Curse of the Celts

by Clara O'Connor

  “Ah, yes. Thank you, I’ll be fine,” he spoke to someone in the hallway before entering the room and closing the door to the stairwell.

  “Cassandra, I…” He hesitated.

  I smiled in amusement at his consternation.

  “It appears the Celts don’t keep to the same rules as the city when it comes to unmarried couples,” I observed dryly.

  “It appears not,” he responded carefully.

  “I’m okay if you are,” I offered quietly when he made no move to come closer.

  He nodded and crossed the room, leaving his candle on the table by the bed before he too cleaned up with a fresh pour of water and the cloth I had used before him. He pulled off his outer layers of clothing, fastidiously folding them and placing them on a nearby chest before climbing in beside me. He quenched the candle with a soft huff of breath.

  The room, which had been so empty before with only my thoughts rattling around in it, now felt suffocatingly small. I dragged back my consciousness from the forests where Devyn lay somewhere, suffering but still alive, I was sure. I would feel it if he were gone; he was closed off, distant, but still breathing. I knew it with the same certainty with which I drew my own breath.

  Being this close to Marcus made the inevitable awareness in my blood begin to heat as the handfast went to work. We had worn the metal cuffs for months now, longer than anyone I had ever heard of and the effects were impossible to ignore – for me at least, unprotected by my lost charm or by Devyn’s proximity. My fingers curled into my palms, digging into the skin to distract my mind from the attraction of the warm body on the other side of the bed.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when a hand gently brushed my shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” came his voice, soft in the darkness.

  I remained silent. I didn’t know what to say. No, I was not all right, and his touch made me at once furious and maddened with the need to turn into his arms. I hated the cuffs with a strength that would bring down the mighty stone walls of the keep if I released it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  The darkness allowed the words to linger in the air.

  “It’s not your fault,” I finally managed to breathe into the cold air.

  “No,” he said dismissively, “not for this – well, maybe a little for this, but I’m sorry for what happened.”

  I stayed silent. Let him say it. I wasn’t going to let him off so lightly if he was actually apologising for what had happened on our way north. His part in it at least had not been on purpose. Gideon, on the other hand, I would hold accountable until the last day I drew breath.

  The bed, despite its considerable substance, moved under Marcus’s mighty exhale. “I shouldn’t have left, I definitely shouldn’t have risked exposure by hooking up with some random Briton in a village, and I’m sorry that Devyn got hurt.”

  Was he sorry? Actually sorry? He’d had a right to be angry that night in the barn; I could hardly blame him for wanting to put some distance between us that night. He had still been grieving for his father and the loss of the only life he had ever known for an uncertain future in this primitive and hostile land. Even without the handfast cuffs complicating everything, his storming off was understandable.

  I reached up to the hand on my shoulder and put mine over it.

  “Okay,” I said softly. I pushed away from the chemical reaction I felt and focused on the Marcus I had known before the handfast: the caring physician, the warm friend, the charismatic social centre of every group. Someone I realised I had not seen in a while. Marcus on the road here had been quiet – not cold but solitary. He spoke seldom and interacted with others as little as possible. I knew he was still grieving, but in trying to push away this terrible handfast attraction, I realised I had pushed away my friend. My friend who was in pain.

  I couldn’t risk turning around to embrace him, not here in the dark with just the two of us, but I pulled his arm around me and tucked it into my body, hoping he understood that comfort was all I could offer him. He stiffened, but as I made no further move, he relaxed, and eventually his breathing evened out.

  I woke the next morning, for once warm and cosy. The coldness of my nose was the only indication that something was not as it had always been… before. In the comforts of the city. I blinked my eyes open to find the wintry sunlight streaming in through the window set in the bare granite walls of Devyn’s father’s castle.

  Devyn. My heart thumped at the remembrance that he was not here. He was not here. The dread made my body heavy in the soft grey light.

  Then who…?

