by Anna Elliott
Madoc jerked his head. “But his opinion is irrelevant. I believe it worth the attempt for you to join the negotiations on Ynys Mon. And as your country’s High King, I ask that you attend.” His eyes, dark and deep-set in his ravaged face, met hers. “Ask, though.” He stressed the word. “Not order. Ynys Mon is but a half day’s ride from here. But any journey may be dangerous in times such as these.”
“I hadn’t been expecting a safe season, even in this place. And if you wish it, yes, I will come to Ynys Mon.”
Isolde paused. The comfrey leaves were softened, now, to a verdant green, and she took up a pouch of powdered slippery elm to tip into the bowl, as well. She could well imagine what Cynlas of Rhos’s words might have been—the ones even Madoc couldn’t bring himself to repeat. Or not within her hearing, at least.
She’d expected almost at every moment to have this conversation or one like it these last five months—ever since the council had ruled her marriage to Marche invalid. On the grounds of Marche’s treason, of course. Not because she’d been forced to the marriage against her will.
Isolde had taken up a pestle to mix the comfrey and slippery elm into a paste, and she had to force her hand to relax its grip on the stone handle.
This, though, was why she’d agreed to the council’s proposal that she be sent to this remote spot. The reason she’d come without argument to Dinas Emrys, despise herself for the cowardice of it though she had—and did still, come to that.
Now she gave the herbs in the bowl a few smooth, rocking strokes with the pestle before saying, “But there is more, isn’t there?”
Madoc hesitated, and Isolde saw doubt or suspicion flicker briefly across his scarred face, saw him draw back with a kind of instinctive aversion, like a horse scenting wolves. She said, with an effort to keep the impatience out of her tone, “I was Constantine’s queen for seven years, my lord Madoc. Since I was thirteen. I’d hardly need witchcraft to guess that there is more to my presence on Ynys Mon than simply a hope that he may be softened by the memory of his friendship with my father. Have you offered him a marriage tie to strengthen any proposed alliance? The lady of Camelerd in exchange for whatever spearmen he chooses to send?”
Madoc was silent a long moment before replying, his dark eyes intent on her face. At last he said, “You’re young, Lady Isolde, to look like that.”
“How do I look?”
“I’ve seen eyes like yours—looking back at me from an enemy’s face across the divide of a shield wall.”
Isolde turned her gaze away. “Perhaps. But I’m old enough, my lord Madoc, to have been married twice by the council’s will. Old enough, too, to choose my battles—and not to enter a fight unless I’ve at least a chance of winning.”
She glanced at Kian, still sitting with his eye closed, and for his sake—and because it wasn’t entirely fair to blame Madoc for the way of the world—made an effort to keep her voice low.
“I could cry,” she said, “or I could take this bowl of comfrey leaves and fling it as hard as I can against the wall. Or I could say that I would rather beg by the side of the road than wed Goram of Ireland or any other man. And still I would be left with the same choice. I can either marry the man the council chooses and keep a measure of control at least over Camelerd and how the lands in my trust are ruled. Or I can be locked behind the gates of a Christian house of holy women—as my mother was—and see Camelerd carved up, divided amongst you all. If anything of the land remains, after the burning and slaughter by Octa and Marche’s men.”
Madoc let out his breath, his shoulders sagging as though with sudden weariness. “I may wish that I could deny the truth of that—but I can’t. The proposal to offer Goram marriage to you and so the control of Camelerd has been made. And I do ask, Lady Isolde, that you consider what the gains won by such an alliance might be.”
Madoc stopped, his eyes, dark and intent, fixed on Isolde’s. “But I swore to the king’s council,” he said, “as I swear to you, now—that you are under my protection as High King. And that I will ask of you no marriage that is not of your own will.”
Before Isolde could answer, Madoc had turned to where Kian still sat unmoving, head tipped back against the wall. “His eye is gone,” Madoc said quietly. “But I know you will do for him otherwise all you can. I leave him in your care.”
