Chapter Eighteen
Llywelyn
A lightness and joy filled me that even the troubles of the day couldn't suppress. The emotion augmented the sharpness of my vision; I couldn't explain it otherwise, either by the brightening day or the clearness of the air.
Meg carries my child!
With effort, I restrained myself from punching the air every time I thought about it and tried to focus on the task at hand.
While we were in the hut, the sky had lightened. Soon the sun would push over the horizon. Early spring flowers poked through the damp ground, and it reminded me again of my incredible luck. I am alive. And Meg carries my child.
I checked Meg beside me. She was caught up in the baby too, more so even than I, and I didn't think it had sunk in fully that someone had wanted to kill us. The anger that I'd been keeping in check for the last hour began rising in my throat again and I tamped it down. It would do me no good.
It was the kind of thing my grandfather had cautioned me against, on one of those rare instances when we were alone and he'd a moment to spare for one of his many grandsons: "It is not the actions of a man when he is sober and clear-eyed that are his measure, but when he is pressed hard, his back against a wall. At those times, fear and anger will be his undoing, and it is a rare man who can put aside those feelings and do what must be done. Be one of those men."
Meg trudged beside me through the woods, her hand clasped tightly in mine. "So who betrayed you this time?"
"Hard to say."
"Not Goronwy," she said.
"I trust him with my life," I said. "If he's betrayed me, I could never trust my own judgment again."
"He loves Anna."
"And love for your daughter is a proper test of a man's character?"
"It ought to be one," she said, "though many tyrants through the ages have loved their children and yet despoiled their country. It seems contradictory to me."
"Men are nothing if not contradictory," I said. "That's one of the first things you learn when you begin to lead them. Plenty of people are perfectly capable of holding two entirely opposite opinions at the same time, and arguing vehemently for each in turn."
Meg laughed. "So young, and yet so cynical."
We walked on, our silence drowned out by the rushing of the river. We gazed across it at the castle.
"Now what?" Meg said.
We'd come out of the woods to the south of the castle, but the Usk was still in full flood, so we had no way to cross, except over the bridge to the castle. I studied the battlements and the gate. I couldn't see the other gate from where we stood as it faced east, reached by a bridge across the Honddu. That's the one we'd gone under. This one was even larger and better fortified.
Except today.
The portcullis was up and the drawbridge down. "I don't like this," I said. "Where is everybody? The guards?"
"We look like peasants in these clothes," Meg said. "I can't wait any longer. I have to go in there. Anna's going to wake soon and if I'm not there, she'll cry." She glanced at me and I shrugged. Into the lion's den. We ran to the bridge across the Usk, our footsteps thudding across its length. At any second, I expected to hear a shout from within the gatehouse, but no one called to us.
Just past the portcullis, I tugged Meg through a left-hand door into the gatehouse. Then I stopped short, surprising Meg who bumped into me and caught my arm. The two guards who should have been protecting the entrance to the castle sprawled unconscious on the ground. I bent to check the breathing of one of the men while Meg felt for his pulse. She looked at me and nodded. "It's faint, but there."
The other man was alive too.
I slid the first man's sword from its sheath and hefted it. It was hardly my grandfather's sword, but it would do for now. Then I tugged the belt knife out of the spot on the man's waist where he carried it and handed it to Meg. "Here." She was too small to hold a long sword, but in a pinch, a knife might do.
"What's happened to them?" Meg whispered, though there clearly was no need for quiet as anyone else in the guard room was unconscious. "Were they dosed, or poisoned?"
I cast my mind back to the night before. Anna, Meg and I had shared the meal with everyone else.
"You pushed your mead away last night," I said. "Why?"
"Pregnant women shouldn't drink alcohol," Meg said. "It's bad for the baby." She glanced at me. "You didn't drink it either, though. Was that just because of me?"
"The well at Brecon is deep and the water always good," I said. "I wanted a clear head."
"Maybe that's it, then," she said. "That's what they used. But it doesn't matter now. We should get moving."
"This way." I took her hand and with her at my heels, knife and sword out to counter any threat, we poked our heads out of the guard room. Nothing. How could there be nothing? Where were my men? Or the assassin and his men, if he had them? "No one's awake."
"We should close the portcullis," Meg said.
The mechanism was designed to release with the push of a lever. I hit it with my boot and it let go, falling to the ground with a rattling crash.
