Legend of the Lakes

by Clara O'Connor

  But that advantage would be gone once the cuff went on my arm. I had no way of knowing if I would be strong enough to resist its compulsion. Each further hour spent with Gideon gave me a greater chance. I looked again at Marcus. His jaw was locked as he stared at the table while the negotiations continued around us.

  I had just given my life in favour of the hundreds of thousands who would die if I did not – was he satisfied now? For a second time, I had to give up the man I loved and agree to marry him. Would I remain compelled after our marriage? If Calchas had permitted Gideon to remain in Londinium I could have hoped for some moments of lucidity during which we could do something, find some way out of the binds in which Calchas had entangled us.

  Marcus, aware of my gaze, looked up at me. His green eyes were direct, as they had been when he had promised to make it right only a few nights before. I had believed him then. He had tried to warn me at the ball, had accused me of being like his father in front of Calchas at lunch, but he hadn’t known the extent of the disappeared, I recalled. He hadn’t known. Calchas was making it appear as if Marcus had been knowingly part of their plans all along. But had he?

  “Cassandra will journey to the ley line at Glastonbury once a year only and none of you will be there. She will be heavily under guard.”

  “The lines in the Lakelands must be tended, or the north will fail and if it fails your Albans will not be too happy,” Rion bargained.

  “You will have Fidelma, and her pet city brat, as soon as she is found,” Calchas countered. He didn’t have Marina then; she had managed to get away. “Of course, I have her one remaining sister and with such bait most rodents will eventually surface.”

  I nodded to Rion. If I was here in Londinium, then Marina was more than capable of tending the circles in Keswick and Penrith. The steward said nothing. If I didn’t know him better, I would say he looked defeated, stunned by Fidelma’s revelations and bound by the fealty he owed to the Plantagenets, and therefore in no position to deny Marcus’s restoration to the throne of York. He’d been neatly outmanoeuvred. With Rion and Richard Mortimer taken, Bronwyn had no choice; the western Celts would be crushed if they stood alone.

  “Then we are agreed. I will have the terms of the Treaty drawn up, and we can sign as a way to celebrate the marriage of Lord Courtenay and your princess tomorrow, just as we did at the last treaty. I do love a little historical symmetry, don’t you?” Calchas delightedly surveyed the sullen faces of the leaders of the Britons at his table. He had finally achieved what centuries of praetors and governors had failed to do. That he would be doing so outside of the Empire and under his direct – if hidden – rule would only be the salt enhancing the flavour of the meal.

  “As enjoyable as this has been, we have a big day ahead. It’s important to look our best,” Calchas commanded as he pushed his chair back from the table. Alvar stepped from his station by the wall to the door, opening it to reveal our praetorian escorts.

  Calchas’s amused gaze followed me as I made my way around the table to Marcus.

  “We were friends once,” I said. I see you.

  I took his hand in one of mine as I leaned close. It would look to the others – and most importantly, to the praetor – as an offering of reconciliation and nothing more, I hoped.

  “We exchanged gifts, and were true.” I gripped him around the wristband that I had not failed to notice earlier and pressed. “I hope in the morning, that is something I can find again.”

  Marcus’s eyes met mine, soft in relief, his fingers brushing the tattoo on the inside of my wrist – the triquetra I wore in Devyn’s memory, a symbol of the charm he had given me long ago. “I would like that too.”

  “Charming, brava.” Calchas applauded, and at his signal, we were each escorted from the room.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Gideon’s hands were on me as soon as the door clicked behind us, whirling me around.

  “What are you doing?” His eyes were furious. “You can’t possibly mean to go through with this?”

  “What choice do we have?” I gritted back. He had suppressed his true feelings so well during dinner, I should have realised it wouldn’t hold.

  Gideon pushed his hands through the black wings of his hair, his mind busily tearing through the possible scenarios, just as he had at dinner, just as we all had, and came up empty. There were no choices here.

  “He has us. We walked right into it; at least this way you and Féile will be happy.”

  He looked at me nonplussed and then he lifted one of the chairs by the table and smashed it against the wall. The door opened, and several sentinels rushed in, weapons raised.

  “No, no, it’s all right,” I said, raising my hands to fend them off. Well, one hand anyway, as the other hand was directed at my former husband, warning him to stay where he was. “It was an accident.”

  The lead praetorian was my once sympathetic guard Kasen. I smiled slightly at the sight of him, my eyes pleading. He nodded before ordering his men out.

  I turned back to Gideon. His golden eyes simmered with the anger inside him.

  “It won’t be so bad,” I said.

  “You are the Lady of the Lake. You need the Griffin,” he said.

  “I can live without the Griffin,” I said. Maybe. His eyes shuttered, and he turned away. Here we were, our last night, and I still didn’t have the strength to tell him how I felt. Tell him, you fool. What would be the point, though?

  “Gideon,” I called to him softly. I hadn’t meant for my words to sound like a rejection.

  He turned to me, and where words had failed, our bodies did not.

