Children of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book Four) (4 page)

“You could have behaved as I did. The first time I arrived in Wales, I didn’t believe Llywelyn was who he said he was and I attacked him with a kitchen knife.”

Goronwy laughed. “I know. He told me after we left Cricieth.”

“
After
we left.” I laughed too. “Smart man.”

“Thank goodness he didn’t tell me sooner or I would have made sure he left you behind.”

I frowned at him. “That would have been a grave mistake.”

“You would have been fair game for Dafydd.”

“Which I was anyway.”

Goronwy peered at me. “I have a hard time picturing you trying to stab Llywelyn.”

I flushed. It wasn’t my fondest memory of my initial trip to Wales. And yet my mistake had revealed Llywelyn’s character to me in a way that little else could have. He’d been understanding and tolerant, even if he’d had a hard time getting his head around the fact that I didn’t know—or believe—who he was. “I didn’t know what I was doing, if that helps.”

Goronwy grinned. “You did put my lord in a fine mood. Even at the time I was grateful for that, although I didn’t yet trust you.”

I smiled too. Really, our entire situation was so absurd as to invite amusement.

“Let’s see if we can answer one question, at least.” I spied a rack of pamphlets on the wall by the nurse’s station and grabbed one. Sure enough, we were at a spa called
Healing Waters
, seemingly because of the aquifer over which the spa had been built. The pamphlet also told me that Aberystwyth received over forty inches of rain a year, spread out over two hundred days. I wasn’t sure why this was a selling point, but maybe they meant to indicate that the healing waters would never run out.

I glanced from the pamphlet to the paperwork in my hand that I hadn’t even started filling out. It asked all the usual questions—name, date of birth, address—all of which were plainly impossible to answer. I hadn’t even asked what year it was, though if our parallel universes were still moving as they had, it should be November of 2016. I’d given birth to David twenty years ago tomorrow. How many different lifetimes had I lived since then?

I shook myself and tried to focus on the needs of the moment. Dr Raj was under the impression that we were staying at the spa, though hopefully even a private clinic would have a mandate to treat a man having a heart attack, regardless of whether or not he was in residence. I’d never had the kind of money necessary to stay in a place like this, but the pool into which we’d fallen indicated an extremely upscale resort, with state-of-the-art medical facilities.

Still, I had to think that the management would kick us out once they discovered that we had neither reservations in the hotel nor money. Unless …

I plopped myself in one of the chairs behind Goronwy and picked up the hem of my gown. I hadn’t sat earlier for fear of ruining the upholstery with my wet dress, but the nurse hadn’t returned with new clothes, and I couldn’t wait a minute longer.

“What are you doing?” Goronwy said.

“Saving us,” I said.

Goronwy smiled. “I thought you already did that.”

“Apparently, it’s not a one-time thing.” I glanced up at him. His eyes were twinkling. It had been a long time since I’d seen him so cheerful. David wasn’t the only one who’d felt the burdens of the last few years, and hadn’t been having enough fun. “You’re happy about this?”

“How could I not be?” Goronwy said. “Is there any doubt that Llywelyn would have died, if not today then next week or next month if we hadn’t brought him here?”

“He still might, you know,” I said, expressing the fear that had roiled my stomach as I watched Dr Raj hurry off after Llywelyn.

Goronwy shook his head. “Not if everything you’ve told me about this world is true.”

I swept tendrils of hair out of my face. The chignon at the back of my head had come loose and my hair was drying into a tangled mess. “But what if I made the wrong choice, Goronwy?” That, too, had been a concern I’d kept in the back of my mind—a secret one, which I hadn’t dared voice to myself, much less to him.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Our bodies break down,” I said. “They’re meant to. What if it turns out that Llywelyn had a stroke, or has a condition that isn’t treatable? I may have condemned him to a long illness, or a lingering twilight, when if we’d stayed at home, he would have … simply died.”

“Did you do what you thought was right at the time?” Goronwy said. These were words I’d heard him speak to David when he’d questioned a course of action he’d chosen.

“Yes.”

“Then leave it alone.”

