I stiffen. “Saints, that you can even ask me that.”
“That first day. When we . . . arrived. The look on your face.”
Little hands. That milk smell. I couldn’t. But Owain turned away like there was no chance I’d do anything else. Left them to me so he could sort out the rest of the plunder. The little weh-weh-weh was a tiny sound in the chaos of the courtyard and yet louder than anything else. Nest cringing whenever he spoke, wrung out like a rag but with her baby safe against her heart and not left in a cradle in some corner to burn.
“I didn’t want to love them,” I reply to my hands, “but I do.”
Nest leans close. “Who’s Miv?”
I choke. No one has said her name in — in —
“Your . . . baby?” Nest whispers, and her eyes go to the rail, to the back of Owain ap Cadwgan cut harsh against the endless sky.
It’s been three summers now. There was a time when I lived in terror of the thought of a baby and another when I was sure it would solve everything, but both were times when I actually believed it possible.
“Elen?”
Owain doesn’t think on it at all.
“That day in the kitchen you asked me what I wanted. She’s what I want.” I scrub at my tears. “I want my sister back. Both my sisters. I want it all back and it’s never coming back. Not my home. Not my parents. Not anything.”
Nest pulls me under her arm and I let her. I let her because she says nothing while I cry, while the ship beneath us rolls back and forth like a cradle.
WE ARE DAYS ON THE SEA, BUT ONE MORNING, A TINY ridge of land edges onto the horizon. As we get closer, I can make out dozens of wharves crowded with sails and masts and brine-sleek ships of every color and size, and beyond is a town built tall that crawls with the kind of activity I’ve only seen in beehives. By midday, the cog is gliding up to a wharf, gentled forward or dragged slower in turns by oars, and sailors toss wrist-thick ropes to gangers to hold us fast.
Owain is last down the swaying ladder leading toward the wharf, and his feet have barely touched planks when Nest says abruptly, “We must go.”
“Hush.” Owain rubs his shoulder, scowling. “In a moment.”
The sailors from our ship are lowering goods to men on the wharf or tossing them over the sides, chattering away in Norse-Irish. One glances at us, then another, then the first makes a two-fingered gesture toward the town.
“No,” Nest replies, sharp enough to bring Owain’s head up. “We must go now. They mean to rob us.”
Owain is instantly on guard, Einion penteulu and Rhys a blink behind. He sizes up the sailors, their shoulders big as horse haunches, the knives at their belts. Then he squints at Nest.
“Behind us,” she whispers. “One’s in a red tunic. The other has black hair. They have friends at the top of the wharf.”
Owain presses a hand to his eyes. He’s weary. We all are. Every muscle must work when you’re on the sea. Your body doesn’t know where it is, so it’s always shifting trying to find out. You shiver every moment because you’re damp enough to grow lichen on your back. There was never a time when Owain or Rhys or Einion penteulu was not standing watch, playing it off all friendly to the sailors, and there was never a time when I truly slept.
At length Owain makes the scatter-and-regroup gesture and mutters something in Rhys’s ear. Einion nods and draws his blade behind his cloak while Rhys fights a pained look. Then we start up the wharf, me at Owain’s elbow and Nest at Einion’s with Rhys a half-step in front, for all the world just travelers leaving a ship.
“On my mark,” Owain says to us sidelong, “girls with Rhys. Run hard. It might get bloody.”
Rhael said they would not harm us if we gave them what they wanted. She said it as she pressed the fire iron in my hand, and even then I wondered for those few fleeting instants why I would need it if there was no danger.
Footfalls behind us echo on wood. I’m still over green-black water deep enough to hold up a ship, and I still can’t swim. We’re halfway up the wharf when two big sailors step into our path. They’re both smirking at Rhys, tall and reedy as he is, when Einion penteulu slams into the bigger one like a runaway ale wagon. Both sailors stagger back, and Owain hollers, “Go!”
I grapple Nest’s hand and give Rhys the other as he shoulders past a sailor and deflects a grab for my hood. Somehow we get clear of the struggle — oh saints, it’s bloody already — and hurry up a bustling wharfside alley lined with market stalls. Rhys drops my hand, but I hold tight to Nest’s as we turn onto a broad street full of alewives and fishermen and apprentices and a curly-haired girl taunting a small boy with a fish head.
We pass at a rapid walk until the palisade gates flash above us and become toothpicks in the distance at our backs, and we’re alone in a spring-greening countryside full of birdsong. In a short while Owain and Einion penteulu appear, and Rhys calls them over. They’re panting, quivering, and wild-eyed, even coming at a dogtrot. This is a foreign land and we haven’t been here long enough to piss, and already those two are shedding blood.
“Aww, sweeting, don’t look at me like that,” Owain says with a dredged-up smile. “Bastards had it coming. You saw it same as me.” Then he glides past to where Nest curls against the hedge with her knees drawn up tight. He sits beside her and asks, “How did you know?”
“I . . . heard them.” But it’s blood in the water. She wasn’t prepared to spin falsehoods, or she has no skill at it.
“I heard them too, chattering away like birds with four tongues,” Owain replies, “but you understood them.”
I see it in her face. Nest is wishing she’d let them rob us, stab us, and slide our bodies into the harbor. She didn’t think. She just acted. Now Owain ap Cadwgan knows something she didn’t want him to know.
“I did,” Nest finally replies.
“How?” Owain asks, and his voice is mellow now, easy and coaxing.
She’s deciding. Her sister’s knife is buried to the hilt in his flesh and she’s deciding whether to twist it or tend the wound. Whether she hates him more than she wants to live.
“My father bought the swords of the Norse-Irish many times to help his army.” Nest says it low and fast. “My mother had a Dublin girl as a maid. I was often in her care. I understand much more than I can speak, though. It was many years ago.”
Owain grins like a milk-fed cat. “And Einion here didn’t want to bring you along. Saint Elen comes through for me yet again, though.” He crosses himself and I smile, miracle-calm, even as things I can’t say line up within me like masses for the dead.
Einion penteulu stands by the hedge nursing an eye that’ll be purple before sundown and a slice across one cheek that could almost use irons. He snorts when I offer, shaking his head slow and insulted, like I’m the one who dealt him the cut.
AT LEAST ONE OF MY WORRIES IS FOR NOTHING. Finding the high king is as easy as asking the crofters and drovers we meet as we walk, and soon we’re approaching the fort of Rathmore. I’m taken with how familiar it is. Had I not known better, I’d swear I was nearing Llyssun or Aberaeron. Same bristly rain-grayed palisades and well-guarded boundaries.