Gweniver looked straight at him down the length of the Council table. "Your uncle of Kernow is working treason. Marc'h has taken the planet to the brink of secession,—he has armed against the rest of Keltia; and—"
"And?"
"He has kidnapped his son Tryffin's lady, and would have her for his."
The room was very silent, though most of those present had known all this for months. Even we, far away on Aojun, had heard some of it, and it was that which had caused us to come home again when we did. But this surpassed in evilness aught that we had heard heretofore, and I was not the only one to gasp aloud with the shock of it.
"You might have warned me," I muttered fiercely to Morgan. But Gweniver was speaking again, as Arthur had made no sign one way or another.
"You will recall, Artos, that some years ago—before you left Keltia on your reiving—Marc'h your uncle had wished to wed Ysild Formartine, heir of Arrochar."
"I remember." The voice seemed to come from a far cold place,—the face was unmoving, and yet it seemed as if a beam of light hit Arthur's eyes, leaving all the rest in shadow.
"Then you will also remember that Ysild rejected him out of hand. What you will not know, as it had not yet come to pass, is that Tryffin your cousin, Marc'h's heir, has himself fallen in love with Ysild, and she with him."
"A complication." I felt the need somehow to shift a focus from Arthur, a focus I did not like.
Gweniver did not even bother to glance my way. "As you say, Glyndour… Any road, when Ysild and Tryffin went to Marc'h to seek his blessing on their marriage, your uncle reacted—poorly. He cast his own son into imprisonment, seized Ysild against her will and, almost it seemed as afterthought, announced to me and to the Council and the Fainne that Kernow was breaking away from Keltia."
Arthur made the nervous gesture I had known him make since boyhood in times of stress: a graceful flexing of his swordhand fingers, a double ripple from smallfinger to thumb and back. But he betrayed no other hint of his mood.
"What has been done about it?"
"What we felt in conscience we must do." That was Keils, and the currents in the Council chamber shifted yet again. To me it seemed that the Councillors, save for those who had been away with Arthur, were better disposed and fuller willing to listen to the First Lord of War than to the Ard-righ; and I liked it not at all that it should be so.
"And that was?"
"We have put Kernow under siege. Blockade, to be more precise about it… No ship gets in or goes out: No commerce is permitted, no supplies can be landed, no reinforcements can be had. Marc'h stands alone."
"Ah, but does he?" whispered Morgan, and several heads turned nervously.
"What is the news of Tryffin?" asked Daronwy from her seat near my own, and I sensed her concern in all the rest of our old Companions. I was sore concerned myself: Tryffin had been my friend and comrade from our days in Coldgates in Bargodion—he and Arthur and I, and Grehan Aoibhell who sat now across the chamber, and Kei who had died under the Boar's hoof at Nandruidion, and Betwyr who had been with us on our creagh-righ. We loved him dearly: He was no great thinker, was Tryff, but he had a high heart and a caring soul, and there were few better sea-lords in all Keltia.
"No news," said Ygrawn, and my gaze shot to her at the note of wretchedness in her voice. And well might she be feeling so: Marc'h was her brother, Tryffin her nephew, and the High King her son—a hard knot to cut through, even for a queen.
I looked steadily at her until she felt my glance and met it. Ygrawn was the only mother I had ever known, my own having died in my faunthood; she had been my methryn since I was scarce six years old. More than that, she had been my Queen for all the years of her marriage with Uthyr, and she was my matemother besides. There was nothing I would fail of doing did Ygrawn ask it of me, and even did she not ask... She read all this as we held each other's eyes, and after a moment she smiled.
"He holds Tryffin on Kernow," she said then, and her gaze shifted to Arthur, but his head was bent to the computer-pad inlaid in the table before him and he did not see. "In the fortress of Tyntagel, on the headland of Penguiron."
I knew the place, and a harsher, harder, more unassailable prison was not in all Keltia. There had been some talk, even, of using it as durance for the Marbh-draoi, should it have fallen out that he had been taken alive, so strong and defensible a place it was.
"And where is Ysild?" I asked. "Marc'h keeps her close with him at Kerriwick," said Gweniver. "And therefore have we held off from besieging either place, confining ourselves for the moment to the blockade from space."
