Dark Moon of Avalon

by Anna Elliott

  Isolde was abruptly back in the stifling, smoke-filled confinement of Fidach’s hut, answering Fidach’s questions about the childhood she and Trystan had shared. Was he always howling-dog crazy when it came to risking his life in a fight? Fidach had asked her. And Isolde had answered, a brief half smile touching and then dying at the edges of her mouth, Yes, he always was.

  So he’d thrown himself headlong off a cliff. That explained the multitude of scrapes and bruises. Isolde lightly brushed a reddening mark on his chest with one fingertip. Another miracle, she thought, that he didn’t break every bone in his body or drive one of those cracked ribs through his lungs.

  She looked up at Eurig again. “So what happened? Couldn’t Octa’s guardsmen have gone back down the hill and around to where Trystan had dropped?”

  Eurig nodded. “Well, and so they could. And they’d maybe have tried it. But there was a patch of thorny briars high as a man’s head growing all about the base of the cliff. They tried hacking through them with their swords—spitting and swearing all the while fit to blister your ears. But they gave up after a time. Heard one of them say if he wasn’t dead already, he would be soon, and it wasn’t worth shredding their skins to finish the job now. So off they went. And me and Hereric”—Eurig nodded in Hereric’s direction—“got through the briars and got Trystan free.”

  “You—” Isolde noticed for the first time the scratches that crisscrossed both Hereric’s and Eurig’s face and arms. “I can give you a salve for that, if you like,” she said.

  Eurig shook his head. “Thanks all the same, lady, but I reckon we can stand it for now. You just see to Trystan.”

  Mother Berthildis had been standing over Trystan, head bowed, but now she turned back to Isolde. “Is there anything further you need?”

  Isolde, still kneeling at Trystan’s side, looked about the room, at the fire in the grate, the washbasin, her collection of ointments and salves. She shook her head. “Nothing. Thank you, mother. But these are your rooms. Wouldn’t you like—”

  The abbess stopped her, though, with a firm shake of her head. “No. Humility is good for the soul, so we are told. Stay where you are, the rooms are yours. I shall go to seek a bed for the night in one of the novices’ cells.” She paused, small dark eyes softening as she looked down at Isolde’s face. She touched Isolde’s cheek, her hand cool and dry as parchment against Isolde’s skin. “And I shall pray—for both of you.”

  Isolde rubbed her arms with hands that felt tingling and numb. She was sitting on the floor beside the bench where Trystan still lay. She’d done for him everything that she could: washed and salved the cuts and bruises. Cleansed and then cauterized the sword cut in his side, because that would stand the best chance of keeping the wound from turning poisoned.

  She’d been wholly thankful, at that moment, as she held the hot knife to the wound, that the Sight didn’t allow her to feel Trystan’s pain. And at the same time, she’d felt the hard, clenched knot in her chest tighten again. Because Trystan should have been screaming when the red-hot metal touched his skin. And instead he’d only groaned, made a slight, feeble movement of his head, and then lapsed into unconsciousness once more.

  Isolde had told the other men to get what sleep they could, since there was nothing they could do for Trystan by staying awake. But they’d refused, instead dividing the night into watches so that one could be awake and with her at all times. Eurig had taken first watch; he now sat on a low wooden stool near the room’s small hearth, and occasionally made a slow circuit of the room, eyeing the door and window—checking, Isolde supposed, that all was secure.

  Hereric, Daka, and Piye had retired to the inner chamber of Mother Berthildis’s rooms, a small, square space with a rug, a chair, and a single narrow sleeping shelf. Isolde hoped they were asleep. All three had looked exhausted, and Hereric’s face had been drawn and tinged with gray, reminding Isolde that barely a week had passed since he himself had lain hovering between death and life.

  Hereric had turned at the last, before following Daka and Piye into the inner room, and looked intently down into Isolde’s face. In the glow of lamplight, the tracks of tears on his broad cheeks had been plain. Trystan hurt …Isolde help? he had signed.

