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

by A. A. Attanasio

  By heeding her counsel, the king's army frequently flushed out warbands from the silver forests and frozen dells. And though she sometimes erred and sent squads on empty forays into icicle woods, her insights often protected the king from hostile flanking maneuvers and unexpected attacks.

  At first, he and the others suspected that she employed magic. Aidan scowled fiercely at that suspicion and Eufrasia laughed. "I know nothing of magic," she confided in the king during one of their many rides together to inspect the troops and the day's march ahead. "I simply know how to look for the blue horses."

  "Show me," the king demanded.

  From a windswept knoll, she pointed across the blinding white world into the overcast sky. "See those hues, those transparencies of the sky beyond? Blue horses! The Riders of the North Wind use those as mounts. At first, that was but a guess. Now, I am sure."

  Arthor saw nothing in the gray sky but nacreous faces of cloud. Even so, the woman's perceptions proved accurate enough for him to continue to heed her counsel. When her predictions failed, she claimed that the invaders had somehow sensed the king's attack.

  The other commanders looked askance at each other whenever Arthor chose Eufrasia's counsel over theirs, which was most of the time. Even Aidan thought the king foolish to heed his daughter's hunches so assiduously. "She's but a girl, sire," he said. "And she is well know for being fickle—in all her choices, men especially. She has entertained and encouraged many admirers. But she is not to be taken seriously. She is but a girl."

  "She's a full year older than I," the king pointed out. "Am I then but a boy, Aidan?"

  Soon, word had spread throughout the army that the king had lost his heart and his head for battle to the beautiful woman from the north. And when Bedevere reported these rumors to him, Arthor smiled giddily, "It's true—this woman is warrior enough for me to love."

  Going to Hell

  The winter wind whispered through the shrine of Hela like voices. "Do you hear them, daughter?" Gorlois asked, the silver eyes in the face he had stolen from Merlin sliding nervously. "Those are no right voices! Those are natterings of the damned."

  Slaying the messengers of death had imbued Morgeu with sufficient power to revive her failing father. He sat on the black draped altar, listening with the attentiveness granted him by the Furor and hearing a muted cacophony of voices.

  She moved hurriedly about the shrine, swinging a thurible that smoked with a redolence of lime and sage. Desperately, she strove to purify the sacred space of the heinous deed she had committed.

  The ether of the slain messengers tainted the dim air with an oily reek. Nothing remained of their bodies or hot knife, only death's rancid stink.

  Morgeu placed the billowy thurible on the altar and stood before the staring body of Merlin whose eyeholes revealed the dazed soul of Gorlois. "Father, listen to me." She took the gaunt face in both of her hands. "We are going to hell. You are coming with me. I need the soul-seeing that the Furor has given you."

  "Do you hear the ramblings of the damned?" Gorlois asked.

  "Father! If you do not heed me, you will die. Those voices have come to carry you away. Do you hear me?"

  His suddenly crisp stare told her that he did. "I'm dying."

  "Yes. You are dying." Morgeu pulled him to his feet. "The messengers of death have come for you. But they cannot have you."

  Gorlois stamped his wolfskin boots. "I won't die again!"

  "Good!" Morgeu secured the onyx buttons on his red jerkin. "You will live in my womb, and I will bring you into the world as my own child. And in time you will be king of Britain. But now—now we must find Cei."

  "Cei?" Gorlois rocked his hoary head to one side. "Who?"

  "Son of Kyner." Morgeu led him by the hand away from the altar and down blind steps into the lightless depths where she had plunged Cei. "You must see Cei now. See him with your strong eye."

  Gorlois peered frightfully into the blackness. "What is this descent, daughter? How came this here?"

  "The shrine to Hela, goddess of the dead, has passageways and chutes into her dark realm. My magic has opened one." She took him under one shoulder and guided him down the rime-crusted steps. "Now you must stare into this darkness and find Kyner's son Cei."

  "Ah!" The Furor's trance-strength penetrated the subterranean dark easily and revealed broken wheels, dismembered dolls, frayed nightshirts that lay strewn on the colossal winding stairwell into death. The living man who had fallen through here not long before had left a glistening path in the air, the effluvial warmth of his life. "I see where he has gone! We will find him."