"If anyone awake doesn't know something's up, they do now," I said. Grunting at the effort, Meg helped me push the great double doors closed and dropped the bars across them. "It takes three men to winch the drawbridge closed. We'll leave it as it is for now."
We moved into the bailey, hugging the gray stone wall that fronted the Honddu River, into which we'd fallen. Brecon's great hall was in the bailey, at the base of the motte where a circular keep of last resort and the oldest part of the castle shot up against the sky. The Bohuns had greatly expanded the castle during their reign. The outer wall of the great hall, above which housed the room where we'd slept and Anna still lay, was worked into the curtain wall. This fortification projected out from either side of the hall and formed a complete circle around the motte.
Last night, the great hall had been full of men, the stables full of animals, and the bailey busy with craft workers. Many of the people who worked in the castle lived in the little village outside it, so I wasn't surprised at their absence. With the dawn, however, people should be starting to stir. Now, the silence was eerie, only broken by the sound of our boots scuffling on the rocky ground.
The vast expanse of Brecon before us was daunting. I glanced up the hill at the keep. What might await us there? Most of my men had actually slept in its old hall that had been the center of the castle before Bohun built his new one.
Control what you can; let go of what you can't. It would take too much time to explore all of Brecon on our own, and the continuing silence made me worry that our assassin had resources we didn't yet know about. Where was the spy who'd shot at us waiting? Someone had left the castle open to attack, but for whom?
Meg released my hand and darted toward the second gatehouse that guarded the crossing of the Honddu. She entered the gatehouse before I could catch her and dropped the portcullis with another loud crash. Meg reappeared and had the gall to look contrite. "Sorry. Someone left the castle wide open on purpose."
"Next time, warn me first," I said. "I'm going to keep you on a tighter rein than before."
She made a face at me, but I took her hand again and we cat-walked up the steps to the great hall. As in the gatehouse, the scene that faced us in the hall brought us to a halt. My men had fallen where they sat at the end of dinner. At the time, I'd noticed that the meal had been less raucous than usual, but I'd attributed it to some hard riding during the day.
"Anna," Meg said, and took off toward the staircase. She hiked her skirts and went up them two at a time. I caught her by the time she entered the hallway and we pushed open the door to our room together.
Our bed lay as we'd left it. The window to the right of the bed was still open, but with an arrow lodged at head height in the frame. That pulled me up short, but Meg pulled aside the curtain blocking Anna's room and looked in.
She sighed. "Anna and Maud are asleep. I can see
them breathing."
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding, and then spun towards the open window at the echo of pounding hooves. The wall of the castle curved west, away from the river, and I stretched out the window to see around it. A man appeared beneath the castle wall where it abutted the river and ran toward a dozen men on horses who rode towards Brecon from the north.
"Stay here!" I ordered Meg. Without waiting to see if she obeyed me, but thinking that with Anna close she would, I raced out of the room, down the first flight of stairs to the great hall, and then continued down the second flight to the kitchen. Like the rest of the castle, it was deserted, and I hurried across the floor to the pantry and the postern gate.
A curtain separated the kitchen from the pantry but once through it, I braked at the sight of a man standing in front of me. He'd been facing the other way, towards the vaulted undercroft that led to the postern gate. My footsteps had given me away and the man did a double take as he recognized me, and I him. "You!" Lacey said. He reached for his sword but mine was already in my hand.
I ran him through.
I pushed and shoved Lacey's body past the doorway and onto the stairs beyond. With a final kick, I rolled him down it, and then slammed the door to the passage. I dropped the locking bar across the door. Fearing that I didn't have time for this but had to take the time nonetheless, I wrestled one of the big chopping tables from the kitchen, through the pantry, and laid it sideways across the door. If someone had an axe, they could chop through the sturdy oak, but otherwise, they were going to have a tough time getting through it.
I raced back to the great hall and nearly collided with Meg in the doorway. "Where's Anna?"
"With Maud," she said. "She's awake and well. Those men, whoever they are, are milling about in the field to the north. They've discovered that both gates are closed and don't seem to know what to do."
"Their man intended that they'd walk in unhindered. Come with me." I led Meg through the great hall with its unmoving men, across the bailey, and into the armory in the back of the main gatehouse. "Can you shoot a bow?"
"No," she said. "Are you kidding? Those things are so huge I don't know if I can even stretch it six inches."
