This was no time for either, not if we hoped ever to leave that hall alive: So, thanking the Mother that Daronwy seemed unaffected, I seized her mind to join with mine, and together we bade Ferdia cast out his fear, and counseled Arthur to calmness, and bent all our strength to raise a defense against Edeyrn's scrutiny. But a solid wall would only confirm his suspicions, and doom us all out of hand: Our rampart had to be light as air and thin as light, a shield of vanishment, that he or any could probe and find naught there to resist the probing. After a moment, it was with deepest thankfulness that I sensed the others join the effort; and—I know not how else to say it—we became transparent, we four; we were invisible, we were absent, we were gone.
And I saw Edeyrn shake off his hesitating attention as a horse will shrug off a bothersome cleggan, and I gave a huge inward sigh of relief to see it, though still I did not allow the magic—if magic it was—to slip away just yet, in case… well, in case. But if I had thought that the worst we should have to face this night, I was about to be shown yet once more just how mistaken I could be.
In the tail accompanying Owein and Edeyrn were several women who swept to their places at the high table with an air of what they plainly thought, or hoped, was queenly arrogance. I, who knew a true queen in whom arrogance had no part, cast a quick scornful glance their way: fair enough, some of them very fair, but all of them most overjewelled and overdressed and overpainted for the occasion; and I began to turn away.
Then, as Owein, having seated Edeyrn in the place of honor, stepped aside with great show of courtesy to hold a chair for one of the women, I saw her face against the rich figured silk of his tunic, and the seeing near stopped my heart. The woman was Gwenwynbar, and, to judge from the fall of her velvet guna, she was heavily pregnant.
Give me this at least: I am not slow to recognize dan at work, though I may not always see it coming, and I recognized this at once as the most fateful of that triad of Fateful Suppers of my life. Most fateful—perhaps most fatal—and most endless also: I thought that meal should go on until time itself had died, and certainly until we ourselves had perished. And indeed I was beginning to think that that last was nearer than any of us might like: Though Ferdia and Daronwy had by skill of banter turned the suspicions of our tablemates, and the four of us together fended off Edeyrn's eye, I despaired anew when I thought of our chances of escaping Gwenwynbar I had not dared glance at Arthur, but judging by the clenched fist that lay in his lap, and how his whole arm shook against mine with the violence of the clenching, I knew he too had seen and recognized his disespoused wife. But, save for a sympathetic touch of mind and hand, I could do naught just now to help him, and presently I felt the terrible trembling ease. His face, when I dared glance at him, was serene and unclouded, and with a shiver of my own I knew he had shut down upon his feelings that control of his that was like a findruinna gate: to close Gwenwynbar out, and close himself in.
But the meal had begun, and for the next three hours we endured perhaps the greatest trial of our lives so far. Certainly it was for our lives that we endured—had we attempted to exit the chamber or the castle we should have been summarily seized, and our lives past that point both brief and painful. As it was, every moment, every mouthful, every breath and every word, we thought to be our last.
In one small thing, or perhaps not so small, we seemed blessed: So far as we could tell, Edeyrn made no further attempt to seek out either us or any other suspected renegades who might be in hall that night. Indeed, from all appearances, he was enjoying a very pleasant nightmeal, on this the next-to-final evening of his stay on Gwynedd. Though he seemed sociable enough, as I watched him with Owein and the others who sat at the high board, his power and his—his otherness were as plainly to be perceived as his very face. No one looking upon Edeyrn could fail to be aware that here was one who was master over men and magic both, and though I detested it, and myself for feeling so, I knew that I felt an awe near as strong as my long hatred, for my father's murderer, and Gorlas's, for the destroyer of Gwaelod and of Daars.
"Aye, that's as may be"—I heard then to my horror from two places away—"but what I want to know is, what might his mother think of him?"
