The Wolf and the Crown (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  "You trespass on ground consecrated to Hela," she warned the stout, long-haired priest in the scarlet vestment of papal authority. "And you do so on the one day of the year when Hela opens the gates of Sleet Den, her asylum for the wicked dead. Flee at once! Flee and spare yourselves the wrath of the Death Goddess!"

  Three of the armed escort turned and ran, alarmed by the unnatural timbre of the witch's voice and the eerie pallor in the cold chapel. On the hill path, the earth gave out beneath them, and they plunged out of sight. Their screams echoed weirdly from the sky above.

  "Ah, too late." Morgeu traced a sigil in the dirt, a wavery snakeline, and small blue flames fluttered out of the ground, almost invisible in the daylight. "The remaining two of you may die screaming with your companions—or you may stay and serve me."

  The phial slipped from the trembling hand of the exorcist and a splash from the River Jordan burst to vapors that rose as a cadaverous face. Shrieking, the priest fled the chapel, his scarlet robes erupting to flames with a dull roar.

  The conflagration consumed him, yet he kept running. Though his flesh melted to black smoke, his bones exploded from the heat, and his marrow lay on the ground bubbling like tar, he ran all the way back to Verulamium. There his ghost was heard wailing for days among the lanes and alleys and in the water pipes and sewer drains.

  A Forest Tryst

  Nynyve found King Arthor in the last golden hour of day practicing swordplay with a sergeant in scale armor. At the sight of her standing alone at the forest edge, beyond the field where the army had dug the night trenches, he executed a double-feint parry and deftly lifted the sergeant's weapon from his hand.

  "He's a remarkable swordsman," the battle-scarred sergeant reluctantly acknowledged to Bedevere as he watched the youth stride away. "Now where is he going? I want the boy to teach me that nimble double pass. I've never seen the likes of it."

  "Sire!" Bedevere called. Arthor paid him no heed. As Ygrane had warned the one-armed soldier before he departed Tintagel, "Keep a close eye on my son, steward. Each of his feet walks a different road, one of this world, one of the other."

  "Lady—what are you doing here, so far from Tintagel?" In the rusted light of the autumn forest, she seemed to possess a golden aura. "These woods are infested with murderous men."

  "You departed Tintagel before I could bid you farewell," she said in a voice languorous as seasmoke.

  He put both hands on her shoulders to feel for himself that she was not an apparition. "It was you who fled without courtesy that first day on the beach."

  "Courtesy!" Her face showed offense yet her hazel eyes smiled. "You dunked me in the sea! I fled before you inflicted further discourtesy upon me."

  "Lady, I could never act discourteously with you." He squeezed her shoulders and stepped back. "I had to know you were not an enchantment. Yet even now, finding you here alone—I think you cannot be other than an enchantress. How else could you..."

  "Travel so far unmolested?" She turned and pointed through long slants of forest light to where four horsemen with waist-long hair and buckskin trousers sat upon their grazing mounts—large, fierce Celtic warriors wearing golden torcs and long swords strapped to their naked backs. "My fiana."

  "Fiana serve the Celt queen ... " Arthor's jaw dropped as comprehension finally opened in him. "You are my mother's successor ... queen of the pagan Celts."

  "I am queen," she acknowledged with a small smile.

  "You're not much older than I ... and yet a queen?"

  "I am older than I appear." She tossed back her cinnamon curls. "And besides, queens are not chosen for their age or wisdom but their kinship with the faerie. You know this."

  "So I have heard."

  "Your mother was taken as a child from the hills to serve the Druids. I am somewhat older. Yet the faerie obey me." She moved away. "And next time we meet, we shall see how this matters between us."

  Arthor did not try to stop her from leaving, not with her four stern warriors glaring at him from among the sun's fiery rays.

  The Invasion

  The sun had not yet risen, and the British camp already busily prepared for the day's march. Scouts came charging through the low skein of mist in the forest. "Bowmen!" they reported. "Barges of bowmen deploying off Oyster Shoals and occupying Fenland and White Hart!"

  "Saxons abhor the bow," one of the commanders muttered. "It's beneath their savage dignity to slay their enemies at a distance." These archers were Foederatus troops—the pagan alliance that imitates Roman battle strategies. "These are King Wesc's men. If that's true, we've bloody days ahead of us."

