by Lisa Cach
He sat down beside me, his movements languid while my whole body tensed and grew awkward with attraction at his nearness. “How are you faring?” he asked, his tone calm and easy. He had the rare ability to seem unruffled by troubling emotions: there was no evidence of the anger and upset I’d glimpsed in his face earlier, and it made me wonder yet again if I was seeing the real Arthur, or a mask.
“I’m well enough. What of Brenn?” As my own shock had faded, my thoughts had gone to the battered warrior. What must he be feeling? Imagination failed me, but I hoped he felt some of the same astonished wonder that I did.
“He may never recover from the shame.”
My heart fell into my stomach, and my shoulders with it. Shame, at his bastard daughter. I’d never considered that.
Arthur chuckled. “Of fainting, Nimia. He dares not show his face for it. The platters of sweetmeats that have been sent to his room make it worse; he thinks the whole household is coddling him.” He took a honey cake from the small table near us and bit off a hunk. “Which they are. He’ll have to gather his courage to face the upcoming weeks of women giving him tender looks and laying a hand on his arm to ask, ‘How are you?’ ”
“He’ll hate that?”
“Part of him will. But he’s still a man, and sympathy is half the battle to a woman’s bed.”
I choked on my wine.
Arthur thumped my back. “From the men, he’ll get a few gruff stories of how they felt when they found out they were to have a child. Most, though, will just wonder how in Hades a man who looks like him fathered a creature like you.”
I decided to take it as a compliment. “Is that what you wonder?”
“No, I can see the resemblance.”
I tucked in my chin and raised my brows.
“I can see past a few scars and missing parts,” Arthur said, his voice still light, the crinkles still at the corners of his eyes, though I sensed his meaning had become deeper. “I can see the face of the man beneath the evidence of his bravery and endurance.”
His gaze seemed to be asking me, Can you?
“I would talk with him, were he willing.”
He took my hand and gently squeezed it, then stood and pulled me up. “Come, then.”
“Now?” I squeaked. I hadn’t had time to think of what I would say, of how I should act. I stumbled, feeling flustered and shy and not a little bit frightened—though of what, I wasn’t sure.
Arthur ignored my protest and led me a short way through the villa to a cozy room off a small inner courtyard. Braziers and lamps had been lit, and food and drink brought to the low table between two couches. Brenn stood with his back to the doorway, face-to-face with yet another Roman statue, this time a bust of an unknown woman. Its paint was long vanished, the lady’s eyes staring blindly from blank white marble as if gazing into eternity. Brenn wore a contraption of forged metal and wood strapped onto the stump of his arm, with a leather harness that went over his shoulder and around his torso.
“Brenn,” Arthur said gently.
Brenn flinched, though he must have heard us coming and known we were there. Arthur squeezed my hand and left us.
Brenn turned, the wood peg of his leg beneath the knee making a metallic rap on the floor; I looked down and saw that the peg ended in a curved blade of dull metal, the tip of it bent to form a flat area. The blade flexed slightly when he put his weight on it, allowing Brenn to move with a degree of grace, despite having only one complete arm for balance.
“I must have gotten my ability to dance from you,” I blurted.
His eye widened. “Then how sorry you must be to have me for a father.”
“No!” I rushed forward. “You misunderstand. I am an excellent dancer. I meant to admire your control of your body, your movement. And I have been told there is none better with a sword.”
“Still, I can’t be what you imagined.”
“I had no imagining.”
He looked away, and I realized how that might have struck him. I had known he must exist, but had not spared a thought on who he might be. “Tall and pale,” I said. “I did think that. You are not pale, though.”
The corner of his mouth pulled in what might almost be a smile. “By spring you will say differently. A winter in Britannia will suck the color even from your golden skin.”
“Are you a Briton by birth?” I asked, as we both edged toward the couches and sat down opposite each other. I poured from the pitcher, my hand shaking, and was surprised to see pale yellow come out, not the red of wine. I sniffed my goblet, and caught the scent of apples.
