Chapter One

Dinas Bran (Llangollen)

Christmas Eve 1292

Anna

“Time travel isn’t meant to be a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Her mother’s words of warning echoed in Anna’s head as she prepared herself to travel one more time. She’d found a seat near the front of the bus, one of a number that faced inward so she was looking out the opposite windows.

Ten years ago, the first time Anna remembered time traveling, she’d been seventeen, driving fourteen-year-old David to pick up their cousin, Christopher. A wall of snow had appeared across the road upon which they’d been driving, and when they’d crashed through it, they’d found themselves in medieval Wales.

Unlike the other times she’d traveled, it wasn’t their own lives that had been in danger in that moment, but Papa’s. Both that day and this one had been gloomy December afternoons within an hour of sunset. Oddly, the turquoise color of the Cardiff bus wasn’t far off from the color of her aunt’s minivan either. Today, however, it was raining instead of snowing, and it wasn’t Anna driving the vehicle.

The Cardiff bus was both bigger and smaller than Anna remembered. Bigger—because it had been a long time since Anna had seen any vehicle larger than a hay cart, and most medieval ships were half the size of this bus. But it was smaller too, barely seeming to hold, once they’d piled into it, the forty people they were taking to the twenty-first century.

David, in his obsessive attention to detail, had built a well-graveled road expressly for this purpose. From the perspective of anyone who wasn’t in on the secret, the road itself looked pretty useless. It started at the bus hanger outside Llangollen and ended at the bottom of a cliff wall. David hadn’t completely given the game away because he’d had the road continue past the cliff until it reached a river.

Still, one might wonder why such a magnificent road would end at a spot where there was neither a bridge nor a ford—and no road on the other side. If they made it through this, Math would have to build one.

Of course, David had built the road this way on purpose, and it very much resembled one of those ramps that semi-trucks were supposed to use when their brakes failed while driving down a steep hill. In this particular case, however, there would be no braking involved. The bed of the road was made of rock and hardened earth, not sand, and the goal was to get the bus going as fast as possible by the time it hit the cliff.

Which was what had prompted Mom to comment on the relationship between Monopoly and time travel in the first place.

That had been a few days ago. Anna, Mom, and Lili, David’s wife, had been warming themselves on cushioned chairs near the fire in Anna’s sitting room, not even pretending to work on the needlework at their feet that was the required pastime of every noble woman in the Middle Ages, even those like Anna who hadn’t been born to it.

When Mom had added, “It might not work—” David, who’d been leaning against the frame of the door, had made a chopping motion with his hand, cutting her off. “This is going to work. I know it.”

Anna had already had this argument with her mother—and lost—so she’d brought in what she considered to be the big gun—David—and was more than willing to let him make her point for her.

David had been dressed, for once, as the King of England he was, in black leather boots polished so brightly they reflected the firelight, brown breeches and blue coat of the finest wool, and a silk shirt that wouldn’t have been out of place in one of the fanciest clubs in London in any century. Or so Anna supposed, since she’d never been in one.

Twenty-four years old in November, David’s once baby-round face had slimmed in the past few years as he’d grown into his body—and the pressures of being King of England weighed him down. When he’d arrived in Dinas Bran, Anna had been shocked to see a few strands of gray amidst his normally sandy brown hair.

He’d come with his family to celebrate Christmas—and the tenth anniversary of their father’s survival at Cilmeri. Dinas Bran had been full to bursting with time travelers and medieval people alike. David had ditched his entire English retinue at Chester Castle in England. His English retainers should have known by now that such behavior meant he was up to something, but as he was the King of England, they had allowed themselves to be persuaded.

“Didn’t we decide that uncertainty and fear are necessary to make the traveling work?” Mom actually laughed. “Should I be worried that you’re not afraid enough?”

“None of us will be feeling any shortage of fear, I assure you.” David shifted in the doorway, straightening slightly as his intensity level rose. “You need to get checked out, Mom. Breast cancer isn’t something to be screwing around with.”

