Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (4 page)

Fortunately, Marty had lived long enough in
the Middle Ages to understand why Anna wasn’t moving. He didn’t tug
at her but instead barked at Mom, “Gather it up for her.”

Mom crouched at Anna’s feet, and Anna
shifted her foot from side to side so Mom could pull the hem out
from under Anna’s boot. Marty pressed his knife into Anna’s skin
the whole time, and she couldn’t even look down as Mom swept up her
train. Anna bent her left forearm enough so that she could hold the
train and the tail of her cloak in her hand.

David had used the delay to move a few feet
closer. “Marty—” His voice held a warning.

“
Not you! I don’t want
you!” Marty squeezed Anna tighter and the knife scraped her
skin.

David’s face paled. Anna knew he was dying
inside as much as Anna was, desperate to help, but helpless to do
so.

Ieuan and Papa, meanwhile, had moved closer
to the exterior door that Marty and Alan had come through and which
led down to the inner ward. They were sidling slowly, waiting for
their chance to move through it and summon help. Lili was bending
over the steward, aiding Bronwen’s attempt to stem the flow of
blood.

From inside the stairwell, Anna couldn’t see
anything else of the room. Nor could she see where Math was
standing, though by the quick glances that David kept sending to
his right, he was close by. From where she stood on the first step,
she could easily see through the doorways to the left and right,
down the long corridors on either side. Unfortunately, Marty could
see along them as well. If Math tried to leave the queen’s hall
through one of the side doors into a corridor, Marty would spot
him. Again, Anna prayed for a maid or a servant—anyone—to come down
one of the long hallways, but they were uncharacteristically
deserted.

Marty took another step back. Now neither of
them could see anything but the stone walls of the stairwell on
either side. Anna leaned into Marty, trying to rest her full weight
against him and drag her feet at the same time. She wanted to slow
him down, to give the others time to get help. The wall-walk ran
all the way around the top of the inner ward. If Math could reach
the southwestern tower before they did, he could stop Marty at the
top of the stairs.

But it seemed Marty had the same thought,
fearing it as much as Anna was praying for it. In response to her
stalling, he pressed harder with the knife. A trickle of blood ran
down Anna’s neck.

“
Okay! Okay!” David’s hands
were up again. “See, I have no weapon. Nobody’s going to do
anything you don’t want.”

“
Let’s go.” With Mom
following, Marty began to climb quickly, circling around and
around, moving up the stairwell so fast that Anna was practically
running backwards to keep up. She fixed her eyes on Mom’s, willing
her to have a plan, willing her to get them out of this. But Marty
kept his knife pressed to Anna’s throat, and as long as that was
the case, neither of them could act.

Anna lost sight of David almost immediately,
though she could hear his footfalls on the stairs below them. He
kept out of sight, presumably to put Marty at ease. Anna couldn’t
hear anything else but her heart pounding in her ears and her
breath rushing in and out. She wanted to hear orders in Welsh. She
wanted someone to save her—a thought which made her more mad than
scared. There was a time when she might have been able to save
herself.

Anna could feel Marty’s manic determination
in the way he held her and the knife. This wasn’t a drunken
man-at-arms who didn’t know what he was doing, which had been the
case with the last man who’d tried to hurt her. Marty had Anna
pinned to him and wasn’t about to let go. He wasn’t at all the soft
middle-aged village headman Callum and Cassie had described.

“
I’m sorry about your wife,
Marty.” Mom kept her eyes fixed on Anna’s. “But what you’re doing
now isn’t the answer.”

“
Isn’t it?” Marty said. “I
know you can take me home, since you’re the one that brought me
here in the first place. I heard all about how you went back to the
modern world when Llywelyn was sick. You jumped off the balcony at
Chepstow. Well, we’re just going to jump off the tower at Rhuddlan.
Same difference.”

He pronounced ‘Rhuddlan’
the English way—saying
Rudlan
instead of
Rithlan—

but neither Mom nor Anna corrected him.

“
Llywelyn and I jumped into
a river, Marty,” Mom said. “If it didn’t work, if we hadn’t
travelled back to the modern world, we’d have just gotten wet.
That’s not what’s going to happen here. What if it doesn’t
work?”

