by Anna Elliott
NIGHT HAD FALLEN WHEN ISOLDE AT last stood again outside Marcia’s sickroom, her hands and the skirts of her gown still smelling faintly of the lavender blossoms she’d picked from their stems. Kian had slept, woken to take a meal of bread and cheese, and slept again, dreaming only at the last, when he’d muttered in his sleep and come awake with a ragged shout.
Isolde had offered to let him stay on the workroom’s bench through the night, but he’d shaken his head and heaved himself to his feet, saying he’d need of outside air. He’d gone, now, to walk the stone ramparts and then take his rest as he could with the other men, on pallets thrown on the floor of the fortress’s fire hall. Isolde had watched him make his way along the passage and out of sight with slow, dragging steps and had felt again a clutch of cold fear on his behalf for what he faced.
Though at least Cabal was with him. The dog had wakened with Kian and come to butt his head against Kian’s side until Kian said that he’d take Cabal out as well. And Isolde couldn’t, she knew, have kept him back without wounding his fiercely hoarded pride. She could only tell him to come to her if the pain grew too great for him to bear and let him go, limping slightly, one hand resting on Cabal’s neck as the big dog trotted along at his side.
Marcia was asleep when Isolde entered the sickroom, lying still beneath the blankets in the great carved bed, her fever-flushed face faintly yellowed by the light of the candle on the side table. Garwen, too, had slept, nodding in a chair by the hearth, though she came awake at Isolde’s entrance and sat up, starting to rise.
“No, it’s all right. Don’t get up.” Isolde crossed first to the bed to lay a hand on Marcia’s brow. Still burning hot and dry, without a trace of relieving sweat. Marcia stirred, slightly, at the touch, a shadow of pain crossing her sleeping face, but didn’t wake, and Isolde took a place on the low wooden settle beside Garwen’s chair. “Thank you for staying with her.”
Garwen waved the thanks away. Despite all the gold rings, her hands moved deftly, rolling up the drop spindle and woolen thread that had fallen from her lap as she slept.
“I’m always happy to be of use for a time.”
A tray with the remains of an evening meal lay on the table beside the bed: a bowl of what looked to have been broth and a half-eaten round of bread.
“Did she eat, then?” Isolde asked.
“She did.” Garwen tucked the spinning into a basket by her side. “Told me to go away and leave her be first, of course. Said she didn’t want any broth or bread or food of any kind.” Isolde could hear in Garwen’s voice the echo of Marcia’s sharp, fretful tones.
Garwen looked up, an unaccustomed gleam of humor appearing in the faded blue eyes. “I told her what she might be wanting and what she was going to have were two different things, and she was going to drink the broth if I had to hold her mouth open and pour it in.”
Then she stopped, a shadow crossing her face as she looked back towards the bed. “Poor child,” she said again. “Not her fault if she was born with a nature to curdle cream and a face to match. Can she live, do you think?”
Isolde thought of the noxious trickle of brown that had begun to mix with the discharge of pus and blood from Marcia’s womb. She shook her head. “No. She punctured the bowl, as well as the walls of the womb when she rid herself of the child. I doubt she’ll last longer than a few days more.”
Garwen sighed but nodded. “I thought so, from the look of her. Still—”
Her eyes were on Marcia’s face, but her look altered, somehow, as though the knot of pain inside her had briefly slipped beyond her control. “Maybe it’s for the best. It’s not as though, is it, she’ll leave anyone behind to be crying for her when she’s gone, poor girl.” She paused, then added, as though she spoke more to herself than to Isolde, “And it’s lucky you are, isn’t it, if you lose a child before they’re grown enough to break your heart.”
Strangely, just for a moment, Isolde could see a faint glimmer in the older woman’s face of the beauty she had once been, and she thought of Garwen’s lost son. Amhar, dead by his father’s hand, because he’d joined Modred, her own father, in his doomed rebellion against the High King.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I remember your son Amhar. He was a brave fighter—and a good man.”
Almost at once, the flicker both of bitterness and youth in Garwen’s look was gone, leaving her simply a plump, middle-aged woman once more, with a lifetime’s wealth in looted Saxon gold about her neck and with a half-embarrassed faith in protective charms.