Chapter Two
WITHOUT THE LEATHER PATCH, THE empty socket of Kian’s eye was bloody, red, and angry and inflamed. Isolde had treated injuries far worse these last seven years. She felt still, though, a hard lurch of mingled sickness and helpless anger at the sight—as she always did when confronted with a wound that no amount of skill at healing could ever make whole.
But Kian was sitting with his shoulders both hunched and rigid, his jaw set as though anticipating a blow. Madoc was gone, but even still she could feel him hating the necessity of having his weakness and injury laid bare. Though Cabal, remaining behind at Madoc’s command, had come to sit at Kian’s side, brindled head resting on the wounded man’s knee.
Isolde closed her eyes briefly, deliberately put all thoughts of the interview with Madoc—all thoughts of Marche—all thoughts of any world at all beyond her workroom’s four stone walls aside. She waited until she existed in a place with Kian alone, suspended in time. Then she opened her eyes. Isolde started to take the measure of his injuries, feeling as gently as she could for broken ribs, checking his hands and arms for other broken bones, and feeling with her mind as well the source of each individual hurt and pain.
That meant that she caught, too, from time to time, brief, broken flashes of memory, jagged as pottery shards in Kian’s mind. A man with a broken nose and a greasy, flea-ridden beard …a dull knife, heated in the fire …the reek of his own vomit as he lay on the ground and—
Isolde’s hands felt clammy before she was even halfway done, and she paused a moment, pushing a stray lock of hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. Easier, she thought, in many ways, to tend the wounded when she’d been still without the Sight. But then, too, she was far more skilled a healer when she could sense every cracked bone, every cut, every part of bruised skin, and feel the pain of them almost as her own.
At last she sat back on her heels. Kian’s injuries were nasty—all the more so because they’d been inflicted with the calculated intent to cause pain. But none was likely to kill. If the mutilated eye stayed free of poison, and none of the other lesser wounds turned bad, he would live.
“Well?”
Kian had sat silent throughout her examination, his gaze fixed on his own muddied riding boots, one hand clenching and unclenching on Cabal’s thick leather collar. Now his voice was edged with something like anger—though Isolde knew it was more for himself and the men who had done this to him than for her.
“Nothing broken, that I can find,” she said. “Though you’ll likely feel for weeks as though you’ve had an entire herd of cattle trample across your back. You’ve maybe one hand’s breadth of skin on you that isn’t bruised purple and green or scraped raw.”
She made the words deliberately matter-of-fact, willing both anger and pity entirely out of her voice. It seemed to help, for Kian grunted, gave Cabal’s head a clumsy pat, and then took up the jar of ale once more, a measure of color ebbing back into his face as he drank.
“A hand’s breadth, eh? Can’t say I noticed it myself.”
Cabal subsided with a heavy sigh onto the ground at Kian’s feet, and Isolde forced herself to smile. Though looking at the bloody eye socket, the smile felt more on the edge of crying. She blinked, though, rose, and turned to where she’d set the still warm comfrey poultice she’d made on the table, taking up a horn spoon and starting to spread the mixture between layers of clean linen.
She’d seen wounded men—men with the marks of torture on them—many, many times. Enough to know that though Kian wasn’t broken, the worst for him was almost certainly yet to come.
“What do you think of the plan to seek alliance with King Goram
?”
Out of the corner of her gaze, she saw Kian’s shoulders relax at the question into an attitude of simple consideration. His face was marred on one side by a long scar, won years ago on the fields of Camlann, and he raised a hand, rubbing the mark unconsciously with the back of his thumb.
“Well, there’s the old saying. If you meet a rabid wolf and an Irishman, kill the Irishman first.”
Isolde laughed in spite of herself, and the corners of Kian’s thin mouth lifted slightly as well, though his bruised face turned grim again almost at once.
“But like Lord Madoc says, I can’t see that we’ve any choice but to try for a treaty with Goram. Not that I’d trust a pact with him unless it was written in his own heart’s blood. But still, there’s another saying among fighting men. That the enemy of your enemy is also your friend. If Goram hates Marche enough to fight him on our behalf, well, then—” He stopped, shrugged, then winced at the movement. “Reckon most of the council feels about the same.”
