Invasion
Salvation
Cerddoniol!
Best-Seller Award at AllRomanceEbooks
Chapter One
The woman's hand grew cold as the child pressed it to her cheek. Color drained first from the manicured tips of the woman's fingers and a red necklace the child had never seen before spilled its beads over her linen tunic. The soldier dragged his hand over the child's hair, crushing her small head, forcing her to watch as the woman crumpled to the ground. Beads trickled from his sword, splashed into her eyes, dripped from her hair onto her cheeks.
Heledd shook the dream from her head, the dream she had when she was too tired to resist her fascination for the beads that cascaded to the stone floor of the round house. Nothing else of the day, fifteen years before, remained in her memory. She never saw the face of the soldier who killed her mother, but the memory of blood, its hideous metallic taste filling her mouth, remained.
The steaming heat in the valley where the River Tywi began its rush to the sea whipped into her face the moment she emerged from the beudy . Her work in the milking shed was finished for the day and she had a few moments before she had to go into the oven that the kitchen became at that time of day. The top of her linen tunic hung over the strings at the back of her milking apron and her bare arms absorbed the sun and browned as though she was the bread in the oven. As she walked across the yard, she imagined the brown dappling on her skin spread from her pale shoulders down her arms to her already darkened wrists. One of the other milkmaids nudged her in the ribs. Heledd turned her head with an inward groan to see her cousin, Alys Llew, on the wide stone wall and her cousin's ten year old maidservant, Betsan, coming toward her.
Rolling her head slowly from side to side to relieve the ache in her shoulders, Heledd changed her direction and climbed the steps to stand on the wall of her uncle's hill caer . Staring at the crest of the mountain towering over her, she took her place beside Alys to comply with the younger girl's demand for company. Though she had never traveled more than an hour's walk in any direction, Heledd did not share her cousin's craving to study every new face that appeared among the soldiers in her uncle's war band.
“I'm sure Dada is preparing for war,” Alys said, dragging Heledd to the edge of the wall. “These men fight like wolves. Look at that one, Heledd.” Her cousin pointed through the field toward two men striking at each other with short swords, defending against blows with the round shields strapped to their arms.
“Which one?” Heledd asked without looking. One shouted. The other hissed. The metal of one's sword struck the edge of the other's shield and Heledd's throat seemed to fill with the taste of her own blood. She lifted her chin, clenched her body but imagined the blade – hot with the fury of the soldier's rage – slice through her belly. With each strike they took against one another, she felt their grunts and shouts pierce her skin. They trained on a patch of ground that, until a few days before, had been a wheat field in which Heledd and the other servants had toiled to bring in the harvest. Toil had been her life since she was old enough to stand. “May I go?”
“Look at the tall one, with dark hair,” Alys said. “He's magnificent and so strong.” Since the harvesting had finished, the visit to the wall had become a customary respite in the daily drudgery of the small amount of work that Alys did on the estate. She had an avid interest in every new man who wore her father's colors. Her only useful occupation was weaving and she excused herself from the task as often as possible to educate herself to the ways of men. She turned her blue eyes on her cousin. “Why are you always so reluctant to watch them? You could easily do battle with any one of these warriors, Heledd.”
“Why do you say that?” Heledd asked, knowing she gave Alys another opportunity to wound her. In the same year that Hywel had celebrated ten years on his throne, Meilor Gwesyn had descended from among the high cwm to the north to murder her family and avenge her father's betrayal. From the age of three, Heledd Bannawg had lived as a prisoner of war and bondservant to her uncle. Though she was a member of his household, Heledd had none of the privileges that her cousins enjoyed. She was now old enough to have a husband, but she had been denied the right to wed. Her claim to her father's property was lost when Ieuan Bannawg betrayed his brother and his friends.
