He pulled up short, and it seemed that Ifan was feeling a similar uncertainty because he stared at Myrddin for a heartbeat. But then he bowed low. “My lord.”
Something inside Myrddin broke loose at that. Releasing Nell, he strode forward and grasped his friend by the shoulders to raise him up. “Don’t do that.”
Ifan met his eyes. “You are Arthur’s heir. You will be high king one day.”
“I am Myrddin, your friend for twenty years.”
“You are Ambrosius’s son.”
“I didn’t know.”
Ifan ducked his head in acknowledgement of that truth. “Gareth told us.”
The two men gazed at each other for a long moment, neither knowing what to say. Then Myrddin raised one shoulder in a rueful gesture. “I will find myself surrounded by new friends in the coming days and weeks. It would be nice to know that the man I fought beside my whole life, who knew me before all this—” Myrddin gestured to the battlefield, but he meant so much more, “—is still my friend.”
Nell gave a low cry from behind him, but Myrddin refused to turn and look at her out of fear that he wouldn’t be able to stop his own tears from falling.
Ifan hesitated, looking warier than ever. “Likely being your friend means I’ll continue to be stuck with the tasks you don’t want.”
Relief flooded through Myrddin at the familiar banter. “What are you complaining about now?”
Ifan pointed with his chin to a point somewhere off to the left. “I’ve had to be nursemaid to your brother while you’ve been adventuring about the countryside without me.”
“Foster brother,” Myrddin said, unable to hold back a huge grin. “Come here.”
Ifan more than obeyed, wrapping Myrddin up in a hug worthy of a bear and lifting him off his feet.
Once Ifan set him down again and Myrddin got his breath back, he said, “I’d have you as the captain of my teulu, if you are willing.”
Ifan’s eyes lit, and then he looked past Myrddin to Nell. “See that, my lady? All the tasks he doesn’t want.”
* * * * *
The afternoon had been spent in the burying of the dead and the succoring of the wounded. Once night had fallen, however, grief had given way to feasting and song. As the last hastily arranged paean to Arthur ended, the king nudged Myrddin’s elbow. “Come with me.”
Huw and Anwen were deep in conversation with Cador, and an exhausted Nell had retired to a tent, one pitched not far from the pavilion in which they were feasting. There wasn’t enough room on the dais in Cador’s hall to accommodate the many lords present—and certainly not enough space in the hall for their men. Thus, because all the men who’d come to Camlann needed the opportunity to celebrate with their king, Cador had ordered the pantries of Caer Caradoc emptied and the feast established at the base of the mountain.
As Myrddin and Arthur stepped outside the pavilion, though it didn’t feel terribly cold and there was no wind, snow began to fall in thick flakes. Both already had their hoods up, and Arthur turned towards one of the fire pits. Thinking Arthur’s plan was to walk among the men, as he used to do long ago, Myrddin pulled his cloak closer around himself and went with him.
But this time there was no fooling the men among whom they passed. Each group they reached stood in turn, bowed, and called out “My lords!” or “Arthur!” A few even said Myrddin’s name, which prompted a low laugh from both Myrddin and Arthur.
When they reached the margins of the camp, Arthur kept going away from the light and towards the ruins of the battlefield. They walked some ways through the churned and muddy sod, now hardening with ice in the cold. After a hundred yards, Myrddin realized where they were going. He hesitated in mid-stride, wanting to protest, but King Arthur kept walking. Finally, another fifty yards on, the king stopped. “This is it. This is where I killed him.” The king looked down at the ground and dug his boot into the earth.
Slowly, Myrddin approached. The snow that was falling had started to stick, covering the ground with white. It was only because the light from the camp reflected off the snow and the low clouds that they could see anything at all, but Myrddin didn’t need to see Modred’s blood to know that he’d lost his life there.
“Do you regret his death?” Myrddin said.
“I regret his life,” Arthur said. “I never wanted to kill him.”
“I know.”
Turning together, they surveyed the huge and sprawling camp, Saxon mixing with British on Arthur’s orders.