  I twisted round in the bed and took in the handsome sleeping face that shared my pillow. Marcus.

  Abruptly, I pulled myself out of his arms and with a thump found myself on the bare rug that was all that separated me from the wooden floor. A floor which I had hit with my now tender arse.

  “Ow,” came a laughing voice from above. “That sounded like it hurt.”

  Marcus’s face appeared over the side of the bed above me, a genuine smile on his lips – the first I had seen there in what felt like for ever.

  “Morning.” I smiled back ruefully.

  “Come back into the warmth,” he invited. “I promise I’ll find a way to restrain myself.”

  Disgruntled, I nonetheless dove back in; it was freezing outside the covers.

  “That’s what you get for being in such a hurry to escape my arms,” he teased. I looked over at him, his green eyes lighting with a warmth that hadn’t been there since his father, the arena, the illness, the escape This was the Marcus I had known for only a few months of summer in the time before.

  “Well, if your giant hulk wasn’t taking up most of the bed…” I shot back.

  “Hulk! I’m just a little tall,” he said, “though not so much out here with the Britons.”

  “Most of the Britons we’ve met so far have been warriors. I’m not sure how typical they are,” I reassured him, giving him a patronising pat on the shoulder.

  He huffed in laughter before his eyes grew sombre.

  “Lord Rhodri has it, Cassandra,” he said.

  I blinked, not following.

  “Has what?”

  “The illness.”

  I thought back to the man by the fireside the night before. He hadn’t looked ill, a little frail maybe, but he was old so surely…?

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t seem too far gone. His skin is a little off colour and there is a tremor in his hands. He looks older than he should; I would put him at late forties, but he seems ten years older somehow.” He shook his head. “The symptoms don’t match the ones I’ve seen in the city – there is something faded about them – but I’m certain that’s what it is.”

  “Bronwyn knew he was ill when she came to Londinium,” I recalled. “She wanted Devyn to leave then, to go home with her and make peace with his father.”

  “That’s not possible. The Treaty Renewal was over two months ago.” Marcus frowned. “His symptoms should be far worse by now.”

  I thought back to the patients he had treated at Bart’s. Once the first symptoms showed, the illness progressed rapidly, the prognosis fatal in weeks, not months.

  “Maybe he’s sick with something else.”

  “No.” Marcus sounded sure. “He has the illness, but somehow they are holding it off.”

  “You think they’ve found a way to treat it?” I asked, happy to see the confident medical professional in Marcus resurface.

  “Fidelma spoke of a treatment,” he reminded me as he braved the cold and jumped out of bed with renewed purpose.

  We arrived in the hall to the sound of raised voices. A short man in a long hooded travelling cloak who stood facing Lord Rhodri fell silent as we entered the room.

  “Is this why you called me back? What do they need?” He spoke gruffly and wasn’t terribly welcoming at the sight of strangers in his lord’s hall. “Well, what do you need? Speak and let me be back on the roa
d.”

  Marcus and I looked at each other in bewilderment. What on earth was going on?

  “His lordship has called back his healer.” A deep voice drew my attention to Gideon’s tall frame as he leaned casually against the eaves of the window, looking out onto the road leading up to the keep.

  I turned back to the bearded man glowering at us.

  “You’re a healer?” Relief sprang inside me. Devyn might not be here yet, but at least help would be at hand when he got here.

  “Yes. Now what do you need, and I’ll be on my way,” he said impatiently.

  “It’s not us. It’s our friend and he’s on the way,” I explained.

  The healer looked exasperatedly at his lord. “You called me back for a patient who isn’t even here. Are you losing what little is left of your mind, my lord? We should have made the journey to Conwy weeks ago. There is nothing in the store and you will be dead before I can make it back. Though maybe that’s what you want,” he finished with a scowl.

  And was met with an answering one.

  “Madoc,” he said, in a quelling tone.

