She came sooner than I had thought; almost too soon, for I was not quite ready for her. One of the reasons I had sought to entice her to come out to me was that I deemed Saltcoats too well warded (also Morgan had ordered me not to go within), and that did I venture inside its walls not only would my magical protection be violate but perhaps I should be cut off from outside sensing (and help, if needed). As it turned out, I did right to fear so.
"Well, bootmaker," came the voice from without, unnervingly like my Morgan’s, so that I startled to hear (even though I had been braced for just that happening), and whanged my thumb with the little tapper.
Marguessan had paused outside the door of the open-sided work-shed where for the past three days I had ensconced myself. I did not look up from the boot I was carefully renailing; but I could sense her suspicion, and retreated at once into the eidolon of Rhobat the humble cobbler, built it up with bardic skill, sent myself very far from Taliesin Glyndour…
"Highness!" I said, bowing deeply and awkwardly, hand on heart, not as one who was ‘customed to such gestures, praying it would pass. "An honor—so sorry for the inadequacies—my fault utterly—pray come in—" She swept by me, and I kept up the chatter, glad of my nervousness, for it made me sound natural.
"Your boots are lovely," she said, sitting down in the fitting-chair, "though you seem to have had some difficulty in following my measure."
"My sorrow for it," I said, as I took her foot in my hand and began to use the taperule on it. "But now your highness is here I am sure I can do better."
Now I did not for one instant think that Marguessan would of a sudden begin spilling out her treasonous soul to a perhaps incompetent bootmaker, but the direct physical contact somehow seemed enough to verify that this was a woman with great and terrible secrets. And as I worked and measured and talked humbly, in my construct of a role, I sensed it more and more; and when I glanced up from my work, out at the faha, and saw Tembrual Phadapte just then dismounting from a lathered bay gelding, I was hard put to it indeed to keep the joy and dismay off my face and out of my voice.
But Marguessan seemed not to notice. She was pleasant enough, if coolly distant—in all ways unlike her twin sister, who treated cobblers as kings and kings as kings, all alike and all equally honorable—and after a few more exchanges, and more apologies from me, she went out from the shed and back into the palace.
I sat down hard in the fitting-chair Marguessan had vacated and blew out my breath in one explosive sigh of relief. But I was not relieved entirely; I had still to find out that which I had come here to learn, and even though I was now certain beyond all doubt that Marguessan was plotting treason with offworlders—and had the evidence of Tembrual’s presence to back that up—I had yet to obtain proof concrete.
But I curled up and slept that night, in a corner of the work-shed, with more confidence and less fear than I had felt for some time.
I never learn.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-one
Next noontide I was commanded to the presence of the Princess Marguessan, and bidden bring the—correctly fitting—boots with me. And although I feared to my bones to go within Saltcoats, I dared not decline. To a humble travelling cobbler, would it not be the crowning moment of his life and profession alike, to be summoned into a castle at a princess’s command, to deliver to her in her own person the boots he had made for her at her behest? Indeed it would be; and that was why I could not refuse the bidding. There was not even any time to warn Morgan; I would have to rely on my wits and wariness alone. So I dashed some water on my face, scrubbed clean my hands of leather stain, pulled on my own boots—far less wonderful than the ones I bore with me for Marguessan’s approval—and with a terrible presentiment of disaster about to come rolling over me like the wave over Gwaelod I followed the servitor within.
Inside, Saltcoats was spacious and beautiful as a keep of this particular style and vintage seldom is. As a rule defensive structures do not lend themselves over-well to grace of design—and no more should they, for their purpose is to keep their folk safe, not to delight the gaze—but somehow Saltcoats managed to fulfill both functions. Whether this was of its current occupant’s doing, or of her predecessor’s, I neither knew nor cared. And where was Malgan Rheged? In all the days of my trade-plying here, I had heard his name mentioned perhaps thrice; all the talk had been rather of Marguessan—and of her offworld visitors.
