Dawn of Avalon (3 page)

I swathed them in bandages and declared them unfit for duty whenever I could. They were brave men, and good ones, many of them, and it was not their fault if their oath-sworn lords had chosen in turn to give their oaths to Vortigern.

Gamma said, always, that when the Roman legions fouled our sacred wells and burned the holy groves, a wedge had been driven between Britain’s gods and the land. She had said that any power of the Sight she taught me was but a faint, wavering reflection of the heights to which the druid-born had once soared.

Still, now, as I knelt there on the dirty cell floor, I could feel Vortigern’s gaze swivel towards me, could hear the thoughts clashing together like knives behind the serpent cold gaze. 

He had no particular reason to trust me. He had known me a scant few weeks, after all. And if Bron was a one of the druid-taught, he was a strange—

I could not—Goddess, could not—let that thin thread of suspicion pull taut. I could not let Vortigern finish the thought that echoed for me clearly as though he had indeed spoken the words aloud into the dank airless space of the prison cell. My hand was on one of the crusted burns on the prisoner’s muscled forearm, close to the floor and hidden by my body so that Vortigern could not see.

I tightened my fingers. Dug in my nails, hard enough that the fair-haired man broke off with a sharp huff of breath in mid-word.

In a tale, I would have felt something in that instant when my hand closed over the prisoner’s wound. A beat of Sight, maybe, like a second pulse, showing me the memory of Gamma’s silent nemetons, the sacred groves where I had lived until last spring.

Or mayhap the red, wrinkled face of the infant who would be Britain’s ruin and downfall one day. 

But as I turned and met Vortigern’s gaze, I felt nothing. And if I reached towards the prisoner in my mind, it was only to promise him that I would pull out his tongue and beat him with it if he tried saying one single word more to undermine our purpose here.

“He is the One.” My hands had gone cold, but the words came out quite steady as I looked first at Vortigern, then at Bron. “This man is the one you have sought, my lord: a man born of no earthly father. I Saw it as I tended his wounds just now.”

* * *

MAYHAP MY TEMPERAMENT—for good or ill—does spring from my mother’s folk, who were of Erin, land of gnarled thorn trees and mists and hidden springs. But she died when I was four, before I could know her more. 

Since spring, when I had returned to my father’s court—and been welcomed by him, I must grant him that much—I had told many tales, but never my own. Neither of my birth, nor of what was to come—my own life unfolding, glimpsed in the swirling blood Gamma had paid to the scrying waters before she died.

Now I could—almost—imagine Gamma standing before me, pursing her lips and telling me that for a healer, compassion comes before all.

Because the prisoner’s body showed scars on battle scars, marks of old sword wounds faded to thin white lines and newer ones still puckered and red. Even apart from the most recent marks, gift from Vortigern and his men. And I had to force myself to consider either scars or wounds as I demanded of him, “Have you utterly lost your wits?”

The prisoner looked at me, eyes hard in his dirt-smeared face.

We were alone in the underground cell’s cramped, rank-smelling space; Bron had given me a long look, and then had muttered something about consulting the auguries to see if what I said were true and gone, drawing Vortigern with him.

There was an energy, a quick, nervous hum beneath the still-muscled control that kept the prisoner prone on the floor, where Vortigern’s final kick had sent him. That was part of what had made me mark him for a fighting man, even more than the battle scars. For the past three days, that energy had been turned towards flicking Vortigern’s temper on the raw. Now the part he had played was—at least partly—fallen away, leaving him free to regard me with a keen-edged, intense focus behind his gaze.

All he said, though—and so flatly that his voice sounded almost indifferent—was: “I might ask you the same thing.” 

Truly, one does need patience above all else when treating with men made ill-humored by the pain of their wounds. And to any who think me over-quick, let me say that I had many times before that day had injured warriors heave pots of their own waste at me—and never once had I let my temper slip.

I had not even intended to lose my temper with this man, now. But I was so tired that my eyes felt as though they had been salted like meat for the winter. And there was as well that future, glimpsed in the scrying waters months before.

