Dead Man's Ransom Read Online Free PDF Page B

legs about the castle wards?”
    “I’m won!” said the boy, hopefully shining. “Bring me to confession, and I’ll hold nothing back.”
     
    Once his mind was made up he spoke up cheerfully and volubly, an outward soul by nature, and very poorly given to silence. His abstention must have cost him prodigies of self-control. Hugh listened to him with an unrevealing face, but Cadfael knew by now how to read every least twitch of those lean, live brows and every glint in the black eyes.
    “My name is Elis ap Cynan, my mother was cousin to Owain Gwynedd. He is my overlord, and he has over-watched me in the fosterage where he placed me when my father died. That is, with my uncle Griffith ap Meilyr, where I grew up with my cousin Eliud as brothers. Griffith’s wife is also distant kin to the prince, and Griffith ranks high among his officers. Owain values us. He will not willingly leave me in captivity,” said the young man sturdily.
    “Even though you hared off after his brother to a battle in which he wanted no part?” said Hugh, unsmiling but mild of voice.
    “Even so,” persisted Elis firmly. “Though if truth must out, I wish I never had, and am like to wish it even more earnestly when I must go back and face him. He’ll have my hide, as like as not.” But he did not sound particularly depressed at the thought, and his sudden grin, tentative here in Hugh’s untested presence, nevertheless would out for a moment. “I was a fool. Not for the first time, and I daresay not the last. Eliud had more sense. He’s grave and deep, he thinks like Owain. It was the first time we ever went different ways. I wish now I’d listened to him. I never knew him to be wrong when it came to it. But I was greedy to see action, and pig-headed, and I went.”
    “And did you like the action you saw?” asked Hugh drily.
    Elis gnawed a considering lip. “The battle, that was fair fight, all in arms on both parts. You were there? Then you know yourself it was a great thing we did, crossing the river in flood, and standing to it in that frozen marsh as we were, sodden and shivering…” That exhilarating memory had suddenly recalled to him the second such crossing attempted, and its less heroic ending, the reverse of the dream of glory. Fished out like a drowning kitten, and hauled back to life face-down in muddy turf, hiccuping up the water he had swallowed, and being squeezed between the hands of a brawny forester. He caught Hugh’s eye, and saw his own recollection reflected there, and had the grace to grin. “Well, flood-water is on no man’s side, it gulps down Welsh as readily as English. But I was not sorry then, not at Lincoln. It was a good fight. Afterwards—no—the town turned my stomach. If I’d known before, I should not have been there. But I was there, and I couldn’t undo it.”
    “You were sick at what was done to Lincoln,” Hugh pointed out reasonably, “yet you went with the raiders to sack Godric’s Ford.”
    “What was I to do? Draw out against the lot of them, my own friends and comrades, stick my nose in the air and tell them what they intended was vile? I’m no such hero!” said Elis openly and heartily. “Still, you’ll allow I did no harm there to anyone, as it fell out. I was taken, and if it please you to say, serve me right, I’ll take no offence. The end of it is, here I am and at your disposal. And I’m kin to Owain and when he knows I’m living he’ll want me back.”
    “Then you and I may very well come to a sensible agreement,” said Hugh, “for I think it very likely that my sheriff, whom I want back just as certainly, is prisoner in Wales as you are here, and if that proves true, an exchange should be no great problem. I’ve no wish to keep you under lock and key in a cell, if you’ll behave yourself seemly and wait the outcome.
    “It’s your quickest way home. Give me your parole not to attempt escape, or to go outside the wards here, and you may have the run of the