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

by A. A. Attanasio

  "No word from your boy," Gorthyn shouted. "No ransom. No reply at all." He drew his horse closer, and the lancers pulled aside to make way for him. "You abandoned him as an infant. And now he abandons you."

  She lowered her swollen face to meet her tormentor's merry eyes. "I forgive you for what you have done to me." Her raspy voice broke in her parched throat. "But Arthor—he cannot forgive you—for what you have done to Britain. Fear him."

  "Haw!" Gorthyn yanked his horse away from the wobbly wagon. "I fear no man and certainly not your gentle Arthor. I took the measure of him at Cunetio. He had not the stomach to kill me then, and so he sealed his doom. On a pike, his head will ride south beside yours to King Wesc's realm. There, your skulls will serve as goblets for the true masters of this island."

  Gorthyn rode off to report to Syrax and Platorius, and Ygrane returned her attention to the pale people hidden from the yellow heat of the day in the deeper shadows of the forest. Around them, animal souls came and went, like a happiness that never grows old.

  []

  Mother Mary, if only I could hear your voice. If only I could know that I have chosen wisely. Syrax demands ransom for my mother's life. Merlin has provided a large cask of ancient silver to buy her freedom. But I will not send a penny to the traitor who has burned our farmlands and doomed so many to famine. Not a penny! Am I wrong? Mother Ygrane is your Son's devoted servant. I know in my heart that the only salvation she seeks is from Him. And yet, she is my mother. Merlin believes I should do all I can to spare her. Once, he was her servant, when she was queen. He has become so sentimental since I took the soul of Morgeu's child from him. With teary eyes, he tells me stories of his mother, blessed Saint Optima, and he weeps for the evil he did as a demon. I believe he feels remorse for what he did—and for a grim future he sees as clearly as memory.

  Sickness of Moonlight

  Bors Bona squatted under the bellied canopy at the entry of his pavilion tent, watching rain seething in the forest, the gray shape of trees gathering out of the fog. The clearing where his army hunkered in their tents had flooded, and many of the soldiers had withdrawn into the forest, to build shelters among the higher boughs. "Eight days now," he mumbled. "Rain and more rain. Not even our messenger birds can escape this storm to inform the king that we are with him. If I were not a Christian, I'd say the gods have cursed us."

  With malefic tendrils, fog infiltrated the tents, moving with menace out of the forest and across the clearing. It glowed like phosphorus in the vague daylight as it slouched into ditches and root furrows.

  Scouts returned to announce that clear weather lay a day's march south, yet each day that they slogged through the mud, spring thunderheads followed.

  "Syrax works magic against us," Eufrasia spoke from inside the tent, where she stirred a pot of white beans. "This storm has every trait of magic. The unnatural fog. The following clouds."

  "Syrax is a Christian for all his foppish pagan garb." Bors picked up a pebble and tossed it into the dimpled water. "Money is the only magic he knows. And money does not buy rain." He stood up with a weary groan and stretched his thick body. "Besides, he has no notion we've turned against him. He would need Daedalus' wings to fly over our position and see that we have shifted from an offensive stance against Camelot to an attack posture against him."

  "Witches fly." Eufrasia ladled the white beans into a clay bowl. "In Caledonia, there are witches who fly with the cranes. They track the herds for the hunters. And they are never wrong."

  "Morgeu the Fey," Bors whispered and stepped into the fragrant tent. "She is a witch as her mother was before her. Perhaps this is her curse."

  "Your priests' prayers seem ineffective." Eufrasia handed him the bowl with a wooden spoon and a rusk of barley bread. "My father, Aidan, has become intrigued by your religion. I tell him it is better to keep our trust in wicca and the old ways."

  Bors accepted the food with a grateful nod. "I've heard enough of the glories of Caledonia from you these many wet days. Do not dun me now with the wonders of wicca. Do you think your true love—what's his name? Dagomere?"

  "Dagonet."

  "Do you think Dagonet is going to give up his good British comforts to return with you to cold Caledonia where witches fly and the herds run?" he asked around a mouthful of hot beans. "I think not, fair lady. Ah, this is good. You are accomplished with the kettle. That more than makes up for your incessant blathering."

