It wasn’t wise to put a name to the dark ones, nor to give your name to them, and it was even more foolish to bargain with them. Not unless you wanted them to come for you one day, asking a payment much too high for what you got.
It did rather sound as if that was exactly what Morgana wanted.
“So, Mother didn’t argue with Morgana, she didn’t even chide her. She just said ‘Since you have told him, you might as well have the teaching of him.’ And that was what she did.” Gwen heard him get up from his chair and walk over to her pallet to peer down at her. The ceiling seemed to move in a slow circle, with his face as the center of it. “Ah, still with me. Good. It is really quite important that you hear this, my love. You need to understand just why it’s futile to resist me and important to love me.”
He sat back down in his chair, satisfied that she was still listening to him. “Naturally, Morgana told me everything then, not the least of which was how the Merlin had tried to have me killed when I was born. Morgana had seen just this thing in her scrying and had told Mother, so Mother had made certain I was safe by giving birth early. By that, Morgana was as much my mother as she was, if not more. Well! When she told me that, I was all for pledging to the Morrigan myself! Unfortunately, the Morrigan does not accept males.” He sighed, theatrically. “Nevertheless, Morgana taught me and kept me safe from my brothers until I could defend myself. Shortly after that, Mother decided that it would be a fine idea to wed Morgana to your father. She had intended him for herself, but her magics were thwarted.”
Oh, Gwen remembered that all too well.
“Now I would imagine at this point, you are wondering why Morgana didn’t ensnare your father. She was more powerful than mother, and the moon goddesses, bright and dark, are goddesses of passion and love. It’s a logical question.” The chair creaked as Medraut leaned back in it. “The answer is simple enough. She didn’t want him. Why would she? He was an old man, more than old enough to be her father.” After a pause, he began to laugh, harder and harder, the sound filling up the entire room, battering her ears. After what seemed like far too long, his laughter died down. “Oh, my. That was funny. You should be able to understand her feelings perfectly, my love. After all you are married to an old man who is more than old enough to be your father.”
As Gwen teetered on the edge of unconsciousness, it came to her in a last moment of pure nausea that for once, Medraut was right; she did understand Morgana’s feelings in that, if in nothing else. She understood them perfectly.
Gwen awoke, as usual, slowly. But as she woke, she was aware almost immediately that she was not where she expected to be.
Scent came to her first, and the scent was of steam and soap, with a touch of rosemary. Then came the sense of hard pressure at her back, not the soft mattress. And there was no weight of furs on her, either.
It was warm, extremely warm. As sensation came back to her fingers, she flexed them, and ran them over the surface she was lying on.
Wood.
There was no wood in her cell except the beams of the ceiling.
She fought against the clinging hold of the potion, struggled to free herself of it, feeling hope begin to stir. She had to see where she was! Finally, she got her eyes open, and looked up at the ceiling above her. It was tiled in blue mosaic. And although it was not tiled in a pattern she recognized, she knew very well what this must be: a Roman bathhouse in a Roman or Roman-styled villa.
She was where she was always groomed while she was unconscious. Only this time, for some reason, she was alone. These rooms echoed dreadfully; if there had been anyone else here, she would have heard the breathing, even if they didn’t stir.
So, alone, and somewhere other than her cell. Hope took on strength. By this time, she knew exactly how soon she could move as the potion wore off; she was nearly on fire with impatience, until at last, she was able to sit up.
She had been lying on a wooden bench very near a small soaking pool, smaller than the one she knew in Arthur’s villa. This definitely was a Roman bathhouse, for the entire interior was paved in mosaic—blue with scenes of mermaids on the walls, brown with plants on the floor and in the pool. Her hair was still damp and a bit heavy but not soaking, so someone had been drying it before she had been abandoned. She was in a chemise, but not a gown, though there was a clean one nearby.
There were, in fact, a great many things nearby . . . including a knife that someone must have been using to clean and trim her nails. It wasn’t a big knife, but it was more of a weapon than she had seen in far too long.
With her eyes fixed on it, she held her breath and listened. There was a lot of commotion going on in the far distance. Shouting. Fighting? Something urgent had interrupted the people grooming her, and kept them occupied long enough for the potion to wear off. If that was fighting, they might even have forgotten her.
At some point, though, someone would realize that they had been gone too long. She had to act, and act quickly.
The first thing she did was to don the gown, slit it up the middle, and use strips she cut from the towels she found to bind the result to her legs like a pair of trews. She followed that by making crude cloth shoes of the remains of the towels. Once, she would have been able to go barefoot in anything but snow. No more. And if she managed to escape, she couldn’t afford damaged feet. She braided her hair roughly, tied the end with a bit of scrap, then hunted, quickly for what else might be useful.
She took what was left of the towels, the knife, and the pumice stone she found there, and a dipper, shoving everything but the knife into a small wooden bucket. She didn’t have the time or the strength to break up the bench to get a club, but she could swing the bucket to bash someone with, and she had the knife.
