“Oh, Llywelyn,” I said. “I—”
A snick came from the door to the room as the latch lifted. We froze and watched, unmoving, as a crack appeared between the frame and the door. A hand clenched the edge of the door, silently opening it further to give room to an object that pointed at the bed.
A crossbow!
My breath caught in my throat. The sound I made was slight, but carried loudly enough in the silent room for the assassin to swing the point of his arrow from the bed, where he thought we’d be, to the window seat.
He hesitated, perhaps unbelieving, and then shot—but Llywelyn had already moved. Between one breath and the next, he pulled me with him into a dive out the window, headfirst towards the Honddu River. Somehow, he was able to turn us in a complete flip so we hit the water with a mighty splash, feet first, before I even had a chance to catch my breath.
Cold! The shock forced all the air from my lungs and caused Llywelyn to release me. Our combined weight had pulled us well under and I struggled to the surface, fighting for air and against the current that pulled us downstream, away from the castle. I bobbed to the surface.
“Meg!”
“Here!” I said. He was five yards from me, moving in a faster current and I spun in a complete circle, my legs working furiously, before I managed to angle myself more towards him. He reached for me and I grasped his fingers, allowing him to pull me to him. I stopped fighting the current and began floating with it, thankful to be alive.
“What is it about water in this country! What in the hell am I doing in a river again?”
Llywelyn sputtered with laughter, understanding my resentment. At least it wasn’t February and the water wasn’t quite as cold as before.
We followed the Honddu under the bridge that led from the castle to the town, and then for the short distance it ran before reaching the Usk. The water was frighteningly choppy now, as it swung us into the main current of the larger river. Llywelyn tried to stop us at the ford across the Usk, but even his long legs couldn’t resist the force of the high water.
We sailed a hundred yards before we passed a rocky outcrop in the river that had created a sandy spit on the western bank. I kicked off for it. My sluggish limbs could barely move and my teeth chattered.
Llywelyn grabbed my arm. “No!”
“Why?” I swung around, uncertain. He got an arm around my waist and we slid past the spit.
“They will look for us there first. There is another place, a half a mile downstream.”
“Are you sure?”
“The river curves east,” he said. “We’ll find safety there.”
A log floated by to our left and he grasped it, swinging it in front of us so I could hold it too. Another three minutes, and Llywelyn was able to push us toward the southern bank. The riverbed had widened and grown more shallow as it swung east, and consequently slowed. My feet hit bottom and we stumbled onto a sandy spit on the southern side of the Usk, formed as the river curved. I fell to my knees and crawled out of the water, and then turned onto my back. Llywelyn threw himself onto his stomach, his arms and legs sprawled wide.
“I’m clearly too old for this kind of exercise,” he said.
I coughed, choking on the mix of water and laughter. “You’re only forty-something, you silly man. You’d better not be too old. We’ve a long road ahead of us.”
“We’re only a half a mile from the castle. Admittedly, I don’t spend much time walking, but I don’t think that distance will task me greatly.”
“That’s not what I meant.” I lay flat on my back, my hand resting on my belly.
Llywelyn rolled onto his side and pushed up on one hand so he could see my face. “What do you mean?”
I turned my head to look at him and didn’t speak. Couldn’t speak. He must have seen something in my look because his eyes narrowed. “Speak plainly, madam.”
“I’m going to have your baby,” I said. “That’s why I haven’t been sleeping.”
“What?” Llywelyn loomed over me so he blocked the moonlight. He patted me up and down. “Are you all right? Mary, mother of God! I can’t believe I just threw you into the river!”
“I’m fine, Llywelyn. Honest. A little cold water can’t hurt the child.”
“How late are you?”
“Ten days,” I said. “I’ve never been this late before except pregnant.”
“I can’t believe it!”
“So you’re happy?” I was suddenly a little worried. He had to be happy.
