‘Agh lasadha an tsolais…’ Gwydion’s voice rose thin above the clamour as he cast and danced his last shreds of defiance at the merciless stone. Blood-red light bubbled at the window. A shade loomed huge over the cowering wizard. Even in the midst of raging madness Will’s senses told him that the stone was ready and poised to force its will upon its tormentor.
Around Will’s neck the leaping salmon talisman shone so bright a green that his eyes could barely stand to see it. He flung the door open and cast Gwydion away from him. A great gust of vileness rushed at his face, blasted him like the flame erupting from the maw of one of Lord Warrewyk’s engines of death. But he drove carelessly onward against it, onward until his outstretched hands were planted against the palpitating surface of the stone.
‘My wife! My child!’ he cried, seeing only their corpses. ‘Bring them back to me!’
He tore the talisman from his neck and, at the very moment of syzygy, plunged it into the stone’s side, driving his fingers deep and forcing his grip to close. Then he gave a shout of savage joy, as he ripped out the stone’s beating heart.
The Blood Stone shook wildly. It roared and screamed. But, in Will’s hands, the heart of the stone was dead and cold and the stone was a battlestone no more. Yet the killing had taken some terrible toll on the killer. How much time passed before his eyes saw the world again, he did not know. There were only voices, swimming in a sea of sound.
‘Quickly!’ Gwydion said, pulling him across the bloodflooded floor. ‘Soldiers are coming!’
Hands struggled to support him. He tottered, fought for command of his legs. Despite the passing of the climactic moment, he remained in the grip of some stubborn affliction.
‘Stand back!’
Gort dashed a bucket of rainwater over him. Together, Wortmaster and wizard lifted him to his feet as the cool light of the full moon glistened on the stones of the inner ward.
‘It hasn’t gone away!’ he raved, reeling like a drunkard. ‘The influence is still there! I can still feel it!’
‘It cannot be,’ Gwydion told Gort. ‘Calm him! He’s moonstruck!’
‘No!’ he cried. ‘The stone lives, I tell you! I can hear it. I can feel it! The soldiers are fighting on!’
Gwydion took hold of his head. ‘The soldiers are fled. Listen to me, Willand! The battlestone is done for! You tore out its heart. The battle ended before ever it began. The castle is fallen.’
‘What is it you hear?’ Willow’s voice asked, looking into his eyes. ‘Is it truly the stone? Oh, Will, let me help you!’
His eyes rolled as Willow held him now. But Willow was dead! Killed by a dragon!
‘Willow?’ His eyes started out from his head.
She hugged him. ‘It’s all right, Will. I’m with you now!’
‘Oh, Willow! You’re alive. You’re alive!’
‘Can’t you do something for him, Wortmaster?’
‘Not here.’
Gort and Gwydion each took an arm, Willow lifted his feet and they rushed him back inside Gort’s rooms and laid him on the bed. Willow sang,
‘How can another ever know,
What weight of woe,
Breaks the heart of a friend so?’
Gort put a piece of heath-pea root in Will’s mouth. ‘Bite on it! Tsk! Tsk! Harder! Chew it up. Oh, that’s better.’ Once the bite was made he pushed Will’s lips back and poured a burning liquor over his teeth. Will choked at the foulness of the taste, but then they pushed him flat and the rigidity began to leave his muscles. He began to float inside his own body.
‘That’s gooood,’ Gort soothed. ‘Very good. You’ve done well tonight. All you could have done and more, eh? Now you just lie there and leave everything to us. Everything to us…’
Gwydion muttered incantations over him, but through it he could hear a fearful booming. It sounded through the castle like the footfalls of a giant, and he feared that somehow the harm in the Blood Stone had finally been made manifest. But then the glory of the full moon dropped steeply away, like a cliff under a soaring seabird. Numbed by the medicine, Will’s mind rose up and up, beyond his body. His spirit flew out beyond the walls of the inner ward, beyond the castle and the town. Darkened lands rolled away beneath his senses. Hill and river, forest and dale, stood out, colourless, washed by the brightest moonlight he had ever known. His mind’s eye saw the ligns as clear as could be: two broad green lanes, one paler than the other, two streams of earth power confined by ancient magic to run straight and true across the land. And where they crossed was the riverside earthworks that had been dug by Lord Strange’s men.
