Traitor's Daughter
Cerddoniol!
Invasion: Book 1 | Pendyffryn: The Conquerors 
from Chapter One
Nearly three hundred years since the Godoðin were defeated, by the year AD875, Rhodri Mawr had earned the friendship of Charles, the king of the Franks, by defeating the Vikings and extended his kingdom from beyond the Menai to the Tywi, from Offa's Dyke to the Irish Sea. Until Aethelfrith had driven his sword into the heart of Powys, Cymraeg was the language of Scotland south of the Highlands, England, Brittany and Cornwall. More than a hundred years had passed since the enemy to the east had silenced the protests of Pengwern and slaughtered Cynddylan. Cyngen's pillar cross of Llangollen stood as proud testament to the hero, Elise.
Spring AD876
Gwennan made the last stitches in the work she intended for her husband's wedding shirt. She had begun the work on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, when the father of her first suitor came to Pendyffryn. Her pleasure in the work was not diminished when he, like every father and suitor after him, had been sent from the house and the suitor's meager virtues were dismissed by her father. Though she had worked on the piece for eight years, the skill of the needlewoman had been joy and solace for the daughter of Daran Pendyffryn, the pendefig of the largest ystad in the region.
The threads she bought from the harvest markets were as bright on that spring morning as on the day she had selected them. The design was as fresh and as meaningful to her at twenty-two as at fourteen. The ravenous hounds were still entwined across the dyed fabric to cover her husband's torso with her promise of love and fidelity—the two virtues she had learned from her parents' long union.
Though her mother had died days after her birth, Gwennan's father spoke of his wife as though she was beside him at every crossroads in their daughter's life. “Your mother has always had misgivings about this family,” Daran Pendyffryn had said of her first suitor. “Blaenant spawns excellent warriors and they are loyal to Pendyffryn, but ambition clouds their judgment. The boy they have proposed to me will command an army—I can see that in him—but he will not be your husband.”
Derwyn Blaenant was handsome, dark-haired with bright, blue eyes that enflamed whomever he studied. Gwennan had known him from her earliest childhood when her father fostered him as his groom. He was older but near enough to her age for the two of them to have become friends but she had accepted her father's assessment of him. The colors she had chosen for the tunic were for another man, a different man from any she knew.
Gwennan had lost count of the men who had asked for her. As she clipped the last golden thread and loosened the spruce green linen from the frame, her father's voice boomed from his office two flights below her turret room. She smoothed the tunic and folded it so that the embroidery, upon which she had lavished so much of her skill and imbued with hopes for her future, was protected and laid the wedding garment on top of all the linens she had prepared for her own home. I will be too old to wed and all these will be dust .
From the window ledge at the second turning of the stairs, Gwennan watched as Elgan Maergwn, the most recent unsuccessful suitor, strode from Daran's office. Her father was forthright in his assessment when he told his daughter his reasons for refusing him.
“He is an adequate warrior and nothing else. He cannot manage the Gaer farm because he is too busy making mead to drink and betting on his hunting dogs. I will replace him when I find a man more capable. That man may be your husband.”
“Does Elgan have any redeeming characteristics to recommend him?” she asked, dismissing the scrap of hope her father offered. He had been similarly scathing about every other suitor and as vague about her future. No one, in his eyes, was fit to be husband to the daughter who would inherit Pendyffryn.
“He has one.”
“And that one is?” She had taken the seat on the bench beside his chair in the office where he spent most of his time when he was at home. Since her eighteenth birthday, her father had spent more time away. His reason was the war surging toward their mountainous homeland from the East. He had returned only weeks ahead of an army that was devastating their neighbors, all along the border with the Saeson.
“You will never discover that one characteristic, Gwennan, for which you will thank me,” was the warrior-prince's response as he laid his arm across her shoulders and planted a kiss on her temple. “Even this one quality was not enough to prevent me from kicking him down the stairs as I have all the others who have had the audacity to think they were worthy of you.”
“Is there one man in all the world you would approve?”
“He must be extraordinary, Gwennan. When I see this man, I will send him to you myself.”
“I will not hold my breath, Tada.” Gwennan rose, brushed her tunic and strode from her father's company. “I would be dead before I could breathe again,” she said over her shoulder.
“If he is not good enough,” her father shouted, “he is not!”
“No one is perfect,” she replied, turning before she opened the door.
“Gwennan, he must be perfect for you.”
“In your opinion, Tada. I have my own ideas of perfection.”
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Salvation, Book 2 | Pendyrffryn: The Conquerors Best Seller Award at AllRomanceEbooks
The only woman he had ever loved, the one woman he could never have.
