Dark Moon of Avalon

by Anna Elliott

  Dywel glanced towards Madoc. “You remember—you saw him as well. Don’t you agree?”

  Madoc had been giving orders to the captain of his guard, but at that he glanced up, frowning. “You heard me greet him as such, didn’t you? I’d scarcely have let him inside if I’d not known him.”

  Cynlas looked from Dywel to Madoc to Isolde, and then back towards the door of the guest hall where Trystan and his escort had now gone from sight.

  “I could swear it’s him,” he said. He sounded less certain, though, his brows drawn together in a bewildered frown. “I could have sworn. …”

  He trailed off, and Dywel shook his head, clapping a hand on Cynlas’s back. “You’re fixed on the man from telling us all about him earlier, that’s all it ith. Come on. There’s likely a cup of ale left in the fire hall.”

  Cynlas passed a shaking hand across his eyes. “Maybe I’m mistaken. It’s been a. …” His words trailed away once again, and his broad shoulders slumped as though with defeat. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

  Watching Cynlas’s righteous fury collapse in on itself, Isolde felt a moment’s pity for him, even in the midst of all else. He must, she thought, have been so thankful to think that he’d found someone to fight instead of mourn.

  Before he could speak to ask any more, though, Isolde said, “I beg you would excuse me, my lords. The hour grows late, and my messenger will be waiting. I bid you all good night.”

  THE FIRE IN ISOLDE’S WORKROOM WAS unlit; the herb-scented air felt chilly and damp as she stepped inside. The flare of torchlight from the passage outside was enough for Isolde to find the tinderbox beside the brazier and kindle a small flame, then light the room’s single oil lantern as well. She hung the lantern back on its hook in the wall and slipped out of her traveling cloak, only then turning to where Trystan sat on the corner bench, leaning back against the wall as Kian had done, days ago.

  He shifted slightly under her gaze, then straightened in surprise as the movement knocked something from the bench to the ground with a metallic chime. He bent to pick it up.

  “What—”

  The first shock of seeing him was wearing off. Even still, though, Isolde looked at the object he held blankly before she recognized Garwen’s Latin-inscribed iron ring and remembered that she’d taken it off her finger when salving Kian’s wounds and forgotten it here.

  “It’s meant to trap devils,” Isolde heard herself say.

  Trystan glanced from the ring to her, one eyebrow cocked. “So you just—what? Hope your devil speaks Latin?”

  Isolde felt a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. “I suppose.” Then she sobered and added, “Garwen gave it to me. She was Amhar’s mother—you remember Amhar?”

  A brief stillness came over Trystan’s face, and then he nodded. “I do. A wicked shot with a bow and arrow. Good with a sword, too.”

  His voice hadn’t altered, but Isolde wondered whether he’d fought in the battle where Amhar had died. He might have. Trystan would have been—Isolde tried to think back—fourteen, she thought, when Amhar had died by his own father Arthur’s hand. Old enough that he’d been fighting with the rest of her father’s army for nearly a year. With that still startling clarity she could see herself at eleven or twelve, trying her hardest not to cry every time he rode away. And then laughing and begging him to take her out fishing or hunting with him when he returned.

  Isolde wondered for a moment whether it was Trystan’s presence that made the memory especially clear, the breath of longing for everything about the years before Camlann unexpectedly strong. Because Trystan was likely the only one she knew who would still remember that time, too. Nearly everyone else was gone—killed at Camlann or dead in the year of plague that had followed.

  “I’ve—” Isolde began, then caught herself, her eyes on Trystan’s face. He was thinner than he’d been five months before, his face leaner, the angles of temple and jaw more well defined. His skin was sun-browned, making his eyes seem even more intensely blue, and his gold-brown hair was longer, tied back now with a leather thong. She could still trace in his features, though, the boy she’d grown up with years before, and it brought an odd, unsteadying shiver to feel that Trystan was now at once both a stranger to her and as familiar as the searingly bright flashes of memory that still caught her off guard.

