Eldhelm, the slave dealer, realized almost at once that he’d made a bad bargain. Staring vacantly ahead of her, unable or unwilling to respond to the loudest and simplest of commands, Annwr drew little interest and no bids until late in the afternoon when Erbert, who’d just been appointed the under-steward of the king’s chambermaids and kitchen sculleries, came looking for a nurse for the newly orphaned princess. Erbert had an intuition he should get one that was stupid and did not speak English, so he picked Annwr—answering Eldhelm’s half-hearted claim that she was a trained nursemaid worth twice her asking price with, “Six sceatta, take it or leave it.”
Eldhelm took it. Erbert grabbed Annwr by the wrist and dragged her out of the slave yard, shoving their way through milling, muttering crowds and clusters of guards—out of the village and up the steep road that switchbacked its way to the top of the granite outcrop that gave the name Gothroc to the central fortress and stronghold of the Kingdom of Derthwald. A portly, middle-aged man, not accustomed to strenuous activity, Erbert was sweating and out of breath by the time they’d reached the top, where a massive oak and iron gate creaked open just enough to let them in, but he forged on, hauling Annwr through the narrow passages between guardhouses, armories, stables, and storage sheds.
Stumbling along behind him, Annwr kept her eyes fixed on the knife Erbert had carelessly stuck in his belt, and if he had not been too nervous to stop off in some alley and take advantage of his temporary authority, things would have ended very differently for both of them that day. As it was, he kept hurrying on until he came to the back gate of a high-walled compound. The gate cracked open at his knock, revealing half the face of an old woman who thrust her hand out, grabbed Annwr by the sleeve, and yanked her inside.
In contrast to Erbert, who hadn’t spoken a single word to Annwr, her new captor began talking as soon as the gate was latched behind them, gesturing wildly with her free hand. It would be months before Annwr would have even a rudimentary grasp of English, so the woman’s guttural exhortations were totally incomprehensible to her, but there was no mistaking the urgency of their tone as she pulled Annwr through an overgrown courtyard garden and into a dark, tightly shuttered room.
It took time for Annwr’s eyes to adjust to the dim light and for silhouettes and shadows around her to take recognizable shapes—a box filled with toys on the floor, a child-size table and chair next to the unlit hearth, and a small bed in the corner with a child-sized figure sitting on it. At first, Annwr thought she was seeing an amazingly lifelike doll dressed in layers of green and gold brocade, its face and hands carved of alabaster, with disks of obsidian for eyes and a smooth veil of silvery-white silk threads for hair. Then the little girl blinked, looked straight at Annwr, and reached up to her with both arms, the fingers of one hand wide open, the other clenched in a fist.
Annwr could not help herself—she shook loose from the old woman’s grasp and picked the child up, expecting the crone to scream and attack her as savagely as she would have attacked any stranger who dared lay a hand on Cyri. Instead, the woman broke into a toothy smile and nodded eagerly. Annwr nodded back without any real idea of what they were agreeing about and watched in numbed bewilderment as the woman darted around the room, still babbling, and opened the doors of its several cabinets, pointing to the rows of child sized gowns as she went. When she’d opened the last cupboard, the old woman pointed to the little girl and said, “Infant Princess Aleswina.” Then she pointed to Annwr. When Annwr said her own name, the woman nodded so vigorously it seemed her head might fly off her shoulders. Then, abruptly, she stopped bobbing her head, pointed to herself and said, “Millicent,” then pointed to the door, ran out, and slammed it behind her.
Left standing in the dark with Aleswina clinging to her, the understanding dawned on Annwr that she was to be the child’s nursemaid. She knew about nursemaids. She’d had one herself. She recalled how much liberty Nonna had had—and taken—so long as she and Feywn were quiet and happy, and so, as she rocked the little girl, humming the lullabies that Nonna used to sing, she began to plan her escape.
Within a month, she had a knife. Within a year, she had a blanket, a rope, and containers for food and water. By the end of three years, she could speak enough English to be sent out to the town market and had convinced her keepers that she could be trusted to come back again. The one thing she did not plan on was that she’d come to care so deeply for the little Saxon princess who clung to her like a limpet to a rock.
If she’d known which way to go, Annwr would have taken Aleswina and gone. If she’d had only herself to think about, she would have run off in any direction at all.
While she never actually gave up her plans to escape, she’d postponed them so often that they no longer seemed real. Meanwhile, she’d had a child to raise, babies to deliver and, in these past seven years, her own small cottage, her garden, and her animals.
It was not much, but it was what she had to show for fifteen years of hardship, and it was not as easy as some people might think to leave it all behind on a moment’s notice. So now she wavered, worrying about Aleswina and also about Betrys, the pig whose regular litters gave Annwr an income of her own, and the geese, whose eggs and offspring added to her economic security as much as their militant defense of the yard added to her safety. These animals were more than livestock to Annwr; they were her friends and her family. If she left, what would happen to them?