"WHY?" was all I said. The ordeal was over at last, and Arthur and I had met as if by merest chance outside the hall, he pausing to commend me on my playing; and now we were alone.
But Arthur shook his head in warning, and drew me farther down the passage. "Not yet; gather your gear, you are done with your service to Owein, and to all others like him. You are with me, Talyn, from now until—well, until. Did I not tell you once that when I had need of your sword at last, I should ask for it? Well, I ask now. If you will wish to come?" he added anxiously.
I laughed. "I think I might be persuaded! Any road, I have little else but what I stand up in. Only let me get my cloak and harp, and a few small bits of gear and garb, and we can be away. You had best await me by the stables, it is less public and we can be the swifter gone." As I turned to go to my chamber: "Just where is it that we shall be gone to?"
"Does it matter?"
"Not in the least," I answered with a grin, "but I should like to know all the same."
"And so you shall," said Arthur, matching my grin with his own. "But not here, and not now. Owein, though he be not to home, has long ears, and many long tongues to wag at them."
"I am come to take you with me north," he said, as we rode more slowly now, slow enough for speech; our first wild gallop out of Caer Dathyl, reminiscent of that flight six years since, had put some real distance between us and possible pursuit. Though I by no means expected any: I was well known in the city by this time, and the incurious guard had waved us by without even a casual challenge. Which possibly he would soon come to regret; as for Owein, by the time he returned from Saltcoats I would be far beyond his reach, and if he puzzled out the truth it no longer mattered. But:
"North!" I echoed, my spirits soaring. "To Coldgates then?"
Arthur shot me a swift glance that I felt even through the darkness; then he turned his eyes straight ahead, to the moon-blanched road that rolled before us, between the horses' forward-pricked ears.
"Do you remember," he said after a while, "Merlynn once laid geis upon me—or perhaps he but foretold my dan, it makes little differ which and with him it is ever hard to tell—that I should one day go to Loch Bel Draccon—
—and take there the sword Llacharn from the hand of the Lady of the Loch," I finished eagerly. "I remember well! Then—"
"Though I did not know it then," continued Arthur, with a strange deliberate air, "Loch Bel Draccon is the ancient name of that arm of the Sea of Glora in which lies Collimare."
I swung in my saddle to stare at him. "Then the Lady you must seek for the sword is Birogue? She knew all this time that you should come to claim it?"
Arthur shrugged under the swathings of his cloak. "She might be, and she may have known—I daresay she can keep counsel on such matters even better than Merlynn himself! We shall not know until we come there; and so until then let us speak of it no more." His face, that had been grave, grew animated. "But let me tell you how it has been with us, and I would hear as much from you—''
So I listened to him, and learned that all was well at Llwynarth with the Companions, and at Coldgates with Uthyr and Ygrawn and all the rest, though he spoke no word of Gweniver and I asked for none. One surprise there was: Marguessan had been wed this sixmonth past to Irian, son of the Lord of Lleyn, and had gone to live with him and his kindred, in that part of Gwynedd that we call the Old North.
And though with one ear I listened to Arthur maundering on about the wedding, and the utter loyalty of the bridegroom and his family to Uthyr and the Counterinsurgency, I was in truth back in a conversation of many years since, looking down into a pair of dark-rimmed, blue-irised eyes, watching on a viewscreen a hapless birlinn being driven by magic onto distant sharp-fanged rocks.
Marguessan. I had not thought of her, save in passing, for many years; now all that old uneasiness came flooding back, and I remembered how I had spoken to Uthyr and Ygrawn not ten minutes after that long-ago incident, telling them—evenly, dispassionately—of what their daughter had done; and mentioning, with diffidence, what steps might be taken to prevent any repetitions. Clearly she could not be watched forever, on the off chance that she might try the same malevolent trick again; but just as clearly she could not be permitted to go about wrecking ships for sport, or worse, by distant sending.
