Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

by Sarah Woodbury

  Callum spoke into the phone, telling Jones what had happened, what he planned to do now, and what he needed from Jones. Jeffries hurried after Callum. “Where are we going, sir?”

  Callum held up one finger to prevent Jeffries from interrupting his conversation with Jones. He spoke into the phone, “How long do you think we have before they send the troops after us?”

  “They might give you a quarter of an hour to come quietly,” said Jones. “They may still have hope of that.”

  “Text me if you hear more. I need you to ring Cassie now and tell her what’s happening. I’ll ring her myself with a meeting place as soon as I have one.” Callum disconnected.

  “We need to do this fast,” he said to Jeffries.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Callum frowned, deciding he had to try. “Please stop calling me ‘sir’.”

  “Aren’t you a lord in the Middle Ages?” Jeffries said.

  “The Earl of Shrewsbury,” Callum said. “How did you know that? I kept it out of my file.”

  “Jones told me.”

  “The man has too loose lips,” Callum said.

  “So, I’ll keep calling you ‘sir’, if that’s all right.”

  The food shops were beginning to open. Awnings for the ethnic grocery shops had been raised, and of course, coffee and tea had been available since five, even on a Saturday morning. Although the safe house was very close, Callum didn’t dare go to it, not only because he didn’t want Jeffries to know about it, but in case they were being followed.

  They headed back through old town Cardiff, coming into it from the opposite direction from which Cassie, Meg, and Anna had entered it. Near the entrance to a coffee shop with a line snaking out the door, Callum stopped to ring Cassie himself.

  She picked up immediately. “Where are you?”

  “Not far. Where are you?”

  “Safe,” she said. “We want to be with you.”

  “Come to Hadley’s Coffee Shop on Queen Street,” Callum said.

  “Mark said that Darren is with you. Why?” she said.

  “I couldn’t get him to leave.”

  Jeffries’ mouth twisted in a wry smile. “I heard that.” He raised his eyebrows and pointed into the shop with his chin.

  Callum nodded. “Coffee, cream, one sugar.”

  “Got it.” Jeffries disappeared inside.

  Callum could have ditched Jeffries then, but he had begun to think that he might prove useful—and seeing as how currently his only ally was Jones, he couldn’t be as choosy as he might otherwise have been. Besides, when Cassie and Callum had arrived here with David two years ago, both Natasha and Driscoll, whom Callum had called friends, had proved to be traitors. Jeffries deserved at least the benefit of the doubt Callum had given them.

  Callum watched him through the window of the coffee shop. So far all Jeffries had done was order. What he hadn’t done was surreptitiously borrow someone’s mobile to ring Tate.

  Callum’s mobile buzzed with an incoming call. “Hang on, Cassie.”

  He switched calls.

  “Where are you?” said Jones.

  Callum told him about the coffee shop, his eyes still on Jeffries’ back. “Did you get the maps?”

  “It took longer to print them than to access them. I’m bringing them, but I’m on a bus,” said Jones.

  “Which bus?” Callum checked his watch. “How long?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Too long,” Callum said.

  “No choice,” said Jones. “Number 25.”

  Jones knew that would mean something to Callum. Memorizing bus and train tables was child’s play to an MI-5 agent. “All right,” Callum said, accepting what he couldn’t change. “The bus turns the corner by the castle. We’ll catch it there.” He hung up.

  Jeffries returned with the coffee. “I should have parked the car somewhere else.”

  “The last thing anyone at the Office wants to do is hunt us down,” Callum said. “Right now, they’re still hoping you’ll bring me in, and that they’ll get to Meg and Anna that way.”

  “If Director Tate rings my mobile, he won’t get an answer,” Jeffries said.

  “And he still won’t know where you are or what you’re doing.” Callum took a sip of coffee.

  “Why are we standing here in the open?” Jeffries said.

  “Because we’re in a surveillance blind spot,” Callum said.