"And has that been as—effective as you could have hoped?" Arthur seemed to be back among us, and on his face now was that old look I remembered from the days on Gwynedd. He had a plan, and it was naught to do with anything that had yet been done…
"It has kept Kernow to a standoff," admitted Keils. "If they will not remain with us, still they cannot be quit of us, not in any real sense. And it is in my mind, Ard-righ, that the most of the Kernish folk wish not to be party to Marc'h's secession. They will not rise up against him,—not yet, that is. But neither will they give him the support he has been counting on."
"Then whence comes he by such arrogance and imprudence—such traha—to so defy us?"
Gweniver looked Arthur straight in the eyes. "For that you were not here to hold the strong hand uppermost upon him. I am Ard-rian, and Keils is our First Lord of War, yet he did not fear our hands as he would have feared your own. But you were not here."
That last was spoken with more of a snarling snap than I had ever in all my days heard Gweniver use; not even in the worst times at Coldgates, when she had been thrawn for every reason and no reason, had I known her to put such bite into her tone.
If Arthur heard it, he gave no sign, but addressed himself to the chamber at large.
"Well. My sorrow that my uncle has seen fit to act so… But, kin or no, he cannot be permitted to go on what way he has chosen. And, more importantly still, Kernow cannot and shall not be let to go its own road apart from Keltia. I took oath as Ard-righ of the Six Nations, and by gods I say I shall not preside as Ard-righ over five only… But, Lady"—this to Gweniver, who startled visibly at his use of both tone and title—"I would speak of this with you in private. As for you others, keep yourselves to hand; I will be summoning you for counsel as you are needed; and the Ard-rian and I shall address the High Council and the vicegerents of the Fainne again in session tomorrow forenoon. But now my wife and I must speak."
"That is the first mention Artos has made, since our return, of the fact that he is wed." I set down my mether and leaned back in my chair.
Ygrawn laughed, a little grimly. "And yet, amhic, I do not think he ever once forgot it whilst you were gone…"
"Be that as it may," I pointed out, "he did take the Yamazai queen to him, and got a child by her—
My foster-mother waved dismissive fingers. "No matter to us, Talyn, and I say a boon to Aojun that their future ruler shall be half a Kelt."
"Aye, well, there is that." I lapsed into uncertain silence. "She will come here, you know, methryn; when the child is old enough to make the journey."
"And I shall be glad indeed to meet them both—nay, truly! The Kelts and the Yamazai go back long centuries in friendship; this is no unfitting thing my son has caused to be, and a queen is hardly an unsuitable ban-charach for an Ard-righ to choose. What is she like, this Majanah? A hawk? A helianth?"
I laughed in spite of myself. "No flower she! Unless she be that firerose I have heard of, that grows on Alectyn Vair—the one that to breathe the great fragrance of is to perish where you stand."
"Then she must be dangerous indeed."
"Oh, aye, like enough—" But I was still working out what Majanah was like. "She is more like a hunting-cat: not wholly biddable, can claw and purr at the same time. I like her well."
Ygrawn nodded. "And the child?"
"A bright and bonny lass, as you will see." I looked up
sharply. "Ah, nay, you do not think what I sense you are thinking—you are thinking it…" .
"It must be thought of," she said reluctantly. "If Artos and Gwennach do never contrive an heir between them—Donah is Arthur's firstborn."
"That we know of." Morgan's four little words dropped the ground out from under us; all the more, as she had been silent since we came to her mother's rooms.
"It has never been proved," I said after a while, "that Malgan is not Owein's son."
"Nor has it been proved that he is not Arthur's. Oh, I know you were at Caer Dathyl all those years, and even you, my beloved, could not say for sure. So let us not now assume one way or the other if we need not."
I was no whit annoyed by Morgan's jab, but following a thought of my own.
"Where is Gwenwynbar these days? For that matter, where is Marguessan?"
"My sister is back on Gwynedd with her lord and son. She and Irian came to the title last year, when old Strahan died. They have two more whelps, by the way, a girl and another boy, born while you were gone—Galeron and Gwain."