My deepest unease lay in the fact that although Marguessan,by her mother's own foresighted decree, had not been given the training in magic that her sister and her cousin had received, she had all the same managed to master this evil, and by no means simple, trick; and doubtless more beside. So I pointed all this out to Ygrawn and Uthyr as forcefully as I might—however beloved I might be to them, I was still only foster-son and cliamhan, and they were, after all, the King and Queen—and suggested possible courses of action and precaution.
But for all my undisguised disquiet, the response of Marguessan's parents had been strangely subdued and noncommittal, and in my dull-wittedness I went puzzled and even angry away. Now it came to me, as it had not then, that they had been every bit as shocked and horrorstruck as I at Marguessan's actions; and indeed I later learned that Ygrawn had secretly set upon her elder daughter that binding-rann we had once spoken of, so that such a thing did not reoccur. As so far it had not; but who knew what skills Marguessan had by now mastered… But now the truth was plain to me: She had been all they had left to them besides each other; and in their loneliness Uthyr and Ygrawn had not wished to set any wedge between their daughter and themselves. Arthur had gone, and I, and Gweniver, and Morgan; only Marguessan had remained with her parents, and they had been loath to distance themselves from her until there plainly was no other choice.
Yet my feeling of unease remained: Soon or late, Marguessan would show her true colors—as, indeed, she had promised me—and naught good should come of it.
And thinking of Marguessan, I found my thoughts naturally leading on to her sister. Marguessan wed, Morgan—what would Morgan be like by now? I had not seen her since that day two decades past when Arthur and I rode to Collimare, as we did now, to leave her with Birogue. Now we rode to claim her back, perhaps, and take her home; or perhaps we rode there to another purpose—Arthur's purpose. Or perhaps all purposes were now the same purpose: We should not know for certain until we came once again to the Forest in the Sea.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-eight
It was a mild, still morning of middle summer, the air sweet and heavy with that milky scent of grass and leaf, the ground under our boots drenched with dew. We stood on the shores of Glora, Arthur and I, as we had stood years since, and waited now as we had waited then.
"At least there is no mist today," I said, my voice unnaturally loud in the absolute hush; and indeed the sea stretched blue and calm and clear in all directions. "This time we shall see her boat before it is upon us."
Arthur raised his brows, then pointed, and I followed the sweep of his pointing arm. "Mist or no," he said, "that craft goes unseen as it does wish."
For indeed the gray-hulled boat was almost to shore by us as he spoke, and yet I swear now, as I did then, that the sparkling strait between us and the island of Collimare had been empty until that instant.
In the stern of the ghostly craft, as before, stood a gray-cloaked figure; but as the boat touched sand beside us, with a very real crunch of keel on gravel, I frowned, for something about this shrouded figure seemed both strangely familiar and utterly unknown…
From beneath the gray folds of the hood, a shadowed smile. "Do you not know me then, Talyn? Or is it that you have forgotten me after all?"
In my bemusement I found my fingers going to a tangled scrap of gold fringe on the edge of my cloak, and I spoke as a man will speak in dreams.
"Your knot of remembrance is tied still, Guenna, if tattered." At that she laughed, and it was her old laugh, and swept the hood from her head. Morguenna Pendreic it was, and yet not so: The girl that I had known was both vanished and somehow present, and the woman who stood in her place, calm
, confident, lovely, I did not know at all.
If I dithered, Arthur had no such difficulty: Striding ankle-deep into the wavelets that broke beneath the boat, he reached out and pulled his sister into his arms, bestowing upon her the same brotherly kiss he had given me, once we were gone from Caer Dathyl and it was safe to exchange warm greetings deferred.
"I had a thought, that it might be you," he was saying joyfully. "But where then is the Lady Birogue?"
