Prince of Time (Book Two in the After Cilmeri series) Read online

  Worse, all day, I had to fight off the pity of my fellow students. It was in the way my friends either didn’t meet my eyes or gave me an insincere smile as I passed them. It was like batting tenth on a ten-man baseball team. Everyone knew you were left out in the cold, but at the same time, they had to sit in the dugout with you day after day, feigning respect. Of the five of us without funding, three had already cleaned out their desks and were gone. Kate, a (funded) friend, came by about noon.

  She plopped into a chair set near where I was standing, examining a pot shard with a magnifying glass. “So,” she said. “What’s this all about?”

  “You mean, ‘this,’ as in, ‘I no longer have a stipend,’ or ‘this’, as in, ‘why am I slaving away for Tillman instead of working on my own stuff’?” I said, without looking up.

  “Either. Both.”

  I sighed and looked down at her. “Tillman told me that I am one of the five students to whom the department has chosen not to offer a stipend. Thus, my options are to quit, pay my own way, or work for him.”

  “But the university doesn’t fund research assistantships anymore,” Kate protested. “This can’t pay your tuition.”

  I rubbed my forehead with my hand. I’d been so focused on living, I’d forgotten about that little item. This was probably just some campus job, like working in the cafeteria. It would pay my rent, but not my tuition.

  “What are you going to do? Are you going to call your parents?” she asked.

  I set down the pot, pulled up a chair next to hers, and sat, my head in my hands. “You know what they’re like,” I said. “I did talk to them yesterday and they offered to rent the shack next to theirs for me.”

  “No tuition, then,” Kate said.

  “No tuition,” I said. “I’m sure their offer sounded reasonable to them, though within thirty seconds, it was like my mom had forgotten why I’d called. She sent her best to you, though she called you ‘Jill,’ and asked after ‘Mark’.”

  “You don’t have a friend named, ‘Jill,’ and who’s ‘Mark’?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I dated a guy named Russ for a while during my junior year in college, but it didn’t click for us and I don’t recall mentioning him to my parents anyway.”

  Kate looked at me with unmistakable pity. She opened the little white bag on her lap. “Here, have a doughnut.”

  I took a cream-filled one. Great. I was reduced to sponging doughnuts off my friends. So much for improving my diet.

  Thus, after a fabulous day, it was nearly midnight before I was able to wave my ID at the guard on duty at the entrance to the library and make my way down into the basement stacks. In the archaeology building, Tillman’s lab was on the fifth floor and you knew how well a professor rated by the location of his office. That was fine within our own department, but to the University as a whole, we belonged in the basement. This was about where the funding for projects was too, unless you were a philandering full professor, that is.

  I’d come out of the elevator and turned the corner into the stacks, sucking down the last of yet another coffee as I did so, when a familiar figure stopped me in my tracks. Him. How did he get in here without any ID? Probably sweet talked a woman at a back entrance. I eyed him, uncertain as to whether I should turn around right then or risk a conversation. Every time he opened his mouth, I found myself succumbing to his words, even when they made no sense.

  David’s sword was on the table beside him and he was well-wrapped in his cloak. Just as well, as it was cold down here. I always wore a sweater or coat to work, even in summer.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, without turning around to look at me.

  Does he have eyes in the back of his head?

  “How did you know it was me?” I said, not moving.

  “Your fragrance is quite distinctive,” he said, turning around now and smiling at me.

  I didn’t even wear any perfume. Was he talking about the smell of my shampoo? A weird sort of compliment. The violent man of this morning was gone, replaced by the kid who I’d met at first, who only wanted to help his friend.

  Trying not to let him know that this was a capitulation of sorts, and that I kind of liked him, I moved to the other side of the table and put my backpack down. His more scary-looking, but incredibly handsome friend was wandering the stacks a short distance away. I was pleased to see him upright and realized that he was over six feet tall too, with the dark hair and blue eyes that screamed “Welsh!” to those in the know. He looked over and I gave him a little half-wave, before quickly putting my hand down. What am I doing?

