by Anna Elliott
She paused. “He might have been one of Marche’s men. But someone—someone close to Con—must have arranged for Con’s guards to be away.” Isolde looked down at the war-hound, still curled at her feet, his head resting on his paws. “And someone drugged Cabal, too, so he’d not raise an alarm.”
Hedda didn’t reply at once. She rose, the workday gown over her arm, and moved to fold it away, as well, in the clothes chest. Then: “You suspect treason from king’s own men?”
Isolde remembered Brychan’s dark, passionate face. The suppressed grief—or had it been triumph?—in his eyes. Slowly, she shook her head. “I don’t know. But in any army—or at any court—there are men whose consciences can be bought for a high enough price.”
A swell of desperate helplessness washed through her, and she had to wait a moment before going on. “And now you have the whole of the reason I have sent Myrddin to Camelerd,” she said at last. “He—and Drustan—are my only hope to save the throne. And to keep from being forced into marriage with a man who may have killed Con.”
Again Hedda was silent a moment before she spoke. Then she turned back to Isolde. “You could speak out to council. Tell them of what you saw.”
“And expect them to take the word of the Witch Queen about a vision she conjured in the flames?” Isolde shook her head. “Some of them believe already that I have indeed a gift of Sight—and fear me the more. And some scoff at their fear. But if I spoke, none would take my word as true beyond doubt. Those who scoff would say it was nothing but women’s superstition and charms. And those who believe would say a woman of magic may also lie for her own ends.”
Another silence fell, in which Isolde could hear the steady whine of the wind outside the turret walls and the throb of the sea below. At her feet, Cabal stirred and whimpered again.
“Then we hope Myrddin returns in time,” Hedda said quietly at last.
Isolde nodded. By Samhain, Myrddin had said. And even that might be too late. Still, she reached out and touched Hedda lightly on the arm.
“Thank you for letting me talk of it, Hedda. I’m glad that there is at least one in Tintagel to whom I can speak the truth.”
Gestures of affection between them were rare, and even now Isolde felt the girl stiffen at her touch. But then Hedda covered Isolde’s hand briefly with her own.
“I’m glad you…tell me, lady. I be on guard, now, as well.”
WHEN HEDDA HAD GONE, ISOLDE SAT beside the banked and flickering fire and took up the bronze bowl, tracing with one fingertip the etched serpents, eternally swallowing their own tails. An ancient thing, part of the old ways and the time before time, before the Romans, before even Britain itself. And once the scrying bowl of Morgan of Avalon.
Abruptly, Isolde blew out the single remaining candle, leaving the room in darkness save for the fire’s orange glow. One of the logs broke and fell, sending up a shower of sparks. Isolde watched them dance and then die against the hearthstones, wondering again at the capricious power that should send a vision to her, not in the ancient scrying bowl, but in ordinary flame, and without a single one of the summoning charms that still echoed, now and again, through her mind. That should carry me to Con’s side as he died, but leave me there to watch helpless, with no power to save his life or even ease his dying alone.
Slowly, Isolde went to the ewer of water that stood in the washbasin and carried it to fill the bowl to the line made by the serpents’ tails. She added a drop of sweet lavender oil from a tiny vial that stood by the bowl, then took a brooch from the jewel casket on her dressing table, pricked her finger, and let three drops of blood fall into the water. She stared into the bowl, breathed in and out, let her thoughts and breath and even her heartbeat slow.
By the power of the raven. The wisdom of the serpent. By Earth and Fire, Water and Wind.
Isolde had heard a tale, once, of a harp made from a murdered man’s bones, strung with strands of his hair. It had sung the name of his killer until justice was done.
But the scrying bowl showed her nothing. Nothing save the glistening sheen of the oil, the spreading mists of red blood, and her own face, shifting and moving with the flicker of firelight. The room was utterly still, the only sounds the moan of the wind outside and Cabal’s soft breathing from his rug on the floor.
Isolde turned away, shutting her eyes. The Sight was like the healing. Like the tales. Something from before Camlann. Something she could not let herself ask how she knew. Could not remember how she had learned.