Llywelyn laughed. “By all the Saints in the Heavens! I hadn’t a hope it would come this soon!” He laughed again and pulled me into his arms. I’d never seen him laugh like this, but it wasn’t the same for me.
“I’m scared, Llywelyn,” I said.
“You’ll be fine. I know it.”
“It’s just—” I couldn’t articulate everything I was feeling: I was afraid of dying in childbirth, of what a sibling would mean to Anna, of raising a child in the thirteenth century. Not for the first time, I longed to see my mother.
Llywelyn squeezed me more tightly. “If you hadn’t been pregnant and stewing about it these last three nights, you wouldn’t have been sitting on that window sill. And if you hadn’t been sitting there, I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed, and we’d both be dead.”
“There is that.” I wrapped my arms around his neck. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” he said, “but I think we ought to get moving.”
“I don’t feel very good,” I said, starting to shake.
He checked the location of the moon to gauge the hour. “I’m in a rather telling state of undress, your wet nightgown reveals more than I want another man to see, and it’s too cold for us to be outside and wet. We need to find some clothes quickly.”
“I can rip my gown,” I said. “You can tie the scrap around your waist.”
“Good idea,” he said.
We scuttled forward into the brush at the edge of the sand bar and I worked at the lower section of my gown, starting at just above my knees. My hands were stiff but Llywelyn held the ends of the gown tight and I found a loose thread Llywelyn wrapped the scrap around his waist and I tied it in a sarong-type knot.
“Very dashing,” I said, as he crouched down again behind our bush to check the area for any signs of human activity.
Llywelyn took my hand and began to lead us west through the trees, back towards the castle. It was very dark under the trees, but there was a hint of grayness to the murk that told me dawn was not far off.
“Do you have a plan?” I asked.
“Not much of one,” Llywelyn said. “It begins and ends with clothing.”
Fortunately, we didn’t have to walk more than a hundred yards before we came upon a hut, centered in a patch of dirt scraped bare of vegetation. It stood under a shaft of moonlight that filtered through the trees.
“You or me?” Llywelyn said. We inspected each other. He certainly looked better than I did. His shoulder length black hair was thrown back from his face and I loved that he’d not grown that mustache he’d threatened me with. He was tall and muscled; I knew he was laughing at me as I studied him because of the way his eyes were twinkling, even if he wasn’t smiling.
“Me,” I said. “I’m not threatening. I may look bedraggled, but you are completely unacceptable.”
Llywelyn smirked at what he viewed as a compliment. “I’ll wait here.”
Wincing on the stubby grass, rocks, and sticks that poked my feet, I tiptoed across the yard to the hut, took a moment to gather my thoughts, and knocked. A woman opened the door. She was much older than I, with gray hair pulled tight in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a dress that was patched, but clean. I was glad to see that the floor of the hut behind her was well-swept and the room ordered.
“Yes,” she said, looking me up and down. “What is it?”
“My man and I fell in the river,” I said. “Do you have a spare change of clothes we could borrow?”
&nb
sp; “Borrow, is it?” she said. “You mean take.”
“We would leave you ours in exchange. When we are safe again, we can return your clothing to you.”
“Humph,” the woman said. “Where’s your man?”
“Waiting in the bushes,” I said. “He’s wearing fewer clothes than I am.”
“And that’s not much,” the woman said. She looked past me and I waved a hand towards where Llywelyn crouched. He stepped out from the trees. The woman sighed. “You might as well come in.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Llywelyn minced his way across the uneven ground. At his approach, the woman’s eyes widened. “My lord!”
“Indeed,” Llywelyn said, coming to a halt on her threshold. “Have you seen any English nearby?”
“I haven’t, my lord,” she said, “but others from the village have spoken of it. Little groups of them, poking their nose in where they don’t belong. Coming from the south, they are.”
“Is it Clare’s men, do you think?” I asked Llywelyn.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was a bold move indeed to get past my guards and into our room with a crossbow. We’ve had traitors up and down Wales apparently, about whom I’ve been completely unaware.”
