Crown of Passion

by Jocelyn Carew

  The new arrivals were taken to Griffith’s great hall. Griffith inclined his head graciously. “We are delighted that you have returned to us, Lady Gwynllion. But it comes to my ears that you seek us out for a purpose, and we shall be glad to hear what it is.” He glanced at Cynan, who reddened guiltily.

  Here was her opportunity. She had long rehearsed the words that would convey most vividly the massacre of the people at Port Madoc. But now the recollection of Taran’s advice barred the words from her tongue, and she could not speak.

  Taran stepped forward. “We come, Prince, on our own errand. Our beloved Prince Madoc has died, and our village has fallen upon evil times,” he said smoothly. He, too, had planned his words.

  Griffith raised an eyebrow. “You want food? Powys is closer to you, and Clwyd at your doorstep. Why come to us at Brecknock?”

  Taran then, deliberately, let his stern glance fall upon Caerleon. “Nay, we need no food. Our Lady Gwynllion, you see, was — most anxious to seek out her husband.” Taran’s glance shifted then from Caerleon to Jenkyn, and in turn to Elfod. “And we, too, are satisfied to see old friends again.” The three men shifted their stances restlessly.

  Griffith was clearly puzzled. He turned to Rhys. “Why have these men come all this way to Brecknock? I wonder at it.” But Rhys was no help.

  Gwyn realized now that her quest for justice was hopeless. Caerleon would deny everything she said, and a village raid was not, unfortunately, a rare event in Wales.

  Gwyn faltered. She said only, to Dewi, “I guess we must take our own revenge, in our own way.” She was not quite sure what she meant.

  Her mind was full of her own problems, for Griffith had insisted on quartering the newlyweds together in a building set apart from all others. She was sure, as sure as she could be of anything, that Caerleon would leave her alone.

  That night Rhys sought Gwyn out in the room Griffith had set aside for her. “Why did you marry him?” Rhys roared.

  Gwyn was furious. “What was I to do? You were going to marry Nesta, and you didn’t care what happened to me.”

  But Rhys said, “I didn’t marry her. When it came to the point, all I could think of was you.”

  Gwyn thought, I wish I had known.

  Rhys added indignantly, “Of course I cared. Why did you think I sent Caerleon after you?”

  Gwyn’s anger made her reckless. “Why did you send Caerleon? You knew he wasn’t to be trusted.”

  Rhys nodded in sorrow. “As it turned out, I should have known. But he was my lieutenant, swore allegiance to me, and I believed he would keep his word.”

  “Well,” said Gwyn stonily, “you see that he didn’t.”

  But Rhys was not so easily put in the wrong. “I noticed that you lost no time in leaping into his bed,” said Rhys. Gwyn looked at him, her somber eyes hard. She had lost all pity for the man, she told herself. His troubles were of his own devising and he had taken her down into the depths of despair with him.

  “But what then of Niclas?” demanded Rhys.

  “He is dead. He lived only a short time after he arrived at Port Madoc.”

  “But Caerleon said he did not see him!”

  “It was not quite like that,” she said somberly.

  Rhys could not tell her the thoughts that had tormented him in the nights since she had gone. He had been a fool to let her go, not to follow her to her grandfather’s land. But he was tortured now into saying the wrong things. “The nights with your husband, I have heard, were not long enough?”

  Stung, Gwyn stood stiffly, her green eyes darkening with bitter anger. “At least he wed me. In church. By a priest. And I am his wife.”

  “You hate him!” cried Rhys.

  “So I do. But that means not that I am willing to break my vows. Especially, mark you, to be with a man who — to use your own words — lost no time aspiring to another bed than mine.”

  She turned to leave. He called out, “Then you are not with child?”

  Gwyn said, “It is none of your business, for the child would not be yours. But I can tell you that I am not.”

  Rhys said, “Then Caerleon lied.”

  Gwyn said, “What else? He has not told the truth to either of us, at any time. And yet he is the man you sent to bring me back to you. Or so you say.”

  Rhys flared up at this, saying, “You don’t believe me?”

  Gwyn said, “Why should I?”

