20. The Kingcup Notes
XX
THE KINGCUP NOTES
The old orchard behind the chapel had long been forgotten, choked by bramble and shadow, the trees half-rotted and bowed like penitents.
No steward came to claim it, and Lord Henry had dismissed it before Seren had come to Castel Thornwyck as unsuitable for proper cultivation.
It had no political worth and thus no place in his mind.
But Seren had plans for it in her goals to stem the tide of food theft and reduce the deaths from starvation and execution from theft.
Her third child had been another daughter.
Seren named her Vala, a Welsh name, and Henry said nothing, likely because he did not care.
Vala was small and constantly wheezing, so Seren spent her mornings walking when she could.
A physician from Stafford had told her that breathing orchard air might strengthen the lungs.
Henry had barely acknowledged Vala’s birth, offering no feast, no blessing, and did not even attend the child’s baptism.
Vala’s frailty and gender were marks against her, and likely Seren’s chosen name for her as well.
So Seren walked with her children and Ragnar, if he was already in the chapel.
And in those walks, she saw the dark, soft soil and the weeds that would not die. Sunlight dappled through the canopy of forgotten trees as if a sign from the divine to plant there.
That spring, she asked Father Osbert if she might have his acolytes clear a patch of it—for herbs, she claimed, for the parish. He’d asked Ragnar for help because he was a big boy, strongly built like his father. Lord Henry was compelled to agree. At least it got Ragnar out of the attic.
By summer, she had gathered village women to help.
Widows. Weavers. Wives of knights. Mothers. Daughters.
They came in plain shawls and worn shoes, hands rough with labor and loss. They brought seeds, scraps, and secrets. They told her what grain shipments were being rerouted, which noble’s steward was skimming the tithe, and which village children had no bread for supper.
They planted and grew food by fall.
Seren called it the Saints’ Garden.
Henry called it nothing at all. He passed it once during a hunt and scoffed, "Let the hens peck in the dust, if it keeps them from the sin of gossip."
He did not see the rows of onions, wheat, beans, and cabbage, the sprigs of rosemary, the tiny pea pods curling along the wall. They were not a part of the keep’s ledgers, so he didn’t notice when the harvest went home with the women.
Erik never came near the orchard. He never spoke of it, nor did he linger. But one morning, after a hard frost that winter, Seren found a sack of seed potatoes by the orchard’s entry. The giver’s identity was marked only by a dried kingcup bloom with faded, brittle yellow petals.
She distributed the seeds to the women.
And that evening, she saw Erik from the tower at the gate, standing watch, his cloak billowing like a banner in the dusk.
They did not speak.
But his lips twitched as he gave a nod toward her garden.
She dipped her head when she passed him in gratitude.
She doubted she’d ever be able to speak to him again.
Henry always had her watched and followed, but every time she saw him, she saw her friend, suffering just as much as she was.
Yet, in their suffering, they tried to give each other a smile and little acts of encouragement, such as the potato seed and her time with Ragnar, though she never saw Ragnar as a favor.
She considered him her son and would die for him as she would for David, Aveline, and Vala.
By winter’s end, the garden fed three villages.
Next year, the harvest would be more bountiful with more hands. Maybe she would ask Henry if she could expand the Saints’ Garden outside of the palisade as long as he thought it was women’s work.
The great Lord Henry had never looked past the brambles or even noticed that the food thefts were down from ninety-eight to ten.
He didn’t know that one weaver bore a child safely after Seren slipped her the name of an herb that softened labor.
A knight’s widow found wool in her basket after praying beside the saint’s statue.
And the village priests spoke of Lady of Thornwyck in their sermons, of her mercy, her bounty, and her divinely favored ability to survive with grace.
One act of servitude had chipped away at Henry’s power. Seren was building her own name, bringing peace to the land known for the dead buried there, all under her husband’s nose.
She had done nothing treasonous. She had only planted, listened, and harvested. But with it came a name whispered throughout the Norman empire: Seren ferch Madoc, a Lady of the Welsh Marches, Marcher Lady de Thornwyck of Mortlande.