“That’s always the way of it, my lord,” the woman said. She’d gone to a box set in a corner of the room and removed a small stack of clothing from it.
“We must get back into the castle,” Llywelyn said.
“Anna’s there, Llywelyn.” I grabbed his arm, the panic rising as it hadn’t before, even in the river. “They won’t hurt her will they?”
“I’m sure she’s fine, Meg,” Llywelyn said. “They won’t bother with her. She’s not my natural child and they know it.” He turned back to the woman. “I need another way inside the castle, other than through the front gate. Has the river flooded the undercroft gate, do you know? My engineers have been concerned about the Honddu side of the castle for the past year.”
“Not that I’ve heard,” she said. “One of my neighbor boys and my nephew got into it just the other day.”
“What undercroft gate?” I said.
“Clare arranged a way to provision the castle from the river, just in case it was ever attacked—by me,” Llywelyn said.
“Can we use it?” I said. “I need Anna, Llywelyn. We need to go now.”
“I know, cariad,” he said, drawing me closer. “We’re already there.”
“I can tell you the way,” the woman said. “Straight out the back door and across the clearing is a trail between two matched trees. It leads directly to the gate that guards the Usk. If you follow the river west you’ll see the ford, though with the flood, you’ll be hard pressed to cross before noon.”
“Thank you,” Llywelyn said.
We dressed quickly in the clothes she provided, the fabric well worn from use, but not by her. I glanced at the woman out of the corner of my eye, acknowledging the loss she must have suffered to have these clothes to spare. I didn’t know that I could ever get used to it.
“The boots are a little tight,” Llywelyn said, tugging them on and cursing under his breath. His toes were well scrunched at the tip.
“At least they’re well-worn,” I said. “The leather is soft. Can you walk?”
Llywelyn gingerly put a foot on the ground and hobbled forward. “Well enough,” he said. Llywelyn tugged my hand and I followed him out the door.
Chapter Eighteen
Llywelyn
A lightness and joy filled me that even the troubles of the day couldn’t suppress. The emotion augmented the sharpness of my vision; I couldn’t explain it otherwise, either by the bright March day or the clearness of the air.
Meg carries my child!
With effort, I restrained myself from punching the air every time I thought about it and tried to focus on the task at hand.
While we were in the hut, the sky had lightened. Soon the sun would push over the horizon. Early spring flowers poked through the damp ground, and it reminded me again of my incredible luck. I am alive. And Meg carries my child.
I checked Meg beside me. She was caught up in the baby too, more so even than I, and I didn’t think it had sunk in fully that someone had wanted to kill us. The anger that I’d been keeping in check for the last hour began rising in my throat again and I tamped it down. It would do me no good.
It was the kind of thing my grandfather had cautioned me against, on one of those rare instances when we were alone and he’d a moment to spare for one of his many grandsons: “It is not the actions of a man when he is sober and clear-eyed that are his measure, but when he is pressed hard, his back against a wall. At those times, fear and anger will be his undoing, and it is a rare man who can put aside those feelings and do what must be done. Be one of those men.”
Meg trudged beside me through the woods, her hand clasped tightly in mine. “So who betrayed you this time?”
“Hard to say.”
“Not Goronwy,” she said.
“I trust him with my life,” I said. “If he’s betrayed me, I could never trust my own judgment again.”
“He loves Anna.”
“And love for your daughter is a proper test of a man’s character?”
“It ought to be one,” she said, “though many tyrants through the ages have loved their children and yet despoiled their country. It seems contradictory to me.”
“Men are nothing if not contradictory,” I said. “That’s one of the first things you learn when you begin to lead them. Plenty of people are perfectly capable of holding two entirely opposite opinions at the same time, and arguing vehemently for each in turn.”
Meg laughed. “So young, and yet so cynical.”
We walked on, our silence drowned out by the rushing of the river. We gazed across it at the castle.
“Now what?” Meg said.
