CHAPTER TWELVE #2
‘When first we… when you took me as your lover… you could not have known who… what you were taking to your bed. Could not have known that you were letting a witch into your heart.’
He tilted his head, taking time to form his reply.
‘Think you that I have not ears to hear what others say of you? Do you imagine me unable to watch and listen over months, to draw my own conclusions? Do you consider I believed you and Mamgi to spend all those long hours closeted together merely learning of recipes and herbs? Think you I had not noticed how the very air around you moves to your will?’
Rhiannon let out the breath she did not know she had been holding.
‘You knew?’ she whispered.
He stepped forwards then and took her hands in his, raising them to his lips for a kiss. ‘I might have kept the company of the men of the village for most of this strange, mountain winter,’ he said, ‘but do you not know that men are the very worst of gossips?’
She smiled then, her usual, beaming, broad, joyful smile. ‘You know what I am, and yet you think you can still call me your love?’
‘I think,’ he said, reaching out to take hold of the ribbon at the neck of her dress and tug it out of its knot, ‘that all the strength of this wondrous sunshine means the water will be warm enough for swimming.’
Before she could protest he had slipped her dress over her shoulders and let it drop to the ground.
Beneath it she wore only a linen shift. He stood back, smiling, and pulled his shirt over his head.
As he turned to kick off his boots and step out of his trousers, Rhiannon saw the angular scar on his back where the arrow had entered his body.
How close she had come to losing him that day.
How empty her life would have been then.
How much he had come to mean to her in those few short months. Naked, he turned to face her again.
‘Well, Mistress Witch, will we go swimming or no?’
Happiness welled up inside her as she quickly took off her shift, so that she too was naked. She held out her hand. ‘Do you trust me not to bewitch you?’
‘Ah, I told you, my love; that you have already done.’
Instead of taking her hand he sprang forwards and took her up into his arms. Rhiannon squealed as he ran with her towards the river and leapt off the bank so that they plunged into the water together.
As they surfaced, splashing and laughing in the deep, ancient rock pool, he pulled her gently to him, pushing her wet hair back off her face.
‘The question is not, can I love a witch,’ he said. ‘Rather you should ask yourself, can you love a simple man-at-arms? I have no magic. No glamours or enchantments to offer you.’
She laughed. ‘I have those of my own.’
‘Then I shall give you my steadfast heart, my unswerving loyalty, and my endless love,’ he said. ‘Will that please you?’
She smiled again, feeling his strong arms around her and the pure spring water washing against her naked body. She felt alive in a way she had never experienced before. ‘It will please me,’ she said, nodding.
‘Then do we have a bargain? That we will be all and everything to each other, no matter our differences, no matter how the world pulls us apart, no matter what awaits us beyond this mountain paradise?’
‘We have a bargain, kind sir. And I believe we should seal it with a kiss.’
So saying she ran her hands through his wet hair, tilting his head to hers, finding his mouth with her own, and kissing him deeply, longingly, hungrily, until she felt his own hunger matching hers, and he pulled her beneath the swirling water.
Brynach stirred on the unyielding earth floor, trying but failing to lie in a way that did not pain his damaged back or broken feet.
Had he not been a battle seasoned soldier, his treatment at the hands of his captors might have finished him.
As it was he had endured their brutality, their torture, and the privations of incarceration.
His badly healed bones troubled him, and his stomach cramped from hunger.
He knew he was weakened and that they preferred to keep him that way.
When he had taken an arrow at Talgar it had stopped him, prevented him from fighting.
He still carried the burden of guilt and failure at not being able to protect Lady Rhiannon.
He had served her father for many years and it was his dearest wish to continue that service to what remained of his master’s family.
At least he knew she had escaped, although he had not been certain at the time.
His injury had enabled the Norman soldiers to take him without a fight, much to his own fury.
He had expected to be summarily despatched and had waited for the fall of foreign steel against his neck.
But the blow never came. The soldiers, foremost among them the one Rhiannon had referred to as Stew-face, had seen more value in presenting him as a prize to their master.
The arrow had been removed with neither care nor pity and the wound cauterised with an iron from the smithy’s forge.
He had been taken up to the great house and secured in a dungeon, left with water and gruel to live or die, at his captor’s pleasure.
It was not until two days later that the new Lord of Brycheiniog, Hubert de Chapelle, had come in person to question him.
Brynach had known at once who he was, for the man, though statuesque and vigorous, was ruined by the lack of a nose.
Even the finely crafted silver replacement he wore could not return to him his handsome visage.
Rhiannon’s story of how she had come to be in the well was known by everyone in the mountain hideout.
The Norman Baron had demanded to know the whereabouts of the mountain community, the number of fighting men that dwelled there, and whether or not the woman seen with him in Talgar was the daughter of Llewellyn ap Ioreth?
His tone had suggested that revenge was uppermost on his mind.
He was enraged to think the girl who had so disfigured him, and whom he had left for dead, was in fact alive.
But Brynach would not talk. Would not tell de Chapelle what he wanted to hear.
Not when they beat him. Not when they crushed his toes with pincers.
Not when they pressed hot irons to the soles of his feet.
Not when they half drowned him. Stew-face took over the job of torturer with loathsome glee, but even he failed to break the old soldier’s spirit.
It was at a point during the third day of his ordeal when the apothecary declared him to be close to death that the trials ceased.
De Chapelle had him thrown in a cell and left there, kept on so little food that come spring, when the snows had gone and the paths to the mountain clear again, he would not have the strength to resist further torment.
So it was with some surprise that, with the morning warmed by a March sun, Brynach found himself being led not to the place of pain, but up the winding stone stairs, out of the building, and onto the soft green grass outside the Great House.
It took tremendous effort to force his legs to work adequately, to remember how to move in an open space.
Months of being shut in a dark cell had left him mole-like in his vision, so that he had to shield his eyes from the brightness of the day.
Even so, it was a joy to be free of his confines, released from the grim hold of grey stone, and to feel the fresh spring breeze upon his face again.
He was led to a cart and ordered to climb onto the back of it.
He was so weak that he was unable to do so without assistance.
When at last he was in the cart, a soldier tied his hands to it so that he could neither jump nor fall out.
Brynach looked about him, wondering what fate held for him, unable to tell from the demeanour of the soldiers whether or not he was being led to his death.
Even Stew-face kept himself at a distance, revealing nothing.
He reasoned that the Baron would not have kept him alive all winter only to have him killed now.
He had a plan for him, a purpose, of that he was certain.
The door of the Great House was thrown open and de Chapelle strode out. He wore a silver breastplate over expensive chain mail, between which was a tabard of red and white. The sun flashed off the silver he wore on his face. He strode to the cart and regarded Brynach will ill concealed repulsion.
‘We are going on a journey, you and I. We will travel back through the valley pass to Cwmdu, to the place where that Cymru bitch should have had the decency to die where I left her. There we will camp. And there I will give you one last chance to tell me the location of the she devil and her band of old men and children.’
Without waiting for any manner of response, he turned on his heel, barking commands at his soldiers, who scurried this way and that to do his bidding.
His fine chestnut horse was fetched and he mounted it, putting on his helmet as he did so.
The helmet had been cleverly designed with a nose piece to cover the one he wore beneath it, disguising the truth of his disfigurement.
Brynach believed that such a man would never overcome the injury, even though it did not stop him fighting.
He would sooner have lost an arm, he thought, than see himself as so reduced, so ridiculous.
Brynach also knew de Chapelle would never forgive Rhiannon.
He had waited with cold fury two winters for the chance to have his vengeance.
Now that the time had come, he would stop at nothing to see the woman who had so damaged him dead.