Children of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book Four) Read Online Free PDF Page A

time since I’d seen him so cheerful. David wasn’t the only one who’d felt the burdens of the last few years, and hadn’t been having enough fun. “You’re happy about this?”
    “How could I not be?” Goronwy said. “Is there any doubt that Llywelyn would have died, if not today then next week or next month if we hadn’t brought him here?”
    “He still might, you know,” I said, expressing the fear that had roiled my stomach as I watched Dr Raj hurry off after Llywelyn.
    Goronwy shook his head. “Not if everything you’ve told me about this world is true.”
    I swept tendrils of hair out of my face. The chignon at the back of my head had come loose and my hair was drying into a tangled mess. “But what if I made the wrong choice, Goronwy?” That, too, had been a concern I’d kept in the back of my mind—a secret one, which I hadn’t dared voice to myself, much less to him.
    “What do you mean?” he said.
    “Our bodies break down,” I said. “They’re meant to. What if it turns out that Llywelyn had a stroke, or has a condition that isn’t treatable? I may have condemned him to a long illness, or a lingering twilight, when if we’d stayed at home, he would have … simply died.”
    “Did you do what you thought was right at the time?” Goronwy said. These were words I’d heard him speak to David when he’d questioned a course of action he’d chosen.
    “Yes.”
    “Then leave it alone.”
    I took in a breath and let it out. Leave it alone . And yet, how could I not worry? I coughed a laugh. Hadn’t I just asked David to try to live more lightly? That he shouldn’t shoulder every burden life put in his path and dwell on what he couldn’t control? Apparently, I needed to hear my advice as much as David did.
    Goronwy glanced towards the empty nurse’s station and then to the hallway beyond it. “Shouldn’t we know something soon?”
    I shrugged. “Maybe. These things always take longer than you think they should.”
    Goronwy snorted under his breath at my non-answer, but I’d spent enough time in hospitals, between my father’s illness and my ex-husband’s, to understand that news came when it did and you couldn’t hurry it. Often, unless you were in the room with a patient at the exact moment a doctor made his rounds, you missed your chance to learn anything and would have no new information until the next day when that particular doctor returned.
    “I have to ask again, how is it that you’re taking this so well?” I said. “You can’t understand a word anyone has said so far, you’re dressed all wrong—not that anyone seems to care about that, not even that we’re soaking wet—and we may be stuck here for the rest of our lives.”
    “I told you. My friend lives.” Goronwy turned back to the window. “And those are my mountains.”
    I gazed at Goronwy’s straightened shoulders for a second, and then went back to what I’d been about to do before we’d started talking. I studied the stitching along the three inch deep hem. Trying not to look as secretive as I felt, I shot a glance at the nurse’s station. It was still empty.
    I pulled my knife from its sheath at my waist and began to work at the stitching. When I’d separated enough of the hem so I could see inside, I sat back, a rush of relief flooding through me. This was the dress I’d put them in.
    “What do you have there?” Goronwy said.
    “My identity.” I laid out my soaked passport (good until 2019), driver’s license (good until April 2017, when I’d be forty-two), and a credit card. Plus four hundred very wet American dollars. I had sewed a different credit card and another two hundred dollars into the seam of my every day dress, as well as scattered other pieces of my identity (including a thumb drive, which contained my entire digital life) throughout other pieces of clothing, all of which were (sadly) still in the Middle Ages.
    Goronwy picked up the credit card and turned it over in his hands.