Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (5 page)

Callum blew out his cheeks and then laughed.
“No less than the truth, as you say.”

“If MI-5 was paying attention, they’ll know
we’re here because of the flash,” David said.

“That would explain how the coastguard was
scrambled so quickly. It may be that they’re paying more attention
than they were last November.” Callum turned on his heel and
disappeared into the cabin behind them. The roof had been ripped
off in the storm, but the walls were still intact. David could hear
his boots scraping on the deck as he moved things around
inside.

David rubbed his forehead. Every muscle in
his body hurt. “Would it make you uncomfortable if I admitted that
I’m a little afraid?”

Cassie gave a half-laugh. “Not at all! I am
too, and I don’t think the truth is a great idea. The people on
that cutter aren’t going to know who we are. We can let them rescue
us, tell them we lost all of our identification and luggage, and
then they can drop us on the shore with no more questions
asked.”

“That’s not going to work,” David said.
“We’re Americans. They’ll hold us until they can sort out who we
are and how we got here. Besides, I don’t lie well. Even if they
don’t understand what is really going on, they’ll know something’s
off.”

“For a politician, you are disconcertingly
honest.” For a few more seconds, Cassie’s eyes followed the
approaching cutter, but then she faced David. “I know it’s too late
now, but the instant we woke up, we should have run and not stopped
running until we got back home again.”

“How could we have done that in the ten
minutes between waking up and when that ship appeared?” David said.
“Could you have swum to shore?”

Cassie licked her lips. “How do you imagine
this playing out? Less than a year ago, they chased your parents
halfway across Wales, trying to prevent them from returning to the
Middle Ages. Callum came with your mother because he wanted to
arrest them. Are these MI-5 agents going to view us any differently
than Callum did? They’ll lock us up until they can figure out if
we’re safe to be loosed on the world, and if they do believe us,
it’s going to be even worse. Time travel, David! You’re going to be
like every holiday of the year wrapped up in one neat bundle and
delivered to their doorstep.”

“Cassie—” David began.

“No, David.” Cassie glowered at him. “Even
after more than six years in medieval Britain, with all the
poisonous politics, backbiting, and outright murder, you still
think the best of people? They’re going to lock you up and never
let you out!”

David didn’t know what to say. He’d brought
his friends here with a certain kind of confidence that never left
him. He was the King of England, and that meant he
had
to
show confidence at all times. Only his closest friends and family
knew how often he struggled with uncertainty. Bile rose in his
throat, which was hurting badly enough as it was. He didn’t answer
Cassie.

She nodded slowly as she watched him. “You
know I’m right, don’t you?”

“Yes. You’re probably right.” David could
smell the diesel fumes from the coastguard cutter, even from this
distance. He felt lightheaded and took in a deep breath to steady
himself. “I may have miscalculated.”

Cassie didn’t rub it in, though she could
have.

“I’m glad you said something, but now it’s
too late to do anything but what we can,” David said. “It was too
late the instant the coastguard found us. I’m sorry. We’re cornered
now.”

Cassie didn’t answer, just turned away from
him to observe the approaching ship.

“I have to tell the truth, Cassie.”

“Okay.”

“What does that mean?” David inspected the
cutter too, acknowledging that its only relationship to the ship
they were on was that they were both technically ‘ships’. The
coastguard cutter was metal and sleek, needing a mere handful of
men to crew it.

“It means
okay,”
Cassie said. “What’s
done is done, and we’ll deal with what is before us and try to get
out of this in one piece.” Then she shot him an actual grin. “It
can’t be more dangerous than facing down King Edward without a
sword.”

David managed a laugh, and then Callum
stepped between them, holding a billfold in his hand.

“What do you have there?” Cassie took it
from Callum and opened it. It contained not money but Callum’s MI-5
badge. Cassie stared at it and then at Callum. “I don’t know which
is more incredible—that you kept it, or that you brought it!”

Callum looked sheepish. “I didn’t bring it
to Scotland, as you well know, but I threw it in my bag this time
because—”

“—because you were traveling with me,” David
said.

