Spindle and Dagger

by J. Anderson Coats

  “You’re not”— Owain cocks his head — “jealous? Of Nest? And what I’m doing? Are you?”

  We pushed Miv’s cradle into shadow. Owain was first through the door. He glanced thrice around the steading, then went straight for Rhael.

  I spin the bracelet on my wrist.

  “Sweeting, come here.”

  Owain holds out an arm, and I hesitate only the smallest moment before I slide over. He squeezes me tight and kisses my hair. “It’s purely vengeance, I promise. The uglier it is, the faster Gerald of bloody Windsor will be spurred to rescue them. Word of how I’m treating her will reach him soon if it hasn’t already. Every day that slips by and he can do nothing for her will make him more beast than man. So when he does come, he’ll come raging, heedless, hellbent — and we’ll be ready, the lads and I.”

  Owain grins, and I go cold. Gerald of Windsor will be dead, and Nest and the little ones will still be here. Which means no ransom. Which means no rescue. Which means neither Nest nor her children will any longer be worth anything at all to Owain ap Cadwgan.

  THE FEAST IS INTO ITS SECOND DAY WHEN THE HALL doors fly open loud enough to echo. The lads are none too steady on their feet after barrels of wine and mead, and Owain actually stumbles over the bench when he rises, dagger in hand. We’re not under attack, though. Attack would be considerably better than Cadwgan ap Bleddyn storming down the aisle, scattering hapless servants and shouting, “Christ Almighty, boy, tell me it’s not true!”

  Owain flops back into the king’s chair and stabs up some mutton. “It’s lovely to see you too, Da. So lovely that I’ll forgive the insult of you kicking in the door and coming armed into this house.”

  “First of all, it’s my house! I’m not yet dead enough for you to be claiming royal residences beyond a few nights’ lodging! Besides, I’ll be damned if I’ll hear any of your smart mouth right now. Not when you’ve just kicked a hornets’ nest.”

  Cadwgan scours the hall. All I’m doing is holding a flagon of wine while David and William cling to the ends of my cloak, but even so, I keep very still. Then he spots Nest in a corner, barefoot, half-dressed in a stained servant’s gown, holding a fussing Not Miv to her shoulder. His mouth falls open and he stammers, “Christ on the Cross. It’s worse than I thought.”

  Owain’s face hardens. “Gerald of Windsor pays every day for the death of Llywelyn ap Ifor.”

  David tugs on my hem. He holds up his arms, eyes huge. I swing him onto my hip, and he burrows close.

  “Son, Llywelyn ap Ifor was a good man, but this war was never meant to satisfy your need for vengeance. You were to leave Dyfed a smoking ruin and undermine whoresons like Gerald of Windsor!”

  “I did leave Dyfed a smoking ruin.” Owain grins. “And I’ve been undermining Gerald of Windsor by much more . . . thorough means.”

  “You must return Nest to her husband,” Cadwgan growls. “Send her and the children home under safe conduct this afternoon.”

  Owain leans back in the massive carved chair. “I don’t think I’ll be doing that.”

  “I think you will.” Cadwgan is fighting for calm. “This is Nest. She is the daughter of a Welsh king of an old and proud lineage. She is the wife of Gerald of Windsor, who holds a province that is right on our southern border for the English king — a man who considers Gerald a very close friend. If that wasn’t enough, she bore the English king a son, for Christ’s sake!”

  “From what I hear, that’s true of half the girls in England,” Owain says with a smirk, but I suck in a breath, because if Gerald of Windsor and the English king have a common cause beyond ambitions toward Cadwgan’s realm or outrage at the burning of Dyfed — and if that common cause is a king’s honey-haired daughter both of them have lain with and have sons with — Saint Elen just may have finally lost patience with me and my foolish little playact once and for all.

  “How do you think Gerald got to be a friend of the king?” Cadwgan makes a frustrated gesture. “The better Gerald keeps her, the higher the king’s opinion of him. Damn you for a fool!”

  “I was overcome by her charm,” Owain replies, expressionless.

