Children of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book Four) (3 page)

Math nodded. “We can’t leave them alone with only nannies. Think of what might happen!”

We all had a quiet laugh at that. Gwenllian was a reserved child under most circumstances, but bright. Lately, she’d been mouthing off to Mom in a way I never remembered doing. Mom claimed that Anna had been equally rebellious at this age. It wasn’t as if Gwenllian got away with it, but without Mom around, and only Bronwen and a few servants to look after both her and the very boisterous Cadell, we might return to find Chepstow Castle in pieces.

“I want to argue with you, but I can’t.” I turned to Lili. “You don’t have to come, either, if you think it might be better not to. You are pregnant, after all.”

“As if that ever stopped any of us from traveling wherever we wished to go.” Anna grinned. “She’s in the first trimester and the pony you bought her is as placid as mine.”

Lili smiled too and the light in her face made my heart ease, just a little. “I learned my lesson months ago,” she said. “You aren’t going anywhere without me.”

Chapter Three

15 November 2016

Meg

“
W
hat the hell, lady! Where’d you come from?”

Those words, said in perfect American English with the right amount of indignation, had me surging into consciousness. A man with a firm grip on my arm tugged me from the water.

I swept a hand over my eyes to clear them and found myself staring up at a fifty-something, overweight American in a baseball hat. His body was bare from the waist up and as I struggled to right myself, I understood why my legs had refused to move at first. I had fallen into a swimming pool, an indoor one within a cathedral-like glass atrium, in what appeared to be a fancy hotel. The man had his arm around my waist and was holding me upright.

The smell of chlorine was so strong it almost had me passing out again. I hadn’t smelled a pool in years. “My husband—”

“Yeah, yeah, my buddy already called 911 or whatever they call it around here. Actually, I think these guys are always in the building.”

These guys
. How long had it been since I’d heard anyone say that?

While I struggled against the skirt which hampered my legs, the man dragged me towards the shallow end of the pool. By the time we reached the steps leading out of the water, I managed to get my feet under me and straighten. The water lapped around my thighs.

And then the urgency I’d felt at Chepstow came rushing back. I swung around, eyes searching. For all his exasperation, the man didn’t waste words. He pointed to where bystanders had laid Llywelyn on his back beside the pool. Goronwy hovered over him. I could hear his sputters in Welsh and it sounded like he was trying to keep everyone away, when he really should be inviting their help.

“Goronwy! It’s okay.” I surged up the steps and out of the water, my legs moving awkwardly in my sopping wet dress. Contrary to my expectations (if this could have been something I would have expected) the expressions of the onlookers were more amused than stunned or horrified. Aside from the question of how we had appeared out of thin air above the pool, I was about as out of place among the scantily dressed crowd as it was possible to be.
I wore a long-sleeved gray kirtle, laced up the front,
and my favorite deep red surcoat, now ruined by chlorine. Their eyes saw a frazzled, middle-aged-and-yet-pregnant woman in disarray.

“Llywelyn.” I gasped his name and fell on my knees beside him. Llywelyn’s eyes were closed, but he was breathing. I looked at Goronwy. “How long was he in the pool?”

“You mean
that
?” Goronwy waved a hand at the water. “Not long. It isn’t deep and we only went under for a moment.”

Three medical personnel burst through the double doors that led to the interior of the hotel and hustled towards Llywelyn. “What happened?” the first of them said as he reached us. He spoke in English, with the lilt of India in his accent. His nametag said, “Dr Raj”. I’d once known a man who had Raj as his first name, but decided it wasn’t the time to ask for clarification. I dearly hoped we hadn’t ended up in New Delhi because that would mean a seriously long journey home.

“I think he’s having a heart attack,” I said.

The two other men set up the stretcher, while Dr Raj listened to Llywelyn’s lungs and heart, and my own heart pounded in my throat.

“What are his symptoms?” Dr Raj said.

I swallowed. “Sorry.” I had answered his first question completely wrong. I had tried to diagnose Llywelyn, rather than explaining what had happened. “He clutched his chest and felt like he couldn’t breathe. Then he lost consciousness.”

“Has he complained of feeling ill before this?” Dr Raj said.

