An Unlikely Match (24 page)

Nickolas and Miss Castleton opened the ball with an almost stiff, extremely awkward minuet. A palpable feeling of relief emerged between them when other couples joined the dance. Nickolas attempted to strike up a friendly conversation, but Miss Castleton seemed . . . sad. ’Twas not an auspicious beginning.

* * *

Time was growing short. Gwen could feel the vaguely familiar sensation closing in around her. Another few minutes and she would be forced to go through it all again. Three hundred ninety-eight times she’d endured the fear, the pain, the terror of that night. Her only consolation lay in knowing that while she relived it, she would remember nothing that had happened since that original night. She would be able to hold to the ignorant assumption that somehow she would escape.

Two stories below her room, the ball was well underway. She’d watched the carriages pull up, seen the guests arrive. Nickolas was down there with all of them, dancing with his future bride. What Gwen wouldn’t have given in that moment to have had him there beside her.

“Please save me from this.” Gwen spoke into the emptiness, her heart breaking with her loneliness and helplessness. The only answering sound was that of music floating up through the chill October night.

She would be alone in her suffering, as always.

Slowly, an unearthly fog began to creep into the room. Ghostly remnants of her room as it had once stood materialized around her. Whispers of the heavy furniture of centuries gone by took form in the room. Behind the sheer white curtains she loved so much hung a phantom set of tapestries, the very same that had hung there on the last night of her life. The night’s transformation had begun. She would forget everything soon. She would not recall four hundred years of quiet and attempts at healing. She would not remember the fortified castle slowly giving way to the peaceful house that now stood. She would not remember the victories the next hours had ensured.

She would not remember
him.

“Oh, Nickolas,” Gwen whispered in anguish. “Please help me. Do not leave me to face this alone.”

The fog grew thick and heavy around her. From across the chasm of centuries, her father called out to her.

“Gwenllian,” his booming voice echoed in the vast emptiness. In his precise and rumbling Welsh, he added the words her tender heart, desperate for his love and affection, could not resist: “Come, dear girl. Your
dadi
is in desperate need of your company.”

“I am coming directly, Father,” she answered, smiling at his kind words. If only he could be thus always!

In the back of her mind a memory nagged: a pair of merry blue eyes and fair hair. A name hovered unidentifiably on her lips, only to fade into nothingness. And why she longed for him, she couldn’t remember.

Her father called to her again, and she hastened to obey.

* * *

A collective gasp sounded around the ballroom. Nickolas knew without even looking that Gwen had made an appearance at last. He told his heart to settle even as it began to beat ever harder. He hadn’t seen her in a week, a week that felt like a lifetime. But would seeing her again be soothing or torturous?

Several of the guests moved anxiously to one side or the other, opening up Nickolas’s view of Gwen moving gracefully across the ballroom. She appeared to be walking quickly, lightly, though her steps made no sound.

Gwen’s face turned so she looked directly at Nickolas but did not, somehow, appear to see him. She was smiling, a different sort of smile than he had ever seen her wear. The weight of sadness that she forever carried with her had vanished. She appeared lighthearted, free, unburdened. There was such innocent joy on her face.

Nickolas stood stunned, speechless. A need, almost desperate, rose up in him to see that look on her face always. That look of hopeful happiness belonged to her. It was, he knew without being told, an expression that once came naturally to her.

He opened his mouth to say something, anything, that might halt her long enough for him to memorize her countenance. She seemed oblivious to the stares of the pressing crowd. Gwen continued her joyous half run.

An instant too late, Nickolas realized he stood directly in her path. Before he could even formulate a thought of stepping aside, she passed directly through him, filling every inch of his body with a soothing warmth, only to leave him cold as she continued past.

Shock and worry filled the faces of the crowd. Miss Castleton inquired after his well-being from directly beside him, as a fiancée ought, but Nickolas’s attention remained riveted on Gwen. She had passed through the back wall of the ballroom and was headed, if his bearings were correct, directly toward The Tower.

“Something is not right, Nickolas.” Dafydd’s whisper barely penetrated his thoughts.

Frenzied conversations echoed all around. Only then did Nickolas truly look at his surroundings and discover his guests were waist-deep in a thick, eerie fog. Glancing out the windows, Nickolas could see the grounds of Tŷ Mynydd swathed in the same other-worldly haze.

Through the windows, he stared after Gwen. She was indeed making her way to The Tower, a lightness to her step that did not at all match her destination. Nickolas remembered all too well the feeling he’d fought on the stairwell of that tower. He could recall with perfect clarity the suffering on Gwen’s face as she’d endured that place at his side.

“He should not have been here alone,” she’d said. And she was doing just that. Going to The Tower. Alone.

A few of the guests were making their way out, thanking him for an enjoyable evening but claiming they were tired or had a long journey ahead of them. He knew, however, they were simply unnerved and were escaping. He was too concerned to do more than offer cursory adieus.

“Dafydd. Griffith.”

“You’re going after her,” Griffith said, obviously not needing an explanation.

“I have to. She did as much for me.”

His friends nodded. Nickolas pulled an overcoat on and cast aside his black mask.

“You will stand watch over the guests?” Nickolas asked them, buttoning his coat against the cold.

“Of course,” Griffith said.

