The old woman did not rush out to help him but waited at the cave mouth for each stumbling step to bring him back. When he entered the cave, she took his face between her rough hands and blew her warm breath upon him. “You can speak,” she told him, “if you will.”
Up until that moment, Bran did not feel he had anything to say, but now all the pent-up words came bubbling up in a confused and tangled rush, only to stick in his throat. He stood swaying on the staff, his tongue tingling with half-formed thoughts and questions, struggling to frame the words until she laid a sooty finger on his lips and said, “Time enough for all your questions anon, but sit down now and rest.”
She did not lead him back to his bed as he expected, but sat him on her three-legged stool beside the fire ring. While he warmed himself, she made a meal for them—a stew with meat this time, a nice fat hare, along with some leeks and wild turnips and dried mushrooms gathered through the autumn and dried in the sun. When she had cut up everything and tossed it into the cauldron, she took a few handfuls of ground wheat, some salt, water, honey, dried berries, and dried herbs and began making up little cakes with dough left over from the last batches.
Bran sat and watched her deft fingers prepare the food, and his thoughts slowed and clarified. “What is your name?” he asked at last, and was surprised to hear a voice that sounded much like the one he knew as his own.
She smiled without glancing up and continued kneading the dough for a moment before answering. She shaped a small loaf and set it to warm and rise on a stone near the fire. Then, looking him full in the face, she replied, “I am Angharad.”
“Are you a gwrach,” he asked, “a sorceress?”
She bent to her work once more, and Bran thought she would not answer. “Please, I mean no disrespect,” he said.
“Only it seems to me that no one can do what you do without the aid of powerful magic.” He paused, watching her mix the flour, and then asked again, “Truly, are you a sorceress?”
“I am as you see me,” she replied. She shaped another small loaf and put it beside the first. “Different people see different things. What do you see?”
Embarrassed now to tell her what he really thought—that he saw a repulsive crone with bits of leaf and seeds in her hair; that he saw a grotesque hag with smoke-darkened skin in a filthy, grease-stained rag of a dress; that he saw a hunchbacked, shambling wreck of a human being—Bran swallowed his blunt observations and instead replied, “I see the woman who with great skill and wisdom has saved my life.”
“I ask you now,” she replied, rolling the dough between her calloused palms, “was it a life worth the saving?”
“I do hope you think so,” he replied.
Angharad stopped her work. Her face grew still as she regarded him with an intensity like the lick of a naked flame over his skin. “It is my most fervent hope,” she said, her voice solemn as a pledge. “What is more, all of Elfael joins me in that hope.”
Bran, feeling suddenly very unworthy of such esteem, lowered his gaze to the fire and said no more that night.
Many more days passed, and Bran’s strength slowly increased. Restless and frustrated by his inability to move about as he would like, he sat and moped by the fire, idly feeding twigs and bark and branches to the flames. He knew he was not well enough to leave yet, and even if he could have limped more than a few paces without exhausting himself, winter, with its blizzards and blasts, still raged. That did not hinder him from wishing he could go and making plans to leave.
Angharad, he knew, would not prevent him. She had said as much, and he had no reason to believe otherwise. Indeed, she seemed more than sympathetic to his plight, for she, too, nursed a low-smouldering hatred for the Ffreinc who had seized Elfael, killed the king, and wiped out the warband.
Outlanders, she called them, whose presence was an offence under heaven, a stink in the nostrils of God.
While Bran shared this view, he could not see himself effecting any significant change in the situation. Even if