Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) (17 page)

“This way, David.” Callum nudged my elbow.

“Coming.” But I didn’t move. In the time it had taken to dismount, the events of the day had overwhelmed me. My heart was pounding out of my ears, and my breath was suddenly coming so fast it wasn’t doing my lungs any good. I shut my eyes, trying to get a grip on myself. I was clenching my fists so tightly my fingernails were cutting into the palms of my hands.

Callum’s hand gripped my shoulder, and he gently guided me away, though I didn’t know where he was taking me because I kept my gaze fixed on my boots. I was grateful for the rain yet again, because with my hood up and the darkness in the courtyard, my inability to function hadn’t caught the general attention of my men.

We ended up near a corner of the porch by the door, just out of the weather and the torchlight. Folding his arms across his chest, Callum leaned his shoulder against the wall, shielding me from the gaze of anyone whose eyes might stray in my direction. “You can talk to me,” he said after a minute had passed and I still hadn’t looked up. “This is me, remember? The man who washes his hands ten times a day.”

“Still?”

His calm words had cut through the static in my head, and I managed to meet his eyes. My heart twisted at the pity and understanding I saw in them.

“Still,” he said.

I shivered and sweated at the same time. My hands, once I managed to unfist them, shook. “We could have died, Callum.”

My friend took in a breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh. As he did so, I could feel the tension ease out of him. After a second, I realized he’d done it on purpose, because my body had involuntarily mimicked his, and oxygen was finally flowing to my brain.

“I know,” he said.

My mouth felt dry, and I licked my lips. “How can I do this to my family? It is one thing for Lee to come after me, but … if something were to happen to them, it would be all my fault.”

“Again, it would not be,” Callum said. “It is, however, the price you pay for being king.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I know,” Callum said.

“I can’t walk away, though.” I put my free hand to my forehead, rubbing hard with my thumb and forefinger. I didn’t feel like I was going to pass out anymore, but I found myself growing angry. “What is that about? I’m willing to risk the lives of my family and everyone I love so I can—” I stopped again, frustrated with myself, and this world, and Lee, and everything else. I glared at Callum, who looked back at me calmly, absorbing my anger without returning it.

“You do it so you can change the world,” Callum said. “You do it to make your peoples’ lives better.”

I fell back to earth with a thud. My anger had continued what Callum had started, normalizing my breathing and allowing me to regain control over my limbs. The panic attack faded. Its absence left me more tired than before, and I turned to put my back to the wall.

Callum dropped his arm from my shoulder, the worry in his eyes vying with relief that I’d stopped quivering. He’d talked openly about his PTSD from his time in Afghanistan. It was pretty clear I had it too.

And possibly, after tonight, so did everyone here.

Cassie approached, concern on her face. She held her shoulders tightly and had the same green-around-the-gills look that I’d been feeling. “Are you okay, David?”

“Not really,” I said.

I spoke the truth, but the words came out normally.

“We should get inside,” Callum said.

I nodded. I’d never panicked like that before, not even after my first battle at fourteen. I didn’t see it as a sign of weakness—Callum would be really angry at me if I did—but if it had happened once, it could happen again. Right now I was among friends, but who was to say that the next time I would be.

I hoped that at least Peckham, if not Romeyn, had gone back to bed so I wouldn’t have to speak to anyone before I slept.

Peckham had, but both Romeyn and Aaron were waiting for me at the door. “Sire,” Aaron said as I reached him. He bowed so low his long beard almost touched his knees. Romeyn had exchanged his workman’s clothes for the traditional robe of an archbishop, though without the crown or chain of office. He had deep circles under his eyes, as I was sure I did too.

“Rise, Aaron,” I said. “I’m too tired for that. You should have stayed in bed.”

Aaron looked offended. He could no more sleep when I was in danger than Justin could. “I’m glad to see you alive, sire. I would hate to have to explain to your mother why you weren’t.”

“You and me both,” I said, without irony. My mother had made her position clear: if she lost me because I’d taken less care of myself than I should have, she would never forgive me. I knew it was her love for me speaking. There was no greater pain than the loss of a child. Anna had lost her second son to illness, and I was coming to realize that it was a loss from which she would never recover.

