Of course I can’t say that, so I go limp and let Owain happily steer me across the hall like a sheepdog at the whistle. He pulls me to a halt at one end of their fortress of benches, nods graciously to Isabel, and drawls, “Mama. A pleasure, as always.”
Isabel swats him playfully. “You wretch. Your mama clearly didn’t take a switch to you enough.”
“Hmm. No wonder you and my father get along so well.” Owain nudges me forward and makes a show of kissing my cheek. “You remember Elen. She needs some company to spin with.”
We may not be outsiders together, Isabel and I, but I can make a better showing. Especially here, among the wives. If she’s decided we’ll not be friends, at the very least I must keep her from becoming an enemy.
But while I flail for something to say — anything — that doesn’t sound foolish or false, Isabel’s impish smile goes bland and cold. “She can’t sit here. You know what your father would say.”
Oh saints. We would have been natural allies, but the only voice in her ear for two years has been Cadwgan’s. Little wonder Isabel and I have never met properly.
“Whatever my father tries to tell you about Elen is unkind, unwarranted, and profoundly untrue,” Owain says, “especially for a man who thinks as highly of the saints as he does. Besides, we both know he’s not happy if he’s sparing the rod.”
Isabel smirks and rolls her eyes good-naturedly.
“You, on the other hand, know how to hold out a proper welcome to your hearth.” Owain bows his head again, and Isabel shrugs, coy and demure, but she can’t quite hide her triumphant smile. “What’ll people think if they see Elen sitting in the dust all alone? She is a guest in your hall, after all. She is my guest in your hall.”
Isabel looks pained, but she sighs and points to an empty place at the end of the bench. I make no move. The wives busy themselves sewing or spinning, but they’re watching us sidelong. Owain’s attention is mostly over his shoulder near the door, where the lads are jostling and passing a flask and snickering. Only when he nudges me again do I perch on the very edge of the bench. It bites a sharp line into my backside. Once I’m seated, Owain grins, kisses me again, then leaves without a backward glance. He rejoins the lads, and they pile out the door and thrash their way outside, throwing snowballs, mayhap, as they head toward the gate.
I pinch out some wool like nothing is amiss and push the spindle down my leg to get a good twist. They’re all watching me, and Owain loves it when people speculate. After several long moments, after the courtyard is quiet, Isabel clears her throat. “You must go.”
“Beg pardon?” I widen my eyes, all innocence.
Isabel rises and jabs a finger at the corner where I came from, but I intentionally let my work tangle and then start fixing it. If I’m not on this bench when Owain returns, there’ll be an argument I’ve no wish to be at the center of.
“Awww, leave the poor little lass alone.” Gwerful tsks and pulls a stitch clear with plump fingers. “Owain will soon take a proper wife, and then where will she be? Out on her ear, that’s where. Unless she starts giving him sons.” She glances at me like I don’t have the sense to work this out myself, but I can’t think of sons without smelling smoke.
“I doubt it.” Annes grins. “Whatever else, she’s made Owain like her better than any of our husbands like us. Who knows? Mayhap she’ll end up the proper wife.”
The women giggle because it’s hilarious that a girl born in some nameless steading might one day wed a king’s son. I laugh, too, because I’m picturing the look on Cadwgan ap Bleddyn’s face should such a thing somehow come to pass.
“If it were as easy as that, don’t you think she’d have done it by now?” Eiluned picks a fleck of grime out of her wool. “I would have.”
It’s not a matter of easy. I wish it was. But it never will be.
“Come now, don’t taunt her,” Gwerful scolds. “She might stay kept, but Owain will marry a girl like Isabel here. Someone with land and a family full of sword-arms. Someone his father would have peace with.”
“Poor child! At least the saints have blessed her —”
“Shut up, all of you!” Isabel snaps. “If my husband walks by and sees her here, I’ll never hear the end of it. She may be a guest in my hall, but I do not have to pass time with her!”
I grip the bench edge, but Isabel wrenches me up, spindle and all, and shoves me hard. I stumble backward into a baby wobbling on tiny bare feet while clutching a fistful of his nurse’s skirts. The baby loses his grip and sits down hard on his backside.
Miv.
Miv we hid in the shadows. Already she was crying in her cradle, arms up, hold me hold me hold me. Rhael said they would not care about her. Mam and Da would come back from the hills and find her wet and hungry and angry, but unharmed.
We did not think of fire.
This baby is not Miv. Miv had shaggy dark hair past her ears. This baby has a trace of sawdust-colored ringlets struggling free from a little gray hood. This baby looks up at me, up and up, and his lip trembles as he stretches his arms to be held.
An elbow hits my ribs, and I stagger, hard, crunching Gwerful’s foot and knocking over Annes’s sewing basket. When I recover, clutching my side, Isabel is drawn up like a murderess with the child on her hip.
“Did you just knock my baby down?” She strokes his tiny round cheek again and again. “You did. I saw you. Your master put you up to this, didn’t he? Owain ap Cadwgan may be all smiles to my face, but I know exactly what he’d do to little Henry given half a chance. One more brother means his share of land and cattle is that much less, and don’t think I haven’t heard him calling my son a half-breed cur!”
I want to beg Isabel’s pardon. I want to tell her my imposing on her spinning circle was not my idea, that she must pay Owain no mind for he’s trying to needle his father through her. That no one put me up to anything, but they did, and Miv is wailing and Rhael stands chin up defiant for a staggering long moment before Einion ap Tewdwr roars like a beast and slings her against the wall, Owain at her feet with a knife-hilt beneath his arm.
I dodge around Isabel and throw myself out the main hall doors into eye-dazzling snow that stings my bare feet. I slog to the chapel, where Llywelyn penteulu’s body still lies before the high altar.
I don’t have a fire iron. I do have a meat knife.
I draw it warband-style, my thumb pressed to the tang like Owain taught me, but the moment I come within an arm’s length of the body, I freeze.
Even now.
“Goddamn you,” I mutter, and I swallow hard and grip the knife till it burns.
That first year, echoes of it happened right before my eyes, day after day, whenever Llywelyn penteulu entered the room, whenever I so much as heard his voice. I kept to the shadows and thought about knives and imagined this moment a thousand different ways.
It’s been three summers now. Owain believes the playact like it’s the paternoster and has not taken a proper wife. I can move from hearth to kitchen to spindlecraft, smile from my place at Owain’s right hand, and sleep through the night.
I slack my grip, roll the knife-hilt in my hand, twice, thrice. Then I slam the blade into its sheath at my hip and turn away. I wouldn’t be seeing echoes at all had Owain ap Cadwgan not led Llywelyn penteulu and the others to my steading. Had Owain not kicked in my door and let the wolves in behind him.