  By midday, the Duke's army knew the veracity of the scouts' reports. Archers held the hummocks and knolls of Fenland and the hills of White Hart, effectively blocking Arthor's advance.

  Messengers hurried north to summon Kyner and Lot from the high woods, and carrier birds flew east to announce the Foederatus invasion to the warlords of the Midlands and to plead for their reinforcements.

  "That help is days away, if those warlords deign to help me at all," Arthor informed the commanders in the war tent. "Meanwhile, Duke Marcus is stranded at Neptune's Toes, unable to ride and now cut off from us by the Foederatus. I will go to him with a warband and ensure his safety. He is under my protection, and I cannot leave him to the mercy of our enemies."

  The commanders mumbled their agreement, indifferent to the fate of this untried boy-king and frustrated in their attempts to agree upon any other way to retrieve their Duke.

  Bedevere alone protested, "The Duke has put himself in this jeopardy by ignoring our war counsel at Tintagel. For you to risk your life riding through enemy's lines is foolhardy at best, and likely fatal."

  "I am high king of Britain," Arthor stated, moving his steady gaze slowly among the commanders. "My brother-in-arms has behaved foolishly and by ignoring my command is now in peril of his life. Am I to abandon him? My lords? I say he is a Christian duke and worthy of our mercy. I forgive him for not trusting his king, a man less than half his age. He still remains under my protection. I will return him to you safely."

  Bedevere waited until Arthor exited the war tent before pulling him sharply aside. "Sire, the Foederatus know you are here. That is why they are staging a full-scale invasion. If we ride out among them, you will surely die."

  Arthor unclasped the corselet of polished metal bands. "We leave our fancy King Arthor behind for this ride, Bedevere. I want eight of the best horsemen in the Duke's army, mounted archers all—and every one a volunteer. Go! Quickly! We must cross Fenland and enter the forest before dark."

  The warband rode north while the army advanced east to engage the entrenched invaders. Arthor led the riders dressed as a common archer. He wore brown leggings, black tunic of padded quilt, and a recurved Persian bow slung across his back, with Excalibur at his side. None of the Furor's men saw their crossing of Fenland behind the screen of the advancing phalanx, and by nightfall Arthor's warband flitted like shadows into the gloom of the autumn forest.

  Demons and Angels

  While Rex Mundi slept in a ditch under stars troweled by racks of cloud, Azael challenged the Fire Lord. "Tell me again why you persist in opposing us?"

  The Fire Lord made no reply, tall and radiant against the darkness of the night.

  "We come from the same place, you and I," Azael went on, almost invisible in the brambles of the shadowed ditch. "We come from heaven. We knew God together. I loved Her as well as you. For that love, we followed Her when She came here, into the cold and the dark. We thought we would know Her better, love Her more intimately. We thought that! And look at us now! We're freezing and groping around in pain. We made a terrible mistake coming here."

  The angel burned silently in the dark.

  "The darkness hurts us with cold—but you hurt yourself with fire. How can you burn yourself and not go mad?" Azael's voice shook with incredulity. "Let that damnable fire go! Release it! It's worse to burn than suffer the cold. I know. I clung to my shred of h
eaven, too. I held it longer than most. I know the pain you're suffering, the constant burning that eats your pain, thrives off it. And not you or the fire or the agony ever gets any less. You burn. Let it go. At least the cold is real. The fire is our past. Lost heaven. Lost and never known again."

  The Fire Lord said nothing, standing still under the stars.

  "You think you are going back?" Azael's many eyes glinted malevolently from where he squatted in the ditch. "You're insane to think that, you know. Building the mineral kingdoms, fitting together life forms, instilling awareness in these hungry shit-makers, that's all madness. It's going nowhere. Break it all down. If we're stuck out here, let's at least face our fate bravely, realistically. These abhorrent illusions you create only make our suffering worse. They harbor false hope. They mock the suffering we can't avoid. That's why we loathe you. You scorn us with these gruesome and filthy things you make. They want to be like us, but they can't. They're assembled things. They fall apart. We can't fall apart. We're real. Our pain is real. Give up your fire, the spark of heaven you cling to so fanatically, so miserably. Let it go! Sink into darkness with us. Accept what has become of us. Stop fighting it. Stop making it worse."

