The Last Pendragon (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 1)

by Sarah Woodbury

  One of the men called to Rhiann, his voice echoing above the rushing water: “My lady! Your father asks that you return to Aberffraw!”

  Cade glanced at Rhiann, but she ignored the men, focusing instead on keeping her head above water. Another shout came from the bank, and Cade chanced a look back. The men had entered the water. More desperate now, he and Rhiann pushed harder, taking long strokes. Rhiann was trying to keep up, and Cade slowed slightly, urging her to stay strong. They were nearly three-quarters of the way across by now, and Cade thought they should have been able to stand, but as he could not get his footing, Rhiann certainly couldn’t either.

  They swam another twenty yards. Rhiann’s breathing became more labored with every stroke. Finally, Cadfan was able to run through the water, and Cade put his feet down again. He touched the sand and stood, finding the water was down to his hips. Rhiann gasped for breath beside him, coughing and numb from the cold. She staggered to her knees in the shallow water. With the water only to his hocks, Cadfan stopped and looked back at Cade. He almost seemed amused, and it was as if he was asking, why exactly did we do this?

  Cade wrapped his arms around Rhiann’s waist and pulled her to her feet, both of them so numb from the cold water that he almost couldn’t feel her skin. Almost. Together they plunged forward, out of the water. Cade released Rhiann as they reached her horse and then ran to Cadfan. He grasped the reins and threw himself onto his back. Seated, he swung around to look at the men behind them. Their pursuers were in the middle of the Strait, with one of them obviously laboring badly.

  “The one who can’t swim is Eben, one of my father’s knights.” Rhiann, too, had mounted and turned back to the water. “I recognized him when he was on the far bank.”

  None of Cadfael’s men appeared to be good swimmers. They swam heavy in the water too, so perhaps they hadn’t had the foresight to strip off their clothes before entering the Strait. Water-filled boots were as good as an anchor around one’s neck in that current. Cade brushed his sopping hair from his eyes and led Rhiann away, riding out of the water to the shore. The trees that grew down to the water’s edge would provide them with a haven. They needed to lose their pursuers in these woods.

  Chapter Three

  Rhiann

  The rain fell in earnest now. Rhiann, wet all through, was so cold she couldn’t feel her fingers. Fortunately, Cade allowed a stop once they’d put some distance between themselves and her father’s men. They dismounted and hurriedly stripped off their wet undergarments and pulled on their dry clothes. Rhiann’s wool cloak felt wonderful after the icy waters of the Strait.

  “I’m sorry.” Cade brushed his wet hair out of his face again. “This isn’t going to get better any time soon.”

  “I know.” Rhiann remounted her horse. “At least we’re alive. My father intended to hang you at dawn.”

  Cade brightened at that. “So it’s a good day already.” With that, he turned and began walking with long strides, leading his horse through the brush and trees.

  Rhiann was exhausted. The last time she’d felt this weary was after the birth of Alcfrith’s stillborn daughter the previous summer. The midwife and she had stayed beside Alcfrith’s bed for two days. In that case, Rhiann had been emotionally drained as well as physically spent, and despair had been the order of the day.

  With Cade, she felt exhilarated. She’d never done anything like this before and was astonished at her own audacity. Can I be the same girl as yesterday? Has one of the sidhe come and tapped me on the shoulder to turn me into someone who would dare to burn down my father’s stables to save his enemy? Rhiann had never even been off the Isle of Anglesey before. Now a whole new world opened before her, with Cade at its center. By saving Cade, she had saved herself, just as Alcfrith had said.

  Rhiann stared at Cade’s back as he led his horse ahead of her along a trail that only he could see. He moved confidently through the forest, and she wondered if that was something she could learn, or at least learn to imitate. He no longer even seemed to feel his wounds. His stride was sure, and when he glanced back at her, perhaps aware of her scrutiny, she saw that the cuts and bruises on his face were gone. That shouldn’t have been possible, even with the time in the salty water of the Strait.

  “Should I dismount?” Rhiann said.

  “Please don’t.” Cade held up his hand. “You’re tired beyond words. It will be easier for me if you stay where you are.”

