A Heart in Sun and Shadow (Cymru That Was Book 1) (6 page)

“Emyr. What do we do? Go back? Find her hut? Maybe she’ll change her mind.” Idrys looked at his brother but found no human expression to read on the narrow face that returned his gaze. Emyr yipped and turned his head to the east.

The first rays of sunlight slipped into the sky and with it came a strange pain riding the wave of tingling sensation in the limbs of each twin.

The change that hit them felt less violent than it had looked the night before, and far quicker.

Emyr knelt on the ground, human and naked in the morning light. Idrys stood entangled in his own pool of clothing, looking around with a very human, surprised expression on his narrow hound’s face. It almost made Emyr laugh. Almost.

“Idrys, it’s all right. Give it a moment. Your senses will be overwhelming for a moment if you’re feeling like I did.”

Emyr took a deep breath and tried to offer what comfort he could to his brother. Ever practical, and rather chilled, he gently pushed his brother out of the way and began to pull on his twin’s discarded clothing.

He stood and took in the forest. They were a long day’s travel from home, if his bearings were correct. Knowing by his own experience that his brother would retain his human mind while confined to the hound form, Emyr turned and spoke.

“We can’t go back to her. The gods only knows what else she might think to do. We have to go home. They’ll be worried sick. Mother must know, at the least. She’s clever, she’ll think of somewhat.” Emyr tugged on his boots, pulling the soft leather over his sore heels.

Idrys tucked his tail into his body without thinking and whined high in his throat. He walked forward and licked his brother’s outstretched hand. He knew Emyr was likely right, and the folly of not listening to Emyr lay fresh and painful in Idrys’s mind.

The brothers walked side by side toward the moors and the sea as the forest woke up around them and the sun rose to cast green and gold shadows among the turning leaves.

They reached the edge of the wood as the sun sank low. The weather held despite heavy clouds that blew in from the sea toward the distant taller hills of Eifon that rose like shadows against the mercurial sky to the north and east.

Emyr got their bearings again as the wood faded into the low heath and brushy grass of the moors that spilled from the tall old forests down to the rocky shore of the western sea. Near the edge of the forest stood a tall standing stone, called a carreg, bone white with its northern face thick with moss. It was a well-known landmark to the twins; the shepherds called it the talking stone, though the tales about how it came to be varied with the telling.

“There, Idrys.” Emyr pointed to the white carreg. “Though I think we should wait here for a while yet.”

The tingling had started again in his body strongly enough that he was able to differentiate it from the burning of his muscles. Night was coming and with it he’d change. They were only perhaps an hour out from Clun Cadair, but it was too close to dark to be sure they’d make it before the curse took its terrible effect once more.

Idrys stood alert next to his brother. His black form came to Emyr’s waist and a light wind lifted the dark fur from his long back. Swallows dipped and circled in the meadow ahead as the sun dropped down over their home.

He too felt the singing in his blood and tensing of his muscles as the light faded. He raised his eyes to his brother and nodded his narrow head in a very human gesture, trying to signal he understood. It was too frustrating, this inability to communicate. He was accustomed to the easy if sometimes argumentative banter that Emyr and he had always shared. Its loss stabbed keenly as despair threatened to fill the hollow of his heart.

The twins retreated into the trees and Emyr stripped off his clothing. He folded each piece carefully and laid them on his boots. Shivering despite the lingering warmth of the day, he sank down beside his brother and slipped an arm over the hound’s shoulders. Idrys licked his cheek, his tail thumping the packed earth.

“Tell them both, Idrys. Mother and father. We owe them the truth,” Emyr said as the sun dropped out of sight.

Again the strange shifting feeling, a pain that was both inside and out at once. The terrible stretching and the sudden sense of
otherness
as the change completed itself with the final dying of the day.

Idrys dressed quickly and walked back out to the edge of the wood.

“Tis only fair, I suppose, that you’d leave me the task of telling them,” he muttered. “This whole mess is my fault, after all.”

Emyr butted his sharp head into Idrys’s hipbone hard enough to stagger his twin.