"It needs to not just be me up there, so I'm going to dress you like a soldier and we can see who this is and what he has to say." I fitted her into a mail shirt and dropped a helmet on her head. It had a hideous-looking feather on the top of it and I hoped whoever was out there would be so distracted by the bizarre presentation that he wouldn't realize my companion was shorter than average-and certainly not Goronwy.
"Maybe there's a box I can stand on," Meg said, tugging a tunic with my colors on it over her head.
"Excellent idea." I grabbed a wooden crate in which arrowheads had been stored and dumped its contents on the ground. "Let's go."
We climbed the circular staircase up to the top of the gatehouse tower, Meg laboring a bit behind me under the unaccustomed weight of the armor. We popped out on the top of the battlements and I put the box on the ground so that Meg could see between the crenellations which were at chest height for me.
I didn't like what lay before us.
"Who is it?" Meg said.
"My cousin, Roger Mortimer," I said. "He's one of the few Marcher lords who remained faithful to the crown throughout the Baron's war. Humphrey de Bohun the elder spoke of him to me just the other day."
"So we've got Bohun, who's gone home; Clare, who's defying you in Senghennydd, and now Mortimer, here in Brecon. I thought the Bohuns had owned Brecon?" Meg said. "Or at the very least, Clare, from whom you took it. Have the Mortimers ever had it?"
"No," I said. "Though Roger appears to be putting in a claim. I defeated his men two years ago before he could reach this far into Wales. The battle became such a rout that I'd heard he's been unable to raise another army."
"It seems he's trying stealth instead."
"Coward."
"And it's his sons who kill you," she said.
"Have a heart, Meg!" I said. "I'm not dead yet."
"No, no! I didn't mean that! You're just taking this so well."
"He can't touch us up here," I said. "No archers."
"What are you going to do?"
"Have a little chat," I said. I lifted my chin and raised my voice. "Cousin! What brings you to Brecon so early in the morning?"
Roger pushed his helmet to the back of his head. "So it is you. I shouldn't be surprised. You always did have the devil's own luck."
"Life is full of surprises," I said. "I live, no thanks to you, it seems."
Roger tsked through his front teeth. "It was you, then, who entered not long ago through the southern gate?"
"You saw us?"
"From a distance," he said. "Apparently, our efforts here were for naught." Roger spun his horse around, effectively ending our conversation. I'd expected more.
He called words to the other men-at-arms who rode with him, words in English that I didn't understand, and pulled his sword from his sheath. He spurred his horse and galloped towards his men. As he approached the lone man standing, the one who'd run out of the passage to greet him, he swung his sword and severed his head from his body. The man hadn't a chance. His body fell and Roger continued on without looking back.
Meg stepped away from the wall, ripped her helmet from her head, and vomited on the stones at her feet.
"Cariad." I wrapped my arms around her waist. "It's all right."
"It isn't." Tears streamed down her face. "How can it be?"
I scooped her up and carried her down the stairs and across the bailey to the hall. As we entered, several of my men stirred. Some had even gotten so far as to stagger onto a bench in order to rest their heads in their forearms on the table. I put Meg in my chair and crouched in front of her. Her face was wet from tears.
"Is this what it's going to be like for our child if we have a son?"
I studied her, not completely sure what she was asking, but knowing at the same time there was only one answer. "Yes."
"I love you, Llywelyn," she said. "I want to have a child with you, but I'm afraid to raise a son here. I don't want him to grow up to be like Roger Mortimer."
"What if he were like me?"
She gazed at me, tears still leaking out of the corners of her eyes. "You are who you are because of a childhood that is not one I would wish on any boy. What you have done-what others have asked of you-is not what I want for my son."
"He will be what God makes him," I said.
Meg shook her head. "He will be what we make him, and what the world makes him. Look at Humphrey de Bohun. He's struggling to find his way in a world in which the rules keep changing and he's not strong enough inside to withstand pressure from men like your brother."
I think I finally understood what she was saying, and had an answer for her. "Our son will be what he needs to be because you will make him that. He will be smart and strong, loving and courageous, because you are all those things. Our son will be the Prince of Wales, and they will call him Fawr, just like my grandfather."
"Everyone will ask too much of him." Her tears had dried and her gaze was steady on my face. "And so much of me. They already ask too much of you."
"Only because I am what they need," I said. "I can think of no one I would rather have as the mother of my son. If anyone will be capable of facing down Edward and England at my side, it's our son."