Spindle and Dagger - J. Anderson Coats Page 0,13

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.