Chapter Text
Hiraeth - a word in Cymraeg (Welsh) that does not translate directly into English. According to the Welsh, it is impossible to describe in words because only the heart knows its meaning. It is a deep longing for somewhere, something or someone, but with an undertone of irretrievable loss. In modern times it's often used to express the longing for one's homeland.
~...~
The grate was pulled away from the opening of Brida's prison with a creak and a scrape of metal on stone, and a girl with elfin features peered down at her.
"Here," the strange girl whispered as she lowered a jug into the pit by a rope tied around its handle.
Brida regarded it with suspicion. It was impossible to tell how much time had passed in that black hole. Days? Weeks? However long it had been, she had ceased to feel thirst some time ago. But her lips were cracked and bleeding, and her mouth filled with ashes, so she knew that she must need it. But the Welsh had tricked her before. The man, Rhodri, reveled in his cruel taunts, and she had no reason to trust that this was any different.
"Please! There isn't much time!"
There were so many vicious things Brida would have liked to have told her if only the thought of speech didn't make her throat feel like it was on fire.
The girl looked back over her shoulder, then back down to Brida. Her fair brow was creased with concern, but her jaw set with stubbornness.
"Please," she said again. "For the child."
The child. Her child. Despite everything, the babe still moved inside her. It had continued to cling to life with such tenacity. Perhaps, Brida thought, it would be an insult to the Gods not to give such a fierce spirit its best chance.
She reached out for the jug. Weak and uncoordinated, her first attempt missed and sent it swinging. The girl quickly adjusted her grip, moving it closer. When she finally got hold of it, Brida still smelled it and was faintly surprised to find that it was clean water.
"Drink slowly, or you will make yourself ill."
Every bone in her body screamed for her to swallow every drop as fast as possible, but Brida knew she was right, so she forced herself to drink slowly. The jug was only about a third full, but it was still more than she had had in days. When she finished, she collapsed back against the wall. The mere act of drinking had taken almost all the energy she had left. The jug was quickly drawn back up.
"I will bring more when I can. But I don't know when. Everyone is in an uproar, and the hall is rarely empty. I'm sorry."
Brida rolled her eyes up to look at the girl once again as she slid the grate back into place. It closed with a clang, and she disappeared from view for a moment but then returned. Her hair swung around her face like a black curtain with her rapid movement and made her skin look all the more pallid by contrast.
"I will bring more when I can," she repeated.
There was a sound from far away, and the girl looked up with a flinch and was gone in an instant. She went so quickly that Brida briefly wondered if she had been her hamingja, come to finally bring her some good fortune. But no, the girl had spoken the Saxon tongue. So not a guardian spirit, but she had reminded Brida of something through the fog of dehydration and hunger. The snippets of overheard conversations and the loud boasts of that turd, Rhodri. The idiot thought he could crush her, but he had given her the one piece of knowledge she needed to keep going.
The Danes were coming.
~...~
"Where is she?!"
The Danes winced as their leader came roaring out of the hall. They had hoped that they would be able to locate their Welsh captive before Sigtryggr noticed her absence, but alas.
Gorm, one of the young warriors meant to be watching her, tried to reassure him, "Lord, she cannot have gone far. We will-"
"You will do nothing!" Sigtryggr rounded on him, snarling. "It seems to be what you do best! I will find her myself."
He stalked away, cursing every man and woman under the sun in general and the one in particular who seemed intent on driving him to madness. The men gathered in a small cluster, muttering amongst themselves as they watched him depart.
"How did she get out this time?"
"There were men outside the door the whole time."
"Could she have gone out the window?"
"And then what? Climbed over the damned wall?"
The men looked at each other in growing dismay and all together decided that, after all, perhaps it was best that they left the whole matter to their leader.
That very man made straight for the one creature he knew could, without fail, locate his elusive captive.
"Cafall!" he called as he approached the kennels. Sure enough, a large mass of wiry fur and witless excitement bounded into view.
The lady’s dog was, quite possibly, the stupidest animal Sigtryggr had ever met. Upon first meeting the Danish invaders, his first instinct had been utter joy at all the new friends he had discovered. But his first loyalty was ever to his mistress, Nest verch Rhodri. The young beast adored the young woman with every fiber of his massive body. Sigtryggr would never have allowed him to remain alive out of fear for his men's safety if he were any better of a guard dog. As it was, Cafall was almost entirely useless as anything but a very heavy and mobile rug.
