Crossroads in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  “But why?” And this time Math heard anguish in her voice.

  Dafydd approached her from behind and put a hand to each of her upper arms. “It’s okay, Lili,” he said. “Let me handle this.”

  Lili held herself stiff, and then her shoulders sagged. She allowed Dafydd to turn her away. Once Dafydd released her, however, she straightened her shoulders and marched straight towards Math. She had the look of a woman on a mission.

  “You may not leave his side,” she said. “Don’t let him do anything he’ll regret later.”

  “Whose side?” Math said. “Dafydd’s?”

  Lili nodded. She lowered her voice. “I have never seen him this angry.”

  Math had bent his head to look into her face and now lifted his gaze to study the back of Dafydd’s head. He would have said Dafydd was determined, but the rigid set to his shoulders told him that Lili might be right. Dafydd’s gentleness had been for Lili only.

  Math nodded. “I wouldn’t have left him anyway. See what you can do with the rest of the wounded.”

  “Come, William.” Lili stepped away, leaving Math to do as he promised. He walked up to stand beside Dafydd, folded his hands behind his back, and let Dafydd get on with it.

  “How much did your captain pay you?” Dafydd said.

  “Enough,” the man said. “Or so I thought at the time. My lord—” He winced and shifted, pain in his face. “A bandage … please … I’m bleeding out.”

  “I haven’t yet decided to let you live,” Dafydd said. “This suits me for now.”

  The man gaped at Dafydd. “But, my lord—”

  “Am I your lord?” Dafydd said. “Because last I saw, you were among a company of men set on killing me.”

  The man shook his head. “Our intent was to capture, not kill.”

  “Your intent was to kill his companions, then,” Math said.

  Dafydd’s jaw bulged. “That makes it so much better.”

  “What kind of plan did you have for keeping the Prince alive?” Math said. “Your aim was deadly.”

  “And why do you say, capture?” Dafydd said. “For what purpose?”

  The man’s mouth was open and his breathing shallow. “Ransom, I think. The Normans hoped to exchange you for lands in the south.”

  “Who gave you your orders?” Dafydd said.

  The man shrugged and then grimaced in pain. “The English commander.”

  “And who is his commander? One of the Mortimers?” Dafydd said.

  The man jerked his head, neither in denial nor agreement

  Math leaned in. “You don’t know? You wear Mortimer colors.”

  “Gethin said it was better that way. We couldn’t wear King Llywelyn’s! Better to unite under one banner.”

  “Mortimer’s,” Math said.

  Again the jerk of the head. “I didn’t get the impression that a Mortimer leads the Norman assault.”

  “Then who does?” Dafydd said.

  “Norman scum are all the same to me.”

  “Yet you took their money to betray your King,” Math said.

  “A man can’t eat loyalty.”

  “And Lord Ieuan starved you, did he?” Math said.

  But the man didn’t answer. He was dead.

  Chapter 6

  25 August 1288

  North of Buellt

  Lili

  Lili had never experienced a day like this before. She clenched the reins of her horse—it had belonged to one of Dafydd’s men who would never need it again—and gritted her teeth. She needed to damp down all emotion, in hopes of also controlling her fear. She could not, however, deny the truth. She was scared.

  She’d been a foolish girl three years ago when she’d fought in the ranks of archers at the battle of Painscastle. She’d thought herself composed and competent at the time, but she hadn’t known anything about war. She hadn’t known anything about men either, or the way the world worked, or why what she wanted might not be hers for the having. King Llywelyn had undermined her security in his denial of her marriage to Dafydd. And the ambush? These last hours had destroyed whatever certainty remained.

  As she waited for the men to get themselves in order, her thoughts went to her men. How did Dafydd and Ieuan live with the knowledge that at any moment, they might be required to kill another person by their own hand? She hadn’t known what it was like. She’d had no real idea of what they faced every time they rode away from the safety of their castle.

  Worse, Dafydd had made a mistake.

