Salvation: Pendyffryn: The Conquerors, Book 2

By Lily Dewaruile

AD877 – Pendyffryn has fallen to the Conqueror, Jehan-Emíl deFreveille. Though Cwmdu warriors defeated Han Chadzy’s first assault, Daran Pendyffryn sends Christophe Maides—known as the Demon to the warriors he terrifies on the battlefield and the women attracted to his bed, hired killer and unrepentant predator—to protect his chosen heir.

From his first sight of Cwmdu, the Demon has coveted the mountains. He had never loved, never been loved but, from his first sight of a flaxen nymph, he covets more than one night of pleasure.

While Han Chadzy takes his revenge on Daran Pendyffryn’s allies to the east, destroying the village and driving inhabitants to the forest, Maides recognizes the first stirrings of desire he has felt since landing on this cold island.

On the chance of finding the flaxen-haired woman again and the opportunity to grasp the mineral-rich mountains surrounding Cwmdu, Maides accepts Daran Pendyffryn’s commission to find and protect Heilyn ap Alun, a boy who will become the most powerful man in the region.

The custom of offering a guest his wife for a night’s companionship is a matter of honor for Alun Cwmdu but he refuses to offend the Demon by offering Heilyn’s mother, a harridan whose sarcasm provokes men to violence. Alun’s captured Saxon slave, Ingred, is another matter.

The customs of his homeland prevent Maides from accepting another’s wife and the mercenary has seen the woman he wants that night, a woman so beautiful she outshines the sun, offering her smile to a man who equals Maides in strength and power. Her scent is of the mountains and the forest, and lingers in Alun’s bed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eres Books
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9780983657729

Lily Dewaruile

Lily Dewaruile is a best-selling author of medieval Welsh fiction. Lily Dewaruile is the pen name of an American author who lived in Wales for thirty years. Her love of the Welsh language, culture and history has inspired her fiction since her first visit to Rhuthun where she heard Welsh spoken for the first time. During her time in Wales, she wrote over twenty novels, many of which are still manuscripts, awaiting their debut.Her first Welsh Medieval novel, TRAITOR'S DAUGHTER, was published while she was living in Wales. The photograph used for the cover of this book is of one the most spectacular sunsets over the historic town of Caerfyrddin, named for the medieval poet, Myrddin (the inspiration for the fictional character, Merlin), where Lily lived for twenty-five of her thirty years in Wales."You will know the man..." One woman stands against the INVASION of her home. One man holds her life in his hands. And... "he was not a man who needed a lot of women. He was a man who needed a lot of one woman. This woman." - INVASION, Book 1 of the Pendyffryn: The Conquerors series, now available. Publication date: November 17, 2012.SALVATION, Book 2 of the Pendyffryn: The Conquerors series. Publication date: January 17, 2013.BETRAYAL, Book 3 of the Pendyffryn: The Conquerors series. Publication date: March 17, 2013REVIVAL, Book 4 of the Pendyffryn: The Conquerors series. Publication date: June 9, 2013RECONCILIATION, Book 5 of the Pendyffryn: The Conquerors. Publication date: January 23, 2014JUSTICE, Book 1 of the Pendyffryn: The Inheritors, Publication date: October 20, 2016MERIT, Book 2 of the Pendyffryn: The Inheritors, Publican date: November 21, 2021More about all of Lily's independently published novels in the Pendyffryn:The Conquers and Pendyffryn:The Inheritors series are on her website: lilydewaruile.com and eresbooks.com, Smashwords, as well as KDP: Amazon and most independent online booksellers.Recent Posts: https://lilydewaruile.com/ysgrifau-posts/

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Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Glossary of Welsh & Pronunciations

Lily’s Books

About the Author

DEDICATION

Hoffwn gyflwyno’r argraffiad hwn i’m cyfeillion yng Nghymru sydd wedi fy nghefnogi ers i fi symud yno ac ers i fi symud i ffwrdd.