With Modred dead, the fight had gone out of the Saxons. It wasn’t even as if Arthur had conquered a huge swath of Saxon territory. The boundaries between Saxon lands and British ones would remain much the same as before. The Saxons had lost their leader. That was all. The Welsh hadn’t been fighting to evict the Saxons from their homes. They had simply not wanted to lose their own.
Still, while the Britons remained wary to have so many Saxons among them this night, refraining even from excessive mead on the off-chance that the peace was merely a ruse, what lay before Myrddin and Arthur was a dream come true—and not a sight Myrddin had ever seen in any dream or vision.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do?” Arthur said.
Myrddin turned his head to look at the king. “Do?”
“You and Nell. Earlier you struggled with the idea that you could be both king and seer. Will you not take the throne when I am dead?”
“Must we speak of this now? Can’t we enjoy the victory?”
“This was my last battle, Myrddin. You and I both know that age is upon me. Whatever conflict lies ahead, it will be for you and Huw to lead our people.”
Myrddin licked his lips, trying to put into words the understanding he and Nell had come to at the end of the battle—almost without knowing it. “I will serve you as long as you live, and I will stand in your place when you no longer wear the crown, but—” he shook his head, “—I was not born to be a king.”
“You were, even if you didn’t know it.”
Myrddin smiled ruefully. “When Huw is ready to take my place, I will step down.” He met Arthur’s gaze. “Whether I serve Britain as king or seer is of no matter. I swear to you that I will be a caretaker of our people to my last breath.”
“There could be no greater legacy of my reign than that.” King Arthur put his hand on Myrddin’s shoulder, and there were tears in his voice as he spoke. “It was a blessed day when you came to me.”
And as the two men gazed across the battlefield towards the festivities, a vision swept across Myrddin’s eyes, this one fleeting and not one that brought him to his knees.
He stood in a corridor beside a closed door, his head pressed against the planks that made up the wall. Huw sat on a low stool nearby, leaning against the same wall with his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. “She’ll be fine, Father. You’ve seen it.”
“The future doesn’t always happen the way it appears in my visions. That’s the whole point of having them.”
“This one will.”
And then, for once proving Huw’s words true almost as soon as he’d spoken them, a newborn’s cry rose up from behind the closed door. Without waiting for the midwife to welcome him inside, Myrddin opened the door and bounded into the room. He stopped cold five paces away from Nell, drinking in the sight of her with a swaddled baby in her arms.
At his entrance, she looked up. Tears tracked down her cheeks and the smile she gave him was tremulous. But the child at her breast was alive and whole, and he found all of a sudden that he could breathe again.
“We have a daughter, my love.”
And as the vision faded, Myrddin finally understood what the king had meant about living without regard to possible futures. Every man, in the end, had only one.
The End
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Continue reading for the opening of The Last Pendragon, the first novella in The Last Pendragon Saga, set in dark age Wales
The Last Pendragon
Rhiann knows that demons walk the night. She has been taught to fear them. But from the moment Cade is dragged before her father's throne, beaten and having lost all of his men to her father's treachery, he stirs something inside her that she has never felt before. When Cade is revealed to be not only Arthur's heir but touched by the sidhe, Rhiann must choose between the life she left behind and the one before her--and how much she is willing to risk to follow her heart.
Kingdom of Gwynedd
655 AD
Rhiann
The smell of smoke and sweat filled the hall, mingling with the overlay of roast pig and boiled vegetables. More soldiers than usual sat at the long tables, here to celebrate their victory. The mood was subdued, however, not the wild jubilation that sometimes accompanied triumph and caused Rhiann’s father to lock her in her room in case he couldn’t control the men.
Today, the drinking had begun in earnest the moment the men had returned from the fight and settled into a steady rhythm Rhiann had never quite seen before. Here and there, a hand clenched a cross hung around the neck or an amulet against the powers of darkness, that should her father see, might mean death for that soldier. For a man to ask the gods for protection instead of the Christ meant he was less afraid of the King of Gwynedd than someone, or perhaps something, else. Rhiann had been afraid of her father her whole life and couldn’t imagine fearing another more, not even the demons that were said to walk the night, hungering for men’s souls.
