DAWN OF AVALON

A story of MORGAN AND MERLIN

from the TWILIGHT OF AVALON universe

by

Anna Elliott

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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Dawn of Avalon

Copyright © 2010 by Anna Elliott

All rights reserved.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Author’s Note

ONE OF MY FAVORITE characters in my Twilight of Avalon trilogy is Isolde’s grandmother, Morgan. (Or Morgan le Fay, as she is commonly known in later versions of the Arthur legends). Morgan’s aging voice came to me very clearly as the narrator for the prologues of all three books. And after I’d finished writing the trilogy, she still haunted me. Myrddin (or Merlin), the famous enchanter of King Arthur’s court, rather haunted me as well, and I couldn’t stop wondering what Morgan and Merlin might have shared when they were young, before Morgan’s brother Arthur ever famously became King of Britain.

So here is Dawn of Avalon, the first part of their story and a prequel to my Twilight of Avalon trilogy. In Arthurian legend, Merlin is famous for ‘having lived time backward’ and being able to See the future as clearly as the past. In the earliest versions of the legend of the dragons at Dinas Emrys, Ambrosius Aurelianus, a famous war leader, digs up the dragons at King Vortigern’s command. Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose version of the King Arthur legends I loosely follow, changed Ambrosius Aurelianus to a mysterious enchanter Merlin, giving me the inspiration for the Merlin of Dawn of Avalon.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading Morgan and Merlin’s story. It was a pure joy to write, and I find now that I’m not quite so haunted by them anymore. I think (I hope) they’re happy with the prequel that I gave them, happy that they had the chance to live out their one perfect day.

Although the vast majority of my research comes from books, there are a couple of websites I can recommend to anyone curious to learn a bit more:

For more on the legends associated with Dinas Emrys (called Dinas Ffareon until

renamed after Merlin), see:

www.celtnet.org.uk/legends/dinas_emrys.html .

For more on the etymology of Merlin's name, see:

medievalscotland.org/problem/names/myrddin.shtml.

To learn more, visit me on the web at www.annaelliottbooks.com. Happy reading!

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PROLOGUE

PAIN. HE WAS AWASH in a black sea of it, and each wave gnawed at his every muscle and nerve.

“I said, what is your name?”

The voice made the blood pound blackly behind the pain that had centered itself in his skull.

“Are you one of Uther’s scabby whore-son cowards? Answer me!”

The prisoner’s eyes were still closed, but he could see the other man against the blackness of his lids: a long, flat, gray-skinned face, like a slab of stone marking some ancient warrior’s grave.

By rights, Vortigern ought to have moss-grown spirals tattooed across his forehead.

Dirty straw rustled as Vortigern took a step forward, and the prisoner forced his eyes open, tensing his muscles and clenching his teeth against another blow.

But the boy stood, blocked Vortigern’s way. The scrawny, dark-haired boy the prisoner could remember coming every day with food and salves.

“No.” The lad had a pale, soft-looking face. He might be—fourteen? Fifteen? His eyes looked older than that, but his cheeks were still smooth as a girl’s. “You’ll only drive him unconscious, and then he’ll tell you nothing at all.”

The aging druid who had stood beside Vortigern opened his mouth as though to speak at that, then glanced at the boy and shut it again. He was a stoop-shouldered old man with gnarled hands and a whipcord frame beneath the white druid’s robe and bull’s-hide cloak. His face looked like something carved in wood: rigid and weathered, one eye blinded by the scar that ran down from under his hair nearly to the corner of his mouth.

The prisoner remembered him coming in daily, as well. At least for as long as he could recall.

Vortigern’s eyes darted, snake-like, from the druid to the prisoner and back again. “Are you sure the boy knows his craft?”

“Know his craft? Oh, aye, I think—” The druid stopped, drew in his breath and said, in a flatter tone, “The … boy knows the healing arts well enough.”

“Good.” Vortigern’s eyes were stone-cold, floating empty in the narrow face. “I would not want him to die. At least, not until he has given me the answers I require of him.”

