Chapter Five
Meg
This was so not acceptable. It might be all right for Mr. Llywelyn Fantasy to live his life in the thirteenth century—and it was clear now that he must be part of some sort of intentional community in which a whole lot of people were living that dream with him—but I had to get going. Mom and Elisa would be worried sick by now. Had they called the police? If so, what would they find?
The thought nagged at me. I didn’t know what had happened to my car or where I was. I remembered sliding into the embankment next to the tree on which Trev died, but nothing after that other than a gaping blackness. I concentrated, trying to recall the impact. Wasn’t there a blue-gray sky? No snow, but a sea instead? How was that possible?
I lay in bed, listening hard. Sounds I’d interpreted as a fan, or the sloshing of a washing machine, or heavy breathing in and out, could easily be waves on a shore. We’d spent a summer at Cape Hatteras after my dad retired and I’d loved falling asleep to the waves rolling in and out. How far from Radnor had Llywelyn taken me? Could I be on the Jersey shore somewhere?
It was hard to believe that I’d survived the crash unscathed, except for an ache in my neck and a throbbing in my head. Anna slept on, apparently completely fine and Llywelyn himself had so far proved to be harmless, seemingly even forgiving me for trying to kill him. I rolled onto my stomach and stuck my face into the pillow, moaning at the thought. It was stupid, stupid, stupid of me to have tried to grab the knife as if I was some sort of karate expert.
I’d taken a self-defense class at sixteen where I’d learn to kick a guy in the balls, but had no real belief that I could do it under stress, and most of the class had consisted of role-playing games anyway, which Elisa and I had hated. Hard to imagine a role-playing game that could have effectively taught me how to respond to a man who claimed to be a thirteenth century Prince of Wales. Then again, contrary to all expectations, I hadn’t needed even the tiny bit of knowledge that class had taught. Llywelyn had lain beside me in bed all night and not touched me.
It wasn’t as if I thought I was irresistibly gorgeous, but I had enough experience with men to know that few individuals of the male persuasion wouldn’t have at least tried. I’d turned guys away a time or two before Trev had tried and succeeded. Yet, Llywelyn hadn’t and was offended at the very thought. At the same time, the possessiveness in his voice when he talked to his brother was unmistakable. “She’s mine,” he’d said. What exactly did that mean?
I rolled off the bed and stood, ready to get moving and face whatever reality Llywelyn had constructed. I walked to where Anna lay and crouched beside her bed, just to check on her. As always, my heart swelled when I looked at her, so glad that I had her. As Mom had said, she was the one good thing we’d gotten out of this mess.
Anna opened her eyes.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I said.
“Hi, Mommy. Are you okay now? You slept a long time!” She lifted a hand and touched the wooden side of the trundle bed. She looked at it for a second before sitting up quickly, twisting her body around in a jerky motion to survey the room.
“It’s okay, Anna,” I said. I picked her up. She still swiveled her head to take in her surroundings.
“Is Gramma here?”
“I would like to think that she’s on her way,” I said. “We had an accident in the car. Do you remember?”
Anna gazed at me, her eyes solemn. “There was a man. He unbuckled my car seat.”
“I imagine he did,” I said. “Did he carry you here?”
She nodded.
“Was he nice?”
She nodded.
“Could you understand him when he talked to you?”
Anna shook her head. “There were two men. And a horse. And then there were more men and one of them had a big stick with fire on the end. We’re in a castle.”
Well now. Just then, someone knocked at the door and I swung around. “Come in!”
The door opened to reveal a girl a few years younger than I, dressed in brown. She was slender and short, but the most noticeable thing about her were two large buck teeth.
“Madam,” the girl said, curtseying. “Are you ready for me to help you dress?” She spoke slowly in Welsh and I aligned each of her words with their modern equivalent, finding that I understood the gist of what she said.
“Yes, please.” I’d made the mistake of sending her away earlier after she delivered breakfast so I could have some privacy to think—a mistake because it only took twenty seconds of contorting myself to realize I wasn’t able to tie my dress up the back. I’d opened the door to call her back, but she’d gone and I’d had to ask the guard to find her for me. Now here she was, giggling in the hall with the man, certain that I was an idiot.
We were destined for full, medieval regalia, in keeping with the fantasy: leather boots, woolen leggings, shift, petticoat, dress, and wimple, with a cloak over all of it, for both Anna and me, even though we were inside. After dressing me, the girl—Dana was her name—fixed my hair. One night and I already understood why women went to bed with their hair in a braid, because otherwise the tangles were painful to get out with only a wooden comb that pulled and caught in my hair.