  And what had she been about to say? I’ve missed you? That, Isolde thought disgustedly, is something I might have said to him at eleven or twelve, when I still believed with all my heart in an oath of friendship sworn in blood. But hardly now.

  She’d changed in the last seven years. Of course she had. So had Trystan. And now she felt …surprise seeing Trystan again. And relief, too. Because for all she’d known otherwise, he might have been dead, lying facedown in the mud or bleeding on a far distant battlefield, sightless eyes staring up at the sky. But she felt something else, too, beneath the relief and the shock. Something that flowed with a hissing warmth through her veins but that she couldn’t quite name.

  The silence between them lengthened, and Isolde was the first to break it, pouring ale into a cup as she’d done for Kian days ago. “Here. Take it. You look as though you haven’t eaten or slept in days.”

  Trystan looked down at the cup of ale she put in his hand, then shrugged, and tossed it back in a single draft. “I may feel like it, too, but it wasn’t quite that bad.”

  Isolde’s eyes went to the bandage tied around his right hand. “Are you actually wounded—or was that only an excuse for speaking to me alone?”

  Trystan, too, glanced down at his bandaged hand. “What? Oh, that.” He shook his head. “No, it’s nothing. Slipped a couple of finger joints out of place, but I put them back myself. It’s fine, now.” He reached to pour another cup of ale from the jar, then asked, almost as though he’d read her thoughts, “Is Kian here?”

  “He’s—” Isolde started, then stopped. She was remembering Kian’s hand going, as though by reflex, to the patch over his eye as soon as he’d recognized Trystan outside. And then Kian had melted quietly away outside, before Trystan could pick him out of the crowd, as though he dreaded seeing the younger man. As, Isolde thought, he probably does. Any man maimed in battle dreads having the damage noticed for the first time—and I owe it to Kian, she thought, not to speak of his capture behind his back.

  “He’s safe,” she said. “Risen to one of Madoc’s most valued fighting men.”

  Trystan’s head tipped in a brief nod of acknowledgment, and there was another moment’s silence. Then Isolde asked, “So why have you come?”

  Trystan let out his breath, setting the cup of ale down, and said, his voice evenly controlled, “Because Hereric’s wounded. Or dead by now. I don’t know.”

  Isolde remembered Hereric’s broad Saxon face and slow smile, his big, gentle hands that spoke for him, since his tongue could not. An escaped slave, Trystan had thought him. Though no one could say for sure. Hereric, simple as a child, never spoke—even in gestures—of his past.

  She asked, “Wounded—how?”

  Trystan leaned one shoulder against the wall, raised the cup, and drank again. “We were attacked. Five days ago. A war party—I don’t know whose they were. No insignia, but their weapons were good quality. Professional fighting men, not just chance bandits.”

  Trystan was never—had never been—easy to read. But growing up with him, Isolde had known his face as well as she knew her own, had learned to recognize what it meant when he sat as still and as casually as he did now and spoke in such an evenly controlled tone. Seven years ago, she thought, I’d have said he was furiously angry—either at the men who did this or at himself for not stopping them.

  Or because he was here, about to ask aid from her? Isolde felt the hissing, unidentifiable feeling spread once more through her veins as she thought, He must be hating this.

  Aloud she asked, “And Hereric was wounded?”

  Trystan rubbed a hand tiredly across his face, then nodded. “Took a blow to the arm. It’s broke
n—badly so. I had to leave him on the boat. He’s too weak to move.”

  “I’m sorry,” Isolde said. And she was. It hurt her to think of Hereric frightened and in pain. “Is he alone?”

  Trystan shook his head. “Not alone. I paid an old fisherwoman to stay with him—make sure he had food and drink. The gods know whether she’ll just take the money and walk away. But she seemed stupid—so maybe she’s honest as well. The two often go hand in hand.”

  “And you came here. Looking for me?”

  It was hardly a question, but Trystan nodded again.

  “I don’t understand, though,” Isolde said. “There must be other healers.”

  Trystan jerked one shoulder impatiently. “Of course there are—the surgeons who serve the war leaders and lordlings of these parts. And can you imagine their faces if I walked in and asked them to please set the broken arm of an escaped Saxon slave? That’s assuming I could even get near enough to one to ask. Men like us aren’t exactly welcome in every corner of the land.”

