Goronwy lost track of the men he killed; lost track of all of his friends but Hywel. Sweat poured down his face—more from the effort of fighting than from the heat of the day, since it seemed that the promise of sunshine had been a faint one. It was better for Cade, at least, were he to lose the cloak. It was better for Rhiann too, standing as she was on the battlements. Goronwy glanced upwards. In the time since they’d left the fort, clouds had massed above them, dark, black, and menacing.
Only from the light that still shot from the center of the field did Goronwy know that Dafydd and Cade remained alive. The light grew brighter, almost blinding him with its intensity when he looked towards it, and still the Saxons didn’t give way. Goronwy shoved his sword through the midsection of one Saxon, pulled it from his belly, and in almost the same motion, slashed through another’s thigh. He spun and met a third man’s blade. The Saxon’s red beard covered his face, and a grin split it. For the first time, Goronwy felt weakness in his arms and found himself giving way under the onslaught.
And then the point of an arrow punched through the man’s ribs. The Saxon had been lunging at Goronwy, his axe held above his head and ready for a killing blow. Now he stared down at the arrowhead that seemed to have come out of nowhere. Goronwy searched all around for the source, and then finally spied Rhiann. She had shot him from the top of the keep.
He wanted to shout at her, to tell her that the battle was a lost cause and that she should save her arrows for the last end of need. Though with that thought, into his mind came the sickening idea that maybe they’d reached that point, that Rhiann had seen the end coming, and was prepared to use her last arrows if they would give her friends a few more moments of life.
Behind him, Hywel still fought as one possessed, and Goronwy resumed his place at his back. Sweat mixed with blood ran into Goronwy’s eyes, and he swiped at it with the back of his hand.
Or maybe those were tears.
Chapter Fourteen
Dafydd
When Cade had offered him Dyrnwyn, Dafydd hadn’t taken it immediately. Standing before his king, he’d felt like his skull was stuffed with cloth, like Angharad’s pillow. But now—now that he was on the battlefield—he’d never felt more glorious than he did in this moment. He didn’t know if it was the sword, his position at the head of the company, or that King Cadwaladr rode beside him. All he knew was that together they’d brought down one man after another.
Dafydd was fighting as if nothing else existed and war was the only reality he would ever know. His sword flaming higher than ever, he followed its lead, as if it had a mind of its own and Dafydd was a slave to its will.
Saxons scattered before him, and he envisioned himself fighting just like Cade had fought against the demons outside Caer Dathyl. He would turn, and they would flee before him. They would throw themselves upon their own blades. Taliesin would compose songs to his greatness—
“You’re getting too far ahead.”
Cade’s sharp rebuke brought Dafydd back to reality. He didn’t let up the motion of his sword arm, but it was as if Cade had thrown a bucket of cold water over his head. He could sense everything around him again and was no longer wrapped in a muffling wool that prevented his senses from working. He felt it all: his muscles clenching and unclenching, his knees signaling to his horse, the ache in his shoulder from the effort of wielding the sword, the whistling of the wind through his helmet, with a high-pitched whine until he wanted to rip it from his head at the incessant noise.
“This way.” Cade had been giving orders all along as they fought. Dafydd had just been ignoring him. Now he did as he was told, working his way back towards their own men instead of following a suicidal course towards the center of the mass of Saxon men.
Nonetheless, Dafydd had allowed too many Saxons to get between him and the Welsh line. Because of it, three Saxons converged on him at once. Though he took out one, and Cade another, the last sliced through the meat of his thigh.
The pain was so unexpected that he screamed. To make matters worse, his moment of inattention allowed a fourth Saxon to bury his axe in the neck of Dafydd’s horse. The horse went down, and Dafydd just managed to leap free.
“Stay with me!” Cade was all fire and light, but Dafydd’s stomach curdled at how exposed they were, even if the push and pull of battle had ebbed for the moment around them since Cade had severed the neck of three Saxons in succession in order to reach Dafydd’s side. Dafydd, meanwhile, gaped at the blood that poured from the wound in his leg, and he scrabbled with his free hand to stop the flow.
