Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (28 page)

“
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

D
avid 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. “Madog 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.

David didn’t have time to press William
further and hoisted himself into the saddle. Two minutes later, the
company was moving. It was half a mile from the spot where they’d
hidden themselves to the top of the valley where David’s father
would emerge, and to David it felt like he’d hardly settled himself
into the saddle before the roar of hundreds of men’s voices split
the air.

“
Madog’s men are charging!”
William’s voice went high with the same excitement and fear that
was inflicting everyone.

David made a guttural sound deep in his
throat. “And hopefully Ieuan and Dad are too.” But he couldn’t tell
from here.

Justin pulled his horse up beside David,
eyebrows raised.

David nodded. Justin was his captain. It was
his job to command the men.