Brother Cadfael 18: The Summer of the Danes

would be highly content with the result of his embassage.
    "And now, my lord Owain," Gilbert pursued, seizing the mellowed moment for which he must have been waiting throughout the feast, "I ask your leave to introduce a petitioner, who comes asking your indulgence for a plea on behalf of another. My appointment here gives me some right, by virtue of my office, to speak for peace, between individual men as between peoples. It is not good that there should be anger between brothers. Just cause there may have been at the outset, but there should be a term to every outlawry, every quarrel. I ask an audience for an ambassador who speaks on behalf of your brother Cadwaladr, that you may be reconciled with him as is fitting, and restore him to his lost place in your favour. May I admit Bledri ap Rhys?"
    There was a brief, sharp silence, in which every eye turned upon the prince's face. Cadfael felt the young man beside him stiffen and quiver in bitter resentment of such a breach of hospitality, for clearly this had been planned deliberately without a word of warning to the prince, without any prior consultation, taking an unfair advantage of the courtesy such a man would undoubtedly show towards the host at whose table he was seated. Even had this audience been sought in private, Cuhelyn would have found it deeply offensive. To precipitate it thus publicly, in hall before the entire household, was a breach of courtesy only possible to an insensitive Norman set up in authority among a people of whom he had no understanding. But if the liberty was as displeasing to Owain as it was to Cuhelyn, he did not allow it to appear. He let the silence lie just long enough to leave the issue in doubt, and perhaps shake Gilbert's valiant self-assurance, and then he said clearly: "At your wish, my lord bishop, I will certainly hear Bledri ap Rhys. Every man has the right to ask and to be heard. Without prejudice to the outcome!"
    It was plain, as soon as the bishop's steward brought the petitioner into the hall, that he had not come straight from travel to ask for this audience. Somewhere about the bishop's enclave he had been waiting at ease for his entry here, and had prepared himself carefully, very fine and impressive in his dress and in his person, every grain of dust from the roads polished away. A tall, broad-shouldered, powerful man, black-haired and black-moustached, with an arrogant beak of a nose, and a bearing truculent rather than conciliatory. He swept with long strides into the centre of the open space fronting the dais, and made an elaborate obeisance in the general direction of prince and bishop. The gesture seemed to Cadfael to tend rather to the performer's own aggrandisement than to any particular reverence for those saluted. He had everyone's attention, and meant to retain it.
    "My lord prince, my lord bishop, your devout servant! I come as a petitioner here before you." He did not look the part, nor was his full, confident voice expressive of any such role.
    "So I have heard," said Owain. "You have something to ask of us. Ask it freely."
    "My lord, I was and am in fealty to your brother Cadwaladr, and I dare venture to speak for his right, in that he goes deprived of his lands, and made a stranger and disinherited in his own country. Whatever you may hold him guilty of, I dare to plead that such a penalty is more than he has deserved, and such as brother should not visit upon brother. And I ask of you that measure of generosity and forgiveness that should restore him his own again. He has endured this despoiling a year already, let that be enough, and set him up again in his lands of Ceredigion. The lord bishop will add his voice to mine for reconciliation."
    "The lord bishop has been before you," said Owain dryly, "and equally eloquent. I am not, and never have been, adamant against my brother, whatever follies he has committed, but murder is worse than folly, and requires a measure of penitence before forgiveness is due. The two, separated, are of no value, and where the one is not, I will not waste the other. Did Cadwaladr send you on this errand?"
    "No, my lord, and knows nothing of my coming. It is he who suffers deprivation, and I who appeal for his right to be restored. If he has done ill in the past, is that good reason for shutting him out from the possibility of doing well in the future? And what has been done to him is extreme, for he has been made an exile in his own country, without a toehold on his own