The Pendragon's Quest (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 4)

by Sarah Woodbury

  “And what was it?” Rhiann said. “Its name, I mean?”

  “Evil,” Taliesin said. “More than that, I will not say as yet.”

  Cade lowered Rhiann to the ground, and she went to her saddle bags where she kept her cloths and bandages. She didn’t need them often, what with Cade’s healing sword, and as she turned to ask Cade whom she should tend first, he’d already crouched beside one of the wounded men. A sword had slashed the man’s belly, and he scrabbled to close the wound. Gently, Cade pushed one of his hands away and laid the other on the hilt of Caledfwlch. The wound began to heal and the man fell back. “Thank you, my lord.”

  Rhiann met Cade’s eyes. One of this man’s own companions had done this to him, and perhaps he’d done worse in return. This shadow was a menace beyond reason or reckoning. Perhaps that was what Taliesin had been trying to tell them.

  _____________

  Thank you for continuing with The Last Pendragon Saga! Read on for the first chapter of The Pendragon’s Champions, the next novella in The Last Pendragon Saga, available at Amazon!

  Sample: The Pendragon’s Champions

  Chapter One

  Cade

  How many times had he left his bed when everyone else was asleep? He’d long since lost count of the nights he’d walked; of the men he’d killed. He liked to think he never killed anyone he didn’t have to, but the words with which Arawn had mocked him still rang in his ears: You think yourself so noble, Cadwaladr son of Cadwallon, even as you lie to yourself. You’re still trying to fill your father’s shoes, aren’t you? And failing, I might add.

  Cade honestly didn’t know if his father had been a particularly wise man or simply a battle leader, born in the right place at the right time to make a difference. Cade had always thought that his father had been what his people needed: a good king, uniting his people and ruling over them with a strong hand. But recently, he’d begun to doubt that this was true. He’d heard stories, things that people said in passing when they didn’t know he could overhear, about his father’s temper, or his ruthlessness, or his neglect of his country while he was away, fighting for Penda. Cade had always thought his father had been fighting with Penda, who after all was his wife’s brother, but given the demands of kingship, Cade had a new perspective on why his people might not think that was the case.

  It seemed to Cade that if he couldn’t unite the warring lords of Wales, he would be remembered as little more than a battle leader himself. Perhaps that was enough. Perhaps that was what his people needed most, but he was too close to his own life to tell. Cade wished that he could have known his father and have had his guidance. He wanted, somehow, to be more than he was—more than just a battle leader—and to find the words to bring all the Welsh to his side.

  Cade was grateful that Taliesin had come to him. Without his advice, Cade might have made more mistakes than he had and fallen into another trap such as the one that took the lives of Cynyr and his men. Still, a father’s hand—a father’s presence—was invaluable. He and Rhun had needed Cynyr and regretted his loss every day of their lives.

  Tonight, it was Taliesin who needed him. The darkness that had attacked them on the road could upend all Cade’s plans if they didn’t deal with it. Taliesin refused to explain or to name the force, other than to say that Mabon’s power was fleeting in comparison. Regardless, it was keeping Taliesin from contact with his patron, Gwydion. And without his help, Taliesin would never see again.

  Once outside his chamber, Cade headed down the hall to what passed for a receiving room at Dinas Bran. Taliesin was there already, just shrugging into his worn cloak. Cade smiled at the ancient garment. Taliesin didn’t have to wear it. He had the new one—the one that was a deep green color and brought out the green in his tawny eyes—that he’d worn to his and Rhiann’s wedding.

  But Cade wasn’t surprised this particular evening to see the faded, black cloth Taliesin had always worn wrapped around his shoulders. It may have been the same cloak worn by the man he’d been when he’d taken the infant Cade from his mother. There was comfort in the long legacy of mysticism from which Taliesin arose and which the cloak represented. They might need that comfort before the night was over.

  “Are you ready?” Taliesin said.

  “If you are.”

  “Given the menace that surrounds this fort,” Taliesin said, “I have thought better of your assistance.”

