Bedevere's 'house of the needle' helped the map-readers locate the army's place in the shrouded world and trudge toward the nearest highway—a road that would lead north to Olicana, a municipality large enough to shelter the horses and offer additional provisions for the soldiers.
Wolf Warriors repeatedly attacked the slogging troops, materializing out of the dirty light. They cut through the defenders, overturned wagons, and carried away butchered sections of horses. The assaults slowed the advance at first and then stopped it altogether as the Riders of the North Wind established themselves in the forests surrounding the road.
"We have crawled into a trap!" Lot announced grimly to Arthor at a twilight war counsel in the king's pavilion. "Our slow progress has allowed the enemy's fleeter warbands to gather around us. They have sacrificed a few raiding parties to test our strength. Come dawn, the full brunt of the invaders will strike!"
Arthor made what preparations he could. The ground was too hard for defensive ditches and palisades, so he ordered wagons overturned. He lifted the limit on arrows that could be fired in an engagement, and priests stayed awake throughout the night, moving among the men, shriving souls and blessing swords for the great battle to come.
Ice balls fell during the night, a fierce hail that bludgeoned the defenders unprotected by the forest. At dawn, the war shrieks began, and waves of Wolf Warriors closed in, lightfooted as if carried to the fray by the gale winds. Garbed in pelts, the invaders charged with animal fury as if the forest had disgorged its beasts.
At the worst of the fighting, when the beastmen broke through the wagon barriers and the mêlée trampled the fires and the strategy tents, the eye of the storm passed overhead. All about, the world lay blank, white, featureless. Overhead, in a perfectly blue sky, the gibbous moon floated, a crystal skull—as if winter had devoured the world and spat out the moon.
A miraculous tantara of horns sounded brightly under the clear sky. Arthor and Kyner, who stood atop an upturned wagon in bitter witness to the destruction of their forces, spotted them first—a long line of muscular horses shouldering powerfully through the snow, ridden by the clans of the north and bearing the dragon banners they had earned with their pledge to the king.
Aidan, chieftain of the Spiral Castle, led the charge, battle-ax swinging, eager to redeem his daughter's life-debt to the boy-king.
Skuld
What hath happened? Why are we alone now? Where are the Nornth? We can't thtay here vewy much longer. We thaw the one-eyed god with hith lover. Will he come here when he ith done with her?
Rex Mundi sat silent except for Dagonet's nervous chattering. Even Lord Monkey sat still within the assembled being, mesmerized yet by the summer-rain scent of Verthandi that lingered in the space where she had sat beside them on the rusty Seat of the Slain.
Merlin looked out over the bone-strewn slopes of the mesa. He gazed beyond to the series of dunes that rippled away like surrounding lines of force. At the horizon, stars shook their fists in a claret sky and the moon hung a brittle and riddled skull.
Across the wasteland, a figure came strolling, at first broken upon the planes of heat that sliced the distance, then whole and seeming to walk in midair splashing among watery traces, then augmented once more to the ground—a child, a young girl no more than five-years-old. Her strawberry hair hung lankly in the heat. Ash smudged her limbs and face and her tattered frock.
Who ith that thmall child?
"That is the third of the Norns," Merlin replied, "the Wyrd Sister called Skuld."
How do you know thith?
"I just know."
The girl slid down the last sand reef and climbed the mesa. Soon, she stood before the giant throne with her head tilted back, looking up at Rex Mundi. A curious expression played on her dirty face. "You're not supposed to sit there. That's All-Father's chair."
Rex Mundi bent over and extended a long arm that was yet far too distant to reach the child. "Come and sit here with me," Merlin invited. "I would like to speak with you."
The child shook her head. "You look scary. And you are not supposed to sit there. That is All-Father's chair."
"It's all right. Your sisters said so, and they sat here with me just moments ago," Merlin said and then tried to inflect Rex Mundi's voice with Dagonet's hurt: "Do you weally think I'm scawee?"
"Yes." She shook her head once, with vigor. "You have darkness in you fighting with light!"
