The Wicked and the Just (28 page)

I can see better now. There are wattled walls, patched and repatched. Dirt floor, damp at the edges. The whole place smells of mold and rot with the faint whiff of goat.

When the fire is busy, Griffith goes to the sack hanging from the rafters. He withdraws a hand-sized wedge of cheese and a loaf of bread. The bread is bloody on one heel, but he cuts a slab from the other end and sets it in a shallow vessel.

He has not cut my throat, raised a hand, pushed me down. He does not seem to even want to.

Behind me, someone screams as if cornered by a haunt.

Gwinny's in the doorway. She's wearing three cloaks dangling with silver cloak-pins and brooches and armorbuckles. About her waist is a man's belt stuffed with two daggers and a length of silk, and she clutches quartermeasure sacks in her fist like a wilting bouquet.

And she looks like the Adversary's Hellspawn daughter as she storms across the room, raving in Welsh.

 

 

T
HE
brat is in my house.
The brat is in my house!

I storm across the room to serve her with the back of my hand what I served the other English of Caernarvon, but Gruffydd catches me in a tight embrace. “Gwenhwyfar, thank Christ! You weren't . . . I didn't . . .”

My little brother is hugging me as he hasn't since we were small. I hold him close for more long moments than I can count, and I'm the one who pulls away first.

“Jesu, lass, you look . . .” By the look of him, Gruffydd is casting about for the word
vengeful,
but seems unwilling to say it aloud. “Were you trapped there? Did any man hurt you?”

I take off the cloaks one at a time and they jingle to the floor. Then I toss down my quartermeasure sacks and slide out of the belt. I take off the too-big felt shoes and dump coin from both. I look at him in triumph.

“I'll be damned,” he murmurs, and he cannot keep the admiration from his voice.

“I'm perfectly sound. I was not trapped anywhere. Not today.” I prime a mighty slap and turn toward the brat, but Gruffydd catches my hand and holds it fast.

“Leave her be.”

“I'll not suffer her in my house.” With my free hand, I fling a shoe at the brat. It bounces off her back and she squawks like a wrung-neck chicken. “English at their best are still bloody well English. But now I'm rid of them all. I'm free.”

Gruffydd tightens his grip. “We're not rid of them, and we're certes not free.”

I hiss and wrench toward the brat, ready to pummel, but my little brother pulls me up cold.

“I said leave her be.”

I snort. “If you're not man enough to give her the justice she deserves, be assured that I will.”

“Vengeance,” Gruffydd says in a low, dangerous voice, “is not justice.”

The brat looks up. She knows we're speaking of her, though she cannot understand a word of Welsh. It is Justice Court, then, and I am justiciar, bailiff, and hangman. I am handing down a sentence in a foreign tongue and carrying it out with the rope.

I narrow my eyes. “You of all men can say such a thing?”

“No. Yes.” Gruffydd runs a hand through his hair. “I cannot, but I must. She . . . tried to make it right.”

“By taking the boot off your neck? How charitable.”

“How do you think the likes of me got on that timber gang?” Gruffydd jabs a finger at the brat.

I flinch. “It was never! You're mad!”

“Her father has the ear of the
honesti
now. She leaned on him, and the castle provisioner passed over all the lackeys who bribed him for months and what do you know? Gruffydd ap Peredur with his tainted malcontent blood has a place on the most sought-after work gang in the Principality.”

I press my lips together. Study the brat crumpled before the fire, tattery and pale and small.

“I know not why she did it,” Gruffydd says. “I only know that she did it knowingly, with intent.”

“You're as much a fool as Dafydd.” I fold my arms. “We must get rid of them. Every man, woman, and child. Every brat and dog.”

I say it in English so she'll tremble and cower.

“Is that what you think this rising is about?” Gruffydd shakes his head as if I'm a child. “Destroying the English? Pushing them out of Gwynedd?”

“We took the seat of royal government. I watched Madog ap Llywelyn wipe his arse with the town charter while the whole Exchequer burned.”

Gruffydd smiles faintly. “Gwen, the English king will come with a massive army and put the rebels down. But then he will want to know why he had to. Have you any idea how much it cost to raise that monstrosity in stone and mortar? Do you really think he'll just let Caernarvon go?”

I toe my pile of goods. There's blood beneath my fingernails.

“When the rising is all over,” Gruffydd says, “the rebels crushed and Madog ap Llywelyn hanged from Caernarvon's walls, the burgesses will come back. They'll rebuild Caernarvon, but they'll remember what happened here. As will the English king. The burgesses have learned what happens when Welshmen are pushed to the wall, and they will not push so hard again.”

Da went out, but Caernarvon happened anyway. Ten years he's been dust, and English have learned naught.

Gruffydd nods at the brat. “This girl has learned it better than most. And now she's the sole holder of her father's burgage. She'll bring her husband into the privileges of Caernarvon and tell him exactly what to think of us. That's who we'll live under. Those who remember the aftermath.”

Not if she doesn't survive the aftermath. Not if I turn her out, let the men with blackened faces take care of her.

Sharp pain shoots up my arm and Gruffydd's breath rushes past my ear. “I see it in your face, Gwenhwyfar. And believe me, I'm sorely tempted to let you, but by God, we are not animals, no matter how many times they say as much.”

