Crown in Candlelight by Rosemary Hawley Jarman Page A

was changed by it. Rising, she folded her sleeves tenderly over the wounded cub. She looked at the great sprawled body of the eagle. Its glory was gone.
    ‘Something must always die.’
    She looked up, startled, for he had voiced her thought.
    ‘Yes. A sacrifice.’
    ‘But to what?’ he asked, and they looked at one another inconclusively. Then he said: ‘What shall you do with the fox?’
    ‘I told you. I’ll nurse him and he will love me for ever.’
    Owen laughed. He had a firm mouth that curled as if always on the edge of laughter. Somehow his mouth looked wise and self-mocking, as if it were older than the rest of him.
    ‘When he’s strong again, he’ll leave you, Hywelis. A fox isn’t a dog; he will be bondman to none.’
    She said: ‘Will you take me back with you, Owen?’ He nodded. ‘Yes. The Lord is asking for you.’ He held the springald out, admiring it. ‘I have made a lovely weapon here. With this I could pick out the eyes of the French.’
    Hywelis was on her knees again, searching among the grass by a stream. She came up with a handful of rough hairy leaves and a few purple and cream flowers. The cream ones she discarded.
    ‘Comfrey plant,’ she said. ‘The Saeson call it Yalluc, or Asses-Ear!’
    ‘Never let the Lord hear you name it so then. I slipped an English oath yesterday and he hurled his cup at me.’
    ‘The purple flowers for Madog, he is a male.’ She wasn’t listening. ‘I’ll boil them in milk and his back will heal soon. And his poor head!’ She touched the cub gently between its ears. She got up. ‘Are we ready?’
    He stretched a foot out from the stirrup and she put her own on it. The pony started up the heathery hill, putting its neck down for the climb. Hywelis said, as her hair blew back and tickled Owen’s face, ‘Why did you talk about shooting at the French, when it’s the English who are our enemy?’
    He chuckled. That was part of a glorious secret, so far a daydream.
    ‘I don’t know,’ he lied. ‘Is your fox easy? We must be home soon, the Lord is restless today.’
    ‘I haven’t seen him since last night; I was away before dawn.’
    ‘With the dew on the grass?’ He clipped the pony’s sides with his strong slim legs. ‘You are strange, Hywelis.’
    She slewed to look at him and she was indeed strange, with her milk-white face and her tilted eyes in which the lingering mysticism of her thoughts still moved. He held her tighter and they rode on over the rise of the hill, where the bracken yielded to sparse sunstroked grass and hawthorn bushes cast round shadows, each like a crouching spider. Below the hillside grew mile on mile of great trees, oak and ash and elm, a city of birds, roaring with song, the lark taking the highest stave over the croak of the starling and the jay’s erratic scream, while thrush and blackbird cried alarm and sweetness. Riding, they passed through a droning mist of insects, and a dragonfly settled for an eyeblink on Hywelis’s hair.
    ‘The Lord’s restless, you say?’ She shifted against Owen. Her back was dry, the dew of her early wandering had vanished into his warmth. She stroked Madog’s quiet feverish head. Owen was easing her earlier melancholy, merely by holding her, by talking in his casual voice. This was no longer the naughty boy she had once been put to guard. This was someone capable, healing, worthy. Dead creatures, her friends, lay in his saddle-bag, but he had slain an enemy … She lifted her face to the sun as they came down the hill to Glyndyfrdwy. It was a small manor, unkempt, its outlying lands lonely, its very stance spelling retirement and defeat. Sad again, she leaned against Owen, her face pressing his neck, the cub still lying like a baby in her arms.
    He felt curious about her. They had grown up together, but now, pressing her, smelling the heather-scent in her hair, he thought: were she only dressed properly, her body groomed … but then, she would not be Hywelis. His contemporaries