Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (14 page)

Meg looked away, a little ashamed. “I know.”
She lifted one shoulder, trying to explain. “I look at him
sometimes, and I don’t even know him anymore. He makes a decision
and it affects three million people. How can such a person be my
son?”

“
I’m sorry I haven’t been
there to help him carry the burden for the last two years,” Callum
said.

Meg let out a dry laugh. “I remember when he
was in middle school—those boys with their machismo and their
fears—they mocked him for all those qualities that have turned him
into a king—honesty, integrity, and righteousness. How David hated
it.”

“
And now we rise—or we
fall—on his decisions. It’s his shoulders that carry us. His
qualities that determine our future.”

“
Anna isn’t ready to return
home because she’s figured that out about him too,” Meg said. “She
sees him the same way you do.”

“
You’re his mother,” Callum
said. “You see his flaws. The rest of us can’t afford
to.”

Meg bit her lip and looked away. Callum
wasn’t entirely right. She adored her son. She’d known how special
he was before he was two years old. She’d forced herself to see his
flaws because if she didn’t, who would?

“
By the way,” Callum said
when she didn’t answer him, “I’ve spoken with your brother-in-law
several times over the last two years and hopefully patched things
up a bit between you.”

Meg was glad for the change of subject. “I
have worried about what happened to him after Llywelyn and I left,
but since I had no way to find out, I tried to put it out of my
mind.”

“
Aye,” Callum said,
reverting to his Scottish roots. “I worried about him too.” He gave
a rueful smile. “I didn’t fear for his life, but Lady Jane could be
a bit merciless when she chose. She could have thrown him into a
cell, whether or not he was an American citizen. But after
Chepstow, Lady Jane let him go. Cassie and I stopped in to see them
on our way home from Oregon two years ago, and I gave him and your
sister your best wishes.”

“
Thank you,” Meg said, and
then her breath caught in her throat. “If Homeland Security or this
military contractor know that we’ve arrived, even if way out here
in Oregon, is Elisa going to find men in black beating down her
door at 3 am?”

Callum made an ‘ach’ sound at the back of
his throat. “To say, ‘I hope not’ isn’t adequate, I know. If
someone from your government discovers you’re here and cares that
you’re here, he might contact them. It is something to be concerned
about.”

“
I should warn them,” Meg
said.

Callum shook his head. “You can’t. Not yet.
It could be the red flag that starts the ball rolling. Besides,
Elisa and Ted know what to do.”

“
What do you
mean?”

Callum let out a
whuf
of air. “This was all
theoretical before two hours ago.” He looked up at the ceiling for
a second, marshalling his thoughts. “Cassie and I have been working
on this problem—your problem—nonstop for two years. We knew one of
you could come through at any time, and we wanted to be ready. It
was an impossible task, I know, but we tried to think of every
contingency, every possibility. It meant that Cassie and I spoke at
length with Ted and Elisa, trying to impress upon them the extent
of the threat against you if the government came knocking. We
concluded, with their consent, that it was better for them not to
know anything. That way, they wouldn’t have to lie.”

“
That means I can’t talk to
my sister.” Meg looked down at her shoes.

“
That’s what it
means.”

Meg brought up her head to find him looking
at her thoughtfully.

“
I admit I didn’t expect
you to arrive on Thanksgiving night in the wilds of Oregon.” Callum
gave a bark of laughter. “When the best-laid plan comes face to
face with reality, guess which loses every time.”

Twenty minutes later, the four of them piled
into Art’s truck, Cassie at the wheel. Callum was an
equal-opportunity kind of guy, but still, having her drive didn’t
strike Meg as his natural tendency any more than it had been
Llywelyn’s when she had driven across Wales in the dead of night,
pregnant with twins. But driving on the right side of the road
would have been even less natural for Callum. Also, it had started
snowing again, and Meg was willing to bet he hadn’t had a ton of
experience driving in snow either.

“
Back way or highway?”
Cassie said to Callum, starting the truck and shifting into
drive.