  Of course I will, Isolde had said. Now, though, there was no more help she could give. She had tried, at intervals, to get Trystan to take some water or wine, but he’d swallowed nothing at all. Still, Isolde couldn’t bring herself to move from where she sat beside him on the floor. She simply sat with her arms hugged about her knees, counting each of Trystan’s terrifyingly shallow breaths.

  Eurig had spoken to her hardly at all since the other three men had gone. Isolde was thankful for it. She kept dreading hearing one of the men ask her, Will he live? And then hearing her own voice answering with the words that even now pressed tight against her throat, I don’t think he will.

  Maybe in the morning she would manage to find some feeble thread of hope and cling to it. Now, though, in the darkest watches of the night, she felt as though she’d exhausted every last scrap of her reserves of courage and determination. She was left with a blank, gray, overwhelming tiredness and a bone-deep certainty that Trystan was going to die. And it would be all her fault, from start to finish, every single step of the way.

  Eurig’s voice broke in on her thoughts, making her start and look up. “Not really his sister, are you?”

  Isolde found she was too exhausted to even try to lie. She said, simply, “How did you know?”

  Eurig shrugged and even smiled slightly, though his brown eyes were soft with mingled sympathy and concern. “Well, for one thing, I’d a sister once. Fond of each other we were, too—when we weren’t fighting like cats and dogs. But I never saw her look at me the way you were looking at Trystan just now.”

  Isolde said nothing, and after a moment Eurig went on, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “And maybe I’d have threatened to tear the liver out of any man that so much as looked at her in a way I didn’t like—same’s Trystan did with you. But if I’m honest, I’m not so sure I’d have walked straight back into my own private corner of hell for her sake.” He gave her another brief smile. “Family feeling’s well and good, but it only carries a man so far.”

  Isolde brushed tiredly at her cheek. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now. I’ve broken so many oaths to Fidach in the last days that I should be dissolved into a pile of dust. But here I stand. That was the job Fidach made the price of our taking you in. Trystan had to go back to the mines—the slave’s mining camp where him and me were prisoner—and rob the store of gold paid for their latest shipment of tin. Trystan—”

  Eurig went on, saying something about Trystan, about his knowing the layout of the filthy pit of a mining camp better than anyone, knowing the movements of the guard patrols, how to get in and out without being seen. About what would have happened to Trystan if he’d been just a hair too slow, if the layout or the guard had been changed in the time he’d been gone.

  But Isolde had stopped hearing. She was looking down at Trystan’s lean, sun-browned face, still and almost relaxed as though in sleep. Her weariness was abruptly gone, leaving her mind feeling light and strangely emptied. Save for the last, lingering echo of a talk she’d had with Kian in her workroom at Dinas Emrys, what now felt like years ago.

  This whole journey, she thought, since that time, has been running away of a kind. Running from Madoc’s proposal. From the men who’d attacked the boat. From Fidach. Even, in a way, running from Trystan. Now, though, she’d reached the bottom, the end, the point where jutting land crumbled away into the sea. No more running. Nowhere left to run.

  Slowly, Isolde rose to her feet and turned to Eurig, breaking in on whatever he’d been saying. “Will you sit with Trystan for a time? He won’t need anything—there’s nothing any of us can do for him just now. But I need to speak with King Cerdic again.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  ISOLDE
WENT BACK TO THE plain cell she’d first been granted. Candle, washbasin, and pitcher of water were still there, where she’d left them hours before. She lighted the candle, emptied the basin, poured clean water in and set it on the hard wooden sleeping shelf. Then she knelt beside it and looked down at the shimmering surface.

  She knew already what she planned to do—what she had to do. But if Marche was there, one of Octa of Kent’s encampment, it would all be for naught.

  So she sat very still, watching the broken sparks of reflected light on the water’s surface, letting her mind empty and her breathing slow. And nothing happened. Nothing. No familiar vision of burned-out huts. No image of Marche’s face. Nothing at all.

  And then, in a lightning flash, a picture did appear: two men, locked in fierce, deadly combat, blades ringing as they slashed and struck at one another with their swords.

