Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) by Sarah Woodbury Read Free Book Online

boots rather than
slippers, which was another piece of good luck, but Meg missed her
mittens. If they weren’t close to a settlement, this was going to
be a tough night. Walking would warm them, however, and the snow
wasn’t falling any more heavily than it had been when they’d
arrived.
    They started downhill, aiming for brighter
patches between the trees. The woods didn’t close in around them,
and the trees were predominantly conifers. By November throughout
most of the east coast of the United States, a thick blanket of
deciduous leaves covered the ground, and most of the trees would
have been bare, which ruled out all but a few locations in
Pennsylvania as a possible landing site.
    The snow provided some ambient light,
particularly since, after falling fairly heavily for twenty
minutes, it had slowed and then stopped. Within another twenty
minutes, the clouds cleared enough to reveal stars. There’d been a
new moon two days earlier in Wales. Meg didn’t know whether 2019
wherever-they-were had a similar astronomical schedule to 1291
Rhuddlan, but for the moment, they were stuck with stars and not
much else to see by.
    Meg and Anna plodded along for at least
another half hour, Meg worrying that she didn’t know what she was
doing, any more than she had when she’d come through three years
ago with Llywelyn and Goronwy. They’d survived and escaped MI-5
during that trip, but it seemed due more to luck than any skill or
intelligence on Meg’s part. But she supposed that if luck was all
they had, she would have to make it work for them.
    But she wasn’t feeling particularly lucky at
the moment, and that made the edge-of-panic feeling that filled her
hard to fight off. She continually scanned the terrain ahead—what
she could see of it—for any sign of a man-made anything, all the
while very aware that her heart was in her throat. It was a feeling
she often got when she was waiting for something to happen—usually
for Llywelyn or a child to return from whatever had taken them out
of Meg’s sight. She was growing to despise the vacillation between
the sweet taste of anticipation and the sour one of crushed
hope.
    Given how she was feeling, she could
understand why Anna didn’t want to talk. Still, as her mother and
being nosy by nature, Meg hated not knowing what her daughter was
thinking, especially in a situation like this.
    “ The boys will be fine,”
Meg said after they’d walked another hundred yards, thinking of
Elisa and Padrig and trying to tell herself the same thing. Whether
Llywelyn and Math would be fine was something else entirely, but
Meg didn’t want to complicate matters by bringing them
up.
    “ I’m trying to tell myself
that a few days apart will be good for them,” Anna said. “But it
isn’t like I can call Math and remind him to brush their teeth
before bed. Even if I’ve lived in the Middle Ages for nine years,
I’m not a medieval parent.”
    “ Lili and Bronwen are
there,” Meg said. “Not to mention that Cadell has bewitched every
woman in the castle with his smile. They have many adults to watch
over them.”
    “ But they’re not
me!”
    It was a wail that Meg understood completely
because she was feeling the same way. The invention of the cell
phone had been a godsend to her as a parent. It meant that she
could always reach her children no matter where they were, and they
could reach her. Nine years ago when Meg’s sister, Elisa, had
called to say that David and Anna had disappeared, Meg’s first
impulse had been to call their cell phones. They hadn’t answered
them, of course, and the nightmare of their unexplained absence had
begun.
    Then Anna calmed a bit. “I think what I’m
struggling with most is that I’m gone, and they don’t know where
to. Bran will be easily entertained away from thinking about my
absence, but Cadell not so much.”
    “ All the adults but Math
and Lili have experienced exactly this before,” Meg said. “They can
explain to him what