  “I can make my own way,” she said. “I don’t intend to be a burden to you.”

  Cade shot her a withering look. “How far would you get, then, without me? And what kind of man would I be to let you go, after all you’ve done?”

  “I–” Rhiann began, unwilling to concede her helplessness, especially given all she’d managed so far, as Cade had said.

  Cade cut her off. “Don’t mention it again. I would not desert you, and I expect the same from you in return.”

  Oh. Well that was a different story entirely. “I wouldn’t! I can be as loyal as any man.”

  “As loyal as those men back there?” Cade’s mouth twisted into a wry smile.

  Rhiann glanced behind her. Thick trees and bushes screened them from the men who stalked them. Cade and she had been traveling for a while, so her father’s men should have come out of the water by now, but there was still no sign of pursuit. “Not like them.”

  Cade nodded. “I hold my men to a higher standard. It’s not unthinking loyalty I want, so much as men who are capable of understanding my orders while they obey them. I don’t want men to follow me blindly. I want them to obey me because I’ve earned their trust, and they have faith in me.”

  “My father expects blindness,” Rhiann said. “He wants me simply to obey him, as if I had no thoughts of my own in my head.”

  “Well now you get to listen to me instead,” Cade said, matter-of-factly. “Do you know the country here?”

  “No,” she said. “Do you?”

  Cade’s expression turned thoughtful. “I’ve spent these last weeks since I took Dinas Emrys scouting the land between the fort and the Strait. I know where we are, and where we need to go.”

  “So you weren’t entirely sure of my father after all,” Rhiann said.

  “I wasn’t completely stupid,” Cade said.

  “I didn’t say you were! I just—” Rhiann paused, wondering what she did think.

  “I walked into a trap I should have seen,” Cade said. “I lost all of my men. I lost the only father I’ve ever known. There is no pain greater than that, and you cannot chastise me more than I have berated myself.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” Rhiann said. “I’ve lived so long in fear of my father that I find it hard to believe that others exist who wouldn’t fear him, who wouldn’t know to fear him.”

  “Well, I know him now and am alive to learn from our encounter.” Cade swatted a branch out of his way. “Thanks to you.”

  “Who was your foster father?” Rhiann blurted out the question, one everyone at Aberffraw had posed a thousand times before without an answer. “Where did your mother hide you?”

  Cade glanced back at her, a small smile playing around his lips. “I can’t believe you still don’t know because the secret wasn’t well kept these last few years. I’m almost tempted not to tell you, but you’d discover it soon enough.”

  “Where?” she asked again.

  “Far enough so that I wasn’t under Cadfael’s nose,” Cade said, “but not so far I wouldn’t have my boots planted firmly in the soil of Gwynedd. My mother is a Saxon, but she refused to deny me my birthright. Taliesin brought me to my father’s vassal, Cynyr, lord of Bryn y Castell.”

  “No wonder we never knew where you’d been taken,” Rhiann said. “Lord Cynyr never pledged his allegiance to my father. That stuck in Cadfael’s craw, I can assure you.”

  “Cynyr’s wife lost a child to sickness only days before Cadfael married my mother, or so I’ve been told,” Cade said. “They put out that he’d recovered and th
en raised me as their own, under their dead son’s name.”

  “When did you learn that you were Cadwallon’s son and the true heir to Gwynedd?” Rhiann said.

  “Cynyr spoke to me of my destiny when I was twelve and ready to hear it,” Cade said. “It was both a surprise, and not. Others within the household had known, you see, and people gossip.”

  “I learned by mistake that I was illegitimate,” Rhiann said. “For the longest time, I’d thought Alcfrith was my mother, until I heard the cook lamenting about how skinny I was, even for a royal bastard.”

  “I’d decided I was a bastard,” Cade said, “because I’d overheard someone speaking of my foster brother, Rhun, as the true son of the household.”

  “Did Rhun mind, once he knew who you really were?”

  “He could have resented me terribly,” Cade said, “but he didn’t. He is only a year older than I, and has been my closest companion all my life.”