The boy had started to spread some sort of vile ointment on the throbbing, crusted burns on the prisoner’s arms. He glanced down to where the boy was working, feeling the vague surprise he felt every time he looked down at the length of his body. Lean and hard-muscled beneath shirt and breeches that were little more than rags.

The boy was telling a story. Something about dragons beneath the soil. He remembered him telling stories before, as well.

The prisoner let his mind drift above the pain, the black pounding in his skull, the fiery stab of his ribs.

This time, though, something reared up, hungry and dark on the edge of his mind, blotting out the words of the tale.

Swords clash. My hand slips on the hilt of my sword. Men choke and die. I must—I must—

The prisoner clenched his teeth. Raised himself on one elbow and looked up at Vortigern. “I hope you enjoy failure, then.”

Vortigern’s kick took him in the gut, jarring what felt like cracked ribs. The many-toothed wave of pain swelled to claim him again as the prisoner’s stomach spasmed, trying to wring out every last drop of the cup of water they’d allowed him today.

Whether he actually was—or had been—a man to hold up to torture, he had no idea. It didn’t matter now. His world had narrowed down to three truths, three hard lumps of certainty here in this filthy prison cell:

He was a prisoner in this place.

He had to ensure he died here.

And Vortigern himself would be dead before the moon had waxed and waned another eight times.

PART I

THE RAYS of the rising sun stained the heaps of broken building stones to crimson orange. As though Lugh, the sun god, cried rusty tears, or the earth of Britain itself leaked blood from a hundred wounds.

Gnarled and bent in his bull’s-hide cloak and white robe, the old druid raised his hands towards the fiery horizon. The sun glinted in his sightless eye. “Britain lies besieged on all sides. The Picts to the north, the Irish sea raiders from the west. Now you, my lord, are betrayed by your Saxon allies, who gobble our lands in the east like a horde of rabid wolves and leave a trail of broken bodies and blood-soaked fields in their wake.

“You seek refuge in these hills, this stronghold of the Old Ones. But I say to you that your tower walls will never stand until they are watered by the blood of a fatherless child.”

If this were a fire tale, I might begin it that way. And mayhap it did happen just as I have imagined it, I do not know.

The harpers who sing of Glass Isles and faerie-forged swords would say that the weaving of this tale began when the Roman legions had trampled over Britain’s holy springs and sacred groves, driving our gods from the land.

They would speak of a great darkness sweeping like a flock of ravens over Britain’s kingdoms. And say the days in which we now lived were just the lightest feathered tip of the first bird’s wings.

Mayhap Bron did give the prophesy to Vortigern just as I’ve told, against the fiery backdrop of the rising sun; he had to utter it somehow and somewhere and in a way that would sway Vortigern and his warriors into believing the words.

But I never saw.

My part in the story began afterwards, helping a wounded and captive man vomit onto the straw covered floor.

“The shriek you hear is caused by the clash of two fighting dragons,” I whispered through clenched teeth. “And every eve of Beltaine, they scream in pain and hurt.”

There are those who claim me naught but a king’s by-blow gotten on a whore; many more who say it is from thence my bad blood springs. But I may tell you that my mother was of the blood royal in her own land, and wedded to my father by earth, fire, and air before he had her killed.

Even Gamma, who took me in and taught me from the time I was four, was wont to say that I had a temper like a storm in summer. But I promise you that before that day, I had never had to clench my teeth to keep from smashing something when telling the story of Lludd and Llefelys and how they captured the two warring dragons who plagued Britain.

The prisoner heaved and retched again. I tightened my hand on the fold of rag I held, watching the knuckles whiten beneath the skin, even as I braced his shoulders with my free arm.

He was a young man, perhaps twenty, but surely no more, with a fall of disheveled, wheat-colored hair that reached to his broad shoulders.

And he had three ribs cracked, at least. Any of them might pierce a lung if he heaved too violently or curled himself forward too hard.

When he had stopped retching, I wiped his face with a fold of the rag, and he let out an involuntary sigh. But he didn’t move, and he rolled onto his back, his eyes fixed on Vortigern.

Are you sure the boy knows his craft? Vortigern had just asked of Bron.