  Jeffries turned his head sharply to look at Callum. “How do you know that?”

  Callum didn’t deign to dignify the question with a reply.

  Jeffries ducked his head. “You must have stashed the girls around here somewhere. Even you aren’t that omnipotent.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jeffries waved a hand. “You know, the way you came out of the debacle after Lady Jane’s death smelling like roses.”

  “That was then, clearly,” Callum said, “given what’s happened to the Project since.”

  “Yeah, but—” Jeffries took a long drink of his tea, “—you’ll end up all right even after this. You always do.”

  Callum eyed him. Jeffries’ words should have sounded resentful, but his tone was more admiring than anything else. Jeffries noticed Callum looking at him and shrugged. “Why do you think I’m here instead of turning you in?”

  “That is oddly honest of you,” Callum said. “I hope you’re not in for more of a ride than you bargained for.”

  “I didn’t join MI-5 to keep an eye on snot-nosed terrorist wannabes or harmless Welsh nationalists. We should be out in the field rounding up the men who bombed GCHQ. Why is Tate wasting resources chasing down you and the girls?”

  “I can’t answer any of that,” Callum said.

  “Neither can I,” Jeffries said, “but if anyone is going to find those answers, it’s going to be you, not Tate.”

  “I fear your confidence has been misplaced,” Callum said.

  “We’ll see,” Jeffries said, “but I’m guessing this blind spot isn’t here by accident.”

  Callum smiled into his coffee. It was true that several cameras between here and the safe house had been routinely vandalized as soon as they were fixed, some multiple times, until their owners had given up and moved them to slightly different locations without the same angle of vision.

  Jeffries’ optimism could not have been more different from Callum’s own assessment of his situation. The last few months had been discouraging in the extreme. One of the most difficult things for Callum to come to terms with was how spectacularly he’d failed in his mission. Cassie argued that he’d done the best he could, but from where he stood, that was irrelevant. Callum had felt like he was in one of those internet memes where ‘You had only one job!’ was written over the top of a toilet that had been installed upside down.

  Callum’s job may have had many moving parts, but it was still one job: to protect David, his family, and his interests in the modern world. In September, Callum had sat in the Permanent Secretary’s office, listening to him explain why the Prime Minister no longer felt the need to fund his department, and had looked into the face of utter failure.

  Recent events, however, had Callum reexamining that assessment. First of all, because the funding had been cut to nothing, when Meg and Anna had come through into this world, only Jones had been on duty to see it. If Callum’s office had been fully up and running, everybody from the Prime Minister on down would have known about it right away. Callum’s strictures would have safeguarded Meg and Anna, but the two women would have been on display, and who was to say that the Prime Minister wouldn’t have swept aside Callum’s carefully laid plans at the last moment?

  Like Director Tate had hoped to do today.

  Second, the demands of Callum’s job had made it difficult to get away last Thanksgiving, and he had feared that he was going to miss this year’s celebration in Oregon. Because his department had been dismantled, however, when he put in for leave, nobody had cared how long he asked to be gone. From the
look on the Permanent Secretary’s face, he might have given Callum time off until Christmas if he’d asked, since he was being transferred back to MI-5 at the new year anyway.

  Third, and more personally, the upheaval of the last few months had ensured that Cassie and Callum felt far less obligation to their jobs or their employer than in the past. Callum saw now that there was more than one way to serve his country, and he was beginning to think that MI-5 might not be it. He and Cassie could return to the Middle Ages with light hearts.

  Provided they survived the journey.

  Chapter Seventeen

  November 1291

  David

  David had never had any delusions regarding his role in war and his ability to fight in it. Raised on the assumption that all the fighting he would ever do was with a plastic light saber or in a computer game, he’d ridden into his first fight beside Bevyn when he was fourteen hoping for little more than survival.