I would like to offer this edition to my friends in Wales who have supported me since I moved there and since I moved away.

Ac yn arbennig, i’m hannwylaf ŵr a’n meibion am eu holl amynedd a chariad. Fe wyddoch ba mor bwysig ag ydych i fi.

And especially, to my dearest husband and our sons for their patience and love. You know how important you are to me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I bob un o’r hanesyddwyr sydd wedi gwneud ymdrech i sicrhau bod y cewri o Gymru ddim yn diflannu.

Every one of the historians who have made the effort to secure the giants of Wales do not disappear.

AD877, Rhodri Mawr Regis.

Pendyffryn has fallen to the Conqueror, Jehan-Emíl deFreveille. Cwmdu warriors defeated Han Chadzy’s first assault, but deFreveille’s former ally has not finished with the dark valley on the other side of the mountains.

One

Opposite Caryl’s door, on the high ground above the buarth, brass sconces lit the lower room in the farm master’s house. His womenfolk prepared to celebrate departed ancestors. When the farm master’s roof caught fire, Caryl ran out with the others in the village to bring buckets.

When her own roof blazed and those of other warriors’ families, she abandoned the well in the buarth and ran into her house, screaming for her children to come to her. She crouched beneath the pall of smoke, batting at the sparks that threatened to set her flaxen hair ablaze. She followed her son’s small whimpers and crawled beneath the curtain that separated the sleeping quarters from the larger room.

Come here. Come to me. I’m here, she coughed, feeling her way through the strikes of flame as the pitch in the beams snapped alive. Where is your sister?

"I’m here, Mam," Susanna cried, touching her leg.

Crawl out. Don’t breathe. Go. Go. Where is your brother?

"Mam. Mam. The tiny voice came from the corner, under the bed he shared with his sister. I can’t see you. I can’t see."

Come out, crawl on the floor, keep low, Titw. Keep down, like a bird, be quick.

Where’s Dad? Where’s Dad? the boy screeched the moment that his hand found her in the red darkness.

He will come for us. The crack of the beam brought a torrent of thatch onto the children’s bed and she ripped her son out, dragging him toward the door and found Susanna huddled on the floor, staring into the carnage as men in gelyn livery struck women and children with swords and axes drenched with blood, hurling gore into the day-bright, fire-lit sky.

We can’t stay here, Caryl hissed, unheard above the scream of the flames and the roar of death all around her. They’ll find us. They’ll kill us.

A woman’s body fell across the door, blocking their escape. Caryl yanked her children through the rubble of falling rafters, ducking, jumping, to the back of the house into the pantry, wedging the slatted door with shelves and jugs, digging at the wall of wattle and lime-washed mud with a fire iron, her children clinging to her back. Behind her, the thatch smothered the table, a mountain of blackened straw, catching as it scattered, crushing and consuming everything they owned.

She hacked at the hard earth, scraping and gouging until the mud buckled and the dry twigs split under her fury. Stay by the wall, she ordered her son as she pushed him through the gap, ripping at the opening with her hands until her daughter fell through. Susanna clasped her brother before both of them crawled toward the shelter of the woodland. Caryl thrust her shoulder out, scratching and clawing at the wall until she fell onto the trembling earth and scurried on her hands and knees to reach the ruins of the old farm in the woods.

Huddling with her children in a corner of the collapsed walls with the few others who had escaped, Caryl shielded her children as their friends were murdered and their homes destroyed. She covered her children’s ears and held them close to block the screams of girls and boys, women torn from their children, men hacked to death in front of their families.

We can’t stay here. She kissed her son and daughter over and over again, murmuring the same words, unheard by anyone near her as the gelyn army found the farm master’s store of mead and turned from killing to celebration.

The walled ruins were fragrant with the scent of moist pine needles but the taint of blood and smoke overwhelmed her as the sunrise sliced across the mountains above them. We can’t stay here. She hadn’t slept, but her children were curled on either side of her, their heads buried in her lap. She raised her face to the gray mist, bent and kissed them until they awoke. The boy stretched, staring at the other women curled at the foot of the stone walls, meeting their wild eyes with wonder.

