by Anna Elliott
“For them to believe it, he had to look as though he’d been mistreated. He battered his face and arms with a rock so he’d be cut and bruised. And then he walked straight out of my father’s fort, into the enemy encampment, and into Arthur’s war tent. He gave Arthur a story about being one of my father’s body slaves who’d managed to get past the guard and over the fort’s outer walls. And he offered to show Arthur and his men how he’d managed it. For a price in gold, of course. Only, of course, it was a trap. The party of men—thirty of Arthur’s best commanders—were taken captive. Arthur had to draw back and call off the siege if he wanted them ransomed.” Isolde shook her head. “I don’t know to this day how he—Marche’s son—got free. Arthur would have had to have put him under guard, with orders to kill him if he turned out to have lied.”
She looked up to find Kian watching her, brows raised. “And he told you all this—Marche’s son?”
“Of course not.” Isolde shook her head, her mouth curving in another crooked smile. “I heard about it from the rest of my father’s men—they talked of nothing else for months. Marche’s son would never have told me himself. He’d have known I’d be furious with him for taking the risk. And he’d have said, It had to be done by someone, and why not me? And I’d have been angrier at him still for being right—and for not losing his temper and shouting back.” She glanced at Kian again. “He almost never did. Lose his temper, I mean. He was …” Isolde stopped her smile fading as she searched for a word. From outside came again the soft trill of birdcalls in the garden just beyond the window, and the whickerings of horses and shouts of men in the outer court beyond that.
“Private, I suppose,” she said at last. “Guarded. Very self-contained. Because of his mother, I think.”
This was drawing near again to everything she dreaded speaking about, and Isolde felt the usual tightening of her stomach. She made herself go on, though, looking up to meet Kian’s bruised gaze. “Marche’s wife had a miserable, hellish life. I’m not even sure I’d wish her lot on Marche himself. When we were children, growing up, her son used to try to protect her as much as he could from Marche’s beatings. And usually wound up whipped or beaten himself for it. It only got worse as he got older. Because then he was old enough to fight. Hit back when his father struck him—which of course made Marche angrier still.”
Isolde’s hands clenched involuntarily, but she made them relax and went on. “I doubt anyone ever knew anything of that but me. He—Marche’s son—never told anyone. And he never, never cried or let anyone know that his back and ribs were more often than not one solid bruise under his shirt. I doubt I’d ever have known, either. But my grandmother was a healer—and by the time I was six or seven, she was teaching me. I knew enough to recognize someone with injuries when I saw him. So I’d make Marche’s son let me salve his bruises. Or strap his ribs if Marche went further than usual and cracked a bone. He hated it. Marche’s son, I mean. And he never talked about his father to me—or even told me straight out that it was his father who beat him. But still, I think he let me get past his guard more than anyone else.”
Isolde stopped. For a moment Kian sat without speaking, the cool, still silence of the workroom drawing in about them. Then Kian said, “You’re speaking of Trystan, aren’t you? He’s Marche’s son.”
The words were more statement than question, and Isolde realized as he spoke that she felt no surprise—that she’d been expecting this almost from the moment Madoc spoke of the bounty Marche offered for the capture of his son.
She gave Kian another small twist of a smile. “Was it the ‘completely reckless’ part that gave it away?”
Kian snorted despite the lines of pain that tightened his mouth. “Well, I’ll not say that’s not got Trystan dead to rights. There’s bravery and there’s madness, and Trystan walks the line between them like no one else I’ve ever known. But no. Them that attacked us used his name—Trystan. And besides—”
Kian stopped, his shoulders hunching. Isolde felt him controlling himself with an effort, but he went on, his voice unchanged. “One of them had been Owain of Powys’s man. Recognized me from the time at Tintagel, five months ago—knew he’d seen me with Trystan.”
Isolde saw again the broken fragments of memory she’d glimpsed in tending Kian’s wounds. “So that’s why the bearded man took you to torture, and not any of the others who’d been captured?”
