A Novel

by Signe Pike

  I waited, my stomach in knots as my brave son and daughter, far too young to face such a nightmare, wiped their faces and stiffened their spines. Cyan swallowed and looked across the courtyard to the guard who stood blocking the stable doors.

  “I love you both so very much,” I said to them, my voice wavering. “You make me so proud.”

  I had scarcely spoken when Gladys gave one last sniff and took off toward the guard in a run. I hesitated a moment, uncertain, and opened my mouth to call her back, but she turned, then called out to Cyan.

  “Come, Cyan, hurry. I bet you can’t catch me!”

  Only a mother could hear the tin in her voice.

  Good girl, Gladys, I thought. You are such a good, good girl.

  I took Cyan’s hand in mine and we hurried toward the stable.

  Tutgual’s guard did not smile, and Gladys stopped, unsure.

  “My lady,” he said.

  “We’ve come to feed the horses,” Gladys said as I came to stand beside her.

  “And I’ve a message for one of our grooms,” I said. “It seems his wife is in labor.”

  The soldier made a face at the womanly news, but did not move from blocking the door. He looked instead at me. The foster sister of Gwenddolau. The twin of Lailoken.

  “I’ll tell him, then,” he said. “Which one is it?”

  “Nay, I’m happy to do it,” I said. “Truly. I promised the children they could see the horses in any case. I have no idea what they’re speaking of in there, but my children have been cooped up for hours.” I smiled. “Is it really too much trouble?”

  “Sorry. I cannot admit anyone.”

  The children’s faces fell in a show of disappointment.

  “Surely the king’s own grandchildren are an exception,” I said. “Please. Even a few moments of distraction would be such a relief.”

  He scoured my eyes for a hint of fear but found nothing.

  “Go on, then,” he said at last, stepping aside.

  “I thank you. We won’t be long.” I guided Gladys toward the grain, calling out brightly, “Go ahead, children, fill your buckets. The fillies carrying their foals are in the back. They’ll be eager for some treats.”

  The stables were already in chaos, the horses of our guests having arrived muddied and in need of feed. Half of Tutgual’s animals were being transferred to a pasture out back. I scanned the madness and spotted our groom tethering a mount by the wall to brush her and mumbling to himself. He looked up as I drew near, straightening in surprise.

  “My lady!” He bowed. “My pardon. I did not see you.”

  I smiled in return. “Please, I can see you are busy. Continue your work.”

  “It has been some time since you’ve come to see the beasts,” he said, continuing with his brush.

  “And too long since I’ve spoken a kind word to you,” I said quickly. “But I regret now I haven’t much time.”

  “Something is wrong, then?” He glanced at my face with concern. “You need my help.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Something is terribly wrong.”

  I drew him to the corner and told him what was taking place, of the war council and the cost to my family—and to all of us—should the Dragon Warriors not be warned.

  “Will you do it?” I asked, my heart in my throat. “Will you ride to Pendragon and give him my warning?”

  He stared a moment at the mount before him, her mane plaited and clasped with coils of gold.

  “Aye, I’ll do it. And I wouldn’a be sorry for it, neither.”

  “Thank you.” I gripped his arm. “Thank you. You need only deliver the message and come back. But carry this. Keep it safe and produce it to Gwenddolau should anyone question you.” I drew the brooch from my pocket and pressed it into his hand. “It bears my crest, the crest of my father. He will then know truly that you have come from me.”

  He nodded and took it, and I reached into my pocket to retrieve the weighty sack of silver.

  “For your trouble. I will reward you double again when I hear you have dispensed with your charge.”

  “You needn’t pay me.” His expression was resolute. “The family of Morken’s been good to me. I reckon I owe you my life.”

  “I thank you, but I shall pray it doesn’t come to that. Deliver the message, then see yourself home. Your wife and your children shall be glad for it. And so will I.”

  “Yes, my lady.” He waited a moment then threw down his brush with a shout. “Did ye hear that lads? I’m going to be a father again! Who’ll take this horse? I’m off. You poor scags are on your own!”