My thought was rising to panic, and yet I did not know why. "And Gwenwynbar?"
"No one knows," said Ygrawn, who had cordially detested her son's first wife and who had been hated every bit as well in return. "Not that I care if the ground has opened up to swallow her, save that she will surely trouble Artos's path somewhere up the years—but it seems suspiciously impossible to me that she could have vanished so completely, and stayed so hid for so long. But so she has, and the boy with her."
And then all at once it came back to me, broke in upon me like the sea that had once broken in on Gwaelod, just as strong, just as whelming…
"On Aojun—when I put on the cathbarr—" Quickly I told these two dearest ladies of mine what had happened that night in Mistissyn, what I had seen and heard while the fillet of Nia was on my brows. And, sorceresses both, they understood as perhaps no others could, or would. I saw by little signs in their bearing—little things that were, littler things that were carefully not—that they were deeply alarmed by my tale and Seeing, and I was afraid; as I had not been before.
* * *
* * *
Chapter Twenty-five
WHEN I WENT to Arthur's chambers later that day, at Arthur's summons, I found his solar empty. Only Cabal, snoozing in his 'customed spot in the window-nook, who swept his tail over the stones as I entered but was too lazy elseways to bestir himself… I went over and scratched his soft ears, and he sighed and leaned his huge head into my hand.
Through the mullioned window just above the hound's little niche, I saw Arthur outside on the turret walk, and giving Cabal one last scruffle I went out to join him.
We had not been alone together since our return, and I glanced curiously at him as I came up alongside. He was not looking at me, but out at the unparalleled vista before us: the great Bight of Caerdroia below, the huge curving half-moon bay that stretches from the ridges of the Dragon's Spine, far out of sight to the southwest, all the way past the City cliffs and the mouths of the Avon Dia up to the feet of the Stair.
Indeed the view this hour was more dramatic even than usual: Sunset was rolling up banks of cloud in the lift westaways, humps and hillocks of blue and purple and gray edged with burning lines of gold, and the wind that often got up in late day was chivying the clouds along.
Arthur was looking at the sky as if it spoke to him, as perhaps it did, and I would for no sake be the one to interrupt their converse…
"Gwenhidw's flocks are going home to pen."
"And Aengus's wind to drive them like a sheepdog of the skies. Artos, what is on you?"
Still he did not turn to me, and I was sharply minded of Morgan standing just so, what time she gave into my hands Nia's fillet. They did not often show sibling resemblance, these two stems of Pendreic, but when they did it was startling to behold.
"Artos?" I asked again, gently, as I had been asking it for fifty years and more.
"To speak as do you bards, Talynno, I have ever loved counterpoint above harmony, and the undertext to the plain gist of the song…"
I let that pass,—soon enough he would come to what he had to say, though what he had just now told me was the thing he had wished me most to hear. But the sheep of Gwenhidw were all safe penned in their starry fold below the skyline before he spoke again.
"I must go to Kernow, Taliesin. Go in force."
"To rescue Tryffin."
"And Ysild; but also to give my uncle Marc'h a lessoning I had never thought to give him. What he has done cuts at my authority and Gwennach's, no doubt of it, but more: It cuts at the fabric we have woven here in Keltia since Brendan first set up the loom." He laughed. "Beside the Loom—But Marc'h must be stopped."
I leaned on the stone coping, still warm from the long afternoon's sun. Since our return two days since, and often on the road home, I had boxed my mental compasses to puzzle out just why it was that Marc'h of Kernow, by all history and opinion an unimaginative and dull-brained trimmer, a gutling and a rake, should so suddenly and spectacularly turn his cloak. Kidnapping Ysild and imprisoning Tryffin I could almost understand; but treason seemed a thing so far beyond Marc'h's line of country as to be more plausibly laid to temporary lunacy than any other more usual cause.
"I know what you are thinking," said Arthur then. "I have been shadow-fencing with it myself since Gwennach first told us…"
"And?"
He closed his hand over his Ring of State, stared at the green stone as if he had been a jewelsmith appraising it for flaws.