The one thing that mildly endeared the animal to Sigtryggr was his unerring ability to locate his beloved mistress. Since taking the village of Aberffraw and the royal enclosure within, this skill had come in handy more than once thanks to the lady’s apparent inability to understand the simple fact that she was a captive and as such should be cowering in mortal terror wherever they put her.
Sigtryggr managed to fend off flailing limbs long enough to untie Cafall from his kennel, and without a word, the dog bounded off towards the gates.
In the past weeks, he'd seen a great deal more of the hills and forests of Wales than he had ever expected. At first sight, she had seemed frail and delicate. His men had dragged her into the hall with that stupid dog running around them, barking happily at the new game they appeared to be playing.
Her skin was pallid, and she was dressed plainly, but the color and quality of the garments spoke to her true status. She had not wept or screamed or fought, merely stood before him quietly while he took her in, hands folded politely in front of her.
"You," Brida said, squinting at the girl from where she rested, weak but still fierce. "You brought me water."
Nest nodded slowly.
"Why?"
She seemed perplexed by this question. Her gaze shifted down, and her head tilted as she put some thought into it before responding.
"It… seemed like the right thing to do."
Brida scoffed and then turned to Sigtryggr with a sneer. "I heard them talking. She is no common Christian whore. She is a royal Christian whore. She is particularly beloved by their King. He is her uncle, and the turd in the pit is her father."
Sigtryggr had felt an involuntary welling of sympathy at that news along with a whole host of other, more conflicted feelings. On the one hand, holding a beloved niece captive would dissuade the Welsh King from attacking too quickly, allowing time for him and his men to recuperate and send word to the Danelaw in the East of his arrival. Perhaps even give some of his fellow countrymen time to arrive and join him - a thought that came with its own measure of complicated emotions.
On the other hand, it also made him responsible for her safety. Any harm that came to her could come back on his head a thousandfold, and he was displeased to find that she had already suffered a prominent bruise to her lip.
"Did one of my men strike you?" he asked, taking her delicate, pointed chin between his fingers and tipping her head back to inspect the mark.
"I swear we did not," one of her captors protested, offended by the question. "She was like this when we found her."
Nest did not react with words, but her gaze had flickered to the pit where her father was now imprisoned. Sigtryggr followed her line of sight and wrinkled his nose in disgust.
"Why?"
She did not attempt to lie. "I tried to bring food to her," she replied, indicating Brida.
Arms held behind his back, Sigtryggr had strolled casually over to the pit and looked down at the man chained up inside.
"What kind of a man strikes his own daughter?"
"The kind whose daughter is a disobedient welp!" Rhodri shouted up.
Sigtryggr raised his eyebrows in mock surprise. This man couldn't seem to stop getting on his every last nerve. He would take no small amount of pleasure in seeing Brida take her slow revenge on him, removing all traces of pride and dignity from him as he had tried to do to her.
"I see. Well, if you have so little interest in her wellbeing, you will not mind if I take it upon myself to see that she is... cared for."
Rhodri's face turned a satisfying shade of purple with rage at this, and Sigtryggr was sure to smile in a way that suggested he imagined a great many ways he could pass the time with the man's daughter.
"If you lay one filthy hand on her-!"
Sigryggr turned away, kicking a few shards of broken pottery down the hole and making the Welshman yelp indignantly.
"Don't worry. I will treat her very well."
He had come back across the hall to where Nest stood, watching him with caution.
"My name is Sigtryggr," he said, crossing his arms over his chest and smiling down at her. "And you are my captive."
Nest had not once appeared particularly distressed by this idea. When he asked her some time later, she had simply shrugged her shoulders and said in that pleasantly slow, lilting accent, "When you walk the same path over and over, it begins to lose its excitement."
Looking back, he should have been warier at learning that this was the fourth time an enemy of her uncle had held her. "Or was it the fifth?" she frowned thoughtfully at the roof and muttered to herself. "Does that one count?"
It was only a matter of days before he'd learned better.
Nest had been sleeping on a small cot in the prince's chamber where her father had taken up residence while the King was away. The area's politics were apparently complex and tense, as Hywel had taken rulership of the isle after the previous king, his own cousin, had died in battle against the Saxons. The former king's sons had been sent into exile, and Hywel had spent a great deal of time there attempting to pacify the local landowners in the past few years.
