by Anna Elliott
Garwen shook her head again. “Not he—one of his men, so I heard tell. I don’t know either which man it is or how grave are his hurts. Only that Madoc asks you to come so soon as you may.”
“Of course.” Isolde started to turn, but Garwen caught hold of her hand. Her fingers were plump, dry, and cool against Isolde’s, but her grip was surprisingly strong.
“Wait. I’ve something for you.” Garwen drew out a small parcel tied up in a knot of cloth from an inner fold of her gown and pressed it into Isolde’s hand. “It’s a guard against devils, you see?”
Unwrapped, the parcel contained a poorly made iron ring, set with a chip of white bone or stone and incised all around with Latin words.
“That’s a sheep’s bone,” Garwen said, pointing to the chip of white. “And the devils enter in—drawn by the scent of death, so the man that sold it to me said. Then the cold iron and the holy words trap them inside.”
Isolde turned the ring so that she could read the crudely carved Latin words. May the fire of God consume the evil one, she thought it read, though several of the words were misspelled and almost illegible.
In the months she’d been at Dinas Emrys in Garwen’s company, Isolde had accepted gifts of pearl-white stones, sprigs of motherwort and cowslip, and water blessed by wandering saints. Garwen was an easy mark, always, for any traveling seller of charms or spells who might pass Dinas Emrys’s gates. That was probably where she’d gotten the cheaply made iron ring. And this was why Isolde had burned the blood-smeared curse doll before Garwen could see.
Isolde had also let Garwen hang a hare’s foot from Marcia’s bed and lay a dried toad under the mattress, because, as Garwen had said in a low, half-embarrassed voice, it wouldn’t hurt and it might do good. Isolde had seen far too many warriors die in protracted agony—however many charms they carried or whatever words they scratched on their swords—to believe it herself. But she never argued.
Garwen, for all her breathless prattle and plump, slightly foolish face, had about her a sense of a locked door. A core of pain somewhere deep inside that no one was allowed to see. And besides, Garwen had good reason to be afraid. So did anyone at Dinas Emrys—anyone in Britain, for that matter. Maybe not of devils, exactly, Isolde thought. Though in many ways the term was close enough.
“You will keep it close by, won’t you?” Garwen asked.
Isolde slipped the ring onto the fourth finger of her right hand and felt a small bur in the poorly hammered iron scrape her skin. “Of course I will,” she said. “Thank you.”
ISOLDE SENSED THE PAIN FIRST OF all. A jolt of fire that shot through her every nerve and made her stomach lurch and her vision blur momentarily. Five months, and still the violence of the awareness caught her off guard, like stepping from a prison cell into a dazzling noonday sun.
She drew in her breath, though, locking the sensation away in a place where it could be borne, and stepped through into her workroom.
The room she used to prepare simples and dry herbs was on the ground floor of the fortress, with a single narrow window that faced out on the walled kitchen garden. The early morning sun slanting in showed a cool, square-built room with a flagged stone floor, a raftered ceiling hung with bunches of drying herbs, and a heavy wooden table, the surface scarred and worn smooth and dark with age.
Now a man stood, one hand resting on the window ledge as he looked outside to where the pale, tender green shoots of carrots and beans and peas were just beginning to poke through the soil. His body was outlined against the light, but even with his face in shadow Isolde recognized the broad, heavily muscled build of Madoc, ruler of Gwynedd and now also Britain’s High King. He wore riding gear, still, tall leather boots that reached past the knee and a fur-lined cloak, fastened at the shoulder with a heavy bronze brooch.
A great brown-and-white war hound lay at Madoc’s feet, head resting on its outstretched paws, and at Isolde’s step in the doorway the big dog sprang up and bounded to greet her, tail furiously beating the air. Isolde put out her hand, and the dog snuffled her palm.
“Good dog, Cabal. Good fellow. Lie down, now.”
Garwen had been right, she thought. It was not from Madoc that the fiery jolt of pain had come; he was unhurt, as far as Isolde could tell. Though no one, Isolde thought, who had known Madoc a year ago would recognize him now. The burns that had covered his face five months ago were healed to thick, ropy scars, twisting his skin and pulling his features slightly askew. He had let his beard grow, so that the worst of the damage to his neck and chin was covered, but even still his face looked fearsome, like Marcia’s blood-painted doll. Or like an idol of the Old Ones roughly modeled in clay.
