by Myers, Karen
To distract him, she asked, “What did you think of your son? Did you recognize him, after all this time?”
“Oh, aye, I did that.” He looked at her a moment. “You should have been a widow by now, but something went wrong. Still, removing the whelp’s whelp is a start, and I can always try him again.”
Angharad’s blood ran cold but she kept her face expressionless.
“After all,” he said, “I only have to succeed once. He has to win every time.”
He pinned Maelgwn in his place with a glance, and drew a knife from a sheath on his belt.
The back door of the house slammed open, and Ceridwen walked out onto the veranda, followed by Bedo. Her skirts swirled about her ankles when she came to an abrupt stop.
“Stirred a sleeping monster, did he, our huntsman?” she said to the air, and then addressed Corniad. “You’ll be putting that away, I think.” She pointed at the knife in his hand, and clenched her fist.
Angharad couldn’t stir from her seat.
“Pardon, mistress,” Corniad said, “but I have a job to do and then I’ll be gone.”
The man neither advanced nor retreated, and Angharad could see the strain in both of them as they contested for control. She tried to get up again, to get away from him, but found she couldn’t move, no more than Maelgwn could.
The strength of the man frightened her, that he could hold two people motionless while battling someone like Ceridwen.
The door opened again, and Ceridwen stepped aside without turning to look. This time, Gwyn ap Nudd strode out and took in the stalemate at a glance. It sounded to Angharad as if there were others behind him, still inside the hallway, but she couldn’t turn to look.
Corniad spat to see him, and lowered his knife-hand. “Prince of Annwn, is it?” he said.
“King of Annwn,” Gwyn replied calmly, and walked down the steps to the ground.
“Is it so?” Corniad asked, as he backed away a step, his eyes roaming to Angharad in frustration. “At whose hands?”
“Cernunnos granted it,” Gwyn replied. “This is Greenway Court, in the heart of Annwn.”
Gwyn advanced another step, and at the force of his presence Corniad fell back again, matching him step for step.
“Who are you,” Gwyn said, “to threaten one of mine, to menace a child in the womb?”
Angharad thought Corniad looked in no danger of being defeated, as he slowly retreated down the garden path. Imp’s growling had muted, but Corniad looked to her still as dangerous as any wild beast, and her child remained vulnerable, once he thought of the beast-sense. Senua, protect her, she thought, glancing at the cat.
What if he decided to just strike, regardless of the consequences? How could she stop him?
Seething Magma led them back through the way to the woods behind the inn, and George killed the way, once Benitoe had exited.
“Can you find, him, Mag?” he asked her, hoping her senses would be much stronger.
He could feel her hesitate. “I could not penetrate his shell before,” she rumbled, “nor can I sense his presence right now.” She paused.
“What is it?” George asked, impatient to get on with finding his father.
“I cannot see you well, either, anymore. Something has changed.”
He turned on his heel and stared at her. “What? What’s different?”
She spoke to him privately, and her voice was dim to him.
*I think you can keep me out now, if you choose.*
Her tone was diffident, as if he were no longer just a friend but something else. It unnerved him.
“So I have my privacy back, is that it?” He hoped the old joke between them would relieve the tension, but she maintained her new formality with him.
*As you wish.*
No, I don’t wish it, he projected at her, distraught. You’re a friend of my heart, and you’re welcome any time. Nothing’s changed.
There was relief in her thought, and the constraint vanished. *Then we will still share our thoughts, whenever it seems right.*
Damn straight, he muttered to himself.
“Huntsman, isn’t that your car?” Benitoe called. He’d walked out into the parking area while George and Seething Magma were talking. “How did that get there?”
George froze, and then ducked out of the woods and ran far enough into the lot to see. How was that possible? Corniad must have driven it back here, after he left him on the ground, but then where was he?
His eyes fell on the wet white blossoms that littered the ground where the rosebush had stood in its pot overnight, before Mag brought it to Angharad this morning. With unnatural clarity he could see every bit of pollen dust on the petals as it washed away, the brown that was beginning to tinge them with death.
His throat seized up in panic and he couldn’t speak. He spun around and ran for the other way-opening, leaving his companions to follow as best they could.
CHAPTER 30
Corniad had backed up in the direction of the way-entrance in response to Gwyn’s slow advance. Too many enemies here, he thought, even if some of them were negligible. He needed more time. It had to be possible to kill the unborn child, even now, if he could just think of it. He’d managed it for Léonie, but he couldn’t reach this woman directly now, too many others in-between.
What was Senua doing here? This had to be her fault, somehow. He’d have to return when this woman was less well-protected, he thought, or better yet once the child was born and vulnerable. Time to go.
At the sound of heavy steps behind him, he turned his head
His son emerged from the way, wet and muddy, with a face like grim death. He took a position a few paces forward along the garden path, barring his escape.
Behind him, the rock-wight flowed out straight into the plantings in the garden, trampling the flowers, and the lutin followed. Without looking back at the way, George raised his hand in the air in an open fist the instant the lutin exited, and then clenched it hard, watching Corniad’s face as he did so.
