Longbow Girl (16 page)

M
erry was dragged by the gushing current through the tunnel. This way, the river ran terrifyingly fast. There was no need to fight, to stroke your way desperately to the other side. You just had to ride it, avoid smashing into the roof or the walls. One hand reaching forward, the other hand protecting her head, Merry raced along. Seconds later, the river spat her out, up into the cave, pulled her through the waterfall, delivered her into the shallows.

She sucked in air, walked on trembling legs up on to the bank.

Was she home? Was this the twenty-first century or some other time?

Then, above the roar of the waterfall, she heard a howl behind her.

Fear stabbed at her.

She turned to see the huge wolfhound, half drowned but still snarling, vibrating with bloodlust, standing just feet away. Merry could see him gather himself, about to leap She pulled her knife from its strap, unsheathed it, gripped the blade in her fingers and threw.

The knife sailed through the air and embedded itself in the wolfhound's chest. With a hideous howl, the beast fell to the ground, lashing back and forth. Merry waited until it stopped moving; then she reached out, pulled her knife from its body.

Her fingers were slippery with blood. She studied the moonlit darkness, waiting to see if more wolfhounds emerged. None did. They must have drowned, or managed to stay on the other side. She rubbed her hand on her tunic, shoved the knife back into its strap around her thigh.

A sudden whinny pierced the air. Merry burst out laughing. Joy and a wild relief surged through her. She'd know that call anywhere.

Jacintha!

She was home.

Merry rushed through the trees to where Jacintha was tethered. The mare snorted at her, as if to say,
Where the hell have you been?
She stroked her knuckles up and down her forehead, just as the mare liked. Merry wondered how long she'd been away. She rummaged in her pack, pulled out her phone. It still had a slight charge. She checked the time. Midnight. It had been only half a day, a few hours of the night, but it felt so much longer. She quickly changed into her own
clothes, squashed Mair's woollen ones into her backpack. Then she untethered Jacintha, vaulted up on her back and set off for home.

She crossed the common lands, glancing right and left, but nobody was around. No one to witness the Welsh Mountain pony with her black-clad rider moving silently through the night. They passed like ghosts through the darkness.

As she crossed on to her own lands, Merry gazed across the valley at the Black Castle looming through the moonlight. She shuddered. Just hours ago. Five hundred years ago.

She felt a wave of dizziness so intense she nearly fell off. Grasping Jacintha's mane, she walked her to the field near the barn where the rest of the herd grazed. She slipped from her pony's back, put her arms around Jacintha's neck and, for a minute, just held on. Then, worrying about what on earth she'd say to her parents if they were still up, she headed for the farmhouse.

She saw with relief that there were no lights on. Her parents had probably gone to bed early, assumed she'd gone out on one of her many long expeditions on Jacintha. They had reluctantly allowed her the same freedoms as before, though she knew they worried. She blew out a breath and let herself in.

She tiptoed up the stairs, past her parents' bedroom. She could hear the soft sounds of their breathing. She peered through the open door into Gawain's bedroom. He lay sleeping on his back, arms thrown out. She felt a stab of emotion, thought of her ancestor. He was long-since dead, but had he
lived? Had he survived the day and night that she had just lived through?

Exhausted, she headed on into her own room. Closed the door softly. Cold, still trembling with the shock and terror of it all, Merry undressed and pulled on pyjamas. She paused just long enough to drain the water from the glass on her bedside table and remove her eye patch; then she got into bed and pulled the covers over her head like she was hiding from the world.

She was home.

She'd escaped the sixteenth century.

On her finger the golden ring gleamed.

An unbreakable link to the past.

R
adio playing. Distant dogs barking. Ponies whinnying. Merry woke shouting, her head full of wolfhounds, huntsmen, the drowning river.
The river of time
. She gazed around wildly, saw the stencilled wardrobe, her primrose-sprigged curtains.
Home
. Felt an overwhelming surge of relief. And disbelief. Had she imagined it all?

She pulled off the covers, tried to get out of bed. Winced. Everything hurt. Her cuts stung like fury. They were all the evidence she needed. She limped across the wooden floors. She was starving, but first she'd have to see to her injuries.

The bathroom was empty. She hurried in, stripped, got under the shower.

