Warden of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book 8) Read online

  Warden of Time

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  Historical Background

  Sample: The Good Knight

  A novel from the After Cilmeri series

  Warden of Time

  by

  Sarah Woodbury

  Copyright © 2014 by Sarah Woodbury

  Cover image by Christine DeMaio-Rice at Flip City Books

  http://flipcitybooks.com

  Warden of Time

  Warden of Time continues the story of time travel, romance, and adventure begun with Daughter of Time …

  As both modern man and medieval king, David is committed to transforming medieval England into his own version of Avalon. But not everyone supports his ideals, and having offended the pope by welcoming Jews and heretics into England, David is summoned to Canterbury to explain himself.

  When information comes to light that reveals the accusations against him have less to do with religion than with power and wealth, David finds himself on familiar ground—and at the center of a conspiracy that stretches from Ireland to Italy. Facing excommunication, a fickle populace, and rebellion even by his fellow time travelers, he must decide what his throne is worth, and what he’s willing to sacrifice to keep it.

  Warden of Time is the eighth novel in the After Cilmeri series.

  www.sarahwoodbury.com

  To Deb, Tom, and Jon

  … who’ve been in this with me

  from the start

  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

  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

  Other books by Sarah Woodbury:

  Cold My Heart: A Novel of King Arthur

  The Last Pendragon

  The Pendragon’s Quest

  Cast of Characters

  David (Dafydd)—Time-traveler, King of England

  Lili—Queen of England, Ieuan’s sister

  Callum—Time-traveler, Earl of Shrewsbury

  Cassie—Time-traveler, Callum’s wife

  Ieuan—Welsh knight, one of David’s men

  Bronwen—Time-traveler, married to Ieuan

  Arthur—son of David and Lili (born June 1289)

  Catrin—daughter of Ieuan and Bronwen (born Nov. 1288)

  Nicholas de Carew—Norman/Welsh lord

  William de Bohun—David’s squire

  Justin—David’s captain

  Bevyn—David’s adviser

  Huw—Member of the Order of the Pendragon

  Darren Jeffries—time traveler (bus passenger)

  Peter Cobb—time traveler (bus passenger)

  Rachel Wolff—time traveler (bus passenger)

  Chapter One

  September 1292

  Canterbury Castle

  David

  The courtyard of Canterbury Castle was full of men and horses when Carew and I entered it. I was already late for my meeting with the emissary from the pope at the Archbishop’s palace, and my guard had been gathering in preparation for accompanying me.

  It was true that the King of England came and went as he pleased, and even a papal legate couldn’t complain if I blew him off, but it might get our meeting off on the wrong foot. I didn’t want the legate to read anything untoward into my lateness or think me petty, but it probably couldn’t be helped that he would. It wasn’t as if I was going to explain what had held me up.

  Looking for Callum, I put one foot in the stirrup and boosted myself to a standing position so I could look over the heads of everyone else, but I didn’t see him. He and Carew were supposed to be coming with me. I was about to drop to the ground again when Peter Cobb, lately of Avalon, led his horse underneath the gatehouse. He stopped to speak to the guard at the gate before continuing through it. As I watched, the guard pointed towards the castle steps. Peter looked in that direction, his brow furrowing, and I waved a hand to draw his attention. His expression cleared, and he hurried toward me.

  “What’s up?” I said, settling into my saddle as he reached me.

  “Callum asked that I report to you,” Peter said, speaking in a variation of medieval English so Carew could understand him. “We’ve found Noah and Mike.”

  “Where?” Carew stood nearby, about to mount his horse.

  “In an alley outside an inn,” Peter said.

  I looked at Peter warily, thinking this could not be the good news it seemed at first. Lee, Mike, and Noah, my three most discontented time traveling bus passengers, had been missing since earlier that morning. At first I’d thought nothing of it—they’d been carousing and womanizing since they’d arrived in the Middle Ages ten months ago—but then my old captain, Bevyn, had arrived in Canterbury, having traveled all the way from Wales, to tell me the bad news.

  These three weren’t just discontented. They were traitors. And it was dealing with the consequences of their treachery that had made me late for my meeting.

  Peter sighed. “They’re both dead. Noah was stabbed and Mike’s throat was cut.”

  “Oh, wow.” The exclamation came out before I could modify it to something more appropriate to the moment.

  “That means murder,” Carew said. “Did you return just to tell us that or does Callum want King David to come to him?”

  “Please, sire.” Peter took in a breath. “Lee left a message Callum thinks you ought to see.”

  “You’d better lead the way,” I said.

  Peter mounted and headed back towards the gate.

