Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8)

by Sarah Woodbury

  “He did follow me, so you were right,” I said. “We locked down the castle last night, but apparently it wasn’t enough.”

  “Or it was too little too late.” Bronwen brushed past Callum, Catrin in her arms. Ieuan followed, already fully dressed. Lili and I had slept through the dawn, but we looked to be the only ones who had. Nobody seemed to care that we weren’t dressed, but then, we were family, and this was an emergency. I loved them all the more for how little they cared about my sensibilities.

  “Which would be my fault since I was here first and should have been thinking about being followed.” Lili picked up Arthur, and he put his face into her neck, his small arms wrapped around her tightly. “Still, you would think that if Lee could have attacked us in here he would have.”

  “I had the same thought,” Callum said. “That’s why he blew up a few huts and not the whole keep—because he couldn’t get inside the inner ward. This explosion is designed to flush you out.”

  I stopped in the act of tugging on my right boot. “If the movies I’ve watched are at all accurate, if I were the President of the United States, this kind of threat would call for my removal from the situation. The Secret Service would get me into the emergency bunker at the White House or maybe into a helicopter to take me to Air Force One. Lee would know that. Perhaps I’m better off staying put.”

  Justin appeared at Callum’s left shoulder. “There is a passage through the catacombs that can take us out of the castle.”

  I looked at Callum, who pressed his lips together, thinking. Then he said, “Follow my logic: I take it as a given that the explosion was caused by Lee. Thus, he is inside the castle. If he is inside the castle, he knows that you are here.”

  “How?” said Bronwen.

  “A question or two to a serving girl could have told him that,” Callum said, “and he has proved himself adept at getting information.”

  “My flag isn’t flying,” I said, “but it’s a weak attempt at secrecy at best. We didn’t tell the inhabitants of the castle to keep my presence a secret, and even if we had, I rode here in broad daylight. The entire town of Dover knows by now that I am here.”

  Callum nodded. “Thus, if Lee came to Dover, he knows too.”

  Impatient with our conversation, Justin gestured to indicate I should enter the corridor. “The entrance is this way.” He was practically dancing on the tips of his toes in his urgency to get us moving.

  Callum overrode him. “Alternatively, rather than draw you out, Lee could be using this explosion as a distraction so he can get inside the keep. Men should be pouring towards the destruction, which might give him the opportunity he needs to go the other way.”

  “He could be on his way here even now,” Justin said.

  I took in a breath and let it out. “Okay.” I still had my reservations, but I let Justin hustle us into the corridor and along it to the stairs. “I’m not sure about the catacombs, though, Justin. That’s where he’d expect us to go, isn’t it? We should go up.”

  “It’s human instinct to go up,” Callum said, keeping pace beside me. “Justin is right that we need to go down.”

  “There is no ‘up’ anyway.” Lili touched my arm briefly before returning her hand to Arthur’s back. I would have taken Arthur from her since he was so heavy, but he was wrapped around her like a four-armed octopus. “The keep isn’t connected to the battlements. We’d be stuck on the roof with nowhere to run.”

  “Maybe it isn’t Lee.” Ieuan had come up behind us, Catrin on his back, piggy-back style. She’d be four years old in November and was bigger than Arthur.

  “I don’t know Lee well, but it’s him,” Bronwen said. “Two explosions within twenty-four hours at castles where David is staying can’t be coincidence. It’s him.”

  So we did as Justin suggested and went down. We did take the precaution of not exiting through the main hall on the first floor but, as when we fled Canterbury, went down another floor to the basement. There I stopped everyone again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s think. I don’t want to go out there and join the throng in the inner ward without a thought about what we’re walking into. What does Lee want?”

  “He wants you dead, sire,” Justin said without hesitation.

  I shook my head, but Lili said, “That does seem to be the case.” She held her hand over Arthur’s exposed ear, not that he could help hearing us. He was learning a very hard lesson with every word his parents spoke.

