Rhuddlan (77 page)

“There’s no point remaining, then. We can
leave straight away. My men are ready. We’ll get almost halfway
before sunset.”

“What about Sir Richard?” Teleri asked in a
loud voice. She stood. “Don’t you want to talk to him, Olwen?”

“I—I suppose I should…”

Rhirid said nothing but his glance in
Teleri’s direction was decidedly unfriendly. Teleri gave him back a
bland stare.

“He’s here now, anyway,” she shrugged.

Richard Delamere entered the tent through the
open flap. He paused for a moment, his eyes traveling from Dylan to
Rhirid to Olwen to Teleri and finally, narrowing, back to Rhirid.
“What’s going on?” he demanded sharply.

It was strange to look at him; her reaction
was muddled. There was the pang of happy emotion, from looking upon
something comfortable and familiar—even intimate—yet it seemed to
have been tempered by time; it was as if she remembered him from
some long ago point in her life, lived under other circumstances.
It was odd, then, that she also felt guilty…But they had made so
much together and he was still the only man she’d ever seen who set
her heart beating faster.

Rhirid walked up to him, planting himself
between him and Olwen and crossing his arms over his chest. “We’re
just finalizing our plans, Sir Richard. Olwen is anxious to get
back to Llanlleyn as soon as possible.”

Delamere looked past him to Olwen. She
thought his eyes were cold. “Is that true, Olwen?”

She switched her gaze to the floor and
nodded.

“Are you satisfied, Sir Richard?” Rhirid
asked with a slight smile. “We’ll be away from here within the
hour—”

“I want to speak with Olwen in private,”
Delamere said abruptly.

“Don’t be unreasonable, Sir Richard—she’s
made up her mind.”

“Please, Richard…this is hard enough…” Olwen
pleaded.

“Is it?” he demanded angrily. He stepped
around Rhirid before the other had a chance to react. “It seems to
me it’s pretty easy for you. How much thought did you give it? Just
these last few moments or since the day he fired our manor and
stole you away?”

Despite an effort to maintain her composure,
tears came to her eyes. She was tired, she missed her children and
she wasn’t used to hearing him snap at her. It was impossible to
answer.

“Why don’t you leave, Sir Richard?” Rhirid
said.

“This has nothing to do with you!”

Rhirid smirked. “Doesn’t it?”

Delamere had his sword out in a flash. Olwen,
nearest to him, grabbed his arm with a shriek. Dylan came up to
Rhirid’s side with his own sword readied.

“She doesn’t know what you did to our manor,
Welshman! She doesn’t know how much you have to answer for! The
house burned to cinders—the livestock slaughtered and their
carcasses left rotting in the open—our servants, homeless, and
chased away—the fields trampled beyond recovery—”

“Richard, please!”

“—You Welsh are always going
on about your
galanas
—well, I demand recompense for the destruction of my
property!”

Rhirid glanced down at the
sword in his rival’s hand with an amused expression and slowly
raised his eyes to Delamere’s face. “Is that
all
you want recompense for, Sir
Richard?” he asked insolently, and then he looked at
Olwen.

Delamere threw down his sword and with an
oath hurled himself upon Rhirid, knocking him backwards through the
tent opening and onto the ground beyond.

Perhaps drawn by the angry shouting, a dozen
men, Welsh and Norman, were already lurking nearby and they were
soon joined by others anxious to witness a fight. Delamere and
Rhirid rolled over several times as each man grappled for a grip on
the other, scattering the feet of the on-lookers. Delamere, the
larger of the two and all the more heavy because he was wearing his
hauberk, came up on top, a knee on either side of Rhirid’s torso.
He pulled his arm back and drove his fist into the Welshman’s face
but before he could repeat the attack, Rhirid gave a mighty heave
and threw him off balance. The chief swung his elbow as he twisted
to free himself from Delamere’s knees and caught the Norman on the
chin, knocking his head back. Rhirid finally extricated himself and
scrambled to his feet.

