Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  In theory, that would have been just fine with Meg, but David would be disappointed that they hadn’t managed to gather anything on his list except for Cassie and Callum. Though even he would have to admit that finding them was a pretty amazing thing for Meg and Anna to have accomplished within two hours of their arrival.

  But for better or for worse, they didn’t crash. Cassie safely navigated the highway interchanges in Portland. As they passed the city, Meg thought about her life and friends there and then put them from her mind. They couldn’t help her.

  As the hour approached midnight, they passed the sign marking the city limits of Eugene, Oregon. Cassie pulled off the highway to get gas for the second time, and after Callum paid the attendant, drove to the twenty-four hour Wal-Mart.

  Never mind that it was midnight on Thanksgiving when all sane people should be sleeping off their turkey and pumpkin pie, the parking lot was packed with Black Friday shoppers. It seemed they’d just missed the midnight crush to get inside the doors. Last Meg had heard, ‘Black Friday’ had been pushed to as early as four A.M. That appeared to have changed since she lived here. Pretty soon the stores would open on Thanksgiving Day, and everyone could skip the turkey entirely.

  Callum slung his backpack over his shoulder and handed a second backpack to Cassie. He saw Meg looking at him and said, “I know it’s paranoid of me, but I don’t want to leave anything in the truck that will identify us. What’s in here—” He raised the backpack, “—is too precious to lose to a sneak thief.”

  “Or Homeland Security,” Cassie said, shrugging her pack onto her shoulders.

  “Is that all you brought?” Meg said. She and Anna owned only what they stood up in, but Meg had thought she’d seen a suitcase in the hallway before they left. Cassie had taken their medieval clothes, and Meg’s stomach sank to think they’d left them behind.

  “We left our bigger bag at Cassie’s aunt’s house, so we wouldn’t be burdened with it,” Callum said. “It just contained clothes, and we can buy new if we need them.”

  Cassie saw Meg’s crestfallen face and made a sad face of her own, “I’m sorry, Meg.”

  “They’re just things,” Meg said. “They aren’t worth our lives. I suppose if we had them with us and were caught, they would be a huge giveaway.”

  “Which we wouldn’t want. We want to keep you under wraps.” Cassie touched Meg’s shoulder sympathetically.

  But Anna leaned close to her mother. “My belt knife is in my boot. How about yours?”

  Meg had left that behind too. She shook her head.

  “I should have said something.” Anna frowned. “Does Wal-Mart have metal detectors?”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Meg said.

  “Are these people mad?” Callum said as he bulldozed his way through the crowded entryway, the three women in his wake.

  The companions popped out to the left of the entrance, in front of the endless row of cash registers. A wave of heat blew over Meg, so she pulled off her hat and unbuttoned the black wool coat she’d borrowed from Cassie’s aunt’s house. Anna shrugged out of her bright purple parka and hung it over her arm. The store was lit up as if it were already Christmas—which Wal-Mart clearly hoped it was—and Meg averted her eyes from the blinding fluorescent lights.

  The colors and variety of items for sale were almost too much to take in. People like to have choices, but they were actually happier with fewer choices than more, which might explain the intent and grim expressions on everybody’s faces. Shopping was definitely a serious business in Eugene, Oregon on Black Friday. Meg had been hoping it would be merrier—like a party.

  “Over here, Mom.” Anna hauled her mother to where Cassie was standing in front of the eyeglasses machine.

  “It says it takes forty minutes, all told. Thirty if you choose one of the eight standard frames,” Cassie said.

  “That I can do.” Without hesitating, Meg put her face up to a rubber sleeve that strongly resembled a diving mask and did everything the machine told her. Beside her, Cassie punched numbers into a keypad, and then Meg heard the distinct sound of a card being inserted. The lights that flashed in Meg’s eyes had momentarily ceased, so she pulled out her head. “I can’t let you pay for this.”

  “You can, and you will,” Cassie said. “That’s what we’re here for. Besides, Callum left a wad of cash with my grandfather. If we return to the Middle Ages, my grandfather will pay the bill. You’re not to worry about it.”

  The machine was beeping at Meg, ready to start again. She didn’t feel so guilty that she didn’t put her face back into the headrest and let the machine continue its calculations. She needed glasses.

  Anna said, “Are you using a fake ID?”

  Cassie laughed. “Of course. Credit cards are the worst for sending up red flags. Nobody can buy anything without the government knowing because both the store you bought it from and the credit card company know. This machine won’t take cash, of course, so we have no choice but to use a card. Callum will use a different card to pay for what he’s getting.”

  Callum had wandered off and came back just as the machine was finishing with Meg’s eyes. He’d lined his cart with an open duffle bag. “Let’s see the list again, Anna,” he said.

  Meg pulled out her head. “You’re thinking we should get started?”

  “We have half an hour until your glasses are done. We might as well use the time,” Cassie said.

  Callum nodded. “Best to be prepared for every contingency.”