Mam, where are we?

We must go from here.

Where, Mam? Where? How will Dad find us?

He will find you. He will always find you, she told them, catching their hands and pulling them further into the woodlands, away from the shouts of the warriors ordering the soldiers to search for the Cymry they had come to kill. Caryl drove forward, northward, toward the only fortress in the valley, never turning her head to see who was left behind or who followed. Until night and the wolves’ howling forced her to seek another shelter, she did not hear her children complain of hunger or hurt. The scent of fresh blood from the horror in the village kept the wolves away from her family.

Foraging in the darkness for food from among the brambles and fungus that webbed through the decaying wood, Caryl cringed at the shouts of the drunken gelyn in the silence of the forest. When she curled around the warm bodies of Susanna and Heilyn, she listened for the crashing of their spears and swords, knowing they would continue hunting, killing, raping. She stared into the faces of her children, held them against her. Never, she promised. Never will anyone hurt you.

Night after night, she hid, quivering as the gelyn hunted more women, murdered more men, slaughtered more children. Crawling through the underbrush in the hours of deepest dark, she searched in every direction before she dared to rise from her belly, listening again without breathing before she pulled herself to crouch and leaned into the clearing, lowering her shoulders to run the few feet to the shelter she had made for her children, her skirt cradling the food she had found where the wild pigs grazed in the beech woods.

A leather-sheathed hand crushed her mouth as her body left the ground, slammed against the warhorse’s shoulder. The animal turned its head and snorted in her face. "What are you doing here, menyw? The warrior’s voice was no more than a breath against her ear. Suspending her in a shield-clad arm, he held a dagger in his left hand, near her throat. Are you from the village? When she didn’t answer, he asked, How many are with you? How many have escaped?"

Caryl pulled at his hand and his arm clenched like iron.

Do you want my friends to know I have found you? With the hand holding the dagger, he traced his fingers from her shoulder to her breast, lingering for a moment before he pressed his jaw against her head, forcing her to expose her neck to his mouth. If so, continue as you are. They will welcome the diversion once they know I am here. He pulled away, stilling his body. When she ceased to struggle, his arm relaxed so that she could breathe. He lifted her to his chest, the flexing muscles of his thigh pressed into the small of her back. How have you survived here on your own?

Caryl remained silent and still, hanging from his arm as though she was no more weight than the shield, as though she was nothing more than the sleeve of his black coat. The food she had taken hours to gather was crushed in the dirt beneath the horse’s hooves. Tears sprang to her eyes but the warrior in black livery did not feel them fall on the back of his gloved hand.

"The woods are stalked tonight, menyw. If you scream, Chadzy’s rabble will find you. Do you understand me? She nodded, gasping a breath as the leather grip loosened. Turning her to face him, he slid his arm around her waist and searched her eyes. Who are you? What are you doing here? When she gave no answer, he smiled. The muscles around his eyes clenched but his face was hidden by a scarf, as black as the sky above the mountains. How many are with you?"

Caryl turned her face away from his ice-blue eyes, eyes that smiled without warmth, laughed without amusement. She recognized him by the warriors’ talk. Diawl.

"Stay in the forest tonight, menyw. By morning, it will be safe for you to return to your home."

My home is gone.

A voice as soft as your body. He tightened his forearm across the small of her back. Take this. You will need it. He thrust a folded length of cloth against her breasts. You may show your gratitude for my help when we meet again. Without warning, he released her to slide down his body but slowed her fall as her feet touched the ground. He sheathed his dagger in the red sash around his waist. Still holding her, he leaned down, whispering against her lips, "I will anticipate our next encounter, menyw, with…pleasure."

