Brenin by evening, with a move to Castell y Bere the day after that. You will need warmer clothing.”
Oh. My. God. Anna wiggled and I put her down. She couched to point out a spider that crawled across the flagstones. Goronwy bent and spoke to her in Welsh. Watching them, I put a hand to my mouth, and a wave of hysteria rolled through me. This time I couldn’t control it. My laughter began as a choke and then swelled to full-fledged giggles. I swung around to face the sea and took a stride toward the edge of the battlements. The wind caught at the cloth on my head, but I let it go, instead wrapping my arms around my waist to try to contain myself. Finally, I gave up and let the tears come.
“Madam?” Goronwy spoke from behind me. I glanced back to see him staring at me, Anna’s hand in his. Anna, fortunately, was used to this sort of thing from me and was smiling too, though with no idea of the joke.
I wiped at my cheeks. “I’m fine. Let’s go in.”
* * * * *
Anna toddled happily after Goronwy and he picked her up before we were half-way down the first flight of steps. That was a good plan because she took a very long time to navigate a set of stairs on her little legs, usually with me counting them one by one. I followed them, watching my feet as we made our way down the stairs, tears still pricking behind my eyes.
Goronwy escorted us to our room, where the same maid from before waited.
“Hello, Dana,” I said. “I see we need more clothes.”
She’d piled two sacks beside the door to the room. Goronwy signaled to the guard waiting outside for us that he should carry them away. Then Goronwy hesitated in the doorway, looking at me as I stood in the center of the room, my hands clasped in front of me. Dana knelt on the floor in front of Anna, helping her into an extra petticoat.
“You’ll be all right, then?” he said.
I honestly didn’t know, but didn’t tell him that. “Thank you, Goronwy. We’ll be fine.”
“I’ll return for you in a few minutes,” he said, and closed the door. I gazed at the closed door, a cold feeling in my chest at the knowledge that I was going to have to turn off that part of me that needed to question what was happening and go with the flow of things.
Dana dressed Anna like a miniature adult, with cloak and hood like mine. On the bed lay further clothes for me. The dress split up the middle, designed for riding astride. The thick black wool cloak hung heavily on my shoulders, the clasp at the throat. It had ties up the front so I wouldn’t have to keep it clutched around me while we traveled, and two slits for my hands instead of sleeves.
Goronwy knocked on our door again.
“Thank you, Dana,” I said in Welsh as we left. Diolch.
“My pleasure, Madam.”
Once in the same courtyard where I’d last seen Llywelyn, a boy stood off to the right of the stairs with a horse, waiting for us.
“Up with you,” Goronwy said. I gazed up at the horse. It was huge—not that all the horses weren’t huge from the ground, but this one seemed to loom over me in a most uncomfortable manner. All around us men and horses jostled each other to mount and I hugged Anna closer to me. I would be the only woman on the journey and all the men, like Goronwy, wore full armor, with long swords at their waists. At least a dozen of them also had giant bows and quivers strapped to their saddlebags.
“I’m supposed to ride this horse to Brecon? I couldn’t take my eyes off the monstrous beast in front of me.
“Your chariot is sunk in the marsh,” Goronwy said. He took Anna from me.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, stalling for time. “We’re spending tonight at that place you mentioned, Coed y Brenin?”
“Yes that’s right,” Goronwy said.
“Isn’t that where Owain Glendower was ambushed and died?”
“What did you say?” Goronwy said.
“Isn’t that the place? My mother sings a song about it. He rode into a gap in the road with high hills on either side and archers attacked him and his men. He and his men fought, but they all died. It was a lot like how Llywelyn . . .” I stopped, horrified. I’d run at the mouth. I shouldn’t know how Llywelyn would meet his death.
“Who was Owain Glendower?” Goronwy said.
“He—”
“We’ll discuss this later.”
Llywelyn had come up behind me. Without warning, he put his hands around my waist and threw me into the saddle. I plopped onto my bottom on the seat and then managed to swing my right leg over the horse to get both feet in the stirrups. I wiggled into a more comfortable position and gathered the reins, as I’d seen actors do in movies. Llywelyn handed Anna to me and she snuggled into my lap, her knees tucked inside her cloak.
“Are you sure about this?” My voice came out high. The horse stepped sideways restlessly and then swerved back to avoid another horse.
“We ride only twenty-five miles,” Llywelyn said. “Was that my brother on the battlements with you?”
I looked down at him, uncertain at the quick change of subject. “Yes.”
“What did you talk about?” He looked at me very intently.
“You,” I said, going for honesty.
“Good.” He patted my knee before walking to his horse which a groom held still a few yards away.