Isolde nodded. She took up the comfrey poultice and pressed the square of herb-saturated linen gently across the empty eye socket, then replaced the leather patch to hold it fast. She felt Kian’s breath go out in an explosive rush and his hands clench on a fold of the traveling cloak he still wore. He didn’t speak, though, and after a moment she asked, only in part still seeking to divert Kian’s mind, “And what about Madoc himself?”
“What do I think about him, you mean?”
Kian was silent, rubbing the old battle scar once more, some of the lines of pain in his face loosening their hold as he appeared to consider his words.
“Well, he’s not one for talk. I doubt any of us that fight with him have had more than a dozen words out of him in the time we’ve served. He doesn’t boast, either, the way fighting men like a leader to do. And the gods know we’re not winning victories under his command. But still—”
Kian jerked one shoulder again and shook his head. “I doubt there’s one among his men wouldn’t follow him into a wolves’ den waving a haunch of raw meat. Somehow he’s that kind. Might even”—Kian’s voice turned briefly sour—“stand a chance of winning if he’d anything like a decent amount of men and weapons and food to command.”
He stopped and was quiet a moment before looking up and meeting Isolde’s gaze, answering the question she had actually, if silently, asked. “Don’t worry yourself,” he said gruffly. “I’ve no regrets about kissing his sword blade and swearing him my oath.” He touched the eye patch. “Even with this—even if I’d died for it—no regrets.”
Kian sat in silence as Isolde bound a second poultice over the ugly bruises on his ribs, bandaged and salved the rest of his raw scrapes and cuts.
“You can stay here awhile,” Isolde said, when she’d done. “I’ll go, if you like, and you can rest quiet where you are.”
Kian’s face looked slightly grayish beneath the bruises and scabs, but he shook his head. “Reckon I can make it to my own bed.”
He made no move to go, though, only sat staring down at his own hands, resting with blunt-tipped fingers splayed on his knees. Then, abruptly, he looked up. “You knew him, then, this son of Marche’s? Knew him well, I mean?”
The question took Isolde by surprise, so that her hands went still on the heap of dirty linens she was bundling together to be washed clean. She could feel, though, an odd intensity to Kian’s words. Somehow tied, she thought, to the memories that still hummed like bees beneath the surface of his control.
She said, slowly, “Marche was my father’s ally—as I told Lord Madoc. He lived at my father’s hall, Marche and his wife and their child.”
She paused, staring unseeingly down at the blood-smeared rags as a wash of still unaccustomedly vivid memory pulled at her like the undertow of a wave. Marche’s son was part of the time she’d walled off in her mind, locked away in a small hidden space inside her and forgotten until five months before. And after forgetting for so long, remembrance now often caught her like a blow, blotting out the time in between so that what she spoke of might have happened only a day before and not seven years. “So yes,” she said at last. “I did know the son.”
Isolde hadn’t meant to go on, but somehow the quality of Kian’s silence and the steady look in his undamaged eye was what in another man might almost have been a plea for more. Isolde wondered for a moment whether he might suspect the truth about the son of Marche and his Saxon bride. But she could sense that this mattered to him, though she was not yet certain—not entirely certain—just how. Besides, she thought, telling him can hardly make a difference now.
She was silent, her gaze traveling over the solid gray stones in the opposite wall, tracing the shadows cast by the strings of hanging herbs. Then she said, “We grew up together—almost from the time I could walk, I can remember playing with …him.”
She paused and glanced up at Kian. “You’ll know the story. It’s sung in these times by every bard in every fire hall in the land. How my mother Gwynefar betrayed Arthur and wedded Modred—my father—when he tried to seize Arthur’s throne. I don’t remember her. She fled to a convent almost as soon as I was born. And my father wasn’t one to concern himself over-much with a daughter. So I was raised my Morgan, my grandmother.”
Isolde paused, searching for words that would capture the fierce, tender, clear-eyed, iron-willed woman, who, even when Isolde had known her, had still the remnants of the beauty she’d been when young. She could find none, though, and after a moment she went on.
