Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance (33 page)

I did go without them, just once, with only
David in his sling, to Cilmeri, a small town just a few miles west
of Builth Wells. A farmer had put up a memorial stone—really just a
big, jagged piece of granite—to mark the spot where Llywelyn died.
Every year on the 11
^th
of December, patriots held a
ceremony to mark the day and the spot where he fell. I couldn’t
bear the thought of that, and was glad that it was March and I was
alone with only the flowers people who still thought of him had
left. I read the death poems and songs to his memory with which
people littered the meadow, and knew that I wouldn’t come back.

The fire in his hearth has gone out,

Its light lost in the murk of the hall.

No one is left to tend it.

A great warrior, a king, our Prince of
Wales

Llywelyn

Has fallen in the snow.

He is quiet now, asleep under the mantle of
peace.

The peace he reached for all his life,

But could never find and we could not give
him,

Is his at last.

The fire in his heart has gone out.

His heat can no longer warm us.

But still we dream, we live

The morning sun wakes us.

In our hearts, he stays with us,

Dreams with us,

And will rise to walk in better days.

Mam and Anna had understood what I hadn’t.
Llywelyn wasn’t there.

* * * * *

“I hear you’re leaving us?” My professor
leaned across his desk and passed me the final paper that completed
my senior requirements for graduation. “What did they offer you out
there in Oregon that we didn’t?”

I looked down at my paper. It was called
The Mythologization of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd: An Historical
Perspective.

“Space,” I said. I knew my professor well
enough to tell him the truth.

“Ah,” Dr. Bill said, folding his hands and
putting his fingers to his lips. “A Ph.D. is a long row to hoe, but
that paper is a good start. Just make sure you don’t stray too far
into the realm of speculation. Then you’ll have something that
should be in the literature department, instead of history.”

“I think I can handle it,” I said, “though I
confess there were times while writing this that I wasn’t sure what
was real and what wasn’t.”

“If we didn’t love history so much, none of
us would be here. We all get our heads so far into the past that
sometimes we forget where we are. Don’t let graduate school take
over your life. Don’t forget that you live in the here and
now.”

“Yes, Dr. Bill,” I said.

Could he read my mind or what? It was four
years since I’d returned to the twentieth century: four years of
love and tears, and an enormous amount of work. Mam had pushed me
towards getting back in school. That first quarter, I signed up at
the local community college to continue those classes I’d started
on before we’d driven to Wales. I’d found evening classes, early
morning classes, independent study classes, and ones that coincided
with the kids’ naps. Over the years we’d bumped along pretty well,
and with David in preschool and Anna in second grade, this last
semester at the university had been a much more stable proposition
for me.

If only Elisa could have been part of it
too. My sister had been more stubborn than either Mam or I had
thought possible. She flat-out refused to accept that I’d been to
Wales, and that David was not Trev’s child. That she’d been
distracted and harassed preparing for her own marriage during
Christmas break four years ago, I could understand, but as the
years had passed, we’d slid into a mutual non-discussion pact. I
didn’t mention Wales, and she didn’t close her ears to my voice.
And I’d sworn on a stack of Bibles never to mention it to Ted, her
husband.

But the reason I was leaving Pennsylvania
was that I no longer could live so close to the place where Wales
started. At first, I drove to the spot every day, maybe multiple
times a day, as long as I had both Anna and David in the car with
me. Yet, in snow, rain, or sun, the road never became what it had
been. Often, I’d park beside the road, get out of the car, and walk
all over the hill, poking into the dirt and sometimes even shouting
Llywelyn’s name. But he never answered, and the road never opened
for me into that black abyss that had brought us to Wales in the
first place.

What I could never come to terms with was
why
it had happened. If I was
meant
, as Llywelyn
thought, to come to Wales, to save his life and bear his child, why
was I back in Pennsylvania? If I was
meant
to save
Llywelyn’s life and his dynasty, why did he still die on that snowy
hillside in 1282? None of it made sense.

