Footsteps in Time Read online

  Book One in the After Cilmeri Series

  Footsteps in Time

  A Time Travel Fantasy

  by

  Sarah Woodbury

  Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Woodbury

  Cover image by Christine DeMaio-Rice at Flip City books

  Footsteps in Time

  In December of 1282, English soldiers ambushed and murdered Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of Wales. His death marked the end of Wales as an independent nation and the beginning of over seven hundred years under the English boot.

  Footsteps in Time is the story of what might have happened had Llywelyn lived.

  And what happens to the two teenagers who save him.

  Books in the After Cilmeri Series:

  Daughter of Time (prequel)

  Footsteps in Time (Book One)

  Winds of Time

  Prince of Time (Book Two)

  Crossroads in Time (Book Three)

  Children of Time (Book Four)

  Exiles in Time

  Castaways in Time

  Ashes of Time

  Warden of Time

  Guardians of Time

  The Gareth and Gwen Medieval Mysteries:

  The Bard’s Daughter

  The Good Knight

  The Uninvited Guest

  The Fourth Horseman

  The Fallen Princess

  The Unlikely Spy

  The Lost Brother

  The Renegade Merchant

  The Lion of Wales Series:

  Cold My Heart

  The Oaken Door

  Of Men and Dragons

  A Long Cloud

  The Last Pendragon Saga:

  The Last Pendragon

  The Pendragon’s Quest

  The Paradisi Chronicles:

  Erase Me Not

  Pronouncing Welsh Names and Places

  Aberystwyth –Ah-bare-IHST-with (the ‘th’ is soft as in ‘forth’)

  Bwlch y Ddeufaen – Boolch ah THEY-vine (the ‘th’ is hard as in ‘they’; the ‘ch’ as in in the Scottish ‘loch’)

  Cadfael – CAD-vile

  Cadwallon – Cad-WASH-lon

  Caernarfon – (‘ae’ makes a long i sound like in ‘kite’) Kire-NAR-von

  Dafydd – DAH-vith (the ‘th’ is hard as in ‘they’)

  Dolgellau – Doll-GESH-lay

  Deheubarth – deh-HAY-barth

  Dolwyddelan – dole-with-EH-lan (the ‘th’ is hard as in ‘they’)

  Gruffydd – GRIFF-ith (the ‘th’ is hard as in ‘they’)

  Gwalchmai – GWALCH-my (‘ai’ makes a long i sound like in ‘kite; the ‘ch’ like in the Scottish ‘loch’)

  Gwenllian – Gwen-SHLEE-an

  Gwladys – Goo-LAD-iss

  Gwynedd – GWIN-eth (the ‘th’ is hard as in ‘the’)

  Hywel – H’wel

  Ieuan – ieu sounds like the cheer, ‘yay’ so, YAY-an

  Llanbadarn Fawr – shlan-BAH-darn vowr

  Llywelyn – shlew-ELL-in

  Maentwrog – Mighn-TOO-rog

  Meilyr – MY-lir

  Owain – OH-wine

  Rhuddlan – RITH-lan (the ‘th’ is hard as in ‘the’)

  Rhun – Rin

  Rhys – Reese

  Sion – Shawn (Sean)

  Tudur – TIH-deer

  Usk – Isk

  Part One

  Prologue

  Llywelyn

  “How can you leave Gwynedd undefended, my lord? Without you, we can’t hold back the English.”

  Goronwy stood with his back to me, gazing out the window at the courtyard where a dozen men prepared to ride out on a scouting mission. I didn’t envy them, for rain lashed their faces and the temperature hovered just above freezing. It was cold for November, even here by the sea.

  I put aside the letter I was writing and gave Goronwy, my steadfast friend through nearly fifty years of governing and fighting, my full attention.

  “Dafydd will hold the north for me, and you with him,” I said. “You may travel with me as far as Castell y Bere, but not beyond that. I need you to watch Dafydd and rein him in if necessary.”