“
I’d like to avoid
metropolitan areas if possible.” Callum glanced at Anna and Meg
sitting in the back seat. The space between Meg’s knees and his
seat wasn’t a lot, but the seat was comfortable and the heater
blasted warm air into her face. “At least nobody is following us
out of this driveway, and with no mobile phones and an ancient
truck—” He put out a hand to Cassie, “—no offense to your
grandfather, Cassie.”

“
None taken,” she
said.

“—
nobody, whether MI-5,
Homeland Security, or anybody else, can track us.”

“
I looked up the Oregon DMV
online before we got in the truck,” Cassie said. “There’s a pair of
highway cameras at Arlington and another at Biggs, before the
turnoff south to Bend. Then it gets worse. Highway 97 through Bend
has a ton of cameras.”

“
That’s not ideal,” Callum
said. “And those are only the ones we know about. What are our
other choices?”

“
We could head south out of
Pendleton on 395. There are only three traffic cameras between here
and the California border,” Cassie said. “There’s a lot less
traffic, too, and it’ll take longer, so those are two
drawbacks.”

“
Less traffic is bad?” Anna
said.

“
You can’t get lost in the
crowd if you’re the only car on the road,” Cassie said.

“
It’s still Thanksgiving
night,” Meg said. “If we can get farther faster, would that be
better?”

Callum spread a map across his lap. He
nodded as he looked at it.

Meg sat back in her seat. “I can drive too,
Cassie.”

Anna poked her mother in the arm. “You
haven’t driven a car in three years.”

“
It’s like riding a bike,”
Meg said. “You never forget.”

“
I thought you needed
glasses?” Anna said.

Meg grimaced. She’d forgotten that her night
vision was particularly awful.

“
We can get you glasses at
Wal-Mart,” Cassie said. “Maybe in Klamath Falls.”

“
How are we going to do
that?” Meg swallowed down an accompanying snort of
disbelief.

“
You wouldn’t believe what
they’ve got kiosks for these days,” Cassie said. “They craft the
lenses right then and there. You stick your head in this machine,
it evaluates your eyes, and once you choose the frames, it makes
the lenses to fit.” She glanced up to the mirror again to look at
Meg. “You probably ought to choose simple metal frames so they
don’t cause comment at home.”

“
I’d like that.” Meg
swallowed back the emotion that had formed in her throat, not only
over the idea of being able to see again, but at Cassie’s use of
the word
home
. Meg
had been inadvertently responsible for Cassie spending five years
alone in the Middle Ages. Cassie had never faulted Meg for it or
complained about it when she thought Meg wasn’t listening. And now
it seemed that Cassie was taking for granted not only that it was
home for Meg but that it was home for her too.

Nobody else seemed to have noticed Cassie’s
use of the word, or at least they didn’t comment on it.

Because of that, Meg decided she’d better
bring it up. She wasn’t a big fan of elephants in the living room,
even if they were of her own making. “Are we all on the same page
here about going back? Anna and I have already talked, and I’ve
gathered from brief conversations with both of you that you’re on
board, but maybe we should all just say it. Or say we don’t want
to.”

Cassie and Callum exchanged a quick glance
and neither answered, prompting Anna to lean forward. “Mom and I
have husbands and children there—a whole family, in fact. You two
are part of our family, but you have each other and are under no
obligation to return to the Middle Ages with us. David would
understand, Callum.”

Something was going on, because still
neither answered. Then Callum said, “Say what you’re thinking,
Cass.” They were on the highway now, heading west.

Cassie took in a breath. “Okay. Here’s the
truth, which is what we all need to put out there: I’ve thought
about it a lot. So much that sometimes I think I’m going crazy
thinking about it.” She glanced in the rearview mirror and caught
Meg’s eye. “Two A.M. is not my friend.”

“
I hear you,” Meg
said.

“
I’ve known for a while,
though, that I don’t belong here as much as I belong there. Those
five years in Scotland changed me. It isn’t just that I found
Callum, but that I found myself.”

