Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) (2 page)

Footfalls came from behind me, and Bevyn’s gruff voice said, “Sire, we have a cart available. Can we move the bodies?”

I turned to look at my old captain, not actually knowing the answer, but Callum nodded. While Rachel and Peter moved off with Bevyn to supervise the work, Callum and I shifted to one side to allow room for the cart to maneuver in the narrow alley.

Cassie, another fellow time-traveler and Callum’s wife, had been standing a few feet away, studying the writing, and now she joined us too. “Why would Lee write that on the wall?”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “I’m standing here, aren’t I? It’s a message from Lee to me.”

Chapter Two

T
he day had started out so well, too. It had begun like most of my days, with me rising at dawn, having woken beside my beautiful wife. Pregnant again, Lili was past the worst of the nausea and radiated health. Although Lili’s overall serenity was hard to undermine, she and I shared a mutual panic that in a few short months we were going to have to meet the emotional needs of
two
children. Without disturbing her, I’d slipped out of bed to find my three-year-old son wide awake in the adjacent room. We’d breakfasted together, Arthur talking non-stop the whole time.

He’d then played at my feet for the next hour as I’d signed documents, made plans, and overseen the many divisions within my government. It was laborious work, often tedious and frustrating, but it was also necessary for the running of the country. My routine was the same whether I was staying in Westminster Palace, York, or here, at Canterbury, sixty miles east of London, and would have been even if I hadn’t been trying to drag England towards a future it probably wasn’t ready for.

Other daily appointments included hearing grievances in the great hall and conferring with a larger group of men—essentially my cabinet, consisting of any officers of state and representatives from Parliament who’d come to my court that day. Politics had become my life. No wonder King Edward, my predecessor, had spent so much time making war. It was easier than keeping the peace.

Then had come the bad news: Bevyn had stormed through the door of the expansive room that I was using as my office, my brother-in-law, Ieuan, on his heels, and announced that not only had Lee, Mike, and Noah fled the castle together with their belongings, but that Lee, in particular, had spent the last ten months working against me and my father, the King of Wales.

We hadn’t known then that Mike and Noah were already lying dead in the alley, so we hadn’t yet made the Irish connection, but what Bevyn had turned up was daunting enough: Lee had taken money my father had given him as an allowance and used it to charm those he could befriend and bribe those he couldn’t into becoming his allies, in preparation for a possible rebellion against my father. The list of people involved ranged from high lords within the Kingdom of Wales to men-at-arms to lowly serving maids.

“I thought Lee had become something of a friend,” I said, more than a little nonplussed to learn I’d harbored a snake in my court.

Bevyn’s face had been devoid of all expression. “I know.”

Years of acquaintance with Bevyn had taught me to listen when he spoke, even if I didn’t like the words he said. He and I had gone through a rough patch in the aftermath of my crowning as King of England, but my fundamental trust in his loyalty—and my need for his wisdom—had pushed me to move past my occasional concerns about his methods.

More often than not, when Bevyn and I were together, we fell easily into old patterns of master and apprentice. I didn’t begrudge Bevyn his role. He’d been my first teacher in Wales. He’d give his life for me, as would Carew, Callum, and Ieuan. And I’d give mine for them. Sometimes, when I hated being king a little too much, I felt like I already had.

“He must have been prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.” Ieuan’s blue eyes had flashed with annoyance, and his black hair had been mussed as if he’d run his hands through it several times. He was wearing it long these days, pulled back and tied at the base of his neck with a leather cord. Lili, his sister and my wife, thought he looked particularly dashing that way.

I wasn’t one to judge another man’s style, but I’d resolutely kept my own sandy brown hair cropped close to my head, the better to manage the wearing of a helmet. Or a crown. Lili complained that it was really that I was too lazy to be bothered with doing anything else with it.

