by Janzen, Tara
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Morgan and his men rode north and east, fording the River Dwyryd, leaving Merioneth and heading deeper into the wild mountains, into the heart of Gwynedd. Morgan would report to Llywelyn, who was rumored to be at Dolwyddelan Castle, before turning south again to warn Dain. Caradoc bore watching, by both his neighbors and his friends.
The wind picked up toward midnight, swirling down the precipitous mountain track and bringing the last stubborn flakes of winter snow. Spring was coming to the valleys and lower forests, but not to the mountains. The high, rocky crags would be dusted white afore morn. Morgan called a halt at the next small clearing. The men quickly set up camp and huddled down close to the fire.
Owain took the first watch, with Morgan to follow, but Morgan had hardly closed his eyes, when the captain was back at his side. Owain said nothing, only knelt down and gestured to the south. Morgan looked in that direction, wondering what he was to see, but then he heard it, a low keening sound, a death wail coming from a far-off distance.
He shuddered and crossed himself, and wondered if the half-crushed man had died, or if there was even more mischief afoot at Balor Keep.
Chapter 8
April 1198
Wydehaw Castle,
South Wales
Lavender streams of clouds coursed across a darkening sky, bringing with them a sunset breeze laden with the fresh smell of spring. The scent drifted into the Hart Tower and mingled with the savory essence of dried herbs, before winding a path around the thousand flowers hanging from the racks and ceiling. Of all the rooms in the tower, Dain had made his bedchamber the most pleasant. The northern solar always smelled rich and soft and sweet, a combination to soothe even a troubled mind to dreams and sleep.
For all his regrets over what he had allowed—nay, encouraged—to happen at his bath a fortnight past, Dain had not lost any sleep. And he did have regrets, one anyway, possibly two. He wasn’t dwelling on them, but he was aware of their existence and their cause—Ceridwen ab Arawn, the innocent one who had seen too much.
She had spoken hardly a word to him since the bath and remained far too mortified to meet his gaze. She averted her eyes and a blush blossomed on her cheeks whenever he neared, a necessity he had avoided whenever possible, hoping not to upset her delicate sensibilities any more than he already had.
His consideration was paying off. She was healing, her bruises fading, her spirits lifting. She was able to limp around on her own and use the chamber pot unaided. He’d fed her only the best food and insured her rest with a bit of sleeping draught in the evenings, and was well pleased with her progress. The only complaint he might lodge would be against her incessant praying. All that soft muttering coming from his bed unnerved him.
He walked to the end of his worktable and searched through the vessels on the worn planks for one containing aqua ardens. For all the good that it had done, he was finished with coddling her. Edmee had seen to her needs for the last two weeks, but he did not care to have Edmee constantly underfoot. If the chit would eat this night, ’twould be from his hand.
He understood her wariness. He’d once felt so himself, under somewhat similar though less benign circumstances, and it was time she learned not to be cowed by the unexpected, even the shockingly unexpected. Though had he the chance to do it all over, he would not have shocked her as he had. She was already overly skittish about marriage. What he and Edmee had done could not have reassured her in any way. Quite the contrary, she was probably more determined than ever to escape, and that he would not allow.
So it was time to woo and conjure.
He found the jar he was looking for and returned to the middle of the table, to the stage he’d set for her entertainment. He had decided on a very special trick, tricks being so much more reliable than magic, a trick so sublime even he believed in it. Two bowls sat in front of him, both empty, and beside them a pair of linen strips. In between lay his rowan wand, and scattered here and there were a few jars and pots containing nothing more than water. A tallow candle flamed nearby.
He began with a wave of the wand, always a good place for a magician to begin. Then, with a flourish, he used the tip of the wand to lift a linen strip and float it down into the first empty bowl. A brief incantation followed, delivered with authority. His confidence was high, the more so for knowing he had succeeded in capturing her attention from where she lay in his great bed. A rustling of damask and a near soundless slide of furs announced her piqued interest.