“I will ride with you, Madam,” Goronwy said, also mounting. He made it look so easy.
“Meg,” I said. “Marged dw i.”
“Lady Marged, then, when we speak in Welsh,” he said. And then he caught me off guard with another question. “What language is it that Anna speaks? It’s unknown to me, yet she has some Welsh.”
I froze. There was so much to remember with all this the other-worldly craziness of what was happening to us. I was having a hard time keeping straight what I should know and what I shouldn’t. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have talked about Owain Glendower because he hadn’t been born yet, if this was really the thirteenth century. Was I actually going to sit here and think that I’d—what?—time-traveled to medieval Wales? And then I looked around and wondered what other explanation there could be and how I could think anything else.
Goronwy still waited for my response.
I stuttered while I thought. “She speaks American,” I said, in an instant coming up with an answer that wasn’t even a lie and would allow me to avoid the dreaded word ‘English.’
“That language is new to me,” Goronwy said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t have.”
Goronwy looked away. “Huh.”
Up ahead, Llywelyn had also mounted. He sat with a s
traight back. He was naturally thick through the chest and shoulders but armor had bulked him up too, just like all the men. With a sinking feeling, I acknowledged that they weren’t built that way as a result of playing football or lifting weights. It was their work with swords and bows that had caused it.
“Let’s move!” A man riding next to Llywelyn raised his sword and twisted it in his wrist like a baton.
With a click of his tongue on his teeth, Goronwy urged his horse forward. I shook my horse’s reins and was startled when he obeyed, moving to match Goronwy’s horse. Everyone paired up to ride underneath the gatehouse and onto the road that led from the castle. As we rode under the final tower, I looked back. Castell Criccieth soared above us. Two soldiers stood on the battlements at the top of the two great towers, still and silent. The wind whipped Llywelyn’s flag on its pole.
The road, comprised of hard-packed dirt, led to a small village at the foot of the promontory on which the castle rested. Admittedly, it looked just as I thought a medieval village should, with a scattering of thatched-roof huts around a central green space, on which a few sheep grazed. We rode among the houses while men, women, and children came out of them to wave, a few of the children running beside the horses to keep up. As the village church came into view, a priest appeared. He stepped forward to block the road and confer with Llywelyn. They spoke, their voices low, and then the priest made the sign of the cross, blessing all of us.
Llywelyn bowed his head in answer and the priest moved aside. As I rode past him, I ducked my head and pulled my cloak over my face, not wanting to meet his gaze.
There it was. I couldn’t turn aside from this no matter how I might want to deny it. Anna and I were in the Middle Ages.
Chapter Six
Llywelyn
“May I ask your thoughts, my lord?” Goronwy asked. We’d stopped to water the horses at a stream and to allow men to dismount and see to their needs. Goronwy had taken the opportunity to tell me of his conversations with Marged.
“I am at sea with her,” I said. “Too many things she says don’t add up.”
“Do you have second thoughts that she seeks to betray you? Do you believe she’s lying?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t. But that doesn’t make what she says true either. Yet if I’m not mistaken, she didn’t believe I was the Prince of Wales when she awoke last night. She so thoroughly didn’t believe me that she attacked me with a knife.”
“My lord!” Goronwy said. “You didn’t tell me that!”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, suitably chastened. “In truth, she knew so little of its use that I was never in danger. What most concerned me was her fear—particularly her fear of me.”
“She rightfully feared retribution for her audacity,” Goronwy said. “Many a lord who would have behaved differently, punished her certainly, and wouldn’t have kept her with him after that.”
I smiled. “But I am not a typical lord now, am I?”
Goronwy nodded. “Might I say, my lord, if you excuse my impertinence, that you can be confident to a fault.”
“Ha!” I said. “When have I ever rebuked you for impertinence? I tried once, as I recall, when you defeated me at wrestling. Nothing ever came of it.”
Goronwy smiled and I was glad to see it. He worried too much these days and it had put lines between his eyes. “There’s much about her that we don’t yet know,” he said. “I’m most interested in the mystery of her chariot, its manner of propulsion and material.”
“She has more to tell us,” I said. “Not that we’re going to believe it either.”
Goronwy snorted a laugh. Then he checked his saddle bags and mounted his horse. I followed suit, all the while contemplating the woman in question. Throughout my conversation with Goronwy, she’d knelt on her cloak, clapping as Anna ran around the clearing. The little girl would run to one tree and then another, and then back to her mother, while Marged counted, seeing how fast the little girl could leave and return.
