Guardians of Time (34 page)

“James!” Callum poked his head through the
trap door. “What are you doing here?”

James’s mouth fell open, but then he
laughed. “Is this your doing? Would it be possible for me to find
myself in captivity without you affecting a rescue? Especially one
as dramatic as this.” He stomped a foot on the roof of the bus, and
the sound echoed metallically. Unfortunately, since the bus abutted
the tower, it also caused a few more stones to fall, and everyone
moved away from it towards the rear of the bus.

“If you would prefer not to be rescued,
you’re free to climb back into your disintegrating cell.” Callum
grunted as he pulled himself through the trapdoor and sat on the
edge, his feet dangling into the interior of the bus. He’d put on
his medieval garb in the time it had taken to drive to the bridge,
and his sword was belted at his waist.

“That is quite all right.” James bent and
held out his hand to Callum, who smirked and allowed his friend to
pull him to his feet. Then the two men grasped each other’s
shoulders in an affectionate way.

Callum released James in order to gesture to
Math and Anna. “I see you’ve met Lord Math and Princess Anna.”

James bowed at the waist. “It is an
honor.”

“My lord!” The shout came from the ground
outside the tower.

They all turned to see Bridget, Peter, and a
man Anna didn’t know grinning at them from the ground on the east
side of the bus. The bus had been driven into the tower at the
front, such that it was oriented north/south and blocked the whole
of the road. Until they moved it—if moving it was possible—no
horseman could get by without riding into the adjacent field or
swimming in the moat.

Callum bent forward, his hands on his knees.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking what you’re doing
here?”

Peter gestured to James Stewart. “We were on
his trail.”

James shook his head with something that
looked like rueful dismay. “How many lives do I owe you now?”

“Ach.” Callum straightened and clapped a
hand on James’s shoulder again. “You would do the same for me. But
now—” He turned around and gazed towards the castle.

Anna looked too: a crowd of people—perhaps
as many as a hundred—had come to stand on the bridge across the
castle’s moat, on the battlements of the castle, and in the outer
bailey, which was effectively an island in the middle of an
extensive moat. She couldn’t see anyone’s expression from this far
away, but nobody seemed to be moving or speaking.

That they were feeling shock wasn’t
surprising. By now, many people had heard of the giant orange and
turquoise bus that had appeared out of nowhere in the midst of a
battlefield a year ago, but seeing it with one’s own eyes was
something else entirely.

“Whose castle is this?” Callum said.

“Fulk Fitzwarin’s,” Peter said.

“Ah yes,” Callum said. “This is Whittington.
And how, exactly, did James Stewart end up a prisoner in his
tower?”

James cleared his throat. “I was riding to
Dinas Bran in the company of Geoffrey de Geneville and Jacques de
Molier, an emissary from the French Court, when a band of ruffians
ambushed us. They brought me here. I didn’t know where I was until
this moment for they blindfolded me, and my room had no windows
until this—” he paused, searching for the word, “—vehicle created
one.”

Callum ran a hand through his hair, in what
looked to Anna like disbelief. “Why would Fitzwarin abduct
you?”

“My lord,” Peter said from the ground, “it
isn’t Fitzwarin’s doing, or not in the main. Red Comyn and Aymer de
Valence are at the root of this.”

Anna had never concerned herself much with
Scottish politics, but even she knew that marriage had allied these
two, and David had worried about it from the first he’d heard of
it. “Where are they now?”

“Here!” A voice bellowed as a host of
horsemen materialized on the other side of the bus—the west
side—from Peter and Bridget. Every man in the company wore armor
and held a sword or axe bare in his hand. Horses filled the road
that ran beside the moat and intersected with the road that ran in
front of the tower, to which the bus was currently
semi-attached.

The lead man, whom Anna didn’t recognize,
bared his teeth at Callum. “And who might you be, sir?”

Callum pulled his sword from his sheath,
though he kept it pointed at the roof of the bus. “I am Alexander
Callum, Earl of Shrewsbury, which the man beside you could have
told you if he’d had a mind to do so, Aymer.”