  The Fire Lord offered only silence to his dark brother. In truth, the burning hurt so much that if he had spoken he knew he would have screamed.

  Wooing Atrebates

  Gorlois in Merlin's body gazed up at the stars from the terrace of the governor's palace in Londinium. The visionary power instilled in him by the Furor allowed him to perceive that the sky so full of fire was itself an illusion. So many stars had already burned out centuries ago, their light orphaned to the dark. Their brilliance persisted as an illusion for mortals, who believed the sky full of fire when in truth it was full of deception.

  All of creation is full of lies, Gorlois realized. Animals camouflaged themselves to pounce on prey, people dissembled, and time itself existed as a mirage. The future and the past did not exist. Reality was instantaneous. Only the small brains that housed the human mind accepted time as real. The future of apocalypse that the Furor feared waited in a time as precise as any place.

  "Merlin, assure our guest of King Wesc's promise," the unctuous voice of Serverus Syrax disturbed Gorlois' musings. "I have shown Count Platorius Atrebates the ingots of gold the good Saxon king has given me for my services to him as a legate. Apparently, the Count wants other assurances from you."

  Gorlois turned from where he leaned on the terrace balustrade and faced Syrax and his guest, the gaunt, gray-whiskered Platorius, Count of the Atrebates. His sullen eyes looked bruised within their wrinkles of prune-dark flesh.

  "Indeed, King Wesc wants peace with the warlords of the Britons." The Furor's message spoke through Merlin's throat. "In return for granting the Saxon king favorable trading status with the lush farmlands and vineyards of the Atrebates, you shall be received as a dignitary among the Foederatus and your domain accorded protection from their storm raiders and Wolf Warriors. Also, you personally will have a share of all booty taken from the provinces that oppose the Foederatus."

  "Merlin," Count Platorius spoke with cold disbelief. "I heard you speak at Camelot not three months ago, offering that youngster Aquila Regalis Thor for our king. Now you speak for the Saxons?"

  "I speak for peace," Gorlois said, obeying the Furor's magic. "Can Arthor offer peace? Perhaps. My hope is that he will. Yet I must look to the welfare of the whole island. What King Wesc offers serves Britain, and I have agreed to speak for him."

  "Just this day I have received a plea for help from your young Arthor in the land of the Dumnoni," Platorius added suspiciously. "The Foederatus have launched a full-scale invasion of Marcus' domain, and your boy wants me to send troops to defend our island."

  "Ignore him," Gorlois said bluntly. "Why should you throw away this opportunity for peace and prosperity among the Atrebates because of a dispute with arrogant Duke Marcus? He has neither pledged himself to Arthor nor accepted King Wesc's peace terms."

  "What of Bors Bona of the Parisi?" the Count asked. "He commands the largest army in Britain. Does King Wesc accept him?"

  "King Wesc accepts all who will trade in peace with him," Gorlois replied. "I will visit with Lord Bona next. First, give me assurance, dear Count, that you will honor King Wesc."

  Count Platorius' brown lids drooped sleepily. "I want peace."

  Stand on Neptune's Toes

  "My lord duke, this villa is indefensible," a surgeon said to Marcus after examining the warlord's damaged leg. They sat under an olive-tree arbor on a terrace overlooking the night-shining bay. "You cannot ride with this injury, and so we cannot slip away in the night. Soon our enemies will swarm over us."

  "You are a military genius as well as a surgeon?" Marcus growled. "Tell me about my leg, not my enemies."

  "God has blessed you with a clean break, my lord duke," the surgeon reported and adjusted the pillows under the reclining man's shoulders. "If the bone had smashed like crockery, you'd be fevered now and dying. As it is, the bone set easily enough, and you will walk again, without a limp I dare say—but only if your enemies let you live."

  Marcus spat out the willow bark he had been gnawing to quell the throbbing pain. "I've had enough of your war counsel, surgeon. I am ordering you to leave this place tonight. Take the other surgeon with you if he wants to go. And send in the drummers."

