Gareth paced back and forth at the end of the corridor. Queen Cristina, herself delivered of a healthy son named Dafydd shortly after Calan Gaeaf, had given up her room for Gwen’s lying in. Gwen had woken at dawn with pains, endured a full day of laboring, and now it was past midnight and still their child hadn’t been delivered.
Sometime around sunset the pains had closed in around Gwen, and the midwives had whisked her away to Cristina’s room. Gareth had started drinking then, stopped a few hours later, and had been pacing back and forth in front of the fire in the great hall ever since. Other residents of Aber waited with him, occasionally shooting glances in his direction, but otherwise had the sense to leave him alone.
“She is well, Gareth.” Seeing the way things were going, Hywel had brought a chair to the end of the closest table and reclined in it, his ankles crossed and his boots on the table top. He sipped at his cup of mead. “They would have told you if she wasn’t.”
“It’s gone on so long!” Gareth stopped his pacing and gazed at the empty doorway. He couldn’t hear anything that was happening upstairs from here.
“God isn’t going to take her from you now, not when He and Gwen have conspired so perfectly to keep you here for the birth,” Hywel said.
Gareth glanced at his lord, worried that his comment had been accompanied by discontent, but Hywel was smiling.
Hywel and his men, Gareth among them, had intended to begin the journey to Ceredigion after Epiphany. That was nine days ago. Although the weather had stayed mild through December, it had turned to winter in January, and here it was, the middle of the month, and the snow fell as heavily today as it had fallen a week ago, making the roads impassable and ensuring Gareth’s presence for the birth of his child.
“Laboring this long is normal.” Hywel dropped his feet to the floor and joined Gareth for a circuit around the hall. “When Eira died, they told me hours earlier that it wasn’t going well. Gwen’s mother too.”
“If she’s going to die, I can’t be out here and her in there.”
“She’s not going to die.”
“You don’t know that!” Gareth shook Hywel off. He’d reached the breaking point and was going to start throwing chairs like King Owain. Before he had to choose a chair to throw, however, one of the midwives appeared in the doorway and canted her head. Gareth bounded towards her.
“If you would come with me, my lord, your wife would see you now.”
Gareth’s breath caught in his throat. In later years, he would say that he had no memory of the journey from the great hall to Cristina’s door, which the midwife opened for him. A second midwife, a woman twice Gareth’s age, turned as he entered. Gareth drank in the sight of the child in her arms and then looked past her to Gwen, who rested in the bed. She lifted her head to smile at him, tears fresh on her cheeks.
“It’s a girl, Gareth,” she said.
The midwife adjusted the baby’s blanket and placed her in Gareth’s arms. Wiping away sudden tears of his own, he sat beside Gwen on the bed and put his forehead to hers, finding himself unable to speak.
“Your lady wife did very well,” the midwife said. “Both she and the child are strong and healthy.”
“Thank you,” Gareth said. “Thank you for everything.”
With a knowing smile at Gareth’s near incoherence, Gwen reached for the baby, who’d begun to root around. “Let me feed her before she cries.”
Gareth settled beside Gwen with his back against the headboard. A servant finished bundling together the used linens and departed, leaving the door half-open.
“Is it safe to see her?” Hywel’s voice came from the corridor.
“Yes, my lord,” the servant answered.
Hywel appeared in the doorway, bracing his shoulder against the frame and smiling. “Have you chosen a name? My father waits in the hall.”
Gareth gently stroked the back of his daughter’s head. “Tangwen.”
“The king won’t mind that we want to honor Tegwen with a piece of her name?” Gwen said, looking quickly up at Hywel. “Given all that happened, we didn’t feel right about taking it entirely.” Both names—as well as Gwen’s own—had the same root, which meant ‘pure’ or ‘white’, but while Teg meant beautiful, Tang was the word for peace.
Hywel blinked, and then he bowed. When he looked up again, Gareth thought he saw tears on his cheeks too. “Tegwen was beautiful, and so is your daughter. But I would choose peace too.”
As Hywel departed, Gwen leaned against Gareth. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Gareth kissed his daughter and then his wife. “I swear to you now that I always will be.”