Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) (3 page)

“Before we get too far ahead of ourselves with this, are we sure that the murders are his doing?” I said, and then at the incredulous looks on my friends’ faces, grimaced. “Yeah, you’re right. I’d be stupid to think otherwise.”

“We must be very careful,” Cassie said. “Armed and dangerous doesn’t quite cover it.”

“We already know about his activities in Wales,” Callum said. “If his anger is directed at David, and if it’s about Ireland, that’s where we start our inquiries.”

“David, he could be gunning for you,” Cassie said.

“He hasn’t tried to murder me yet. He’s had opportunities before. You know he has.” I chewed on my lower lip as I thought. “I’m more worried about my father.”

“You sent a pigeon to Cardiff to warn him that Lee is missing,” Callum said. “You’ve done what you can. Your father will be prepared in case Lee returns to Wales to renew his mischief there. But I think he won’t. He’s up to something else.”

“If that’s true, why murder Mike and Noah? Why now?” Cassie said. “What are we missing?”

“A lot,” I said. “Not even Bevyn saw this coming.”

“Lee could have other plans for you,” Cassie said. “It’s only you, your sister, and your mother who can return him to Avalon. Maybe Lee wants you alive so you can take him back when he’s ready.”

“After he’s wreaked havoc here, you mean,” Callum said dryly.

“It’s odd,” I said. “He never once talked in my presence about returning to Avalon.”

“Mike did,” Cassie said. “He talked about it all the time. It was annoying.”

“But not Lee,” I said. “What if he was glad to find himself here because this is where the conquest of Ireland started? What if he thinks he can change things now so the future never happens?”

Cassie frowned. “He does realize this is a different universe, right? We think of ourselves as time travelers, but we’re really not.”

“He knows,” Callum said.

I ran a hand through my hair, my eyes going automatically to the bloodstained ground where the bodies had lain. I forced myself to turn away. “As important as Lee may be, he must take a back seat to my current and very pressing dispute with the Church. I was due at the Archbishop’s palace an hour ago.”

“I would agree that the dispute with the Church is more important—unless Lee’s sudden departure and your disagreement with the pope have something to do with one another,” Callum said.

“I can’t see how that could be,” I said.

Callum made a rueful face, and I returned my eyes to the ground, silently nodding in acknowledgement that it usually paid to keep an open mind when it came to affairs of state. I looked up again in time to see the identical apprehensive look cross both Cassie’s and Callum’s faces, which would have been comical if the situation hadn’t been so serious.

With the bodies loaded into its bed, the cart headed down the alley towards the cross street. Mike and Noah would lie in a room off the barracks awaiting a more thorough examination by Rachel. It wasn’t a task I envied her. She’d already mounted her horse in preparation for returning to the castle, and Cassie left us to join her. Beyond them, the crowd had moved aside to let the cart pass by, and then Justin replaced the barricade.

“Who found the bodies in the first place?” I asked Callum. Now that everyone else had dispersed to their various duties, he, Carew, and Bevyn were my only remaining companions.

“Jeffries,” Bevyn said, butchering Darren’s name into something barely recognizable. Bevyn’s English was functional, but he hadn’t ever gotten a handle on English names, which he considered bizarre and unnatural. “He and Cobb together.”

Darren Jeffries and Peter Cobb had also been on that bus. While Darren had worked at MI-5 with Callum and stuck close to my mom and sister, even knowing they were time travelers, Peter had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fortunately for Peter, he fit right in. He hadn’t worked for the intelligence services, but he’d served in the military in Afghanistan, even doing a stint in the military police. Both men were now part of Callum’s personal retinue.

“Keep them at it.” I put my hand on Callum’s shoulder. “Whatever you’re doing, however this hunt progresses, they are from Avalon and need to be involved. My family brought Lee here. I included him in my court. He is
my
responsibility.”

“I don’t agree, but I hear what you’re saying,” Callum said. None of the others even blinked any more at my use of the word
Avalon
as a way to talk about the modern world. We all used it now, time travelers and medieval people alike. With the arrival of the bus, a portion of the truth had literally fallen front and center into everyone’s laps, and there was no more denial: we were from a different world. Fortunately, accusations of witchcraft hadn’t yet been leveled at any of us.