If that vision was
will be
, and not merely a shifting
may be
, I had only this brief window of time to choose for myself how I might serve Britain’s honor now. Before I was caught in the web of what harpers would one day turn to story and song.

The knowledge made me snap back through gritted teeth, “I apologize. Were you enjoying Vortigern’s attentions? I could call him in here again. He might be willing to break another two or three of your ribs while you play the babbling fool. Though if you had half a grain of sense, you would at least pretend to be knocked unconscious when he gets to work on you. Men like Vortigern want those they hurt to be able to feel the pain.”

The prisoner looked down at the length of linen I had bound tightly about his cracked ribs to keep their jagged edges from shifting and piercing a lung. Something hard crossed his face, like a cloud across the sun. And then his hand shot out, so swiftly that I had no time to react before he was dragging me forward, close enough that I could smell the blood and sweat on his tattered clothes. “Maybe I want it to hurt. Did you ever think of that?”

His hand had wrapped itself around my throat in a grip like a vise. My chest burned and my vision blurred. His breath was hot on my face. “You realize all I’d have to do would be to squeeze, and—”

I did know how to defend myself, Bron and Gamma between them had seen to that. But I had no chance. Behind me, the door to the cell banged open. And then the prisoner was all at once jerked backwards, landing with a dull thud on the dirty, straw-strewn floor. Bron straddled him—braided hair, white druid’s robe and all—and held a knife to his throat.

The prisoner fought, and of a certainty he fought well, with a fierce, concentrated economy of movement. Once he did land a blow on Bron’s jaw, hard enough to snap Bron’s head back and make him spit a mouthful of blood.

But the nameless prisoner was weak, feverish after a week of imprisonment and starvation and interrogation at Vortigern’s hands. And for all Bron had passed sixty winters a season or two back, he knew more wrestling holds than most men learn in a lifetime or more.

When the brief, snarling scuffle ended, the younger man still lay flat, panting and winded, with Bron pinning him flat to the ground. 

The prisoner was staring, eyes narrowed. “If you’re a druid, I’m—”

Bron grunted and shifted his grip on the hilt of the blade. “Right now I’d say all you should be caring about is that I’m the man with a knife at your throat. And that it stays there until you agree to show the lady a bit o’ respect.”

The prisoner’s eyes flared wide. His jaw went slack, and then his head turned—slowly. “Lady.”

I ordered myself to draw a slow breath, despite the hollow sliver of fear pressing up under my ribcage. I could not, in conscience, be angry with Bron. I knew it even before the prisoner spat out the word. Bron was oath-sworn to protect me, to guard my life with his own, and had volunteered for this mission without even being asked. Volunteered though it meant walking a knife’s edge, where one slip might mean both our lives.

And I could see in his face, the tight set of his gray-stubbled jaw, that he was mortally afraid he might have made such a slip now. 

Vortigern would not leave us alone here long, of that I had no doubt. If he did not come himself, he would certainly send a guard. Which meant that, of a surety and for good or ill, I had now no choice but to win this wounded, half-crazed prisoner’s trust.

“You were right, in a way,” I said, and met the prisoner’s gaze. “I am of Uther Pendragon’s line. I am Morgan. His daughter. And this”—I tilted my head—“Is Bron. My bodyguard.” I drew a breath. “Will you tell me your name? Whose war band you belonged to?”

Something—just for a moment—flickered across the prisoner’s angular face. 

But then he moved, ran a hand across his face as though he were peeling the show of feeling from his skin and flinging it from him. 

“Why should you think I ever belonged to anyone’s war band?”

Bron grunted at that, rubbing the reddened mark on his jaw where the nameless prisoner’s blow had landed. “Think we can rule out ‘bard’ or ‘scholar’ for what you might ha’ been before this, anyway.”

I watched the younger man, searching his gaze. But he did not move, not even by a fraction of a muscle. No expression on his face, nothing in the blue eyes.

