Legend of the Lakes

by Clara O'Connor

  “We need to be careful,” Rion cautioned. “We haven’t revealed everything that happened yesterday.”

  “What do you mean?” Bronwyn asked. “What else happened?”

  “Devyn wasn’t dead when he hit the waves,” he began. “We pulled him out, but the wound was fatal. There was nothing we could do.”

  Bronwyn waved her hand, quieting him.

  “I need to tell you something, about the relationship between… He was the last Griffin.” Bronwyn stumbled over her message, her face tight with concern, her eyes never moving from me. “I…”

  “Not anymore,” Rion interjected. “Druid John performed a ceremony and the spirit of the Griffin was transferred to Gideon.”

  Bronwyn’s eyes rounded, her head angling to take in the scarred warrior stationed in the furthest corner of the room. Gideon slanted her a wink in reply.

  “Oh, thank the Gods.” Bronwyn put her hand to her chest and ran the other hand over her face, exhaling as the room waited for her to collect herself. “That’s what I needed to talk to you about. I didn’t want to say it in front of everyone, but my mother is a Glyndŵr and she often spoke of the legends of her house when we were children. I was afraid for Cass. There is…” She hesitated, lowering her voice before continuing. “In the stories, the lady does not long outlive her Griffin, especially if they are together.”

  “What do you mean?” Rion asked.

  “It’s just part of the lore passed down by my mother. She has a romantic bent, and loves tales of star-crossed lovers. My mother said there has been a curse that originated in the days of Arthur Pendragon. The first Lady of the Lake to come to our aid, Guinevere, was rumoured to have betrayed her husband with his strongest knight. When he was killed she did not long survive her protector.”

  “There was no Griffin then,” Rion interjected.

  “No, the first Griffin came many centuries later and yet…” A line appeared between Bronwyn’s brows. “When Jasper Tewdwr was Griffin he was killed in the border wars and the Lady Margaret did not long survive him. There were rumours of an affair between them even though she was married to his brother Edmund. They were not the first either: a previous lady who married her Griffin also faded away after he drowned. This is why there is a rule against the lady and the Griffin being together. That’s why Llewelyn was happy to support Cass marrying Marcus, to keep them apart. The curse is something we have long speculated on in our house.”

  Rion looked murderous. “He endangered her like this?”

  “I don’t think Devyn knew,” Bronwyn defended. “He was raised outside our house. There would have been no need to teach him the lore as we all thought the line of the lady had ended. I never… I thought they had ended it. Cass seemed to accept she would marry Marcus. But if there is a new Griffin, then all is well.”

  Rion exchanged looks with Gideon, shoulders slumped. “We have repeated Devyn’s mistake.”

  “What? How?”

  Bronwyn’s eyes widened as she tried to conceive how I could already have attached to another Griffin. I had carelessly lost one, only to have become entangled with another so quickly. I almost felt sorry for her, but despite her confusion, I couldn’t summon the energy to respond.

  “You know the tethering effect of the handfast cuff?” Rion checked and Bronwyn nodded. Our inability to separate had been an issue on our journey north.

  “Once Marcus boarded the Imperial ships and started to leave, Catriona… she was in pain. It looked like it was killing her – some kind of barbaric punishment the handfast inflicts for not complying with its edicts.”

  “How did you get it off?” Bronwyn looked to me, pulling short as pieces clicked into place. “Wait, how were you going to get it off if you married Devyn instead of Marcus?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “There was a loophole. It seems it was some version of the contract charm,” Rion said and the up-until-now silent Gideon grunted. “Any marriage will remove it.”

  Bron’s eyes flicked between us. “Then… who?”

  Gideon bowed sharply.

  “Oh.” Bronwyn’s eyes were wide as she absorbed the latest revelation. “When York hears of this, he will not be pleased.”

  “We won’t tell him.” Rion surveyed the room to underline his command.

  “What?” Bronwyn gasped.

  “Any of it.”