Darting back to the underbrush, only a flash of the brass fittings on his warhorse’s armor before he vanished into the foliage behind her still visible. As though he had never been, only the leaves quivered in his passing. Caryl’s body shuddered with such force that she dared not move until her terror subsided. Even so, until the screams of Chadzy’s army reached her, she did not return to her children for fear the Diawl was watching.

Bodies and carts were strewn like chaff in the wind or burned to cinders were they stood. At the close of each long day, Caryl and the other women watched the horizon to the north but there were no fires in Maldwyn’s fortress to give evidence of the battle waged there against marauders driven from Pendyffryn. The Llangwmdu warriors returned from their battle for Cwmdu, murmuring tales of the Diawl warrior—a man so merciless, so fierce that, when his name was spoken, Han Chadzy ordered fires set to everything they could not carry and retreated eastward beyond the mountains. Caryl gathered her children beneath the embroidered carthen she had received from a shadow in the darkness, telling no one that the Diawl had a heart that beat as steady as the pulse of the earth.

The warriors returned along the road, toward the outlying fields of their home, they carried their weapons in triumph. Maldwyn Cwmdu was dead but his fierce warriors were undefeated. The Saeson army that had destroyed their peace had been chased away, but took with it all the meat and grain in the stores. The breeding ewes had been slaughtered and their unborn lambs consumed with them. The small amount of grain that could be found was brought into the buarth. There was no feed for the few remaining animals. The farmers who returned could find no seeds to plant, no dairy herd to milk.

Daran Pendyffryn will send aid, Alun Cwmdu, the father of Caryl’s children, told the Llangwmdu villagers. He gathered his children in his arms, kissing each in turn. He acknowledged their mother was alive with greater apathy than for the farm master’s wife. When his children were gone to their bed in the shell of their house beneath a canopy of carthen, he turned on his heel and took one of his women to his bed.

The first petals of snow pricked Caryl’s face a few weeks later. A white deluge appeared and turned brown with mud. While Pendyffryn capitulated to their conqueror, no rescue came and the people of Llangwmdu starved. Warriors hunted game in the forests but even the smallest animals had been decimated by Han Chadzy’s orders to destroy anything they could not take with them. Llangwmdu became a village of scavengers, dragging rotting carcasses to be roasted on open spits in the buarth for all to share.

On the feast day, the women foraged for roots, searching all day to find a turnip that would have been discarded to the fodder bin in previous winters. The farm master’s accounts were ashes and his wife made no effort either to restore them or to reinstate the order of the farm. Her longhouse stood roofless, blackened against the sky.

As the early gales stirred the snow in the mountains, amid the rubble in the shell of her house, Caryl prepared a meal of root broth for her children at sunset and lay down on the floor of the canopied area she shared with them to sleep away her own hunger. At sunrise, she dragged the embroidered carthen over her shoulders and went with the wives of Alun Cwmdu’s war band to gather firewood. At midday, while she scoured the frozen ground in the orchard for fallen fruit, the father of her children stood over her.

Daran Pendyffryn has answered me at last.

What does that mean?

Alun crouched near her, pressing his back on the cold stone wall that marked the village from the orchard. It means we will have meat fit for men, he said, staring at her muddied hands and broken nails. "It also means that we will have to fight the gelyn soon, when they turn back against us." His face was thin and his bright red hair was dull, untended. Gray patched his beard. Alun Cwmdu was not the careless seventeen year old youth she dreaded. He was not the twenty-one year old warrior to whom she had been forced to return. He was nearly thirty and pendefig of Cwmdu. He was still a man she had not allowed to touch her since their son was conceived. In her heart, she had left him, given him the divorce she craved.

Good. She had no strength to show the relief that his news brought her for the sake of their children.

An emissary comes to negotiate for Pendyffryn.

"You are pendefig, Caryl replied, pulling the decaying fruit she had freed from the soil into her lap, scraping the mud and bracken away before she laid it in the basket with the two others she had found. When her husband extended his hand to drag a stray wisp of her pale hair from her cheek, Caryl jerked her head away from him. Touch me again and I will kill you."

