Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (6 page)

Anna was being really calm, and Meg didn’t
know if it was because coming to rest in a modern forest was less
traumatic in comparison to being knifed by Marty, or if Anna really
was this good in a crisis. Meg’s initial panic was still subsiding,
so she stalled for time before answering her daughter, chewing on
her lower lip as she took in their surroundings more fully. They
had fallen into a forest, in the snow, in the same murky
heading-towards-nightfall that they’d left in Wales.

“
Listen!” Anna held up a
hand.

Meg didn’t hear anything at first, and then
her heart skipped a beat as a distant engine roared overhead.

“
I don’t believe it,” Anna
said.

“
Given that the alternative
would be lying at the base of the tower at Rhuddlan, this is much
better,” Meg said. “Did you think it wouldn’t work?”

Anna shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s
been so long since I did this. You and David have been back and
forth a bunch of times, but I’ve only traveled with David in Aunt
Elisa’s minivan or with you. It has occurred to me more than once
that I might not have what it takes to travel like you guys do. It
would be logical if it were just you and David who have the
genes—or whatever—for it.”

“
You almost came here when
you went into labor with Cadell,” Meg said.

Anna wrinkled her nose. “True. I’d forgotten
about that.” She shrugged. “I’m still not sure that really
happened.”

Meg hadn’t seen it, but
David had been sure. Meg didn’t want to argue about it, since it
didn’t matter at the moment. She and Anna had
traveled
, whether because of Anna,
Meg, or both.

Meg wiped her hands on the edge of her
cloak. “I’m really cold. We should start walking.”

“
To where?” Anna
said.

“
Downhill,” Meg said.
“Isn’t that what Math taught David? Follow the contours of the land
downhill and then find a river to follow downstream.”

If Meg had traveled back in time to Cilmeri
with David and Anna, she would have had a lot to say about the
sink-or-swim nature of that early training of David’s. But she
hadn’t been there, and she could hardly complain about the man
Llywelyn had turned David into, or the little bit of knowledge Meg
herself could now relate because of what Math had taught him all
those years ago.

“
I have spent so little
time in the woods over the last nine years it isn’t even funny.”
Anna fastened three more of the wooden toggles that kept her cloak
closed. The hall at Rhuddlan had been cold, and everyone in the
Middle Ages wore their cloaks indoors as a matter of course, a fact
for which Meg was intensely grateful now. “Could we be near Mt.
Snowdon?”

“
The trees look wrong to me
for modern Wales,” Meg said, “though what do I know? Maybe pine
trees and Douglas firs predominate in one of those tree farms
they’ve planted.”

“
If we can find some sign
of civilization, we’ll know.” Anna gave a half-laugh as she pulled
a leaf out of Meg’s hair. “We’d better hurry before it turns
completely dark.”

Both women were wearing boots rather than
slippers, which was another piece of good luck, but Meg missed her
mittens. If they weren’t close to a settlement, this was going to
be a tough night. Walking would warm them, however, and the snow
wasn’t falling any more heavily than it had been when they’d
arrived.

They started downhill, aiming for brighter
patches between the trees. The woods didn’t close in around them,
and the trees were predominantly conifers. By November throughout
most of the east coast of the United States, a thick blanket of
deciduous leaves covered the ground, and most of the trees would
have been bare, which ruled out all but a few locations in
Pennsylvania as a possible landing site.

The snow provided some ambient light,
particularly since, after falling fairly heavily for twenty
minutes, it had slowed and then stopped. Within another twenty
minutes, the clouds cleared enough to reveal stars. There’d been a
new moon two days earlier in Wales. Meg didn’t know whether 2019
wherever-they-were had a similar astronomical schedule to 1291
Rhuddlan, but for the moment, they were stuck with stars and not
much else to see by.

Meg and Anna plodded along for at least
another half hour, Meg worrying that she didn’t know what she was
doing, any more than she had when she’d come through three years
ago with Llywelyn and Goronwy. They’d survived and escaped MI-5
during that trip, but it seemed due more to luck than any skill or
intelligence on Meg’s part. But she supposed that if luck was all
they had, she would have to make it work for them.