  Down he hobbled, helped by his daughter, whose pale skin glowed, suffused with light, like the dusty shine of moth wings.

  The Other Side of the Stars

  Rex Mundi reached down from the corroded and red-stained Seat of the Slain and offered his hairy hand to the little girl in the tattered brown frock. She climbed the pitted leg of the throne laboriously, dislodging flakes of rust, and seized the proffered hand.

  Pulled up onto the giant metal seat, she stood beside the bestial man and wiped wrung strands of strawberry hair from her sooty face. "My name is Skuld." She absently swung one scrawny leg as she stood and slapped the torn sole of her tree-bark sandal on the scaly iron. "Show me monkey. I want to see monkey."

  Lord Monkey, come forth! We have a new fwiend for you.

  Rex Mundi offered his leathery hands to the child, then placed the little fingers against his whiskered face. She felt Lord Monkey staring back at her and closed her eyes and watched him frisking across the span of days left for him.

  "He's so funny!" She giggled and pressed her cheek against the savage mask of Rex Mundi. His fur-soft body smelled of musky, indigo loam. "Lord Monkey—you will live many happy days yet!"

  "Only if the Furor does not skin him," Merlin spoke aloud.

  The child pulled away, alarmed. "If he catches him! You are not supposed to sit here. He would squash you. Lord Monkey is small and spry and will find his way down the other side of the stars. He will do that when you are squashed."

  Merlin! I don't like thith! Thith is a tewible fate!

  "Oh, yes, little man," the young girl agreed with a nod. "Soon you will be bones on the slopes. All-Father will break you."

  Oh, pleath, help uth!

  "I can't help you, little man." Skuld shrugged her bony shoulders. "You are where you do not belong. You will die here."

  "You can help us climb down the other side of the stars," Merlin spoke, reaching out and taking the young girl's arm.

  "No. You are too big. The Asa and Vana will see you."

  Atha and Vana? Who are they?

  "The gods, Dagonet," Merlin answered. "The warrior and fertility gods of the Storm Tree." He gently squeezed Skuld's arm. "I know how you can help us."

  "I don't want to help you." The child pulled her arm away. "All-Father will get mad at me."

  "He won't get mad, Skuld, because he will never know. He will be too happy to know." Merlin emptied the pockets of his magical robe, filling his conical hat with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires from the Dragon's hoard. "Take these and sprinkle them off the Raven's Bough on the far side from where we descend."

  They will dithtwact the godthl We will ethcape untheen!

  Skuld gasped. "They are beautiful stones! The Asa and Vana will wear them in their hair and on their clothes and always think kindly of me." Her smudged face shone with reflected carats of colored light. "You are friendly, Rex Mundi. Yes, yes, now I want to thank you."

  "Then, show us the way to the other side of the stars."

  Field of Miracles

  Cei stared at the priest's sad face of burst capillaries and sagging wattles, eyes burned red. "You're drunk."

  "Yes, I am inebriated." The priest ran a trembling hand over his bloodburst freckles and bowed his balding, pale-red pate. "Futilely have I tried to drown my crisis of faith."

  "No wonder you are in hell." Cei shoved to his feet.


  "Wait!" The priest stumbled out of the pew and fell in a clumsy sprawl into the aisle.

  Cei strode to the door without glancing back. "You can't help me find my way. You've lost the way yourself."

  "Please, wait!" The priest came flying toward the glare of the open door. Had he opened it himself-—or the ghost? Hammers of alcohol pounded his brain harder in the wincing light of day. Gingerly, he picked his way down the stone steps. On the cracked pavement, he spied the specter shambling like a churlish bear under the coke-blown sky. "I must speak with you ...”

  "You're besotted." Cei passed through the seething smoke from a curb grating and continued across the sunless, cobbled street.

  "Where are you going?" One foot in the gutter, the priest squinted numbly after the hulking figure—an hallucination of King Arthur's court, perfect to the tiniest detail: scuffed boots laced to the knees, black cord breeks, padded tunic, and leather corselet. What is this vision saying—more than 'stop drinking'?

