Spindle and Dagger Page 10

  “My babies,” she whispers. “They’ll be so frightened. All alone.”

  “You’ll be back with them before you know it,” I say, but Nest merely lowers her head onto her knees, the wineskin dangling from her fingers.

  They are safe. They’re together. They’re going home.

  I take the wineskin from Nest and drink deep. Even though I did not leave them to save my own skin, even though I left them to save theirs, to them it will only matter that I didn’t come back.

  I’VE SEEN SHIPS AT WHARF AND SHIPS UNDER SAIL, but I have never been close enough to mark the green sludge crusting the waterline, the splintery, graying wood, the low and ominous creaks leaking from somewhere within like an old man’s windy guts.

  “A pity Saint Elen will not tell Owain he’ll die at sea,” mutters Einion penteulu, and for once I agree with him even as I wish he’d keep his mouth shut.

  “Say that a little louder,” I reply under my breath. “Owain’s quite in the humor to hear it.”

  We both study Owain, standing on the wharf-end with his back to us watching a rowboat approach. He’s long since traded his leather armor for a night’s lodging and now wears a drover’s coarseweave tunic, but I’d wager real drovers don’t constantly complain of the itching. In addition to Gerald’s bounty, the English king has put a price of ten shillings on Owain’s head. Owain brags it should be twenty, but he always sits facing the door and hasn’t been cold sober since we arrived in this little harbor town.

  Einion penteulu nods toward Nest where she slumps, washrag-limp, against a nearby post. “You mind your tasks. I’ll mind mine.”

  I should be grateful Nest isn’t plotting ways to steal a dagger and stab Owain repeatedly in the vitals, but I know the look about her all too well. It comes on you when Einion ap Tewdwr whispers grim in your ear that they killed them both and seized all the beasts, and in that moment you realize that you will never again have a home unless you make one yourself by hook and by crook, by warp and by weft.

  The rowboat pulls up to the wharf, and the sailor at the oars nods to Owain. The boat seems small and manageable, but I can’t look away from the dark water beneath. I can’t swim. Neither can Owain. Einion penteulu and Rhys climb into the boat, but Nest hesitates, clinging to the brine-damp post.

  “Be quick about it,” Owain grumbles.

  “Be easy!” I snap. “You could have let her go home with her children. You didn’t have to drag her along with us.”

  “What, I was just going to give her back? Like my father wanted?” Owain makes a flighty gesture and simpers, “Oh, here you are, Gerald of bloody Windsor who killed my penteulu in cold blood, please take your beautiful wife back. I’ll just admit defeat now and go cower in Ireland under another man’s sword-arm.” His voice goes hard again. “Sorry, sweeting, but I hope to Christ you know that’s never going to happen.”

  Nest closes her eyes.

  The rowboat sways under us as the sailor works the oars. Soon we’re alongside the merchant cog, and a rope ladder tumbles down till it dangles above the rowboat’s flank. The sailor at the oars nods us toward it while he keeps the boat close to the ship in the choppy water. Rhys climbs first, rung by agonizing rung as the cog dips and groans in the swells, until he disappears over the side. Then Einion penteulu nudges me. I put on my miracle face and climb. When I reach the top, a sailor helps me over the side of the ship with one meaty hand on my forearm and the other on my backside. He says something to his fellows that’s a slurry of liquid sounds, but it makes them cackle like jackdaws.

  This has the look of a teulu at sea, and we are far from anywhere Owain might have sway.

  I make a show of putting myself near Rhys even though he clutches the ship rail and looks the worst kind of greensick. Rhys is coltish, but he towers over many men by at least a handswidth, and when he shifts closer to me and touches his forearm, the sailors go back to their rope hauling and crate stacking even as they size him up sidelong.

  Einion penteulu appears at the top of the ladder, then Nest, and finally Owain. A sailor directs us with stabs of his finger to the back of the ship, so I get a good view of the sailors busying themselves with ropes and canvas and oars, calling to one another in that strange tongue I can’t follow. Nest curls up beside a crate while Einion joins Rhys and Owain at the rail.

  I hang back. I want to know how long the crossing will be, how Owain will know where to find the high king, what we’ll do if Cadwgan’s old brother in arms has no welcome for us. But after we traded the horses Owain “obtained” from his father to pay our passage, Einion penteulu tried asking how long we’d be away, and Owain told him to shut his gob or draw his blade.

