“He lacks for spirit, that one. If not for Llewelyn’s coaxing, I daresay he’d never stir from the hearth.”
“Well, it’s hard on the lad, Rob, being lame. What future has he, after all? Under Welsh law, that crooked leg bars him from any claim to his father’s lands.”
Robert shrugged. “He’s not like to starve. Their law also holds that he must be provided for.”
“True, but would you want to be taken care of—like a woman? At thirteen, Adda’s old enough to feel the shame of it.”
“I suppose,” Robert agreed, without interest. It was not that he wished Adda ill, merely that he regretted his engrafting onto the Corbet family tree. It was fortunate indeed that Llewelyn was of more promising stock. “Tell me, Hugh, what plans have you made for Llewelyn’s future?”
“Well, it is the custom in Wales for boys to be placed with a local lord when they reach fourteen or so. Whilst in his service, they learn the use of arms, the tactics of warfare, much like our youths do whilst serving as squires. Margaret thought to send Llewelyn back to her brothers for such training, but I think I’ve persuaded her that we should place him as a squire in a Norman household. I daresay the boy will balk at first, but I feel such a move would be in his best interest.”
“That is just what I’d hoped you’d say, Hugh. You see, when I was in London at Whitsuntide, I had the good fortune to encounter his Grace, the Earl of Chester. Naturally the conversation turned to our common interests, protecting our respective lands from Welsh raids. He was most interested to learn that your stepson is the grandson of Owain Fawr, and he suggested that he find a place for the boy in his household.”
“Jesú!” This was so far above Hugh’s expectations that he was, for the moment, speechless, and Robert grinned, well pleased with himself.
“I see I need not tell you what an opportunity this will be for the boy, for us all. Chester is one of the greatest lords of the realm, and as shrewd as a fox for all his youth. He saw at once the advantage of befriending a boy who might one day rule in his grandfather’s stead. Llewelyn has the blood-right, after all, and most assuredly the spirit. With luck…” He shrugged again and said, “But a chance like this, to come to manhood in an Earl’s household! Loyalties given in youth often last for life. As Chester’s squire, the brilliance of Llewelyn’s world cannot help but eclipse all he’s learned in the woodlands of Wales. He’ll find himself amongst the greatest Norman lords, at the royal court, and in time he’ll come to embrace Norman values, to adopt Norman traditions as his own.”
Robert paused. “Do not misunderstand me, Hugh. I know how fond you are of the boy, and I find him a likable lad myself. But I cannot help feeling a certain disappointment that, after four years, he clings so tenaciously to the teachings of an undeniably primitive people. Despite all the advantages you’ve given him, Llewelyn remains so stubbornly—”
“Welsh?” Hugh suggested dryly, and Robert laughed. He’d actually been about to say “untamed” before thinking better of it, and he did not demur now at his brother’s interpretation; they were, he thought, merely different ways of saying the same thing.
“Well, I shall talk to Margaret this forenoon, tell her about Chester’s offer—” Hugh began, and then turned toward the opening door.
“Ah, Margaret, we were just speaking of you. Rob has—Margaret?”
Upon seeing Marared for the first time, Hugh had blessed his luck, suddenly found himself eager to consummate their political alliance in the marriage bed. Marared was a beautiful woman, if rather exotic by English standards, and after four years of marriage, he still took considerable pleasure in the sight of her. But she had no smile for him now, and the golden glow that owed so little to the sun was gone. Bleached of color, her face was ashen and her lashes were sooty thickets, smudged with the kohl bleeding into a wet trail of tears.
She paid no heed to Robert, crossed to her husband. “Hugh, we must go home. We must go back to Powys at once. It is my brother Owain. He…he’s been murdered.”
There was a word in Welsh, hiraeth, that translated as “longing,” but it meant much more, spoke of the Welsh love of the land, of the yearning of the exile for family, friends, home. Whenever he was claimed by hiraeth, Llewelyn would flee to the heights of Breiddyn Craig, and there he would spend hours in sun-drenched solitude, gazing out over the vales of the rivers Hafren, Vyrnwy, and Tanat. Now he was back at last, sitting Sul before the grey stones and slate roof of Llanfair, the church of St Mary.