Unable to believe my own ears, I craned past Arthur's suddenly rigid form to glare at the speaker: Ferdia, with blithe cheerful heedlessness, had succeeded in killing his earlier fears with the help of ale. Not as a rule one for the mether, he seemed to have done a good job this night, to judge from the flushed face and tousled hair; and now he was deep in sozzled discussion with one of our tablemates, a thin, overeager, furtive-faced man who had boasted earlier to the table of his exalted status: kern-equerry to one Pyrs Vechan, a vassal of Owein's who held a duchas in the Deer Hills behind the city. Ferdia's ale-born question seemed to have turned to stone all those near enough to have heard it: I gathered by their uneasy reaction that speculation on the Marbh-draoi's maternal parent was not a thing much done, here or elsewhere—though doubtless none knew the truth of it as did Arthur and I; even Daronwy was ignorant of it, and certainly Ferdia had no idea—and for a drunken stranger to do so was little short of declared disloyalty, a true guest-sin. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but Arthur was quicker.
If any one of us had had lawful cause to sink a drench too many this night, surely it had been my fostern. I had scarce dared look at him for near the entire duration of the nightmeal, for fear of what I should, or should not, see upon his face. To have looked for the first time upon the dark lord of Keltia, who by his arm and his dan would be brought down, was surely enough to unnerve even the boldest; to have seen his former wife not only sharing plate and cup but seemingly her bed as well with the man he would one day face in battle for Gwynedd… I do not know how he did it, Arthur, to keep himself calm and clear-headed in the face of all that and the continuing peril of our lives as well; and I wondered, by no means for the first time nor the last neither, whether he himself was entirely mortal and human.
But then, seeing the pain in his eyes when at last I turned to look at him, I saw that he was both; and when he skillfully interposed his own slyly humorous comment between Ferdia's blunder and the suddenly bristling suspicions of our unpleasant tablemate, to turn the danger of the moment, I saw too that he was, for all that, more besides.
Still, even such prolonged torture as this must come at last to an end, though—dan's final twist of the pirn—there was to be one trial yet to live through.
Owein had stood up in his place, cup in hand, to offer the traditional health to the ruler of Keltia that had once been reserved as rightful tribute to Keltia's rightful monarchs. Now, as I watched it offered to the Marbh-draoi, and saw his complacent acceptance of it, as if indeed he merited it by right, I thought of Uthyr, so kind, so patient, so worthy, so far away in Coldgates and so far away from ever being offered even this tiny thing that should, with so much else, have been his, and my anger rose up bitter to choke me.
Yet it did not need Daronwy's warning hand on mine to bid me compose myself: Owein was leaving the high table, and, with Ederyn at his side, was beginning an apparently customary progress down the hall's main aisle. An unnerving prospect, particularly since that stroll would bring them within five feet of us as we sat there. Our table was the outermost of those ranked on that side of the hall, and the bench upon which we four sat was the outer bench of that table, so that we had been sitting all evening with our backs to the wide center aisle down which Edeyrn and the rest would be passing.
Not only that, but we would of course be obliged to rise and turn to face them as they did so, and there would be no one for us to hide behind: Edeyrn, Owein—and Gwenwynbar—would be near enough for us to touch.
I resigned myself to the inevitable: This was without doubt the end of us. Though Owein might not know us by sight, surely the Marbh-draoi could not fail to see at five feet's distance what he had been able to sense at five hundred's. But if by some miracle he should miss us, there was no way in all the worlds that Gwenwy
nbar would do so. She would see us as she went by—Arthur, Ferdia, Daronwy, myself—would see and know us, and would cry a seizing down upon us, and that would be that, an end neither painless nor swift.
That was what my brain told me, as I watched Edeyrn and Owein, with Gwenwynbar three steps behind, come stately down the hall between the bowing rows of courtiers and servitors alike. But what my othersight told me was very different, and I could only assume that my very natural wish to survive was coloring my senses…
They were twenty feet away now, then ten, then five, and now they were passing us. I bowed as deep and respectful as any Theocracy lackey in that hall, and to my right Arthur and Ferdia did the same; on my other side Daronwy dipped in a court curtsy—even in that unbearably crammed instant I could sense her fury at having to do so to Gwenwynbar of all women.