  Cei labored on through the strange, burning world. A wan inkwash of pipes and tanks loomed in the murky distance against an ashen sky. A fishing village erupted grayly in the smog. No—not a village at all, but a tremendous yard of metal poles and trawl lines fenced in by woven wire.

  "It is a power plant," the priest said, lapsing to his native tongue while huffing from his strenuous jog. When he saw the lack of comprehension, he said in Latin, "A mill that makes light."

  "Makes light?" Cei looked about at the netherworld of industrial exhaust. "Then why is it so dark here?"

  The priest laughed and held an arm out to stop the ghost, and his hand touched emptiness faintly cold. "I cannot explain." He held his aching ribs as he caught his breath. "How have you come here?"

  Before Cei could reply, thunder rumbled overhead, and a massive shadow glided above them—a huge, roaring bird soaring stiff-winged above the smoldering landscape. The priest laughed again and waved for him to follow.

  They walked through yellowed clapboard warrens where watchdogs yapped at the priest and whined and slinked away from the phantom. Shift workers filed past on the cinder lanes, lean, haggard-faced men in dingy clothes. None saw Cei. Many walked right through him.

  At a hillcrest among oxidized warehouses, the priest pointed down the sky to a long field of blinking lanterns where the stiff-winged bird alighted, skimming over the ground and coming to rest among others like itself—metal creatures.

  Cei looked sideways for more clarity and saw an open hatch and people disembarking. His mind reeled. These silver giants were not creatures at all but metal ships designed to fly. "What is this field of miracles?"

  Riding Blue Horses

  Eufrasia's empty tracks in the snow led to where she stood alone on a knoll, her voice unspoken and unhappiness clear on her young, wind-burnished features. Arthor stood back from her, admiring the way she filled her fawnskin breeches, her commanding stance, arms crossed over padded gray jerkin, white cowl pulled back so that her flaxen hair webbed the wind. He thought her joyless look an assessment of that day's difficult march.

  Not since Nynyve, a season past, had he experienced such lightness of heart in the presence of a woman. His fascination with her touched on respect and love. What he remembered of Nynyve seemed a dream or something that had happened in the distant past, another lifetime. With Eufrasia, the hope of love felt entirely plausible, and he began to believe that indeed the Nine Queens had sent Nynyve as a gift, to heal him from Morgeu's wound so that he could know true love with a mortal woman.

  He actually believed this. And earlier, he had even consulted with Bedevere about the proper protocol for an entreaty of marriage. The steward had turned his haughty features aside as if smelling something disagreeable. "Love has no protocol, sire."

  "Arthor," she called to him with ready familiarity. He kicked through the snow to her side. "I've overheard Urien making snide comment to Marcus about us. He said you've become my hem-sniffer."

  "Empty prattle." Arthor laughed lightly and made mental note to speak a harsh word privately to Urien. "I've told you—Urien is the Idealist, Marcus the Fatalist—"

  "Yes, yes. And Kyner the Optimist, Lot the Cynic" She kept her face averted, dismissing his labels. "What they say is true."

  "Not at all, Eufrasia. Urien makes a hopeful comment.

  "The Fatalist did not contradict him," she said, catching his eye with her cold stare. "You have become my hem-sniffer, Arthor."

  He felt a thump in his chest as though his heart had stalled. "What are you saying?"

  "Why do you always take my counsel?" She frowned at him. "I'm not always right, yet you give my advice greater weight than you do that of your warlords. It's obvious—you are smitten with me."

  Arthor's jaw slung sideways. "Obvious?"

  "Do you deny it?"

  "Deny it?" His eyebrows jumped, then settled to a determined stare. Why—no, not at all. I am smitten with you. But I—I am not ready for where my heart leads me."

  "Don't you want me?"

  Abruptly, the image of Morgeu rose starkly in his mind—as though Nynyve had never touched him, as though no balm of care and love had healed his soulful wound—and he shook his head firmly. "No. Not in the way you deserve. I am not ready yet to take a wife."

  "So." Her sigh clouded in the cold. "I am fine enough for war games yet not worthy to be your wife."

  "You are indeed a woman worthy to be my wife," Arthor spoke hurriedly. "I am not yet worthy to be your husband. I must establish myself first as king."