Merlin attempted a laugh and it came out as a harsh cry that forced the child back two paces. "Don't be afraid of me. I am Rex Mundi—Lord of the World. I'm not one being but many. I have inside me a monkey, a man, a wizard, and, yes, darkness and light—but they are not fighting. Fighting? Oh no! They are—dancing! Yes, dancing. They like to dance. They are friends of God."
"Really?" The child stepped closer. "You know God?" "Intimately." Merlin tried on a smile and dropped it when he saw the fright in the child's eyes. "Your sister Verthandi just went with us to visit God at a dance in a palace of water. Azael, tell the child—aren't you and the Fire Lord outstanding dancers?"
Azael remained silent, until Merlin mentally voiced, Dog ashes—that's your destiny if we don't get out!
"Sure, I love to dance, little girl. I'm wild for it."
The child reached up with both arms. "I want to see monkey!"
Creatures of Light
When the messengers of death came for Gorlois' soul and showed Morgeu the locks of hair from her two boys, Gawain and Gareth, her heart hammered. "You cannot have my sons."
Then, we must take your father. Their breaths sifted over her with the sad smell from pillows crushed by fevered heads.
"No!" Morgeu backed away from the silhouettes in the door. Blown snow clotted in their sticky red hair, and morning's gray February light wrapped itself around them like some brighter aspect of their presence woven from snow. In that glare, she could not tell if there were three or four messengers. "He is not my father anymore. He is my child now. I hold him to my root-blood."
This knife will cut that root.
In the hands of the one behind, a flame opened like a barb of lightning, briefly underlighting a visage of shameful beauty, lewdly evil, before the knife was hid. Gorlois comes with us or your sons. We will take a soul with us.
She had counted three, definitely three. Slowly, she continued retreating backward, her hands reaching behind until she felt the fabric of the altar. "Who gave you the locks of hair from my sons? Who dares put their lives in your cruel hands, your filthy hands?"
From Cei, son of Kyner. These locks come from Cei, given him by the boys' father himself. So freely given, now freely taken. They stepped into the chapel, hair like rusted spikes, figures congealed to darkness save the lucent shine of their beautiful eyes.
"Then Cei can take back the locks he gave," she spoke hurriedly, her hands feeling with frantic urgency behind her, touching the warm metal of a wish-bringer plate where incense yet burned. "Those locks are not his to give, and he can take them back. They are not freely given what are not his to give."
To the asylum of the wicked dead he has been flung, and now through time yet to be he wanders, awaiting the message we bring that will end his aimless roving. The voice that carried these words brought with it weariness, weight, the gloom of failure.
"Listen to me, messengers of death—" With one hand, she clutched a wish-bringer plate, with the other a hot thurible. "I set Cei upon his timeless roamings. I will have him back—and he will reclaim the locks he has given you. My sons are not yours to take, not yet. And this, the child at my root-blood, is mine as well. For now, you will take nothing of mine. Hear me, gruesome spirits. Nothing!"
Morgeu whipped her arms forward, casting the steaming thurible and smoking incense plate at the grim visitors. Her aim true, each magical implement struck one of the messengers, smashing them to fumes.
The third rushed her, the lightning barb aimed for her womb. She caught the knife hand by the wrist in both of her hands and found herself
gripping an arm strong as an axle.
Her grimacing face confronted a countenance of ethereal beauty evil with disdain. Her knee kicked forward, found unexpected softness, and a cry like ice snapping. The knife arm relented, and she turned the blade and drove it deep into the creature of light.
Eufrasia's War
Aidan's reinforcements broke through the back ranks of the raiders as they fell upon King Arthor's army. Under the blue eye of the winter storm, Celts and Britons slaughtered Picts. The fields trampled to slush under the attack darkened crimson. By the time the snowy gale winds began howling again, the king's army had destroyed the fur-clad invaders. Their corpses sat up in the pyre flames that consumed them, as if attentive to their souls climbing the ladders of black smoke into the gray sky.
"All Britain offers you gratitude for what you've done this day, Chief Aidan," Arthor acknowledged the chieftain when Aidan and his field-commanders entered the king's war pavilion. "We were doomed, trapped in the open, until you swept down like the wrath of God!"