  "As if you haven't given me your share of chatter during our damp confinement. If I didn't ..."

  "Hush!" Bors held his wooden spoon aloft, eyes raised toward the sagging ceiling. "Listen. The rain has stopped!"

  Outside, the sky had abruptly cleared. Blue heavens, streaked with mares' tails, let down broad slants of sunlight among retreating towers of stormclouds. And on the ground, fog crawled off like a thing alive, like a sickness of moonlight.

  The Goal without a Journey

  Seven days north from where he killed the bear, Dagonet released his last arrow at the seventh star of twilight. He stood at the northern limit of land, upon a cold jade sea far from everything familiar.

  White bears watched him off an island of blue snow. In the distance, other icebergs herded, drifting with slow rapture like ghosts frozen to corporeality. Schools of silver fish veered through the green water at his feet and vanished into the nightworld of the ocean's depths.

  Long ago, by some faerie path, he had left Britain far behind. This was an alien shore. His arrow flew through a sky hung with seven stars and draperies of windy, plutonic light and fell into a sea that closed around it in viscous ripples.

  By chilled starlight he found her a short while later, washed up on the gravel shore. The arrow had pierced her breast, near her heart. He carried her to the driftwood fire upon the rocky strand, where Lord Monkey danced excitedly at the sight of another human being. Dagonet wondered if she was human.

  Her cinnamon hair carried tiny lights within it that rhymed with the fire. Gray eyes watched him sleepily, peepholes to a winter day. He gawked at her, a man made lonely by her beauty.

  "I'm thorry! My arrow fell into the thea. How could it hit you? Are you a mermaid?"

  "I am the Lady of the Lake." Her eyes rolled in pain, and she gazed silently at the pelt of stars.

  "I'm thorry! I'm thorry!" His hands flustered in his matted hair, and he looked despairingly at Lord Monkey. "What can we do?"

  Lord Monkey leaped from the riding board onto the bed of the dray cart and chittered excitedly.

  "Yeth! We mutht take her to the withard!"

  He lifted the beautiful woman onto the cart and strapped Lord Monkey into his leather harness before snapping the reins. Even as he turned to hop out of the cart and go to his horse, darkness closed like a tunnel. He sighted his horse far away, watching him cat-eyed on the shore of the cold sea. It dwindled to a star and blinked away.

  Blood hammered through his head. Sunlight splashed over the cart, and he and the monkey winced against the brilliance of a spring day at the seashore. The beach could have been Armorica, where he had frolicked as a child. It was not. A rocky coastline of unfamiliar contour climbed through crescent dunes toward hills of dense trees. Overhead gulls wheeled and shrieked.

  "Where are we?" he asked, crouching over the wounded woman.

  "The goal without a journey."

  "I don't underthtand."

  "Poor Dagonet. You have served your master Merlin well, though unwittingly." Nynyve closed her eyes and breathed shallowly and with much pain. "He used you to strike me with a magic arrow, so that I am forced to leave this world for years to come—until I return to this shore in Cymru and claim your king."

  "Why? Why would Merlin do thith?"

  "To protect his king. If Arthor loved me too well, he would leave this world, to live with me on Avalon."

  "Apple Isle ..." Dagonet began to understand. "That ith the goal without a journey—the plathe outthide of time."

  "Yes, Dagonet. Avalon lies across the sea from
here." Her lovely face contorted as she tried to sit up. "Take me to the water."

  Dagonet obeyed. He carried her over the shell-strewn sand and kelp mounds to a placid cove, where water lapped gently. As soon as he lowered her into the sea, she dissolved away, a mirage that dimmed into a reflection on the smooth water and vanished.

  The white arrow drifted on the surface, and when he reached to pluck it, he saw himself in the sea's dark mirror. All magic had drained from him, and he confronted a hunchbacked dwarf with a large, freckled face.

  Going Invisible

  Fog silvered the grass. Like a night beast, it came crawling through the trees. Initially timid of the daylight, it slinked along root ledges and into shadowed gullies. Ygrane, strapped to the cedar post, her blackened, swollen eyelids painfully squinting in the sunshine, watched animal souls and faeries flee from the slitherous fog. And by that, she knew these mists were not natural.