For not only had Tembrual Phadapte put in an appearance, but she had been joined this very morning by some of the others on my list for watching as well: the half-Kelts Phayle Redshield and Kiar mac Ffreswm. And I felt something brewing like a thunderstorm in the air, and I liked it not.
Marguessan did not keep me waiting. I had been prepared to hang about many hours in the servitors’ hall to be favored finally with a ten-second audience and the offer of her hand to kiss before being shuffled off again to the work-sheds. But nay; I was ushered at once into a lovely chamber that must have been her private hall—not the Great Hall, but a lesser, more comfortable one—and she swept in at once to greet me.
"Welcome, ollave!" she said with a smile, holding out her hand.
I bent over it dutifully, taking care not to kiss but only to bow, hoping desperately to cover the start of alarm I had given when she addressed me by my title. Although I minded almost at once that ‘ollave’ was a title of mastership in a craft, by no means exclusive to bards, and that she meant only to honor my skill, it had been a nasty little moment, and I prayed that Marguessan had not noticed my break.
Which apparently she had not: She graciously accepted the boots—or rather she allowed a maid to do so—and then, quite astonishingly, offered me a cup of wine and a seat across from her by the fireside. I took the cup and tried not to stare down into its contents—all my instincts were screaming. Do not drink!—then glancing up I caught Marguessan watching me with the expression more customarily worn by a mousing cat or a heron poised to spear a fish. Well, this time the prey saw it coming—but for all of me I could not work out why I was suddenly suspect. Then Rannick of Lissard joined us in the hall, and I began to see things a little more clearly.
But still I clung to my concealment. They could only have doubts as to the blameless innocence of one who claimed to be naught but a travelling cobbler; it did not seem possible that they knew me for who I was in truth, so perhaps all was not lost just yet, and would not be, provided I kept my wits about me. The worst case was that Rannick had seen me in Caer Dathyl or had heard of me asking questions in Lleyn, and now was distrustful to find me turned up at Saltcoats. Well; could be allayed, it seemed, with a plausible story, and when Rannick began artfully to sound me out as to my recent adventures in the boot trade, I did my best to appear as artless as I might.
"Oh aye, my lord, Lleyn to be sure—your highness’s lands, I know well—and aye, Caer Dathyl—not so much business, not there, nay, better in the provinces—" I rabbited on, even drank some of the wine, and prayed I sounded more a harmless gormless minkler than a clever spy; not hard, for ‘clever’ was about the last thing I was just now feeling.
And, bit by bit, I began to get the terrible, the sinking panic-clawing feeling that they were not believing me, not one littlest word. I did all in my power to sway them back to me; I did everything but juggle with the winecups, growing more desperate with each little tale or anecdote.
At last, beaten, I lapsed into uncertain silence, looking helplessly around at the expressionless faces of Marguessan, Rannick and Tembrual Phadapte who had come in whilst I was floundering, whispered briefly to Marguessan and taken a seat to one side. Finally Marguessan, who had been sending out little fingerlings of magic toward me, creeping and patting and prying, trying to dislodge she still had no idea what, lifted her head and looked straight at me.
"Enough of this. You are no cobbler, though the boots could not disprove you. Will you tell us of your will, or shall we have the truth of you in other ways? It will not be pleasant, do we resort
to that."
I met her look for look, wondering if she knew more than she said, feeling my disguise falling from me like a cracking glaze, like ashlar shedding from a weathered front. In a very few moments now I should stand bare-face before them all; we had underestimated Marguessan’s power in her own hall, and what she would do when she saw me there…
I said aloud, "I will admit to it. But not before these outfrenne lieges. Let them be sent from here, and your highness shall know all."
Rannick made an angry surging movement, but Marguessan stayed him with one uplifted hand.
"Nay—I am well able to defend myself in my own place against such as this. Go. Both you. But come again when I do call."
Tembrual, who had raised an eyebrow at my demand but made no other sign, rose to her feet and moved rather ungainly to the door, Rannick reluctantly following after. When they had gone, and the heavy oak doors closed behind them, Marguessan looked at me.
"Well, Taliesin," she said. "Shall we speak face to face, do you think?"