  They left the glasses machine to do its thing and wandered the aisles of Wal-Mart with what seemed like half the population of Eugene. Meg kept getting distracted by the colors and the plastic, but Anna and Callum took to the project with a will. Within fifteen minutes, they had worked their way through the basics of David’s list, including the coveted potatoes (three different kinds) and tomato seeds. It was too bad that neither chocolate nor coffee beans (these were from originally from Africa, but they hadn’t been ‘discovered’ and cultivated by 1290) would grow in the British climate.

  Meg knew, and had to restrain herself from explaining in a David-esque manner, that some historians had even suggested that the introduction of the potato as a staple of food production in Europe after 1492 was enough to account for the rise of Western Europe as a superpower. Meg wasn’t big on increasing the population too fast, but greater population meant more minds at work and could lead to more scientific advances and more hands to do the work that needed doing. So, potatoes it was.

  Cassie took it upon herself to organize the items they were buying into categories. With a smile at Meg, she took an entire box of SPF 15 lip balm and tucked it into the duffel bag. “Bronwen specifically mentioned the blue kind.”

  “I believe you,” Meg said.

  “Anything you want, Mom?” Anna flourished the list in one hand.

  Meg gazed around at the choices and—quite frankly—the excess, and shook her head. “I’m sure I’ll want to bring some things back, but I keep thinking about what it looks like for us to have modern luxuries—plastic in particular—and so I decide to do without. What I want most are the things that I really can’t have: a cell phone, a ball point pen, a car, and—” she picked up a novel with a picture of Stonehenge on the cover, “—something to read.” Then she smiled. “I could do with some thick cotton socks.”

  Anna smiled back. “We’ll swing by and pick up a couple pairs on the way to see if your glasses are done.”

  While Callum paid for the pile of goodies, Anna, Cassie, and Meg trooped back to the vision center where a very helpful—and very tired—employee presented Meg with glasses in a bright red case. Meg had chosen simple pewter frames, more angular than round, which appeared to be the current style. She put them on and about fell over. Meg had forgotten what it was like to see. She spent a few minutes alternating between looking through the glasses and lowering them to look over the top of the frames.

  “What do you think?” This time it was Cassie bouncing
up and down, clearly pleased with the gift.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Meg said. “Thank you just isn’t enough.”

  “My pleasure,” Cassie said. “Truly.”

  Callum had also bought four cell phones, and once he joined the women, they all stood in an out-of-the-way spot near the bathrooms and customer service, and he opened one of the packages. It was so loud in the store that nobody was going to overhear what they were discussing.

  “You got four phones?” Cassie accepted hers. “Why?”

  “One, the Black Friday sale had these marked two for the price of one, so why not get four?” Callum said. “And two, these mobiles work internationally. The odds of anyone tracing them before we get out of the country later today are very slim, and I want to be able to keep in contact in case we get separated.”

  “They’re nice.” Anna turned hers over in her hands. “Last I saw, touchscreens were expensive.”

  Meg squeezed her shoulder. “It’s the little things that trip you up.”

  Callum looked up from his phone. “Can you keep driving, Cassie? I have work to do.”

  “Get me some coffee, and I’ll be good to go,” she said.

  Meg didn’t offer to drive again, even with her new glasses. When she looked over Callum’s shoulder at his phone, amazingly, she could read the small print on the screen, even though it wasn’t two inches from her nose. Twenty minutes earlier, she wouldn’t have been able even to see it. “What do you mean, ‘work’?”

  “We’re on a blackout with MI-5 due to the bombing, so I’m not expected to make contact with anyone until I return to Cardiff. I need to talk to Jones, however. He and I established a procedure—not just for me but for any agent in distress or who’s been compromised—to fall back on pre-arranged email accounts and new mobiles. Give me a second.”

  Callum worked furiously on his phone for five minutes while the three women unpacked their phones and turned them on. Then Callum looked up at Anna and Meg. “Jones sent a message to my account, giving me his new number. Before I ring him, I need your photos.”

  “Our photos?” Anna said.

  “ID, Anna,” Meg said. “I think we’re about to see what technology can do again.”

  Callum lined up Anna and then Meg against a square of white wall in the lobby of Wal-Mart, taking photos of each of them in turn. He texted them to Mark and then switched to telephone mode and dialed Mark’s number that, as far as Meg could tell, he’d memorized in the two seconds he’d been looking at his email.

  Mark picked up. Meg could hear his tinny voice, even from a few feet away. “I received the photos. Where are you?”

  Callum brought the phone down, put it on speaker set to a low volume, and the four friends huddled around it. “About to start driving again. This is a big country and it’s going to take a while. Where are you?”

  “Hang on.” There was a pause, a flurry of conversation in the background, and then the slamming of a door. “Good job I had a spare mobile ready to go because I wouldn’t have had a chance to slip away. I’m in the maintenance closet.”

  Cassie and Callum exchanged a bemused look, which Meg didn’t understand, and then Callum said, “What’s the situation?”

  “It’s chaos in here right now. We’ve been taken over by Signals.”

  “What’s ‘Signals’ again?” Meg said.

  “It’s the nickname for the agency that got bombed,” Cassie said.

  “Has there been any mention of the Project?” Callum said.

  “Not so far,” Mark said. “Earlier, I spent two hours orienting the techs who arrived. They’re rebuilding the system from the ground up. They assume Signals was compromised before it was bombed.”