And then to Dafydd’s horror, Cade dismounted, ripped off the invisibility cloak, and held out Caledfwlch to him. “Trade me.”
Dafydd looked at him stupidly, so Cade thrust Caledfwlch into Dafydd’s hand, took Dyrnwyn from Dafydd’s left, and dropped the invisibility cloak over Dafydd’s shoulders. With quick movements, he affixed it around his neck.
“Will it heal me?” Those were the only words Dafydd could think to say.
“It better.” Cade planted his feet, his back to Dafydd and his power shining resplendent. His light reflected off the black clouds above them, even if he wielded less than he might have were it night.
And even as Dafydd watched, his wound closed. After another dozen heartbeats, he could stand and take his place, back to back with Cade, though this time it was Dafydd’s sword that was invisible and he who dispatched would-be attackers who thought they would take out the King of Gwynedd from behind.
In truth, for all Dyrnwyn’s glory, Dafydd was glad to fight with Caledfwlch instead. She didn’t require some kind of test to wield her, and even if she wasn’t as mighty as Dyrnwyn and didn’t flame from hilt to tip, she felt more comfortable in his hand.
“I’ll want her back when we’re done here,” Cade said, reading Dafydd’s mind. “And the cloak.”
Dafydd’s heart lightened further when a moment later, from three different directions, Bedwyr, Goronwy, and Hywel appeared to join their circle. They were invincible now, no matter how many men came against them.
“Hold!”
The command echoed around the field, and the Saxons obeyed instantly, falling back from Cade’s ring of men. Even Dafydd’s countrymen faltered. Surprised, Dafydd saw a man wearing Hywel’s crest remove his helmet and sit on it, his head bent and his sword lose in his hand. No Saxon took advantage of his capitulation because the Saxon warrior beside him capitulated too.
Two dozen men in black strode through the faltering forces. They converged on Cade’s small ring of five from every direction. Finally Dafydd understood what was happening, and he barked a laugh at how unsurprised he was at this turn of events. Part of him had been expecting something like this from the start. Mabon was late to the party, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t eventually going to show.
“I thought we killed them.” That was Bedwyr, deadpan as usual.
“Apparently not,” said Hywel, having obviously spent too much time in Bedwyr’s company.
“They killed King Arthur on the road to Caer Fawr,” Goronwy said.
“And the men of Castell Clydog, back in Ceredigion,” Dafydd said.
“They are here now. That is all that matters,” Cade said. “And if they are here, then Mabon can’t be far away.”
The five companions backed towards each other, narrowing their circle so fewer of Mabon’s men could attack them at once or isolate them. The first man to appear in front of Dafydd was clean-shaven, his nose a fine point. He didn’t see Dafydd, of course, since he was invisible and that was all Dafydd noted of him before Caledfwlch skewered him through the belly. Dafydd didn’t remember even thrusting the sword.
But he didn’t have time to think about it before another set upon him. And another, and he lost track of anything but these men in black who shouldn’t be here, and yet were.
He’d killed four men and had countered the blade of a fifth when he sensed commotion to his right. Out of the corner of his eye, he strained to see what was happening,
even while dispatching his lateest opponent. Dafydd killed him and then turned to see Cade holding off two men at the same time. One was enormous, built out of solid rock it seemed, and the other was Mabon.
Sick to death of Mabon and all the damage he’d done, Dafydd moved towards Cade, though he stumbled over a body on the ground as he did so. Despite the fact that Dafydd was still wearing the cloak so Cade shouldn’t be able to see him, Cade held out a hand to stop him from coming any closer. Oddly, as Cade moved, the entire battle slowed. Maybe it was some new magic of Cade’s or Mabon was disturbing the passage of time. Regardless, Dafydd pulled up just behind Cade and glared at Mabon, but the god had eyes only for the King of Gwynedd.
“Put up your sword. You have lost.” The familiar sneer was plastered to Mabon’s face.
