Tempted by Ruin (Sons of Britain Book 4)

by Mia West

“Bastards,” Arthur whispered. “Think they’ve fucked yet?”

  “I’d wager they’ve done something.” He waved a hand. “No sight of them even now.”

  “Gwen’s going to crow. Everything pops up in the spring, she said.” He rolled his eyes.

  “If you see spring anytime soon, you let me know.”

  Just as he said it, Gawain’s younger brothers came through the entrance. As every other time Bedwyr had spotted them, they had their heads together, as if plotting someone’s demise. “What d’you think of those two?”

  “Gareth and Gahers?” Arthur shrugged. “Lads. Why? What about you?”

  “Don’t know.” Bedwyr studied them. They’d moved in their joined-at-the-shoulder way to the table where the bread loaves lay, and they were leaning as one over one of the slicing boards. “In a way, they remind me of Gawain. But in a way, they don’t.”

  Arthur grinned at him. “Astute.”

  “Fuck off,” he growled. “You know what I mean. They look enough like him. But they look like Agravain, too, so…”

  He let the thought trail because Arthur would suss what he meant. They were sons of Lot. Bedwyr didn’t hold out much hope that the man had fathered more than one good one out of four.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said. “They don’t seem so bad. Fairly excited to see Gawain again.”

  They had been, bouncing as much as Gawain’s new pup and yelping to show him about the place. Medraut and Galahad did the same, every time they returned home.

  Arthur elbowed him. “What’s that smile? Remembering this morning?”

  “No.” He turned his ale cup in his fingers. “Just remembering how excited the boys were when we got back to Elain’s.”

  “Are you going sentimental on me?” Arthur said, his voice teasing.

  The words made his ears flame red, he was sure, but he couldn’t deny there was truth in them. As much as he might have wished another hour of Arthur naked on top of him, he was always glad to see family again.

  And, well, so should Arthur be.

  “You could stand some sentiment yourself,” he grumbled.

  “What?”

  “About the boys.”

  “What about them? I was the one playing unbroken pony with them, breaking my back. Didn’t see you hefting them around or splashing through puddles with them.”

  “No, but…”

  He had Arthur’s full attention now, shoulders square, palm flat on the table. If he didn’t word this just right, their evening wouldn’t go quite as nicely as their morning had done.

  Then again, perhaps some things were more important than that.

  Marginally.

  “Might be time to talk to Medraut.”

  “Talk to him about what?” Arthur said immediately, obtusely, and irritation rose up Bedwyr’s back.

  “You know perfectly well about what.”

  Arthur stared at him.

  At this, at least, Bedwyr excelled. After a long, dragging moment, Arthur said, “What would it change?”

  “What would it change? Are you jesting?”

  “But what good would it do? We don’t know yet. And we won’t for a while.”

  “You can’t just be the hero uncle all the time, swooping back in from mission or campaigns to play games with him. At some point, you’re going to have to face the fact you might be his father.”

  It landed between them like a stone. What had possessed him to blurt it out like that, and in Lot’s hall of all the damned places?

  Arthur’s nose flared on his breaths, and his gray eyes had gone as flat as cold iron. “I told Gwen they’d want for nothing,” he said, his voice level as a frozen pond, “and I’ve kept my word. Did she put you up to this?”

  “No—”

  “Elain?”

  “No!”

  “Then what is this?” Arthur sat back, then, and gave him a careful look. “Do you not trust me to do it when the time comes?”

  He hesitated half a breath too long, and Arthur’s gaze narrowed.

  “Truly?”

  Bedwyr scrambled for something to meet this gaze before it froze him solid.

  Only one way to combat that: fire.

  “He wants to know.”

  “He—what?”

  “Medraut wants to know,” Bedwyr said.

  “Know what?”

  “If you’re his father.” Gods forgive him. He’d just lied to save himself. “Gwen told me,” he added quietly.

  “Gwen.”

  He nodded.

  Arthur looked across the hall, his jaw working. “And why didn’t Gwen mention this fact to me? Hmm? Why didn’t she come to the potential father, instead of—”

  “To her brother? Why do you think?”

