Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (20 page)

Cassie shot Meg a sardonic look. “Lots. My
husband plans for every contingency.” She looked at Callum. “Though
I don’t think even you believed Anna’s and Meg’s arrival was
imminent or you might have done things differently from the
start.”

“
I didn’t.” Callum sped out
of the parking lot, following the directions to the Wal-Mart given
to him by the GPS in the car. When they reached the store, its
parking lot was packed, just as the one in Eugene had
been.

Cassie and Anna got out. “We’ll be as quick
as we can.”

“
I don’t see any parking
spaces anyway,” Meg said to Callum. “Is it turning out to be a good
thing or a bad thing that we’re fleeing across America on Black
Friday?”

Callum gave a laugh, circling through the
parking lot at two miles an hour. “I’ll let you know when we
finally reach that plane.”

Meg sat back in her seat and closed her
eyes. She didn’t want to feel tension in her shoulders any more.
She didn’t want to be scared that men in a black SUV would pull up
beside them and point their guns. When Llywelyn had been ill and
she’d brought him to Aberystwyth, whatever happened, she’d found
comfort in the fact that she’d had no choice. This time it had been
Marty’s choice, and he’d paid for it with his life. Meg hated what
he’d done to Anna. She hated how her children and grandchildren had
been forced to witness what he’d done to Anna. But she would never
have wished him dead.

Then again, justice being what it was in
medieval Wales, he might have paid for his actions with his life
anyway.

And with that, tears pricked at the corners
of Meg’s eyes, partly because she was so tired, but mostly because
she had allowed herself to think about Llywelyn again for more than
a few seconds. She knew—because she knew him—that he would be going
out of his mind with worry for her and Anna. He’d told Meg what it
had been like when she’d disappeared at the beginning of her labor
with David twenty-three years ago. Meg’s absence had torn him
apart, as it had ripped away her own heart. He’d spent as many
years searching for her as she had for him.

At least this time he knew where she’d gone.
At least he knew now that she would do everything in her power to
return to him and the children. But he had to be hating his own
impotence every second they were apart. Hopefully, with David
beside him, he would find a way to keep busy.

Callum tapped his fingers on the steering
wheel. “This is taking too long.”

Meg peered out the window, but no sirens
wailed and no police cars turned into the parking lot. “The store’s
just crowded.”

Wal-Mart’s cameras might be on a
closed-circuit, but that didn’t mean the ones in the parking lot
were. Fortunately, since it wasn’t yet seven in the morning, it was
still dark. They could hide among the huge number of people and
cars. If it had been any morning but Black Friday, the parking lot
would have been all but deserted, and they would have had a much
harder time keeping a low profile.

Callum grunted, which Meg took to be
dissatisfied agreement, and before Meg started to actively worry
about them too, Cassie and Anna came out the front entrance of the
store. Callum pulled around the end of the parking lot, cruising
slowly, and stopped before he reached the end of the row of cars.
Anna saw him, tugged on Cassie’s arm, and hurried over, both women
taking long, confident strides. Meg felt a burst of admiration for
her daughter, who was handling these difficult circumstances with
such grace.

“
Any problems?” Callum said
as Cassie and Anna opened their doors and sat in their
seats.

“
Not that I know of,”
Cassie said. “We got the same deal you did, and Anna and I bought
the same phones, though we went through separate registers.” She
shot Callum a worried look. “I hope that’s okay.”

“
It should be,” Callum
said.

“
It’s a question of how
omnipotent the U.S. government has become,” Anna said. “I can’t say
it looks good from here.”

“
Hundreds of people all
over the United States are buying these phones today,” Meg said.
“Buying them in two separate transactions was a great
idea.”

“
I will never again say
that I hate Black Friday,” Cassie said. “I have never shopped on
this day. We always avoided it.” Then she held up a prepaid mailer
envelope. “I also wondered if you would object to me using
this?”

“
What is it for?” Callum
said.