I scarcely heard Bron’s answer, either, beyond vague awareness that his voice was stiff without the usual west-country lilt.

“You must dig a large pit, and in that pit, place a large cauldron brim-full of mead.” I shaped the words almost soundlessly with my lips. Dipped the rag into a cup of water to wipe the prisoner’s face again. “The dragons will be seen fighting in the sky, but in their exhaustion they will fall and become drunk on the mead. Then may you imprison them in a stone chamber deep beneath the ground.”

A tale is a lie, and yet not a lie. And a man who hears it may be in pain, and yet not in pain, when caught up in a story where the past breathes and time is an endless curve.

And if my spirit was in those days somewhat soured on the romance of those tales harpers sing, I told them still when working over a man like the one before me now.

Three days ago, Vortigern’s men had caught him on the edge of the fortress defenses and dragged him in, beaten and captive. Likely a warrior to one of the petty chieftains of Gwynedd, who had opposed Vortigern’s bid for the throne. There surely was no shortage of those.

And Vortigern had crushed them all, before his Saxon allies rose up in revolt.

Now Vortigern demanded that I keep the prisoner alive long enough that he could be forced into revealing whose man he was, which of the chieftains dared still oppose Vortigern’s reign.

“None so bad.”

The prisoner was still breathing unsteadily from Vortigern’s kick, and his mouth was torn from a backhanded blow of Vortigern’s fist. A trickle of blood dripped down his chin.

He was not handsome. Even beneath the mottled bruising and the dirt, his features were too sharply-angled and high-browed. But his eyes were beautiful, surely, thickly lashed, and a deep-blue in color, blue as the sea.

Now the sea-blue eyes were implacable and hard and fixed on Vortigern.

“None so bad. Though you could use work on the follow-through after a blow. From the shoulder, if you mind what I told you before. But well done, for a king who must seldom dirty his own—”

The words ended in a grunt as Vortigern drove another savage kick into the already cracked ribs.

Even the half-built walls of Vortigern’s hill fortress seemed to press in around me. Walls of any kind were as yet passing strange to me still, and all the time Bron and I had been here I had felt as though the mere knowledge of the fort’s defensive bounds was enough to peel my nerves raw.

Now my skin felt as though it would split open and the edges of my vision shivered red. Though I managed—just—to keep myself from turning to face Vortigern again.

I had seen hard sights before, the Goddess knew. On the journey here, to Vortigern’s refuge, I had seen a settlement, burned and raided by one of the Saxon war parties that savaged our countryside. My father’s people, or they once had been. Now men, women, and children—even babies—were broken rag dolls, lying in mud.

I had Seen the future Gamma had shown me in the scrying waters before she died.

Still, it took every last reserve of will to remain where I was, kneeling on the prison cell’s floor. A thin, dark-haired boy of fourteen or fifteen—I could pass for as young as that, dressed as I was.

I had given up on the story, but I spoke those other words silently over in my mind, again and again, like one of Gamma’s charms: a thin, dark-haired, scrawny boy. No threat to any king, however tenuous or unstable his grip on the throne.

Even without turning, I could imagine the flare of Vortigern’s nostrils, the curling and uncurling of his thick-fingered hands. “You know,” he said, “A man can live a considerable time with most of his skin gone. I for one would take great pleasure in peeling off his scabby hide and nailing it to the wall of my fire hall. Who are you? Did Uther send you?”

Vortigern asked that of the prisoner at every turn; I could hear the name now without either flinching or feeling a familiar slow burn of fury.

Uther, called the Pendragon by his warriors. He it was who had driven the usurper of Britain’s high kingship back into this last refuge, high in the hills of Gwynedd. Uther Pendragon, who besieged Vortigern’s forces now and kept him penned like a wounded bear in a cage, within the stronghold he struggled to build on this ancient hill fort of Dinas Ffareon.

I had sat this way, in this same filthy prison cell, through seven interrogation sessions, now. Had watched as Vortigern kicked the prisoner savagely, or burned him with a glowing brand. The prisoner’s response never varied: he would give Vortigern a blank-faced, dead-eyed look from those sea-blue eyes and spill out answers that were merely a goad. Gadfly bites at Vortigern’s wrath. As though he were trying to provoke Vortigern into hurting him more.

