Fair, Bright, and Terrible Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  FAIR, BRIGHT, AND TERRIBLE

  First edition. January 26, 2017.

  Copyright © 2017 Elizabeth Kingston.

  Cover design by The Killion Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Historical Note

  Chapter 1

  The Bodies

  Chapter 2

  The Lover

  Chapter 3

  The Choice

  Chapter 4

  The Harsh Light of Day

  Chapter 5

  The Work to be Done

  Chapter 6

  The Longing

  Chapter 7

  The Mirror

  Chapter 8

  The Ashes

  Chapter 9

  The Opening

  Chapter 10

  The Unseen

  Chapter 11

  The Choosing

  Chapter 12

  The Bright

  Chapter 13

  The Terrible

  Epilogue

  The Fair

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  For Tommy

  Historical Note

  In the reign of Henry III of England, Simon de Montfort led a rebellion of barons that, for a time, took power away from the crown and gave it to a parliamentary body. In 1265, an alliance of Marcher lords (who were allied with King Henry's son, Edward I) fought to oust Montfort and return power to the king.

  During this time of unrest and for many years following, the Welsh, led by Llewellyn, fought against the English for the independent sovereignty of Wales. These struggles culminated in a final Welsh rebellion in 1282, during which Llewellyn lost his life and Edward I conquered Wales definitively.

  WELSH WORDS

  cariad: darling, love

  ab/ap: son of

  ferch: daughter of

  PRONUNCIATIONS

  Eluned: Ell-in-id

  Gwenllian: Gwen-lee-an

  Rhys: Reese

  Ruardean: Roo-ar-deen

  Lascaux: Lasko

  Dafydd: Davith

  Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising,

  fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in battle array?

  - Song of Solomon 6:10

  Chapter 1

  The Bodies

  It all ended in cold flesh. This prince, the war, and every life: it ended in cold flesh, no matter how hot the blood that had once pounded through it. She had always known this, of course. But there is knowing a thing, and then there is feeling the truth of it cut you open and close around your heart.

  Eluned had come to London when winter still held, before the thaw rendered the sight more gruesome, to behold the face of her own defeat. She wanted to look upon it before there was nothing but a skull on a spike above the city. But it was too high to see much and the flesh was discolored, his features obscured by his tangled hair. Even still it almost made her wish she could weep, to see this bloodied scrap of Llewellyn, last true Prince of Wales.

  It took only a moment to close her eyes in a brief prayer of thanksgiving that God had taken Llewellyn’s beloved wife first. King Edward was the kind of man who might have forced that poor girl to look at this ugly trophy. Behold, he would say. This is the end that awaits my enemies.

  Eluned pulled her hood closer around her face, staring up at the lifeless eyes. This might have been her own end. It might have been her daughter’s.

  “Better we are gone from here before any remark how long you look at him, my lady.” It was Tegwarad who spoke low, his eyes scanning the half-empty street while his hand rested carefully near his dagger. He was one of her guard. He was Welsh, but smart enough not to speak it here.

  “Do any stare at me in wonder?” she asked, still looking up at the face she had come to see. “Do they whisper their suspicion of the lady who seems to pay homage to the rebel?”

  “Nay, my lady,” came the answer. “Not yet.”

  “You will tell me when they do, and then shall I be gone from here. Not a minute before.”

  She kept her voice mild. At least she thought she did. Many times in the month since she had learned of Llewellyn’s death, she had found that her perception did not match reality. Always in small ways, like this. It should worry her. Certainly she had not shouted, she reasoned, as she memorized the precise curl of Llewellyn’s hair where it fell on his forehead. Had there been anger in her voice? Impatience? She could not say for certain, and Llewellyn did not provide an opinion.

  Tomorrow she would be forty, and today she spoke in her head to a dead man, asking if her voice had been too sharp. A frail mind and a hard heart, is that what age did to her? She had thought she might wail at this sight, this evidence that all her hopes were ended. Yet she did not wail or weep, nor even feel despair. She only felt empty, and tired.

  “I am told it was the Mortimers who betrayed him, that they did lay a trap.”

  She heard Tegwarad’s grunt of mild interest beside her. He waited, but when she did not speak again he moved from her side to give her privacy. She did not follow to tell him that she believed there was more betrayal in store for those who continued fighting. Now the Welsh nobles would turn on each other. The war went on, with some Welsh still fighting despite the death of their prince, under the banner of Llewellyn’s brother Dafydd. She knew they would not succeed, even were there not betrayal in store. It did not need skill in the art of war, nor knowledge of the enemy’s plan, to see that without Llewellyn they were lost.

  “Truly, I had thought of that,” she whispered now. It was not an apology. She was not penitent. She had known that Dafydd would never unite the Welsh. She had known that if Llewellyn fell, there must be another to take his place in command of their hearts. She, and only she, had planned for that. “It was a sound plan. But it failed. I failed.”