Though maybe that, she thought, is why it will not return now.
Chapter Eight
THE AIR OF THE PRISON cell was as fetid as it had been the previous day, chill and dank and heavy with the prison-reek of fear, and by the light of the lantern she carried, Isolde saw that the men, too, were positioned almost exactly as they had been when she’d left the day before. The boy Cyn lay asleep on the straw, while the bearded man sat propped against the wall, his knees drawn up, head resting on his folded arms. He looked up sharply, though, as the door swung open.
“I thought I told you not to come again.” He sounded more tired, though, than angry, Isolde thought, his voice still rough either with sleeplessness or with thirst.
“And I thought if it was a choice between starving and seeing me again, you’d maybe decide my coming wasn’t so bad. Besides, I wanted to look at Cyn’s wrists.”
Isolde set down the bread and water she’d brought with her and knelt at the boy’s side, touching him lightly on one shoulder, but Cyn didn’t move, didn’t even stir. He must, Isolde supposed, have taken the draft she’d given him for pain.
Isolde reached to touch him again, then stopped abruptly. His face was that of a sleeping child. But there was no rise and fall of his chest, and when she put a hand to his neck to feel for a pulse, she found his skin icy cold.
For a moment, she thought he must simply have died in his sleep—or that the draft had been too strong. But then she saw the faint, purpling bruises about his nose and mouth, just visible in the lantern’s unsteady light, and the threads of cloth that clung to the slack lips.
Slowly, she turned to the other man. “He’s dead.”
“Yes.”
Their eyes met, and an echo woke in Isolde’s mind.
I told him I’d see him through.
Isolde looked again at Cyn. Dead, she thought, these many hours, to judge by the chill of his skin. Dosed with both the drafts I left behind and then smothered with a fold of his cloak by his companion and friend.
She looked up. “Because he’d have broken in the end?”
The bearded man said nothing. His eyes, startlingly blue amid the cell’s squalor, were hard and flat as they watched her, but he sat just beyond the circle of light cast by the lantern, so that the rest of his face was in shadow. Isolde looked down at Cyn and felt a brief flicker of anger that he should have died this way. Without a choice of his own.
She remembered, though, something Con had once said, exhausted by battle only a few hours ended, his face bleak. Men may live with honor. Few manage to die with it. And the gods know, she thought, I’ve seen that true enough in the men who die of their wounds in my care. Some—a few—die the way a warrior would wish. The rest…
She thought of Cyn’s eyes the day before, hollow with the dumb, hopeless suffering of an animal in pain. Gently, she lifted the Saxon boy’s arms, one after the other, and crossed them over his chest. Then she looked up again at Cyn’s companion, still motionless against the wall.
“You’ve seen Cyn out of this,” she said. “As you promised. But what about you?”
He jerked one shoulder dismissively. “What you have to face, you can.”
And then he looked up and watched her a moment, his face expressionless above the ragged tunic and dirt-streaked beard. “And now are you going to have me brought before the king’s council on charge of murder?”
Isolde looked from the dead boy’s face to that of the bearded man. “Do you think I would?” When he
made no answer, she said, her eyes still meeting his gaze, “They may guess—as I did. But they won’t know it from me. And I’ll send the commander of the king’s guard and some of his men to collect the…to collect him. In name, at least, Tintagel is still my domain.”
The bearded man was silent, and then his head tipped in the briefest fraction of a nod, whether of simple acknowledgment or of thanks, Isolde couldn’t have said. She rose to her feet and was about to turn for the door when another question made her stop.
“Your husband the king,” the man said. “He was killed—wounded in the fighting, so the word went?”
Isolde, frowning, studied the man. She had the strange impression that he’d spoken almost against his will. As though he sneered at himself, even as he spoke, for the weakness of asking, but hadn’t been able to keep the words back. Though what about the question had been urgent enough to force him into speech, she couldn’t see.
Slowly, she said, “I see the news reaches even to these cells.”
There was another silence, longer this time, and then abruptly the bearded man asked, “Will you answer me something?”