She had never, though, seen Madoc himself betray the smallest awareness of the scars, either by look or by word. He was still no more than thirty, and a man of action, his nature shaped by years of war, quick to anger and slow to forgive. Not one to pay the face he showed the world much mind, save that it betray nothing of fear in the face of a battle to be fought and won.
Now, though, the grim line of his mouth relaxed, if only slightly, as he watched Cabal settle himself in response to Isolde’s command.
“That dog obeys you a deal faster yet than he does me.”
Isolde watched Cabal lie down once more at Madoc’s feet, body curved in a neat bow, and shook her head. “He knows I miss having him with me, that’s all.”
She thought of the weeks after Con’s death when Cabal, Con’s war dog, had refused to leave her side, lying in one corner of her rooms with a look of almost human grief in his liquid dark eyes. Now Cabal was Madoc’s. And she wouldn’t, she thought, have wished for the big dog any other place. He was a war hound, trained for hunting and battle. Though she did miss him, more than she would have believed.
Madoc had straightened from his brief bow of greeting, and now said, with the bluntness that always marked his speech, “Then you’ll be glad to know that he’s come to no harm in what fighting we’ve had. But I am sorry to tell you, Lady Isolde, that we can still bring you now no word of Camelerd.”
Isolde was aware of sickening disappointment, as well as spreading cold fear—though she had not really expected Madoc would succeed in learning how Camelerd, her own country, fared in the war that raged back and forth beyond Dinas Emrys’s mountain fastness and high stone walls.
Camelerd was hers, her own domain by right of her birth, however little her place as Con’s High Queen had allowed her to attend herself to its rule. And now she could see nothing of the kingdom; Marche himself was not there. She remembered, though, with a feeling like ice-cold needles pricking every part of her skin, the vision she had seen earlier in the basin in her own room. Burned-out huts kicked savagely apart …mother and child lying dead in their own blood. If Marche was not in Camelerd, there were still his Saxon allies. And Camelerd was too rich a country to expect or even hope that those allies would not attack, spreading ruin of the same kind to every corner of the land.
Madoc’s face, though, looked gray with exhaustion beneath the angry scars—and Isolde was still conscious as well of a dull, relentless pain that radiated like the heat of a fire in the corner of the room to her right.
She nodded and said only, “I thank you, my lord Madoc, for the efforts you have made.”
Madoc made a brief, impatient movement, dismissing the thanks, but his reply, if he made any, was lost to Isolde. Her body tight with a kind of dread premonition, she had turned to where a second man sat slumped on the room’s corner bench, his features still more shadowed than Madoc’s in the dim light. Even so, though, Isolde knew him, too, at once.
Kian.
He wore the green badge and leather armor of Madoc’s honor guard, his whole bearing as accustomed to the soldier’s gear as if he’d never lived as an outlaw, never hunted and fought for Trystan’s band of masterless men. But then, Isolde thought, Kian had been a soldier more than half his life, in the years before Camlann.
He would be nearing fifty, now, a barrel-ch
ested man with a grim, remorseless face under a shock of grizzled hair. His face now was a mass of purpling bruises, his mouth swollen and torn, a cut over one brow trailing a line of dried blood. He held himself as though his ribs ached. And he had, too, Isolde saw, a patch over one eye, held fast by a leather thong.
It was from there—from beneath that leather eye patch—that Isolde could sense the worst of the pain, and a sharp twist of guilt went through her. If not for her, Kian would never have left Trystan, never have sworn his oath to Madoc—never be sitting slumped in her workroom now, one eye lost. For the eye was gone. Even without looking, she was sure of that.
Kian’s whole body, though, seemed clenched, and he watched her from the shadows with a set, rigid look she’d seen countless times before in the soldiers who came into her care. Men badly wounded—often with arms or hands or lower limbs gone—who dreaded the debility being noticed for the first time. And more than that, dreaded all signs of pity or sympathy as they would salt rubbed into an open wound.
And so Isolde turned, reaching for her scrip of ointments and salves, before saying, mildly, “Goddess mother. I hope the other man looks worse, at least?”