Garwen’s eyes clouded behind a mist of tears, but she shook her head. “Thank you, my dear. But …don’t be sorry. The gods—God, I mean—knows women have enough to bear without taking the blame for men’s warring and killing ways as well. And it’s a long time ago now.”
She was silent, and then her eyes lifted to meet Isolde’s. “It’s a hurt that never stops bleeding, though, does it? Lose a child, and it’s—”
Isolde saw for a moment a tiny grave outside the church yard in Cornwall where Con, too, now lay buried, remembered standing beside it and feeling as though she’d ripped off a piece of her own heart and buried it under the rocky soil. “A broken place inside you that will never be whole,” she said.
Garwen watched her, then nodded as though in confirmation, making the gold pins in her sparse gray hair spark in the firelight. “I thought you’d be another that had lost a babe. You’ve the look of it in your eyes.”
ISOLDE OPENED THE WINDOW SHUTTERS AND stood looking out over the fortress courtyard, just as she had in the hour of dawn. The night now was moonless, the sky foggy and gray with luminous clouds, but the courtyard below was lighted by torches set into the walls above gateways and doors. She could see the sentries on the timbered walk atop the outer palisade, their shields painted with the gold lion of Gwynedd. Dinas Emrys was one of Madoc’s own holdings, defended whether he himself was present or no by a force of his men.
Isolde turned away to see that Marcia was awake, her head turning restlessly against the pillow, eyes fever-bright and a hectic flush on her cheeks.
“Do you want something to make you sleep?”
Marcia shook her head, lips pressed tight. “No. Nothing. I won’t take it if you try.”
“Then I won’t try,” Isolde said peaceably. Instead, she poured water into a cup and held it to Marcia’s lips.
The other girl let out an involuntary sigh as the cool water touched her mouth, and she drained the cup before pushing it away. Then she turned her head, looking across towards the window where Isolde had stood a short while before. She was silent a moment, then, “You’ve never asked me who the father really was.”
Isolde set the cup down on the bedside table. “Would you have told me if I had?”
“No.”
“Well, then.”
Marcia turned her head restlessly, thin fingers still twisting together. “He doesn’t know, either.” She was silent, dark gaze focused inward, then burst out, her voice suddenly harsh, “He doesn’t deserve to know. I might have told him. I might have been glad to carry the child, if—”
“If?” Isolde repeated.
But Marcia shook her head, pressing her lips tight together once again. “Nothing. And it doesn’t matter. The child’s dead.”
She stopped. Her voice was still bitter, but there was a glistening of tears in the close-set dark eyes, and a raw edge of pain in her tone. She stared straight ahead, gaze suddenly bleak. “The child’s dead,” she said again.
Isolde watched her a moment, then touched Marcia’s shoulder and said, “I’m truly sorry.”
Marcia went rigid, but then her shoulders slumped and she started to cry, silently, the tears rolling slowly down her face. She choked them back, though, pulling away from Isolde’s touch, and sat staring down at her nervously clasped and twisting hands.
“It …wasn’t for you,” she muttered, her voice so low that Isolde only just caught the words. “The curse doll.” Marcia’s head lifted and she met I
solde’s eyes. “It wasn’t for you. It was for—”
She stopped, and though Isolde waited for her to go on, the other girl only shook her head. After a moment, though, Marcia shifted in bed and asked, “Is it true you’re to go with Lord Madoc to Ynys Mon?” And then, when Isolde nodded, Marcia was silent once more.
“Don’t trust them.” Marcia’s head lifted abruptly, and her hand came out and gripped Isolde’s arm.
Marcia’s grasp felt like the clutch of a bird’s claws on Isolde’s skin, hot and dry and sharply hard.
“Who do you mean?” Isolde asked.
“The men of the council. Don’t trust them—any of them.” Marcia’s throat contracted as she swallowed, and when she went on, her voice was a whisper, thready and light. “There was treason among them before. And there’ll be treason again. No,” she added, as Isolde started to speak. “Don’t ask. Don’t ask me any more. Just …be careful. That’s all.”