As Edeyrn's glance touched upon us, brushing over our faces like a black feather, I summoned all my strength to keep body and soul and mind most still and silent, as a baby rabbit will freeze to immobility when a hunting owl flies by overhead. The only part of me that moved, besides my pounding heart, was my hand, that as ever in times of need and stress had closed upon the gold case that held my hawk's feather.
Arthur too seemed to have closed his hand upon something, though I could not see what it might be. But even as he did so, Edeyrn's eyes that had been keen and bright upon him suddenly blinked and unfocused, and he moved on. Owein's own gaze ran incuriously over us, and he nodded—perhaps a little more respectfully than he might have done had he not noticed our bard's insignia.
Then Gwenwynbar was before us, and I prepared myself anew for the outcry and battle that seemed certain to follow, resolved that none should come to Arthur save over my slain form and at great cost to themselves.
She looked each of us straight on, her dark eyes going first to Arthur, then to me, then flicking briefly over Ferdia and Daronwy and back again to Arthur, and I held my breath.
Arthur bowed as he had bowed to Edeyrn, but now he bowed to her alone, his face showing nothing I could read. But plainly his onetime wife had seen rather more, for she hesitated, just the barest check of stride and speed, and something passed over her countenance to which I could put no name. Then she inclined her head to Arthur, and followed Owein out of the hall.
Though we waited every second for guards to fall upon us, and when at last we ourselves left the hall our backs crawled every step of the way, we passed unhindered, and departed Caer Dathyl unpursued by guard or thought.
"Why did she not tell him!"
It was perhaps the twentieth time Daronwy had asked the question, and she no more thought to get an answer now than she had done when first she asked it.
We were at the moment as safe as we could be short of Llwynarth: Having put as many miles between us and Caer Dathyl as our horses could give us, we lay now hidden up in the summer shieling of a family secretly loyal to the Counterinsurgency, some thirty lai into the Deer Hills.
And as we had done twenty times already as response to Daronwy's question, we shook our heads in baffled unison. For indeed none of us had an answer: as to why Gwenwynbar, who had last been heard of swearing vengeance on her husband and all his kin and friends and cause, had saved us there in the hall from the swords of Owein's Ravens. By now—and none of us had any illusions on that account—we all of us would have been either slain or praying for it as release from torture. No question but that Gwenwynbar had saved our lives; but still the question remained.
If Arthur had any answer—and he was the only one among us who might—he was keeping it to himself for now, and perhaps for always. On our carefully circumspect trot out of Caer Dathyl, and subsequent wild drumming bansha-ride into this present doubtful safety, he had said not one word, and he said none now.
"Well," said Ferdia heavily, "she may have saved us and it is not that I am not grateful—but to be beholden to her ... Clearly she is Owein's bedmate now, ban-charach or lennaun or lightskirt or whatever."
I lowered my eyes and carefully shut my mind as he and Daronwy idly disputed Gwenwynbar's status in Owein's household, but the thought blazed in my mind until I could not believe they did not see it plain upon my face: the thought that the child Gwenwynbar was great with was no child of Owein Rheged's, as all seemed to assume, but a child of Arthur's.
That he was thinking the same, and had been all night, I knew well; and later we spoke of it privately, away from the others.
"You have only to count the months, Talyn. It could well be mine."
"And if it is?"
Arthur ran a hand over his face. "If it is—then it shares heirship with Gweniver and Marguessan and Morgan and myself, for it is blood of the House of Don."
"And if it is," I heard myself saying calmly, "then you must destroy it before it can destroy you." I pretended not to see the shocked, guilty face that turned toward me—shock to hear the unspeakable spoken, guilt for having thought the same long since—and resolutely continued, "This you know already. But, Artos, I know that it is not. It cannot be. Why else do you think Gwenwynbar saved us?"
Now Arthur looked only surprised. "I had thought, that must be the one sure proof that the child is mine; for her to so spare me and the rest of you." A harsh, desperate laugh. "Which do you think Owein might prefer it, his or mine? Or Edeyrn? More to the point, whose would Gwenwynbar wish it?"