I took in a breath and let it out.
Leave it alone
. And yet, how could I not worry? I coughed a laugh. Hadn’t I just asked David to try to live more lightly? That he shouldn’t shoulder every burden life put in his path and dwell on what he couldn’t control? Apparently, I needed to hear my advice as much as David did.

Goronwy glanced towards the empty nurse’s station and then to the hallway beyond it. “Shouldn’t we know something soon?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. These things always take longer than you think they should.”

Goronwy snorted under his breath at my non-answer, but I’d spent enough time in hospitals, between my father’s illness and my ex-husband’s, to understand that news came when it did and you couldn’t hurry it. Often, unless you were in the room with a patient at the exact moment a doctor made his rounds, you missed your chance to learn anything and would have no new information until the next day when that particular doctor returned.

“I have to ask again, how is it that you’re taking this so well?” I said. “You can’t understand a word anyone has said so far, you’re dressed all wrong—not that anyone seems to care about that, not even that we’re soaking wet—and we may be stuck here for the rest of our lives.”

“I told you. My friend lives.” Goronwy turned back to the window. “And those are my mountains.”

I gazed at Goronwy’s straightened shoulders for a second, and then went back to what I’d been about to do before we’d started talking. I studied the stitching along the three inch deep hem. Trying not to look as secretive as I felt, I shot a glance at the nurse’s station. It was still empty.

I pulled my knife from its sheath at my waist and began to work at the stitching. When I’d separated enough of the hem so I could see inside, I sat back, a rush of relief flooding through me. This
was
the dress I’d put them in.

“What do you have there?” Goronwy said.

“My identity.” I laid out my soaked passport (good until 2019), driver’s license (good until April 2017, when I’d be forty-two), and a credit card. Plus four hundred very wet American dollars. I had sewed a different credit card and another two hundred dollars into the seam of my every day dress, as well as scattered other pieces of my identity (including a thumb drive, which contained my entire digital life) throughout other pieces of clothing, all of which were (sadly) still in the Middle Ages.

Goronwy picked up the credit card and turned it over in his hands. “How is this your identity?”

“Actually, if that works, it’s money.” I took back the card. “It could allow us to stay here until Llywelyn gets well, depending on what all this costs.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“Then we’ll start selling everything we own.”

I stewed briefly about the ethical issue of running up charges on a card I would (probably) never pay back, and then put it aside. The first thing was for Llywelyn to live. I’d mail the credit card company a gold coin in payment if I had to.

I also decided I wouldn’t mention how low my expectations were that the spa would accept my credit card. I’d been in Wales for four years. My sister could have—should have—cancelled the card as soon as I disappeared. It wasn’t something I’d ever thought to mention or ask her in the years between my disappearances. I’d tried to tell her about my life in medieval Wales, and about Llywelyn,
so many times
. She’d always cut me off, never wanting to talk about him. Still, David’s opinion was that part of her had always believed me—and certainly she’d believed me enough not to want any of us declared dead.

The moment I thought of Elisa, I felt a sharp punch to the gut. I honestly had no idea what kind of reception she would give me when I called her and told her I was here, in the twenty-first century, once again. But I had to call her, no matter how upset it made her.

David had related what had happened when he’d gone to her house. At first, Elisa had disbelieved who he was and that he could have been living in medieval Wales. Would she believe it was I on the phone, or simply hang up on me? Three years had passed since she’d seen David: a long time. While I’d had no way to contact her, humans weren’t always rational beings. Could she forgive me for my silence?

At the very least, Elisa had to feel that I’d abandoned her. Certainly, David had made it clear when he left with Ieuan and Bronwen that I was happy in the Middle Ages and had no intention of returning to the modern world if I could help it. If it had been she who had told me that, how would it have made me feel? I had effectively chosen never to see her again.

Goronwy thumbed through the cash and then set it down on my lap in a deliberate motion such that his forefinger rested on the pile for a second longer than it had to. “You really did plan ahead.”

He didn’t speak the sentence as a question, but it was one. He was looking for answers. He had been the one to urge us to the top of that wall, but he could see now that I’d not told him everything I was thinking. “I wasn’t planning for this, Goronwy, at least not specifically. I certainly hadn’t planned on coming here today.”