  “Did he ... was he also killed in the battle?” Rhiann said hesitantly, hating to think that Cade had lost his brother as well as his father.

  “No,” Cade said, shortly. “He awaits us at Dinas Emrys. Rhun is not a Christian.”

  Rhiann sucked in a breath. “If my father had known, he would never have let him enter his house. He might have killed him on the spot.”

  Cade snorted a laugh. “Instead he killed his own priest, who had traveled with us as proof of your father’s good faith.”

  Rhiann felt her eyes go wide. “I didn’t know that.”

  Cade checked Rhiann’s face and then turned back to the trail. “There is an ancient chapel near Bryn y Castell. It stands over a natural spring long revered as a holy site. I went there to pray for assistance before I journeyed to Anglesey. Rhun laughed at me for it. It crossed my mind as the first of your father’s arrows hit us, that Rhun was right to mock. Now, however ... now I’m not so sure.”

  Rhiann started to reply, even to assure him of her own belief, when Cade held up a hand to silence her. They listened together, and then he motioned for her to dismount. Believing absolutely that he knew more of the woods than she, Rhiann closed her mouth and dropped as silently as she could to the ground. The layers of leaves that had muffled the sounds of their steps would do the same for any pursuers.

  Rhiann listened hard with Cade, feeling, more than hearing, the quiet under the trees. Although she was not a woodsman, she knew to be careful when the small sounds were silenced.

  Cade pointed to the bow Rhiann had strapped to her horse. “Can you shoot that?” He kept his voice low.

  “It’s too big for me,” she said. “I wish I could have brought mine, but I took this from the armory for you. Some men feel as naked without a bow as a blade.”

  “I do always prefer to have both,” Cade said.

  He stroked his horse’s nose reassuringly and then stepped to Rhiann’s side in order to untie the bow from the saddlebags. Rhiann helped him strap the quiver onto his back and then rifled through the saddlebags to find the bowstrings. On top of them were the apples Rhiann had brought, and she looked longingly at them.

  Cade shook his head. “Can you wait? Apples make too much noise when you bite into them.”

  It was such a mundane observation that she almost laughed, but sobered instantly, saddened to see that the loaf of bread she’d included had disintegrated in the water. Putting her hunger aside, she retrieved the sack containing the bowstrings, thankful that they had remained dry within their leather casing.

  “You can shoot a bow, then?” Cade fitted the string to the bow and tied the ends.

  “My father doesn’t have a son and has lamented that fact every day of his reign,” Rhiann said. “Several years ago, he taught me to shoot, as an ill-humored jest I think, because he had no son to teach. I continued on my own because ... I wanted to, and a woman might have a need to defend herself.”

  “I grant you that. Like right now.” Without asking, he put his hand to her waist and pulled out the belt knife she always kept there. He bent his head to meet her eyes. “Can you use this if you have to?”

  “Yes. That too my father was willing to make sure of.” It wasn’t for her, of course, that Cadfael had done so, but because an assault on his daughter would besmirch his honor as much as her own.

  “Don’t hesitate,” Cade said, echoing the words of Rhiann’s long-ago instructor.

  “I know,” she said.

  Cade put out a hand, palm down. “Stay low; stay quiet.”

  Rhiann nodded. She tried to track him with her eyes as he made his way through the woods but in a blink of an eye, he’d slipped away.

  In his absence, the air under the trees became oppressive. The rain continued to drip, drip, drip from the leafless branches above. Many times in late winter and early spring, the drizzle was so unrelenting at Aberffraw she thought she’d go mad if she spent another day without the sun. Now, she listened hard to distinguish between the natural sound of the rain in the trees and something that might be unnatural, like the plopping of raindrops on metal or leather.

  Her horse blew air from his nostrils, and Rhiann stroked his cheek to calm him. He could sense her unease, and she strove to damp it down. She leaned forward so her head rested on his and tried to take deep breaths. They stood together, listening, for a hundred heartbeats, Rhiann counting them out one by one. Then the horse raised his head, and at that moment Rhiann felt motion behind her.

  She made to spin around, knife extended, but reacted too late.

