Legend of the Lakes

by Clara O'Connor

  A flicker of annoyance wafted over his face.

  It was a familiar expression that I recognised from Gideon – the first time I had noticed any familial resemblance beyond their shared stature. Arrogance aside, physically they were not terribly alike, unlike the steward’s middle son who was a life-size younger copy of his father.

  The steward drew a breath, his lips thin. “What do ye in York?”

  “You are preparing to take on Londinium, and we have come to offer what assistance we may,” Zara answered, while Fidelma’s eyes glinted at the head of the table.

  “We don’t need your help,” Lord Richard said. The lords and ladies around the table all turned to stare at him. We were vastly outnumbered, and currently begging assistance from neighbours who had little inclination to get involved, and my daughter’s life was at stake. Féile might mean little personally to the company here, but they were each and every one clear that the next Lady of the Lake being held in Londinium would not end well for them. And the steward wanted to refuse the magical advantage we had over the technologically advanced weapons Londinium would throw at us.

  “Are you gone mad?” Llewelyn spoke for the room.

  The steward faced the assembly, and the looks he met there seemed to convince even his mighty will to bow. If the druids were in then what possible reason could he have to refuse them?

  “Fine,” he said begrudgingly.

  “Why don’t you catch us up?” Fidelma smiled impishly.

  Llewelyn looked between the druids and the steward. When the later made no further move beyond staring at Fidelma with a locked jaw, he outlined the current status of the gathering armies.

  “Winter is closing in. Alba will join us in the spring.”

  “Spring will be too late,” Fidelma announced.

  What did she know? Could she see something? Was Féile in danger? Was it already too late?

  “Why?” asked Rion’s measured voice.

  “The line through Londinium is on the verge of collapse,” John explained. His thin face looked up and to the left in the direction of the distant southern ley line, his fingers tapping at the table in front of him. “We must get to it now; once it is gone, we will never restore it.”

  “We can’t risk going sooner,” Llewelyn said. “We’ll be massacred.”

  “If the line dies, we’re all dead anyway,” Fidelma stated softly.

  The room erupted, as those who understood the ley lines and those who understood war attempted to explain to the other their position and the impossibility of the other option. The ley line was failing. I could barely comprehend what that meant. I had spent much of the last two years healing the ley that ran from the south to the north. I could see the impact of the growing corruption in the Belinus line on the land. The further south we went, the more ravaged the land, and the higher the number of ill. But for the line to collapse entirely… And never be restored…? That line ran from east to west through Kernow. I met Bronwyn’s ashen face; her country would be uninhabitable within months of the line collapsing.

  “Can’t we do something?” I asked Fidelma.

  “I have spent years doing what I could. What I can offer is no longer enough. Your mother knew it was failing and she tried to do something about it.”

  “What? You know why our mother was in the borders? You’re saying that she gave Catriona up on purpose?” Rion asked.

  “Yes – at least she meant for her to be there. It was not part of the plan for Viviane to be killed,” Fidelma said. “She believed that she could heal the line. She had a vision: mother, daughter, and Griffin were vital to heal the line. She was impetuous, and she believed that they would hear her. The Strand line in Londinium must be healed. The corruption caused by industrialisation, technology, the loss of the old ways, and it being abandoned for so long without anyone to tend to it has been catastrophic. The corruption has slowly been seeping north from the intersection at Glastonbury. Your mother could feel it in Carlisle; it nagged at her endlessly. She had to do something and she had a vision that she believed in. The triskelion was the key: each loop springs from the centre, and she believed that she and you were two arms and the third would be created in Londinium. She thought if she could just get closer she would figure it out, and the final pieces would fall into place.”

  “But she never got closer.”

  “She should never have gone,” the steward said, scowling at the elderly druid. It was clearly an argument they had trodden before. “She left us vulnerable; she had no right to make such a decision.”

  “She saw what was coming. She saw what had happened across western Europe and northern Africa, line after line failing, people growing ill, the land growing weak. She had to act.”

  “Like you? Aye and much good it did her.”

  “I followed the path, once she was gone. I had no choice.”

  “There is always a choice,” Richard roared.

  The room silenced at his outburst. The exchange had been heated on the steward’s side at least. Rion placed his hand on my arm, acknowledging our pain at finally discovering why the lady had risked her life by going south.

  “I did what I thought was right,” Fidelma stated quietly.

  “Oh aye. Well done,” Llewelyn threw at her, his tone caustic on discovering she had more insight into my mother’s motivation that she had failed to share previously in defence of Rhodri. “And where has that got us? No Griffin, a lady with no training, the next lady in the arms of our enemies, and the line failing before we can get to it.”

  “But there is a new Griffin.” Lord Richard smiled, thin-lipped.

  “What?” Fidelma looked around to spot a new addition to our group.

  “My son,” Richard indicated Gideon with his chin. “Husband and Griffin to the Lady of the Lake.”

  Fidelma’s face was shocked. “But how?”

  “The morning Devyn died,” Rion began, before recounting the events on the beach, including the crucial elements he had chosen to omit the last time they had heard this tale.

  Fidelma’s face was grey. “Why did you not tell us this before?”

