I watched her pace, let her talk; and by and by she quietened, and sat at her dressing table in her shift to brush out her hair—something that calmed her as not even a sleeping-drench could,
I could see her grow visibly more tranquil with every stroke of the silver-backed brush on the still-golden tresses.
At last she set down the brush, stared unseeing at her reflection in the mirror, and sighed once, slipping off her shift and coming naked into the bed beside me. But love was not on her mind as she fitted herself against me, her head on my chest and my arms round her as ever.
"Do you think Arthur has found Donah yet?" she asked in a small voice, and I knew she was thinking of Gerrans now, who had gone on the embassy with his uncle the King.
"If he has not, be very sure he will." I kissed the top of her head, and stared up at the new constellations that had recently been installed on the underside of the bed canopy. Diamonds for white stars, sapphires for blue ones, rubies for red giants, topazes for yellow dwarfs… all most correct. I stared at the biggish gold diamond that I knew represented Fomor’s sun; and then I shot upright, shaking all over. Morgan surged up beside me, put her arms round me.
"Beloved, what? What is it? Have you Seen?"
Oh, I had Seen, right enough; and could not believe what I thought I Saw… Slowly I allowed her to draw me down beside her, to cradle my head against her breasts. But I still clutched at her arms like a terrified child, and indeed I still felt like one…
"When first we heard from Janjan that Donayah had been taken," I began hesitantly, still striving to See my way through the tangle, and not liking at all what I Saw, "you remember how surprised we were that Melwas, of all folk, would choose to do so?"
"Truly," she agreed at once. "We had made that treaty with him, for one thing, and you yourself have often told me how long he has been an admirer of Arthur—from that time all you yourselves kidnapped him away from his grandfather…" Her voice trailed off. "Oh Goddess—Kerridwen Rhen ferch Hu—nay, oh Talyn, tell me this is not so…"
"I cannot," I said. "For it is true."
"But why would he feign to be friend, all these years, and only now choose to take revenge for that? Besides, it was a reiving, not an abduction; even Nanteos had grudging admiration for the action."
"Again true," I said. "And therefore—
"Therefore something, or someone, else."
We were both silent, but the same name was ringing like a great bell in both our souls. Marguessan. Again. Or still.
"But how?" breathed Morgan at last. "How could she have turned Melwas against Arthur? And whyfor?"
"How is easy," I said bitterly. "No doubt but that he was indeed smitten with Donah, and would have wished to wed—and perhaps Marguessan had hand in that as well, a small pishogue or love-cantrip, naught easier for her to cast from afar. Or from close to, for that matter; she has long been difficult of finding, as you will recall. Maybe she was farther away than any of us ever thought to think."
"And the whyfor?"
I gave a short laugh. "I think we have long since had the answer to that. But as soon as the fior-comlainn is done with, I shall go and find out for myself. Perhaps I can learn something that may be of use."
I was wrong and right, as we most always are. The whyfor was not as I had thought, and what I learned was of more use than I could have imagined.
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
The fior-comlainn to settle the charges of Errian of Kerveldin against Gweniver Pendreic was set for noon three days hence, at Turusachan, in the Fian compall behind the commandery; it would be public, as such things are required by law to be, but minimally so—the compall stands could seat only a few hundred at best, and most of those places would be filled by the royal family and kindred and Councillors, and by the Fian command. Few ordinary Kelts would witness the defense of Gweniver against what was now thought by all to be the malice of Marguessan—and which I intended to prove so the earliest chance I had.
Errian’s chief second, one Rannick of Lissard, whose name struck me for some reason as not unfamiliar, made loud objections to the arrangements out of sheer bloody-mindedness, mouthing irately that it was by no means a neutral site as law prescribed, and suchlike, but really now. Gweniver was High Queen of Keltia; did the little toad hope to find a neutral site he would have to take this trial to some other galaxy…
By default as well as by unanimous decision of the Council Arthur would know naught about any of this until it was over. Ygrawn and others had wished him recalled at once, but Gweniver would not hear of it, saying Donah’s safety was paramount claim here and she herself was well defended already, and she had bullied the Council into so voting. It would have been impossible in any case, as none in Keltia or Aojun, either, knew just now where Arthur and Majanah were. He would learn the outcome soon enough, Gwen had argued; for the moment let him have no other concern but the safe recovery of his daughter. We did not like it much, but, as with so much of late, we had no choice in the matter.
Keils had spent the time in hard practice in the Fianna’s dueling-halls. Errian had elected to use claymores to settle the trial, which seemed to me and others more than a little vainglorious, but the choice was his to make. And as I watched Keils now from the viewing balcony of the hall, even to my far from expert eye the onetime warlord still looked to be one of the finest warriors ever to lift a blade. Mighty Mother, I thought, he will have to be…
"How comes it that this unheard-of Errian thinks to prevail against Keils of the Battles?" demanded Ferdia indignantly. He was watching with me as below Keils cut and blocked and parried with what seemed languid ease, and I was glad of the company. We had not seen so much of late of our old Feradach; he had come into his lordship of Valtinglas on Erinna some years since, and the duchas being a demanding one and difficult to run, he had spent less time on Tara among us than he or we might have wished. But on the instant he had heard of the challenge he had come racing to Caerdroia, full of fury at the monstrous wrong done Gweniver by her own Companions, swearing to beat them senseless one by one when all this was over, vowing that had only he been there sooner Keils should have been his second, instead of, as was now the case, Ferdia being Keils’s. He studied his principal now, critical but approving.