“Ow. Leave off, you.” The gesture jolted Idrys out of his deepening self-loathing. A tiny smile shifted across his lips only to fade into a grim and determined line.

Together they set out for the holding, hugging the line of the trees as they made for Clun Cadair and a very strange homecoming.

The shout went up through the holding as the slender form of a son long lost appeared like an apparition at the opening of the low palisade that defined the border of the llys.

“Be you spirits, come to torment us?” asked Gethin, the aging head of Chief Brychan’s flocks. He eyed the tall black hound and the filthy, gaunt youth he barely recognized as one of the twins who’d so merrily set out hunting nearly two months before.

“I’m not a spirit, Gethin. A spirit wouldn’t be half so dirty or tired, I’d hope.” Idrys halted at the sight of the men gathering with spears.

It might have been funny if he weren’t so weary. Here they’d wished for nothing but home these many days and now home was proving hard to enter. Truthfully, he’d given precious little thought to what his reception might be, instead focusing on how he’d explain his terrible folly to what he imagined would be angry, worried parents.

“Emyr?” Gethin motioned the two young men behind him back toward the cluster of dwellings. “Gods boy! What’s happened to you? Where’s your brother? What’s with that great black beast?” He stepped forward, peering into the youth’s face in the light of the standing torches that marked the entry to the holding.

Idrys didn’t bother to correct his mistake and instead answered, “I’ll tell my tale to mother and father first, if that’s all right. It’s long, I’m afraid.” Tears threatened to spill as a lump rose from his heart to his throat. Gethin clapped the boy on the shoulder and escorted him to the main hall without further questions.

Emyr pressed close to his brother’s side. The myriad of human and animal smells and sounds overwhelmed him again. Sheep, horse, fresh-cut rushes, cooking meat, and wood smoke, the smells of home. The llys would be near empty this time of year for the summer grazing of the flocks and the tending of the harvest fields and fishing in the seasonal villages near the sea.

The outer cluster of wood and stone houses were mostly boarded up. They both were grateful for this small mercy. It meant less people to stare and shrink away as they passed.

A slim figure broke away from the light doorway of the great hall. Her skirts flying around her, Hafwyn ran to her children and threw her arms around Idrys. He clung to her tightly, the tears that had been gathering for the last few hours welling over with a strangled cry. She smelled of lanolin, wood smoke, and fresh pears. She smelled like his mother, tall and strong, solid and real.

Emyr pressed his narrow head into her skirts as he too drowned in her familiar scent and warmth. Their mother pulled back suddenly and stared down at the large black hound. He looked up at her with desperate eyes, willing her to know him, somehow, through special motherly magic or intuition.

Hafwyn tentatively reached out her hand and stroked the silken head of the hound. She looked then at her son and saw the same sad desperation mirrored in the brown eyes of both boy and dog. She knew then, though her practical mind forced away the thoughts of the impossible.

“My son has returned,” she said, her voice loud and clear though full of un-invoked emotion. She put her arm around her son’s slim shoulders and led him inside. Brychan stood, a rough, hirsute hulk of a man, in the doorway to the hall but moved aside as his wife and child entered with the unnaturally sized black hound. His blue eyes searched Idrys’s own dark ones for a long moment.

Once inside the light of the long and thankfully empty room, he reached for his son. Idrys went to him and fell into his thick arms with another grieving cry. He tucked his head against the bristling beard. His father was stiff, caught between relief and anger and wondering, but he embraced his son for a moment before pushing back the red-eyed lad.

“Where is your brother, Emyr?” Brychan asked, making the same mistake the others had.

Idrys realized his hair lay unbound against his shoulders. He’d always worn his own hair braided, a habit ingrained to help everyone tell him apart from his brother. He shook his head slowly.

“It’s not a tale I can tell here.” He glanced behind to where the courtyard outside was slowly filling with the permanent folk of the holding.

“Food, and a bath. Then we’ll hear the story,” Hafwyn said firmly, putting a hand on her husband’s arm.

She ordered Melita, her maid and companion, to help her fill the copper tub before the hearth in the twins’ old room. Brychan, after a look from his beautiful wife, fetched a bowl of thick stew from the hearth and sat quietly with his son as the boy ate.