  “We were concerned that there might be another traitor in our midst,” Rion explained. “Turns out we were right.”

  Whoever had taken Féile at least did not go back to Londinium with the information that Gideon was the Griffin and that we were married. There might be rumours in Carlisle that we were lovers but given Gideon’s reputation that he had slept with half the single women in the city, that didn’t mean much. Still, only half a dozen people in the world knew the information we were now revealing.

  “You are the Griffin?” Fidelma directed her question directly to Gideon.

  He nodded, no more pleased to be forced into having to deal with Fidelma than his father had been.

  “It’s not possible. Devyn Glyndŵr died. The Griffin is dead.”

  Some of the Anglian lords and a number of the druids started to agree that the line was extinguished, even though John himself confirmed that he had performed the rite of transfer. They were all too ready to believe that Gideon was lying.

  “It’s true,” Rhodri said, coming forward. “He bears the mark of the first Griffin.”

  A number of the company frowned. The lore of the Griffin was mysterious. The Glyndŵrs kept the knowledge to themselves as a defensive measure, as the abilities of the Griffin, like that of the Lake bloodline, varied wildly between generations. By not sharing the knowledge with the world, others simply assumed that the powers passed down were similar and as strong from one to the next.

  “What mark?” Rion asked.

  “Pup,” Rhodri stepped forward from his discreet spot in the back of the room and instructed Gideon to stand with a lift of his head. The steward bristled at the sight of the old Griffin under his roof. I struggled not to roll my eyes.

  Gideon stood reluctantly, then a glint came into his eye, and he unhooked the clasp on his dress tunic, slowly revealing his chest. He threw Bronwyn a wink
as she gave him an admiring glance, her expression quickly clearing as her gaze extended to include me.

  “Wife,” he tossed me the shirt which was still warm from his skin as he turned and displayed the image drawn across his back to the room.

  The room hissed at the image, the predatory eagle intermingled with the proud lion. The tattoo that Devyn had worn had been a work of art, but it had been manmade. This drawing, by contrast, was undeniably otherworldly. I had only seen it briefly by the lake, had not had a chance to examine it up close. Now, my fingers lifted to touch it, to trace it from the finely wrought wings to the pads of the lion’s hind legs perched above the tree that I knew swirled up from his right thigh.

  Fidelma crossed the room. Her hand hovered above Gideon’s shoulder as he turned back around and stilled to find her so close. She stepped backwards, her breath exhaling in a hiss.

  “What are your gifts?” she asked, almost as if she had forgotten whom she was addressing.

  Gideon’s face closed over. She met his eyes and her own welled up as she stepped back nodding, as if to herself.

  “Time is running out on the ley line?” Recovering faster from the news he had already previously absorbed, Rion returned to the main subject of concern.

  “Yes,” said Zara, “we have a few weeks at most.”

  “We won’t get inside the walls in time,” Richard said.

  “Oh yes we can,” Rion replied, already two moves ahead on the board.

  “Not without Alba, and it will take weeks for their army to get here.”

  “We don’t need the Albans,” Rion offered. “We have an invitation.”

  “What?”

  “We attend the Treaty Renewal,” Rion suggested calmly, as if we weren’t on the brink of war with the opposite party of said Treaty.

  “Just walk right in?” the steward scoffed.

  “Yes, why not?”

  My jaw dropped. “I can’t just walk right in. They’ll have me in moments.”

  “No, they won’t,” Fidelma said, and her face started to change, her skin smoothing out and her hair darkening until it was a black waterfall down her back with broad streaks of white. Her face was almost smooth, though still lived in, wrinkles by her eyes and across her forehead from where she clearly raised her eyebrows a lot. It was a characteristic gesture that was so familiar to me, as were her high cheekbones and her golden eyes that were clear now the film of age had lifted.

  A ripple of reaction went through the hall. The hand tightening on my shoulder shook me out of my shock at the revelation sooner than everyone else as I turned to the man behind me. Gideon’s smirk was in place as the room reacted to the transformed Fidelma. There was the sound of a crashing chair as Henry Mortimer stood, turning to take in his father’s reaction, but the steward also seemed less surprised than the rest of the room. Then Henry looked over at Gideon’s amused face before striding from the hall, Alice going after him.

  I turned back to Fidelma, who was watching the retreating warrior leave with regret. She squared her shoulders before turning back to the top of the table where Lord Richard glowered from his seat. He squashed down his own visibly strong reaction, only to scoff at what the transformed druid seemed to be proposing. “You’re suggesting we send in our strongest asset protected only by a child’s trick.”

  “Yes,” Fidelma answered him with a challenging smile. “An illusion… and our son.”

  Our son. This was Gideon’s mother.

  I blinked. “You knew?” I asked under my breath.

  “Suspected.”

  That explained his antipathy to Fidelma, the odd jibes and his refusal to be alone with her.

  “I agree with Rion,” Gideon stated. “If we go, we can check on the ley line and search for Féile.”

  “How do you plan to do that?” the steward challenged, his features pinched. He was not enjoying the afternoon.

  “Devyn went to Londinium to see if he could find the lady, and find her he did.” Rhodri reminded us.