They had passed the next level and in only a
few more circuits approached the top of the tower. Marty spoke
around gritted teeth. “It’s going to work.”

They hit the top step and spilled out into
the circular tower. Marty swung Anna around so that at last she was
going forward. She had a brief image of Mom stabbing Marty in the
back with her belt knife. He wasn’t wearing armor, so a well-placed
knife could go right through his clothing. But Mom wasn’t a
warrior. She didn’t know how to kill with a blade. And even if she
did, she couldn’t risk stabbing Marty in the back on the chance
that his arm would jerk and he’d slice Anna’s throat.

Marty pushed Anna towards one of the
crenels. Now that they were outside, Anna could hear men shouting
in both the inner ward behind her and the outer ward directly
below. Three men pounded along the battlement, coming from the
northwestern tower.

Mom threw out a hand to them. “Stay
back!”

In response to the threat, Marty brought
Anna tight against him again and faced the soldiers. They slowed
and pulled up, their faces drawn and white. Anna assumed that
someone—Papa, Math or Ieuan—had told the soldiers what was
happening, but hearing about the danger was very different from
seeing it.

Or living it.

Anna was breathing too fast, and the world
began to darken around the edges again.

Having neutralized the guards for now, Marty
turned Anna so that his back was up against the battlement. With
the guards to his left and Mom on his right, each at a forty-five
degree angle to Anna, nobody could get to him without going through
her. Mom’s eyes were very wide, and her mouthed worked as if she
was trying to speak but was having a hard time figuring out what
she could say to end this nightmare.

“
It’s okay, Mom,” Anna
said, though it really wasn’t. The only part about this that was in
any way ‘okay’ was that when Marty had grabbed her a moment ago, he
had repositioned his left arm so it went across her chest rather
than holding her arms wrenched behind her back. It meant Anna could
move them. Which meant she might be able to fight him.

“
Meg, get up into that
gap.” Marty was talking about the crenel. The classic gap-toothed
appearance of a medieval battlement was composed of merlons—the
higher bits—and the crenels—the gaps between them. When Mom didn’t
move right away, Marty clenched Anna tighter. “Now!”

“
I’m doing it! I’m doing
it!” Mom went to the closest crenel and put a hand on one of the
merlons. She had to use the other hand to gather up her own skirt
and cloak, and then she boosted herself up into the gap. Although
Anna couldn’t see what Mom could see, she’d been up here before,
and she knew it was a
long
way down.

Anna wouldn’t have been nearly so scared if
Marty had taken them to the tower in the outer ward that overlooked
the Conwy River. David was having problems with the river
undercutting the bank and the curtain wall, and the water lapped
right at the base of the tower. Jumping from there would have been
much the same as when Mom and Papa had jumped from the balcony at
Chepstow Castle. The three of them could have ended up in the river
if the time travel part didn’t work—instead of flat as a pancake at
the base of this tower.

Out of the corners of each eye, Anna could
see the men who had gathered along the wall-walk leading from the
southwestern tower to the other two corners. Everyone was watching
Marty. Nobody dared to move, not even the two men who stood with
arrows nocked to their bows.

“
Just shoot!” Anna
said.

But because Marty was
hiding behind her and Anna was the sister of the King of England
and the daughter of the King of Wales, none of them would risk
shooting her to get to him. Getting out of this in one piece was
going to be up to her. She needed to
do
something. She just didn’t know
what that something should be, and she feared that whatever she
might try would come too late to save any of them.

Then Math came through the stairwell
doorway, his face white as a sheet. Anna wanted to say some word of
comfort, but there was nothing to say that would make the fact that
his wife was pressed to a stranger’s chest with his knife to her
throat any better. And that his mother-in-law stood in one of the
crenels behind them. Anna didn’t know how Marty had known about it,
but the crenels in the southwestern tower were a foot lower,
hitting slightly below her waist, than the crenels in all the other
towers, where they rose to chest height.

“
I don’t mean to hurt you.”
Marty’s words came low in Anna’s ear.

