Winds of Time

A novella from the
After Cilmeri
Series

Winds of Time

by

Sarah Woodbury

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Sarah Woodbury

Cover image by Christine DeMaio-Rice at Flip
City Books

http://flipcitybooks.com

Winds of Time
is a 20,000 word novella from the
After Cilmeri
series:

Meg had thought that taking a commuter
flight from Pasco, Washington to Boise, Idaho would be a simple
matter. But nothing is simple for Meg when it comes to travel, and
especially not when she finds herself in the Middle Ages again
instead of in a plane crash on a mountain side in Oregon.

And when the pilot takes off without her in
a quest to return to the twenty-first century, Meg will need every
last bit of maturity and knowledge she gained in the sixteen years
she spent in the modern world—to survive even a day in this
one.

A note from the author: This
story was started many years ago, as part of
Footsteps in Time
. When it came down
to it, however, the story didn’t
fit
with what was happening with David and Anna and
had to be put aside. Happily, I am now able to share, in ebook
form, the story of Meg’s return to the Middle Ages. Thus,
Winds of Time
takes place
between Part 1 and Part 2 of
Footsteps in
Time
, Book One in the
After Cilmeri
Series. I think you will
enjoy
Winds of Time
more if you read
Footsteps in
Time
first.
Diolch
yn fawr
(thank you)!

–
Sarah

To everyone who,

even for a moment,

wishes they could travel back in time …

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)

Other books by Sarah Woodbury:

The Last Pendragon

The Pendragon’s Quest

Cold My Heart: A Novel of King Arthur

The Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mysteries:

The Good Knight

The Uninvited Guest

www.sarahwoodbury.com

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 “th” 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”)

Chapter One

I wrapped my arms around my waist and leaned
forward, trying to control my nausea as the plane shuddered and
jerked. The pilot put out a hand to steady me, and then quickly
moved it back to the controls.

“
My God, Meg!” he said.
“What just happened? We should be dead on that mountain! Now, I
can’t raise anyone on the radio—nothing but static—and I’m flying
by the seat of my pants here. The electronics are good, but what I
can see of the terrain looks totally wrong. I don’t understand
it!”

“
Just put her down if you
can, Marty,” I said. “We can figure out what’s going on when we
land.”

“
Put her down? Where!” And
then he screeched. The trees he’d been flying over gave way to a
heavy sea, rolling beneath us.

“
Jesus Christ!” Marty
circled the plane back towards land.

I said nothing, just looked out the window
at the country below, my chin in my hand. The fog was not as thick
now, but it limited visibility to a quarter-mile. There were no
houses or towns in sight and the land appeared rocky all the way
down to the shoreline.

“
Where in the hell are we?”
Marty said.

As we were supposed to be flying over the
mountains of Oregon right now, I could understand his bewilderment.
I swallowed hard. The environment, if not the land itself, looked
familiar to me.

The Middle Ages … again.

I decided this fact wouldn’t comfort Marty
in the slightest.

“
Fly south, Marty,” I said,
after he circled the plane for a third time.

I could make out the sun, trying to shine
through the fog. It sat very high in the sky and made me think we
were in the same late summer we’d left in Oregon, temporally
anyway. Wild-eyed, Marty turned the plane as I had asked. We flew
on, unspeaking. The land rolled away below us. The rocky coastline
gave way to a hilly, grass-covered terrain, interspersed with
stands of trees. Everything was beautifully green. The patches of
ground we could see didn’t include a city.

“
We’re going to run out of
fuel soon,” Marty said, his voice so quiet I almost couldn’t hear
him over the drone of the plane. “When that happens, what do you
propose we do?”

I sighed. “Just put her down. Find a field.
Hopefully people live among these trees, though I don’t see any
smoke.”

“
Smoke,” Marty said. “I
gather I’m not looking to follow the power lines?”

“
I’m afraid there won’t be
any power lines.”

“
You do know where we are,”
Marty said. “What’s going on here?”

I turned to look at him. “This has happened
to me before,” I said, enunciating as clearly as I could. “I can’t
explain it, but I’m afraid we’ve been displaced in space and time,
to a world not our own.”

Marty scoffed his disbelief. “You’re kidding
me!” Then, he looked through the windscreen at the pristine
landscape over which we were flying. “You aren’t kidding me?”

I shook my head, no happier with this new
reality than Marty, but I’d come to terms with the possibility of
it long ago. “Sixteen years ago, I lived in thirteenth century
Wales for close to a year,” I said. “I fear that we’re back again,
though whether in the same country or a different one, hundreds of
years earlier or later, I don’t know.”

