* * * * *
I stared out the window, David in my arms, watching the lights come on as evening progressed. I marveled at the brightness and color, but couldn't help missing, missing, missing my life in Wales. Until time do us part, Llywelyn had feared, and he'd been right to. We would probably never know what had caused me to come to him after Trev died-at the very spot where he died. Or why. Only that I did.
"Can you tell me, cariad?" Mom said the next morning. "I missed you."
I shifted my head to get a better view of her in the chair beside the bed, and adjusted David on my breast. "I'm sorry, Mom," I said. "I spent the last nine months explaining where I'm from, and now I must explain to you where I've been, and you aren't going to believe me any more than they did."
"Meg," Mom said. "I'm your mother. What won't I believe?"
"That I traveled to thirteenth century Wales. That David's father is Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of Wales."
I held Mom's eyes, though her face showed no expression, but then she smiled. She stood, came to sit on the side of the bed, and took my hand. "I know," she said.
"You know? I said. "How do you know?
"Anna," she said. "She's told me all about her Papa, and horses, and a man named Goronwy who made her laugh. She spoke in Welsh. You've done wonderful things with her, Meg."
"You believe me!"
"You are my darling daughter," Mom said. "There's nothing you could tell me that I wouldn't believe, if you believed it to be true."
When David grew old enough to travel, we flew to Wales-against my mother's better judgment. I begged her for help, for I didn't want to go alone, and eventually she consented to come with me.
"He's not there, cariad," she said, even as she booked the tickets and then paid for them. "The castles are gone or empty shells. It will be nothing like you remember them. Keep your dreams. Cold reality will only dash them."
Mom was right, and yet she wasn't.
We went first to Cricieth, since it was there that I'd started-we'd started-though I'd only stayed there for a day. It was as I remembered, a mighty fortress built on rock on a promontory in the sea. But the walls had mostly crumbled, and I confused the lady at the visitor center who speculated on its successive construction, postulating that it was Edward who had built the outer curtain wall. I think not!
I stood on the edge of the cliff, as the battlements were gone, and looked out over the sea. Then I turned to the town below. The mountain loomed behind it, as it always had, but the village had spread along the seashore, thriving and modern, having long since filled in the marsh in which my car lay buried. Power poles lined the beach instead of trees, but if I closed my eyes and breathed, it smelled the same. It was my Wales, but still, without Llywelyn in it.
Everywhere we went, I collected stories about Llywelyn. He lived here. He fought there. Two different abbeys claimed his body as his final resting place, but none could produce his grave. Throughout, I restrained myself from pointing to the baby in my arms and saying: "Look! This is his son! The true Prince of Wales! Open your eyes and see!"
We reached Brecon in the driving rain. Anna had held Mom's hand as we walked across the parking lot, but she stopped as soon as she saw the castle and refused to go any further. I could understand, for it shocked me too. The castle had a giant, white house attached to it.
"What is that?" I asked.
"It says on the information sheet, 'Brecon Castle Hotel'," Mom said. "That's where we're supposed to be staying."
"What have they done to it?" I breathed.
Mom scooped up Anna and we walked across the castle grounds, or what had been the castle grounds and into the front entrance of the house. Mom checked us in as I blindly wandered the reception room, following my nose, until I reached the garden and the last standing stones of the old castle. Mom and Anna followed me outside and we stood in the center of what had been the outer courtyard.
"Papa's not here, is he?" Anna said.
"No, honey." My eyes filled with tears. "He's not."
That was the last of the Welsh castle tours. We visited Roman ruins and the massive and well-preserved English castles that Edward had built to subjugate Wales, but I didn't want Anna to wonder where Llywelyn was when she was too young to understand my grief or cope with her own.
I did go without them, just once, with only David in his sling, to Cilmeri, a small town just a few miles west of Builth Wells. A farmer had put up a memorial stone-really just a big, jagged piece of granite-to mark the spot where Llywelyn died. Every year on the 11th of December, patriots held a ceremony to mark the day and the spot where he fell. I couldn't bear the thought of that, and was glad that it was March and I was alone with only the flowers people who still thought of him had left. I read the death poems and songs to his memory with which people littered the meadow, and knew that I wouldn't come back.
The fire in his hearth has gone out,
Its light lost in the murk of the hall.
No one is left to tend it.
A great warrior, a king, our Prince of Wales
Llywelyn
Has fallen in the snow.
He is quiet now, asleep under the mantle of peace.
The peace he reached for all his life,
But could never find and we could not give him,
Is his at last.
The fire in his heart has gone out.
His heat can no longer warm us.
But still we dream, we live
The morning sun wakes us.
In our hearts, he stays with us,
Dreams with us,
And will rise to walk in better days.
Mom and Anna had understood what I hadn't. Llywelyn wasn't there.