Except for the very real existence of David,
I wouldn’t have believed it had happened at all—as if it was a
year-long dream which I only awoke from in my mother’s garden. I
hoped that by leaving Pennsylvania, Llywelyn would haunt me less. I
intended to continue my research on Wales, to become an historian,
but I needed to stop
living
in the past. I needed to get
away to an entirely different place, and face the fact that this
was the only life I was going to get.

As I watched David grow, I could see his
father in him. Even at four, he was a driven child, a
perfectionist, always wanting to climb higher, run faster—push
himself harder than any child I knew—and most adults, for that
matter
.
And maybe that’s where the answer lay—maybe I needed
to raise my son to be the man
he
needed to be, and hope that
who he was would transcend space and time, if that
time
ever
came.

But I couldn’t tell David who his father
was. It wouldn’t do to raise a boy who thought he was the Prince of
Wales. In the twentieth century, that job belonged to another man,
in another country, a world and a lifetime away. Even Anna appeared
to have no memory of Wales at all. Now that she was in school, she
refused to speak a word of Welsh, as if punishing me for taking her
away from all that she loved.

No. It’s best that we leave.

And yet, I still lay in bed at night, and
wept for him. Wales lost him, I lost him, at the very point when
his triumph was within his grasp. Still, I heard the hope under the
despair, and dreamed of what might have been and what could still
be. Someday. Hope for me; hope for him.

Walk with me, under star-strewn
skies,,
Your hand warm in
mine.

Until the dawn, I’ll dream
of you,

Good night, my love. Good
night.

Until that sun wakes you, and you turn to
find me beside you once again, I wish you dreams of peace. Good
night, my love. Good night.

Continue the story of Meg, Llywelyn, Anna,
and David by reading the next book in the
After Cilmeri
Series by Sarah Woodbury:

Footsteps in Time: A Time Travel Fantasy

In December of 1282, English soldiers
ambushed and murdered Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of
Wales.  His death marked the end of Wales as an independent
nation and the beginning of over seven hundred years of English
oppression.

Footsteps in Time
is the story of what
might have happened had Llywelyn lived. 

And what happens to the two American
teenagers who save him.

______________

Excerpt:
Footsteps in Time: A Time Travel
Fantasy

“
D
o you want me to
come with you?”

Anna looked back at her brother. He’d
followed her to the door, his coat in his hand.

“Okay,” she said, trying not to sound
relieved. “You can hold the map.”

The clouds were so low they blended into the
trees around the house and Anna tipped her head to the sky, feeling
a few gentle snowflakes hit her face. They walked across the
driveway, the first to leave tracks in the new snow.

“You’re sure you can handle this?” David
asked, eyeing the van. It faced the house so Anna would have to
back it out.

“Christopher’s waiting,” Anna said. “It’s
not like I have a choice.”

“If you say so,” David said.

Their aunt had asked Anna to pick up her
cousin at a friend’s house, since she had a late meeting and
wouldn’t make it. Ignoring David’s skeptical expression, Anna
tugged open the door, threw her purse on the floor between the
seats, and got in the driver’s side. David plopped himself beside
her with a mischievous grin.

“And don’t you dare say anything!” she said,
wagging her finger in his face before he could open his mouth. He
was three years younger than she, having just turned fourteen in
November, unbearably pompous at times, and good at everything.
Except for his handwriting, which was atrocious. Sometimes a girl
had to hold onto the small things.

“Which way?” Anna asked, once they reached
the main road. The windshield wipers flicked away the new snow,
barely keeping up. Anna peered through the white for oncoming cars
and waited for David to say something.

David studied the map, disconcertingly
turning it this way and that, and then finally settled back in his
seat with it upside down. “Uh . . . right,” he said.

Anna took a right, and then a left, and
within three minutes they were thoroughly lost. “This is so unlike
you,” she said.