  He’d sent Math down a different path to the ford because he didn’t trust the road before him. He’d had an inkling of what might happen, and yet … he had still underestimated his opponent. She wasn’t used to thinking about Dafydd as fallible. On one hand, it made him more accessible, but on the other hand, it made the future more terrifying. From now on, every time Dafydd rode out of the castle while she watched from the battlements, she had to let him go with the knowledge that he could make mistakes.

  “You will stay between Dai and Evan the whole time,” Dafydd said.

  “Yes, Dafydd,” Lili said, for once having no intention of doing anything but what he suggested. She didn’t have a sword and she’d use her bow if she could, but it wasn’t a good weapon for close work, which is what they’d face in the bailey of the castle.

  They’d left the surviving English cavalry behind at the ford, alive and bandaged, but hobbled. War among the Normans in their own country—Normandy—had always been a matter of capturing prisoners for ransom. Everyone knew that. But this war was about survival. If that meant Dafydd ordered the death of Englishmen who might have otherwise lived to fight again, no Welshman would have thought less of him. But he hadn’t, and Lili, for one, was glad.

  They crossed the Wye River at the ford and came out of the trees in good order. Dafydd had set them up as if they were English cavalry, which meant that the men carrying pole arms—spears rather than the heavier lances in this case—led the company, not Dafydd and Math. It probably made sense, though Lili heard some of the men mumbling about how it was just like the Norman lords to lead from the rear instead of the front as God intended.

  As they cantered towards Buellt Castle, Lili’s heart rose into her throat. The big double gatehouse which King Llywelyn had rebuilt loomed above them and they followed the road directly towards it, brazening out their deception. All of the men wore the Mortimer tunics and had their helms drawn over their faces. With their losses, and a few men left behind to watch over the English prisoners, Dafydd’s company resembled the English force in number—before the ambush, that is.

  The lead rider lifted a hand to the guard on the battlement. Without any hesitation, the guard waved them forward and signaled to the men below to ratchet up the portcullis. Math kept Dafydd close to him. Dafydd’s head was bare and his hands were tied in front of him. As he approached the gatehouse, the men on the battlements cheered.

  Once inside the bailey, Dafydd gave the English captain a chance to approach his horse, waiting through a long count of ten, and giving his entire company the opportunity to pass through the gate and into the bailey. Lili hung back, trying not to draw attention to herself amidst the much larger men. Under all this armor, she could pass for a youth, and men generally saw what they expected to see. The Englishmen who’d taken over Buellt didn’t expect to see a woman among the riders, so they didn’t see one.

  “I count six,” Lili said to Evan under her breath.

  “Against thirty,” Evan said. “This should be quick. We might come out of this in one piece. The key is not to be the lone casualty.”

  If the defenders had been paying closer attention, they should have seen that Dafydd’s company spread themselves evenly throughout the cramped outer bailey, which was barely large enough to contain the thirty Welsh cavalry. The bailey remained as it had been when Lili had left that morning, encompassed by a curtain wall and accessed through the twin-towered gatehouse they’d just come through. Beyond, a motte supported a great roun
d keep, which was defended by a small masonry wall and six towers. From the intact state of the defenses, the Welsh garrison had put up no resistance.

  It seemed to Lili that even the breeze held its breath as the company reined in. The English captain came to a halt at Dafydd’s stirrup. “So this is the Welsh pup? He doesn’t look like much.”

  This had to be sheer bravado because he couldn’t have been more wrong. Dafydd didn’t wear his helm or his sword, but he was half a foot taller than the captain, broader, and while his face still bore a hint of the childish roundness of youth, his blue eyes held a steely glint as he glared down at the man. An Englishman underestimated Dafydd at his peril.

  Fortunately, most of Dafydd’s men didn’t understand English or they would have risen as one against the captain. Math would not have been able to stop them. As it was, Dafydd bent forward and rested an elbow on his knee. “All is not what it seems.” Dafydd straightened, dropped the ropes that he’d been holding around his wrists, and with a casual flick of his ankle, caught the captain underneath his chin with the toe of his boot.