"Well, he thought not that Keils would be the one to fight him," I said reasonably. "He challenged Gwennach, remember, and had no reason to think that she would not champion herself. It was a gamble on his part, but one he thought to win. He did not know about—"
"—about the bairn to come," said Ferdia, nodding. "Aye, aye, just so. Ah, look, that old parry, so sweet he makes it look, so easy he takes the blade—Even so," he said, returning to his original line, "Gwen is no feather-arm! She is a better general than a sworder, right enough, but we all of us have seen her put steel to good account. I mind me of that time at Glenanaar—"
And we were off, trying to lose a little of the terrifying present in the long glow of our shared past. Even if Glenanaar was perhaps not the piece of the past I would myself have chosen to be minded of just this minute. Below, the match ended, with Keils victorious—as he had been in every single one of the seven back-to-back bouts he had just now fought, the best swordmasters in the Fianna having been his practice partners—and not one of them had tossed the Queen’s champion any charity touches, to be sure. Nor would Keils have wished or expected any: For him, it had ever been no quarter asked and no quarter given, and injustice was to him the greatest evil there could be. Which creed played no small part in this matter: that, and the utter unswervable loyalty to the Crown that had marked his service to Uthyr as well as to Uthyr’s two co-successors. And the other thing? What of that? Had Keils’s well-known loyalty to the Crown been surpassed here by his equally well-known loyalty to his Queen—to the woman who had long time been his beloved? And was that a good thing or no?
I went down with Ferdia to the practice floor below, where Keils was stripping off the dueling plastron and tre
ws he had worn for the session. He greeted us cheerfully, and motioned us to follow him to the adjoining pool-baths, where he plunged into the steaming waters to ease his muscles and stop them stiffening. We did not converse much; little needed be said.
He had seemed to take in good part the marriage of state that had been at first between Gweniver and Arthur, and it had certainly not altered his own relationship to either. For royal personages, no less than common folk, have had lennauns, or ceile-charach, or co-mates, even, for all the years of Keltia: Our marriage laws allow for any number of humane combinations of lawful union, and for quite a few outside the law as well. And indeed, Gweniver and Keils remained for many years a devoted loving pair, as they had been for even longer before; Arthur, who for his part wished to lose neither wife nor friend, Queen nor warlord, was troubled not in the least by their continuing union, and himself found love with Majanah of the Yamazai.
But then Arthur and Gweniver had suddenly seen each other plain, and had fallen in love, simply, suddenly; coming at last to that union of heart and mind, soul and dan, that Uthyr and Merlynn and Ygrawn and so many others had foreseen for them. And Keils had borne himself with grace and honor, even as had they. He had by then found Meloran, and left with her soon after for the estates Arthur had granted him on Gwynedd. But who knew what he felt in his heart, or spoke to the winds, alone on the battlements of his castle, in the dark Gwyneddan midnights? And who knew how Gweniver herself felt now, about this knight of hers returning to fight her cause once more, this time to such deadly and final purpose…
I started as Ferdia waved a hand in front of my face. "Miles away," he was saying cheerfully. "Star-leagues, probably—"
"My sorrow, Ferad." I put an arm round his shoulders and, bidding farewell until later to Keils and the small knot of Fians with him in the pool, left the commandery with Ferdia and walked back across the Great Square.
Halfway to the palace I changed my mind. "I have just remembered a thing I need to do in Seren Beirdd," I told him. "But do you go and talk to Gwennach, cheer her up. I think she and Morgan are finished by now with the day’s hearing-court."
Ferdia shook his head. "How can she think about little pismire grazing rights disputes on Kernow, when all this is on her?"
A good question, and one more folk than he were asking. For Errian of Kerveldin had followed another old tradition besides that of the sgian through the challenge-parchment: He had chosen that this fior-comlainn should be to the death.
And so it would be: Keils was nothing loath to rid the realm of "this slinter"—one of the more repeatable terms he had for his opponent—and he was still less loath to hazard his own life in the combat. But did he lose, Gwen’s life was forfeit along with his, and that was not to be thought of—though should it fall out so, the sentence upon her would not be carried out until her child was safely born. But Keils would not permit it even to be spoken of, and we were with him on that. Still, it must be thought of, and there had been several very secret Council sessions on it already…
"She thinks about those things because of all this which is on her," I said, answering Ferdia at last. "If anything can help her through these few days—"
I bade him distracted farewell, and turned my steps away from the palace, past the House of Peers and Senate and Assembly buildings, past the house of the Ban-draoi, to Seren Beirdd, which rose complete now in shining newness on the middle part of the palace plateau, hard by the entrance to the Way of Souls. And tried not to think of where that way led—up to the royal barrowing-ground at Ni-maen.