Kian grunted, his brows climbing into his thatch of grizzled hair. “Don’t give me much credit, do you? Think there was only one?”
Isolde smiled, if only briefly. Beneath the bruises, Kian’s face was that of an old man, gray and at the last extremity of exhaustion. She could feel how tightly stretched he was, how hard he worked to maintain control and keep from shattering apart. Still, if he could joke, that was at least a hopeful sign.
She studied him, wondering whether she ought to look for the full extent of his injuries now. She glanced at Madoc, though, and decided to wait. Kian was a soldier, and Madoc his lord. And by this time she’d treated enough men like Kian to know he’d hate like bitter poison to have his wounds examined under Madoc’s eyes.
Instead, she broke the seal on a jar of ale and handed it to Kian. “Here. Drink this. It’s about the best I can offer for the pain.”
Kian took a long pull at the jar, then sat back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, considering her with the one visible eye. “Well, now. Can’t say I was keen on being doctored, but maybe it’s none so bad after all.”
Isolde saw him grimace, though, as he set the jar beside him on the bench.
Even without looking, she could feel the marks of a heavy boot over his ribs—where he’d been kicked viciously as he lay curled on the ground. But Isolde stopped herself before she could say anything more. Kian wouldn’t want the seething anger she felt for whoever had done this to him any more than he would have wanted the burden of sympathy.
She opened a stoppered vial of goldenseal infusion and, taking up a clean linen rag, started to sponge the dirt and dried blood away from the multitude of cuts and abrasions on Kian’s hands and forearms. That much, she judged, he wouldn’t mind before his king.
Then she glanced up at Madoc, still standing by the window.
“What happened?”
“Ambush.” Madoc unclasped his hands from behind his back and rubbed one along the length of his jaw. “Well carried out, really.” His mouth tightened. “Hit our supply wagons, in the rear of our train. Dirty whoreson—” He checked himself. “Dogs knew we’d have to turn the spearmen and cavalry around and fight, with food rations running as short as they are.”
Isolde took a pot of comfrey salve from the uppermost shelf. She had a rule for herself: she never let herself hesitate to mention Marche, never allowed her voice to waver in speaking his name. And so now, smoothing the ointment over Kian’s scraped knuckles, she asked, “Marche’s men?”
Madoc’s head moved in brief confirmation. “They were. Effectively, at any rate. Some wore Marche’s colors, I know. Some Saxons. Some with Owain of Powys’s badge on their shields. We fought them off—just. But they outnumbered us. Took two of our supply wagons as easily as catching pox from a village whore.” A faint tinge of color crept into Madoc’s face, and he added, “Your pardon, Lady Isolde.”
“Granted.”
Madoc gave another short nod of acknowledgment, and then his face tightened. “Took a dozen captives, as well as the wagons. Kian”—Madoc jerked his head in Kian’s direction—“was one.”
That explains, then, Isolde thought, the ridged marks where tight rope bonds have worn the skin raw about Kian’s wrists. She glanced up at Kian’s battered face. “But you escaped?”
Kian’s look was impassive beneath the bruises, the line of his mouth grim. He jerked one shoulder. “Was that or have my guts turned to fodder for the ravens.”
“And the others?”
Kian hunched his shoulders but said briefly, “Oh, aye. Got them free, as well.”
But none of those others, Isolde thought, can have been as badly hurt as Kian, otherwise they would be here as well. She knew she couldn’t ask, though, why Kian had been the only man to come to serious harm—any more than she could have spoken of the bruises on his ribs.
She’d seen men broken by torture or battle—many of them. Enough to know that Kian was not one of those. But she was aware of the fiery ache of his muscles, the throb from the empty socket of his eye. And she could feel, still, how thin and brittle was the veneer of calm he held over those jagged memory shards.
And Kian was hardly one of those who found talking a relief for memories or fear. Isolde knew him well enough to be sure of that. If Kian chooses to tell me, she thought, I’ll know. But to ask would only make him relive the beating he’d taken to no good cause.
Madoc was speaking again, half turned away to stare out across the quiet walled garden once again. A kitchen boy in rough undyed tunic and woolen hose had come to kneel in one of the furrowed beds, pulling weeds from among the rows of plants with quick, efficient jerks.
