The Old Magic (2 page)

But though Mab could see many things, the future was closed to her. For that she turned to Idath. His Cauldron of Rebirth
showed the future of all lives that were reborn from it. He would tell her the outcome of today’s battle.

The endless misty plain frustrated her, and she howled her displeasure—a wailing, terrifying cry that had slain grown men
on the battlefield. They had named her
bean sidhé
—the banshee—for it, and Morrigan, Lady of the Ravens, those birds who were the only victor on any battlefield. They had loved
her once.

The echoes of her cry died away in the mist, and Mab snarled with rage at her memories.

“There’s no need to shout,” Idath said mildly.

He was tall and gaunt, his whole being cloaked in shadows. Beneath the heavy antler-crowned bronze helmet he wore, his eyes
glowed a feral red. Yet he, just as she, was dwindling away through the force of the humans’ disbelief.

“Don’t play games with me,” Mab raged. “You know what I’ve come for.”

“You’ve come to know what will be,” Idath answered. “But are you sure that’s what you truly want? The future holds only sorrow,
for all things die.”

“Not us!” Mab answered quickly. “We shall live forever—for as long as the hearts of the people beat in tune with the Old Ways.”

“And if they are all dead?” Idath answered inexorably. His cloak billowed, and now Mab could see the glowing metal of the
Cauldron of Rebirth, souls rising from it like steam as they returned to the world; the dead who filled it being transformed
by Idath’s powerful magic. “You have made much work for me in these last years, with your Vortigern. His appetite for slaughter
is endless.”

“He was necessary,” Mab answered. “Constant and his Christians were destroying us. Vortigern is a Pagan. He will restore the
Old Ways once he rules England.”

“Are you truly certain of that, my love? Gaze into my cauldron and tell me what you see here.” Idath stepped back.

Almost reluctantly, Mab came forward and gazed down into the mists. The pearls that studded the lip of the cauldron glowed
like captive moons, turning the liquid within an eerie glowing emerald. The mist that boiled up from the cauldron’s depths
veiled the surface.

“I can’t see anything,” Mab complained.

“The future is always in motion,” Idath replied. “Wait a moment and it will settle … there.”

Mab gazed down, fascinated at the mirrored scene the cauldron contained. She saw the gates of Pendragon Castle forced open
by treachery, saw Vortigern’s troops swarm through the breech, slaughtering everyone they could reach as the red dragon banner
of King Constant was dragged down and trampled underfoot. She watched as the King, knowing his army was defeated, ordered
all his prisoners slain, and watched as Constant was slain in turn. The golden crown rolled across the floor, away from the
spreading pool of blood.

Vortigern picked it up, a slow smile of satisfaction spreading across his heavy Saxon features as he placed it upon his head.
He stepped up to the throne from which Constant had been dragged only moments before, and seated himself on it.

“Where is the boy?” Mab heard him ask.

“Your Grace, he has escaped to Normandy with Queen Lionors,” Kentigern told his brother. “He’s just a boy.” His voice shook
a little with fear as the new king frowned.

“Boys grow up to be trouble,” Vortigern rumbled. He seemed to recover his triumphal feelings of a moment before with an effort.
“But meanwhile, there’s work to do. Take as many knights as you need and ride through the kingdom. Slay everybody who isn’t
loyal to me and won’t pay my new taxes, Pagan or Christian. The Queen of the Old Ways thinks I will rule as her puppet to
bring back the Old Ways, but she’s wrong. From now on, the supreme power in the land is me—and only me.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Kentigern said, bowing and nearly stumbling with the relief of leaving the royal presence alive.

“No!”
Mab’s shriek of despair shattered the smooth surface of the cauldron, dissolving the image. “No! I gave him Britain so that
he would bring back the Old Ways! He has betrayed me! He has betrayed all of us!”

“He has been true to his own nature,” Idath said inexorably. “His symbol is the White Dragon, and the White Dragon cares for
nothing but battle.”

“He will serve me in the end,” Mab vowed through gritted teeth. “Whether he wills it or not. But the next champion I choose
will not be able to betray me, ever—this I swear!”

