Spindle and Dagger - J. Anderson Coats Page 0,16
he’s better than healthy. The second day he wordlessly walks at my side, and as evening is falling, he sidles up as we’re about to raise camp. He holds out his injured arm, the bandages already unrolled.
He’s been waiting to do this. Waiting till he’s nowhere near anyone who’ll call him pisser or ask if he’s the kind of milksop who whines for his mama whenever he gets a little scratch. Rhys isn’t showing me his wound because he thinks something’s wrong. It’s because he’s four and ten, he’s been six months away from home, and more than medicine or a miracle, this boy needs a bit of kindness that no one else will think to give him.
Rhys shakes long tangly curls over his eyes as I step near. There’s a faint shadow of hair on his upper lip, and oh saints but four and ten is young. Younger even than almost-twelve, because Margred is still chasing butterflies and sneaking honey cakes and has not been asked to look terror in the eye.
Mayhap Rhael felt this way too when she told me not to be afraid.
“You’ll be back among them before you know it,” I tell him, and instead of whisking away like a cat, he smiles at the dirt and mutters his thanks, touching the raised edge of the wound as he kneels to kindle a fire.
WE ARRIVE AT THE HUNTING LODGE MIDMORNING. It takes hardly any time to get things settled. The steward keeps the place well in the absence of his lord. He’s been in Cadwgan’s service so long he remembers Owain toddling around the place in baby gowns. If he’s not harried, the steward will tell stories of tiny Owain pissing circles on the walls or trying to ride the wolfhounds like ponies and getting bitten when they tired of it.
On my way into the hall I always pause before a series of thigh-high gashes in the door frame where Owain’s mother once marked his height with her meat knife. I thumb each one in order and wonder how she got him to keep still long enough to get a good reckoning. Llyssun is my favorite of all the royal residences because it’s got these small reminders that Owain’s family isn’t always turbulent and complicated. There was once a place for a mother who delighted in her growing son, so there’s got to be a place for a girl who’d live beside him.
By day, the household is unremarkable. Servants move trestle boards and feed the hearth fire, children run around, and sleet drags against the walls like animal claws. By day I often forget for long stretches that Owain isn’t here. It’s like he’s just out hunting with the lads and he’ll be back for supper all bootsteps and off-color jokes, and later I’ll follow him to the big bed in the king’s chamber and drift to sleep curled beneath his arm.
It’s when daylight starts to fade and there’s no Owain that the quiet sets in. Not the restful kind of quiet, either. Not the quiet that comes with spinning in glowing firelight or petting a pup asleep across your knees or listening to your father and mother sing two-part ballads, their voices twining through the dark while you nestle deeper into your pallet with your sister’s back warming yours.
It’s the quiet that makes me force myself to eat supper all smiles because people are watching. The quiet that keeps me huddled in the big bed, cold and awake and alone. The quiet that makes me recall every time I thought of the knife, how easily I could have killed Owain ap Cadwgan and finished the work my sister started, and wonder why under Heaven I would do such a thing when I should be thanking Almighty God for him.
In that quiet, there are brothers two summers apart. The older one curls his lip in disgust while the younger one just looks sad. They fade into the hills like they never were, and I reach a hand across the expanse of bed to where Owain should be but isn’t.
OUT IN THE YARD, THERE’S A SERIES OF SHOUTS AND the scrunch of gate hinges, then Einion penteulu calling for the steward. I put aside my wool and stow my spindle hastily enough that I seem excited, but not urgent and panicked like there’s cause for alarm. People are watching.
The lads flood the courtyard, plunder on their backs and on tethers behind them. Owain is cheerful and windblown