Silence for a long, long moment. Far away I could hear a piper, the notes rising silver into the afternoon air, and it troubled me that I could not place the tune…
"Aye or nay?"
I closed my eyes. It seemed to be one of Adoran Tudur’s, slower than a march, but swifter than a marunad or coronach: stately, soaring, so beautiful…
"Taliesin."
I opened my eyes and smiled into Marguessan’s. "Oh that," I said, and let the mask fall away.
I do not think, looking back on it from the vantage of years and thought, that Marguessan truly had ever expected me to yield. It was as if an enemy had suddenly handed her a sword upon the battlefield, hilt first in token of surrender, and she did not know how it should be taken, or what should be done after she had received it. But this was her victory; I was not about to help her. Yielding was all I would do for her.
"How did you know?" I asked then. "The magic—"
She seemed to startle back to herself. "Oh, nay, the magic was good enough, though coming into Saltcoats were your downfall. My sister’s webs are strong outside, but here I am the spinner, and soon or late you would have been ravelled out. Nay, a simpler thing entirely, and a strange one. Look at your hand."
"My hand—" But I looked as I had been bidden, and felt a shock as of icemelt thrown in my face. The spell Morgan had cast on me had been proof against almost all magics—I did not fault her for that she did not prevail entirely against her sister—but this was something that had naught to do with magic, and, all unthinking, I had brought my discovery on myself.
For glinting on the smallfinger of my left hand was the marriage ring Morgan had set there—the match to her own, the two serpents enknowed of each other, their eyes rubies, their scales clearly cut in old dark gold—the ring I had left there as of habit so old it was beyond habit.
"It is part of my hand," I said, still looking upon it. "I did not even know I had it on; but then, I never take it off." I looked up at her, and small knives came in my eyes. "Save that once, in Oeth-Anoeth, but then I was not the one who removed it. And you remembered."
"And I remembered." Marguessan’s face, not very like her twin’s but almost as fair, bore now an extraordinary expression that I could not unskein. Envy seemed part of it, and pity, and hatred, and a strange crabbed kind of love, and sadness; but those were not the whole of it, nor even the main. What that was I did not know. But in that moment I think Marguessan and I were closer than ever in all our lives we had been, true sibs, and not just through Morgan alone…
But it passed. "Fitting that your marriage ring should so betray you, Talyn," she said then, and that was the old Marguessan we had known and loathed all these years.
Outside, the pipes had been joined by drums and horns; the sound had surely reached the edge of space by now, so high it soared. I let myself rise with it, then pulled myself down again to the moment.
"Fitting that my marriage ring should so sustain me, Marguessan," I said gently, with the tiniest bard-weight laid on the ‘my,’ "that you should fear it enough to take it from me in Oeth-Anoeth. Think you to do likewise here in Saltcoats? Or just take the hand with it? Your choice."
She flushed dull red under the insult to her own wedded state, then was white again, whiter than before. But I was yet getting started…
"So why do you not just tell me what are your plans, and we will go on from there," I suggested in the most reasonable voice in all the worlds. "You already know why I am here; do me the like courtesy in return."
She stared me down, then all at once she began to laugh. "Why not, why not after all?" she said, still smiling. "Though I doubt not but that you and my sister have already guessed the main of it, and by now my cousin-brother and his mate also… Well, my plans then are these, Taliesin Pen-bardd: to overthrow the double throne and set a single one in its place, and I the one to sit upon it."
"No news there," I said in a bored voice, to bait her, and it did.
"Not? Well then, hear this: I it was who set Melwas of Fomor on to reive away the little highness of Aojun, my brother’s half-blood lamb."
"Knowing that Artos would of course go after her." And so had we all suspected…
"Counting that he would." Her eyes did what in another person and another moment would have been called dancing with merriment; but not her, and not here. "And I did so rouse the spirit of avengement for sullied Keltia in the breast of Errian of Kerveldin that he declared fior-comlainn against his own Queen. Came close to winning, too."
"Closer than you know," I said calmly. "Keils was all but struck down when he turned it from defeat to triumph. He lived, and he won."
