The Pendragon's Challenge (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 7)

by Sarah Woodbury

  He took it. “You’re sure about this?”

  “The only thing I’m sure about is that we have very little time.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Bedwyr

  Bedwyr definitely could have been happier. He would have been a great deal happier if he had been on the walls beside Hywel, preparing to fight off the Northumbrian horde rather than down here in an underground room in the ruin of a building near the west gate.

  Over two hundred years ago when the Romans had marched away from Britain, they’d left most of their cities as they’d been—stripped of all moveable goods, for certain—but intact. Whether building in stone or wood, they’d built to last, and they’d had no patience for anything that wouldn’t stand the test of time. This building, however, which had to have been a guardhouse, since it was sitting over an escape tunnel, was either an exception to that rule or had been deliberately destroyed.

  Bedwyr was guessing the latter. He’d never asked his grandfather if Rheged’s army had destroyed the building on their way out, but it would make sense if they had. And yet, although two walls of the building had been knocked down, and the wooden roof was long gone, the room underneath the main floor was whole. Once they’d levered aside some of the larger stones, he’d been able to get to the trap door.

  Above Bedwyr’s head, the entire city was seething with activity. Penda was preparing both to defend the city and to leave it. Peada, however, had come with Bedwyr, along with a giant of a man whom Bedwyr had picked out of a line of soldiers as the most capable of moving large items.

  Peada was counting out the beats. “Pull!”

  Bedwyr and the Mercian soldier, Wystan, pulled up on their respective crowbars which they’d hooked around the double trap doors at their feet. Wystan was so strong that his iron bar actually bent a little, and at last the doors moved a little too.

  “Rest,” Peada said. “Are you sure there’s a tunnel down there?”

  Bedwyr was bent over with his hands on his knees, but he moved a hand to point to one of the torches that he’d slotted into a sconce on the wall. “The flame flickers.”

  Wystan nodded. “There’s a stiff breeze blowing through the cracks. It has to be coming from somewhere.

  Peada’s eyes brightened. “Again.”

  Bedwyr and Wystan pulled on the doors but, after a count of ten, Bedwyr dropped his iron bar. “We’re close, but I need you to find more men, preferably younger and stronger than I.”

  Peada was up instantly to do as Bedwyr asked, climbing the rubble-covered steps to street level. Here in the basement, the steady drizzle that had started to fall from the sky wasn’t bothering them, but storms were as common in Britain in June as December, and it looked as if they were in for a big one. As far as Bedwyr was concerned, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Cade could fight outside during the day without his cloak only if the sun was hidden. Admittedly, rain was harmful to bowstrings, but it would make the ground mucky outside the city walls and the rungs of the Northumbrian ladders slippery. If the rain fell hard enough, it would also wash away blood.

  “How did you know about this tunnel anyway?” Wystan eyes narrowed as he looked on Bedwyr with suspicion.

  Bedwyr wiped at the sweat on his brow. “Before your lot came, my grandfather was one of the defenders of this city. When I was still in the cradle, he told me the story of following this tunnel out of the city as the walls were breached.”

  “He was a coward then.”

  Bedwyr scoffed. “He lived to fight another day, didn’t he? He lived to father my father who fathered me, who is going to save your life and the life of your king—a man foolish enough to try to defend a city against overwhelming odds, just as the old King of Rheged did.”

  Wystan remained unforgiving. “I would rather die than surrender.”

  “Well—” Bedwyr grunted as he reached for the crowbar again, “—that’s where you and I will have to differ, and it’s also why your people will never conquer Wales. You would rather die heroically and stupidly than continue to serve your king.” He shrugged. “I understand, but I can’t respect that decision any more than you can respect mine.”

  Still looking fierce, Wystan picked up the crowbar, hooked it around the door latch, and with a great shout, heaved. The door flipped upward and fell open on the floor with a bang and a cloud of dust. Wystan himself staggered backwards now that he had nothing to pull against.

  Bedwyr grinned. “That worked well, don’t you think?”

  Wystan glared at him. “You angered me on purpose.”