  So now we all leave Owain be and let him growl about what a bastard his father is, how ill his cousin Madog ap Rhirid served him, how the English king and Gerald of Windsor could do very improbable things to each other. It’s safer that way, even though betimes it’s hard not to remind Owain that he’d be raiding and plundering quite merrily had he not abducted the wife of the lord of Dyfed for pure vengeance, or had he given her back when offered the chance.

  THE SEA IS GRAY AND JAGGEDY. IT’S LOVELY IN THE way of bleak things. The sails rattle overhead, and the wind tugs at my cloak. Everything smells so clean and wind-raked, nothing like the stale harbor behind us or the worrisome damp of brackish wood beneath.

  Owain, Rhys, and Einion penteulu spend most of their time at the rail studying the water as if they know a damn thing about it. Nest stays folded in a hollow between two crates of something pungent. Her hood falls heavy over her forehead and her body curls itself into shadows. All I can see of her is a slant of pale cheek slashed by a loose strand of hair.

  The day passes slow, but when it’s getting toward evening, I put together some cheese and meat for us all from our rucksack of stale provisions. Owain, Rhys, and Einion penteulu take theirs with muttered thanks. I’ve saved the best portion, even though I don’t expect Nest to eat it. I kneel at her side and touch her shoulder. Her hood shudders and there’s a muffled sob. I slip the food in my apron, edge myself into the hollow beside her, and draw her close like she’s one of the children. Nest sobs again, chokes, presses both hands against her eyes.

  “Damn him,” she mutters. “This was the one thing. I wasn’t going to give him this, too.”

  “You’re not. Owain’s clear over there. I won’t tell.” I squeeze her shoulders in a way I mean to be playful and reassuring, but Nest goes still and tense under my arm.

  “I should . . . thank you. While I can. For everything you’ve done for my children. I was . . . not at my best. You just did for them. Now they love you.”

  I told them I’d be back. William must worry that the enemy got me. Not Miv will peek under blankets like a game of where-is-baby. David may never be better again.

  “There’s just one thing I need to know.” Nest picks at her fraying sleeve. “Did you really enjoy their company? Or were you just doing as he told you?”

  I stiffen. “Saints, that you can even ask me that.”

  “That first day. When we . . . arrived. The look on your face.”

  Little hands. That milk smell. I couldn’t. But Owain turned away like there was no chance I’d do anything else. Left them to me so he could sort out the rest of the plunder. The little weh-weh-weh was a tiny sound in the chaos of the courtyard and yet louder than anything else. Nest cringing whenever he spoke, wrung out like a rag but with her baby safe against her heart and not left in a cradle in some corner to burn.

  “I didn’t want to love them,” I reply to my hands, “but I do.”

  Nest leans close. “Who’s Miv?”

  I choke. No one has said her name in — in —

  “Your . . . baby?” Nest whispers, and her eyes go to the rail, to the back of Owain ap Cadwgan cut harsh against the endless sky.

  It’s been three summers now. There was a time when I lived in terror of the thought of a baby and another when I was sure it would solve everything, but both
were times when I actually believed it possible.

  “Elen?”

  Owain doesn’t think on it at all.

  “That day in the kitchen you asked me what I wanted. She’s what I want.” I scrub at my tears. “I want my sister back. Both my sisters. I want it all back and it’s never coming back. Not my home. Not my parents. Not anything.”

  Nest pulls me under her arm and I let her. I let her because she says nothing while I cry, while the ship beneath us rolls back and forth like a cradle.

  WE ARE DAYS ON THE SEA, BUT ONE MORNING, A TINY ridge of land edges onto the horizon. As we get closer, I can make out dozens of wharves crowded with sails and masts and brine-sleek ships of every color and size, and beyond is a town built tall that crawls with the kind of activity I’ve only seen in beehives. By midday, the cog is gliding up to a wharf, gentled forward or dragged slower in turns by oars, and sailors toss wrist-thick ropes to gangers to hold us fast.

  Owain is last down the swaying ladder leading toward the wharf, and his feet have barely touched planks when Nest says abruptly, “We must go.”

  “Hush.” Owain rubs his shoulder, scowling. “In a moment.”