“I wish you hadn’t come here, sire,” Aaron said.

A little perturbed, I took a few more steps into the anteroom at the front of the palace. Romeyn and Aaron came with me. “How can you say that, Aaron?”

His hands behind his back, Romeyn stood beside Aaron. “Hear him out, your majesty.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by an alliance between these two very intelligent men.

My men had followed me under the gatehouse into the courtyard, and Peckham’s steward was speaking with Justin about arranging for food and shelter for my men for what remained of the night. Cadfan had already been taken away to the stables.

“I’ve been eavesdropping, as you requested, sire,” Aaron said as if my request and his acceding to it were the most natural thing in the world to speak about out loud in the presence of the Archbishop of York. “I was dozing beside the cardinal when his secretary woke him to tell him of the destruction of the castle. Acquasparta said something I think you need to know about.”

I observed him, waiting.

Aaron took in a breath. “The cardinal didn’t express shock or surprise, as if he’d been expecting the news. Then he said, ‘I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.’”

My eyes narrowed. “That’s from Revelations.”

“I know that, sire,” Aaron said.                 

“Putting aside how you know that, what does this have to do with my coming here?” I said. “I don’t even ride a white horse.”

“True, but King Philip does,” Romeyn said. “He is known for it.”

Aaron put out a hand to me. “I know it sounds absurd on the surface, but I can’t think why else Acquasparta would have quoted that particular passage. It worries me.”

I bent my head, feeling exhaustion wash over me. Philip as a stand-in for Christ himself had my stomach churning. My brain was working clearly, however, and I took in an easy breath.

 “I have to sleep for a few hours. We all do.” I turned to Callum, who’d entered the anteroom with Cassie while I’d been speaking with Romeyn and Aaron. “What do you think?”

“I think we perhaps should have gone to Chilham with Carew,” Callum said.

“We still can.” Cassie slipped her hand into Callum’s.

“What is the hour?” I said.

“Five in the morning, give or take,” Cassie said.

I shook my head. “I just need three hours of sleep. We can be in Chilham by noon, depending on what the dawn brings us.”

Romeyn and Aaron exchanged an inscrutable look, one at which both of them seemed very accomplished, and Romeyn said, “This way, sire, if you will.”

Romeyn ignored the steward, who’d been hovering on the far side of the anteroom, and who’d wanted to take me elsewhere. Instead, Romeyn led me to his own room on the first floor of the palace. I loosened my sword belt, removing it in order to lean my sword against the wall, and fell face first onto the bed fully clothed. I heard the door close behind me, and then I slept.

Chapter Sixteen

I
’d learned over the last four years to put away troubles in a locked box in my mind so as to clear it for sleep. I was so exhausted, I didn’t have to do that this time, but my dreams were troubled: a presence with Darth Vader’s voice recited a laundry list of incomprehensible tasks that faced me, while fire and smoke poured out of a hole in the ground in front of me. I woke with a start to a sunlit room and the squeak of a door opening behind me.

In a flash, I spun off the bed, my belt knife in my hand. William stood before me, his mouth open in surprise. I stopped when I saw him and straightened, slipping my knife into its sheath. “Sorry.”

William bowed. “I apologize, sire, but you asked to be woken in three hours. It has been four.”

Now that I was upright, the room came into focus. I’d slept in a four-poster bed with gold curtains that I hadn’t bothered to undo and sleep behind. Someone had thrown a blanket across my back—I credited Cassie for the thought—and I hadn’t moved from the position I’d first lain down in. I was standing on a wooden floor, worn in places but otherwise spotless. Steam rose from a basin of water on a table near the window. I hadn’t heard the maid come in to bring it.

“I don’t fault you. Obviously, I needed the sleep. Did you manage any?”

He shrugged. “A little.”

I took that to mean ‘no’.

“I slept a few hours in the castle before it blew up.”

“What did I miss?” I said.

“Nothing of note, sire. Lord Ieuan sent a rider to the constable at Dover Castle to tell him what happened here at Canterbury and that we fear French involvement, though we have no proof of it. It is too soon to have heard back.”