  Cadwgan sighs impatiently. “If Gerald doesn’t get her back soon, the English king could use this affront as just cause for an invasion. He could force me to submit and accept him as my overlord — or worse, install some Norman freebooter on the make to govern my kingdom. Gilbert fitz Richard de Clare would very much like to be a friend of the king, and he has thirty land-hungry knights at his command who’ve all been promised a piece of your patrimony.”

  Killing Gerald of Windsor would have been bad, but men die in raids, and the English king would have ranted a while before pulling another man from obscurity and giving him Dyfed to hold, giving him Nest in marriage so she’d be looked after. Just as he did with Gerald of Windsor all those years ago.

  “If Gerald wants them back, he can come bareheaded up that aisle and beg for them on his knees.” Owain takes a drink of wine. “Until then, I’ll keep them as I see fit.”

  William twists a hand into my cloak and whispers, “Is my papa coming?”

  I give him what I hope is a reassuring smile and put a finger to my lips because there’s no good answer to that question.

  “This is a mistake, son.” Cadwgan shakes his head. “I’m as happy as you to see Gerald humbled, but this is beyond Gerald now.”

  “You worry overmuch. Everything’s in hand.” Owain rises from the king’s chair and gestures grandly to it. “Take some meat? You must have been all day in the saddle.”

  “We’re not done here,” Cadwgan replies, but he lowers himself into the chair with a groan as Owain takes a seat on the bench next to him.

  They’ll want wine, and anything I can do to keep this fragile peace will be good for all of us. I gently pull away from William, hold up the flagon by way of explanation, and murmur that he should help his mother with the baby. He nods and creeps along the wall toward Nest, keeping to shadows. I approach the high table, David still on my hip, and fight down the desire to brain Owain ap Cadwgan with the flagon and knock half a measure of sense into him.

  I made Owain this way, though. I stood over his sickbed and taught it to him chapter and verse as I put salve on the raised ripple of flesh that my sister gave him and I burned clean.

  “What does your oh-so-clever bedmate think of your captive?” Cadwgan asks Owain. “Are they tearing each other’s hair out? Or mayhap you should be worried they’re in league against you.”

  Owain laughs and holds up his mug. “Why would they be in league against me?”

  I pour the wine, a long crimson sluice that catches stray winks of firelight.

  “This isn’t the first time Nest has been carried off by an enemy,” Cadwgan says. “She had about eight or nine summers when the Normans killed her father and took her away to England. You came by your clever bedmate much the same way.”

  “It’s nowhere near the same.” Owain takes a drink and smooths a hand over my hip, and I twitch as if stung. “Elen saved my life. I keep her close. All the Normans did for Nest was shove her at the English king to help her get on in the world. Giving that roaming-handed lecher a child set her up for life.”

  That’s one way to see it. How a man would see it.

  Cadwgan frowns. “I don’t think you understand the scale of what you’ve done. I planned a war, lad. Not a slaughter.”

  “I know exactly what I’ve done,” Owain replies. “I’ve sent a message to every man the length and breadth of the kingdoms of Wales: Keep your damn hands off my birthright. Stay well clear of anything belonging to me and mine.”

  “That may be what you think you’ve done.” Cadwgan tips his mug at Owain. “Gerald of Windsor will come for her, though. That means he’s coming for you. No quarter given.”

  I will not think of my father, how he was killed with my mother and all the beasts seized so there was no one to come for me.

  Nest’s father, too. I touch the bracelet, then pull my sleeve
over it.

  Owain merely smiles and asks politely after Isabel’s health. For a long moment Cadwgan looks capable of killing his son with his bare hands, then he coughs the kind of helpless laugh you do when there’s nothing left to say.

  Because when Gerald of Windsor comes for us, it won’t be the hellbent, rage-driven attack of a mad dog after all. Not if Gerald can trade on his friendship with the English king. He’ll call up an army of big Normans and use all the resources of Dyfed to hunt down the man who abducted and misused his wife and children.

  Owain will have just the lads of his warband. And the favor of a saint he’s never had a reason to question.

