Page 4 of Wolfehound
“My lord?” he finally said.
Colm’s eyes were closed, indicative of his exhaustion now that he’d spent so much energy speaking on something he’d never told anyone. Not even his wife. But he was one of the very few who knew the truth. He couldn’t take it to his grave because if he did and Gwenllian did indeed produce sons, the deaths of those killed in the battles that would undoubtedly come would be on him because he knew everything.
And he hadn’t told the truth.
He’d been wrestling with the dilemma for twenty years.
“Only a handful of us knew the truth,” he finally said. “Four or five at the most. Three that knew are dead.”
“Who is that?”
“William de Wolfe and his closest friends, Paris de Norville, Lord Bowmont, and Sir Kieran Hage,” Colm murmured. His strength was fading. “I was the fourth. There is a fifth.”
“Who is that?”
“The knight who raised Gwenllian as his daughter.”
“What is his name?”
There was the question. Colm had told St. Zosimus his deepest secret for a reason, but now that the priest had asked for the last key piece of information, he was oddly hesitant. He didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because he’d be betraying a man he’d once served with, a man he considered a friend. He knew St. Zosimus was going to take this revelation straight to the king. He knew that meant his friend, the one who had raised Gwenllian as his own, would be in a good deal of trouble. But the reality was that the man had done something he should not have, knowing full well the consequences.
Betray his friend?
Or betray his country?
Colm made the only choice he could.
He told him.
PART ONE
THE PRINCESS OF GHOSTS ANDDRAGONS
CHAPTER ONE
Nanhysglain, Wales
Year of Our Lord 1282
Twenty Years Earlier
“What do youintend to do with the children?”
The question came from Paris de Norville, captain of the army from Northwood Castle in Northumberland. He had directed it to the Earl of Warenton, William de Wolfe, his best friend in the entire world but also a man who had been fueled by rage and hatred for the past six months. Ever since losing one of his sons, James, in an ambush in Llandeilo, Wales, William had been inconsolable.
The man was bent on revenge.
Unfortunately, that revenge was now focused on several small children, all offspring of the Welsh princes who had taken his son from him. The final battle had ended today, in the wilds of Wales, after chasing the scattered Welsh princes. It had no longer been a battle, but a hunt. One prince had been killed and now… now, they had the last one, cornered in a bog and brought to his knees. This was it, the moment they’d been waiting for.
The end.
But it was not without complications.
Complications that included the next generation of Welsh royalty, children of the princes. One infant, two small girls, and two small boys, all of them under the guardianship of Dafydd ap Gruffudd, brother of Llywelyn the Last, a man who had been betrayed and then executed by a gang of enraged Englishmen. Though William hadn’t been part of the betrayal, he hadn’t done anything to stop it. War was vicious by nature. But he had been responsible for the capture of the brother of the man responsible for his son’s death. Dafydd, and the children, were all his prisoners now.
God help them.
And it was something that concerned Paris greatly. He’d known William since they had been children, closer than brothers, and he’d never seen the man so… bitter. That was the best way to describe it. And William’s sons—Scott, Troy, and Patrick, his eldest boys—spoke in hushed whispers about their father these days. They’d never seen him like this, not ever. William de Wolfe was, if nothing else, a man who was consummately in control, always fair, always rational, and always with a heart of compassion.
