Champions of Time (The After Cilmeri Series, #13)

by Sarah Woodbury

  Ieuan led the others south, towards the gatehouse. He had more men with him because it was his job to canvas the entire inner ward in case the prisoners had been moved from their original location or, if they were extremely lucky, Roger Mortimer had chosen to hide himself in one of the gatehouse towers. Unlike the orders given to the men assaulting Beeston’s main entrance, theirs were to kill everyone they saw, no questions asked.

  Samuel had seen the weapon that Andre handled so easily. Black on black, long and sleek, it was clearly deadly. If the weapons from Avalon did everything Callum said they would—and Samuel had no reason not to believe him—he would have thrown everything they had at Beeston from the start. Mortimer had set out to wrest England from David’s control, and he needed to be punished accordingly for his overreaching. Samuel himself didn’t care one whit for these traitors and didn’t see the point in coddling them.

  David did see it, however, and really, his opinion was the one that mattered. That was why he’d authorized the use of the Avalonian weapons only as a last resort, and again, Samuel wasn’t in a position to argue. David’s rule of Britain was predicated on the fact that the people themselves had begged him to lead them, and that was all the justification Samuel needed tonight. He trusted because to do otherwise would be willful stupidity. It was David who had first welcomed the Jews into Britain. He was among the khasidei, the Righteous, never mind that David would be the first to admit he hadn’t done enough. He’d done what he could at a time when nobody else was doing anything.

  “This is only going to find us Venny, right? Mathew, Cador, and Rhys are being kept in the outer ward—or they’ve already been killed,” George said in an undertone. “Nobody seemed willing to talk about that.”

  Samuel glanced towards the younger man, thinking the words came from trepidation, but George appeared very focused and genuinely curious. “One step at a time. We deal with this, and then we deal with that. Truthfully, we know nothing for certain.”

  An arrow whispered through the air, and a moment later, Samuel thought he heard a breathy cry, instantly cut off. No body fell from the wall-walk, however, and he decided that Constance knew what she was doing, and they were to keep going. They were a dozen feet from the tower door now, and a single torch shone from a sconce fastened to the stones. The handle of the knife he held felt slick against his skin. It was a cool night, but he was sweating. He took in a breath, motioned for George to move to the other side of the door, and knocked, returning to his position before an answer came.

  The door opened, revealing a man silhouetted against the lantern light behind him, and hardly a single breath later, an arrow hit him in the center of his mass. Knives at the ready, Samuel and George were through the door immediately afterwards. Samuel caught the man by the shoulders and laid him on the ground before he could fall on his own, thinking to mitigate the noise. The man was sputtering, trying to breathe through the blood in his mouth. George slid his knife between two ribs into his heart to put him out of his misery. It was exactly the kind of compassion and ruthlessness Samuel had grown to expect from these Avalonians.

  If there had been anyone else in the room, they wouldn’t have taken the time to be quiet. It was too much to expect that the guard was on duty alone, however, so Samuel wasn’t surprised when a second guard, perhaps summoned by whatever noise they had made or simply because he had been returning to the guardroom at his appointed time, appeared through a narrow doorway at the back of the room.

  That moment of hesitation where he gaped at the scene before him allowed Samuel time to throw his knife. It tumbled end over end, its aim true, but the distance was great enough that the man dodged, and the knife clattered harmlessly against the wall behind him.

  But the distraction gave George time enough to bound forward and tackle the man before the guard’s sword could clear its sheath.

  Samuel was larger than George, and he followed immediately after in order to put his knee to the man’s chest. “How many men guard the inner ward?”

  Blood dripped from the guard’s lips where George had punched him. Samuel took the man’s head in both hands, prepared to pound the back of his head into the floorboards. “How many!”

  “Two of us here. Four in the gatehouse. Two on the wall-walk.”

  “Where are the prisoners?” George asked.

  The guard motioned vaguely with his head towards the floor above. Samuel sensed his eyes darkening. He hadn’t thought George had hit him that hard, but then he saw blood seeping from the back of the man’s head into the floorboards. He’d cracked his skull in the fall.

