Coming to my side, Peter hissed, “Where were you? I thought you’d just gone to your room, but then you were practically assaulting King Arthur, for crying out loud. What were you thinking?”
As I shook my head, a wave of dizziness followed and Peter had to steady me and help me sit in the nearest chair. Arthur surprised me by striding over and kneeling at my side. Placing his hand on my forehead as if he were taking my temperature, he looked intently into my eyes and I was immediately filled with a sense of peace and belonging. I couldn’t deny it; I felt more whole near him.
He and Taliesin seemed to communicate wordlessly as they shared a look. “A vision?” the bard asked.
Arthur cocked his head at me. “I believe so. What did you see, child?”
“The Mari Lwyd,” I replied before I could stop myself.
Arthur’s smile was almost fatherly. “The Mari Lwyd? Do you mean the figure that young men dress up as to go begging door to door for ale? I encountered the practice sometime after I was made king. My son used to love . . .” Glancing at Tynan, he caught himself. “While it might be a fitting vision of gaiety at this time of year, I don’t know what its significance might be. Are you prone to visions?”
“No.”
Arthur looked at Taliesin again. “I doubt it’s of much importance, so I will leave the riddling of it to you. My task here is too urgent to be distracted by the fledgling magics of an untrained girl.” I almost bristled at the dismissal, but his smile was reassuring and I relaxed. “Don’t worry, child. Dreams of the merry grey horse don’t imply much evil.”
How innocent you really are, my king
Because I did think of him as my king. I couldn’t help it.
Taliesin was watching me. Accustomed to my habit of keeping secrets from him, I doubted he was so easily fooled. I wasn’t sure how much I could tell without revealing everything else I’d been hiding.
The bard placed his harp in a case, shutting it with a snap. “Those of you with family or friends in the city, I thank you for your attendance this evening and invite you to spend the rest of this holiday in whatever manner you prefer. Arthur has invoked the ancient rite of hospitality and I will have no need of Protectors here tonight except for my son and Peter Larsen. For those of you who wish to remain, dinner has been laid out in the ballroom. My family and I will retire with the king and his attendants to the main dining room.” I was surprisingly touched when Taliesin’s gaze included Peter and me under the term family. More than half of the Protectors departed with warm wishes of Merry Christmas and Happy Solstice, while the rest bustled off to enjoy their dinner. Once they were gone, Arthur began to speak, but Taliesin held up his hand to stop him. Gesturing towards the dining room, he preceded us there.
The carved oak table in the Pim Ranch dining room could have easily seated twice our number. The cook—whom I’d never seen but who always seemed to anticipate the need for food—had already laid out a feast on platters down the center of the table. Two huge brass candlesticks towered at either end. Daley approached the table and made a complicated gesture with his hands. There was a brief smell of ozone as twin balls of electricity appeared on the tips of his fingers. He flexed his hands and they were released, floating to the top of each candlestick to illuminate the room with warm light.
Even Arthur looked impressed. “May we speak freely now?”
Taliesin hesitated. “Word of Rhiannon’s parentage, and of her arrival here, have already spread through the community of magic users. Unfortunately, I cannot trust that there are not some among my people who are willing to trade knowledge for currency.” He turned to Miko. “Do you sense any glamour or subterfuge nearby?”
“I don’t think so, except . . .” She paused, her gaze fixed on the woman standing beside Arthur. “Except for the fairy of course.” The woman was beautiful but extreme with her hair cut and dyed in a screaming red mohawk and wearing an orange jumpsuit that appeared to be made out of rubber straps. I realized I recognized her—she was one of the visitors to Viviane’s deathbed. She’d seemed truly sad at the time and I wondered if she knew that my foster-mother’s death had only been temporary. Arthur’s other female attendant, a ginger-haired woman who looked to be in her mid-thirties, murmured something under her breath to the somber looking man beside her. He frowned and shushed her.
Taliesin took the three in with a glance. “Well met, Bedivere. I am glad to know that Morgana has awakened the Sleepers at last.” The man bowed but remained silent.
I glanced at Miko and she whispered, “Morgan placed Arthur’s most loyal knights under a sleeping enchantment, to be awakened when he was.”