The only entrance into this room probably led to the changing room. She eased toward the doorway and peered cautiously through it. The next room, also paved and walled in mosaic like the first, was empty, but unfortunately there was nothing useful there in the way of clothing or a weapon.
There were two more doors into the changing room. She could not afford to take the wrong one, lose time, possibly be trapped in the one with the cold bath in it. She listened again, going over how a bathhouse was laid out in her mind; there would be at least one room that had a cold bath in it, but any sound would be coming from the doorway that led to the rest of the building.
That way. What she wanted was the quickest way outside, one that didn’t pass any more rooms. Granted, she didn’t have much in the way of resources, but stopping to try to steal anything would only increase the risk of being caught. She moved quickly to the corridor. Here the mosaic continued only on the floor; the walls were plaster, painted with fading scenes of Roman gods and creatures of story.
The cloth wrapped around her feet muffled her footsteps and allowed her to move in complete silence. She listened intently as she moved and kept a sharp watch for places she might be able to hide if anyone came along this corridor. But no doors gave onto it except the one at the end, and the only light came from slit windows high up under the ceiling.
The noise was all coming, so far as she could tell, from the opposite side of the villa. And to her delirious joy, the corridor she was in opened not onto a courtyard but onto a bit of graveled yard surrounded by a laid stone wall. And in the center of the yard was a pile of wood, a chopping block, and an ax, left stuck in the block, as if the user had been interrupted. This was the yard that supplied the hypocaust with wood!
With that in her hand it would take more than two or three men to make her a captive again. She ran out into the yard, seeing the mouth of the furnace in the wall to her right as she did so.
She shoved the knife in the bucket, grabbed the ax, and yanked it out; the wall had been built to keep people out, not in; there was a rough way up it by way of the wood stacked against it, and she took it, flinging herself flat on the top of it to avoid being seen.
The wall was built at the top of a steep slope, with woods at the bottom. It
was a long way down to the ground. But this height was nothing she hadn’t managed before, so long as she remembered how to fall and tumble. The building she had just left loomed higher than the wall—there was no way to tell what all the ruckus was about. She just hoped it would continue.
Breathing a prayer to Epona, she tipped herself feet-first over the edge, ax in one hand, bucket in the other.
She hit hard enough to hurt but not hard enough to break or sprain her ankles, and she turned the fall into a barely controlled tumble and let the momentum hurtle her down the slope at a pace far faster than she could have run. This came at a cost, of course; stones hidden in the long, rank grasses bruised her ribs as she rolled over them, and she collided abruptly with a tree trunk at the bottom. But still—nothing broke, and she was able to scramble to her feet and duck into the woods.
She felt as if she was on fire with exultation. She was free!
Free, yes. But the trick is to stay free. She paused, panting, to take stock of her situation.
All right, I have no idea of where I am. Or . . . when . . . It could be early spring or autumn. The trees were leafless—
But buds on the branches of the bushes that screened her were greening.
Spring, then. She had been Medraut’s captive for most of the winter. She still didn’t know where she was, and there was no way to find out quickly. Or slowly, for that matter. Assuming she got away, far away, and encountered farmers or a village, she didn’t dare ask anyone, for as soon as it was known that she had escaped, Medraut would have his men out looking for her. Think, girl. East was dangerous. South was the Saxons. North was Lot’s.
All right. No matter where I am, if I go west, eventually I will come to our lands, or at least the lands of Father’s allies. All she had to do was figure out just which way was west.
But first she had to put as much distance between her and that villa as possible, and for that the best answer was to travel directly away from it, no matter which direction that was.
Bucket in one hand, ax in the other, she made herself think calmly and gathered all of her scouting skills together.
Then she slipped into the forest like a phantom.
Those scouting skills returned with every step she took, until she was slipping through the woods as silently as any deer and leaving less trace. Perversely, the fact that her feet were wrapped in rags meant that she left almost no footprints, and the few she left were unrecognizable as human. Every time she came to a stream, she waded into it and walked along it for as long as her feet could take the cold. She never went in the same direction twice, either, going upstream on one and downstream on the next. So when she heard the hounds behind her and then heard their baying turn to bafflement, she knew she had bought herself at least a little more time.
But if they got downwind of her, they would find her without finding her trail, so she needed to either get downwind of them or get something between herself and them that could confuse the scent.
She was hoping for a nice swamp, or some other pungent way to break her trail, when she realized that there were some sort of animals in the woods ahead of her, for she heard slow footsteps and the occasionally breaking twigs. She froze as she heard snuffling, then relaxed as she recognized the sound as a herd of deer rather than the vastly more dangerous herd of swine. She altered her course to find them, pushing through more underbrush, until she surmounted the top of a little ridge, crouching to keep from making a “human” silhouette that would spook them.
When she did spy the herd, grazing on twig ends, she realized she had made a mistake, but a fortunate one. Not deer. Goats. This was much, much better than deer. Probably the fighting had driven them away from their usual pasture, and their pungent smell would surely cover her scent, and they should be used to human beings. There were about twenty of them, brown and gray, still shaggy with their winter coats.