With my hair finally smooth, Dana began to do something elaborate with small braids and in the end perched them on the top of my head, a cloth pinned over them. At least I wasn’t being forced to wear a veil; at least the dress was blue, my favorite color. But honestly, did the fantasy have to go so far as to not allow me a shower? Or underwear? I cursed myself for not shaving my legs the previous morning. Of all days to forget . . .
Anna watched the procedure, eyes wide, taking it all in. What questions or pronouncements might I get out of her later?
I liked reading about history a lot. I liked listening to Mom’s stories about Wales, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that for women, living in any era but the twentieth century—the latter half of the twentieth century even—sucked. After the fact, I understood that I’d allowed Trev to guilt me into a subservient existence with him, but I had eventually left him when he hurt me, and I knew that occasionally I was even smart and capable. Throughout history, however, women had little say in their lives, less power, and no credit for doing anything interesting. No, thank you.
I took Anna’s hand and she and I trailed the maid down the hall, down a flight of stairs, and through a door. I’d heard the voices from halfway down the stairs and guessed I’d find many people where she was taking me, but was still completely unprepared to step into a cavernous hall at the foot of the stairs populated by more than a hundred people. The noise level didn’t really change at our entrance, but plenty of heads swiveled toward us and away again as the maid led us to an empty spot at the end of a twenty-foot table.
The room was huge—a great hall in every sense of the word. Window slits started at head high, and a fireplace took up a portion of one wall, big enough for half a dozen people to hide. Thick tapestries that looked like rugs filled in the spaces between the windows. The room smelled of smoke, unwashed bodies, roasted meat, and beer. Great. Just like that frat party Elisa took me to in October.
A smaller table stood on a dais about six feet away. Dafydd sat at it, accompanied by four men, all dressed as he was in mail armor, cloak, and boots. He raised his glass to me, the smirk thankfully absent, but I looked away and didn’t return his greeting, turning instead to Anna. When in an awkward social situation, having a little girl on your lap is an excellent distraction.
“Are you ready to eat?” I asked her.
Anna nodded. The activity in the hall had struck her uncharacteristically dumb. I hugged her close and talked to her to fill the gap and put her at her ease. “It’s okay. We’ll have some breakfast and then maybe we can go outside and see if it’s a nice day.”
A serving maid brought a plate of biscuits and another of fried eggs. Next to those she laid a carafe of an unspecified liquid (mead?) and another plate of bread—flat and unleavened. I glanced surreptitiously at my neighbor to my left. He was using the flat bread as a plate.
“What’s that?” Anna asked.
“A trencher,” I said, without remembering where I’d heard about them.
I pulled one to me and spooned the eggs onto it. I offered Anna a biscuit with honey, which she took, moving off my lap to kneel on the bench so she could reach the table better. She wore a simple, undyed, linen dress, little boots, and cloak of her own. Her hair stuck out all over her head in a curly mass that we’d tamed with a head band. She also wore something that bore only a passing resemblance to a diaper. She’d peed in the chamber pot earlier, as she’d started waking dry more and more often at home, but I wasn’t holding my breath about her being potty trained in a day. If we stayed here very long, it was I, I suspected, who was going to be trained, not her.
And then I shuddered, terrified that we might stay here longer than a day. The more I surveyed the room and these people, their total immersion in the thirteenth century became more apparent.
Did they even have a phone? Were we going to have to walk to the nearest town? Anna had mentioned horses, so maybe we could ride, not that I had any skill in that department.
“Are you okay?” I hugged Anna around the waist and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
She nodded, big eyes again. “I don’t see Gramma.”
“If she were here, it would be hard to spot her in this crowd,” I said. “But I don’t think she is. We’ll see about finding her after breakfast.”
Covertly, I studied my neighbors, needing to abandon this charade, get up and leave, but not sure how. No one paid me any attention, even Dafydd, who now conferred closely with a man on his right, his face turned away from me. Relieved, I slid off the bench, picked up Anna, and sidled away from the table.
I really wanted to walk out the great front double doors at the end of the hall. To do it, I’d have to cross a fifty-foot gauntlet of people, mostly men. I wasn’t sure that would be the best idea. I shuddered at the memory what could have happened last night if Llywelyn had been a different man from the one he was. Given the seriousness of these people, escape seemed ill-advised as yet. Instead, I returned to the stairs.