“That depends on what question you ask.”
He laughed shortly. “Fair enough. All right, my question is, What are you going to do now—with King Constantine gone?”
Isolde stared at him, feeling…she supposed surprise was uppermost. Though just for a moment, she felt again the grasp of Marche’s fingers on her throat, his breath hot and close enough to mingle with her own. She shook her head to clear the memory away and said, still frowning, “Why should you—?”
“Care?” Another brief, grim smile touched the prisoner’s mouth. “Humor me. At any rate, there’s not much I’m likely to do with anything you tell me down here, is there.”
Isolde studied him, trying to guess at his thoughts or the reason behind the question, but his face was impassive as before, the blue eyes giving nothing away. At last she let out her breath. “All right. I don’t know what I’ll do now—I’m not sure I even know how to look beyond the next few days.”
She heard the bleakness in her tone and stopped before she could say anymore, instead bending to pick up the lantern she’d brought. Then she straightened, looking across at the bearded prisoner once more. “But as you say, what you have to face, you can.”
ISOLDE STEPPED OUT INTO TINTAGEL’S CENTRAL courtyard, drawing her cloak closed against the chill. She could still see Cyn’s lifeless face, the marks of tears from the day before visible in the dirt on his cheeks. Tonight she would have to inform the king’s council that one of the Saxon prisoners had died in his cell. She doubted any of them would think to ask more than that—or care. Likely they would assume Marche’s guardsmen had gone a step too far in their interrogation and sport.
For now, though, she’d left the bearded man alone with his dead, though whether that was kindness or cruelty she’d not been able to tell.
The day was raw and damp, and beneath gray, sullen clouds a steady trickle of people flowed in through the gates that opened onto the wagon road. The unending stream of fugitives and refugees, fleeing from the scorched and blasted land—or returning to homes they’d fled from before the Saxon advance, in the hope of finding something still there.
Their faces held the stunned, exhausted look of those who have forgotten all else but the simple will to survive. Whole families in ragged, mud-spattered clothes, pushing handcarts piled with what possessions they had salvaged from home. Carpenters and smiths with their tools bundled on their backs. Filthy, hollow-eyed children clinging to their mothers’ skirts, their faces gaunt, their bellies swollen with hunger.
Isolde approached one such mother, a woman dressed in ragged, threadbare wool, strands of dark, curling hair slipping out of a blue head-cloth. A child clung to her hand, a little boy of two, maybe, or three, his face dirty, his mouth crusted with dark sores. As Isolde reached her side, the woman turned, and Isolde saw that though her frame was slight, her belly was swollen with another child. Isolde hesitated, remembering the terrified scream of the Christian soldier in the infirmary the day before. But the woman’s dark eyes, though weary, held nothing of fear.
Isolde thought of Marcia, the serving maid who, on Nest’s orders, had attended her that morning. A thin, sharp-featured girl, her cheeks pitted with the marks of a childhood pox. Marcia had given the scrying bowl one swift, sharp glance as she’d entered Isolde’s chambers, had watched Isolde, all the while she attended her, with wary, narrowed eyes. But she’d not been afraid.
Marcia and the rest of Nest’s women might look askance and whisper at the birthmark on Isolde’s wrist. Might watch with flint-eyed satisfaction when one of the girls Con favored took ill, or a man in Isolde’s care died, or a child she delivered was born breech and strangled on the cord. But it’s men, Isolde thought, who believe in witches. And a rare woman who’ll be truly afraid of one of her own kind.
The woman before Isolde now had made a quick, awkward curtsy, her movements clumsy with the weight of the child, and Isolde put out a hand to steady her. She was still young—twenty-five or twenty-six, at a guess—with a handsome, vivid face, broad across the brow and tapering to a firm, squared-off chin. But what might have been beauty was marred by a birthmark, a great, wine-colored stain that began at her temple and covered nearly to her mouth, extending full to the corner of the eye.
“What help can we give you?” Isolde asked her.
