Prince of Time (12 page)

“And we don’t know what’s going to happen now,” Ieuan said.

“It’s going to be a time of great upheaval,” I said. “With Edward dead, who claims the English throne? His eldest son, who is just over a year old, inherits. But you know as well as I that inheriting the throne and claiming it are two entirely different things.”

“Hereford,” Ieuan growled. He used the same tone every time he mentioned the name.
Everything always comes back to Humphrey de Bohun.

I leaned my head against the headrest. “Hereford,” I repeated. “He won’t claim the throne, but while the cat’s away, the mouse will play.”

“Some mouse,” Ieuan said.

“Do I get to ask who Hereford is?” Bronwen said.

“He is a lord of the March as well as Lord High Constable of England,” Ieuan answered. “His full name is Humphrey de Bohun. The Welsh have suffered for generations under the Earl of Hereford’s boot, whoever he may be.”

“He’ll take advantage,” I said. “Edward’s death alone is a huge gift to him—but coupled with the deaths of half of the nobility of the March, plus mine, will only serve his interests. If I didn’t know the true story, I would’ve guessed that Hereford himself colluded with Jacob to kill everyone.”

“Carew will tell your father what happened in the pavilion,” Ieuan said. “Even without us there, the Prince will know what to do and how to prepare for it. He is in a much stronger position than he was, even a year ago.”

“What will he do?” Bronwen said, trying to follow along.

David let a breath hiss through his teeth. “Prepare for war.”

Chapter Ten

Bronwen

“
P
repare for war,” David said.

No matter how impossible, improbable, and outright ridiculous it was to think it, David thought he was a Prince of Wales. He sat in my car and talked about war with the Earl of Hereford, dead for nearly seven hundred and fifty years, as if it could happen tomorrow.
To him, it could happen tomorrow!

We drove for a while in silence, each with our own thoughts. Eventually, the sky began to lighten, and I pulled off the highway and into a McDonald’s restaurant. We all ordered, and as usual, I paid. I thought they’d eaten a lot of pizza, but I’ve never seen any men eat as much in one sitting as those two did. Ieuan ordered another root beer and this one was super large. I worried about his teeth. If Ieuan really was from the thirteenth century, he didn’t have a lot of familiarity with sugar. But that is probably why both he and David ordered hot fudge sundaes ‘to go’. I was surprised they were even on the menu at breakfast, but maybe there was a market for them, beyond my two lunatic companions.

We pulled into the long driveway that led to David’s aunt’s house a little after 7:30 in the morning. Elisa opened the door to us. She had blonde hair, David’s blue eyes, and was dressed professionally in a tailored suit with heels, making her five inches taller than I was instead of three.

“Hi, Aunt Elisa,” David said, leaning against one of the porch pillars. He kept a few feet away, so as not to appear threatening. He and Ieuan had also left their swords in the car, which I thought was probably a good thing.

Elisa stood frozen in the doorway, her eyes fixed on David’s. She must have seen something in them, because she didn’t slam the door immediately.

“Who are you?” Elisa said.

“It’s David, Auntie,” he said, “all grown up.”

Silence. David didn’t fill it. Elisa was immobile as she regarded him. Her eyes traveled from the top of his head, down to his boots, and back again.

“She’s not Anna.” Elisa flicked a glance at me.

“No, Aunt Elisa,” David said. “This is my friend, Bronwen Llywelyn.”

I stuck out my hand. “Hi.”

Elisa’s good manners were ingrained, because she took my hand and shook it.

“May we come in?” David said.

Elisa took a step back, no longer meeting David’s eyes. “I have to go to work. Can you come back later?”

A look passed over David’s face. Impatience, I thought. “Aunt Elisa, we have nowhere to go. I have news of Mom and Anna. Please let us in. We won’t be any trouble.”

Suddenly Elisa’s face crumpled. “Is it really you, David? Can it really be you?”

David stepped forward, his shoulder pushing the door open wider, and Elisa moved into his arms. She wrapped her arms around his waist and sobbed into his neck. I couldn’t see his face, but he bent his head and rested his cheek on the top of her head.