  He had wanted to win, of course. He had wanted to make his father proud, but he’d had no delusions that if he was brave enough or fought hard enough, somehow they would win. It was only after he’d lived in the Middle Ages for a few years and fought in more battles that he’d started to understand what it took to win. And for the most part it wasn’t bravery, at least not his bravery, or only if by ‘bravery’ one meant the ability not to turn tail and run.

  David’s bravery in battle wasn’t going to save them. Subterfuge, on the other hand, or the ability to think several moves ahead of his opponent … now that was a different story.

  Justin and David crouched behind some scraggly bushes, looking up the valley towards Aberglaslyn. Thick fog surrounded them thanks to a sharp downturn in the temperature of the air compared to the river and the valley. The fog was turning out to be a godsend, however, hiding their slow approach to their current location.

  Fog was not without its drawbacks: sound carried better, so they had to be even more careful to stay quiet; and David couldn’t see a thing beyond his nose. He’d rock/paper/scissored Ieuan for Uncle Ted’s binoculars and won. David had them in his hand, awaiting the moment he was able to see anything through them.

  A scout had reported that Ieuan and his men had reached their position too, roughly half a mile to the north of where David’s men were hiding. Ieuan was to be the anvil to David’s hammer. David just hoped that Madog and his army really lay between them, because however much the scouts assured him that they were there and in the numbers advertised, David couldn’t see them. His desire to remain in control of any situation was being tested.

  Justin put a hand on David’s arm and tipped his head towards a shadow that had emerged from a stand of trees downslope from them. “Scout.”

  “We can’t allow him to stumble upon us by mistake,” David said.

  “I’ll take him.” Justin gathered himself, ready to spring up and descend on the scout.

  “No. Wait. If he gets close, kill him, but just watch him until I get back.” David wriggled away and ran the fifty feet to where his men had gathered in the trees near the path they’d come in on.

  William stood holding the reins of both his horse and David’s. When he saw David, he started forward. “My lord—”

  David held up his hand to stop him and tried to look reassuring at the same time. “I need an archer.”

  “I’m an archer, my lord.” One of the Welsh riders stepped forward while at the same time tossing the reins of his horse to a compatriot. His name was Afan, and to say that he was an archer was to seriously understate the case.

  “Come with me,” David said.

  David and Afan crawled to where Justin still waited, trying to hurry and yet be as quiet as possible. To David’s ears, they were making an awful lot of noise, but with the coming of day, the wind had risen and was rustling the branches in the trees around them.

  “Is he still there?” David threw himself onto his stomach beside Justin. He didn’t bother pulling out his binoculars again because they still couldn’t see farther than the stand of trees that hid the scout.

  “There’s two of them now,” Justin said. “The second is still hidden among the brambles. You were right to wait, my lord.”

  David couldn’t see the one in the trees but believed he was there. “Can you take him?” he said to Afan.

  Afan had settled at David’s shoulder, on the other side from Justin. “Either of them, my lord. Or both.” His eyes flashed.

  David had offended him with the question, but he’d had to ask it. “Justin, work your way around to the right. Afan, be ready to loose an arrow the instant Justin appears to take the nearest man down. We can’t give the second scout time to shout a warning.”

  Justin disappeared into the bushes to the right, and Afan retreated towards the left to a position that would allow him to stand to shoot, but still hide him from the sight of the scouts. Another ten minutes and the sun would fully rise; at that point, it would be a lot harder for both sides to hide, no matter how gray the morning. They needed to get the scouts before then.

  Or rather, his men needed to kill them. There wasn’t much point in pretending otherwise. Though Bevyn wasn’t with David today, he felt his old mentor at his left shoulder, speaking urgently in his ear as he had before that first battle at the Conwy River when David was fourteen years old, reviewing what he’d taught him all those years ago at Castell y Bere. David hadn’t learned everything he needed to know about life in the Middle Ages from Bevyn, but he’d learned how to fight. Bevyn had taught David to do what was necessary because it was necessary. It was a legacy that, regardless of the disagreements that had come between the two men in the past, David could be grateful for now.

