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  There came a shout behind them. “Arrêt!”

  The three rose and turned as one to see four Ffreinc mar-chogi on the road behind them. Weapons drawn, the soldiers advanced, walking warily, their expressions grave in the dim light.

  “Ride!” shouted Iwan, darting to his horse. “Hie!”

  The cry died in his throat, for even as the three prepared to flee, five more marchogi stepped from the surrounding wood. Their blades glimmered dimly in the dusky light. Even so, Iwan, wounded as he was, would have challenged them and taken his chances, but Ffreol prevented him. “Iwan! No!

  They’ll kill you.”

  “They mean to kill us anyway,” replied the warrior carelessly. “We must fight.”

  “No!” Ffreol put out a restraining hand and pulled him back. “Let me talk to them.”

  Before Iwan could protest, the monk stepped forward. Stretching out empty hands, he walked a few paces to meet the advancing knights. “Pax vobiscum!” he called. Continuing in Latin, he said, “Peace to you this night. Please, put up your swords. You have nothing to fear from us.”

  One of the Ffreinc made a reply that neither Bran nor Iwan understood. The priest repeated himself, speaking more slowly; he stepped closer, holding out his hands to show that he had no weapons. The knight who had spoken moved to intercept him. The point of his sword flicked the air. Ffreol took another step, then stopped and looked down.

  “Ffreol?” called Bran.

  The monk made no answer but half turned as he glanced back toward Bran and Iwan. Even in the failing light, Bran could see that blood covered the front of the monk’s robe.

  Ffreol himself appeared confused by this. He looked down again, and then his hands found the gaping rent in his throat. He clutched at the wound, and blood spilled over his fingers. “Pax vobiscum,” he spluttered, then crashed to his knees in the road.

  “You filthy scum!” screamed Bran. Leaping to the saddle, he drew his sword and spurred his horse forward to put himself between the wounded priest and the Ffreinc attackers. He was instantly surrounded. Bran made but one sweeping slash with his blade before he was hauled kicking from the saddle.

  Fighting free of the hands that gripped him, he struggled to where Brother Ffreol lay on his side. The monk reached out a hand and brought Bran’s face close to his lips. “God keep you,” he whispered, his voice a fading whisper.

  “Ffreol!” cried Bran. “No!”

  The priest gave out a little sigh and laid his head upon the road. Bran fell upon the body. Clutching the priest’s face between his hands, he shouted, “Ffreol! Ffreol!” But his friend and confessor was dead. Then Bran felt the hands of his captors on him; they hauled him to his feet and dragged him away.

  Jerking his head around, he saw Iwan thrashing wildly with his sword as the marchogi swarmed around him. “Here!” Bran shouted. “To me! To me!”

  That was all he could get out before he was flung to the ground and pinned there with a boot on his neck, his face shoved into the dirt. He tried to wrestle free but received a sharp kick in the ribs, and then the air was driven from his lungs by a knee in his back.

  With a last desperate effort, he twisted on the ground, seized the leg of the marchogi, and pulled him down. Grasping the soldier’s helmet, Bran yanked it off and began pummelling the startled soldier with it. In his mind, it was not a nameless Ffreinc soldier he bludgeoned senseless, but ruthless King William himself.

  In the frenzy of the fight, Bran felt the handle of the soldier’s knife, drew it, and raised his arm to plunge the point into the knight’s throat. As the blade slashed down, however, the marchogi fell on him, pulling him away, cheating him of the kill. Screaming and writhing in their grasp, kicking and clawing like an animal caught in a net, Bran tried to fight free. Then one of the knights raised the butt of a spear, and the night exploded in a shower of stars and pain as blow after blow rained down upon him.

  CHAPTER 10

  You are Welsh, yes? A Briton?”

  Bruised, bloodied, and bound at the wrists by a rope that looped around his neck, Bran was dragged roughly forward and forced to his knees before a man standing in the wavering pool of light from a handheld torch. Dressed in a long tunic of yellow linen with a short blue cloak and boots of soft brown leather, he carried neither sword nor spear, and the others deferred to him. Bran took him to be their lord.