I pull free, glare down at her.

“She stays,” Gruffydd says in a ragged voice. “Come what may, we will not harm her or allow harm to come to her.”

The brat is trembling now. Hard. Ripping at a loose thread on her cuff as if it's biting her.

Like as not she thinks she's escaped a terrible fate, but she'll come to envy those who fell in Caernarvon.

She is without the walls now.

***

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I don't get up at bare dawn. I lie abed till the whole sky is pink, stretch like a hearthcat, and smile up at the thatch.

Then I rise and spend a long, delicious moment deciding what I'm going to do next.

Sometime in the night, the brat moved. She's huddled near the door even though it's the coldest place in the house. She's staring hard at the floor, and there are stark lines down her cheeks where tears have carved runnels through the grime.

I ignore the brat, stir the fire to life, tend to Mam. Gruffydd comes in with a bucket of water and she flinches hard, even though he thumps right past her without a look.

Gruffydd and I are eating bread and cheese when we hear a shuffle, and there she is before us. She's trembling so badly she can barely keep her footing, but she stands chin up, shoulders back, as if she's priming for hemp about her neck.

The brat swallows several times, then chokes out, what will become of me?

Gruffydd glances my way, but I fold my arms and shrug. “She's here because of you,” I tell him in Welsh. “You deal with her.”

He glares at me, then fixes the brat with a cool stare. That depends, he says in English. Have you anyone that will come for you?

Yes! She jumps on it, clings to it. My cousin. Nicholas of Coventry. He's a squire for Sir Reginald de Tibetot. You'll find him at Wallingford. He'll come. I know he will.

Gruffydd nods and tells her, we'll ask the priest's boy to fetch him here. Should you value your life, you'll not stir from this house till your cousin arrives. Those men out there are not to be trifled with.

“And until then,” I say in Welsh, “you work.” I pick up the empty bucket and shove it into her arms. “Go fetch water.”

What did you say, she asks, and I grab her wrist and rough her toward the door.

“Water! Go. Fetch. Water.”

The brat frowns at me in utter bewilderment as she clutches the bucket. Her clawed-up fingers stand out white and stark.

“Best hope you're a fast learner.” I smirk and narrow my eyes. “Some of us learned English beneath the rod.”

She blinks rapidly, then squares up like a cornered beast.

You're savages, cries the brat, the lot of you are savages who killed my father!

“And many other swine besides,” I reply. “The master was decent enough, but the Officer of the Town Mills deserved worse than the nice clean hanging he got.”

Her grip tightens on the bucket rim. She isn't moving.

“Do what you're told or it'll go hard for you.” I point to the door and she follows my finger with the round eyes of prey. “I can make things go
very
hard for you.”

The brat swallows. She gets ten steps into the yard ere she asks, where is the water?

I stare her down from my doorway. She is within
my
walls now. I will show her what it is to be mistress.

All at once she falls, shoulders and back, scowl and teeth, and she shrinks like a helpless child. Then she shuffles around, stumbles downhill, and disappears in the brush.

When I return to the fire, I take the bread Gruffydd offers and say firmly, “No harm.”

Gruffydd smiles. “God's honest truth? I enjoyed every moment of that.”

The brat does not return till well past midday. Brambles in her hair and gown soaking wet, a gash across her forearm and muddy to the knees. But the bucket is full and she drops it at the fireside, jaw clenched, gallows-defiant.

I wait till she collapses by the fire and pries a crust of burned oatbread from the bakestone. Then I pour the water into the cooking pot and hand the bucket back.

“Go fetch water,” I tell her in Welsh.

The brat trembles to her feet. Staying upright is costing her, but every line of her is mutinous, furious.

She is coming undone slowly. First her arms, then her hands, then her eyes.

She would strike me.

Do it. I've been waiting for this moment longer than you know.

But she masters it. She closes her eyes and bites it back. Hard through the arms, stiff like a fence-rail. The brat throws the crust down, takes the bucket, and sweeps out the door.

This will not last. She will break. And I will laugh till I weep while the brat nurses bruises and a split lip with naught to look forward to but more of the same. Day in and day out. Because the vale will give her ten times worse just for being English.

Because I'm her only hope.

And she knows it.

 

The brat sleeps heavy, like sodden wool. Day after day, I kick her awake and work her. From bleak not-dawn till long past sunset, she fetches and carries. Cuts firewood. Bears water. Tends Mam. Dirties her hands with pitch and shit and ash and mud. Day after day.

There's no spinning. No embroidery or hemming.

The brat does not break.

She looks bad, though. Her skin is gray. Even her lips. She keeps wrapping her hair behind her ears as if her fingers need busying.

One day I catch her idle in the clearing, the bucket at her side, staring at the soot-smudged walls and crumbling towers of what was once the king's borough of Caernarvon. There's no fear about her, though. No anger. It's more as though she would reach down and embrace it, gather it together and rebuild it as a child might a castle of stones.

Her father still hangs from the window. Like Da once, from the walls.

The next day, I find the priest's boy and send him for the brat's kin.

 

 

S
HE CALLS
me lazy. At least I think she does. What she doesn't know is that I cannot sleep with my cheek against dirt and I cannot close my eyes without fire and blood and smoke and the red-raw terror of his last moments of life.