October 26th, 513 CE

Billowing clouds of smoke began to black out the sky as Lleu finished preparations for his spur of the moment plan, which mostly amounted to covering Gwyn’s hair with an off-green curtain and hiding his own face beneath his hood.

“I still don’t like this,” I said, eyeing a lock of brown hair dangling down the side of Gwyn’s face. Osa quickly stuffed it back into the cloth wrapped around his head, but the plan still seemed a bit too simple and fragile for what we were going to do.

“Everything will be fine,” Lleu said. “Are we ready?” That air of confidence he always seemed to have as bright as ever. It was really beginning to piss me off.

“Ready,” Osa said uncertainly, and I shared a wary glance with my brother. Even he seemed unsettled by this plan.

“Let's go then,” Lleu said, flashing a reassuring grin and pulling the hood of his cloak over his head.

I put my arm around Gwyn’s shoulder, gripping my harp close with my other hand. Lleu took Osa’s arm, then the three of us rushed from the alley as if fleeing from the flames, which we sort of were. As per Lleu’s instruction we ran straight towards the group of soldiers, working our way through the gathered crowd of people on the verge of panicking.

“Stay back!” One of the sailors was shouting over the noise of the crowd, though I couldn’t make out which one. The sailors all stood in two orderly rows, hands on the ball-like pommels of their swords as people shouted at them. The aura of fear was practically suffocating.

“Let us through!” Lleu shouted over the ambient rumble of angry voices, pushing Gwyn and I closer to the line of sailors as he and Osa moved forward. “At least let us get to one of the fishing boats!”

“Nobody leaves until we get the boy,” one of the soldiers said, a man with a long twisted scar running down the length of his nose.

“This boy?” Lleu asked, pulling the scrap of curtain from Gwyn’s head, letting his jaw length hair fall out in a mess of brown flecked with wisps of gray.

The sailor blinked, then a smile spread across his splitting lips. “Hey, boss!” He called to someone else, and another one of the sailors broke from his spot in the second line and approached. Meanwhile the people around us were beginning to stare at Gwyn's hair, soft muttering coming from those immediately behind us.

I scowled. They’d all known this boy for years, yet now that they were under attack, they were all looking at him as they might have a fine strip of beef. I scowled at them, but Osa put a hand on my shoulder and shook her head. I wanted to argue with her, but a glance at the new sailor made me stop.

He was the man who’d left the roman’s ship with the captain. So, he was the ship's lieutenant?

“What is it?” The lieutenant said, a frown on his face as he neared us.

“This one, boss,”the sailor said. “He’s got the hair.”

The lieutenant shifted his gaze to us, looking Gwyn up and down before glancing to Lleu, Osa, then finally me.

“You,” he said, eyes narrowing, and I flinched, the frown on his lips translated into that one word. “The captain was supposed to be following you. Where is he?” He glanced back to Gwyn whose face was increasingly pale, then continued, “and why did you lie to him?”

I swallowed hard. Lleu’s hand was suddenly on my arm. “Are you-” he began, speaking towards the lieutenant, but I spoke over him.

“I’m sorry,” I said in a rush, my fear helping with the lie I was about to spin. “He caught us when I tried to warn my friends. He told us to come here, that he was going to have some more fun before leaving. Please sir, don’t hurt me, I did as he asked!” I felt Lleu’s hand tighten on my arm as I spoke, my heart pounding in my ears as I internally prayed for the man to believe me.

After a moment he sighed, then shook his head. “That sounds like the captain. Very well, follow me.” He turned and started off towards the trireme with the dog’s head sail, parting a line through the men for us to follow after him. “Men, to the ship!” He called, and slowly the sailor’s began to pull people away from the crowd, marching backwards along the dock behind us.

The crowd moved forward as the sailors moved back, following them along the pier, voices rising louder and louder, drawing attention from the longship opposite the trireme. Sailor’s began to mass at the other ship’s rail as those from the Romans’ vessel loweder a plank towards the dock. Casually, Lleu drew back the hood of his cloak, letting his rose gold hair flow free, then drew his sword and stabbed the lieutenant in the leg.

The man’s eyes bulged and a scream tore itself from his lips as he collapsed to the dock. In an instant Roman sailors were drawing their blades and people began shouting louder from the encroaching crowd. The groan of wood sounded from above and I looked up in time to see several sailors from the longship swinging from their vessel on thick ropes, swords and spears drawn as they fell upon the enemy, knocking people to the ground and slashing with a wild yet somehow controlled ferocity.

I put down my small harp and gripped the hilt of my belt-knife as the Romans pressed closer around us. The lieutenant groaned and spat curses at Lleu’s feet, and Lleu gave Gwyn and I a look, jerking his head towards the prone and bleeding man. We moved forward, grabbing him by his thick arms and lifting the lieutenant to his feet, the sudden blood loss and pain leaving him unsteady and easy to contain.

Osa quickly set about binding the gushing wound in his leg as Lleu raised his sword to the surrounding soldiers and cried, “stop!” Several men frowned at him, but it was as if his voice carried some physical force, locking everyone in place and silencing the crowd dock, the distant roar of flames and screaming suddenly audible.

“Let us go,” Lleu continued, his voice still carrying, but now lined with more diplomacy than command. “Let us go, and we will release this man safely back into your care. Harm me or mine in any way, however, and your boss dies!”

