Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series)

A Novel from the
After Cilmeri
Series

Exiles in Time

by

Sarah Woodbury

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright © 2013 by Sarah
Woodbury

Cover image by Christine DeMaio-Rice at
Flip City Books

http://flipcitybooks.com

Exiles in Time

Two years in Afghanistan; four years
working for MI-5, the British security service; and the death of
both of his parents from cancer. At the age of thirty-four, Callum
thought he’d experienced the worst that life could throw at him.
That is, until his boss ordered him to open a buried file on his
desk and to take it seriously. His new assignment: to detain and
question a pregnant woman and her ailing husband—and if need be, to
stop them from returning to medieval Wales.

Until today, Callum believed in his
job and always followed orders. Until today, he thought time travel
wasn’t real …

Exiles in Time is the sixth novel in
the After Cilmeri series. Other books in the series include a
prequel, Daughter of Time, and Books 1-4: Footsteps in Time, Prince
of Time, Crossroads in Time, and Children of Time.

www.sarahwoodbury.com

To Dad

I think you would
have

liked this one

Books in the
After Cilmeri
Series:

Daughter of Time
(prequel)

Footsteps in Time (Book
One)

Winds of Time

Prince of Time (Book
Two)

Crossroads in Time (Book
Three)

Children of Time (Book
Four)

Exiles in Time

Castaways in
Time

The Gareth and Gwen Medieval
Mysteries:

The Bard’s
Daughter

The Good Knight

The Uninvited
Guest

The Fourth
Horseman

The Last Pendragon Saga:

The Last
Pendragon

The Pendragon’s
Quest

Other books by Sarah
Woodbury:

Cold My Heart: A Novel of
King Arthur

A Brief Guide to Welsh
Pronunciation

c
a hard ‘c’ sound (Cadfael)

ch
a non-English sound as in Scottish ‘ch’ in ‘loch’
(Fychan)

dd
a buzzy ‘th’ sound, as in ‘there’ (Ddu; Gwynedd)

f
as in ‘of’ (Cadfael)

ff
as in ‘off’ (Gruffydd)

g
a hard ‘g’ sound, as in ‘gas’ (Goronwy)

l
as in ‘lamp’ (Llywelyn)

ll
a breathy ‘thl’ sound that does not occur in English
(Llywelyn)

rh
a breathy mix between ‘r’ and ‘rh’ that does not occur in
English (Rhys)

th
a softer sound than for ‘dd,’ as in ‘thick’
(Arthur)

u
a short ‘ih’ sound (Gruffydd), or a long ‘ee’ sound
(Cymru—pronounced ‘kumree’)

w
as a consonant, it’s an English ‘w’ (Llywelyn); as a vowel, an
‘oo’ sound (Bwlch)

y
the only letter in which Welsh is not phonetic. It can be an
‘ih’ sound, as in ‘Gwyn,’ is often an ‘uh’ sound (Cymru), and at
the end of the word is an ‘ee’ sound (thus, both Cymru—the modern
word for Wales—and Cymry—the word for Wales in the Dark Ages—are
pronounced ‘kumree’)

Prologue

November 2016

Cardiff, Wales

Callum

“
W
e found them.” It was Agent Jones, the new man, who so far had
done a better job of keeping his composure in the current crisis
than most of his superiors.

“
Where?” Callum said,
holding his dripping hands above the sink. Callum’s employer, the
British internal security service known as MI-5, no longer stocked
paper towels. Callum needed to run the drying machine, but the
conversation with Jones came first.

“
Fueling up at a petrol
station south of Builth Wells,” said Jones.

“
So we have them,” Callum
said, not as a question.

Jones paused before speaking. Callum
sensed him arranging and rearranging his sentences in his head to
find a way to tell the truth in the most efficient and least
painful manner. “We didn’t catch the image in real time, sir. It’s
from an hour ago.”

Callum slammed his fist onto the
counter. “What road were they on?”

“
The A470, sir.”

“
I want to see the images.
Set it up. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“
Yes, sir.”

Callum dried his hands and was back in
the conference room within the allotted time.

Agent Jones stood at attention to the
right of the screen that filled one wall. The images of their
fugitives took up half the space: Meg Lloyd; her husband, Llywelyn
Gruffydd (who claimed to be the last Prince of Wales); and Goronwy,
whose surname they hadn’t yet determined.

“
So they’re headed back to
Chepstow.” Callum nodded to Jones, who tapped a square in one
corner of the screen showing a map of Wales. He highlighted the
southeastern portion of the country and enlarged it to fill the
screen.

“
They must have taken that
trackway from Devil’s Bridge,” said Agent Natasha Clark, pointing
to the unnamed road that ran through the Elan Valley. “No cameras,
which is why it took so long to find them.”

“
Not much of anything out
there but sheep,” said Jones, “though at least the road is
paved.”

“
It couldn’t have been fun
in the dark,” Natasha said. “They must have felt desperate to take
that road.”

“
We made them desperate,”
Callum said.

The initial pickup had been handled
badly, not by Callum, but by Thomas Smythe, a fellow security
service agent. Although the file on Meg was Callum’s, and had been
for six months, his boss had bypassed him for the lead on the case
because Smythe spoke Welsh. Smythe didn’t know anything about
people, however, and had misjudged his quarry badly, going in heavy
when he should have gone in light.