“It’s nothing,” Mom had said. “Most lumps disappear on their own.”

“Most lumps do, and it is probably nothing,” David said, “but since I’m going, you might as well come too.”

“I will come with you, Meg,” Papa said.

“Llywelyn, be reasonable. We can’t leave the twins alone. Who knows the trouble they’ll get into?” Mom put a hand on Papa’s cheek.

Papa’s hair might have nearly as much gray in it now as black but, according to Rachel, he was fit and healthy, and his blue eyes had twinkled at Mom with compassion and understanding. Even after all these years, the looks that passed between them gave Anna a tingly feeling in her stomach to see how much her parents loved each other. In the need to see that love, some part of Anna would always be three years old, and she knew herself blessed to have found something similar in her marriage to Math.

Who, unfortunately, Anna would be leaving behind.

“Between their nannies, Gwenllian, and me, we are perfectly capable of taking care of the twins for a few days—weeks even, if that’s what it takes,” Lili had said, “and Wales is in good hands with Math and Ieuan. You’re going to have to look for a different excuse not to go.”

Lili was heavily pregnant with her second child, which meant Mom hadn’t asked why she wasn’t going. Mom had time traveled while pregnant three times. Anna herself had done so with her mother when she was a toddler, so traveling didn’t appear to have any negative effects on small people. Still, the very act meant putting themselves in danger, which nobody, least of all David, was going to let Lili do. Childbirth in the Middle Ages was dangerous enough.

Mom had faced David again, shaking her head hard enough in annoyance to loosen a pin or two from her elaborate upswept hairdo. Brown strands framed her face, and her eyes flashed. “What about England? Don’t you think you’re being just a teensy bit reckless and irresponsible leaving everyone in the lurch so you can go back to the modern world? You just want a McDonald’s hamburger for the first time in ten years.”

David had studied his mother and hadn’t answered.

Mom’s color had been high, and the words she’d thrown at David hadn’t been nice—or even true. Then she’d looked away. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t believe it. I’m just—”

“Scared.” Papa brought both hands down onto Mom’s shoulders. “As we all are. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go forward anyway. You must see a physician. More to the point, you must have one of these—” he made an impatient gesture with one hand, “—scans.”

“If it were just you, Mom,” David said, “I’d consider waiting to see if the lump goes away. You say it’s tender, which cancer generally isn’t, and Rachel tells me lumps like yours happen all the time to forty-something women who’ve nursed four kids. You are an unlikely candidate for breast cancer anyway. I believe her. But I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and now that Shane is sick—”

His voice had broken off as they all considered the real reason—the driving reason—that David was contemplating this trip. Shane, a tow-headed seven-year-old who’d come to the Middle Ages on the Cardiff bus with his parents, Jane and Carl, had what Rachel feared to be childhood leukemia. The disease was eminently curable in the twenty-first century. Not so much in the thirteenth.

David, in fact, had confessed to Anna that he was taking Shane to the modern world regardless of what anyone else thought or said against it, even if he had to hold Shane in his arms and jump off a cliff alone as he’d done with Ieuan a number of years ago.

In the end, Mom had agreed to come. She’d even seen the wisdom in taking the other bus passengers back with them. Now, Anna’s overriding concern was to have them all survive the attempt. Like David, Anna assumed it was going to work. It had better work!

From the front of the bus where he’d been standing near the driver’s seat, checking names off a list, David lifted a hand to get the attention of the passengers. “Everybody buckle up!”

Anna got to her feet instead. “I should stand beside you, David.”

“Sit, sit, sit!” David flapped a hand at her. “You’re fine where you are, Anna.” And then he added in an undertone, “You and Mom should wear your seat belts in case this doesn’t work.”

“That is not what I wanted to hear from you,” Papa said, but then he smiled, and his tone softened. “We’re with you, son. Whatever happens.” He draped one arm across the back of Mom’s seat and bent one leg to rest his ankle on his knee. He was looking far more relaxed about the trip than Anna might have expected.