“I’m glad someone was thinking last night,” I said.

“The men of Dover are always ready for an attack from across the Channel, so that will be nothing new to them,” he said, “but they will warn the other ports to be on the alert.”

 Located on the east coast of Kent, less than twenty miles from Canterbury, Dover town and castle was one of the longest-established communities in England, dating to Anglo-Saxon times. Ports like Dover had protected England from foreign invasion since before there was an England. I also saw them as our first line of defense against diseases coming from the Continent and had worked extensively with the ports’ representatives to document all boats coming in and out of England. At times I’d felt almost like a supplicant. The men of the ports had a strong independent streak and were not to be dictated to, even by the king. Perhaps especially not by the king.

But although medieval people struggled with the concept of invisible pathogens, once the portsmen understood that my aim wasn’t to tax them to death, they’d risen to the challenge. Most of the new policies and procedures that regulated shipping had been proposed by them. The Black Death might still be sixty years away, but it wasn’t the only incipient pandemic out there, and the only way it was getting to England was by sea.

Thus I was glad Ieuan had the foresight to send word to the constable at Dover, one Stephen de Pencester. He operated under the oversight of Edmund Mortimer, whom I’d named Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, one of the most powerful positions in England. Mortimer represented these port towns in my cabinet. Although he’d had little connection to eastern England up until now, I’d essentially bribed him with this responsibility to keep his eyes off opportunities for expansion of his personal estates into Ireland. It was one of the things about being King of England I hated most—doing something I wouldn’t normally have approved of in order to accomplish what I saw as a greater good.

“What about Lee?” I said.

“No, my lord. No sign.”

I nodded, having expected nothing better. In retrospect, Lee seemed too much of a professional to have stuck around to watch the destruction of Canterbury Castle. He wasn’t a criminal or a serial arsonist, at least as far as I knew. He was a terrorist, with specific goals and aims. Getting caught watching the results of his handiwork would have been sloppy of him.

Though he’d met with Frenchmen, I wasn’t sure what kind of connection there could be between Lee and King Philip, or Lee and Acquasparta, but I could easily see a link between Acquasparta and Philip, since it was Acquasparta himself who had informed me of the pope’s support of Philip’s claim to Aquitaine. The pope or Acquasparta wouldn’t even have needed to speak to Philip directly, and all three could be working through underlings. Plausible deniability wasn’t a modern invention. Any one of them might want to be able to stand before me, or another questioner, without having to lie outright.

Cassie appeared in the doorway, tipping her head to William to indicate that he was dismissed. She had a fresh shirt and tunic bundled in her arms, and she handed them to me. I splashed water on my face from the basin of warm water, and as I dried my skin, I eyed her warily. She wanted to talk. I wasn’t sure I was going to be happy with what she wanted to talk about.

“Does Callum know you’re here?” I said.

She laughed. “Are you afraid of what I’m going to say?” We were speaking American English, which allowed her to leave off ‘my lord’ or ‘sire’.

“Where is he?” I said.

“He went off with Darren and Peter, ‘pursuing a lead’.” She shook her head. “I had my eyes closed at the time so I didn’t ask for more.”

“I need to talk to him.”

She ignored that. “I don’t agree that you should be a part of the team that goes after Lee. He isn’t worth your direct attention.”

“How can you say that? Lee tried to kill me.” I stripped off my shirt, dropped it beside the basin, and pulled the new one over my head, tucking it into my breeches and then tying the strings that kept the neck closed. Next I put on the dark green tunic, which was slightly shorter than those I normally wore, falling to just above my knees. It fit me across the shoulders, and I suspected that Cassie had quested among my men for a spare that would fit. She helped me buckle my sword belt around my waist to keep everything in place.

Cassie shook out my cloak, now clean and dry, and swung it around my shoulders. “Exactly. It’s personal with you. I don’t think it is with him.”

“I don’t think you’re right in that,” I said. “Looking back, he played me perfectly. He wasn’t a sycophant—he knew I wouldn’t respond well to flattery—he was acerbic and witty, with just the right amount of irreverence to draw me in.”