Children of Ceridwen

Shutters beat against the panes, rattling the horn plates of the window. They glowed orange against the shutters, lit within by a fire falling and blazing with each gust of howling wind. Like cat's eyes in the night, they shone on Madwyn, watching her across the room where she huddled beside the gulping fire. She rubbed her stiff toes together through three layers of stockings. Her sewing needle trembled between neat stitches of embroidery. It dove into the pale cloth with her exhale and shook as her chest seized, unable to breathe in as she found the needle's tip and pulled the black thread through. 

A prick caught into her finger, and she brought her hand down, needle still stuck where she’d pierced herself. Madwyn pulled it out, stared at the sanguine bead forming from so small a wound. Thunder roll across the roof nor the distant boom of waves against the cliff's base. Yet all she heard was the stiff breathing of her husband sitting leg-splayed across from her, elbow on the wooden rest of a carved cross-legged seat, brown-bearded chin resting on the backs of fidgeting fingers. 

A faint bruise crinkled beside his narrowing eye. A mark she’d made, broken onto his flesh in the same terror that a mouse might inflict when strangled between two giant's hands. That pleased him. He’d laughed at her trivial defense; paraded it in front of visiting highborns, saying “see how poorly she treats me?” For that, she was named a scold. 

Finally, he shifted, opened his mouth, and Madwyn gasped at an inhale, lowering her head, her eyes. 

“Make him quiet!” Elstan roared across into the air, assuming their son’s nursemaid would hear across the halls of their Normandy keep, well into the upper levels. His cry was barely a mark on the clattering and bellowing wind with its hard washes of rain. 

“It’s just the storm,” Madwyn held her finger away from the cloth and rolled her lips shut. 

“The storm?” He scoffed. The wide of his mustache parted long enough for him to pick at a tooth with the long nail of his little finger, staring at her, through her. She kept her gaze away, shivering again, feeling in her chest that rattling of the shutters, that heavy deluge of rain.

“You know,” Elstan finally began, “it's your fault he cries. I should have chosen better - a stronger womb. Adaf’s children don’t cry and they’re not half as frail.” 

She turned her ear to the pop and hiss of the flames. 

“Instead you had to tangle me with your pretty words and pretty eyes like a molded seed painted up for my coin and tossed into the stores. Come winter, we’ll take bread from your festering granary and see the make of its yield.”

Madwyn closed her eyes and heard the creak of the cross-legged seat as he stood. Footsteps neared and her lids flashed open to find him approaching the fire. Stooping out of her seat, she ducked past him and moved into the deep cold at the furthest end of the room. 

He slapped a palm on the hearth's mantle. “Quiet him!” He smacked the stone again, hissing, “a nave.” 

Madwyn pressed herself into the corner of a window's sill, the stone frigid against her cheek. Though cold rattled through her, she felt easier near the window. She could breathe into the shuttering and wuthering of the horn plates. Squeezing her embroidery work in her stiffened grip, stared at the yellowed horn and brass grate. At the base of the sill, a divot formed a bleak hole between her and the world beyond. Wind whistled through, singing like a siren's song in the gale. Beyond the opening, she spied high waves reaching up, stretching out with their foaming fingers to shake the keep, to rattle shutters and horn and grating from the window, and catch her fall. But with each rise, each attempt to graze the base of the keep, they tired; swirled down into a black murk. 

“You’re not even listening to me,” Elstan said to the fire. 

“Of course I am.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

She shook herself to attention and turned, blinking out of her dream, “sorry?”

“About your rotten son. What are you going to do to fix it?”