  “They let you out?” I asked Ieuan, in Welsh.

  “This afternoon,” he said. “The wound wasn’t deep, just bloody. I’m taking a ‘pill’ that Prince Dafydd tells me is an ‘antibiotic’. He says that is why he brought me to this land, because he was afraid that I would die without it.”

  “Prince Dafydd?” I asked, then covered my ears. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  “It’s nothing,” David said, “just a nickname between the two of us.”

  I looked at him, and then at Ieuan, who was staring at his feet. Deciding to get down to business, since I was never going to get a straight answer out of these two, I pulled out my laptop, set it down on the table, and opened it. “What are you doing here?” I asked David. “Ieuan shouldn’t be on his feet, surely.”

  “Ieuan says sitting hurts more than standing, so I’m taking him at his word. I’m trying to find a knife similar to mine, so that when I attempt to sell it, I’ll already have done some of the work for the buyer.”

  Of course. Silly of me to think that I was the only one to have this idea. “Did you find something?” I asked.

  “Here,” he said, turning around the book he was reading so I could look at it.

  I skimmed the page as he aligned his knife with the picture in the book. They were remarkably similar. The knife in the book was found in a church in Cilmeri, near Builth Wells, in Wales. It was dated to the thirteenth century CE (common era), and purported to belong to Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last Prince of Wales.

  I looked up at him.

  “Is this why you were asking about Llywelyn ap Gruffydd?” I asked. “If your knife is its twin, it’s very old.”

  “I believe it is. As I said, my father gave it to me.”

  “And who’s your father?” I asked.

  “Um,” he said, but again didn’t answer. Instead, he reached for the knife and slid it into its sheath.

  “Do you know someone who might like to buy it?” he asked. “Dinner at the Salvation Army was filling, but not something we want to do on a regular basis.”

  I felt bad. They really didn’t have any money. I sat down in front of my laptop.

  “What’s your aunt’s name?” I asked. “I’ll look her up.”

  “Elisa Shepherd,” he said, and the smile was back.

  I searched for her and there she was, with phone number and address and an accompanying map. I pulled out my cell phone and handed it to him.

  “Why don’t you call her?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “She thinks I’m dead. I can’t just call her.”

  “What? What are you saying? Why is it that virtually everything out of your mouth is a complete sentence that makes no sense at all?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t think I can call her.”

  “Back up to where she thinks you’re dead,” I said.

  “My sister and I disappeared in early December, three years ago this coming winter. If I were Aunt Elisa and I called her, I wouldn’t believe me either.” He shrugged. “My voice has changed since then, so she wouldn’t even recognize it.”

  “But you think showing up on her doorstep will be better?” I said.

  “At least then she’ll see me. She might shut the door in my face, but if I call her and scare her, she might call the police and I’d never get close to her.”

  “Email?”
<
br />   “Same thing; and I don’t have an email account anyway.”

  “No email; no money; no phone; no ID. You obviously aren’t dead, yet you haven’t bothered to let anyone know you’re alive. Where have you been living the last two and a half years?”

  David looked at me with the same completely blank stare he’d given me in the parking lot, and then looked away. “I really can’t tell you,” he said, finally. “You wouldn’t believe me. Sometimes I don’t even believe me.”

  “Try me,” I said, with all the confidence of the congenitally unflappable. I’d lived in a yurt after all. If he was from the frozen tundra, he would find a kindred soul in me.

  There was that look again. “My name, three years ago, was David Lloyd,” he said. “Somewhere on the internet, you may encounter a record of our unsolved case. If you read it, you would find that my sister, Anna, and I disappeared on the evening of December 11, 2010. Neither the minivan we drove, nor our bodies, were ever found. These last years we’ve been living in Wales...in the thirteenth century.”

  I blinked. David looked steadily back at me. I opened my mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. Okay, maybe I’m a little flappable.

  “And Ieuan?”

  David sighed. “He was caught up in the time warp that brought me back here. He’s one of my men-at-arms.”

