“Good. The fact that the door is locked indicates that whoever is taking over the castle didn’t come in this way.” He plucked the key from its hook and unlocked the door, which swung wide to reveal water from the moat sloshing a foot from the threshold—as well as a boat moored to an iron post just outside the door. David sighed in satisfaction. “Just as Callum promised.”
Chapter Twelve
Trim Castle
Callum
“What did I tell you? So much for compromise.” Few people were as cool under pressure as Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the King of Wales. He’d made a joke, but at the moment Callum wasn’t capable of laughing.
“Stay down and stay behind me!” They were backed into the far corner of the great hall, and Callum was protecting Llywelyn with his body. What Callum wouldn’t have given to have Darren and his gun beside him, but he’d left Darren in Dublin with Rachel, who was teaching a class.
Callum had fired his first shot into the air to get everyone’s attention, which it had, though not enough to halt the attack or to save the fifteen justiciars who were already dead. The assault had come so suddenly, Callum hadn’t been able to do anything other than protect himself and Llywelyn.
He hadn’t fallen into complacency. He hadn’t assumed that all was well when it wasn’t. He’d told David and Meg just this morning that he felt something was off and didn’t want them anywhere near the great hall, but his unease hadn’t risen to the level where he felt he could call off the conference. He hadn’t gone with his gut, and men had died because of it.
Men continued to converge on him, so Callum fired a second shot, killing one of the attackers, whose identity he didn’t know, with a bullet to the chest. He went down cold, the blood from the wound pooling underneath him and creeping between the floorboards of the hall.
That was finally enough to stop the men coming towards him. Medieval men didn’t know enough about guns—or anything about guns, for that matter—to realize what they were facing. Rumors of the two shootings—the first by Callum in Scotland and the second by Cassie in Shrewsbury—had to have spread this far by now, but likely the listeners hadn’t believed the stories or hadn’t yet reconciled what they’d heard with the weapon in Callum’s hand.
Even now, as Callum held off three armed men standing in a semi-circle before him, he wasn’t entirely sure how they’d arrived at this position. Up until a moment ago, it had been business as usual in the hall: the priest had prayed, Llywelyn had said a few words, and the pontificating had begun, with each lord, whether Irish or English, going over the same ground they’d covered yesterday. And the day before that. Callum had thought the representatives to the English Parliament tended to stand on ceremony and drone on and on about their privileges, but they had nothing on the men of Ireland.
And then suddenly, ten of the delegates and fifteen of their men-at-arms who’d accompanied them into the hall had swung into action, knives and swords appearing as if by magic in their hands. With brutal efficiency and a terrifying single-mindedness, they’d attacked their neighbors. The hall had been swept for weapons earlier that morning. Callum had overseen the process, but one of the agreements had been that every lord at Trim had to be involved in the security or they weren’t going to participate. Nobody trusted anyone else.
For good reason, as it turned out.
Geoffrey de Geneville lay slumped on the main table at which Llywelyn and Callum had been sitting, stabbed in the back, literally and figuratively, since many of the men who’d risen up to murder the delegates had pledged their loyalty to him. The Earl of Ulster, brother to James Stewart’s wife, was dead too, along with the two Butler boys. Fighting continued throughout the hall, though it was woefully one-sided. The justiciars not in on the plan had entered the hall entirely unarmed as custom demanded during difficult peace talks.
Only five remained. They’d taken up a defensive position in a far corner, backing themselves against the wall on the opposite side of the hall from Callum and Llywelyn. Several were covered in blood. Two fended off attackers with chair legs while three more held knives taken from an attacker. Everyone else was dead or bleeding out.
“Alexander, we need to move.” Llywelyn’s voice was steady, and he had a hand on Callum’s back as Callum had instructed, since as long as he felt Llywelyn’s hand there, he could keep his eyes on the three traitors who faced him. But by calling Callum by his given name, he’d revealed his level of stress.