  “I did, and you very obligingly rose to the bait.” Bedwyr bent to open the other half of the double-doors, revealing a stone staircase leading down. Bedwyr wrinkled his nose at the smell of mold and earth, but his sweaty face was cooled by the breeze, which brought fresh air into the room too. He heaved a sigh of relief that the tunnel was not only still open, but clear enough after all this time that the air wasn’t poisonous.

  Peada returned, but stopped on the threshold to the room with the men he’d brought bunching up behind him. “Is it safe?”

  “I suppose it’s time we found out.” Bedwyr grabbed a torch and set off down the steps with it.

  Peada didn’t move, instead calling after Bedwyr, “It’s a quarter-mile to the Dee.”

  Bedwyr didn’t look back. “Then I’d better hurry, oughtn’t I? The Northumbrians are coming, and you have men to gather. Why don’t you do that while you wait for me to return.” If they were going to flee the city, they needed to do it soon. “You coming, Wystan? Wouldn’t want anyone to think you were a coward.”

  Wystan growled, and his heavy feet thudded on the stairs behind Bedwyr. “I don’t like tunnels.”

  “If you fit, everyone will fit.” Bedwyr reached a door at the bottom of the stairs. A simple lift of the metal latch opened it. Though dirt had accumulated against the bottom of the door, it wasn’t so thick that one hard shove couldn’t push through it.

  “They’ll be rats down here for sure.” Wystan sounded like Goronwy.

  Despite himself, Bedwyr was starting to like the Mercian. He shined the torch all around the stone ceiling and walls. The torch flickered in the wind, but the wick was fresh and well-oiled, so it stayed lit as he started forward down the tunnel. That the walls were still standing after all these years emboldened Bedwyr, and he picked up the pace. He could feel the pressure above him of the fight about to start, even though he couldn’t see the soldiers on the walls. They needed a way out, and this was it.

  A quarter-mile at a fast walk takes hardly any time at all, though to Bedwyr it felt like an hour before the path started rising up again, having dipped far down to run underneath the river. Sensibly, the Romans had lined with lead the part of the tunnel that ran under the river itself. Still, water dripped everywhere, and Bedwyr had a horrible feeling that the only thing that was keeping the river from flooding the tunnel was sheer belligerence on the part of those ancient builders.

  “We’re here.” Wystan heaved a huge sigh of relief as he spied the exit: a ramshackle door that didn’t want to open all the way. Somehow Wystan wedged his large bulk through it, however, and the two men came out the other side.

  They found themselves in another cave-like basement, which was easily exited by following a flight of rough-cut stairs upwards. They came out at the foot of what had once been a guard tower, now so overgrown with shrubs and trees that it was no wonder the Saxon conquerors of Chester had never noticed it. The land to the west of the river was boggy—thus the long clay tunnel—and this was the first solid ground, which wasn’t really all that solid. It was really raining now, and the earth under Bedwyr’s feet was soft. It would take very little rain to turn the dirt to mud.

  Bedwyr immediately looked to Wystan. “Run back to Peada and tell him that the tunnel is clear and to start getting people through it.”

  “What are you going to do?” Wystan said.

  “Make sure no Northumbrians have come this far. They shouldn’t know abo
ut the tunnel if your king didn’t, but a company could have forded the river downstream to come at the city this way, precisely to stop anyone from leaving.”

  Wystan gave Bedwyr a jerky nod and re-entered the tunnel.

  At his departure, Bedwyr took a breath and closed his eyes. He didn’t have a hint of the sight or a touch of the sidhe, but he knew his grandfather’s stories. One of them, as he’d related to Cade on the journey here, and the reason Cade had entrusted Bedwyr with the task of finding the tunnel, involved the sacred relic from Calvary that had been left behind at Chester. The priest in whose charge it had been placed had been killed at some point after he left the tunnel, along with a dozen men of Rheged, who’d died defending him. According to Penda, the Saxons hadn’t retrieved the relic, however, and if they didn’t have it, nobody had ever seen it again.

