I sighed. "It must be so, then, as you have said: that they rule together, joint sovereigns over Keltia."
"It must be," agreed Merlynn with a grave nod. "And that, I think, is a solution not they nor the King nor the people are ready to hear, at least not yet awhile."
"Impasse, then."
"It would seem so."
But I could tell by the look in his eyes and the sound in his voice that he did not think so; and, what was more, no more did I.
I had not seen the Princess Gweniver for near ten years. While I had been studying at Bargodion, she had been at Glassary on the planet Vannin training for a Ban-draoi; and when I had been off at Tinnavardan, she had been sent to still another hidden school of the Sisterhood, to become Domina a high priestess of her order, and to serve thereafter her first prenticeship. Therefore our paths had crossed not at all in all that time, and only in the past sevennight here in the shieling had I met Gweniver again.
Had I not been Druid, trained to look past the mask of aspect, I might not have recognized her straightway. She had not altered so much in outward appearances, but rather in those inner sources from which all outer form does spring: the seeming taking its shape from the substance.
While Morgan and Marguessan had been changing from children to young lasses, and Arthur from stripling to warrior, and I from dreamer to bard, Gweniver had been changing more than all. Ten years ago, she had been still a creature of contentions, like any adolescent, lass or lad; half woman, half child, yet she had managed to be wholly royal. Now, royaler still, she was a sorceress as well, calm with power, confident, forceful, very much in control; and though she had not yet achieved to Ygrawn's wise and humorous detachment, she was well on her road to it.
For myself, I had neither qualm nor shyness in seeking her out: We had not begun well together, she and I, but since that long-ago afternoon up in the old watchpost, when she had wept and spoken from her sorrow, and I had watched and listened from my own, we had put away between us all our disliking and distrust. We were not perhaps the best and closest of friends, but we were friends, so that when I sought her in her rooms she greeted me with a smile, and bade me come in.
"For not every day," she explained, setting a chair for me by the quartz-hearth, "does a riogh-bardan come to call."
I laughed and took the cup of ale she offered. "Riogh-bardan only by default—the King your uncle will have no other bard near him, and any road there are in Coldgates but few to choose from. Thus do I owe my appointment as royal bard to proximity more than skill."
Unexpectedly she colored a little. "That is not how the Ard-righ does tell it…"
I watched her as she set another keeve of ale to warm at the hearth. She had grown fairer as well as surer: Her beauty, like her power, had root in that deep, shining totality that grows from inner life—strength and skill, intelligence and integrity, all manifested in beauty of face and form. And the longer I looked, the plainer it grew; it, not she… The black hair and lynx-gray eyes and spear-straight posture were much as they had ever been, though now the hair was longer, the eyes clearer-sighted, the figure more rounded of breast and hip, with an assurance over all that had not been there before. It spoke of sensuality, and acquaintance with desiring and being desired; something that could be used as both weapon and defense.
And it troubled me, for this was something I had not foreseen: that I should look on Gweniver as any man might look on any woman, to find her fair, or that she looking back on me should return that finding—as I now saw she plainly did. And for an instant I panicked and despaired, for it would be a complication too complex to be borne—then I saw her smile, and I smiled too. "Well, Talyn." It was all she said, and all she needed to say: Words and smile together carried amusement, and vivid regret, and a fine frank honesty. She would not deny her feeling, and she expected the same from me; but all else was denied, and that too she expected.
"Well, Gwennach." And then the moment was over, never to be repeated. We spoke for the next two hours as any friends might who had not seen each other for some time, constraint set by, to tell one another what has been seen and learned and known in that time of absence; we spoke as Druid and Domina, Ban-draoi and bard. Uthyr we spoke of, and Ygrawn, and Merlynn; of her teacher, the Mathr'achtaran Hdana; of Morgan and Marguessan; of Keils Rathen, Uthyr's war-leader, who had been her tutor in martial matters—and, somewhat to my surprise, in heart-matters as well; of Elphin who had been my master in the harp and later my helper with the Hanes.