Marcia let go her grip on Isolde’s arm and sank back, turning her face to the wall. Then, just as abruptly, she turned her head and looked up at Isolde once again.
“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” Her hands were clenched tight on the edge of the blanket, and she said, before Isolde could reply, “Don’t lie—I can see in your face it’s true. I’m going to die. And be damned for killing the child.”
Isolde started to reach towards the other girl, then stopped herself. Marcia would only view touch as an insult or added gall. “I think,” she said instead, “that God or anyone else would think you’ve suffered enough.”
Chapter Three
THE BANQUETING HALL WAS LIT by pine torches set in brackets along the walls, the fragrance of the resin sharp in the air. Madoc’s fortress at Caer Gybi on the isle of Ynys Mon was newly built; the timbered walls of the great banqueting hall were still unseasoned by years, though they were hung with tapestries and the trophies of war—Saxon war helms and double-headed axes, feathered spear shafts and polished swords, even a Roman gladius, the blade dulled with time.
Nothing, Isolde thought, to show that this had once been a holy place. Whether crushed by Rome or only by time, the gods of Ynys Mon were gone. Not even their echoes now remained.
She wondered whether it was that empty void where there should have been a lingering shadowy remnant, at least, that had made her certain from the moment she’d stepped into the hall that this meeting was doomed to fail. Or whether it was only the dark, brooding presence of King Goram of Ireland that cast such a pall of futility over every word spoken here thus far.
Isolde took a swallow of sweet honey wine from the cup before her, her gaze on the man who sat at the far end of the hall’s high table. Time, she thought, had been unkind to the Irish king. She would scarcely have recognized King Goram as the man she’d seen more than ten years before.
All those at the high table wore richly formal dress; Isolde herself wore a gown of deep crimson color, the neck and sleeves embroidered with gold thread, and her hair was caught up in a gold net seeded with pearls. King Goram of Ireland wore a tunic heavy with gold braid, the sleeves and collar trimmed with ermine, and a silver wolf-skin cloak was pinned to one shoulder with a ruby brooch as big as a child’s fist. Once vigorous and well built, though, his body now looked bloated, heavy, and flabby beneath the costly clothes, and rolls of fat spilled over the thick golden torque at his throat. Streaks of white now showed in his hair, and his face, too, looked ravaged, the skin puffy and shot with broken veins, the dark eyes all but lost in pockets of flesh.
And yet, Isolde thought, anyone in his presence would feel the force of the man, the iron-hard will beneath the ruined frame. Madoc was speaking to him, and though Goram was sprawled with seeming indolence in his place, eating of the platter of roasted boar, his gaze was keen and shrewd, never wavering from Madoc’s face.
A black-haired harper sat on a wooden stool beside the high table, his carved-wood instrument resting on his knee, and Isolde, listening, tried to fix her thoughts on the scene around her and to blot out the chill of the dream that had come to her the night before. Tried to block out, too, the memory of what the waters had shown her in the hour before dawn—though she’d needed the knowledge that vision had brought, before setting out with Madoc and the rest of the party on the day’s long ride through the forests and the journey across water to Ynys Mon.
The harper’s song soared high above the mingled men’s voices into the raftered ceiling overhead, and for a moment Isolde did forget all else in a sudden, aching memory of Myrddin. Though this man was almost as unlike the old, white-haired druid she had known as could be imagined.
Taliesin was both brother and bard to King Dywel of Logres, who now sat at the high table on Goram’s other side. But where Dywel was a big, darkly handsome, square-jawed man, with streaks of white at the temples of his tightly curling black hair, Taliesin was sleekly plump in his fine cream-colored wool tunic and breeches, with an oiled dark beard and a full-cheeked face. A face, Isolde thought, that ought to have been good-humored but was somehow marred by the twist of his mouth and the look of sullen, smoldering bitterness about his dark eyes.
Strangely, though, his voice was very clear and true, and the plump hands moved over the strings of his instrument like twin birds, with incredible speed and grace.
Who clears the stone-place of the mountain?
What the place in which the setting of the sun lies?