Bevyn grimaced. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a contact in Wales or London who warned him I was coming. He could have been ready for the day when I learned the truth about what he’s been doing all these months and acted against him.” Bevyn was a legend among the Welsh soldiers and spoken of almost like the bogey-man among the English ones. He’d been my first captain and was now castellan of Llanfaes Castle on Anglesey. He was also one of the leaders—if not
the
leader—of the very secretive Order of the Pendragon, whose purpose was to protect me and my interests.

I kept my gaze steady on Bevyn’s face and resisted the urge to lift my eyes to the painted and carved ceiling above my head, struggling against my frustration and anger, and trying not to direct either at Bevyn, who was only the bearer of bad news.

“If I may.” Callum looked at me warily, as if he knew what could have been coming from my lips and wasn’t convinced it wouldn’t at any second, “that could be the good news. We could have forced them to run before they were ready.”

“I hope you’re right about that, but you may need to reexamine your use of the word
good
,” I said.

Bevyn pounded a gloved fist into the palm of his other hand. “I failed you, sire.”

“No, Bevyn,” I said. “It is I who should have been smarter.”

Up until May, Lee had been lumped in among the malcontents who’d vexed my mother so severely she’d come to me for an intervention. Mike, in particular, had been nothing but trouble from the first moment he’d arrived in the medieval world. For most of the past year, the three men had lived at Caerphilly Castle in Wales with a number of other bus passengers who’d banded together in their disgruntlement.

Not that I could really blame them. Through no fault of their own, they’d found themselves in the Middle Ages, simply because they’d happened to be on the same bus as my mother and sister at a moment when Mom’s and Anna’s lives were in danger. What happened to them wasn’t their fault.

What was their fault was how they responded to the adversity. Being on that bus may have ensured their survival, since the bombing of Cardiff’s city hall and courthouse must have killed quite a few people inside the buildings and on the road, but these disgruntled few didn’t necessarily see it that way. Nor were they in any way thankful for the help they’d received once here. They resented their need to forge new lives and refused to even try to make the best of it.

During the time these discontented passengers had spent under my mother’s watchful eye, Lee, for the most part, had been an enigma to her. With every day that passed, however, Mike had grown more combative. He was a large man, taller than I, and he outweighed me by forty pounds, which made him dangerous when he was drunk. In turn, Noah, Mike’s partner in crime, had spent those same six months at Mike’s right hand, drinking him under the table despite being one-third smaller. Noah had a narrow face and pointed chin—and a wolfish way of looking at a man like he was assessing whether or not to eat him for dinner—or like a rat inspecting a particularly dubious piece of cheese.

Their drinking and carousing had reached a point where my mother demanded that I either throw them into a dungeon, as my father wanted, or try to make something of them. Last May, I’d chosen the latter, in hopes that seeing more of this new world they lived in might assuage their discontent. In truth, I felt guilty about their continued presence in the Middle Ages, knowing that I could take them back to the modern world if I was willing to risk all of our lives to make that transition one more time.

But it was a risk I wasn’t willing to take. It might be the one time it didn’t work. And I certainly wasn’t willing to risk my mother or sister on that chance. What made my decision all the harder was that they all knew it—from the very beginning we’d been honest about who we were and what we were capable of—and it was an honesty we all had to live with, Mike, Noah, and Lee included.

Thus, also at my mother’s urging, I’d taken Lee, the only other single, male bus passenger staying at Caerphilly, into my court too. Within a day of the trio’s arrival in London, however, Mike’s and Noah’s behavior had reached an epic low. In a drunken stupor, the pair had climbed onto the wall-walk and peed off it onto the head of the captain of the garrison. They’d spent two nights in a cell simply to sober them up.

On the third day of their incarceration, with me showing no signs of letting them out, Lee had come to me to speak for both of them. Mike had only ever given me bravado and monosyllabic answers, and the less volatile Noah had risen to a certain degree of sullenness, still without much in the way of forthcomingness. But that day, Lee showed himself to be perfectly polite, sharply intelligent, and in possession of a keen sense of humor. He didn’t smile often, but when he did, it lit his pale face. He’d reminded me of Callum’s friend and confidant, Mark Jones—not in looks, since Lee was six feet tall and thinly muscular—but in attitude.