Thirty steps led to the second floor. Instead of stopping there and going to my room, I kept going. I climbed another twenty steps to the third floor, huffing from the effort of carrying Anna, and then twenty more before I faced a heavy wooden door, set in the wall ahead of me. I pulled the latch and stepped into a new world.
The sea air filled my lungs.
“Look at the bird!” Anna said.
The wind tossed her curls into my face. I hugged her to me and wrapped my cloak around us both, not wanting her to get chilled.
It was a seagull, exactly like the ones I might see at home. But this wasn’t home—wasn’t like any place I’d ever seen. We stood on the battlements of a castle, just as Anna had said. But it wasn’t a picturesque castle from a fairytale. It was a working castle with stables and smoke rising from a blacksmith’s forge, chickens and pigs and horses, and lots and lots of men sporting various weaponry: swords, axes, bows and arrows. Some milled below me in the courtyard of the castle and others moved purposefully from the keep, through the courtyards, and gatehouses, and back again.
Beyond the walls, the sea surrounded us on three sides and crashed on the rocks below so loudly that it wasn’t any wonder that the sound had penetrated the walls. High white clouds skidded across the sky, and lower, storm clouds lay on the horizon. Gray dominated everything: the sky, the sea, the castle walls on which I stood. It didn’t feel cold enough for snow, but I could believe that rain was coming. The view awed me.
Anna brought me back to reality, wiggling to get down. She ran around the inside of the circular walls once before poking her finger into a hole in the mortar between two of the stones.
“Don’t be fooled by the view. The man isn’t worth it.” I nearly jumped in shock, and turned at the voice behind me. Dafydd stood in the doorway, one shoulder propped against the frame, his arms folded across his chest. He spoke in French, as he had with Llywelyn in the bedroom.
“Excuse me?” I said.
David pushed off the frame and walked toward me. I took a half step backward, stooping to grasp Anna’s hand. I held it tightly in mine, pulling her away from the wall and toward me.
“I speak of my brother, Prince Llywelyn,” he said. “War is coming. He’ll be off and you’ll pine for him for a while, but then you’ll leave him. They always do.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Dafydd laughed. “Is that so? You soon will.”
I took another step, trying to get away from his smile, but the tower had a diameter of twenty feet and I had nowhere to go. The cold rough stones of the battlement pressed into my back. Dafydd was very close now. He’d tied his long hair back from his face with a leather tie, revealing a sculpted face and strong jaw.
Here was a man who would have tried last night.
No doubt many women were attracted to him because of his looks alone, which of course he knew, but I saw something else in his eyes that seemed sincere, and a little vulnerable, despite the flippancy of his words.
The thought was icier than the wind. I might not be the sharpest crayon in the box, but if I needed any further evidence that the person living the fantasy just might be me, not Llywelyn, this was it. These people were real. I was out of place—and time?
I bent to Anna and swung her onto my hip. Dafydd ignored her. He put his right elbow on the top of a crenellation and stroked my left sleeve with one finger. “You’re very beautiful,” he said. “Why have I not seen you before?”
“I haven’t been here before,” I said. I scooted sideways, putting a few more inches between us. Unfortunately, Dafydd matched my movement, following me.
“My brother is very fortunate,” Dafydd said. I looked away, completely at a loss. The man was flirting with me—this strange, gorgeous, armor-clad man was flirting with me on the top of a castle in God-knows where.
“Why don’t you like him?” I said.
Dafydd stopped short. “He’s my brother and the Prince of Wales. I would die for him.”
I stared at him, completely befuddled by his statement. I hadn’t thought he would tell me why, but that he would deny, with all sincerity, that he hated Llywelyn was so out of sync with his words or actions both in the past and in the future that it left me speechless.
A shadow moved below me and I turned to look down. Even from the back, I recognized Llywelyn coming down the stairs of the keep. Dafydd must have seen him too, because he straightened and pulled away from me, perhaps not so sure of himself after all. Another man had followed Llywelyn out of the keep and at his call, Llywelyn turned. In doing so, he glanced up at the battlements and saw us looking down at him. He stood, his hands on his hips, head thrown back, and met my eyes. I gave a little wave and then felt stupid to have done so, but Anna mimicked me and turned it into something cute.
“Hi!” she said.
