Shades of Time kobo

by Sarah Woodbury

  “What do you see?” Still mounted, Math called after Bevyn from the road.

  “We have two bodies.” Twenty yards into the woods, Bevyn crouched beside the corpses. The marauders had hastily shoved them underneath a blackberry bramble. In the dark, they might have seemed well hidden, but as it was March, the bramble was hardly more than a tangle of prickly sticks, with no leaves or fruit. The blue jacket one of the men wore stood out clearly against the green grass and brown bush, along with Math’s crest, a red dragon rampant on a field of yellow.

  Math walked to where Bevyn crouched. He didn’t curse, just gazed silently at the bodies. Then he gestured to three other men to come closer. “Get them out. There should be three more about somewhere.”

  “Over here!” The shout came from the direction of the road.

  Bevyn caught Math’s arm before he could respond. “No remains we find will be Anna’s.”

  “I know. They wouldn’t have gone to this much trouble to cover up what they’d done if they meant to harm her. That’s why they hid the bodies. If not for Mair, they might have slipped away without anyone seeing them, and we would have been truly lost as to why she never came home. Because Anna was seeing to a birth, if she took longer, I wouldn’t have worried, and I wouldn’t have realized until sometime today that anything was amiss.”

  Bevyn’s frown was permanently affixed to his face. “Does this mean we have a spy in Llangollen?”

  “She rides to the university most days,” Math said. “Everyone knows her habits, so a stranger at the tavern could have asked around. It’s only because Lili and Bronwen are here, and then the birth, that Anna’s routine was disrupted.”

  Bevyn took in a sharp breath through his nose, understanding Math’s meaning. “Whoever took her was stalking her, awaiting their chance.”

  “Though if that’s supposed to make me feel better, it doesn’t.” Math glowered. “I was complacent with her safety. I thought five men were enough to protect her from any threat she might face.”

  “It would have been enough—except they brought a company of twenty.” Bevyn’s earlier anger at what he perceived as Math’s carelessness was gone. “This was well planned. It’s impossible to protect anyone in that situation.”

  “More guards would have evened the odds.”

  Bevyn shrugged. It was pointless to argue. “Come on. We’re not done. She didn’t leave the road here.”

  They returned to the road but didn’t mount their horses again, instead walking back along it away from the bend. If Anna had escaped capture it would be because she had found a way off the road, as Mair had done.

  “Here, my lord!” Rhys, Math’s best tracker (other than Bevyn himself), waved from a spot ahead of them where the broken down stone wall that lined the road was particularly destroyed.

  Bevyn bent to put a hand to the impressions of horses’ hooves in the dirt and then climbed over the wall to find similar tracks on the other side. He nodded at Math. “Several horses leapt the wall here.”

  “If one was ridden by Anna—” Math’s face was white as he scrambled after Bevyn.

  “We know for certain she was being chased, and it stands to reason she would have looked for a way out.” Rhys gestured to the mass of hoofprints that had torn up the turf in the field. “This early in the spring, the grass is still only a few inches tall, and it’s rained every day this week, so the ground is soft and muddy. The impressions are impossible to miss.”

  Math studied the ground and said with clear regret, “Her horse was not built for galloping, and she’s never taken to riding, even though she worked hard to learn.”

  “There are so many other things she’s good at,” Bevyn said.

  Math shook his head. “I didn’t see the need to press her on becoming a better horsewoman than the minimum she needed to be.”

  “Again, this is not your fault, Math,” Bevyn said. “I know you’re angry, but the only man to blame for Anna’s abduction is the one who ordered it.”

  Math sighed and turned on his heel, trudging across the field in a northerly direction with Bevyn, both of them careful to skirt the hoofprints they were following. Rhys loped ahead of them and came eventually to a halt before a stand of trees that prevented them from seeing the land on the other side. In the dark last night, Anna would have found them even more impenetrable, but it seemed she’d entered them anyway because that’s where the tracks led.