  The two stood glaring at each other when Caerleon joined them. “I thought I had better come to see what my lady wife is doing,” he said pleasantly. “I dare not trust her with any man.”

  Rhys looked at him, too full of fury to speak, but his hands clenched and unclenched into fists. Suddenly, in a rush, he left. Caerleon advanced upon his wife, smiling. “I wish you would not talk to that man again. I should hate to kill him.”

  Rashly, Gwyn taunted, “He need not worry. You make war only on women and children, old men and boys.”

  The spark leaping in his eyes told her that she had gone too far. But for once he controlled himself. He moved rapidly to the door and through it before she could speak again.

  At length Gwyn could stand the idle life no longer. She had been at Brecknock for less than a week. Her men now looked as though they were in better health and spirits, having enjoyed rest and food. They had had a chance to get over their grievous wounds, and she felt that they were strong enough now to back her up.

  “Lord Taran, I beg of you,” she pleaded, “let me tell Prince Griffith of our accusation against Caerleon. He will turn him over to us for justice, and then we can leave this place. I am sick of the very air we breathe here.”

  Taran smiled wisely. “I do not doubt that, lady. But no southerner tells the men of Port Madoc how to deal with their enemy.”

  “He will hand Caerleon over to us!” she cried.

  “And then? What shall we do with him?”

  She was silent. There seemed no way to deal justly with a man who had wrought such terrible, unforgivable devastation on her people.

  Taran watched her, then smiled to himself, satisfied. She had seen the force of his argument “Fret not, lady. We will deal with him.”

  “How? Murder?”

  “Murder? It is not a word we know.”

  “What, then, of those three men of Caerleon’s, dead in the river?”

  Taran appeared mystified. “I cannot guess what happened. But remember, lady, the devil knows his own.”

  But Griffith soon demanded to know why Caerleon’s three men had died. He sent for her and Taran. Rhys stood nearby and fixed his eyes hungrily upon Gwyn. Gwyn, summoning her men as witnesses, explained the entire story to Griffith. “My Lord Rhys will affirm that his message to Caerleon was not as Caerleon gave it to me.”

  Her men stood strongly behind her, and she thought at last she had Griffith’s ear. But he sent for Caerleon, who arrived with a couple of his men. If there was dismay in his eyes when he saw the forces raised against him, only Gwyn saw it.

  Caerleon’s defense was simple. “She lies. Everything she has said is untrue. I don’t know why, but she has left my bed, and she lies.”

  But Gwyn’s men sprang to her defense. There was an uproar as they shouted, “He is the liar! Murderer! He killed Prince Madoc, he killed his host, the man who had offered hospitality. This is a great sin against our people!”

  Caerleon said calmly. “I never laid a finger on your grandfather. And that is the truth.”

  It was true. Prince Madoc had died when his heart burst within him, and Caerleon had not, in fact, laid a finger on him. But Caerleon overreached himself when he said, “Her men killed my men, but that does not seem to be a matter that interests this court.”

  Rhys intervened then and said, “Why would the men of Port Madoc kill your men unless there is truth in the lady’s accusations? Surely men of our land do not fall upon their guests and murder them without reason.”

  Rhys backed Caerleon into a corner from which he could not escape. Griff
ith, realizing that he had no choice, said, “My brother-in-law has reason.” There was the slightest emphasis on brother-in-law, and Gwyn thought she saw a grimace cross the face of Lord Rhys. But Griffith continued and in a few words banished Caerleon from the court of South Wales.

  But even as Caerleon left the great hall, his final word was for the man he hated above all men. “The next time we meet, Rhys ap Llewellyn, one of us will not come back alive.”

  They did not meet again, except in public. That evening Elfod’s body was found, crumpled in a corner of a wall of Brecknock fortress, a knife in his chest. Gwyn gazed down upon the distorted features. Caerleon caught her eye. He was ashen with fear — and the next morning Caerleon and his men were nowhere to be found.

  Siôned, Caerleon’s recent bedmate, had vanished too. And no man knew where the men from Dyfed had gone.

