As if dreaming, she watched him fling aside his black cloak to reveal the sword strapped to his back. In a single motion, he unsheathed it. Lightning flashed along the tapered blade etched with curling flame, the hilt fashioned like an upraised hand thrusting a torch into Heaven.
Lady of Light, she knew that sword. She’d seen it a thousand times, clasped to her father’s breast.
Arching back, legs braced, the executioner plunged the sword straight up toward the roiling clouds. At the same moment, he dragged the hood from his head. An aura of unearthly fire burst into life around his powerful frame, cloaking his short tawny hair with the streaming white-gold mane of the archangel Uriel.
But she knew him by another name.
“Beltran,” she whispered, one hand rising to her throat. Somehow, blessed Goddess, she’d known he would come.
But the blade gripped in his fist was no Christian sword of Judgment. As lightning forked down to envelop the sword with cobalt fire, she breathed the word.
Excalibur.
The archangel lowered his head and gazed at her, blue flame pulsing around his body. A warm torrent of tears blurred her vision.
“Thou art restored to divinity. Why did thou remain in the mortal world?” she said, numb with disbelief. The rising wind tore at her gown and lashed streaming tendrils of hair around her.
The lion’s roar that could shred eardrums like the blast of trumpets rumbled so low it made her bones vibrate.
“Rhiannon, my treasure, do you not know?”
A human voice pierced the storm, a great bellow of rage. Movement flickered at the edge of vision—her beefy guard, his arm cocked. His spear whistled toward her.
Beside her, Beltran’s arm swept up, palm raised toward her attacker in a halting motion. The lightning channeled through his upraised sword and burst from his palm in a cascade of fire. The blast incinerated the flying missile to ash. The guard’s contorted face vanished behind a wall of flame.
Fresh screams filled the air as spectators, guards, captives scattered wildly in all directions. The poor unfortunates bound to their stakes struggled as scattered fires kindled in the pyre all around.
Driven into action, Rhiannon darted through the smoke to the nearest stake and began working madly at the ropes. Beside her, Young John leaped over a tongue of fire and began tugging at the cords that restrained a second captive.
A fresh torrent of blue fire scorched through the open air, whelming a knot of guardsmen who were charging toward them. Howling bodies scattered in all directions. Blindly Rhiannon darted from captive to captive, pausing only to snatch up a dagger from a fallen guard to saw at the ropes. Young John flitted like an imp through the smoke, herding the stunned prisoners toward open air.
At last they’d freed them all, sent them all stumbling toward safety. Now fire roared up around her, the acrid smoke stinging her eyes, setting her lungs ablaze. Bent double with coughing, swiping her streaming eyes, she reeled toward open ground. Goddess save her, the smoke had grown so thick she couldn’t see.
Before her terrified eyes, the flames parted. Beltran’s black-clad form emerged, Excalibur held upright like a cross before him. She voiced a glad cry and rushed toward him—her hope, her guide, her love.
With one strong arm he caught her around the waist, sweeping her effortlessly from the burning pyre. Coughing, she wound her arms around his neck and clung to him as the flames crackled around them, the intense heat singeing her hair.
Like a miracle there was a horse before her, a saddle beneath her, strong hands boosting her forward to straddle the pommel as he swung up behind.
“Wait,” she said hoarsely. “The others! We can’t leave them.”
“We won’t,” he said grimly, arms closing around her to grasp the reins. The coal-black stallion—a strange mount, not Serafin—sidled and snorted. “Some have already scattered. The others are bundled in a wagon. We’ll have to lead them out, but I fear we won’t get far.”
Above them the skies opened, the dry sting of hail now mixed with sleeting rain. Rhiannon was drenched between one breath and the next, as though someone had overturned a basin of icy water on her head. She stripped back her wet hair and squinted into the gale, straining to see through the billowing smoke.
There. A brewer’s wagon, its barrels heaved over the side and staved against the earth, a dozen sooty captives crowded within. Young John perched on the seat beside a graybeard prisoner with fierce eyes. The graybeard raised the brewer’s whip and lashed the carthorses into a clumsy gallop.
She and Beltran thundered past, leading the way over the storm-lashed field, the flaming pyre falling away behind them.
Blinded and deafened by the tempest, Rhiannon clung to the saddle, gasping for air as her burning lungs slowly cleared. When Beltran flung his cloak around her, she huddled gratefully in its folds, still warm from his body, and inhaled the familiar spice of frankincense. Still trembling, she leaned back against his broad chest and closed her eyes.
She could hardly believe he was here, she was saved, they were together—for however long. She could scarcely believe she wouldn’t wake screaming in her cell.
But she mustn’t go to pieces now. Thanks to Uriel and the storm—and hadn’t there been a hint of Faerie magick, her mother’s weather magick about that?—they’d escaped the immediate threat. But plenty of survivors had watched them flee, seen them bowling along the road from the city.