  Samuel cursed under his breath, but they would get no more from him. With George on his heels, he raced upstairs. The second level proved to be empty, but the top floor opened onto a single room with a locked door. He turned to George. “We need a key.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  As George disappeared back down the stairwell, Samuel knocked on the door. “Who’s in there?”

  A moment later, the frightened face of a young man of twenty appeared in the little window. It wasn’t Venny, nor another man Samuel recognized. “What’s happening? They won’t tell me anything. It’s been days!”

  “Who are you?”

  “Henry Percy.” He backed off the threshold, fear evident in his face. “Who are you?”

  “Samuel ben Aaron.”

  “The-the Jew?” Henry stuttered, hope filling his face. “Companion to Earl Callum?”

  “The same.”

  George was back, a large iron key in his hand. “Try this.”

  Samuel shoved they key into the lock. It turned, and the door opened. “We’re getting you out of here. Where’s Venny?”

  “I don’t know what’s happened to him. They’ve kept me here alone, questioning me.” His voice faded away, causing Samuel to look at him more closely.

  “They tortured you? Why? What could you tell them?”

  “Nothing!” The word carried a full measure of pain. “Somehow they knew I was working with Humphrey de Bohun, but where he’d gone or what he planned after he left Beeston, I couldn’t tell them even if I wanted to.”

  “He’s out there waiting for us.” Samuel took Henry’s arm, more gently than he might have thought to do a few moments ago. “Come on.” The three men hastened down the stairs.

  Once back in the guardroom, Henry went straight for the jug on the table and took a long swig. The remains of a simple meal sat on a tray, and he snatched up the bit of bread and cheese and stuffed both into his mouth. He spoke around the food. “In between beatings, they barely fed me.”

  Samuel didn’t begrudge him the time. “We have food at the camp, but you’ll need your strength for what’s to come. Take a sword too.”

  With fingers that trembled, Henry unbuckled the sword belt belonging to the guard Constance had killed with an arrow, deeming the sword attached to it of better quality than the other dead man’s. “I was to have been knighted last week.”

  “If we get out of here in one piece, it can still happen.” Samuel went to the door and peered out.

  “Not with how I behaved,” Henry said. “I should have fought.”

  “More experienced men than you couldn’t have done more. Don’t take too much on yourself. You are alive to fight another day, and that is what matters to the king—and your grandfather.”

  Henry looked up, his eyes questioning. “What do you know of him? He is well?”

  “The king forgave him his treason, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s here too.”

  Henry swallowed hard. “And the king?”

  “He’s alive.”

  “Keep up, why don’t you,” George added, though somewhat under his breath. And then to Samuel he said, “We should go.”

  The balcony by which they’d entered the inner ward was directly opposite, thus the reason for Constance’s impressive shot. At first, Samuel was hesitant to fill the doorway, fearing she would mistake him for one of Beeston’s defenders. He doused the
lantern, leaving the room in total darkness, but allowing a greater contrast to the sky outside.

  Then someone—by size and shape it was Sophie—stepped away from the curtain wall and waved an arm. “All clear.”

  Henry had recovered enough to frown. “Is that a girl?”

  George grinned. “She’s the one who got us up here.”

  Samuel smirked at the surprise in Henry’s face. He decided he wouldn’t befuddle him further by mentioning that the two-foot arrow sticking out of the guard’s chest had been shot by Constance. Samuel hadn’t always been what Callum called enlightened, but his first real encounter with a woman from Avalon had been Cassie, now Callum’s wife and the mother of his son. These days it was either learn and adapt or get run over.

  They loped across the courtyard, swords out this time, though as Sophie had promised, they encountered no resistance. All of their companions were already at the balcony.

  “Henry Percy.” Ieuan looked him up and down. “You don’t look well.” Then he turned to Samuel. “You found nobody else?”

