Spindle and Dagger - J. Anderson Coats Page 0,77

Gerald replies mildly. “He won’t do without his precious saint. Making him safe from all harm. As long as you’re near.”

Nest has every reason to want Owain ap Cadwgan dead. I don’t begrudge her that. She would have told Gerald everything she knew, everything she observed. The playact’s not a secret — that’s how it does its work — but now Saint Elen is a weapon in Gerald’s hands.

I’m a weapon. And there’s but one way to blunt it.

“Don’t bother. It’s all lies.” I square up and blink back tears I can’t account for. “Saint Elen does not protect Owain. She never has. I made it all up for my own ends. He finally found out. Turned his back on me. Abandoned me. He wants nothing more to do with me or Saint Elen ever again now that he knows everything he believed about her is a lie.”

“Everything?” Gerald raises one rusty brow.

“He can’t stand knowing he’s just a man. No better or worse than any other.” My belly is churning. This ends here. Gerald will have no reason to keep me from Nest. “Owain will not come here, so you may as well —”

“Hsst.” Gerald gestures to a Norman fighting man standing at the tent flap, who drags Owain in by his bound wrists. “Say it again for Sir Pilgrim.”

I can’t breathe. I’m trying to speak. And the patter is gone completely.

Gerald of Windsor is smiling.

Owain’s mouth hangs open, making words that don’t come out. Hunched over like a boot to the guts. Like a knife to the back.

“My, my,” Gerald drawls, “Sir Pilgrim looks remarkably upturned for the sake of a man he swears back to front he is not. You, dear girl, look as wretched as Judas. I wonder why that is.”

Nest would fold her arms. She’d say Owain has this coming. But she did not have to drag me into it. She could have told Gerald to take his vengeance swift and clean in a raid.

But if it’s not cruel and ugly, it won’t be vengeance.

“So let me see if I have this clear.” Gerald jabs a mocking thumb at Owain. “You’re a simple pilgrim who is definitely not Owain ap Cadwgan, and I definitely cannot lure that double-dealing son of a whore to this place by keeping this girl, because somehow she just spun a tale out of nowhere that he was fool enough to believe for bleeding years. So I definitely should let the girl go at once and should definitely not hang every man of you from the walls.”

Owain’s face is going warband blank. Like it’s foregone that the others will watch him die, and he is deciding now how that will look.

“Th-that’s right, my lord.” I can still make this right. I must save them. “They’re pilgrims. Let them go. Please. You will face Owain ap Cadwgan before you know it, and you will do well to be ready for him.”

Gerald snorts and gestures, and the Norman behind Owain hauls him away stumbling. Outside, someone calls for rope, lots of it.

I scrub tears from my eyes. I’m numb.

Owain will hang. He will hang at the hands of a man whose destruction he swore to preside over. Knowing Saint Elen will not save him because she has never looked to him. Knowing it was I who brought him to this moment.

Nest will hug me. She’ll tell me it had to be done. That at least hanging’s clean. She will sit with me all the hours I need to mourn, and if Saint Elen has any mercy, one day the echoes of this betrayal will fade.

“My lord Clare?” Another Norman standing at the tent flap gestures at me. “What of her?”

“I’ve heard enough. Send her out.”

My mouth falls open.

“Hang her with the others?”

“Nah. I’ll not hang a girl.”

“C-Clare?” I swallow and swallow. “No. No, you’re Gerald of Windsor.”

The man on the bench smiles the smallest, faintest bit. Then he nods at the warbander, and the world is dissolving into blurry color and I am stumbling with a painful hand on my elbow and then I’m in the mud outside the tent.

Not Gerald of Windsor who Nest promised would see us all a family. Gilbert fitz Richard de Clare. Who commands thirty land-hungry knights who’ve all been promised a piece of Ceredigion.

Owain will hang, this province will fall, and I’m no closer to Nest than I was when I stepped in this tent.

I PICK MYSELF UP. I’M MUDDY AND SORE AND MORE than a little