The Brothers of Gwynedd by Edith Pargeter

ponies. They told him they were bred on their lord's lands in Penllyn. And the name of their lord was Llewelyn ap Griffith. He lives, madam, he is well, he has his manhood, and he is set up on his own lands."
      "Set up by his uncle," she said, so drily that I could not tell whether there was any bitterness there, or any wonder, or whether she was glad in her heart that he should be living and free, and in some sort a princeling, or whether she grudged him all, and chiefly his freedom. "So he got his pay," she said, "for betraying me, after all. Why else should David give him an appanage, and he with so little left for himself?"
      My mother's husband said bluntly, for he had the Welsh openness with those he served: "Madam, if he had betrayed you we should never have reached the border. Do you think one well-mounted courier could not move faster than we did, with two litters and a gaggle of children? He got his commote for soldier service. These men of his said he was in arms with his uncle at Rhuddlan."
      "There was no blood shed there," she said sharply, "and little fighting." But whether she said it to belittle what he had done or to reassure herself in face of a danger she had not known one of her children was venturing, I could not be sure. And then she said in a muted cry, gripping her hands together: "He was not yet thirteen years old!"
      Then I knew that for all her hard front, and the bitterness that tore her two ways where he was concerned, she still loved him.

    That winter came and passed in mild, moist weather, with scarcely any frost but a sprinkling of rime in the mornings, washed away by rain or melted by thin sunshine long before noon. And I noticed that daily the Lady Senena watched the skies and the wind, and bided her time, and was often private with my mother's husband for short whiles. In February, when for the first time the true winter came down, a fair fall of snow and then iron frost to bind it, it seemed to me that their eyes grew intent and bright, as though they had been waiting only for this. And when it held all the last ten days of February, with every day they drew breath more easily and hopefully, and spoke of the weather as though it held more meaning for them than for us, how the word went that the great marshes of Moorfields, outside the north gate of the city, were frozen over hard as rock, but with overmuch deadening snow for good sport, so that the young men who went out there for play were forced to sweep small parts of the ice for their games. And I thought how this way from the city would be the quickest and most secret, once that marsh was past, for the forest came close on that side. But they told me nothing, and I asked nothing.
      The last day of February matched all those before. My mother's husband went out from us in the afternoon, and did not come back with the night, but the Lady Senena came in the dusk from visiting her lord, and told us that she would spend the night in the lodging with us, for the Lord Griffith was a little unwell, and she had entreated him to rest, and the guards not to disturb him again until morning.
      What she told my mother I do not know, but those two women slept—or at least lay, for I think much of the night they did not sleep at all—in the same bed that night, and I know they talked much, for I heard their voices whenever I stirred from my own slumber. The girl had a little chamber of her own, and the boys slept as children do, wholeheartedly and deeply. I lay in the dark, listening to those two muted voices within, that spoke without distinguishable words, my mother's pitched lower, and now that I heard them thus together, far the calmer and more assured, and the lady's tight, brittle and imploring, like one lost in prayer. I doubt she was not heard.
      Towards dawn she slept. When the first light began I was uneasy with the silence, and I got up and pulled on my hose and shirt and cotte, and went stealthily and lifted the