Alun showed her the back of his fist with a growl and rose to his feet. Why would I do that, Caryl Gernant? I have had all I ever wanted from you.

When he walked away toward the farm master’s house where he now held his llys with his whores and his war band, Caryl returned to her search. And I have had more than I ever did or ever will want of you…or any man. She poured her rage into her work, scratching through the grass with her fingers until she found the soft fruit she sought.

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Two

Maides crouched at the edge of the escarpment overlooking the narrow river valley. His half wild warhorse protested against the quietude and the interrupted race to the edge. Maides held the reins in his fist, keeping the animal’s head down while he studied the area. The long valley was accessible to an army only through the gentler terrain of the pasture lands of its neighbor, Pendyffryn, or as he had discovered, from the north.

While his friend, Jehan-Emíl deFreveille held Pendyffryn, Maides saw no future for an attack on Cwmdu, though many men would try for the sake of its wealth in minerals and woodlands. The valley did not interest him but the mountains that surrounded it were the life’s blood of the black-clad mercenary. Taking Pendyffryn was deFreveille’s prize. Cwmdu was his. Maides dug his long fingers deep into the soil and rubbed the dirt in his palm. Many cold winters and dry summers had turned the soil above Cwmdu rich with humus. For a moment, he allowed his severe expression to soften into a thin smile.

He calmed his warhorse, waiting for his command of warriors to reach him. In his thoughts were the twists of war that had put him as enemy and, this time, a second time, as friend to the men and women in the valley stretching for miles along the river below him. Less than four months ago, when he arrived in their country, his first sight of their homeland had been unconcerned by any cost to them. As he urged his horse to descend the narrow track through the forest, his cold smile stole into his eyes. On this winter day, following the deaths of many and the birth of a few, his entry had been won easily, at the cost of a single promise to an old man to find the boy heir to the Pendyffryn ystad.

Behind the mercenary, his warriors struggled with the pack animals and carts. He almost laughed at the warriors’ frustration. He had fought beside, and against, none better in his career but these could not make beasts of burden do as they commanded. He had seen too much evil and committed too many crimes himself to find humor in their incompetence. He was loyal only to Jehan-Emîl deFreveille and to his duty to protect the members of deFreveille’s household.

If you cannot command, Iago, perhaps you should carry the grain on your own back and let the ass give the orders.

Leaving his men behind, Maides drove his mount down the mountain track to the edge of the river south of the settlement and saw how easily Han Chadzy had overrun their defenses. The river was their enemy when Chadzy had come down the narrow valley from the north and found shelter in the forest that grew to the very edge of the village. Then, it had been a simple matter to convince Chadzy’s drunken command that the small guerilla force he commanded was the vanguard of Maldwyn’s army. Maides did not discount the effect that his own reputation had on Han Chadzy—they had clashed before with similar results. In his lifetime, Maides had never been defeated. He had never sustained a wound that had the power to stop him in battle. Men despaired when they saw his cold, pale eyes singling them out for the kill.

If he had come to conquer, Maides estimated his casualties would have been slight and his victory assured. The people lived in makeshift shelters and the warriors were idle. Two months had passed since Chadzy’s retreat and no effort had been made to protect Llangwmdu from another attack. The dark mercenary reminded himself that he was not there as an invader nor as an advisor. Allowing his mad stallion to pace along the riverbank in full view of the villagers, he waited again for his command to join him before he led them across the river.

Caryl Gernant was among the small group of men and women who watched the black-clad warrior ride from the river, water cascading from his chestnut horse’s flanks like silver coins. He pushed his black leather coat open, displaying a dagger in the flash of red around his waist. He peeled the black leather gloves from his powerful hands. She tugged the rag of blue scarf closer around her face.

Some cheered as he rode past the hafodydd into the buarth, but the foreign mercenary showed no regard for their relief at the sight of the sacks of grain and sides of meat that he brought with him. His ice shard eyes swept the crowd with disinterest. He gave orders to his warriors and shifted his lean body as he prepared to dismount to accept Alun Cwmdu’s welcome.