  “I suppose not.” Isolde wondered for the first time how Trystan and Hereric had come to be moored so close by. What would bring two mercenaries, their swords for hire to the highest bidder, to the coast of Gwynedd at all?

  Trystan’s blue eyes were steady on hers, though, and he said, his voice quiet, his face completely serious now, “Please, Isa. Will you help him?”

  The words rang oddly in Isolde’s ears, but it was a moment before she realized that was because he’d used the old childhood name. She thought, Trystan is probably the only one left alive who would think to call me that now.

  She said, “You don’t have to ask. Of course I will.”

  And then she went suddenly still, shocked into immobility by idea that had struck her like a dash of cold water across the face. She thought, It might be possible. It might—if Trystan agrees. And if he does—

  Trystan’s gaze still rested on hers. Slowly, Isolde said, “I’ll do everything for Hereric that I can. And if I asked you for help as well, would you give it?”

  Trystan’s brows rose, and he was silent a moment before replying. Then: “Is this the price of your care for Hereric?”

  His tone was neutral, but even still Isolde felt anger coil and harden in her chest—and in the same moment realized that the unnamed feeling had been anger, all this time. Not so much at what Trystan had said, but because Trystan, her childhood companion, oath-sworn friend, protector and playmate and brother she’d never had—

  Because he had left five months ago. Would have slipped off without even saying good-bye, if she’d not forced that much out of him, at least.

  Which isn’t, she thought, entirely fair. Just because we grew up together—were friends at thirteen and fifteen, seven years ago—doesn’t mean Trystan owes me anything now. The anger refused to die away, though, and she demanded, “Do you honestly think I would do that? Ask you to bargain with Hereric’s life? You know me better than that.”

  For a long moment, Trystan was silent, his gaze on her face, a look she couldn’t quite read at the back of his blue eyes. And then he nodded. “Maybe I do.”

  The room was dark, save for the lantern’s glow, deepening the shadows about his mouth and eyes. Trystan leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, and then he said, “All right. Tell me what you need.”

  Isolde let out her breath. “Do you know Cerdic of Wessex’s country? Could you cross safely through his lands?”

  Trystan’s brows lifted once more, but he said, “I suppose so. It’s an unstable country—there’s always raiding and fighting along the borders. But if need be, yes.”

  “Fighting,” Isolde said. “You mean the hostilities between Cerdic and Octa of Kent?”

  “Cerdic, Octa, and whichever of their warlords take it into their heads to steal cattle or burn a village.”

  “You’ve seen it firsthand?”

  Trystan tipped his head in a brief nod.

  “Which of them did you fight for?”

  One corner of Trystan’s mouth curved again. “Not for Octa, or I’d not be able to safely cross through Cerdic’s lands.”

  Not for Octa. Until she heard him say the words, Isolde hadn’t realized she’d instinctively tensed in anticipation of his response. Not that she knew enough about Cerdic of Wessex to judge him preferable to the Kentish king. Cerdic might have been her father’s ally, but she’d never met or even seen him that she could recall.

  Modred, as she’d told Kian, had never had much attention or thought to spare for her, his only daughter—though she thought he’d loved her, in a distant, abstracted way. But for all her life, before Camlann, he’d been at war with Arthur. Modred had been constantly on campaign, leaving Isolde and Morgan in one garrison or another. She’d scarcely seen him, her own father, much less his allies from those years.

  “Does Cerdic know that you’re. …” Isolde stopped, caught off guard by how hard it was to say Marche’s name. “That you’re his grandson?”

  She’d thought Trystan might be angry at the question—and a shadow did flicker across his face, but only briefly. Apparently, whatever ghosts the mention of Marche’s name raised either were laid or were such constant companions that by now he hardly spared them a glance.