  “Why not?” asked Gideon. “Anything that displeases the steward…”

  “I don’t know who we can trust,” Rion said. “There has to be a traitor. Someone must have betrayed our mother. What Catriona said earlier, about not being a random match for Marcus. If she’s right, then it was planned. We always thought it was bad luck. There was never any hint that anyone in Londinium knew our mother was dead. We assumed that whatever had brought her so close to the city, the sentinels killing her was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But they knew.”

  “So?”

  “So somebody must have helped them,” Rion said. “We thought the sentinels came upon mother by chance, but what would bring them so deep into the borderlands? And they knew exactly where to find her. Somebody told them.”

  “How did Marcus send word to the Empire about where to meet us?” I summoned the energy to ask, suddenly sitting upright. He was right. “We didn’t know where we were going when we left the city. Matthias bid us go to York, but Devyn wanted us to go to Carlisle. We were never meant to be here in Conwy. How did they know to come here? To get the mistletoe? They were near done by the time we got there.”

  I had thought only of Marcus, but he must have had help.

  Rion nodded grimly at this further evidence of a traitor in our midst. “Until we know who it is, we keep Gideon’s new status as Griffin, and as the lady’s husband, to ourselves. Are we agreed?”

  I shrugged as Bronwyn and Gideon concurred with Rion’s plan.

  I barely knew who I was anymore. I had already been struggling under the recently bestowed titles that still felt alien to me, and had been further bowed by discovering I was soon to be a mother, and now I was adrift without Devyn. This last I was not ready to face at all.

  Wife. It felt incomprehensible.

  Chapter Three

  “There must be retribution,” Richard Mortimer argued for the thousandth time. I had heard him repeat this over and over during the last few days, while I drifted occasionally into and out of the room which seemed to serve as the headquarters of their war council. “We cannot let such an incursion go unanswered.”

  “They will think us weak.” Lady Morwyn supported the steward’s argument. Caernarfon was not a natural ally of Anglia, but on many such points they agreed.

  “We are not prepared to go to war with Londinium,” Rion countered. “If we attack them on their own territory they will cut us down with their guns.”

  “Then we take out one of the smaller cities,” Lord Richard said. “Venta Belgarum or Dubris, somewhere in the Shadowlands.”

  “You would attack one of these minor walled cities and what then? Kill innocent men, women, and children to show your strength,” Rion challenged.

  “Aye,” said Lord Richard shortly, sitting tall in his seat and baring his teeth. He had waited his entire life for an opportunity to take on the Imperial province.

  “Blood for blood,” Llewelyn agreed.

  “When they killed the Lady of the Lake, we did nothing. We repaid their insult not at all because we were afraid, afraid that without the lady we would not be strong enough, that the city would come at us and keep coming. I have spent the last twenty years ensuring that the next time they crossed the line, we would be ready. And by the gods, I am ready,” the steward announced.

  “I agree that war is coming, but we are not ready.” Rion levelled a look at the steward. “Yes, I know you are prepared for war, but Mercia is not. We have always had the lady. It has been so long since the treaty. We are further away than you, and maybe that has made us complacent. We will need time to make r
eady for war.

  “Gwynedd has already begun to arm itself; the attack was on our coast. I have sent word to Powys, Dyfed, and Gwent. If you say we ride, then we will ride. If you say we wait then we will hold until you are ready.” Llewelyn directed his solidarity towards Rion despite his stated preference for retribution but he was apparently unwilling to ally with York. “What they have taken will only tide them over for so long. We cannot let them raid our stores or those in the other kingdoms. We must defend ourselves.”

  Druid John spoke hesitantly. “If the legions return we are vulnerable on the coast.”

  “We can send a guard,” Llewelyn offered.

  “If we are over-run again, we are too few already,” the druid replied. “As the ley lines die, magic in the blood runs thin. We have just suffered a devastating loss. We cannot move the oak groves to a safer place. But if you can guard them, we will move the community inland.” The druid looked to Llewelyn. “We thought perhaps Dinas Emrys in the mountains. We will be close enough to travel to tend the harvest, but the community will be safer.”