Morgan gave him a smile brimming with secrets and straightforwardness in equal parts. "Oh, not far; she has other calls upon her now, and so I have come to be Lady at Collimare." She spoke to him, but her eyes had not left my face; before I could drown utterly in their deeps I heard Arthur's cheerful voice, and startled back to life. "Talyn, have you no kiss for Guenna?" It was what I had been longing to do, and fearing to do, and dreading lest I ventured and was rebuffed; and never would I have dared it on my own. But now at Arthur's prompting I stepped forward, and taking Morgan's hands in mine I kissed her given cheek, soft and cool beneath my lips. Then, to my utter confoundment, she turned her face straight on to mine, and her mouth briefly brushed my own, with a touch like frost and fire. I looked down at her, amazed, yet not at all surprised: This was dan, then, come at last; how simple it was in the end. I saw by her eyes that she shared my thought, doubtless had known it before I had, even; and both of us saw too that from now until the end of our days we should know all things together. Morgan stepped back then, and when she spoke her voice was clear and grave, nothing of what we had just shared reflected in it.
"Come then, both of you. There is something must be done, and only we three may do it."
We stepped from the gray boat onto the island's shore; without a backward glance to see if we followed, Morgan plunged into the trackless wood that came down nearly to the water's edge. As we trailed obediently after her through the silent dripping thickets, I could not take my eyes from the graceful figure that moved so silently before us. Not only to avoid being lost in the many trees did I stare so hard upon her, but because I found it hard to accept that the colt-awkward, blond-braided tearaway that had been Morgan as I knew her was now this stately young sorceress in the long gray cloak. But the eyes, if farther-seeing, had been the same.
All at once the trees thinned and we were in a clearing at the forest's heart. Across the grassy ground stood a white stone llan, of the ancient shape and style, the kind that had been sheltering anchorites since first the Kelts did dwell on Earth. Such an air of dread and mystery lay upon the clearing that I hesitated to step from the trees' protecting shadow, and Arthur, a half-stride in front of me, likewise held back. I read in his reluctance the same cause as fueled my own: For all our Druid training, our Fian or bardic experience, there was in this place a power, and a Presence, that neither of us had encountered before.
Then Morgan turned and smiled and gestured us to follow, and without a heartbeat's pause we went, biddable as lambs under the nippings of a working hound.
The llan was bigger within than it had appeared from across the clearing's width: The rooms—a grianan, several sleeping chambers, a pool-room and cookplace and annat—were clean, bare, spacious, airy; the few furnishings of carved honey-colored oak were draped with jewel-bright fabrics and thick furs. Arthur disposed himself upon a broad pilloweddivan, immediately at home, while I paced around like a cat in a new place, poking into things, unable to settle.
This was where Morgan and her Sidhe teacher—or teachers?—had dwelled and studied and practiced all these years; their activity, and perhaps that of others before them, had left an imprint that seemed to cling to the white walls as closely as did the coats of clean limewash that brightened them. Palpable magic, and not just here, either—
"Does your fur crackle then, Master Cat?" Morgan was watching me from an archway across the room, her face alight with mischief. She had shed the hood and swathing cloak, and stood there clad in the plain gray robe that the Ban-draoi wear indoors and out. Its plainness served only to highlight her beauty's richness: the tallness of her, the gold of the smooth hair, the hazel eyes like a pool deep in Collimare's own woods.
I laughed, a little shamefaced to be so caught out. "Oh, perhaps a few random sparks… There is more to this place, I think, than what we do see here."
She nodded gravely, mischief vanished. "Oh aye, there is more! Shall you see it now, or had you rather wait?"
It was one of the sacred caverns of the Ban-draoi: like to, though far smaller than, Broinn-na-draoichta at the great convent school of Scartanore. We had reached it through a hidden door in the annat's north wall—Morgan had not touched it, but it had opened for us all the same—and then a shallow set of steps and a tunnel into the island's heart had led us down into darkness. It was no place for men, a women's hallow pure and plain—and before you cry scorn on me for what may sound like prejudice of gender I would speedily say that neither are our Druid hallows places for women. Some mysteries are not for sharing.
But Morgan knew what we were feeling—the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up by now, and Arthur's eyes were wide and wary—and she laid one hand on my arm and the other hand upon her brother's; we both flinched at even that light touch.
"Be easy, careddau. It is naught, and it will pass. You are expected here, and you have been long awaited."
Now though she had meant those words to comfort, they had precisely the opposite effect, at least on me: I felt as if some very cold, very strong, very sudden tide had washed over me from neck to toes. I opened my mouth to speak, but Morgan was no longer with us.