  Justin, the captain of my guard, had been talking to several other soldiers. At the sight of me following Peter to the gate, he quickly organized a phalanx of knights and men-at-arms to accompany me. I wouldn’t have left the castle with just Peter and Carew—I knew better than to do that—but a small, evil, and unworthy part of me had been amused to see Justin sweat about it. It was better than thinking about what faced me in that alley.

  I wasn’t squeamish. I’d killed men myself too many times. It wasn’t something I was proud of, but it was a fact of my life, going back to that first fight against King Edward’s forces at the Conwy River when I was fourteen. Murder, however, was different from battles, even if it made no material sense that it should be. It was a crime no
t only against the people who died, but against their families and the state as well.

  “Where are we going, sire?” Justin said as he pulled up beside me.

  “Callum has found Mike and Noah,” I said. “Dead.”

  Justin’s mouth formed a silent ‘O’, and then he waved a hand to his men to form a tighter grouping around me. Two guards rode in front, with Peter ahead of them leading the way. The main street of Canterbury was wide enough for four men to ride abreast, and we ended up in something of a diamond formation, with Carew and me in the middle.

  The people of Canterbury were out in force since it was barely noon, and they scurried to get out of the way, gawking and bowing as we passed.

  Peter didn’t take us far—we could have walked, though I generally didn’t walk anywhere. It was a matter of a few turnings among progressively narrower streets until he arrived in an alleyway between an inn and a row of two-story houses built one against the other. The alley had been blocked off by a wooden sawhorse, and a crowd of people six or seven deep pressed against the barrier.

  Peter elbowed his way through them, and Justin got his men to clear a path for me. I dismounted just outside the alleyway and handed my reins to an eight-year-old boy who stood watching. I hoped he hadn’t seen the dead men, but this being the Middle Ages, he probably had. “Take care of my horse for me, will you, son?”

  His eyes widened when he realized who I was, and he ducked his head and bowed. “Yes, sire.”

  Carew and the others followed me as I sidled between the barrier and the wall. Several guardsmen stood facing outward, shielding the dead men on the ground from the onlookers’ view. Each bent his head to me as I moved through them, and then I stopped short as soon as I saw what lay beyond their circle: Noah and Mike, just as Peter had said.

  Blood soaked the front of Mike’s gray tunic, having flowed from a terrible wound in his throat. It looked as if Noah had been harder to kill—perhaps having come through the doorway of the inn into the alley with more wariness than Mike. He’d been stabbed in the midsection, and from the amount of blood coating his shirt, he’d bled out after having been settled against the wall. More blood pooled underneath both men.

  Dr. Rachel Wolff, another bus passenger, crouched before Noah’s body. She took notes on a piece of paper, her eyes flicking from the bodies to her medieval version of a clipboard. She looked over at me and grimaced but then went back to her work. I was glad I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I didn’t think I would have lost the contents of my stomach on the ground, but my meal would have sat like a rock in my clenched belly.

  Callum stood with one arm folded across his chest and his fist to his chin. He acknowledged me with a nod of his head as I came to stand beside him. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Of course.” I consciously steadied my breathing. It wasn’t that I was feeling light-headed exactly, but it was best to pre-empt any possibility that I might. “What do we know?”

  Callum gestured towards Mike and Noah. “They’re dead, as you can see. I have men questioning the neighbors and the owner of the inn to see if anyone saw or heard anything. Jeffries is heading up that task as he has the most experience. It seems Mike and Noah trusted Lee when they shouldn’t have.” Then Callum pointed to the alley wall.

  Up until that point, I’d had eyes only for the bodies, but now I allowed my gaze to roam upward. An image of a fist had been painted in the middle of the wall, in what I thought (sickeningly) might be blood. I really hoped it wasn’t. Below the drawing were the words: Tiocfaidh ár lá.

  “I’m not sure what I’m looking at,” I said.

  Callum glanced at me in surprise, and then he dropped his arms and turned to look at me more fully. “I apologize, my lord. I forgot where you grew up. It means, ‘our day will come’, in Irish Gaelic. That’s a slogan of the Irish resistance to English rule.”

  “Lee did this?” I said.

  “Who else could have drawn that fist?” Callum said. “It isn’t as if we might possibly entertain the idea that Noah and Mike were jumped by street thieves.”

  “I suppose not.”

  I rubbed my chin, more befuddled than I could articulate by this turn of events. While I dithered beside Callum, two of my men covered both bodies with cloths so they were no longer exposed to sight. Rachel had straightened to talk to Peter, and Callum gestured that they should come closer. “Do you know the time of death?” he said.

  “The bodies are warm, but they’re stiffening,” she said.

  “So, they’ve been dead a few hours,” Callum said.