  If he’d wanted to light a fire, he’d succeeded. Lot’s men still chatted, blissfully unaware of the conflagration about to go up in their midst.

  But, as much as he loved Arthur—as much as he’d given him and would give up for him—this discussion was long overdue. It pained him to think it, but some small part of him didn’t trust Arthur to face the question head-on, mostly because he’d made no move to do so yet.

  Yes, Medraut scarcely stood as high as their belts and he wouldn’t bear arms—not real ones—for another five years, at least.

  But he was the grandson of two warlords, being raised in a family unlike any other at Ban’s.

  No, Bedwyr didn’t know for certain whether Medraut wondered, but Gwen had said something was on his mind. What if someone in Ban’s household had said something to him to plant the question? His birth had been unusual enough that anyone who’d seen him as a babe would still remember it. A local lad had witnessed it, too—one of the carpenters’ sons—and a babe covered in a pelt of hair would be memorable. Lads taunted each other over less. Wouldn’t take but one more step for someone to connect it with Arthur’s own appearance as a babe. It wasn’t for nothing that he’d been named for a bear.

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I heard you, well and clear.”

  “Look at me, cub.”

  “Don’t call me that here.”

  He’d done it, then. He wanted to pull the man into a shadowed corner and soothe his hackles. They needed to be a united front here. But he didn’t get the chance.

  “Cousin?”

  Bedwyr turned to find Gareth and Gahers standing behind him. “Yes?”

  “Mother invites you join,” Gareth said in his broken Cymrish. “She wishes talk family.”

  Right. He’d been expecting this summons at some point. She was his aunt, after all, and would want all the news of the people she’d known. “Tell her I’ll be happy to.”

  “She say come chamber.” Gareth turned to Arthur. “We know secret cave. You wish see?”

  Arthur glared at Bedwyr until he was sure the cub would beg off. But then Arthur nodded to them. “Be glad to. Hall’s a bit stifling.”

  Bedwyr watched them leave, then rose to go visit his aunt.

  An hour with someone who didn’t want to murder him sounded like just the thing.

  Chapter 16

  Palahmed sat on the pebbles of the little cove and watched the surf swell in and out.

  He’d come down here to think. That’s what he’d told himself, even as he’d known he was lying. But why he’d hoped to run into Gawain, he couldn’t say. Objectively, the thought filled him with dread, for as soon as the hawk saw him, he would demand an answer.

  It was one thing to slip away in the night, down narrow stairs and dark corridors, but it was quite another to dodge a man in broad daylight.

  Or in what counted as daylight this far north.

  He scowled at the sky and thought he must look a sight, hunkered so on a beach with no company but gulls and the odd crab carcass. How out of place he must look in his southern garb. They’d outfitted themselves as best they could on no notice, under Gawain’s reluctant direction, but their thin layers of quilted wool were no match for the damp chill of the Orcades.
He wondered for the thousandth time that Gawain had survived even the climate of this place.

  Then again, some might think the same of the homeland he’d fled. Hot all day, freezing at night—a place of extremes. A beautiful one, if a man chose to find that beauty. Some did.

  Some even sought it out.

  We have a guest, his father had said, that night so long ago.

  His dark eyes had danced with the news. They had guests all the time—his father was a wealthy man, a powerful man—but word of them rarely caused this light in his gaze. So, though he was seventeen and had been knocking foreheads with his father for more than a year over petty things, Palahmed had been intrigued. When he asked who was coming, his father had only smiled and told him not to miss dinner.

  At the appointed hour, the most striking man he’d ever seen walked into the dining chamber.

  Palahmed had commenced to sweat. He’d taken great pains to hide his secret from his father—that he desired other men would have brought shame to his father’s name and severe punishment onto his own head. It was a sin committed in foreign lands, cursed by God and rotting of the heart and mind. He’d heard his father pronounce these things, and so he’d been quiet about it.