  The feast peters out and Cadwgan leaves, but the lads still sit around the hall and laugh too loudly and tell boastful stories while drinking through the contents of Cadwgan’s storehouse. Owain has had way too much wine and he’s ignoring me to listen to Einion penteulu recount for the hundredth time today the bit about Gerald of Windsor escaping his home down the privy shaft, and I’m beginning to seriously question the spinning of that story. They’ll be at it all afternoon and well into the evening. Most of the morrow as well. All of them together tight around the hearth, shoulder to shoulder, reliving every clunk of steel and firebrand-crackle and plundering of some precious thing. Rhys holds a mug with his good hand, and with his other lifts a bucket of water up and down, up and down, so the muscles relearn their purpose.

  I swallow the last of the wine in the mazer I’m holding and mutter something about the kitchen. Not one of them looks up. Owain’s right about one thing — nobody would pay me any mind in the shadows, even if I went armed and inclined to cut a man good and proper.

  The kitchen is cozy. Nest leans against the far wall, her eyes blank like coins. William is stacking scraps of wood with Not Miv, but when he sees me, he comes running. “Elen! Elen, can you get — him — to let me play outside? He says I’ll get a thrashing if I do!”

  No comfort, indeed. Keeping boys indoors would try a saint’s patience. It’s hard enough to convince Margred and the cousins to play knucklebones in the maidens’ quarters when it’s too wet for ball.

  “I would if I could,” I reply cheerfully, “but Owain ap Cadwgan is like a cat. He does what he wants.”

  William ventures a smile. “Does he play with his supper before killing it?”

  I snort-laugh. From the mouths of babes. William is shuffling his feet and glancing longingly at the door, so very much like Margred that I pull up my hood, race across the courtyard to the king’s chamber, and retrieve my ball from my rucksack. I’m back in moments, and I pitch it to him. “Since you can’t play outside, play inside.”

  William tosses the ball from hand to hand, then bounces it off the wall and catches it. He’s grinning like it’s market day and he has a penny to spend. I’ll have to make a new ball, but somehow I don’t think Margred will mind.

  David is curled in Nest’s cloak under a table littered with scraps. When he sees me kneeling, he mutters Alice around the thumb in his mouth. I pull him out and into my lap, and I tell him a story that my mother used to tell Rhael and me when we were small, one about a girl from the sea who fell in love with a king whose hall stood high on a mountain.

  When the story is finished, William sits down near his brother and rolls the ball to him. I slide out from under David, hoping he’ll roll it back, but when he doesn’t, William collects the ball and rolls it again. I edge close to Nest and wait for her to speak, but all she does is sway.

  “Are you all right?” I finally ask.

  “I don’t think I can do this again,” Nest says in a floaty, absent voice.

  “The Normans took you away,” I whisper.

  She looks up, startled. Then she nods. “When I was a little girl. After my father was killed in battle. My older brother was smuggled away and took refuge abroad. My younger brother and I . . . weren’t.” Nest cuts her eyes toward me. “You were taken, too, weren’t you? From a steading?”

  Miv’s cradle stood against the far wall. She was still crying when they shuffled Owain into a sling of canvas, him passed out, trailing blood, and gray as month-old oatmeal. Still crying when Einion put a hand between my shoulder blades and marched me toward the door, toward the square of bright blank daylight beyond. Ten steps and I could have grabbed her. But then they would have noticed her. Ten steps, but somewhere in the shadows, Rhael was making a sound like a lamb with a broken spine.

  I should have thought of fire.

  “I thought so,” Nest breathes. “Oh saints, child.”

  Owain loves it when people speculate. He’d love Nest thinking that he dragged me screaming and crying to his bed. I can tell already she’d not believe me if I told her that he was in no condition to put a hand on me until well after I realized what I’d done and went willingly. Part of the playact was that Owain would keep me close, and even four-and-ten-year-old me had the sense to know what kind of close would serve me best.

  Nest pulls me into a tight embrace. A comforting embrace. A mother’s embrace.

  I will not think of my mother. I don’t pull away, though.

  “Owain ap Cadwgan abducting my children and me to humiliate and taunt my husband is a horrible act of war,” Nest whispers into my hair, “but holding a girl like you at his mercy is nothing but cruel for cruel’s sake.”