Who has sought peace without fear seven times?
Who names the waterfalls?
The song and the noise from the lower hall were enough to cover the voices of the men, so that Isolde could only guess at what Madoc was saying to the Irish king, but she saw Madoc pause as though waiting for an answer from the other man. Goram was silent, working at a scrap of gristle from between his teeth with the point of his knife. He was still slouched back in his chair, but Isolde, watching his face, thought that the look in his black eyes spoke of a mind behind the seeming indolence of his pose—a mind that was calculating his every move with deliberate effect.
The Irish king raised a hand and barked out an order to one of the slaves behind him, taking a deep draft from the drinking horn the man refilled before sitting back in his chair and fixing his gaze on Madoc once more to make reply.
King Goram had brought with him to Ynys Mon some forty of his own spearmen, who now took up the benches at the lower end of the hall along with Madoc’s own guardsmen and the war bands of the two men who sat, after Dywel of Logres, on King Goram’s other side.
Cynlas of Rhos was a big, hatchet-faced man of fifty or thereabout, broadly built and tall, the weathered skin of his face beginning to loosen over the bluntly prominent bones, his ox-blood-colored hair and mustache just threaded with gray. He’d brought with him his son, Bedwyr, and a younger mirror of his father—though Bedwyr’s fiery hair was perhaps a shade lighter, and his nose had been broken and inexpertly set.
Both father and son looked angry. Cynlas sat immobile with his arms folded across his chest, while Bedwyr shifted restlessly in his seat, turning his wine cup over and over in his hands, eyes darting this way and that. Bedwyr’s chin was thrust out, his face belligerent, making him look somehow younger than his eighteen or nineteen years. Even from the far end of the table, Isolde could feel the tension seeping from both men, though whether the anger was for Goram or for Madoc she couldn’t say. Cynlas had lost tracts of land—good land—to Madoc in a series of border skirmishes, had his cattle raided, his men slaughtered, and his settlements burned. As had Madoc, of course, by Cynlas’s spearmen.
But then, Isolde thought, watching Cynlas’s grimly set face, Cynlas has been shamed by defeat, and Madoc has won the place of High King. Bitter gall to be forced to sit at table with Madoc, then, drinking his ale and eating his meat—however great the need for alliance might be.
The tension also seemed to have spilled over into the lower part of the hall, where the guardsmen of the kings at table sat on wooden benches, eating and drinking mead. They wer
e all but silent, with none of the shouting or laughter usual in a banqueting hall, and sharply divided, Madoc’s men on one side of the room, Cynlas’s on another, with Goram’s own war band ranged on benches to the rear of the hall.
Isolde, watching the men eyeing each other across the central hearth, thought that the atmosphere of the great hall felt like hot glass, ready to crack and shatter into violence at any time. Already two of the men—one of Cynlas’s and one of Madoc’s—had exchanged a series of insults that escalated into a brawl. The two combatants had had to be pulled apart by their fellows from where they’d been locked together and pummeling each other with fists, because the evening had begun with the heaping of all arms in a pile outside the doors, token that this was a meeting of peace.
Now the harper’s song came to an end, so that Isolde caught Goram’s final words.
“—say of Marche and Octa may be true. But what is it to me? You—you yourself, Lord Madoc—have watered the very earth beneath this hall with the blood of my finest warriors. So I ask you, why should I care whether Marche and Octa together burn your settlements or take your wives for their whores, save that it leaves fewer cattle—and fewer women—for my men to seize by raid?”
Isolde saw Madoc’s jaw harden as though he were clamping his teeth down on the reply he might have made. A mark, she thought, of how much Madoc had changed in the time he’d served as High King. Five months ago, he would have fisted the Irishman in the mouth for a speech of that kind.
Cynlas, though, made a quick, convulsive movement, his hand moving to where the hilt of his sword would have been, had he not removed the blade and laid it in the pile of weaponry outside the hall door with the rest of the men. The movement was not lost on Goram. The Irish king turned in place with an almost serpentlike speed that was surprising in one of his bulk. Then he stopped, the veiled black gaze flicking indifferently over Cynlas before he spoke.
