“What watchtower?” Penda spread his hands wide. “We know of no such tunnel.”
Bedwyr scoffed. “That would be because you were not born a Briton.” He turned to Cade. “My grandfather was a man of Rheged, and one of the last to retreat from Chester before it was overrun by Mercia. He told me where the westward tunnel begins.”
“Hopefully it hasn’t collapsed due to neglect.” Hywel shot a disgusted look at Penda.
“The Romans built it,” Cade said by way of assurance. “While Dafydd leads the riders, we will get everyone else but a skeleton defense through the tunnel as quick as we can. Those who remain behind will make a show of resisting the Northumbrians, and then we ourselves will retreat.” He looked to Rhiann. “I need you to go with Dafydd.”
“You need me on the wall, as always.”
She, as ever, had the power to stop Cade in his tracks just by looking at him. “Rhiann—”
Hywel stepped between them. “She’s right, my lord. Penda says he has archers, but we have over a mile of wall to defend. He doesn’t have that many. If the tunnel is passable, she can retreat with the rest of us.”
“She carries my heir.” Cade spoke through gritted teeth.
Rhiann moved closer. “I will not be used as your mother was—as a thing to barter to whomever the council chooses to replace you. We will live free or not at all. I’m staying with you.”
Cade grimaced. “It will be just like Caer Fawr all over again.”
“You needed me at Caer Fawr.” Rhiann put the flat of her hand on his chest and looked up into his face. “That reminds me. I have thought up a name for our son: Geraint.”
“Cariad.” Cade almost folded in on himself, and he found that he was unable to answer. Though, of course, he didn’t have to.
“The archers will defend the north and east walls of the city.” Penda spoke loudly in Saxon, interrupting their quiet conversation in Welsh. “I have thousands of arrows stockpiled.”
Cade kept his eyes on his wife’s face. “That’s good, because it’s likely we’ll need them.”
Chapter Thirteen
Catrin
As Taliesin had raised his arms, perhaps to call down some great power to burst the doors asunder—or at least to open them—Catrin had felt a whisper of the same power that she’d felt on the hill when they’d first arrived in the Otherworld. Then it had pulled her towards the castle, and even though they’d decided to come despite their fears, she’d attempted the whole time to block its call. She had every reason to distrust it, particularly after Goronwy had described the aura around the castle—and then the snowstorm. But still, the essence of the castle didn’t feel malevolent to her.
And it seemed silly to not even try the doors before barraging them with magic.
As it turned out, when she pulled on the handle, the door opened easily on greased hinges. Her eyes went first towards the light coming from the middle of the courtyard where a fountain was adorned with trellises of beautiful flowers. A cascade of water spilled from it, and the breeze on her face warmed her from head to toe. Which made the sight of so many men on the ground all around the fountain and in the shadows in the gatehouse barbican all the more horrifying.
Goronwy pressed up behind her, gripping her upper arms, and then he moved her slightly aside so he could pass. He crouched next to the first body, which lay ten feet away, still within the barbican that protected the courtyard, and put two fingers to the man’s neck. The man’s face was gray with death and chiseled, almost as if it were made of stone, so when Goronwy looked back at Catrin and shook his head, she was not surprised.
Taliesin and Mabon moved quickly through the gateway, and at last Catrin followed. Although she remained focused on the dead men and bent to look into every face, Taliesin headed for the front doors to the keep that lay on the far side of the courtyard. Those great doors—nearly as large as the doors to the gatehouse—were closed too, and he pressed an ear to the wood to listen. At some point, Goronwy had unsheathed his sword, and he carried it point down. If the men who’d attacked the castle were still here, their small party was in real danger.
Catrin stood near the fountain with her hand to her throat. “Who could have done this?”
Nobody answered, least of all Taliesin. His silence may have been in large part because he knew and wouldn’t say. Mabon straightened, having actually been feeling for a pulse in another man’s neck, in imitation of Goronwy, and said, “Every one of these men looks nearly the same. Did you notice that, Taliesin?”
