King of the May

by Myers, Karen

  “Ask.”

  Briafael cleared his throat. “Why have you chosen to invest this man?”

  “Those reasons are my own,” the horned man replied. Too bad, George thought, he wanted to know, too.

  Briafael was taken aback and decided to approach the topic more indirectly. “You are focused on justice at the great hunt, and we have always believed that justice is your primary domain.”

  “That is so.”

  “And is this visible concern in the doings of Gwyn’s domain recently also about justice?”

  The horned man leaned forward and, even though separated by the table between them, Briafael retreated a step.

  “Gwyn’s domain? Gwyn ap Nudd is the Prince of Annwn. Do not forget who is the King.”

  Llefelys watched intently, and nodded.

  “I am sorry, great lord,” Briafael bowed. “I misspoke.”

  “I have made my wishes plain enough about the suitability of the current Prince. Those who would remove him undertake a perilous course.”

  He rotated his head with the great antlers, and fixed his gaze on Llefelys. “It is not the great hunt that is Annwn, nor even the hounds. I am Annwn. Nor is Annwn restricted to one place—justice will be found everywhere.”

  Silence fell upon the room. George could smell the masked fear of the people at the table. They never realized how much their scents betrayed them. Only Llefelys sat calmly, controlled, as confident in scent as he looked. One king to another, George thought. He wondered what Lludd would smell like, and the horned man snorted.

  George was out by the kennels when Ceridwen sought him after her guests had left. He was chatting with Tudur, Llefelys’s huntsman. Rhian, in an approximation of Gwyn’s hunt livery, stood by his side.

  “I’m grateful, huntsman, for your kindness in letting my kinswoman ride with you for hound exercise or anything else she can help with. She will find experience in other kennels most valuable.”

  “Please join us yourself, huntsman,” Tudur said.

  “Whenever I can,” he replied. He turned to greet Ceridwen. “What does my schedule look like?”

  “You won’t have much free time, George. She glanced at his companions. “May I speak with you a moment? Let’s go in.”

  He left Rhian with her new mentor and started to walk back to the main building with Ceridwen. “Did it go as you expected today?” he asked.

  “Cernunnos was a surprise but, yes, it did.”

  He warned her. “I don’t think you’ll get him to repeat that declaration, or even appear, for every meeting.”

  “I agree. I had the three of them today prepare a statement about his words. They will leave that with us to share for each subsequent meeting, just in case. Maybe that way we can continue to engage his attention by not going over the same ground each time.”

  They walked together a short distance in companionable silence.

  “What do you know about Cai, Angharad’s second husband?” Ceridwen asked him. “I was talking to Llefelys about him, after you left.”

  “Nothing but the portrait hanging over her mantel. A tough looking man.”

  She glanced at him. “You should talk to her about him, sometime.”

  George said, darkly, “If I ever get her back.” He fingered his beard and privately vowed to keep it until he freed her. He didn’t trust Lludd to honor guest-right. It was so frustratingly indirect, empowering Gwyn to defeat Lludd so that he could live with his wife in peace. If this lasted much longer, he’d have a go at it himself.

  He couldn’t think about what it might mean if Gwyn lost the challenge at Nos Galan Mai.

  Ceridwen watched his face and made an attempt to lighten the mood. She said, cheerfully, “She’s holding her own—you’d be proud of her. You should see her chambers, they’re fairly haunted by pictures of you and Cernunnos. Lludd fears to visit her there anymore.”

  George knew he was being handled but he smiled appreciatively anyway. “I can just picture it,” he said. He was always proud of her, Ceridwen had no need to urge him.

  “Have you heard?” she said. “She’s found an apprentice, under Lludd’s very nose.”

  CHAPTER 27

  And so George’s days continued for most of the week. He was summoned late each morning by Ceridwen and presented to her latest bunch of visitors, and most of the time, to George’s astonishment, Cernunnos made himself available for more questions.