Cautiously, she stood up. They looked at her calmly, the sure sign that they were not feral. With a grin, she walked toward them and clucked at them. “Come on,” she whispered, making a little shooing motion. “We need to go, you and I. There are dogs coming, and you won’t like them any better than I do.” The lead goat looked at her with his strange goat eyes, snorted, and stamped his foot. The other goats all looked up at him and stopped eating. He bobbed his head, then led the herd off in the direction she wanted.
They let her get right in among them. She began to wonder after a few moments if this was something more than an ordinary goat herd . . . because not only were they going the way she wanted to, but very soon the leader was taking them at quite a brisk pace, and the rest were not protesting at all, nor trying to stop to graze. He took them to a track that was wide enough that she wasn’t being slapped by underbrush and kept them on it. She was able to trot along in the middle of them quite as if they had accepted her as one of them.
Even as she thought that, the leader turned his head over his shoulder and looked at her. There was a green flash as his yellow eyes with their kidney-shaped pupils became laughing green eyes; there was a shiver of Power, and she almost stopped dead in her tracks at the shock. Then they became goat eyes again, and the he-goat continued shoving his way through the underbrush beside the path. She hurried to keep up with them.
The Ceffyl Dwr, she thought to herself. The Water Horses sometimes took on the aspect of other hooved animals than the horse. The green eyes were a good clue as to what they were, and so was the fact that this path they were on was never very far from a stream. As they pressed on, he increased the pace again until they were trotting and she was really stretching her legs. It had be a long time since she’d walked this far. Her legs started to hurt. Ah, gods, if only he would be a horse so I could ride!
But she knew that was impossible, for he would be keeping his distance from her because of the iron ax and knife. And she dared not abandon the only weapons she had. But “Thank you!” she called softly. The he-goat bobbed his head but did not look back at her again.
Behind them, the sound of the dogs faded with distance, then died away. If they hadn’t lost the trail before she joined the Water Horses, they surely had now.
Her side ached; she pressed her elbow into it and kept up.
He could be taking me to the Otherworld . . .
That was a risk she would have to take. Annwn was a dangerous place for mortals, and the Water Horses were not often known for having kindly natures. There was no telling what else she might meet there, either.
But she thought she could probably keep herself safe as long as she kept her wits about her. At this point—yes, Annwn was much to be preferred over being in Medraut’s hands.
The goats pushed on, and she held her aching side and ran with them. Wherever they were going, one thing was sure. It was away from Medraut.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The goats finally stopped in the last blue glow of twilight at the edge of a lake—stopped and then plunged in. They didn’t stop, either—nor did they swim. They ducked beneath the still, cool surface with hardly a splash at all and didn’t emerge again. Gwen found herself quite alone except for a fluttering in the reeds of birds, and the distant mutter of ducks.
Gwen was not at all surprised at their sudden abandonment. Exhausted, yes, but not surprised. The Ceffyl Dwr, like all the Folk of Annwn, were fickle and quite easily lost interest in the plight of mortals. It was wiser, when you got aid from them, not to count too much on it and never to expect anything further.
So here she was, on the edge of a lake with nothing more than the clothing on her back, the ax, and the contents of her bucket. In the dark, hungry, and with a raging thirst.
All right. Things were not so bad.
Though she was hungry, she had been eating well in captivity; a few days without food would do her no harm, and a single night was negligible. She had water right here at her feet. She could find some place to hide in order to sleep, even in the dark, and if the moon came up, well, all the better. The important thing was t
hat she was free, and the Water Horses had made sure that Medraut would have a wretched time trying to track her. Even though he had hair of hers to do so magically, being so muddled up with the Water Horse magic might well be enough to throw him off the “scent” there, too, for a while.
While she could still see, she bundled the knife in the leftover strips of toweling, then got herself a bucket full of water. The dipper made a fine cup, and she drank until she was sated, then sat down and waited to see what sort of moon would rise.
To her great joy, it was full; the sight of the pale orb lifting slowly above the trees made her breathe a sigh of intense relief. She would easily be able to see now, to get into what was probably the single safest place to sleep unless she found an old den to hide in—tied into the crotch of a tree as far above the ground as she could manage.
The light painted a swath of silver across the lake, and touched the wisps of mist that were just beginning to rise from the waters. In the morning, well, there were a lot of things that she could do to find food. There were edible roots, and if she could manage to make a line, she could certainly fish. The ax was a comfort to have, but it was the sharp little knife that was going to make all the difference to her survival.
She gathered up her things and began to prowl the lake shore, and within moments she found exactly what she needed: an ancient tree, uprooted by a winter storm, lying half in, half out of the water. She explored the trunk, pulling brush that had piled up against it aside, and uncovered a hollow beneath it full of dead leaves blown in by the winds that was just big enough to hold her. She shoved her possessions in as far as they would go and crawled in after, pulling the brush back across the opening. The leaves crackled and gave off a slightly bitter smell, which should further serve to mask her scent.
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