  Rhys didn’t continue into the woods until Math and Bevyn had caught up.

  “I hear water.” Math swiveled his head this way and that, trying to orient himself.

  “The stream below us is running fast,” Rhys said. “I haven’t stood in this exact spot before, but I know the area. The invaders chose their place for an ambush well. It is hemmed in on one side by the slope of the hill, and on this side by a ravine.” He frowned. “But it’s too steep; it isn’t possible to cross at this location.”

  “The tracks tell us she did.” Bevyn shoved his shoulder between two bushes, breaking and bending many branches in the process. The horse would have leapt the lower branches, and Bevyn could see more broken at head height.

  “But she couldn’t have.” Rhys hustled after him. “At least two horses galloped through here, but they had nowhere to go.”

  As Rhys came abreast, Bevyn caught his arm, and the young man realized the danger at the same moment, grasping the trunk of a white birch tree clinging to the edge of a steep ravine, at the bottom of which the stream was running high. The landscape in this area was riddled with streams such as this, rising and falling depending upon the season and sometimes disappearing altogether.

  Below them, a man and horse, both unmoving, lay half-submerged in the water.

  Math reached Bevyn’s other side and stared down at the body. “He has to be dead.”

  “Indeed.”

  Neither man was a stranger to death, but this was not the morning they’d envisioned having when Bevyn had arrived yesterday to confer. Bevyn turned to command several men to make their way down to the stream, though at this time of year, it was more akin to a river, flowing high with spring rains. They’d have to use ropes to descend if they themselves didn’t want to end up with broken necks.

  Math let out a breath. “No Anna, thank the saints.”

  “You realize what this means, don’t you?” Bevyn gestured to the dead man and horse. “Anna isn’t here, so we don’t have to worry about looking for her anymore. She’s gone to Avalon, my lord.”

  The tension eased out of Math’s posture. “We’ll keep looking anyway, but you’re right: our priority now is to discover where the rest of the soldiers went and who they were working for. Even if they don’t have her, they still invaded Wales.”

  “I’ll get the men organized. What do you want to do now?”

  Math looked off into the distance. “What do I want? To be in Avalon with her. I hate that she’s there all by herself.” He clenched his hands into fists. Bevyn recognized the signs of a man who wanted to punch something. Anything. But Math wasn’t a sixteen-year-old youth, and he was wise enough to know breaking his knuckle on a tree trunk wouldn’t help his wife—or his boys, who were missing their mother.

  Bevyn nodded encouragingly. “We will do what we must and more. They had twenty riders; it shouldn’t be hard for Ieuan—for me—to pick up their trail.”

  “Don’t ask me to stay home for this.”

  Bevyn scoffed. “Ieuan didn’t, and I won’t overrule him. You have every right to remain in the thick of things. Dafydd would.” The two men exchanged a glance, acknowledging that only Dafydd truly had the power to go after Anna. It was the one thing he could do that they could not. Bevyn had never been to Avalon, but he’d heard enough stories by now to know it was a world of miracles and mysteries. According to Dafydd, it also had ten times as many people as they did here. Were Dafydd to go after her, he could end up an ocean away, and then they would have two people stuck in Avalon instead of one. Better to solve the mystery before D
afydd even learned she was missing.

  It came to Bevyn, however, that he wouldn’t be the one to find Anna. He’d been less than twenty years old when Meg had come to King Llywelyn and in his early thirties when Dafydd had arrived in Wales to save his father. Now he was past forty, and most of the men with whom Bevyn had trained as a youth were dead. Many had died in battle, the rest from sickness and disease, and at times he felt as if he’d achieved his position in life not from his skill with a sword or his acumen but simply because he was the last man standing.

  When Dafydd had sent him away after being crowned King of England, it had been a dark time in Bevyn’s life, only brightened by his new wife and growing family back on Anglesey. Now that he was returned to the fold, so to speak, he was damned if he was going to allow some Scottish plot to upend his well-ordered life. Given that Bevyn was the last man standing, he had the experience to do the job that needed doing, even if it was the last thing he wanted: “It is I who will stay home, my lord.”

