A Heart in Sun and Shadow (Cymru That Was Book 1) (12 page)

His mother and Melita were keeping quiet vigil with their guest. Áine sat with her head bowed over her hands, which lay folded on the table. She wore one of Caron’s gowns, the sleeves a little short on her long pale arms. Her hair was loose and spilled forward in a soft cascade of burnished scarlet. The color was so very near the remembered color of Seren’s locks that he gasped and heard Idrys, who’d come in behind him, growl softly deep in his black furred throat.

At the sound Áine raised her head and the spell of memory was broken. Though her skin looked pale enough in the fire and lamplight, it was not iridescent with its own inner glow. Her face was striking, but not beautiful. Her nose was straight, and her lips full, almost petulant, even with the deep lines of sorrow marking her broad face. Her mouth was offset by a stubborn chin that bore a faint crooked scar. Her eyes were not swirling silver but instead that new leaf-green, which he remembered from earlier being marked with specks of gold like sunlight on leaves. Those eyes were now full of shadows and pain, too human in their reflective suffering.

Only her hair, straight and red as precious gems in the dancing light, only her hair was like the woman of the Fair Folk.

Emyr put his hand down to quiet Idrys and forced himself to smile and walk forward naturally.
What care I if she’s some sort of halfblood? The stories say it’s possible. She’s a wisewoman and clearly human enough for grief and injury. She’s not Seren, that’s all that matters.

Idrys kept his distance, circling the group and watching as his brother told them that the pyre was set and ready. Hafwyn tactfully suggested they sit and keep vigil ‘til dark set in fully. Idrys heard Áine agree.

He sniffed the air, parsing her scent from the woodsmoke. She smelled of his mother’s soap, lavender and tea rose, and something else besides. She had a scent almost like spiced wine, sweet and strange at once under the other threads of smell. She smelled human enough, the metallic taint of blood from her scabbing scratches adding in yet another layer. He sighed and turned to head to his room. The tingling in his blood was growing stronger. Soon enough he’d meet her as a man and could take her measure then. His brother seemed to like her well enough, though his face, too, was troubled.

* * *

Áine hobbled outside with the help of Melita. Emyr and his tall black hound had disappeared into one of the rooms off the back of the hall. Hafwyn brought a bench out for her and sat beside her, keeping vigil as Urien and Llew lit torches around the square to stave off the deepening gloom.

Áine felt like wood or perhaps stone. Dead and heavy. She could feel her heartbeat and cursed it softly under her breath. When the tears came, silent and thick, she made sure each was caught in her lap or her sleeves.

She looked up finally, rubbing her palms into her sore and reddened eyes. It was full dark and a little group had assembled. Hafwyn noticed her looking around and whispered introductions as each approached.

“That’s Gethin there. He’s our master of flocks.” She nodded at the older man who stood a little distance from the pyre with his graying head bowed in respect. “And you already know Urien ap Daffyd and Llew ap Evadi,” Hafwyn said, naming the men.

Urien was the shorter, stockier man with the thick umber beard. Llew was slender and tall, and fairer, though still more tan than Áine, with gold hair and a clean shaven face. Áine had met Melita virch Badi and Caron wreic Llew now by name, and so Hafwyn did not point them out again.

A small family appeared out of the darkness. Hafwyn named them all for Áine as well. The oldest was Madoc ap Madog whom all called Moel, the Bald, for his smooth pate. He was as old as Tesn had been and walked with a slight limp.

His son was Adaf, an unassuming man of middle years with his dark hair just starting to thin and worn loose about the shoulders. His wife and two young children followed. She was called Maderun and looked at her feet more than ahead. She was younger than her husband by a good decade if Áine reckoned it properly.

Maderun’s daughters, Gwir, who was four, and Geneth, seven, clung to their mother’s skirt and stared alternately between the pyre with its white-wrapped burden and Áine. Another handful of men and women filtered in, all passed their middling years. Áine lost track of names as her eyes fixed on the pyre and memories floated in and out of her vision, sharp behind bleak eyes.

Finally Emyr emerged, having washed the mud from his skin and changed clothing. He walked out into the square and nodded to Áine. She leaned heavily on Hafwyn and rose to her feet.