Corniad felt the way collapse and the gust of wind that resulted, and took an involuntary step back. He’d thought that only Cernunnos could do that. Was this perhaps the beast-master in the body of his son? He reached out to probe his mind and encountered a slick wall, and his compulsions slid off of it.
Was this still his son? It felt nothing like him, nothing like the man he’d put down, up on the hillside.
He eyed the high walls on three sides, and dodged around the man blocking his path, whatever he was. He ran for the garden entrance he’d seen beyond the way, any exit he could find before he was trapped utterly, but the rock-wight flowed more swiftly than he could have imagined and reared up flat along the wall, blocking that escape.
He stopped once he realized it was hopeless. He couldn’t scale those walls, and on the veranda and its steps the others were gathered, waiting for the scene to play out.
He took up the full measure of his dignity and turned to face them all. It had to come to an end sometime, he supposed. I wanted to live more than I wanted to stop Cernunnos, and so I left myself open to this continuation of the lineage. Now it’s come back to menace me.
Still, the pure line was gone—this accident that called itself his son was something else, he thought. At least he’d accomplished that much before he died, along with all the years of life he would have otherwise been denied. It would have to do.
He released his control over the ones he held and waited for Gwyn to pronounce sentence. The dogs in the house began a furious barking, now that they were free of his compulsion to silence. He felt the presence of the hounds in kennels across the lane at his back, alerted by the noise.
Gwyn, King of Annwn, walked away from the veranda and joined Corniad’s son, whose muddy face was still black with rage. They spoke to each other as if he didn’t exist.
“My granddaughter’s husband?” Gwyn asked George.
“And her murderer,” his son replied. “My unborn brother, too.”
George must have seen the puzzled expression on his face, for he spoke to him directly, then. “Did you even name him, before you killed him?”
Corniad shook his head. You don’t name the unborn, he thought, it’s senseless.
George declared, in a measured tone. “To hell with you, then. I did, when I found out about him, so that he would not go nameless into the night. His name is Gilbert, after my grandfather.”
There was a resonance in the air when he spoke, as if something heard and approved.
“I would have liked a brother,” George said quietly, “and sisters, too.”
Corniad told him, “Our kind have only sons,” and he noted a strange look on his son’s face which puzzled him.
“Have you no attachment to family,” George asked him, “none at all? Is it the red deer in you, or something darker? Even animals don’t turn on their own like this.”
He leaned forward, and his voice hardened. “This is my garden, my house, my one small place of peace in this court. What gives you the right to kill me, to invade my home, to terrorize my family?”
His voice rose, and Corniad held himself still. There was more here than his flesh and blood, he knew. Cernunnos was resonant in the bitter words.
“I chose family,” his son continued. “I chose to find you, despite Cernunnos’s objection, and this is the result—a deadly threat to me and all of mine.”
Corniad was stung to speak. “We are not the same, in blood or power, and I deny your heritage from me. You should never have been born.”
“And you’ve done your best to fix that, haven’t you?” George looked at him for a moment. “All for the sake of a longer lifespan? Was that it?”
Corniad did not respond.
“Tell me, was it worth it?” George persisted.
“Kill me and be done with it,” Corniad said, provoked.
George considered the request as if he would comply on the spot. “Madog killed all his children so that he would raise no rivals. And yet he died.”
Corniad spat out, “I know not who Madog is. I have only the one son, myself, and it looks like he’s going to be the death of me, as I feared all along.”
He raised his face to the sky that threatened rain, one last time. “Twenty-five years was a short reward, but far more than I could have expected if I hadn’t tried.”
As he breathed the air of the garden, he thought, it will be Gwyn, armed for the purpose. His son didn’t have the stomach for it. A relief, I suppose, to be done running at last. He closed his eyes and waited for the strike.
George was stopped in his tracks by Corniad’s resigned accusation. He’s right, he thought, the son he feared has indeed survived, and I intend his death. But that’s wrong. Isn’t it?
I can’t leave him alive. He tried to kill me. He could have killed Angharad. This is no time to be sentimental.
But the red anger which had been choking him receded, and he found himself regarding his father with more distance. Can I kill him now, he thought, in cooling blood instead of hot wrath, out of policy instead of self-defense?
Look at him, standing there, his face lifted to the overcast sky. This was the same sky when he assaulted me, before the rain began west of here. I’m soaked from that rain, but here… it’s as if it hasn’t happened yet. But he did try to kill me, just a little while ago. It’s not his fault I’m still alive. And he expects me to kill him now, as my natural response.
Gwyn turned his head to look at George, and drew the saber by his side as if to offer it, but George shook his head slightly, irresolute.
Cernunnos picked that moment to erupt as the horned man, and Gwyn stepped back to give him room.
“You must choose,” the deep voice said, and George knew to whom he spoke.
“It’s not right,” George protested, his own voice in the shared body. “My father, my blood. This is not the great hunt.”
His control was overruled, and the horned man turned to Gwyn. “You shall witness this judgment, as king.”