  He pulled me into him, and his mouth descended on mine, desperate and hungry, alive. So alive. I kissed him back fiercely, my hands tearing through his hair, under his tunic, across the warmth of his skin. Skin to skin, touch to touch, I was in the air, on the bed; he was over me, inside me, and we spun higher and tighter together. Frantic and heated, unable to feel, touch, smell, taste enough of each other as we came together.

  We collapsed as the storm faded, wrapped in each other’s arms. I fell onto his chest. Surrounded by the salty, woodsy scent that was uniquely Gideon. I closed my eyes and imagined myself back in Carlisle, the clean Lakeland air sweeping in through the open window, heard the laughter outside, the patter of small footsteps coming up the corridor.

  I would never know that again. I would never be there again. My heart was sore inside me. Maybe it would be better once I could no longer feel. Once I no longer needed this. Them.

  His hand travelled down the length of my spine, slowly, as if we had all the time in the world. He twisted me across his body until I was underneath him, his strong arms bracing himself above me as he looked down directly into my eyes.

  “How could you agree to his terms?”

  My lips trembled and I felt tears heat the corner of my eyes. I couldn’t speak. I pushed him away, and he let me. I turned my head away while I gained my composure.

  I bit my lip and breathed for a few moments until the tear in my throat grew less painful.

  “Why did you do any of it?” I threw at him the question that had been swirling inside me for months, years.

  “What?” he asked, thrown by the lack of context.

  “Why did you sign up for any of this? You didn’t have to. You didn’t even like me,” I reminded him.

  He huffed. “You really want to do this? Now?”

  “Yes, why not? What have I got to lose? I’ll never see you again.” I turned to look at him. “In fact, I wouldn’t worry about it too much. By this time tomorrow I won’t even care.”

  He flinched. His jaw tightened at the reminder. He had given up the last four years of his life to remove the previous handfast cuff.

  “What exactly are you asking, Cat?” He propped himself up on one elbow and looked over at me in the flickering light.

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I used to worry that you were forced into marrying me, but then you were angry at my a
sking Nimue to free you. It doesn’t really matter anymore. You will take care of Féile, right? That hasn’t changed – you still love her?”

  His eyes flashed.

  “All I’ve ever wanted is to have…” He stopped and started again. “My mother left when I was a child; my father never seemed to love me either. I told myself I didn’t care that I didn’t need anyone. Then that little girl wrapped her tiny fingers around my heart and, well… I would lay down my life to keep her safe, to ensure she always knows that she is loved. That will never change.”

  I nodded. I knew this. But there was one answer I didn’t have, one that gnawed at me.

  “Were you with me because Rion ordered it?”

  “You keep saying this. You think I slept with you out of duty?” He laughed out loud, turning sombre as he looked back over at me, a finger reaching out to trace my bare collarbone. “I was so angry at you for not being there for Féile, angry at what you had said before… but I couldn’t watch you drift away again. From the moment I first set eyes on you, you were so alive, so vivid. I pushed you, you pushed back. I was yours from the moment you stepped into that glade fit to kill me.”

  The day he had shot Devyn, magic had swelled up inside me to strike him down.

  “I thought you didn’t like me.” He had been horrible from the first moment we had met.

  “You walked into my life in love with another man.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I put a hole in a man’s shoulder, and you looked like you would raze the world in retribution. It wasn’t too hard.”

  A smile widened across my face.

  “You liked me.”

  Silence.

  “You liked me, liked me.”

  I nudged his ribs with an elbow, and he huffed in response.

  “But I was with Devyn.”

  “Mmm. You were so busy trying to convince everyone you were with Marcus, but I saw you. I saw where your heart was given. Not only were you in love with someone who wasn’t me, but it was Devyn bloody Glyndŵr. Oathbreaker. The legendary Griffin.”

  He looked at me. His eyes were dark with the past.

  “If he had lived, I would have stayed in my place. I knew you would never look at me as you did him. Until I discovered that there was a fate worse than that one. That you would look at me,” he breathed deeply, “and see him.”

  I gnawed at my lip, remembering back to the times when he had kissed me and frozen when I responded. Was this why? He hadn’t been recoiling from me, but afraid that I was only kissing him back in the hope that I might find some essence of Devyn within him.

  “I never saw him in you,” I said softly.

  He had told me his worst fear of that time, so I offered him mine in return.

  “I thought you hated me, resented me for stealing your independence. For needing you.”

  “Maybe I did for a while there.” He touched my chin lightly, turning my head back to face him so I would see in the golden depths of his eyes his pain, his darkest fears. “I married you, I made promises but you did not want them, did not want me. I know you were in pain so I stayed away. For as long as I could. I stayed away.”

  Promises? Our wedding vows. He had given me his vow, and I had never acknowledged it, had crushed it beneath my heel.

  “Then when you became so ill, I couldn’t stay away any longer.” He took a deep shuddering breath. “I lay on the other side of the bed, watching you fade away. I just wanted to be near you before you were gone. You turned into me, your head on my chest, and your heartbeat… it began to keep time with mine. I could hear it, feel it grow stronger. When you woke… I have never known anything like that night. And then you came to me at the ball like I lit up the world. You came to me, you were alive… but I was afraid it was him you sought. The next morning, what I said was unforgivable.”