“Don’t I know it.” Callum began to edge around the wall, always keeping Llywelyn behind him and his gun pointed at his opponents. The real puzzler was the diversity of the three men: one was Irish, one English, and the third Scottish.
“Put down the weapon, whatever it be,” the Irishman said in accented English. He was a MacMurrough, the clan that had been displaced as kings of Leinster a hundred years ago by the Norman conquerors his ancestor had invited in, and was brother to Niall, their clan chieftain. What he was doing standing next to Richard de Feypo, a man supposedly loyal to Geoffrey de Geneville, Callum didn’t know and wouldn’t try to guess until he got himself and Llywelyn out of the castle alive. Now that Callum had seen the third man—the Scot—up close, he realized that he’d met him years ago in Scotland, in the retinue of Red Comyn.
“Let us go, or I will shoot again,” Callum said. “Do you really want to be killing the King of Wales?”
“Whether we want to be or not is of no consequence,” Feypo said. “We are committed.”
“I can see that.” Callum said.
He and Llywelyn continued to move along the wall, making for a side door that would take them out of the hall and into the bailey—at which point they undoubtedly would be presented with more enemies and a worse predicament. Callum could only assume that what was taking place in the hall was happening throughout the castle. He was more glad than he could say that Cassie, his wife, had stayed home in Shrewsbury with their young son, Gareth, born in July of last year.
“Six feet to go.” Llywelyn spoke low in Callum’s ear.
Feypo and the others must have realized that Callum’s and Llywelyn’s escape was imminent because, without seeming to have exchanged any signal, they leapt forward to attack. Callum fired into the center of the Scotsman’s mass and then pivoted to fire at MacMurrough at point blank range. He was swiveling back, knowing he was too late to stop Feypo but planning to try anyway, when Llywelyn swung a chair at Feypo’s head. The bottom rung met Feypo’s sword. While the chair splintered, the blow forced the sword from Feypo’s hand, and the weapon sailed across the room.
At which point Callum shot Feypo through the temple. By now, Callum had reached the inescapable conclusion that he had to get Llywelyn out of here by whatever means necessary, and that meant using the gun. His clip held ten rounds, and he’d used five just getting them to the door. He didn’t know how many more shots it would take to get them out of the castle, but he had to hope that five would be enough.
Llywelyn pulled open the side door and poked out his head. “Come on. It’s clear.”
Callum stooped to retrieve two swords—one from MacMurrough and the other from the Scotsman. He handed MacMurrough’s to Llywelyn, who took it before crossing the threshold. Callum continued to face backwards, his eyes on the remaining enemies in the hall. He felt bad for abandoning the last victims, but two had gone down while he’d been shooting, and the remainder were outnumbered more than five to one. If Callum had been alone, he still might have helped, but he had Llywelyn to protect, and he couldn’t justify risking their lives on such long odds.
Clear obviously didn’t mean the same thing to Llywelyn as it did to Callum. Men were fighting everywhere, many of them dressed in peasant clothes, which meant they were men Callum himself had posted at Trim. He’d at least done that right. None of the combatants, however, were in their immediate vicinity. Callum and Llywelyn could have joined one of the groups, probably to real effect, but Callum knew his job: he had to get Llywelyn to safety.
Typicall
y, it was pouring rain, but both men had worn their cloaks into the hall as a matter of course. The room had two fireplaces, which struggled to heat the large space on such a cold, wet day as this. Wearing the hoods of their cloaks would look normal and give them a chance to blend in with their enemies, so they pulled them over their heads.
“Meg.” Though Llywelyn spoke in an even tone, Callum was fully aware of the anguish behind her name.
“She was with your son, and it would be foolish to try to search the castle for them. They’ll have made it to the postern gate. They’re probably in the boat already. You’ll see.”
Llywelyn set off at a run, staying on the eastern perimeter of the bailey and heading south, away from the gatehouse and towards the rear of the castle. The north gate would be guarded and could provide no way out for them.