Lee had sworn to me that from that day forward Mike and Noah would live a reformed life, and if they didn’t, I could conscript them into my newly-established navy. So I’d given the pair one more chance and been rewarded because they
had
reformed. Or so it had appeared. I couldn’t help thinking now that Mike, Noah, and Lee, like the Three Stooges, had been running rings around me the whole time. Except these three weren’t funny.

Instead of rescuing Mike and Noah from my (and the garrison captain’s) wrath out of the goodness of his heart, Lee had made himself the ringleader of the three men, and their reformation had been only on the surface.

To my credit, I hadn’t entirely bought the idea that they were completely reformed. I’d brought all three with me on this journey to Canterbury out of a growing belief that something wasn’t quite right about them. There had been an innate brutality about Mike and a slyness in Noah that had worried me, and I’d been afraid to leave them alone in London under less watchful eyes. My intuition, unfortunately, hadn’t revealed to me any specifics, or that it was Lee I had to be most wary of, not the other two.

It looked as if my father’s suggestion to toss the trio into the Tower of London would have been the better choice. But even though I’d often wished that Mike and Noah hadn’t been on that bus, I would never in a million years have wanted them dead.

Chapter Three

“
W
hat message is that?” Cassie said. “Free Ireland?”

I shrugged. “That’s what it looks like to me.”

Ireland was an ongoing problem. Portions of it had been conquered by Norman barons over a hundred years ago, and the English king had ruled it ever since, taking the title of Lord of Ireland. I’d reluctantly inherited that authority four years ago when I’d become King of England and had been trying to negotiate a graceful way out of ruling it ever since.

“What sucks is that my sympathies are entirely with the Irish,” I said. “I just haven’t figured out how to leave.”

“It would be easier if you didn’t mind your barons rising up against you,” Cassie said.

“And even if I were willing to risk that—which quite frankly I am—I won’t be able to change anything if I’m not the king.”

“Catch-22,” Cassie said.

“To Lee, that might be a pathetic excuse for inaction,” I said. “After my crowning, I put off dealing with rights for women because discrimination seemed too culturally ingrained and difficult to change. It was easier not to address it. This is the same.”

“As always, you’re too hard on yourself.” Callum said. “You have so much on your plate already.”

“That may be, but when will I have less?” I said.

The answer, of course, was
never.

Cassie studied the wall, her brow furrowed. “I still don’t get it. How does that symbol on the wall, and that writing, which only Callum understands, free Ireland? Why kill Mike and Noah? What’s the point of any of this?”

“We won’t know until we find him, though it occurs to me that I may know something about Lee that could help us,” I said.

“That’s more than I can say,” Callum said.

“That reminds me—” I gestured to the wall, “—of something Lee said a while back. Several times since he came to London, Lee mentioned the Troubles in Ireland, the ones with a capital ‘T’. When he mentioned them, I made sympathetic noises, but I didn’t want to talk about Ireland with him since it’s a sore point, as you know. I do remember him mentioning some talks that were due to start around the time you left Avalon in the bus.” I glanced from Cassie to Callum. “Do you guys know anything about that?”

Callum frowned. “I do. Cardiff was to be neutral ground for a meeting of representatives from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and England, as well as the EU. The economic crisis had brought some problems to the forefront that needed to be resolved. The negotiations were to begin the week after we left.”

“Maybe that’s why Lee was in Cardiff that day,” I said.

“Are you wondering if he was there as a demonstrator?” Callum said.

“He could have been. It’s clear he doesn’t think much of English control of Ireland,” I said.

“There’s a big difference between demonstrating in front of city hall and murder,” And then Cassie gave a gasp as she realized what she’d said.

A wintry chill settled in my chest, and my breath caught in my throat too. “City Hall.”

Cassie looked from me to Callum. “He couldn’t have—” She broke off.

Callum put up both hands. “Can we put anything past him, given that he murdered Mike and Noah?”

“But if he had something to do with the bombing—” Cassie closed her eyes for a second. “I have never met an angrier man than Lee.”