Anna could melt any man’s heart, no matter how severe, and Llywelyn was no exception. I could see his smile, even from fifty feet above him. He spoke to the other man, sketched a wave at us, and continued across the courtyard and through the enormous gatehouse that marked the entrance to another courtyard. He’d ignored Dafydd completely. Not sure what to make of that, I turned to Dafydd to try to read his expression—but he’d disappeared.
I looked to the doorway; Anna and I were alone again. I’d grown cold—and unsettled. I didn’t want to stay up here alone any longer. I took one last long look at the mountains and the sea and then, with Anna on my hip, headed for the door to the stairs. Before I could reach it, however, another man came through it, the same one I’d seen talking to Llywelyn on the stairs to the keep.
“Madam,” he said, with a slight bow, speaking in French. “I am Goronwy, counselor to the Prince. He asks that you come inside. Plans have changed and we will leave before the noon hour.”
“Where are we going?” I felt really disoriented now.
“Brecon,” he said.
A chill settled in my stomach that had nothing to do with the air around me. I knew what Brecon meant to me—a dorm at Bryn Mawr College where my sister went to school—but Goronwy meant the real thing: Brecon, Wales.
“May I ask where I am?”
“You don’t know?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have a good memory of last night.”
“Mine is very clear. Lord Llywelyn has some questions for you on that score, but they will keep. For now, I can tell you that we are at Castell Criccieth, in Gwynedd.”
I’d never heard of it. “How long will it take to get to Brecon?”
“At least a week,” Goronwy said. “Lord Llywelyn wishes to depart before the rains come. If we ride inland, we can reach his manor in the forest of Coed y Brenin by evening, with a move to Castell y Bere the day after that. You will need warmer clothing.”
Oh. My. God. Anna wiggled and I put her down. She couched to point out a spider that crawled across the flagstones. Goronwy bent and spoke to her in Welsh. Watching them, I put a hand to my mouth, and a wave of hysteria rolled through me. This time I couldn’t control it. My laughter began as a choke and then swelled to full-fledged giggles. I swung around to face the sea and took a stride toward the edge of the battlements. The wind caught at the cloth on my head, but I let it go, instead wrapping my arms around my waist to try to contain myself. Finally, I gave up and let the tears come.
“Madam?” Goronwy spoke from behind me. I glanced back to see him staring at me, Anna’s hand in his. Anna, fortunately, was used to this sort of thing from me and was smiling too, though with no idea of the joke.
I wiped at my cheeks. “I’m fine. Let’s go in.”
* * * * *
Anna toddled happily after Goronwy and he picked her up before we were half-way down the first flight of steps. That was a good plan because she took a very long time to navigate a set of stairs on her little legs, usually with me counting them one by one. I followed them, watching my feet as we made our way down the stairs, tears still pricking behind my eyes.
Goronwy escorted us to our room, where the same maid from before waited.
“Hello, Dana,” I said. “I see we need more clothes.”
She’d piled two sacks beside the door to the room. Goronwy signaled to the guard waiting outside for us that he should carry them away. Then Goronwy hesitated in the doorway, looking at me as I stood in the center of the room, my hands clasped in front of me. Dana knelt on the floor in front of Anna, helping her into an extra petticoat.
“You’ll be all right, then?” he said.
I honestly didn’t know, but didn’t tell him that. “Thank you, Goronwy. We’ll be fine.”
“I’ll return for you in a few minutes,” he said, and closed the door. I gazed at the closed door, a cold feeling in my chest at the knowledge that I was going to have to turn off that part of me that needed to question what was happening and go with the flow of things.
Dana dressed Anna like a miniature adult, with cloak and hood like mine. On the bed lay further clothes for me. The dress split up the middle, designed for riding astride. The thick black wool cloak hung heavily on my shoulders, the clasp at the throat. It had ties up the front so I wouldn’t have to keep it clutched around me while we traveled, and two slits for my hands instead of sleeves.
Goronwy knocked on our door again.
“Thank you, Dana,” I said in Welsh as we left. Diolch.
“My pleasure, Madam.”
Once in the same courtyard where I’d last seen Llywelyn, a boy stood off to the right of the stairs with a horse, waiting for us.
“Up with you,” Goronwy said. I gazed up at the horse. It was huge—not that all the horses weren’t huge from the ground, but this one seemed to loom over me in a most uncomfortable manner. All around us men and horses jostled each other to mount and I hugged Anna closer to me. I would be the only woman on the journey and all the men, like Goronwy, wore full armor, with long swords at their waists. At least a dozen of them also had giant bows and quivers strapped to their saddlebags.