This ancient church in the vale of Meifod was the traditional burial place for the princes of Powys; here his mother’s father had been entombed and here his slain uncle would be laid to rest. He sought to summon up grief for this uncle he could little remember, but to no avail. He’d come back for a funeral, to mourn a man who was his blood kin, and yet as he looked upon the wooded hills that rose up behind the church, he felt only exhilaration, felt like a caged gerfalcon, suddenly free to soar up into the sun-bright azure sky.
Here he’d passed the first ten years of his life. Seven miles to the south was Castell Coch, the ancestral seat for the princes of Powys. His mother’s family had a plas—a palace—less than a mile away, at Mathraval. The woods of mountain ash and oak and sycamore, the river teeming with trout and greyling, dappled by summer sun and shadowed by willow and alder—each stone was known to him, each hawthorn hedge rooted deep in memory. He was home.
He glanced sideways at his companion, one of his stepfather’s squires. Should he tell Alan of his family’s plas, he knew what the other boy would expect, a Norman edifice of soaring stone and mortar, for while most castles were timbered fortresses, the word “palace” conjured up images of grandeur and luxury. Llewelyn had been to London, had seen the Tower and the palace at Westminster, and he’d heard of the splendors of Windsor Castle. He knew there was nothing in Wales to compare to the magnificence of the Norman court, and he cared not at all that this was so.
He laughed suddenly, and when Alan shot him a curious look, he slid from Sul, handing the squire the reins.
“I’d be obliged if you looked after Sul, Alan. Should my lady mother or my stepfather ask for me, concoct what excuse you will.”
Alan grinned. “Consider it done. But are you sure you’d not want company?”
Llewelyn was tempted, but only briefly. He thought of Alan as a friend, but his were memories, emotions, sensations that no Norman could hope to understand.
The Vyrnwy was free of the mud and debris that so often polluted English rivers, for there were no towns to despoil its purity with refuse and human waste. Llewelyn could see chalk-white pebbles glimmering on the shallow river bottom, see the shadows cast by fish feeding amidst the wavering stalks of water weeds. He forgot entirely that his uncle had died by this very river, his plas at Carreghova besieged by a man who was Llewelyn’s own first cousin, Gwenwynwyn, Prince of southern Powys. He forgot his mother’s tears, forgot his stepfather’s ambitious plans for his future, forgot all but the here and now.
He’d walked these woods so often in memory, hearing the rustle of woodmice and squirrels, the warning cries of overhead birds, sentinels ever on the alert for the intrusion of man into their domain. A fox come to the river to drink was slow to heed the alert and froze at sight of Llewelyn, muzzle silvered with crystal droplets of river water, black eyes bright as polished jet. Boy and fox stared at one another in rapt silence, and then Llewelyn snapped his fingers, freeing the fox to vanish into the shadows as if by sorcery; not a twig cracked, not a leaf rustled to mark its passing. Llewelyn laughed and walked on.
He felt no surprise when he broke through a clearing in the wood and came upon the boys by the river; somehow he’d known that he would find them here. The Vyrnwy had always been their favorite fishing stream.
Shyness was an alien emotion to Llewelyn, but he found himself suddenly ensnared by it now, reluctant to approach the youths who’d once been like his brothers. They were not talking, theirs the companionable silence born of the intimacy
of blood and a bonding that had begun in the cradle. Watching them, Llewelyn felt an unexpected emotion stir, one closely akin to envy. He belonged here, too, fishing on the banks of the Vyrnwy with Ednyved and Rhys, but how to surmount the barriers built up by four years of English exile?
They were lounging on the grass in positions as characteristic as they were familiar: Rhys sitting upright, utterly intent upon the trout to be hooked, Ednyved sprawled on his back in the sun, fishing pole wedged into a pyramid of piled-up rocks. And as ever, Llewelyn found himself marveling that two boys so unlike could share the same blood. First cousins they were, but none seeing them together would ever have guessed the kinship.