The Llangwmdu villagers had heard of the dark skinned mercenary—the warrior whose name drove Chadzy from their home. The craftsmen and dairywomen who watched him dismount had no doubt of his ability to destroy or deliver them.

Caryl caught her flaxen hair back as the breeze whipped it, like tendrils of white gold over her pretty, fine-boned face. Though her hands were stained with the soil that had worked into the fine creases of her fingers, she held her head high and met the gaze of the mercenary. He could not recognize her, not from a moment’s encounter in the dark night. She was as hungry as the man who stood next to her. Her gaze was as eager as every other pair of eyes staring at the provisions the Diawl had brought with him.

Although the Diawl did not release her from his cold glare, Caryl spoke to the man beside her and bestowed upon him a smile so generous that anyone witnessing it, anyone who did not know her, would have thought they were lovers.

I hope he has brought more than meat and grain, Caryl said to her companion. I have tasted only rotten fruit for so long that I have forgotten what can be done with fresh.

"Another harvest will pass before these orchards bear fruit, boneddiges," the craftsman replied, returning her smile as he bowed his head over her.

I would just as soon have soap, Caryl murmured.

Maides did not see the man’s face before he was called to respond to his host’s greeting. The man laughed and Maides lost sight of the woman in the surging crowd. Like most of the other women and the craftsmen, she was gaunt and her eyes were dark-rimmed. The warriors were better fed. The children, though ragged and thin, were healthy compared to their mothers.

Maides greeted Alun Cwmdu, taking a firm grip of the pendefig’s forearm. The hostile strength of Alun’s hand closed on his arm. Other men had more patience for talk but he had allowed himself to be drawn into the task of negotiating allegiances, for one reason. The mountain. As the pendefig led him toward the longhouse on the rise above the buarth, Maides glanced over his shoulder to watch the flaxen-haired woman walk away beside the emaciated man who stood a head taller, nearly as tall as his observer. Also, perhaps, for the woman. Recognition surged through his groin and a rare smile creased the muscles beneath his eyes as he recalled his promise to give her opportunity to show her appreciation. Seeing her smile, his anticipation leapt from interest to need.

Thought of her with this craftsman coiled in his mind but Maides stretched his long legs toward the hearth and fixed his concentration on Alun Cwmdu’s terms of accordance. The terms he was prepared to offer left little in the pendefig’s talk to challenge him. The red-bearded man sitting opposite the emissary in the farm master’s half-derelict house was jovial and proud.

Alun Cwmdu fondled a well-fed, copper-haired woman whose presence irritated Maides. He did not care for the Cymry’s custom of treating women as equals in the household. He cared less for treating women as amusements when men met to discuss matters of business. Allegiances were better formed without such distractions, but Alun Cwmdu was already too drunk on the wine Maides had brought to continue that night. Despite his stern discipline, his thoughts wandered to the face of the pale woman in the buarth whose eyes were the color of beechnut.

You will want a woman to warm your bed, Alun said.

She is your wife? The custom of offering a man’s wife as company for a guest was inexplicable. Such hospitality dishonored the wife and lessened the husband. The woman who had accompanied Alun Cwmdu into the longhouse and served the meal to the two men smiled as Alun clasped her wrist. Maides’s ice blue eyes narrowed as they traveled over her supple curves. There were only a few like her in the village—available to anyone who offered food in exchange for services.

I no longer have a wife. Alun propelled the woman toward his guest. And, if I did, I would not insult you by offering her. Take Ingred. She is warm-blooded. Alun planted a kiss on the gelyn slave’s brow.

Where is your son? Maides demanded without preamble.

With his mother, Alun replied.

Dead?

My son lives, Sharkeyn. His mother is dead to me, as she is to all honorable men.

From his experience of the Saeson, Maides understood the bitter declaration. The women who had survived Chadzy’s raid were taken