Archive of Our Own

From under the apple tree, across the garden, Creiddylad sees him, and it hits her like an arrow to the chest. 

They have been here since noon, her and her maids, lounging about the grass with their sleeves rolled to elbows, kirtles hitched to knees, hair slipping out of sleepy braids. Cheese, pickled fruits and half-eaten bread lie forgotten at their feet, and they have crowned her with a garland of flowers so that every laugh or bob of her head sprinkles petals onto her lap like blossoms. Around them the castle heaves with sound, but here in the garden they have found a momentary paradise: an intimate, iridescent world like the inside of a bubble. He should not be privy to it and as he breaks away from the shadows of the cloisters, great hunting dog, Dormarch, at his heel, she knows he knows that.

Creiddylad stands in greeting, shielding her face against the sunlight. The bubble bursts; white faced, her maids scrabble to make themselves decent, frantically tugging sleeves over wrists and skirts back over shins. When their mistress dismisses them with a soft word, they gather what they can of their picnic and scatter like sparrows back to the safety of the women’s quarters. Gulls descend at once to tear, shrieking, at the abandoned scraps.

"This is a pleasant surprise," she says. One round-faced maid lingers, eyes flitting between the dog and its master. "Thank you, you may leave us now,” Creiddylad tells the girl. The gulls shriek and keen. The ropey muscles of Dormarch’s pale neck tighten. “Come, Gwyn, it’s a lovely afternoon. Shall we walk?”

The maid hesitates, the battle between instinct and obedience playing out in the set of her brow and the stiffness of her lips until eventually, with a last glance behind, she leaves.

As they set out, Creiddylad does not offer her arm to Gwyn as she might have done once, when they were younger. There is a distance between them which has been growing with the passing years, once a crack, now a dusty riverbed winding through the landscape of their relationship like a scar, and they both know their physical proximity now will do little to heal it. Still, the uneasiness of his silence as they walk is an invitation for idle conversation that she cannot resist.

“Spring came early this year,” she says as they pass the bustling stables and storerooms, through the blue shadows of the gatehouse, and into the brilliant world beyond. By the lake, a heron is picking its way through the rushes, head poised lance-like on serpentine neck. The sight of Dormarch sends it away in a flurry of wings, smaller, smaller, until it is like a crane fly against the cloudless sky.

Gwyn follows a step behind her, over the bridge and along the dirt path. The verges of long grass here are vibrant with wildflowers and buzzing insects, and fat sheep freckle the distant fields like daisies. When Creiddylad glances back, she finds she has trailed petals from her crown of flowers, like tiny footsteps, all white and purple and pink.

“You should have seen the daffodils, Gwyn,” she says, skimming a hand over the grass. By the path, there is a lonely huddle of them, drooped and late blooming. Dipping down, she breaks off one yellow head. She can feel Gwyn’s eyes on her but she does not lift her gaze to meet them.

Before, she might have brushed aside his pale hair and tucked that daffodil playfully behind his ear. But he has grown into a stranger, tall and broad-shouldered, and so she turns the flower over in her hand instead, letting the anxious thrum of her heartbeat roll through her like a tide.

He falls into step beside her.

"It was not an easy winter,” she goes on, the words coming carelessly, anything to fill the emptiness. They dip under the fluffy catkins of a birch tree, past a patch of cowslips nodding in the afternoon light; and when the path grows ragged with brambles, she does not reach for his arm to steady herself. “Some of father’s servants died, poor things, and Cousin Branwen too has been so very unwell. They sent her here for a time, away from Harlech, away from the sea wind. You know, we’ve entertained a great many visitors this past year. Gwallog, even, with your little niece. Knocking about father’s halls, she was, like a black-eyed coblyn.”

Creiddylad laughs then, without really knowing why, and from the bushes, somewhere out of sight, comes the cackled response of a magpie. The first cool breeze of the day rustles through the grass, prickling at her neck. At her side, Dormarch yawns with a flash of curved white teeth and a blood-red tongue.

“Edern visited us too, some months ago,” she says, “I hear he is in Ireland now but I pray he returns for the wedding."

Their eyes meet.

It is brief but she feels it like the nick of a knife and knows she has stumbled into the very snare she was trying to avoid. The chill wind rises, knocks the earth askew; and when at last he speaks, it is not in the voice from her childhood but the voice of something deeper, something of the forest, the mist, the dark places.

“Creiddylad,” he says, “this betrothal—”

"Please. Is this truly the first thing you have to say to me?"

She is turning the daffodil over in her hands, clammy sweat of her palms mixing with its sticky sap.

“I was not consulted,” he says. “You know I never would have agreed to this marriage.”

"Why should you have been consulted? There is no more to be said. Please, the arrangements are already made.” Again comes the magpie’s call, sharper, colder, and she cannot stop herself from adding, quietly: “How foolish I was to think you might have been happy for me."

The canopy of trees ahead is knitted together into a vaulted ceiling of green. They pass under it, through the dappled shade and into the light of the other side, accompanied only by the sounds of the country and their footsteps and the march of her pulse in her ears. She is holding her breath, waiting for his retort. Eventually it comes.

"We would be good together, Creiddylad. Whatever luxury your heart desires, whatever fleeting whim, let me give it to you."

Each word chisels at the riverbed of their relationship, widens it into a gully.

"I ask only for your blessing to marry whomsoever I choose," she says.

"You know well that is not what I meant."

"What do you mean, then? Look at us. We would destroy each other."

All love is some kind of destruction, she has convinced herself, an endless undoing and recreating to fit around another person, to bend dutifully to whatever role has been pushed onto her: sister, daughter, wife. Soon she will rebuild herself to the pattern of Gwythyr’s wildfire passion and find eventual comfort in that new identity. There is no comfort to be found in the man beside her, though. Too desolate, too consuming, is that destruction that she knows if she were to draw too close to it, to let herself be sucked under those waves, she could never be remade.

