Prologue continued

I recognized two of the men. The one in the lead was a huge man, a head taller than Father and half again broader, and huge of belly as well. In his mail and his heavy cloak he seemed to me, a boy, like a [WELSH TERM] giant. His horse, too, was the biggest I'd ever seen -- bigger than all but a few I've seen since, even in the great English and Frankish cavalries. The giant's name was Gryffyd and he'd been bringing us silver bars and leaving with satchels and chests full of silver coins for as long as I could remember. The other man had come only once before and I didn't know his name, but I knew his beard. It was braided into two tails, and those tails, each with a brown glass bead at its end, had been a curiosity to me that past summer, as had the man's strange way of speaking. Now they were a full hand longer and caked with snow and the ice from his breath and seemed more strange still, like tusks.

"You chose the devil's own time to come, Gryffyd," Father said.

"You think I chose it?" the giant said. He tugged the reins and his great horse slumped to a stop and shook the snow from its mein.

"Chose it or not, you've left a clear track all the way here," Father said.

"We're not fools, Cynwrig," Gryffd shot back. "We covered our track where the path leaves the road. And with all the drifting--"

"You shouldn't have come."

The four men dismounted. Gryffd stomped his huge boots to get some warmth flowing in his legs. Even off his horse he towered over us. "Llywelyn burned the English castle on the Ystwyth two months ago," he said. "He's getting ready to move against the English in Powys in the spring. He needs the coins now."

"He won't have any coins at all if the English find this place."

Gryffd shoved his reins toward me with a hand as big as an ax head, and I took them, and he swept past Father and me like a passing storm. "If we're going to argue, Cynwrig," he said, "at least extend me the hospitality of doing it around a warm fire." He stopped outside the door of our hovel, waiting, and after a defiant pause Father led him inside and he ducked through the low doorway into the warmth.