  Magic thickened this haze, and it moved through the woods with lyrical obscenity. Feverish shapes rose up from tuffets and hummocks. Quivering tendrils stroked hillsides and hedges with long, lingering caresses.

  Foot soldiers and lancers looked up with perplexity at the blue sky and muttered disconcertedly about the fog rolling up from the creekbeds and flaring through the forest. A scout galloped out of the fallen cloudbank on the road ahead, pebbles clattering behind his horse's heels. The animal's mane streamed, the rider flapping his leather hat in one hand and clutching reins in the other. "The tyrant's coming!" he shouted as he slashed past.

  "Merlin ... " Ygrane whispered and closed her eyes.

  A whistle of winter wind jolted her to a wide-eyed stare, and the footmen leading her wagon fell under a volley of arrows.

  The lancers lowered their weapons, crouched behind their shields, and formed a defensive ring. Like moonsmoke, the fog billowed over them, and the landscape went lunar, white and sterile. Even shouted voices sounded mute.

  The boreal wind whistled again. Wounded groans and shrieks surrounded her, and the clatter of lances and shields on the road bricks followed.

  Out of the swirling mists, a figure of shadowy veils strode, far shorter than Merlin and stouter. A woman with frizzled hair and a swollen belly strenuously pulled herself up and into the wagon. "Mother! What have these whoresons done to you?"

  "Morgeu—" Ygrane's mind jarred as the leather thews loosened from her limbs, and she fell forward into her daughter's strong arms. "This—this is your magic?"

  "We must not dawdle here." Morgeu hoisted Ygrane upright. "Arthor comes now like the whirlwind, and we are in the midst of it. You must listen to me. Your pain is a dream—and now you are awake. Your legs are strong. Your body is light. Together, we fly!"

  Morgeu's enchantment erased all suffering in the older woman, and she felt airy as they descended from the wagon and clambered over the fallen bodies of the lancers. "Where are we going?"

  Morgeu's arm tightened about her mother's waist. "We are going where these clashing armies will not crush us. And to get there, we are going invisible."

  "Morgeu—you put the child you carry in jeopardy!" Ygrane glanced about wildly at the rushing shadows in the fog. "We are in a battlefield."

  "Have no fear." The enchantress guided Ygrane down into a weed-choked ditch. "My child moves now and is ready to be born. There is no better place for this warrior to enter our world than here among the fury of men. Help me, mother."

  "Morgeu!" Ygrane knelt in the bracken beside her daughter under the shouts of soldiers and the thunder of hooves. "You are giving birth now—in this dangerous place?"

  "Danger is the fate of this child, mother," she spoke through gnashed teeth and braced her legs apart against the sides of the ditch. "Danger is this child's path—to the throne of Britain!"

  Blood Brotherhood

  "Merlin's magic has spun a fog upon the highway to Cold Kitchen," Severus Syrax said to Count Platorius as they rode upon the high trail above the River Amnis. Below them, they could see the red pantile roofs of the hamlet hot with sunlight, and on the highway to the south, a cloud had fallen to earth. "No matter. Our siege engines are stopped, but Gorthyn has fanned our army into the forests, and we will outflank the wizard's pitiful fog."

  Platorius unscrolled a message-ribbon handed him by an attendant. "Merlin has rescued the abbess Ygrane. That was the intent of this magical haze. She offers no protection as a shield now. I told you we should have listened to Gorthyn and sent her head to Camelot. We lost a chance to inflict terror on our enemy."

  "Let them have the tyrant's mother." The magister militum adjusted his turbaned helmet as he peered down the river gorge at streams of soldiers hurrying along the banks. "King Wesc has bolstered our numbers with three legions of Wolf Warriors. Three legions, Platorius! Eighteen thousand blood-crazed fighters! The tyrant is doomed. I have no concern that our ally Bors slogs through mud in the north, tied down by rain. We don't need him. All we ever needed was to remove him as a rival. And now that he is not a true contender, there will be less that we must share when we achieve victory. Our forces are overwhelming—too strong even for Arthor's fanatical blood brotherhood."