  He had attacked me, had said horrible things to me, had pushed me away before I could do the same to him. As every woman he’d ever cared about had.

  “When Callum discovered that you needed me, needed me to be close to keep you whole, I felt like I had cursed you, like my need to tie you to me, to bind you to keep you from leaving me was something I had done to you. It was my punishment to be there for you but not touch you. How could I touch you? So I sat there night after night, so close, so needed, and not give in to my need.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me,” I said. “That you suffered my presence.”

  He gave a bitter laugh. “Oh, I suffered all right. I experienced the agonies of the damned. To have what I wanted so close but not be able to touch you. When I was weak and thought I might break, I would sit outside in the hall, hoping I was still near enough to be of use but needing to put a stone wall between myself and temptation. “

  “You weren’t with other women?” I asked. I had been so sure, and then all the more humiliated when I had to track him down the next day to ensure I had spent enough time close to him that I didn’t lose the fragile emotional health that allowed me to be near my daughter, unaware that he had never been more than a few feet away.

  He frowned. “Other women? For me, since that day, there has only been you.”

  That day? The day we had first met?

  “Are you telling me you haven’t been with another woman in five years?” I scoffed. Not if the tales I’d been told were anything to go by.

  “Like a Christian monk.” He smiled at my incredulity.

  “But I was with Devyn.” Was he really saying that if Devyn had lived, he would never have touched another woman?

  “I don’t have the healthiest relationship with love.”

  His amber eyes met mine solemnly, hollow at the future he had foreseen, and his lips twisted.

  “What a waste that would have been,” I teased. “So, all that time, after Féile was born…”

  “You were healing. I never looked elsewhere. I never really hoped, expected… this.”

  “So you didn’t marry me because Rion asked you to.” I smiled at him; it had always seemed out of character that this was the one order he had followed.

  “I married you because you would have died,” he teased, my noble knight.

  “And I’ve divorced you for the same reason – so we’re even,” I threw back flippantly. If my aim had been to keep the mood light it failed dismally as his face darkened.

  “Even?” he said bleakly. “We’d barely started.”

  Then he kissed me. A soul-deep promise of a kiss. A promise we both knew he couldn’t keep.

  I sat in the window, staring out as the pale dawn light crept slowly over the city. I felt cold despite Gideon’s tunic and the warm arms wrapped around me. I leaned back into him, holding on to every second.

  He squirmed as my cold fingers traced the winding Celtic swirls repeated through the oak tree on his thigh, up and across his hip.

  My lips curled in a smile. “Does my big, bad warrior find my fingers too cold?”

  He snatched up my fingers and lifted them, trapping them in both of his and blowing his hot breath into the space. “Your big, bad warrior finds your fingers an affront. How do you get this cold?”

  I laughed, and once he had freed my sufficiently warm hands, began to trace the dara knot on his inner wrist.

  I then drew the four-sided knot in the window, misted by the condensation against the cold glass. Beside it I drew the triquetra from my tattoo for Devyn, and beside that the triskelion I had received in Avalon, the three arms spinning to reach each other.

  “What do these three symbols have in common?” I asked him.

  “They’re all pretty common symbols,” he said, examining the three shapes on the window.

  His thumb rubbed against the Dara knot that had transferred from his inner wrist to my own.

  “Two sided, three sided, open, closed,” he muttered to himself. “They have nothing in common.”

  “They are all different, but they are all intertwined.” I retraced the intricate knots, different numbers of l
oops but all combined to make a single knot. When we tended the ley lines, we usually did it with three people; three is a significant number in druidic tradition. “Mother, maiden, crone. Earth, water, air. Past, present, future. “

  “What are you saying?”

  “I think that there are many stones at each circle, and they are each significant, but they always combine to make a single circle.” I traced the circle in the triquetra. Was this the answer? When I had descended at Mary le Strand, my anchor hadn’t been one of the three, it had been Gideon who had pulled me out. What if my reach could go further? Could I heal the fracture at the heart of the Strand line, free those souls trapped within? Once he left, I would never be as strong as this again.

  “When I started to tend the ley lines, I had this recurring dream that I was tethered to the shore, and when I come back, it is because you hold me here. I asked Nimue to set you free so that I didn’t need you and I think she said that whether I needed you was up to me but that the Griffin responds to necessity. After the Strand you restored me; having you close still felt necessary. I’ve had time to think carefully about what she said – that I have all I need and need all I have. Maybe the reason I have needed more of you than any lady that went before is because the ley line needs more than it ever did before? Maybe I’ve resisted using all the tools available to me.”

  “You think this is why it didn’t work before?”

  “It’s part of it.” My gut clenched. “But there’s something else, something I haven’t seen before. Why couldn’t I free those souls as I did in the borders?”

  “The last souls were trapped by war, a war fought with magic and technology; their deaths bound them to the land they spilt their blood on,” Gideon mused.

  “But the latents that were fed to the ley line here, their blood wasn’t spilt, their energy was drained. How are they bound? If I can’t free them, their pain will continue to twist the line.”