  “You’ve been seeking this on your own for far too long,” Cade said. “You have even gone to Anglesey, where the old groves used to grow before the Romans cut them down. Your visions have not returned to you, and with the trouble on the road last night, we can no longer delay.”

  “There are places I haven’t been,” Taliesin said. “Questions I haven’t asked.”

  “We have both avoided this day ever since you came to me,” Cade said. “I can help you. Let me help you. Let me do for you what only I can.”

  Taliesin studied his friend and then nodded. Together the two men walked quietly down the stairs to the great hall and then took the second stairway into the kitchen. A pigeon hooted in its cage, ready for tomorrow’s meal. Cade moved his hand to touch it as he passed and then drew it back. For whatever reason, whether Arianrhod’s gifts or some new strength of his own, he no longer needed it.

  Taliesin was already through the pantry door, and as Cade trotted down the cellar steps after him, Taliesin lifted his staff so the light he’d conjured at the end of it could fill the room, illuminating the stones on the floor.

  “Do you know under which stone lies the passage we seek?” Taliesin said.

  “I checked for it earlier.” Cade crouched, slipped a knife from the sheath at his waist, and slotted it between two stones. One of the stones slid out easily, and Cade set it aside. “I can slide it back into place once we’re through. It will be easy enough for me to find it again from the other side.”

  “My apologies, Cade, for what may come next.”

  Cade looked up at the bard, who was observing him gravely. Taliesin had used Cade’s nickname—something Cade never remembered him doing before. “You and I both know there is need. And, in truth, we’ve been in far worse places.”

  “That we have, my friend,” Taliesin said.

  “And I, in turn, might ask why you continually seek such places out?”

  Cade laughed at Geraint’s dry tone, and turned to see him descending the stairs, his sword in his hand. Cade smiled apologetically and got to his feet.

  “When the King of Gwynedd sneaks about in his own castle,” Geraint said. “What can I do but follow and try to dissuade him from embarking on whatever potentially disastrous adventure he’s contemplating? You know this isn’t a good idea if you opted not to tell me of it in advance.”

  Cade laughed again. “I thought, when I first learned of my inheritance and that one day I should be High King of Wales, that when I ordered a man to jump, like as not he’d say, Yes, my lord, how high?”

  “And now,” Geraint said, “you wonder why those around you are far more likely to tell you that whatever you intend is the god-damned-stupidest plan they’ve ever heard.”

  “That does seem to be the case, more often than not,” Cade admitted.

  Geraint met Cade’s eyes, held them for a moment, and then smiled himself. “But then, as you well know, we still jump.”

  Cade relaxed and held out his hand in greeting. “Thank you for coming, although, as you say, I did not ask for it.”

  Geraint reached for him, and they grasped forearms. “I heard you pass in the hall and was worried about more intruders.” He gestured with his head towards the hole in the floor. “Am I allowed to ask what you’re doing?”

  Taliesin stared down into the gap. It was impossible to see anything beyond the rim of the hole.

  “Could be we don’t really know,” Cade said.

  “Nice,” Geraint said.

  Cade sat on the edge of the opening and dropped to the rough stones that formed the floor of the cave
below. He reached for Taliesin’s staff and then caught the bard himself as he released his handhold to drop into Cade’s arms.

  Taliesin was sweating slightly. Cade checked his expression and realized that the sweat wasn’t from exertion but from fear of heights.

  “That wasn’t as bad as last time,” Cade said, remembering the fifteen-foot drop Taliesin had needed to navigate in Arawn’s cavern under Caer Dathyl.

  “It’s always bad,” Taliesin said. “But seeing as how we’re here now, we might as well keep going.”

  Cade glanced up to Geraint, who leaned into the opening Taliesin had just vacated.

  “I could come with you,” Geraint said.

  “I would feel better knowing you were guarding the fort and our backs,” Cade said.

  Geraint nodded, mollified, and removed his head from the hole. Taliesin had already turned away. The light at the end of Taliesin’s staff lit the small space, about fifteen feet on a side. It bore little resemblance to the caves under Caer Dathyl with their high ceilings and arched corridors. Compared to those, this was less than an anteroom. Cade pulled Caledfwlch from its sheath. The familiar colors that bounced and shimmered off the crystals in the stone walls comforted him.