“On and off for months,” I said.

“Has he woken at all?” Dr Raj said.

I glanced at Goronwy, whose face was nearly as drawn and pale as Llywelyn’s, and shook my head.

“How long has he been unconscious?”

“I—I—I’m not sure …” I searched for words that wouldn’t make me sound insane. “A few minutes? We all fell in the water. Goronwy got him out as fast as he could.”

Dr Raj nodded. “We’ll take care of him.” One of the attendants had already put an oxygen mask on Llywelyn’s face and the plastic clouded with every breath. Somehow, through all this, Llywelyn had managed to continue breathing.
Stay alive! Please keep breathing!

Dr Raj nodded to his helpers, who loaded Llywelyn onto the stretcher. As they rolled it toward the doors, I trotted beside Llywelyn, holding his hand. The opening wasn’t large enough for me to pass through it with him, so I had to move aside to let the men with the stretcher go ahead of me. Since I had to stop anyway, I took a moment to squeeze water from my dress so I wouldn’t drip all over the interior of the hotel. The puddle I created headed for one of the drains in the concrete pool deck.

Goronwy had stayed close to me, even as his head swiveled from side to side, taking in his surroundings. His attention, like mine, always came back to Llywelyn, however. I nodded encouragingly to him, although I didn’t feel particularly encouraged myself, before following Dr Raj through the double doors.

In a few strides, we caught up to the stretcher. We had entered a foyer, perhaps twenty-four by thirty-six feet, with three sets of double doors leading from it. The floor was comprised of white tile and the walls were painted a pale pink and decorated with Impressionist prints.

“Where are you taking him?” I said.

The attendants ignored me and rolled Llywelyn through the pair of doors to the left, heading down a tiled hallway which was decorated similarly to the foyer. Dr Raj stayed to answer, though his brow furrowed at the question. “To the infirmary, of course. Our facilities here are state of the art. We’ll take good care of your father.”

“Of—of course.” I managed not to flush red. “But I must tell you that he’s my husband, not my father.”

Dr Raj glanced at me and then away again. “I’m sorry. My mistake. Forgive me.” He jerked his head, indicating we should come with him, and hurried after Llywelyn. As I trotted beside Dr Raj, Goronwy stayed just to my left, silent as before and asking no questions I couldn’t answer, for which I was grateful. I couldn’t begin to imagine what he was thinking and feeling right now. I was carrying my emotions only a hair’s-breadth below the surface and didn’t know if I could handle his too, just now.

Thirty seconds later, we reached the medical clinic, accessed from the corridor through another set of wide double doors. Dr Raj pulled up, though he waved a hand to send the stretcher onward. The attendants bypassed the waiting room and the main desk and pushed Llywelyn into a wide hallway, more sterilely white than the first.

“If you will wait here,” Dr Raj said, “we will attend to your husband.”

“But—”

Dr Raj had already turned away, hustling in the wake of the two attendants. I stared after him, seeing nothing through the blur of tears that filled my eyes. Then the nurse who manned the desk came around from behind it and nudged my arm. “I’ll need you to sign
here
and
here
.” Pale-skinned like me, she spoke in English, with a fruity, upper-class English accent.

Blindly, I took the pen. I gazed at the form. It was in English but I couldn’t make sense of it. I signed on the lines she indicated anyway. “What will they do to him?”

“Whatever he needs.” The nurse tugged the clipboard from my hand and passed the forms to an orderly, who hurried down the hall after the doctor. “I have more papers that will need your signature, if you would step this way?”

“Of course.”

The nurse handed the clipboard back to me, with four forms attached for me to fill out, front and back.

I took it. “Do you know how long it will be before we can see him?” I said.

“As long as it takes,” the nurse said, back at her desk with her eyes on her computer screen.

I swallowed hard, bereft now. The urgency of our arrival in this world had passed and Llywelyn was getting the care he needed. This was, of course, why I’d brought him here. Llywelyn had been fading for months, short of breath and suffering. I could hardly complain now that getting him treated meant I couldn’t be with him.

Water drip-drip-dripped off my clothing into my shoes. I looked down. I was standing in a puddle. “Um.”

The nurse didn’t look at me.