“
They could be heading
anywhere, not necessarily Chepstow,” Callum said.

“
If they didn’t go north,
Chepstow Castle is the most logical choice,” said Jones. “They’re
trying to reverse what they did to come here.”

According to Meg’s brother-in-law,
Ted, Meg had spent the last few years living in medieval Wales. She
and her companions had started out earlier in the week in the
Middle Ages, jumped from Chepstow’s balcony that overlooked the Wye
River, and gone from 1288 Chepstow to 2016 Aberystwyth in the blink
of an eye.

“
Does that sound as crazy
to you as it does to me?” The last member of the team, John
Driscoll, kicked back in his chair.

“
From their point of view,
it makes a certain kind of sense,” said Jones.

Snorting his disgust, Driscoll tossed
the papers he’d been holding onto the conference table. “A pregnant
woman and two old men, one of whom has a heart condition, are
running circles around us. How in the hell have they eluded
us?”

“
While Meg might be from
this world originally,” Natasha said, “Llywelyn and Goronwy are
not. That reaches to the heart of our problem: they don’t think
like we do.”

“
I wouldn’t have taken you
for a true believer, Natasha,” Driscoll said.

Natasha gave her fellow agent a sour
look. “I’m not. Just keeping my options open.”

“
I can’t believe we’re even
having this discussion. As if that’s not crazy right there.”
Driscoll mumbled the words under his breath as he typed into his
laptop.

“
If we could focus on the
mission …” Callum said.

“
Of course, sir,” Natasha
said. “All I’m saying is that if Meg is telling the
truth—”

“
Would you rather I put you
on to infiltrating those Welsh nationalists in St. David’s?” Callum
said. “You could reveal everything you know about the return of the
last Prince of Wales and they’d welcome you to their meetings with
open arms.”

That made Natasha laugh. “No, no. I’ll
take this case any day over that.”

Callum checked his watch and then
pointed to Jones. “Keep watching the cameras. If they’re in
Chepstow, or getting close, we need to know.” He looked at the rest
of his team. “I think we all should be involved in
this.”

Driscoll closed the lid of his
computer and got to his feet. “I’ll get Ted ready.” He left the
room.

Callum turned to Natasha and Jones. “I
don’t want to hear talk about anything but the task before us. We
have a job to do, and we’re going to do it.”

“
Yes, sir,” Jones and
Natasha said together.

The SUV pulled into the parking lot of
Chepstow Castle a few minutes before seven in the
morning.

Natasha rubbed her hands together. “It
looks cold.”

“
It’s November in Wales.
What did you expect?” Callum unlatched the door and discovered that
the driver had parked directly over a puddle. Having just responded
curtly to Natasha, Callum refrained from chewing out the driver.
They were all going to get a lot wetter than this before the day
was over. Callum was still dressed in his regular work clothes:
business suit, trench coat, and respectable shoes. Half an hour ago
when they’d left Cardiff, he hadn’t felt he could stop by his flat
to collect his rain boots and hat.

The men who made up Callum’s security
team wore Kevlar under black trench coats. While it was standard
policy to wear armor during operations like this, Callum hadn’t
seen the point for himself. As far as Callum was concerned, nobody
was shooting anyone today, and certainly not pregnant women or men
who thought they were nobles from medieval Wales. They weren’t a
threat to anyone but themselves, and even that was
debatable.

In fact, this was a crap assignment
and Callum would be the first to admit it. MI-5 usually dealt with
threats to national security such as the detection and apprehension
of terrorists. These people needed a psychiatrist. They certainly
didn’t need to be chased by a dozen agents from MI-5.

For this mission, Callum had brought
two SUVs and a larger van, which he directed to park in the
castle’s rear car park. He then dispersed his ten men around the
perimeter of Chepstow Castle. They could patrol the exterior until
Callum got word that Cardiff had rousted the government official
who managed the castle, and he had arrived to unlock the main door.
Callum left Ted inside the second SUV with two agents to watch over
him. There wasn’t any point in getting him wet until the castle
opened for business. Callum got back into his SUV himself just as
his phone rang.

It was Jones. Callum put him on
speaker and popped up the tablet that connected the SUV to the
computer in the conference room back in Cardiff. His eyes went
instinctively to a corner of the screen where Jones had pasted the
picture of one of the girls who’d somehow gotten caught up in all
this: Bronwen Llywelyn. She’d been an archaeology graduate student
in Pennsylvania before she’d disappeared three years ago. Ted had
met her and claimed that she’d gone back to the Middle Ages with
Meg’s son, David.

“
What can you tell me?”
Callum said. “Are we in the right place?”

“
A camera caught their car
coming into Chepstow earlier this morning,” said Jones.

“
When this is over, heads
will roll,” Natasha said. “You can be sure that Smythe’s will be
first, even if he is the current pet of Thames House.”

Callum glanced at Natasha in the rear
view mirror, surprised at the venom in her voice. He was touched if
it was on his behalf but sensed there was more to it. Ever since
he’d come back from Afghanistan, there were moments when Callum
didn’t trust his instincts, particularly with women. He wanted to
ask Natasha what Smythe had done to her, but now wasn’t the
time.