“Cider,” Brenn said. “I like it better than sour Roman wine.”
“I’ve not had it,” I said, and took a sip. The dry, fermenting must of an orchard in autumn filled my mouth. It was a softer flavor than the acid bite of wine, and after getting past the strangeness of it, I found I liked it. “We have this in common, then,” I said, raising the goblet.
“To answer your question: I was born in Armorica,” Brenn said.
I nodded. Armorica was in the northwest of Gaul and had remained independent from Rome. Celts had long moved between there and Britannia. “How came you to be here, with Ambrosius?”
He looked past me, out the empty doorway, and for a long moment I thought he would not answer. Then he rubbed his mouth with his leathery hand, dropped it, and sighed. “Chasing a dream; the dream that was Ligeia.”
My heart thumped. “You thought she came here?”
“She may have. She may be here still, on the Isle of Mona.”
I set down the goblet, my hands too weak with shock to hold it. “Here. She may be here.”
“Mona,” he corrected, and then seeing my expression he waved the thought away, erasing its importance. “I don’t know that she’s there.”
“But you followed her here, to Britannia?”
He shook his head. “I followed Maerlin.”
My lips parted. “Maerlin?”
“We should start at the beginning.”
“Yes. Please,” I said, and picked my goblet back up, holding it between both hands so it wouldn’t slosh.
“It’ll sound like ancient history to someone as young as you.” He scratched under the leather harness on his shoulder—he seemed as nervous of me as I was of him—settled back, and began. “I went to fight with the Romans when I was fourteen. My family—your family—were farmers, but I had no love for the plow. I had six older brothers, which meant there would be no land left for me. Better that I strike out on my own. I’m not so sorry for those older brothers, though: they were good for teaching me to fight if I wanted my share of respect. Or food.” He grinned.
I quavered a smile back, while my mind reeled at the thought of having six uncles in Armorica.
“I walked across Gaul until I found a Roman legion. I worked my way up through the ranks, fighting with the Romans for fifteen years, until an ambush by Ostrogoths in the Alps. It was a massacre. I escaped, but I ended up lost, wandering alone, half-starved. Which is when I met Ligeia.”
I sipped my cider, tried not to show how intensely I wanted to hear this as I waited for him to continue. My mind was spinning madly with the knowledge that I had family in Armorica. Cousins by now, surely, possibly with the same strangely shaded eyes. By the goddess, might I even have brothers and sisters somewhere?
“Ligeia seemed to be waiting for me, sitting on a rock in the sunshine, a basket of food beside her. I came around a bend in a path and there she was. Smiling.” He ran his hand through his short hair, scrubbing at his scalp as if he still couldn’t believe it. “She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, or have seen since, in all the lands I’ve wandered. And not just because of the basket of food.
“The next few days with her . . .” He cleared his throat and became fascinated by his goblet. “Well, you don’t need to hear that. Then I wo
ke one morning and she was gone.” He looked up, his eye wide with loss, throwing back at me the copper color that was a mirror of my own. “It was as if the whole thing had been a dream. I almost convinced myself it had been.”
“You never saw her again?”
He shook his head, but without conviction. “Not in the flesh. I searched. She wasn’t someone to go unnoticed, especially not with those tattoos covering her arms and legs.”
“And the rest of her body,” I said.
“No, just her hands and legs, and a few small ones, here,” he said, running his fingertip along his forehead, at the hairline.
I remembered those marks. “A chain of spirals, like waves.”
He nodded.
I remembered the tattoos on her hands and legs as well, and realized I didn’t have any memory of spirals on her torso. I’d only assumed they were there because of my own tattoos, and my childhood memories of her were too faded to be trusted. It was her face I remembered most; and yes, her hands, which had been so skilled at giving comfort.
“I became a mercenary after that; a soldier for hire. I wanted to see more of the world than the barracks of Roman forts. It was about six years later, in Byzantium, that this happened in a battle.” He gestured at his missing arm and eye. “But I made sure no one survived to gloat about it.”