Several of the Romans glanced to one another, some looking at the half dozen men sprawled out on the dock beneath the Welsh sailors, some already bleeding out.

“Fuck you!” Someone shouted, dousing the area in a sudden anxious tension. Then a man raised his blade and charged one of the welsh sailors.

“Gods’ damn it all,'' Lleu growled, hefting his blade to defend himself as one after another the Romans threw themselves back into the fray.

Beside me I suddenly realized that Gwyn was holding his belt knife in his free hand and was raising it to the Lieutenant's neck.

“Wait,” I tried to say, but I was too slow. Gwyn’s knife scored a quick thin line of red across the man’s neck, and a moment later a fountain of red arced in a loose spray from the wound, spaying Osa where she still knelt bandaging the man’s leg.

She cried out in shot, falling away into the old planks, and I inwardly cursed as a man’s boot nearly connected with her head. I let the lieutenant's corpse go, pushing both it and Gwyn away from me as I leapt forward and helped Osa back to her feet.

“Damn it, Gwyn” I growled, snatching up my harp once more, holding it close as I gestured for Osa to stand behind me and drew my knife. Already a small group of welsh were fighting beside Lleu, forming a small circle of safety around us as the fighting grew intense. Looking over the narrow dock I realized that most of the crowd of citizens had dispersed, no doubt afraid of being caught up in the struggle. I couldn’t blame them. I was already in the middle of it and scared shitless by the sheer volume of carnage.

The fight was over in only a few minutes, the Welsh sailors outnumbering the Romans nearly four to one. Lleu was again soaked in more blood than I’d ever seen on a man before, his boots leaving red footprints on the dark timber’s as he returned to us.

“Come,” he said, gesturing towards the longship. “My men have already lowered the plank, we only wait for our prince and his friends to board, then we will be off.”

I glanced from the tall fair haired man, to the corpses strewn across the docks, to the town blazing red and shrouded by a cloud of black and gray ash behind him, and shook my head. I glanced at my brother, finding Gwyn pale and shaking, but doing his best to hide it. He’d killed before, so had I, and we’d seen plenty of times before, so I wasn’t sure why he looked so upset now.

“What is it?” I asked gently, putting a hand on his arm and looking him in the eye, though he wasn’t meeting my gaze. I don’t think I’d ever seen him look so distraught before.

“There,” he said after a moment, pointing. I turned to look, and found a line of people dressed in tunic’s laying dead or dying, their clothes marking them as farmers and laborers, not sailors or soldiers.

“Oh,” I said slowly, a knot of remorse and hate twisting itself through my guts at the sight of my neighbors and friends lying dead for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Don’t look at that,” I said, putting a hand to my brother’s cheek and trying to gently turn his head away.

“I can’t not look at them,” Gwyn said, and I could hear the anger in his voice like the distant rumble of drums. “They were my people. I might not have been their king, or even a leader, but they were my people, and they deserved better.”

I let his words sink in for a moment, then returned my gaze to the line of corpses, trying to recall the names of each face I could make out among the mass of dead.

“We must leave,” Lleu said from the side, not an ounce of patience in his voice. “Come, there is little time left now.”

“We should bury them,” Gwyn said, to which Lleu frowned.

“There isn’t enough-” Lleu began, but I cut him off.

“There should be enough time to ensure that their bodies will at least burn when the flames reach this far,” I said, my voice curiously steady and calm. “It is the least we should do for dragging them into a conflict they weren’t even aware of.”

Lleu sighed, but nodded. “My apologies, my lord,” he said to Gwyn. “You are right of course. Come, let us be quick about it then.”

My brother gave me an appreciative smile full of remorse as Lleu turned away, and I gave him a matching smile in return before we set about our grim task. Of the dozen or so injured and dead from the people of Coronium, we found four who would survive with help from Osa’s care, and two whose throats were bled to spare them from their suffering. Gwyn insisted he do it himself, but in the end it was both of us who drove those deep cuts through their flesh.

It didn’t take long to line the dead on pallets of dry wood in the fire’s path and load the survivors onto Lleu’s ship with the help of the Welsh sailors. The work was done in almost complete silence, a grim haze lingering in the smoky air as we worked. It took barely an hour before we were pushing away from the dock.

We set out a good distance from the town and watched as the flames crawled forward, engulfing the last of the building’s, then finally the dock in a smear of orange, yellow, red, gray, and black.

With no prompting I lifted my harp and began to play, the strings humming out a dark and heavy dirge to send the poor souls lost to the blaze and the Romans’ wrathful ways. The ship was doused in a respectful silence as I played, one song trailing into another, my voice sometimes singing in Welsh and sometimes in Latin, until finally the sun set, my fingers ached, and my throat grew sore, my voice hoarse.

I stood there in the center of the ship, breathing hard with exertion as the Lleu gave the order to set sail and begin rowing, sailor’s springing to life in a chaotic rush of noise that drowned out the last lingering whispers of music. I slumped forward, Osa sliding my arm around my shoulder before I could fall, Gwyn catching my harp as it slipped from my fingers.

Everything after that became a blur as I was led away from the center of the deck to the back of the ship where most of the cargo was stored in barrels and crates. I vaguely recalled Osa and my brother helping to lay me down before the world went dark, and I was submerged into a dreamless sleep.