The Wicked and the Just (30 page)

 

 

T
HERE'S A SWEET
, burny smell. Just ahead is a wide patch of blackened earth scattered with what look like tangled branches till I get closer and realize they're bones. Scorched and melted and left to bleach.

Animal bones. Cows and sheep and goats. A twinkly star fallen to a black landscape. Ones and dozens and hundreds.

That's bad enough. Then I see the bodies.

Three of them, two men and a woman, hanging from a tree not far from the path Gwinny forges. Purple faces. Crooked necks. Pecked-out holes where eyes once were.

The woman is Mistress Sandys.

I'm on my knees in mud and gasping and choking and they're all dead and all I want is my father back even if he does his fool dancing before every window in Christendom.

A hand on my shoulder, and Gwinny is hauling me up by one arm. “Don't look. Take my hand. Face ahead.”

I do as she tells me. My gown is heavy with clinging mud. We're a hundred breaths away when she says, “It'll get better. Not for a while, but it will.”

I want to ask Gwinny why. Why the Welsh of the countryside attacked Caernarvon with such sudden violence. Why they hanged and cut down the innocent. Why they tore up the market and looted the wharves and reduced the toll trestle to a pile of splinters.

I don't, though. I think I already know.

 

 

F
ANWRA'S
steading is damp and airless. There's no fire. The brat hovers in the doorway and I jerk her in, stumbling. She does not twitch or gag as I expected. She bears up straight, despite her bloodless face.

I kneel at Fanwra's head and smooth her sweaty hair. Then I tuck the cheese into her hands. I do not ask how she fares.

A bundle lies beside the door. The creature within is colorless and smooth, oddly calm. Like statuary, or a figure cast in wax.

I shove the bundle into the brat's arms. She shudders and scrambles to hand it back.

“You'll hold it,” I tell her. “You did this. So have a good look at what you wrought.”

Her eyes widen and she says, I did not do this.

I pinch the warm pink flesh of her upper arm. “This is hunger's work.”

The brat rubs the reddening patch and says, your poor neighbor. Who will look after her? Where is her husband?

“Husband?” I snort. “She should be so lucky. I reckon you believe I gave Edward Mercer justice merely for your benefit.”

The brat swallows hard. She looks greensick. She whispers words in English I do not recognize.

Fanwra eats the cheese as if it will disappear.

Ave Maria gratia plena,
whispers the brat, and she holds the bundle close as if it's a live, breathing child.

 

The walk is the same as before, same tree-stump hillsides and stolen fields, but now I stride through those fields that by right should be Gruffydd's. The Watchers have been scattered, the cattle loosed, the struggling barley thrice trampled. I grind my heel into the parched, prickly roots. Give me salt enough and I would sow every handswidth.

The market trestle is splinters, scattered like kindling. Even the walls don't seem as high. The market common is torn up, littered with rubbish. No bodies, though. No bodies anywhere.

There are no more gates, only hinges clinging to the walls like broken spiders. I can look all the way up High Street to where it curves like a spine, obscuring the Water Gate and the strait beyond. Men on what's left of the towers watch me enter the gravetown, blades shouldered, careful.

They must be Madog's men, guarding their prize. As if there's an English soul within a day's ride who still breathed God's air.

Already they're taking Caernarvon down. Brick by brick, timber by timber, plank by miserable plank. By the time the English king arrives, this place will not be worth fighting for.

Farther up High, I pass men bearing long rolls of canvas slung between them. Little wonder there are no bodies. Madog's men are disposing of them.

They must plan to be here for a while.

The master still hangs from the window, sightless, gray, withered. I pass beneath him and into the house, into the brat's old demesne.

Not a stick of furniture remains. Not trestle nor coffer nor wall-cloth. There are only bare, battered floors and sooty walls. I put it to memory. I will tell her every spill and scorch, every last absence.

I will enjoy watching it hurt.

Something is wadded in the corner. It's head-sized, washwater-colored and lumpy like vomit. I toe it and it becomes linen. A ray of glowing blue turns over. I kneel, peel apart the folds.

The castle appears first. The castle and a walled town. It's unmistakably Caernarvon, notched and purple-banded in tiny tight stitches high in the corner. Then Saint Joseph, his cloak a field of backstitches and his curly hair spilling over his collar while the Holy Child sits serenely on his arm, haloed. The Virgin is unfinished, an outline cast in blue and scarlet.

