Dawn of Avalon (6 page)

For all the grief was months old, I felt my eyes stinging as I spoke the words. “I wanted to stay there, in the forest where she raised me. But she made me swear to return to my father’s court when she was gone.”

Uther my father had professed himself more than glad to see me. And I even thought he spoke true. For the half-moment or two he looked at me before he was away with his warriors, planning their next campaign. But he had not even tried to barter me away in marriage for the sake of some strategic alliance, as many fathers would have done. I must—did, I suppose—grant him that much.

Still, I felt my mouth twist again. “I found, when I returned, that my father had indeed married Ygraine of Cornwall. And paid his druids to prophesy that their son was the promised one, he who would turn back the Saxon tide. I’m sorry for my brother Arthur, in a way. I had never seen him before last spring. I scarcely know him now. But I imagine it’s been a heavy load for a boy of thirteen to carry, to have been promised such a destiny from birth.”

For a moment, the swirling blood and water in Gamma’s scrying bowl stood before my gaze. I shut my eyes to clear them. “Yet I think, from what I have seen of him, that he carries the burden well. So well, indeed, that the prophesies may even prove true. He may be Britain’s savior from the Saxon hordes. If”—a shiver danced across my skin—“if he lives through the battles he and my father now fight. Lives long enough to grow to a man.”

I stopped again for breath, then said, still meeting the prisoner’s eyes, “A band of my father’s warriors has dug a tunnel, beneath this hill.” The owl called again as I gestured to the forested slope above and around. “Beneath Vortigern’s fortress. That is the true reason Vortigern’s walls will not stand. My father is, whatever else, a great warrior. He saw this place and knew he had no hope of mounting an open attack. Too many men would die before the summit of Dinas Ffareon could be gained. And so he set his builders to devising a tunnel, to carrying away the soil and bracing the tunnels walls. They have worked in secret these last weeks, night after night. Covering the mouth of the tunnel with branches and dry brush every morning at dawn. Though, truly, it has not been so hard to hide. Vortigern has not men enough to spare to send many out beyond the fortress on patrol. My part—my part and Bron’s—was to gain entrance in Bron’s guise of wandering druid, mine of his serving boy. To give Vortigern a false prophesy about the blood of a fatherless child, so that he would look no further for the reason his tower walls fell.”

I drew another breath, then said to the prisoner, my voice quiet in the larger hush of night, “You forced my hand when you nearly made Vortigern doubt me, doubt Bron. I told the first lie I could think of to make you stop, and to win back Vortigern’s trust. But I could not have let you to pay for the lie with your life.”

The prisoner ran a hand down his face. There was just light enough that I could read his expression: dazed confusion as he struggled to block out the visions long enough that he might take in the meaning of what I had told him. That, mixed with wary disbelief. Then both were gone, replaced by something hard and dully angry at the back of his gaze. “This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was supposed to die. That was all I wanted. Death. Is that so goddamned much to ask? For Vortigern to kill me and put an end to this—”

He made a quick, angry gesture and I saw a shudder twist through him as his gaze traveled around the night-dark forest. The shudder was instantly controlled, though; whoever he was, the force of discipline was deep in him and strong.

He stilled and looked back at me, the dead-eyed, stony look back in place. “I’m sorry if I hurt you, Morgan, Daughter of Uther. But you should go. Go to your father’s men and carry out your mission, if you will. But leave me here to finish mine.”

“No.” I was sick, still, and filled with a chill shaking that felt as though my bones had been turned to ice. I spoke almost before I knew—but if I am honest, in that moment, I could not have said whether I refused because some larger purpose spoke through me or whether I simply could not face the thought of going off into the night alone.

Above us, Vortigern’s fortress still loomed like a great, hulking beast ready to strike. But the woods here, the forest quiet, was at least a little like the forest of oaks where I had been raised. No walls, here, nor anything to keep the night breeze from stirring my hair, lifting the fear from my skin and blowing it free like dandelion seed.

