Read Online Rexanne Becnel by Where Magic Dwells - Free Book Online

look. “Why? What concern are they to you?”
    “They’re the offspring of English soldiers, are they not?”
    Wynne’s jaw clenched. “The bastards of a vile and cruel army,” she hissed, though not loud enough for the children to hear. “The forgotten by-blows of a heartless invading people.”
    For once, he was not able to completely hide his reaction. She saw a faint flush cross his jaw, and his throat worked as he swallowed hard. So she had made him uncomfortable. Good.
    “I am told your people do not hold a child’s parentage against him,” he responded, his tone low and mild in comparison with hers.
    “And I’m told your people do,” she snapped back.
    His gaze did not waver under her furious glare. “There are those of us born on the wrong side of the sheets who yet manage to rise above it.”
    “You?” she exclaimed. “Are you saying that you were bastard-born?”
    He nodded once, and for a moment Wynne stared at him in ill-disguised shock. She could see his admission had not come easy, and that fact touched her with unexpected sympathy. How foolish were the English, she thought. To blame a child for his parents’ actions was so unfair. The pain of it clearly lingered long after the child grew to adulthood.
    Yet she knew that she could not afford to let this man’s own troubled childhood affect her judgment. She forced herself to sound firm. “Be that as it may, your similarity of situation in no way gives you the right to pry into the lives of these children.”
    “Perhaps not. But the expressed wishes of one of their fathers does.”
    “Their fathers?” Wynne stared at him, not quite understanding what he meant. “What do you mean, ‘their fathers’?” Then she gasped, and her hands tightened into fists. “They have no fathers,” she snapped, hardly able to believe that anyone, even an Englishman, could believe that those men’s wishes mattered in the least to her.
    “One of them has a father who wants him,” the English knight countered with maddening persistence. “I’d like your help in determining just which one it is.”
    “A father who wants him?” she sputtered, still in shock. “A father who wants him? If that were not so poor a joke, I’d laugh in your face!”
    “ ’Tis not a joke. I have good reason to believe one of these children you raised was sired by my liege lord. He but wants the child of his loins.”
    “The child of rape, you mean. He gave up all rights to any child when he joined the godless horde that stormed across this land, killing, raping, and pillaging!”
    He had the good grace to pause at her angry words, but then he pushed on. “What’s done is done. Would you punish the child now by denying him the rights of his parentage?”
    At that very moment Rhys and Madoc came tumbling back toward them, racing to see who was the faster. Only by the most stringent effort was Wynne able to bury her burning emotions. But her hands balled into fists and her jaw tightened painfully as her eyes glared her bitter feelings at him. Though she held her tongue, however, her mind seethed with vengeance.
    Deny the child his parentage. What a fool this man was. Did he truly believe that anyone of Cymru would ever consider an English heritage valuable? Only the arrogant English would see it that way. And now this most arrogant of all Englishmen had come to her, wishing to take one of her children back to England with him!
    Had she all the abilities attributed to her by the gossips, she would have turned him into a viper then and there, or at least struck him down with an affliction of the gut. Maybe blinded him or caused his tongue to swell and thicken, then rot and fall out. But she did not possess such dark powers, and she’d never thought it such a pity as she did now.
    “Wynne, Wynne. Madoc didn’t wash with soaproot,”
    Isolde shouted as she, too, ran up. “He only wet his hands a very little, then wiped them on my skirt!”
    With a last cutting glare at