  The sun was just beginning to sink as I made his excuses to Tutgual’s man at the gate and watched him ride off into the distance, his head bent low over the neck of Cyan’s horse.

  • • •

  Cyan and Gladys wept themselves to sleep. I looked at them now, their goose-down pillows damp beneath their heads. Rhys’s bed lay empty as the lords in the feast room plotted their attack with my son alongside them.

  As my husband plotted the attack upon his very own daughter.

  To keep my mind from preying upon what little strength I had, I moved soundlessly to the simple pine table where Rhys kept his possessions. There wasn’t much. He was a simple young man, and pure, and, for the son of a prince, shockingly uninterested in material things. There was a comb, and I picked it up gingerly. It smelled of him, his dark hair, the fresh scent of soap and of leather. A vellum map of the tribal lands was stretched out here, too, the ink worn in the places where he’d traced his finger.

  The fields and forests of Cadzow in the lands of the Goddeu. Clyde Rock and Partick, the seats of Strathclyde in the territory of the Damnonii. His mother’s people and his father’s.

  I touched my fingers to the map, summoning the thread that bound mother to child, the one that could not be severed with a thousand swords. Rhys was sitting in the great room, his green eyes keen, watching the men who spoke all around. There was fear; I could feel it. What lies would they weave to poison the mind of Rhydderch’s young son, to turn him against his very own uncles?

  Against his true father?

  What tales would they tell to incite Rhydderch to war?

  There was so much sorrow, but whether it was Rhys’s or my own, who could say? Where did a mother end and her child begin? I blinked the wetness from my eyes and looked down at the map. One route had been worn more than the others, and I moved my hand lightly along the trail of faded ink, collecting the dream fragments Rhys had left with his fingers.

  The way traveled from our summer fortress at Cadzow, miles and miles through the verdant pastures of Liddesdale, to the place high above a gorge where the river Esk and the Liddel Water met. It was the site of a timeworn but magnificent fortress, fortified by the ancients, since charred and rebuilt. I’d never been there, but Lailoken had described it.

  Gwenddolau’s fortress. The fortress Pendragon.

  The way the cliffs dropped a hundred feet below into the shallow rush of the river. Its ramparts made of monstrous oak, meters high and fortified with stone. The wooded emerald vale of the Esk stretched to the east. To the west, the glittering, salty vastness of the Solway Firth. Far below, the old Roman road skirted beneath its sentinel watch, but the men who built this fortress were no friends of Rome.

  The little hall built within blazed with candlelight and smelled of hot baked bread and freshly uncorked ale, no matter the day. And if he closed his eyes in summer, when the wind carried the scent of creek leaves up off the water, Lailoken told me he could almost imagine he was back home.

  It was this fortress in the lands of the Selgovae that Rhys had been dreaming of. Of his uncle Lailoken and the Dragon Warriors, his far-famed heroes. Of sitting at the table with a horn of ale beside one of the greatest warriors of all time.

  The man the Song Keepers would remember as Uther Pendragon.

  CHAPTER 46

  * * *

  Rhydderch did not come to bed. What I mistook to be him, enter
ing in the late hours of night, was instead only a sound that haunts me still: the ominous slide of wood accompanied by a thunk.

  I leapt from bed and went to test the door.

  Bolted from the outside. I was now a prisoner in my own chamber.

  If they could have seen my teeth flash like a predator’s in the dark, they would have known my fury. I wanted to fly at the door, to strike it, to scream. But the thought of Gladys and Cyan sleeping at last on the other side of the wall stayed my hands, as did the thought of waking them after sleep had finally found them, to have them worry for their mother, hearing her gone mad . . . I dressed instead and went to sit beside the glow of the hearth, my fury the only company apart from the rapid beating of my heart.

  Was this to be it, then? Would my coward of a husband not even come to look upon my face before he left to wage war on my own brother? Did he not even possess the barest sense of honor and duty to look me in the eye and tell me the truth?