  The captain went down, a gasp of stunned silence encompassed the garrison, and then everything happened at once, like one of those explosions that took down the wall at Painscastle during the previous war. A heartbeat after the captain hit the ground, Dafydd’s men were off their horses. Half ran as fast as they could towards the gatehouse that led to the keep, which had been left open, as was normal in the hustle and bustle of daily life. One of the guardsmen on the wall had his mouth open, gazing at the running men as if each had grown two heads. None of his fellows reacted any more quickly. By the time they did, the rest of Dafydd’s men had targeted all the members of the garrison they could see.

  Because a horse didn’t provide a stable platform for Lili to bend her bow, Dafydd had instructed her to find a piece of higher ground and watch the roofs for archers bringing their bows to bear on his men. She dismounted and ran to a stump of wood, rising two feet above the ground, designed as a stand for chopping wood. It would allow her to see above the men in the bailey.

  She craned her neck towards the top of the gatehouse and then ran her eyes along the battlements. A shout from Dafydd had her swinging around to look to where he pointed: an archer had appeared at the top of the keep. She raised her bow, her arrow already pressed into it, but the other archer got his shot off first.

  An arrow rammed into her shoulder, throwing her backwards off the stump. The back of her head slammed into the packed earth of the courtyard and the force of the fall knocked all the air from her lungs. She lay as she’d fallen, stunned, her limbs akimbo. Was this dying? Lili’s ears rang inside her head. All she could see was sky, the edge of the stable roof, and the shaft sticking up from her right shoulder. She felt no pain as of yet, but stars danced before her eyes and her vision blackened around the edges.

  “Lili!” Dafydd fell to his knees beside her. She turned her head to look at him, blinked hard, still confused as to why her head hurt more than her shoulder. She brought up a hand and touched the point where the shaft had gone in, feeling along it to the feathered end. Her hand came away clean. “There’s no blood. Why?”

  “Just lie still.” Dafydd felt all around her shoulders and arms, his fingers ending up at the pulse at her throat. “Does your shoulder hurt?”

  “That’s the part that’s confusing me,” Lili said. “It feels okay, but I can’t lift up my body.” Lili tried again to roll onto her side, wanting to push to her knees, but she couldn’t move more than a hair’s-breadth. She fell back.

  “What in the world—?” And then, incongruously, Dafydd laughed. Lili gazed at him in amazement, but a grin split his face from ear to ear. He felt under her shoulder where it met the dirt of the bailey. “The arrow has you pinned.” He tugged and wiggled at the shaft. Then he enveloped her in an embrace, his arms between her and the dirt at her back. “Hold on.” He lifted her up with a jerk.

  “Ow!” Lili had been unprepared for the sudden movement. She put a hand to the back of her head and came away with blood. She stared at her fingers and then at Dafydd. “But—” She glanced at the arrow, sticking out of her shoulder. She still couldn’t feel it.

  “The arrow didn’t touch you.” Dafydd tucked his hands under her armpits and helped her rise to her feet. He sat her on the stump, on which she’d been standing earlier. While Dafydd had been occupied with Lili, Dafydd’s men had subdued the garrison. No wounded Welshmen lay on the ground.

  Math had taken charge. “Get them against the wall!” Math glanced to Dafydd, who nodded that he should continue.

  “It looks like Math has this well in hand,” Dafydd said. “Let’s get your armor off you.”

  “Are you sure?” Lili said.

  Dafydd’s looked at her warily. “What do you mean?”

  “In coming to my aid, you could have sacrificed your own men!”

  Dafydd stopped in the act of working at the buckle that held the top edge of the leather armor together. “The English never had much of a chance. The numbers were too uneven, exactly how I like it.”

  Two of Dafydd’s men passed close by, herding a member of the garrison towards curtain wall. He’d been stripped of weaponry and his hands were tied behind his back. Two of the six Englishmen in the bailey were down, but four faced the wall, and soon three others, who’d been found asleep in the barracks, joined their fellows, along with the English captain. The craft workers and servants were gathered in the center of the bailey, unharmed.

  “That’s why you don’t like it when I fight beside you,” Lili said. “I distract you.”