  “That’s what Smith said when he recalled me,” Callum said.

  “You’re still seen as lily white, by the way. Incorruptible. Wish you were here to glare at these people, because they don’t trust me,” Mark said. “I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for the last half hour. They took over my whole system.”

  “I can’t be sorry about that,” Callum said, “because I need you.” He gave Mark a brief rundown of the last few hours since he’d gone dark, and his concerns regarding his ability to arrive safely in San Francisco.

  Meg looked sideways at the Black Friday shoppers around them. No one even seemed to notice them.

  Mark said that he couldn’t use the usual channels because of the blackout on communication, but he could still monitor the situation and see what the chatter was like at other agencies. “My coffee shop has been open for two hours. I’ll go there with my own laptop. And I’ll see what I can do about getting Meg and Anna ID.”

  “We’ll call you when we get closer to the airport in San Francisco,” Callum said.

  “I should have a better grasp of the situation by then,” Mark said.

  Callum ended the connection.

  “I thought we were going to the consulate?” Anna said.

  “Did I say that? I didn’t mean it. With communications down, neither MI-5 nor we can risk it,” Callum said, “though they don’t know why I agreed so readily since they don’t know about you two.” He smirked.

  “Callum waves that badge around, and everybody obeys,” Cassie said. “It isn’t far off from being the Earl of Shrewsbury, come to think about it.”

  Meg gazed out the store window at the parking lot, lit up with a million fluorescent lights. They were there to make the parking lot safer, but the harsh bright white was anything but comforting.

  Anna reached out and took her hand. “I feel like this ought to be different, somehow. Like I ought to be feeling something more momentous, or doing something more momentous, than shopping at a Wal-Mart.”

  Meg squeezed Anna’s hand. “I don’t know about that. Shopping is the worst and the best of American living. Twenty-four kinds of toothbrushes and a pair of glasses that lets me see your face clearly from across the room for the first time in two years. I’ll take it.”

  Chapter Nine

  November 1291

  David

  ��My lord … may I ask you something?” William de Bohun said.

  At sixteen years old, William had become a full-fledged member of the Order of the Pendragon. Although no longer a child, he still looked at David through the same calm brown eyes he’d shown in the church outside Llangollen. David had taken him on as his squire not merely as a way to control his father, which was a good reason in and of itself, but because he was a member of the up-and-coming generation of Anglo-Normans. If David was to rule England, he needed to win the hearts and minds of William and his peers.

  Besides, David liked him.

  “Of course,” David said.

  “About what happened this evening …” William paused again, and David could practically see the gears turning in that blonde head as he tried to think of the best way to phrase what he wanted to ask.

  David waited while William stalled by tightening down the buckle on David’s left bracer a little too tightly. David put his free hand on William’s arm and looked at him. “Just ask.”

  “I was standing on the battlement with a sentry when your sister and mother arrived at the top of the southwest tower. I had no other duties at the time.” He hastened to add these last words with a worried glance at his lord’s face.

  “It is fine, William,” David said. “I was with my family and had given you leave to go. There was no reason for you not to be on the battlement.”

  From David’s perspective, it was better for William to be there than in the storage closet with the latest girl he’d taken a fancy to. David needed to have a conversation with William about his responsibilities in that regard. If the girl became pregnant, William’s father would never in a million years allow him to marry her, and it would open the whole can of worms about what it meant to be illegitimate. It was okay in Wales as long as the father acknowledged the child. Not so okay in England. And the Church wouldn’t like it, of course.

  William swallowed. “
Yes, my lord.”

  “So you saw them fall.” David wasn’t asking a question.

  “And disappear,” William said. “I don’t understand how such a thing could happen.”

  David laughed under his breath. “Neither do I, William. I only know that it did, and we must continue to act as if such a thing was meant to happen.”

  “Oh, I know that.” William gazed at David intently. “Such was not my concern.”

  David narrowed his eyes at his squire. “Then what?”

  “It’s about the man who fell with them and died,” William said. “Who was he?”

  “A mistake, clearly,” David said.

  William’s lower lip jutted out a bit because he thought David was either dismissing him or not being truthful.

  So David added, “Martin knew my mother from years ago. I was raised in Avalon. You know that, right?”

  William nodded. “Your father sent your mother there before she gave birth to protect you.”

  “Right.” David didn’t even grind his teeth at the lie he was telling. Though he’d fought it that very afternoon, he had to admit its necessity now more than ever. “When Anna and I returned here to save my father’s life, my mother was left behind. A few months before I turned sixteen, she too returned, inadvertently bringing Martin with her. He had to leave Avalon because of her.”

  “Is that why you invited him to Rhuddlan? Because she felt guilty?”

  It was both insightful and brave of him to ask that, and David decided not to slap him down for his impudence. The boy’s intensity was making David cautious, and he chose his words carefully. “Not guilt so much as an apology. I sought to mend the rift that event caused in our lives and in his. I had hoped Martin would visit me in London two years ago, after he aided Lord Callum in his moment of need. I wanted to thank him. As King of England, I could have granted him whatever he wished.”

  “Except to return to Avalon,” William said.