“Be careful, Nickolas.” Dafydd spoke with almost unnerving somberness. “Gwen would not fear that place if there were not a very good reason.”

He nodded and began his trek across the heavily fogged landscape.

“God keep you, Nickolas Pritchard,” Dafydd’s voice echoed after him.

“I certainly hope He does,” Nickolas muttered to himself and trudged determinedly toward The Tower, which glowed brighter than he ever remembered seeing it.

Chapter Twenty-One

“Have you seen my father, Taffy?” Gwen asked, watching the man lug a bundle of swords down the long, narrow passage leading to the base of the east tower. She had not yet accustomed herself to living in a castle under siege. Her heart pounded at the thought of the army gathering across the meadow outside the castle walls.

“He’s up to the east tower, Miss Gwenllian,” Taffy replied. “In an odd mood, he is. Grumbling and stalking around.”

Gwen nodded her understanding. The arrival of King Henry’s troops had dampened everyone’s spirits but had noticeably worried her usually unflappable father.

“He called out for me across the courtyard,” Gwen said. “He did not sound put out with me this time.”

“Then you’d best go find out what it is Master Cadoc wants,” Taffy suggested. “Might be important.”

Gwen agreed and continued her quick walk toward the tower. Everything seemed important these past forty-eight hours. Y Castell was in a constant state of agitated activity. Weapons were gathered and sharpened. Fortifications were reenforced. Gwen wondered at times if their efforts would do any good. They were vastly outnumbered.

But Father would scold her for such thinking. He had been insistent they would be victorious. Still, something lurked in the back of his eyes that worried her. Despite his confident words and demeanor, her father was afraid.

Gwen hurried her steps, hoping to prove something of a comfort to him. He would have some task or another for her to perform, and she would, as always, do it with enthusiasm and anxiety, hoping this time she would receive his full approval.

The bottom of the east tower teemed with activity. At least half of the castle’s gathered population must have been wandering in and out of the single door and up and down the stairs to still other passageways and parts of the fortified castle walls. Gwen greeted them as she passed. The crowd’s nervous solemnity made Gwen uneasy. She hated the thought of war but knew it lurked just outside the thick stone walls.

She noted as she looked around that none of those gathered there were among her closest associates. Seldom were
all
of her friends sleeping or on guard duty at the same time.

“Gwenllian.”

She spun at the sound of Father’s voice above her. He stood, the very model of a warrior, halfway up the flight of stairs leading to the tower room.

“I heard you calling for me,
Dadi.
” She forced a smile. She had the oddest feeling of foreboding.
Do not be absurd
, she silently scolded herself. Father did not appear angry or overset or worried. So why did her skin seem to suddenly crawl? “Is there something I can do for you?”

“As a matter of fact, there is,” he replied, holding a hand out to her. “There is something you must do. For all of us.”

It was a strange thing for him to say. Something that she
must
do? What did he mean? And for
all of us
. Everyone at Y Castell? That seemed unlikely, nigh near impossible, even.

Gwen walked to the stairwell and climbed, placing her fingers in the massive hand of her father. His hand closed around hers, and a deep, chilling shiver snaked down her spine. Gwen impulsively pulled back on her hand, intending to chafe at her cold arms, but her father’s grip tightened.

“I am cold, Father.”

“There is a fire built in the room. You will be warm enough.”

He pulled her rather forcefully up the remaining stairs and led her through the door to the tower room. It had, over the hundred years since Y Castell had been built, served as a bedchamber and was still furnished as such. The large four-poster bed was hung with heavy, velvet curtains. A table and chairs occupied another portion of the room. In the fireplace, built directly into the wall, a fire crackled, but Gwen did not feel any warmer. She had the almost overwhelming urge to wrap her arms around herself the way she had as a child when a storm or a dream had frightened her. But Father had yet to release her hand. His grip, if anything, had tightened further.

Behind her, Gwen heard the door lock. She turned to see Arwyn ap Bedwyr, dressed in his usual priest’s attire, slip the key into his pocket. Gwen looked from her father to the priest, her heart pounding in her chest. The look the two men exchanged was heavy with unspoken meaning, and suddenly, she felt afraid.

Arwyn nodded to Gwen’s father before turning and walking to the table. He lifted from its surface a length of deepest black fabric. Out the tower window visible to the awaiting invading army he unfurled it, securing the end he held to nails already driven into the stone along the bottom of the window.

A black flag
? Gwen silently asked herself.
Why black? What does that mean?

“Are you truly willing to do this, Cadoc?” The priest turned back to face them, looking piercingly at Gwen’s father.

“We are both determined.” Father seemed to be reminding the other man of a previously determined fact. “Y Castell must not fall into the hands of the enemy.”

The priest nodded. “Then we will protect this land at all costs.”

“At all costs,” Gwen’s father answered. His hand shifted to wrap around her wrist, his other hand doing the same with her other arm.

“
Dadi
?” Gwen whispered, her fear causing her voice to shake.

He ignored her plea, his eyes focused on Arwyn ap Bedwyr. Gwen watched the priest lift a heavy tome from the table and carry it slowly to a wooden lectern that Gwen had never before seen in that room. The book he carried was not a Bible, she knew immediately. As the priest opened the book, a warmth-stealing chill permeated the room.