  The hardest questions were about the destruction of the ways, especially Madog’s way between the old world and the new. Each time he tried to set it in context, as a minor part of a revolutionary change coming to their lives with the possibility of the rock-wights creating ways at will for everyone who had something to trade. But sometimes they simply couldn’t envision it.

  Their lives were long and relatively timeless, he realized. Things changed in their lifetimes, of course, but slowly. Everything had a rhythm and a proper place. It made his human sense of ever-faster inevitable change seem very alien to them. What a difference our history makes, he thought.

  It brought home to him just how much of an outlier Gwyn was, with his occasional visits to the human world, and his relatively recent stay of twenty years there, decades ago.

  He’d wanted to demonstrate way-destruction initially, but without the rock-wights to make one for him, he couldn’t. Now he was glad of it. Cydifor’s ballad about it was bad enough. For some of Ceridwen’s colleagues, a physical example would have been devastating. They would never have been able to focus on anything else.

  What they most wanted to know was whether the killing of Madog’s old world way had been truly necessary, or was it instead a ploy by Gwyn to monopolize the connection between the two lands. Despite everything Ceridwen or he could say about immigration, some skeptics just would not be moved from their suspicions.

  Twice he had been subjected to attacks, mental probes that went deeper than necessary to verify the truth of what he said.

  The first time, Ceridwen had icily broken it off and turned on the offender in outrage, but George defused the situation. “Panic makes some people neglect their manners,” he’d said, and that had seemed to be enough to shame the man before his peers.

  The second time, it was a woman who had so far forgotten herself as to probe uninvited to see how he sensed the ways. She was a way-finder herself, an unusual combination, and seemed to think that gave her the right. At her intrusion, Cernunnos erupted as the deer-headed man and advanced upon her, his antlers lowered menacingly.

  She fled the room, and George was hard-pressed to stop himself from following her. It took him several moments to pull the god back. It’s my job to let them be rude, if necessary, he told him, silently. Whatever it takes to satisfy them.

  I tire of this, came the reply.

  Please, George thought. My wife, and Gwyn… It’s one way to make this less bloody than it has to be.

  There was no response, and that session had resumed with one fewer attendee.

  Finally, at the end of the week, there was a free afternoon. George took advantage of the time to walk outside the gates and clear his head.

  He had his eye on a patch of woods about two miles from the castle. The kitten would not be left behind, and so he carried it on his shoulder. It would be too large for that in a few weeks, but for now he had other things to think about and let it be.

  He found a fallen tree not far inside the margin and sat there and watched the kitten explore, letting the life of the woods surround him. He opened himself up to his beast sense and listened. It wasn’t quiet, a woodland in spring, but it wasn’t complicated, either. All the creatures had their own lives to lead and were busy about it.

  He seemed to have been left with a new sensitivity since his captivity. He could dampen it down. but now it seemed to never quite leave him any more. It took an effort to ignore it completely, but he was trying to learn how. He didn’t want to witness unnecessarily the deaths and panics that punctuated the lives of so many small
creatures. It was like listening to every sparrow fall, overwhelming if not filtered out.

  Cernunnos and he had exchanged something, in both directions. I’ve contaminated him myself, he recognized. Lately some of his remarks have been leavened by humor, almost human. He marveled at how cooperative and patient Cernunnos had been so far with Ceridwen’s visiting wizards.

  He missed Rhodri, someone of his own age to stand with him when he was surrounded by so many elders. Morien was the youngest “scholar” he had met, by far, but even he was several hundred years old, as best as George could tell.

  Rhodri had departed for Greenway Court yesterday, with Gwyn’s permission, and he carried George’s greetings to Seething Magma and Maelgwn. He’d heard from Gwyn about Mag threatening to come and rescue him from Creiddylad. Too bad that wouldn’t have worked, he thought. Nice to imagine her destroying Calubriga in the process but of course it would have been too dangerous for her risking a claiming.