  Their faces were grim and set, their strikes brutal as they moved in a circling dance; plainly, this was a fight to the death. The chests of both men heaved, and the younger of the two had a freely bleeding cut on one cheek. With a furious cry, the older man raised his sword two-handed above his head and charged. And then, with the same thunderclap suddenness, the vision was gone.

  Isolde sat back, the beat of her own heart hammering loud in her ears, cold sweat drying on her skin. The vision was gone, but she could still see the faces of the two men as clearly as though they’d been before her still. Two men. One older, with long black hair and dark eyes and a coarse, heavily handsome face. The other younger, with strikingly blue eyes set under slanted brown brows. Two men, she thought. Father and son. She’d seen them—known them—plainly. Marche and Trystan.

  And just as clearly, what she’d seen was not happening now, because Trystan was now lying only a short distance away, hovering between life and death. So the fight with Marche might have been a glimpse of the past or of the future yet to occur.

  Or, Isolde thought, simply another of those huge jokes on the part of whatever controlled the Sight.

  Drawing in her breath, Isolde leaned forward to look into the basin of water once more.

  But nothing more appeared.

  Isolde stared until her eyes ached, until her temples pounded, and her vision started to blur. She reached inside her for the space where the quivering strings of Sight were tied. But not even a flicker of an image broke the water’s glimmering surface. Not even another flash of a sword fight between Trystan and Marche.

  Definitely, she thought, another of the gods’ malicious jokes. Oddly, though, she didn’t feel angry—or even very surprised. Maybe she was simply too exhausted for resentment or shock. Or maybe, she thought grimly, it’s only to be expected that every time I have to face real danger, the Sight leaves me with absolutely no help on which to rely.

  Slowly, and still with that odd feeling of detachment, she rose to her feet, blew out the candle, and turned to the door. She had still to see King Cerdic. This only meant that she now had no idea whether she would succeed or be doomed from the first.

  THE FIRST LIGHT OF EARLY DAWN was creeping into Cerdic’s apartments, leeching the room of color and turning Cerdic’s fur-lined robe and sculptured old man’s face to ashy gray and making the plaited white beard and braided hair stand out startlingly white. The Saxon king looked, Isolde thought, more than ever like Trystan—as Trystan looked now. As she’d left him, with the frightening stillness of a mortally wounded man creeping up his throat and across the line of his jaw.

  Cerdic was eyeing her consideringly, ice-blue gaze fixed on her face. Finally, he cleared his throat and spoke. “You are asking a great deal, Lady Isolde.”

  Isolde shook her head. She pushed all memory of Trystan’s broken body, his still face, and shallowly drawn breaths away, locking up unwanted emotion tightly in a small walled-off box in her chest. Later, she thought, you can go back to being agonizingly afraid for Trystan’s life. Now even the thought of him was a stumbling block she couldn’t afford.

  “No. I’m asking you to give your word that you’ll not threaten the lives of the four men who arrived here tonight—men whom I’ve already told you bear you no threat at all. In exchange for a way to avoid both swearing allegiance to Octa of Kent and a defeat at his hands.”

  Outside, she could hear the abbey stirring to life. Feet in the corridors, a high, sweet chanting from the chapel as the abbey sisters began the day in prayer. Cerdic’s brows lifted, his lightly guttural voice, when he spoke, turning dry. “But you’ll not tell me this miraculous plan?”

  Isolde shook her head again. “No,” she said steadily. “Not until I have your word that the men I spoke of will meet with no threat from you or from any of your men.”

  Cerdic was silent a long moment, and then he rapped out a single word, with the suddenness of a sprung-arrow bolt. “Why?”

  “Because if I die tomorrow, I want it to be with the knowledge that I’ve done all I can to see that these four men remain unharmed.”

  The Saxon king’s brows shot upwards once again. “You expect me to believe you’ll lead me to a defeat of Octa and Marche when you can’t even preserve your own life?”

  Isolde smiled thinly. “I said I would—almost—guarantee you a means of forcing Octa of Kent to back down. Perhaps even dealing his armies a crushing blow. That I myself would survive the attempt was never part of the bargain.”

