Uneasy Lies the Crown (11 page)

Owain took no notice of her momentary reluctance and pushed inside her until he found the wave that had built up within him. It was at the very moment that his ecstasy arrived that she ripped herself from him.

He was half in shock, half beyond command of his own body, before he realized she was curled in a tight ball on her side away from him, clutching at her belly and shaking with violent sobs.

“Marged?” He bolted up on his elbow, looking her over. Between her legs, she crammed one hand, trying to dam the blood that was trickling over her fingers and seeping onto the white sheets.

“It hurts, Owain. It hurts,” she forced, gritting her teeth. Her face was jammed into the pillow, her fine mouth twisting with a soundless cry as she pulled tighter into herself, her knees almost touching her face.

“Oh God.” He pulled the sheets up over her and grabbed the blanket that had fallen to the floor during their lovemaking. With it wrapped about his waist, he shoved the chamber door open. “Someone! Help her! Hurry, hurry. Please! At once.” He darted down the corridor, almost smashing into Iolo as he came around the corner. “Oh please, Iolo. Oh God, Margaret needs help. She’s bleeding.”

Iolo placed a hand on his shoulder, motioning to a wide-eyed boy servant behind him. “Fetch Abraham, posthaste. Waste not a moment. Lady Margaret is very ill.” Then he led Owain back to the chamber.

“Shhh.” Iolo comforted her, wiping at her tears with a corner of the sheet and arranging the blanket around her that Owain had handed him.

Still bare-chested, Owain hovered close as he pulled on his braes and hose. “I don’t understand. All was well and she... then...” His voice cracked and he bent down at her bedside. He laid a hand on her arm, stroking it, willing her pain to vanish. “Have you been ill, Marged? Having pains?”

“Ill?” Iolo’s jaw tightened as he looked away. He turned his back to watch the door. “She wasn’t ill, m’lord. She was with child. You weren’t aware?”

With child? No, she would not have told me anyway. She always kept it a secret until the child had quickened.

Owain’s heart clenched. The blood was now spilling into a bright pool that had spread from her knees to her ribs on the sheets beneath her. With so much lost, the child could not possibly —

He embraced her, but in her tides of agony she could realize nothing of his compassion—or his guilt.

When the physician Abraham came, it took him little time to diagnose her affliction. She had lost the child she was carrying. He told Owain in a blameless manner as she lay sleeping. A strong tea of willow bark and chamomile had eased her cramps and brought on needed slumber.

After the difficult birth of their youngest twins, Owain and Margaret had avoided intimacy for awhile, both aware of the danger that another birth could impose upon her life. But in time, their deep love for one another had stirred old passions. They had both forgotten. They would not again.

15

Mid Wales — July, 1400

In the very heart of Wales, two cloaked men rode into a deeply cut valley. As the sun bowed behind an abrupt ridge line, a dark shadow crept with cold certainty across the land. Uneasy, the men halted to gather their bearings. Their horses snorted and flicked their ears at every sound.

“You had best discover it soon, Tom...” the one said, his dark eyes flitting from hilltop to hollow, “or it will be both our heads on Ruthin’s wall.”

Tom, the younger of the two, sneered. “No one finds Gethin’s hiding place. It’s never the same. He’ll find us.”

Further south, a huddle of cottages smoked with the lure of cooking fires, light beckoning ghostly from the cracks around their shutters.

“Will we be aware of that fact before or after they knock us senseless from these two stolen horses?” The older man pulled his hood up. His name was Griffith ap David and, just like Owain Glyndwr, he had found himself the object of Lord Grey’s disdain. Though not a man of great station or wealth, he had been afforded some responsibilities in recent years, only to have them snatched away at whim by Lord Grey. At his age, the dangerous life of a rebel against the king held a very unsavory appeal.

“God’s stinking breath,” Griffith muttered, “I thought you knew where the hell you were going. Well, I won’t tarry here waiting for starvation to take me. We’ll follow that trail... and if his men are watching us, I pray they recognize you in this failing light.”

Griffith ap David spurred his horse and lurched ahead.

“Allow me,” Tom growled.

“By all means. You can ride in a circle just as aimlessly as I can.”