For all that it had always been a fear of ours, that fear arose more from media representations of the Middle Ages than actual fact. While the burning of heretics was common practice in this time, the witch trials that had spread throughout Europe were still over a hundred years in the future. The Spanish Inquisition, which was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, was another hundred more.

“I should have acted against Lee sooner,” Callum said.

“You did more than I,” I said.

What I didn’t say, because Callum already knew it, was that the best thing about the arrival of the bus last year was that it had brought forty potential friends from the modern world to medieval Wales to share this life with us. The simple fact that we were all stuck here together gave us a feeling of camaraderie. It was natural—and maybe even necessary, given how hard this life could be—to assume the best until someone proved him or herself untrustworthy. I had viewed my three malcontents as an irritation, not a threat, and now my fingers were well and truly burned.

I was reminded again why monarchies were a bad idea. Too much depended upon the whims of a single man—in this case, me—who sometimes didn’t listen as closely to his advisers as he should or listened to the wrong people.

Nicholas de Carew, who’d so far said nothing and wore a noncommittal expression on his face, made a dismissive motion with one hand. “It’s everyone’s fault. We’ve long known about Mike’s and Noah’s discontent. Lee held himself apart at Caerphilly, but we should have been keeping a closer eye on all of them before this.”

Half-Welsh and half-English, Carew maintained a double life in this new world order I’d created. Upon the execution of William de Valence, my father had installed Carew as the Lord of Pembroke, which had been Valence’s title under King Edward. In England, Carew was the Earl of Winchester, with most of his lands in the south and west of the country. Not quite forty years old, he cut a fine figure—tall and broad shouldered—and always wore the latest clothing styles. Today he wore a blue tunic and tight brown breeches tucked into high black boots. To his regret, however, his blond hair was both graying and balding.

Some of my barons had accused me of favoring my Welsh advisers over my English ones, but for all their complaints, only Ieuan and Bevyn were truly Welsh, and they’d earned their place beside me. I relied on their wisdom every day, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have had a kingdom to govern at all without their help.

During the two years that Callum had been stuck in the modern world, I’d missed him more than I could say. Not only was he well-educated, smart, and capable, but I valued his ability to see situations clearly. Although he’d taken up the mantle of the Earl of Shrewsbury upon his return to the Middle Ages, he spent most of his time in my court.

As with Carew, I tried not to feel guilty about making him neglect his lands and people—they were by definition my lands and people too—but Callum had a capable steward in our mutual friend, Samuel. And I
needed
Callum, especially today—and that was before I’d learned about what Lee had been up to during the ten months he’d lived in the Middle Ages.

I looked away, sifting through the interactions I’d had with Lee for anything I might have told him that he could use against me. I hadn’t involved Lee in any confidential plans, but by the simple fact of living at my court, Lee knew more about me and my rule than I would want an enemy to know. He’d been part of my entourage for months, and it seemed he’d been working against me the whole time, just as he’d been working against my father while in Wales. I could only hope that by removing him from my father’s court, I’d short-circuited whatever insurrection he’d been planning there. It may be that we’d inadvertently been just in time.

Unfortunately, even with the Irish fist on the wall, we didn’t know what he intended here in England. Any time over the last three months, he and I could have talked about something that was of lesser importance to me, which I’d since forgotten, but was vital to him.

I closed my eyes, sickened through and through and fighting to put aside my personal resentment so I could deal with what was before me. Controlling my expression was something I’d been practicing. I didn’t need to hide my feelings from these close companions. They would have known I felt betrayed even if I didn’t say anything.

I was already facing the greatest challenge of my reign so far in this confrontation with the papal legate, over what the pope saw as an excess of religious freedom in England. When I saw the legate, I needed to make sure that the only emotions that showed on my face were ones I wanted him to see.