  The only answer was a winter wind that stung her eyes. It didn’t matter anymore. There would be more fighting and dying, more cruelty and destruction. She must watch all of it come to ruin despite her foresight, despite a lifetime of effort. Now the only thing to do was to sit very still in the safe place she had fashioned for herself, and wait for it to be over.

  For soon it would be over. This was the beginning of the end, and all ended in cold flesh. Be it scattered on the ground after battle, or leering down from a spike high above London, or shivering beneath the cloak of a hopeless Welshwoman, it all ended in cold, cold flesh.

  Over the next months, the losses came regularly. First came word that Dinwen, the stronghold that in her childhood she had called home, had fallen to the English. Her brother, who had once eaten so many apples that he had been sick all over her best shoes – that impetuous boy had become a man who had ruled the place and died in the assault. His son and heir was taken to Edward, where he would swear fealty and beg the king’s pardon. He was a small enough fish that mercy was like to be given, in exchange for all his lands and wealth. Thus would end centuries of her family’s rule in Wales, though their bards could sing a history of twenty-two generations in power. The lands they had held when Romans claimed this island as their own – all of it would now be called England.

  She sat in her solar and wondered how long until they were forgotten. Her family would be dead history, covered over by time, nothing but a vague and faceless group labelled “savage Welsh” to be dismissed by the English who usurped their place. Long ago she had tried to close her heart to it. By giving her in marriage to a Norman lord, her family made her more Norman than Welsh. It was tradition that a wife take on her husband’s nationality.


  And so she told herself as she sat, decades after the wedding that had made her a Norman lady, in the room where she had birthed Norman children to a Norman lord. It was there that word came to her from an abbess, telling her of the burning of the church at St. Anian and the murder of the monks there. Among those slaughtered was Adda, who had served as her father’s personal cleric and had fed her wild strawberries and who told her, when her mother died, about the glories of Heaven. The news of it sent a pain through her heart, and she knelt for hours in the chapel to pray for his sweet soul. She prayed too for the many other innocents who were murdered by looting soldiers, only because Edward’s forces knew there would be no reprisal. The king would claim the scorched land as his own, build a new castle over the bones of the dead, and call it good.

  “Prince Dafydd is captured, my lady,” said a voice that came to her sometime in the summer, as she sat in her solar in the keep of Ruardean.

  She looked up to see Edmund, physician of the keep and old advisor to her husband’s family. It was strange this news should come from him, but when she looked about her she saw others watching her warily. They knew, then, how this mattered to her, and had decided Edmund should be the one to voice it.

  Eluned forced herself to inhabit the present fully, to listen to these words that she had known would be spoken. It was almost over. Llewellyn was fallen; his brother Dafydd had carried on but now was captured.

  “Then it is done,” she said. “Does he live?”

  “He lives and is taken to King Edward, my lady,” replied Edmund. “There is also word of a bloody skirmish near to us here at Ruardean, just west. Even now they fight.”

  Now she saw the man next to him – only a boy, really, with a scanty beard on his cheek and so covered in mud and weariness that she wondered he was still upright. She took the cup of wine that one of her ladies held out to her and came forward to thrust it under his nose.

  “Drink,” she commanded him, and he obeyed. She drew a long and steady breath, feeling the air trickle slow and heavy into her chest, pressing it all out again before she was ready to speak. “What news do you bring me of this fighting so near to us?”

  “Only a half-day’s ride from this keep, my lady. I am sent to you by Rhys ab Owain, who begs you will send whatever aid you are able.”

  Rhys ab Owain. Her uncle. He who was more like a father to her than her own father had been. He had danced at her wedding, and pinched her cheek and declared her to possess the keenest wits in the family. She made herself stand still and look at the boy squarely, though all of her wanted to turn her face away.

  “Does Rhys know that Dafydd is taken, that the larger host is fallen into English hands?”

  The boy nodded. “He has heard rumors of it, but was not certain of their truth.”

  Of long habit, her mind immediately set to calculating. Whence the news of Dafydd’s capture, and what was the likelihood it was true? How much time might they have, how many men might be needed, against whom did Rhys fight and with what numbers?

  But in less time than it took to think these thoughts, she had already dismissed them. None of it mattered. All had been lost when Llewellyn’s head had been cut from his shoulders, months ago. There was no aid she could send now to change the course of things, and no careful scheming would save them.

  Now would come the blood-soaked details that followed decisive victory. She must endure it.

  “Tomorrow we will ride out,” she announced, “to ask my uncle in God’s name to lay down arms and submit himself to the king’s mercy. Master Edmund, you will send him this message today and then prepare such remedies as may be needed to tend the wounded tomorrow.”

  The messenger boy looked caught between a sob and a shout of protest. “In a day there will be no wounded, only dead!”

  She sat down to her embroidery again, a cool dismissal. She put in stitches that later she would have to pluck out, so disordered were they, and spoke to the nearest servant. “Bring this boy to the kitchens and give him his fill of meat and drink.”