“
Don’t you?”

Maybe it was the venom in Anna’s voice,
which surprised even her; maybe he’d expected to hear fear. Either
way, it didn’t matter. His knife dropped slightly, and Anna
reacted, getting her arm between his arm and her neck, in order to
shove the knife away, and slamming the heel of her right boot into
his knee. Then Anna held onto his arm with all her strength and
used his weight as leverage for her own.

“
Damn you!” Instead of
swinging forward away from the wall as Anna had intended, however,
Marty used their combined weight to swing them around and pin Anna
between him and the battlement. In doing so, Anna’s forehead banged
into Mom’s legs. Instinctively, Anna’s arms came up, releasing
their hold on Marty’s arm in favor of grabbing onto Mom.

Mom shrieked. “Anna!”

“
I’ve got you!” Anna’s arms
clenched around Mom’s knees.

But though Mom’s hands scrabbled at the
stones of the merlons on either side of her, the sudden weight of
Anna falling against her and Marty pressing forward onto her lower
half was too much. Her fingers couldn’t maintain their grip. If
this had been a movie, more often than not, Mom would have been
saved from falling at the last second by heroics from Anna or
David.

But Anna wasn’t strong enough to stop Mom’s
fall, and since falling was what Marty wanted, he threw his weight
forward against Anna’s back. They toppled together through the
crenel. As she fell, Anna made one last attempt to get free,
twisting away from Marty. He screamed and released his tight hold
around her waist.

But it was too late.

Anna squeezed her eyes
shut. Black abyss or horrifying
thud
, she didn’t want to know which it
would be until she hit.

Chapter Three

November 1291

David

“M
other of God!�� Math was the first to reach the crenel, his
hand clutching at empty air.

David was beside Math an instant later, and
both men lunged over the parapet, their eyes staring and their
hearts in their mouths. It was fifty feet to the ground, and David
was sure he would see three bodies sprawled below the tower. But he
didn’t. Only one body lay in the grass of the outer ward:
Marty’s.

“
They’re gone.” Math’s
voice was full of shock.

David had been sure as he’d come out of the
stairwell, his eyes fixed on Anna and Mom, that there were a
million things he should have done to stop Marty. But at the time,
he couldn’t think of anything other than what he did, which was to
let Marty get this far and then try to do an end run around him.
David put a hand on Math’s shoulder, trying to comfort him, though
what comfort he could give at a time like this couldn’t be
much.

Dad appeared on David’s right and looked
over the wall too. “Dafydd—” He gripped David’s shoulder hard, and
David checked his father’s face. In the fading light, David
couldn’t tell if his face was paler than usual, only that he’d gone
white around the lips. David had a sudden vision of himself
throwing his father over his shoulder and jumping too.

“
Don’t have a heart attack
on me, Dad,” he said.

“
Your mother—”

“
She’ll be all right,”
David said. “They both will.”

Math finally blinked and straightened,
resting his hands on the stones of the crenel. “Where do you think
they’ve gone? To Pennsylvania again? Or Cardiff?”

David shook his head. He hadn’t a clue and
didn’t want to guess.

While David, Dad, and Math had chased after
Marty, Ieuan had taken the opposite tack, maybe hoping to break
their fall if they didn’t time travel. He had arrived at the base
of the tower within a few seconds of Math and David’s arrival at
the top. He looked down at Marty’s body and then squinted
upwards.

David leaned out to talk to him. “I assume
he’s dead?”

“
Indeed.” Ieuan toed the
body. Marty’s neck was set at a cruel angle, and two arrows stuck
out of his back, arrows which had been released by the bowmen when
Marty had turned his back on them. It was an ugly sight, even from
here.

A man-at-arms ran to Ieuan with a torch. The
way the soldier kept looking from the top of the tower to Marty had
David’s mind moving quickly to damage control. Ieuan was clearly
thinking about it too because he spun on his heel and surveyed the
crowd that had gathered in the aftermath of the fall. Though the
sun had just set, it was only a little after four in the afternoon.
So, while the craft stalls and smithy were closing up for the day,
it wasn’t as if everyone had gone to bed.