  At the time, all Saxons had been pagan and without Penda’s knowledge of Britain’s Treasures. That meant there was a good chance the conquerors hadn’t known what they had. In keeping with the Church’s pledge of simplicity, the dish had been kept in a plain wooden box, and the dish itself was made of fired clay. If the dish had been destroyed, so be it, but as Bedwyr turned on one heel, surveying the land around him, he put together everything he knew about its disappearance, coupled with what he’d learned today about the Mercian occupation of Chester.

  In short, they didn’t know about the tunnel, which meant that the priest’s company hadn’t been ambushed right here. Otherwise, the Saxons, presumably, would have fortified this secret way into Chester, not left it to decay and become lost to time. How his grandfather had known the priests’ fate was a question Bedwyr had never asked—for if all of the priest’s defenders had died in the Treasure’s defense, how had his grandfather learned the story?

  Unless … the witness had been Bedwyr’s grandfather himself. The more Bedwyr considered the possibility, the more likely he found it. The story of Chester’s lost Treasure wasn’t one sung by any bard he knew. It was a story passed from grandfather to grandson on cold winter nights when only the family was present to listen. He knew too why his grandfather hadn’t confessed that it was he who witnessed the ambush. That would mean that he’d seen the outcome but not fought, and he would have been ashamed.

  Having himself fought in many battles by now, Bedwyr wished he could reassure his grandfather that he didn’t blame him for hiding. Except for Wales itself, the Saxons had overrun all of the lands that had once belonged to the Britons. They were an onrushing tide that could not be stopped, and the death of a sixteen-year-old boy would have done nothing to avert Britain’s fate.

  Knowing that he had little time, since Peada would soon be leading men back through the tunnel, Bedwyr re-entered the basement with his torch and shone it all around the walls on either side of the door. Then he opened the door and went back into the tunnel itself.

  He didn’t know what he was looking for necessarily. Chances were, the Treasure, if it ever had been hidden here, was long gone. Chances were it had been destroyed in the ambush, not hidden before the priest ever left Chester in the hopes that he could one day return for it. But Bedwyr had to look.

  He tried to place himself in the shoes of that long-dead priest, knowing what he held and fearing that it would fall into Saxon hands. The tunnel had been a well-maintained avenue connecting Chester with the guard tower on the other side of the Dee. If the priest hid the dish before leaving the tunnel, he would have chosen a place small enough to hide a box. As was the case with all but the lead-lined part of the tunnel, the walls and ceiling were exposed stone and well-mortared. Even after all these years and the weight pressing down from overhead, none of the stones had fallen.

  Having set the torch in one of the many sconces the Romans had conveniently placed every twenty feet along the entire length of the tunnel, Bedwyr began running his hand up and down the walls all around the door and progressing away from it down the tunnel, growing ever more anxious that he wouldn’t finish this task before either the Northumbrians—for whom he was supposed to be watching—or more importantly Peada and Penda—came. Then he realized he was making the usual mistake of a searcher: he was focusing on the area from his waist to his head, when a good hiding place was either in the ceiling itself or at ankle level.

  He crouched to the ground and swept away the detritus that had built up close to the wall. The dirt and dust was several inches deep here, and soon he’d exposed a length of wall that hadn’t seen air for nearly a century. Nothing seemed out of place or amiss, and he began to shift the dirt faster, frantically almost, fearing discovery at any moment.

  And then, about three feet from the door, his hand hit an anomaly in one of the stones, which was otherwise a typical one-foot square block. Inset into the bottom right corner was a second square the width of his thumb. He prodded at it, and then he pressed it hard.

  It sank half an inch into the wall, and the stone to the right popped open like a cupboard, revealing a hollow space behind the façade. A wooden box sat in the exact center of the cupboard, just as it had since the priest had put it there so many years ago.

  Bedwyr was opposed generally to reliance on anything magical or from the world of the sidhe. The Treasures as a whole made him uncomfortable, and he much preferred to be grounded in what he could see, hear, and touch. But they were backed into a corner—and it wasn’t as if his family hadn’t protected the secret of the dish for three generations. He’d accepted the stories his grandfather had told him, as he’d accepted as his fate Cade’s charge to find it.