Dafydd opened his mouth to deny Mabon’s words, but then his throat locked up and he couldn’t. Where earlier Dafydd had seen Welshmen and Saxons sitting together, now they set upon each other again. Every man moved so slowly, however, it was as if their swords weighed a hundred pounds. Right in front of him, a Saxon killed one of Tudur’s men. Gagging, Dafydd looked away, towards the west and Caer Fawr. The castle was in flames. Tears pricked his eyes.
A moan came from behind him. He spun towards it, terrified of what he might find, and the reality was far worse than he’d imagined. Goronwy lay on the field, about to lose his head to one of the men in black. Hywel and Bedwyr were already down.
“No!”
Dafydd threw himself at Goronwy’s attacker, wrapping his arms around his waist and bringing him to the ground. As they hit the grass, the fall knocked Caledfwlch from Dafydd’s hand, but he didn’t care. He sat up, straddled the man, and punched him in the face. The man tried to defend himself, but Dafydd gave him a sharp cut that broke his jaw and Dafydd’s hand at the same time.
“Dafydd!”
The word came sharply, and when Dafydd ignored the admonishment, came a second time. Only because it was the voice of someone he loved, did he finally heed it. Goronwy had crawled to the spot where Dafydd had dropped Caledfwlch and fallen flat on it.
More thankful than he’d ever been in his life, Dafydd staggered to where his brother lay healing from the gash Mabon’s man had put in his side. Dafydd collapsed next to him and swung the invisibility cloak over both of them. Goronwy would live. Many wouldn’t. Dafydd swallowed his tears at the loss of his friends, and put one finger on the top of Caledfwlch’s hilt. His broken hand began to heal.
But from this battle, the Welsh would never recover.
Chapter Fifteen
Rhiann
Wind had whipped around them almost from the instant the fighting had started and chilled Rhiann to her core. She ignored how she felt, however, and fired another arrow, adding to the carnage in the fields below Caer Fawr. The battle raged right in front of the lowest rampart where the main Saxon force had gathered on the near side of the little creek. Penda must have thought they would soon be entering the fort, once they’d figured out how to breach the final rampart.
As Rhiann watched, her heart rose in her throat, such that she could hardly breathe around the ache. Taliesin had remained beside her as the morning wore on and the number of bodies of the fallen, already too numerous to count, grew ever larger. It was easy to think why doesn’t he do something, but Taliesin’s magic could not save their army.
She’d seen, long before the fighting men possibly could have, that the Saxons were going to win. She shot an arrow at a man who’d been about to decapitate Hywel. Every time she aimed her bow, her hands trembled in the moment before she fired. She had to swallow hard and still them, trying to capture the calm that was required for the task. She failed every time, though her aim remained true.
All of a sudden, however, she knew what to do, and she wasn’t going to do it standing here, too far from the fight to see it properly or make a difference. She raced for the doorway to the keep, and though Taliesin tried to grab her arm to stop her, she shook him off. “I’m not close enough. Stay or come, I don’t care which, but don’t hinder me!”
She barreled down the stairs from the battlements, skidding down each step since she was moving so fast. Taliesin followed behind her, no longer protesting. Rhiann burst into the great hall. A dozen women looked up as she entered—mostly camp followers and hangers-on—along with Angharad and Catrin, who lifted a hand to her as she passed them.
“What—” Angharad said.
Rhiann waved back, not wanting to alarm them since their fear would do nobody any good. She simply told them the same thing as she’d told Taliesin: “I need to get closer.”
It wasn’t that she couldn’t shoot an arrow four hundred yards. Of course she could. Even with her smaller bow, she could make one fly that far. But it wouldn’t be as accurate as she needed it to be. She’d almost killed Hywel with that last shot. She’d never been so afraid to loose an arrow in her life, not even at the battle at Caersws where she and Dafydd and defended the retreat of the women and children.
Maybe she’d been naïve then. Maybe she hadn’t known enough. Now she did, and the knowledge had her on her knees.
Rhiann crashed open the door leading from the great hall, passed a few men who’d made it back inside the fort, and headed for the gate. The door had been left partially open, and she ran through it.