  But this man… He was the very picture of everything Palahmed wanted, with silver hair and eyes the tawny shade of a lion’s coat. Though he was well-dressed, he wore no gaudy ornaments—no bracelets on his wrists, no rings on his fingers but one. A wide but plain silver band, its worth apparent in its weight, not in any intricate decoration.

  His father had introduced each family member, and when he’d come to Palahmed, he’d looked at their guest and said, My elder son,…Palamedes.

  The man had beamed and then embraced him. He wore an oil spiced with something Palahmed had smelled at the market but couldn’t place, and when he set Palahmed away, his wide, smiling mouth was very close. Your father is mischievous. I am also Palamedes.

  He’d passed that dinner on a cloud. It had felt that way, at least, that he floated several feet above everyone else. The man turned out to be an old acquaintance from the years his father had spent being schooled in Athens. Palamedes was the best dinner guest he could remember, laughing with his father, charming his mother, even teasing Safir, and full of tales.

  By the meal’s end, Palahmed was half in love.

  And so he might have been excused for what he did next, which was to lurk about Palamedes’s chamber at night, hoping for a chance to talk to him alone, and for the courage to take that opportunity if it arose.

  It didn’t. Mostly, he would find the man reading from a pile of scrolls and didn’t want to interrupt him. When he arrived on the third night, though, Palamedes was having a bath.

  It would have been enough to watch the man wash himself, for he was well-built for a man of his years. But as Palahmed peered from behind a heavy curtain, he discovered the man wasn’t alone. He had with him a young man, not quite as tall as Palahmed, but with a similarly slim frame and dark hair. Palahmed hadn’t seen him bring anyone into their house, though it was a large place with several twisting corridors, so he imagined their guest had quietly slipped his companion into his chamber at an opportune moment.

  As he watched, Palamedes began to wash the young man’s hair. His fingers worked deep in lather and then gently cupped the head as he poured water to rinse it. When his hand slipped down that soapy back to cup a buttock and the mysterious bathmate’s elbow cocked as he gripped himself, Palahmed got an idea. The worst he’d ever had and yet the most essential.

  For a quarter hour later, when the young man shouted his climax, covering Palahmed’s own furtive release, and then turned his head and spoke to Palamedes in Safir’s voice, their fate was written.

  Too shocked to barge into their guest’s room, he’d gone to his father. He would toss the man out, Palahmed was certain. Never mind that he had wished it had been him in that bath with Palamedes, or that the scent of his own seed still lingered on his palm as he tattled. He felt driven. Safir had scarcely fourteen years. Yes, he’d been officially welcomed into manhood at temple. Yes, his voice had begun to deepen, and he’d sprouted hair where he’d had none a year before. And yes, he’d begun to express interest in other people, whispering bold, explicit questions to Palahmed as they lay in their beds in the dark. But he was younger than Palahmed, and Palahmed had to protect him.

  It would be much later before he recognized he’d been driven harder by something else: shame. That he’d spilled watching his brother’s body flex and twist to climax. And it haunted him.

  It continued to haunt him, even after his father refused to throw out his guest. Even after he’d woken Safir in the night and lured him to the docks with promises of adventure. Even after he’d arrived in Cymru, frightened but determined to provide for his brother. Because the first time he’d walked into Caron’s brothel, it hadn’t been the silver-haired men who’d made his skin feel too hot, too tight. It’d been the young men his own age.

  And though he had provided for Safir, had made a home and a vocation for them both, there had been Dafydd and Ifan and Tristan…

  …and Gawain.

  Who had given him far more trust than he deserved for far too long, only to be rewarded with guilty tears and a refusal to explain them.

  He looked at the sea and sighed.

  The explanation, at least, he could remedy. He rose and climbed the path back to the stronghold.

  But at the end of an hour, and a thorough search of every corner of the fortress he’d seen, Gawain was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter 17

  “Another cup?”

  Bedwyr shook his head, probably too hastily, but he could already feel the sour berry brew gurgling in his gut. He’d be shitting loose if he drank any more of the stuff. “No, thank you.”