  “Are you a Briton?” He spoke English with the curious flattened nasal tone of the Ffreinc. “Answer me!” He nodded to one of the soldiers, who gave Bran a quick kick in the ribs.

  The pain of the blow roused Bran. He lifted his head to gaze with loathing at his inquisitor.

  “I think you are Welsh, yes?” the Ffreinc noble said.

  Unwilling to dignify the word, Bran merely nodded.

  “What were you doing on the road?” asked the man.

  “Travelling,” mumbled Bran. His voice sounded strange and loud in his ears; his head throbbed from the knocks he had taken.

  “At night?”

  “My friends and I—we had business in Lundein.We were on our way home.” He raised accusing eyes to his Ffreinc interrogator. “The man your soldiers killed was a priest, you bloody—” Bran lunged forward, but the soldier holding the rope yanked him back. He was forced down on his knees once more. “You will all rot in hell.”

  “Perhaps,” admitted the man. “We think he was a spy.”

  “He was a man of God, you murdering bastard!”

  “And the other one?”

  “What about the other one?” asked Bran. “Did you kill him, too?”

  “He has eluded capture.”

  That was something at least. “Let me go,” Bran said. “You have no right to hold me. I’ve done nothing.”

  “It is for my lord to hold or release you as he sees fit,” said the Ffreinc nobleman. “I am his seneschal.”

  “Who is your lord? I demand to speak to him.”

  “Speak to him you shall,Welshman,” replied the seneschal.

  “You are coming with us.” Turning to the marchogi holding the torches, he said, “Liez-le.”

  Bran spent the rest of the night tied to a tree, nursing a battered skull and a consuming hatred of the Ffreinc. His friend, Brother Ffreol, cut down like a dog in the road and himself taken captive . . . This, added to the gross injustice of Cardinal Ranulf ’s demands, overthrew the balance of Bran’s mind—a balance already made precarious by the loss of his father and the warband.

  He passed in and out of consciousness, his dreams merging with reality until he could no longer tell one from the other. In his mind he walked a dark forest pathway, longbow in hand and a quiver of arrows on his hip. Over and over again, he heard the sound of hoofbeats, and a Ffreinc knight would thunder out of the darkness, brandishing a sword. As the knight closed on him, blade held high, Bran would slowly raise the bow and send an arrow into his attacker’s heart. The shock of the impact lifted the rider from the saddle and pinned him to a tree. The horse would gallop past, and Bran would walk on. This same event repeated itself throughout the long night as Bran moved through his dream, leaving an endless string of corpses dangling in the forest.

  Sometime before morning, the moon set, and Bran heard an owl cry in the treetop above him. He came awake then and found himself bound fast to a stout elm tree, but uncertain how he had come to be there. Groggily, like a man emerging from a drunken stupor, he looked around. There were Ffreinc soldiers sleeping on the ground nearby. He saw their inert bodies, and his first thought was that he had killed them.

  But no, they breathed still. They were alive, and he was a captive. His head beat with a steady throb; his ribs burned where he had been kicked. There was a nasty metallic taste in his mouth, as if he had been sucking on rusty iron. His shirt was wet where he had sweat through it, and the night air was cold where the cloth clung to his skin. He ached from head to heel.

  When the owl called again, memory came flooding back in a confused rush of images: an enemy soldier writhing and
moaning, his face a battered, bloody pulp; mailed soldiers swarming out of the shadows; the body of his friend Ffreol crumpled in the road, grasping at words as life fled through a slit in his throat; a blade glinting swift and sharp in the moonlight; Iwan, horse rearing, sword sweeping a wide, lethal arc as he galloped away; a Ffreinc helmet, greasy with blood, lifted high against a pale summer moon . . .

  So it was true. Not all of it was a dream. He could still tell the difference. That was some small comfort at least. He told himself he had to keep his wits about him if he was to survive, and on that thought, he closed his eyes and called upon Saint Michael to help him in his time of need.

  The Ffreinc marchogi broke camp abruptly. Bran was tied to his own horse as the troops made directly for Caer Cadarn. The invaders moved slowly, burdened as they were with ox-drawn wagons full of weapons, tools, and provisions. Alongside the men-at-arms were others—smiths and builders. A few of the invaders had women and children with them. They were not raiders, Bran concluded, but armed settlers. They were coming to Elfael, and they meant to stay.