I put my hand on the prisoner’s arm, not a gentle touch, this time, but a hard grip that made his head come up sharply and his muscles tense. 

“A god rides your brow, whoever you are. And that is not an easy nor a comfortable gift. Believe me, I have cause to know. But I can’t let you stay here and get yourself recaptured and killed. There’s too much at stake.” I drew in another breath, still gripping his arm. “I need you to come with me now. And if anything happens to me, if Vortigern’s men find us, and I’m the one captured, I need you to swear to me that you’ll run—as fast as you can—to where my father’s men are. I’ll draw you a map on the ground here, now. And you must swear to me that if anything happens to me, you’ll get to my father’s men and deliver the message that they must make ready to attack.”

I saw him start to shake his head, saw him open his mouth to refuse again. I tightened my grasp. “You must! Would you have Vortigern remain king thanks to you? The man who gave you these?” I touched the raw lash marks on his back. “Would you let your choice tonight keep that man on Britain’s throne?”

I could see the fine tremor of a muscle on the side of his jaw, and realized just how on edge his nerves were, how close to the point of breaking. 

The moment lengthened, stretched out, the night silence grew and swelled between us, broken only by the harsh bark of a fox from somewhere not far distant, the creak of the branches above as they swayed in the night breeze.

  Then, finally, the prisoner jerked his head in a wordless nod. He grimaced as the movement jarred his injuries, but spread his hand out, palm up.

“Go. I’ll follow. I swear to it. As you asked.”

* * *

MY FATHER'S MEN were gone. 

They should have been hard at work, clearing earth from the tunnel they had made on the eastern side of Dinas Ffareon. But the forest was utterly deserted, and the black mouth of the tunnel, when we reached it, yawned silent and empty as a tomb.

I drew the prisoner inside, rearranged the cover of brush and branches over the opening as best I could. In truth, what else could I do? The prisoner had kept pace with me as best he might—and truly, better than I could have hoped—as we had made our way through the chill, dark night, skirting the thick forest along the base of the hill.

But the walk had tired him. He was pale and sweating, muscles shivering as though he fought at every moment a grim battle to stay on his feet. And dawn was breaking, pale-gray light beginning to spill like a cascade down the hillside. We could not risk remaining out in the open much longer; Vortigern’s patrols might be rare in the usual way, but he would surely send out searchers when he woke from the night’s drinking and found his proposed sacrifice to the gods gone.

“Sit.”

The prisoner didn’t resist, but sank down as I bade him onto the ground, though still with an echo of that spare, focused economy of movement I had seen in him before. A warrior’s training, too, had been carved deep into his muscle and bone.

I had given him my cloak to cover himself, and a pair of Bron’s breeches that rode low on his hips and ended well above his ankles. 

But apart from that, I had had no boots nor other clothing to offer him. I could see, now, in the faint light of dawn that filtered through the branches, that his feet were pale with cold and bleeding from a dozen and more scratches, as were his hands and arms. He braced his forearms on his knees and lowered his head, and I heard the harsh rasp as he fought to control his breathing.

The opening of the tunnel had been braced with split timbers to hold back the weight of earth above and around. I sat down opposite him, leaning against one of the wooden beams. The prisoner’s eyes, bleak and gray in the pale half-light, met mine.

“What now?”

I gave him the answer I had already decided on, the only answer I could find just now. “We wait. What else can we do? Vortigern’s guardsmen will be out and combing the forest for you soon.”

He nodded once, moving as though the effort were almost too great, but then rubbed a hand across his face as though he were trying to keep alert.

“Your father’s men?”

“I don’t know.” Now that we had stopped moving, I was realizing how utterly exhausted I was, as well. I heard a quiver in my voice, and gritted my teeth to stop the words shaking any more. “I don’t know what’s happened to them. They should be here.”

