Cymru - Chapter 8

GWILYM

Gwilym walked quietly between the stables in the landing tower, breathing in the scents of the merod dozing in the stalls. He could smell hay, sweet and summery; the alkaline odours of saddle soap and leather polish, the sharp tang of pine-pitch burning on the torches. He’d never appreciated his olfactory senses quite so much before, which seemed most remiss of him. The world of scent was beautiful, and yet so… ignored.

But then, every detail suddenly felt clearer to him. Someone had tried to kill him.

Gwilym ran one finger carefully along the arrow shaft he held. Wicked barbs stuck out along it, most of them showing a dull reddish-brown in the torchlight. Awen hadn’t just caught that arrow, she’d also held on while it sliced her hand open. He couldn’t imagine how that had been possible. He wondered if she’d noticed it cutting her at the time. You heard stories about Riders, and how they could go into these strange mental states where everything was all focused and intense. Gwilym wondered if Awen could teach him it; it would probably help speed up paperwork no end.

He looked around at the merod. Normally, these ten were the stables of Aberystwyth’s Alpha Wing, but as they were off threatening Northlanders into going to the Archwiliad the stalls had been given over to whichever Wing was visiting. Nine animals stood there now, and Gwilym wondered if Awen would be flying in to meet him. He’d only seen her briefly after she’d returned the would-be assassin, but she’d looked rather disturbed. Probably not the best mood for riding in.

One of the merod, a massive animal with muscles that were probably sentient, jerked awake and looked about suddenly, his ears pricked forward. Gwilym wandered over to his stall and held out a hand. The meraden stepped willingly forward and nuzzled his palm, the short whiskers of his muzzle tickling slightly. Gwilym grinned.

“He likes it if you scratch his chin,” Awen’s voice said softly behind him. Gwilym glanced over his shoulder at her.

She was leaning against the doorframe with her left arm hanging strangely and both shoulders slumped. She looked exhausted. Her eyes watched him with a peculiar intensity that he wondered at; they hadn’t done so this morning.

Obediently, Gwilym scratched the meraden’s chin. It made a sort of groaning noise in its throat and stretched its head forward, rustling its wings contentedly. Awen came over to stand beside him, looking at the meraden with a tired affection.

“His name’s Brân,” she said. Brân gave a low whicker. “And he’s actually a pest, don’t let him fool you. He just acts cute to impress people.”

“He knew you were here,” Gwilym said thoughtfully. “He woke up before you arrived apropos of nothing and looked all expectant.”

“Instinct,” Awen said. “Riders imprint themselves on their merod when they’re born.”

“A duck imprinted itself onto me, once,” Gwilym said. He paused. “I’m sorry, I thought there was more story there than there actually was. This anecdote has no interesting end.”

Awen smiled. It was a small smile, and not a shadow of the one she’d had barely twelve hours earlier, but it was genuine.

“It’s a good anecdote, though,” she reassured him. “I rather liked it. Do you still have the duck?”

“No,” Gwilym admitted. “My brother and I managed to wean it off me. It flew south and I never saw it again.” He considered that. “Or maybe I have, but, you know. It’s a duck. It looks like the others.”

Brân snorted, and stepped up to his door to push at Awen with his nose. She raised her right hand to touch him, and Gwilym saw the bandage wrapped around it, slightly loose and heavily bloodstained. He looked properly at her. Up close he could see a similar bandage in a similar state mostly hidden under the collar of her uniform. As she moved he could see the stiffness in her left side, particularly through her shoulder. She looked pale.

Which meant Awen had been in one hell of a fight with what had seemed to Gwilym to be an adolescent boy who was still unconscious in his cell.

He held up the arrow, coloured by her blood still, and took her injured hand. She didn’t resist as he slid the bandage off the wound, jagged edged and long. Gwilym sighed.

“I feel incredibly guilty about this,” he confessed. More so now he could see it: it looked unbelievably painful.

“Don’t, honestly,” Awen smiled gently. “It’ll heal, and you’re still alive.”

“You know, this happened at dinner,” Gwilym chided before he could stop himself. “Why haven’t you had it stitched yet?”

Awen looked away, shifting her left shoulder slightly. Brân tossed his head anxiously.

“Our medic is…” She bit her lip. “Our medic is gone,” she finished at last, looking up at Gwilym with a haunted expression. “You met him. Owain. I’d have gone to him otherwise.”

“Where’s he gone?” Gwilym asked quietly. He didn’t need to be told it was serious. Wings were raised together. They were families. They never left each other.

“I don’t know,” Awen said hopelessly. “He wouldn’t say. But he’s not working for the Union anymore, I don’t think. He’s gone rogue.”

That was where she got the other injuries, then. Including that throat wound. With a surge of outrage, it suddenly hit home to Gwilym what it meant: he’d tried to kill her. All of Gwilym’s family were dead, now – well, except Uncle Sion, who’d left for Erinn to become Aunty Sioned and now worked on a potato farm in exchange for free lodgings and a sack of coal a week – but he had memories of them. He tried to imagine how it would have felt if his sister had tried to kill him.

Or maybe not his sister. She’d been an Angry Person.