Only towards the very end of the sessions, when he was hurt nearly to unconsciousness, would the nameless prisoner gasp out an exhausted, I don’t remember. I don’t know.

Now: “All right.” The prisoner still fought to draw breath, but the expression in his eyes hadn’t changed. “I will tell you. I am oath-sworn to the boy, here.” He jerked his head at me. “He is the one whose coming the druids have prophesied. Son of Uther the Pendragon, who shall come from the West, bearing the faerie-forged sword. I am sorry, lad.”—he turned to look at me with an exaggerated, sorrowful leer—“I gave it my best try, but I—”

I did not for a moment imagine that he had intended Vortigern to believe his claim. He had over-acted the speech so badly that even a two-year-old child would have seen through the lie. It was merely another goad, another lash to Vortigern’s fury.

But this was Vortigern, who had ceded great swaths of the eastern short to the Saxon brothers Horsa and Hengist in exchange for the pledge of their swords. Then had seen his Saxon allies turn on him like rabid dogs and drive him back and back again into the Gwynedd hills where he struggled to build this fortress now. Only to find that his tower walls crumbled every time they rose past the height of a man. As though even the land itself were refusing to support his claim to Britain’s throne.

And Vortigern faced now, too, the rumblings of dissent from his own men, not pleased to serve a king who made over whole kingdoms to the Saxon hordes. Or who could not win at battles with Uther, but fell back and back again.

I had heard the sullen mutters and seen the angry sidelong looks as the warriors worked to drag building stones from where they’d fallen in a tumbled heap. And I had treated many foot soldiers, these last weeks, who came to me with mysterious aches or pains and begged leave to return home to their families for the harvest time.

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.

Now, though—

I heard the prisoner’s indrawn breath, a sharp gasp as of anguish or fear. But the prison walls, the prisoner himself, even, were gone, blotted out by the wash of red-tinted vision that filled my gaze.

I saw stone towers shaking, crumbling to the ground. I saw … myself. Wearing a dress of apple green, while all about me warriors drank and shouted victory and clapped my brother Arthur on the back.

I nearly gasped at that, for this vision I had Seen already, in Gamma’s scrying waters, and I knew the ending of it all too well. But then, even as I bit my lip and tasted blood, the image was gone in a wash of darkness, and another took its place: Vortigern, screaming aloud in agony and beating at flames that licked his fur-trimmed robes as all about him a timbered building burned.

And then there was nothing, nothing but the dirty straw and the whitewashed earthen walls of the prison cell—and the nameless prisoner, staring at me with his eyes dilated almost to black, his lean features set and utterly blank, blank as a carving in stone.

I felt sick, still, and cold almost to my bones, and I had another of those moments when I could—almost—imagine Gamma standing beside me and asking why I did not simply take the prisoner by the shoulders and shake him and demand that he take me at my word.

But I had no time to speak, truly I had none, even had I recovered my breath the instant the vision had gone.

The cell door flew open with a crash that make my heart jerk again inside my chest, and two of Vortigern’s guards burst into the room. Burly, mustached men, both of them, in helmets and leather armor, both carrying swords

I realized, in that instant, that it was not only in the vision I had shared with the prisoner that the earth had shook as building stones crashed to the ground. Outside, Vortigern’s part-completed tower had fallen once more. And already the two guards were hauling the prisoner up between them, shouldering me aside to drag him to his feet.

“You say he’s the one whose blood will allow the towers to stand.” That was the older guard, a broad-shouldered man with fingers like blood sausages and a face scarred by some childhood pox. “Vortigern says he dies now. Today.”

PART II

I WOULD BEAR my brother Arthur a son, who would ride with him into battle and fight beside him, for a time. Would, with Arthur, succeed in turning back the Saxon tide. But then one day, our son would turn traitor, whether for greed or anger or love I did not yet know. But the son I would one day bear would one day turn on his father, and bring ruin on Arthur’s reign.

That was my future, the one Gamma had shown me in the scrying waters before she died. A destiny written in my blood and Arthur’s stars, a fate lying both within me and without, as all fate does.