She’d lay odds this great black stallion with his noble heart galloping beneath them could have outrun any horse in Britain. But the heavy-laden wagon was already slowing. A dozen fleeing heretics with death warrants signed by the Queen herself—pursuit would not be long in coming. The Archbishop and Bloody Bonner would see to that.
She twisted to look up at Beltran, chiseled features intent as he scanned the horizon. The rain had eased to a steady downpour, but the road was a sucking sea of mud that slowed their flight.
Rhiannon gave herself a moment, just a moment to embrace him with her eyes—his strong jaw, his firm mouth, his beloved brow furrowed with determination. His piercing eyes flickered with wrathful lightning. Then she applied her wits to the business at hand.
“Beltran,” she said huskily, throat scratched and raw from coughing. “This headlong flight is folly. That wagon will be mired in mud in no time. We must get off the road.”
Reluctantly he nodded, his gaze flickering toward her. When their eyes met, his hard face softened.
“God’s body, Rhiannon!” he said, low and intent. “I prayed I didn’t come too late. If I had—if they’d burned you—I swear to Christ I would have climbed on that pyre myself.”
She managed a wobbly smile of reassurance and lifted a trembling hand to brush his jaw, raspy with stubble. “I doubt thy God would have allowed that.”
His cobalt eyes creased in a thoughtful smile. “We’ve called an armistice, He and I. I’m beginning to learn to channel this holy wrath. And it seems my earthly exile has some...compensations.”
“You’ve seen firsthand thy God’s capacity for mercy,” she said softly. “All those poor souls who were condemned to burn, myself among them—”
“Never,” he growled.
“Thou could have let thy Church carry out its sentence, and yet thou chose to save them,” she marveled. “And the sword! Excalibur. My father allowed you to...?”
“He seemed to want me to have it.” He shook his head in wonder. “Or so claimed the Lady of the Lake. But I’
ve the feeling I’m not meant to keep it.”
“Nay, it must return to my father’s hand. The magick that binds it to him is very powerful.” Her eyes lingered on the hilt thrust over his shoulder—a hand gripping a golden torch. “’Tis more than a weapon, that blade. Especially in thy hands, with the double magick of the sword and thy God flowing through it.”
“It burned like a torch indeed, and showed me a way through the Veil. Without it, I would never have reached you in time.” Protectively his arms tightened around her. “Your father loves you, Rhiannon.”
She sighed and leaned into his strong embrace. “The blade is a guiding light, a guide through the mists...” She trailed off. Then inspiration seized her, and a gasp spilled out.
“Beltran, stop the horse!”
“What is it?” In a heartbeat he shifted to battle-readiness, tension crackling through him. Excalibur seemed to leap to his gauntleted hand as he surveyed the rain-swept fields and hedges.
Gray stubble shimmered with pools of standing water. Coils of smoke rose from the wattle-and-daub chimneys of a handful of cottages scattered like dice across the fields. The foul weather had kept them all indoors—all save themselves, and the laden wagon churning through the mud in their wake.
Hastily she scanned the view. “We need someplace...a little hollow or valley, a freshwater spring. There!”
Not far from the road rose a spinney of rowan trees, with water glimmering beneath. Rowan, which her people called witch wood. Precisely the sort of place they wanted.
Frowning, Beltran eyed the terrain. “The wagon will never make it over that plowed field.”
“We can walk.” Tingling with excitement, breathless with a blend of anticipation and fear that somehow her instincts were wrong, Rhiannon jumped down from the saddle before he could stop her.
He cursed, but reined in and swung down. She was already running to the wagon, words of reassurance and explanation bubbling from her lips. In the sea of tired and dirty faces turned toward her, worried eyes swung between her and Beltran’s stern features.
Although he must have thought she’d run mad, he backed her up, bless the man. Beneath his calm authority the wagon was halted beside the road, the exhausted carthorses cut free at Rhiannon’s insistence. Soon the small cavalcade of smoke-stained men, women and children went straggling across the plowed field. Beltran gripped the black’s reins and strode along beside her, the sword held loosely in his fist.
“I hope to Christ you know what you’re doing,” he muttered. “Those guards will have organized and ridden after us by now.”
She knew she should share his concern, but a strange ebullience buoyed her up. Incongruously, she wanted to skip and laugh with it. “Don’t you trust me yet, Beltran?”
His eyes seared into her. “With my life. I’d follow you through Hell itself.”
She heard his words and her soul thrilled. All the love in her heart welled up, bringing tears to her eyes. Wordlessly gazing up at him, she slipped her hand into his. Their fingers twined together around the stallion’s reins. On the other side, Young John came quietly forward and linked his thin hand through hers.
Behind them, taking heart from their serene certainty, their companions drew closer, hands finding hands, the strong helping the weak over the rutted earth.
Now the spinney rose around them, green and brown, a floating carpet of leaves coating the still pool inside. Swiftly she glanced about, taking stock. Even with all her lost magick, Rhiannon could never have raised the mists and summoned the Veil unaided, far from the ancient nodes of power. A brief flicker of worry furrowed her brow.