  I saw it in his face as his color returned, as he got stronger, as the wound below his arm puckered and darkened. He had no more need of me. I’d brought him back from purgatory’s doorstep, and now he’d turn me loose with a pat on the head and perhaps a coin in my hand, but without half a clue where I was or a house to go back to or any decent way to keep myself.

  “I’m not here against my will.” I edge gently out of her hug. “I’m Owain’s protector. Saint Elen keeps him safe if he does the same for me.”

  Nest holds me at arm’s length. “That’s all? Oh, child. I’m sorry.”

  I bristle. “What for?”

  “He didn’t bring you here to be his wife or gain your parents’ blessing to keep you at his hearth.” She smiles sadly. “You may as well be a pet.”

  I will not remember my father, how he’d bind tiny dolls for us out of heather and slip them in our apron straps. I will not remember my mother or how she’d hum while she stirred the pottage or banked the fire. I will not remember how they kissed us each on the head and said they’d be back by nightfall, to keep the fire burning and add turnips to the pottage around midday so it would be ready upon their return.

  “Owain keeps me close.” I make a show of spinning Nest’s bracelet around my wrist. “I am not a pet.”

  Nest slowly lifts a hand to cover her mouth. “Please don’t tell me you think he loves you. I know you’re young, but I don’t think I can bear to hear that.”

  Owain loves his hunting dogs. He loves his warband. He most certainly loves the short sword he plundered off a dead Norman lord. Those are the things Owain ap Cadwgan loves.

  But for three years now, Owain has put a roof over my head. I’m never hungry when he’s not. He’s bullied and beaten more than one man who’s spoken roughly to me or out of turn. He has yet to raise a hand to me in anger.

  “Or . . . saints, you’re not going to tell me you love him, are you?”

  There’ll be no brothers two summers apart in steadings across a valley. Rhael will never be in my kitchen. No ballads at sundown, no giggling boy and girl swinging a leather bucket between them as they come up the path. Owain ap Cadwgan is the sole reason it’ll never happen.

  I snort quietly. Shake my head.

  William has gotten David to return the ball to him by aiming it at his brother’s forehead. The littler boy bats it back to keep from getting hit. William chortles, and David is almost smiling.

  Then William tosses the ball to Nest and sings, “Now throw it to Elen, Mama, and she can throw it to David! David, sit on your backside and catch the ball, all right?”

  David doesn’t sit up, but he does pass his cloth square t
o his other hand and stretch out a palm.

  Nest lets out a long breath and rubs her thumb over the tiny curve of sinew wrapped around the ball’s opening. Then she unravels it with a flick of her fingernail and shows the flabby bladder to William. “In a moment, dear. Let’s have Elen fix the ball first.”

  William nods and kneels to whisper to David.

  As Nest hands me the bladder and sinew, she turns away from the boys and leans close. “This is probably a fool’s errand, but you’re out here with us instead of in there with him. So . . .” She takes a deep breath. “You must help me convince Owain ap Cadwgan to send my children back to their father. I cannot bear it, wondering what he might do to them on a whim. Not after what happened to my younger brother.”

  I turn all my attention to working the tiny piece of sinew into a loop around the pucker in the bladder. She couldn’t have forgotten that’s why they’re here at all.

  “I know it can’t be me. Going back to Gerald. I’m not asking that. But help them. Please. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Her servant’s linsey is stained. Her feet are wrapped in rags. Her hair is tied back with the kind of hemp twine that binds undressed fleeces. Yet Nest stands chin up, shieldlike, as if there’s a clatter in the yard outside.

  “Please.” Her voice breaks. “There must be something you want.”

  My steading unburned. My parents bustling around hearth and yard and byre. Brothers two summers apart, Rhael at my door. Miv as big as Margred, playing hoodman-blind with my son and daughter.

  I cinch the sinew tight.

  “Elen?” William has pulled David upright, balancing the littler boy and helping him hold his palms outstretched to catch the ball. “Look, we’re ready!”

  “There is,” I say quietly to Nest, and I toss the ball to the boys, pick up the mazer that one of the kitchen lads refilled, and squish through the rain toward the hall.