I looked up at him once and then down to my boots. Goronwy and I were friends, close friends, but Llywelyn had always been a part of our friendship. Goronwy and I had leagued together at times—most recently, in trying to get Llywelyn to consent to David’s marriage to Lili—but we’d never gone anywhere together, or hung out as friends. Sitting with him here felt more intimate than he and I had ever been. It wasn’t in a sexual way, but I found myself revealed to him. I’d never felt this way with any man but Llywelyn.

“I sewed my cards and my passport into this dress when I discovered I was pregnant,” I said.

“Ah,” Goronwy said. “You returned to this time at Dafydd’s birth. You were afraid that it might happen again?”

I nodded.

“For good reason, I suppose,” he said. “One would think that childbirth was difficult enough without adding time travel to it.”

“It was twenty years ago to the day that I returned to this world the first time,” I said. “That fact sends chills down my spine.”

Goronwy massaged the back of his neck and stared at the floor. “I’ve never been comfortable with magic.”

“And you think I am?” I said. “It’s crazy! The whole thing is crazy.”

“You’ve never talked about what happened to you all those years ago,” Goronwy said. “I’ve only heard your story from Llywelyn.”

“I can tell you now,” I said. “Everyone was abed when Anna woke in the night, late on the 15
^th
. I went to her and was holding her when my water broke. The next second, we had fallen onto my mother’s lawn. David was born in the early hours of November 16
^th
.”

“By now, after three voyages to this world and back, you’d think we would understand why this happens and how it happens,” he said.

“I’ve come to believe that there’s something in me—in my children—that makes world-shifting possible.” I held up my passport. “I may never know what that special something is, but I don’t always have to be unprepared.”

Chapter Four

15 November 2016

Meg

I
struggled with the forms for half an hour, before giving up on conveying anything close to the truth.

“Why are you smiling?” Goronwy eyed me as I bit the end of the pen.

“Because I’m making this up as I go along and it’s kind of amusing.”

I’d made Llywelyn an American, given him my father’s social security number (I’d memorized it before he died, when he was in and out of the hospital so much, and it stuck with me), and the address and phone number of my childhood home. In twenty minutes, I’d created an entire fake back story for him out of whole cloth.

By the time I finished, a new nurse had replaced the old one, who appeared only long enough to plop a pile of surgical scrubs on the chair next to me. She smelled of smoke, which she hadn’t before, and I guessed that she’d taken my request for clothing as an opportunity to sneak a cigarette before going off-shift. I gave her a smile and thanks, which she didn’t acknowledge. After she’d gone, I held up one of the shirts, pursing my lips as I studied it.

“What—what are those?” Goronwy said, looking truly discomfited for the first time.

“Dry clothes,” I said. “Except now I’m having second thoughts.” It wasn’t that they wouldn’t cover us adequately, but I couldn’t see Goronwy willingly changing into the flimsy pants. And what would he do with his sword, which so far he’d kept well hidden under his cloak? Strap it around his waist? It would contrast badly with the lime green scrubs. Surely they would confiscate it.

For my part, at five and half months pregnant and
really
showing, especially in my wet dress, the pants might not even fit. I’d had my seamstress add to the seams of my dress only last week, and already it was tight. I’d meant to ask her to do it again in the morning.

I hated to think what the attendants who cared for Llywelyn had thought of his gear. He’d been wearing his armor and sword when we jumped from the wall, the same as Goronwy. It was part of his formal attire. After our talk on the balcony, we were to have feasted in the hall, as a proper send off for the kids’ journey to London.

“I think I have a better idea,” I said. “Come with me.”

I took Goronwy’s arm and headed towards the doors to the waiting room, though not before I passed off my falsified but completed forms to the nurse behind the desk. She took them without a word and didn’t even glance up at us. Perhaps one of the hallmarks of the
Healing Waters
spa was that the staff didn’t ask questions, no matter how odd their guests or patients appeared to be. If an individual had enough money to stay here, maybe he assumed he’d also bought discretion.