  “You think I care what these strangers think? I care not. I have spent too long keeping you alive despite yourself, and I’m not waiting here for some traveller who may or not make it, who I may or may not be able to help. What I know is that if you will not go to Conwy, I will go alone and be back before the last of the supplies runs out,” he spat. “I hope.”

  “Madoc.”

  Lord Rhodri’s tone brooked no further complaint. His healer merely stared back at him in disgust, sending us a similarly dismissive glare before he turned and began to stride out of the hall.

  “Madoc!” Lord Rhodri’s bellow brought the man’s exit to a sharp halt, and he turned, surprise at the force of his lord’s command clear on his bristled face.

  Lord Rhodri stared down the hall before explaining softly.

  “It’s Devyn. Devyn is coming.”

  The man’s face fell in shock and he took a quick step forward.

  “What? He has the Mallacht? Not the boy.” He looked fiercely towards us as if commanding our denial at his conjecture. “But we haven’t enough for you to last the week. How can I help him? If I go now, I can be back in a few days, less if your brother gives me fresh horses.”

  “It’s not the Mallacht,” I interjected, recognising the Briton term for the illness. Whatever medication it was that was running low was clearly intended to treat what ailed the father and not the son. “It’s some kind of poison or infection. We think. At least, he was….”

  “I threw a knife at him. I hit him. There was probably something on the blade,” came a flat voice from the window.

  I glared at Gideon and got an uncaring shrug in response.

  “What was on the knife?” Two hard voices spoke in unison as the older men turned towards the laconic dark-haired warrior.

  “I don’t know,” he frowned slightly. “People knew that we were going in search of them. The chances that the pointed end of my knife might scratch the Oathbreaker were probably even enough that someone took the time to apply a little something to the blade. Whether it’s a poison or curse… I have no way of knowing.”

  Or caring, his tone communicated quite clearly.

  “The scar…” Lord Rhodri’s eyes narrowed. “You’re the York pup the Mercians took in. You expect me to believe you don’t know what was on the blade that you stuck in my son?”

  The man could still move quickly when he wanted to and shoved Gideon against the wall, his elbow in the taller man’s neck.

  Gideon smiled darkly and pushed away from the wall against the hard bone digging into his exposed throat.

  “If I had wanted your son dead then he would be dead.”

  Lord Rhodri sagged. “They wouldn’t even let him come home. It was not his sin.”

  “He ate your sin, old man,” Gideon said into the silence in a hard voice.

  Lord Rhodri stepped back, his body seeming to diminish as he made his way back over to the chair by the fire, his alertness fading.

  “He was just a boy. Just a child.”

  He spoke into the fire, no longer really present in the room.

  I wondered if he had travelled back in time, to the frozen riverside where he had chosen to save his own life and that of his son, leaving my mother and me to our fates. I felt no hate towards the broken man by the fire. He had failed my mother and me on that day, and he and his son had been paying for it ever since. This once proud warrior sat in his empty shell of a keep, praying to whatever gods they believed in out here, to see his son one last time before he died – the son he must have thought dead this last decade, the son who had paid the more substantial price for his father’s sin. A boy who could barely remember a time when his own people didn’t hate him. A people who hated him for my sake. And he had come for me anyway.

  I crossed over to Lord Rhodri. I didn’t know him, but his pain was a palpable thing as I laid my hand on his arm.

  “He’s going to be okay. We will make sure that he recovers.” I couldn’t promise any more and I wasn’t even sure I could guarantee that much. I met Gideon’s dark gaze. He seemed to resolve something and pushed himself off the wall.

  “Which way did you send your men?” he asked gruffly.

  “What?” Lord Rhodri struggled to gather himself back. His face was pale and I noticed a flush had appeared on his high cheekbones, which were so like his son’s.

  “You sent men out last night, didn’t you? There’s no point me going in the same direction.”

  Gideon was going out to search for them. I don’t know why the thought of him seeking Devyn comforted me, but it did.