“This is. . .” She choked on her heart and paused to breathe again. “This is Tesn. She was my mother and my teacher. I’ve traveled near the length and breadth of Cymru learning by her side.” She paused again as the tide of memories lifted her voice from her for a long moment. “She was the most generous, kind, loving, and patient woman ever to serve the people. I don’t. . .I don’t know what I’ll do without her.”

Áine crumpled then, falling against Hafwyn as a cry of pure anguish tore from her sore throat. She knew she should say the prayers to ease the passing of another. It’s what Tesn would have done.
Damn her and damn what she’d have done. She can’t do it, can she?
Áine stood there as Emyr walked forward to set the pyre aflame. She watched as the fire caught and consumed.

She turned to Hafwyn and asked for her small knife. The woman looked a question at her but did not ask it aloud and instead pulled the small blade from her belt.

Áine let go of her and limped toward the pyre. She gripped her hair in a tight fist and hacked into with the little knife. It came free in her hand, clean and soft and red as blood. Wisps of hair floated around her chin as she tossed the flowing handful onto the fire.

She stepped back and leaned against Hafwyn again. Hafwyn kept a tight arm around the taller woman’s shoulders until finally Áine turned her face away from the growing heat and bent to weep into the shoulder of a stranger.

They gave Áine the extra room off the central hall that was reserved for guests. She fell almost immediately into an exhausted slumber. Melita and Hafwyn made sure that her fire was well banked with coals and then slipped from the room as their guest’s sobs died slowly into sleep.

“Poor thing,” Melita said to Hafwyn as they walked into the main hall.

“Aye,” Hafwyn said. “But the only thing that heals grief is time.”

“Which she’ll have in abundance here, I suppose.” Idrys leaned against the long table with his still booted feet resting on the stone of the hearth. Emyr was sprawled on the rushes with a raised head and alert eyes that shifted between his mother and his twin.

“I meant it when I said she was welcome here as long she’d like to stay,” Hafwyn said firmly.

Melita looked between the two and gracefully excused herself saying she was going to go check in and perhaps have supper with Llew and Caron if they’d no further need of her here. Idrys watched the older woman leave with a calm gaze and then turned back to his mother as she came to sit on the wide stone hearth.

“There’s cold meat and fresh bread, if you want supper,” Idrys offered.

“Nay, thanks love.” Hafwyn sighed heavily. Emyr sat up and put his head in her lap. She smiled down at her other son and stroked his silken ears. “Too much sorrow today for eating, I think.”

“Moel’s fit to raise a fuss, I think,” Idrys said.

“About Áine? Did he say somewhat to you?”

“He’s not spoken exactly, though he did ask me how long our guest might choose to reside here.”

“That’s the chief’s business and not his own, isn’t it?” Hafwyn tipped her head to the side and considered. “She’s not one of the Folk, I don’t think.”

“No.” Idrys’s mouth set in a line and he stared into the fire. “She’s not, or at least not entirely. Her eyes are all wrong, and her skin more milk than moonlight. But that hair…” He stopped and shook himself, then looked back at her. “She might be ill luck, her. And if that woman was the mother that birthed her, I’ll eat my horse, saddle and all.”

“There are many kinds of mother, Idrys.” Hafwyn reached out and laid her hand on his knee.

“Hush mother. Idrys is dead.” His look darkened as he returned his gaze to the flames.

Emyr gave a growl of protest and rammed his narrow head into Idrys’s thigh. His twin relented and abandoned a portion of his sad and bitter thoughts as he scratched his brother’s head in the same way that Emyr often scratched his during the day.

“We’ll see how it goes. Mayhap she’ll not care to stay past when her leg is healed up anyhow. And,” he raised a hand to forestall his mother’s next comment, “I’ll make sure she’s accorded everything a wisewoman should be and when she chooses to leave, we’ll outfit her.” Idrys looked down into his brother’s liquid brown eyes. “Satisfied, brother?”

Emyr licked his leg and wagged his tail. He appreciated how hard it was for Idrys to fill his shoes, to pretend that he was his twin while his own identity died away. Emyr was more natural as the chief. He liked to argue the finer points of cantref law and custom while sitting around with his men or riding out to help shore up a wall, till a field, or hunt down wayward flocks.

