by Anna Elliott
Mother Berthildis stopped, sharp black eyes resting on Isolde’s once more, and again Isolde had the sense that the older woman’s gaze looked through her, read her thoughts, saw every corner of her inner self. Clearly, though, she expected some response, and so Isolde nodded again. “Yes. That is what I ask.”
The abbess gave another brief snort. “Not one to scare easily, are you? I’ve known strong men to crack and own up to a crime they’d denied when I looked at them that way.”
Isolde smiled a little. “I’m sure that’s true.”
For a long moment, there was silence in the small, plainly furnished room. Then Mother Berthildis nodded abruptly. “Very well.”
Isolde was so shocked that for a moment she thought sheer weariness was making her ears play tricks. “Did you just say—”
“I said very well.” The older woman’s voice was edged with impatience. “This is of some importance, is it not?”
Still stunned nearly speechless, Isolde nodded, and the abbess heaved herself to her feet. “Very well, then. Christ tells us to treat with kindness the benighted strangers who seek shelter at our doors.” A trace of humor flickered momentarily across Mother Berthildis’s lined face and she added, “Granted, this request of yours is likely not what He had in mind. But still, I believe in extending a hand to those in need. And”—again her intent black gaze swept Isolde’s face—“and in trusting those I deem worthy.”
The flash of unexpected sympathy or kindness in her dark gaze brought a sudden lump to Isolde’s throat. But before she could speak, Mother Berthildis turned away, crossing to the room’s single wooden shelf and lifting a heavy volume, bound in leather incised with a cross. She set the book on the table before Isolde, then turned to face her. “Will you”—all trace of the sympathy was gone, and her voice and face were suddenly fierce—“will you put your hand on the book of God’s holy word and swear that the guardsmen will suffer no lasting harm from the draft you put in their ale?”
Isolde lifted her gaze to meet the abbess’s. “If you wish it, I will. But since, as you say, I have promised not to lie to you, I must tell you that swearing on your holy book will probably not mean to me what it would to you.”
For another long space of silence, Mother Berthildis’s fiercely black gaze rested on Isolde’s. And then, slowly, the abbess nodded her head. Likely, Isolde thought, I told her nothing but what she already knew, and the request was nothing more than another test of good faith. She made herself sit without moving while the older woman frowned, seemingly lost in thought. Then she nodded her head once again.
“Very well.” Again the black eyes met Isolde’s, but this time Isolde thought their look had softened. There might even have been a shadow of sympathy in their depths. “Will you swear, then, on whatever precious thing it is that you have left behind in coming here?”
Another of those knife-edged memories of Trystan’s sleeping face flashed through Isolde. She closed her eyes against it just briefly, and against the press of hot tears that rose to her eyes. Let herself think too long on Trystan and she’d sit here weeping until every last scrap of the final reserves of strength she was drawing on had drained away.
She drew a breath, then looked back at the older woman and made herself speak as steadily as before. “I swear on what I have left behind—on all I hold dear—that Cerdic’s guardsmen will come to no harm by my hand. They will only slumber and wake in the morning as from heavy sleep.”
Isolde was expecting another silence, another penetrating look from the small black eyes. But instead Mother Berthildis nodded her head briskly. “Very well, then. The hospitality of the Abbey of Saint Eucherius is yours. And I will pray that whatever it is you would say to King Cerdic meets with a receptive ear.” She stopped, and Isolde thought just the hint of a grim smile curved the thin trap of a mouth. “Though whether my prayers will be any more successful at touching Cerdic than those of his wife remains to be seen.”
TRYSTAN LED THE WAY ALL BUT soundlessly through the night-dark forest, trusting in his companions to stay close. He probably ought to check that Eurig and Hereric were keeping up—for Hereric’s sake, at least. But he didn’t trust himself to stay on the alert for danger, worry for his companions, and manage to block out the black pounding in his skull.
Yes, perfect. He might have known that a dose of poppy syrup would leave him with an even worse headache than wine.