  “Lee cannot be alive at the end of the day,” Justin said.

  I glanced at Justin, disturbed at where his mind had gone but unable to blame him for it either. “I don’t disagree, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves since we have to catch him first. Given that he has only blown up a small building in the outer ward so far—”

  “—I can’t believe you just used the word ‘only’ in this context,” Bronwen said.

  I smirked at her, grateful for the touch of levity at this stressful moment. “I assume he’s planning something specific, which he hasn’t yet accomplished, and is still here. The whole purpose of this bombing has to be because he can’t get to me any other way. It’s either a distraction so he can get inside the inner ward, or he wants me to come out the gate and walk straight into his arms.”

  “He could have blown a hole through the wall here like he did at Canterbury,” Ieuan said. “That would have been the fastest way to get to you.”

  “Only if he could then get through the hole,” Lili said. “He wants to be certain he gets Dafydd this time, which means he has a plan he thinks will work.”

  “Because he knows me,” I said.

  “It’s more than that.” Bronwen was looking down at her feet as she thought. Then she glanced at Callum. “I’m no expert on explosives, but I saw what happened to Canterbury. This explosion was nothing compared to that. What if he couldn’t blow a hole in the wall?”

  Callum’s eyes narrowed as he thought. “Are you thinking he’s out of explosives, or at the very least, out of detonators?”

  Ieuan looked from Callum to me. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “If that’s true,” I said to Callum without answering Ieuan’s question, “and he fails to draw me out, he could disappear in the crowds here, to appear a hundred miles away with a new plan and new way to harm us. We can’t take that chance. We can’t allow him to get away.”

  “Those of your men who guard the walls and the gatehouses know what he looks like because they’ve seen him,” Bronwen said, “but nobody else in the castle does. A quick disguise, slipping out in all the commotion, and he could disappear with nobody the wiser.”

  Lili’s face was paler than usual. “He has a gun, too, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.” Callum’s hand made a reflexive jerk to the small of his back. “We should assume it. I have one too, as does Jeffries, but—”

  “We don’t want to go there,” I said, “not unless we have to.”

  “It does make the need to hide you all the more urgent,” Bronwen said.

  “The Welsh guards have taken over one of the towers near the Fitzwilliam gate,” Lili said. “David and I could go there.”

  “You just want to get your hands on a bow,” I said.

  “It’s the only counter to a gun that I know, other than another gun,” Lili said.

  “It isn’t safe, Dafydd,” Ieuan said. “We have no way to get you there without being seen.”

  I put up a hand to Ieuan. Lili was his little sister, so he’d spent all of her life telling her what to do, but I needed to hear what she had to say. “If he really has blown up those buildings to draw me out, he must have a plan as to what to do with me once he has me. Any public harm to me and he ends up dead too. He is inside Dover Castle, surrounded by soldiers.”

  “I know,” Lili said.

  “I can see from your eyes that there’s more to this than you’ve said so far,” I said. “What’s the rest of your thought, Lili?”

  She lifted her eyes to t
he ceiling and took in a breath. “At worst, you can escape Dover by going back to Avalon.”

  “What?” Ieuan said.

  “What are you saying, Lili?” Bronwen said.

  “Dover doesn’t have moats so much as dry ditches,” Lili said, “dug deep to increase the height of the wall above. I asked Sir Stephen how water could remain in a ditch that was so high up a cliff, and he explained that in all the years he’s been Dover’s constable, he’s never seen more than an ankle-deep amount of water in the wettest of them. But we’ve had so much rain this summer, many aren’t draining as they usually do.”

  If I went back in time, it affected everyone, and our son especially. That she still held Arthur, knowing that he was listening to every word, meant to me that she was not only serious, but perhaps even right. “The particular spot I’m thinking of is right next to the tower where the archers are staying, and it’s slightly deeper than the rest of the ditch. Yesterday there was three feet of water in it. It rained all night, so there’s probably more now. Beneath that is the same mud and grass that’s everywhere else. It isn’t the Wye River, but the wall is only twenty feet high along that section. Dafydd could use it, if he had to.”