  Dafydd didn’t answer, just continued to work at the rest of the buckles that ran down Lili’s side and held the armor on her. She raised her arms and he lifted it over her head. Because all of the mail had been too heavy and far too big for her, Dafydd had assigned her an elaborate boiled leather cuirass from one of the dead. It had included leather caps for her shoulders and upper arms. Lili hadn’t wanted to wear it at all, but Dafydd had insisted that she not enter Buellt unprotected. If she’d refused, he would have left her to guard the prisoners.

  When Dafydd had put the armor on her, he had laughed and commented that she ‘looked like a football player’. Whatever that meant. She hadn’t tasked him with an explanation at the time.

  Dafydd snapped the shaft in half and pulled out the pieces. Together, they studied the hole the arrow had punched through the armor. “I must have turned just as he shot,” Lili said. “The arrow got through the armor, but at an angle, and then it just kept going through empty air, until it reached the other side.” She wiggled her finger in the hole.

  “It was a very near thing.” Dafydd’s voice was calm but it had an edge to it and he held his jaw tightly.

  “Did—did someone else get him?” Lili said.

  Dafydd nodded. “One of the men I sent into the keep came out on the wall just as the archer loosed a second shot. My man ran him through.”

  Lili bit her lip. Dafydd looked into her face and then ran a finger along the line of her jaw. “Are you really okay?”

  “Yes.”

  His teeth clenched again and he glanced towards Math. Lili recognized what that look meant. For all his genuine concern for her, she was right in what she’d said. He needed not to worry about her. He needed to focus on what he was going to do now that he’d taken the castle. That was something he couldn’t leave entirely to Math.

  “They need you,” she said. “Honestly, I’m fine.”

  Dafydd nodded and stood, and then turned to face Evan and Math as they approached. “What’s the cost?” he said.

  “Several of our men are injured, though not severely,” Math said. “Two dead among the English garrison.”

  “Bring me one of the prisoners,” Dafydd said.

  Math bowed, perhaps recognizing the intensity in Dafydd, too, and that in this moment, Dafydd was his commander, not his brother-in-law. He returned with one of the Welshmen.

  “Tell me
your name,” Dafydd said.

  “I am a loyal Welshman, my lord, Rhys ap Gruffydd.” The man bowed low.

  “If you are loyal, how is it you came to fight for the Normans?” Dafydd said.

  “By pretending disloyalty to you, I stayed free. I couldn’t help my countrymen if I was in prison with them.”

  Dafydd thought about that for a few moments, neither accepting nor dismissing. It might even be true. The man didn’t shift from foot to foot, nor look away as if he was nervous, but kept his gaze on Dafydd.

  “Who let the English in?” Dafydd said.

  “The captain of the garrison, Gethin.”

  “Who bribed him?”

  “I couldn’t say, my lord—”

  Dafydd crowded into Rhys and grasped him by his coat to jerk him closer. As Dafydd was eight inches taller than he, the man’s toes barely touched the ground. “Tell me who?”

  The man sputtered and spit, unable to get any words out.

  “Who! One of the Mortimers?” Dafydd said.

  “N-n-no, my lord,” Rhys said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why, then, do the English soldiers wear these colors?”

  “D-d-disguise.” Rhys held himself very still, without struggling, which was brave of him, given that Lili herself felt like cowering before Dafydd’s wrath. This was a side of him she hadn’t ever seen, but then, she’d not fought beside him in the last three years. At Painscastle, their victory had been so lopsided and predestined, he’d not shown anger.

  Dafydd glared at the man and settled him back on his feet, but didn’t let go of his coat. “So you do know more.”

  “Only guesses, my lord, from some of the things the soldiers said.”

  “For the last time, if not one of the Mortimers, then who?”

  “Gilbert de Clare.”

  Dafydd released Rhys without warning and he staggered backwards, stumbling on an errant stone that caught under his heel. He would have fallen if Evan hadn’t grasped him underneath the arm.

  Dafydd spun towards Math. “You know what? I don’t care why they did what they did. I don’t even care who ordered it. Just lock them up, as securely as you can. We have bigger fish to fry.”