  He smiled wolfishly. Maybe Rhodri could change that, and together he could help Mag leave no two stones atop each other in the ruins, and the small beasts would make their homes there. He shook his head—that wasn’t him. It was hard to tell where his thought started and Cernunnos’s ended, they were in such agreement on this subject.

  Rhodri had formally handed off his ambassadorial responsibilities to George before Llefelys yesterday, alarmingly enough. Ceridwen told him not to be concerned, that she would help him with it, but George knew he had far too little knowledge for the job.

  Well, no one was asking him to start a war or negotiate a peace. He’d manage, he supposed.

  The kitten had collapsed on his belly in a patch of sunlight, his ears twitching in his sleep to fend off the little buzzing insects. He took a few deep breaths of the vibrant spring air, green and alive, then rose to his feet. He leaned over to pick up the surprised kitten and walked back to the road with him in the crook of his arm where he promptly fell asleep again, to George’s amusement.

  Good to be trusted like that, he thought. Makes a pleasant change from my daily interviewers.

  On the way back he met Morien lingering just inside the gate. He paused to shift the kitten to his shoulder and wondered if Morien had been keeping an eye on his whereabouts. Well, why not, he thought. They don’t know what to make of me here, either. It’s only sensible to keep track of my movements. He smiled for a moment, thinking of Maelgwn tracking Gwion and Dyfnallt. He couldn’t overlay Maelgwn on Morien, they were just too different. But he had a momentary fellow-feeling for the other two huntsman, suspected and followed as they tried to do their jobs.

  “Did you find the woods restful?” Morien said as George approached.

  “I’ve been coming to terms with… changed conditions.” He hastened to amplify this cryptic remark at Morien’s raised eyebrow “Between Cernunnos and me, I mean.”

  “And did you succeed?”

  “I suppose so,” he said. At least he was becoming more accustomed to it. “On the whole, this is better,” he said judiciously. “Cernunnos was too remote before.”

  Something about Morien’s stance made him look more closely. “Was there some news?” he asked.

  Morien said, “Beli Mawr has announced the location for this year’s Nos Galan Mai contest. It will be at Gwastadedd Mawr, a great chalk downland not very far from the southern coast in the middle of Britain.”

  George tried to guess where that would be. Salisbury Plain, maybe.

  “Are there large standing stones there? he asked.

  Morien stared at him blankly. George realized, that meant nothing. Who was to say there was any equivalent of Stonehenge in the fae world?

  “Never mind,” he said, waving the question away.

  Morien said, “It’s a good choice—equidistant from several ways, including one from Gaul. Llefelys does not always attend, but he has declared he will be there this year.”

  He looked at George seriously. “Everyone will be there.”

  Seething Magma gave a light tug on her connection to George, currently the most distant of her extended family. He was still there, faint but detectable. She couldn’t feel any details, but he seemed normal. She’d been alarmed at that peculiar taste he’d had for a couple of weeks while in captivity, almost as if his nature had changed, like a metamorphic rock under heat and pressure. She’d never felt a change like that to a living creature before.

  Gwyn had been right. It wasn’t easy to try and interfere with the affairs of the short-lived with any delicacy. They’d handled it on their own. Rhodri gave her the details when he found she already knew something about it.

  She was still worried about George. She knew there would be some sort of ritualized struggle in three weeks that posed a risk to all of them. Rhodri had tried to explain it to her, but she was most alarmed by what she picked up from him of Angharad in danger, with her child growing inside her.

  She wanted to just go and help them, but she well understood how foolish it would be while the rock-wights were vulnerable. No one understood better, after her experience with Granite Cloud, and her mother Gravel would not permit it.

  But maybe Rhodri’s plan would work. The experiments were promising.

  It would be nice to indulge in foreign travel again, she thought.

  “So have you talked to Rhodri yet?” Eurig asked Ives, in Gwyn’s council room.

  “That I have. It’s quite a story, so it is. But no real harm done, I understand.”

  Eurig pursed his lips which caused his mustaches to quiver. “I suppose not, but I don’t like this captivity of Angharad, whatever Lludd wants to call it. At least Rhian and George are with my daughter now, in Gaul.”