So between those of her people who harbored resentment towards her uncle and the men from his own ships who were less than trustworthy, Sigtryggr felt there was good reason to keep a close eye on his captive for her own sake. And so he'd decided to keep her in the prince's chamber with him. This would further the narrative that he meant to take her as a concubine, which would have the dual benefit of keeping other men at a respectful distance, and absolutely infuriating Rhodri.
The unintended benefit he had discovered was that Nest herself was not entirely unamusing as a companion, especially during the long hours that passed while his men rested from their long journey. There was little else to occupy his time; he had few responsibilities and even fewer diversions. He'd taken to conversing with the young woman and found her surprisingly well educated.
King Hywel was a man who believed in learning, and Nest had been taught to read and write along with the most common languages encountered in their land along with his own children. She had been raised and educated in a nunnery since childhood. She could converse in English as easily as in Welsh and had learned a little of Sigtryggr's own tongue from the Christian Danes who came to the nunnery on pilgrimage. Their conversations had begun with him correcting her terrible pronunciation of his language and had quickly moved on to other subjects.
She maintained a strange sort of calm about her situation, even when petitioning him to allow the villagers to bury their dead. She had disregarded Brida's scoffs and kept her gaze fixed on him, waiting patiently until he finally agreed.
"Why do you not hate me? I have killed many of your people. My men even more," he had asked later on, over a game of draughts.
"It is not as if I do not care. But what good would hating you do now? Would it bring the dead back to life? I can only try and do what I can for the living, to ask you not to mistreat them. As for the rest," she shrugged, "It is in God's hands, and I will say my prayers for the dead and the living."
"If your God is so great, why do so many of your prayers go unanswered?"
Nest pursed her lips and frowned over her next move before responding carefully, "I was taught that God set us apart from the animals by giving us the freedom to choose for ourselves; to do good or evil. Some choose evil, and he does not interfere with that choice. Our reward for choosing good is in the next life."
Sigtryggr smiled wryly, "My people do not have such a belief. For most, the next life is merely that, another life. So we must find our own rewards."
"Is that what I shall be to you? A reward?"
"That depends. Do you plan to make my life here easy?"
"Not particularly."
He really should have taken her at her word.
Author's Notes
I'm setting it in Aberffraw for several reasons.
- Dinefwr Castle didn't exist at the time, so it’s no less historically accurate than the show to move the location of the action.
- I have watched too much Hinterland.
- I wanna.
I will be taking heavy liberties with how things happen in the show for historical and story reasons. I've had to read history books written in 1912, and I will USE it, dammit!
Cultural/Historical/Language Notes
I have striven at all times to portray the early medieval Welsh with the utmost respect. However, I am not Welsh myself and am always happy to receive criticism/feedback/advice from those who know more than I.
We have quite a lot of information about medieval Wales thanks to the Laws of Hywel Dda. However, I’ve definitely found conflicting interpretations of some of these laws from different scholars. I’ve chosen to go with the interpretations that are the most favorable to the kind of story I wanted to write.
The timelines of Hywel, Sigtryggr, and Edward just don’t match up as they’re shown in the show, so I’ve again given myself permission to fudge the historical timeline to make things fit. In some ways things will be shifted a little closer to “historical accuracy.” For example, Hywel’s relationship with the English wasn’t quite what is seen in the show, and generally it seems that he had a very respectful if not even deferential relationship with the King of England. At other times I’ve kept things as we see them in the show. Hywel didn’t have a brother named Rhodri, although the royal houses of Wales certainly didn’t have a lack of people of that name.
The Welsh ‘ll’ is one of the most difficult to reproduce sounds I’ve ever encountered. The best description I’ve seen is that it’s like an ‘L’ but with a ‘th’ right before it.
Llys - Medieval Wales was split between multiple countries much as England was at the same time. Each of these countries was split into cantrefs , with the maedref being the administrative center of each cantref. The king would travel between these throughout the year and stay in the royal enclosure known as the llys which would contain a hall, a chamber for prince, food house, stable, porch, barn, dormitory, and privy. When the king was absent the cantref would be governed by a lord, usually a relative of the king.