Marguessan smiled outright. "He won, but does he live?" At my sudden sharp intake of breath: "Nay, do not even think it! Besides, you cannot. Try."
I felt that far too familiar sinking feeling come again upon me, but leaned cautiously forward in my seat, until I felt the edges of an invisible net begin to cut against me, and I sat back again.
"I have had it round you since you took your seat there an hour since," Marguessan kindly informed me. "Do not move of a sudden, either, thinking to defeat it; it will tighten on you the closer the more you struggle against it."
"Neat, but not gaudy." I forced myself to calmness, pulling in away from the unseen net. "But this that you have said of Keils—"
"Keils is nothing!" she hissed, standing up and beginning to pace the chamber, her skirts frothing, whipping over the leather boots she wore which were none of my making. "Arthur, Gweniver, all nothing! I shall be High Queen, my son Mordryth Tanist to follow me; and I have the allies to make it so." Her glance went to the closed oak doors at the far end of the room, and mine went with it.
"Them? They are your—"
"They are my trusted and honored agents." She laughed again. "Well, not so, not quite. They are my bought dogs, my hirelings. I have paid them as befits a princess, and in turn they will do for me what must be done to make me Queen."
"Ah, the same old things, Marguessan," I said, shaking my head in mock sorrow and disappointment. "Never anything new under the suns. Always the old frayed plans that you recycle and hope to make into shining new ones. But to do that you needs must put something new into the mix."
"But I have something new," she said, and I heard the note of triumph in her voice. "Several things new, what is more; and one of which you will remember well—from Caervanogue?"
And the room went black before my eyes. I learned later that it had done so chiefly because I had surged forward uncontrollably against the unseen net that held me fast—snaoim-draoi, it was called, the druid’s knot—and it had cut off the blood to my brain. But as I reeled back sick and dizzy in my chair, I knew it was for a different reason that the light had fled: The new thing Marguessan spoke of—or one of them—was in fact that very old thing of joyless bane and utter damnation, the Black Graal.
"Not that old thing," I muttered, when I was again able to speak.
&nb
sp; Marguessan laughed knowingly and with scorn at my vaunting attempt to deprecate it, for she knew well how we had all dreaded such a resurgent chancing.
"Aye, you all prayed and hoped and trusted that it was gone, you hapless hopeless children—you cling to the Light as babes to your methryn’s skirts." She paused, looked down at me. "Well, Glyndour, I tell you, it takes more than a pretty-lad Guardian to keep the Gates against the one who taught me how to break them—but that for later. Just now, there are matters more of the world with which I must deal."
"And you purchased yourself some suitable outworlders to help you."
"Some, aye, are outfrenne. Other some are Kelt, or rather part-Kelt—barred or banished by my brother or his mate. Denied, they made their way to Clero, changing their names and histories as seemed good to them, and prospered in becoming useful. They will prove even more so—both useful and prosperous—in the end."
But I was back a few thoughts. "And Keils—"
—most like is dead by now," she snapped. "I arranged things most well, do you not think so? That Gweniver’s onetime lover—or perhaps not so onetime as that, not so former as folk thought?—must come back to defend her, because I had arranged such doubt in folk’s minds that none else would do so. It was a perfect plan perfectly executed, save of course that Keils himself was not executed, there in the ring. An oversight merely, which I trust is set right by now, seen to by my helpers on Tara. Oh, and also it has been so worked that Arthur himself will be blamed for Keils’s death—a jealous husband, returning home unexpectedly, coming upon his wife’s long-gone lover conveniently returned… Well, you are a bard; you know how those tragical balladries go."
Keils dead? I could not credit it, could not feel it. And yet Marguessan’s voice carried the unmistakable note of truth; and this, remember, was a woman had not scrupled nor hesitated to sacrifice two of her own children to advance her dark cause. She would not lie to me about Keils; but thinking of him slain had brought me round to what I had some time since accepted: that Marguessan would not in a thousand thousand lifetimes let me leave Saltcoats alive.
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