His floating mind perceived waves of light running along both ligns. It was so easy now to see them. Effortless, where once it had been impossible. He saw that one of the ligns cut straight through the middle of the castle. There it shattered like sunlight on water. It filled both inner and outer wards with a million scintillas of moving light. But the waves that travelled along the ligns were greying, dimmer now. The power seemed to be pulling back, running away to southward, withdrawing – or being withdrawn – towards a presence that lurked on the southern horizon.
The understanding stole over him that a disastrous bloodbath had been avoided. Lord Strange’s going over to the enemy had fatally weakened Duke Richard’s position. At first, the duke and his allies had stubbornly refused to fly. But then the duke’s warrior resolve had broken. His troops had been ordered from the barricades and entrenchments. With his plans in tatters, the duke’s main force had hastily made off, while a small party of horsemen and wagons went by unfrequented ways into the wilds of the west, into Cambray, where the queen’s forces could not easily follow.
Boom! Boom!
Will’s mind swooped and dived like a house martin over a night land that shone as bright as day. He saw how Ludford had been given up, castle and all. The great host had already closed on the town and the undefended gates were thrown wide to admit the queen’s army. The delighted rabble had doubtless been promised they could take what they wanted in place of unpaid wages. Men were looting all that could be found instead of pursuing their enemy in rout.
Boom! Boom!
And here was the source of that thunderous booming. An engine of war, hauled in to knock upon the locked gates of the castle. A great oak trunk mounted on chains in a timber frame, lifted by two crews of men hauling on ropes, then let fall until its mighty crash rang to the echo.
‘Hemlock, belladonna, mandrake deep,
Bring him home his thoughts to keep…’
Gort’s chanting brought Will’s roaming mind back into the room. The crucial moment of the full moon had long passed and its ebbing power allowed Will to return steadily to himself. The artful stars of Gort’s ceiling replaced those of the real sky as Will opened his eyes.
Boom! Boom!
‘We can’t linger here,’ he heard Gwydion say.
He tried to sit up, but Willow steadied him. She seemed on the point of tears and only one thing could have filled her face with such anguish.
‘Where’s Bethe?’ he said, coming to.
‘Will…’ Her tears flowed. ‘She’s gone.’
‘Gone?’ He struggled up.
‘With the duchess! Will, I couldn’t do anything.’
‘Why didn’t you keep her with you?’ he demanded.
‘Steady!’ Gort said, laying a hand on his chest. ‘That’s not the way. It’s nobody’s fault. Willow made sure that Bethe was safe with the duchess before she came down to tend you, and in the meanwhile—’
‘Willow…’ He felt her agony overwhelm him.
‘When I found you, you were out of your mind. And when I went back the duchess was gone. It all happened so fast. Oh, Will!’
He pulled her to him as she sobbed. ‘Willow, Willow. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.’
‘She’ll be well tended,’ Gort said. ‘The Lady Cicely’s been a mother seven times over.’
‘How could she have taken her? And what if the queen’s soldiers cat
ch them?’
Gwydion stepped into the circle of candlelight. ‘No one from the queen’s army will dare follow Richard into the west. Or if they do they will not get far along the mountain roads, for there is great magic still in the land of Cambray. They do not suffer the uninvited in those hills.’
Boom! Boom!
‘That’s a battering ram,’ Will said.
‘I hope Lord Warrewyk took his guns along with him,’ Gort muttered. ‘And his casks of sorcerer’s powder, too. If those engines of destruction are ready to be turned upon us, then this fair castle will be slighted to ruins in half a day!’
Will told Gwydion, ‘I saw a great army in retreat to the south. But there was a line of carts going swiftly westward, towards the mountains of Cambray.’
Gort nodded. ‘The princes will allow Richard through to the coast, for he pays to keep ships in more than one port. These days he knows not to keep all his eggs in one basket. I think he will head for Caerwathen.’