Her legs, arms, feet, hands and face were latticed with cuts and scratches. She swore as the hot water sluiced over them.
She shampooed her hair and tried to pick out bits of bramble and twig that had caught in it. She practically unearthed a bird's nest.

She got out, towelled herself dry, daubed her cuts with antiseptic and covered them with plasters, apart from the ones on her face. They'd heal better in the air.

Pulling on her dressing gown, she hurried back to her room, dressed in soft, baggy combat trousers and a long-sleeved T-shirt. She slipped a woollen cardigan on top to make sure no plasters were visible through the thin fabric. She toed her feet into her Uggs and was just about to go downstairs when she saw the ring glinting on her finger.

She felt a lurch.
You stole
, she chided herself.
You had reason
, the new voice answered. She pulled off the ring, hid it in her bedside table.

‘Merry! It's gone ten. Are you ill?' asked her mother, when she appeared in the kitchen. ‘And your face! My God, Merry! Did someone attack you?'

Merry shook her head. Well, other than the countess . . . ‘No one, Mam, don't worry. I just went out riding on Jacintha, got carried away. You know what I'm like with time . . . Night fell and I was in the forest.'

‘Luckily for you, your father and I went to bed early. He assured me you'd be fine even though I wanted to go out and look for you. He heard you come in, though. God only knows what time.'

‘Sorry,' said Merry, inadequately. On impulse, she went over to her mother, kissed her cheek.

Elinor smiled. ‘I expect you're hungry, Spinner?'

Merry nodded. ‘Starving!'

Her mother made pancakes, busying herself at the stove. Gawain sat in his high chair scrunching up a plastic book.

Merry ate three pancakes with sugar and lemon juice, washed down with a mug of milky coffee and a glass of water.

She felt stronger.

Then her father appeared in the doorway. ‘Merry Seren Owen! What time did you—?' He crossed the kitchen in two paces. ‘What the hell happened to your face? Who hurt you?'

‘No one.' She shook her head. ‘Thorn bushes, Da.'

Caradoc made a harrumphing sound. ‘And the look in your eye . . . where does that come from?'

‘What look?' asked Merry warily.

‘You look frightened,
cariad
. And something else . . . Like you've had a very, very close shave.'

Merry forced herself to meet his gaze. ‘No one hurt me.'

They
could
have, they
nearly
did. She thought of the huntsmen, the wolfhounds, the knife . . . She shuddered, hoped her father didn't see it. She got up, hugged him, comforted by his bulk, by the security of him. But then she thought of her ancestor. If he had been killed that day, could the tentacles of time reach forward, claim her father too? She pushed down the memories, tried to reason them away. Five hundred years ago. Long gone. Her father was safe. They were all safe.

So why didn't she feel it?

M
erry could hardly drag herself through her chores for the rest of the day. Her body ached and she was exhausted. It was a kind of delayed shock, she knew that. Her mind kept turning back to the River of Time, as she now called it, to the Black Castle, thinking of being hunted, of being prey . . . She'd find herself staring into space, teeth clenched, hands fisted, seeing not what was before her but what was five hundred years ago. She avoided her parents, exhausted too by the effort of lying, of concealing, of smiling and pretending everything was normal.

She went to her bedroom at eight o'clock, pleading a headache. She closed herself in, sat on her bed in the sudden, throbbing silence. She opened her bedside table, pulled out the ring. Turned it over in her hands, studying it. It was a
signet ring made of rich rose gold – Welsh gold, of course. On the outside, she could see the motto of the de Courcys:
Avis la Fin
. Look to the End. It was odd; instead of the two phoenixes that they now had, there was only one. She turned the ring around in her hands, studying the inside. There was a number, in Roman numerals. MDXX. She googled it on her phone, worked it out: 1520. She whistled through her teeth. Nearly five hundred years old.

It was beautiful but she didn't want it any more. It gave her the same feeling her book had: that she wasn't the rightful owner. She had taken the book in innocence and had nearly paid a very high price for it. She knew with some deep instinct that she would pay a higher price for taking this ring in full knowledge of what she was doing.

She shut it away again, pulled her curtains, then slipped under the covers.