“Rhiann, it isn’t safe—” Taliesin said.
“Safe enough.”
Taliesin let her go, since they were already on the path. As she’d seen from her position on the battlements, the Saxons who’d surged between the ramparts in their initial victory had been decimated by the Welsh charge. Those that remained had given up trying to get into the keep. Their ladders didn’t reach, and the battle had moved outside. The Saxons had gone with it, unaware that the Welsh hadn’t even bothered to close the door.
At last she reached the Annex—the defense works that Goronwy had defended in the initial assault. It had a twenty-foot high rampart, augmented by walls that encircled an area fifty feet wide and twenty deep. Though it protected the main gate at the bottom of pathway, once the Saxons had come over the walls and opened that gate from the inside, they’d abandoned it as a post.
Taliesin closed and barred the gate to the annex, effectively locking them into this small, raised haven amidst the turmoil below them. The ancients had built it for just such an occasion, so the annex could be a last defense, in addition to the keep.
Rhiann climbed to the top of the wall. If anything, the roiling mass of men had moved closer to the ramparts in the time she’d taken to get here. Twenty feet away, a Welshman lost his head to a Saxon axe. She’d seen so much carnage, it shouldn’t have surprised her, but tears sprang to her eyes anyway. She brushed them away with the back of her hand.
Goronwy, Bedwyr, Hywel, and Cade, who’d thrown off his cloak, stood in the center of the battlefield. Rhiann didn’t see Dafydd, and her heart fell, until she realized that he must be filling the gap in their ring. The companions fought facing outward with their backs to the center of the circle. But even as she watched, a phalanx of attackers in black surrounded them.
She turned to Taliesin, her gaze imploring. She couldn’t help it. Druids had spoken to the gods for thousands of years, and he was the only one with any answers here at all. “Are you sure—”
“This is a long way from over.”
But for once, Rhiann didn’t believe him. Couldn’t believe him. He’d been right so many times before, but—
“Stand your ground, Rhiann, and don’t waste your arrows.”
“I’m almost out.”
“I’ll get you more.” Taliesin left her to scavenge arrows from the quivers of the dead archers who’d fallen in the initial defense of the fort.
Rhiann set her feet and began loosing arrows into the Saxon army. One, two, three … She trusted that Taliesin would find replacements and, as promised, before her remaining ones were spent, he appeared beside her with fistfuls that he stuffed into her quiver.
She had to pause in her shooting as he filled it, and their eyes met. A light grew behind Taliesin’s eyes that she hadn’t seen since that first day they’d met, months ago on the battlements of Dinas Emrys. Taliesin then stepped away, raised hands above his head, and focused all his attention on a point over the center of the battlefield where Cade and his friends fought.
Earlier, at the start of the battle, he’d chanted words in a language she hadn’t understood, but now he lifted his chin, and his voice rang out above the howl of the wind and the clash of men:
A knight on a swift horse
creates turmoil among his enemies
Thither will come an ancient enemy,
Grief will he know.
Sin and treason follow
And old hatreds are renewed
One stroke of his sword
And our warlord comes
He remakes us
and brings to us a new Eden.
As Taliesin finished, the most beautiful sound Rhiann had ever heard sounded from the west, wafting across the hills and fields. It was a horn—not a Saxon horn, but an old-fashioned Welsh one. She knew the sound, even knew the horn, though she’d only heard it once before, in the setting out from Bryn y Castell before the ride to Caersws.
A lifetime ago.
Rhun, Siawn, and their men had finally come.
With their coming, the storm that had threatened to unleash its rain, ever since their men had ridden out of the fort, broke over the battlefield.
Wind and rain whipped into Rhiann’s face as Rhun’s men crashed into the side of the Saxon lines. What had been a cohesive force collapsed instantly. Rhun’s sword rose and fell, slaying every man within reach. But there were so many, and Rhun had two hundred Saxons to fight before he could reach Cade and his friends.
Rise of the Pendragon (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 6) Page 8