Idrys was confined to darkness, though he rode out at night often enough with only Emyr to accompany him. While he could drink with his friends, a thing Emyr envied, Idrys had little contact with the outer settlements other than the dealings that took place at suppers or in the feasting after dark on holidays.

Emyr knew too that Áine’s resemblance to the Fair Folk, faint enough though it was, would sting Idrys more as well. His twin still blamed himself for their fate and on very dark, very bad nights Idrys had a time or two confessed he still dreamed of the moon-pale Lady and her warm bower as only a man trapped in the deep of winter can yearn for a summer’s day in the light.

Seren. Though she’d cursed them out of pique at being unable to separate the two, she’d still managed to come between them. It was a wound that Emyr longed to heal but could see no clear path.

Time, his mother counseled.
Time, indeed. Seven years of slow healing ripped open by one blood-haired woman.
He gave a very un-doglike sigh and sank down into the rushes at his brother’s feet.

* * *

Áine dreamed of waves and small white birds and she wasn’t sure at first where she was when she awoke. Her leg hurt and the bed she lay in smelled strange. She wondered if they’d reached Clun Cadair and turned over to feel for Tesn’s warmth.

The events of the day flooded into her memory with a sharp, cold pain. She curled into a ball and felt the tears threaten to rise. She took several careful breaths and sat up slowly.

Her crudely shorn hair hung at odd lengths around her face, reminding her of her inadequate gestures the night before. She was wearing only a light linen shift and recalled Melita and Hafwyn helping her undress the night before.

Grimly, she took stock of her body. Her leg throbbed, though perhaps a little less than the day previous. Her head felt sore, but better for the comfortable, warm rest she’d gotten. Her shoulders ached and the biggest scrape on her hip had scabbed and pulled tight so that it protested with a sharp pain as she moved and stretched. She was alive and going to mend, it seemed.

And what good is that? I’ve got nothing. No Tesn to guide me, no healing kit, no pack, no clothes of my own, nothing.
She shivered.

She had her skills still, if grief didn’t dull her intellect. And worse come to worse, she could always cry somewhere in private and trade the pearls for goods. Áine smiled ruefully at that thought. It was something Tesn had told her once, counseling her ward that if desperate times struck, she should be not faint to use whatever means she could to continue her service to the people of Cymru.

All right, you silly nit. You can lie here feeling sorry for yourself or you can try to be useful. Tesn would have your ear off if she saw you laying about when there might be work.

Áine shifted and painfully pulled her legs over the side of the bed. The dress she’d borrowed the day before lay folded on a bench near the casement. She limped over to the bench and struggled into the gown. She tidied the bed as best she could and then hobbled to the door.

Leaning heavily against it she steeled herself to face the people she could now hear moving about in the hall. She ran one hand through her mangled locks and shrugging, pulled the door open.

Emyr, Llew, and Urien had ridden out at first light to finish their circuit of the wintering crofts and to check on the progress of those who would be returning to their homes this week with goods for taxes and trade. Emyr had glanced at Áine’s door but decided she’d like as not stay in today anyway, what with her grief weighing so hard on her slender shoulders.

Caron was in the hall with Melita and Hafwyn. They were boiling down a vat of berries for preserves over the cooking hearth while Melita pounded out the week’s bread. Hafwyn sat calmly on a bench against the wall with her spinning in hand. She was smiling as Áine emerged but quickly turned her head to nod to her guest.

“Sleep well, did you?” Hafwyn asked.

The other two women stared silently at the pale young woman. Áine’s hair hung in uneven lengths around her face which was still red-eyed and pinched with sorrow. She filled out Caron’s borrowed gown nicely, but her shoulders were hunched and her gait halting as she limped to the table and sat with a heavy sigh.

“Aye, thank you.” Áine gave a wan smile to Caron who quickly left off stirring the berries to fetch the plate of bread and cheese and pears she’d laid by at Hafwyn’s bidding for their guest.

“My son is riding out toward the river today to check on the crofts. He’s going to keep an eye out for your pack. Meanwhile, I’ve got a lovely bolt of thick bleached linen, which I hope will suit you for a dress?” Hafwyn smiled warmly at the girl. She understood the pain of grief and felt a depth of compassion and good will toward the young wisewoman that surprised her.