  Ieuan walked over, talking in a flurry of words, only about three of which I understood. Strike that. I understood nothing he said.

  “Slow down!” I said.

  He stopped, and then started again. “As my lord told you, I am Ieuan ap Cynan,” Ieuan said, with a slight bow. “We were traveling along Hadrian’s Wall when we were captured and imprisoned in Carlisle Castle by the crusader and castellan, Sir John de Falkes. We escaped but English soldiers chased us and one of them shot me in the back. My lord picked me up, ran with me to the edge of a cliff, and jumped. I remember nothing except a black abyss before our feet, and then I woke up in your hospital.”

  Ieuan pronounced the word in English, as if he didn’t know the Welsh equivalent.

  I looked at David, who was nodding. “Tell her the rest, Ieuan.”

  “He tells me that this is ‘the future,’ though when we were in Wales, he’d spoken of this country as the land of Madoc. I’ve ridden the vehicle which brought his sister and him to Wales, and it is a wondrous machine, but so is everything and everyone I have seen in this land.”

  “The land of Madoc?” I asked. I turned to David. “What’s he talking about?”

  “You may recall the story of Madoc ap Owain Gwynedd. In 1170 AD he sailed from Wales to the New World. Lewis and Clark believed that the Mandan people of the upper Missouri River were his descendants.”

  “Yes, of course, I know the story.”

  “Well, it might seem odd now, but it made sense to my father and me to explain the existence of a minivan in thirteenth century Wales, as attributable to Madoc’s descendents. It even kind of makes sense.”

  If you’re demented. “You’re serious,” I said.

  “Yes, of course. Everything Ieuan and I have told you here is true. My hope is that you can convince him that this is the twenty-first century, and maybe in the process, he can convince you that he was born in 1261 AD.”

  I coughed. I ran my fingers though my hair and I plopped myself back into my chair. “Okay, Ieuan. Who is David’s father? He still isn’t telling me.”

  “Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of Wales.”

  Appalled, I held out my hand to stop him. “That’s it!” I said. “Don’t tell me anymore.” I slammed the lid down on my laptop and stood up. With my hands resting flat on the table, I leaned into David’s face.

  “What in the hell is going on? Why are you doing this? What’s the point? Why do you want to screw with my mind? I actually felt sorry for you for a moment!” My hands shaking, I stuffed my laptop into my bag and threw it onto my shoulder.

  David moved to block the exit. I did a side-to-side dance to try to get around him, but then stopped, frustrated, three feet from him.

  “Please,” he said. “Please listen to me. You speak Welsh and you’ve helped us, beyond anything I should have asked. I’ve long since stopped believing in coincidences. Please don’t walk out on us.”

  “You’re trying to tell me that two and a half years ago you and your sister time-traveled to the Middle Ages, where you found out you were really the Prince of Wales?”

  “Yes,” David said. “I know it sounds crazy. Like I said, I would think it was crazy if I weren’t living it myself.”

  “You have men-at-arms at your command, yet you grew up here, with no training or previous knowledge that Llywelyn was your true father?”

  David had the nerve to shrug his shoulders. “All Americans behave like royalty, Bronwen. Except for the killing, I don’t have to be anyone other than myself.”

  Except for the killing. I stared down at the floor and then at David. Ieuan came up beside me. He stood close, his hand resting on the small of my back. “Tell me when you were born,” he said gently. “It would help me very much to know in what time I’m living.”

  “I was born in 1990. This is 2013,” I said. “In your terms, two thousand and thirteen years since the birth of Christ.”

  Ieuan nodded his head, very slowly, then turned it to look at David. David spread his hands wide. “I’m sorry, Ieuan. I couldn’t tell you this when we were in Wales. It’s nearly impossible to believe until you live it. I’ve told very few people, and not even Bevyn. My father has confided only in Tudur and Goronwy.”

  “Who are Tudur and Goronwy?” I asked.