Idrys looked down at Emyr, who waited patiently beside him at the headmost table. When he’d half-finished his food, Idrys took the bowl and set it onto the bench beside him for his twin. Neither had eaten in at least two days, though it felt far longer. The warm stew soured in his stomach as he faced his father.

Brychan had more grey in his hair than Idrys remembered. “I’m sorry father,” he began.

Whatever Brychan might have said in reply was forestalled by Hafwyn’s return. She beckoned him away from the table toward the private rooms built into the back of the hall.

It was strange to return to his room. A fire burned in the hearth and the large copper tub steamed on the stone floor in front of it. The bed was made, a state it rarely found itself in when the twins had slept here. Idrys shivered.
Two months gone,
it feels like yesterday and like years all at once.

Melita and Hafwyn both left the youth and the hound alone to bathe. A small pot of soap lay next to a soft cloth and a change of clothing on the hearth. Idrys stripped with a sigh and sank down into the bath. He had to tuck his knees up to his chin to fit, but it was heavenly just to relax into the hot water.

He took up the pot and scraped up a bit of the soft, crumbling soap. It smelled of roses, his mother’s favorite scent. Idrys scrubbed himself, finally dunking his hair into the now tepid and filthy water. Reluctantly he stood and dried himself with the soft cloth.

“I guess I’d better explain it to them, because things will be strange when you request a bath tomorrow morning after sunrise.” He grinned down at Emyr who had flopped onto the bed as soon as they were alone. His mirth lasted only a moment as there came a soft knock on the door.

“One moment,” he called. He wrung the excess water from his curling hair and pulled on the clean tunic and trousers.

Going to the door, he opened it. Hafwyn stood with bowls of the thick stew in each hand, Brychan looming behind her. Both parents carried a mixed expression of worry and curiosity, though the chief’s was tinged with anger as well.

The twins sat on the bed, Emyr sitting up so he could eat from the bowl that Idrys tucked between his long forelegs. Idrys also ate, thinking that if he were chewing, he’d have excuse not to speak. The stew didn’t last. Exhaustion pulled at his limbs and he sighed. It was best to get it over with.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he said, hating the way his voice broke and wavered. He was so tired and this tale was too great a burden to bear alone.

Emyr leaned against Idrys’s side and tucked his narrow head under his brother’s arm. The soft heat of the hound lent Idrys strength.
I’m not alone. I have to speak for us both now. Well, at least ‘til morning.

“Start at the beginning,” Hafwyn said and her gentle tone combined with the understanding and sympathetic gaze of his twin broke the dam of words inside.

The story poured from him then, though he fumbled with some of the parts in Seren’s house. He could see from the slight flush in his mother’s cheeks and the knowing cast of his father’s look that their imaginations filled in the more seductive details that he left unspoken. Neither of his parents spoke nor broke the spell his tale wove in the little room. He related the details of their daring and doomed escape and the mad flight through the wood for home. Finally, Idrys reached the end, speaking of the horrible curse and subsequent transformation.

So loyal, each to the other. As you’ve shared your lives, so shall you split the burden of your fate
.

He stopped then, Emyr beside him sitting up on his haunches now, head raised as each watched their parents.

Hafwyn nodded. She’d half-suspected something of the sort the moment the tall black hound at stared up at her with her son’s own eyes. She opened her mouth to speak words of comfort to her children but her husband went rigid beside her and cut off what she might have said.

“Idrys.” His face had turned red as he absorbed the tale. “This is your fault, boy.” He rose to his feet with an angry gesture, thick hands balled into fists. “If you hadn’t led your brother on that mad chase, none of this would have befallen you. Why don’t you ever listen? Look what you’ve done to your brother!” His voice boomed in the tiny space, his blue eyes bright and hard as stones.

“I know, father,” Idrys said softly before his mother could chide her husband. He bowed his dark head and gripped a handful of Emyr’s silky coat. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to make it right.”

He looked up then, toward his mother. Emyr had promised that telling the truth would help. Hafwyn was clever, she always thought of something.