  It was as her fingers traced over the green ivy, embroidered at the cloth’s edge, that she had a thought that stopped her. Vines and leaves curled at the border and made her think of quiet forests where her daughter had camped with the fighting men of Ruardean. It had ever pleased her, to think of that. To know how safe her child had been under the open sky with faithful companions by her side.

  “Stop,” she called too loudly. The boy turned to face her again. “Are there other of my kinsmen who fight with my Uncle Rhys?”

  “His son,” came the answer, and she was standing, the embroidery frame clattering at her feet as she stared at him.

  Every person in the room stared back at her as the sound echoed. For a moment she had no command of her tongue. It seemed to her that her skin grew tight, that it could not contain her, that she would split open and everything inside her would spill out before their eyes. And what use would that be? What use was she at all, anymore?

  She slid a look to Master Edmund, who seemed a decade older than he had been a moment ago.

  “We go now,” she said in a voice like a whip, and watched the flurry of activity as they hastened to obey her. Vincent came forward, who commanded the knights of Ruardean. “A mission of mercy only,” she told him with a hard edge in her voice. “Any man who would dare to enter the fight, whether for England or for Wales, I will see him hanged ere the next rising of the sun.”

  “Aye, my lady. But it will go hard, if he calls on them to aid him.”

  She looked at him, her eyes scanning his face to find signs that he was loyal to her. It was not loyalty that mattered most now, though. He was sworn to Ruardean and so would obey her as far as he was able, she was sure of it. But his heart did not belong to her.

  “You will tell them what I tell you now,” she said, her voice low and clear. “All that I do in these dark days has but one purpose: to safeguard the lives and fortunes of my children. This course was chosen by my daughter, who commanded you to serve me. If you would honor her command, if you would keep her safe, you will not draw steel for any reason.”

  He nodded once, his face grim as he went to gather the men.

  It was nearing nightfall when they came on the place where the fighting now was ended. From the rise above the valley, they could see how the swarm of English soldiers had won swiftly and decisively over the handful of doomed Welsh. The victors would have cut the throats of many Welsh survivors had Eluned not hastened to stop them. She used the advantage she had as a highborn lady, wife to a Marcher lord, whose vast lands lay but a mile from where these Welshmen lay dying. “I am the lady of Ruardean, and it is my wish,” she said in a voice that would cause emperors to hesitate, and soon the priests she had brought with her were permitted to go among them and administer last rites.

  She had not even asked her uncle’s fate yet, when he was brought to her. Two of her men had found Rhys amid the carnage, and carried him across the field to lay him at her feet. She bade them raise the pavilion around her, a simple structure meant for quick shelter during travel, three sides and a roof. All the while she stood looking down at the chest that did not move with indrawn breath, the killing arrow that lodged behind an ear. Only when the canvas was raised around them did she kneel beside him.

  “You lived to be an old man, Uncle Rhys. I am glad of it,” she whispered to him. She had last seen him nearly ten years ago. Now every hair was gray, every inch of his face wrinkled. An old lion, who had guarded her in her childhood with a ferocity she had taken for granted. “I am sorry. I am sorry.” For staying safe in her fortress while he died in a field. For all her miscalculations. For failing. “I am sorry.”

  The sun sank low in the sky and she had them bring a torch, and water so that she might wash him. The English commander, whose name she could not keep in her head, made noises about treason and the threat of excommunication until she told him that unless the Pope himself came to prevent it, her uncle would be anointed and buri
ed in consecrated ground. As this English nobody could not boast a personal correspondence with the Holy Father – and she could – the matter was quickly settled.

  The blood was barely washed from his face when she heard the men shout, struggling to bring in another body. Eluned did not turn, knowing who they had found and not wanting to see his corpse. Not yet. But then came Master Edmund’s voice, calling urgently for mead and light, telling them to be gentle as they carried him under the shelter. It was no corpse.

  She turned from his father to him. His chest labored to bring in air, his gray eyes unfocused. “Madog,” she said, and clasped his hand to her breast.

  His swift look told her everything, the wild hope in it as he rolled his eyes toward her and the keen disappointment when he saw she was not her daughter. Then came the twitch at the corner of his mouth that was almost a smile, to acknowledge that he had been foolish to hope it. She felt her own face mirror the expression. No, she was not her daughter. But they would make do nonetheless.

  “Eluned,” he rasped in a voice much diminished. “God curse you if you have dared to aid us in battle.”

  “Nay,” she answered, and did not trust her voice to say more. For here was her daughter’s greatest friend, ally and companion, who even in this moment thought only of her daughter’s survival and not his own. Eluned looked at the pale face and the hard gray eyes above the tangle of beard, but saw an awkward boy on the cusp of manhood who had sworn to her in all his grave solemnity that his life was her daughter’s to command. In all the years that had covered his smooth cheek with wiry beard, never had he sworn fealty to any other.

  His hand in hers gave a hard squeeze, demanding that she speak.

  “Gwenllian is safe, far from here. Nor is there any danger to her from my actions this day or any other day, by Mary do I swear it.”