Kian’s muscles jerked, one hand reflexively touching the patch over his eye, and Isolde felt a quick stab of compunction mingled with anger at herself. She was tired, still, with the effort of blocking out awareness of the pain her treatment of Kian’s wounds had inevitably caused. Though that, she thought, was hardly an excuse.
She said, quickly, “I’m so sorry, Kian. You don’t have to answer that. Forget I ever asked.”
Cabal had risen and now whined softly, butting his head against Kian’s arm. Kian rested a hand on the big dog’s head, then picked up the jar of ale and brought it to his mouth, downing several long swallows before at last he set it down. Isolde could almost hear him forcing a rush of memory back into its box. She knew, though, that there was nothing at all she might say that would ease the struggle or soften the effect of her words. She watched helplessly for what seemed an endless moment before he looked up at her again and asked abruptly, “Did you know who Trystan was, then, when you saw him five months ago?”
A memory struck Isolde of Trystan as she’d first seen him those months before, dirty and unshaven, eyes red-rimmed with fatigue, slumped against the stone wall of Tintagel’s prison cell. Captured by Con’s army as a Saxon spy, guarded, interrogated, and beaten by men who’d no more idea than she herself had done that they kept prison watch on Marche’s son.
She shook her head. “No—at least, not at first. I’d …blotted out nearly all my memories from before Camlann. Because it hurt too much to remember them after. And besides—” She moved one shoulder. “He was barely fifteen the last time I saw him. And—what? Two and twenty, now. He’d changed. So had we both.”
She paused, staring at the wall straight ahead. “Though I did remember, in the end.”
“When you went back to get him free of Marche’s prison?”
Isolde nodded. “Yes. I knew then who he was.” She stopped again, recalling that last scene with Trystan—when he would have slipped away without speaking to her, without so much as telling her good-bye, if she’d not happened on him just before. When she’d added Trystan, her childhood companion and only true friend, to the list of all the others who’d gone and would never come back.
She folded her hands shut, opened them again, then looked up at Kian once more. “Why do you ask?”
Kian took another draft of ale, then sat a moment without speaking. Then he raised a hand to touch his eye patch once again, and instead of answering, asked, “How did you know the man who did this had a beard?”
Isolde, too, was silent a long moment before she spoke. Then finally she said, “Let’s each of us take a question we don’t have to answer, all right?”
She thought there might have been a faint flash of amusement in Kian’s gaze, but then he shook his head, looking down into the half-empty jar of ale. He drew in his breath, then said without looking up, “They say that you can …see things.”
Isolde’s eyes moved once more to the workroom’s shelves, the ordered rows of pottery jars and the hanging herbs above, the copper brazier with its still glowing coals. “Yes,” she said. “I know they do.”
Kian’s shoulders hunched, and Isolde saw his fingers tighten on Cabal’s collar once again. Then his head lifted and his one remaining eye met hers.
“Could you see Trystan, if you tried?”
Let another charge of witchcraft be brought, Isolde thought again, and she’d face a sentence of burning she couldn’t hope to escape. And yet—
Isolde met Kian’s weary, pain-dark gaze once more. Strange, she thought, that it should be Kian I trust. Not five months before, he’d spat a
t her feet and called her a she-devil and nearly cut her throat. But she did trust him—more than any. And even if she’d not, she knew she couldn’t have ignored the unwilling, half-shamed look of anxiety at the back of his gaze. Not when she could still feel in him the ragged pulse of memory her thoughtless question of a moment ago had stirred.
She said, slowly, “I can try.”
To all things, Myrddin had once said, there is an ebb and a flow. And that the only constant in this world and the Other alike was change itself.
Isolde filled a shallow copper pan with water and set it on the scarred wooden table, peripherally aware that Kian had sat up a little on his bench and was watching her with an odd blend of uneasiness, disbelief, wonder—and something like simple curiosity as well—on his battered face.