The trail took them directly away from the groggy hamlet—closer to the crags that crowded skyward. They soon found their path clinging tentatively to the thin shoulder of an escarpment. Rocks dislodged by their horses’ hooves clattered down the steep slope.

“We should turn back,” Griffith said between his chattering teeth. “This wind will send us to our graves.”

He thought he glimpsed a figure ducking behind a rock above them, then convinced himself it was only a shadow. Darkness was descending and there was neither moon nor stars to light their way. His stiff muscles protested going on any more, yet they couldn’t stop now. Turning his head, he glanced back toward the village, thinking of the food being cooked over its fires, but they had already lost sight of its buildings with all the twists in the roadway. He would have risked his life to beg for a bowl of stew, despite the great price that he knew must be on his head by now. Surely they would die in these hills anyway, with nothing more to claim than what they had fled with and the two horses stolen from Lord Grey’s barn in retaliation for his trickery.

Before he turned back to gauge the willingness of his guide, Griffith heard a thud upon the trail before them. His eyes flew wide as a spear tip pricked his throat. Gruff hands ripped him from his saddle. He landed on his shoulder on the road, jagged stones cutting at his cheek.

A well-aimed boot punched him in the kidney. Dark cloaks swarmed above him. He clutched his head in his hands to protect his face, while they rained blow after blow upon his frozen body. The air was crushed from his lungs. His only thought was the need to breathe.

As he gasped for air, they hoisted him up and slammed his back against a rock.

“Who are you and what business do you have here?” one of the ambushers snarled.

Still fighting for breath, Griffith opened his eyes to mere slits. He swallowed and tasted blood draining down the back of his throat. A sidelong glance told him Tom was in no shape to answer. His friend lay in a crumpled heap on the ground. Griffith counted the number of his attackers—only four, but it might has well have been forty, so swift and ruthless they were.

“We seek...” Griffith began, as one of them grabbed his hair to lift his head up, “a man named Rhys Gethin of Cwm Llanerch.”

A trickle of blood ran from one of his nostrils. It felt as though there were bars of iron squeezing his chest from every side.

One of the attackers pulled a stone cudgel from beneath his cloak and raised it above his head. “There is none by that name here.”

“No.” A man from behind shoved him aside. He stepped forward and by the dim light of a starless night all that Griffith ap David could see was the ragged outline of a bearded chin. “Let him state his business first.”

Fighting against the stabbing sensation in his ribs, Griffith coughed and for a moment it was all he could do not to give in to unconsciousness, the pain was so intense.

“Your business?” the bearded one questioned, stooping to within just inches from his face.

“I come seeking aid. Lord Grey would have my head. Mine and other Welshmen’s, as it pleases his fancy. He promised me many things—a pardon among them. But if not for the keen ears of my friend there...”—swallowing more blood, Griffith nodded at Tom, who was now moaning, his fingers clawing at the flakes of rock near his head—“if not for him, I would have gotten Grey’s dagger clear through my belly.”

The bearded man pulled back his hood and smiled in the darkness. “If it’s Gethin the Fierce you seek, look no further. But unless a life hiding in the hills suits you, you are lost coming here. If it’s retribution you so desire, that would take a true fight. Are you up to that, man?”

A fight? Not presently.
Sensing he was at last no longer marked as a foe, Griffith ap David let his eyelids drop down and blackness take him away.

Sycharth, Wales — August, 1400

Outside Sycharth, a persistent drizzle soaked the earth. In the room where Owain Glyndwr wrote his letters, kept his records and met with important guests, it was dry and warm, yet quite unsettled.

“Two days?” Owain slapped the summons against his palm. He stomped toward the hearth and thrust the letter over the hungry flames. Then he shook his head, crumpled it into a ball and threw it on the floor. “How am I to raise enough retainers to comply with his demands in two days?”

Iolo and Rhys exchanged a glance, neither daring to answer just yet.

The messenger who had delivered the summons quivered in Owain’s shadow. He had been dispatched from Ruthin that very morning, sent with haste even though Lord Grey himself had been in preparation for his own departure to Scotland for over a fortnight.