Callum caught his arm and pointed ahead to where a dozen men were engaged in heavy fighting, blocking the way to postern gate. “We’ll never make it.”
“We must climb the battlement and jump.”
Callum kept pace with Llywelyn. “Last I heard, neither of us could time travel.”
“I didn’t suggest that we might.” Llywelyn gave a harsh laugh. “It just looks to me as if it’s our only way out, and one that you and I have experienced before.” He was referring to the day they’d met—if you could call Callum throwing his arms around Llywelyn’s knees and falling from the balcony at Chepstow Castle meeting.
With his feet splashing through the puddles that had formed between the walkway’s stones, Callum cursed their predicament, furious with himself on every level.
A man edged out of a doorway to their right. Callum would have run him through had he not recognized him as Magnus Godfridson, the lone Danish delegate to Parliament and the mayor of Oxmantown, the village north of Dublin to which the Danes had been exiled after the Normans took the city a hundred years ago. He had his sword out, but at the sight of Llywelyn and Callum, he immediately flipped it to catch the blade while he held the hilt out to Llywelyn. “Take me with you. We are stronger as three.”
Llywelyn didn’t take the sword. Nor did he break stride. “Come.”
They ran down a narrow alley between the great hall and the barracks. When they reached the line of huts that abutted the curtain wall, they took a right. This alley was also cramped—so much so that Callum could have stretched out both arms and touched the wall of the barracks with the gun, which he still held in his right hand, and nicked the closest hut with the tip of the sword in his left.
He swung around to check that nobody was behind them and then faced forward again, for once grateful at the absence of walkie-talkies or mobile phones that would have allowed their attackers easy communication among themselves.
Llywelyn and Magnus had reached the last hut and stopped, crouching a little and prepared for trouble.
“I’ve got you,” Callum said, turning backwards again to check behind them. “Keep your heads on a swivel, yeah?”
Keep your heads on a swivel wasn’t a common term in the Middle Ages, but Callum used it all the time with his men, and he figured Llywelyn would know what he meant, even if Magnus did not. Still, war was in the Dane’s DNA, even if he was a merchant in his day job. He went up the stairs after Llywelyn, his head moving constantly to scope out danger.
Callum had to focus hard to keep his attention on everything at once: his feet, his weapons, Llywelyn and Magnus ahead of him, and sounds from the bailey that might indicate trouble. The steps were slippery from the rain, and the last thing any of them wanted was to fall flat on his face, but this was what he’d trained for, both as a soldier and as a spy.
“Step away, son,” Llywelyn said.
Callum had been going up the stairs backwards, so at first he hadn’t seen the man blocking the top of the staircase, sword out and hood pulled down low over his face. At Llywelyn’s words, however, the man immediately pushed back his hood to reveal the boyish face of Robbie Bruce, albeit with a grim set to his jaw. The young man backed up and let the men come all the way up the steps to reach the cover of the roof over the battlements. Below them lay the part of the moat that, when the sluice gate was closed, made a quiet port between the Boyne River and the castle. The castle could be supplied from the river through a dock gate that came into the castle below the great hall.
“What are you doing here?” Llywelyn took a step towards the young man, his voice as menacing as Callum had ever heard it.
“I-I came to warn King David of treachery!”
Callum almost laughed. “Left it a little late, didn’t you? How do we know you’re not with them?”
Robbie immediately sheathed his sword and put up his hands. “I’m not! I swear it!”
“Where are Christopher and the others?” Callum said.
“I was with them earlier, but Christopher thought it important that one of us ride to Trim.”
“How did you know of the treachery?” Llywelyn said.
“Not this treachery!” Robbie was wide-eyed. “Red Comyn brought a dozen ships from Scotland. We saw them yesterday at Drogheda.”
Callum intervened. He’d already killed one of Comyn’s men, and if Comyn was involved, Robbie was the last person of whom they should be suspicious. “We’ll hear all about it later. Right now, King Llywelyn’s safety is my first obligation.”
