Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) Read Online Free

it so that only Callum,
in his station as Earl of Shrewsbury, sailed with him in this
particular ship. Ever since the White Ship had gone down in the
English Channel a hundred and fifty years ago, losing England its
prince and the flower of its nobility who’d sailed all in the same
ship, no English king had sailed with more than a handful of his
retainers in a single craft. To continue that tradition made sense
and, in this case, served David’s purposes.
    Back at home, Callum would have been
surprised not to find David up and about by dawn, but here, alone
for once, he could sleep without interruption. Most of the time,
Callum forgot that David was only twenty years old. For all that he
took up more space than the average man, he looked his age—maybe
younger. When Callum was twenty, he’d still been growing and had
been known to sleep for fifteen hours at a stretch.
    Callum moved behind Cassie, placing his arms
around her waist and his chin on her shoulder. “The wind is picking
up.”
    She leaned against him. “It’s changed
direction again.”
    Callum licked his index finger and stuck it
in the air. He’d seen other people do that to gauge the direction
of the wind, but all it did for him was make his finger cold.
Better to look at the sail above their heads. “It’s coming down
from the north.” His brow furrowed. “That’s not usual.”
    “It isn’t,” Cassie said. “A north wind is an
ill wind; isn’t that what the old wives in Scotland say?”
    Callum laughed. “You would know better than
I. All I know is that we’re in the middle of the Irish Sea with no
radio or GPS.”
    “If this turns into a real storm, is it too
late to make for safe harbor at Pembroke?” Cassie said.
    Callum looked behind them, in the direction
they’d come. “I can’t see land anywhere.”
    “If I had a thermometer, I wouldn’t be
surprised to learn that the temperature had dropped twenty degrees
in the last ten minutes,” Cassie said.
    Callum held out his hand as the first drops
of rain began to patter onto the deck. “We should get under
cover.”
    Cassie moved with him back towards their
tiny cabin, but before they reached it, the captain planted himself
in front of Callum. “I swear to you, I inspected the ship myself
this morning,” he said. “The rudder was whole then.”
    Callum’s stomach sank into his boots. “But
it isn’t now?” The rudder was a very important part of the
ship.
    “The tiller has jammed. I can’t steer
her.”
    Cassie edged closer to the captain. “Can you
rig something up? The way you swing the sail steers us too, doesn’t
it?”
    “Normally, yes, but if this squall becomes a
storm, I’ll have to shorten sail, maybe even drop it. We’ll be dead
in the water with no way to control the ship.”
    Callum lifted a hand to protect his eyes
from the rain, which fell harder, sweeping across the deck with
each gust of wind. He tugged up his hood, but the wind immediately
blew it off his head again. The ship began to rock uncomfortably
with each swelling wave. “I’ll wake the king. Maybe he’ll have an
idea.”
    “He doesn’t and knows far too little about
sailing.” David stood in the doorway of his cabin, clutching the
frame and rocking back and forth as the ship dove into another
trough and came up the other side. “Captain Evan, do you suspect
sabotage?”
    The captain bowed low before David. “I
couldn’t say. I can vouch for every one of my sailors.”
    “I don’t doubt that, since without a rudder,
they’re in the same predicament as we are,” David said. “Presumably
none of them have a death wish.”
    The captain’s eyes crossed as if he wasn’t
entirely sure what David was saying. Callum could have told him
that he wasn’t the only one who didn’t always catch David’s
meaning.
    “Can you fix it?” David said, overriding the
captain’s confusion.
    “Not without getting into the water, which
would be deadly in this weather,” the captain said.
    David