  “It’s a desolate spot,” Llewelyn observed. “We will send men to help you build.”

  The druid bowed his head. “We thank you, my lord.”

  When the talk returned to defences and the border and building up garrisons, I stood up and left the room. What did any of it matter?

  Llewelyn promised me daily that Rhodri would arrive soon. I thought no further ahead than that. I ate meals as directed by Marina and Oban, who would sit with me to see it was done. When I could slip out I stood on the walls of the castle watching the coast road in the damp drizzle, waiting for him to appear. Gideon hovered in the shadows, always there.

  The time slipped slowly by, and when night fell, and I could bear my own company no longer, I would curl up in the corner of Llewelyn’s war room. On one such evening, I found myself the topic of debate.

  “The mistletoe is nothing,” Fidelma dismissed. “It treats the symptoms. We must go after the root of the problem.”

  “And how do we do that?” Rion asked.

  Fidelma looked towards me. “The illness is a result of the deteriorating ley lines; the corruption of the lines has grown considerably in the last twenty years. She must tend the lines.”

  “She barely has enough ability to do the most basic magic,” Callum said. He had repeatedly offered to teach me. I knew I needed to be stronger. I placed a hand over the small bump of my belly. I had to be stronger.

  “That won’t matter. She was born for this; her bloodline is our greatest defence against the death of the lines. She must do this,” said Fidelma.

  “No, we need her powers to be honed as a weapon,” the steward insisted to the room. “War is coming, the Lady of the Lake has always been our main weapon in keeping the Empire in its place. She is little threat right now. She needs to learn how to use her power. We need her to be ready to fight.”

  “The lines come first. The Mallacht spreads through the land and we know what comes next. We’ve seen the damage that happens once the lines fail,” Fidelma looked weary from the days of arguing.

  They were speaking like I wasn’t here. Perhaps I wasn’t. But I wasn’t not here either. “What are you talking about?”

  Fidelma came over and took a seat beside me, cradling my hands gently in her own. “You need time to heal, but we need you. The land has suffered while the Lady of the Lake has been absent. There is a network of energy lines that run under the ground, crisscrossing the earth. “

  “Yes, I know.” Even in Londinium we had some awareness of the lines, if only because fluctuations in the energy could interfere with our technology.

  Fidelma continued. “For centuries we have tended them – those with magic in their blood can sing to the line, so that it runs true. Where magic has died out, and technology has become the only tool tended by humans, the line grows polluted and the energy corrupts. We are so few now that the lines across the continent are failing, and as they fail the knock-on impact of the pollutants gradually infects the land.”

  “Enough of this. If the Empire comes in and wipes us out, there will be no one to tend the lines.” The steward cut across her.

  Fidelma cut him a pitiful glare. “If there are no lines, then there will be no land to fight over. Everything will wither and die.”

  A hand slammed into the wood of the window shutters, silencing the argument.

  “Who are you to decide the actions of the Lady of the Lake?” Gideon snarled.

  I felt all eyes turn to my dark corner. I had vowed to myself to grow strong in order to take on the Empire, to hone what abilities I had so that they could never hurt me or mine again. And now here I was sitting uselessly while they braced for war, debating whether I should fight or heal the energy lines that I only vaguely knew existed. The words that Marcus had thrown at me on the beach replayed in my mind. That I was selfish, that I thought only of myself and my own needs and wants, and took no care of the greater good. If what Fidelma said was true then the higher purpose was to tend the ley lines.

  I was only one person though – what good was I? To either side.

  “Callum’s right. I don’t know how to do anything; I haven’t been trained.”

  “I will train you,” Fidelma said. “Come with me to Glastonbury and I will show you how.”

  I hesitated.

  “No,” said Rion. “She comes north with me. My sister is returning home.”

  I looked at him numbly. Home. What home did I have without Devyn? Did it matter where I went? My hand went protectively to the tiny life inside me. It did matter. She mattered.