  The sailors from our ship are lowering goods to men on the wharf or tossing them over the sides, chattering away in Norse-Irish. One glances at us, then another, then the first makes a two-fingered gesture toward the town.

  “No,” Nest replies, sharp enough to bring Owain’s head up. “We must go now. They mean to rob us.”

  Owain is instantly on guard, Einion penteulu and Rhys a blink behind. He sizes up the sailors, their shoulders big as horse haunches, the knives at their belts. Then he squints at Nest.

  “Behind us,” she whispers. “One’s in a red tunic. The other has black hair. They have friends at the top of the wharf.”

  Owain presses a hand to his eyes. He’s weary. We all are. Every muscle must work when you’re on the sea. Your body doesn’t know where it is, so it’s always shifting trying to find out. You shiver every moment because you’re damp enough to grow lichen on your back. There was never a time when Owain or Rhys or Einion penteulu was not standing watch, playing it off all friendly to the sailors, and there was never a time when I truly slept.

  At length Owain makes the scatter-and-regroup gesture and mutters something in Rhys’s ear. Einion nods and draws his blade behind his cloak while Rhys fights a pained look. Then we start up the wharf, me at Owain’s elbow and Nest at Einion’s with Rhys a half-step in front, for all the world just travelers leaving a ship.

  “On my mark,” Owain says to us sidelong, “girls with Rhys. Run hard. It might get bloody.”

  Rhael said they would not harm us if we gave them what they wanted. She said it as she pressed the fire iron in my hand, and even then I wondered for those few fleeting instants why I would need it if there was no danger.

  Footfalls behind us echo on wood. I’m still over green-black water deep enough to hold up a ship, and I still can’t swim. We’re halfway up the wharf when two big sailors step into our path. They’re both smirking at Rhys, tall and reedy as he is, when Einion penteulu slams into the bigger one like a runaway ale wagon. Both sailors stagger back, and Owain hollers, “Go!”

  I grapple Nest’s hand and give Rhys the other as he shoulders past a sailor and deflects a grab for my hood. Somehow we get clear of the struggle — oh saints, it’s bloody already — and hurry up a bustling wharfside alley lined with market stalls. Rhys drops my hand, but I hold tight to Nest’s as we turn onto a broad street full of alewives and fishermen and apprentices and a curly-haired girl taunting a small boy with a fish head.

  We pass at a rapid walk until the palisade gates flash above us and become toothpicks in the distance at our backs, and we’re alone in a spring-greening countryside full of birdsong. In a short while Owain and Einion penteulu appear, and Rhys calls them over. They’re panting, quivering, and wild-eyed, even coming at a dogtrot. This is a foreign land and we haven’t been here long enough to piss, and already those two are shedding blood.

  “Aww, sweeting, don’t look at me like that,” Owain says with a dredged-up smile. “Bastards had it coming. You saw it same as me.” Then he glides past to where Nest curls against the hedge with her knees drawn up tight. He sits beside her and asks, “How did you know?”

  “I . . . heard them.” But it’s blood in the water. She wasn’t prepared to spin falsehoods, or she has no skill at it.

  “I heard them too, chattering away like birds with four tongues,” Owain replies, “but you understood them.”

  I see it in her face. Nest is wishing she’d let them rob us, stab us, and slide our bodies into the harbor. She didn’t think. She just acted. Now Owain ap Cadwgan knows something she didn’t want him to know.

  “I did,” Nest finally replies.

  “How?” Owain asks, and his voice is mellow now, easy and coaxing.

  She’s deciding. Her sister’s knife is buried to the hilt in his flesh and she’s deciding whether to twist it or tend the wound. Whether she hates him more than she wants to live.

  “My father bought the swords of the Norse-Irish many times to help his army.” Nest says it low and fast. “My mother had a Dublin girl as a maid. I was often in her care. I understand much more than I can speak, though. It was many years ago.”

  Owain grins like a milk-fed cat. “And Einion here didn’t want to bring you along. Saint Elen comes through for me yet again, though.” He crosses himself and I smile, miracle-calm, even as things I can’t say line up within me like masses for the dead.

  Einion penteulu stands by the hedge nursing an eye that’ll be purple before sundown and a slice across one cheek that could almost use irons. He snorts when I offer, shaking his head slow and insulted, like I’m the one who dealt him the cut.

