Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) (9 page)

Then Carew entered the room, followed by Bevyn and Ieuan.

“Does the Order of the Pendragon know anything about any of this?” I said without explaining which ‘this’ I was referring to. Whether the murders or the papal legate’s demands, I didn’t care. They were all high-ranking members. They all should know.

My companions exchanged rueful looks, but it was Bevyn who committed himself to answer. “No, sire.”

Though most members of the Order were fighting men, they weren’t meant to be warrior monks like the Templars. For all that there was no doubt the members thought they were carrying out God’s will, they were much more practical than that. Their sole mission was to protect me at all costs.

They did that not by guarding me, which they left to lesser men, but by playing politics and espionage. If Gilbert de Clare or Edmund Mortimer had been at Canterbury, they would have been in on this too. Intrigue was like bread and butter to them, which was a good thing because it didn’t come naturally to me.

It did come more easily, however, to Lili and Cassie. Callum’s influence had made both women members in the Order, and since then, the formerly all-male membership had grown to include several more women, the men having finally realized that women could make excellent spies. Other than those members who had direct contact with me, I didn’t know the names of most of them, nor the Order’s exact numbers.

When she’d first joined the Order, I’d attempted to get Lili to tell me something more about it or what they talked about at their meetings. She’d taken my face in her hands, kissed me, and refused to answer any of my questions except to say that she’d sworn an oath to keep what happened with the Order within the Order. She would never do anything that violated either my trust in her or her new responsibilities.

There’d been a wicked gleam in her eye too, which worried me a little. But my wife had as much honor as any knight I knew. I’d given up.

According to Bevyn, my ignorance in these matters was for my protection and theirs, though I secretly thought it had more to do with the fact that Bevyn liked keeping secrets, even from his king. I did know that the current concern was to keep a lid on growth, so as not to inadvertently invite a traitor into our midst. Which it seems I had done when I decided to take my trio of troublemakers off my mother’s hands.

The door behind me opened, and Bronwen, Ieuan’s wife, entered the room. This was becoming a party. Bronwen was a time traveler too, having chosen to come to the Middle Ages with Ieuan and me after we ended up in modern Pennsylvania seven years ago.

Lili’s blue eyes flashed at the sight of her best friend, her anxiety briefly giving way to amusement, though I couldn’t think what could be amusing her right now. Bronwen carried a tray with a half-dozen wooden cups and a pitcher wrapped in a cloth, which Lili rose to take from her.

“Sorry I’m late,” Bronwen said. “I heard what happened and thought this might help some of you think better.” She and Lili set down their burdens on the long table where I conducted cabinet meetings and signed papers, just as the last of my time traveling companions at Canterbury arrived: Peter, Darren, Cassie, and Rachel.

Rachel was Britain’s chief medical officer, as I liked to call her, though only the time travelers caught the Star Trek reference. That first day in the medieval world, Rachel had accepted Anna’s offer to head up her nascent medical school and to be the organizer of everything that had to do with medicine in Britain. Rachel had spent six months setting up a college of medicine in Llangollen, training others to train others. Two weeks ago, I’d asked her to join my entourage. Medieval kings spent most of their time circumambulating their kingdoms, and I wanted her to see what was happening in the entire country.

Anna had given her a big job. Too big a job for one person, really. But if I could go from being a fourteen-year-old American kid to being the King of England, I didn’t think it was too much to ask that other people take steps towards fulfilling their potential too.

Huw, who’d entered the room last, remained standing a few paces away, half-turned so he could see both me and the door. At approximately twenty, he had an earnest intentness that reminded me of myself when I was younger, though I had probably been even more innocent.

The young man had come a long way since that day when he and his father had walked across Gwynedd with me after I’d been abducted and almost killed. The traitor responsible had been among my closest guard and had been working with two others who hated me. It was a constant problem—needing to trust those close to me in order to stay sane but never knowing if any man was really my friend. I’d been wrong before, and clearly I’d been wrong again.

Chapter Nine

“
Y
ou heard what happened at the Archbishop’s palace?” I said to my friends, having moved from my chair beside the fire to the table. Everyone else had found a place to sit too.