  “Goronwy is my father’s steward,” said David. “Tudur is the grandson of Ednyfed Fychan, Llywelyn Fawr’s steward. Ednyfed Fychan was—”

  “I know who Ednyfed Fychan was,” I snapped. “His grandson Tudur founded the House of Tudor in England.”

  “What is she saying about Tudur?” Ieuan asked, his eyes widening. “What has Tudur to do with the English?”

  David shook his head and put a reassuring hand on Ieuan’s arm. “Nothing, Ieuan.” he said. “At least not yet.”

  “Okay,” I said. I turned my back on David and walked the other way, pacing around the table twice before coming to stand in front of him again. “I know I should just walk out of here, but for some reason I’m not going to.”

  The men had watched my pacing and now Ieuan reached around me and gently relieved me of my backpack. He held it up and inspected it, before slinging it along one shoulder. “This is just like Princess Marged’s pack, my lord, though larger, and believe it or not, heavier,” he said.

  “Argh!” I stomped my foot, then pointed at David. “You have no money?”

  “No money,” David answered. “I have three packets of sugar that Ieuan made me put in my pocket to take home, if we can, in fact, return home, but they aren’t going to get us far.”

  “All right then. I have a little. I know a place that’s open all night. Let’s go get a pizza and you can tell me all about it.”

  Dafydd looked down at me. “Pizza?” he asked, in an expectant voice.

  Lunatics, both of them.

  Chapter Seven

  Ieuan

  I followed Prince Dafydd and Bronwen out of the “stacks,” and up the stairs through the library. I admired the many books along the way, and marveled at the number of scribes it must have taken to copy out so many. This calculation alone would have forced me to admit my lord’s words were true, but I’d already done so, long before we left the hospital. I’d lain in bed the previous night, staring up at the ceiling, trying to take an accounting of the men and materials needed to create what I saw before me. Prince Dafydd told me that one kind of machine built another kind of machine, which wasn’t easy to comprehend, but I also knew that somewhere along the way, a man had to build the first machine.

  It wasn’t reasonable to think that man had been Madoc, or even his son or grandson. Madoc had sailed from Wales less than a century before I was b
orn. Changes of the magnitude and type in David’s land were not possible in so short a time. I didn’t believe it. But what had happened?

  At the time, I’d turned my head to look at Prince Dafydd, who hadn’t been asleep either. He was absorbed in a book, written in English so I couldn’t make out the title. He’d shown me how small the print was and how thin the pages. It told a story involving a machine that flew to the stars.

  “Tell me again, my lord,” I’d asked. “How did we come here?”

  Prince Dafydd rested the book on his lap. “I don’t know, Ieuan,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible—but here we are, so it is possible.”

  “How do you explain it?” I asked. “Is it magic? A miracle? A gift from God?”

  “I’m not going to deny that, Ieuan,” Dafydd said. “I can’t sneer at divine intervention or discount the possibility of it.”

  “But you believe it’s something else?” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” Dafydd said. “Yet, I can’t live my life as if I should somehow expect a miracle because I need one. All my life I’ve learned to operate as if everything has a cause, and if I can’t explain something, it’s because I’m ignorant. Magic, certainly, is something in which I don’t believe.”

  “So magic to you is not something for which there is no explanation.”

  “Yes,” Prince Dafydd said. “It’s simply something for which I don’t have enough information to explain. Yet.”

  I’d faced the ceiling again and thought some more. I’d never felt the need to consider what might constitute the difference between magic and miracles—and that which passed for them. It was remarkable to think about living in a world in which everything had an explanation, as Dafydd seemed to.

  To me, magic was pagan: the druids of old whom the Romans, pagan themselves, forced underground. Miracles, in turn, were a gift from God. But now that I was living in the midst of a miracle, I could see how someone could view them as being two sides of the same coin—both events or works that we puny humans were unable to comprehend or explain. I’d never known anyone accused of witchcraft, but I’d heard the stories. We needed to avoid the stain of that accusation at all cost, or jeopardize whatever God had planned for Wales, and for Prince Dafydd.