He tried the trick the first time with only water, soaking the linen and passing it over the candle. A doused flame was what he got for his effort. He had expected no more, but he should have known she wouldn’t let his failure pass without a disparaging remark. “Fool man,” the chit muttered, just loud enough for him to hear.
A grin tugged at his lips, but he managed to control it.
The remaining linen strip received only aqua ardens with the incantation, and when he passed that cloth over the newly lit candle, a gasp came from the bed, followed by a snort of laughter.
He had expected no less. The linen had disappeared in a whoosh of flames, burned to a cinder. He was not discouraged. He was playing to an audience of one, and a little calculated failure did much to soften the mark.
He had no more linen, so he looked around the room, seeking an alternative. Luckily, a miracle occurred. From out of thin air, a soft and dark blue ball appeared in the palm of his hand. He looked appropriately startled and amazed, but did nothing beyond lifting his hand in front of him. Slowly, the indigo orb blossomed in an untwisting spiral, folds of cloth slipping through his fingers, a length of it rippling down his forearm.
Silk, Ceridwen thought. Nothing else moved like silk, and nothing moved like silk in the hands of a master, though she would have done well to call him thief as well as fool. Her red book was missing. Worse yet, with the book gone, she’d lost Mychael’s letters.
She gingerly tested her jaw, but did not move her arm. The bite there ached clear through to her bone. Thief Dain might be, but on the whole, her lot had improved since her night with Ragnor, albeit temporarily. Unless she could free herself and reach Strata Florida, she still had Caradoc to face.
A series of Dain’s fluid moves had the gold-and-silver shot cloth floating in the air, swooping and soaring with barely the tip of his wand used for direction. She watched the graceful flight of silk and hoped he had the sense not to try his magic on such a costly piece of cloth.
He did not, for his next move sent the scarf sliding through the air into one of the bowls. She cringed, and almost dared not to watch. Nothing had happened with his first spell, and that was the best she hoped would happen again, for his second spell had obviously gone awry.
Dain chose a jar, but in the deepening gloom, Ceridwen couldn’t tell if it was one he’d already tried. She soon realized it didn’t matter, for he poured into the bowl the contents of that jar as well as most of the other jars and pots on the table. The incantations began in earnest then, his voice rising and falling with the rhythms of bewitchment. During a particularly potent-sounding phrase, he transferred the silk to the other bowl and poured one last bottle of liquid over it, preparing it for certain ruination, she was sure. When he lifted the sodden mass on his wand and passed it over the candle, her heart sank in expectation of the worst.
Fire sizzled and caught on the edge of the silk and, faster than she could follow with her eyes, encased the whole length of cloth with flame. She gave it up for lost... but the cloth did not burn.
Her eyes widened in disbelief. Fire encircled the silk like a sheath, flames and heat swirling around, spiraling up, sparks of light flashing off the gold and silver threads, but the silk itself remained untouched. When the flames died, Dain floated the scarf again, in the air and up and about, an indigo swallow soaring through the aftermath of his magic.
She watched him, her heart beating faster. He was as Ragnor had said after all, a sorcerer, a practitioner of the dark arts she’d read a
bout in the parchments hidden in the convent’s manuscript room, the place where she’d found her red book.
Heresies for sure, and pagan magic too, the cleric who had shown the parchments to Ceridwen had said, translated and transcribed by an eleventh-century monk who had thought he had an eye for ancient history. The church had disagreed with bell, book, and candle. Ceridwen hadn’t known that day what to believe of the cleric’s disjointed and breathless ramblings, except when he’d loosed his braies, she’d known enough to run.
Curious, she’d gone back when the lustful cleric was well and truly away, and she’d found wonders within the heresies, story upon story woven into a fantastical whole, along with faded illuminations showing a time of not one God, but of many gods and goddesses and the mighty wars of enchantment they’d fought.