Though at that, the headache was far better company than his own thoughts, beating like the black ache of a bruise. Ever since he’d woken and found Isolde gone.
Just for a moment, he wished Isolde were before him, not because he’d know she was safe as because he’d be able to take her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. Powers of hell, what had she been thinking of?
Unless something had happened to her. A dozen images, each more stomach-twisting than the last flashed through his mind. With an effort, he pushed them away.
She’d left those signs for him to read. Gone. Don’t follow.
Trystan pushed a branch aside before it could slap him in the face and wondered whether she’d actually drugged him on purpose so that she could get away. But only for a moment. Isolde was too brave for her own good, and she lost her temper in a moment at cruelty or injustice and broke her heart because she couldn’t heal the whole goddamned suffering world. She wouldn’t have done that.
Probably.
Trystan paused, eyes scanning the darkness, and wished the moon were brighter or the trees here less thick. Unless any guard patrols out tonight were carrying flaming torches, they were just as likely to walk slap into them.
He shook his head and started to move again, rubbing the space between his eyes. Isolde wouldn’t have tricked him into swallowing the draft so that she could get free. Probably. At any rate, he was the one who’d been idiot enough to take the draft she’d given him, leaving her there alone.
He’d done it already a dozen times or more, but still he replayed everything in his mind, trying to imagine what in the nine caverns of hell could have made her get up and go off on her own. Something he’d said?
He’d managed not to give vent to the hot, unspent fury that even now was making the muscles of his arms spasm and his hands clench. Not much of it, at any rate. She hadn’t needed the burden of that on top of everything else.
He’d told her Marche was nothing to him, now. Which was true. And yet he still couldn’t escape.
It figured. It bloody figured that the son of a goat-rutting bastard would turn up now and poison his life all over again.
From somewhere up ahead, a branch snapped, and Trystan froze.
Voices. Speaking one of the eastern Saxon dialects. A band of Octa’s men, most like.
He could feel Eurig behind him going still as well, sense him silently drawing the knife from his belt. In an instant, Trystan had gripped his own knife and turned to hold it at Eurig’s throat. The other man stiffened with shock, but he was too well trained to do more than draw in a startled breath.
“Get Hereric out of this.” Trystan said in a voice that was almost soundless, less carrying than a whisper.
Eurig answered in the same tone. “Are you out of your skull?” The moonlight was just bright enough for him to make out Eurig’s expression of disbelief. “You think we’re going to go off and leave you here to die?”
The voices were coming closer. Trystan heard the crunch of leaves under at least half a dozen feet. He pressed the knife a bit harder into Eurig’s throat, though still not hard enough to break the skin. “Get him out of here. Swear it. Or I swear to every demon in the underworld that even dead I’ll come back and plague you to the end of your days.”
ISOLDE LAY ON HER BACK, STARING up at the plastered ceiling of the small novice’s cell Mother Berthildis had offered her for as long as she wished to stay. She had washed, tidied herself, eaten a little of the meal of bread, dried apples, and cheese that the abbess had given her. She had even rested briefly on the same straw-filled
mattress where she now lay. She’d been too much on edge, still, to sleep, though, and after a time she’d risen and gone to the kitchens as Mother Berthildis had instructed to collect the supper tray prepared for Cerdic’s guards.
The two burly, flaxen-haired guards had been absorbed in a game of dice and had barely glanced at her as she’d delivered the food and cups of ale—laced, now, with the remains of Isolde’s store of poppy draft, which she’d emptied into the cups on the way across the abbey courtyard to the guest hall. And now she lay once more on the rustling straw bed, marking the time by the shuffling footsteps in the passage outside as the nuns went to the chapel to pray.
Finally, when she judged the poppy would have had time to take effect, she rose, her heart beating quickly, drew her cloak about her shoulders, and stepped out again into the night.