Delamere was not as nimble, hampered by his
mail, but once he was up he kept moving, driven by rage and the
desperate sense that he had nothing left to lose. He threw a punch
at Rhirid’s head; the chief ducked back and it missed but the
Norman immediately followed it with a quick blow to his exposed
midsection and when Rhirid doubled over, gasping for breath,
knocked him down again with a fist to the back of his head. For a
moment, everything in Rhirid’s eyes was black but he well aware of
his audience and fought to clear his head. His was the more
difficult task; while Delamere had shots at all of him, he was
limited to his opponent’s head. If he punched Delamere anywhere in
the torso, he was more likely to hurt his hand on the metal hauberk
than to crack the Norman’s ribs.

Delamere knew he ought to press his advantage
but the hot weather and the heavy hauberk forced him to pause to
catch his breath. By that time, the Welshman was up again. He
approached Delamere, who had decided he would duck the blow and ram
his head into Rhirid’s stomach but this plan backfired. Rhirid
swung out with his right fist; Delamere ducked but immediately met
Rhirid’s left fist on its way up. The punch caught him firmly under
the chin and knocked him to the ground. Dimly, the blood pounding
in his head and bright points of light sparkling in his eyes, he
recalled Longsword saying something about the chief being
left-handed. He struggled to his feet.

The crowd around the two combatants had grown
even larger and now included Longsword. Finally realizing her
protests were lost in the cheers and groans of the on-lookers,
Olwen pushed her way to his side and begged him to stop the
fight.

He looked down at her, aghast. “I can’t do
that!”

“Please, Lord William! One of them is going
to be killed!”

“No, no; there’s little danger of that,” he
said dismissively. He glanced over her head in time to see Delamere
take another hit on the chin, and winced. “If they didn’t decide it
this way, they’d take up swords and then you’d be right.”

But Olwen, frightened by the blood streaming
from both men’s faces and the eerie approval of the crowd, was
unconvinced. “There’s nothing for them to decide, Lord William!
This is senseless!”

Longsword’s mouth twisted sourly. “Most women
would be flattered to see two men fighting over them,” he told
her.

“Then most women are idiots!” She whirled
away angrily, ready to leave the both of them, Richard and Rhirid,
when the full import of Longsword’s words struck her. If the men
were fighting over her, then she had the right to stop the fight
herself. Resolutely, she turned back, forced her way through the
press of on-lookers and entered the circle of combat. She was
behind Rhirid, who did not see her, and facing Richard, who did.
For a moment he was frozen in place as he stared at her. Someone
shouted her name but she ignored him. Just as she stepped forward
to take advantage of the lull, Rhirid swung at the unmoving
Delamere, who swerved away reflexively and sent out his own fist in
reply. The blow connected with the chief’s face and, off-balance
and arms flailing for support, he teetered backwards, striking
Olwen on the side of her head and sending her to the ground.

Chapter 46

June, 1177

Rhuddlan Castle, Gwynedd

Teleri walked into her rooms at Rhuddlan and
was startled to realize that everything was the same, just as she
had left it, complete with fussing servants. For some reason, she’d
expected something different—perhaps the expectation merely came
from the odd feeling that she’d been away for much longer than she
actually had been. At first she submitted to the women who wept
over her because they believed she’d been ill-treated, so pale was
her face, so thin was her body and they did everything they’d
always done for her: they scented her bath, adorned her in fine
clothing, combed and dressed her hair, propped cushions behind her
back, brought her mead—but even after three days it was to no
avail. Everything was the same but she was not. Instead of
providing her a measure of comfort, the familiar ministrations
irritated her to the point at which she wanted to scream from
frustration.

She wasn’t the only one. The whole mood of
the castle was tense and tentative. Rhuddlan felt like a stoppered
wineskin lying in the sun. Pressure was building up inside. There
was very little activity in the ward. The gates remained shut;
stoppered.