Perspiration trickled down the back of Rhiann’s dress, made of the finest blue wool that her father had gotten in trade from merchants on the continent. Welsh wool, while plentiful, was courser than that of sheep raised in warmer climates. The Saxon threat was enough to keep the Cymry within their own borders, but the sailors still took to the western seas, bringing in trade goods of wine, finely wrought cloth, metalwork, and pottery.
For once, Rhiann’s father, King Cadfael of Gwynedd, had eaten little and drunk less. For her own preservation, Rhiann had always been sensitive to his moods and noted the exact instant his disposition changed. He shifted in his seat and rolled his shoulders, like a man preparing for a battle instead of the next course of his meal. A moment later, the big, double doors to the hall creaked open, pushed inward by two of the men who always guarded them. The rain puddled in the courtyard behind them, and Rhiann wished she were out in it instead of here—anywhere but here.
She kept her place, standing behind and to the left of her father’s chair. It was her duty to tend to his needs at dinner as punishment for her refusal to marry the man he’d chosen for her. Rhiann hadn’t turned the man down because he didn’t love her, or she him; she knew better than to wish for that. It was a hope for mutual respect for which she was holding out. But even this seemed too much to ask for an unloved, bastard daughter. Consequently, Rhiann spent her days as a maidservant, albeit one who worked above stairs. She didn’t regret her station. As the months passed, she’d come to prefer it to sharing space at the table with her father and his increasingly belligerent allies.
Silence descended on the hall as two of King Cadfael’s men-at-arms entered, dragging between them a young man whose head fell so far forward that no one could see his face. He was visibly collapsed, with his arms dangling over the guards’ shoulders and his feet trailing behind him. As the trio progressed along the aisle between the tables toward the king’s seat, the youth seemed to recover somewhat, getting his feet under him and managing to keep up with their strides. As he came more to himself, he straightened further.
By the time he reached the dais on which Rhiann’s father sat, he was using the men-at-arms as crutches on either side of him. Because he was significantly taller than they, it was even as if he was hammering them into the ground with his weight. His footsteps rang out more firmly with every stride, echoing from floor to ceiling, matching the drumming of Rhiann’s heart. The closer he got to her father, the harder it became to swallow her tears. By the souls of all the Saints, Cadwaladr, why did you come?
Rhiann had been her father’s prisoner her whole life, unable to escape his iron hand. The high, wooden palisade that circled Aberffraw had always signified prison walls to her, rather than a means to protect her from the darkness beyond. This young man had grown up on the other side of that wall. He’d not had to enter here. He’d had a choice, but had recklessly thrown that choice away and was now captive, just as she was. She felt herself dying a little inside with every step he took as he approached Cadfael.
The young man, Cadwaladr, the last of the Pendragons, fixed his eyes on those of the woman sitting beside the King. She was Alcfrith, Cadfael’s wife, taken as bride after the death of Cadwaladr’s father. Rhiann couldn’t see her face, but from the back, the tension was a rod up her spine, and her shoulders were frozen as if in ice.
“Hello, Mother.” Cadwaladr’s lips were cracked and bleeding, puffy from the beating that had bruised the whole length of him. Rhiann had heard they’d close to killed him, but from the look of him now, he wasn’t yet at death’s door.
“Son.” Alcfrith’s voice was as stiff as her body.
Rhiann’s father ranged back in his chair, legs crossed at the ankles to project his calm and deny the importance of the moment. “Foolish whelp. I’d thought you’d put up more of a fight, not that I regret the ease of your defeat. This will allow me to reinforce my eastern border more quickly than I’d thought. Penda will be pleased.”
“You and I both know why my company was not prepared for battle today,” Cadwaladr said.
Cadfael shrugged. “Your men are dead and you a shell of a man. What did you think? That the people would welcome you? That I would let you take my lands?”
“My lands,” Cadwaladr said.
Rhiann’s father sneered his contempt. He reached out an arm to Alcfrith and massaged the back of her neck. She didn’t bend to him. If anything, the tension in her increased. “You meet your death tomorrow, as proof of your ignobility.”