“
It’s so I can mail the
truck keys back to my grandfather,” Cassie said. “By the time he
gets them, we’ll be long gone, or we’ll be in custody. It won’t
matter if someone knows we were once in Medford.”

“
Okay,” Callum said, giving
in far more easily than he might have. And then he explained why.
“I’m sorry we involved him. I wish I had been smarter about finding
another vehicle.”

“
Short of renting one,
which would have been a trick in Pendleton, Oregon on Thanksgiving
night, I don’t see what choice we had,” Meg said. “No matter whose
car we borrowed, if they caught our images at Mission Market or the
truck stop, they would have traced us to Art.”

Cassie grimaced. “I think it’s actually our
fault—Callum’s and mine.”

“
How so?” Anna passed a
phone to Meg and started opening a second herself.

Cassie twisted in her seat to look back at
them. “Assuming they picked up the flash of your entrance into this
world at the same time Mark did, seeing Callum and me on those
cameras shortly thereafter, with a posse of searchers, was like
blowing a horn and announcing, ‘they’re here!’” Then she looked
over at Callum. “You understand that my grandfather isn’t
regretting helping us, right? No matter how much trouble we’ve
caused him?”

Callum gave a jerky nod.

“
What do you mean by that?”
Anna said.

Cassie busied herself with the phones in her
lap. “My grandfather would have been offended if we hadn’t asked
him for help. On the reservation, we look out for each other, never
mind who might be in trouble with the law. That’s why so many men
volunteered to look for you. It’s a dangerous world out there.”

“
We’re grateful,” Meg
said.

“
It would be the same at
Llangollen,” Anna said. “People protect their own.”

Cassie nodded. “Here’s what my grandfather
wants in return: for David to fund an expedition to the New World
himself, instead of leaving it to the Spanish in two hundred years.
He wants us to make sure it turns out better.”

“
That won’t be easy,” Meg
said. “Ninety percent of the native peoples who were here before
Columbus died after 1492. Mostly from disease. Is it better to
leave it for later, or to ‘discover’ the New World now hoping we
can handle the side effects?”

“
Creating the United States
of Britain is one thing,” Anna said, “but we’d be changing history
on a way bigger scale. Maybe there’d be no U.S.”

“
Maybe,” Meg said. “But how
responsible are we for something that might or might not happen
five hundred years from now? We’ve already changed the course of
British history irreparably. I don’t think we should worry about
the U.S.” She laughed. “We’re sitting here running from a
government that feels pretty totalitarian to me right now. We have
the ideals, and most of them aren’t even reality in this world.
Maybe we can make something better.”

“
All those deaths, though,”
Anna said. “I can’t even wrap my mind around a 90% mortality
rate.”

The conversation had carried them back onto
the highway. Callum seemed to be handling driving on the right side
of the road without any trouble. He hadn’t contributed to this
conversation at all, but then, as a Scotsman, it wasn’t his
country’s future at stake.

“
My grandfather understands
there might not be a right answer,” Cassie said. “But we’ve got to
come up with something
better
.”

Chapter Twelve

November 1291

David

G
iven what his father had looked like when David had forced him
into his bed in the early hours of the morning, he’d been prepared
to tell him that there was no way he was continuing with the army
towards Maentwrog. But when Dad appeared shortly before noon, he
seemed like a completely different person from the man David had
put to bed.

“
What are you looking at?”
Dad said when he caught David staring.

David hastily cleared his expression and
deflected his father’s question. “I gather you slept well?”

“
Strangely enough, I did.”
Dad swung his arms back and forth, loosening his shoulders. “I’m
not in my dotage yet, you know.”

“
You’ve mentioned that
before,” David said, and then opted for the truth. “I don’t know
when I’ve ever seen you as gray as you were last night, except when
you’ve been ill.”

“
I might have lost a step
or two, but I make up for it in cunning.” He shot his son a wicked
grin, again belying his earlier exhaustion. “I’ve been thinking
about our friend Madog.”

