Prince of Time by Sarah Woodbury

I didn’t want to know what it was. She parked the car and got out, jerking the door handle and slamming it closed behind her. The parking lot wasn’t full, and we walked across it to the emergency room entrance. The ambulance men had already unloaded Ieuan and together we peered through some glass doors into a room where he was being worked on by a doctor and two nurses. Bronwen headed for the nurses’ station.
    “Do I need to sign him in?” she said.
    A woman behind the desk looked up. “Yes.” She handed Bronwen a clipboard. “I’ll need his full name, birth date, ID number, and current address.”
    Bronwen looked over at me. I shrugged and put out my hand for the clipboard. We walked to some chairs, set against a wall in the hallway, and studied the paperwork.
    “How closely are they going to check all this right now?” I said.
    “It’s all in the computer,” Bronwen said. “They’ll know immediately if something isn’t right.”
    This was going to be a little more difficult than I’d thought. I picked up the pen and wrote Ieuan’s name and nothing else. I had no ID numbers, no address, and certainly no credible birth date, so I left it all blank and walked back to the desk.
    “My friend is from Wales,” I said. “I don’t know his ID number.”
    The nurse looked irritated. “May I see your ID then?”
    “I don’t have any. I’m only sixteen,” I said, taking a cue from Bronwen.
    “Social security number?” the nurse said.
    “I don’t know it.”
    Pursing her lips, the nurse wrote INDIGENT in big letters across Ieuan’s form. I hoped he would still get decent treatment from the doctors, since that’s why I had brought him here in the first place.
    I went back to Bronwen. She had a cup of coffee balanced on her lap and was in the process of loading it up with cream and sugar. She ripped off the top of the packets of sugar, two at a time, and dumped them in until I lost track. She saw me watching her, and smiled.
    “Like a little coffee with your sugar?” I said.
    “Coffee is one of the four basic food groups, didn’t you know?” she said.
    “And apparently cream and sugar are two more,” I said.
    “No, no, no. They’re included in the coffee group.” She stirred her coffee with one of those tiny straws that came with Styrofoam coffee, but were remarkably ineffective, especially given the quantity of sugar in her cup. “I don’t actually like coffee,” she confessed. “What I drink is basically hot coffee ice cream.”
    She took a sip and sighed. I sat beside her again.
    “May I ask you a question?” I said.
    “You can ask,” she answered, her eyes closed now and her head resting against the wall behind us.
     “Since you share his name, do you know of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, a Prince of Wales from the Middle Ages?” I said.
    “You mean the last Prince of Wales? The one the English killed in 1282?”
    “Yes, that’s the one.” I let out a breath, and it was like a cold rush of water had been poured over my head. I felt lightheaded, almost ready to pass out . It was as I’d feared and suspected: my Wales existed in a different dimension. We weren’t time travelers, but travelers to another world, separate, and parallel to this one.
    I stared off into the distance, taking in the bustle of the emergency room without really seeing it. Riding across the Scottish countryside with Ieuan and Aaron, I’d had a moment where I’d felt myself free, but Bronwen’s words truly loosed the chains that held me. If I got back to Wales— no, I wouldn’t think it— when I got back to Wales— I could do and be what I wanted, without fear of affecting the future into which I’d been born.
    A nurse came over to us. “We’re moving him upstairs now. You may follow us to his room,” she said.
    “Thank you,” Bronwen and I said together and stood up.
    Ieuan lay unmoving on his gurney. “Is he going to be all right?” I asked the nurse, before she turned away.
    “We believe so.