Will stroked Willow’s hair. ‘Did you hear that? Our child is to pass over the seas. She will be safe in the Blessed Isle.’ He looked up. ‘And Edward? What of him?’
‘Most of Richard’s army are with the hosts of Lords Warrewyk and Sarum. They have been sent south, and Edward will be with them.’
‘Where are they going?’
Gwydion pursed his lips. ‘My guess would be Belstrand on the south coast, for there waits the fleet that brought Lord Warrewyk over the Narrow Seas. He and his father and Edward will take ship once more for the fortress port of Callas. They will easily outmarch an army that is intent on looting Ludford. Do you see now how Richard’s power has been dispersed, but not broken? This is the best of all outcomes. We have carried out a most satisfactory day’s work! Most satisfactory!’
‘I wish it felt like it.’ Will’s eyes narrowed at the wizard’s enthusiasm. ‘What about the stump of the Blood Stone?’
‘I did the only thing possible if Richard was not to have it.’
‘You dropped it back down the well?’
‘I did. I do not know what boon the drained Blood Stone will confer, but confer a boon it now must. Perhaps the good ale that Edwold hoped for will one day make Ludford famous for its brews.’
‘And what about the other spent stone?’
‘Richard’s men have taken the stump of the Blow Stone away with them.’ Gwydion made a dismissive gesture. ‘That is a small matter, for I would argue that it is right in principle for all battlestones, spent or not, to be returned whence they came. My concern there is only to prevent Richard misusing what he has taken.’
Boom! Boom!
Bestial cries and the great heaving and slamming of the iron-shod trunk against the gates almost drowned Gwydion’s words.
Willow pulled away. ‘I can smell burning!’
‘We must see how the land lies,’ the wizard told them.
They followed as he went up to the walls near the inner gatehouse and looked out over the ruined outer ward. It was eerily deserted and ghastly to see. A lone unsaddled horse galloped in circles, its ears pricked, nostrils flaring. Many of the goods of the castle had been strewn about, carts were overturned and the dead bodies of men and animals littered the ground.
Beyond the shadows the sky was red and the din dreadful. Will looked skyward, remembering the nightmare dragon that had tormented his stone-fevered mind. It had seemed so real. He shivered, shielding his eyes against the glare of flames. Beyond the castle walls the town was being torn apart by the queen’s forces. Many houses were already sheathed in flame and there was screaming. It was as if Maskull had cast a spell over the queen’s soldiers. Many townsfolk too slow to run would die tonight, and Will heard their despairing cries. Their lord had deserted them, and many would rush into the clutches of the Sightless Ones, for the chapter house was the only building that would remain inviolate.
The great castle was especially unsafe. Without defenders to guard the walls and gates and towers, they could not stand for even an hour. And Will knew there were those among the queen’s forces intent on searching out booty more valuable than that which the town afforded.
Boom! Boom!
Will turned at the sound of the battering ram. The gatemen would have secured the entrance before disappearing over the walls. That would have given more time for the duke’s party to make their escape. There was the clang of iron, the shattering of roof slates. Will saw the flukes of a siege hook scraping up the wall on its rope. At last the hook found a purchase on the stone and the rope pulled taut. Then other iron hooks flew over the walls and hung momentarily like spiders before they too dug in tight.
‘Grapnels!’ Gort cried. ‘They’re climbing the walls!’
‘We must go now,’ Gwydion said, as if in answer to the latest splintering sound of the ram. He began to shepherd them back towards the spiral stair that led down into the inner ward.
‘Are we going to get out alive?’ Willow asked, her upturned face smudged. ‘And where will we go if we do?’
Will could give her no answer. He let Gwydion lead them past the Round House, and then back towards the kitchens. There they picked up three loaves and filled a large earthenware jug with water. ‘I must go to Trinovant,’ the wizard said.
‘What about us?’
The wizard handed Will the water jug and pushed him on into the innermost ward. ‘I must find a way to solve the verse that points the way to the next stone.’
‘The verse…’
Will gasped. He had forgotten about the Blood Stone’s vital message to them.