Even more to the point, I thought, though I did not say it, neither then nor later, whose will Gwenwynbar claim it?
* * *
Chapter Twenty-five
Safe again at Llwynarth, by the next day after our return I was feeling confident enough to tackle Arthur on several matters; and after breaking that morning's fast with a much chastened Ferdia, I headed for my fostern's quarters to do just that.
This new Llwynarth was still new even to us who sheltered there, and although it was larger, more comfortable, better planned and better hidden than its predecessor, still I found myself resenting the reason, and the author of that reason, for our enforced relocation.
"Are you going to blame Gwenar for everything then, Talyn, from now to Nevermas, or just for such things as suit you?"
To judge by the look in his eyes, Arthur had been up most of the night; to judge by the unprecedented tidiness of his chamber and the bareness of his workdesk, he had defended himself well against the night's hauntings. And seeing the weariness and sorrow that were on him, I was instantly remorseful that I had just carped as I had against the admittedly far-from-blameless Gwenwynbar.
But not remorseful enough to repent of it… "Nay," I snapped back, "only for such things as she can be rightly credited! She could not betray Coldgates, for instance, so most like I would not hold her to account did the shieling come to be laid bare—though perhaps I might even so, now I think on it. And do you not go telling me yet again how she did save us from Edeyrn and Owein; even you cannot absolve her from obliging us to find a new Llwynarth."
"I had not thought to try." He stood up, flexing his neck and shoulders as if to rid himself of some invisible burden. "And as I have also told you before, we should have had to find a new lair sometime; now or a year now makes little differ. As for Gwenar, leave it. She has chosen her own road and her own dan will chivy her down it."
"But the—"
"I said leave it, Glyndour." The dark eyes flashed warning to match the sudden steel in the voice—it was ever a bad sign when Arthur addressed one of us by surname—and I subsided. "All the same," he continued after an uncomfortable little pause, "I am still glad we went to Caer Dathyl as we did, for now I have seen as I have wished to see who we have so long been fighting; whom in the end we shall destroy."
"And he has seen you, maybe," I muttered.
"Now do not start that up again—Any road, I think not."
"Artos, he looked straight at you! At all of us, come to it."
"Even so, I do not think he saw us—any of us—by grace of this." He had been fidgeting with something in the pocket of his tunic
—as he had been when Edeyrn passed us by in Owein's hall—and now he brought it out upon his open palm. "Morgan my sister sent it to me before we left for Caer Dathyl. She and Birogue constructed it at Collimare. There is mighty magic in it, and on it."
"I can see that; or rather do not need to see, for it is plain to any sense. She grows skilled…"
Glancing up at him for permission, I carefully took the talisman from his hand. It was a water-white sphere of purest rock crystal, smooth and polished, ice-cold even though it had been in Arthur's hand, and in his inner pocket before that. Bound round by two intersecting bands of incised silver—runes, but I could not make any sense of them—it was of the bigness of a grape or cherry, and it prismed the light like a cabochon diamond.
"This is what saved us from Edeyrn, Tal, not I or you or Ronwyn or anything we thought in our conceit to do." He watched me as I turned the thing in my fingers, marvelling at its beauty and the supreme skill that had made a thing of power from a piece of rock. "And, like it how little you might, it was Gwenar saved us from Owein. As simple as that."
"Naught is ever that simple." I returned the crystal to him and sat back, putting my hands behind my head. "But, just for now, let us say that it is so…" I turned the topic. "I had not thought young Morgan to be so far along in her studies. Birogue must be a queen among teachers, though of course she has good stuff on which to work. That is no magic of Druid or Ban-draoi, that talisman, but some practice of the Shining Folk. Never did we learn such ranns at Bargodion, nor I think your mother and Gweniver, at their own schools."
Arthur's face, that had been clouded, cleared like sudden sun. "Guenna does do well, though I seldom hear from her save through our mother. This was the first direct communication I have had from her for three years, as if—"
"—as if she knew her brother had need of her craft," I finished for him. "And doubtless she did; no great surprise there."
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