“That’s because they’re pawns.”
“As we all are,” Goronwy said.
“No.” Taliesin shook his head. “I mean they are literally pawns. These are the animated forms of the chess set, one of the Treasures, placed here to guard the castle.” He looked around. “This is all of them, it seems.”
“What power!” A mixture of awe and greed crossed Mabon’s face. That he wanted that power for himself went without saying, and Catrin knew in that moment that he would betray all of them without hesitation if it meant he could get closer to the one who wielded it.
Goronwy, however, had moved on to yet another body. “The guards were overwhelmed, either by skill or by numbers.” He motioned with one hand. “Their killers weren’t emotional—just systematic, killing one after another.”
Catrin put aside the ache in her heart and approached Mabon, who had moved to the door to the keep to stand beside Taliesin. “How did you come by the chess piece you gave Rhiann? A king, wasn’t it?”
Mabon looked mutinous for a moment, but then he laughed. “Why not tell you?” He gestured to the dead pawns. “It was a gift.”
“From whom?”
Mabon waggled his finger at her. “That would be telling now, wouldn’t it?” His expression turned thoughtful. “Perhaps he gave it to me because he had already planned this, knowing that he was going to destroy its magic.”
A strange look crossed Taliesin’s face, as if he didn’t agree but decided at the last moment not to say so. Mabon wasn’t paying attention anyway, having already pushed through the doors to the keep as if he was entering his own hall, rather than one full of ominous magic.
Catrin and Goronwy made to follow, but Taliesin stopped them, though his eyes remained on Mabon. “Don’t believe him,” he said in an undertone.
“It isn’t destroyed?” Goronwy said.
“Whatever has happened here hasn’t destroyed the chess set, only collected its magic into fewer pieces.”
“How do you know?” Catrin said.
“I have the little king with me, and it still thrums with power.”
Mabon, meanwhile, was halfway down the cavernous hall, and he waved a hand indicating they should catch up. “Hurry. I might be mortal, but I am not immune to what has happened here. There are more layers to this castle than what we see here.”
Goronwy held back. “We should leave. We are hopelessly outmatched.”
“There’s no going back,” Taliesin said flatly, and he gestured towards the gatehouse, “only forward.”
Catrin spun around to look where Taliesin pointed. He was right. The gatehouse had disappeared, to be replaced by smooth stone. Even with Catrin’s sight, she couldn’t make out a seam in the wall. “I don’t understand.”
“Time and space don’t move in the Otherworld the way they do in yours,” Mabon said, again sounding more reasonable than Catrin had come to expect from the god. “That was the entrance. Now it isn’t.”
“Stay close,” Taliesin said. “Mabon is right that no doorway leads to the same place twice, and I don’t want to get separated.”
The hall was built in white and gray marble, without colorful tapestries, a fire, or furniture of any kind. The only adornment lay in alcoves along the walls, containing silent gray statues with cold faces not unlike the dead pawns outside.
“Don’t look at them.” Taliesin strode forward after Mabon. “They don’t like it.”
Catrin hustled to keep up. “It�
�s the rest of the chess set! What happened to them?”
“They are frozen by the same magic that animated the pawns. As the pawns were Dôn’s guards, these are her servants.” Taliesin pointed downward with one finger. “Note the way the stones of the floor emulate a chess board.”
Now that Catrin knew what to look for, she could see the way the white stones alternated with a darker gray. She was more out of her depth than she’d ever been in her life.
“Quiet.” Mabon put out a hand.
They’d reached the far end of the hall, where the only door was a narrow passage off to the right. The wind that whistled past them lifted a stray lock from Catrin’s forehead.
Taliesin looked sharply at the sidhe. “What do you hear?”
“I don’t know. Just … something.” Mabon’s expression had turned wary, which was an unusual look for him. “The only way out is up. I’ll go first.” And without waiting for permission, he began to take the stairs two at a time.
“He’s been here before,” Goronwy said. “Let him lead.”