  Math swung around to look at him. “You?”

  “What if these men didn’t try to abduct Anna for the reasons we think? What if the point is to send you into a frenzy?”

  Math stared at him. “To what end?”

  Bevyn pointed towards the castle. With the morning growing older, the clouds were higher above the earth, and they could see Dinas Bran perched on its mountain top. “With all of us gone, who’s guarding the heir to the throne of England?”

  Math’s eyes darkened. He could see the implications as well as Bevyn. So all he did was nod. “I suppose you are.”

  Chapter Ten

  19 March 2022

  Elisa

  Elen leaned forward from the backseat of the car as the not-so-dulcet tones of Attica’s new hit song, My Baby Shakes It, blared out from the recesses of Elisa’s purse. “That’s a new ringtone, Mom. I’m impressed.”

  “I wanted to make sure I could hear it when it rang.” Elisa’s hands shook as she rummaged in her purse for the phone. She’d allowed it to fall to the bottom, rather than keeping it in the cell phone pocket, because every time she came upon it, she cried. She’d been weary of crying.

  Ted, who was driving, kept his attention on the road ahead of him, but she could see his eyes flicking towards her every few seconds. “What—are you saying that’s the phone?”

  “Watch the road, Ted. I’ve got this.” Elisa finally came up with the phone. Brushing some eyeliner dust off the screen—or maybe that was ancient crayon that had been crushed inside her purse long ago—she pressed talk and then put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Aunt Elisa?”

  “Anna! Oh, thank God! Please tell me you aren’t in Pennsylvania.”

  “No. London.”

  Elisa put her hand over the receiver. “She’s in London!”

  The moment Elisa said Anna’s name, Ted pulled to the side of the road in a gravel turnout. “Put her on speaker.” It was raining, and once Ted turned off the windshield wipers, Elisa couldn’t see much through the windows. Nobody seemed to be around them, but now that she had Anna actually on the phone, she found herself instantly paranoid that MI-5 or some other secret agency was going to descend on them and whisk them off before she could see Christopher.

  “Hi, Anna!” Elen was bouncing up and down on the back seat. She had grown a great deal in the nine months Christopher had been gone to the Middle Ages, but she was still only twelve, and Elisa was pleased she had yet to acquire that Teflon coating many kids wore from being hurt too many times. She was just as eager and cheerful as ever—especially any time her time traveling cousins were mentioned. Somehow six months in an English school hadn’t dampened her enthusiasm any. Elen appeared to have the ability to win over even schoolyard bullies.

  Anna laughed. “Hi, Elen. I’m so happy to hear your voice.”

  In Elisa’s head, Anna would always be seventeen, but she reminded herself what she was hearing now was the exhausted voice of a twenty-eight-year-old woman who’d just time traveled to the modern world from the Middle Ages.

  “Are you alone? Did anyone else come with you?”

  “No. I’m sorry. Christopher is with David in Ireland.”

  Ted coughed and laughed at the same time, though as Elisa glanced over at him, he had tears streaming unselfconsciously down his cheeks. That was Ted. He was the most honest and stable man you could ever hope to meet. He was her rock. And yet he cried to hear his niece’s voice.

  Now he leaned closer to the phone, and when he spoke, if Elisa hadn’t been looking at him, she wouldn’t have known he was crying. “We decided we needed to be here, Anna. We—” He glanced at Elisa, and she knew he was wondering how much he should say over the phone. Ultimately, he simply added, “We haven’t been idle any more than Mark has.”

  There was silence on the other end before Anna said, “I don’t know what that means, but I can’t wait to find out. Where exactly are you?”

  “We rented a house in Kent.”

  “You did what?”

