Dark Moon of Avalon

by Anna Elliott

  Cerdic absently ran a finger around the rim of his own cup, frowning at the film of wine left on his skin. “And what you propose, Lady Isolde, is, to put it plainly, madness.”

  Isolde’s hand clenched on a fold of her gown. “Does that mean you refuse?”

  Cerdic was silent a moment more, eyes on the reddish brown liquid in his cup. Then he looked up, and, unexpectedly, his stern, hawklike face cracked in a smile. “On the contrary, Lady Isolde. I agree.”

  Isolde’s breath went out in a rush, and for a moment the whole room seemed to tilt about her. As though from a great distance, she heard her own voice ask, “What did you say?”

  “I said I agree.” Cerdic raised a hand, stopping Isolde before she could speak, his brows drawing together once more. “I know. There are a dozen and more ways in which the scheme could fail. Marche may be there to recognize you, as you have already said. Octa may not rise to the bait. His forces could prove superior after all. But as I told you before, Lady Isolde, we Saxons like war. And I find, even at my advanced age, that I’m not so ready to give it up after all. If you can bend the odds of victory slightly in our favor, I would far sooner bury my sword in Octa’s belly or split his skull with my war axe than make him an ally. After you left last night, I had time to think on what we each of us had said. And I realized I had begun to sound like some bleating Christian. Like one of the pious sisters here who prates and whines about forgiving our enemies and turning the other cheek so they can hit us again. Woden’s bollocks, it’s enough to make me wish I’d razed this place to the ground when my wife died, instead of having that yellow old crone of an abbess mutter her prayers at me and eye me like a dog slavering over a bone every time she passes me by. Hoping to make a believer of me and save me from the pits of hell, no doubt.”

  Cerdic’s lip curled, and then he paused, studying Isolde, something hard and implacable crossing his blue gaze. “And besides—if a young woman who looks, to speak plainly, as though even I could snap her in two with one hand has nonetheless the nerve to propose this plan, I would not show less courage by failing to agree.”

  An edge had crept into his tone, and Isolde wondered whether the Saxon king did feel an insult in what she had proposed. In being forced, in a way, to hide behind a woman’s skirts—or at least rely on a woman to win his fight. She couldn’t find it in her to care, though, one way or the other. The wave of relief that had washed over temporarily blotted out all else. Cerdic had agreed. Why didn’t matter.

  Cerdic raised his cup of wine to his mouth again, then set it down and asked, “Will you take a guard? Some of my men?”

  Isolde shook her head. “No. I’ll be more likely to be believed if I go alone.” She paused, her mouth twisting, then added, “And like you, I don’t want to add any more deaths to my conscience.”

  Cerdic was still watching her, his lids slightly lowered, his head on one side, as though he tried to see some part of her not outwardly visible. “You realize,” he said abruptly, “that you could be going towards your own death?”

  A sudden image of Trystan, lying motionless and pale on the bench in Mother Berthildis’s rooms flashed before Isolde. She pressed her eyes shut to clear the image—or try to—then said, with another twist of a smile, “Didn’t you tell me just last night that fate moves ever as she shall, my lord king? And we all go towards our own deaths. Every day we draw nearer and nearer still. Some meet it sooner than others, that is all.”

  Cerdic opened his mouth as though to answer, then closed it again. “You leave tonight?” he asked instead.

  “If you agree with me that that’s best.” Isolde paused. With the flash of Trystan’s face, the space in her chest where she’d locked all unwanted emotion away was splitting open, fear—not for herself, but for him—again spilling free. She said, “There is one last promise I would ask of you, though, before I go.”

  Cerdic’s slanted brows—so much like his grandson’s—rose. “Go on.”

  Isolde swallowed hard. “As I said, I can’t be sure whether Marche makes a member of Octa’s party or not. But if I don’t come back—if the plan goes wrong and I die, and if Octa’s forces overrun your position here, I want you to promise me that you’ll not let Trystan fall into Marche’s hands. Kill him first.”