  “He tracked me down because I was matched to Marcus Courtenay, and he hacked the city’s records to see if the pieces fit. It was logic and technology, not mystical powers.” I corrected him.

  “He went straight to you and stayed, even after all evidence suggested he was wrong,” Rhodri insisted stubbornly.

  “He tracked you down,” Gideon repeated. He exchanged a look with Rhodri across the room, and a wide grin split the older man’s face.

  “Of course.”

  “Care to share with the group?” Bronwyn asked, when neither said anything further.

  “Nimue told you that the Griffin is empowered by necessity,” Rhodri said. How did he know that? I looked back at Gideon. Was this where he had spent his morning?

  Gideon looked at the ground, contemplating the wood before surveying the room, his gaze coming to a stop on me. “I’ve had some six months of honing my hunting skills.”

  Six months at the lakeshore shackled to Avalon, every night transforming from a man into one of the Griffin’s forms, hunting endlessly for prey. What if the torment had had a purpose? What if our need was answered?

  “Do you really think…?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe being Griffin still has its uses.”

  “You are not the child’s Griffin,” Lord Richard said, helpful as ever.

  “I believe I can find her.”

  Rion looked from one to the other of us grimly. “That’s good enough for me.”

  “We are agreed then?” I asked in disbelief. Years had been spent planning for this war, all of which would be upended here after a series of revelations and half-hidden truths.

  “Agreed.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  On the second day of journeying south, the landscape started to change, the fields gave way to woods and the hills were rolling. But they had a sense of abandonment, and I could identify now what I had barely sensed the last time I had crossed the borderlands.

  There was a ley line here, the May line, running from Land’s End in Kernow through the Chiltern hills and across Europe. It wasn’t corrupted in the same way the Belinus line was, or the way I expected the one that ran through Londinium was. When I tended the Belinus line, I noted there were two types of wrongness: one was a twisted sound to the notes, discordant off-key notes that waved through at certain times of the year, and I could sense that same problem here in the May line; the other was more physical, like a sludge, a heavy weight that overtook the water and polluted it. Yes, that was it, one was corruption, the other was pollution.

  The borderline was sickened with the dissonance of twisted corruption. The power that Avalon had given me pulsed to be released, to spread and heal the wrongness here.

  I dropped back beside Fidelma, seeking a distraction from that call I felt to heal the line – her new appearance would take some getting used to.

  “Why did you do it?” I waved my hand at her face.

  Her mouth pulled down. “I wanted to do my work without the burden of being the steward’s wife. To tend the line, to be part of my new community. To attend the Treaty Renewal as a druid, or wisewoman, and no more. I hoped to avoid bringing pain to my family by simply ceasing to be the wife and the mother I no longer was.”

  “Seems to me like they were the only ones to figure it out,” I commented.

  An eyebrow directed at Gideon’s back was my only response.

  “Should I call you Elizabeth now?” I had had trouble adjusting to my new name, and had had to accept what others chose to call me. The least I could do was offer my friend the dignity of her own choice.

  “I have been Fidelma a long time,” she said in answer. “Elizabeth was a different person.”

  “Is this all the truth or part illusion?” I asked. Some of the signs of aging made her appear older than other women her age.

  It was odd to speak to someone I knew, who had overnight become a complete stranger to my eye. Though not to Gideon it seemed, who had all but disappeared in the days spen
t in hurried preparation to get to Londinium at the usual prescribed time for the Treaty Renewal. He had barely tolerated Fidelma when he had suspected her of being Elizabeth Mortimer. Now she wore his mother’s face once more, he avoided her presence when at all possible. And as I had been in consultation with Callum and the druids while I still could, I had barely caught sight of him or Rhodri until we assembled to leave. I had felt relieved not to have to face Rhodri, even though he too knew the pain of a lost child. I couldn’t bear to meet him until I could put his granddaughter back in his arms.

  “Ah,” she pulled at the silver-streaked braid that came over her shoulder. “The truth is that working with the ley lines after your mother was gone has been taxing work. It took its toll on my body.”

  Was it vain to worry that my hair might be white in twenty years?

  She laughed at my expression, sensing my concerns.

  “No, child. You are the lady, you were born for this.” She cocked her head. “Can you feel it?”

  I raised a brow. Of course I could feel it – or rather, hear it. It was a hum that sang and keened as we climbed each hill and passed each tree. It was in my throat, on my skin, a flicker in my eye.

  We were weeks off Samhain but there was something here of that otherworld. What I had experienced the night I crossed the borders with Devyn and Marcus had been terrifying. The borders had writhed with the dead and battle-fallen. It wasn’t like that now, but there was a note of it that tumbled through the breeze.

  “I can hear something.” I started to describe my previous experience.

  Fidelma nodded. “Aye, the battles here raged for centuries. So many dead. Thousands and thousands, of us, of them. Generation after generation, this was where they bled, where they died. So many trapped here.”

  “Trapped?” I asked, confused. “I thought they crossed over on one night a year.”

  “At Samhain? Yes, that’s true everywhere else. Here it is something different. They are caught here, so many souls damned in the place they fell.”