“You killed men after your arm had been hacked off?” I said in disbelief.
He laughed. “With blood spurting out of my veins? No. I was wounded, and infection set in afterward. It was lose the arm or my life, and there were many points when I thought losing my life the better bargain. But then in the midst of the fever, blood, and pain, I saw Ligeia. Or thought I did.”
I drew in a breath. “She came to you. In your mind. When you thought you were going to die.”
His head pulled back in surprise. “Yes.”
“She did the same for me.”
“Then it was real,” he said in wonder. “I didn’t understand most of what she said—it was a chant, in another language. But then I heard her say that my story was not finished, and I must stay alive because I would be needed.”
“For what?”
He laughed. “It would have made life easier if she’d told me.” He tilted his head, turning it like a bird to get a better view of me through his one good eye. “Maybe it has to do with you. What are the chances that we would meet, eh? That Maerlin—of all people—should bring us together? There must be something big that’s going to happen, that we’ll both be part of.”
I grimaced. “Phannic prophecies, I’ve found, are rarely painless in their fulfillment. I hope for both our sakes that you’re wrong.”
“I’ve wondered for years,” he mused, as much to himself as to me. “I’ve thought it was Maerlin who needed me. Now that you’re here, though, I don’t know. It can’t be coincidence, can it, that we should meet?”
“I don’t like to think what Fate has in store for us, if I’m the one who’s going to need you. Need speaks of things going wrong, of danger. Of life and death.”
“That’s a dark view to take. Life must have been hard on you, if you expect the worst at every turn.”
I looked on this man who was missing limbs and an eye, and yet had continued as a warrior, and felt my own trials small, my efforts weak in comparison. Here was a strength born of endurance, and of perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. He showed no bitterness for the cruelties of Fate he’d suffered, no anger at the world. He’d loved a woman and followed the hope of her across Europe, on the memory of a dream.
“There have been hard moments,” I said, and hoped he’d never ask for details. I didn’t want to tell him what Sygarius had done to me, or what Clovis had sent me to Tolosa to do. It was enough that, thanks to Fenwig, he already knew that I had been the lover of Clovis, King of the Franks. “Plenty of good ones, too, though. Go on, what happened after you lost your arm and eye?”
He looked like he wanted to ask about those hard times, but he also seemed to sense my resistance. He refilled his cider and went on: “It was a long time until I was well again, and then I had to find another way of living than as a soldier. I learned the blacksmith’s trade—it’s no easier than fighting if you have only one arm, but I understood it. The metal spoke to me in a way that it doesn’t, to most men. And I figured out how to make this,” he said, raising his elaborate false arm. He demonstrated how he could open and close the pincer on the end by squeezing his upper arm against his body. “And this.” He raised his false leg. “I made a silver eye with a tiger stone for an iris, too, but it seems to scare people when I wear it. Just as well; the patch is more comfortable.”
I made a noncommittal sound and tried to imagine the fearsome appearance he’d have with a gleaming silver eyeball in that scarred face. “Maybe make one out of quartz, with a ruby iris, to wear in battle,” I said. “No one would dare fight you.”
He grinned, showing a gap of missing teeth on one side of his mouth. “They run already, when they see the weapons I strap onto my arm and leg. Anyway, there I was, a blacksmith experimenting in metallurgy. And then Maerlin came.”
“This was in Byzantium?”
“Yes, in Constantinople. Maerlin said he’d met a man with one of my blades, and had come to meet its maker. And all I could do was stand there like a poleaxed cow, staring at his tattoos.”
“What was Maerlin doing in Constantinople? Why had he traveled so far?”
Brenn leaned back and used his false leg to scratch his opposite shin. “Maerlin. You’ve noticed he’s a little different?”
I made a choking sound.