  Once free of the forest, the long, slow cavalcade passed through an apparently empty land. No one worked the fields; no one was seen on the road or even around the few farms and settlements scattered amongst the distant hillsides. Bran took this to mean that the monks had been able to raise the alarm and spread the word; the people had fled to the monastery at Llanelli.

  At their approach to the caer, the Ffreinc seneschal rode ahead to inform his lord of their arrival. By the time they started up the ramp, the gates were open. Everything in the caer appeared to be in good order—nothing out of place, no signs of destruction or pillage. It appeared as though the new residents had simply replaced the old, continuing the steady march of life in the caer without missing a step.

  The marchogi threw Bran, still bound, into the tiny root cellar beneath the kitchen, and there he languished through the rest of the day. The cool, damp dark complemented his misery, and he embraced it, mourning his losses and cursing the infinite cruelty of fate. He cursed the Ffreinc, and cursed his father, too.

  Why, oh why, had Rhi Brychan held out so long? If he had sworn fealty to Red William when peace was first offered—as Cadwgan, in the neighbouring cantref of Eiwas, and other British kings had long since done—then at least the throne of Elfael would still be free, and his father, the warband, and Brother Ffreol would still be alive. True, Elfael would be subject to the Ffreinc and much the poorer for it, but they would still have their land and their lives.

  Why had Rhi Brychan refused the Conqueror’s repeated offers of peace?

  Stubbornness, Bran decided. Pure, mean, pigheaded stubbornness and spite.

  Bran’s mother had always been able to moderate her husband’s harsher views, even as she lightened his darker moods. Queen Rhian had provided the levity and love that Bran remembered in his early years. With her death, that necessary balance and influence ceased, never to be replaced by another. At first, young Bran had done what he could to imitate his mother’s engaging ways—to be the one to brighten the king’s dour disposition. He learned riddles and songs and made up amusing stories to tell, but of course it was not the same. Without his queen, the king had grown increasingly severe. Always a demanding man, Brychan had become a bitter, exacting, dissatisfied tyrant, finding fault with everyone and everything. Nothing was ever good enough. Certainly, nothing Bran ever did was good enough. Young Bran, striving to please and yearning for the approving touch of a father’s hand, only ever saw that hand raised in anger.

  Thus, he learned at an early age that since he could never please his father, he might as well please himself. That is the course he had pursued ever since—much to his father’s annoyance and eventual despair.

  So now the king was dead. From the day the Conqueror seized the throne of the English overlords, Brychan had resisted. Having to suffer the English was bad enough; their centuries-long presence in Britain was, to him, still a fresh wound into which salt was rubbed almost daily. Brychan, like his Celtic fathers, reckoned time not in years or decades but in whole generations. If he looked back to a time when Britain and the Britons were the sole masters of their island realm, he also looked forward to a day when the Cymry would be free again. Thus, when William, Duke of Normandie, settled his bulk on Harold’s throne that fateful Christmas Day, Rhi Brychan vowed he would die before swearing allegiance to any Ffreinc usurper.

  At long last, thought Bran, that oft-repeated boast had been challenged—and the challenge made good. Brychan was dead, his warriors with him, and the pale high-handed foreigners ran rampant through the land.

  How now, Father? Bran reflected bitterly. Is this what you hoped to achieve? The vile enemy sits on your throne, and your heir squats in the pit. Are you proud of your legacy?

  It was not until the following morning that Bran was finally released and marched to his father’s great hall. He was brought to stand before a slender young man, not much older than himself, who, despite the mild summer day, sat hunched by the hearth, warming his white hands at the flames as if it were the dead of winter.

  Dressed in a spotless blue tunic and yellow mantle, the thin-faced fellow observed Bran’s scuffed and battered appearance with a grimace of disgust. “You will answer me— if you can, Briton,” said the young man. His Latin, though heavily accented, could at least be understood. “What is your name?”

