The Arglwydd Maelog did not deign to watch Cadogan's slow, painful rise from his knees. By the time the traveler was back on his feet, swaying slightly, his father was already issuing commands to one of his retainers, his voice once more the flat, indifferent rumble of distant thunder. The matter of Cadogan and the forsaken Barony of Glyndŵr was, it seemed, concluded. Dismissed.
As he turned to make the arduous journey back through the great hall, he caught the eye of the broader of the two young men on the dais – his half-brother? Brother? Cadogan's fractured memories offered no clear names, only a vague sense of long-standing animosity. The man offered a slow, deliberate smirk, a look of pure, unadulterated contempt that promised future trouble. The leaner one simply stared, his expression unreadable, before turning his attention back to the Arglwydd.
The walk back to his chamber, under the renewed, now perhaps pitying or scornful, gazes of the hall's occupants, was a fresh torment. Every muscle screamed, his head throbbed, but a new, cold fire burned within him, fueled by the Arglwydd's disdain and the impossible task ahead. Glyndŵr. Thorns, wolves, fearful men, and a murdered reeve. A barony of ghosts and lost causes.
Morfudd was waiting outside his door, her face a mask of anxiety. She said nothing as she helped him back to his pallet, her touch gentle but her silence heavy. Only when he was settled, propped up against the stone wall, did she speak, her voice barely a whisper. "Glyndŵr," she breathed, the name itself an exhalation of despair. "Arglwydd drugarog, Glyndŵr." Merciful Lord. It was not a prayer, but an expression of pure dismay. "You know of it?" he asked, his voice raspy. She nodded, her eyes wide with a fear that chilled him more than the room's damp. "It is a cursed place, Cadogan bach. The Old Ones… they say the earth there drinks blood and offers only sorrow. No man of Caer Maelog goes there willingly. Even the wolves walk with shadows at their heels."
A delightful prospect. "Supplies," he said, changing the subject before her litany of woes completely unnerved him. "The Arglwydd said…" Morfudd's face tightened. "Supplies," she repeated bitterly. "He offers you nothing, child. What I give you comes from my own small stores, what little I can beg or barter from the kitchens when Cook is in a generous mood." She gestured to a small, lumpy sack in the corner he hadn't noticed before. "Some dried meat, not much. A handful of hard bread. A skin of ale, likely watered. My herbs for your journey, for wounds and fever." She wrung her hands. "It is barely enough for three days, let alone to tame a wild land."
So, the Arglwydd's pronouncement of "supplies Morfudd deems you need" was another twist of the knife – effectively, nothing official. He was being cast out with the barest pretense of support. This confirmed the nature of the assignment: it was an expulsion, a sentence to a slow, miserable failure.
Later that day, as the light began to wane, a gruff guard appeared at his door. "Yr Arglwydd says your men await you in the lower bailey," he announced, his tone bored, making no effort to hide his disdain for the errand or its recipient. "Be quick about it. They've tasks elsewhere if you're too sick to lead them."
Lead them. The irony was a bitter pill. With Morfudd's reluctant help – she insisted on accompanying him, fussing over him like a mother hen with a chick too foolish to fear foxes – he made his way down winding, uneven stone steps into a small, muddy enclosure at the base of the keep.
Five men stood huddled near a crumbling section of the outer wall, their postures sullen, their expressions ranging from apathy to outright resentment. They were a motley collection, clad in mismatched, patched leather and dull, dented scraps of mail. Their weapons, leaning against the wall, were equally uninspiring: a couple of chipped spears, a rusty axe, a shortbow with a frayed string, and one surprisingly decent, though unadorned, sword.
These were not the pride of Caer Maelog's warband. These were the leavings, the expendable, the men the Arglwydd could indeed "spare." As he approached, their conversation, a low grumble, ceased. They turned, and he saw their faces more clearly in the fading light – hard, weathered, and uniformly unimpressed. One, a burly man with a scarred face and a single, milky eye, spat onto the mud at Cadogan's feet. "So this is the lordling who leads us to our graves in Glyndŵr," the one-eyed man said, his voice a gravelly sneer. The Brythonic was heavily accented, crude, but the meaning was unmistakable.
The others shifted, their resentment a palpable force. They were being sent to a death-trap under the command of a boy barely out of his sickbed, a "Cadogan bach" whose own father clearly held him in contempt. His mind raced. This was his first test of leadership, and his resources were a half-starved, sickly body, a rudimentary grasp of their language, and the sheer, desperate audacity of his 21st-century will. He could not show weakness. He could not afford to.
He drew himself up to Cadogan's full, unimpressive height, meeting the one-eyed man's hostile gaze. He ignored the insult, the spit in the mud. "I am Cadogan ap Maelog," he said, his voice thin but carrying in the sudden quiet. He used the formal patronymic, a small claim to an authority he didn't feel. "You are assigned to me. We leave for Glyndŵr at dawn." He looked at each of them in turn, his gaze lingering for a moment, trying to convey a seriousness, a resolve, that might penetrate their hostility. "Know this," he added, the words coming slowly but with conviction, "Glyndŵr may be a grave for some. It will not be for me. And perhaps," he offered the faintest, most dangerous sliver of a different future, "it need not be for those who follow with a will to work, and to live."
A scoff from the one-eyed man. The others remained sullen, but a flicker of something – surprise? Uncertainty? – passed through one or two of their eyes. It was infinitesimally small, but it was there. He had no illusions. These men were not loyal. They were not skilled. They were, like Glyndŵr itself, a problem to be solved, a raw, unpromising material from which something – anything – had to be forged.
"Rest, if you can call it that," he said, his strength beginning to waver. "Dawn comes too soon." He turned, before his legs could betray him, and with Morfudd hovering anxiously, began the slow climb back to his chamber, leaving the five scorned men to their bitter thoughts in the darkening bailey. The weight of Glyndŵr, and of the men he was supposed to lead there, settled upon him, heavier than any stone.