  I put a hand on Arthur’s back and leaned close. “Show me.”

  Lili passed Arthur to Bronwen, who took him in her arms. He wrapped his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck in the same position as he’d been holding onto his mother.

  I kissed Arthur’s cheek. “We’ll be back. Stay with your auntie.” There was no talk this time about being brave or behaving like a man. What was important was that my three-year-old son knew he was loved by everyone in his life, and that he was safe. Except for a few brief interludes, Ieuan, Bronwen, and Catrin had lived with us since his birth. Bronwen was like a second mother to him, and Catrin more like a sister than a cousin.

  Arthur nodded into Bronwen’s shoulder. Ieuan still held Catrin, and the four of them stood stricken, looking after us as we left the basement for the inner ward. Justin hurried to take his place beside me. “I can’t let you expose yourself like this, my lord.”

  “You can, and you will,” I said.

  Callum’s silence I took to be approval—neither enthusiastic nor grudging, but with the same sentiment that was passing through my head: if Lili was right, than getting to the tower where the archers had stored their gear was a better place than any other to hide me. Her idea was good enough to try, even if none of us were happy about the Avalon part of it.

  Justin made a choking sound. “Sire—” But at my calm look, he subsided and bowed his head. “I will keep you safe, if it’s possible to do so.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m willing to risk this.”

  Dover Castle was a busy place—a town in and of itself—and between the normal state of affairs and the explosion near the gatehouse, nobody took any notice when the four of us emerged from the basement into the inner ward. As had been the case since I arrived, I was dressed inconspicuously in clothes that were clean this time, but not my usual wardrobe. As it turned out, King Edward hadn’t left any finery at Dover, and we’d had to borrow from a member of the garrison yet again.

  We were well into mid-morning now, as Lili and I really had slept quite late. While it wasn’t raining at the moment, the day was overcast, and many puddles several feet across remained in the courtyard from rain during the night. As Sir Stephen had implied to Lili, it had rained so often this summer the ground was saturated.

  “I need to see what’s what first,” I said.

  “Sire—” Justin was set to protest again, but I ignored him and mounted the stairs to the battlement on the inner curtain wall and looked out. The dust was settling and something had caught fire again, near the main gate where the two Frenchmen were being housed. The curtain wall which abutted the destroyed buildings had been damaged too, though it was still standing in parts.

  Justin gave a snort of disgust. “I see now. The explosion was a diversion so Lee could free those French spies.”

  “You could be right,” Lili said, “or we could be meant to think so. Maybe, like Bronwen suggested, the explosion didn’t go off quite as Lee had hoped. Maybe he meant to blow a hole in the wall.”

  “He came close enough that it might not matter.” I looked at her carefully. She was unusually determined today, which was saying something for her. “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said without looking at me.

  She didn’t often talk about the premonitions she had—she was self-conscious about not being believed—but what other people called gut instinct came out as something akin to the sight in Lili. I’d learned to trust the few occasions when she’d made clear that a certain course of action should be followed.

  Cassie waved to us from the tower above the gatehouse. Callum put up a hand to her. She seemed to want to talk, and I could see him warring with himself because of his obligation to me. I pushed at Callum’s shoulder. “Go. Find out what she knows.” Callum dashed away along the wall-walk.

  “Where’s this tower?” Justin said.

  “I’ll show you,” Lili said.

  We had to leave the inner ward, which had Justin grumbling again as he jogged down the stairs to the ground and then across the inner ward to the southern gate. We had to go through it to reach the middle ward. The outer ward was an enclosed area beyond that one, and its walls went all the way to the edge of the cliff above the beach, a full quarter-mile from the keep.