  The surgeon bowed gratefully and quickly exited. Moments later, four nervous young men entered accompanied by a portly man with curly whiskers and a knee-length tunic of combed wool. "I am Cupetianus," the hefty man announced with a tremulous voice, "master of this villa and spokesman for the fisherfolk of Neptune's Toes. My lord duke—we are honored to receive you in our humble village—we are honored, indeed, yes, honored. The fisherfolk, a wary lot, they, uh, they ask me to ask you, uh, when, that is, how soon you expect your army to join you here?"

  "I don't," the duke answered flatly. "You saw the messenger who came this day and left soon after? He reports that as we speak my army is locked in mortal combat at Fenland and White Hart with a large Foederatus force. They cannot reach us. We are on our own."

  "Our own?" Cupetianus's small eyes widened in his pudgy face.

  "The Foederatus know I am cut off from my army," Marcus went on calmly. "But they don't know exactly where I am. If you keep the fisherfolk from announcing my presence, we will have more time before the Saxons come through here looking for me."

  "Oh my lord duke!" Cupetianus knelt at the bedside of the injured warrior. "Several boats of fishermen and their families have already fled! The Saxons may have caught them at sea or farther down the coast. If so, they will be here by morning!"

  Marcus cursed silently. "You know that if I surrender myself to Saxons, the pagans will burn this town to the ground anyway? They have not come like the Romans to master the land and its people. They come only to destroy. We must gather the people and all the weapons we can find and take our stand here, on Neptune's Toes."

  Faerie

  King Arthor led his warband slowly through the night forest, impeded by darkness and dense undergrowth. His men muttered behind him as branches slapped at them and thorn bramble cut their steeds, eliciting loud whinnies. "Sire, we must camp till light."

  Arthor shot a dark look at Bedevere. "We go on. We must press past the Foederatus line before daybreak."

  "In this darkness that is impossible." Bedevere pitched his voice for the king's ears alone. "We dare not leave the forest, for the open country exposes us to enemy archers. We must stay."

  "No!" Arthor spoke loud enough for all to hear. "We go on through the dark, through the bramble, through hell if we must."

  "And lose our way?" Bedevere whispered hotly. "Or stumble into a Saxon war gang? No, sire. We must stop for the night."

  Arthor would not listen to his experienced steward, so determined was he to break through to Neptune's Toes before the Saxons found Duke Marcus. He shoved his palfrey beyond Bedevere, wanting to free hi
mself from the man's concerned badgering. Soon, he rode well advanced of the others and spied a smoky light glimmering ahead, like foxfire—or an enemy's torch. He drew Excalibur.

  "Put away your good sword," a deep-throated woman's voice spoke in Gaelic. "It is never wise to raise a weapon against faerie."

  "Nynyve!"

  "At your side, my king." The queen emerged from the darkness among the trees riding a black stallion, a piece of night itself. "Wait here for your men. Then follow that foxfire. Those are faerie, and they will lead you upon the most direct route through this forest to where you are going. Do not dare overtake them—or you will lose yourself in the Otherworld."

  Before he could question her further, Nynyve pulled back into the dark forest and disappeared. Arthor waited, as she had instructed, and when his warband caught up with him, he led them in pursuit of the vaporous lights far into the woods.

  The cutting bramble fell away, and soon they found themselves clopping quickly along tree-cloistered avenues and boulevards, their hooves muted by the thick carpet of fallen leaves.

  "Where are you leading us, sire?" Bedevere inquired.

  "I am not leading at all." Arthor pointed to the flurrying ghost lights ahead. "The faerie guide us."

  "Faerie?" Bedevere cried in fright. "We are Christians! By the very wounds of Christ, sire, they are leading us to hell!"

  "Hush, Bedevere," Arthor warned. "You'll frighten the men."

  "I will not hush, sire! Our souls are in jeopardy!" The steward signed to one of the warband. "You, ride ahead and cut them off. Scout their path and find out where we've been led."

  "No!" the king commanded. But he was not this warband's king, and the chosen rider flew ahead. In moments, he disappeared from sight. All that night, they heard his voice calling from below them, from under the rootweave of the forest. And so horrified were his cries and so swiftly shifting that none dared stop to dig for him until daybreak.