 And time was slipping away. I could feel each precious moment I had here dripping away, like water through clenched hands. A bare handful of moments in which I might persuade the prisoner not to blurt out the truth of who I was the moment Vortigern or one of his guards stepped into the room.

I let out a breath. “You’ve opened the leg wound again.” I gestured to the bandages I had used on the prisoner’s upper thigh. That wound he had already carried when he had first been captured and dragged into Vortigern’s prison cell: a deep cut made by a long dagger or sword, and already some days old when I had seen it on that first day.

But he jerked back and even tried to rise when I moved to unfasten the pin I had used to hold the bandage in place. “A lady shouldn’t—”

“So when you thought me a boy, it was all right to try to kill me. But now that you know me for a girl, I’m suddenly too delicate to dress a bloodied sword cut?”

I did manage to keep my touch gentle, though, as I pushed the prisoner back onto the straw. To my surprise, he did not resist. Perhaps he was only too much exhausted from the fight with Bron. I added, more quietly, “Lie still. Please. And let me help you.”

For a moment, visions of burned settlements, broken bodies and homes danced like sparks before my eyes. Our harpers are full of laments for a warrior slain in battle, but murdered mothers and babies lie in silent graves. “I only wish this were the worst thing I’d seen.”

The prisoner had torn out three stitches that would need to be reset. I threaded a needle and could feel Bron’s eyes on me. I had known him as long as I had known Gamma, since I was four years old. He had taught me to draw a bow and arrow, to throw a knife and spar with a wooden staff.

And now, even without the Sight, I could have read the silent look he gave: a silent apology for bringing us to this moment with his slip of the tongue, mingled with a dubious,
Good luck to you, lass. I hope you know what you’re about.

I began. “When the Roman legions marched away and abandoned Britain, the land was left prey to barbarians on all sides. Constantine, Prince of Brittany, crossed the channel to Britain with an army two thousand strong, and defended the land, became Constantine
Waredwr—
Britain’s deliverer and High King.

“But then Constantine was killed. Murdered by Pictish assassins. His throne was seized by Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu, he who calls himself Vortigern now. Only Constantine’s nephew, Uther Pendragon, was left to oppose Vortigern’s claim to the High Kingship of Britain.”

I stopped and did risk a glance upward, then, holding the prisoner’s gaze even as my mouth twisted just slightly, “My father, whatever he may think of me or I of him, does love Britain. He has struck at Vortigern’s forces again and again. He would be here, now, storming the fortress—setting you free—were it not that any open attack on a hill as steep as this one would mean certain death.”

I waited two, then three beats of my own heart; three, then four of the prisoner’s harshly-drawn breaths.

I was used to anger from wounded men. When a man has nought else but his pride, he guards it at all costs. And a man rendered infant-helpless by a battle wound has little left to him but his pride.

I was used, too, to the youngest of the wounded men—little more than boys, really, cut down as they struggled to wield too-heavy swords—looking at me with pleading in their eyes. A look that said, plain as speaking,
Tell me you can make me whole again. Tell me I’m not going to die.

 This man, though—I had heard my father’s Saxon slaves tell fire tales of monstrous beings who claw their way back from the grave, unable to die or feel pain. It might have been one of those creatures I spoke to now.

I laid a hand—just lightly—across the newly stitched wound.

The Sight, Gamma had called the power she had taught me. Once it flowed like the first thaw of spring, a bounty from Britain’s earth, a song as many-voiced and bright-colored as the throb of the ocean or the cry of the wind.

Now men looked on the earth as naught but a slave, to be fought over and stripped of its spoils. And the Sight was a tide that sometimes ebbed, sometimes swelled, that would not come on command and did not always show true.

Still, I had found, sometimes, that I could catch a memory from a warrior’s pain—See the battle or the sword fight where the wounded man had taken his injury, sometimes hear a quick echo of the man’s thoughts at the time he got the wound. Fear and pain, often. Surprise, always. A warrior ever imagines the Morrigan’s raven wings will pass him by, however many of his companions fall.