“Is that why you haven’t had this looked at?” Gwilym asked as delicately as she could.

Awen smiled a humourless smile.

“Owain was our medic,” she stated. “I’ve not been to anyone else since I was about ten and he first specialised. I mean, I have in the field, but in the field it’s either me or one of the others, not… Not a trained medic.” Awen looked at him dully. “Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Gwilym said gently. “Yes, it does.” But that cut still needed stitching, and the one on her neck definitely did. He glanced around the stable block and saw the medkit in the corner of the manager’s station. Inclining his head, he led Awen over there, realising as he sat her on the tall stool that he’d had hold of her hand for the entire time, and hadn’t noticed. It seemed she hadn’t, either.

“You know,” he told her conversationally, “my father never spoke to me much about how to rule a city. My sister was older, and then my brother, so… you know… It didn’t seem necessary, I suppose. But he did used to take me on tours of the city sometimes anyway.” Gwilym had loved it. His father had, by necessity, not been around much. When he could, they’d do the tours and it was like a family day out, a treat for them all. “I loved them because they meant I got to see the whole city. He never kept to only the good areas. He’d go to the poor, run-down areas too. We were going through one on one occasion, and I remember seeing a load of fishing families there. Most of the workers were missing limbs.”

“Missing limbs?” Awen cocked her head at him. It was an incredibly endearing sign of attention that was favourably reminiscent of his duck. “Entire limbs?”

“Some of them,” he nodded. “Some just bits. A foot here and there, a few fingers. Either way: it turned out that there had been a storm a few months before, a really bad one. Most people on the boats had hell’s own job of getting them into dock, and they’d picked up injuries, some bad, some not so bad. The point was, they were too poor to afford a doctor at the time, so in almost every case the wounds had become gangrenous.”

Awen winced. “That’s awful.”

“Yes,” said Gwilym sadly. He’d cried himself to sleep that night.

“I will be getting this looked at before that stage, though,” Awen smiled. It was still a shadow of her smile earlier that day. He grinned anyway.

“Not where I was going, actually,” he said. “I trained as a medic for the next three years and sneaked out of the palace at night to run a clinic for the poor. Free of charge.”

Awen stared at him incredulously. “You did what?”

“Oh, yes.” Gwilym smiled reminiscently. “My training was very basic, of course, so there were an awful lot of people I couldn’t help, but I did my bit. And, most relevant to this situation, the first thing I ever learned was how to stitch up an open wound.” He looked at her. She didn’t look away. “I’m not a medic, Rider. I just know how to help, if you want me to.”

Awen snorted and looked at Brân, her smile wry.

“Thank you,” she said. “Well negotiated. I see now why you’re Sovereign.”

He did her throat wound first, deeming it more important than her hand. She was an impressive patient; she didn’t even flinch at the seaweed solution, and sat motionless as Gwilym sewed her skin back together. Fortunately it was a shallow wound: clearly she’d stopped Owain before he’d had chance to do more.

Finally he finished it, and turned his attention to her palm. It was less life-threatening, but a nastier injury.

“Thank you,” he said quietly as he used the seaweed solution again. Awen shook her head.

“Any Rider would have done it, Sovereign,” she said. “I’m just glad I was there.”

“No one’s ever tried to kill me before, you know,” Gwilym sighed. Carefully, he began the stitches along the jagged edges. “It’s quite upsetting.”

Awen chuckled. “As I understand it, Sovereign, it’s par for the course in your line of work. Chalk it up to experience.”

“Does this mean I need one of those nubile slaves to be a food taster now?” Gwilym asked. “Hordes of dancing girls trained as ninjas? A flock of trained mutant birds to attack anyone who looks a bit shady?”

“Definitely,” Awen grinned. “Although how are you defining ‘shady’, because you may need to put up signs warning innocent people to leave their wide-brimmed hats at home on pain of mutated bird.”

“No,” Gwilym said. “I’m in a position of power. My definitions will vary by the day and only I will be aware of their nuances.”

“Oh,” Awen said thoughtfully. “Well in that case you should also replace all your advisors with the nubile food tasters and dancing girls and have a marvellous time while the city crumbles around you.”

“Damned good plan.” Gwilym negotiated the middle of the cut carefully, trying not to lose any more of Awen’s skin. It was tricky: it ran right across the crease in her palm. “We still don’t know who the boy is, by the way,” he told her. “He’s not woken up yet. You did a good job on him.”

“I didn’t,” Awen sighed. “Adara did. I was busy with Owain at the time.”

“He did this, then,” Gwilym said. He didn’t let it be a question. His anger toward the man surprised him, but he didn’t try to push it aside. Awen nodded, watching the needle.

“He wanted me to let the boy go,” she said quietly. Gwilym paused and stared at her. She carried on. “I think he was in on it. He wouldn’t say why, he just asked me to trust him.”

“I’m sorry,” Gwilym said, and he truly was.

“So am I,” Awen said expressionlessly. “Mostly because I didn’t see it coming. I keep looking back over things he’s said or done, and in retrospect I don’t know how I didn’t see it. Something was wrong.”