  AT LEAST ONE OF MY WORRIES IS FOR NOTHING. Finding the high king is as easy as asking the crofters and drovers we meet as we walk, and soon we’re approaching the fort of Rathmore. I’m taken with how familiar it is. Had I not known better, I’d swear I was nearing Llyssun or Aberaeron. Same bristly rain-grayed palisades and well-guarded boundaries.

  The Rathmore sentries approach, hands on weapons, and ask something in a hash of syllables. Owain mutters in Nest’s ear, then guides her forward. She speaks to them, halting, like she’s feeling along in a dark room. One of the sentries disappears, then returns with a woman who has silvery plaits and high freckled cheekbones. She’s dressed in a fur-trimmed cloak and wears a horseshoe made of gold around her neck, and her tone is friendly and confident.

  Owain looks at Nest expectantly, and she says, “The lady of this house is bidding us health in her lord’s name, that we should come in and be welcome. She is called Sadb, and she is Muirchertach’s wife.”

  Another of my worries, gone in a breath. After Owain’s foot-dragging, I’d braced for a show of force from the Irish or at least a cold shoulder, Cadwgan’s onetime allies or not.

  “You must thank her,” Owain replies. Nest says something to him, and he repeats it to Sadb sound for sound: “Uh vwar vwugh.”

  Sadb smiles and gestures for us to follow her through the gate and across a muddy courtyard toward a structure that must be the hall. Nest tries to drop back, away from Owain, but he puts her hand on his elbow and turns on her that feral warband smile that gives me the shudders. So I take her other hand as we slog through Rathmore’s yard, and she presses so close that we bump shoulders every other step.

  The hall is dim and smoky. There’s a hearth and benches and trestle boards leaning against the wall. A cat hunches over a mouse near the door and two graybeards play flinches near the fire. I know this place is not Llyssun and the steward won’t be speaking a tongue I can follow, much less have any stories of tiny Owain, but I still run my thumb along the door frame out of simple, wishful habit.

  Sadb asks something of Owain, but he smiles graciously and motions to Nest. Nest’s face reddens as she stumbles out some syllables to our hostess. Sadb nods, touches Nest’s c
heek in a kind and motherly way, then addresses servants who have gathered around her. A girl of about ten summers skips forward, and my first thought is to hug her because she and Margred could be sisters. She’s sun-browned, like me, which makes her wheat-white hair stand out like a halo. Sadb puts a hand on the girl’s head and says something like orla.

  “Órlaith,” Nest repeats, and the wheat-haired girl beams and pokes both thumbs into her chest.

  Then Sadb says something to Órlaith, and Nest winces so hard I bite my tongue to keep from asking what she heard. Sadb notices Nest’s expression and pauses, but Nest forces a smile and makes a helpless open-handed gesture. Órlaith tugs on my sleeve just like Margred does when she has something to show me. I hesitate, but Sadb shoos me with a patient smile before calling to someone else, so I let the child tow Nest and me away. I can only hope Rathmore’s kitchen is as familiar as everything else so far. Perhaps there’ll be a spare bladder and I can make the three of us a ball.

  Behind the hall is a small shed with a curtain tacked across the door, and inside is a basin of clean water on a bench. A wooden dish of soap sits next to the basin, and a scrap of linen hangs from a peg jammed between the wall wattles. Órlaith makes motions like I should wash my face and body.

  I blink back tears. I know I’m in a state. I know this is no way to present myself in anyone’s hall, much less a king’s, but I was dragged from my bed one morning and spent more days than I can count fleeing warbands who wanted Owain’s head on a spear before being bundled onto a ship full of filthy cutthroats who pointed and leered when I pissed in a bucket behind my cloak. It’s not like these people have to mock me for it.

  Órlaith frowns thoughtfully, then holds up one finger and disappears.

  Nest squirms. “Elen? I must beg your pardon. I think I may have told them something that isn’t true. Not on purpose, though. I swear it.”

  “What? What did you tell them?”

  Órlaith is back, and over her arm is a handful of new wool that tumbles into an elegant gown in a gray-blue that makes me think right away of the sea. She holds it out and in fearlessly bad Welsh says, “A gift from my lady. For the wife of the guest.”