“Gracious Lady, thrice-crowned Queen, hear the prayers of those who worship you and come to our aid.” Ambrosia finished her
morning prayers in a hasty rush and got to her feet.
Not that you’ll help,
she added cynically. The hilltop shrine—no more than a tiny altar hidden at the end of a long passageway made up of bluestone
menhirs—was one of the few on the Downs that still remained undefiled. But even it had not escaped without injury, for at
the back wall was the carven stone image of Mab in her three aspects—Morrigan the Warrior, Titania the Maiden, and Melusine
the Mother—that had been marred by some angry and disappointed petitioner until only the Warrior aspect was still whole. The
Maiden and the Mother had been battered almost into invisibility, but between them Mab-Morrigan—Raven-lady, Sword-crowned,
Queen of Battles—looked down at Ambrosia with sightless, knowing eyes.

Ambrosia lingered, more from weariness than from any desire to commune with the Lady she still grudgingly served. On the crude
stone altar a bronze lamp shone down on the meager offerings—a barley-cake, some flowers, water from the sacred well. Little
enough to offer to the Queen of Air and Darkness, but her followers were starving.

“And it isn’t as though You’re going to come for them,” Ambrosia said with a sigh. Ambrosia had not seen Mab in the flesh
since she was a child first serving at the great shrine of Sarum, when Constant’s rule, though Christian, had not yet descended
into its later madness. In those days the followers of the Old Ways had been persecuted and driven from their holy places,
but they had not been hunted and slaughtered as Vortigern was doing now. It was scant consolation in these dark days to know
that the Christians suffered equally from the new King’s tyranny.

Ambrosia lifted the carved amber amulet that she wore about her neck and kissed it dutifully. Then she turned reluctantly
away from the altar, back to the world and her duties.
There are times when I wonder if You ever cared for us at all,
she thought. Ambrosia only had her mother’s tales of the golden time when the Old Ways reigned supreme, their magic setting
in motion the stars and the seasons. Now everything was darker, grimmer.

She stepped out into the daylight again, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the light. All around the shrine and its sacred
well there were crude shelters made of wicker and animal skins, where refugees from Vortigern’s endless pogroms took shelter.
Some of those hiding here were Christians, Ambrosia was almost certain of it, but in the old days the shrine of the Old Ways
had been open to anyone who sought refuge there, and Ambrosia intended to continue that custom.

“You look tired today, my dear,” Lailoken said. He was a Druid, and still wore the hooded white robe of his order and carried
the golden
boline
hung at his belt, but his oak-grove had been cut down long ago. Since that time he had been a wanderer among the courts of
those lords who clung to the Old Ways, but under Vortigern’s rule no one dared any longer to harbor a prophet and seer, lest
they be accused of plotting against the king.

“I’m always tired,” Ambrosia said crossly. “And hungry. But there’s no use grumbling about it. There are hungry mouths to
feed, and—”

She broke off, studying his lined and weathered face. “Lailoken, you look as if you’d been eating green apples. Have you had
a vision?”

“Yes, well … that is to say, I’m not quite sure.” The old Druid’s voice quivered, both with age and with the fear of his own
powers that had come with the years of secrecy and hiding. Once he had been a great prophet, able to see into the future and
advise men on what the fates held in store for them, but the years of persecution had taken their toll.

Ambrosia put a hand gently on his arm. “Oh, well, never mind it now. We’ll talk about it later over a nice cup of herbal tea,”
she said reassuringly. At least they still had the herbs for that.

But later never came, and in after years she wondered what Lailoken’s vision had been, and whether knowing it would have done
her any good at all.

The sun was overhead when the riders appeared upon the horizon. Ambrosia was standing beside the sacred well, overseeing the
filling of buckets and waterskins that would provide water for cooking and cleaning for all the camp’s inhabitants.

She squinted her eyes, peering into the distance, trying to see. Her heart sank as she counted the horsemen’s numbers. There
were too many of them to be anything but trouble. A trick of the wind stretched their banner smooth against the sky for a
moment, and on its dark surface Ambrosia could see the White Dragon. These were Vortigern’s men.

Lady, save us!
Ambrosia breathed a terrified prayer, clutching the amulet she wore as if Mab might truly come in answer to this prayer when
she’d come to no other. For one long minute she stood frozen, transfixed by the horror she could envision so clearly.