  Elisa stepped in. “We have a house—listen, Anna. I know Mark has all sorts of safeguards in place, and it would be better if we could talk in person rather than doing it over the phone.”

  “I know. Just a sec.” They could hear walking, and then the phone being set on a table. “I’ve put you on speaker. Here’s Mark.”

  “When did she arrive, Mark?” Ted said.

  “Two in the morning. I would have called then, but I wanted to get as much as I could sorted before I did.”

  “We planned for this, Mark,” Ted said.

  “I know—” Mark paused, and Elisa had the sense he’d wearily wiped his brow. “But I didn’t foresee her arriving on horseback in the middle of Westminster Hall.”

  There was total silence in the car. “Did he say she brought a horse?” Elen said.

  From the background, Anna said, “It wasn’t my fault! I was being chased by Scots!”

  Ted laughed, and Elisa suddenly found her shoulders shaking too, though whether from laughter or tears she wasn’t entirely sure. She had lived daily with a tension in her shoulders and stomach at what Christopher had to be going through in that faraway world, and though he hadn’t returned with Anna, to know he was alive and well—and the rest of her family was too—had her breathing normally for the first time in nine months.

  She hadn’t lied to herself either that a great portion of that tension derived from guilt. Her last conversation with Christopher had been a fight, and she knew in her heart that part of the reason he had wanted to go to the Middle Ages in the first place was because she’d been holding on too tightly to her almost-grown-up son. At the time, she believed she couldn’t help it—and told herself it was for his own good.

  But the nine months without him had torn her apart and remade her in ways she never would have expected. Though the tension and fear of losing him forever had never left her, she’d learned to live with it and without him—and without knowing what had happened to him.

  That he’d gone to the Middle Ages had been pretty clear once things had gotten sorted, as Mark would say. Mark himself had known only some of the story, and he’d reached out to Ted as soon as he could no longer contact Christopher. Time travel had been the first assumption they’d made, since Christopher had told his father the straightforward truth the evening before about who he was with and what had happened so far.

  And that was another source of guilt, because of course she’d had calls from Christopher on her phone all morning. Normally she might have left her meeting to answer them, but she hadn’t. And by the time she chose to answer them, he had ditched his phone. She hadn’t even been able to hug Arthur, her own great-nephew, because of her stubbornness.

  From the deaths of her father and mother, she was well acquainted with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The grief she’d felt at Christopher’s loss had been genuine, but it was the grief at her own culpability that kept her up at night. She’
d gone through all the stages: angrily denying she’d done anything wrong or that it was her fault; promising God or fate or the powers-that-be that she would do anything if only they would make things right; utter despair that she was a terrible mother and incapable of change; and then acceptance.

  And it was the acceptance that had lit a fire under her—and changed the course of their lives. Christopher’s expressed desire to find a career that could one day help David had made both her and Ted think that’s what they needed to do too.

  “Unfortunately, as usual, things got out of hand fairly quickly.” Mark had come back on the phone. He sighed heavily. “A police officer arrived in the hall right after Anna did. He panicked and shot the horse.”

  “Who else knows Anna is here?” Ted said.

  “The policemen who found her in Westminster Hall, the doctors and nurses who treated her, and the inspector who briefly interviewed her before I arrived.” Mark reeled off the list. “And that’s only the ones we know about. I have no idea if anyone else has been paying attention recently and tracked the flash as she came in. We have to assume it.”

  “So too many to squash,” Elisa said. “What are we going to do?”

  “No idea,” Mark said.

  “We have to come up with an explanation as to what she was doing there,” Ted said.

  “And why Five took it over?” Mark said. “We’re working on that.”

  A new voice came on the line, causing Elisa to almost drop the phone.

  “Anna’s best bet, for the time being, is to lay low.”

  “This is Livia, my—” Mark paused, “—she works with me, and she knows pretty much everything. She’s patched in from Thames House on another untraceable line.”

  Elisa and Ted exchanged a look, but then they both shrugged. If Mark trusted her, they had to too.