  “Dafydd.” Goronwy swung around to face me. “Traitor isn’t too strong a word to describe him. You can’t deny it.”

  “I don’t deny it. Dafydd follows always his own desires, usually in direct opposition to mine. I can’t trust him to remain true to Wales or to me, but I can trust him to remain true to himself. For now, his interests and those of Wales coincide.” I picked up my pen and twirled it in my hand. “It’s not Dafydd’s loyalty that concerns me, but the Mortimers.”

  “The Mortimers!” Goronwy’s tone for them matched the one he’d used for Dafydd. “We’ve heard rumors only. They hold Buellt Castle for King Edward and no amount of persuasion is ever going to talk them out of it.”

  “So Marged said.”

  “You still want to risk it? You listen to neither her nor me. If you go south to meet them, I fear you meet your death.”

  “I do listen, Goronwy,” I said. “That’s why you’re staying here, in case I don’t return. The men will follow Dafydd if they know you stand with him.”

  Goronwy rubbed his face with both hands. “There’s nothing I can say to persuade you not to make this journey?”

  “If we are to defeat the English once and for all, if I am to rule Wales in fact as well as name, I must control the south. The Mortimers’ allegiance would strengthen my position and shorten the war. Surely you can see that I must meet them?”

  “If it were true, I would see it, my lord; but I don’t believe they will betray England. Not all men bend with the wind as easily as Dafydd.”

  “Some bend; some break.” I picked up the letter and saluted Goronwy with it. “This time either Edward or I will break. I know only that I can bend no longer.”

  Goronwy took a deep breath. “May I take my leave, my lord?”

  I nodded. Goronwy bowed and left the room. I gripped my pen, reading over the words I’d written, and signed my name at the end: We fight because we are forced to fight, for we, and all Wales, are oppressed, subjugated, despoiled, reduced to servitude by the royal officers and bailiffs so that we feel, and have often so protested to the king, that we are left without any remedy ...

  Map of Wales

  Chapter One

  Anna

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  Anna looked back at her brother. He’d followed her to the door, his coat in his hand.

  “Okay.” She tried not to sound relieved. “You can hold the map.”

  The clouds were so low they blended into the trees around the house and Anna tipped her head to the sky, feeling a few gentle snowflakes hit her face. They walked across the driveway, the first to leave tracks in the new snow.

  “You’re sure you can handle this?” David eyed the van. It faced the house so Anna would have to back it out.

  “Christopher’s waiting,” Anna said. “It’s not like I have a choice.”

  “If you say so.”

  Their aunt had asked Anna to pick up her cousin at a friend’s house since she had a late meeting and wouldn’t make it. Ignoring David’s skeptical expression, Anna tugged open the door, threw her purse on the floor between the seats, and got in the driver’s side. David plopped himself beside her with a mischievous grin.

  “And don’t you dare say anything!” She wagged her finger in his face before he could open his mouth. He was three years younger than she, having just turned fourteen in November, unbearably pompous at times, and good at everything. Except for his handwriting, which was atrocious. Sometimes a girl had to hold onto the small things.

  “Which way?” Anna said once they reached the main road. The windshield wipers flicked away the
new snow, barely keeping up. Anna peered through the white for oncoming cars and waited for David to say something.

  David studied the map, disconcertingly turning it this way and that, and then finally settled back in his seat with it upside down. “Uh ... right.”

  Anna took a right, and then a left, and within three minutes they were thoroughly lost. “This is so unlike you.”

  “I’m trying! But look at this—” He held out the map.

  Anna glanced at it, but one of the reasons she’d accepted his offer to come with her was because maps confused her under the best of circumstances.

  “The roads wander at random, and they all look the same,” he said. “Half of them don’t even have signs.”

  Anna had to agree. Identical leafless trees and rugged terrain faced them at every turn. She drove up one hill and down another, winding back and forth around rocky outcroppings and spectacular, yet similar, mansions. As the minutes ticked by, Anna clenched the wheel more tightly. She and David sat unspeaking in their heated, all-wheel drive cocoon, while the snow fell harder and the sky outside the windows darkened with the waning of the day. Then, just as they crested a small rise and were taking a downhill curve to the left, David hissed and reached for the handhold above his door.