Cadfael waved his hand to Rhiann, signaling her to refill his cup of wine and that the interview was over. She obeyed, of course, stepping forward with her carafe. The guards tugged on Cadwaladr, but as he moved, Rhiann glanced up and met his eyes. It was only for a heartbeat, but in that space it seemed to Rhiann that they were the only ones in the room. She expected to see desperation and fear in him, or at the very least, pain. Instead, she saw understanding. She could hardly credit it. When had she ever known that?
“You’re wrong, Father,” Rhiann said, as the guards hauled Cadwaladr away. “Cadwaladr comes to us as a defeated prisoner, and yet, he has more honor, more nobility, than any other man in this room.”
“He is the Pendragon,” Alcfrith said, with more starch in her voice than Rhiann had heard in many years. “Cadfael can’t change that, even by killing him.”
Rhiann’s father snorted a laugh into his cup before draining it. He didn’t even slap the women down, so sure was he of his own omnipotence. “You may keep your dreams.” He pushed himself to his feet and turned to leave. “The dragon is chained; the prophecy dead.”
Rhiann had heard about Cadwaladr her whole life. As a child, men in Cadfael’s court had spoken of him as if he were a demon from the Underworld, or worse, a Saxon, coming to steal their home like a thief in the night. Later on, as she began to piece the story together, she realized that he was only a little older than she was, twenty-two now to her twenty, and their words said more about their own fears than Cadwaladr’s power.
Rhiann’s father had married Cadwaladr’s mother after Cadwallon’s death in battle, many miles from Aberffraw. The High Council of Wales had wanted peace in Gwynedd, in order to focus the concerted attention of all th
e native British rulers on the threat of the encroaching Saxons. Throughout Rhiann’s life, the Saxon kingdoms had been growing in number and power. Two centuries before, the British kings had invited them in, but once here, could not control them. The Saxons had overrun nearly all of what had been British lands only a few generations before.
By now, everyone knew that the Saxons wouldn’t ever return to their ancestral lands across the water. Her father, Cadfael, and Cadwallon before him, had allied with Penda of Mercia, but it had left a sour taste in the collective mouth of their people. All the Cymry knew that it was only a matter of time before the Saxons turned their gaze covetously on Wales.
The Council had settled upon Cadfael as the man to impose peace amid the chaos of constant war, provided Alcfrith agreed to the marriage. Rhiann suspected that agreed was too generous a word, and like most noble women, Alcfrith had had little choice in the matter. While the High Kingship had never materialized, and he didn’t even rule all Gwynedd like Cadwallon before him, Cadfael did control a significant piece of it: Cadwaladr’s birthright, as he’d said.
What Alcfrith had not done upon her marriage was give up her son, instead sending him away to be raised by another. Rhiann’s father had raged at Alcfrith time and again, demanding to know to whom she’d given him. Alcfrith had refused to say, and perhaps that was the bargain she’d made—safety for her son, in exchange for her allegiance.
And now Cadwaladr was here, walking into the lion’s den, although not quite of his own accord. Cadfael had spies everywhere and had known of his coming. The story he’d put out was that Cadwaladr’s small band had forded the Menai Strait and met Cadfael’s army just shy of Bryn Celliddu. Cadfael hadn’t even bothered to meet the force himself, instead delegating the task to lesser men.
But Rhiann wasn’t so sure, especially now that she’d heard Cadwaladr’s exchange with her father. Before the feast, she’d questioned some of the older men in the garrison, particularly those who’d held allegiance to Cadwaladr’s father once upon a time. A few of them had muttered among themselves about the evil Cadfael’s acts would bring to Gwynedd. One even mentioned that he’d seen demons in the woods surrounding Aberffraw. The others had dismissed that as fantasy, and then together they’d rebuffed Rhiann’s questions, as they had every right to do. Yet each, individually, had given her a look—like he wanted to speak—but thought better of it. Why had Cadwaladr come, only to be defeated so easily? Why had he sacrificed his men for such a fleeting chance?
Frost Against the Hilt (The Lion of Wales Book 5) Page 12