“
I’m listening,” David
said.

Dad took a bite of mutton, chewing hard, and
then swallowed. David had learned to eat mutton for breakfast, but
he was suddenly envious of Anna, who might be getting cheerios. If
she was safe. Worry for her and Mom had David’s stomach clenching,
and he put down his buttered roll, no longer hungry.

“
I’ve decided that I know
what this is about,” Dad said. “And it isn’t about his ancestral
lands in Meirionnydd. Or at least only peripherally.”

“
Okay,” David had no clue
where this was going.

“
It’s about
gold.”

David had grown fond of
gold in the last three years since he’d become King of England. If
land meant power, so did cold, hard cash. And in the Middle Ages,
gold
was
cash.
“What gold?”

Dad snapped his fingers at one of the pages
standing near a doorway that led to a corridor off the great hall.
“Bring me the map on my desk. The big one.”

“
Yes, my lord.” The page
ducked a bow and dashed off, returning a minute later with a two
foot square piece of parchment.

Dad whipped it out of the boy’s hand and
laid it on the table, using two cups, a pitcher, and a knife to
hold down the corners, which wanted to roll back up. It was a map
of Gwynedd, one drawn by Mom and Bronwen, from their own memories
and using the maps of this time as reference. Distances were hard
to gauge in the Middle Ages, and drawn coastlines didn’t always
translate to geographical maps like this one.

Latitude was easily determined by the angle
of the sun, but longitude was harder. Two years ago, David had
printed out an internet account of how navigators had worked out
longitude. Upon his return to this world, he’d presented the
various options to the scholars at Cambridge and Oxford, who’d
shared it with their counterparts on the Continent.

The working out of how to determine
longitude, particularly at sea, was one of the greatest collective
scientific endeavors in history. David didn’t want to short circuit
the advancements that came with those efforts, so, as in that other
world, the British crown was offering a considerable prize for the
person or persons who came up with a workable system that could be
implemented on land and sea. GPS, sadly, wasn’t an option. But a
working chronometer? David was counting on it.

“
I know you are hoping that
your mother returns with a survey of the mineral deposits in
Wales,” Dad said. “I will be interested to see how accurate such a
map could be, and if our finds match your world’s.”

It hadn’t occurred to David that the
resources below ground might be different in this universe. It
didn’t seem like they should be. He gestured to the map in front of
them. “What does this map tell you?”

Dad planted a finger on Carndochen, a second
at Cymer in Dolgellau, and a third at Harlech. “These three
castles. What do you see?”

“
If a man were to control
those positions, he would control all passage in and out of that
region of Meirionnydd,” David said.

“
Very good,” Dad said.
“More to the point, Carndochen and Cymer are also locations where
gold has been found. I have sent men several times to survey the
area, using local men as guides, but other than a few rocks and
flecks of gold sifted out of the river, they have found nothing
productive. It’s my guess that Madog has found more, perhaps a
great deal more.”

“
Could he keep such a find
a secret?” David said.

Dad looked at him.

“
What?”

“
This is gold, son,” he
said gently. “The man who finds a vein of it running through the
earth would want to keep that knowledge to himself, wouldn’t
he?”

David nodded, reorienting his thinking from
a global to a local scale. “He might need help extracting it,
however. He might tell his lord under the pledge that he would
share the profits.”

Dad’s mouth twitched. “Where Madog is
concerned, that would be a good way to get oneself killed, but a
peasant might not know that.”

“
Can I ask you a question?”
David said.

“
Of course.” Dad rolled up
the map and slipped the tie around it.

“
Many barons in England
have behaved similarly to Madog and Rhys,” David said. “Some have
supported my enemies, and I have taken their lands—like you did
with Madog. Others, like Rhys, you have left in place, though with
a much diminished patrimony. Why the difference, and how did you
decide how to deal with each one?”