  3

  Winter set in. The storm that had cloaked the mountain when Gwyn and her men descended toward Brecknock was only the beginning of one of the hardest winters in man’s memory. The snows came early, and stayed. Supplies of wood ran low, and the wind whistled through the slit windows in the tower, chilling everyone to the bone. Food ran short, and the huntsmen went out every day to search for elusive deer. Long before Candlemas, the little river itself had frozen along the edges, and only a thin trickle moved through the center, darker against the gray ice under the charcoal sky.

  Snows fell heavily upon the mountains and drifted high in the valleys. The cold crept in like the great bear of winter and shook the land in its relentless grip.

  Rhys followed Gwyn out of the dining hall one afternoon as the twilight softened the land with its blue light. He drew her into a recess in the palisade wall.

  “Caerleon cannot claim your loyalty any longer. What will you do?”

  Gwyn was thoughtful. “I do not rightly know. He is still alive, so I think, and so I am bound to him, by law and by church.” She lifted her green eyes to look into Rhys’s. “Yet, even were he dead, I could not bear a man’s touch on me. There may be no reason in my feeling, yet it is there, and it possesses me.”

  “Not even me? You love me.”

  “No more,” she said sadly. “You have used me badly. My love for you is only cold ashes of a dead fire. Do not stir it, Rhys, for there is not a coal left to flare up again.”

  “Used you badly? I sent for you, to bring you back to my side.”

  She gave him a long, measuring look. “So you did. You would have done better, my Lord Rhys, to run your own errands, for your messenger played you false.”

  She left him, then, standing alone in the purpling gloom, and the gathering darkness touched the ache within him and turned it into deep pain.

  Aidua sensed much of the desolation within her, but his comfort came in such cryptic words that they did not console her at once. “Child, there is a time when it is best to mourn. A time to weep, and a time to laugh.”

  “I cannot laugh.”

  “A time to love,” he continued as though she had not spoken, “and a time to hate. When the time to hate is done, then it will again be time to love.”

  “To love? I know not what is love.”

  Aidua looked at her with pity and said, “Look at me, child.”

  Obediently she lifted her gaze to his kind face, and knew he loved her. “This is love,” he said, confirming her unspoken thoughts, “to forget self, to see only good and forget the evil, to erase the hurt as though it had never been. You will come to that, and then you will be wise.”

  Rhys now seemed to have taken over the duties of Griffith’s foreign minister. Whether it was because of Griffith’s insistence that Rhys was, in fact, his brother-in-law — or soon would be — or not, yet it was Rhys who nurtured the alliance. As the winter wore on, Rhys wrote letters and sent messengers to those Welsh lands that had not yet joined him. Riders went to Powys, to Monmouthshire, and even as far as the Isle of Mona, asking all to join in a spring offensive to drive the hated Normans back to the sea. He put a postscript on his letter to the Isle of Mona, saying that two wagon loads of grain would be as valuable to the cause as a one armed man. The Isle of Mona was a fertile land and without their grain, any united Welsh effort would be doomed to starvation.

  After Rhys had sent out all his messages, he was forced to sit back and wait for the replies. But it went sorely against him, for he was not a waiting man. He counted off the days as though they were his enemies, as though he could hold them back by sheer force until he was ready to start his spring offensive.

  The letters in answer to his summons came in slowly. But the first to come was from Powys, far in the north. The news was bad. Prince Owen of Powys was hard put simply to stave off attacks from Ludlow. He had no men left to join any southern offensive and, in fact, was barely holding his own against the raids of the Normans. It seemed, said Rhys to himself, that the Normans were now learning how to fight in winter.

  It took all of Rhys’s persistence, his unceasing hammering away at Griffith, to get him to send an expedition to the north. “Once we have sent the Ludlow Normans packing,” said Rhys, “then Powys will be free to give us his army. And our help now will show him that we have his interests at heart.”

  Griffith was reluctant.

  Rhys gritted his teeth. “An attack on one of us is an attack on all. And until we understand that, we are doomed to failure.”

  Taran spoke for his men. “Lord Rhys, we will go with you to Powys, thus far and no farther. For there is need of us in Port Madoc, and we have accomplished that for which we left our homeland.”

  Rhys nodded. “What will the lady do?”