“Look at your arms. You are so muscular. Are you legs the same? Let me see,” Alys demanded, gesturing for Heledd to lift the skirt of her plain frock. Heledd pulled the back of the ragged skirt up to her knee and dropped it at once. “Take off that awful scarf. You look like an old woman.” Heledd raised her hands, untied the knot at the back of her neck and drew the white scarf clear of her blood red hair. The severe plait tumbled down her back and she twisted it up again into a tight knot at the back of her head. “You do look like a man, you know. A young one, of course, but that soldier – the handsome one training with Urien Macsen – has been watching you ever since you joined me here. He must be wondering what you are.”
Against all her strongest instincts, Heledd looked in the direction that her cousin indicated and saw Urien, the commander of her uncle's war band, with the dark-haired soldier. Both men were looking in her direction and she lifted her chin, turning her gaze again toward the mountain in the west. “They are soldiers. I don't care what they think. There are always too many.”
“What do you expect?” Alys laughed. “We are here to watch them train.”
“You are here to watch them. You have called me here to keep you company,” Heledd replied, steadfastly gazing at the Gurnos but it hid the sun from her.
“My father needs these men – to protect us. Would you rather have no one to lift a sword to defend you when our enemies come – as my father did when he was betrayed by his own brother? Not one of our enemies would distinguish between me and the daughter of a traitor. You would be at their mercy as much as I, perhaps more so … if they knew who you were.”
In the moment the tall woman on the wall removed her scarf, Garmon's sword was raised at arm's length at his shoulder, ready to strike his opponent. He saw her hair tumble from its constraint, as red as the rowan berry, gilded by the blaze of the lowering sun behind her. Urien's blade struck him, flat-edge, on his upper arm.
“Do you like that one?” Urien laughed.
“Who is she?”
“One of the dairy women, a bondservant. Alys Llew is her mistress.”
“Her name?”
“Heledd.”
Garmon considered the sound. His education painted the picture that felled Troy, the same beauty worked its poison to fell him. “Does she have a favorite?”
“Not that one. Llew has wanted to breed her since she came to womanhood but none of my men will have her. Talk is that she will go to Meilor Gwesyn.”
Garmon glanced over his shoulder at his friend and commanding officer. “He's—. Meilor Gwesyn won't …”
“He'll tame her,” Urien said, “or break her. Llew would rather his soldiers have that pleasure.” Urien's laugh struck Garmon between his shoulder blades, just as the woman lifted her face toward the west. “If no one else, though she's not to my liking,” Urien continued, “I'll have her. Better an even older man than you, Garmon, than chained alive in Meilor's cromlech.” He dropped his hand on his friend's neck. “She isn't to your taste. A man with your schooling—.”
“Is she always so arrogant?”
“Not always, but often. Some say her smile, when she offers one, can break a man, even one as hard as you.”
Garmon's jaw set and his granite-hued eyes narrowed. “You know me well.”
“Well enough, Northerner. It's a rare man can bring a smile to that one's lips. I'll stake a month's drink on your determination, Garmon, against her pride.”
“I do not wager for women, Southerner.”
“Whatever you do, she is destined for Meilor's bed unless she's taken.”
“You know my reason, Urien. There is only one way I will take any woman,” Garmon said, flexing his arm and striking his commander's shield. “Let us finish this.”
“That can be arranged, brother,” Urien grinned, throwing his weight into the blow, driving the northerner back a step. “You know the law. Make your choice. She will be for the next man to speak. I will not standby for Meilor to leave his mark.”
“You are too old, Southerner. Neither you nor Meilor Gwesyn will have her.” His blows thundered on Urien's defenses, greeted by laughter and equal force as they crushed the grain stocks with their studded boots.
Traitor's Daughter is available @ smashwords.com, allromanceebooks.com, barnesandnoble.com, Amazon as well as all major online book retailers. Also available in a paperback edition.
Traitor's Daughter is Eres's first ebook publication.
If you have enjoyed this book, you may enjoy the planned sequel, Vengeance's Son:
Raised on a hunger for vengeance, Meilor Gwesyn's grandson plans to abduct Anwen Garmon – the daughter of his mother's despised cousin, Heledd, but Anwen has her own plans for Gwesyn Gwern.
Vengeance's Son, (Book Two in The Tywi Series)
is Cymraeg (Welsh) for wonderous