  Lord Rhodri lifted a hand and pointed south. “You said you were just outside Worcester when you parted and that your party came through Rhayader and Llanfyllin, so I sent them towards Oswestry and Shrewsbury, which would have been the most direct route.”

  “Maybe too direct. Bronwyn is no fool. York is on the roads hunting them and if they were to try and cut her off, they would have taken that road. It’s what I would have done.”

  “You would know,” grumbled the old healer.

  “What if she came on the old roads up to Ellesmere? It would be longer, which explains why they’re not here yet, but it would have been safer,” Gideon suggested.

  “Why would a princess of Kernow ride in fear of York? Why would they be in danger from your father’s troops?” Lord Rhodri had been a warrior in the service of the Lady of the Lake once; he would understand more about the tensions and alliances that made up Briton politics than I could ever hope to. What was it that seemed off to him? Since leaving Oxford we had ridden in fear of York, fortunate that when they finally caught us Callum had led them, and their focus had been on the immediate threat to all our lives rather than their original mission.

  “Your son rides with her.” Gideon shrugged.

  “What would York want with Devyn? He is worth nothing to your father,” said Lord Rhodri.

  “No, but you have something that is of worth.” Nobody needed to turn to look at Marcus. York was scouring the countryside for the three of us and if they found Devyn they would be unlikely to let him go. And when the steward discovered that the Plantagenet prince was sitting behind the fortified walls of a Gwynedd castle and that Callum had had us within his grasp and let us go, he would not be happy about it. Having Devyn would give him leverage.

  “I don’t know how that poison got on my knife, but I do know that my father will not overextend himself to ensure that the Griffin doesn’t die from a wound I gave him.”

  Gideon delivered this casually from where he leaned against the wall, as if he were speaking of matters which he could scarcely be bothered to discuss, but there was something about the very casual nature of his tone and posture that seemed overdone to me. It did bother him that Devyn might die of the dagger wound he had dealt. Not for Devyn’s own sake perhaps, but because killing him had not been Gideon’s intent and he bri
stled at being used that way. Or maybe it was because he wanted to ensure Devyn lived for my brother’s sake, though either way it didn’t really matter. I believed that if Gideon set out to find Devyn, then find him he would. That was good enough for me.

  Lord Rhodri surveyed Gideon steadily.

  “I have no fresh horse to give you.” Apparently Devyn’s father had drawn the same conclusion. “Take your own, but go through Chirk on your way. The De Laceys will give you some horses and I’ll write you a letter of safe passage. Perhaps not a full introduction, though. They bear the steward little love.”

  “Few outside Anglia do,” Gideon acknowledged.

  Madoc pulled some parchment from the travel bag that still hung from his shoulder, quickly followed by a quill and a small pot of ink. Sometimes it shocked me anew how thoroughly the Britons had managed to hold off the advances of the modern age so completely. Surely ink in a ballpoint pen wouldn’t be too great a concession to the technology of the Empire? It wasn’t like it was a computer tablet. Was it sheer stubbornness or was there a reason why they stuck to the barest of conveniences?

  There was a notable shake in his hand as Lord Rhodri wrote his letter for the family at Chirk Castle. Nobody else seemed to observe the difficulty he was having as he turned away to conceal a suppressed cough. Gideon, having retrieved his cloak and sword from wherever they had been stored, accepted the completed note and with a nod to me strode out of the hall.

  “Marcus?” I called as soon as Gideon and Madoc had left the hall. I might be entirely at a loss when it came to the politics of this strange and foreign land, but I had waited before calling attention to Lord Rhodri’s condition until the man he considered no friend of his house was gone.

  I threw a concerned look towards Devyn’s father, indicating that Marcus needed to take a closer look at him while the druid was absent from the hall. Maybe Marcus’s assessment of how advanced his illness was an underestimation of its progression.

  “Can you help him?” I asked as Marcus checked his vitals. The older man was slumped in his chair, exhausted from the façade he had maintained in the presence of the younger warrior.