Then she found her voice. “Run!” she cried to the startled folk around her. “The White Dragon is coming for us! Run!”

She dropped the bucket she’d been filling and ran down the hill to the huts to spread the alarm. By the time she got there,
the panic had spread, and the fastest of Vortigern’s riders had reached the outskirts of the camp.

It was a slaughter. The refugees were given no chance to surrender and less to escape. Some of the men fought back, with quarterstaff
and spear, but they were cut down like summer wheat. Vortigern’s men rode among the women and children, slashing and stabbing
like madmen and setting the torch to everything that could burn. Within moments, the encampment was a hell of smoke, fire,
and blood, filled with the shouts of the butchers and the screams of the dying.

Ambrosia clutched a screaming child in her arms—snatched up as it fled in panic from the riders—and looked around herself
wildly for some direction that promised escape. Seeing a gap in the fighting, she began to run toward it, clumsy with the
burden in her arms.

She did not see the blow that knocked her from her feet and sent her spiralling down into blackness and silence.

The pain harried her back toward consciousness like a watchdog nipping at the heels of its flock. Ambrosia grunted, opening
her eyes and coughing from the smoke she breathed. The smell of blood was a sweetish sickly rot that overlay everything like
the stench from a poisoned wound. She tried to move, but a great weight lay upon her back and legs, and even the motion of
lifting her head brought a bright flame of agony alight behind her eyes. She groaned in pain and frustration, the memory of
the attack coming back to her in mocking fragments. She froze for a moment, listening, but there was no more sound of slaughter
… only a quiet like that of death.

It took her nearly an hour, wounded as she was, to struggle from beneath the body of the dead man whose corpse had concealed
the fact that she still lived from Vortigern’s marauders. At last she stood, bloody and aching and sick, in the middle of
an ash-covered ruin that had once been a holy place. It was twilight, and the sun was setting in a sky as red as the blood-soaked
earth beneath her feet. The unburied dead lay all around her—man, woman, and child slain for no more reason than that they
were here. She walked among them, searching, hoping to find someone who had survived as she had, but there was no one else
alive. All were dead, butchered, their possessions looted or burned around them.

At last Ambrosia looked up the hill. Vortigern’s men had been thorough. Some of the stones of the shrine had been pulled down
and a fire set there. Its smoke was still rising in an oily black column. There were bodies there too, the bodies of those
who had fled to the sanctuary in fear and hope, but they had received no answer to their prayers save the cold steel of a
sword-blade. This place was a holy refuge no longer, merely another place that had been broken by the king’s will.

And no one had stopped him.

No one had come to their aid.

No one had answered their prayers.

“Damn you, Mab.” Ambrosia’s voice sounded harsh and rusty, like the cry of the ravens who flocked here to feed on the dead.
“Do you hear me, you midnight hag? I said damn you, and all your heartless kind! Why didn’t you help us? Don’t we matter to
you?”

She looked down at the amber talisman she wore, the symbol of the triskelion spiral crowned by a horned moon that marked the
covenant she had sworn to the Old Ways, and suddenly she could bear to wear that mark no longer. She jerked at it, breaking
the leather cord from which it hung, and flung the amulet as far from her as she could.

“Well if we don’t matter to you, Lady, then you don’t matter to me—not you, nor any god under heaven. Never again. I’d rather
worship a stone statue like the Christians do. It’d be more honest.”

With dragging steps Ambrosia began to walk slowly away from the scene of so much death and pain. She did not look back.

She did not know how long she wandered, weak and sick, across the war-torn land. No one bothered her, for who would interfere
with a madwoman who wept and laughed and sang as she walked and ranted against unseen presences? She ate what she could beg
or steal, and drank from streams and standing ponds, and mourned her dead and cursed her gods as she wandered.

And at last she came to Avalon.

Avalon Abbey had been the first outpost of the new religion in Britain. Kings had risen and fallen, but all had left Avalon
alone, for it was known the length and breadth of the land that a new kind of magic ruled here, and even kings were wary of
what they did not understand. First a chapel, then a church, then a convent and hospital had been built upon that tiny outcropping
of land on Britain’s western shore, where Avalon endured from century to century, its green mist-shrouded heights rising up
out of the tidal flats like the bulk of some primordial sea-beast.