Footsteps in Time (23 page)

“
You thought to leave us,
did you?” he whispered.

David could barely speak through the
pressure on his throat. “I have to relieve myself,” David said.
“Would you rather I did that on you?”

Fychan squeezed a little harder, and
then relaxed his hold. As David gagged and choked for breath, he
twisted the knife into David’s stomach, drawing blood.

“
I should kill you now,” he
said. “When you bested me before, it wasn’t a fair fight. You only
win when you cheat.”

“
So give me a blade and
I’ll fight you fairly!” David hissed back, straightening his
shoulders and trying to get away from his knife. He left his hands
in the loosened rope but held the end in his fist in case it came
undone before he was ready.

“
Oh no, you don’t.” Fychan
matched David’s step backwards with one of his own. “You’re worth
more alive than dead, and if we fought, you wouldn’t live to see
tomorrow.”

They glared at each other until David
forced himself to back down. He let his shoulders slump and tried
to look as defeated as possible. Fychan pounced gleefully on his
apparent capitulation.

“
Ha!” he said. “You’ll
never be the Prince of Wales. We’ll not abide a weakling such as
you!”

“
I need to piss,” David
said, his head down, though he watched Fychan through his lowered
lashes.

“
Over there.” Fychan jerked
his head at a nearby tree.

David walked toward it. Fychan
followed, the knife in his right hand, held lightly at David’s
back. Deciding he could abide this no longer, David took two long
strides before Fychan could stop him.

“
Hey!” he said.

In the split second it took
for Fychan to reach him, David spun around, bashing his right elbow
into the flat of the knife. David followed the spin with a quick
grab to Fychan’s knife hand. Fychan didn’t have time to react
before David had twisted Fychan’s arm up and around, using his
momentum to leverage him to his knees.

Fychan screamed and
loosened his grip on the knife just enough for David to grasp it
with his right hand and jerk it from him. Realizing he was out of
time, David didn’t hesitate. Stepping behind Fychan, David slashed
downward, cutting Fychan’s throat and dropping his body to the
ground before any blood could touch him. David glanced toward the
fire. Dai and Marchudd were just levering themselves to their
feet.

David ran.

His goal was to put as much distance
between them as possible. David dashed through the bracken and
within a hundred yards found himself facing a creek, on the other
side of which was a craggy cliff. He had to make an immediate
choice: cross the creek or not, go upstream or down, try to find a
path through the rock or run along the shore. David crossed the
creek, soaking his breeches to the knees, and headed upstream,
looking for a path up the cliff.

Settling into a jog, David listened
for Marchudd and Dai. They couldn’t have ridden easily through the
undergrowth, but David didn’t know if another path went to this
spot. David’s sense was that one of the three men knew this region
of Wales well. If David was lucky, that person had been
Fychan.

Too
bad
. Within a minute, the crunch of hooves
on rock echoed behind David. He threw himself into some bushes. If
he could hide for long enough, because Marchudd had neither dog nor
bow, they’d give up and leave. Now that David was free, the only
way Marchudd could capture him would be to corner him. David swore
that wasn’t going to happen.

Clip-clop,
clip-clop.
Marchudd walked his horse past
David’s position.

“
Not here!” Dai shouted,
from somewhere downstream.

“
Fool! He’ll hear us!”
Marchudd hissed.

Anxiously David took
soft, shallow breaths, certain Marchudd could hear his heart
pounding. The sound of it filled
David’s
own ears. Marchudd and Dai conferred in whispers a few yards away,
but David couldn’t hear their words.
Silence
. David stayed in his bush,
praying and waiting. A few minutes later, the clop, clopping of the
hooves began again, and gradually moved away down the creek. Still,
David didn’t move, thinking it a trap. Another ten minutes went by,
and then David sensed, rather than saw, a shadow pass his bush and
travel up the creek in the opposite direction from the
horse.

At last, he couldn’t stand
it any longer. David eased his head out of the bush. Nobody was
near the creek. Taking a chance, he scuttled away from the creek,
toward the cliff. Now that the rain had stopped and the moon was
up, he could see well enough to detect differences in the shadows
along the rock. The moon showed some grassy patches, and what
looked like a trail, wending its way up through them. David
sprinted forward into the rocks, and began to follow the path,
climbing up and away from the river.

At the top of the rocky
cliff, David faced a rolling landscape of grassland and trees. It
might have been green and welcoming in daylight, but it would give
him little cover by moonlight. He’d be a sitting duck out there.
David couldn’t abide the thought of being run down from behind by a
man on horseback, but he didn’t dare stop moving. He flitted from
rock to tree, to rock again, trying not to trip in the hidden holes
and roots that pot-marked the landscape, trying continually to move
south, back towards the road where his company traveled.

David hiked and jogged and wandered
through the long night until, as dawn was breaking, he stumbled out
of a copse of trees into a little valley, in the center of which
lay five huts. He pulled up short at the sight. He’d known,
intellectually, that the people he’d met on his journey through
Gwynedd had to live somewhere, but in the thirty-six hours since
Marchudd had taken him from the campsite, David had felt completely
alone.

He ran to the nearest hut. Before he
could knock, the door opened and David fell forward on his knees on
the threshold.

“
Who is it, Branwen?” a
male voice said.

Surprised faces of the inhabitants of
the hut, more than half a dozen of them, looked back at David. The
man who’d spoken got to his feet on the other side of the
room.

“
My lord!” he
said.

David blinked. The heat from the fire
and the blood pounding in his head blurred his vision. He
swayed.