  “More than three, but fewer than twelve. I don’t have the equipment to say better than that,” she said. “The alley is used to store refuse, and the killer scattered straw over the bodies, so they weren’t found immediately. But you’re right, it couldn’t have been long.”

  “Mike and Noah were seen in the castle shortly after dawn,” I said, “but not since then.”

  Rachel checked the sky with a quick glance. “It’s noon now? So, that puts time of death within six hours.” She nodded. “That makes sense.”

  Footfalls came from behind me, and Bevyn’s gruff voice said, “Sire, we have a cart available. Can we move the bodies?”

  I turned to look at my old captain, not actually knowing the answer, but Callum nodded. While Rachel and Peter moved off with Bevyn to supervise the work, Callum and I shifted to one side to allow room for the cart to maneuver in the narrow alley.

  Cassie, another fellow time-traveler and Callum’s wife, had been standing a few feet away, studying the writing, and now she joined us too. “Why would Lee write that on the wall?”

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “I’m standing here, aren’t I? It’s a message from Lee to me.”

  Chapter Two

  The day had started out so well, too. It had begun like most of my days, with me rising at dawn, having woken beside my beautiful wife. Pregnant again, Lili was past the worst of the nausea and radiated health. Although Lili’s overall serenity was hard to undermine, she and I shared a mutual panic that in a few short months we were going to have to meet the emotional needs of two children. Without disturbing her, I’d slipped out of bed to find my three-year-old son wide awake in the adjacent room. We’d breakfasted together, Arthur talking non-stop the whole time.

  He’d then played at my feet for the next hour as I’d signed documents, made plans, and overseen the many divisions within my government. It was laborious work, often tedious and frustrating, but it was also necessary for the running of the country. My routine was the same whether I was staying in Westminster Palace, York, or here, at Canterbury, sixty miles east of London, and would have been even if I hadn’t been trying to drag England towards a future it probably wasn’t ready for.

  Other daily appointments included hearing grievances in the great hall and conferring with a larger group of men—essentially my cabinet, consisting of any officers of state and representatives from Parliament who’d come to my court that day. Politics had become my life. No wonder King Edward, my predecessor, had spent so much time making war. It was easier than keeping the peace.

  Then had come the bad news: Bevyn had stormed through the door of the expansive room that I was using as my office, my brother-in-law, Ieuan, on his heels, and announced that not only had Lee, Mike, and Noah fled the castle together with their belongings, but that Lee, in particular, had spent the last ten months working against me and my father, the King of Wales.

  We hadn’t known then that Mike and Noah were already lying dead in the alley, so we hadn’t yet made the Irish connection, but what Bevyn had turned up was daunting enough: Lee had taken money my father had given him as an allowance and used it to charm those he could befriend and bribe those he couldn’t into becoming his allies, in preparation for a possible rebellion against my father. The list of people involved ranged from high lords within the Kingdom of Wales to men-at-arms to lowly serving maids.

  “I thought Lee
had become something of a friend,” I said, more than a little nonplussed to learn I’d harbored a snake in my court.

  Bevyn’s face had been devoid of all expression. “I know.”

  Years of acquaintance with Bevyn had taught me to listen when he spoke, even if I didn’t like the words he said. He and I had gone through a rough patch in the aftermath of my crowning as King of England, but my fundamental trust in his loyalty—and my need for his wisdom—had pushed me to move past my occasional concerns about his methods.

  More often than not, when Bevyn and I were together, we fell easily into old patterns of master and apprentice. I didn’t begrudge Bevyn his role. He’d been my first teacher in Wales. He’d give his life for me, as would Carew, Callum, and Ieuan. And I’d give mine for them. Sometimes, when I hated being king a little too much, I felt like I already had.

  “He must have been prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.” Ieuan’s blue eyes had flashed with annoyance, and his black hair had been mussed as if he’d run his hands through it several times. He was wearing it long these days, pulled back and tied at the base of his neck with a leather cord. Lili, his sister and my wife, thought he looked particularly dashing that way.

  I wasn’t one to judge another man’s style, but I’d resolutely kept my own sandy brown hair cropped close to my head, the better to manage the wearing of a helmet. Or a crown. Lili complained that it was really that I was too lazy to be bothered with doing anything else with it.

  Bevyn grimaced. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a contact in Wales or London who warned him I was coming. He could have been ready for the day when I learned the truth about what he’s been doing all these months and acted against him.” Bevyn was a legend among the Welsh soldiers and spoken of almost like the bogey-man among the English ones. He’d been my first captain and was now castellan of Llanfaes Castle on Anglesey. He was also one of the leaders—if not the leader—of the very secretive Order of the Pendragon, whose purpose was to protect me and my interests.