But all that time, as if by common consent, never once a word of Arthur. I would have thought, if I thought at all, that by now surely he might be mentioned, but it seemed it was not so. Yet I do not think, and did not think then, that we spoke naught of him: Arthur's name may not have been between us, but he was there all the same.
One night perhaps a fortnight before I was to leave Coldgates, to begin my professional career as anruth, or travelling bard, Ygrawn came to my chambers. Since she had wed Uthyr and mothered the twins, we had had few chances to be private as of old, when the Lady of Daars and her foster-son could share an indulgent lazy chat before retiring. Now it was Queen Ygrawn and Taliesin ap Gwyddno the King's bard who found time scarce for talk, but we were still ourselves.
She sank into the chair closest to the quartz-fire just as she had always used to, stretching out her hands to the warmth. Twelve years as Queen had changed her little; she was still slender and quiet and gracefully intense, but now there was a peace about her as well, a thing that had come to her in part from Uthyr and in part out of her queenship: that easiness of spirit one is free to show when one has achieved what one has long unknowingly sought.
I waited in our old companionable silence—so companionable a silence that neither of us thought of it as waiting—for her to say what she had come to say, and after a while she began to speak.
"I have a thing to ask of you, Talynno." She did not look at me but into the hypnotic shimmerings of the quartz. "It is a thing you may refuse as you do please, but also it is a thing I would ask of you and Arthur only. He has already consented, and I come now to ask you."
"No need to ask," I said at once. "What is it you would have me to do, mathra-chairda?" Ygrawn threw me a brilliant smile at the name I had given her: 'heart-mother,' of all our names for fosterer the tenderest and most loving of all.
"I expected you to offer so, amhic," she said, her voice deeper than her wont with her sudden emotion. "But listen first, and then say aye or nay as you will… You know that Morgan is to be trained as a Ban-draoi."
"I do so," I said, surprised at the turn of the talk. "I have seen her skills at work already; and felt them too, my sorrow to say! I had not been ten minutes back in the shieling before she had earthfasted me most firm and proper. She will be a most—exceptional sorceress.''
Ygrawn laughed, a little sadly as it seemed to me. "Ah, the tactful tongue of an ollave… She will be far more than that, Talyn, as I know full well you have Seen, and as Merlynn warns me."
'Warns'? "Surely—"
"She will be no ordinary Ban-draoi." Now the amethyst eyes, clear as ever, were fixed on mine. "It seems to be my dan to give to Keltia children unlike any other's children: Arthur to be King and the doom of Edeyrn; and Morgan to be the mightiest magician since Brendan himself."
My whole being shivered and stilled. "I have felt it," I whispered. "And it has been Seen… But what have I just now to do with it?"
"She must go to learn, as I have said, but not to any common school. There is a place Merlynn has spoken of——and only there can she learn what she must learn." Merlynn's voice came from the door behind me; I was not surprised to hear him, for I had known of his presence for some minutes, but what he had next to say astonished me indeed.
"She must go to the Lady of the Loch," he said, coming in and taking a seat between us. "No other teacher will suffice. And you, Talyn, and Arthur must bring her there yourselves. No other escort will serve."
"You have sp
oken once before of this Lady," I said presently. "You said that Arthur must take some sword from her hand—"
"In good time. But not yet."
"Well, who then is she?"
Merlynn and Ygrawn exchanged a swift, many-meaninged glance, and, for all my skill at interpreting, I could catch not so much as a splinter of its freight. Then Merlynn looked straight at me, and straighter spoke.
"Her name is Birogue of the Mountain. She is a lady of the Sidhe."
"Of the Shining Folk! And she is willing to be teacher to Morgan?"
"Indeed so."
