But then, for all Ailithir's fond hopes, I was a most erratic seer.
* * *
Chapter Six
For all its high far tragedy, the death of King Leowyn was to Arthur but a false drag across the scent he followed: that seeming mysterious secret he knew I was keeping from him. For my part, I knew he would have it out of me in the end—not even Luath was keener or steadier or more untiring in the hunt—but I was hoping to keep the thing my own a while yet. Obedient to Ygrawn's wish, I said no word to anyone of my sister's warning. If Gorlas knew, he was not saying either, and Ailithir, who did know, was for his part silent too.
But though all was silence, all at Daars was not well; and nor did I cheat or cozen myself into thinking it so. Naught to name or note, only a certain, or uncertain, feeling: watching Berain, Ygrawn's guard-captain, putting an extra edge on her weapons; listening to the undertones in Elphin's chaunting every night in hall; sensing the spring-steel tension in Ygrawn's whole body when she would embrace Arthur and me and brush a light kiss over our foreheads and give us goodnight. From Gorlas, yet nothing; he was as calm and unruffled as he had always been, so that I, looking to find in his face or voice or mien something of the stern secret rebellion of which Ygrawn had told me, grew only the more baffled the more I found nothing like, and wondered if it were there at all, or indeed had ever been.
But it had, and it was; and soon it was made plain to me in no controvertible manner.
It was a rain-filled afternoon in early spring, too late for snow and too soon for greening. Arthur and I, released betimes from our lessons by Ailithir's ill humor, were too delighted with our unexpected gift of freedom to quarrel with or question its cause: Pausing only to catch up our cloaks and call Luath from his doze before the fire, we pelted past the guards at the castle gate and headed down into the town.
Despite the rain and chill, the streets of Daars were far from empty: not thronged but modestly thick with townspeople, and a fair sprinkling of folk in from the outlying glens and townlands, come to do their marketing or visit friends or attend to tasks or truancies of their own.
We spent an idle hour or two wandering through the Stanestreets, our favorite quarter of the city, with its cobbled alleys and tall narrow houses and lanes leading into tiny squares lined with shops. It was a craftsmen's quarter: leatherworkers and potters and jewelsmiths and the like, all of whom knew us well and most of whom had enjoyed our modest custom. But my favorite shop of all, and the one that by tacit agreement we ever left for last, was the luthiers' workshop in
Swan Street
—the place where harps were made. On other visits I had hung round the artisans like a bee sipping from a flower, and they for their part had seemed pleased to share their joy in the work.
Today, though, the luthiers seemed to have no time for us. Perhaps the weather had got into the wood, and made them cross; save for a brief greeting they said little, and their mood seemed one of distraction. Though they would never have shown us open discourtesy—more for that we were their friends than that we were their lord's sons—still there was a palpable coolness, and after a brief five minutes Arthur gave them a rather short good-day and dragged me with him back into the street.
The rain was moving off now and the day brightening, so we strolled back leisurely through the main market-square, thinking to buy a pastai or two, or perhaps a sweet, to hold us until supper. We had not been paying much mind to how we went, and so when we found ourselves in one of the blindstreets that ran off the city walls, we turned round with a laugh and a groan for our inattention, to find our way back to our route. To our surprise, the street was not empty behind us. A man stood upon the rain-slick cobbles, effectively barring the path, and though he was dressed in the Arvon fashion, we somehow knew him to be no man of the district. Another shared our doubt: Luath had bounded forward, every hackle lifted on his massive neck and the tips of his gleaming fangs just showing under a curled lip. He was growling, very softly, though it came to me that the growl was more the one that a dog will use to discourage an enemy when he himself is afraid, rather than one of challenge or confident hostility. Arthur hastily hooked him by his studded collar, lest the stranger take offense, or worse.
But when the man spoke, his voice was pleasant and his words unexceptionable. "Hail, young masters! Where to on so dour a day?"