As she entered the abbey guest wing, her stomach tightened in anticipation of what she would find. But the poppy draft had worked. When she reached the entrance to Cerdic’s rooms, she found both guards deep in drugged sleep, slumped down with their backs against the wall, snoring lightly and with their spears and painted shields fallen unheeded to the ground.
Isolde stood a moment looking down at them. Then she stepped over their prone forms and pushed open the heavy wooden door.
Inside all was in darkness, save for the light of a fire in the hearth, but after the trip across the darkened courtyard, her eyes were already adjusted to the night. She could just make out a man’s form seated before the flames, his face in shadow from the light at his back. For a moment, the silence was so absolute that Isolde could hear the beating of her own heart. Then a dry, old voice spoke out of the shadowed dark.
“Well. It’s been a long time since a beautiful young woman sought my bedchamber at night. Might I ask who you are?”
KING CERDIC OF WESSEX WAS AN old man. Nearly as old, Isolde thought, as Mother Berthildis must be. His beard was white, plaited into a single long braid that reached nearly to his breastbone. He wore his snow-white hair long, with several strands here and there plaited into braids whose ends were capped with gold. His hands, too, were stiff with gold warrior’s rings, and the skin was parchment thin, blue-veined, and flecked with spots of brown. But what struck Isolde when she looked at the Saxon king was not the age carved into every line of his frame. What struck her like a blow to the pit of her stomach was how plainly, despite the gold, the braided hair, the battle scar across the bridge of his nose, the Saxon king’s features mirrored those of his grandson.
The skin might be loosening over the bones of his cheekbones and firmly cut jaw, but Cerdic had the same lean features, the same slightly slanted brows as Trystan. And the same startlingly blue eyes as well. It had made Isolde slightly dizzy when she’d first entered the room—and wrung from her a twist of bitter amusement. Clearly, the fates were refusing to let her stop thinking of Trystan—or forget, even for a moment, that Cerdic’s daughter had been Trystan’s mother.
She had given already her account of who she was and how she had come to enter his private rooms. Now she sat on the hard wooden chair Cerdic had offered, waiting in silence for his response.
Cerdic had lit a lamp, carrying a burning taper from the hearth fire, so that the room about them was illumined by a flickering orange glow. It was a square-built room, very plain, with lime-washed plaster walls and a rush-strewn floor. But furs—silvery wolf and black bear pelts—had been hung to keep out the drafts, an immense curtained bed had been erected in one corner, and a set of drinking vessels worked in chased gold stood on the room’s single table. Plainly, Cerdic had brought his own comforts with him to furnish the room for the duration of his stay.
Cerdic himself was now studying Isolde impassively, his lean face as well governed at concealing his thoughts as Trystan’s had ever been. Impossible to tell what went on behind the guarded blue gaze or guess whether he was angry over this midnight intrusion into his private apartments. Impossible even, Isolde thought, to guess whether he believes me or no. The Saxon king wore a heavy, fur-lined robe over a linen under-tunic, and on his breast a heavy collar of gold set with deep red stones that shone like drops of blood.
When at last he spoke, it was in a voice that sounded rusty and faintly creaking with age. “Well then, Lady Isolde of Camelerd, what is it you would say to me?”
Something of Isolde’s surprise must have showed on her face, because Cerdic waved an impatient hand. He spoke the British tongue with only a faintest guttural trace of an accent, reminding Isolde that if his father had been Saxon, his mother had been Briton, a princess of Gwent. A last relic of the reign of King Vortigern, who had sought alliance instead of war with the Saxon invaders.
“Lady Isolde, should you be fortunate—or perhaps I should say unfortunate—enough to reach my advanced age, you will find that strength is a thing that must be hoarded as a wolf guards its kill. You learn to dispense with what only saps the strength needlessly—anger, for example. The pleasures of the bed. And fear.”