In fact, Papa had been with David from the start. Mom had traveled with Papa and Goronwy a few years ago to save Papa’s life. He saw it as a fair trade that he would be doing the same for her. Besides, the shadows behind his eyes told Anna how worried he was about Mom, as they all were, even if they told themselves the worry was for nothing. More than any other disease, cancer was a terrifying proposition, incurable in the Middle Ages. Anna saw it as a parasite growing inside her mother, and she just wanted it out!

David actually managed a smile. “It’s just that Anna has never done this alone, and Mom isn’t going to lose both of us in one day if this doesn’t turn out the way we want it to.”

“I thought you said it was going to work.” Shane’s mother, Jane, looked up at David from her position in the driver’s seat. The Cardiff bus had been lovingly repaired by several of the more mechanically-minded time travelers, Jane among them, so it seemed oddly appropriate that she would be the one to drive it into the cliff today.

Since she would be at the very front of the bus with him, Jane was risking her life almost as much as David was, though if they crashed, she at least would have an airbag to protect her. David was going to stand beside her, his hands gripping the metal bar that ran horizontally across the dash. He’d have no protection if the bus ran head first into the cliff instead of time traveling. He would be thrown through the windshield and killed.

“Oh my God.” Mom, who was sitting in a seat that faced front, but adjacent to Anna, suddenly put both hands to her face, her fingers spread wide to cover her mouth and cheeks. “This is insane. I cannot believe I let you talk me into this.”

“It’s our fault Shane is here, even if we didn’t mean to bring him.” Anna said. “We can’t let him die when we could do something about it.”

“Then if that’s the case, I should be taking him by myself.” Mom straightened her spine, revealing her innate courage that was never far beneath the surface. “Nobody else needs to risk it.”

“Anna offered to do the same thing, but I told her no.” David unbent from his post behind Jane’s seat and came closer. “It isn’t just about Shane any more. We need information and whatever supplies we can get so we can reverse engineer what we can’t yet make. At a minimum, Rachel says a high-powered microscope would do wonders. What’s more, by taking the bus today, everyone who came with you on it can go home. One shot deal. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“I think that’s what the game tells you to do when you’re going to jail, not escaping it,” Mom said, though she managed a smile to mask her worry.

Anna had certainly been annoyed at times over the years with David’s intense sense of purpose and what amounted to tunnel vision when he was sure he was doing the right thing. Today, however, his earnestness was endearing—in large part because what he believed to be right definitely was.

David reached for his mother’s other hand. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this time we will all die in a great tragedy like when the White Ship went down in the English Channel and King Henry lost his son and the flower of English nobility in one go. You’re right that time travel isn’t to be used frivolously, but this isn’t frivolous.”

“It isn’t like David’s been running down to the corner store every five minutes,” Anna said.

“Yeah, well, Mom’s right that sometimes it feels like I am,” David said. “Even if I didn’t stay, I did travel only a few months ago when I dropped off Lee.”

David was referring to one of the bus passengers, who’d turned out to be a terrorist, possibly for an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army. Lee had been involved not only in the bombings in Avalon in Cardiff, which had brought Anna, Mom, and the bus to the Middle Ages in the first place, but also bombings at Canterbury Castle and Dover Castle in September.

In his confrontation with Lee, David had inadvertently returned to Avalon and, as he said, dropped Lee off. It was a huge relief to be rid of Lee, but they all retained a nagging anxiety about what kind of trouble he might be causing wherever he was now. Since the traveling was keyed to David’s needs, not Lee’s, Lee wouldn’t have ended up some place remote like the Arctic or the Sahara Desert. He’d have fallen into North America or Wales, where he could do a great deal of harm.

“If people are going to stay here, they have to truly choose it—and not because they’re afraid to die on the way back. You don’t have to go. I can’t make you. But regardless of your choice, I am going.” David’s voice went soft. “I can’t have them on my conscience any more. I have to do this.”

Mom gazed down the length of the bus and finally nodded. “More than anything, children like Shane need to grow up where they were born and live with all the advantages that life can give them.”