Then, as if the weather knew what a crappy day this had already been, the clouds let loose their rain. We all took a step back into the relative shelter of the alley wall. Within a minute, the bloody image across from me began to run, and I studied it morosely. Though the dark clouds mirrored my low mood, that mood hadn’t, in fact, begun this morning, but at the moment the Archbishop of Canterbury had asked me to travel to his seat.

He’d done so because the papal legate, Cardinal Acquasparta, had fallen ill on the journey across the English Channel. Once he’d reached land, it had become clear that he wasn’t suffering from the usual seasickness. He’d managed to make it to Canterbury, but so far had been too ill to complete the journey to London, to the point of being bedridden and near death.

I would have been happy to wait to meet him until he recovered. In fact, I’d been avoiding for months (if not years) what I was sure would be a disagreeable conversation. But a papal legate, and the pope’s concerns about my rule of England, could be put off for only so long.

In addition to not wanting to talk about religious matters with Acquasparta, I was worried about the precedent it set. Delegations presented themselves to the King of England, not the other way around. I wasn’t normally one to stand on ceremony, but I was very aware of my precarious position. I didn’t want to appear as a supplicant, especially not to this pope, especially not when everybody (me included) knew my stance on the freedom of religion was so at odds with his.

On the positive side, the papal legate hadn’t rejected my offer to have Aaron, my physician and friend, examine him to see if he could put him on the road to recovery. Aaron was Jewish, one of many members of his religion whom I’d welcomed into England, and a good doctor besides. To send him away because of his religion would have been cutting off the legate’s nose to spite his face. This bit of practical acceptance gave me hope that our meeting wouldn’t be as contentious as I’d initially feared.

The time had come, however, to find out.

Chapter Four

L
eaving the investigation of Lee to the experts, namely Darren, Peter, and Bevyn, I took Callum and Carew to ride the short distance with me to the Archbishop’s palace. We were accompanied by a portion of my usual entourage, led by Justin, deeming it unnecessary to descend on the Archbishop’s palace with more than thirty men.

Those of us who would enter the Archbishop’s precincts weren’t armed either, and it was strange not to feel the familiar weight of my sword at my side. But John Peckham was a man of God, genuinely loathing war, and he had asked that we leave our weapons behind when we entered his domain. Though he was very frail now, the Archbishop of Canterbury was still the most powerful churchman in England, and I’d bowed to his request.

With Lee on the loose, I hoped I wouldn’t regret my decision. Still, it was only a half-mile to the palace from the castle, and the route was as secure as Justin could make it. My hand-picked company of Welsh archers watched from the tops of buildings and the city walls. I was surrounded by those men of my own guard who could be spared from the task of hunting Lee, while the city’s regular garrison patrolled the streets. All in all, I thought both the attention to detail and security were impressive and had said as much to Justin.

The rain had continued to fall as rain in England tended to do, and my horse picked his way through the muddy street. I kept to the exact middle, careful to avoid the wheel tracks where water had pooled. The roads weren’t cobbled, so the dirt had turned to mud, mixing with the muck created by ten thousand people living too closely together without modern sanitation. Up ahead, in fact, was a garbage collector, loading his cart with what looked like soiled straw from a barn.

I gave the cart a wide birth and held my breath as I passed it. He was doing an important—if not crucial—job, though not one I would ever have wanted. Worse would have been a night soil collector with his cart;
night soil
being the medieval term for human waste.

Many people lined the edges of the street and bowed to me, undeterred by the weather. Above me on both sides, windows opened, and spectators shouted, ‘The king! The king!’ as I passed. I lifted one hand to them briefly before using it to tuck my cloak and hood more tightly around myself. This wasn’t so much because I was cold, but because I wasn’t in the mood to smile right now and didn’t want my people to know it.

Thomas Becket had been murdered in Canterbury, and it was because of that murder that Canterbury had become a place of pilgrimage as well as a thriving merchant town. It was near enough to the English Channel to be a waypoint for commerce between London and Europe, as well as a market fair for the whole region around it in eastern Kent. At one time, before the Norman conquest of England, Canterbury may have been bigger than London.