  “Nobody that mattered. We have two dead guards, one thanks to Constance.” Samuel nodded at the archer, who was staring at the ground with her arms folded across her chest. She might have been thinking about the men she’d killed, but Samuel thought it more likely that she was angry they hadn’t found her husband.

  “She downed two more on the wall-walk,” Ieuan said, “and we encountered four in the gatehouse.”

  “According to the man I questioned, that’s the total number that guarded the inner ward,” Samuel said.

  Sophie let out a breath. “What do we do now? It’s good we have Henry, but since we found only him, that means we’re not done.”

  “Not even by half.” Andre’s weapon rested on his shoulder. As far as Samuel knew, he hadn’t fired it, which was good because Callum had told him it would be loud, even with something called a silencer on the end that was supposed to muffle the sound. Samuel hadn’t asked how the others had died, but he assumed they’d been put to the sword.

  “Do we lower the drawbridge?” George said. “If we don’t, we can’t get back in.”

  “Well, we can, thanks to Sophie,” Ieuan said. “I’m more concerned about Roger Mortimer retreating inside the inner ward with a hundred men and holding us off for longer than we care to besiege him. There’s a well here. We could spend months trying to get him out.”

  “If we go out the way we came in, though, then what?” Sophie asked. “I can get us into the outer ward, but—”

  “But it is full of hundreds of men,” George finished for her.

  “Maybe that’s not a bad thing,” Samuel said. “With the fires, it has to be chaos over there by now. We are only nine, and all of us speak English. We can lose ourselves among the crowd.”

  Sophie nudged Ieuan’s elbow. “Whatever we decide, Math is waiting for our signal. They need to begin the assault.”

  Samuel had used the walkie-talkies himself, so he had no problem with Ieuan handing the one he carried to him. “I’ve been trying to get through, but it’s hard to hear anything, and I didn’t want to turn the volume up any louder. Now we can. Do your best to raise him. We can always send up a fire arrow of our own as a signal if we need to.” Then to Sophie, he said, “You can get everyone from the ditch into the outer ward?”

  She nodded. “Piece of cake.”

  It was a phrase Samuel had heard the Avalonians use a time or two. He knew what it meant, even if he had no idea why it meant that. “Good. I’ll stay here. That way when they take the outer ward, it will be a simple matter for me to lower the drawbridge.”

  Ieuan nodded, gesturing to the three men who’d taken the gatehouse with him but knew nothing of climbing. “You stay too.”

  Tom, the closest man to him, looked comically relieved that he wouldn’t be scaling the cliff again.

  Then Ieuan gestured to the Avalonians and Constance. “Let’s go get our friends.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  2 April 1294

  Venny

  Venny didn’t know what was happening. But at this point, as far as he was concerned, the specifics were immaterial. After two weeks of silence and fear that they’d been abandoned, his king had come.

  That this was his king he had no doubt. Nothing else would have excited his captors this much, and the whistles and explosions above his head were like nothing he’d ever heard or seen before. The room in the barracks in which he and his companions were being held captive had a tiny window, and he could see many-colored sparks showering Beeston from above. He had no idea what these meant, since they didn’t appear to be doing any damage to the castle, but if David had come for them, then it was time they did something for themselves. Long past time.

  He turned to Rhys, Cador, and Mathew—and his father, Hugh, who sat in the only chair. The room consisted of one bed, which naturally had also gone to Venny’s father, and four thin pallets on the floor with thin blankets to match. They’d been lucky to have had those. “It’s time to go.”

  “Where?” As usual, his father was the man who sought to question Venny’s authority. The last two weeks had been a trial for that reason, far more than the simple fact of their captivity. Though truthfully, as time had gone on, he’d come to see that Hugh’s disparagement of Venny had far more to do with his father’s own frustration and ill-humor at his relative impotence than because of anything Venny had done or said.

  Which is why he could answer with a measure of equanimity, “Out of here.”

  Hugh Venables pointed towards the door. “How? Last I checked, it was locked.”