The bard kissed the hand of the fairy with the red mohawk in an old-fashioned, gallant gesture. “And well met to you as well, Titania.” An unreadable expression flitted over his face. “I did not know that you had entered Arthur’s service. I would not have thought you would give up dominion over your own realm.”
The fairy flushed, but lifted her chin proudly. “The time has come to take sides, bard. Oberon has chosen Merlin’s and cast me out of my own home in Cannock Chase. He prefers the form of a great black cat to that of a man now, and uses it to terrorize the lower fairies and local humans. All in Merlin’s name.”
Bowing low, he released her hand. “I am sorry Titania.” Taliesin then turned and greeted the ginger-haired woman with a cordial nod. When she smiled politely but didn’t speak, he frowned suddenly as if something had caught his attention.
“Old friend,” Arthur said, “shouldn’t we retire somewhere private? The news I bring may be difficult to hear.”
Distracted from his regard of the woman, Taliesin turned away. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it or not, but the woman seemed relieved to no longer be the object of his scrutiny.
The bard made a sweeping gesture around the room. “This is my family. If what you have to say is so difficult, all the more reason that I hear it in their company.”
Arthur nodded. “Of course. Perhaps if I were more honest with myself, I would say instead that my news will be difficult for me to speak out loud.”
Taliesin went very still. “Morgana.”
“Yes.”
“Is she?”
“No. Not yet.”
Tynan stepped away from the shadows near the wall. “What is it? What’s wrong with my mother?” It amazed me that he seemed to have forgiven her for stabbing him in the heart with Excalibur.
A muscle in Arthur’s cheek twitched. When he took a ragged breath, I realized that all the calm politeness was only a façade. “Your mother has been ailing for some time, more in her heart than in her body I think, but I could see the difference in her shortly after I was awakened. She seemed to be . . . fading. I realize now she couldn’t bear what she’d had to do to you, my son, to awaken me. This morning, I found her in our bed as stiff and cold as if she were dead.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I thought at first she was dead, but the physician I summoned declared that life was in her yet.”
Taliesin had flinched at the word dead and was now clutching the back of one of the chairs like a lifeline. The movement wasn’t lost on Arthur. “I don’t begrudge either of you the comfort you took in one another while I was gone, old friend.”
Taliesin bowed his head in acknowledgement. I was torn between admiring Arthur’s benevolence and understanding, and rolling my eyes at how he assumed any relationship between them had to be because they were missing him.
Tynan had slumped back against the wall and his eyes were large and dark. “Is my mother sick?”
Arthur rubbed his eyes wearily. “No, not sick. The physician believes she took some unknown poison strong enough to kill even one of her kind. Only the bond between us is keeping her alive, and I can feel it failing minute by minute.”
Taliesin collapsed into the chair as if he could no longer stand upright. “Where is she now?”
“This is the only thing that delayed me coming to you. We were at Cornwall. I couldn’t leave he
r alone and unprotected, so I brought her through the Paths to her sister Morgause.”
The bard looked up sharply. “You left her with the Seer of New York? Why? Morgana would be safer left in a den of snakes than with Morgause! The woman is unhinged. You must know that she cannot be trusted.”
But I could see by the sudden flash of fear on Arthur’s face that he hadn’t known that at all—he’d been asleep for too long. “Then we must prepare to leave with even greater haste! You can’t be ignorant as to why I’ve come for you.” Whatever else I might doubt about him, there was no doubting his love for Morgan le Fay.
The bard seemed to shrink into himself. “I can’t help you.”
Daley put a hand on his father’s shoulder. “What is it? What does he want?”
“He wants me to give him the Cauldron of Bran.” Seeing the confusion on our faces, he laughed but the sound was bitter. “I forget sometimes how much of our history has faded into myth. You would know it better by another name.” Taliesin paused dramatically.
“The Holy Grail.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
CARNELIAN
The Holy Grail.
Holy smokes.