The castle appears first. Even she has built it.

Caernarvon, in stitches and thread.

I jab the tip of my plundered knife beneath the stitches and twist. Thread catches, strains, and I gouge hard. More thread falls, tiny worms of purple and gray. I rip and stab Caernarvon from the linen even as Madog's men pull down walls and townhouses.

Finally there's no more thread. I've cut myself twice and my blood stains the frayed edge.

But Caernarvon is not gone. There's a faint outline on the linen where the stitches were, tiny holes suggesting towers, walls, gates, rooftops. Ghosts of color where thread rubbed cloth. Caernarvon still presides over the Holy Family, present even without substance.

And I look out the half-shuttered window at the castle just clipping the sky, dark as rain. My throat tightens and I grip the brat's linen in both hands because Gruffydd is right, curse him, and it's all for naught.

The extents and rolls may be ash, the town charter may be naught but privy rag, but none of these acts can undo Caernarvon. Brick and plank have stood. Kings have blessed. Men have seen. Girls have stitched. We could pull it down again and again. They'll come back. They'll always come back.

Outside, I ask one of the labor gangs carrying corpses to cut down the master and bury him. I wait till the crow-pecked body is wrapped in canvas and laid in a grave ere I fold the brat's linen into a tight packet and head home, dirtying my feet through once-Watched fields.

 

 

“E
VERYTHING,
” Gwinny says, and she smiles as if the Adversary himself did the wrecking.

“Everything,” I whisper.

“Every trunk and chest and wooden spoon,” she prods, still smiling. “Not a splinter or scrap remains.”

“Did you see Mistress Tipley or Mistress Pole?” I ask. “Emmaline de Coucy? I would give much to know they're sound.”

Gwinny draws back and eyes me. “Naught remains in your house. Everything you have in the world has been kicked in or made off with. Your precious embroidery frame. Your colored threads. Your mother's gown.”

I swallow. “What of the Glovers next door? There are so many little ones, and Mistress Glover bore her baby not long ago. Surely they wouldn't have slaughtered children. Would they?”

“Madog's men garrison the town,” Gwinny says stonily. “Should any English remain, God help them.”

“They must have fled.” I nod, fierce and sure. “They must have.”

Gwinny narrows her eyes. “Fled home, you mean. Back to England. Where they belong.”

“Emmaline has no memory of England. All she knows is Caernarvon. That's her home.”

“It's not her home. It's not
your
home.”

I square up and look Gwinny in the eye. “I would that were true. But it's not. My home isn't mine any longer. He took it, and I must make shift with what's left me. Caernarvon is my home now.”

Gwinny flinches, blinks, turns away.

 

 

H
ORSEBACK ENGLISH
, a decree from their king, and the new lord of Pencoed rode right up to the hall door and kicked it in and that's all I saw because Mam threw the blanket over Gruffydd and me and there was screaming and clatter and ere long we found ourselves in a ditch tangled in that blanket a stone's throw from the hall and Mam next to us was weeping quietly and there was nowhere to go but into the greenwood, away from that timbered hall that the prince himself granted Da, where I was just old enough to kneel before the prince during his final days on God's own earth.

 

 

I
F
I close my eyes I can see it still, the new chimney, the dovecote, the endless rolling yardlands of barley and oats and rye.

But it's his now. It'll never be mine, and even if I go back, I'll be at their mercy. My thieving uncle Roger and his wretchedly fertile girl-wife and their little pink baby. I'll have to pretend to like the howling brat who stole Edgeley from me and mayhap even play nursemaid to it.

Gwinny said everything I had in the world was kicked in or made off with, but that's not true. I have what's left of a townhouse on a plot of ground sixty feet by eighty on Shire Hall Street in the king's borough of Caernarvon. Out of one window you can see Anglesey, green atop green like layers of infidel silk. Out the other, houses and roads and the walls curving around it all like a great embrace. On one side the Glovers, on the other, the Poles. The church downstreet, the castle up, the middle alive with dogs and children and neighbors.

I'll find a way to have what's mine. What my father made mine because he'd have more for me than the lot of a steward's daughter on an estate, hers by right, that she could never have.

Get out, he said.

He did not mean forever.