  “Tell Cerdic that I was the son of Marche—the traitor who cost him victory at Camlann?” Trystan raised the cup of ale to his mouth and drank again. “He’d not have trusted me with a table knife, let alone a sword if he’d known that. Besides, it was Cewlin—one of Cerdic’s warlords—I fought for, not Cerdic himself. I scarcely saw Cerdic, and never to speak to.” He frowned. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”

  Isolde nodded. “You told me at Tintagel, yes.”

  She was silent a moment, watching Trystan’s face, patched with shadow by the lantern’s flickering light. She could feel how easy it would be to fall back into her old childhood way of speaking to him—almost as easily as though she talked for herself. And yet, it was still hard to join her memories of the Trystan she’d grown up with to the man she’d met five months before. A man with the first joints of the fingers on his left hand gone and the brand of slavery on his neck.

  Trystan shifted, stretching his booted feet out towards the glowing brazier, and gave her a quick, direct look from under his slanted brows. “So what does my having fought as a mercenary for a Saxon warlord have to do with what you want from me now?”

  It was very late—or very early. Isolde could see the garden outside the window beginning to lighten with the approach of dawn. She rubbed her eyes. “First, let me tell you what’s happened in the last days.”

  Trystan sat in silence, the cup of ale in his unbandaged hand, while Isolde told him. She left out Kian’s story of the reward Marche had offered for Trystan’s capture. Because she might have a rule for herself about not flinching away from mentioning Marche’s name. But she absolutely couldn’t face the thought of speaking with Trystan about him tonight.

  She told him, though, of the meeting with King Goram, of Marcia’s warning of treason—and of the morning’s ambush as they traveled back from Ynys Mon. Despite her efforts, her voice faltered slightly when she came to Bedwyr’s death, and she looked up to find Trystan watching her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Not that you need me to tell you, but there was nothing else you could have done for him.”

  Isolde looked away. “No.”

  “It’s—”

  But the control Isolde had been hoarding all throughout the long day abruptly snapped, and she cut him off. “If you’re about to say it was a good death, then don’t. There’s no such thing. Death is ugly. Brutal and sordid and ugly. Always. Every time.”

  She realized that there were tears on her cheeks, and she scrubbed them furiously away.

  Trystan made a brief movement, as though he were about to reach out for her. And Isolde felt a twist of something like panic at the realization of how much she wanted him to. As though she truly had been ten years old again, and he could sti
ll put an arm around her when she cried. As if she could lean her head against his shoulder and forget all that troubled her—surrender it all into his hands.

  Trystan checked the motion, though, instead shaking his head. “No. I wasn’t going to call it a good death. Bleeding to death is a filthy, unpleasant way to go, and I don’t suppose Cynlas’s son liked it any better than the other men I’ve seen die that way. I was only going to say that it’s always a dirty trick of fate when you’ve got to kill a man to be kind.”

  Isolde nodded. Trystan’s words had scarcely been ones of comfort, but even still Isolde felt a clenched knot inside her chest begin to ease and loosen a bit. This was why she’d missed Trystan with an ache that was almost physical. Because he understood; he always had.

  But that was all. The warmth that was flooding through her veins didn’t have to mean anything more. Anything but that it was good for once to feel that she could trust and rely on someone, good not to feel so completely alone.

  But Trystan had left—disappeared once before. He would surely sooner or later leave again.

  And then, abruptly, Isolde remembered Cynlas’s words in the courtyard outside. Though Trystan had given no sign in speaking Cynlas’s name that the King of Rhos meant anything more to him than another man.

  “Do you—”

  She checked herself, though, before she could finish, and waited a moment, wiping the last of the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands and then drawing a steadying breath. “What I wanted to ask was this: you fought for Cewlin, Cerdic’s man. Could you get to wherever Cerdic is holding court now?”

  Trystan looked up sharply, brows drawn. “Why?”

  “Because I want you to take me there. Cerdic was my father’s ally—he has as much reason as Goram to hate Marche. And he’s Octa’s enemy as well, for all the rumors are that Octa is now seeking to end the fighting between them. Goram has rejected an alliance between his armies and ours. But we still need more men—more supplies—if they’re not to be crushed. Cerdic is the best and clearest choice.”