“Aye, I know. It’s like befriending a wildcat. He doesn’t mean to claw your skin off, it just happens. And pray to the gods that he never does mean to harm you. I wouldn’t say that his intentions are usually good, either. He exists somewhere outside of right and wrong, at least as judged by the rest of us. His is a strange mind. Brilliant. Far-seeing. And curious, always curious. He’d come to Byzantium, and gone far beyond, too, looking for knowledge. Mathematics, astrology, medicine, alchemy, fighting techniques. Even cookery, if you can believe that. And yet he always says he hasn’t found what he seeks.”
Well, he’d found it now. He’d stolen the chalice from me. “You recognized the style of his tattoos when you met,” I said.
“The spirals, yes. They cover his scalp, too; you can’t see them for the hair. Fenwig said that you have tattoos?”
I lifted my hem to show him the ones on a thigh. “You don’t want to see the others,” I said. “I’m not shy about my body, but I think it would be uncomfortable for you.”
“You mean they’re on . . .”
I gestured at my breasts and my loins.
His face colored. “No, I don’t want to see.” He thought a moment, then frowned. “Why are they there?”
“I’m beginning to wonder the same thing.” And I was. Maerlin’s were on his joints and his scalp; if they were anywhere more private, I hadn’t yet discovered them and didn’t know that I wanted to. My mother’s had been on her legs, hands, and brow. Did the tattoos speak to our strengths, to what set us apart from each other?
I wasn’t sure I liked what that said about my talents.
And—did anyone else of the Phanne have a labyrinth on her body in addition to the spirals, like I did? If not, what did it mean?
“Maerlin wanted my skill with metal. I wanted what he knew of the Phanne, and of fighting skills he’d learned in distant lands. And I wanted to come back to this part of the world; I missed it. So I came with him, and when he found anyone of the Phanne, he would ask about Ligeia. There were no certain stories, but it seemed possible she may have gone to the Isle of Mona.”
“You came this far after her, and did not continue the journey?”
“Look at me,” he said. “This isn’t the handsome young soldier she spent a few summer d
ays in the mountains with.”
“Nor can she still be that young woman.”
“I sent word to Maerlin’s mother that I was here, and to tell Ligeia so if she was there, or if she ever appeared there. If Ligeia wanted to see me, she would know where to find me.” He shrugged. “I never heard back.”
“Wait. Maerlin’s mother is on the Isle of Mona?”
“His half sister, as well. He didn’t tell you? His mother is the head priestess.”
I sat back, crossed my arms, and huffed out a breath, feeling strangely put upon. Arthur hadn’t told me, either—not that he’d have had a reason to. “No, Maerlin didn’t tell me.”
Brenn snorted. “There’s his weak spot, if you want to know it. Mention the Isle of Mona and watch him lose what little color he has. He’s sworn never to go within a hundred miles of the place. Won’t talk about his mother or sister. He’s afraid of them, and hates them for it.”
Which made me desperately want to know why. The talk of family also reminded me of something that Brenn might be very happy to hear. “You know from Fenwig that I was Clovis’s lover.”
“Fenwig said ‘consort.’ We all thought him mad, saying you would turn up here, looking for Maerlin; Maerlin was the only one who believed him. The consort of the king of the Franks, coming to Corinium to see Maerlin? Madness.” He laughed, a deep rolling chuckle. “How much madder everyone must think it now, to hear that I’m your father!”
“And it gets madder still,” I said, smiling. “Clovis and I have a son, Theodoric, whom he has acknowledged as his heir. Brenn, Theo is your grandson.”
Brenn’s laughter choked mid-chuckle. “I can’t take many more of these surprises.” He downed his cider in a single long swig, thunked the goblet on the table, and swore. “By Mars, though, that’s one I never would have guessed. I started out the seventh son of an Armorican farmer, and ended up the grandfather of a future king. Life’s an amazing thing, Nimia. By Mars, it’s an amazing thing.”
“I want it back,” I told Maerlin with as much confidence as I could muster, though inside I was trembling. I’d come in pursuit of my chalice, my talk with Brenn the night before having given me the courage to confront him. Hearing that he was afraid of his female relatives made him sound hopelessly human and typically male, rather than a great and terrifying wizard. And if Brenn considered him a friend, he must not be all bad.