She could almost feel the ring, lying there next to her, just inches away. It was like a link in a chain connecting her to the past, to the sixteenth century. As she lay in the darkness, she cast her mind back, felt just a pale version of the terror that had almost consumed her. But what was almost worse was the feeling that the past had somehow got into her blood, as if swimming through the River of Time had contaminated her in some way, infected her, because some small part of her, the part that spoke with the new voice, that walked on the outside of its feet,
wanted
to go back.

But the Merry she had known for all her life, the Merry she had been, that girl did not want to go back. Under any
circumstances.
That
Merry knew what she should do: get rid of the ring. Neutralize it in the same way she had neutralized the book. As she fell asleep, she thought up a plan, intending to carry it out the next day. She reckoned she'd worked it all out, a way to keep her and her family safe and sever the link with the past. She didn't give a thought to the law of unintended consequences, to the chain of events the ring and her plan would unleash. If she had known, she would have taken it to the top of the north face of Pen y Fan and thrown it to the winds.

The next morning, making the most of her free time during the wonderfully long Easter holidays, Merry headed out after breakfast.

‘Going for a walk,' she told her mother.

‘What's with the backpack?' Elinor asked.

‘Just being practical. Warm layer, bottle of water,' improvised Merry. She hurried from the kitchen before her mother could check.

She headed for the burial mound. Using the trick Parks had taught her, she crept up to it, rolling on the outside of her feet, moving silently as she had when she walked through the Tudor night. She kept pausing, turning full circle, checking he was not hiding behind a bush, but there was no sign of him.

She waited and watched some distance away from the burial mound. She circled it, checked from all angles, waited and watched, but there was no sign of Parks. It was a Saturday,
she didn't expect him to be working, but she was taking no chances.

Just to be sure, she called out: ‘Professor Parks? It's Merry. Come to say hello. You'd better come out if you're hiding somewhere. I don't want to contaminate the scene!'

Her words just echoed away through the trees. She waited, half expecting Parks to step from some concealing thicket with a frown and a sharp comment.

But after the minutes ticked by, Merry felt sure she was alone.

She walked up the mound, eyed the squares marked out by strings on sticks. She pulled off her backpack and sat cross-legged on the forest floor. She opened the pack, took out Mair's shawl, still damp, and cut off a small piece, big enough to wrap the ring in. She rubbed it in the loose soil. She scored its wool fibres with a pair of scissors till it looked rough and threadbare. Then she rolled the ring in the tattered fabric, got to her feet and walked up to the mound.

She studied the neat little squares, trying to work out where Parks would dig next. There was one that looked half excavated and she chose that. She pushed the cloth in deep but not too deep, just an inch or so, reckoning he'd find it within a day or two. Then she tried to smooth out the top layer. She sat back, studied her handiwork.
It'll do
, she thought. Then, glancing around to make sure Parks hadn't crept up on her, she backed away.

‘I'm sorry, chieftain,' she whispered, as if he might hear. ‘Just doing what I need to do.'

She'd hoped to feel a sense of relief. She'd got rid of the ring. She'd severed that link to the past. But that night in bed, she had the same strange yearning, the same strange fear that she would go back. She saw it in brilliant detail, the Tudor kingdom she had entered, the world she had left behind. Every time she closed her eye, she would see it on the inside of her eyelid, more lifelike than the world outside her bedroom window.

Merry tried to live a normal life. She texted James, but he texted back that he had no news. He was training, doing his best, waiting . . .

Robbed of her searching, deprived of her swim training, with no James to burn the days, Merry felt oddly purposeless. She still felt the strange yearning, the sense of contamination, the desire to go back to the past. She felt as if she had unfinished business there.

She found herself heading out to Sarn Helen, to the smooth ground of the old Roman road where she could gallop. She would lean down across Jacintha's neck and urge her on: run,
run like the wind
, and her pony would lengthen her stride and gallop so fast Merry felt like they were flying over the wild mountains.

Every time she took Jacintha out, she would remember how on the Arab stallion she had galloped for her life.

She rode out for four days in a row, in sun and rain. All the time she felt as if she were waiting for something to happen. Waiting for Professor Parks to discover the ring and bring it to
them – the treasure that would save their farm for ever. But Parks didn't come. And Merry began to have a jittery feeling, as if something were happening, something she couldn't see, wouldn't see, until it was too late.