He wasn’t displeased to find that two men had become three and then four, but that still didn’t mean they should stay and fight it out. Ieuan had handpicked David’s men, with approval from Callum. Everyone was better than good, knew what he’d signed up for, and was doing his job. Callum needed to let them do it while he did his.
Robbie gave a brief shake of his head. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“I can’t say that we do either, son,” Llywelyn said.
Shouts and the sound of running feet came to them from the other side of the barracks, and then four men appeared, moving together in double time. A moment later, four more men came out the front door of the keep and joined them. They weren’t friendlies, but they hadn’t looked in Callum’s direction yet either.
“Time to go,” Llywelyn said.
Callum poked his head through a crenel.
“King David has jumped this far—” Robbie looked with Callum for a second, “—but it’s a long way down.”
“It’ll be fine.” Callum gritted his teeth. “It will have to be.”
Then Callum’s attention was caught by a row boat just coming around the far corner of the castle to the south. Two people were inside: a woman kneeling in the prow and a man pulling hard on the oars. The woman’s hood was up, but the man was bareheaded. Even from the side, Callum recognized him—and would have recognized him at twice the distance. He almost cheered. Something had gone right.
“That’s Dafydd and Meg.” Llywelyn sheathed his sword, shed his cloak, and pulled off his boots.
Callum groaned, but he followed suit, as did Robbie, his teeth chattering the moment his feet hit the cold stones of the battlement. Magnus, however, stared at them. “You cannot be serious.”
By way of an answer, Llywelyn ducked out from underneath the battlement’s covering and, without ceremony or hesitation, jumped.
“Lord Callum.”
Callum turned to see Magnus pointing towards the keep. As long as they’d been underneath the overhanging roof, they’d been hidden from the view of the men in the bailey, but now that Llywelyn had jumped, they’d been spotted.
Callum shoved Robbie towards the nearest crenel. “Time to go!”
Robbie didn’t wait to be told twice. Overcoming his inhibitions in two seconds, he scrambled into Llywelyn’s crenel and leapt from the gap.
Robbie’s and Llywelyn’s heads both bobbed back up to the surface, and they began to swim hard towards the boat. It had been smart to remove their cloaks and boots, though they might regret their absence when they hit shore. But with the distance they had to swim, divesting themselves of the weight could mean the diff
erence between drowning and not.
Callum glanced at Magnus. “Take your chances with this or with them.” He climbed into the crenel.
Magnus cursed and tugged off his boots. “You people are mad.”
Callum grinned as the Dane scrambled into the adjacent crenel. “Make sure you get enough distance from the castle wall so you don’t kill yourself.”
Magnus had a wide-eyed look to him that matched Robbie’s of earlier, but he met Callum’s gaze and nodded. Callum himself took heart that the others had done it. Even now, he could see David easing back on the oars, having seen Llywelyn and Robbie leap from the battlement and start to swim towards him.
Callum drew in a deep breath and jumped.
Chapter Thirteen
South of Drumconrath
Aine
Aine woke to find blessed daylight filling the shelter, so much so that it had to be mid-morning already. Huw and William were still asleep, but Christopher stood near one of the posts that supported the roof, his attention on the fields and pastures before him. Though the rain had stopped by the time Christopher had arrived at her father’s fort last night, it appeared to have returned. A rainy mist hovered close to the ground, shrouding the trees and valleys. That was good news, in a way, since that meant it also shrouded them.
Although the night had been one of the most miserable of her life, Aine had worked hard to put a brave face on it. They’d walked another hour after Robbie had left, and then the men had decided that they needed to find shelter. While she hadn’t wanted to be the reason they stopped, she’d been overtly shivering. Sleeping in a shepherd’s two-walled shelter had been a new experience for her. She suspected that it had been new to the men too, though none had complained about it. With the moon rising, it hadn’t been too dark to see without a torch, but somehow lighting a fire hadn’t felt like too great risk. Dry kindling had been stacked against one of the walls—a gift from God, or so it seemed—and they had used it.
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