"I have never heard of one of—them willingly to have to do with us," I said doubtfully. "Save for what you have told us of Edeyrn—" I stopped, cast a quick look at Ygrawn, for perhaps the Marbh-draoi's parentage was not known to her. But I saw from her tiny nod that it was, and went on. "But this is a different thing altogether. How can you know?"
"I should know," said Merlynn quietly. "She and I have been together these sevenscore years and more. And in the end, I shall join her under the hollow hill."
The chamber's silence went unbroken for many minutes. "And Marguessan?" I asked, when I spoke again. "What of her?"
Merlynn made as if to speak, but Ygrawn was there before him. "The learning is not for her."
All at once I had heard enough; more than I wanted to know of too many things, and I seized gratefully on the practical as a detail to save me.
"Where shall we go then, Arthur and Morgan and I, to find Birogue?"
Merlynn's gaze went past me, through the rock of Sulven that was all round us, and across many miles of dark air; he was seeing some far place, and a greater purpose even than this.
"To Collimare," he said then. "The Forest in the Sea."
* * *
Chapter Twenty-one
In the dawnlight of a cold October morning, some weeks after Ygrawn's request and Merlynn's revelation, Arthur and I stood with Morgan on the shores of the Sea of Glora. The little waves lapped on the rocky shingle a few feet away, and thirty yards out a white woolly wall of mist came down to meet the surface of the water. It was very still, and none of us spoke.
We had travelled here from Coldgates, just the three of us alone, no guide or guard else. At first I had protested the plan, thinking such a journey too taxing for a ten-year-old child; but then I had remembered a worse journey far, made by a child younger still, and I had said no more.
For her part Morgan had seemed to enjoy it immensely: the riding, often by night; the secret ways through the hills; the grand, majestic country through which we passed. For myself, I enjoyed the faring near as much: I had not been so long with Arthur since our boyhood days at the shieling, and had never been so long in Morgan's company before; I was learning something new of her every hour. As the youngest of even so large a family as my own, I had not known many children well, so that Morgan's smallest quirks were revelations. She was very definitely a person of her own, cheerful and charming, self-aware though utterly unselfconscious, with an unflagging interest in everything we encountered and anything Arthur or I happened to say.
Not that Arthur chanced to say much: He seemed pleased and proud enough to play the role of protective older brother, but ever since we had set out a kind of heaviness had clung round him like a rain-soaked cloak; I could not pierce it even with all my bard's subtlety, nor Morgan with her sunny prattle, though even she sensed his mood—indeed, he scarce strove to hide it, and that too was not like him.
So we stood now on the shores of the great inland sea, waiting as Merlynn had instructed us, for the coming of Birogue. And, waiting, I wondered yet again at my old teacher: It seemed a thing reckless in the extreme, for mortals to seek lovers from among the Shining Ones, and yet just such a thing as he would do. I wondered too about the Sidhe lady we now waited upon, and how her choice of mate had been received among her own folk… But then my speculations died away, for the mist upon the water had shivered itself and parted, and through the white rags now came the prow of a boat.
Such a boat as none of us, and perhaps few Kelts ever, had seen: Its prow was the carved head of a piast, with clear rock-crystals for its eyes; its hull was gray and clinker-built, and no sail did cling to its slim silver mast. Silently it moved across the waves—against the current, I noted with interest—and swung gently inshore, beaching itself at our feet.
I glanced quickly at Arthur, but he made no move either to stir or speak; then down at Morgan, whose small face was alight. Then a flash caught my eye, and my head snapped up to look upon the figure that had been standing so quietly in the stern of the boat as to seem another, smaller mast.
The flash had been one white arm throwing back the hood of the gray cloak that she wore; for that it was a woman there was now no mistake. Never had I seen such a face: young and fair, and yet the eyes were older than time, deep wells of starry knowledge; and as Morgan at my side disengaged her hand from mine and stepped eagerly forward, I moved involuntarily back.