We returned the greeting, though how he had known to call us so—he had used the word in local dialect which translates as 'young lords' and is reserved for the children of chiefs—we could not guess. Certain it was he had not twigged us from our attire: As usual in our leisure hours, Arthur and I wore garb that would have disgraced ragpickers' brats—muddy boots drooping and half unsoled, threadbare tunics, trews with the knees worn through and leinnas out at the elbows—and we bore no badge or device that might have made our rank apparent to a stranger.
So while Arthur, ever my master in politesse, engaged the man in small chat, I withdrew a little, and studied the stranger with the wiles Ailithir had been at such pains of late to teach me. It was immediately plain to my kenning that this man wore concealment as casually as he wore his raincloak. Yet it seemed too that there was about him naught worthy of hiding: He was tall, but no more than the average; dark, but so were most Kymry in the west of Arvon; neither over-graced nor ill-favored of face. Nor was there any trace of accent to his speech: He seemed a man who belonged it might be anywhere, and yet he seemed also to have come from nowhere.
Whatever, clearly he did not belong in Daars, and stealing a sidewise glance at Arthur I could see that my fostern thought so too—though all the stranger would have seen in his manner was the courtesy any Kelt would have shown. Still and all, it was with a sudden thrill of trepidation, and a greater of astonishment, that I heard Arthur inviting him up to the castle for the nightmeal and lodging till morning.
It was not the invitation of itself that caused my wariness and surprise; that was law and custom in Keltia, bred into our very bones—we would no more think or study to do such than we would think to breathe, so instinctive a matter is it with us. Indeed, Arthur and even I had offered hospitality on other occasions, to other strangers, in the name of Gorlas and Ygrawn… But this particular stranger was not as those others had been; everything about him seemed just that least littlest bit wrong. He was just that one word too glib, the encounter had been just that minutest fraction too casual, the man himself the tiniest shade too eager to take up Arthur's invitation.
So I hung back a pace or two as we walked up to the castle, though the stranger repeatedly turned round to include me in converse, and I kept my thoughts shielded from anyone who might be trying to read them. For the one first thing that had struck me, a warning that had blazed like a fireflaw from the stranger's eyes to mine the instant our glances had met, was the certain knowledge that he knew me.
Knew me for who I was: Not some bedraggled street-waif, nor yet the lord's nephew of my masquerading, but Taliesin Glyndour, son of Gwyddno, escape of Gwaelod, brother to six troublesome thorns in the Marbh-draoi's foot. And running in tandem with this sensing was another, darker and more dire knowledge: This man, whatever he feigned to be, was almost certainly one of Owein's Ravens.
"Well of course he is a Raven!" said Arthur, rolling up his eyes at my obtuseness. "I confess I did not see it until that we had spoken for a time—certainly not until after you had kenned it—do you think I had asked him to supper else?"
I stared at him. We were in Arthur's chamber, where he was changing his clothes for something more befitting his father's high table; I had already attended to my own attire in my rooms down the hall.
"You know he is a Raven, and yet you invite him to take hospitality of us!" I threw an exasperated look of my own at Ailithir, who was sitting in the window seat, and did not see it. "Athro?"
At that he looked round at me, answering my glance with an uplifted brow. "Adhalta?" he replied, echoing my tone and overlaying it with a faint touch of surprise and reproof: Cl
early I had not shone so brightly here as I had thought. He saw this, too. "Think, Taliesin," he added in a kindlier voice.
I thought, and blushed. "Ah. For that it would be best to keep an eye on him ourselves, whilst he is in Daars."
"Aye so," said Arthur, lacing up his points. "And no bad thing would it be, either, for my mother and Scathach and Elphin to take their own measure of him. And you above all, far-eolas," he said to Ailithir, using the term of most respect—'man of knowledge'—from pupil to teacher.
Ailithir bowed where he sat. "My thanks for the name! Now I bid you listen both, and listen well"—here his whole being seemed to somehow hush—"This stranger in the gate is an enemy to us all; not to us of Daars only but to all in Keltia. The master whom he serves serves a darker master still—keep this well in mind. Taliesin, I doubt not but that your kenning is a right one: that Owein, having heard rumors, sends his Raven here to ferret you out. You did well to ken him so swiftly; and you, Arthur, did as well to think quick enough to offer him our board. See you do as well to guard your minds and your tongues during the nightmeal and after, and if you can do so without discourtesy, keep away from him entirely. We do not know as yet what skill he might have, and others better used to it will take up the kenning for you."