Gwydion spoke it in the true tongue:
‘Faic dama nallaid far askaine de,
Righ rofhir e ansambith athan?
Coise fodecht e na iarrair rathod,
Do-fhaicsennech muig firran a bran.’
‘What does it mean?’ Willow asked, awed by the sound of the words.
‘Its meaning is a matter that requires much thought.’ Gwydion cast an eye at the ramparts where dark figures were already beginning to appear. ‘And rather more time than we have at present.’
Gort said, ‘Master Gwydion! I think these inner gates might hold the queen’s soldiers back for a little while, but we should make haste. Follow me! There is a secret way down to the river.’
‘Stop!’ Gwydion said, gesturing them to go a different way. ‘Wortmaster, you and I will take our leave together. We shall do so by a route which none can follow. But Will and Willow – you must stay within these walls.’
Will halted and stared at the wizard. ‘Did I hear you right?’
Willow grasped the wizard’s robe. ‘Where can we hide? They’ll search everywhere!’
‘Oh, it is best not to be hidden,’ Gwydion said, handing her the loaves. ‘What is hidden may always be found. Take the bread, you’ll soon be glad of it.’
Gort looked anxiously towards the inner gate which he knew must soon come under attack. ‘Master Gwydion, those who are presently knocking upon the outer door will easily scale these walls too. They may kill anyone they find here. Do you want Will to defend himself by magic?’
‘There will be no need for that. Indeed, he must not resort to magic at any cost!’
‘I’ll stay,’ Will said, seizing the wizard’s sleeve, ‘but only if you take Willow with you!’
‘No, Will!’ Willow shouted. ‘I won’t go without you!’
Gwydion laid a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘The plan I have is quite simple. And safer than any other.’
He led them down to the dungeon under the keep. Gwydion struck up a pale light and they saw storerooms that had been part emptied by the duke’s household servants. Here was the cell in which Lord Dudlea had spent his nights. It was vacant now. Inside, the cold stone floor was scattered with filthy straw. There were rusty chains hanging from the walls and a thick iron door with a small, barred window. Will recalled how here, years ago, he had heard a baby crying where no baby had been. Now, with Bethe taken away from them and the pain of that parting keen in thei
r hearts, he marvelled that their predicament could have so affected him before Bethe had even been thought of.
‘Must we go in there?’ Willow said, her lips a ghastly blue in the magelight.
‘You must,’ Gwydion told her, ushering them both inside. ‘For they will not murder their own.’
‘You’re making a joke,’ Will said. He set the jug down and stared at the wizard in the noisome darkness. ‘But I don’t see the humour in it.’
‘It is no joke.’
‘How can we pose as captives? What about the parley? Half of the king’s host know me by sight. Lord Strange certainly does. A haircut and a fresh suit of clothes will be no protection here.’
Gwydion braced his feet widely, put his hands to his temples, muttered. He began to dance and twirl in the straw. Words rumbled deep in his throat, words that were not in the true tongue, nor any tongue that Will had heard Gwydion use before. He recoiled from the wizard’s magical caress, felt something dry being dashed across his face, something like a powder, a pepper that stung his eyes. Then a blinding brilliance almost knocked them both down and left them in utter blackness apart from the colours in their heads.
‘Lord Strange may know the sight of you, Willand, but he does not know the Maceugh!’
‘The…what?’
Will’s own voice sounded odd in his throat as the wizard struck up the magelight anew.
‘When the magic settles fully upon you, you will begin to know who you have become.’
Willow dropped her loaves, and when Will turned to her he was amazed to see another. ‘What’s happened to us?’ he said, shaken to his marrow. ‘What have you done?’
Willow put a floury hand to his cheek. ‘Oh, Will, look at your face!’
‘Do not be alarmed,’ Gwydion said. ‘You are now not merely dressed as a lord and lady of the Blessed Isle, you are clothed in flesh anew. It is not an illusion. I have employed an ancient magic that might have been made for the purpose. It is a transformation that will deceive even Maskull’s eye. It’s one of my best skills.’
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