  “I do not know,” responded Taran. “She is much troubled, and no man can ease her mind. She feels shame that she brought Caerleon to our land.”

  “That is my guilt!” Rhys cried out. “I sent him. No matter that I did not send him in anger, yet the fault is mine.”

  Taran shook his head. “No man can see all, not even Aidua, the priest. What is done, is done.”

  “Past restoring, I know,” said Rhys, thinking dourly of his ill-fated love for the Lady Gwynllion. “I shall be glad,” he added with an attempt at cheerfulness, “of your company even thus far.”

  At length, Griffith agreed to send a handful of men with Rhys on an expedition to deal once again with Ludlow Castle. Gwyn, after consulting with her men, volunteered to join the party traveling to Ludlow.

  The snag in the proceedings, to everyone’s surprise, came from Nesta. She informed Rhys, “I shall be ready in three days.”

  The silence that met her was total, until finally her brother said, with brotherly candor, “Nesta, you’re crazy. What do you want to go to war for?”

  “Oh, I am not going to war. I am going along with Rhys, to keep him company.”

  Rhys finally pulled himself together. “This is warfare. Ladies do not go on expeditions of this kind.”

  Nesta said calmly, “But I don’t plan to fight, naturally. It is only that I should like to see a castle. So that I know what to expect, you see, when you conquer castles and give them to me.”

  Rhys said harshly, “What makes you think I’m going to do that?”

  “Oh, but that’s why you’re marrying me, to give me things.”

  Sara, restored to favor with the defection of Siôned, could not refrain from talking to Gwyn. “My pretty Nesta was always one for fancy baubles. She will not rest until she gets what she wants. Pretty as an angel, she is — and it goes hard with me to see anyone deny her what she wants.”

  “I am sure,” said Gwyn dryly, “that Lord Rhys will not say her nay.”

  Watching with detachment, nonetheless she was sick at heart at seeing the great warrior Rhys ap Llewellyn badgered by such a silly woman. But, Gwyn told herself, he had asked for it. Let him get out of it.

  Rhys did well. Suddenly capitulating, with the smile that was enough to turn Gwyn’s heart over, although it had no effect on Nesta, he said, “Fine, let us count then on three days.”r />
  Gwyn could not believe what she heard. She hurried out of the room after him. “What do you mean by that? I don’t want my men going out chasing down a castle for her!”

  Rhys shook his head gently. “I don’t want my men to be at the mercy of a slow-riding addition to our war party, either. But she’ll forget it, like a child, as soon as she has her own way. You will see.”

  But in the end Rhys was mistaken, for Nesta, like a child before Christmas, had no intention of giving up her first sight of a castle. And in three days, to everyone’s amazement, Princess Nesta was ready. She rode a white palfrey with a silver-trimmed saddle, and there were ten pack ponies behind, carrying her own clothing, the necessities for her table, candlesticks and candles, and three ladies-in-waiting. Rhys objected strenuously, saying that they were going to travel light and travel fast. And the packhorses would not only be in the way, but would also be apt to fall into the hands of the Normans. No matter what Rhys said, Nesta smiled. She said, “I should not marry a man who would let my pack train fall into the hands of the enemy. I wish to see a castle, and I shall.”

  Gwyn rode with her men. It was a relief. While Caerleon was at Brecknock, Nesta’s court was the only haven she could find. But now Caerleon had vanished over the mountains, and with her own men at hand, she felt no peril.

  But if the truth were told, Gwyn felt nothing at all. There was no way for her to turn, no future that she could see. She could not return to Port Madoc until she had brought justice down upon her murdering husband.

  She had been diverted from her purpose by her own men, who — she was convinced — were dispensing justice in their own way. Caerleon’s three men, found dead along the riverbank, and Elfod’s body all told the tale. But still Caerleon lived.

  The gloom of her mind did not lift until they had reached the borders of Powys. They crossed the Ithan River, aware that Powys men were watching from the distant mountaintops. At length, satisfied as to their identity, the Powys men came down and escorted them to Prince Owen’s capital. The town itself, called Llandrindod, was larger even than Brecknock. The Prince of Powys was a powerful ruler, owning great wealth, wealth the Normans were nibbling away at.