He rose then, and I saw that he was dressed for once as a lord of Gorlas's court, in paper-fine sith-silk and a floor-length robe of dark red velvet, a chain of pearls and rubies round his neck.
"Come, my lords; let us go down."
We were the last to arrive in the Great Hall; ordinarily this would have annoyed my foster-father, but I saw at once that he was taken up with the guest. Out of the tail of my eye I caught Ygrawn's quick unsmiling glance, and from over against the wall Elphin gave me the smallest of nods. My relief was intense—So, then, they had all been warned—and I spared a moment to study my fostern.
In the years I had been at Daars, Arthur had gone from a sturdy lad to a tall and well-grown youth. Fourteen years old next Wolf-moon, he was already taller than his mother, who by no means lacked inches, and like a staghound puppy not yet grown into its paws and bones, he was still a little stiff-limbed when he moved. But as the hunting-dog is seen in the puppy, so the warrior that would be was seen in Arthur even now; promise too of rare good looks—the chestnut hair and oakleaf eyes, the pale Kymric coloring, owing neither to Ygrawn nor Gorlas but to some other forebear; near or far as may be, but in no case of the line of Daars.
He crossed the hall now to lead his mother up to the high table at the room's eastern end, and I followed with Ailithir. Gorlas himself escorted the stranger guest, whom by now we had been let to know was called Perran, though I doubted even then that it was his truename, and later—much later—I knew that it was not. But the story he gave Gorlas now was that he was a traveller from Vangor in the southeast, passing through Arvon on a holiday journey. The tale was just plausible—even in those days of Edeyrn pleasure journeys were not entirely forbidden—but to my prejudging ear it seemed unlikely, and it seemed I was not the only one who thought so.
"From Vangor, is it?" murmured Scathach as she passed me on her way to her own place at the high table.
"Where is the wrong there?"
"Oh, very like none, to be sure; Vangor is a fine place. It would be finer still did it not lie within a few hours' ride of Caer Dathyl—and those who rule at Caer Dathyl these days."
And it was not the House of Don that did so… I watched Perran take the guest-place a little ways down the table's length. Caer Dathyl, the ancient seat of the princes of Gwynedd since the planet was first peopled, was now unwilling homeplace to Edeyrn's sword-arm—Owein Rheged. Stupid it was of Perran, or whatever his name was, to claim residence in Vangor—a place long under Owein's yoke and sway. It served only to focus attention on what had shouted itself from the first: that here was one of Owein's trained and trusted killers—one of his blood-beaked Ravens.
There would be direr dinners to come, but at that point in my young life that meal was the worst I had ever endured. To sit there, in sight of all in hall, choking down the odd mouthful of food, and more ale and usqua than I had any business drinking at my age, knowing all the while that not seven seats away sat a man who sought my name and life, and perhaps the lives of my foster-kin as well—It did not make for the pleasantest of evenings, and more than once I caught concerned glances from Arthur, Elphin and Ygrawn.
But all things end at last, though the evil ones seem to take so much longer to do so, and after a while I heard from a very long way off Gorlas calling the tune for the dancing that followed the feast. By now the drink had worked most powerfully upon me, and I was, not to put too high a gloss on it, just at that point of cupshot truthfulness where anything might be said—and too often is. Luckily, others had seen this too; and while Arthur, Scathach and Elphin were all casually converging on me with intent from separate corners of the hall, Ailithir got there first, and lost no time haling me out onto the broad terrace that hangs above the river. The cool damp night air flowed over my burning skin and cleared some of the ale-fumes away; when I could see again I looked up at Ailithir, and quickly lowered my head again.