“
Help him!” the man said,
rushing to David’s side. Branwen and the man raised David to his
feet, eased him against one wall of the hut, and helped him sit.
With his feet splayed out in front of him, David tried to get his
balance back.

David blinked. The inhabitants of the
hut stared back at him, completely silent, except for the man who
remained close by his side.

“
My lord, Dafydd?” he
said.

David nodded. “Yes, I’m
Dafydd.”

“
Your captain, Lord Bevyn,
was here in this house only last night. He brought news that you’d
disappeared. He feared the English had taken you.”

David lifted his hand and
dropped it, feeling more helpless than ever. “Not the English. The
traitors were our own people, Welshmen thinking to sell me to
Edward.”

The man sputtered his outrage, but
David turned his head to look at the man’s wife who hovered near
the fire. “Food? Water? Please?”

“
Yes, yes, Branwen hurry.”
Her husband urged her on. “I’m Aeddan ap Owain, and this is my wife
Branwen, and our children.”

The children gazed at David, their
eyes wide and faces pale. One little girl, perhaps about seven,
sucked one finger and stared at David with a grave expression on
her face. He crooked a finger at her and she came
closer.

“
Are you going to die?”
she said. “You look like my grandpa did right before he died. He
was all white in the face and tired, just like you are.”

David smiled and reached for her
hand.

“
I’m not
going to die,
cariad
,” he said. “I’m just tired and hungry. If I could stay here a
while, and sleep, I will be well tomorrow.”

“
Yes, yes,” Aeddan
said.

Branwen handed Aeddan a bowl of
porridge. He turned to David with it, but as David reached for it,
his hands shook so much he knew if he held it, it would
spill.

“
I—I can’t.”

Aeddan had seemed flustered
before but now his voice deepened with quiet confidence. “Never
mind, my lord. We’ll hold it together.”

Aeddan leaned forward; David put his
hands on the outside of Aeddan’s and together they tipped the first
sip into David’s mouth. The warmth flooded him and he took another
drink and then another until his hands stopped shaking. Finally,
David was able to take the bowl from Aeddan, who handed him a
spoon. Under the watchful eye of Aeddan’s family, David ate every
drop. When he’d finished, he set the bowl down and leaned his head
back against the wall, regarding Aeddan through half-open
eyes.

“
There were only three
men,” David said. “One is dead and the others are searching for me.
I don’t know if they still seek me, but if one or two men approach,
possibly on horseback, you must beware. I’ve no sword and must
sleep. I can’t be of help.”

“
My brother-in-law and I
fought with you, my lord, the winter we sent Edward home with his
tail between his legs,” Aeddan said. “I will warn him and the
families nearby that you are here. We’ll watch until you wake, and
then travel with you wherever you need to go.”

David lifted a hand to him and he
clasped it briefly before letting go.

“
Thank you,” David
said.

One of the drawbacks to David’s life
in Wales was the almost total lack of privacy. He was never alone,
even while sleeping—especially while sleeping. When David lived
among the other boys, a dozen of them would sleep in the stable, or
the great hall, or an out-of-the-way room somewhere in a castle.
Now that David was a prince, Math, or Bevyn, or even Hywel, whom
Father had promoted to manservant, was always with him, along with
a dozen of his guard close by.

With no privacy at
night comes an inability to keep private information private.
Everyone knew who snored, who had insomnia, and who was
conspicuously absent from his bed when a certain husband was away.
What everyone knew about David was that when he slept, he slept
deeply. As a child, this had meant he wet the bed routinely
(
not
information
that he ever wanted anyone in Wales to know— David assumed his
sister and mother could keep that a secret) but here in Wales, his
fathomless slumber had prompted one of the boys who shared his
Latin class to nickname him ‘Mortuus’, as in one who is dead. Safe
at last, in the home of Aeddan ap Owain, David slept the day
away.

He woke up once, many hours later.
Branwen gave him more food and a flagon of water. “My husband
stands watch with his bow,” she said. “There’ve been no strangers
near today.”

“
Thank you,” David said,
but before he could martial more of a reply, he was asleep
again.

Early the next morning,
David woke naturally. He lay on a pallet against the far wall.
Aeddan must have moved him to allow enough room to walk around the
small hut. David gazed at the ceiling, noting that the hut was
typical for the Middle Ages, made of wood supports packed with
wattle and daub. The floor was dirt, covered by a layer of reed
mats. It was simply furnished with a table, two stools, and several
benches pushed up against one wall. The fire was the centerpiece of
the house, with a hole in the roof above it to let out the smoke.
By stretching, David could have touched three of the children who
slept near him. The others were scattered across the floor; their
parents slept in a small alcove on the opposite side of the
room.

His movement caught the attention of
the little girl with whom he’d spoken the day before. She curled on
her side to talk to him.

“
I’m glad you didn’t die,”
she said.

“
Me too,” David
said.

“
My name is
Gwen.”

“
That’s my sister’s
name.”

Gwen looked confused. “Your sister is
named Anna,” she said.

David smiled. “I mean my baby sister’s
name. She’s Gwenllian.”

“
Oh.” Gwen stuck a finger
in her mouth. “You share the same father.”

“
Yes,”
David said. “The prince is her father by Elinor, and he’s my father
by my mother,
Marged
.”

“
My lord,” someone behind
Gwen whispered. David lifted his head to see the bright eyes of her
older brother, a boy of twelve, and the oldest of Aeddan and
Branwen’s children.

“
I am Huw ap Aeddan,” he
said.

“
Thank you for sharing
your home with me, Huw,” David said. “But it’s almost full light
and I must leave soon.”

“
Father and my Uncle Rhys
will accompany you,” Huw said, “and I get to come too if you will
have me.”