  “What?” Anna took a quick look at David. His mouth was open but no sound came out, and he pointed straight ahead.

  Anna returned her gaze to the windshield. Ten feet in front of them, a wall of snow blocked the road, like a massive, opaque picture window. She had no time to respond, think, or press the brake before they hit it.

  Whuf!

  They powered through the wall and, for a long three seconds, a vast black space surrounded them. Then they burst through to the other side to find themselves bouncing down a snow-covered hill, much like the one they’d been driving on but with grass beneath their wheels instead of asphalt. During the first few seconds as Anna fought to bring the van under control, they rumbled into a clearing situated halfway down the hill. She gaped through the windshield at the three men on horseback, who’d appeared out of nowhere. They stared back at her, frozen as if in a photograph, oblivious now to a fourth man, who’d fallen on the ground.

  All four men held swords.

  “Anna!” David finally found his voice.

  Anna stood on the brakes but couldn’t get any traction in the snow. All three horses reared, catapulting their riders out of their saddles. Anna careened into two of the men who fell under the wheels with a sickening crunching thud. Still unable to stop the van, she plowed right over them and the snow-covered grass into the underside of a rearing horse.

  By then, the van was starting to slide sideways, and its nose slewed under the horse’s front hooves, which were high in the air, and hit its midsection full on. The windshield shattered from the impact of the hooves, the horse fell backwards, pinning its rider beneath it, and the airbags exploded. By then, the van’s momentum had spun it completely around, carried it across the clearing to the edge, and over it.

  The van slid another twenty feet down the hill before it connected with a tree at the bottom of the slope. Breathless, chained by the seatbelt, Anna sat stunned.

  David fumbled with the door handle. “Come on.” He shoved at her shoulder. When she didn’t move, he grasped her chin and turned her head to look at him. “The gas tank could explode.”

  Her heart catching in her throat, Anna wrenched the door open and tumbled into the snow. She and David ran toward a small stand of trees thirty feet to their left and stopped there, breathing hard. The van remained as they’d left it, sad and crumpled against the tree at the base of the hill. David had a line of blood on his cheek. Anna put her hand to her forehead, and it came away with blood, marring her brown glove.

  “What—” Anna swallowed hard and tried again. “How did we go from lost to totaled in two point four seconds?” She found a tissue in her pocket, wiped at the blood on her glove, and began dabbing at her forehead.

  David followed the van tracks with his eyes. “Can you walk up the hill with me and see what’s up there?”

  “Shouldn’t we call Mom first?” Their mother was giving a talk at a medieval history conference in Philadelphia, which is why she’d parked her children at her sister’s house in Bryn Mawr in the first place.

  “Let’s find out where we are before we call her,” David said.

  Anna was starting to shake, whether from cold or shock it didn’t really matter. David saw it and took her hand for perhaps the first time in ten years. He tugged her up the hill to the clearing. They came to a stop at the top, unable to take another step. Two dozen men lay dead on the ground. They sprawled in every possible position. A man close to Anna was missing an arm, and his blood stained the snow around him. Anna’s stomach heaved, and she turned away, but there was no place to look where a dead man didn’t lie.

  But even as she looked away, her brain registered that the men weren’t dressed normally. They wore mail and helmets and many still had swords in their hands. Then David left her at a run, heading along the path the van had followed. Anna watched him, trying not to see anyone else. He crouched next to a body.

  “Over here!” He waved an arm.

  Anna followed David’s snowy footprints, weaving among the dead men. Every one had been butchered. By the time she came to a halt beside David, tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “My God, David.” She choked on the words. “Where are we?” Heedless of the snow, Anna fell to her knees beside the man David was helping to sit upright. She was still breathing hard. She’d never been in a car accident before, much less one that landed her in the middle of a clearing full of dead men.