In the beginning, she’d found great comfort within those worn pages, for they recounted the stories of her childhood, stories about the Children of Don, the Mother Goddess; about Ceraunnos, the “Horned One”; about Ceridwen, her namesake and the mother of the great Druid Taliesin. Those tales had been told over and again by a beautiful mother to her children, her gentle fingers combing through their fair hair, her voice falling like an angel’s sigh upon their ears. Rhiannon had been her name, and Ceridwen missed her still, her loss having left an emptiness nothing had ever filled.
The years had passed slowly, and Ceridwen had spent many days eluding the prioress so she could explore the nooks and crannies of the scriptoria, but the deeper she’d delved into the century-old parchments, the less comfort she’d found. Obscure references to Carn Merioneth had been written in the margins of one of the manuscripts, leading her to another one written in the same hand and bound in red leather. The finding of that book had set her upon her present doomed course, for what that scribe had reported as myth, Ceridwen had known to be fact: Carn Merioneth had been a land of golden apple trees, its orchards praised far and wide for the sweetness of their fruit; a land of amber honey and forests rich in game, home to hart and hind, fallow deer, roe, and boar. All this and more had been protected by a palisade of beauty and grace built on the cliffs above the wild Irish Sea—and it had all been destroyed by a giant who rose up out of the dark night wielding a flaming sword.
With such truth from the past facing her, how could she not believe what the book had gone on to foretell of dragons and blood and evil men and her own grim future? And if perchance the history of Carn Merioneth had simply been told by one who had been there, and the prophesy was no more than an imaginative tale, how had that person known of pryf? For the dark mystery of the deepest caves below Carn Merioneth had been written upon the pages of the red book as surely as it was written in her memory and on the walls of that long-ago tunnel.
Damned book. No power on earth could make her call dragons, and the only blood she would deal in was the blood of Christ her Savior in Holy Communion. As for evil men, who could it be besides Gwrnach and Caradoc, and as she loathed the father for his murderous destruction of her home and family, she loathed the son.
Yet her fate had arrived, in the guise of a handsome rogue whose smile had brought a blush to even Abbess Edith’s sour face, and she had not eluded it. Since the night the good woman had put Ceridwen into Morgan ab Kynan’s hands, betrayal had become the watchword of her life. The betrayal of all she’d learned in childhood, the betrayal of the convent’s teachings, and the most painful betrayal of all, that of a mother who had filled her head with dreams that had become nightmares, and then left her to face them alone.
Her gaze followed Dain as he moved around the table. If she couldn’t escape the nightmare, she would have to fight, and within the depths of such a master’s knowledge could lie the seeds of her salvation, if she had the strength and the means to use them against Caradoc.
The Boar was reputed not to fear any living man or beast, but if the red book was true—and she dare not doubt it any longer—he would have need of magic, and she would rather give him magic than her blood.
Dain had such magic. He had just proven as much, despite his earlier denials. He may not be Light-elf or tylwyth teg but neither was he a mere leech. A man did not mark himself with strange symbols he did not believe in, and she’d felt the heat of Brochan’s Great Charm herself. Italian glass, indeed. The old man, Erlend, had not thought so. He’d nearly jumped clean out of his skin when she’d brandished it. As an ally, one like Dain could lend strength to her fight. As an enemy, though, he would do nothing to help her, least of all let her go.
She closed her eyes, dismayed that she had fallen so quickly into the depths of degradation, needing an ally such as him to save herself from eternal damnation. Not even the abbess had foreseen such an early demise of her moral fiber.
Wicked man. She’d recognized his seduction two weeks earlier for exactly what it was, an act of utter depravity, and she could not imagine what had induced the maid Edmee to rouse him in such a manner. For herself, she heartily wished she had never been a part of what she’d seen.
But she had been. She’d felt his slumberous gaze upon her, and she’d felt his deep groan of pleasure vibrate through her after their eyes had met. That lush, primal sound had changed her somehow, touched her in places she had never been touched, and every time she looked at him now, she felt those vibrations stir anew. Nothing in the nunnery had prepared her for him, not even the lustful cleric.