  "You are such a boy."

  "Not much younger than you."

  She thumbed his chin disapprovingly. "You are much younger now than when you saved me from Guthlac."

  "Younger?" Arthor's brow creased, mystified. "I—I've learned to love since then. You have no notion how difficult it has been for me—to love. I've been betrayed ... "

  "You betray yourself, Arthor." Eufrasia's voice cut keenly. "I came here to give you my hand. You turned away from me at the Spiral Castle—and rightly so, for a manly reason I respect. I came here to repay my life-debt to you—and to seek love. Now that my debt is paid, you want to ride blue horses with me! You're such a boy. Don't you see? There are no blue horses, Arthor. I made that up to justify my intuitions. I was so eager for your love, I pretended to know more than I know. And you believed me. Now I see my games are not clever enough to win your heart." She stalked away and added without looking back, "I won't be sitting at your war table any longer."

  []

  Mother Mary, I have lost Eufrasia! She gave herself to me—this beautiful woman, this courageous woman ... and I turned her away! I believed that I was ready for her to be my wife. I believed that Nynyve had been the antidote to Morgeu's curse and that now I am ready for love. But I am not ready! I am scared, Mother Mary. When Eufrasia asked if I wanted her, all hope of love shriveled in a sudden fright—for my very soul knows that I am polluted with sin and undeserving of love. My fear owns me. The unholy child in my sister's womb owns me. My heart is clogged with fear—for what I have done, for what will come of it. How dare I believe I am worthy of any woman's love after what I have done? Yet, I can be forgiven. Isn't that what your Son promises? That we can be forgiven even for the most heinous sins. Then, why can I not forgive myself? The Church preaches forgiveness, yet there is no one here to bless me as your Son would bless me. I have spoken to the bishop at Greta Bridge of the need to confess, and he urges me to prayer. So, I am here again, kneeling before you, praying. If I make it to Londinium, I will suggest to the Archbishop the need for the Church to shrive souls in this life. Must I wait for your Son's second coming to be forgiven? Will I never know a woman's love in this life?

  Exorcism

  With the thaw came floods. King Arthor's army had successfully defended against the Raiders of the North Wind, but washed-out roads, swollen rivers, downed bridges, and impassable fields of mud and bog hampered the journey south. The king dispersed his victorious forces among the northern cities,
serving the communities no longer as warriors but as a corps of civil engineers to rebuild the thoroughfares, dike the wild streams, and prepare the mired land for the spring plantings.

  Lot's impatience to find his wife grew unbearable, and he determined to travel south with his sons to Verulamium. Arthor, equally anguished over the loss of his stepbrother Cei, agreed to accompany him, and he left Marcus, Urien, and Kyner in command of the army bemired in the fenny north.

  Traveling lightly and changing horses frequently, Arthor's small cadre flew quickly south and arrived in Verulamium days later so plastered in mud that at first the city guards would not admit them, believing they were chthonic entities evoked by Morgeu the Fey to defend her unholy shrine.

  At the desecrated chapel, they found the remnants of Morgeu's unholy arts. Lot recognized the sigils chalked onto the walls as ciphers of the netherworld. "Do not enter here," he warned and held his boys back. "This shrine opens upon the world below."

  Arthor remembered too well his own unhappy transit of the hollow hills, and he heeded the chieftain's warning. The king's bishop gathered his priests and began an intricate exsufflation. Sulfur fires blazed upwind of the doomful shrine, each slowly smothered underfoot by holy men chanting Scripture so that the thick fumes penetrated the evil place and saturated every crevice with astringent vapors. Then blessed staves dug out the foundation, and the black stones toppled inward, interring forever that site of pagan worship.

  In the midst of this ceremony, a messenger arrived from nearby Londinium. Word of the king's presence in Verulamium had reached the magister militum, and Severus Syrax invited Arthor to visit the governor's palace and review the latest peace terms presented by King Wesc.

  Seeking Lot to notify him of the message, the king found him in an adjacent willow grove with his sons. They stood about a tented wagon that had been hidden there, shrouded in willow bines. Twilight painted the gray wagon glimmering red.