She hadn’t expected
Longsword’s cold reaction to meeting her again. Anger and a lot of
loud words, yes, but not the hateful, stony eyes boring into her.
After the embarrassment of his public rejection had died away,
outrage had replaced it. By what right did he humiliate her in such
a callous manner? She was the one with the grievance, after all; it
had
always
been her
grievance, not his. He couldn’t, after three years, steal it from
her—why had he? She hadn’t learned the answer on the long ride back
to Rhuddlan; the stiff wind had blown directly into their faces and
had made the travel tiring, and no one had dared speak to her
unless it involved personal necessities. Whether the men feared
Longsword’s reaction or had elected her the scapegoat of the failed
plan to destroy the earl, she didn’t know.

The situation did not improve upon arrival at
Rhuddlan. Longsword barely thanked his men for their efforts before
disappearing. It was whispered he was unhappy with the lack of
ransoms even though the main purpose of retrieving Olwen had been
achieved. But Teleri, her mind unconsciously sifting through the
numbing chatter of her servants, suddenly realized the truth had to
do with her and nothing else, and she understood why he had spurned
her at Hawarden.

She sat down to await his angry summons,
certain that he would not be able to contain himself for long. She
was nervous; for the first time in their married life, she felt she
had wronged him.

One day passed, and then another. The summons
did not come. Nothing seemed to move or breathe in Rhuddlan until
she heard that Richard Delamere had ridden off to inspect what
little remained of his manor. The information unnerved her further.
Delamere had invariably supported her and now he wouldn’t be able
to come to her defense.

Another day passed without comment. She was
growing fidgety. She’d kept to her rooms because she hadn’t wanted
to draw attention to herself but she was starting to believe
Longsword’s lack of communication was his way of punishing her for
her crime. One more day and then she could no longer sleep. Now it
was less punishment and more like torture. A bit of her former
spirit returned to her. She may have been in the wrong, she thought
grimly, but to force her to dangle uncertainly for almost a week
was similarly reprehensible. She decided she didn’t need his
summons; she would find him.

Delamere had told him once that if there were
any one trait which proved beyond doubt that he was his father’s
son, it was the repugnant habit of cultivating melancholy. Some
men, having experienced misfortune (Delamere had told him), got
drunk until they felt better; others picked fights in order to feel
a physical pain as great as the emotional one; still others toiled
ceaselessly in an effort to divert their minds. But (Delamere had
told him) he and his father preferred to immerse themselves in a
mourning so complete that it alienated anyone around them who might
have been of some comfort. “It’s my opinion that you enjoy
wallowing in self-pity, Will,” Delamere had told him. “You’ve
always had a tendency to interpret trouble as a personal
insult.”

But Longsword had no idea how else to
interpret the troubles which had befallen him over the past three
months. Every interest of his, every action, every relationship had
ended in calamity. It was more than a mere streak of bad luck,
right up to that horrific interview in the bailey at Hawarden.

The worst of it all had been the news about
Gladys.

For a long time he’d cursed Teleri. No one
knew how wrenched apart he’d been; the impotent fury he’d felt and
the desire to smash everything he saw…But he’d said nothing to
anyone, not even Delamere, mindful of the reaction he’d gotten when
he’d dismissed Ralph de Vire from his service. And eventually the
days had become easier, more benign. He’d found himself looking
forward to another day out of the fortress, first hunting Rhirid
and then plotting against the earl; he didn’t flounder as much when
he had a purpose and he thanked God it took his mind off his
personal problems…And now this—

Seeing Teleri again brought it all back in a
sickening rush. Of course he’d known she was at Hawarden but he
hadn’t really dwelled on the probability of meeting her face to
face. He just hadn’t thought about it—and yet there she was,
looking exactly as she had looked the last time he’d seen her at
Rhuddlan—as if nothing at all had changed—as if his whole life
hadn’t been turned on its head…

He heard, from somewhere far away, a voice
commanding someone to “place it there,” followed by the thud of a
chair hitting the wooden floor to his left and the hasty scurry of
feet. There was a swish of clothing and a body dropped into the
chair. The thought crossed his overburdened mind that Delamere,
crushed by Olwen’s defection, had gone away. But then he smelled
the faint scent of lavender and as abruptly as he realized that the
entire hall had gone dead silent, he knew who was sitting next to
him. He swiveled his head in shock.