  “I don’t know.” David had gotten his arm under the man’s shoulder and now braced his back. The man didn’t appear to have any blood on him, although it was obvious from his quiet moans that he was hurt.

  The man grunted and put his hands to his helmet, struggling to pull it from his head. Anna leaned forward, helped him remove it, and then set it on the ground beside him. The man looked old to have been in a battle. He had a head of dark hair, with touches of white at his temples, but his mustache was mostly gray and his face was lined. At the moment, it was also streaked with sweat and dirt—and very pale.

  “Diolch,” he said.

  Anna blinked. That was thank you in Welsh, which she knew because of her mother’s near-continual efforts to teach her the language, although Anna had never thought she’d actually need to know it. She met the man’s eyes. They were deep blue but bloodshot from his exertions. To her surprise, instead of finding them full of fear and pain, they held amusement. Anna couldn’t credit it and decided she must be mistaken.

  The man turned to David. “Pwy dach chi?” Who are you?

  “Dafydd dw i,” David said. My name is David. David gestured towards Anna and continued in Welsh. “This is my sister, Anna.”

  The man’s eyes tracked back to Anna, and a twitch of a smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. “We need to find safety before night falls,” he said, still all in Welsh. “I must find my men.”

  Now that was equally ridiculous and impossible.

  Anna was trying to think what to say to him, anything to say to him, when someone shouted. She swung around. A dozen men on horses rode out of the trees near the van. David settled the man back on the ground and stood up. At the sight of him, the lead rider reined his horse. The others crowded up behind him.

  They all stared at each other, or rather, the men stared at David. They seemed frozen to their horses, and Anna looked up at David, trying to see what they saw. He had turned fourteen in November, but his voice hadn’t yet changed. Nor had he grown as tall as many of his friends. At 5’ 6”, he was still four inches taller than she, however. David had sandy blonde hair, cut short, and an athletic build thanks to his continuous efforts in soccer and karate. Anna’s friends at school considered him cute in a geeky sort of way.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

&nbs
p; “I don’t know,” David said. “Is it our clothes? Your hair?”

  Anna touched her head, feeling the clip that held her hair back from her face. The bun had come lose, and her hair cascaded down her back in a tangled, curly mass.

  “They’re looking at you, David, not me.”

  The man they’d helped moaned, and David crouched again beside him. His movement broke the spell holding the horsemen. They shouted, something like “move!” and “now!” and their lead rider climbed the hill and dismounted. He elbowed Anna out of the way, knocking her on her rear in the snow, and knelt beside the wounded man. This newcomer was about David’s height but fit the description Anna had always attributed to the word grizzled. Like all these men, he wore mail and a helmet and bore a sword. He had bracers on his arms—where had she learned that word?—and a surcoat over his chain mail.

  He and the injured man held a conversation while David and Anna looked at each other across the six feet of space that separated them. Despite her comprehension earlier, Anna couldn’t understand a word. Maybe the man had spoken slower for their benefit or in a different dialect from what he spoke now.

  Then the grizzled man shouted something and other men responded by hurrying up the hill. They surrounded the downed man and lifted him to his feet. He walked away—actually walked—men supporting him on either side.

  David and Anna sat in the snow, forgotten. Anna’s jeans were soaking wet, she was stiff from the cold, and her hands were frozen, even in her winter gloves.

  “What do we do now?” David’s eyes tracked the progress of the soldiers.

  “Let’s go back up the hill,” Anna said. “We didn’t drive that far. There must be a road at the top.”

  David gave her a skeptical look, which she ignored. Anna took a few steps, trying not to look at the dead men whom she’d managed to forget for a few minutes, and then found herself running away across the meadow. She veered into the wheel tracks of the van. David pounded along beside her until she had to slow down. They’d reached the upward slope at the far side of the meadow. The snow was deeper here because men and horses hadn’t packed it down; her feet lost their purchase on the steep slope, and she put out a hand to keep from falling.