But she wasn’t feeling particularly lucky at
the moment, and that made the edge-of-panic feeling that filled her
hard to fight off. She continually scanned the terrain ahead—what
she could see of it—for any sign of a man-made anything, all the
while very aware that her heart was in her throat. It was a feeling
she often got when she was waiting for something to happen—usually
for Llywelyn or a child to return from whatever had taken them out
of Meg’s sight. She was growing to despise the vacillation between
the sweet taste of anticipation and the sour one of crushed
hope.

Given how she was feeling, she could
understand why Anna didn’t want to talk. Still, as her mother and
being nosy by nature, Meg hated not knowing what her daughter was
thinking, especially in a situation like this.

“
The boys will be fine,”
Meg said after they’d walked another hundred yards, thinking of
Elisa and Padrig and trying to tell herself the same thing. Whether
Llywelyn and Math would be fine was something else entirely, but
Meg didn’t want to complicate matters by bringing them
up.

“
I’m trying to tell myself
that a few days apart will be good for them,” Anna said. “But it
isn’t like I can call Math and remind him to brush their teeth
before bed. Even if I’ve lived in the Middle Ages for nine years,
I’m not a medieval parent.”

“
Lili and Bronwen are
there,” Meg said. “Not to mention that Cadell has bewitched every
woman in the castle with his smile. They have many adults to watch
over them.”

“
But they’re not
me!”

It was a wail that Meg understood completely
because she was feeling the same way. The invention of the cell
phone had been a godsend to her as a parent. It meant that she
could always reach her children no matter where they were, and they
could reach her. Nine years ago when Meg’s sister, Elisa, had
called to say that David and Anna had disappeared, Meg’s first
impulse had been to call their cell phones. They hadn’t answered
them, of course, and the nightmare of their unexplained absence had
begun.

Then Anna calmed a bit. “I think what I’m
struggling with most is that I’m gone, and they don’t know where
to. Bran will be easily entertained away from thinking about my
absence, but Cadell not so much.”

“
All the adults but Math
and Lili have experienced exactly this before,” Meg said. “They can
explain to him what it’s like, even if he can’t really understand
it. He knows that you’re from this world, even if we call it
Avalon.”

Anna nodded. “That’ll help. And I suppose
you’re right that it’s a good thing we’re here since otherwise we’d
be dead.”

Meg reached out to touch Anna’s hand. “Do
you want to talk about the fact that Marty didn’t come with
us?”

“
Now that it’s over, I feel
bad for him. He just wanted to go home,” Anna said.

“
I get that,” Meg said,
“but I can’t forgive him for threatening my daughter’s
life.”

“
He was holding on to me,
pressing against me, while I was holding on to you. But then his
grip loosened there at the end, which gave me a second chance to
fight him off. He screamed and let go of me. I don’t know why.”
Anna choked a bit over the words. “We were already
falling.”

“
What’s done is done,” Meg
said matter-of-factly. “The last thing you should feel is guilt
about what might have happened to Marty. Now, we need to focus on
getting back.”

“
I could do with a shower,”
Anna said. “Is that too much to ask before we return? One
shower?”

Meg laughed. “I can’t answer that. We have
no money, no I.D., and we possess only what we stand up in. A lot
is going to depend on where we are, and who we can call on for
help.”

“
Cassie and Callum will
help us,” Anna said.

“
We have to find them
first,” Meg said. “If we can find an internet café, we can look up
MI-5 and send Callum an email.”

Anna scoffed under her breath. “Do you think
it will be that easy? MI-5 is a secret government agency.”

“
I imagine if I put
we’re here
in the subject
line, someone will pay attention,” Meg said. “I don’t want to end
up in a cell like David, but it might be preferable to freezing to
death out here.”

“
That isn’t going to
happen, not unless this place is really, really remote,” Anna
said.