“I’m sorry to surprise you this way. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Slowly recovering, wiping the tears on her cheeks, Elisa let us inside the house. As we followed her into the living room, she gripped David’s arm so tightly her knuckles were white. Everyone grieved in a different way. Hers was suddenly sharp and new all over again. I didn’t know what that was like. I never had any siblings and it wasn’t like I was close to my parents.

Elisa pulled David to a seat beside her on her coach. It was yellow, with green and blue flowers, and David looked incongruous there in his war gear. Ieuan and I took chairs opposite but her eyes were only for David. She clutched both his arms. “Why are you dressed this way?”

David put his own hands on her shoulders, but didn’t speak, and it occurred to me that he hadn’t thought this through further than arriving in Bryn Mawr.
How do you tell your Aunt that her sister isn’t dead but living in the Middle Ages as the Princess of Wales
?

“Auntie,” David finally said. “I want to explain, but I can’t think of any good way to do it.”

“Just tell me,” she said.

David took a deep breath and let it out. “When Anna and I took your van to pick up Christopher,” David said, “we crossed a barrier into another time, specifically into thirteenth century Wales. When Mom disappeared a year ago, she also traveled there. I don’t know how it is possible, or why, only that it happened. We are all well, but living in another world, one I need to get back to as soon as possible.”

Elisa stilled and then released him. She put her hand to her mouth, her nose pinched and her face white.

“What are you saying?” she said, anger in her voice. “Why are you telling me this?”

As her words were painfully similar to the ones I’d fired at him, I understood what she was feeling, and thought I could help. “Elisa, please listen to him. I know this is hard to hear, but proof of his words is before you. David
is
here. He has so much more to explain to you and I believe that he’s telling the truth.”

Elisa stood and stepped to look out the bank of windows that opened to the rear of her house. Two French doors led to a patio. She leaned her forehead on the glass and fiddled with the lock with one hand. Then, she fisted the other and raised it above her head to pound it against the door. The glass didn’t break, but Elisa did.

“I can’t—I can’t do this.” She turned on her heel, both fists clenched at her sides though her anger was contradicted by the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Just … just … stay here. Make yourself at home.” And then she was running from the room, her head down, refusing to look at David again. Her heels staccatoed on the slate in the hall, keys tinkled as she grabbed them off the table by the door, and then the front door opened and closed behind her.

David sat in silence, his head turned in the direction she’d gone. Then he stood and went to the door. I reached him just as he opened it, in time to see his Aunt speed away up the driveway in her car. He turned to us. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know how to tell her, and now I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Give her some time,” Ieuan said. “She’s gone to collect herself. She’ll be back.”

David nodded, shrugged, and closed the door. I looked from one to the other, saddened by Aunt Elisa’s grief, but also appalled by the men’s complacency. Yet, perhaps they were right, and I hoped, like me, she’d come home willing to listen.

* * * * *

Make yourself at home
. The words resonated in my head. I regret to say, David and Ieuan did make themselves at home, with enthusiasm. I hadn’t known that a shower could make a person as happy as the one in Elisa Shepherd’s house made Ieuan. He was truly a kid in a candy store. Everything was exciting to him: the food; television; books; floors; cleaning products. He overlooked nothing in that whole house in his explorations. David just let him do what he wanted.

“Ieuan is one of the smartest, most curious men I know,” David said in an aside to me. “Let him be. He’ll wring from this every possible experience he can, and then return to Wales, grateful for the chance to have seen it.”

David, for his part, spent most of the day on Elisa’s computer. I poked my head into the office every now and then. He was friendly, but absorbed in whatever he was doing and at first I left him to it. I kept thinking that I should go back to Penn State, but I told myself that I was too tired; that the drive was too long on no sleep. I went back to Ieuan. He was sitting on the couch, his hand resting lightly on his bandages; perhaps his ribs hurt him more than he’d admitted. He held the remote control in his hand and as David had taught him, flipped through the channels.