  I had neither slept nor moved when the soft rap came at my door in the early hours of morning. I looked up slowly, preparing to face Rhydderch, but heard my eldest son’s voice call out instead.

  “Mother?”

  I rushed to Rhys as the soldiers admitted him to my chamber, pulling him into my arms.

  “Oh, Rhys, you’ve come. You’ve come.”

  I drew back to look at him, smoothing my hands over his face. The whites of his eyes were pink with exhaustion. Or with sorrow.

  “You are a prisoner here,” he said, green eyes darkening.

  “Do not worry for me. Tell me what’s happened. Have you eaten? Have you slept? Are you all right?”

  An answer was on his lips, but then he could only shake his head, his mouth twisting in a futile effort to stifle his cry.

  “Oh, love. It’s all right. It’s all right.” I only meant to soothe him, but my mother’s touch was his undoing. His strong shoulders shook and he leaned his forehead against mine as he began to weep.

  “I can’t . . .” he whispered. “I can’t . . .”

  The dam within me burst, my tears rushing to mingle with his.

  “It’s all right. You don’t have to say. You needn’t say a word. Just let me hold you.”

  We stood like that for a long moment, hearts hemorrhaging and foreheads touching, my hands bracing the back of his dark head, wishing I could pull him back into the shelter of my body where no harm could ever find him.

  “Please,” he said after a while, in a low voice. “Don’t cry any longer, Mother. I cannot bear it.”

  I gave a soft smile and squeezed his head between my hands, one last blessing, before releasing him.

  “That sound,” I said, tilting my head. I could hear it now in the distance: the eerie scrape of metal over rock. The men of the war party were sharpening their blades upon the whetstone of the king. He kept it at the foot of his throne in the feast hall. The Song Keepers, long ago, had created its myth: that any brave man who sharpened his sword upon it was certain to deal out death, while the sword of the coward would be rendered as dull and witless as a reed.

  I looked up. “Have you sharpened your sword on the stone?”

  Rhys nodded.

  “Good. Then you are ready.”

  “I am not ready,” he said, his voice low. “The lords of the south say my uncle is a weak link in what must become a fortified chain. The strength of the Angle king Theodric grows in the east, and yet Pendragon will not swear allegiance. They plan to crush him, Mother, him and all his men, and create an unbreakable confederacy. And I—” His jaw clenched.

  I could not let Rhys ride off into battle with a war in his own heart.

  “Rhys. Listen to me now. You are strong and brave, and more skilled at arms than half your father’s men. Be alert. Be ready for anything. And should the fog of battle come upon you, you will do what you must. War is not about victory. Blast what the Keepers say. War is about survival. Your only task is to protect yourself, to come home.”

  I looked into his eyes, lending him strength I did not have. “Do not worry for your uncles; they will look after themselves.”

  “And what of Angharad? I swear to you, if they . . .” He swallowed. “If they do not deliver her up, I will find her. Father and I—we’re going to make certain Angharad is brought back home.”

  “Rhys”—I took his hands in mine—“do nothing foolhardy. You must keep your head. Promise me. Promise! You must promise me you’ll come home.”

  He looked down, his handsome face full of shadows. “I promise I will.”

  The heavy clunk of the bolt sounded and the door eased open. Rhydderch’s man gestured to my son.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  Rhys gave a nod.

  “So,” I said. “Your father will not come?”

  He looked away. Gave a slight shake of his head.

  “Then perhaps he is wise. For I cannot say what I would do.”

  “He no more wishes to see you a prisoner than do I. Do not be so unforgiving,” he said carefully. “You know why he does this. If he wishes to become king, he has no choice.” His face hardened. “I heard old Tutgual say it himself. If we succeed, Father will at last be named tanist.”

  So Tutgual meant to serve his faithful son one last task: win this battle, and Rhydderch would be promised his place as rightful king.