“We gained one scrap of information, though.”
His face, too, was impassive and grim beneath the weariness, but the set of his shoulders and back and the tightness of his mouth spoke of the tautly controlled fury the capture of his men had raised.
“We learned that Marche has offered a bounty in gold for information on the whereabouts of his son.”
Isolde had been spreading ointment over Kian’s wrists, so that the words caught her unprepared. Though, she thought, she supposed she ought to have expected something of the kind. She knew—if anyone did—the man Marche was.
Still, her hands jerked involuntarily, so that she almost lost her grip on the pot of salve. But Madoc was still turned away, and Kian was slumped back against the wall, the visible eye drooping closed; they neither of them saw. Isolde waited a moment, then said, “His son?”
She’d kept her voice level, but still something made Madoc glance round at her. “You’d have known him, wouldn’t you? Marche was oath sworn to your father—that is, before he turned his coat at Camlann.”
Isolde nodded slowly, turning back to begin winding a strip of clean linen about the scored rope marks on Kian’s arms, reminding herself of her own rule. “Marche has been good, always, at tacking his allegiance to whichever side the winds of victory are blowing from. And yes, I did know his son. Years ago, when we were both children, though.” She paused, tied the bandage off in a knot, then asked, “Do you know why Marche should be seeking him now?”
She felt Kian’s muscles twitch in her grasp, and he started to speak, but then seemed to check himself. After a moment, Madoc said, “That’s why the information is of some value. Rumor is that Octa of Kent is seeking alliance with Cerdic of Wessex. Already he’s allied himself with Octa of Kent. Which would give their united forces effective control of the whole goddamn eastern Saxon shore.”
Madoc’s fist struck once against the stones of the window ledge, and Cabal, still lying at his feet, stiffened, ears lifting at the angry tone. Madoc, though, drew in his breath and went on, more calmly, “Already Marche and Octa have an alliance between them. And Marche and Cerdic were once allies as well—under your father
. Marche betrayed that alliance at Camlann. Something Cerdic would be slow to forgive, if he’s considering a joint alliance between himself, Octa, and Marche. But on the other hand, Marche was once wedded to Cerdic’s daughter. His son would also be Cerdic’s grandson. So Marche offering gold to any bringing him word of his son—” Madoc raised a hand and let it fall. “It’s enough to make me think the rumors of Octa seeking Cerdic’s friendship are true. That Marche is working at finding anything—or in this case, anyone—who might tip the scales of Cerdic’s goodwill in his favor.”
Isolde was silent, staring at the wall opposite. It was strange, too, to now be able to remember Cerdic’s daughter. Marche’s wife. To look back across the years to see Aefre, daughter of Cerdic, as Isolde remembered her. Fair-haired and pale, with a slow, sweet voice—cringing reflexively when anyone spoke to her and carrying herself as though her ribs ached.
Isolde could remember, too, earning herself a lashing for slapping a noblewoman’s face when she’d been mocking Aefre’s painfully stammering speech. And Morgan, her grandmother, putting witch hazel on the lash marks on her hands and telling her to save her temper for those who stood a chance of joining in a fight—because Aefre had none.
Though even Morgan had salved Aefre’s bruises with tight-set lips and very gentle hands. And given Aefre a daily posset to take that made sure she never conceived another child.
Another ripple of memory swept through Isolde of her own dizzying relief when her monthly bleeding had come on, five months before. Despite her rule, her lips felt stiff, and it was hard to make herself speak the words. She shook her head, though, drew a slow, steadying breath, and said, “Yes, of course. I do remember. And the marriage was part of Marche’s oath to my father. A way of cementing their allegiance with Cerdic in the war with Arthur and those who remained loyal to him.”
Madoc snorted. “Marriage or no, Cerdic would have kissed the a—” He stopped. “Hand of the devil himself if he’d offered to make war on Arthur on Cerdic’s behalf. Cerdic had his army crushed by Arthur’s forces at Badon Hill. He’d neither forgive nor forget the defeat. But Octa of Kent must be hoping he’ll forgive Marche the betrayal at Camlann. Or at least overlook it enough to unite with him against us.”