The Sight was altered, since it had drifted like sea mist back into her, bit by bit, those months before. Maybe because she herself was changed. Or maybe, she thought, simply because the Sight ebbed and flowed with all the rest.
She had the dream. And she could feel the pain of those she worked to heal—catch flashes of memory, sometimes, as she had from Kian, if they were bound and knotted together with the pain. She couldn’t read other thoughts, though. And thus far she’d seen nothing but the smoldering trail of Marche’s destruction in scrying water of any kind.
Kian was watching, though, and so Isolde emptied her mind, focusing her gaze so that she stared both at the water’s mirror-smooth surface and past it, to something beyond. She let her breathing slow, her heart steady, reaching inside herself for the place where the strands of the Sight were tied. She let the echoes creep in, first of the Old Ones, the soft lilting voice that spoke from somewhere deep beneath the fortress stones—deep as the caverns where Myrddin’s dragons were said to lie. And then—
HE MOVED THROUGH THE FOREST WITH the ease of long practice, pausing now and again to listen for any signs of pursuit and ignoring the steadily mounting pain from the wound in his side. You must be getting soft, he thought. The quarry guards would have gotten another four nights’ work, at least, out of a man in your shape.
Still, by this time he could probably have walked backwards and in his sleep through a fully pitched army camp without being heard or seen. Much less along a silent wooded path, with the memory of Hereric’s agonized face in his mind’s eye to keep him moving ahead.
A rustle sounded up ahead in the damp leaf mold underfoot, and he froze, molding himself against the trunk of a beech tree, one hand moving automatically to the hilt of his sword. Probably nothing but a badger or a deer. But then he didn’t want to die swearing at himself for stupidity, either.
ISOLDE CAME BACK TO HERSELF TO find that Kian was gripping her arm, his face blanched beneath the angry bruises and scrapes. She pressed her hands to her eyes, drawing breath like a swimmer coming up for air.
“It’s all right. I’m all right.”
Kian’s breath went out in an explosive rush, and he sank back on the bench, grunting involuntarily at the jarring of his bruises. “Powers of Satan. You looked like you were seeing a vision of the damned in hell.”
Cabal, too, was beside her, thrusting his nose into her palm, a high, anxious whine sounding in his throat. Isolde put a hand on the big dog’s neck and drew another slow breath.
“No. Nothing like that. I didn’t see anything. Not really. It was just—”
She shook her head, shivering a little, a prickle of cold sliding down her spine as she tried to recall the feeling. As if a chill hand gripped her by the back of the neck, and she saw—
“There was a man. And a feeling that he was in …danger, I suppose. Trouble.”
“Trystan?”
She could hear the tension in Kian’s voice as he asked the question, but she could only shake her head again. “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know. I. …”
Another of those huge, cruel jokes, she thought. That the Sight should show her nothing of actual use—just enough for the fear of uncertainty, which was always the most gnawing fear of all. Though Kian wouldn’t thank her, she thought, for trying to spare him worry or pain.
She met Kian’s look directly and said, “I can’t be sure. But if you ask me what I believe, then yes, I think it was Trystan I saw.”
“Danger.” Kian rubbed the back of his thumb along the long, puckered scar, then grunted. “Wouldn’t exactly have needed the Sight to guess that much.”
“I’m sorry.”
Kian shook his head. “Aye, well. Shouldn’t have asked you to try it, maybe.”
Isolde could hear the flat weariness in his voice, see the lines of exhaustion and pain deepening about the corners of his mouth. She knelt before the low wooden chest that sat beside Kian’s bench, lifted the lid, and drew out a pair of folded blankets.
“Lie back and rest now,” she said. “You need to sleep—and it may as well be here as anywhere else.”
To her surprise, Kian made no protest—which was itself a mark, she thought, of just how pain-sick and tired he was. He swung his feet, muddied boots and all, up onto the bench, the breath hissing through his teeth at the effort. But he took the blankets from Isolde before she could cover him, tossing one carelessly over his legs and bunching the other behind his head.
“All right. Been out of the nursery long enough to make my own bed.”