"Britain's gratitude should not go to me, sire." Aidan folded back his cowl in the king's presence, exposing the traits of his hard life, his smashed nose and missing ear. "This is Eufrasia's war. My daughter insisted we come south from the Spiral Castle to offer you our swords and our lives in your northern campaign. I and the other clan chiefs thought that gesture imprudent in this season of storms—but our Eufrasia insisted that, as you'd not accept her hand in marriage, her life-debt had to be paid in foe's blood."
Arthor beamed, "This day, she is Britain's savior."
"You may deliver such high praise directly, sire," said Aidan with a proud smile. "Eufrasia is here among us. Her archery felled a dozen of our enemies—and from horseback no less. Daughter—"
From among the northern clansmen in kilts and loricas of leather-hooped armor, a slender warrior stepped forward: an archer in tawed leather boots, green breeches, and white cowl. With the hood unlaced, blonde tresses spilled forth as Eufrasia bent her knee before the king.
"You placed your life in jeopardy for Britain?" Arthor asked, astonished. "The winter ride alone— That was arduous and dangerous."
"I came to serve you, King Arthor." She lifted her chin and exposed the confident curve of her jaw, "I who would not have life this day had you not put your life at hazard for me."
"You and your father have won your place at our strategy table." Arthor took her hand and urged her rise. "For the remainder of this campaign, your counsel is joined with ours."
Arthor did not release her hand as he led her to the trestle table and unscrolled maps. Hours before, he did not believe he would scan these drawings again. Standing before them with the maiden beside him, he looked closely at her while she scrutinized the terrain, and she seemed more lovely to him than he had noticed before.
[]
Mother Mary, I know your prayers to our Father sent Aidan to us when we needed him most. His fierce clansmen have broken the invaders' hold and strengthened our ranks! And his daughter—she inspires strong feelings in me. Oh dear Mother Mary, I cannot drive from my mind the terror that Morgeu has instilled in me with the horror we share. At least, Eufrasia is no supernatural being as is Nynyve. She is wholly mortal and all the more attractive to me for that. If only I could find the strength in my soul to overthrow my sister's evil enchantment. Pray for me, Mother Mary. Pray that I may live to love as a man.
King Wesc
Compact, with a limp from a boating accident in his youth, King Wesc had not the appearance of a monarch. He dressed simply, in red wool shirts and black trousers with attached socks. His tall boots had twin serpents styled into the kid leather, and his jerkin, too, displayed coiled serpents. Otherwise, he offered no sign of his rank and wore his ginger beard long and his dark hair short, like a farmer. With no dagger or sword on his person, he relied entirely upon his warriors to defend him.
Those warriors, and all the ranks of men under Wesc's command, loved their king not for his ferocity but for his charm and wisdom. All knew that he moved through the world beloved of Lady, wife of the Furor.
She, who wept tears of gold that turned to amber in the sea, bestowed wisdom, foresight, and luck upon those she loved. And she loved Wesc for the faithfulness he had shown her since boyhood when, youngest of his family and bereft of inheritance, he gave himself not to rancor and the fight for land but to sacred poetry, her own passion.
Of small stature, he had little to offer as a warrior; neither had he any skill as a vitiki, a magician, nor as a lawspeaker, who settled disputes and questions of honor. Ritual bored him, and he found no place among the temples. Throughout his adolescence and into early manhood, he applied his hand to nothing more than sacred poetry.
When the Saxons needed a legate to send among the Angles, Jutes, and Picts during the early years of the Foederatus, they chose Wesc. His eloquence, his mellifluous singing voice, and his unimposing stature assured his happy reception within the bickering tribes.
To the surprise of all, he proved more than a mere legate. The wisdom that Lady had instilled in him came forth in unexpected ways, providing battle insights at war counsels that proved decisive in winning stunning victories time and again. His renown as a strategist who won land for whatever assembly he served uplifted him to the status of a leader.
Then Hengist and Horsa, the first great commanders of the Foederatus, died in battle against the Dragon Lords of the Britons. Wesc came to Britain to hold the land the Saxons had won, and he succeeded by concluding trade agreements with the magister militum of Londinium while dispatching fanatical warrior sects to the west and north, to demonstrate the prudence of negotiating with him and the hopelessness of fighting.