“Nam seith ny dyrreith ogaer sidi.” Taliesin’s eyes found mine as he repeated in English, “Except seven, none returned from the Fortress of the Otherworld. All of you know the story of how Arthur led an army into Avalon.” He shifted his gaze to Arthur, but the king didn’t look away from the implied accusation. “We failed in our mission, but we did not return home empty-handed. We took spoils with us.” He spat the word. “Perhaps to convince ourselves that our quest and the loss of so many men were not in vain.”
Arthur sat down at the table, speaking patiently as if to a child. “I didn’t know what the Cauldron truly was when you claimed it as the price for your service and left me. If I had, you know I would never have parted with it. It might have been used to heal me after Mordred’s attack.” Arthur lifted a beckoning hand towards Tynan when he turned away. “That dark event is behind us now, my son. You’ve paid for it with your blood. I speak of it now only to explain.” Tynan relaxed, but he remained by the wall, partly in shadow.
The bard straightened his shoulders. “Believe me, Arthur, if I had known then what it was, I would have used it to save you from your centuries of sleep. By the time I understood, it was no longer in my possession.”
Arthur looked so stricken that I felt incensed on his behalf, a result of his innate ability to command fealty. “Are you saying you had the actual friggin’ Grail and you lost it?” I yelped. “Isn’t it like the cup of Christ or something?” Peter and I shared a concerned look. I may not have been raised religious the way he was, but even I knew that losing something like that would be pretty heinous.
When Taliesin raised his eyebrow at me, I immediately felt foolish. “At Jesus of Nazareth’s crucifixion, I am sure his followers had graver concerns than collecting his blood in a cup, but as this new religion spread through the British Isles, the accounts of the power he seemed to have over death became confused with tales of the life-giving magic of the cauldron.”
Miko gave a little gasp. “I remember this story. Bran the Blessed was the king of Wales. He had a cauldron that brought the dead back to life, but he lost it somehow to the king of Ireland. Eventually the two went to war. Bran won, but the cauldron was destroyed and he was killed by treachery.”
Taliesin sighed. “Yet another example of history become myth. In ancient times, a conflict erupted among Greylanders and civil war broke out between the Tuatha Dé Danann of Ireland and the Tylwyth Teg of Wales who were led by the giant Bran. The war spread from our world into Avalon, or Annwn as it was called then, and the final battle was fought there. The cauldron was a talisman of the earth magic, older than Excalibur. No one knows who crafted it or how Bran came to find it, but it was lost in Avalon. As we retreated from Merlin, taking what we could from fortresses and castles on the way, we thought it only an object of great beauty made of gold and pearl.”
My heart skipped a beat as startled pink sparks exploded across my vision. “I thought cauldrons were made of black iron, like they always show witches using at Halloween.”
It was Arthur who answered me. “The word is clumsy in English. I prefer grail for it captures the fineness of it. The Grail was a deep bowl crafted in gold with pearls inlaid all around the edge.”
Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap.
“Where have you hidden it, Taliesin?” Arthur’s voice had become dangerous. Peter and Daley were immediately on their feet and at the bard’s side.
Taliesin waved them off. “I forget that you probably know very little of the multitude of stories which have grown up around your exploits, Arthur. If you did, you wouldn’t need me to answer that question.”
The king’s voice was only marginally louder, but I could feel the power of command in it. “Then enlighten me.”
“I was tricked into giving it to a trusted knight who once served you, and who was my companion in arms. I know where the Grail is. Every child who has read the tales knows where it is. The Grail is kept in the castle of the Fisher King, but we knew him once as Galahad.”
Arthur’s frown made the room feel dark and cold. “Galahad? That priggish, self-righteous little know it all? He was only a mortal.”
“Tales contain the seeds of truth. I suppose that drinking from the Grail periodically has extended his life, but perhaps not. Perhaps he died long ago and the Grail is buried with him.”
Arthur stood and his attendants flanked him. “Take me to this castle of the Fisher King then without delay. Morgan’s life hangs in the balance. Galahad would never let her die.”
Taliesin snorted, the most unrefined sound I’d ever heard him make. “He showed no interest in saving you from endless sleep! Do you think his judgment will be any different for Morgana? If he is even alive at all.”
“Then we’ll convince him to come to the correct judgment. And if he’s dead, I’ll dig him up with my bare hands if I have to, but I will find the Grail! Now where is this castle?”
