Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance by Sarah Woodbury Page B

finally
penetrated and Llywelyn’s vision cleared. He relaxed his hands and
set me on my feet. Anna had been asleep on a blanket but sat up,
her eyes wide, looking at us. Llywelyn’s face fell and he put his
forehead into mine.
    “I didn’t mean to scare you or her.” He ran
his hands up and down my arms. “Last night, I promised you I
wouldn’t hurt you, and here I’ve already broken that promise. I
can’t fix it. I’m sorry, Marged.”
    “I didn’t betray you, Llywelyn,” I said.
    “I know that now,” he said. “But there’s too
much about you that is unfamiliar and unusual. I haven’t had time
to hear your story, but you can’t evade my questions any longer. I
will not abide another day in ignorance.”
    “I know no more than you, Llywelyn,” I said.
“I don’t know how I came to be here, or why, only that Anna and I
are here.”
    Llywelyn eased back from me further.
“Perhaps you are a gift from God,” he said, in Welsh. “Perhaps he
sent you so I wouldn’t die at Coedwig Gap today.”
    “How many are dead?” I said, in French, not
letting him know I understood him. His comment had been for himself
alone.
    “Too many.”
    “I saw the battle. I saw men fall, but many,
surely, survived.”
    “And they need help,” Llywelyn said. He
stepped around me to my horse. “We need the bandages you
carry.”
    “Is there someone who can stay with Anna?
Perhaps I can assist. I took a first aid class last quarter.”
    He glanced at me. “You know something of
healing?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I do.
    Okay, so by twentieth
century standards I knew nothing about healing, but I figured if
this really was the Middle Ages, the people here knew less than
nothing and I might actually be useful.
    In addition to that first
aid class, which I should have known not to mention to Llywelyn
since he couldn’t possibly know what ‘first aid’ was, I’d had a
baby. I’d doctored Anna’s knees countless times. I’d even held
Elisa together when as a child she’d run into a barbed wire fence
without seeing it. Our parents hadn’t been home and in the first
frantic minutes, I’d staunched the blood, cleaned her wounds, and
plastered her with bandaids before calling my neighbor for
help.
    “ We’ll need clean water
and alcohol,” I said as Llywelyn tugged the saddlebag off the horse
and lugged it toward the road. I grabbed Anna’s hand and hung back,
not wanting her to see what was in front of us. I’d followed the
battle as best I could from my hiding place. Men had died, many of
them.
    “ Rhodri!” Llywelyn called
to a young man hauling a man by his feet off the road. Helmetless
but unhurt, he trotted over to Llywelyn.
    “ Yes, my lord,” he said, a
little breathlessly. His face was whiter than the usual Celtic
pallor.
    “ I want you to stay with
the little girl, here,” Llywelyn said. “Marged has some healing
skill that we need.”
    “ Yes, my lord,” Rhodri
said. “I’ve six younger brothers and sisters. I know how to look
after little ones.” He crouched in front of Anna. “Would you like
to walk with me and look for bugs?”
    I thought the chances of
finding any bugs in the middle of a leafless, January woods in
Wales slim to none, but he had the right idea. I bent to her and
spoke in English. “Will you go with him? Mommy’s going to be right
over there, helping some people who got hurt. Rhodri wants to know
if you’d like to look for bugs with him?”
    Anna nodded and
transferred her hand from mine to Rhodri’s. They set off slowly
toward the woods, away from the road, Rhodri modifying his gate to
a loose-hipped walk to match her tiny steps.
    “ Okay,” I said, looking
after them for another few seconds, and then turning the other way.
I didn’t know if I was traumatizing Anna for life by all she’d seen
and heard in the last twenty-four hours, but she’d been making
friends among Llywelyn’s company during our ride, so I hoped she
was okay with Rhodri—and more importantly,