She was fingering the beads in her hair with her left hand, running her fingers along the wires. Gwilym pulled another stitch closed carefully.

“You didn’t see it because he was your brother,” he said gently. “Or as good as. No one expects their family to do something like this.”

“I’m trained to see things like this,” Awen said. She swirled the beads faster. “I just… I think the problem was that I never really got on with him that well. He was always a good tactician, and he was very practical. If something needed doing he’d get it done. It’s why he was Deputy.”

“But?” Gwilym asked.

“But… It’s not that his ruthlessness was a problem, because you need that in a warrior to some degree. And it was good to have someone in the Wing who could be ruthless like Owain was.” Brân stamped his hoof in his stall. Gwilym wondered how much of Awen’s emotions the meraden picked up. “But Owain applied that ruthlessness to everyone. He was manipulative, but in the worst way, because I don’t think he ever saw anyone as a fellow person.” Awen shook her head. Her hair glimmered gold. “People were things to Owain, for him to use as he needed. I mean, I can see this now…”

Awen trailed off, and Gwilym wished he was doing something even fractionally more comforting to her right now than stabbing her repeatedly in the hand. Somehow it just didn’t seem to give off the right vibes. He settled for rubbing the back of her hand with his fingers as he prepared the final stitch; she gave him a small smile.

“What will you do now?” he asked her. Awen’s eyes hardened.

“Find him,” she said. “And I will. And when I do, I think I might just finish chopping his bloody fingers off.”

Well, that was scary. Riders were scary. Gwilym was scared.

“I want to know who he’s working for and why,” Awen said quietly. “And why he – they – want you dead. And then I’m going to haul whatever’s left of him in front of the Union, and they can deal with it.”

Well, Gwilym supposed, it would be nice if she could stop the people who were trying to kill him. Nubile food tasters were just so pretentious. He tied off the last stitch and carefully re-bandaged her hand. Awen inspected his handiwork and smiled.

“Good job,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re quite welcome,” Gwilym said mildly, packing the equipment away again. “Now, what’s wrong with your shoulder? You haven’t moved your left arm since you came in.”

“It had an argument with a stone floor,” Awen said, using her freshly fixed hand to touch it gingerly. “Now it’s bruised to hell and back. It’ll be fine, though; I’ll see a druid before we go about all of it.”

Gwilym was glad to hear her say that, but gladder still he’d stitched her up himself. Druids could do a good job of speeding up the healing process to a few days but in the case of large wounds like that stitches were still required for a full heal, and druids weren’t good at it.

“In the meantime, let me poke at it,” he said. “It’ll free up the muscles at least.”

Awen cautiously tried to raise her arm and winced.

“Alright,” she agreed. “Just don’t poke the bruised bit. That still hurts.”

“That was the bit I wanted to poke,” Gwilym told her. “I’m intrigued to see if you ever show pain like normal people.”

Awen chuckled dryly, and Gwilym walked around her stool to get to her shoulder better. Her muscles were densely packed; it was like kneading a stone.

“So,” Gwilym said as he worked. “What exactly did you want to talk to me about up here before our lives got turned upside down earlier?”

“Oh,” Awen sighed, “conspiracies and that. How well do you know Lady Marged?”

“She makes me socks,” Gwilym said. He was wearing some now, they were lovely. “And she sells me green dyes cheaply. I can’t say I’ve had all that many meetings with her that were in any way official, though.”

“Well, we think she’s trying to set up a big power vacuum of anarchy with herself set to benefit,” Awen said. Her shoulder twitched involuntarily under Gwilym’s hand, and relaxed slightly. “Or so Flyn thinks, anyway. We know she’s doing something, she’s sending dissenters into other cities to tell the people that they should have power and not the Sovereigns.”

“That doesn’t sound like Marged,” Gwilym smiled. “Unless she’s doing something else and for entirely altruistic reasons, and that’s just what it looks like.”

“Well, quite,” Awen agreed. “Now Flyn… I’ll be honest with you. Flyn thinks that what she’s doing, motivations aside, is destabilising the Sovereigns, and for obvious reasons is therefore tipping the country into war again, since having fixed Sovereigns rather than lots of power plays is what dragged us out of war last time.”

“Partly,” Gwilym agreed. Awen waved her right hand dismissively.

“Yes, I know, but this is Flyn’s thought process,” she said. “The point is that’s what Flyn thinks. His counter plan, therefore, is to cement the power of the Sovereigns by having one rule all the others, so none can step out of line like Lady Marged. A king and regents. If a regent misbehaves, the king can simply get all the others together and remove that regent, and replace them with someone of his choosing.”

Gwilym stopped kneading for a moment to stare at Awen. “He wants ultimate power?”

“I think so,” Awen said glumly. She shifted her shoulder in a mute appeal for him to continue; Gwilym took the hint. “Which would be better than, you know, anarchic wars again, but only if that’s actually Marged’s plan.”

“Ah.” Gwilym nodded in dawning comprehension. “You want me to go and talk to Marged and find out what the crap she’s up to.”

“If you could,” Awen agreed. “That would be lovely.”

Politics. Gwilym hated them so.