Spindle and Dagger - J. Anderson Coats Page 0,8
of Powys. She’s well on her way to charming this disreputable lot into good behavior. She’s wearing a gown that never had blood on the cuffs.
She is nothing like me.
I can’t do this myself. I can’t just decide there’s a place for me here and stand in it. If I could, I’d have done it by now. If I don’t have someone like Isabel on my side, I will always stand apart.
THE MEAL GOES WELL PAST SUNDOWN. VENISON AND savories and mug after mug of wine and mead. I don’t so much as look Isabel’s way again. She was not helping me. She was removing her husband from my presence. I didn’t see it. I should have seen it.
Down the table, there’s a burst of cackling muffled by hands.
This is the nest of vipers Margred will put her foot into next year. Sweet, kindhearted Margred, who has promised we’ll be friends forever, come what may. She’s still young enough to make those kinds of promises. She’s that sure of her place in this difficult family and that innocent of what her promise might cost.
It’s full winter dark when I follow Owain across the snow-skiffed yard to the sleeping chamber. He leads me near the banked fire and pulls his blanket over us both, and we lie together in the dying emberlight. Afterward, he holds me close and I rest my head against his shoulder. His arm across my back is comforting and solid, and his sun-browned hand over my hip looks like armor.
I open my mouth to ask Owain how long we’ll be stuck here and if there’ll be gingerbread and whether he minds if I spend the morrow with Margred and the cousins, but before I can, he wraps his other arm around me and into my hair he murmurs, “I can’t believe he’s gone.”
I can’t say how much I glory in Llywelyn penteulu soon to be food for worms six feet beneath God’s green earth. I dare not speak ill of a single one of Owain’s brothers, living or dead.
The patter rises to save me, smooth and well-trodden like a path I’ve walked a thousand times. “Saint Elen kept you from harm, just as she always does.”
“Not an armslength from me,” he whispers. “I turned . . . and the blade was already falling, and I . . . shouted, but . . .”
Owain slides a finger along the scar beneath his arm. It’s a slim, wine-colored line of flesh that runs about the length of my finger. It looks like nothing. Mayhap a ridge worn into his skin from too-tight leather armor or a scratch by a stray fingernail during bedsport.
He almost bled out from that wound, though. Owain ap Cadwgan would have died that day, were it not for me.
“Saint Elen looks to you always,” I repeat.
He lets out a long, trembling breath and tightens his arms around me, but I don’t snuggle against him this time because now I’m looking at that scar and thinking how in two motions I could kill Owain ap Cadwgan.
One motion to seize the knife.
The other to cut his throat.
The dagger is within easy reach beneath a pile of clothing. I could kill him and he’d be dead. I close my eyes against a clatter in the yard. The fire iron cold in my hand as he kicked in the door. Miv crying. Blood everywhere. I begged Saint Elen for my life that day, and she gave it to me.
“When are we leaving?” I finally ask.
Owain sighs deep. “Epiphany. Would it was sooner. I’ll not be good company for man or beast. My father may send us out early just to be rid of us.”
Rid of me, he must mean. “Where are we going? The hunting lodge at Llyssun?”
“You are.”
“Where are you — oh.”
He and the lads will disappear into the hills and later sweep down with fire and sword on dwellings and goods belonging to some enemy of Cadwgan. They’ll kill anyone who fights back and burn everything that stands and smash anything that won’t burn and plunder everything of value and drive off whatever lows or grunts or bleats. They will wreck and pillage again and again until the tenants of Cadwgan’s enemy have nothing but postholes and cinders and corpses, so it’s known to every man that their lord is helpless to defend them.
Raids are done with steel and terror, quick like the snap of a neck. In the best of them, no one sees you coming