He almost laughs then, eyes flashing.

“Is so relentless a love such a terrible thing?”

Creiddylad turns on her heel. Underfoot, the dirt path crunches. Her father's castle spins into her line of sight, the trail of flowers beckoning her home. But Gwyn's fingers find her wrist in a snap. He holds her fast.

Fear has always been the map by which she has navigated their relationship, learning by heart every black mire of his stubbornness, every proud mountaintop. Until now it was only ever with scornful eyes or his glib tongue or carefully planned silences that he commanded her obedience. Never before would he have dared be so bold as to grab her.

Her heart is racing, her free hand clenched so tight that the daffodil is crushed between her fingers. He makes no further move towards her. They stand frozen, Gwyn between her and the sun, his hair luminous. In his shadow, there is no warmth.

When finally she yanks her arm free, skin pink and throbbing, Creiddylad knows it is only because he has allowed it. That realisation makes her sick, and that sickness is carving the gully between them into a ravine.

She discards the crushed daffodil, wiping her palm on her skirt, avoiding his gaze. They both know the unspoken agreement in her release was that she would not run, so when he gestures with open arms for her to continue walking, she does.

Wordlessly they go, weaving through the trees and long grass, over crumbling bridges, by streams bubbling with glassy water. But her mind is far from quiet and there is only so long she can hold her tongue.

“Your words are not those of a man who loves me,” Creiddylad says at last.

Dormarch’s fur bristles.

"How would you have me speak then?” Gwyn says. “Would you put another man’s words in my mouth? What sweet nothings he must have whispered to turn you into such a loyal hound.”

“A loyal hound!” she spits back. “Is that not what you would also make of me?” Her cheeks are burning, her heart pounding in her throat, cold sweat clinging to every part of her. "Am I a weapon to be passed from man to man, claimed by whoever finds they can best wield me? Am I a nation to be conquered? A treasure to be stolen? Is that how you see me?"

Gwyn says nothing, and that silence is splintering the ground between them, that ravine tumbling open into a great, desolate valley.

Before them, the forest looms, purple as a bruise. A sea of bluebells rolls in the wind and the air is sickly with the pungent garlic stink of ramsons and the dark, loamy smell of rotten leaves. Gnarled trees hunch like crouching hunters, unsuspecting deer picking their way between them. Her father's castle is but a grey smudge against the distant treeline now, where her maids await her return.

Dormarch’s ears swivel. He fidgets impatiently, a growl rumbling through his body. At his master’s signal, he goes into the woods like a ghost.

Gwyn draws up before her. He is so close she sees herself in the sea-mist paleness of his eyes, feels his breath on her hair. She holds his gaze. Her anger has given her the clarity to see it, that splinter of his own weakness, and for the first time in her life she is whittling it into a weapon of her own.

"Do not marry Gwythyr, Creiddylad,” he says. “Do not force my hand. I will not get down and beg you."

Her mouth is a sharp line. "You already are."

It is an arrow to the chest but this time it was Creiddylad who loosed it, and she can see in his face that the barbed tip has found its mark.

“Let Gwythyr come then!” he rages. “Bring his armies. Even as they still breathe, I will carve their flesh from their bones and torture their own sons into such madness that they beg like starving men for a taste of it! Believe me, this whole world will be dragged into the depths of Hell before I see you marry him. In your name I will slice your little maids open and feed their steaming entrails to my dogs. And as for Gwythyr! With God as my witness, Creiddylad, I will mount his bloody head upon the frame of our very marriage bed. Listen well! I promise you this: you will know despair before you know his touch.”

In his uncontrolled fury and spluttered threats, she almost recognises him: that boy she once knew, rendered weak by his own powerlessness. But it is over. Things are different now. There was a time when, in their childish games and disagreements, she would have bartered for his forgiveness with tears and compliance. She knows he is desperate for that now, for her to soften obediently into something forgiving around his every jagged edge, until he has moulded her to the shape of him. That time has long passed. He is not the only one who has grown into a stranger. 

She holds his gaze still. From somewhere in the forest comes the scuffle of a chase, then the swan-song shriek of a rabbit is silenced by Dormarch’s teeth. She does not flinch.

"And what then, Gwyn?” says Creiddylad. “When the world has met its ruin by your hand and everyone we love has been ground to dust, will you be contented at last? And when I resist you still? Will you drag me by my hair into the dirt and the wildflowers? We are alone. Why not do it now?"

Between them, that yawning valley cracks into an ocean, a thousand leagues of peaked black waves breaking against enemy cliffs. Every memory of their past is eroding into it, rotting things dashing against the rocks, food for ravenous gulls.

This time it is he who makes to leave. She feels the ghost of his grip on her wrist still, sees the faint outline of his fingers, and she does not stop him.

"I will never be yours, Gwyn," Creiddylad shouts at his retreating back, voice swallowed by the forest. Even as he melts into the mist, Dormarch beside him, she knows he can hear her. “That is my promise to you. Until the end of days, I will not be yours. I will never be yours.”

She stands in the shadows, taming her own breathing, feeling the cold sweat subside. Her hair has come loose, flower crown gone. Through the dense trees, the rising vapour of evening is coming like a wave across the fields, a great creeping tide. If she must be undone and remade, she thinks, let her be stronger, let her bones be broken and reset as steel. Let her be a knife, an arrow.

For now he is gone, though. She is alone and, as she follows that trail of flowers home, she knows her own path is mapped. She will make good on her promise.

But, when the time comes, so will he.