Oh, she was still 'there,' in the body, but she had gone all the same: had in the Ban-draoi manner gone out by going inward, and was so caught up now in the demands of moment and magic as not to notice us at all.
She drew herself up to her full tallness, and though she made no gesture that either of us could see—as she had made none to open the hidden door—suddenly light began to bloom upon the cavern walls.
No light from sconces or crystals or torches, just cool blue luminance called from the stone itself; neither brilliant nor blinding, but more than sufficient for us to see one another, our faces pale and apprehensive in the glow, and to half-glimpse the carvings upon the walls, where the stone had been made flat and smooth. From these, after one quick look, I averted my eyes with great firmness of resolve, and Arthur did the same: Though we knew many of the incised symbols from our own tradition, many more belonged to the Sisterhood, or perhaps to a tradition older still, and were in any case not to be stared upon by even favored intruders.
I looked past Morgan to the center of the cave. A dolmen stood there, one of those ancient pillar-stones that point like fingers from earth to sky. As a rule, too, they stand beneath that sky, either alone, like the one I had passed so long ago on the road to Daars, or in conjunction with nemetons, the great stone circles that are our holiest hallows. Never had I seen or even heard of one in the deeps of the earth. It looked as if it had grown there, rising out of the rough-cut floor; it was hardly hewed, seeming shapen only by patient chipping, if even that. But there must have been some, once, who had set their hands to it, for as Morgan moved her own hand, and the light fell upon the dolmen's face in obedience to her wave, I caught my breath in awe: There upon each of the stone's four sides, faint though unmistakable, was the carved outline of a hiked sword.
Beside me Arthur too had seen, had caught his breath in the same shivering awe that had claimed me; unlike me, he stepped forward, hand outstretched, unthinking. But Morgan spoke to bar his way.
"Not yet," she said, and he stopped where he stood. "This is the weapon that has been prepared for you: the Sword from the Air and the Sword from the Water, the Sword from the Fire and the Sword from the Stone. And the way of the test is this: Face each of the four in its turn, without fear or failing, and at the end shall Llacharn be yours."
Morgan had not looked at us as she had spoken but upon the sword prisoned in the rock; now she turned to
face us, and something of what she had learned all these years was in her eyes, some unimaginable sorcery of the Shining Folk, or holy Nia, or the blessed Brendan, or all those together, or none of those at all. Whatever it may have been, before it I felt once again the five-year-old boy I had been, awed by my tutor's magic, and all the years between, that had made me Druid and bard and ollave, were suddenly vanished away.
But Arthur and his sister looked into each other's eyes, deep and long and hard, and as I looked from her to him and back again I could see in them the mother they shared, and the royal brothers who had fathered them. Sibs and cousins both… Then I forgot my musings in the wonder of what came next.
There had been a wordless questioning, and an equally wordless assent: Then Morgan bowed her head, and as if it had been a signal, a wind arose in the cave, a wind in the depths of the earth that howled and boomed and ripped the very breath from my lungs. As abruptly as it had come, it was gone, and in its place was water. A strange water this, that poured past us and over us and around us, the blue light glowing eerily through it. Yet though it nearly knocked us off our feet with the force of its passing, as if we had been standing in a mountainstream when suddenly it rushed down in spate, we were dry-shod and dry-clothed, not a drop did touch us.
Then the water too was gone, and now the blue light that came from the cavern walls was all at once burning gold. All the cave seemed filled with fire, there was no air to breathe but only flame, the heat was as the inside of a star; yet we did not flash into cinders, our garments did not kindle and blaze, we were not even singed by the heat.
And then the cave was as it was, stone only, gray stone and green stone, stone the color of new wine and stone the color of old blood, stone like snow beneath the moon and stone blue to blackness. We felt the weight of it, everlasting, insupportable, heard the planet's slow groan as it shifted itself through space. Then the sword that was carved upon the dolmen, the sword that had been buffeted by wind and washed in water and bathed in flame, was there before us, more plainly to be seen than ever, almost visibly trembling to be free of the stone that held it firm.
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