  Taliesin led Cade a few paces to a tunnel that led north from the fort and down at a sharp angle. The walls glistened with moisture, and Cade was aware of the tons of rock that pressed down on them from above. After forty-seven steps, Cade counting them out in his head in case things went horribly wrong and he had to come back in the dark, the path forked and Taliesin took the right-hand choice. Unspeaking, they descended further into the mountain. If they hadn’t brought light with them, they would have been surrounded by a suffocating blackness. Cade gripped the hilt of Caledfwlch more tightly.

  After another twenty yards of careful navigation on the rough stone pathway, Taliesin halted. “So it is here.”

  Cade peered over Taliesin’s shoulder and contemplated what had brought Taliesin up short. Stairs, surely ancient beyond reckoning, had been cut into the path just in front of them. Instinctively, Cade moved in front of Taliesin, who gave way. Even more carefully now, feeling with his feet for any obstacles that might hinder them, Cade walked down the steps. He gained confidence as the treads held and the edges didn’t crumble away to spill him onto his backside, or forward onto his outstretched hands.

  “How much farther, do you think?” Cade said.

  He didn’t need to look behind him to register Taliesin’s smirk. “You’re asking me? The seer who no longer sees? I imagine we will reach the place when we get there.”

  “You will see again.” Cade put all the assurance in his heart into the words.

  “That is my hope. I would give up almost anything, excepting my life itself, to have that gift returned.”

  “And that is why we have come.”

  A hundred of Taliesin’s heartbeats later, the pair came to a halt, their path barred by a wooden door.

  “How old do you think this place is?” Cade said.

  “Ancient,” Taliesin said, “but I’m not sure that we’re quite there yet. I would not have expected to find a door where we are going.”

  “And yet, here one is.” The door had once been connected to the frame by leather ties, but they’d disintegrated, leaving only holes where the hinges had been.

  “Can you move the door?” Taliesin asked.

  There was room enough for only one of them in the narrow space, so Cade handed Caledfwlch to Taliesin, who stepped back to give Cade room. With a grunt, for the door was solidly made, Cade lifted it from its rest and turned it against the rock that made up the side wall of the tunnel. Blackness, even deeper than in the staircase they’d just come down, gaped at them.

  Cade was still adjusting the door to ensure that he’d properly braced it on the uneven stones when Taliesin passed through the doorway. But then he stopped short, releasing a sigh of surprise, and Cade looked past him into the room. The two men stood on the threshold of a room lined from floor to ceiling with shelves. Instead of books or implements, however, as Cade might have expected—were he to expect to find anything down here—the spaces were filled with bones. Hundreds of them.

  There were so many that Cade supposed they were looking upon a resting place for many generations of Britons. What’s more, the bones were organized by type: long bones on this shelf, skulls in that corner, hands on a shelf above feet. At some point after death, once the flesh had dried from the bones, someone had sorted and separated them and brought them to this spot.

  A creeping sensation raised the hair on the back of Cade’s neck at the notion that a man might inter a body only to dig it up again once the flesh was gone.

  “Have no fear. These are dry bones, nothing more.” Absently, Taliesin handed Cade back his sword and raised his staff high. Then he crossed the floor towards a table in the center of the room.

  A man’s body lay on it, the skeleton complete, unlike the rest of the dead in the room. His desiccated remains were still fully clothed, though his skin was dried and yellowed, and he had scraps of hair clinging to his scalp and face. His folded hands rested on his chest.

  “He must have been a great man,” Cade said.

  “With loyal followers whose loyalty continued after death,” Taliesin said. “Why else would they have gone to such effort?”

  At the same time, the dead man had no weapons or armor, as any lord or battle leader would have wanted at his burial. His only possession appeared to be a plain wooden box, perhaps a foot long and half that wide, which rested at his feet on the end of the table.