An excerpt from Chapter One:
Calan Gaeaf AD877, Rhodri Mawr Regis. Pendyffryn has fallen to the Conqueror, Jehan-Emíl deFreveille. Cwmdu warriors defeated Han Chadzy's first assault, but deFreveille's former ally has not finished with the dark valley on the other side of the mountains.
Opposite Caryl's door, on the high ground above the buarth, brass sconces lit the lower room in the farm master's house. His womenfolk prepared for C alan Gaeaf, to celebrate departed ancestors at the start of winter. When the farm master's roof caught fire, Caryl ran out with the others in the village to bring buckets.
When her own roof blazed and those of other warriors' families, she abandoned the well in the buarth and ran into her house, screaming for her children to come to her. She crouched beneath the pall of smoke, batting at the sparks that threatened to set her flaxen hair ablaze. She followed her son's small whimpers and crawled beneath the curtain that separated the sleeping quarters from the larger room.
“Come here. Come to me. I'm here,” she coughed, feeling her way through the strikes of flame as the pitch in the beams snapped alive. “Where is your sister?”
“I'm here, Mam,” Susanna cried, touching her leg.
“Crawl out. Don't breathe. Go. Go. Where is your brother?”
“Mam. Mam.” The tiny voice came from the corner, under the bed he shared with his sister. “I can't see you. I can't see.”
“Come out, crawl on the floor, keep low, Titw. Keep down, like a bird, be quick.”
“Where's Dad? Where's Dad?” the boy screeched the moment that his hand found her in the red darkness.
“He will come for us.” The crack of the beam brought a torrent of thatch onto the children's bed and she ripped her son out, dragging him toward the door and found Susanna huddled on the floor, staring into the carnage as men in gelyn livery struck women and children with swords and axes drenched with blood, hurling gore into the day-bright, fire-lit sky.
“We can't stay here,” Caryl hissed, unheard above the scream of the flames and the roar of death all around her. They'll find us. They'll kill us.
A woman's body fell across the door, blocking their escape. Caryl yanked her children through the rubble of falling rafters, ducking, jumping, to the back of the house into the pantry, wedging the slatted door with shelves and jugs, digging at the wall of wattle and lime-washed mud with a fire iron, her children clinging to her back. Behind her, the thatch smothered the table, a mountain of blackened straw, catching as it scattered, crushing and consuming everything they owned.
She hacked at the hard earth, scraping and gouging until the mud buckled and the dry twigs split under her fury. “Stay by the wall,” she ordered her son as she pushed him through the gap, ripping at the opening with her hands until her daughter fell through. Susanna clasped her brother before both of them crawled toward the shelter of the woodland. Caryl thrust her shoulder out, scratching and clawing at the wall until she fell onto the trembling earth and scurried on her hands and knees to reach the ruins of the old farm in the woods.
Huddling with her children in a corner of the collapsed walls with the few others who had escaped, Caryl shielded her children as their friends were murdered and their homes destroyed. She covered her children's ears and held them close to block the screams of girls and boys, women torn from their children, men hacked to death in front of their families.
“We can't stay here.” She kissed her son and daughter over and over again, murmuring the same words, unheard by anyone near her as the gelyn army found the farm master's store of mead and turned from killing to celebration.
The walled ruins were fragrant with the scent of moist pine needles but the taint of blood and smoke overwhelmed her as the sunrise sliced across the mountains above them. “We can't stay here.” She hadn't slept, but her children were curled on either side of her, their heads buried in her lap. She raised her face to the gray mist, bent and kissed them until they awoke. The boy stretched, staring at the other women curled at the foot of the stone walls, meeting their wild eyes with wonder.
“Mam, where are we?”
“We must go from here.”
“Where, Mam? Where? How will Dad find us?”
“He will find you. He will always find you,” she told them, catching their hands and pulling them further into the woodlands, away from the shouts of the warriors ordering the soldiers to search for the Cymry they had come to kill. Caryl drove forward, northward, toward the only fortress in the valley, never turning her head to see who was left behind or who followed. Until night and the wolves' howling forced her to seek another shelter, she did not hear her children complain of hunger or hurt. The scent of fresh blood from the horror in the village kept the wolves away from her family.
Foraging in the darkness for food from among the brambles and fungus that webbed through the decaying wood, Caryl could hear the drunken gelyn in the silence of the forest. When she curled around the warm bodies of Susanna and Heilyn, she listened for the crashing of their spears and swords, knowing they would continue hunting, killing, raping. She stared into the faces of her children, held them against her. “Never,” she promised. “Never will anyone hurt you.”
Salvation, Book 2, Pendyffryn: The Conquerors is available @ smashwords.com, allromanceebooks.com, omnilit.com, amazon.com as well as all Amazon's international online book retailing sites, kobobooks.com, and on the iBookstore worldwide.
