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Alwyn held Rhian’s hand and held up Emrys with the other. Sian and Rhosyn followed behind muttering, but Cerys walked beside them. She said, “My father would scream if he knew where I was now.”
Alwyn snorted. “I’m trying to think of what to tell my father that won’t make him kill me.”
“Tell him we braved Chalon Forest to save a woman pursued by strange magic,” Emrys said. “The truth.” He watched to see how Rhian would respond but she seemed indifferent or deaf to his words.
She walked loose and easy beside Alwyn, head high, turning at every sound. She watched a rabbit dart away and the autumn birds singing the morning’s rise, tracking them until some new noise caught her attention and dragged her after. Reminded him of deer marching gingerly through the moors or cats at a window, tracking everything, startled by every sound.
“Not sure that’s better,” Alwyn snorted.
“You’ve returned with a prize,” Cerys said. “The daughters of Lyr are your prisoners.”
“No,” he smiled.
Sian said, “Not your prisoners.”
“Know it,” he said.
“Tell him of Goda the Bard and the lord of bone,” said Rhian. She turned to him, raised her face to his. Touched by dawnlight, she was radiant. A rare beauty. The fatal kind that drowned men like Alwyn. There was a fragility to her that Emrys didn’t see in her sisters, in Cerys.
Cerys marched past the barrow of his ancestors, a slight smile played across her lips but she said nothing. He watched the way she moved so calm and relaxed, powerful like a predator stalking the lands unconcerned and unafraid of anything.
Absently, he touched the wound in his side and wondered if he found her beautiful or wanted to be her. To be like her. Strong and certain.
Matauc land was quiet so early. Last night’s feast still flooded the clan.
Only one night.
Emrys snorted, spat, remembering his mother’s face on the monster. “They caught a monster yesterday. Maybe your father will have heard. They took it down in Chalon Forest.”
Alwyn frowned. “What?”
“That’s what the feast was for. My father was skinning the beast before you and Aeronwen found me outside his longhouse.”
“Thought they just meant a big stag.” Alwyn snorted like a Matauc. “Might soften the blow or make it worse. What kind of fool walks into the forest after we killed and butchered one of its children?”
“Well,” Emrys laughed. “You can blame me.”
“Ah, Birdie,” Alwyn shook his head and turned to Rhian. “My cousin’s an idiot. He believes others think as little of him as he thinks of himself.”
Sian said, “Who’s your father?”
“Goronwyn mip Alwyn,” said Alwyn.
“No, the little bird. Who’s your father?”
“No one,” Emrys laughed without anger or bitterness. “My mother was a slave made free by Owain mip Merfyn.”
Rhosyn cursed and Sian sighed, “Of course.” She spat. “Of course we’d walk straight into the wolf’s den.”
Rhosyn said, “I knew it. God’s bloody eyes, I knew it!”
“Who?” Rhian frowned up at Alwyn.
Before Alwyn could speak, Sian said, “Head of Clan Matauc.”
“The old wolf,” Cerys said.
“God’s splintered teeth,” Rhosyn said. She pushed Alwyn hard from behind. “Hey, promise us here and now, yeah? Promise you’ll ransom us.”
Alwyn snorted. “The laird hates my father.”
Rhosyn rounded on Emrys, who laughed. “He loved my mother but despises me. You send me to ask on your behalf and it won’t go well for any of us.”
She chewed on her lips. “I knew it.”
“My father will protect you, if only to thumb it at Owain. You’ll be safe enough, especially if none but us know who you are.”
In view of the longhouses there was no running away. Sian took her sister by the hand and said, “We’ll face it.”
“Father’s going to kill us.”
“Yes.”
Cerys said, “He’ll be happy to have us all home. The rest won’t matter.”
Sian and Rhosyn said nothing to that and the weight of reality settled upon them as they kept wide of Owain’s longhouse and made their way into the valley where the rest of the longhouses nestled together to form the village proper.
Green. So green. The soft turf beneath their feet almost spongelike as they descended into the valley. The longhouses arranged in two straight lines enclosed by a wide circle of larger homes, some of them shared by several families under the protection of chiefs all owing fealty to the laird.
Despite Owain’s enmity, Goronwyn was a powerful chief who had always treated Emrys kindly. Not as a father treats a son or even foster son. Never that. But he welcomed Emrys, which was more than many. No matter how they may love hearing him sing, they preferred him elsewhere. Far away.
They assumed he had done something to lose his father’s inheritance and acknowledgement. Some great indiscretion or shame. But he had been only a boy. A child. Still, none treated him as family, except Ariana.