  The sight of the fair-haired interloper sitting in the chair Rhi Brychan used for a throne offended Bran in a way he would not have thought possible. When he failed to reply quickly enough, the young man who, apparently, was lord and leader of the invaders rose from his seat, drew back his arm, and gave Bran a sharp, backhanded slap across the mouth.

  Hatred leapt up hot and quick. Bran swallowed it down with an effort. “I am called Gwrgi,” he answered, taking the first name that came to mind.

  “Where is your home?”

  “Ty Gwyn,” Bran lied. “In Brycheiniog.”

  “You are a nobleman, I think,” decided the Norman lord. His downy beard and soft dark eyes gave him a look of mild innocence—like a lamb or a yearling calf.

  “No,” replied Bran, his denial firm. “I am not a nobleman.”

  “Yes,” asserted his inquisitor, “I think you are.” He reached out and took hold of Bran’s sleeve, rubbing the cloth between his fingers as if to appraise its worth. “A prince, perhaps, or at least a knight.”

  “I am a merchant,” Bran replied with dull insistence.

  “I think,” the Ffreinc lord concluded, “you are not.” He gave his narrow head a decisive shake, making his curls bounce. “All noblemen claim to be commoners when captured. You would be foolish to do otherwise.”

  When Bran said nothing, the Norman drew back his hand and let fly again, catching Bran on the cheek, just below the eye. The heavy gold ring on the young man’s finger tore the flesh; blood welled up and trickled down the side of his face. “I am not a nobleman,” muttered Bran through clenched teeth. “I am a merchant.”

  “A pity,” sniffed the young lord, turning away. “Noblemen we ransom—beggars, thieves, and spies we kill.” He nodded to his attending soldiers. “Take him away.”

  “No! Wait!” shouted Bran. “Ransom! You want money? Silver? I can get it.”

  The Ffreinc lord spoke a word to his men. They halted, still holding Bran tightly between them. “How much?” inquired the young lord.

  “A little,” replied Bran. “Enough.”

  The Norman gathered his blue cloak around his shoulders and studied his captive for a moment. “I think you are lying, Welshman.” The word was a slur in his mouth. “But no matter. We can always kill you later.”

  He turned away and resumed his place by the fire. “I am Count Falkes de Braose,” he announced, settling himself in the chair once more. “I am lord of this place now, so mind your tongue, and we shall yet come to a satisfactory agreement.”

  Bran, determined to appear pliant and dutiful, answered respectfully.
“That is my fervent hope, Count de Braose.”

  “Good. Then let us arrange your ransom,” replied the count. “The amount you must pay will depend on your answers to my questions.”

  “I understand,” Bran said, trying to sound agreeable. “I will answer as well as I can.”

  “Where were you and that priest going when my men found you on the road?”

  “We were returning from Lundein,” replied Bran. “Brother Ffreol had business with the monastery there, and I was hoping to buy some cloth to sell in the markets hereabouts.”

  “This business of yours compelled you to ride at night. Why?”

  “We had been away a long time,” answered Bran, “and Brother Ffreol was anxious to get home. He had an important message for his bishop, or so he said.”

  “I think you were spies,” de Braose announced.

  Bran shook his head. “No.”

  “What about the other one? Was he a merchant, too?”

  “Iwan?” said Bran. “Iwan is a friend. He rode with us to provide protection.”

  “A task at which he failed miserably,” observed the count. “He escaped, but we will find him—and when we do, he will be made to pay for his crimes.”

  Bran took this to mean he had injured or killed at least one of the marchogi in the skirmish on the road.

  “Only a coward would kill a priest,” observed Bran. “Since you require men to pay for their crimes, why not begin with your own?”

  The count leaned forward dangerously. “If you wish to keep your tongue, you will speak with more respect.” He sat back and smoothed his tunic with his long fingers. “Now then, you knew my men were attacked by your people on that same road some days ago?”

  “I was in Lundein, as I said,” Bran replied. “I heard nothing of it.”

  “No?” wondered the count, holding his head to one side. “I can tell you the attack was crushed utterly. The lord of this place and his pitifully few warriors were wiped out.”

  “Three hundred against thirty,” Bran replied, bitterness sharpening his tone. “It would not have been difficult.”