“I told them,” Carew said. “Should I put out a query in regard to another meeting with Acquasparta and the Archbishops?”

“I told Romeyn I wanted to see him and Peckham here tomorrow,” I said, “but you’d probably better send a message to Acquasparta too. At the very least, we should inquire about his health. He didn’t look good when we left.”

“Nor did Peckham,” Callum said. “Aaron was seeing to him.”

“Could you have a look at both of them, Rachel?” I said.

“Of course,” Rachel said. “I have also looked in on the two guards Lee and the others disabled before leaving the castle. They’ll both live.”

I felt a slight easing in my shoulders. These were the two men Callum had tasked with keeping an eye on Lee, Mike, and Noah. After we’d realized their charges were missing, we’d searched the castle from top to bottom, ultimately finding the two guards tied up and unconscious in one of the neglected cellars underneath a corner tower. They had no memory of how Lee had gotten the drop on them. Nor did they know where he was now.

Meanwhile, Ieuan put out a hand to Bronwen. “You don’t have to be here.”

“And let you boys get yourselves into all kinds of trouble without Lili and me?” Bronwen said. “I don’t think so.”

Ieuan gestured to the drink they’d brought. “What’s this?”

Darren had pulled out a chair so Rachel could sit at the table, and now she leaned forward to smell what was in the pot. “Am I smelling coffee?”

“Sirrah, you jest!” Callum said, in a parody of medieval-speak, and sniffed too.

Bronwen grinned. “I do not jest.”

“How did you achieve this?” Callum said.

“I have friends in high places,” Bronwen said, with a glance at me.

“I thought coffee came from the New World?” Peter said.

“Ah, that’s what they want you to think, but it doesn’t.” Bronwen looked very pleased with herself. “It comes from Africa.”

I’d been a kid when I’d come to Wales, so I’d never developed a taste for coffee. But Bronwen’s particular love for it, heavily laden with cream and sugar, was well known. Crusaders had brought sugar back from the Holy Land a hundred years ago, and since London had become one of the foremost trading capitals of Europe, it was now possible to get it in quantity, especially if you were the King of England. Cream, of course, was easy.

I took a cup from Bronwen, allowing the aroma to wash over me. It smelled like morning. My mother had drunk coffee too, once upon a time.

“I didn’t know if you all liked coffee,” Bronwen said, “but Cassie assured me you did.”

“I might be British born and raised,” Rachel said, “but nobody makes it through medical school or residency on tea alone. This is sugar?” She picked up one of the cups filled with brown crystals.

“Sugar and cream, just like the doctor ordered,” Bronwen said, watching Rachel scoop both into her cup. “You are a girl after my own heart.”

“May I?” Rachel held up her cup to me.

I still hadn’t taken a drink of mine, and nobody—even close friends such as this—could drink before the king. I nodded.

She took a sip and then closed her eyes. “Heaven. Thank you, Bronwen, from the bottom of my heart.”

“It hasn’t been that long for you,” Bronwen said. “I haven’t had coffee since 1285.”

That was seven years ago. It had been only ten months since the bus had taken Rachel and forty other people through the barrier that separated this world from Avalon. If I still felt like an alien from another planet half the time, it wasn’t any wonder that so many passengers were having a hard time of it. Rachel had grown up in Wales and spoke Welsh, but that was about as far as she or any of the others got towards familiarity with the medieval world.

Bevyn cleared his throat. He admired Bronwen, so he’d briefly shown amusement at the interruption, but now he returned to his usual intensity. “Men are continuing to hunt for Lee, but the longer we go without finding him, the less likely we’ll be able to bring him back.”

Lili put a hand on my shoulder. “Lee is stranded in the Middle Ages with few friends and almost no possessions. He has murdered his companions and could cause more trouble—he’s certainly giving Dafydd a headache—but other than sowing discontent and harming those guards, I honestly can’t see how Lee could be that much of a threat to Dafydd’s rule.”

“We know what he planned in Wales,” Callum said. “I won’t underestimate him.”