  His aunt smiled and ladled herself another. “Your father used to love this. Couldn’t drink enough of it. Took some time to find comparable fruit here.” She hung the ladle on its hook and took a long sip. “Can you guess who taught me to make it?”

  “Um…” He cast about. Who taught girls to cook? “Your mother?” He’d never known either of his grandmothers, but it made sense.

  “Gods, no, she was long dead. Couldn’t wait to be rid of my father, if I had to guess. We had that in common, she and I.” She took another sip. “No, no, it was Mabyn. You knew her?”

  He shifted on the low stool she’d given him and nodded. “She’s the Myrddin now. Or was last I knew.”

  Morgawse grinned at him. “Last I knew, as well. She’ll live forever, Mabyn will. Though we all must die. Seems a shame; so much knowledge will go with her. So many secrets.”

  Bedwyr looked up at the conspiratorial tone of that last bit, but his aunt’s face didn’t betray any eagerness to confide. “She’s training Arthur’s younger sister. To midwifery, I mean. Not to be the Myrddin.”

  “Sharp girl?”

  Mora had had about a dozen years when they’d left. She might be married by now. “Aye. Had to be, with Arthur and Cai to contend with.”

  “Cai. Older brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Warrior?”

  He looked at her closely. The story of how they’d been banished, how Cai had betrayed them, had traveled as far as Rhys’s. He couldn’t tell if it had made it this far, and couldn’t recall Gawain mentioning it. “He was my first shieldmate.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, I just… Well, when I lost my hand, I trained back up with Arthur. We kept on as shieldmates after that.”

  “Is this Cai a favorite of Uthyr’s, do you think?”

  Could be. Bedwyr didn’t consider himself overly proud, but when they’d left the mountains they’d also left behind a hole in his father’s fighting force. “It’s likely. He fights well.”

  “And you and Arthur are no longer there,” she said, as if she’d read his thoughts. “What good fortune for Cai.”

  Cai could rot, for all that he cared.

&nb
sp; “Were he and Arthur close?”

  “Close enough.”

  “And you and Gwenhwyfar?”

  “We are. She sends greetings.”

  Morgawse raised her cup, as if in toast. “Siblings should be close. Sometimes, their survival depends upon it. How is your father?”

  Cheerily drunk and celebrating Saxon losses, last Bedwyr had seen him. That had been at Rhys’s the previous autumn. “He’s as hale as ever. More silver now in the beard than he’d like to admit.”

  His aunt laughed. “Silver. Hard to imagine it. I’d know him, though, if he tottered through that door, stooped and gray. I’ve wondered over the years if I’d see him again. Then again, I don’t have to. You’re here.” Her gaze dipped down him to his boots and back up. “You look very like him, Bedwyr.”

  It wasn’t the first he’d heard that, not by a league.

  But it might have been the first time it’d made him feel itchy.

  “Do you know why I left the mountains?”

  “You met Lot?”

  She leaned on an elbow. “Ooh, tell me this tale.”

  Of her own leaving? Poor woman must be bored solid up here if she wanted her own life recounted to her. Problem was, he didn’t know but the slimmest details. “Lot visited for a harvest festival, and you…took to him. And left with him. In the middle of the night.”

  She snorted. “You’ll not win any storytelling competitions with that one, my dear. Here.” She set down her cup and rose. “I’ll help you round it out.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Arthur stalked ahead until one of the lads tugged on his sleeve.

  “This way.”

  Right. They were leading him. Grinding his teeth, he bit back the bitter, frustrated words that wanted to spill, and nodded. “Lead on.”

  Not saying the words didn’t mean he wouldn’t think them, though. Fine position Bedwyr was in. He was Medraut’s uncle, unmistakably. The lad had come out of his sister’s body, after all. It was an awfully easy thing for him to say, You should talk to him. Awfully easy, when Bed would never have to have that conversation.

  And what was Bed about, pushing on this now? When they stood on the arse-end of the world, surrounded by seawater and strangers, leagues from home? What possible good could it do either of them to even think on it, let alone waste the effort of an argument?