All the
might-be
’s seemed to flash in an instant through my mind: my father’s warriors lying dead somewhere out there in the brooding forest, staring up at the lightening sky with sightless eyes. Vortigern’s men tearing aside the branches that concealed our refuge, here, and dragging us out and back inside the fortress walls.

I pressed my eyes closed, then looked at the man opposite me. “You See the future. Don’t you?”

“Is it the future?” I had the impression he spoke without conscious control, as though the words had wrenched themselves free to hang between us in the dim stillness. He ran a hand down his face again and went on. “I don’t know. I don’t know whether what I See actually comes to pass. I don’t—”

He had regained control now; he stopped, gritting his teeth as though biting off any further words, then looked down at the ground and said, in a different tone, “The ground here—it’s wet. We should make sure it’s safe to stay before we do anything else.”

I followed his gesture and saw he was right, the tunnel’s earthen floor was muddied, the footmarks my father’s men had left filled with little pools of dirtied water. At least it showed they had been here, and not long ago.

“Do you have flint?” the prisoner asked.

I dug in the pack I had brought and found flint and tinder both, wrapped in a scrap of oilskin to keep dry. A branch from the covering at the tunnel’s mouth and a torn length of my cloak made a makeshift torch. When he had it lighted, the prisoner led the way along the muddied ground, deeper into the center of the hill.

The torch’s flame cast wild, dancing shadows on the earthen walls, and my heart quickened, all weariness forgotten, for truly I did not know what we would find. My father’s men worked slowly, bracing the walls as they went, and knew what they were about. But there are ever dangers in work of this kind, and a sudden cave-in could have buried them. 

The air grew danker and chill as we made our way along, my companion holding the torch aloft. And then he stopped, so abruptly that I bumped against his back.

“This must be why they stopped work—why they’re not here now.”

I looked past him, and saw that the tunnel ended, not in the cave-in I had feared, but in a wall of solid gray rock, glistening and dripping with moisture in the fire’s dancing orange light. I should perhaps have been frightened. We were deep underground, and there was always the danger that the seeping water would cause the tunnel walls to collapse.

But there was a strange, austere … beauty, I suppose, in the scene before us. As anything ancient and immovable must be called beautiful, in its way. The torchlight glinted off the rock’s smooth, rippling face, sparking the drops and running rivulets of water to glowing jewels.

It was like a strange, earth-weighted sanctuary, or a shrine to some god of roots and rock and earth. And I felt, standing there, as though we did indeed stand in the singing presence of one of the Old Ones, who had passed from flesh into spirit to dwell forever in hollow hills like this one.

Perhaps my companion felt it, as well. Or perhaps he was only too exhausted for words. But we neither of us spoke, not until we had made our way back along the tunnel, back to the sunlight that poured through the entrance like some age-old answer to whatever lay buried deep within the soil.

I forced my lips apart to ask, “Is it safe for us to be here?” 

“I think so.” He was squinting as though the bright sunlight hurt his eyes, and sat down again, tipping his head back against one of the bracing beams. “If we stay here, near the entrance, we’ll have time to get out if there’s a collapse. And it’s a better hiding place than any other, just now.”

He rubbed his eyes, and I had the feeling he was reaching towards some bleak reserve of strength. Then he looked up at me. “Tell me what happened last night. Tell me how we came to get away from Vortigern.”

I had meant to ask him if he could See aught of our future, now. But I could feel the shivers of the nightmare darkness still twisting beneath the surface of his control. Or perhaps I only saw it in the tautness of his neck and shoulders, the white lines about the corners of his mouth; a healer learns to read bodies as well as minds.

Instead I drew out my healer’s kit. “Let me tend your injuries and I’ll tell you the whole.”

He had opened the leg wound again. I could see the stain of fresh blood through the breeches I had given him, nearly black in the shadows of the tunnel. But it was in truth for myself as much as for him that I had offered to see to his wounds. Changing bandages, checking stitches and applying salves to the multitude of cuts and scrapes on his skin: these were all familiar, anchoring and steadying me as I spoke.