Tale of Gwyn Read Online Free

bold enough, brave enough, to stand for the poor when the Lords get greedy, or when times are bad?” the old woman asked them.
    Gwyn shrugged.
    â€œAnd if I told you I had seen him once?”
    Gwyn didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want to hurt the old woman’s feelings.
    â€œOsh aye, then, and maybe I didn’t; it was so long ago I wasn’t even as old as yourself. I never know what’s memory and what’s dreams, not anymore.”
    â€œWe’d best be on, or it’ll be dark before we get back.” Gwyn changed the subject. “My mother worries,” she explained.
    â€œShe always was a worrier, that I remember clearly,” the crone said. “And you’ll have eight more miles along the Way for her to worry about, and she’ll be right to worry, these days.”
    They trudged through the snow, Tad behind and the old woman on Gwyn’s arm. “You’ll have a mug of nanny’s warm milk before you go on again,” the old woman said to Gwyn. “You’ll warm your hands at our fire. And I could find an apple for a boy, even in this winter.” She turned to look at Tad, sulking along behind them.
    He opened his mouth to tell her that they had baskets of apples in their cellar and bins filled with potatoes and onions, but Gwyn glared at him. He snapped his mouth shut, but he might as well have spoken, Gwyn saw, looking down at the old lady’s wrinkled face.
    She didn’t know what had happened to Tad, to make him the way he was. He was as bad as a Lord, the way he acted. He hadn’t been whipped enough, he hadn’t been given enough work—but her mother had been so afraid to lose him and Da had given way to her in everything concerning Tad. Well, her father had waited so long for a son and had suffered the loss of two before Tad had been born. Her mother too, although neither of them spoke of it, had watched anxiously over Tad during his first years, keeping him in during bad weather, keeping him away from other children when there was contagion nearby, nursing him night after night when his little body wracked with the cough that brought up any food he got down. And Tad, unlike his two brothers, had turned three, then four, and on. Gwyn’s hand often itched to smack him as he rested beside a fire while others worked, but she knew why her parents cherished him so. She had lain awake for the three nights her mother keened over the last, dead within a week of being born, dead in the morning who had been alive the night before. She had seen Da’s helplessness before her mother’s grief, and his own grief, too, with no son to inherit the Inn.
    As they came nearer to the little house, Gwyn heard the old woman take in a sharp breath and felt her stumble as she tried to rush forward. Gwyn looked up from the snow underfoot to see a dark shape flat on the snow, motionless. The door of the hut stood open. Smoke rose in a scrawny curl from the chimney. They hurried forward, ignoring Tad’s protests.
    The dark shape was a dog, a brown and black dog with bones jutting out under his coat and his blood dried on the snow around him. The snow near the door was trampled with footprints. The old woman didn’t look twice at the dog, but stumbled up to the door and through it. Gwyn hesitated, looking down at the dead animal while Tad caught up to her.
    â€œLet’s go home, Gwyn,” he asked, pleading.
    Gwyn just stood there. It was a skinny, scruffy dog, and it was hungry before it died.
    â€œSomething bad has happened, Gwyn,” Tad whispered at her. “We can’t go in there.”
    Gwyn nodded her head, then followed the old woman into the house. She didn’t know, really, why she did that. She could have put the basket down on the doorstep and fled. Whatever had happened, there was nothing she could do now.
    Inside, the air was chilly. Gwyn saw, in the one room, a fire burned down to bright ashes, a rough