  David kept his eyes on the first scout they’d seen. The man crouched low, hurrying from the original stand of trees where his friend waited, up the slope towards David. The scout was only fifteen yards away when Justin stepped out from behind a gorse bush. Before Justin could even move against the man, Afan had loosed his arrow from the left. David heard the dull thud of it hitting flesh.

  David was on his feet in an instant, racing down the slope towards the trees eighty feet away. He slid the last distance on the fallen bracken and wet grass, barreling into the second scout, who was hit but not dead. The arrow protruded from the left side of his chest. Afan had missed the center of his mass, though it was still a spectacular shot from where Afan stood to where the scout had been standing in the dark under the trees.

  The man scrabbled with his hands at his waist. At first David thought he was going for a blade, but then David saw the horn slung on a leather strap around the man’s torso. Even if David hadn’t tackled him, he wouldn’t have had enough breath to sound it, but David gave him points for trying.

  David ripped the horn out of the scout’s hands and threw it down the slope. It was only then that he truly looked at the man. He was young—David’s age or maybe a little younger. And he was dying; they both knew it.

  David clasped his hand in his. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  “You.”

  David bent closer as the man tried to speak again.

  “We didn’t think you would come too.”

  “It was just luck that I was with my father at Rhuddlan,” David said. There was no harm in telling him that, since he would never be able to tell Madog.

  “No! No!” The scout came to himself for a second, finding strength he shouldn’t still have, and grasped David’s shoulder with his free hand. “Not you. Not luck. Not for you.” His eyes widened. “We didn’t know. Tell Madog—” He held himself still, and for a second David thought he was going to speak again, but then he couldn’t. He was dead.

  David sat back on his heels, cold swirling in his belly. Men had died in his arms before, but he’d never held an enemy to his last breath, never witnessed the kind of deathbed confession you see only in movies, and he didn’t know what the man had meant for him to understand or to tell Madog.

  Afan spoke from behind David. “M
adog didn’t come all this way to defeat you, my lord. He wants only your father.”

  David turned to look up at him. “Is that what you understood from what he said?”

  “You are the King of England,” Afan said. “The only reason Madog is free to wage war against your father is because England no longer threatens Wales. Your very life protects us. Every Welshman knows it. Madog knows it.”

  David didn’t know how to respond. What the scout had said had occurred to him before, but he hadn’t ever heard anyone else articulate it. David looked back to the scout and reached out to close his eyes. Then he wiped his bloodstained hands on the scout’s cloak and stood.

  Justin had come up beside Afan and had been listening. He’d just killed a man for David, a Welshman fighting a war for Wales, but even he was nodding. “We all know it.”

  A horn call sounded in the far distance, reverberating down the valley. “That’s your father,” Afan said.

  Although Dad’s company had dawdled on the way to the bridge to give Ieuan and David time to get their men in position, Dad’s intent was to ride the mile from Beddgelert to Aberglaslyn at a canter. That would bring the lead horses to the head of the valley in no more than ten minutes. The road along the river was only wide enough for two horses to ride abreast, which meant that the company would stretch out for a quarter of a mile. David was regretting this plan more and more by the second.

  “We should move.” He backed off their position and ran to his horse, finding his hands shaking—not so much from fear as adrenaline. He put the binoculars away in the saddlebag.

  William was right there beside David, fastening down the straps. “Is it time, my lord?”

  “It’s time.” David caught William by the upper arm. “I know you fought for me at Windsor, but you’ve never been in a cavalry charge. You stay to the back or your father and mine will have my head, you understand?”

  “Yes, my lord.” William nodded, but David wasn’t entirely confident he’d obey. William was his father’s son and had a fine sense of honor. As shown by the fact that he was David’s squire in the first place, he had a knack for letting his honor lead him into trouble.