  EURIG WAS SITTING AT TRYSTAN’S BEDSIDE as Isolde had left him when she returned to the abbess’s rooms. He looked up as Isolde entered, and she saw that his eyes were red-rimmed, his face lined with fatigue. Piye and Daka were awake as well, sitting against the far wall with their arms folded, their dark faces only slightly better rested than Eurig’s.

  “Hereric?” Isolde asked, as she came to stand at Trystan’s side. He, too, looked exactly the same as she’d left him, his skin pale beneath the tan of living so much out of doors, his face utterly still. She told herself fiercely that she was only imagining a slightly longer pause between each of his shallowly drawn breaths.

  Eurig shifted position on his hard wooden stool. “Still asleep,” he said. “Reckoned we’d leave him be. If he’s the only one of us that can get any rest, he may as well get as much as he can.”

  Isolde nodded. She laid a hand on Trystan’s forehead. His skin was cool. No trace of a fever, at least. She folded her fingers tightly to keep herself from touching him anymore, from putting a hand to his cheek or brushing his hair back from his brow. Let herself start that and she’d lose what resolve she still had. She made herself instead turn away from his bed and look at the other three men.

  “Will you all listen, then? I want to tell you about my meeting with Cerdic and what he and I have planned.”

  She told them the whole. When she came to telling them who she truly was, Eurig interrupted to say, “Knew you were a lady, whatever you said before.” But save for that, he, Piye, and Daka listened in silence until she came to the end.

  When she’d finished speaking, there was a pause in which the only sounds were of Trystan’s breathing and the snap and crackle of the fire in the hearth. The three men exchanged a look in which a silent decision seemed to be made, and then Eurig said, “Piye and Daka go with you. Not in to meet with Octa—you’re right that you’ll stand the best chance of success there if you’re on your own. But they’ll go with you as far as Octa’s camp.”

  Isolde opened her mouth to speak, but Eurig stopped her. His usual awkwardness had dropped away, and he said with sudden firmness, “No. Don’t argue. If you’re caught before you reach Octa, you can call them your slaves, your bodyguard—or two black devils you’ve raised from hell to do your bidding. Whatever you choose. But they go with you. Not going to do Britain or anyone else here a lot of good if you get your throat cut by guards or bandits before you get within sight of Octa.”

  Isolde felt a lump rise in her throat, and she swallowed hard. She looked from Daka to Piye and said shakily, “Thank you.” Then she turned back to Eurig, closing her eyes briefly as she searched for words.

  Again Eurig stopped her, though, seeming to know already what she’d been about to say. “Oh, aye. I’ll guard him.” He nodded towards Trystan’s motionless form. “Anyone gets past me to do him harm, it’s because I’m already dead.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Eurig added, in a different voice, “Don’t know whether it would occur to you—being a lady and all. But Octa’s bunch are like to be a rough lot. Have you thought—”

  The ready flush of embarrassment was creeping up Eurig’s neck, and he cast a look of appeal at the other two.

  “He mean,” Daka said, “not many women in war camp. Not enough to go around. What if Octa’s men see you, think better you warm their beds than go to their king?”

  Isolde ordered herself not to look towards Trystan again. “I had thought of that,” she said. “And I do have a plan. It will keep Octa and all the rest of his men from getting too close to me—and maybe keep Octa from setting any of his men to guard me. If it works.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  ISOLDE BURIED HER FACE IN her hands, hi
ding her eyes—though she risked a brief glance at the man who stood looking down at her, his broad, stupid face a mask of indecision in the flare of torchlight above. Behind him, the army encampment stretched out across the night-dark plain, rows of sagging goat-hide tents grouped in clusters, with here and there a campfire casting an eerie pool of flickering orange. The whole was surrounded by a deep trench dug out of the soil, then an earth and timber stockade. There were only two openings in the stockade, both manned by guards. A well thought out and elaborately engineered defense, considering that Octa’s purported mission here was one of peace.

  Through the gaps between her fingers, Isolde watched the guard at this, the encampment’s northern gate, frown ponderously. He had long, greasy, blond hair and across his shoulders he wore a wolf’s pelt that had been improperly cured—if it had been cured at all. The stench was catching in the back of her throat every time she drew breath.