Cassie’s mouth was open. “I knew you thought
a lot about returning to this world when you first got here, but I
didn’t know you still did.”

“Every day.” Callum took in a breath. “We
can do this.”

“Under the circumstances, I don’t think we
have much choice,” Cassie said, “and I agree that if we stick
together, we might get out of this in one piece. I won’t lie,
David, if you don’t want me to.”

The cutter pulled up to within fifty feet of
their wreck and stopped. A man came out of the wheelhouse and put a
megaphone to his lips. “Do you need assistance?” The helicopter
hovered overhead.

David laughed at the absurdity of the
question. They were standing in a husk of a ship, slowly sinking
into the Bristol Channel. What did they need if not assistance?

“Just follow my lead, my lord,” Callum
said.

“Will do,” David said.

If they weren’t planning on telling the
truth, he might have suggested that Callum cease with the ‘my
lords’, but David was who he was: a twenty-year-old American boy
turned King of England. What he hadn’t said to Cassie was that he’d
wanted to tell the truth because that mantle of responsibility was
so solidly his now that he was completely uninterested in
pretending otherwise. He’d been arrogant, though, and probably
delusional to think that anyone here would accord him comparable
respect.

For years, he’d played over and over in his
mind what he would do if he ever returned to the twenty-first
century. He’d known about MI-5; he’d known that they’d chased his
parents across Wales. But he honestly hadn’t spent any time
thinking about what they might do to him if they apprehended him.
He was about to find out.

Callum moved to the ship’s rail and held up
his badge. “Security Service! I must get these people to Cardiff
immediately.”

Callum had left his badge in David’s care
when he’d gone to Scotland, before he met Cassie. David was
grateful for whatever impulse had told Callum not to leave it
behind this time. That Callum had brought it didn’t necessarily
mean that he wanted to forsake his life in the Middle Ages, only
that he’d been thinking about it. A lot.

Cassie filled Callum’s place beside David.
“I have a bad feeling about this.”

David smirked. He couldn’t help it; Cassie
had said the phrase so perfectly.

The man with the megaphone peered at
Callum’s badge, and then someone in the wheel house, whose face
David couldn’t see because of the glare off the windshield,
signaled his approval. The first man gave a quick salute to Callum.
“Sir!”

Callum glanced back at David, who shrugged.
It was too late to change course now; they were committed. Twenty
seconds later, a lifeboat appeared in the water off the back of the
cutter and surfed towards the wrecked cog. It pulled up to the
side. David and Callum reached over the rail to grasp the hands of
the first man out of the lifeboat, the same one who’d spoken to
them through the megaphone; they helped him to hop over the rail
and onto the deck, and then he handed each of them a life
jacket.

“I’m coastguard rescue officer Dan
Timmons.”

“David Llywelyn.” David shrugged into the
life jacket.

Callum held up his badge. “I’m Agent
Alexander Callum.”

David did a double-take at Callum’s use of
his first name. It was completely normal to give it under these
circumstances, but this was only the second time David had heard
‘Alexander’ come out of Callum’s mouth. In the first instance,
Callum had been drinking mead for the first time and had consumed a
few too many cups.

“I’ll need to speak to my superiors
immediately,” Callum said.

“You can radio them from the ship.” Timmons
words came out clipped. His first priority, as it should have been,
was not to chat but to get them off the cog and to safety.

“Thank you.” Callum said.

Cassie went first, clambering over the rail
with Callum steadying her by holding onto her upper arm. The
officer who’d remained in the lifeboat reached for her hand, but as
she stepped into the lifeboat, the buoyant surface caused her to
lose her footing, and she went down on her knees between the seats.
At least she was safe.

David followed, losing his footing as she
had, and swallowed down a curse. He felt awkward, completely out of
his element, and helpless. The last time he’d come to the modern
world, he’d done it accidently-on-purpose to save Ieuan, who at the
time had been his man-at-arms and had been wounded by an English
arrow. The wound would have been mortal if David hadn’t jumped off
a cliff with him on the wild theory that putting his own life in
danger would transport them both back to the twenty-first century.
It had done exactly that. They’d returned to the Middle Ages with
Bronwen in the same way he and Anna had come the first time: by
almost causing a car accident.

