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Day Two
Rhys
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In an instant, Rhys was on his feet and racing toward the door. Only he and Catrin had understood the Welsh Gruffydd had spoken—and he hadn’t said townspeople either, but defaid, sheep, the Welsh slur for Englishmen. Gruffydd knew little to no French—certainly not enough to convey what needed to be conveyed in the heat of the moment.
Rhys’s presence might not have been enough to stop the guards from marching Gruffydd to the dungeon for disturbing the peace of the hall, but Simon’s arrival hard on Rhys’s heels was another matter entirely. They released Gruffydd, and he went to Rhys, grasping him by the upper arms in his urgency. “I was at the Queen’s Gate to inquire about returning to work, like you said I should do, now that someone more reasonable is in charge—” here Gruffydd bobbed his head in Simon’s direction, “—when my boy found me. He’d been to the city gate and seen them gathering, hundreds of them, he said, with torches, saying they were going to burn out the evildoers.”
“How did he know that was their purpose?” Catrin had appeared on Rhys’s other side.
“He speaks a little English, does my boy. Impossible language, if you ask me, but he knows it. He can count too, thanks to Sir Rhys. I sent him back to the village running, but I can only hope he’ll be in time to warn everyone.”
Rhys turned to Simon and explained what Gruffydd had said.
Simon’s expression, already grim, darkened. “Just what we need.”
Rhys cast around the hall. “I don’t see Guy or our new sheriff.”
“They retired when the king did,” Simon said. “You and I will deal with it.”
“May we be of assistance?” Rolf le Strange came to a halt a few paces away, flanked by his brother, John. Even side-by-side, Rhys couldn’t tell them apart but for the chevron on their shoulders.
“By the saints, yes! Gather your men. Every last one of them.” And Simon quickly explained what was happening.
Rolf frowned. “We could let them—”
Simon turned on him, glaring so hard it was like flames were shooting from his eyeballs. It wasn’t Simon’s place to berate a lord of higher rank, but he did it anyway. “This is a land of law and order. The king does not countenance anyone taking justice into their own hands. And he certainly doesn’t approve of the murder of innocent women and children.”
Rolf took a step back at Simon’s adamancy, but he also nodded. “Of course.” He began sending men and guards every which way, most to saddle up and be prepared to ride.
Now Simon turned to Rhys. “Go now. I know you can ride without a saddle, and you’re not in armor. Take whatever horse is free first. Get your people out. They’ll listen to you, and none of us could make ourselves understood anyway.”
Rhys was out the door in a flash, as he perhaps should have been the moment Gruffydd had told him the news—except, without the help of Simon and, God help him, Rolf, he could have done little beyond affirming the warning of Gruffydd’s boy. But if he knew a higher authority was on the way, Rhys could possibly delay the vigilantes until help arrived. He would have hauled Gruffydd after him, but he had been on a horse’s back maybe five times in his life and would only slow Rhys down.
He ran towards the Queen’s Gate. Someone had just arrived because a stable boy was walking a horse towards the hitching post. Rhys intercepted him and took the horse, mounting just inside the gate. The stables themselves were located outside the castle because there was simply no room inside for anything that wasn’t strictly necessary to either the king’s retinue or the castle’s construction.
And then Catrin caught the bridle. “Take me too. The horse can carry two that far, and I can help.”
His first instinct was to keep her safe, but she was right that the two of them could cover more ground once at the village, which didn’t have a bell or any kind of central alarm (an oversight he would remedy tomorrow). And unlike Gruffydd, she’d learned to ride as a child.
He reached down and hauled Catrin onto the horse’s back behind him. Then he spurred the horse through the gate, and they raced between the lines of workers’ tents and huts towards the entrance to the encompassing palisade.
“Open the gate! Open the gate!” He shouted the words in his best French, and the guards hastened to obey, not knowing in the dark whom they were obeying but assuming anyone on horseback wearing Prince Edmund’s sigil had the authority to tell them what to do.