Then she glimpsed her father’s sword, gleaming pure silver in the shadows, and took heart. Through narrowed eyes, Beltran watched her. Their companions clustered around, forming a circle without her guidance, hands linking in a chain.
A deep stillness settled over and inside them, the low thrum of expectation she recognized as the prelude to powerful magick.
Barely whispering, she instructed Beltran to hold her father’s sword upright between them. Lightly she wrapped her hands over his and gripped the hilt. The blade brightened, a low hum rising from the steel, making her bones vibrate. Calm and certain, Beltran’s gaze locked on hers like a steadying hand.
She swallowed past a throat gone dry with nerves.
“I’m not certain how to make this work,” she whispered.
“When you summoned the Veil, you cried out something,” he urged, brow furrowed as he fought to recall the event. “I was praying, begging God for your life.”
As though he too felt the growing compulsion, he began murmuring a prayer to Christ in the Roman tongue. Around them, scattered voices took up the words. Young John’s piping voice started a counterpoint—the paternoster in Protestant English. Rhiannon closed her eyes and tightened her grip on Beltran’s.
A rising tide of joy buoyed her flagging spirits, nearly lifting her feet from the soil. The old words of power welled up within her like a bubbling spring. Thankfully, she opened herself to the tingling rush of magick—that dizzying force she’d feared never to feel again, summoned by the marriage of Excalibur’s magick and the Christians’ prayers, the powerful grace of their God.
Raising her face toward Heaven, she cried out the spell.
Chapter Nineteen
The distant chime of bells woke her, a joyous din that echoed and sang through her blood. She stretched and opened her eyes, marveled at the sense of peace and wellbeing flooding through her. Had she somehow returned to Faerie?
But nay. The wainscoted walls of a mortal dwelling coalesced around her, sunlight streaming through diamond-shaped panes across the honey-colored wooden floor. Pewter gleamed on the white-draped table. A fire crackled in the hearth. The good English smells of brown beer and sharp cheese wafted to her nostrils.
Rhiannon pushed back the blankets and sat. Cool air teased her bare skin beneath the clean shift that was her only garment.
“Dear Goddess,” she said to Beltran. “Where are we?”
He turned from the window and strode to her side. “Village of Wythe, the innkeeper says. Just within the Scottish border. The Queen of Scots’ domain, and thus free of Tudor influence. Your magick proved oddly precise, love.”
“My magick...?” Slowly the details spilled through her drowsy brain—the dungeon, the pyre, Uriel raging through the tempest like the Angel of Vengeance he was. The smell of autumn as they linked hands in the spinney, Excalibur shining like a star before them.
She knuckled the sleep from her eyes. “Rather I think it was our magick, thine and mine. Somehow we linked Faerie and Christian magick in a way I’ve never seen before.”
The old Beltran would have denied such a blasphemous notion. Now he merely studied her, a thoughtful frown creasing his brow.
Opting not to hurry him through this radical evolution in his thinking, she smiled and shrugged. “Or perhaps someone was watching out for us. The Lady of the Lake, thy God—perhaps even my father, who can say? Where are the others?”
“In the common room, some of them, keeping the feast day. When those bells started their clamor, Young John ran down to the church for tidings.”
“Feast day?” Rhiannon’s brow furrowed, the beginnings of alarm prickling through her. “Why, how long have I slept?”
“A full night and day, and we all agreed you’ve earned it. It’s the Feast of All Saints.”
“’Tis the Day of the Dead, in Fae
rie...” The day after Samhain. Anxious, she flung back the blankets and leaped to the floor. Heedless of her undress, fresh-washed hair swirling around her shoulders, she padded barefoot past Beltran and hurried to the window.
Their second-story chamber overlooked the courtyard, the bustling stables and kitchens, the clean-swept cobbles of a village street beyond. Above the thatched roofs of the whitewashed cottages, the rugged sere and bracken of the Scottish moors rolled toward the horizon, under a fleet of briskly scudding clouds.
Astonished, she turned to Beltran. “But this is peace and order! The Convergence should have fallen, the Veil dropped, the way opened between the worlds.”
Tenderly he smoothed a loose ringlet from her eyes and folded her hands around a pewter mug. “You were deceived by your sister’s witchcraft. Your death would have brought about the event, not averted it. The Lady laid it upon me to tell you.”
“Then the Convergence still looms. We’ve done nothing to avert it.”
“It won’t happen today,” he said firmly. “Drink your beer.”
Pensive, she sipped the foaming brown beer. The cool wetness soothed her smoke-raw throat.
Suddenly she was famished, weeks of starvation rations in the dungeon catching up with her. Protective of her welfare as always, Beltran urged her to the table. The polished pewter held simple ware—a crusty loaf of fresh barley bread, sweet crumbling cheese, a steaming tureen of mutton stew swimming with carrots and turnips. Her mouth watering, Rhiannon fell upon the feast.
Between mouthfuls, she demanded, “The others—are they well?”
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