“I’m trying!” he said, “but look at this—”
he held out the map and Anna glanced at it. One of the reasons
she’d accepted his offer, however, was because maps confused her
under the best of circumstances. “The roads wander at random and
they all look the same. Half of them don’t even have signs.”

Anna had to agree, especially in December,
with the leafless trees and rugged terrain. She drove up one hill
and down another, winding back and forth around rocky outcroppings
and spectacular, yet similar, mansions. As the minutes ticked by,
Anna clenched the wheel more tightly. They sat unspeaking in their
heated, all-wheel drive cocoon, while the snow fell harder and the
sky outside the windows darkened with the waning of the day. Then,
just as they crested a small rise and were taking a downhill curve
to the left, David hissed and reached for the handhold above his
door.

“What?” Anna asked. She took a quick look at
him. His mouth was open, but no sound came out and he pointed
straight ahead.

Anna returned her gaze to the windscreen.
Ten feet in front of them, a wall of snow blocked the road, like a
massive, opaque picture window. She had no time respond, think, or
press the brake, before they hit it.

Whuf!

They powered through the wall and for a long
three seconds a vast black space surrounded them. Then they burst
through to the other side to find themselves bouncing down a
snow-covered hill, much like the one they’d been driving on, but
with grass beneath their wheels instead of asphalt. During the
first few seconds as Anna fought to bring the van under control,
they rumbled into a clearing situated halfway down the hill. 
She gaped through the windshield at the three men on horseback who
appeared out of nowhere. They stared back at her, frozen as if in a
photograph, oblivious now to the fourth man on the ground whom
they’d surrounded.

All four men held swords. 

“Anna!” David said, finally finding his
voice.

Anna stood on the brakes, but couldn’t get
any traction in the snow.  All three horses reared,
catapulting their riders out of the saddle. Anna careened into two
of the men who fell under the wheels with a sickening crunching
thud. Still unable to stop the van, she plowed right over them and
the snow-covered grass, into the underside of a rearing horse.

By then, the van was starting to slide
sideways and its nose slewed under its front hooves, which were
high in the air, and hit its midsection full on.  The
windshield shattered from the impact of the hooves, the horse fell
backwards, pinning its rider beneath it, and the airbags exploded.
By then, the van’s momentum had spun it completely around, carried
it across the clearing to its edge, and over it.

It slid another twenty feet down the hill
before connecting with a tree at the bottom of the slope.
Breathless, chained by the seatbelt, Anna sat stunned. David
fumbled with the door handle.

“Come on,” he said. He shoved at her
shoulder. When she didn’t move, he grasped her chin to turn her
head to look at him. “The gas tank could explode.”

Her heart catching in her throat, Anna
wrenched the door open and tumbled into the snow. She and David ran
toward a small stand of trees thirty feet to their left, and
stopped there, breathing hard. The van remained as they’d left it,
sad and crumpled against the tree at the base of the hill. David
had a line of blood on his cheek. Anna put her hand to her forehead
and it came away with blood, marring her brown glove.

“What—” Anna said, swallowed hard, and tried
again. “How did we go from lost to totaled in two point four
seconds?” She found a tissue in her pocket, wiped at the blood on
her glove, and began dabbing at her forehead.

David followed the van tracks with his eyes.
“Can you walk up the hill with me and see what’s up there?”

“Shouldn’t we call Mom first?” Their mother
was giving a talk at a medieval history conference in Philadelphia,
which is why she’d parked her children at her sister’s house in
Bryn Mawr in the first place.

“Let’s find out where we are before we call
her,” David said.

Anna was starting to shake, whether from
cold or shock it didn’t really matter. David saw it and took her
hand for perhaps the first time in ten years. He tugged her up the
hill to the clearing. They came to a stop at the top, unable to
take another step. Two dozen men lay dead on the ground. They
sprawled in every possible position. A man close to Anna was
missing an arm and his blood stained the snow around him. Anna’s
stomach heaved and she turned away, but there was no place to look
where a dead man didn’t lie.