Then the horse was through and faced an immediate choice as to which direction to ride. Catrin swung out an arm to point north where lights bobbed along Edward’s new road. Those lights appeared to belong to stragglers to the main party of townspeople, but it was enough to tell him that, since the vigilantes were taking the northern road by the River Cadnant, he should take the southern one along the River Seiont, past the old palace and St. Peblig’s church. The little Welsh village lay almost due east of the old palace, at a lower elevation along the River Cadnant. It was reachable by a lane off both main roads.
The crowd of vigilantes had a significant head start, but they were hampered by their numbers and the fact that they were walking, while Rhys’s borrowed horse could cross the distance at a gallop. Which it proceeded to do. Coming down off the rise on the other side of the church, he raced through the village to the far end and pulled up at the last, most western, house. When the party of townspeople arrived, it would likely be the first house they threatened.
There was no sign of Gruffydd’s boy, but in the distance to the west, lights bobbed, still a good half-mile away. They had less than a quarter of an hour to get everyone out.
Catrin slid off the horse. “I’ll wake the people here. You can cover more ground with the horse, and they know you anyway. They’ll heed your voice.”
Rhys didn’t argue. They were here now, and the whole point of her coming was to split up the work.
“Awake! Awake!” He urged his horse back up the lane, shouting as he rode, and by the time he’d ridden back to the green, he could hear people stirring. Not everyone would have been asleep already, but people did tend to settle in once the sun went down because they rose with the dawn to work.
“What is it?” Aron appeared at his front door, scratching the back of his head.
“You’re free!” Rhys’s spirits lifted at the sight of the older man. Something had gone right today.
“Thanks to you, my lord.”
Rhys dismounted, talking as he did so. “The townspeople are marching towards the village. They intend to burn it to the ground.” There didn’t seem to be any point in breaking the news gently.
“Right.” Aron spun on his heel. “I’ll see to my lot. We’ll get to the church, yeah?”
“Yes.” Rhys hadn’t thought that far ahead, but it made sense. Even vigilantes might be hesitant to burn St. Peblig’s with people inside.
His heart was pounding in his ears as he went from house to house, waking some and rousting others. He hadn’t ever noticed how aged the villagers had become, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. After Llywelyn’s death, it was Gwynedd that experienced some of the worst of the fighting. With so many men dead in the war and widows and children fled, life only now was beginning to return to what could even remotely be called normal. The number of elders meant fewer than he’d hoped had heard his shouting. Many would have to be woken by hand.
Iago and Mari, the courting couple, were not together as it turned out, but Iago took it upon himself to wake her and the rest of her family, since Gruffydd remained back at the castle. By the time Rhys emerged from a third house, Gruffydd’s son had arrived, limping on an apparent sprained ankle but joy in his face to see the entire village on the move.
“Rhys!” Catrin’s call came from the western entrance to the town. “They’re here!”
Rhys turned to look just as a flaming arrow arched through the air and hit the dirt a few feet from where Catrin stood. Rhys shouted at her to come to him at the same moment she did the exact opposite, lifting her skirts and running towards the oncoming townspeople, screaming at them in English to stop, that they were going to kill innocents. He ran after her.
None of the townspeople appeared to be listening or maybe even hearing her because a second arrow flamed, this time hitting the thatched roof of the last house. Villagers were wailing all around him, and then Rhys found a girl of ten arresting his headlong run by hanging onto his arm.
“My granny won’t come!”
“What?” He looked down at her as she tugged his sleeve.
“She says no defaid is going to drive her out of her home, and she’ll die in her bed or nowhere.”
Cursing, Rhys followed the girl into a house not far from the one currently in flames. The girl fell to her knees beside her grandmother’s bed. “You have to come, Mamgu!” That was Welsh for grandmother.
The woman was skin and bones. “I won’t!”
Rhys bent to her. “You’re not going to die today, not by their hand, not on my watch.”
“They won’t force me out of my home!”
“It can be rebuilt.” Rhys spoke gently. “She’s not ready to lose you, not this way.”
The grandmother glanced at her granddaughter, who had tears streaming down her cheeks. Then her wrinkled chin firmed. “Where are we going?”
“To the church.” Taking her words as tacit permission, Rhys scooped the grandmother into his arms, noting that his saddle bags would have weighed more than she did, and carried her from the house.