Betrayal, Book 3 | Pendyffryn: The Conquerors "The best of men... The most treacherous of lovers."
from Chapter One
Bestseller Award at AllRomance eBooks
Gwennan glared at her husband, facing her from the other side of the bedchamber. He was weary, his boots and legs covered in black slush, but she had no sympathy for him. “Why did you send my father away?”
“I did not send him. He went,” deFreveille answered. “He had work. He could not stay longer.”
“But why did you not at least allow him to say good-bye to me?”
“I did not prevent your father from seeing you, menyw . He decided to go at dawn. He did not ask to have you awakened.”
“I don't believe you.”
“Regardless, there is the truth.”
“What caused his haste? Why, without seeing me?” The gelyn commander shrugged, though he knew the answer, drank his wine and began to undress. Gwennan sank to the edge of the bed and stared at her hands. “Ieuan, I may never see him again.”
Jehan-Emíl turned the chair to face her while he pulled off his boots, keeping his eyes on her. The sight of her helped him forget that he had been riding in undergrowth and sludge all day, that he was cold and filthy, and that the weight of his responsibility to them — his family, his men, the people — was too heavy, at times, for one man. The start of a new year broke the period of mild weather. The hard frost went deep into the soil and all mornings dawned white. Soldiers moved with ease over the frozen fields and the woods provided no shelter.
“I have promised you will see him in spring. I will take you myself. If I am able.”
“People die in winter,” she reminded him. “He is almost alone there.”
“What do you want me to say? That I will let you go to him?” He dropped the boot and yanked the other free. “No. I need you here, for my children. Where I can protect you all. Besides that old woman is there, Galar, she went also.”
“I know.”
“How?” His brow furrowed.
“I asked my father to take her,” Gwennan sighed. “And Derwyn.”
“To Pendyffryn?”
“Of course,” she said wearily, falling back onto the bed, her arms above her head. “It is home for us.”
Jehan-Emíl dragged his shirt over his head, tossed it aside and ran his hands over his chest, relieving the ache of hours on the back of his warhorse. His fatigue was too great to give any energy to the surge of jealousy he felt. It washed over him and left him in deeper melancholy. “Where is home for us, Gwennan?”
Betrayal, Book 3, Pendyffryn: The Conquerors is available @ smashwords.com, allromanceebooks.com, barnesandnoble.com as well as many international online book retailing sites, kobobooks.com, and soon on the iBookstore worldwide.
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Revival, May 2013:
"Hate drove her from their marriage bed. Love drove him to the threshold of death."
from Chapter One
Soon? Only a hopeful man, a fool, could have believed there were not weeks, months, of delays to his plans for Alun Cwmdu's widow and her children. Only such a fool, once a man inspiring fear and dread, the instrument of death to more men and women than he – Maides, the Demon, now Diawl to these people, stirring in their misery, people dependent on his skill to destroy their enemies – had ever called by name. Not one among them was a friend. Not one stood by him now.
Derision. He expected nothing less. Denial . That also. Refusal . No doubt but it was too late. He was his father's son. By his own hand, by his deeds, by all he had ever done in the name of his friendship for deFreveille, Maides had earned this. This . The mercenary set his foot on the threshold of the long house he had rebuilt from the ruin his former employers had destroyed. Could it be enough?
A house, a woman. Not a very good house, a modest house in comparison to the villa overlooking the sea that had been his childhood home. But a woman, a woman worth any price he had ever been asked to pay and, as he expected at that time of night, she worked by the hearth in solitude, h er hand poised but she did not raise her eyes from her sewing. Though her hand remained above the cloth and her fingers gripped the slender needle, she made no stitch for several minutes.
“What garment is this that keeps you working when everyone else has gone to their beds?” The cloth was not silk, not the color of the sea of his boyhood, not his gift.
Maides stood at the opposite side of the hearth, a cup of mead in one hand, the jug in the other. His expression was as indifferent as always but he had been watching her. The stitches disappeared from her vision as her thoughts followed her fears. She set the cloth on top of the basket and pushed it away from her, laying her head against the back of the chair, turning her eyes to the small failing embers. Morgan's decree was more successful in lowering Caryl Gernant's spirits than even the Cwmdu woman, in all her hatefulness, could have hoped. Even Jac had been driven away.
When she did not answer, Maides filled his cup again and put the jug on the mantle. While he had watched her, her expression had changed often, never to a smile, and she plied her needle as though blind. He could have watched her in silence and left her to the thoughts that troubled her, but he wanted her to be troubled by him, not some phantom he did not know.