  With trembling hands, Bedwyr lifted the lid to reveal a plain ceramic dish, its burnish dark with age. The rim was cracked too, revealing the red clay from which it had been made and, impulsively, he traced his forefinger along the top edge. No earthquake shook the tunnel when he touched it, and the break felt smooth as butter beneath his finger. After a moment he took in a breath and pulled his hand away.

  “This way!”

  At the sound of Peada’s voice, Bedwyr hesitated, but he knew that he didn’t have enough time to pull out the box and hide it on his person and then put everything back the way it had been before they’d be upon him. He closed the lid, leaving the dish where it was, pushed the stone door shut, and then hastily swept the dirt back into place with long sweeps of his arm. Then he stomped all around the area before going to the exit and out the door into the basement.

  He took the torch from the tunnel and put it into yet another sconce on the wall, this one inside the basement. By the time Peada appeared at the exit to the tunnel, Wystan at his heels and followed by a long line of men, Bedwyr was working vigorously at the front door to get it to open all the way. He turned to look as the Mercian prince appeared, grinned, and gestured him out the door.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rhiann

  Rhiann knew that Hywel missed having Bedwyr at his side, but she hoped that she and Cade could be a viable substitute. Cade wasn’t as gruff or as amusing as Bedwyr, however. And he was currently invisible.

  “They’re going to wonder where you’ve gone,” Hywel said out of the corner of his mouth. Rhiann, Cade, and Hywel were standing on the wall-walk near the city’s northern gate.

  “Peada is leading the men out of the city, so only Penda needs to know where I am, and I have chosen to make my stand away from him, as makes sense,” Cade said. “He and I already talked about it.”

  “What if someone comes looking for you?” Rhiann said from Cade’s other side. She held her unstrung bow loosely in her left hand, waiting for the Northumbrians to reach shooting range before stringing it. The rain was falling steadily and would ruin the bowstring if she strung it any sooner.

  While Penda had made the wrong choice in deciding to defend his city, at least he hadn’t been stupid about it: he’d placed painted stones on the ground at intervals outside the city walls to give the archers an idea of how far away their enemy was, so they could conserve their arrows until the Northumbrians came within range. Now that the sun ha
d risen, Rhiann could see the markers in the distance.

  “If someone comes for me, send them elsewhere, and if they say that they’ve just come from there, all you have to do is shrug.” Cade clapped a hand on Hywel’s shoulder. “If it even comes to that. We will all be killing Northumbrians, and who is going to have time to look for Gwynedd’s wayward king?”

  “You will be killing Northumbrians before they even touch me.” Hywel rolled his eyes. “I won’t take credit for what I have not done.”

  “We should be so lucky as to take credit for anything today,” Rhiann said. “The Northumbrians are too many.”

  Under the mantle, Cade sighed. It was one of the miracles of its creation that by wearing it, everything about him, even his boots and sword when it was unsheathed, or his horse were he riding it, were hidden. He didn’t even cast a shadow.

  Rhiann frowned. “Why do Saxon women not fight beside their men? I’ve never understood it.”

  Hywel spoke through a tight jaw. “Because they have so many men, they don’t need to call upon their women.”

  Rhiann’s eyes remained focused on the oncoming force. “They do have a lot of men.” It was intentionally the kind of flat tone Bedwyr would have used, and Hywel smiled, as Rhiann had hoped he would.

  “It’s almost time to start shooting, Rhiann,” Cade said.

  “How exactly did we get here?” she said. “Yesterday we were at Dinas Bran talking about baby names.”

  “We’re through! We’re through!”

  They all spun around to look down at the messenger, a young Mercian man with a shock of blond hair, flattened now by the rain. He could see only Hywel and Rhiann on the wall-walk, so in Cade’s supposed absence Hywel was the one to ask, “What do you mean we’re through?” He glanced back over the walls. “The Northumbrians have breached the wall?”

  Rhiann put out a hand to him. “No. He means Bedwyr found the tunnel’s exit.”