"I am sorry! But he might have—"
"He might have been the one to give order for the death of Gwaelod, think you? And because you thought him so, is that good reason to give him cause to slay you too, or at the least deliver you over to Owein? Idiot boy!" He cuffed my ear, not gently, and my mind cleared wonderfully. "No Raven killed Gwaelod; that took a stronger hand than some hireling's. Nor do I think Owein himself did so. As for the other thing—" He paused for a few moments, that distant listening look coming over his face; then he was back. "I do not think he knows you," said Ailithir at last. "He may have come here under orders to seek you out, that is probably true enough. But I and others were kenning him close the whole night, and unless he is exceptionally skilled at hiding his thought, he has accepted the tale that you are Gorlas's poor sister's boy, hidden away for shame and pity. We are safe enough, maybe, for the time being."
I lowered myself carefully onto a stone bench, for the lights of Daars below were beginning to go in and out in a manner I cared for not at all.
"But?"
"But the fact that he has come here at all—that someone in power, Owein, or whoever, has seen fit to send in spies—that is what mislikes me so about it."
"It will be as my sister Tegau said, then," I muttered. "The Marbh-draoi turns his eyes to Daars."
"It seems so, and that is all we shall say of it here and tonight. Bed, you; and not so much as one finger do I lift to ease your potsickness."
"But I am not—" And then, my sorrow to say, I was.
* * *
Chapter Seven
When I opened my eyes next morning—at least I thought it was the next morning; to judge by how I felt it could more plausibly have been the middle of next week—the dreadful spinning giddiness was gone, and the sick spasms at the back of my sand-dry throat gone too. And so, I sensed at once, was Perran…
After a while it seemed to me that I might safely sit up; but the instant I did so, I fell back into the pillows with a piteous groan.
"Bad head?" came the mock-sympathetic question. I stopped whimpering at the altogether impossible pain in my head—there never was such a headache, my very hair hurt—long enough to squint muzzily at the indeterminate blob in the chair by the bed. The blob resolved into Arthur; he was holding something in his hands, and on his face was a smile to match his tone.
"Go away." I pulled the pillow over my head, rolling over as I did so, and was instantly sorry I had moved.
"Drink this," said Arthur when I had stopped making the pathetic sounds that seemed the only right response to how I felt. He was holding out to me the thing he had had in his hands: a mether half-full of some dark noxious-looking herbal swill.
"Never." He continued to look down at me, and after a moment I sighed and capitulated, gagging as I tried not to taste the mether's contents. "Done.
Now go away."
"Not until you eat this." When I jibbed, Arthur added coolly, "Not one word do you get of what news I have this morning heard unless you do."
It was only some dry oat-cake, and out of my shame I tried to hide how sublimely good I found it; my body craved the salt and sugar, and I gobbled up without further protest each farl that Arthur so inexorably held out. Not only that, but the vile-tasting drench he had all but poured down my throat seemed to work with the short crumbly cake to restore me to human state; already the punishing headache was fading to a more bearable throb.
"Better?" he asked.
"Much. Now what news?"
"Ah, that…" Suddenly he was drifting toward the door. "Well, there is no news. I lied so that you would eat, the herbs in the drench work better on a full stomach—'' Before I could marshal brain and arm to let me throw something at him he was gone.
Well for me that I threw nothing after all, for almost before Arthur was through the door from the one side Elphin Carannoc was coming in from the other. At sight of my teacher I sat up in the bed and ran my fingers through my elf-locked hair—so much better did I feel that I could perform even that rough grooming without undue discomfort—then looked up at Elphin with a face as near to guileless as I could that moment make it.
Not near enough, it seemed. There was a silence of perhaps five seconds' duration, and then Elphin and I both burst into laughter. He recovered himself first.
"I promise you it is no laughing matter, master Gwion." He laid the slightest glassy edge on the name, and the smile vanished from my face.
"I am well reproved," I said humbly, and the penitence was genuine. "Last night—"
"Last night you might well have ruined all, were it not for Ailithir's hauling you so timely off. You are well repaid for your foolishness." The glint then of a green eye. "If it is drowning you are after, do not torment yourself with shallow water."
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