Castle of Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

fast as she dared until the
moon had set. Then she slowed to a walk, not wanting to stop lest
she fall asleep and be captured. Shortly after dawn she left the
road, which was little more than a rough track in the wilderness,
to hide behind rocks and bushes while a troop of armed men
thundered past. She was sure they were looking for her.
    She had one advantage: she knew the land
better than the foreigners did, and could avoid them by staying off
the road and traveling through the forest, slowly making her way
north and east. She drank water from streams and ate the greens and
berries she found. Her training as an herbalist under Rhys’s
tutelage served her well in her search for food. In this summer
season she need not worry about hunger. Not yet, at any rate.
    She knew many of her fellow countrymen lived
in the forests, but she met no one. She thought they must have fled
elsewhere before the conquering Normans.
    When darkness came again Branwen decided to
rest. She spent a lonely night huddled beneath a tree, starting
into fearful wakefulness at every sound and trying not to think
what Sir Edouard would do to her if he found her. She was afraid to
think about Sir Edouard at all. The memory of what had happened in
Father Conan’s bedchamber made her feel dirty – and guilty, because
a part of her had accepted his lovemaking. She was every bit as
much a traitor to her family as Griffin was. She deserved her
exile.
    On the second day her horse cast a shoe.
Branwen dismounted and led the pony through thinning trees to a
clearing. She removed the saddle and bit, and turned the animal
loose. It was a dear friend by now and she hated to leave it, but
there was nothing else to do. She hoped some good Welshman would
find it and have it shod and treat it kindly. There would be enough
forage here for it to feed on indefinitely.
    There was a tumbledown cottage, no more than
a hut, in the clearing. She hid her horse’s trappings in a clump of
bushes and went to the cottage door. It hung dejectedly on broken
hinges. Normans again, most likely. They destroyed everything they
did not carry away. Within the dwelling were signs of violence.
Little had been left except part of a stale loaf of bread on a
crude table and a ragged, dirty brown dress, crumpled into a
corner. Branwen turned up her nose at the rancid smell of it, but
it would be infinitely safer for her to wear such a garment than
the too-conspicuous blue and gold robe she now had on. She changed
clothes, fastened her belt and knife over the brown wool, and then,
not wanting to leave any trace of her presence to lead pursuers in
her direction, she took the blue dress back to the woods and buried
it under a rock. She ate part of the stale bread she had found,
quenched her thirst in a nearby stream, and continued eastward on
foot.
    She stayed out of sight, sleeping wherever
she could find the scanty protection of rocks or low-hanging tree
branches, existing on the food she scavenged from the forest. She
thought she must have left Wales long ago. The open spaces she
found, once farmland, were now barren and unpeopled, as though a
marauding army had marched through. Probably Normans, Branwen
thought in bitter disgust, and kept to the shelter of the
forests.
    It was midday when she stumbled out of thick
trees onto cultivated fields and saw before her a village. It was
scarcely more than a few dilapidated hovels, scattered along a dirt
track that divided the fields and led to a mound in the distance.
On top of the mound rose a rude motte-and-bailey-fortress. Branwen
could see men working in the fields.
    The nearest house was a bit larger than the
others, and was set a little apart from them. Branwen heard an
anguished cry from within. Someone was in pain or some deep
distress.
    She ought to have slipped back into the woods
and gone on. It would have been safer. But she was exhausted from
walking for so many days and she had no destination, no goal,
except to keep away from the Normans