  “I’ll come North too,” Callum spoke up gruffly, not looking in the direction of his liege lord. “I can teach you how to handle the elements. You won’t be fit for much more than that till the little one comes. I can show you the basics of how to wield your power, how to fight until you’re ready for Fidelma.”

  It appeared the little cat that had escaped the bag of secrets we kept had wandered a little further. Had Marina told him perhaps? She was the one whose perceptive observations had alerted me to the pregnancy in the first place. I had told her to tell no one, but I understood if she had said something to Callum after seeing the large professor hold me. She may have assumed he was someone I trusted. My marriage and the new Griffin so far remained secret. We wouldn’t have been able to hide the baby for long anyway.

  “She’s pregnant?” Fidelma’s eyes snagged on my wayward hand. “When are you expecting to have it?”

  “May. June. I’m not sure.” I answered into my lap, from the corner of my vision I could see Rhys place his hand on Llewelyn’s arm. I turned further away, back to the high druid. I hadn’t thought what this would mean to Llewelyn. Couldn’t bear to look up and see happiness.

  Fidelma glowered at Callum. “We can’t wait so long.”

  Callum looked at her, aghast. “You cannot be serious. Tending the lines takes a toll.”

  “It won’t be as hard on her; she is the lady. Her mother tended them all of her life, was born to it and she never…” She waved a hand to indicate her own aged skin and silver hair.

  “The lady did not tend the lines while she was with child,” Callum insisted. “The lines have waited this long, they can wait a little longer.”

  Fidelma’s golden eyes glared but she had been defeated. Callum’s suggestion gave everyone what they wanted. I would learn to fight and tend the lines and be safely tucked away as far from the Empire as possible. I was too numb to care. If Callum taught me how to fight, then I would tend the ley lines if they wanted me to.

  “It’s settled then,” Rion stated. “Marina’s brother has asked to remain with Catriona; Oban will come too.”

  Fidelma smiled tightly, accepting the consensus in the room, as I hastily exited before anyone could make more plans for my future. It was settled. I would go to Carlisle. I recognised that Oban joining us was evidence of Rion trying to velvet coat his iron-fisted control of me, and I was
grateful that I would have a familiar face with me.

  When Rhodri finally arrived, I found I could not face him. I retreated to my room to keep the world out. When I went outside, it would be to say goodbye. I wasn’t ready. I would never be ready.

  I heard Callum’s rumbling voice. Footsteps came and went. Rion insisting. Bronwyn pleading. I lay unmoving, watching the rain slide down my window.

  “My lady,” came Rhodri’s trembling voice.

  I couldn’t answer.

  I wanted to. Nobody else in all the world would understand my pain like the man on the other side of the door. But I couldn’t speak over the shards of glass in my throat. Couldn’t push off the heavy blackness that pushed down on me. I had thought it would get better, thought I must be over the worst of it, had functioned and walked and talked over the last few days. But tightness whipped across my temples, grinding me down. My chest felt as if it would splinter open and spit the ruined pieces of my heart out on the floor.

  “If my presence offends you, I can leave,” Rhodri said through the door. “Llewelyn did not think… I wished to speak with you but I will leave. You may have the ceremony in peace.”

  His words floated in to me as his footsteps began to move away from the door.

  Rhodri, the disgraced Griffin, would have received no welcome from my brother or the steward of York. He thought that I too blamed him for decade-old events. I sat up in the bed, still dressed in my clothes from yesterday – had I slept in them? I wasn’t even sure if I had slept. There had been darkness and I supposed I might have.

  I pulled open the door and stepped into the hall. Rhodri’s hunched form halted. He turned back to me.

  My chin trembled as my mouth opened uselessly and I compressed my lips together to contain whatever noise might emerge from within. I lifted a hand to Rhodri, and he haltingly returned along the hall.

  I had thought him a ruined man the first time I met him. He was a shadow of that man now, despite his recent recovery from the illness. Yet as he drew me to him, his frail body gave me strength, gave me comfort.