Anna looked to the man on Aymer’s left,
noting his shockingly red hair and understanding that this was Red
Comyn.

Aymer’s eyes didn’t quite skate to the left,
but his horse shifted, and he had to tug the reins in order to keep
him under control. The men around him were murmuring too. Callum
had been central to the negotiations in Scotland that had put John
Balliol, their king, on the throne. Even if David would have
preferred Robert Bruce as King of Scotland, he hadn’t forced the
issue, and Callum was well-known and well-respected for the role
he’d played in averting war.

“You should go, Aymer,” Red Comyn said, his
eyes on Callum instead of his brother-in-law, “right now, while you
still can.”

“What? Why?” Aymer jerked his chin to
indicate Callum and—as it turned out—the rest of Anna’s family,
including Mom, who had climbed onto the roof of the bus too without
Anna noticing. “They’re outnumbered. We have the advantage.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that. I
imagine cousin Fulk is reconsidering his position right about now,”
Red said.

Aymer’s face twisted in fury. “Coward! This
jumped-up earl holds no power over you.”

David had been called an
upstart
prince
more than once by angry Norman lords, but Anna had never
heard Callum referred to in such a derogatory way. Medieval people,
familiar with nobility, could tell at a glance that he had been
born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and the mantle of authority
rested naturally on his shoulders.

Red kept his expression serene. “I’m cutting
my losses, Aymer. I should never have listened to you.”

“This is as much your doing as mine,
Scotsman.”

The murmuring rose in volume among Red’s
men, not liking the tone of Aymer’s voice.

“I say otherwise,” Red said, “and I can
muster witnesses to prove it.”

Aymer scoffed, while at the same time
raising his sword above his head and speaking to the Frenchmen
among the soldiers behind him. “We’re leaving!”

“I don’t think so,” Callum said.

Aymer threw a glance up at him. “You can’t
stop me.”

“I can.”

“You have no army.”

Callum pointed to the road behind them.

A swell of relief filled Anna’s chest.
Whether or not Aymer escaped, none of them were in danger anymore:
the road behind Aymer was filling with soldiers from the garrison
of Whittington, who had filed out of the castle while Callum had
been talking to Aymer—perhaps even stalling him. They’d followed
the same route from the castle entrance Aymer had taken, circling
around the moat to the south and west before turning north to make
up three sides of the square. At the same time, thundering hooves
sounded, coming down the western road. Thirty seconds later,
Samuel, with Callum’s entire guard behind him, appeared out of the
rain.

Even better, Aymer wasn’t going anywhere
because the Scottish guard that surrounded him chose that moment to
close ranks. Their loyalty, it seemed, was to Red Comyn, not
Aymer.

Callum sheathed his sword. “We done
here?”

He glanced at James Stewart, who shrugged.
“I am at your service, my lord.”

“What I want to know,” Anna said, “is if
there’s any way I can get home to Dinas Bran in the next few hours
in order to celebrate Christmas with my sons?”

Meg

F
rom the moment the
bomb had gone off at Caernarfon Castle, Meg hadn’t been able to
think about anything but the whereabouts of David and Llywelyn.
Throughout the discussions of how to get themselves back to the
Middle Ages, she’d sat unspeaking, in kind of a comatose state.

No matter how many times she told herself
that David would have contacted them if he’d been in the modern
world, and that Director Tate had reported only four bodies in the
ruins of the tower, her heart had been beating too fast, while at
the same time her whole body felt stiff, even frozen.

She’d played no part in the decision to
return the rental van—if only because Cassie and Callum would have
had to pay for it if they didn’t—and return to the Middle Ages in
the Cardiff bus. She wouldn’t have seen Rupert enter the bus
because she hadn’t been looking. All she could see was the empty
seat beside her where Llywelyn should have been sitting.

There had been times before when she’d
thought she’d lost him. He was twenty years older than she and the
King of Wales, which meant that war and warfare had been a way of
life since the day he’d walked away from his family at sixteen and
joined his uncle’s court. Though Meg hadn’t seen the explosion at
the castle, she’d seen Anna’s white face, and that was all she
needed to know about what had happened.