  "We fight for peace and alliance, Severus." Platorius pointed across the steep gorge at the distant bastion walls and garret towers of Camelot. "They fight for dominance. Victory is not always assured the noble of cause. Base as their motives are, the tyrant's blood brothers are desperate and will fight without hope of quarter. You may withdraw to your family's estates in Gaul, Canaan, Egypt. The Foederatus have sanctuary in Saxony, Juteland, and Frisia. But for Arthor, there is only Britain."

  "Do you fear for your holdings, my dear count?" Severus Syrax smiled thinly. "The Atrebates territory is secure. And my promise stands: Once the tyrant is overthrown, you will reign as high king of Britain. I am content as magister militum of Londinium, managing my family's affairs of trade in Britain. Your lineage is among the most venerable on the island, and this day you shall be king."

  "The way that brigand Gorthyn struts about, calling himself king of the Belgae, I believe he will covet the title of monarch." Platorius looked nervously at Syrax, and the dark pouches under the count's eyes trembled with a frightened tic. "King Wesc has placed him in command of the storm troops. When this war is over, he may well use them to take what he covets."

  Severus Syrax's smile widened. "My niece yet owes me a favor for her recent failure in Londinium. Perhaps when these troubles are over, King Gorthyn will enjoy a visit from our alluring Selwa."

  The Bag of Dreams

  Upon a sturdy black mare, Merlin rode beside King Arthor into battle. He had intended to wear no armor but to trust in his magic to protect him. The king had insisted the wizard don chain-mail vest and bronze legionary helmet with neck- and cheek-guards and white crest feathers. He felt glad that he had complied, for as soon as they departed the fortress, the enemy rushed from the forests onto the very slopes of Camelot. Arrows darkened the sky, and slingshot rocks clanged off his helmet and the face mask of his horse.

  Arthor wore a shiny bronze eagle vizard and rode with his famous Madonna-painted shield raised over his helmeted head to protect himself from falling projectiles. Bedevere gazed out from behind the mask of a woeful Greek fury. Looking at them, Merlin felt as though he kept company again with demons. At his side, slung from his shoulder, he carried a cowhide sack rattling with amulets and talismans, a bag of dreams by which he planned to bedevil their foes.

  The war cries of the king's men emboldened the wizard, and he rode faster. As a demon, he had presided over numerous battles and knew intimately all the hostile stratagems of men. As a mortal he had directly partaken in only one armed conflict.

  During his first days away from his mother in the kingdom of Cos near Greta Bridge, he had dared take a stand with farmers against a Pictish warband. The Furor had driven him mad after that slaughter—and echoes of that madness resounded in his long skull with the sound of the arrows' cold wind and the first clang of metal clashing on metal.
Merlin gritted his teeth against the jarring sounds and reached into his bag for a weapon of magic.

  The king's assignment had been simple. Merlin was charged to help Arthor drive a wedge into the advancing line. Kyner and Cei would rush in behind and establish defensive positions well away from Camelot. Once the fields were cleared, Lot and his northmen would descend into the river gorge to drive the invaders south, into the marshes. Urien would hold and protect the hamlet of Cold Kitchen. And Marcus carried the responsibility of defending Camelot and advancing as summoned.

  In the midst of the fray, Merlin became disoriented. The screaming of horses, the jostling of their big bodies with scurrying foot soldiers scattering among them, stabbing and slashing, heightened his sense of madness. He chanted calming spells, and they worked as he bounded among the jammed warriors.

  From the bag of dreams, he withdrew a terror-amulet and tossed it at a company of ferocious berserkers, a squad of horribles clad in human skin, shriveled faces staring eyeless from their thighs, scalps hanging from their belts.

  The amulet exploded panic among the barbarous warriors, and they fell over themselves in rabid retreat. Merlin hollered victoriously and reached for another magical weapon. At that moment, a flung ax struck his helmet and split it wide, sending him careening off his horse and into the thriving melee.

  Arthor shoved his steed through a throng of frenzied foot soldiers swarming about the fallen wizard, Excalibur hacking furiously. He pranced a circle about Merlin, driving the enemy off and allowing defenders and a surgeon to reach the bloodied wizard. "He lives!" the surgeon called—and the king waved them off to Camelot and swung his horse back toward the fury of the battle.