Taliesin was on his feet now too. “Don’t you understand? No one knows, not even Robin Goodfellow. Galahad asked him for the use of a Path Guide, claiming he was weary of the world and wanted to find a remote, forgotten place where he could spend the rest of his days fishing. That Guide never returned. The tales sprang from rumors of mysterious encounters with a Fisher King and his magic Grail. Those who stumbled upon his castle and were given refuge would find themselves alone on the ground somewhere completely different when they awoke from sleep. I eventually suspected that Galahad and the Fisher King were one and the same.”
Arthur’s expression darkened. “How can I believe that the youngest of my knights managed to trick you, Taliesin the warrior-bard, out of the legendary Cauldron of Bran? You must have recognized it. What game are you playing? Would you treat Morgan’s life so lightly?”
Taliesin’s face went white, but his voice was controlled. “I had barely even looked at it. I was so angry at the fool’s errand you had led us on that I took it to spite you when I saw how it caught your eye. I had no desire for treasure. All it did was remind me of everything we lost in Avalon. When Galahad was not chosen by Morgana to join the Sleepers, he found me and begged for the Grail. He told me he wanted it so he could always remember the glory of the King of Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table. Perhaps he had somehow divined its true nature, but I believed his request was innocent and gave it to him gladly. It was only later that I began to doubt. Still, the Cauldron of Bran—the Grail—was a mysterious and dangerous power. I decided it was better lost in the mists of history along with the Fisher King.”
“Why?” Peter asked. “Why is it so dangerous? Something that can heal, maybe even raise the dead, it sounds like a miracle.”
Taliesin smiled sadly. “They say the god you and Rowan follow could do the same. What was his fate among his fellow men?” I could feel Peter holding back his protest. Nothing we�
��d experienced thus far had shaken his faith, but he seemed to realize this was an argument that no one would win.
Arthur wasn’t convinced. “Yes, it’s a powerful weapon. To be able to heal one’s army would make all the difference in a war. Perhaps you just don’t want me possessing that advantage, old friend.”
“Has using any talisman of the earth magic ever been that simple? You of all people should be wary of it. The earth magic picks and chooses who it will favor, and it can abandon that favor just as quickly.” Taliesin pointed his finger at me. “The cost of quickening Excalibur was almost this young woman’s life. Do you think the Grail will ask any less? It betrayed Bran and let him die in the Grey Lands of Avalon.”
Arthur nodded, but I could tell he wasn’t swayed. His purple aura of majestic, absolute certainty and strength of will remained pure and unsullied by lesser emotions. “Then declare a truce between us and join me again, old friend. I will trust in your wise council over such a powerful object, I promise it.” Seeing something in Taliesin’s face, he pressed his advantage. “We share a common enemy in Merlin. Whatever differences we have over the course we believe this world should be on, they are nothing compared to what Merlin will do if he has free reign over the earth. Morgan told me that until recently it was believed that Merlin had created the Wall Between Worlds to protect himself, but even before I was struck down, I’d begun to suspect that his sojourn there wasn’t voluntary. Now we know that Viviane trapped him there.”
“Under Guinevere’s orders and using her spell,” I couldn’t help adding. When Arthur frowned at me, I realized he hadn’t been told everything yet.
I suppose I can’t blame Morgan for not wanting to talk to her lover about his wife.
“Guinevere? What does she have to do with it?”
I surprised myself with a surge of red anger on my mother’s behalf. “Basically everything! This whole mess started when you betrayed her. Viviane didn’t give you Excalibur, Guinevere did. I have no idea how she got it, but she didn’t believe you would trust it if it came from her. You’d already chosen Morgan over her, and that made Merlin so paranoid that he seduced Guinevere and then convinced Mordred to kill you. Sending Guinevere into Merlin’s arms is why I was born, why she left you and disappeared, and one of the reasons why Merlin is so eager to escape now that he’s found me!” Peter took my hand to calm me, but the heat on my skin was warning enough and I pulled away before he could register its unnatural temperature.
Sword of Elements Series Boxed Set 2: Bound In Blue, Caught In Crimson & To Make A Witch Page 34