Here Be Dragons - 1 by Sharon Kay Penman Read Free Book Online

cousin, he snapped, "And Llewelyn might well ask if this is the Welsh way of welcome!"
Turning back to Llewelyn, he smiled, said, "We thought you'd be home for your uncle's funeral, were watching for you."
Llewelyn smiled back, and coming forward, he settled himself beside them on the grass. A silence fell between them, one that seemed likely to swallow up any words they could throw into the void. It was broken at last by Llewelyn;
he heard himself making courteous queries about the health and well-being of their families, falling back upon all the obligatory conversational gambits to be shared between strangers. Nor did Rhys ease the awkwardness any by offering
Llewelyn formal condolences for the death of his uncle.
    27
I lewelyn would have liked to speak freely, to explain that he'd not his Uncle
Owa.in all that well. But he felt constrained to respond ha conventional politeness, and thus found himself flying false colWl coming before them in the guise of a grief that was not his. ° ' Rhys offered him an apple. "Did your stepfather come with you?" asked, as if he could possibly have had any interest in Hugh's whereabouts.
Llewelyn nodded - "Hugh came on behalf of the Corbet family, as a sture of respect to my mother's kin ..." He stopped, for Ednyved had teaned forward, was regarding him with exaggerated attention.
"Why do you look at me like that? Has my face of a sudden turned green?"
"I was trying to decide," Ednyved drawled, "whether or not you'd picked up a
French accent."
Llewelyn tensed, ~but then he looked more closely at the other boy, saw that
Ednyved's eyes were bright with friendly laughter.
"No French accent," he said, and grinned, "but I did spend some right uncomfortable days this spring, worrying that I'd picked up the French pox!"
Ednyved's mouth twitched. "Llewelyn!" With a frown toward his cousin. "If you please, no bawdy talknot before the lad here!" Ducking just in time as an apple whizzed past his head.
Seconds later, Rhys followed up his aerial assault with a direct frontal attack, and Ednyved, caught off balance, was knocked flat. Rhys's anger was more assumed than not, and their scuffling soon took on an almost ritualistic quality, for this was an old game, rarely played out in earnest, and likely to continue until one or the other of the combatants lost interest. In this case the mock battle lasted until they noticed that Llewelyn had appropriated the rest of the apples and stretched himself out comfortably on the turf to watch, for all the world like a front-row spectator at a bearbaiting.
"Go to it, lads," he said airily, and by common consent, they both pounced on him at once. For a few hectic moments all three boys were tumbling about on the riverbank, until at last they lay panting in a tangled heap, lacking breath for anything but laughter.
After that, there seemed to be too much to say and not enough time m which to say it, and they plunged into the past as if fearing it might somehow be forgotten if it was not shared immediately, interrupting each other freely, trading insults and memories, laughing for laughter's sake alone.
Rhys had gone to the river to drink. Returning, he threw himself "wl" 'n ^e
8rass/ anc* broke into Ednyved's monologue to demand, When must you go back to
England, Llewelyn?"
    28
"I'm not going back," Llewelyn said, at once capturing their undivided attention.
"You both know the history of my House, know how my uncles Davydd and Rhodri cheated my father and my other uncles of their rightful share of my grandfather's inheritance. They carved Gwynedd up between them as if it were a meat pie, forced my father, Owain Fawr's firstborn, into exile, brought about his death whilst I was shll in my cradle. His blood is on their hands and they've yet to answer for it I think it time they did."
"You mean to avenge your father's death?" Rhys's green eyes were luminous, aglitter with sudden excitement, but Ednyved seemed far more dubious.
"All know the English are born half mad,"