  “Hello, missy.” An iron-strong arm slipped around her waist as the voice spoke in her ear. Rhiann slashed down and back with the knife, but the man caught her wrist with his free hand before she could connect. “Now, now. We can’t have that.”

  He squeezed her wrist until she gasped in pain and released the knife. It dropped to the ground, instantly becoming lost among the leaves at the base of the tree. The horses stamped nervously, and the man pulled her backwards, away from them, wrenching her arms behind her back at the same time.

  Rhiann stumbled, but managed to catch her breath anyway. “Cade! Ca—”

  The man cut off her words with a hand to her mouth. She growled at him, and tried to bite him as she struggled to pull away. She managed to get one of his fingers between her teeth.

  “Mochyn budr!” He threw Rhiann from him.

  She fell to the ground, hands out to brace against the impact. The moment she hit the earth, she pushed off, but again the man was quicker, and his full weight came down on her back. He had one of her wrists in each of his hands and forced her to stretch them out to each side, so that she lay in the shape of a cross beneath him, with her face pressed into the muddy leaves of the forest. Her heart was beating so hard she thought it would explode out of her ears, and she writhed and twisted, trying to fight free.

  His voice sounded in her ear again. “They said, unspoiled, but I have a mind to teach you a lesson.”

  “Dai.” Another man spoke. “We don’t have time for this.”

  Dai stiffened and sneered. “I don’t have to answer to you, Madoc.”

  A pair of boots stopped beside Rhiann’s nose. “But you do answer to me.”

  She knew that voice. It belonged to one of her father’s captains, a man named Gruffydd.

  Dai grunted as he reluctantly lifted himself off of Rhiann.

  Before Rhiann could properly gather her legs under her for a second attempt at freedom, Gruffydd reached down, grasped her under her arms, and yanked her to her feet. He lifted her so high that her toes barely touched the ground and hauled her over to where the men’s horses were tethered. He shoved Rhiann towards his horse, and she found herself caught in Madoc’s arms.

  This, by some miracle, was the same Madoc who’d been one of Cade’s father’s men and had helped them last night, little though his help had been. Madoc was a squat, bulky man, his shoulders broad from years of swordplay. Though his hair was gray, she was not going to underestimate his strength or endurance. His face was impassive as
he gazed at her. Rhiann didn’t know if his loyalty to the dead Cadwallon, or his disloyalty to her father, would stretch any further than it already had.

  Madoc pulled Rhiann toward him so his face was only inches from hers. “You will stay close, and you will obey, or face the consequences. Do you understand?”

  Rhiann nodded. In the last twelve hours, I’ve burned the stables, freed Cade, escaped from Aberffraw, and swum the Menai Strait. I can wait my chance, if there is one.

  With Madoc’s help, Gruffydd threw her across the withers of his horse, face down. She struggled for purchase to pull herself upright, but Gruffydd mounted behind her and pushed her down with his hand on the small of her back.

  “You’ll stay there where I can see you.” Gruffydd gathered the reins and turned the horse’s head.

  Cade! Where are you? Even as Rhiann thought those words, she countered them with a frantic prayer that he wouldn’t find himself captive again because of a foolish attempt to rescue her.

  In close formation, the three horses came out of the forest and onto a wide road. The sky was gray all the way down to the ground, and the rain began falling harder now, or at least it seemed that way because they were out from under the trees. Rhiann rested her cheek on the horse’s warm coat, feeling the rain drip down her face. She closed her eyes, choosing not to watch the cobbles fly past under the horse’s hooves as Gruffydd picked up the pace. Because of its resemblance to the roads on Anglesey, she decided that this must be the Roman road that ran from Caerleon in the east to Caernarfon on the western coast.

  The Romans had marched away from Britain over two hundred years before, leaving their roads and ruined forts behind them. The roads, many of which were still well-maintained, were the fastest pathways across Wales, but many of the forts had been abandoned. One lay at Caernarfon. The stones of another were underneath Aberffraw, and a third on the tip of Anglesey. Her father had allowed her to visit that ruin once, along with Alcfrith, in an attempt to bring his wife out of her impenetrable grief after the birth of yet another stillborn daughter.