drunk on illusions. Remembering that now, Ranulf felt a flicker of hope.
“So why, then, are you leading an army into Gwynedd?”
Henry raised a mocking brow. “Since when are you so disingenuous? You may not want me here, but you know why I am here. Owain Gwynedd poses a serious threat to the English Crown. He is an able, ambitious man and if I turned a blind eye to his scheming for long, Cheshire and Shropshire would soon be speaking Welsh.”
“You exaggerate, Harry.”
“A king’s prerogative, Uncle. But I do not exaggerate by much.
Owain has proved himself to be much too adroit at exploiting English weaknesses. Look what happened during the chaos of Stephen’s reign. He seized control of the entire cantref of Tegeingl. Need I remind you how close that is to Chester? Or that the present Earl of Chester is a ten-year-old boy? Moreover, Owain has been casting out bait toward the Marcher lords, and some of them are greedy enough to snap it up, hook and all. After all, loyalty has never been a conspicuous Marcher virtue.”
When Ranulf did not respond, Henry correctly interpreted his silence as reluctant assent. “You know I speak true, Uncle, however little you want to admit it. But I do not begrudge your affection for the Welsh.” He glanced sideways at the older man, grey eyes glinting in the sun. “I never said, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ now did I?”
Ranulf smiled. “You’re your father’s son, for certes, lad. That perverse humor of yours most surely does not come from my sister, God love her! So… why am I here, then? What do you want from me?”
“I am hoping that a show of force will be enough to tame Owain’s rebellious urges. If so, I’ll need you to negotiate peace terms. Right now I want the benefit of your seven years in Wales. You know the man, Ranulf. Tell me about him. What sort of foe-or friend-is he?”
Ranulf leaned back against the wall, shading his eyes from the glare of sun on water. “I respect him,” he said, doling out the words with miserly precision. “And there are few men I’d say that about.”
“Dare I ask if you include me in that small, select group? No.. better you do not answer,” Henry joked. “So you respect him. Why?”
“On your side of the border, the Welsh are viewed as a rash, passionate people. Whether that be true or not, Owain is neither. He is as shrewd as any fox, farsighted and pragmatic, deliberate in all that he does. He keeps his temper in check, his enemies close, and his thoughts to himself. He forgives, but I doubt that he forgets. Above all, he understands what Stephen never did-that he must put the king’s needs above the man’s.”
“He sounds like a man worthy of your respect,” Henry conceded. “A pity he is not more like his brother. Cadwaladr is a ship without a rudder; no one ever knows where the winds or his whims will take him. Owain is much the older of the two, is he not?”
“I think there are about ten years between them, mayhap a few years less. I know Owain’s next birthday is his fifty-seventh, for he was born in God’s Year 1100. But he is aging like an oak, stunting the sons growing in that vast shadow. He has nigh on a dozen, some by his wife, several by his current concubine, the rest by other bedmates, including the best of the lot, Hywel, whom I count as a friend. I would not want to encounter Hywel on a battlefield, Harry.”
Ranulf said it smiling, but Henry caught the undertone. “I hope you will not, Uncle. Truly I do.”
“But no promises?”
“No,” Henry said slowly. “No promises. Mine would not be worth much on its own. You’d need one, too, from Owain Gwynedd.”
“Yes,” Ranulf agreed, “I suppose I would.” And after that, they stood without talking for a time, gazing toward the west, toward Wales.
CHAPTER THREE
August 1157
Aber, North Wales
As she entered the Great Hall, all eyes followed the Welsh king’s concubine. By the standards of their age, Cristyn was no longer young at thirty-seven. But she still turned male heads with ease. Dressed richly in a vibrant red gown, she defied Welsh fashion by wearing her hair long, a curly, midnight cloud set off by a veil of gauzy gold, as transparent as summer sunlight. The colors were deliberately dramatic. She’d have been just as compelling, though, in mourning garb, for her vital, passionate nature burned brighter and hotter than any fire. All knew she held their king’s heart in the palm of her hand, and few seeing her now wondered why.
One who did watched from the shadows with a sardonic smile. Hywel ab Owain could not deny that Cristyn made his father happy or that he’d have wed her years ago if not for the inconvenient existence of his wife, Gwladys. It even amused Hywel that he might one day have a stepmother younger than he was, although it had taken him years to see the ironic humor in that. In the beginning of their liaison, Hywel had been horrified that his father would bed a girl of seventeen. It had not helped that he’d found her so damnably desirable himself. He still did, but no longer with the shamed, hungry yearning of raw youth. When he looked upon his father’s leman now, it was with an oddly impersonal desire, the poet’s innate love of beauty continually at war with the prince’s deep- rooted dislike of the woman.
“I see the queen bee has set all the drones to buzzing about her again. You think she’ll ever grow tired of preening her tail feathers in public?”
The speaker mixing metaphors with such reckless abandon was Hywel’s half-brother, Cynan, who’d come up unnoticed behind him. Like Hywel, Cynan was born out of wedlock. But in Wales, it was enough that the father recognized the child as his, and so Cynan and Hywel and their other illegitimate half-brothers were on an equal footing with Iorwerth and Maelgwn, the sons of Owain’s lawful wife. Hywel, the result of Owain’s youthful love affair with the daughter of an Irish lord, was the firstborn, the oldest at thirty-eight, of Owain’s considerable brood. The rest ranged in age through their thirties and twenties down to Cristyn’s two sons, nineteen-year-old Davydd and twelve-year-old Rhodri.
Cynan never referred to Cristyn by her given name if he could help it. It was always the “queen bee,” although not in his father’s hearing; even Cynan was not that rash. Hywel’s private name for her was the “lioness,” after reading in a bestiary that the female lion was fiercely protective of her cubs. Cristyn’s eldest cub was now swaggering across the hall toward her, the younger cub nowhere in sight. Cynan, who detested Davydd fully as much as he did Cristyn, muttered an obscenity. Hywel snagged a cup of mead from a passing servant and waited for Cristyn to come to him.
That she would, he did not doubt; a lioness was always wary when male lions were on the prowl. Hywel had no false pride, for he had won fame at an early age and was renowned throughout Wales as a poet and soldier. He and Cristyn both knew that he was the most formidable of her foes, the son most like Owain.
Cristyn greeted Hywel with a cool smile. “I’d heard that you had ridden in, Hywel. Is my lord Owain expecting you?”
His own smile was wry, acknowledging the deft thrust: a polite welcome for an interloper. “I daresay he is, Cristyn. When has he ever ridden off to war without me at his side?”
Cristyn’s smile held steady. Davydd, following in his mother’s footsteps, had neither her self-control nor her skill at verbal jousting. Glaring at Hywel, he said belligerently, “My father does not need your help to defeat the English.”
Hywel had done enough hell-raising in his own youth to understand Davydd’s need to chase after trouble and court confrontations. Usually he overlooked his half-brother’s bravado. Tonight, though, he was tired and Davydd’s barb rankled. “Tell me, Davydd, have you bloodied your own sword yet?”
Davydd’s face flooded with color. “Whoreson!” he snarled, and people nearby gave up any polite pretense that they were not eavesdropping. Others had begun to drift over and they soon had a large, expectant audience. Cristyn put a hand on her son’s arm, saying softly, “Do not take his bait, Davydd. Let it lie.”
Davydd was no fool, and the part of his brain not inflamed by anger was sending him the same message. But at nineteen, pride had a louder voice than common sense. “Hywel owes me an apology,” he insisted. “If he says he is sorry, I’ll be satisfied.”