A smile lighted the lovely face. "I am Birogue," the woman said then, in a voice not unlike Ygrawn's, low and vibrant, subtly amused. She looked from Morgan to Arthur, whose head came up like a hound's under her stare, then to me—it was like drowning in silver light—and then back to Morgan. "Come, Morguenna Pendreic."
Morgan surged forward in her eagerness like the wave we call the sea-bear; then suddenly she seemed to remember the two who had come with her to this place. Turning swiftly, she embraced first me, then Arthur, thin little arms hugging us fiercely, and then stepped into the gray boat.
I looked up to meet Birogue's glance like a glowing flame, and I who had once thought Merlynn's gaze hard to bear now learned an entirely new level of difficulty. But I was not unschooled, and I held my mind and my gaze steady before hers, with all that I had learned and all that I had possessed to begin with plain in my eyes, and again she smiled.
"Well stood, Medeni's son," she said, and my mother's name was like the slap of a breaking wave in my face.
"Lady, how come you to speak of my mother?"
The silver light took on a glint of steel. "Another time for that," said Birogue. "But for now, know that she was my friend, and if by taking her under the hill I could have saved her, know too that I would have done so, even in despite of my king's command."
Looking into those eyes, I knew that I should hear no more just then than I had just heard; and perhaps could have borne to hear no more: The utter unexpectedness of it—that a Sidhe lady should claim friendship with my long-dead mother—had all but staggered me right there where I stood.
But now the little craft began to quiver, as a horse will shift leg if kept too long standing under saddle, and I knew that it—or perhaps its mistress—wished to be gone. It seemed that young Morgan knew also, for suddenly she reached out a hand to each of us, leaning perilously out over the boat's low side.
Stirring from his motionless stance, Arthur took the cold little fingers, kissing them as he would have kissed a queen's.
Then the child turned to me, and with speed and shyness tied a knot into the gold tassels of my cloak-fringe.
"A knot of remembrance," she said, cheeks flaming with her own boldness. "Do not forget me, Talyn, while I am gone!"
I kissed her hand as Arthur had done. "It needs no knot," I said in answer. "But, Guenna, do not you forget me…"
Then Birogue drew her gently again to her side, and as gently did the gray boat draw back into the morning mists, leaving Arthur and me to shiver on the strand.
He did not ask me as we stood there, nor when we turned to ride slowly away; nor all that long day of travel, nor yet at the fireside that night, when we broke the day's fast with a hot meal. That was ever one of Arthur's graces, that he knew always when you had rather say naught of some deep matter and when you longed dearly to speak of it. He assumed you had your own very good reasons for either course, and honored them—however he himself might have felt about it.
And however you yourself might have felt
about it, soon or late, surer than any tugging or taunt, his restraint would coax speech from you; and you would never even know you had been coaxed…
"I have never met any who knew my mother," I said presently. "Well, not truly knew her—save for your mother, and Gorlas and Uthyr and Merlynn."
Arthur all at once found something of great concern in the precise arrangement of our broiling meat.
"Surely folk must have spoken of her to you?" he asked after a moment, voice carefully uninflected.
I laughed, not unkindly, at his carefulness. "Oh aye; about as much as folk have spoken to you, I think, of your father—your true father.''
Arthur grinned, a little wryly; but the days were long gone when any mention of Amris Pendreic caused him to pull into himself, like a snail prodded with a stick.
"Aye to that—even my mother has not been exactly forthcoming… Is it that they think we cannot bear the knowing, or what is it?" He did not pause for answer. "But it seems hardly the same, Talyn, for all that: I did not know that Amris was my father, while there has never been doubt as to who was your mother. Unless you are after all a changeling from under the hill, and no human child at all? That would explain much I have often wondered at—"
I flung a bit of moss at his head. "You need not look so pleased at the possibility." Not for worlds would I admit even to him that I had been thinking along those same lines myself, questing out on the inner planes—a quick silent sensing. But what I got back was only the answer I had known was truth before even I had asked: Gwyddno and Medeni were my true and only parents, this life round; I, and they, indisputedly human.
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