  And I . . . I would become queen. Upon the spilling of my brothers’ and my daughter’s and my lover’s blood.

  The thought nearly made me retch. Curse his kingship and curse him! I wanted to scream.

  But I feared what power my words might have, and here was my firstborn son, riding off to war.

  And then, to my horror, I heard the ominous blare of the summoning horn, the call to arms no man could ignore. In the fields beyond the orchards of Partick, the tenants would be lifting their spears from the walls, embracing their wives and children. The people of town would be issuing onto the streets to hail their heroes riding off to battle.

  I drew Rhys to me one last time and gave him a kiss.

  “Be safe,” I said. “May the Gods keep you.”

  I thought I knew pain. I had witnessed the murder of Cathan. I had lost my mother and my father. Ariane had left me. I had suffered a lifetime apart from my lover. I had sent away my youngest child to be raised by another.

  But as Rhys looked at me one last time and closed the door, I discovered a pain unlike any I had felt before. I felt it rise like a looming tower of water, until the very pressure of my chamber dropped the way the air shifts when there is a storm out at sea. It made my ears ache. And then it crashed, rendering my body to splinters.

  There is a place within pain that exists beyond tears.

  It is a bottomless black pit that sends men marching with their spears drawn into mill-grinders. It is a beast with a thousand heads that rips at your entrails.

  Languoreth.

  Hadn’t my mother warned me all those years ago that this day would come? She had tried to warn me, but in doing so she had only ensured that the creature knew my name.

  The beast had been hunting me the whole of my life, and it came this day to finish me in my chamber. I closed my eyes and offered up my veins. The beast had a name I never truly knew until that moment.

  The beast who came was called War.

  • • •

  Aela was there. She told me Brodyn had been taken sometime after midnight to the prison pit beyond Tutgual’s hall, where he was being held for “safekeeping.”

  I did not wash. The room began to smell sour. Water came, but it made me retch. Food came but I could not eat. I tracked the hours as the sun shifted across the floor. The men had long since left. My groom would deliver his warning first. Even so, Rhydderch’s cavalry was fast as well; they would likely arrive right on his heels. Darkness fell, and I began to feel as though my body were a shell. I was already drifting someplace above myself, when I heard the far-off unbolting of my chamber door and blinked into the lamplight to find Elufed bending over me.


  “That will be all,” she said to the guard, then turned to me. “Have you eaten?”

  She looked at me expectantly but my mouth felt too heavy. I did not answer.

  “She has taken neither food nor drink since the war party left,” I heard Aela say.

  “Good,” Elufed said. She bent over me once more and peered into my eyes.

  “I cannot free you, but I can offer you this.” I felt her press something fat and fibrous into my palm. “The blood of a Wisdom Keeper flows through your veins. Eat it. Your body will know what to do.”

  Then she was gone. My tongue was welded with dryness to the roof of my mouth and I swallowed to wet it, struggling to sit up.

  “My lady!” Aela came to assist me, and I could almost see my reflection in her eyes, hair dirty and limp in strings, my eyes hollowed out.

  “What has she given you?” Aela asked protectively.

  “Never mind it,” I said. “It will not harm me.” But I knew what Elufed had given me would come at a cost. Clasped between my fingers was the power to see.

  “Leave me,” I bid Aela. “And no matter what you may hear, do not disturb me.”

  Aela hesitated and I looked up.

  “You must do it. For I am too weak, Aela, to ask you again.”

  She stood a long moment, then dipped her head.

  The guard let her out. With her absence my chamber fell silent as a tomb. But tombs were sacred places, portals to the dead. I took a little water and opened my palm to look at the little red mushroom cap before placing it on my tongue.

  It was spongy and raw, not dried, but earthy. And bitter. So bitter, my mouth began to water and my nose began to run. I swallowed it down and waited for the memory in my bones to aid me in what I needed to do.

  My husband and the king had locked me in the blinding dark.

  Now I called upon my ancestors to give me the power of Sight.