“
It looks pretty remote to
me,” Meg said.

“
Yeah, but they know we’re
here, right? Callum keeps talking about a flash,” Anna said. “They
could be scrambling rescue helicopters even now.”

Instinctively, both women looked up. Meg had
a vision of men in Kevlar converging on their position, but the
only sound was the rustle of the wind in the trees and the crunch
of snow beneath their feet. The sky remained clear of rotor blades.
“It’s late afternoon. Maybe nobody’s on duty.”

“
The world could have
changed a lot in two years,” Anna said, “Maybe nobody’s on duty at
all.”

“
That’s a very nice
thought, Anna,” Meg said, “and I hope it’s true, although it would
be unfortunate if we’ve fallen into a world undergoing the zombie
apocalypse.”

“
It’s weird to think about,
isn’t it?” Anna said. “Anything could have happened here. Maybe
MI-5 has taken over the world.”

“
We have too much to do to
spend even an hour in a cell,” Meg said.

“
I don’t suppose you have
any modern money hidden in that dress you’re wearing?” Anna
said.

“
No.” Meg cursed to herself
as she realized what an idiot she’d been. “In fact, I don’t have
anything good on me at all, not like last time.”

Before Meg had taken Goronwy and Llywelyn to
the modern world, she’d carefully sewn her passport, credit cards,
and money into the hems of several dresses as a precaution against
the day the opportunity to time travel arose or Llywelyn fell ill
enough to make the need to come to the twenty-first century urgent.
Which he had. Unfortunately, Meg was wearing a new dress today and
hadn’t bothered to transfer any of those papers into it. “What’s
really dumb is that I actively didn’t do it. I told myself there
was no need.”

“
Hindsight is 20-20,” Anna
said. “It’s like when you’re cutting a bagel with the blade towards
you and you think—right before you slice through your
finger—
this is really
dumb
.”

“
I had no business becoming
complacent,” Meg said, still kicking herself.
“If we ever get home, I won’t make that mistake
again.”

“
I, however, have
something.” Anna loosened the strings on her purse, which was tied
to the belt around her waist, and pulled out a piece of paper that
had been folded into a small square. Unfolding it, she waved it at
Meg, triumphant.

“
Is that David’s list?” Meg
said, unable to keep the incredulity out of her voice.

“
Yup,” Anna said. “I
started carrying it everywhere last year, just in case.”

Meg’s eyes had deteriorated enough since
she’d turned forty. While many people her age couldn’t see anything
without reading glasses unless it was three feet or more away from
their face, Meg had the opposite problem. She couldn’t read (or
see) anything clearly unless it was ten inches from her face. This
low light didn’t help at all, but half the time broad daylight
wasn’t much better. For the first time in her life, reading had
become a chore. She never had enough light, and she ended up
leaning closer and closer, trying to see what was on the paper.

She had acquired a pair of glasses for
seeing distance, but they never felt comfortable to her eyes or on
her face, and they couldn’t correct the way she needed them to. She
hadn’t been wearing them to the dinner anyway.

“
I’m glad one of us was
smart enough to plan ahead,” Meg said. “Or maybe you really do have
the
sight,
like the
legends say.” In the Arthurian mythology that David existed within,
Anna was Morgane to David’s Arthur.

Anna shot her mother a disgusted look but
didn’t reply, turning the paper this way and that. She was trying
to catch a bit of light so she could read it. “Some of what’s on
here isn’t going to be easy to get.”

“
We’ll do what we can, and
David will forgive us if we fall short,” Meg said.

After David had returned from modern Cardiff
two years ago, he’d enumerated a list of items that he would have
liked to procure if he’d had the chance and if he hadn’t been
incarcerated the whole time he was here. He’d come home with a
stack of papers, which was useful, but consisted only of what he
could discover in an hour on the internet. He’d asked for two
telephone calls: one to his Uncle Ted and one to an employee of the
CDC (Centers for Disease Control)—and been denied even that.