“I’m supposed to ride this horse to Brecon? I couldn’t take my eyes off the monstrous beast in front of me.
“Your chariot is sunk in the marsh,” Goronwy said. He took Anna from me.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, stalling for time. “We’re spending tonight at that place you mentioned, Coed y Brenin?”
“Yes that’s right,” Goronwy said.
“Isn’t that where Owain Glendower was ambushed and died?”
“What did you say?” Goronwy said.
“Isn’t that the place? My mother sings a song about it. He rode into a gap in the road with high hills on either side and archers attacked him and his men. He and his men fought, but they all died. It was a lot like how Llywelyn . . .” I stopped, horrified. I’d run at the mouth. I shouldn’t know how Llywelyn would meet his death.
“Who was Owain Glendower?” Goronwy said.
“He—”
“We’ll discuss this later.”
Llywelyn had come up behind me. Without warning, he put his hands around my waist and threw me into the saddle. I plopped onto my bottom on the seat and then managed to swing my right leg over the horse to get both feet in the stirrups. I wiggled into a more comfortable position and gathered the reins, as I’d seen actors do in movies. Llywelyn handed Anna to me and she snuggled into my lap, her knees tucked inside her cloak.
“Are you sure about this?” My voice came out high. The horse stepped sideways restlessly and then swerved back to avoid another horse.
“We ride only twenty-five miles,” Llywelyn said. “Was that my brother on the battlements with you?”
I looked down at him, uncertain at the quick change of subject. “Yes.”
“What did you talk about?” He looked at me very intently.
“You,” I said, going for honesty.
“Good.” He patted my knee before walking to his horse which a groom held still a few yards away.
“I will ride with you, Madam,” Goronwy said, also mounting. He made it look so easy.
“Meg,” I said. “Marged dw i.”
“Lady Marged, then, when we speak in Welsh,” he said. And then he caught me off guard with another question. “What language is it that Anna speaks? It’s unknown to me, yet she has some Welsh.”
I froze. There was so much to remember with all this the other-worldly craziness of what was happening to us. I was having a hard time keeping straight what I should know and what I shouldn’t. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have talked about Owain Glendower because he hadn’t been born yet, if this was really the thirteenth century. Was I actually going to sit here and think that I’d—what?—time-traveled to medieval Wales? And then I looked around and wondered what other explanation there could be and how I could think anything else.
Goronwy still waited for my response.
I stuttered while I thought. “She speaks American,” I said, in an instant coming up with an answer that wasn’t even a lie and would allow me to avoid the dreaded word ‘English.’
“That language is new to me,” Goronwy said. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t have.”
Goronwy looked away. “Huh.”
Up ahead, Llywelyn had also mounted. He sat with a straight back. He was naturally thick through the chest and shoulders but armor had bulked him up too, just like all the men. With a sinking feeling, I acknowledged that they weren’t built that way as a result of playing football or lifting weights. It was their work with swords and bows that had caused it.
“Let’s move!” A man riding next to Llywelyn raised his sword and twisted it in his wrist like a baton.
With a click of his tongue on his teeth, Goronwy urged his horse forward. I shook my horse’s reins and was startled when he obeyed, moving to match Goronwy’s horse. Everyone paired up to ride underneath the gatehouse and onto the road that led from the castle. As we rode under the final tower, I looked back. Castell Criccieth soared above us. Two soldiers stood on the battlements at the top of the two great towers, still and silent. The wind whipped Llywelyn’s flag on its pole.
The road, comprised of hard-packed dirt, led to a small village at the foot of the promontory on which the castle rested. Admittedly, it looked just as I thought a medieval village should, with a scattering of thatched-roof huts around a central green space, on which a few sheep grazed. We rode among the houses while men, women, and children came out of them to wave, a few of the children running beside the horses to keep up. As the village church came into view, a priest appeared. He stepped forward to block the road and confer with Llywelyn. They spoke, their voices low, and then the priest made the sign of the cross, blessing all of us.
Llywelyn bowed his head in answer and the priest moved aside. As I rode past him, I ducked my head and pulled my cloak over my face, not wanting to meet his gaze.
There it was. I couldn’t turn aside from this no matter how I might want to deny it. Anna and I were in the Middle Ages.