Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (7 page)

Meg knew, even if she couldn’t read it at
the moment, that the list went far beyond the CDC and Bronwen’s lip
balm. It included heirloom seeds for foods like pumpkins,
chocolate, and tomatoes; a couple different varieties of potatoes;
vaccines for the children as well as other medicines, specifically
more sophisticated antibiotics than the rudimentary penicillin Anna
had developed; and maps of Great Britain.

David’s most pressing request, odd as it
sounded, was for a geological survey showing where minerals and
resources were to be found throughout Britain and Ireland. He
wanted a better map than what he’d downloaded off the internet when
he was sixteen. Though David hadn’t mentioned it today when he was
talking about either the rebellion brewing in Wales or his grand
plan for a United States of Britain, minerals meant wealth. No
state—whether kingdom or republic—could succeed over the long haul
without them. David had gone as far as he could with what he had.
Unfortunately a map to the level of detail he wanted was
classified.

Which meant they needed Callum—for that and
for everything else.

“
It feels like we’ve been
walking for hours.” Anna cinched her cloak tighter under her chin.
“I was hoping I’d warm up, but I haven’t.”

She was right that they’d been walking
downhill for a while now, and as they neared the bottom of the
current slope, a prickling sensation started at the back of Meg’s
neck that she not only knew where she was, but that she’d been here
before. Well, not here-here, but in the vicinity.

“
What’s up, Mom?” Anna said
when Meg didn’t respond to her complaint. “You’ve slowed
down.”

“
One, I can’t see a thing,”
Meg said.

“
Maybe we can get you some
glasses while we’re here.” Anna suddenly giggled. “When we do get
back, we can say that we went to Avalon to do our Christmas
shopping because we’d grown tired of the selection at the local
mall.”

Meg laughed too, though Anna was right about
the glasses. Not being able to see properly was painful—like a sore
toe that wouldn’t heal. It nagged at Meg every moment of every
day.

Lights flared ahead of them. After a few
seconds, the single glare coalesced into two points of light, which
meant they were headlights on a vehicle. The car was moving fast on
a road that ran along the bottom of the slope. Within fifteen
seconds it had passed them by, moving from left to right in front
of them.

Anna broke into a run. “Thank God!”

The powerful smell of burning gasoline was
overlaid by the scent of smoke. “Is that a woodstove?” Meg sniffed
the air.

They were still fifty yards from where Meg
thought the road should be, though they’d been plunged into
darkness again, made worse by the flare of the headlights that had
ruined what little night vision she’d had.

Anna spun around to look at her mother.
“Even if all we run into is a log cabin next door to the middle of
nowhere, we’ll have heat.”

“
And the possibility of a
phone,” Meg said.

The two women went a little farther. One
instant there was nothing, and then there was a road, a dark strip
of black against the gray of the trees that lined it on either
side. Meg wanted to hurry in case another car was coming along the
road even now, but her vision hadn’t improved in the last two
minutes, and the ground was very slippery. She and Anna were wet
and cold enough that they didn’t want to add to their misery by
having one of them step in a hole and go down with a sprained
ankle. Given how remote this location appeared to be, it might be a
while before they saw another car.

They stumbled into a ditch that was
fortunately no wetter than the surrounding grass and leaves, and
clambered up the other side onto the road, which had been cleared
of trees for twenty feet on either side. The blacktop had been laid
in a narrow strip, without the yellow line to delineate the two
lanes of the road.

“
Wow.” Anna bent and
touched the blacktop with one hand.

“
Don’t kiss it,” Meg said.
“It’ll be dirty.”

Anna laughed, bouncing up and down on her
toes. “Who’d have thought a paved road could be such a beautiful
thing.”

“
Not to rain on your
parade, but we should start walking.” Meg looked up at the sky,
which was now clear of all but a few clouds. It was colder than
before too, with a brisk wind blowing down the road towards them.
“Can you see the north star? My eyes are so bad I can barely tell
there are stars up there.”