He paused, regarding her from under slightly hooded eyes, so that Isolde was reminded of a golden hawk looking down from a great height to the ground below. “I have no doubt that you are who you claim to be. I knew your grandmother—and it might be she standing before me. You are the lady Isolde, daughter of Modred, Arthur’s heir. You have, by your own account, drugged my bodyguard and gone to no little trouble to gain audience with me. Plainly, then, what you have to say is of some import. I could bluster and shout about your invasion of my private rooms or about the treatment of my personal guard—though I must say that if they were fool enough to take food and drink from the hands of a strange woman, they deserve every part of what they get. But in any case, what would a show of anger on my part gain? Nothing. In the end, we would be in exactly the same place as we are now—I needing to hear what you have come to say before I can seek my rest tonight.” He ended with a gesture to the tapestried bed in one corner of the room.
“You could, though, summon fresh guards and have me forcibly dragged out instead,” Isolde said.
The quick, wry amusement that twitched at the corners of Cerdic’s mouth was so much like Trystan’s that her heart contracted painfully in her chest. “So I could,” Cerdic agreed. “But if I have dispensed with anger, lust, and fear, I confess that curiosity proves stubborn still. I would sleep poorly tonight did I not know what has brought the daughter of my sometime ally Modred to my door.”
For all this was the reason she’d come here tonight, the reason she’d set out from Dinas Emrys at all, Isolde suddenly felt entirely without words.
She made herself draw breath, steadying herself, consciously locking all thoughts of Trystan, of Hereric, and Fidach, of her own fatigue away. For all Cerdic’s formal manner and dryly calm voice, the Saxon king’s blue gaze and lean, hard-featured face spoke of a man accustomed to power and ill inclined to suffer either irritation or fools. She had this one opening, this one window of opportunity to make her case. If she failed—or if he simply refused to ally against Octa and Marche—she knew he would not grant her audience a second time.
“There is a rumor abroad,” she said at last, “that you are considering an alliance with Octa of Kent—and so by extension with Marche of Cornwall. That it is for that purpose you have come here now.”
Cerdic didn’t answer at once. His brows drew together and he frowned as though weighing his words. Then he cleared his throat. “I am an old man. As I have said. And I have seen a lifetime of near-constant war. I fought Arthur at Badon Hill, and saw my armies broken and near destroyed. I fought at your father’s side at Camlann and nearly lost both my kingdom and my life. Would it be any wonder, then, if I sought to make peace before I died? If I wished to live out my remaining years at home and not amidst the muck of the battlefields?”
Isolde shook her head. “No. But I would wonder at your choice of allies.”
“You mean Octa?” Another faint smile just brushed at Cerdic’s mouth above the plaited white beard. “Octa
of the Bloody Knife? A man learns in battle to respect his enemy, Lady Isolde—if he is wise, that is. And I have fought Octa of Kent for nearly half our lives. He is neither an honest man, nor a good one. But he is a warrior to be feared. And as such, he has my respect.”
“All that may be true enough,” Isolde said. “But I was speaking of Lord Marche.”
A brief shadow of something cold and hard passed across Cerdic’s face, but his voice was unchanged as he repeated, “Marche?”
“Yes.” Isolde willed herself not to flinch away, this time of all times, from speaking the name. “The man who killed your daughter.”
“Ah.” The sound Cerdic made was a soft exhalation of breath, no more. As though a pain he had lived with so long as to have almost forgotten had suddenly been eased. “You are certain?”
“Certain in my own mind. As certain as though I’d seen it done.”
“Ah,” Cerdic said again. The blue gaze turned distant for a moment, looking past Isolde at something beyond. “I wondered. I always wondered—though I could not, of course, be sure.” He was silent, then shook his head, his gaze returning from the past to meet Isolde’s. “I am glad to know this before I die. And I thank you for having brought this knowledge to me. But what you say changes nothing.”
“Nothing?”
Despite her efforts, Isolde was unable to keep a hard edge from creeping into her tone, and she wondered whether Cerdic would anger. Instead he said, with no change of expression, “You have come to ask whether I would ally with Britain against Octa and Marche. That is your purpose, is it not?”