  Venny mimicked his father’s gesture. “King David is out there and has brought an army to free us. I, for one, am not going to sit idly by and wait for Roger Mortimer to decide to use us against him rather than surrender. He kept us alive because it was all that was keeping the king from attacking. Now he is attacking anyway, as he should be. Perhaps as he should have done days ago.”

  Hugh sniffed. “Your precious king is dead. Whoever this is, he cares nothing for you.”

  Mathew had risen to his feet after Hugh’s first comment, but now he strode the three paces that was the entire width of the room towards Venny’s father, getting right in his face. Yesterday, Venny might have stopped him, knowing that appeasement was the only way they were going to survive their captivity. Not tonight.

  “I have listened to your snarking and sniping for two solid weeks, and I’m not going to listen anymore. Your son is going to lead us out of here, and I am going to follow. You are welcome to stay behind, but if you come with us, you will keep your mouth shut, or we really will leave you behind.”

  For once, Hugh actually looked somewhat cowed, whether because of Mathew’s words or because of his size. Mathew’s hands were also clenched into fists, and Hugh might have finally realized that he’d pushed the Londoner too far. “It hardly matters, since there’s no way out.” He straightened his tunic with a jerk.

  “There’s always been a way out,” Cador said.

  At his father’s surprised look, Venny chose to enlighten him. “We believed the odds of escaping the barracks—and Beeston afterwards—were slim to none, so we didn’t choose to attempt it. They’re in our favor now.” Venny nodded at Rhys and Mathew. “Take off the hinges.”

  Hugh gaped, but Venny didn’t bother to explain because the men were already at work. Mortimer’s men had never allowed them any iron. The room had been built without a fireplace, and they’d been given no brazier to keep them warm. But necessity bred invention, as Venny had heard King David say more than once. It was a matter of moments for Mathew to detach two of the bedposts to use as hammer and chisel, and then some tapping and prying to remove the pegs that allowed the hinges on the door to work. The gap created between the frame and the door was narrow, but it was wide enough to slip a slat of wood, also from the bed. With a shove upward, the slat dislodged the wooden bar that had been the additional security for the door.

 
With a satisfied grunt, Mathew shoved the door wide and together with Venny, they looked left and right. Nobody was guarding the corridor.

  Moving on quiet feet, they left the room in single file, Venny in the lead and Cador bringing up the rear, as was his custom, even though he had no bow and arrow tonight. As Venny had said to his father, the initial escape was the easy part, but now they didn’t want to alert anyone to the fact that they were free before they reached the ground floor.

  Nobody came up the stairs, however, and, a moment later, Venny passed through the doorway into the guardroom. It looked like nothing out of the ordinary—a table, benches, a few trunks—and only a single guard, who stood with his back to them, facing out the open doorway. Freedom was so close, Venny could taste it.

  The guard’s shoulders were tensed and his hands braced against the frame of the door. His desire to be out in the bailey defending the castle with his fellows, instead of guarding useless prisoners, was palpable.

  Venny himself was the slightest of his companions, barring Hugh, so he stepped aside and let Mathew rush the man. He hit him in the back, though at an angle, so his head hit the edge of the frame of the door. He went down and didn’t get back up again.

  Mathew loomed over him, fire in his eyes. After two weeks in prison, he was ready to kill anything that moved, but Venny made an impatient gesture. “Get his weapons.”

  Cador was already pawing through a trunk at the far end of the room. “Venny!” He tossed Venny a knife in a sheath, and then he cheered as he came up with his quiver. His bow stood upright in one corner. Probably none of the defenders of Beeston could use it, so they didn’t recognize it for the masterpiece of craftsmanship that it was.

  By now, Rhys had moved the motionless guard out of the doorway and closed the door so they could work without being observed. Hastily buckling on sword belts and adjusting their weaponry, the four of them huddled together to confer. And then to Venny’s surprise, his father joined them. “Well done.”

  None of them responded to the accolade, though Venny wasn’t displeased to have it. Then he quickly suppressed the feeling of pleasure. It did him no good to want to please his father. Even when the approval was sincere, it never lasted.