We’d come out of the woods to the south of the castle, but the Usk was still in full flood, so we had no way to cross, except over the bridge to the castle. I studied the battlements and the gate. I couldn’t see the other gate from where we stood as it faced east, reached by a bridge across the Honddu. That’s the one we’d gone under. This one was even larger and better fortified.
Except today.
The portcullis was up and the drawbridge down. “I don’t like this,” I said. “Where is everybody? The guards?”
“We look like peasants in these clothes,” Meg said. “I can’t wait any longer. I have to go in there. Anna’s going to wake soon and if I’m not there, she’ll cry.” She glanced at me and I shrugged. Into the lion’s den. We ran to the bridge across the Usk, our footsteps thudding across its length. At any second, I expected to hear a shout from within the gatehouse, but no one called to us.
Just past the portcullis, I tugged Meg through a left-hand door into the gatehouse. Then I stopped short, surprising Meg who bumped into me and caught my arm. The two guards who should have been protecting the entrance to the castle sprawled unconscious on the ground. I bent to check the breathing of one of the men while Meg felt for his pulse. She looked at me and nodded. “It’s faint, but there.”
The other man was alive too.
I slid the first man’s sword from its sheath and hefted it. It was hardly my grandfather’s sword, but it would do for now. Then I tugged the belt knife out of the spot on the man’s waist where he carried it and handed it to Meg. “Here.” She was too small to hold a long sword, but in a pinch, a knife might do.
“What’s happened to them?” Meg whispered, though there clearly was no need for quiet as anyone else in the guard room was unconscious. “Were they drugged, or poisoned?”
I cast my mind back to the night before. Anna, Meg and I had shared the meal with everyone else.
“You pushed your mead away last night,” I said. “Why?”
“Pregnant women shouldn’t drink alcohol,” Meg said. “It’s bad for the baby.” She glanced at me. “You didn’t drink it either, though. Was that just be
cause of me?”
“The well at Brecon is deep and the water always good,” I said. “I wanted a clear head.”
“Maybe that’s it, then,” she said. “That’s what they used. But it doesn’t matter now. We should get moving.”
“This way.” I took her hand and with her at my heels, knife and sword out to counter any threat, we poked our heads out of the guard room. Nothing. How could there be nothing? Where were my men? Or the assassin and his men, if he had them? “No one’s awake.”
“We should close the portcullis,” Meg said.
The mechanism was designed to release with the push of a lever. I hit it with my boot and it let go, falling to the ground with a rattling crash.
“If anyone awake doesn’t know something’s up, they do now,” I said. Grunting at the effort, Meg helped me push the great double doors closed and dropped the bars across them. “It takes three men to winch the drawbridge closed. We’ll leave it as it is for now.”
We moved into the bailey, hugging the gray stone wall that fronted the Honddu River, into which we’d fallen. Brecon’s great hall was in the bailey, at the base of the motte where a circular keep of last resort and the oldest part of the castle shot up against the sky. The Bohuns had greatly expanded the castle during their reign. The outer wall of the great hall, above which housed the room where we’d slept and Anna still lay, was worked into the curtain wall. This fortification projected out from either side of the hall and formed a complete circle around the motte.
Last night, the great hall had been full of men, the stables full of animals, and the bailey busy with craft workers. Many of the people who worked in the castle lived in the little village outside it, so I wasn’t surprised at their absence. With the dawn, however, people should be starting to stir. Now, the silence was eerie, only broken by the sound of our boots scuffling on the rocky ground.
The vast expanse of Brecon before us was daunting. I glanced up the hill at the keep. What might await us there? Most of my men had actually slept in its old hall that had been the center of the castle before Bohun built his new one.
Control what you can; let go of what you can’t. It would take too much time to explore all of Brecon on our own, and the continuing silence made me worry that our assassin had resources we didn’t yet know about. Where was the spy who’d shot at us waiting? Someone had left the castle open to attack, but for whom?
Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance Page 19