More recently, his mother had jumped with
his father and Goronwy off the balcony at Chepstow Castle, also on
purpose, to save his father’s life. Llywelyn had been suffering
from an infection around his heart, which was killing him. They’d
returned to the Middle Ages the same way, though with Callum as a
stowaway. Today, with the storm raging around them, David had
calculated that the odds of ending up in the twenty-first century,
rather than ending up dead, were relatively high. In a strange way,
it was almost as if he were immortal, except that he was pretty
sure that one swing of a sword to his neck would put an end to him
in short order.

Still, the risky part was that time travel
didn’t always happen. Before he was born, his mother had fallen out
of the window at Brecon Castle with his father to escape an
assassin, and a few years ago she’d been caught up in a storm in
the Irish Sea and almost drowned. Anna had seemed to waver in time
at the birth of her first son, Cadell. None of those events had
resulted in time travel. The unpredictability of the whole process
made him more than nervous about getting back. It made him want to
puke.

“What’s wrong?” Cassie’s voice was a low
whisper in David’s ear as he struggled to right himself and find a
seat in the boat beside her.

“I’m royally ticked off to be here,” David
said.

Cassie snorted a laugh, a hand to her
mouth.

“How about you?” David said.

“Ask me in a few hours,” she said. “I think
I’m still too stunned to think straight.”

“You need to know that I’m serious about the
timeline,” David said. “To me, this is a raid: we get in, we gather
whatever information we can or need, and we get out. Or at least I
do,” he amended.

“Callum and I are with you,” Cassie said,
“whatever happens.”

David nodded, accepting that she meant it in
this moment, though they really would have to see how both she and
Callum felt in a day or two, after a shower and the chance to truly
consider what they would leave behind to return home with him.
Callum, at least, was none too certain that a return to the Middle
Ages was what he wanted to do, even if Cassie didn’t want to admit
it.

Callum and the coastguard officer got into
the life raft last, and the coastguard officer waved at the
helicopter, which began to circle around them but at a higher
altitude. David touched the artificial fabric of his life vest. He
wanted to take everything here home with him, but he would have to
make do with filling his brain instead.

“Why not the Bahamas?” Again Cassie leaned
in close to whisper to David, though between the noise of the
helicopter and the lifeboat engine, she could have shouted in his
ear and nobody else in the raft could have heard her.

“Excuse me?” David said.

“Why don’t you ever end up some place warm?
We could have a hut by the beach, a hammock, and a fruity drink by
now.”

“Because that’s not where I’m needed,” David
said, taking her question as a serious one instead of a joke.

Cassie made a rueful face. “Leave it to you
to be so practical, even when doing something that ought to be
impossible.”

The lifeboat sped back to the cutter, and
David allowed himself to be lifted onto the deck. He followed the
others as Timmons led them up to the wheelhouse and indicated a
bench seat where they should sit.

“We need the cog towed to the pier,” David
said. “It’s a wreck, but it’s medieval. You don’t want it sinking
into the channel.”

Officer Timmons swung his head to look at
David. “Did you say the ship is medieval?”

“It is.” Callum answered for David.

Officer Timmons seemed to notice their full
medieval garb for the first time. Although he said, ‘yes, sir’, his
eyes flicked from the sword at David’s waist to Callum’s.

Callum pulled his sword three inches out of
its sheath. “Believe me, it’s real.”

“And so is the ship,” David said, “though
it’s hardly seaworthy any more.”

Timmons opened his mouth to say something,
stopped to think again, and simply said, “The tug is already on its
way. My first priority is to get you to shore safely.”

David grumbled to himself and sat,
cataloguing the contents of the trunk left behind in his cabin.
Besides clothes, it held his armor and what passed for toiletries
in the Middle Ages. His primary secretary had ridden in a different
ship and retained the endless paperwork that went along with being
King of England. David was kind of sorry about that now, since such
documents could have provided proof that he was who he said he
was.