Emrys didn’t know—would never know—if Goronwyn’s kindness was meant as a slight attack upon Owain, a way to snub his rule and flaunt defiance. It didn’t matter, not after all the years he’d spent there. Alwyn and Aeronwen would never be his siblings. He’d never be named a foster son or anything like that, but his cousins were brother and sister to him in every way that mattered.
At least to him.
When they arrived at Goronwyn’s longhouse at the far end of the valley, Emrys turned back to Owain’s longhouse upon the hill. “I have to meet my father.”
“After you rest,” Alwyn said. “Come on.” He pushed open the door and led Rhian in but Emrys remained outside. “Come on, Birdie.”
“That you, Al?” A gentle voice came from down the hall.
“Yeah,” Alwyn called into the hall but kept his eyes on Emrys and spoke to him, “Once you rest—”
Emrys shook his head. “Must go now, while I’ve still the nerve.”
Alwyn swallowed and nodded. “Need help?”
Cerys said, “I’ll help him.”
“No,” Emrys said, though he wanted her very much. Wanted her strong arms on him, helping him trudge back up out of the valley. Wanted any excuse to avoid Owain. “Best for you and your cousins if you stay here.
“Who’s this?” Alwyn’s mother said from within.
“Rhian, mother,” said Alwyn.
“And who are her people?” Emrys could see the way his aunt scrutinized the beautiful girl standing in only her nightgown, filthy and unshod, within her home.
“Mother,” Alwyn turned from Emrys to speak with her.
“You’ll be safe here,” Emrys said to Cerys, to Sian and Rhosyn. And though he knew the sisters didn’t believe or trust him, they followed their sister inside to meet Alwyn’s mother, Blodwen, youngest sister of the laird.
The pain in his side expanded without them to accompany him, to distract him. Rhian said he would never recover from such a wound. All the better that he abandon this place, get far away from its source, from the angry god of the forest claiming his life.
They would know how to heal him at the University. A magic wound for a place of science. One final way to banish superstition from the world.
It throbbed and thrummed. Felt the echo of the lord of bone’s words rattling through him as he pushed open the door to his father’s longhouse.
Despite the celebration of the night before, the great hall had been cleaned already. He snorted, unsurprised. A few drunk bodies littered the ground, the tables, but most was set back in its place. Dawn pierced the darkness of the hall in pillars of light streaming in from the windows. The bones of the skywhale holding up the ceiling shined black, even in the dark. Imbued with their own uncanny, unfathomable light.
Would believe such a beast was an impossibility had he not grown up beneath those bones that never seemed to age or wither. At the far end of the hall, he turned to the door leading further in. Where his father lived with his family.
He took a breath and let it out before taking one more and pushing open the door and there was Owain sitting on the floor with his back pressed against the wall with his two sons. His smile didn’t falter and he didn’t acknowledge the appearance of Emrys.
In one hand, he held the flint knife of clan Matauc and in the other a bone the length of a man’s arm. “You press the blade here, like this, and at an angle. Always carve out and away from your body.” He slid the knife along the bone, flaying away a thin strip of bone that curled away like he carved wood. “Here, you try.”
He handed the bone and the blade to his son, still ignoring Emrys, but his sons couldn’t.
Bleddyn, the elder, gripped the knife tightly but the bone limply. He had all the darkness of his mother but appeared in every other way the mirror of his father. Seeing his father’s eyes stare at him from a young face with that same mix of disinterest and disgust unnerved Emrys. Bleddyn’s hair formed a black halo round his head and he cocked his head at Emrys.
His brother Folant was the image of his mother, even with her huge eyes. On his small face, they appeared even rounder and wider, seeming to take up most of his face. He held a ball in his tiny hands and stared at Emrys.
Only after his sons gawked at Emrys did Owain turn to his bastard. “Ah, still here. Help me up.” He reached one of his hands to Emrys who took it reflexively, hoisted his father to his feet. Owain clapped him on the shoulder still looking down at his heirs. “If you’re not going to use it, give it here.” He stretched his hand to Bleddyn but the boy didn’t seem to notice. “Boy.”
Bleddyn blinked and handed the knife back to Owain.
But he had held it so easily, had it given to him without question or hesitation.
He was the heir.
Knowing didn’t make the sting any less. “Need to speak with you. Alone.”
Owain snorted, sliding the ancient knife into the sheath at his forearm. “Come on then.” He put a hand on either son’s shoulder and pushed them along before him down the hallway until they came to another room.
Comfortably warm. After the long cold of the forest, the heat radiating from the fireplace hit him like a wave. It loosened him, made him relax, even there beside his father. The walls lined with pelts and antlers and paintings of his ancestors. An old family, but a weak and rarely considered branch of the Matauc line until Owain and Ariana took control. On the far wall, the ancient painting recreated a hundred times hung as it had for longer than the longhouse existed. There, old Matauc played his lyre for Saoirse, the third moon and mother to them all, while they sat on the bones of the skywhale whose corpse brought wealth to Morfil, the land beneath his feet.