  Cerdic watched her, looking down the length of his nose, making Isolde think more than ever of a golden hawk regarding some smaller, lesser bird down on the ground. Then, finally, he shook his head, setting the gold-capped braids in his hair swaying.

  “No.” He paused, his mouth also curving in a slight, thin smile. “I may have about me little sentiment and less affection. But I like you, Lady Isolde. And I loved your father well. I would not have his daughter’s life added to the burden I carry of all the other lives I’ve taken in my time. Even for the chance of defeating Octa of Kent.”

  Isolde tensed her muscles and closed her eyes, rejecting the wash of defeat that threatened to overwhelm her. Not now, she thought again. Not now. Because if she gave up, watched Cerdic swear alliance with Octa and Marche, then Trystan’s being hurt—even in thought, she wouldn’t let herself say Trystan’s death, as though thinking the possibility would make it true—was nothing but purposeless waste.

  So she drew in her breath, looked across at Cerdic, and laid her very last bargaining piece on the table between them. “What about for the sake of your grandson?”

  Cerdic’s brows drew together. “Explain what you mean.”

  No turning back now. Her choice was made. “The man who was brought in wounded tonight. He is your daughter’s son.”

  If the words came as a shock, Cerdic gave no sign. The papery skin around his eyes and mouth might have tightened a little, but that was all. He sat in silence another long moment, and then he said, with no change of expression, “Marche’s son?”

  “Your daughter Aefre’s son.”

  Cerdic sat without speaking, without even moving, once again. Then at last he said, “I remember the boy. My daughter visited me just once after she was wedded. She brought her son to me. A well-formed, handsome lad. Brown eyes.”

  The obviousness of the trap Cerdic had laid was oddly steadying. Isolde folded her hands together in her lap, for once feeling not even a faint shadow of regret that she did now remember the years before Camlann. “I knew your daughter, Lord Cerdic—though I was only thirteen when she died. And I’ve known her son from the time I was born. Trystan’s eyes are blue—like his mother’s. Like yours.”

  Cerdic’s expression still didn’t change, but he let out a slow breath, the air hissing through his teeth. “I had to be sure, you understand. There are many who would claim kinship with a king, did they have a drop of my blood in their veins or no.”

  “Of course.”

  Cerdic made a quick, half-angry gesture with one hand, the gold warrior’s rings gleaming in the early dawn light. “And you expect—what? That I should at
once embrace this son my daughter bore to a traitor? Bypass my own son and make him my heir, maybe?”

  The controlled anger in his tone, in the line of his mouth was like Trystan’s as well. “No,” Isolde said. “That kind of ending is for harper’s fire tales. And Trystan—”

  May not even live another day Will you just make up your. She clamped her jaw tight shut, though, before she could say the words aloud. She drew breath and began again. “All I ask, my lord king, is that for your grandson’s sake, you give me your promise that he and his companions will be under your protection. And then hear out what I propose. Because your daughter’s son is—” Her voice wavered slightly, but she made herself go on. “A brave man. And because he once carried out almost exactly the gambit I would propose now.”

  Isolde had time to count five beats of her own heart before at last Cerdic inclined his head. “Very well,” he said. “You have my word. Go on.”

  Cerdic listened in silence while Isolde spoke. At one point, he took two chased silver cups out, filled them with wine, and silently handed one to Isolde, but otherwise he remained as still as though he’d been carved from the same block of wood as his chair. Even after Isolde had stopped speaking, he sat immobile, keen blue eyes on her face.

  “You propose then, to go—alone and unaided—into Octa’s encampment. Pretending to be an escaped prisoner—a slave. You cannot say for certain whether Octa’s recent ally Marche of Cornwall will be among those present. You think not and are willing to take the gamble that you are right. If you are wrong, Marche will recognize you at once and you will die. However, if you succeed in persuading Octa that you are an escaped slave, you will offer him false intelligence of my position here and maneuver Octa into making an attack that will end in his defeat.”

  Isolde’s throat felt dry with talking. She raised the silver cup Cerdic had given her and took a swallow of wine. “Yes. That is what I propose.”