And yet, she hadn’t felt his death in her
heart. Love for Llywelyn wouldn’t let her go, wouldn’t let her
rest, and was the only thing keeping despair at bay. That and the
knowledge that David might have known what was coming and would
have known to hold onto his father with all his strength. She found
some comfort in the knowledge that wherever they were, they were
together.

She didn’t know who had come up with the
idea to drive headfirst into the center stem of the archway on the
Menai Bridge, but even she had to admit, in the moments she was
capable of rational thought, that to do so was a genius way to get
home. The consequences of hitting it, had the time traveling not
worked, would have been irretrievable.

Meg had believed in the moment of impact
that she would survive, for the sake of her five children, if not
her own. And thus, she was in no way surprised when the bus dropped
onto the road in time to rescue Bridget, Peter, and James Stewart,
of all people, from the malicious hands of Aymer de Valence.

Honestly, Meg was good with that.

She was even better with Fulk Fitzwarin’s
offer, seemingly worked out with Callum as part of his penance—Meg
hadn’t bothered with the details—to give them horses to ride home
to Dinas Bran and carts to haul all their stuff with them, which
thankfully had been well packed into the bus’s storage compartment
and hadn’t been damaged in the collision with the tower. It was
obvious to anyone looking that the bus wasn’t going anywhere any
time soon.

They had only seven miles as the crow flies
to ride, though of course a bit longer by road. No journey she had
ever taken had ever felt as long. Riding, she was surrounded by
friends and family—as well as Red Comyn and his Scots. Testimony by
the various witnesses had revealed that James’s abduction had been
a mistake from start to finish—in that Red and Aymer had meant to
disrupt the emissary’s journey but then found they had more than
they bargained for in James Stewart. Faced with the decision to
either kill him, which had been Aymer’s choice, or grab him, Red
had insisted on the latter.

His protection hardly made up for the death
of the French emissary’s entire guard, and it wasn’t as if Comyn
was forgiven his actions. But arresting a nobleman was a different
matter entirely than arresting a commoner, and Red Comyn knew he
was far better off surrendering, apologizing, and admitting fault
than running. He had lands and status, which, if he fled to another
country, he abandoned. In the Middle Ages, starting over wasn’t
quite the same as in the twenty-first century. It wasn’t as if he
could just go get a job.

Thus, Callum—and James Stewart, in
fact—believed rehabilitation was the better path to follow in this
instance; and that furthermore, it was possible.

Callum was known for making those kinds of
decisions.

As, in fact, was David.

“We’re almost there, Mom. Hang on,” Anna
said.

“There’s no guarantee they’re even here,”
Meg said. “What if they ended up in Scotland?”

“Then that’s where they needed to be,” Anna
said matter-of-factly.

Neither of them mentioned—nor would they—the
possibility that David and Llywelyn could be dead. If they weren’t
at Dinas Bran, Meg would wait. Painfully and dying a little herself
each day perhaps, but she would wait.

“How can you be so calm?” Meg knew the
question had come out a wail, but she couldn’t help it.

“In a few more minutes we’ll know, and
knowing will be better than not knowing,” Anna said.

The sky was darkening as clouds formed on
the western horizon, and the sun, never high to begin with, sank
behind them, shrouding in semi-darkness the mountain they were
climbing. Meg kept glancing towards where she hoped to see the
battlements, but trees hid her view of them until they reached the
final switchback.

Turning, they crested a rise, and Anna
gasped and pointed. “Mom! Look!”

The towers above the gatehouse were clearly
visible, and each flew a flag. On one tower flapped the three lions
that were Llywelyn’s personal crest, and on the adjacent tower flew
the red dragon of Wales. Neither flag would have been flown had
David or Llywelyn not been in residence.

A company of riders burst from the
gatehouse. It was a scene Meg would play over and over again in her
mind, seeing Llywelyn riding towards her, his face split by a
glorious smile. Meg dismounted without waiting for help from Math
and ran to him. As Llywelyn approached, he reached down and, with a
strength that denied his sixty-plus years, scooped her up and
pulled her in front of him like he might have twenty years ago when
she’d been a girl and life had held nothing but possibility.