"In Mistissyn," he said haltingly. "Who was it you saw when the crown of Nia gave you the Seeing? Do I need to mind you of their names? Or their goals?"
I ran a hand over my new beard, grown three years since on Aojun. "Nay—would I could forget."
"And I. But this did not begin with our denying Marc'h the place he sought in the Fainne, the lordship paramount of Kernow, though he claims that now as his right and justification. It did not begin with Gwenar, even, nor yet with Marguessan. It is rather the last working of the Marbh-draoi Edeyrn. His arm is long, and reaches out to us even from Annwn,—it is he who pulls me into kin-strife."
"You are not the one did begin it."
"As Ard-righ, and kin to Marc'h, I must be the one shall end it. And to do that—" He drew me inside the solar and latched the turret door against the night. Cabal, too lazy to budge for me, leaped frisking upon his master, as if they had been parted another seven years, and I grinned to recall the frightened four-months' puppy I had rescued from the ruins of a murdered town.
"To do that," Arthur resumed, when we were sitting beside the hearth as so often we had done down the years, methers in hand and toes to the grate, "I must walk a line notoriously difficult of treading. Many others have come to grief over such a path in time past."
"You have ever been neat-footed enough when it counted. But see, Artos," I said suddenly, leaning forward, "see how it may be done."
And I spoke as if Midir himself, the lord of plan and meaning, had taken command of my voice and tongue and brain; and when at last I ceased to speak, Arthur nodded, simply, once, and said only, "Aye."
The system of Kernow was the fifth of our seven to be settled, and like Vannin and Tara it has but the one inhabited, eponymous world. A small planet as planets go, it is a surpassing fair one, rich in mineral wealth: mostly ocean (hence the great sea-skills of the Kernishfolk), with two continents and a vast number of island groupings of varying formation and size.
Perhaps because of the sparseness of its population and the distances between settled regions, Kernow had ever been one of Keltia's more peaceful planets, Ruling House succeeding House in orderly, lawful turnings. The Tregarons, Ygrawn's family, were the seventh ducal kindred, and eleventh overall, to claim the lordship of Kernow, and held sway from their ancient seat at Kerriwick, twelve miles down the iron-fanged coast from Tyntagel.
Dynas Dau Cell, the Twice-dark Stronghold… It was the most un
assailable castle on Kernow, one of the most fearfully tenable in all Keltia, and never once in all our history had it been reduced, by siege or by straight attack.
And we had no hope or indeed plan of so doing now… I sat in my chamber aboard Prydwen and studied what tapes I could find. Tyntagel had been built in two sections; a weakness, I hear the strategical architects among you already crowing, but let me assure you it was not so. The main ward was on a high rocky peninsula so narrow at the join as to be as near an island as might ever be; the Carrai, the tiny neck of land was called, the Thong. The lower wards were on the Penguiron headland proper, and were operable, and defensible, on their own.
It was in the island ward that Marc'h had imprisoned Tryffin his son and heir—I ran the tape forward and back until it flickered of itself to the place I wished it; after a long time I froze the image and slumped in my chair, staring unseeing at the screen, confidence all but dead within me.
How in all the seven hells had I allowed my traha to pull Arthur into so mad a plan? Bad enough that we had come home to face treason and kin-rift so near the Throne; worse still that it had come so hard on our return, before Prydwen's hull was scarce cooled from our crossing. This, though…
"Second thoughts, Pen-bardd?"
That was Morgan, who had entered all unheard; Daronwy was with her. I smiled, and waved a hand at the tapescreen.
"As you see, lady…"
Daronwy laughed and seated herself across the table. "It grates me that we must work this against Marc'h, who seems more stupid, I think, than evil; but truly, does it not feel like the old days come again!"
In spite of my deep misgivings, I smiled back at her. "Good days, ill days both, Ronwyn."
"Never mind. Tryff will be glad to see us, any road."
"And Ysild?" I cast my glance sidewise to Morgan. "She is your friend, after all. How think you it will work on her, raped away by Marc'h?"
"Marc'h has made several mistakes here," said Morguenna Pendreic. "Any one of which were sufficient to cause his downfall; but taking Ysild may well prove to be the worst day's choice he ever made."
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