There were men connected with the abbey, to be sure, the chaplain mostly. At least three times a year the archdeacon came, more rarely the Bishop of St. David’s. Men from the village purveyed with the order or labored in the fields, but none of them had been like Dain, neither the holy men nor the villagers. The son of a Welsh prince had come once, requesting food and lodging for his men; and as his father had endowed the abbey in the name of his mother, the laws of claustration had been eased enough to allow them to camp close to the convent walls. Ceridwen remembered looking upon the tall and handsome young man, and she’d felt a longing, not for him particularly, but for what Gwrnach had stolen from her, the chance to love and the birthright to marry well. She had not known then how foolish her longing had been.
That long-ago prince and Dain shared a similar arrogance in their bearing, but the younger man had not had Dain’s seductive grace, nor the intensity of his gaze. Over the last fortnight, she’d often felt the touch of the mage’s dark eyes upon her. It was more than instinct that warned her when he was watching; there was a tactile quality in the attention he was able to level across a room. No other person she’d known—man, woman, or child—had possessed such a talent. Nor had anyone else been able to set a dancing flame to silk and leave the cloth untouched. Neither had she ever seen stitchery as fine as that which graced her face and shoulder. That alone was enough to convince her Dain worked in concert with powers she did not yet understand.
He was rare, this Dain, and he held a good portion of her fate in the palms of his hands and in the tips of his skillful fingers. She knew no better reason to enlist his aid through whatever means necessary, or almost any means. She would not do what Edmee had done. She would not barter sexual favors for his trinkets or his help. Not that she could imagine him wanting such from her. In traveling with Morgan and his men, she had not noticed anyone reacting to her with so much as a raised eyebrow. Morgan himself had certainly wasted no time in turning down her offer of marriage in return for his fighting arm at her side.
No, she would not entice a man with her body or her favors, least of all a sorcerer accustomed to sinful pleasures. As for her friendship, it had no value beyond the gift itself, and she had no gold with which to buy his services or his teachings. In truth, she had nothing to offer him except the chance to save her life, and he’d already done that once and done it very well.
She lifted a tentative hand to the side of her face. She would bear scars. Whatever beauty she might have had, Ragnor had stolen from her, but ’twould make no difference to Caradoc. He did not want her for the fairness of her face and form. He
only wanted her.
He only wanted her at any cost.
The realization slowly registered, bringing with it the first hint of advantage she’d had in many long weeks. She had no need of gold to gain Dain’s support. Her leverage lay in herself. She had worth to Caradoc, therefore she had worth to Dain. No doubt he had made that clear to her cousin before he’d sent Morgan north. She wondered if he’d dared to ask outright for ransom.
More than likely, she decided. She was betrothed to a Welsh lord, and she was being held in a Marcher castle. The seeds of conflict were well sown in those simple facts. Should she escape, the wizard would get nothing for his trouble, except a war.
Her bargain would be clear: in return for his teachings of magic, she would not escape him as she had Morgan, for despite its poor outcome, she had escaped Morgan.
Ceridwen almost smiled. Should the chance to escape arise, she would take it without a backward glance or an ounce of guilt, no matter what she promised Dain, but it would have to be better than a fair chance. She could not afford any more failures, neither physically nor emotionally.
She looked up to where Dain was again working at the table. In the fading light he looked more than a match for the Boar. Mayhaps not in bodily strength, but no one could deny the sheer presence of the man.
It might be enough.
She knew from Mychael’s letters that Caradoc was said to resemble his father, and Gwrnach had been a golden giant, a sun god gone berserk. His enraged stance in the blood-soaked bailey of Carn Merioneth would forever be engraved in her memory. Her mother’s maid, Moriath, had held her close as they stood on the hill above the keep, drawing her to her side and warning her not to cry out at the horror of what they saw. Mychael had been spared the final sight of their home in flames, for he had not awakened in Moriath’s arms until they were well and away.
Mychael, dear sweet brother, was her only real hope of salvation. ’Twas folly to believe in another, especially a dark sinner like Dain, yet Mychael might have been lost to her. She’d received no letter bearing his mark for nearly six months, and two of her own had gone unanswered.