“Do you by chance have a change of clothes we could borrow?” I gestured towards Goronwy, who was equally soaked. He brushed a hand though his hair, shedding more water onto the floor.

The nurse looked up and bit her lip. “Let me see what I can do.” She left her computer and walked down the hall. I took a step away from the desk so I could peer after her. She disappeared through a doorway to the left.

Still with the clipboard in my hand, I tucked my other hand into Goronwy’s elbow. “Let’s move over here.”

I urged him towards a line of chairs which faced a picture window that looked over a garden and a green meadow beyond that. Mountains hovered in the distance. Late afternoon sun shone onto the grass lawn beyond the flagstone patio, reachable through French doors that opened from the waiting room. Clouds were moving in from the west, however, and soon it would be dark.

Thankfully, all the chairs were empty and nobody waited with us. Even if the nurse seemed imperturbable, I didn’t think I could have handled more stares and curiosity. Now that we were here, now that jumping off the wall into the Wye River had ‘worked’, I was very near to hysterical laughter and/or unleashing my tears. I wouldn’t have taken any bets as to which might fight their way out of my chest first.

I didn’t dare sit down on one of the chairs, since my dress would soak it instantly. Goronwy, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to his drenched, temporally-out-of-place appearance. He stood in front of the big window and gazed out of it for a long minute. Then he turned back to me and asked his first question, though hundreds had to be crowding to the forefront of his mind. “Where are we?”

“I have no idea,” I said, “other than that we’re in my time. From the looks, this is a private clinic in the countryside, though I don’t know in which country.”

“You are speaking Welsh to me,” Goronwy said, “but your words make no sense. What is
private clinic?
”

A smile quirked at the corner of my lips. Even after four years in Wales, I had fallen into speaking English for words that I couldn’t find in Welsh. ‘Private clinic’ didn’t translate very well into medieval Welsh. “People come from far away specifically to stay here. It’s not anyone’s home. It’s like they are guests at a castle who pay for the privilege of spending the night. Likely, the residents are also very rich. Even better, I expect the doctors here are as skilled as any we’d find anywhere in the world.”

“I’m glad for that,” Goronwy said, “especially if what you’ve always said about your medicine is true. But I didn’t mean that.” He gestured towards the windows. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say we’re near Aberystwyth.”

His observation caught me completely off guard. “What?” I moved to stand next to him.

“I know those mountains,” Goronwy said. “They rise above the Abbey of Strata Florida.”

“Really?” My heart leapt, and then I immediately squashed the emotion. It couldn’t be true. Whenever we’d traveled in time before, we’d ended up in the United States, going into the future, and in the United Kingdom, going into the past. When I’d returned to the Middle Ages four years ago, I’d landed near Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, which had been a great disappointment. “Are you sure?”

“I can’t be
sure
,” Goronwy said, patience in his voice. “We’ve come more than seven hundred years into the future. With all the changes that have happened in that time, maybe the mountains don’t exist anymore.”

“They exist, I assure you.” In all my years in Wales, both in the modern world and the medieval, I’d never made it to Strata Florida Abbey, but that at least I knew to be true.

Goronwy allowed himself a sigh and continued to stare out the window, watching the play of sun and shadow on the hills. I looked with him, stunned that they could be our mountains. The veil between Llywelyn’s world and mine had never been so thin.

I hadn’t heard anyone speaking Welsh yet, however. Admittedly, our doctor was of Indian descent and if Goronwy was right, if we were near Aberystwyth, the town was in western Wales, not in Gwynedd, so Welsh speakers with fluency were thinner on the ground here than in the north. But if Goronwy was right, if we really were in Wales … a wave of relief swept through me. Oddly, I hadn’t wanted to go ‘home’ to the United States. I hadn’t wanted the temptation of ending up in a place as familiar as that. I didn’t know if I would have David’s ability to walk away.

At the very least, finding ourselves in Wales would make life easier for Llywelyn and Goronwy. They knew the country; they knew the language up to a point. We could get by.

“You’re taking this very well,” I said.

“Am I?” Goronwy said, though I had the sense that his focus remained on the mountains, not on me. “How am I supposed to take it?”