“I shall, great lord,” Gwyn replied. George thought he saw sympathy in his eyes, but no help.
What do you want with my father’s line, he asked Cernunnos, silently. What are they for?
The horned man replied aloud, “They hold—he held—the mastership of my beast-clan. They stand for me, act for me when I am elsewhere. They bear my blood and some of my power.”
Corniad pulled himself out of the stillness of his preparation for death to retort. “And we are your slaves, all our short lives, like the beasts you bred us from. But you gave us human forms, and we’ve learned independence. My own father taught me, before he died, as his father had taught him.”
He stared hard into the horned man’s face. “I swore my father’s death would be the last, in the old way. I will do your bidding no more, my lord. You might as well end it now.”
But all of us are constrained, George thought, by death, by circumstances. There is no such thing as complete independence. It made his head hurt, this three-sided conversation, with two of the voices in his own head.
How can I choose, he thought. If I choose loyalty, family, love—why, that’s not Corniad, even if he’s family, too. It’s an impossible choice.
He pulled back the horned man form and confronted his father directly.
“I am more afraid of you attacking me and my child than I am of Cernunnos who can kill me at the merest whim. You’ve become a monster.”
Corniad abruptly took on the form of the horned man himself. “And you? Is this what you want your wife to see, in your marriage bed?”
The blood drained from George’s face. Never, he thought. In his mind he heard the echo of Madog’s taunt—fawns, she’ll bear fawns. He noticed the sharp, broken tines on one side of his father’s rack. Was that the injury that had happened in the car crash that killed his mother, never healed, never replaced? Or did he shed them each year and that’s how they grew back, now?
“I missed you both, as a boy,” he said, slowly. “I missed you so much, in the strangeness of Virginia and my grandfather’s home. But what you’ve become, it’s worse than if you’d just died. It would have been better that way.”
How much of what he had missed was false, he wondered, cobbled together from his memories and his father’s compulsions not to get too curious.
“And I missed Cernunnos, too,” he said. “He’s stern, but he’s never betrayed me. Perhaps he will some day”—Cernunnos snorted somewhere inside—“but then nothing is certain but dusty death, as the poets know, and I can escape it no more than you can. I wish I could, for my wife’s sake.”
He heard the thickening in his voice but he couldn’t hide it. “You, father, you betrayed me, and my mother, and the son she carried. You lost your way, and I don’t know you. I can’t let you live.”
He looked over at Gwyn’s sword, still drawn.
“No, huntsman.” Benitoe’s voice rang out, from behind Corniad, on the garden path where he’d stood unmoving all this time.
He stood firmly before all the taller witnesses. “You mustn’t do this. You can’t cause your father’s death, or let someone else do it.”
He pointed at Gwyn with a nod of his chin. “The fae, well, they’ve learned to do things like that. Their families are… complex, with their conflicting loyalties and their long memories. But that’s not how my folk live, and not who you are, either.”
George stared at him, focusing on his words and shutting out his father’s closed face.
Benitoe said, “It’s not about his crimes, huntsman. It’s about your own honor. To kill him like this, like a dangerous animal… that would stain you with your own blood, and you could never wash it out, never come back from that.”
“Foolish,” Gwyn murmured at his side.
It’s true, George thought, it would be foolish to let him live. But he remembered the stain Gwyn himself carrie
d for the death of Cyledr Wyllt’s father and the torture of his son. Even the fae have lines they cannot cross without guilt.
He could feel the rightness of Benitoe’s words, but how could he let this dangerous animal survive? How would his own family ever be safe while his father lived?
“Have you anything to say, father?” he asked, unable to ignore the broken tines, the evidence of the attack that had killed his mother, but forcing himself to listen to his defense, to give him his say.
Corniad reverted to his human form and the surprise on his face was eloquent. He clearly had no expectation of survival. An unexpected expression swept across his face, and he dropped his head. George thought it might have been shame.
The advance of the young black cat through this tableau of rigid forms attracted all eyes. He trotted up to Corniad and sat before him, but the man turned his face away morosely, silent.
“You have the beast-sense. You know who the cat carries,” George said. “Speak with her.”
There was no visible reaction, but the cat lifted his paw and touched Corniad’s leg, and he tilted his head as if listening.
I have all of this inside me, too, George thought, the grimness, the fatalism. I recognize it well enough. Could I become such a monster, killing my children and my wife? He shuddered. Kill me first, Cernunnos, he thought.
And yet, he is my father. He began as a rebel, hiding in the human world, but it took my accidental conception to turn him into a murderer. He was disloyal to Cernunnos, but he didn’t mean evil when he started.
In his head, Cernunnos commanded his obedience. Judge him, he intoned.
How can I, George replied.
He shook himself. Enough. He nodded his head briskly and spoke sternly to his father. “Will you abide my judgment? Don’t think of me as your son, but as an ally of Cernunnos, to whom we both owe fealty.”
Corniad lifted his head. A certain calmness had settled upon him, as if he were willing to cede control over his fate, content to let someone else sort out his motivations and his actions, and he nodded to his son.