“
I see the Little Dipper.”
Anna pointed.

“
So we head this way.” Meg
turned into the wind and set off. If Anna had pointed to the
correct star, it meant they’d come from the south, so now they were
going west, which also happened to mean continuing
downhill.

“
Why west?” Anna hurried to
catch up. “Do you know where we are?”

“
If we’re in Wales, west
will eventually get us to the Irish Sea, right?” Meg said. “And if
we’re not in Wales …”

“
The whole United States is
to the west of Pennsylvania,” Anna said.

“
I’m thinking the trees are
wrong for Pennsylvania,” Meg said. “These are
evergreens.”

Anna’s step faltered. “Do you think we’re in
Oregon?” She looked stricken. In the years following Meg’s and
Anna’s initial return to the modern world when Anna was three years
old, Anna had forgotten her time in Wales, along with everything
before David’s birth. This included the existence of both her
fathers, Trevor and Llywelyn. She’d blocked the memories so
completely, she even told people that she’d been born in Oregon, as
if her life had started the day they’d moved there. Eventually, Meg
had stopped correcting her. Oregon had been home to Anna. Home to
Meg too.

Meg cleared her throat. “We’ll see. We could
be in Colorado, though I can’t imagine why we’d end up there.”

“
We end up where we’re
supposed to,” Anna said. “That’s what you and David always
say.”

“
And we’ll keep saying it
until we don’t,” Meg said unhelpfully. She was getting that
hysterical panicky feeling again and needed to keep moving to
control it.

They walked for ten minutes, leaving the
smell of smoke behind them. Meg had chosen to follow the road
rather than find a house. She wasn’t completely sure why. Maybe it
was the awkwardness of appearing at someone’s door in medieval garb
and asking for help. If they flagged down a car, the driver would
have already been moving, so picking them up would be less of an
imposition.

The sound of an engine reverberated from
behind them, saving Meg from having to analyze her own actions any
further. The vehicle was coming from the east and heading in their
direction. Anna and Meg stepped off the road so they wouldn’t get
hit if the driver decided not to slow down or couldn’t see them in
their dark dresses and cloaks. Committed at least to the attempt to
find help, Meg stepped in front of Anna and waved both arms in a
big sweeping motion to see if the driver would stop.

“
What d’you think?” Anna
said as she eyed the oncoming vehicle. The size of the headlights
and their distance from the ground suggested they belonged to a
truck. “Serial killer?”

“
Let’s hope not.” But Meg
didn’t think so, and she was a lot less concerned about being in
the middle of nowhere with Anna in the modern world than if they’d
found themselves stranded somewhere remote in the Middle Ages.
Rural areas in the United States were safer places for lost women
than cities.

In the Middle Ages, the
opposite was true. Rural areas were home to lawless men, who
were
very
unsafe
for women. Even though, relatively speaking, a village was a big
place in the Middle Ages and a tiny place in the modern world,
their characteristics were much the same. In both cases—rural
America and urban Middle Ages—the key was the extent to which
everybody knew everybody else and kept an eye on their
neighbors.

Meg really did think she knew where they
were too, a fact which was confirmed a moment later as the truck
slowed down and the headlights revealed the license plate on the
front of the truck. Oregon.

The truck had a king-cab, and was bright
red, clean, and new. When the driver stopped and rolled down the
automatic passenger side window, the seats inside proved to be
leather. He could be a well-off serial killer, but somehow Meg
doubted it, especially when a girl of nine or ten with a mane of
black hair (the same color as her father’s) peered at her from the
back seat.

“
Can I help you?” In his
early forties, the man was clean-cut and handsome, with short hair
and dark eyes. He was dressed well for any event on the west coast:
dark khaki pants, a buttoned down shirt, and a black leather
jacket. Meg couldn’t see his feet, but he wouldn’t be wearing
tennis shoes.

“
We were hoping for a
ride,” Meg said.

“
Did your car break down?”
the man said.