“I’m wondering now if from the beginning this wasn’t a trap for us,” Catrin said. “Arianrhod could have given him to us knowing that Taliesin would take him right back into the Otherworld. Was that the plan from the start? Or did she not know what Taliesin intended?”
“Taliesin didn’t know what he intended, exactly.” The bard said, speaking of himself in the third person. Then he trotted up the stairs after Mabon, soon disappearing as the stairway curved around the central column.
Mabon’s and Taliesin’s long legs easily carried them up the steps. Catrin, however, was a much smaller person—and Goronwy much heavier—so very quickly the two of them fell behind. Catrin was breathing hard by the time they reached the top, having come up at least a hundred steps, which meant that the tower stretched far higher into the sky than she would have thought from looking at it from the outside.
Goronwy pushed open the door at the top of the steps, and they found themselves in a small, round room, perhaps fifteen feet across.
Catrin stopped on the threshold, stunned. “It’s empty. Where are Mabon and Taliesin?”
“Don’t come any closer.” Taliesin’s voice echoed around them. It held the tone of Command and stopped them in their tracks, but there was no sign of the bard himself.
“I knew I should have gone my own way.” Mabon’s voice faded into silence, and Catrin realized Taliesin had been speaking to him, not to her and Goronwy.
She looked wildly around. “What’s happened? How can they not be here?”
“I don’t know.” Almost cat-like, Goronwy began to stalk about the small room. It was circular, and its only furniture was a table with a basin of water in it and a chest that when Goronwy lifted up the lid contained a bundle of rags wrapped around a length of old rope. Nothing else. The walls were plastered white and the floor was smooth wood, worn from feet treading on it for years beyond counting.
After making a complete circuit of the room, he returned to where she stood in the doorway. Out of fear that closing it all the way would lock them in as had the gatehouse doors, she hadn’t allowed it to swing all the way closed.
Goronwy put his hand on the door at head height and eased it open. He looked down the dark stairwell and then stepped back to let the door close.
Catrin breathed a sigh of relief when it didn’t seal. “There has to be more to this castle than what we’ve seen.”
“As in, where Taliesin and Mabon have got to? Yes, indeed.” Goronwy gave a derisive laugh, but she didn’t sense that it was directed at her.
“We should go back down to the hall.”
“I don’t think so,” Goronwy said. “There was no exit from there.”
“Then how do we get out of here?”
“I think that’s going to be up to you.”
Now it was her turn to laugh. “What do you mean by that? I have none of Taliesin’s power.”
“But you have different power—and it’s clear that you have power here. It was you who opened the door.” He turned in a circle, taking in a full view of the room. “Have a look. Maybe you’ll see things differently from me.”
“I’m not a witch, no matter what people have said about me.”
“You’re a seeress. So see.”
Catrin began to walk around the room as Goronwy had asked. She went first to the tiny window to look out. It faced west and showed her that they stood at least sixty feet above the ground, which remained snow covered, though the snow itself had stopped falling. The window was too small for either of them to fit through, and it led to a straight drop down, so it couldn’t provide a way out. She moved on to the trunk.
Goronwy had left it open, and she stooped to remove the rags. Instead of disregarding them, as he had, she was of the opinion that nothing in this room was here by accident. She knelt, laid the bundle on the floor and, with careful movements, unwrapped it. The rope he’d dismissed as useless was revealed to be a horse’s halter. As the halter was made of rope instead of leather, sliding knots replaced iron buckles to adjust the size to the horse.
Goronwy stood over her, his head bent and his fist to his lips. “I didn’t even see it.”
“You saw what you were predisposed to see. When Taliesin sang of a halter to tame any horse, you imagined rich leather adorned in gold and gems—” she gestured to the rope, “—not knotted hemp like a poor farmer might use to guide his broken-down carthorse.”
Angry voices echoed up to them from the hall below, and then a man bellowed in rage. “Where did they go?”
“You fool! You scared them away!” The woman’s voice was equally forceful—and equally angry.
The man shouted at her again. “I’ve been tricked! He told me I would find Treasures here!”