My men had glanced at them often, every one with an amused expression on his faces. Marged was obviously genuine, obviously loved her daughter—but I wasn’t sure about anything else about her. How could I be? She’d hardly sat on a horse before today, given the unprofessional nature of her seat and the stiffness in her walk when she dismounted. How had she come from Radnor? It was a six day ride in full summer for a woman, not to mention in the dead of winter with snow in the mountains and a small child to care for.
Marged gathered Anna to her and walked back to where her horse was tethered. It was the walk that got me thinking. Marged walked unlike any woman I’d ever known. I pictured her as I’d seen her striding across the bailey at Castell Criccieth. She moved along as if she were a man wearing breeches (which admittedly she was wearing when I found her) and not used to the hindrance of a dress around her ankles. That walk of hers was a signpost that told me there was more to Marged’s differences than merely a matter of dress or of the strange vehicle in which she came to me.
It was also in the way she spoke, not only to me but to everyone. On one hand, she had yet to accord me my title, ‘my lord,’ in Welsh, French, or even this ‘American’ that Goronwy informed me was her native tongue. On the other hand, she tossed around ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to anyone and everyone in a manner which indicated she was supremely confident in her own station, unconcerned with the station of others, or viewed every person, whether low or high, as her equal. Now that was a daunting thought.
She reminded me a bit, in fact, of my mother—not so much in later life when she was embittered by years of imprisonment and loss—but when I was a small child and it was only my brother, Owain, and me in her house. She was loving, protective, and without fear. She would stand up to anyone when we, her cubs, were threatened, even my father. When I was young, I do believe she loved me.
As I gathered the reins and led my men out of the clearing, I glanced toward the sea, eyeing the clouds that moved closer with every breath. At noon when we’d left Criccieth, they were still distant. I’d allowed only this one short rest at mid-afternoon because the clouds were beginning to crowd the space between the sea and the sky and I didn’t think we had much longer before the rain hit.
“Reminds me of when your Uncle died,” Geraint said, tipping his head to the western sky.
Dark clouds had gathered in the east that day, which we’d taken as a sign of trouble to come. Trouble always came from the east, though the weather almost never did. The storm had broken, with cacophony of hail and crashing rain, unusual for Wales at any time of year, where the wet was generally steady and unrelenting, but quiet.
“Uncle Dafydd liked to describe England as a looming storm, biding its time before it struck, downing us without warning with lightening and thunder,” I said. Twenty years later, the menace was less evident, yet the only difference was that I was older, and that the men of Wales had rallied around my masthead, more prepared to weather any storm England could inflict upon us.
“But we should only have snow today, praise God.” Geraint’s body swayed with the easy walk of the horse. “We need to reach the manor before the sun sets.”
Watching him clutch his cloak around himself, I had a pang of regret that I’d brought him on this journey. I valued his advice and selfishly wanted him with me, but if I needed extra cushions on the road, he needed a bed. God willing, we wouldn’t spend any night on the open road. The mountains between us and Brecon formed a barrier that was only thirty miles across—forty miles if we took the old Roman road from Llanio—but in a blizzard, forty miles could be four hundred for all the difference it would make.
I looked back to find Marged. She’d tucked Anna inside her own cloak, so only the little girl’s head showed from between two of the ties. Marged noticed me watching and grinned. That was another difference between her and any other woman . . . how many women would have come on this journey without complaint, and then had the stamina to grin at me?
Of all the women wh
o’d shared my bed in recent years, I’d always known, even through the blindness of lust, that they were with me because I was the Prince of Wales. Either they or their fathers put them in my path because they wanted the prestige it could give them. But as always, none had born me a child, and eventually I’d urged each of them to marry someone else.
Goronwy noted my attention and trotted up beside me. “We’re approaching Coedwig Gap,” he said. “It’s the perfect place for an ambush if Marged’s memory is correct, whoever this Owain Glendower might be.”
Hywel reined in close on the other side. “Should we prepare, my lord?”
“Yes,” I said. “At worst, the exercise will wake everybody up. It’s easy to become complacent when the challenges have become fewer or farther between.”
Hywel nodded. “If this is a trap, I have no intention of going in unprepared.” Putting his weight on his stirrups, he stood in them and raised his sword to gain the attention of the men.
“Find someone to take charge of Marged, Goronwy,” I said, keeping my voice low underneath Hywel’s call. “I need you if there’s to be a fight.”
“Yes, my lord.”
We rode on, in better formation and more watchful. Another quarter of a mile and we crested a rise that gave us a view of the land around us, though not the road ahead as it bent and was obscured by trees. Goronwy checked his horse, looking southeast. I followed his gaze, only to grimace at the sight: smoke rose towards the sky in billowing clouds. It was too much for daily activity in any village, not to mention the small one that crouched in the valley below, separated from us by expansive fields and stands of trees.
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