Rhys shared with Llewelyn the pitch-black hair so common to their people, but while Llewelyn’s eyes were dark, too, Rhys had the eyes of a Welsh mountain cat, purest, palest green. His unusual coloring, thick sable lashes, and features so symmetrical as to draw all eyes were, for him, a burden rather than a blessing. He loathed being fussed over, and yet his startling beauty of face doomed him to be forever fending off the gushing compliments and effusive embraces of his doting female relatives, who considered him quite the handsomest male child ever born and took great pride in showing him off to mothers and aunts of less favored youngsters, to Rhys’s utter disgust and the vast amusement of his friends.
It was possible to look upon his beauty—for there was no other word for it—and to note his slightness of build and conclude that there was a softness, a fragility about the boy. That was, Llewelyn had long ago learned, an impression so erroneous as to be utterly ludicrous, and not a little dangerous. Rhys was as hard, as unyielding as the flint of his native land; there was no give in him, none at all.
As for Ednyved, in all honesty he could only be described as homely. Lanky brown hair, deepset eyes of a nondescript color that was neither brown nor hazel but a murky shade somewhere in between, a mouth too wide and chin too thrusting, too prominent. Big-boned even as a small boy, he seemed to have sprouted up at least a foot since Llewelyn had seen him last, and Llewelyn had no doubts that when fully grown, Ednyved would tower head and shoulders above other men.
As he watched, Llewelyn suddenly found himself remembering a childhood game he’d long ago liked to play with his mother, in which they sought to identify people with their animal counterparts. Llewelyn had promptly pleased his sleekly independent and unpredictable mother by categorizing her as a cat. Hugh, whom he liked, he saw as an Irish wolfhound, a dog as bright as it was even-tempered. Robert Corbet, whom he did not like, he dubbed another sort of dog altogether, the courageous but muddleheaded mastiff. Morgan, too, was easy to classify, for Morgan was a priest with the soul of a soldier, a man who’d chosen of his own free will to fetter his wilder instincts to the stringent disciplines of his Church. Morgan, Llewelyn had explained to Marared, could only be a falcon, for the falcon was the most predatory of birds, a prince of the skies that could nonetheless be tamed to hunt at man’s command. Adda, too, was a bird, a caged sparrow hawk, tethered to earth whilst his spirit pined only to fly; when he’d told his mother that, tears had filled her eyes. But when she wanted to know how he saw himself, Llewelyn grew reticent, evasive. From the day she’d taken him to the Tower of London to see the caged cats, he’d known what animal he wanted to claim as his own, the tawny-maned lion, but that was a vanity he was not willing to confess, even to his mother.
He had never tried to characterize Rhys or Ednyved, but it came to him now without need for reflection, for Rhys had the unpredictable edginess of a high-strung stallion and Ednyved all the latent power, the massive strength and lazy good humor of the tame bear he’d seen at London’s Smithfield Fair.
Ednyved yawned and stretched, reaching for the woven sack that lay beside their bait pail. He shook several apples out onto the grass, tossed one to Rhys.
“I daresay you want one, too, Llewelyn?” he asked nonchalantly and, without looking up, sent an apple sailing through the air. It was remarkably accurate for a blind pitch, landing just where Llewelyn had been standing seconds before. He was no longer there, however, having recoiled with such vehemence that he bumped bruisingly into the nearest tree. Rhys, no less startled, spun around so precipitantly that he overturned the bait pail, and, as he cursed and Llewelyn took several deep breaths, trying to get his pulse rate back to normal, Ednyved rolled over in the grass and laughed and laughed.
“How in hellfire did you know I was there?” Llewelyn demanded, and Ednyved feigned surprise.
“How could I not, with you making enough noise to bestir the dead? Is that the English style of woodland warfare?”
He’d always been a lethal tease, and Llewelyn was not normally thin-skinned. But they’d not yet established the boundaries of their new relationship. Llewelyn opened his mouth to make a sharp retort, but Rhys was quicker. Rhys’s pride was prickly and unpredictable, easily affronted, and he’d been embarrassed by his failure to take notice of Llewelyn. Glaring at his cousin, he snapped, “And Llewelyn might well ask if this is the Welsh way of welcome!” Turning back to Llewelyn, he smiled, said, “We thought you’d be home for your uncle’s funeral, were watching for you.”