“Get yourself back to Ruthin as quick as you came,” Owain said to the youth, “and tell your master this: he will march to Scotland without this Welshman.”

The messenger, now shaking visibly, did not move.

“Leave, I said!” Owain was more apt to keep his ranting private and work through his troubles while staring into the shifting waters of the Dee, but this insult had hurled him to eruption. If Grey had been standing in the room himself, he likely would have felt Owain’s strong hands upon his throat.

“But... your pardon, my lord.” The youth glanced up, swallowed, and quickly lowered his eyes again. “Am I to tell him you will be delayed in your arrival?”

“Delayed? It is he who is delayed in having this message delivered. He will get
nothing
from me in this manner.” Owain strode to the window. “Get this boy a fresh horse, Iolo, and send him on his way.”

Iolo pulled the messenger to his feet and escorted him hastily out the door.

Rhys picked up the letter and smoothed it out on the table. “He meant to do this, you know?” Squinting, he drew out his knife, then plunged it into the top of the letter and pulled it cleanly downward. He separated the two halves, uncorked the leather costrel which he often kept on his person and dribbled ale over them. Ambling over to the hearth, he cocked his head. “He’ll make damn certain he gets every kernel of grain and remnant of chaff you own.” Then he cast the letter into the fire.

Owain’s mind was roiling with anger, but then he caught sight through the open window of movement beyond the bridge over the moat and his attention drifted there. The mist and late hour made nearly indistinct, gray images of everything. If not for the people by the bridge moving into a huddle, he would have found it hard to distinguish them from the buildings and trees beyond.

Only four guards were posted at the bridge. Before them now were a group of mounted strangers numbering a dozen. They appeared to be seeking entrance. Travelers, perhaps, in need of shelter from the dampness? They did not appear to be imposing. On the morrow, he would make certain to triple the guard.

Owain faced Rhys. “Lord Grey does as he pleases and a pretender wears England’s crown. Richard’s rule may have had its own troubles, but this tyranny is no better. Bolingbroke has no right to sit upon the throne while the young Earl of March yet lives. What will become of the boy, Rhys? Would anyone cry ‘murder’ if he too met a sudden death?” He crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head. “God help me, but I will not bow to Grey on this or any matter. If I did, it would never end.”

“If you stand against Grey, you stand against all of England.”

“Do I? Bolingbroke does not stand for all of England. Certainly, he does not stand for Wales.”

On the wall behind his writing table rested his father’s sword—the very weapon that had been carried through the bloody fields and smoking villages of France and swung by his father’s strong arm with unquestioning repetition on behalf of England’s king, Edward III. Carefully, he lifted it from its hooks and studied it. The edge had been sharpened many times following Owain’s own madly fought battles in Scotland under Richard’s banner and the binding was worn, but there was no hint of rust on the blade. Even in times of peace when Owain was seeing to his own lands and growing family, he had taken great pains to care for it.

“Shall we look to our guests?” Owain slid the sword beneath his belt. He had forgotten what it was like to know it was there at his side.

“But Owain —?”

Owain glanced over his shoulder. He knew the question that was coming:
What will you do about it?

“Don’t ask me,” Owain said. “For now, I haven’t the answers, my friend.”

Then he turned on his heel and, with Rhys only a few feet behind, strode through the vast hall, where a handful of servants were preparing for the evening meal and Owain’s family and guests had gathered. He passed his place at the table’s head with barely a glance at Margaret. An ever-present porter flung the front door open.

Fine droplets of mist hung suspended in the air. Owain stalked down the front steps and over the short expanse of roadway before the bridge, Rhys doubling his steps to keep up with Owain’s long stride. As they moved across the bridge, one of the visitors pushed his way past the guards.

A man with a short, dark beard and a prematurely balding head gazed boldly at them. Then, bowing his head, he flung his cloak over his shoulders and held his hands wide, palms up, to show he held no weapons there.

Owain eyed him with caution, keeping a safe distance. The man had a shrewd look to him, with eyes and ears that Owain was sure missed nothing.

“Sir Dafydd,” Owain said, addressing an older knight who had taken on the duty of overseeing his guard, “who are these men?”