But if others were to suffer, who was she to be spared? She had been an agent in creating this conflict. To leave now, to hide in the mountains and leave Wales eventually, would be the final, and most hideous, betrayal.

She did not welcome the clarity of her choice, but she could not deny the inevitable decision it forced on her. Divided heart or not, she knew what she had to do.

“I do not need meat. Let the children have the chicken. Before we feast, however, I need a scrap of parchment to write on,” she said.

“We have no parchment here. Not even in the church.”

“How do you record baptisms and deaths?”

“There’s a linen that the priest writes on when he comes. Problem is, it fades fast, so most don’t know when they were born.” He chuckled and patted his chest. “Some say I am over eighty, some say only sixty. I say somewhere in between. I remember Llywelyn’s war, but I was a youth then. As if it matters. When you are young, you are young. If you get old, you are old. Not the birthing that counts, nor the dying, but the living.”

There was wisdom in his words. They soothed her, and reinforced the decision she had made. “Please find me some linen, just a scrap, and a means to write on it. I will also need a brave man to carry what I write.”

“We can burn sticks for the writing, I suppose. But the men left are slow and feeble. If not, they would be with the banner of the dragon.”

“Is there no mule in the village to carry a man?”

“There were two, but they were taken, along with half the pigs.”

So Carwyn’s little army had not just been living off the land, but requisitioning from the villagers. “Have more than a few animals been taken?”

His face fell, and he made a little shrug. “Some grain. And word has it there was trouble with some girls in the next valley. Such things happen.”

Her back instinctively stiffened. Despite what Ifan said, there were some things that should not happen, no matter how common they might be during war, and this was one of them.

Her misgivings about her course of action disappeared at once. Overhunting the forests was one thing, and taking the people’s livestock another. This transgression could not be excused on any grounds. Her father’s men needed her, for many reasons.

“There’s my granddaughter,” the elder said. “She knows the hills as well as any man, and is strong and quick. She will run where you want her to go with this message of yours.”

A bit of linen was found, and the sticks were burnt. Nesta banished everyone from the cottage while she wrote her message.