“
Your grandfather told me
that he liked who you became there,” Callum said.

Cassie smiled, but her eyes were very
bright, and when she spoke next Meg could hear the tears in the
back of her throat. “The last thing my grandfather said to me when
he hugged me goodbye just now was that we needed to go if we could.
He believes that everything happens for a reason, and I would be
wrong to turn off the path laid before my feet.”

Meg gave that admission the moment of silent
respect it deserved. It was exactly what she herself thought. Then
she looked at Callum. “What about you?”

Callum turned in his seat so he could see
Meg and Anna better. “Does David want me back?”

Meg choked on a laugh. “Want you back? Are
you kidding me?”

“
That’s a ‘yes’, then?”
Callum said.

“
Definitely a ‘yes’,” Anna
said. “He trusts you and sometimes feels like he’s ruling Britain
by the seat of his pants. He has plans, but a lot of the time I
don’t think he trusts himself completely.”

“
What do you mean?” Cassie
said. “Is this a power corrupts thing?”

“
Power, adulation,” Anna
said, making Meg think about the conversation she’d just had with
Callum. “But more than those two, David worries that he’ll take
short-cuts and compromise his beliefs. That he’ll come to think
that the end justifies the means. He knows he needs all of us to
keep him sane and on the right track. It would be easy to get off
it.”

“
I’ve tried to put all my
responsibilities back there out of my mind since I couldn’t do
anything about them,” Callum said. “But I have to ask: am I still
the Earl of Shrewsbury?”

“
You are,” Anna said.
“David has taken personal responsibility for your people while
you’ve been absent, Samuel continues to oversee the day-to-day
stuff, and Math has been checking in from time to time too. You
have a very capable sheriff, which is good, and everyone knows that
you are in Avalon and will return when you can.”

Cassie laughed. “Did you say ‘Avalon’?”

“
She did,” Meg said, “and
you might want to laugh, but it’s the only explanation that anyone
can accept. If David has to put up with it, we all do. And
honestly, thank God for it because otherwise we’d all be branded as
witches.”

“
Which we want to avoid,”
Cassie said. “I’m good with that.”

“
What happened when David
returned to you?” Callum said. “We haven’t even asked.”

Now it was Meg’s turn to laugh. “A war,
that’s what!” And between her and Anna, they spent the next hour as
Cassie drove west down I-84, telling them about William de
Valence’s rise and fall, along with the continued development of
reforms David and Llywelyn were working on in England and Wales.
They concluded with David’s vision for the future he’d just told
them about.

When they’d finished, Callum folded his
hands at the back of his head and stared up at the ceiling of the
truck. “I wish Lady Jane could have been here to hear this.”

“
It’s just as well she
isn’t,” Cassie said. “The time travel initiative can die an
unmourned death, and we won’t be here to answer anyone’s questions.
If we can get out of our current situation in one piece, that
is.”

“
I hope we don’t have a
military contractor on our tail.” Meg patted Callum’s arm. “I
thought MI-5 was bad, but they sound much worse.”

“
I’m about to be sacked,”
he said, “so I can hardly complain if you point out how poorly you
were treated.”

“
David was treated worse,”
Cassie said, “and it was the military contractor that drugged him.
I’d take Homeland Security any day over them.”

Callum glanced at his wife. “They aren’t the
buffoons the media makes them out to be. They have resources and
the full power of the American government should they choose to
wield it.”

The windshield wipers started sweeping
faster, and Meg put up a hand to wipe away the steam on her window.
The snow was falling harder. “We probably should go all the way to
I-5 in Portland,” she said. “The road to Bend is often closed with
blowing snow in winter.”

“
I know.” Cassie ground her
teeth. “It isn’t even December! Why is it snowing?”

“
You’ve lived in Britain
for too long,” Meg said.

“
We’ll all be back in
Britain a bit sooner than we intended if the snow keeps up,” Anna
said, looking out her window. “We won’t have to worry about finding
a tower to jump off.”