He lay back, then, his eye drooping closed, arms crossed over his chest. “You needn’t stay on my account, you know—you can go.”
“I know,” Isolde said. “Lie down, Cabal.”
The big dog turned in place three times, then settled himself once more on the floor beside Kian’s bed, and Isolde drew out a wooden stool. Another mark, she thought, of the depth of Kian’s exhaustion that he didn’t object. But the first day was always the worst, when men like Kian dreamed themselves back into the blood and killing of battle or the terror of capture. Isolde always sat by them, to wake them if they groaned or cried out in sleep, as she had with Con.
She took up a bunch of dried lavender whose small dusky purple buds were ready to be picked free of their stems and sat down, thinking of Con laughing with Myrddin five years before. And when he’d done, the shadowed, haunted look had ebbed from Con’s eyes and somehow into Myrddin’s, as though the old man had taken his boy-king’s blood-soaked memories for his own.
But Myrddin’s magic—if magic it had been—was as beyond her powers now as then. She couldn’t blot out Kian’s memories or drain them off into her own mind, any more than she could restore his eye. She could only heal his wounds as best she might—and try to keep him from reliving the agony of them in nightmare while he rested here.
For a long while after Isolde had sat down, neither of them spoke, the silence of the workroom broken only by the soft rustle of the dried leaves as she worked, and by Kian’s slow, slightly rasping breaths. She knew, though, by the rhythm of those breaths that he wasn’t yet asleep.
At last he said, “He’d have gone north, likely, when he left Tintagel.”
“Trystan?”
Kian nodded. “Signed on with whoever would pay the most for fighting men. And the chiefs in the Pritani lands are always on the lookout for swords to add to their war bands. That’s what I’d have done, in his place.”
“Then he’ll be far out of reach of Marche or any of his men.”
Kian shifted on the bench. “Aye. He’d be well away. Unless he’s less sense than I credit him for.”
Isolde forced herself not to ask the obvious question, but Kian answered it all the same, his thin mouth hardening in brief satisfaction. “And no. Them that did this”—he gestured to his eye—“know nothing but what they might have before. I didn’t give them anything.”
“I’m sure that’s true.” Isolde dropped a handful of the tiny dried lavender buds into a stitched linen bag, sending out a breath of spicy, flower-scented air. Then she looked up and asked, suddenly, “What about Madoc—does he know that Trystan is Marche’s son?”
Kian was silent so long b
efore replying that she thought he’d at last fallen asleep after all. But then, slowly, he shook his head and said, “He doesn’t. Not so far as I know, at least—and I reckon he’d have said something if he did.”
“You didn’t tell him, though?”
Kian let out his breath, then shook his head again. “No, he’s heard no word of it from me.” Kian’s eye opened, and he stared up at the ceiling. “I’ll tell you, I lived outlaw with Trystan for three years. Fought at his side and at his back more times than I can say. Never swore him an oath, mind. And I left five months ago, to pledge my service to Lord Madoc. Drank his ale and kissed the blade of his sword and made him the death vow and all. So maybe I was wrong not to tell him the whole when he asked what the bastards who captured us wanted to know. But—”
Kian stopped and lay without speaking a time, pain-bleared gaze still fixed on the ceiling above. “Well, Trystan and I were guarding each other’s backs before ever I laid eyes on Madoc, that’s all.”
Isolde watched him shift himself, wince, and then shift again, as though trying to find a position of ease. She said, “I suppose it’s no good my asking whether you couldn’t get Lord Madoc to grant you a month’s leave from fighting duty? No, all right. I know—I might as well try to teach you to embroider in colored wool. It would likely be easier.”
Kian’s laugh was a harsh breath of mirth, no more, but it was a laugh. Then he turned his head, his battered face softening slightly as he looked at her and gave her hand an awkward pat with his big, calloused one, his voice turning gruff once again. “Don’t mind for me, lass,” he said. “I’ve been a sight closer to death than I am now. I’m not that easy to kill.”