She wasn’t sure. He’d be sent away to study with another family in a few years. She wasn’t sure what he meant. Her chair near the fire toppled at a swing of his hand and he stormed out into the hall, shouting again for someone to silence their babe. When he was gone, her grip on the embroidery cloth loosened. The prick of her finger stained a blue sewn flower red. Turning back to the window, she pressed her hand to the flattened horn shingles, feeling the rumbling of the storm behind them. Taking the small brass nob between finger and thumb, she drew the panes in, revealing the shivering wood of the shutters. Their latch rattled against a small shackle and lifted with a gentle touch. The wooden shutter flew open and banged against the keep's wall. Wind and rain blasted against her, pulling her tightly bound hair loose about the fringe. 

The sea roiled below, rising and falling with the thundering of some great beast. Gripping the sill, Madwyn leaned forward and blinked past the loose locks of hair catching in her lashes. Icy rain fell over her shoulders in waves. Within the tempest of inky waters and ivory foam, she imagined a ship and its shepherd rowing through the broiling storm. Lightning flashed, and she saw him raise a lantern, waiting for her at the base of cliffs. Thunder rolled overhead and she turned to face right, to gaze across the blank fields beyond the gates. 

Another flickering signal came from a candle within a carriage, held by the hand of a pitying aunt or uncle, or some friend of sympathy. But the wind blew them away and she withdrew into the sill, leaning still on its ledge but turning her eyes down to the water. 

Other lives painted a picture clearer than the brightest, cloudless day. Those lives fled to convents, to family estates, to self-made homes with all they owned to sell for their keep. Forgotten to them, all that they owned was oft owned by another when their souls were signed away. Flee with naught but a nightdress and a husband might claim theft. She rocked back on her heels, lowering her forehead to the drenched stone. 

Or they claim a wife would not consort with them, that they were adulteresses, scolds, unreasonable, or maddened. And with no common skills to disguise herself among the layfolk, Madwyn knew she could do little more than hide and wait for the church to call on her, to bid her return by threat of excommunication, chastizement, wanton abandon, and forbade to speak to any not of that ungodly cast. No family could aid her, and she laughed at this. 

“Consensual abduction,” she whispered to the wind. “Are there any willing to take the title of rapist for me? To face the church and court for my moment's freedom? No…” She’d ruin herself, her family, her son too, if she abducted him with her. For a moment she imagined herself strong enough to face excommunication, to stand against the church for freedom from this keep. For forty days she could stand that trial before her babe was ripped from her arms and she was imprisoned, lashed in a public square, treated like a wretch until she made good with her harrowed, morally injured husband and bid him to take her in, promise to be willing and dutiful. 

Another door slammed. The fireplace howled and swallowed the flames, casting her in nothing more than the dim flickers of pine candles. Water dripped from her loose tresses and darkened the blue wool of her shoulders. Parting her entwined fingers, the embroidery cloth waved and wriggled free, reaching into the wind and catching hold of a gust to carry it off into the dark like a tumbling dove. 

Madwyn straightened, smoothed her skirts, and set her face. Her hem whispered against the rushing mats as she crossed into the hall and floated up a spiral stairway. Her babes cry deafened her as Madwyn opened the nursery door for the first time since she'd given the little lord life. 

“My Lady,” the nursemaid was red-faced and panicked, bouncing the curly-haired boy on her knee and smoothing over the tears on his cheeks. Madwyn approached, lifted the boy beneath the arms, pulling him out of the nursemaid's lap to take the fretting woman's place in the seat near the hearth. Nodding for the woman to go, she let the babe onto her skirts and pulled him close, feeling his cold little fingers scrabble around her neck. 

Speaking into his hair, she watched the fire, “we will be molded grain, you and I. Never perfect. Never obedient. We will sink into the earth without those roots which feed other men; make them strong.” The last word came out as a hiss. “Food for the brutes, but never to become one.” 

She leaned away, cradling the quieting babes head. His great blue eyes were wide on her with crying lips still and silent. “Don’t fear this life, little lord. Even the worst of times will pass. While others wage war, we shall be set free. What’s a little loudness when time will forget souls of our make? History won’t mark us.” she tapped the boy's nose. “ Let us not be strangled mice while trapped.”