Marty gripped the yoke so hard his knuckles
turned white. Just then, the fog thinned, revealing a small lake
with a clearing next to it that looked like it could be a possible
landing site. Without another word, Marty circled the little plane,
lowering it to the ground as he did so. With only a few bumps in
the grassy clearing, he landed and brought the plane to a halt.
With a twist of his wrist, he turned off the engine, and we were
quiet.

“
I think I saw power lines
to the north, just as we landed,” he said.

“
No, Marty. You
didn’t.”

“
I did. I know
it.”

I chose not to wait for
further recriminations or questions I wasn’t ready to answer, and
wrenched the door handle. Pushing it open, I hopped out and hauled
my backpack from the seat behind me. The lake lay a few yards to my
right and was as clear as any I’d ever seen. Grasses grew almost to
the water’s edge, and wildflowers covered the hills around us. I
took in a deep breath and gazed up at the sky, now as clear as the
air I breathed. The fog was gone.
And what
did that fog represent? The fog of confusion? The mists of
time?
I had no answers for
Marty.

Before we landed, I, too, had noticed
something in the distance that looked manmade, though not power
lines. Hoping to spot it again, I shouldered my pack and took off
at a brisk walk, following the south side of the lake. After fifty
yards or so, I angled away from the lake and headed up a small hill
that formed the south side of the little valley. Another ten
minutes of hard walking brought me to the top. I stopped and turned
to look back at the plane, with Marty still seated inside. Then I
gazed in the opposite direction and my heart skipped a beat. A
long, stone wall stretched from east to west in front of me.

Dear God, it’s Hadrian’s wall.

I sagged to my knees. This was too much. It
was bad enough to be in the Middle Ages again, but worse to find
myself so far from Wales. I would have to cross miles of open
country to reach Llywelyn, if he still lived in this world. Even if
he’d changed the future as I’d urged, Llywelyn still might not have
survived Cilmeri. The thought terrified me and hysterical laughter
bubbled up in my throat. I tried hard never to think of him as a
person, a human being whom I loved. I’d spent the last sixteen
years studying his world, all the while pretending to know much
less of him than I really did.

My time with Llywelyn had
taken on the quality of a dream. If not for the very real existence
of David, I could have told myself my journey to his time had never
happened. That first meeting with Llywelyn occurred shortly after
my husband’s funeral. I lost control of my Honda Civic on a country
road in the middle of winter, with Anna in the back seat. The road
had been slippery and as I came to a stop sign, at the very place
my husband had died, the car skidded sideways. Instead of hitting
the hill that rose up beside the road, the car slid
through
it and into a
marsh beside Criccieth Castle. I hit my head and had no memories
until after Llywelyn rescued us.

I had been returned to my time at the moment
of David’s birth. He was Llywelyn’s longed-for son, the one who
would have ruled after him, had fate treated us differently. Anna
had woken in the night and I had taken her to the toilet. I’d been
squatting in front of her as she sat on the seat, her head resting
on my shoulder, when my water broke. I gasped, and Anna gasped, and
we were gone. We found ourselves in the grass outside my mother’s
house.

When my mother died a few years ago, I’d
lost the one person who knew the truth about my life. I had always
meant to tell David about his father, but it seemed needlessly
cruel to fill him with stories about the other world in which he’d
been conceived, but would never see. It would have made it
impossible for him to fit into the twenty-first century.

With a flood of emotion, I realized that now
I might be able to tell Llywelyn about his son—and just knowing
that David existed, somewhere, might make a difference to him.

Too, it helped that I hadn’t
left Anna and David behind in the twenty-first century. Whatever
the police investigators said, I didn’t believe they were dead, or
runaways, which is what the police assumed. It was too coincidental
that they should vanish just as I had, very near to the place where
I’d gone to Wales. I clung to the belief that they were still
alive, but displaced to another world—like I was yet again. At the
same time, if I dwelt on the idea at all, it terrified me not to
know where they were. What if they made their way home again and
found me gone?
My little girl … my
wonderful son … please, God, take care of them.

With these thoughts spinning in my head, I
said a prayer for my mother, and for Llywelyn, and for my children,
wherever they were, and stared out at the medieval landscape in
front of me.

Thinking that it was time to talk to Marty,
I turned around to head back to the plane and was astonished to see
it rolling steadily across the grass. For half a second, I watched
it dumbly. Surely, Marty wasn’t going to take off and leave me
here? Where exactly did he think he was going to go? Yet, I knew
the answer without having to ask: to find his mythical power
lines.

I shouted, though he couldn’t hear me over
the plane’s engine, and then took off at a run down the hill. I had
climbed too far, however, and I was only halfway down the slope
when his front wheels lifted off the grass. Five seconds later, he
was fifteen feet above the ground—then thirty—then one hundred. He
circled the little plane around the lake and even had the gall to
tilt his wings to wave at me, before heading north. I watched the
plane’s white tail until it disappeared.