I sat beside him, finding myself a corner of the couch in which to curl up.

“The colors aren’t true.” He glanced over at me.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“The green isn’t true green; the sky’s too blue; and I can stare at the sun in this machine and not hurt my eyes.”

He flipped silently through the channels. “Click. Click. Click.”

I watched him, noting again the solidity of him, how he was so physically
there
in a way in which I wasn’t accustomed. He held the remote in his left hand, balancing it in his palm, and it too reflected the arduous nature of his upbringing. Thick calluses covered his fingers, and he had a long scar running across the back of his hand between his thumb and forefinger I hadn’t noticed before,.

“What’s that from?” I gestured in the air above it.

“Oh, that.” He transferred the remote to his right hand and held up his left, flexing his fingers before forming a fist. “I was skinning a rabbit with a dull knife, so I was pressing harder than I should have had to. The knife slipped and left me this. It took nearly a year to get my full motion back.”

“How old were you?”

“Nine.”

“I was ten.” I held out my left hand to show a scar on my forefinger. “Except I was scaling fish.”

Ieuan took my hand to inspect it, and then surprised me by ducking his head to give the scar a quick kiss. “You could have lost the end of it. You were lucky.”

He went back to his television as if our exchange had been the most normal thing in the world and I slowly pulled my hand back, not knowing what to think. He stopped at a soccer game. “I like this. It’s similar to a game I played with my friends as a boy. My sister was always worming her way in, asking to play too.”

“You have a sister?”

“Her name is Lili. She’s fifteen now and will marry soon. It was my hope that after our trip to England, I would take my leave of my Prince for a time and find her a husband.”

He went back to the remote. “Click. Click. Click.”

“Prince Dafydd told me that you’re not married.” Ieuan said.

“No, I’m not,” I said.

“You must be widowed, then.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve never married.”

He looked at me then. “How is that possible? Prince Dafydd says you must be at least twenty-two years old, though I find it hard to believe him. Where’s your father?”

“I’m twenty-three, and my father lives in Belize, at the end of a hundred mile dirt road. He doesn’t think it’s his responsibility to find me a husband. In the twenty-first century, nobody gets married at fifteen and when women do get married, they find their own husbands.”

Ieuan turned back to his television, but his eyes had an unfocused look that told me he wasn’t watching it. “I don’t arrange a marriage for my sister because I want her gone from my house but because I love her and want what is best for her.”

“Does she want you to find her a husband?” I said.

“She wants to join me in Prince Dafydd’s service,” he said. “Even you must admit that’s not possible.”

“Not in your time,” I said. “In this time, women can be soldiers.”

Ieuan clicked off the television and gave me his full attention. “Is that what you want? Do you want to fight and kill men?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t. But I support the right of a woman to be a soldier if she wants to be.”

“Aah,” Ieuan said. “You’re talking about choices.”

“I am?” I felt like I was losing control of the conversation.

“It seems to me that you have many choices in this century. That’s not true in Wales. For my sister, Lili may become a wife or enter a convent. For me, I had no choice at all. I became a soldier.”

“There are other jobs in your world,” I said. “Blacksmith, farmer, merchant. Those are all choices.”

“Not for me,” Ieuan said. “I am my father’s only son. He was a knight, so I am also a knight. I have lands and must care for the people who live on them. I have a steward and housekeeper and Lili, who does much of the work of running my estates when I’m away.”

“So she does do important work,” I said.

“Yes, like mine, but it’s not work that she chooses. When I inherited my estate, it became her job to run the household.”

“And if either of you chose
not
to do that work?” I said. “What then?”

“The estate would fall into disarray; we would lose our lands because Prince Llywelyn would object to our lack of husbandry; or worse, the English would see an advantage in our negligence and take our lands by force, harming the people who live on the land and work it. When my uncle died, I swore an oath to Llywelyn, my liege lord, and in turn to the people whom I protect. Doing something different from this, along the lines of what you describe isn’t a possible
choice
for us. We have a duty to fulfill, for our Prince and our country, and our children to come.”