Bursts of laughter came here and there from the bus passengers as they situated themselves. Some of the people climbed to the upper level of the bus, which Anna thought brave of them, given what they were about to do. This was sure to look much worse from up there.

Anna herself wasn’t sure she really wanted to see the bus crash at all, though she was probably required to do so since she was one of the people who had to fear for her life in order for the time travel to work. She prodded David’s toe with hers. “They’re happy to be here.”

“I’m really glad to know that. I thought they would be, once they started thinking about all the people and things they’d missed over the last year. I just hope—” David cut himself off.

“What do you hope?” Mom said.

David licked his lips. “I just hope that what they’re going home to is still there. You guys left Cardiff in kind of a mess. Who knows what damage those terrorists have done in the last year?”

“That would be their fault,” Anna said, knowing where her brother’s thoughts had headed, “not yours.”

David gave a disparaging click of his tongue. “Even I am not so full of self-importance as to think I’m in any way responsible for the problems of the modern world, but I did give Lee back to them. It’s been three months! A year in the Middle Ages was probably the best thing that ever happened to Lee, because it allowed him to elude the authorities to the point of dropping completely off the radar.”

“All set, my lord.” Callum appeared in front of David, with his wife, Cassie; and time travelers Darren Jeffries and Peter Cobb in tow.

When Callum had arrived in the Middle Ages, he’d been a capable, even superior, MI-5 agent, but one suffering from his experience in war and too honorable to be happy serving employers who had less honor than he did. A few months in David’s service had given him purpose, focusing his energies and intelligence and turning him into one of David’s closest confidants. Now, as the Earl of Shrewsbury, he was one of the most powerful men in England to boot.

Leaving space for Callum to sit directly behind the driver, Cassie set her backpack on the floor in front of her, took the next seat down, and buckled up. She wore jeans, a sweater, and a leather jacket, all of which fit her well since they were hers. She, along with those of them who were planning to return to the Middle Ages once their work in the twenty-first century was done, had stored their medieval clothing for the return journey in the back of the bus.

At the moment, Anna’s mother wore the modern clothes she’d borrowed from Cassie’s aunt’s house last Thanksgiving when she and Anna had traveled on Thanksgiving Day. Though David himself hadn’t had the pleasure of that experience, he meant to model this trip on that one: on Christmas Eve, the authorities would be short-staffed, thinking more about presents and ham dinners than tracking rogue time travelers across the planet. The only real drawback was that it meant missing Christmas with their children.

Just like last time too, Mom wore the Pendleton wool coat she’d borrowed from Cassie’s aunt, which should keep her as warm as the thick wool cloak she normally wore. Anna wore the clothes she’d borrowed too, including the puffy purple parka she’d had to forgo once they’d returned to medieval Gwynedd. Peter Cobb wore casual clothing (not his fatigues), which he’d had in his duffel when he arrived in the Middle Ages on the bus, but Callum and Darren were looking extremely handsome, dressed as they were once again in their MI-5 suits and trench coats. Anna knew for a fact that Callum had secreted his gun at the small of his back, making it almost a given that Darren had too.

That left Papa and David in best-they-could-do medieval replicas of modern garb, which was pretty hilarious and ironic when Anna thought about it. Both wore wool pants over their regular leather boots, a linen shirt, and a wool sweater over the top. Somewhere David might still have the clothes he’d come to the Middle Ages wearing ten years ago, but it wasn’t as if they would fit him.

“Is everyone here?” Anna looked up at Callum.

“According to my list, they are,” David said.

Mom clasped her hands in front of her lips and studied David and Anna over the top of them. “You do know that to return a busload of people from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century is completely mad.”

“Yup,” Anna caught her brother’s eye and saw the same recklessness in his expression that had suddenly swept over her.

“You have no idea where we’re going to end up,” Mom said.

“No, we don’t,” Anna said.

David’s chin firmed. “But I sure do hope we run into Lee.”

At which point Anna thought, but didn’t say, be careful what you wish for! In David’s case, wishes had a disconcerting tendency to come true.