Llewelyn smiled back, and coming forward, he settled himself beside them on the grass. A silence fell between them, one that seemed likely to swallow up any words they could throw into the void. It was broken at last by Llewelyn; he heard himself making courteous queries about the health and well-being of their families, falling back upon all the obligatory conversational gambits to be shared between strangers. Nor did Rhys ease the awkwardness any by offering Llewelyn formal condolences for the death of his uncle.
Llewelyn would have liked to speak freely, to explain that he’d not known his Uncle Owain all that well. But he felt constrained to respond with a conventional politeness, and thus found himself flying false colors, coming before them in the guise of a grief that was not his.
Rhys offered him an apple. “Did your stepfather come with you?” he asked, as if he could possibly have had any interest in Hugh’s whereabouts.
Llewelyn nodded. “Hugh came on behalf of the Corbet family, as a gesture of respect to my mother’s kin…” He stopped, for Ednyved had leaned forward, was regarding him with exaggerated attention.
“Why do you look at me like that? Has my face of a sudden turned green?”
“I was trying to decide,” Ednyved drawled, “whether or not you’d picked up a French accent.”
Llewelyn tensed, but then he looked more closely at the other boy, saw that Ednyved’s eyes were bright with friendly laughter.
“No French accent,” he said, and grinned, “but I did spend some right uncomfortable days this spring, worrying that I’d picked up the French pox!”
Ednyved’s mouth twitched. “Llewelyn!” With a frown toward his cousin. “If you please, no bawdy talk—not before the lad here!” Ducking just in time as an apple whizzed past his head.
Seconds later, Rhys followed up his aerial assault with a direct frontal attack, and Ednyved, caught off balance, was knocked flat. Rhys’s anger was more assumed than not, and their scuffling soon took on an almost ritualistic quality, for this was an old game, rarely played out in earnest, and likely to continue until one or the other of the combatants lost interest. In this case the mock battle lasted until they noticed that Llewelyn had appropriated the rest of the apples and stretched himself out comfortably on the turf to watch, for all the world like a front-row spectator at a bearbaiting.
“Go to it, lads,” he said airily, and by common consent, they both pounced on him at once. For a few hectic moments all three boys were tumbling about on the riverbank, until at last they lay panting in a tangled heap, lacking breath for anything but laughter.
After that, there seemed to be too much to say and not enough time in which to say it, and they plunged into the past as if fearing it might somehow be forgotten if it was not shared immediately, interrupting each other freely, trading insults and memories, laughing for laughter’s sake alon
e.
Rhys had gone to the river to drink. Returning, he threw himself down in the grass, and broke into Ednyved’s monologue to demand, “When must you go back to England, Llewelyn?”
“I’m not going back,” Llewelyn said, at once capturing their undivided attention.
“You both know the history of my House, know how my uncles Davydd and Rhodri cheated my father and my other uncles of their rightful share of my grandfather’s inheritance. They carved Gwynedd up between them as if it were a meat pie, forced my father, Owain Fawr’s firstborn, into exile, brought about his death whilst I was still in my cradle. His blood is on their hands and they’ve yet to answer for it. I think it time they did.”
“You mean to avenge your father’s death?” Rhys’s green eyes were luminous, aglitter with sudden excitement, but Ednyved seemed far more dubious.
“All know the English are born half mad,” he said slowly, “but I wonder if the madness might not be in the water they drink or the air they breathe. How else explain that four short years amongst them could have so scattered your wits?”
Llewelyn was amused. “Your faith in me is truly wondrous to behold, Ednyved. Think you that I’m such a fool as to challenge my uncles on my own, with only God on my side? I had a long talk this morn with my Uncle Gruffydd, and he has sworn to give me his full backing, men who know war well and the money to pay them; he even offered the services of no less a soldier than Gwyn ab Ednywain. It is my intent, too, to join forces with my Uncle Cynan’s two grown sons. They were denied their inheritance just as I was, giving us common cause against Davydd and Rhodri.”
“When you do put it that way, it does not sound quite so crackbrained,” Ednyved conceded. “But how in the name of the Lord Jesus did you ever get your lady mother and stepfather to give their consent?”