“For you?” he asked, gesturing toward the cloth.
“No,” she said, leaning forward again and dropping a length of gauze to cover the work. “I cannot work openly on my own clothing without suspicion, but I thank you for the gift.”
“There is no one in this house, no one who comes to this house, no one to question what you do,” he told her. “Were you not alone when I came through that door? Will you not be alone after I have gone?”
“Yes.”
“What prevents you while I am here?” he asked, setting the jug on the mantle.
“The cloth you gave me for a gown is hidden,” she murmured, glancing around her in dismay as though she expected someone to be listening. “Anyone can come through that door at any time, as you have done. I cannot satisfy your curiosity.”
“I am not curious,” he replied, a glint warming his cool gaze. Her blush made him laugh. “Boys are curious, menyw .” ...
Reconciliation, January 2014: "She fought to gain her freedom. He fought to win her love."
from Chapter One
“Mutti? Mutti, are you here?” Bey Jedeh entered through the opposite door, at the far end of the long, empty room, carrying a round ceremonial shield and saddlebags draped over his arm. “Where is my mother?” Bey Jedeh did not answer but placed his burden beside him, on top of a long box. Emíl deFreveille spoke. “Come, Christophe, we have no time. The boat will not wait for you to say goodbye to her.” His mother was not in the house. His father was dead and his mother was free to go back to her people. “You are like your father,” Rizah told him. “Go. Be what he was.” There was no other word of farewell. He turned to face his father's friend, hiding his eleven year old fear and the tears in his ice-blue eyes. “Mutti.”
The wharf steamed, reeking of sweat and fish. He carried the box, saddlebags and round shield without help. DeFreveille had taken his father's weapons to the boat before dawn. The Greek sailors, some of them years younger than Christophe, ran in every direction to prepare for the sailing. DeFreveille pushed him ahead, jostled by the crowds of fishermen, sailors, drunkards and prostitutes. “Get on the boat, boy, or we'll be stranded here and your father's property stolen.” Christophe did not look back at the white house on the cliff above the harbor. No one he knew lived there anymore. “Mutti.”
“Christophe?” Caryl turned onto her back, toward her husband. “Are you awake?” His long body stretched over the bed, restless, sweating and fighting with the carthen that confined him. He threw them off with a growl.
“The boat.”
“Christophe, are you dreaming?”
The boat pitched as though Poseidon thrashed beneath them. Emíl deFreveille held him against the railings. “Hold him,” the eldest of the tutored boys yelled. “We'll see if this black one is human or demon.” Christophe panted, fought his captors. The blade carved through the skin on his back but he did not scream. “Demon,” they whispered, awed he felt no pain. “Demon.”
“Christophe!”
But the pain tore his soul, wrenched it free of his body and cast hatred in his heart. The few people he still loved were driven out, leaving him empty of all but rage and hate. “Don't be a fool, Jehan-Emíl. Let the young demon fight his own battles. He will need to know how to fight if he is to live in this place.”
“Mutti, where did you go?”
“Christophe,” Caryl pleaded, to wake him.
A woman. Endless steps to climb. Wanting – a new thing. And fear, as he had felt it as a boy, leaving his home to live among strangers, cast out, degraded by suspicion, repulsion. This woman invites. He reaches.
“Caryl.”
“Yes, it's me!” she said, laying her head on his shoulder, stroking his chest, sighing.
They take her away from him, the tutored boys. They hide her and laugh in his face when he throws all his might to break through the wall their hatred and taunting have built. He is a man but their childish tricks keep the woman beyond his reach. “Hold her. We will see whether the Demon has spoiled her. “No!” He shoved the boys away and grabbed the eldest, ready to tear his throat open with his teeth.
His breath came ragged as he sat at the edge of the bed, staring at the white-washed walls surrounding him. “Caryl,” he said under his breath, staring at the pale hand resting on his arm, another on his shoulder, the pressure and heat of her body against his back. He steadied his breathing, concentrated his mind.
“A dream, Christophe. Another dream.”
“Caryl?”
“Yes, it's me,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around his chest and staring at what she could see of his face, taking her breaths slow and deep to calm her terror. “You were dreaming.” She hugged him tight, relieved he had come to his senses before his rage exploded.
“I do not dream.”
“No?” she laughed. “Is this like ‘not arrogance, certainty'? Not dreams, thoughts?” She dropped her arms, folding them close to her body against the cold. “Who is Mutti?”
“Menyw,” he said, glaring at her over his shoulder. “What have you done to me?”
“Me?” she asked with a pout, shoving him with a laugh. “I am not the one who is in battle with carthen and makes war with the night.” ...
is Cymraeg (Welsh) for wonderous