“I’m sure you’ll have heard the tales of her as well. She’s called sorceress or witch in nearly every one of those bard’s songs. And maybe she was—I don’t know. She taught me all I know of herb craft and healing and—”
Isolde stopped and drew a breath before going on. “She loved me,” she said after a moment. “I never doubted that. But all the same, it was a …lonely life for a child. There were other children, of course, at my father’s hall—the children of his nobles and servants and fighting men. But they were all afraid of playing with a witch girl.”
She looked up at Kian again. “I’m very like my grandmother, so I’ve been told—or like what she was when she was young. And children can be cruel little beings.” She paused, looking back across the years and added, “Though to be fair, it was my own fault as well. I came on a band of the older boys beating on one of the younger ones—just for sport, and because they could. They’d given him two black eyes and knocked out one of his teeth. I was seven, I think, and I lost my temper and made them all beg the younger boy’s forgiveness and told them if I ever caught them doing anything of the kind again I’d curse them and turn them all into slugs.”
Isolde stopped and gave Kian a brief twist of a smile. “Scarcely surprising that the other children about the hall were too much afraid to even speak to me after that. And I’d no brothers or sisters. Instead, I had—”
She caught herself. “Marche’s son. He was—is, I suppose, if he’s still alive—two years older than I am.”
Kian shifted his weight on the bench, but he didn’t speak. Isolde could hear, from the outer court beyond the kitchen garden outside, the thud of horses’ hooves and the calls and shouts of men. One or other of the king’s war parties—Cynlas’s or Dywel’s—must have arrived.
She went on, “He was never afraid of me—or of my grandmother. I don’t know why. But I can remember playing together when he was—oh, four, maybe, and I was two or three. Long before he left the women’s quarters to train with the men, at any rate, and that would have been when he was seven and I was five.”
Isolde paused, watching the dust motes dance in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through the window. From outside, she could hear the faint drunken buzzing of bees and the throaty trill of a mourning dove’s call.
“Even then, though, I used to follow him everywhere, every chance I got.” She smiled a little again. “I probably drove him to distraction—though he never said so. He used to take me fishing, sometimes, when he’d tim
e off from learning to ride and fight with a sword and all the rest. And he showed me things—how to throw a knife. Catch fish. Build a fire in the woods. That sort of thing.”
She stopped as another sudden, knife-sharp memory came back. Herself, nine years old and leaning over the edge of a small fishing skiff, trailing her hand in the water and squealing in surprise when a fish’s slippery, oddly bone-hard mouth nibbled on her fingertips.
“I knew you couldn’t do it,” the brown-haired boy beside her had said.
She’d looked up. “Do what?”
“Keep still long enough for me to actually catch anything.” He tugged one of her braids and grinned. “Now keep quiet, or I’ll throw you over the side and let you swim back to shore.”
Isolde shut her eyes a moment. If she wasn’t yet accustomed to living with memory again, she wasn’t used, either, to the waves of longing for that time each separate remembrance brought. She could dismiss as cowardly the wish that she could go back to safety of the world before the battle at Camlann. What was far harder to dismiss was how much she missed herself, the way she’d been then.
Kian shifted again, as though seeking to ease the strain on his bruised back, and the sound brought her back to the present. “We had our own secret language, too—signs we’d worked out to leave messages for each other with stones or dry branches or leaves, that sort of thing. We even swore a blood oath of friendship. When I was ten and he was twelve. Mostly”—she smiled a bit—“mostly because he said a girl would just be scared sick at the sight of blood, and I wanted to prove I wasn’t afraid.”
She paused, her eyes on her own clasped hands. “We were friends, though—really friends. He was well liked—popular with the other boys. And the men as well, because he was good with a sword. And completely fearless in battle. He’d won that reputation for himself before he was fifteen.” Isolde gave Kian a one-sided smile. “Or completely reckless. Depending on who you ask. I remember once, one battle—he was fighting with my father’s men. They were in a hill fort under siege—no chance of escape—and facing Arthur’s combined forces. And they were outnumbered by at least two to one. They none of them thought they’d live to see another day. And T— Marche’s son, stood up and volunteered to go alone to Arthur’s camp, pretending to be an escaped slave with intelligence to offer about my father’s side.