“
Not exactly,” Meg said,
avoiding the question as best she could. “Are you headed into
town?”

“
I wasn’t going all the way
into Pendleton,” he said. “We’re having Thanksgiving near
Helix.”

“
My grandmother lives
there,” the man’s daughter put in.

Meg repeated the word ‘Thanksgiving’ to
herself at the same moment that Anna breathed the name of the town.
Pendleton was a small town in eastern Oregon. Meg didn’t know it
well, but she’d been here for the rodeo once and several times more
for conferences. She’d visited the cultural center on the
reservation, where they now were, and knew something of the
geography of the area.

Meg glanced at Anna again, seeing how she
was taking this news. When Meg had gone into labor with David,
she’d ended up outside her mother’s house in Pennsylvania because
clearly that was where she’d needed to be. But to return to Oregon
where they’d lived for so many years caused an unexpected ache in
her heart. Like Anna, Meg had real friends here and a life that had
been totally, radically different from the one she now led in Wales
with Llywelyn.

“
We’d be happy if you can
just get us closer than this,” Meg said. “Could you drop us off at
the convenience store in Mission?”

The driver looked the women up and down,
concern in his eyes. In their medieval dresses and cloaks, damp and
shivering, Meg had to admit that they must have looked a sight.
“Are you sure?”

“
Definitely.” Meg pulled
open the door. The man found the latch that would move the
passenger seat forward, and Anna crawled into the back beside the
man’s daughter.

“
I’m Meg, and this is my
daughter, Anna.”

“
Nice to meet you,” he
said. “I’m Jim. This is my daughter, Star.”

“
Thanks for the ride,” Anna
put in.

Meg glanced into the back and saw Star scoot
the blanket she’d been sitting under closer to Anna so they could
share it. “Thank you too,” Anna said.

Star smiled.

Jim started driving, and after yet another
long look at Meg, he turned the heat to ‘high’.

Meg put her hands right up
to the vent and let the heat seep into her. She hadn’t been back to
the United States for seven years, and it was odd how natural it
felt to be sitting in this truck. She had to acknowledge, for the
first time in a while, how fundamentally
foreign
the Middle Ages still was to
her.

Jim spoke American English
and drove an American truck on an American road. Regardless of his
ethnic background, Meg
knew
him in a way she could never know someone she had
just met in medieval Wales. In the Middle Ages, even after all this
time, Meg was still on the outside looking in.

“
Do you have a phone?” Jim
said.

“
No.” Meg shook her
head.

“
Not that it would do you
any good out here. No service.” He hesitated for a second and then
seemed to decide something, because he added, “When we get there,
you can use my phone to call who you need to. I can’t just leave
you in the parking lot.” Then he glanced in the rearview mirror at
Anna. “I don’t mean to pry, but are you guys in
trouble?”

Neither Anna nor Meg answered. Meg wanted to
trust him, but after what happened the last time she’d come to the
modern world—or when David had come the following year—Meg thought
it might be better to involve as few people as possible in their
problems. It was bad enough that her brother-in-law, Ted, had found
himself mixed up with MI-5. Meg didn’t want to inflict men in black
SUVs and Kevlar on a total stranger.

Still, it was fortunate that Meg hadn’t
ended up in some place she knew better. She might have known Jim in
that long ago life, and he would have been even more full of
questions. He was her age, but since she hadn’t grown up here, they
hadn’t known each other at school. And because he was her age, he
was unlikely to have taken a class from her, if he’d even gone to
college in Oregon. Nor was there any reason for him to recognize a
random history professor who’d disappeared seven years ago.

“
The reason I ask is that I
noticed when you got in the truck that you have blood on your neck,
Anna,” Jim said. “Were you in a car accident or—?” He left his
concern hanging, but Meg imagined he was thinking along the lines
of domestic violence.

Meg glanced back at Anna, and they shared a
long look. Meg still didn’t want to tell Jim anything and wouldn’t
know what to say if she did, but Anna stuck her head between the
seats. “Do you live around here, Jim?”