Star of the Bards was a fair house, for music and for words. Built of the lovely gold-veined creamy granite from the quarries of the Dragon’s Spine, it stood eight-rayed and many-towered around a central grassy court. Cloisters and smaller quadrangles filled out its interior, and at night its lantern windows could be seen from most quarters of the City.
I loved the place—indeed, I had had no light hand in its designing, for who knew better than bards themselves what bards might need by way of working precincts?—and spent more time there than my other duties did strictly allow. But I did not go there now to play musical truant, pleasant thought though that was. Nay: I had business, terrible business, with the head of the Order—business that bore on the two desperate situations in which Keltia now found itself. And I had found help here, before, when I came to Seren Beirdd in need.
Perhaps I should clear up one minor matter, before you in your rightful confusion begin calling hard on me for misleading you: I was not, neither at this time nor any time past or to come, the leader of the Bardic Order. Oh, to be sure, sometimes, often, I was called Chief Bard in popular nomenclature, and Pen-bardd by those who would honor or flatter; but in strictest truth I held no title in my Order grander than that of ollave. And that was by any way of weighing quite grand enough for anyone.
No more did I covet such rank: To be head of the Order of Bards was like herding cats. It was to be more the chieftain of an unruly fractious clann, to be more jurisconsult or administrator or politician than practicing bard; not my idea of a good time, or even a desirable one. ‘Chief Bard’ was a title used for any ollave in these days—the actual, presiding head of the order was known as the Blue Bard; or Derwydd, meaning Trunk of the Oak; or Cath-Awen even, Head of the Holy Inspiration—and was by no means the codified title given to the chief of the order that it would later become. Just so you know.
Any road, I went in at the hall’s west door, stopping even in my haste and preoccupation to marvel yet again at the wonder of the carvings upon it—a great frieze-fan of saints and kings and gods and bards and queens—and then headed to a wing of the huge brugh where only the most very senior masters were given leave to go. For I was planning my spying stint to come, and I had need of expert advice.
My advisor, indeed, was awaiting me. I apologized for my tardiness as if I had been a lad back at school, even as I made him the reverence due to a great teacher from his pupil—for so he was, and so I had been. Elphin Carannoc had been the first one ever to see in me the spark that, properly fanned and fed, could grow to hardship’s flame. He had been my teacher at Daars, set to instruct me by my foster-father Gorlas Penarvon, who was that time wedded to Ygrawn; he had been my companion in the days before there were Companions, with me on the roads of Gwynedd, spying for the Counterinsurgency against the Marbh-draoi; he had brought me to Tinnavardan, the secret hidden bard-school, and there had spoken for me to masters whose names rang like harps themselves down the halls of years.
I loved Elphin most dearly. Since Merlynn’s strange going, and Gorlas’s death decades since and Scathach Aodann’s only last year—she who had been the first true Fian Arthur and I had ever known, who had taught us both in the warrior’s way, Arthur of course far more successfully than I—Elphin was the one surviving mentor of my youth. And though I was called Pen-bardd, and he himself had been first of all Kelts to call me so, for my invention of the Hanes in my student days, I knew there were things he yet could teach me. For he was now Cath-Awen, and so I had come to him today.
He seemed to be quite fully informed of all the momentous happenings of the last couple of days; in the end, I had to apprise him of very little.
"Ah well," said Elphin complacently when I remarked on this. "Good it is to be king…"
"Maybe not so much, not these days, not for Artos," I said, and the smile went out like a snuffed candle from his face and from his eyes.
"Nay; maybe not so much. Well, Talyn, I do not know how I can help you. It seems a thing you alone can do, and you have it well lined out."
I sat back in my chair, much eased in mind. "That is all, really, I wished you to tell me. We are all asea here: Artos being gone, and Donah taken, and now this terrible thing come upon Gwennach—I did not know what else to do, how to help."
Elphin was silent a while. "How does the Lady Ygrawn?" he asked then, and I glanced swiftly at him in surprised gratitude. In the press of other fears and concerns, few indeed had
thought to inquire as to the state of mind in which Arthur’s mother and Gweniver’s aunt-by-marriage now found herself, and I found myself remembering how close Ygrawn and Elphin had been in the days of Daars and Coldgates.
"Well enough," I said. "Though when one has a reputation for strength unwearied and peace of mind untroubled, sometimes it is hard for folk to realize that strength and peace are acts of will, and can fail one when they are most needed…"
"It was ever so with Ygrawn," he agreed, smiling that smile which comes from memory’s heart. "Never did she receive the support that should have been hers; no one ever thought she needed it… And truth to tell, Talyn, you and I know well she has ever preferred it so! She will come through this, as will we all."
"Be it so to that." And for a short stolen time we spoke of other, lighter things, to cheer ourselves and ease our hearts awhile. But always, always, behind all else the dark clouds were rising; and how pitifully little we had as weapon against that night.
The day of the fior-comlainn dawned bright and cold. I was with Keils as he armed himself in the vesting-room just off the compall ground; Ferdia, as chief second, Betwyr, Alannagh, Tryffin and Ysild—Tarian and Grehan, as officers of state, could not join us, but sat with the judges in the ring without—all our oldest fellow Companions, together again, for comfort and for assurance of victory to come.
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