Bronwen looked from Callum to me. “Good riddance, I say—” She stopped, her expression faltering at the look on my face that I didn’t master as quickly as I should have. Clearly she hadn’t liked Lee either. She gave a slight cough. “Sorry.”

“We have been many steps behind them from the start,” I said, “because once Lee left Avalon on the bus, we have had no access to information about him other than what he told us. In fact, it seems now that, back in Caerphilly, Lee may have deliberately provoked and encouraged Noah and Mike in their rudeness and misbehavior in order to keep our attention on them, leaving him free to plot and plan with impunity.”

“The best-case scenario is that he fled too soon, before whatever he was plotting was complete. While he could terrorize a town,” Callum said, “that pales in comparison to what he could do if he has made contact with David’s enemies, as he did in Wales with King Llywelyn’s foes.”

I studied my friend. This wasn’t an exclusive family gathering, and yet he had used my given name. He must have been really upset to have done so. It was never my intent to turn friends into inferiors, but we all knew the reality of everyone else’s relative position to mine. Fortunately, we were among friends and his use of my name went unnoticed—or at least unremarked.

“I can tell you that Lee isn’t from London originally,” Rachel said, “even though that’s what he told everyone. I can hear traces of an accent in his voice, but I can’t place it. I’m not even sure he’s from England.”

“I can hear it too,” Darren said. “It bothered me at first, but he’d hardly be the first man to teach himself a new accent as a way to improve his lot in life.”

And Darren should know. The son of an African father and a white mother, Darren had started out at nineteen as a bobby on the streets of London. He’d gone to university at night and risen through the ranks—not without some resentment on the part of those who weren’t rising as fast, with accusations of reverse racism. Darren had ignored the naysayers by focusing rigidly on his goal to get off the street and make detective, which he’d done at the relatively young age of twenty-eight. A year later, he’d applied to MI-5 and been accepted. Callum had snapped him up for Cardiff as soon as Darren’s file had crossed his desk.

“In this case, however, it seems Lee might have done it to hide his identity,” I said.

“The fact is we know very little about any of the bus passengers, not having access to records that would tell us more. I apologize for not bringing all of you into the loop sooner.” Callum gestured to Huw, who up until now had been standing off to one side, completely silent. He took his duties to the Order so seriously it was almost a fault. I, for one, would like to see him unbend enough to joke with his fellows. And the last time I’d asked if he had a girl somewhere, he said he hadn’t time for such frivolity. “Tell them.”

“Once King David made the decision to take the three men out of Caerphilly and include them in his court, the Order decided to find out more about what they’d been doing since they arrived.” Huw held himself straight and spoke formally. “Such was my task.”

“I should have been the one to ask,” I said.

“You thought all they’d been doing was drinking,” Lili said.

I sighed. “That’s all I wanted them to be doing, and I didn’t inquire further because I didn’t want to deal with them. You may laugh at me, especially after what we’ve all been through together, but just the thought of forty new needy people was overwhelming to me.”

“Nobody’s laughing,” Bronwen said flatly.

“It was never your job to deal with them. It was Callum’s and mine,” Cassie said. “It’s our fault more than anyone else’s.”

“I didn’t see it either,” Bronwen said, “and I’ve spent more time at Caerphilly this year than any of you.”

I felt my irritation rising. This was the same conversation I’d had this morning with Callum and Carew. “Will one of you let me admit I was wrong, just this once?”

“We’ll let you admit it when it’s your fault,” Bronwen said. “As always, you take too much on yourself.” She could have concluded with
so there
, but I was glad she didn’t. Instead, she gave me a flinty smile, and I subsided. Bronwen never had trouble speaking her mind, and seven years in the Middle Ages had only made her see more clearly what was important. Her graduate program’s loss was my gain.

“Up until their arrival at the king’s court, Mike and Noah may have been only what they appeared to be,” Huw said as if the interruption hadn’t happened. “And that was what led us astray. They drank, they whored around, and they had no occupation other than their own pleasure. Once they arrived in London, however, it appears that Lee took them into his confidence.”

I held up my hand to interrupt. “You all may have noted the moderation in Mike’s and Noah’s behavior since their transfer from Caerphilly to my court.”