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 to 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.