  Isolde made an effort to master the raging impatience that lapped at her, stopped herself from saying, Will you just make up your mind? Get on with it, can’t you?

  Instead, she let her shoulders shake as though with sobs. It would have been horribly easy to let herself give way to actual tears, when her every thought led like a circling path back to Trystan. When the very beat of her heart seemed to echo the terrifying pause before each rise and fall of Trystan’s breath.

  She had left Trystan lying under Mother Berthildis’s watch, as unresponsive as before, as much poised on a knife edge between death and life. There was nothing more she could have done for him, though, even if she were still there, by his side. He still couldn’t swallow even tiny spoonfuls of water or broth. And Mother Berthildis and the other holy sisters could sit with him as well as she, could try again at intervals to get him to drink and keep the fire alight so that he stayed warm.

  Even still, every nerve in Isolde’s body was screaming that she should be back by his side, even now, even in the midst of her fears of what she was about to face. But giving way to actual tears would be to risk washing away the marks that Mother Berthildis had helped her paint on her face, arms, and hands before she’d left the abbey with Daka and Piye. It had taken them nearly an hour, dabbing Isolde’s skin with a mixture of thick oat porridge and dark red wine.

  “What do you think?” Isolde had asked, when they were done.

  The abbess had snorted briefly through her nose. “I think it looks like you’ve got wine and oat porridge dabbed in spots on your skin and pillow sewn under the belly of your dress.” And then she’d paused, head tilted to one side as she frowned at Isolde from under drawn brows. “But yes. At night, with nothing but firelight, and the hood of your cloak pulled up—you’ll look well enough like a woman who’s caught the pox and is far gone with child. Especially to a lot of men. I don’t suppose Octa’s soldiers have done much sickroom nursing to know what a real pox victim looks like. Or that they’ve ever troubled themselves overmuch with noticing just how a breeding woman’s belly looks. I think you’ll pass.”

  Now, standing in the chill night air and pretending to cry for Octa’s guardsman, Isolde could only hope Mother Berthildis had judged rightly—and wonder, as she repeated her plea in the stumbling fragments she knew of the Saxon tongue, whether this was the moment when the night’s luck would turn. Because up until now, it had all gone with almost frightening ease.

  She had left the abbey with Daka and Piye in the hour before sundown. Both of the brothers had gone warily, their knives drawn, their shoulders tight with watching and listening for any sign or sound of alarm. But they’d met with no one at all abroad as they made their way across pastured fields and a brief stretch of woodland to Octa’s camp. They’d passed two small clustered settlements, but both had been deserted, empty even of livestock. Doubtless the families who lived in the huts had packed what possessions could be carried, roped together their cattle and goats, and fled into the surrounding hills, as much braced for trouble as Octa’s camp appeared to be.

  Piye hadn’t even been struck by one of his fits. Just before they’d come within sight of the encampment, Isolde had seen him touch the iron ring she’d given him days before. He’d seen her watching, and had given her a quick, slanted smile that had made Isolde think he might have been half expecting a fit to strike him down.

  She had wondered whether Piye’s and his brother’s nerves felt as raw as her own, set on edge by the unnatural hush and quiet of the countryside that felt like the silence before a clap of thunder. But she’d bidden them both good-bye in the shelter of trees that ringed Octa’s camp. Dark had fallen by that time, so that their faces were only a deeper darkness amidst the shadows. Piye had said something, and Daka had translated in a whisper. “He say take care, lady. As do I.”

  They had offered to stay within sight of Octa’s encampment, but Isolde had shaken her head, knowing that the danger for all of them would be far greater if they were found by one of Octa’s patrols. Now, though, she felt an insidious, cowardly wish that she’d not refused their offer to stay. Because standing here, shivering as she waited for the man before her to decide whether to take her to his king, she would have felt a shade less alone if she could have imagined Piye’s and Daka’s eyes watching her from somewhere out in the surrounding dark.

