Spindle and Dagger - J. Anderson Coats Page 0,28
much wine and he’s ignoring me to listen to Einion penteulu recount for the hundredth time today the bit about Gerald of Windsor escaping his home down the privy shaft, and I’m beginning to seriously question the spinning of that story. They’ll be at it all afternoon and well into the evening. Most of the morrow as well. All of them together tight around the hearth, shoulder to shoulder, reliving every clunk of steel and firebrand-crackle and plundering of some precious thing. Rhys holds a mug with his good hand, and with his other lifts a bucket of water up and down, up and down, so the muscles relearn their purpose.
I swallow the last of the wine in the mazer I’m holding and mutter something about the kitchen. Not one of them looks up. Owain’s right about one thing — nobody would pay me any mind in the shadows, even if I went armed and inclined to cut a man good and proper.
The kitchen is cozy. Nest leans against the far wall, her eyes blank like coins. William is stacking scraps of wood with Not Miv, but when he sees me, he comes running. “Elen! Elen, can you get — him — to let me play outside? He says I’ll get a thrashing if I do!”
No comfort, indeed. Keeping boys indoors would try a saint’s patience. It’s hard enough to convince Margred and the cousins to play knucklebones in the maidens’ quarters when it’s too wet for ball.
“I would if I could,” I reply cheerfully, “but Owain ap Cadwgan is like a cat. He does what he wants.”
William ventures a smile. “Does he play with his supper before killing it?”
I snort-laugh. From the mouths of babes. William is shuffling his feet and glancing longingly at the door, so very much like Margred that I pull up my hood, race across the courtyard to the king’s chamber, and retrieve my ball from my rucksack. I’m back in moments, and I pitch it to him. “Since you can’t play outside, play inside.”
William tosses the ball from hand to hand, then bounces it off the wall and catches it. He’s grinning like it’s market day and he has a penny to spend. I’ll have to make a new ball, but somehow I don’t think Margred will mind.
David is curled in Nest’s cloak under a table littered with scraps. When he sees me kneeling, he mutters Alice around the thumb in his mouth. I pull him out and into my lap, and I tell him a story that my mother used to tell Rhael and me when we were small, one about a girl from the sea who fell in love with a king whose hall stood high on a mountain.
When the story is finished, William sits down near his brother and rolls the ball to him. I slide out from under David, hoping he’ll roll it back, but when he doesn’t, William collects the ball and rolls it again. I edge close to Nest and wait for her to speak, but all she does is sway.
“Are you all right?” I finally ask.
“I don’t think I can do this again,” Nest says in a floaty, absent voice.
“The Normans took you away,” I whisper.
She looks up, startled. Then she nods. “When I was a little girl. After my father was killed in battle. My older brother was smuggled away and took refuge abroad. My younger brother and I . . . weren’t.” Nest cuts her eyes toward me. “You were taken, too, weren’t you? From a steading?”
Miv’s cradle stood against the far wall. She was still crying when they shuffled Owain into a sling of canvas, him passed out, trailing blood, and gray as month-old oatmeal. Still crying when Einion put a hand between my shoulder blades and marched me toward the door, toward the square of bright blank daylight beyond. Ten steps and I could have grabbed her. But then they would have noticed her. Ten steps, but somewhere in the shadows, Rhael was making a sound like a lamb with a broken spine.
I should have thought of fire.
“I thought so,” Nest breathes. “Oh saints, child.”
Owain loves it when people speculate. He’d love Nest thinking that he dragged me screaming and crying to his bed. I can tell already she’d not believe me if I told her that he was in no condition to put a hand on me until well after I realized what I’d done and went willingly. Part of the playact