“You destroyed them!” The woman was fighting back, but if this was the man who’d killed the pawns, as it appeared it was, they needed to get out of there quickly.
Her hands shaking, Catrin hastily gathered up the rope and the rag wrapping and stuffed the bundle into her pack. Goronwy, meanwhile, strode to the door and looked out. “We need to get out of here, and not by the stairs, not without Taliesin or Cade to help us.”
Catrin clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. “Then how?”
“By seeing what nobody else can.” He pointed to the small table. “What’s that for?”
“It’s a bowl with water in it.” Catrin looked into it. At first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than a hand-washing bowl like any chamber might have, but then Catrin looked more closely at the etchings on the bottom and around the rim. They were hardly more than scratches, but she could still make out the spokes of a wheel and, within each set of spokes, was a rune from the old language. The bowl itself was made of bone, from what animal she didn’t dare to guess. She looked over at Goronwy. “This isn’t Dôn’s. It’s Arianrhod’s.”
“Can you make it work?”
Catrin laughed, though the sound came out more desperate than amused. “To what end? Scrying will not get us out of here—and besides, as I told you when we first met, I don’t do magic. I just sense it.”
“Like I don’t do magic?” Goronwy looked down the stairwell one more time, then closed the door and dropped the bar across it. She had faint hope that a single piece of wood could stop a strong assault for long, but it made her feel better—safer that they were locked in. “We were separated from Taliesin and Mabon and brought to this room for a reason. That bowl is here for a reason. You may say you don’t do magic, but it looks to me as if Arianrhod is telling you that you should.” He lowered his voice. “I learned something new today. Maybe you are meant to too.”
Catrin stared at him through several heartbeats, each one pounding loud in her ears, and then she nodded. Taking in a breath to center herself and calm her racing heart, she looked again into the bowl and touched the water with one finger.
Immediately, she was thrown into the midst of battle. Men screamed and died all
around her, fighting hand-to-hand on a wall-walk. She was standing beside Rhiann on a battlement in the pouring rain, even as Rhiann shot arrow after arrow into a horde of oncoming Saxons. There were too many to count, and as Catrin caught her breath, a Saxon ladder hit the side of the wall on which Rhiann was standing. At first Catrin had thought she was at Caer Fawr, but then she realized she was somewhere else entirely.
Catrin jerked as an arrow shot by her head, and as she did so, she pulled out of the vision. The runes within the spokes of the wheel stood out as if they were etched in silver, and she spoke them out loud as she deciphered them: “Halter and stone, blood and bone. And in the center are the symbols meant to represent a man and a woman.” Still breathing hard from what she’d seen, she bent her head, more shaken than she’d ever been in her life. “This isn’t going to work.”
Goronwy crossed the floor in two strides. “We have all those things! I am even a child of the blood as you are.” More shouts came from below, muffled now by the closed door.
“It isn’t that.” She shut her eyes, not yet willing to speak to Goronwy of what she’d seen. She didn’t know if the battle was happening right now, or if it was in the future. Either way, Rhiann’s need was desperate—more desperate, in fact, than Catrin’s own. “The stone we need is not ordinary. It’s the Treasure, and Cade has it. If he were here—”
She broke off as Goronwy pulled the stone from his pack. It looked like nothing more or less than a typical river rock, unchanged from when the two of them had removed it from King Arthur’s shield back on the road from Caerleon.
“How—”
“Cade gave it back to me, with the caution that Taliesin had insisted on it.” Goronwy frowned. “Half the time Taliesin claims that his sight has failed him, and then he does this—”
“I am a woman, and I have the halter. You are a man, and you have the stone. The bowl is made of bone, and I have a bone knife that is sharp enough to draw blood.”
“Surely a metal blade would cut more easily,” Goronwy said.
Catrin grimaced. “Iron blocks magic. Bone is what is needed.” She pulled the knife from a sheath at her waist and gave it to Goronwy.
The Pendragon's Challenge (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 7) Page 9