  But by now, she thought, they ought to be halfway back to the abbey. If they’d met with no trouble on the way. Halfway back to where Trystan—

  Isolde jerked her thoughts back for what must have been the hundredth time and looked up at the big blond guard again, trying to sound as though she were choking back sobs, willing herself to push all thoughts, all memories of Trystan far, far back, at least for now.

  If expectations of failure meant that you earned your own defeat, letting herself be distracted tonight would just as surely be to court her own death. Instead she cast about in her memory for the words that would convey what she wanted, wishing she knew more of the Saxon tongue. “Please. Octa be glad see me. Give you reward. Or—” She let her voice trail off doubtfully. “Octa not trust you? Not let you near enough to speak? Oh, please—”

  She clutched at the guardsman’s sleeve. As she’d hoped, the man’s combined disgust and unwillingness to admit that he wasn’t high enough in the king’s regard to have Octa’s private ear made him at last decide to act.

  He shook her roughly off. “Get away from me, you poxy whore!” Isolde understood that much, at least. He turned and shouted something over his shoulder—an order, she supposed, for someone to replace him as guard, because after a moment a second man came up out of the shadows behind the first. The second man looked younger, with a nose that had been broken and never set. He cast a curious, sidelong look at Isolde, then took up a position at the gate, spear and shield at the ready. The first man said something to him, too low and quick for Isolde to make out, then turned back to her.

  “You come with me.”

  HE WAS IN HELL.

  It had to be hell, because it was so cold.

  But his ribs still hurt like a ring-tailed devil. Unpleasant. But it seemed an unlikely punishment for his sins. And there was a voice somewhere. Chanting. What sounded like prayers. Which seemed wrong for hell, too.

  Not bloody likely he’d have ended up in heaven.

  His thoughts felt slippery—too slippery to come together. But he was sure of that much.

  There was a crushing weight on his chest. And a pain that felt like being stabbed in a dozen different places by red-hot knives. God, there was no escaping it. Not that he could move. Or even open his eyes.

  But there was something. Something he hadn’t done. Something he had to remember. Some reason he had to get out of here. Wherever here was.

  THE BLOND GUARDSMAN LED ISOLDE THROUGH the darkened camp, weaving a course through the churned and muddied pathways that separated the clusters of tents. The stench of the place was almost overwhelming—smoke and mud and human waste and the smell of too many unwashed bodies packed into too small a space. Finally, the guard stopped i
n front of a small, crudely constructed dwelling built of logs and meant, Isolde guessed, for housing prisoners, because it had a wooden plank door and a heavy crossbeam that when dropped into place would bar the door from the outside.

  “In here. Wait.”

  He swung the door open, gave Isolde a rough shove that sent her across the threshold, then shut the door once more. From the pitch dark within, Isolde heard the bar being dropped across the door outside and fought down a primal wave of panic at being locked in—and blind. The darkness was so complete that she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, much less make out the details of the room.

  Or even tell whether or not there was anyone else with her in this place.

  That thought sent another jolt of panic skittering through her veins, and she forced herself to draw long, steadying breaths. She had Piye’s knife, slipped into the top of her boot, but she didn’t dare draw it just now. Not when the guard might be back at any moment, and her life and the success of this venture depended on appearing as absolutely no threat.

  Instead, she made herself reach out a hand, touch the wall to orient herself, and make a slow circuit of her prison. The space was windowless, square-built, and with only one door, smelling of unseasoned timber and straw from the thatched roof. And it was completely empty, save for herself. Not so much as a handful of straw on the earthen floor.

  When she’d finished her circuit and reached the bolted door once more, Isolde let out a breath of relief, then gritted her teeth and set herself to wait in the blackness that seemed to press like a solid force against her eyes.

  Isolde touched the marks on her face and hands—meant to simulate the oozing sores of pox—then pressed her hands against the stitched bag of goose down that swelled out the belly of her gown. She could do nothing, for now, but wait for the blond guardsman to return. Wait and see whether Octa would be taken in by her story or no. Or whether—