The woman ducked her head, the dark curls bobbing. “Thank ’ee, my lady. Just food enough to see us on our way, if it please ’ee, my lady.”
Her head was still bowed, so that her face was hidden from Isolde’s gaze, and her voice had slipped into a beggar’s whine. But there was a perfunctory, almost bored note in her tone, as well, as though both words and manner were an act so familiar they could by now be assumed with a bare minimum of effort or even thought.
And she probably has had training enough in pleading and begging for aid, Isolde thought. On the road from wherever she has come.
She gestured toward where Father Nenian stood at the far end of the courtyard, distributing loaves of bread and sacks of meal to men and women who stood in a mute, straggling line. The priest’s face was puckered with distress at the misery before him, but he spoke a kind word to each as he handed out the provisions, pressing bony hands and making the sign of blessing over the heads of the children. Sometimes one of those waiting would try to push ahead past some of the others, and an argument would break out, but he saw to it that such argument were quickly resolved, his manner as calm as before, his voice mild.
“Father Nenian will give you what provisions we can spare,” Isolde said. “Where are you bound?”
The question seemed to surprise the woman, for her head came up and her eyes, long-lashed and dark, studied Isolde with a flicker of appraisal. Then: “Glevum, my lady, if we can get so far. I’ve kin there. And there’s nothing to hold us here now, my poor boy and me.”
The beggar’s whine had crept into her voice again, and she darted another quick look from under her lashes at Isolde. Then, seeing Isolde had made no move to go, she said, “Come to that, lady, there is something more you could do for me—if you could find it in your heart to show a bit o’ kindness to me and my boy, here. We’d a farm, you see. Lived in Perenporth, my man and me. But when the call came out to fight the filthy Saxon dogs—beg pardon, my lady, but that’s what they are and I’ll not say different—when the call for arms came out, nothing would do my man but that he must join your good lord’s army and fight to drive the dirty devils back where they came. And my boy and me, we followed right along, for I’d not send my man off to the fighting to maybe die all on his own, without me there to care for him.”
She looked up again, a sheen of tears glistening in the dark eyes. “And he was killed. In this here fighting up Dimilioc way. Died in my arms, he did, saying he was only thankful he could give his life in service to your good lord our king and making me swear on his spilled bloo
d I’d bring up our boy, here, to fight the filthy Saxon devils, as well. And—”
She stopped, putting an arm about the child beside her. The boy’s nose was running, and she wiped it with a fold of her skirt before going on.
“Well, at any rate, my lady, if there was anything you could give us. Anything that might buy us a night or two of shelter on our way…”
She trailed off. The boy squirmed impatiently in his mother’s grasp, but she didn’t move. Her head was once more bowed, but her free hand came out suggestively, palm up.
“Yes, of course.” Isolde reached into the embroidered purse she wore tied at her girdle and counted out a handful of coppers.
The woman’s fingers curled tight around the coins, and then she dropped another quick curtsy, made awkward by the bulk of her swollen belly.
“God bless you, my lady. God and the Holy Mother and all His saints above. And I’ll say a prayer for you at every church and chapel we come to, I swear it on my poor man’s grave.”
Isolde was retying the purse at her girdle. “What? Oh, thank you,” she said absently. “That’s very kind.” She finished fastening the purse, then looked up. “Perenporth is a fishing village, though. If you use the same story again, you’d better make your husband a fisherman instead of a farmer—especially if you’re telling it around here. Anyone in this area will know Perenporth, as well.”
The woman’s head lifted with a jerk, her eyes flaring wide in alarm. Then the wide mouth started to twitch, and at last she broke into a throaty, surprisingly musical laugh, her dark eyes crinkling to slits of amusement.
“All right, got me fair and square. A fishing village, is it?” She shook her head. “Ah, well. Can’t be helped. Heard the name on the road and took a chance.”
She’d dropped the Cornish accent, and without it her voice was low and slightly husky, with a lilting tone a little like Myrddin’s. She grinned, showing a row of brown-stained teeth. “Not nearly the easy mark I’d have thought a fine lady would be, you’re not. Was that all that gave me away?”