There beneath the painting on a low wide couch sat Saoirse, Owain’s wife and mother to his heirs. Her Though the sun streamed in from windows on the left side of the room, she sat backlit by the fire, by the lit candles.
Her sons went to her sides and though she accepted them with kind words, she stared hard at Emrys who chose to stare back placidly. She could not hurt him or make him cower. Not after the night in Chalon. She said, “Still here.”
“He’s obedient, if nothing else,” said Owain. He bent down and kissed her forehead, before sitting and leaning back, hooking his knife hand behind the couch’s back. Bleddyn to the right of Saoirse scowled at him but Folant between her and Owain waited, watched.
“He looks terrible,” said Saoirse.
His father would not honor his request for privacy but instead made whatever fell between them even more public, in the eyes of his wife and heirs, his servants and slaves. Choosing to sidestep the arguments and the miles of words that would bubble angrily between them, Emrys lifted his shirt and revealed the blackened wound. Bleddyn scowled, leaning forward but Folant’s eyes went wide, forming perfect circles in his small face. Saoirse leaned away, disgusted.
Owain’s eyes remained on Emrys’ face. “She’s right, you know. When’s the last time you slept?” He cocked his head. “Or washed?”
Emrys waited for him to acknowledge the wound but Owain would be goaded by nothing, would do nothing except by his choice. Emrys knew this but thought, or hoped, seeing his son ravaged would elicit some concern or even interest. Time dilated between them and it was Bleddyn who broke the silence.
“Are you dying?” No malice in the question, only curiosity. Likely he had never seen a man wounded badly enough to die.
Owain snorted. “Something he caught out on the moors.”
“Chalon,” said Emrys.
Saoirse’s eyebrows came low, her brow furrowed, while her sons only gaped.
Owain sniffed, snorted. “Fool.”
His body burned, his chest full of bees, his wound throbbing, and the echoed call of the lord of bones reverberated through his bones, causing him to shiver there in the warmth of his father’s fire. He let his shirt fall, covering the wound once more. “The lord of bone.”
Emrys let the words hang between them all. The fire cracked. The scent of cooked eggs, of rashers frying. There’d be baked beans and tomatoes too. Mushrooms, given the season.
Owain sat still as a statue, stared.
Emrys took a breath. “He’s claimed me.”
“Can’t have you, boy. You’re mine. You belong to your brothers.”
Saoirse winced at the word. “Sharing blood doesn’t make them brothers.”
“Does if I say.” Owain kept his eyes on Emrys. “Your lord of bone can have you when they’re done with you. First, you’ll be their shadow.”
Emrys didn’t know what he expected. It felt so important, so crucial for his father to know, to understand. But it all became fog drifting away, burning away, and he could do nothing to grasp it, hold it close, make him understand. “I will never heal of this wound.” He kept his voice steady, solid, full.
Owain snorted and turned to Saoirse. “When will Berit be here?” Before she could answer, he turned back to Emrys. “Where’s Ariana?”
“Home abed, no doubt.”
“She’ll sniff it out. The wyrd can be countered by the wyrder.” He stood and approached Emrys, the fire reflecting against his bald head, revealing the veins ridging his bare arms. Though Emrys stood half a head taller than his father, he felt smaller. He forced himself to stand and not cower when Owain lifted his hands.
Owain had never struck him yet the fear remained bonedeep in Emrys. Afraid of the violence promised in Owain’s every movement, the way he prowled through life, cold and vicious as the wolf they named him. Emrys could not help but flinch. His father didn’t sneer or snort or comment, only set his hands upon his shoulders and met his eyes.
But Emrys looked down, unable, even after all that befell him, to look meet his father’s eyes.
“Look at me, boy.”
Emrys swallowed, took a breath, and raised his gaze to his father.
A heaviness that dragged at his chin, the weight of a lifetime of scorn and indifference. Taking a breath, he leveled his eyes upon his father’s eyes. Dark and rich. His pupils expanded and took him in and Emrys felt the sensation of being consumed. The deathly eyes of a predator burrowing into him, plumbing the depths of his ravaged soul.
And Owain said, “You’re home now. This is where you belong.”
Such simple words. Such brutal, ravishing words. Emrys wiped at his face but could not stop the shuddering, the sobs reaching up from the deepdark of the earth. And though he told himself he would never shed another tear for his father, he wept, tearless, in those steady hands that held him but did not embrace him.
Owain said, “You’re home, boy. I’ll protect you and you’ll protect your brothers.”