  Ives nodded.

  “Is everything ready, now?” Eurig asked.

  “We’re all done. The cases and cupboards in the huntsman’s office are all boarded over and secured.

  Eurig shook his head ruefully. “Young Maelgwn has dedicated himself to following the huntsmen, and I get reports daily. We’ve got their obvious spies looking over their shoulders for ours.”

  Late at night in his great-uncle’s suite at Greenway Court, Brynach unfolded the letter again. This was his first from Rhian, and already the paper was wearing through at the creases from handling.

  He read it over again anyway. When he’d been told of Gwythyr’s claim on her at the ceremony and her subsequent abduction, the bottom had fallen out of his world.

  She told him in her letter how the thought of him had kept her heart up in her captivity and, as it had on each previous reading, an inarticulate pride seized him. He wanted above all not to disappoint her, to have her think well of him.

  There had been another letter, borne by Rhodri. She’d spoken with his kinswoman Coronwen, apparently. It was the topics she so casually mentioned that startled him. She’d discussed the duties of a queen with his cousin. Well, that was to be expected, especially when Gwyn had no consort for a model. And then she went on to ask about Brynach, and teased him with childhood stories that circulated within his family. He gritted his teeth—he could only hope the more embarrassing ones had been mutely passed over.

  But the last topic she mentioned, the famous long marriages of Eurig and Tegwen, of Llefelys and Coronwen, and what made those work—that had him completely unsettled. He was only eighteen, but he was sure what he wanted. He just expected to wait for Rhian to grow a little older, to let her gradually come to terms with him, if she wanted to. They’d parted comfortably like that a few weeks ago.

  Something had changed her, almost overnight. She’d grown into a young woman while she was gone, and now he was worried. Was she serious about him, as he hoped? Could he possibly live up to it?

  He knew he had to write a reply but so much seemed to be hanging upon it—what to say, how to say it. It was a delicate matter, and it scared him, but it had to be done. He had something drafted in his mind. Maybe in a few days it would be well-seasoned enough to commit to paper.

  At last, Gwyn thought.
Llefelys had finally responded, just two weeks before Nos Galan Mai.

  He leaned back in his chair, alone in his rooms at Camulodunum, with the letter in his hand.

  Ceridwen’s reports had been encouraging. George was doing a splendid job, with Cernunnos, of defusing the fear and uncertainty that had been created around him. That neutralized one serious attack from his father and his allies. Not all of her colleagues were persuaded, of course, but on the whole they were making progress.

  But now this letter from his uncle Llefelys… He requested access to the new world. He didn’t demand it, as his brother did. Specifically, he wanted his own way, if the rock-wights could do it. He also requested land for settlement and a discussion about immigration policies. He proposed a meeting after Nos Galan Mai, an unstated vote of confidence in his success, Gwyn was amused to see. Gwythyr must be no favorite in the Gaulish court at the moment.

  Could the rock-wights do it? They hadn’t done so for hundreds or thousands of years, as far as he knew. He was waiting to hear from Rhodri about the latest experiments. He worked in daily expectation of success, but Gwyn was used to discounting the rash optimism of youth.

  All this was the future, encapsulated in the letter he waved in his hand. What about the present?

  Eurig’s reports made him uneasy. Things were strangely quiet at home. It wasn’t right. Gwythyr may have been discomfited for now by the escape of his captives, but it just wasn’t like Lludd to restrain himself, and so far he had made few visible moves since Angharad’s seizure and the failed abductions. He knew there had to be more. He made a note to talk about it with Edern.

  That night, Creiddylad met with her father in his private chambers.

  She’d argued about it with Gwythyr, but it didn’t matter what he thought. The two of them had to return to Britain for Nos Galan Mai anyway, and the sooner they got out of Calubriga, the better. With the escape of their captives there was no longer any need to stay distant. There would be no recapturing them from Llefelys, of that she was certain.