  The gate wasn’t closed, but the drawbridge had been lifted a few feet up from the ground to prevent anyone from entering. People were streaming out of the northern gate that led to the main entrance to the castle (and the northern part of the outer ward). They might be gawking, but they also wanted to help put out the fire. It had to be put out as quickly as possible, for the same reason we’d put so much effort into putting out the fire at Canterbury Castle. Fire could spread, and without sophisticated fire-fighting equipment, it could destroy a castle nearly as easily as Lee’s C-4.

  The guards were preventing anyone from returning to the keep, however, even though I could see several people gesticulating to them about how important it was that they do so. The security measures we’d instituted before I’d gone to sleep were still being followed. With the outer ward on fire, it should have been obvious that the measures needed to remain in place, but I acknowledged that what was obvious to me might not be to a medieval person who’d never before dealt with a terrorist such as Lee.

  We skirted a crate that had been discarded on the ground in someone’s haste, and then we reached the southern gatehouse. “Let us out,” I said to the guard.

  “My orders are clear.” His eyes flicked to Justin’s face. “Nobody in or out of this gate.”

  Justin stepped closer. “I was the one who gave you that order, wasn’t I?”

  The guard put his heels together. “Yes, sir!”

  If I wasn’t in such a hurry, I would have found this funny. The guard thought Justin was testing him.

  “I honor your commitment to duty, Osmond,” Justin said, “but I didn’t mean that you shouldn’t obey the king.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The guard’s expression turned to horror. He sputtered, gaping at me, and I clapped him on the shoulder to reassure him. Justin, for all his reservations about this plan, didn’t wait for the guard to act. He grabbed the wheel, around which was wound the chain that held the wooden drawbridge, and released it. The drawbridge dropped to the ground with a sudden bang, and we ran across the bridge into the middle ward. I turned back and made a winding motion with my hand. “Bring it up!”

  The guard, still wide-eyed, hastened to obey. Callum hadn’t caught up yet, but I knew he could talk his way past the guard, or simply exit by the other gate and come around the long way. Then I ran after Lili, who was making for a tower that lay kitty corner to the gatehouse and southeast of the Fitzwilliam gate, which was the northeaster
n exit from the castle. Here the curtain wall made an inward jag before heading south to the white cliffs above the sea.

  All told, the outer walls of Dover Castle encompassed so many acres that nearly four football fields laid end to end could fit between the inner curtain wall and the sea. Watch towers, which gave shelter to the guards and access to the wall-walk, were placed every fifty yards or so along the curtain wall. Many ladders were also propped up against the edge of the walkway for easy access to the battlement.

  As agile as ever, even though she was pregnant, Lili took a ladder up to the wall-walk, and I followed. Once I reached the top, however, I pulled up, a tendril of unease curling in my belly. The distance to the ground might be twenty feet on the inside of the wall to the bailey, but it was higher than that to the bottom of the ditch outside the wall. Very few people could survive a fall from that height unless they fell into a body of water. For distances greater than a hundred feet, water acted like concrete—you’d hit the surface with an almighty splat and break every bone in your body.

  “This way,” Lili said, pretending she didn’t see my dour expression and turning to run along the wall-walk. After a few steps, however, she halted with a gasp.

  Lee himself stepped out of the doorway to the tower we’d been aiming for, his ever-present duffel bag strung over his shoulder. Whatever vision she’d had of the way events were going to go, Lee’s sudden appearance apparently wasn’t a part of it. Shock crossed Lee’s face too, and since my breath had caught in my throat, I doubted I had been able to control the surprise in mine.

  Then Lee dropped the duffel back to the wall-walk, reached behind him to the small of his back, and pulled out a gun.

  He pointed it at me. “Tell everyone to get off the wall.” Then, as if the gun wasn’t bad enough, he raised his left hand to show me the trigger remote he held.

  I spoke to Lili in Welsh. “Get away, cariad. Find Callum. Find the explosives. I will stall him as long as I can. I love you. Go.”