At the Roman villa of Dubrae, overlooking white limestone cliffs and the Belgic Strait that separated him from his homeland, he continued to compose sacred poetry. And he kept the company of a cat, the animal most cherished by Lady. The black female cat that followed him everywhere remained nameless. She was for him Lady's companionship in this world.
Strolling among the colonnades above the white cliffs, he recited her poetry fit for the gods: "Lady, you recall the distances — in the cold lakes that became your eyes — without giving up their clouds — and the black wing of the fluke — that tattered and became your shadow — and the violence, unthinking, possessed — that alone can win us peace."
The Machinery of Hell
Cei wandered the sad limits of hell under smokestacks that spat flame and a pall of black smoke. Sidelong cats shied from him, and none others noticed his passage. Gray grass, rigid and brittle, clumped around poles stuck upright in the ground. Strung between the intervals of these tar-slapped poles, cables stretched tautly upon which ravens stood dark sentinel. The black city on all sides lay smoking.
Against the baleful sky, a cross crested a small church, a building of gray pitted stone that sulked beside a warehouse of flue-black bricks. He crossed weedy barrens, where broken glass glinted among cinders, a garden of gloom and approached the chapel chanting aloud supplications to the deity that had kindled the stars in their dark and had set this city of perdition so far from their wan light. With salty sorrow in his throat, he entered the vestibule. He knew himself unworthy of benediction, yet grateful to discover sanctuary even here among the machinery of hell.
The buckled linoleum floor did not bend under his weight and carried no shadow of him from the wine colors let down by windows of stained glass, wherein he recognized the figures of his salvation. Sobbing his prayers, he eased himself into the rearmost pew and knelt. "Father, forgive me!" he cried aloud at the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer and began reciting it again, tear-blurred eyes fixed upon the plaster Christ above the altar.
A priest in rumpled black soutane staggered toward him down the aisle. His blood-webbed eyes tight with incredulity, a silver flask in one hand, the other guiding him along the pews, he drew closer and muttered something in a foreign language.
Cei wiped away tears and asked softly,
"Father—you see me?"
The priest understood his Latin and nodded as he approached, mumbling further in his alien tongue.
Cei stood. "You can hear me? You understand me?"
"Yes, I understand you," the priest answered in Latin, and his ruined eyes blinked as he reached out to touch the apparition. But his hand felt nothing, mere air. "Who—who are you?"
"I am Cei, son of Kyner, seneschal to King Arthor of Britain."
The cleric sagged into the pew in front of Cei and sat backward on one bent leg facing the large man in the tattered cassock of a priest.
Cei saw the priest's incredulity and nodded. "Oh, this is but my disguise. Here, I have my cuirass beneath." He pulled the cassock over his head and revealed his black leather breast-shield embossed with the royal dragon. "My sword—I—I lost my sword gambling."
The priest looked with dismay at the flask in his hand and placed it gently on the pew.
"Father, I am lost," Cei spoke beseechingly. "Will you help me find my way to the world of the living?"
Blue Horses
The slow caravans of King Arthor's army moved north against the rim of the snow-spelled world. After crushingly defeating the Riders of the North Wind under the staring blue eye of the blizzard, the king's army moved effectively from one northern city to the next. Though the snows continued intermittently, the gale winds did not return, and the columns of foot soldiers, wings of cavalry, and trains of wagons journeyed through a white waste mute as the face of the moon.
True to his word, King Arthor kept Eufrasia at his side during all strategy sessions, and she proved an effective though eccentric tactician. Lot and Aidan provided accurate assessments of terrain familiar to them made strange by giant alabaster drifts. Marcus and Urien offered cunning military maneuvers for aggressively engaging the enemy. And Kyner, still quietly grieving the loss of his son, nonetheless efficiently managed the integration of the varied forces so that the army's morale remained high. But none proved as insightful as Eufrasia in pinpointing the location and movements of the raiders.
The Wolf and the Crown (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 3) Page 22