  Cade took a step closer. “Who buries their dead this way?”

  “Early Christians,” Taliesin said.

  “Why do you say that?” Cade said. “We came looking for a pagan site. Perhaps we’ve found it.”

  “No. As was the lot of my spiritual ancestors, the Roman legions hounded the Christians all across their territories before becoming Christian themselves. The early believers were forced underground in order to preserve their dead without interference and to save their bones from desecration.” Taliesin glanced at Cade. “If you recall your history, the Romans cremated their dead.”

  “I do remember, and I have heard of tombs like this, but I thought them limited to the place of Jesus’s birth.”

  “The early Christians appear to have brought the tradition to Britain, along with their religion,” Taliesin said.

  Cade detected a bitter tone in Taliesin’s voice. They rarely discussed their respective faiths, and Cade had taken to ignoring their differences because they meant so little to him. Perhaps that had been a mistake.

  “Come,” Taliesin said. “The place I want is older and farther on.”

  Cade moved to follow Taliesin out of the room. He stopped, however, at the foot of the table on which the man lay. The wooden box was closed, and something Cade couldn’t express in words drew him to it. He propped Caledfwlch against the table beside the man’s feet and, with gentle hands, lifted the lid of the box. Lying nestled within a nearly disintegrated piece of deep blue cloth was a clay cup, crafted no differently from any of the cups from which mead had been drunk that evening at Dinas Bran. Looking closely, however, Cade saw that someone had taken care to etch the image of a fish into the side of the cup’s bowl. Any colors that had been fired into the clay, however, had long since faded, along with the sheen of firing.

  Noting Cade’s attention, Taliesin returned to his side and looked over Cade’s shoulder. “It’s just a cup.”

  Cade allowed himself a small smile. “Yes. You’re right. It’s just a cup.”

  He closed the lid and recaptured his sword. With Taliesin in the lead again, they continued their journey, exiting the room through a rear doorway and then following a path which descended deeper into the mountain.

  Eighty paces on, with the tunnel curving in on itself so it seemed to take them directly below the Christian cavern, they found what Taliesin sought. Many tons of rock pressed dow
n on them, and Cade’s thoughts shied away from the immensity of what lay above them. He focused instead on this new cave they’d found. Much grander than the room above, the ceiling stretched twenty feet above their heads. A wall on the other side of the room was so far away, Cade could just make it out in the dim light. Arawn could have found a home here.

  “I thought the druids worshipped in the forests.” Cade’s voice boomed around the room, bouncing off the walls. He bit his lip, wishing he’d modulated his tone.

  “They did,” Taliesin said. “But they also found caves to their liking. Our power comes from the earth, and the deeper within it we go, the greater the power we can wield.”

  Taliesin had once explained to Cade how he drew his strength from the natural world. The magic flowed like a waterfall through him, though rising upward, not down. Much of Taliesin’s youth had been spent learning to control it, rather than let random acts of magic burst from his fingertips, or even from the top of his head. Cade thought about that for a moment, wondering if it gave him some insight into what had happened in Arawn’s cavern, or about the source of the shadow’s power. Then he dismissed his musings as something he wasn’t ever going to understand.

  Taliesin continued speaking. “As with your Christians after them, the druids found themselves forced underground at times when the Romans got too close.” He shot Cade a look, then, and it was one of resentment, before his face cleared and the gentle expression he usually wore reappeared. “But unlike your Christians, my kind has all but disappeared.”

  “I can see why if the only place you can worship is this difficult to find,” Cade said, trying to lighten the mood.

  Taliesin obliged with a smile, but it didn’t rise to his eyes, and Cade resolved to keep to the business at hand.

  Faded paintings adorned the walls, depicting scenes with trees and men—perhaps the sacred groves on Anglesey which the Romans had destroyed. Water gurgled from a spring in the distance, close to the far wall. The last druids to come here had set five sconces in the walls, with torches already prepared to light the room, and had etched a star with five points in the smooth stone of the floor. An altar sat in the precise center of the star. And in its center, in the place of honor, rested a nearly flat wooden bowl.