But if my path forward lay in darkness, I had still this night, now.

On either side of me, a leather-armored guard lay snoring, slumped on the floor. Dana, great Goddess Mother, I prayed through gritted teeth, let them sleep on. Let the draught I had added to their evening ale keep them witless and unconscious at least until dawn.

I could not be caught, nor seen. I wore my boy’s garb of rough tunic and breeches. But I had a dark traveling cloak thrown over my shoulders. And beneath the cloak, I carried a traveler’s pack of my healer’s kit, a change of clothes, and enough bread and dried venison to last at least two days. I had, too, the bow and linen arrow-bag that I had trained on with Bron.

None of these could be explained away if I were seen by one of Vortigern’s guardsmen.

I had already lifted the heavy crossbar from across the door. Now as I pushed, the age-blackened panel swung open with a shriek that sounded like the scream of Llud’s warring dragons. I froze, fear a wash of cold edged with grit over my skin. But the guards on either side of the door slept on.

Swiftly, then, my heart pounding hard in my ears, I slipped inside the darkened room where Vortigern’s prisoner now lay. Not the cramped and filthy prison cell where he had been kept these last days; that had been deemed by Bron—and accepted grudgingly by Vortigern—as no fit place for a man to sojourn before gifting the gods with his life’s blood.

Bron had, and I thanked the Goddess for it, kept his head when Vortigern’s men would have dragged the prisoner out and slit his throat without delay. He had declared that the prisoner’s spirit was to be chained as guardian of the fortress here. And that therefore the prisoner must be bathed and purified, as the druid princes who made the Great Gift had been of old.

He must, Bron said, be painted with the warriors’ marks, and fed the last meal of oat cakes charred by an open flame.

Where a crabbed and rough-tongued warrior of sixty-odd had heard of the ancient rituals attending a Prince of the Land, I had no idea; the triple death was one of those practices leeched of their power by the legions of Rome. Perhaps Gamma had told Bron stories. I had sometimes suspected he had been more to her than my trusted bodyguard. Though that Bron had known the rites—and that Vortigern believed in them—was all I could find it in me to care of, then or now.

After the flare of torchlight in the hallway outside, my eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness of the room within. I was alone; Bron’s part was to attend the ceremony of wine and ale sharing in Vortigern’s half-completed fire hall.

The prisoner had been housed in the roughly built timbered dwelling where Vortigern and the chiefs of his warriors slept. The room was windowless, the only light the rays of torchlight slanting in through the open doorway behind me. I could only just make out the shadowy shapes of the room’s furnishings: a table, a crudely made wooden chair, a few skins flung down for rugs on the floor and an equally crude bed.

Vortigern had been fleeing for his life when he had come here, to this remote hill fort in the Gwynedd hills; his wealth, his fine furnishings, his chased silver drinking cups and cushioned chairs, all these he had been forced to leave behind. And as I stepped inside, I did not know, truly, whether the prisoner would trample over me in a wild bid for freedom or try once again to strangle me on sight.

But he did neither. The prisoner lay on the bed, his body a long, lean shadow edged with gold where the light struck. Naked, as befitted a Prince of the Land, save for an arm band of fox’s fur.

They had bound him. Vortigern might bow to the rites of the old ones, but neither was he a fool; the prisoner’s wrists and ankles were tied to the four posts of the bed’s frame. Though there was, at least, enough slack in the ropes for him to turn on his side if he chose, and the loops of rope about his wrists were padded so as not to chafe overmuch at his bare skin.

And he was asleep. Utterly, deeply so, I could hear it in the steady rhythm of his breathing, see the slow, shallow rise and fall of his chest.

Any may doubt me who like, but it was not until I had crossed the room as quickly and silently as I could did I realize that I had made no plan for what I would say to the man before me when he woke.

All this long day since I had first spoken to the prisoner in his cramped, airless cell, I had been strung up with the tension of planning out the how of our escape: drugging the guards, Bron’s keeping Vortigern occupied and out of the way. If I had considered the prisoner at all, it was only with a quick, hot flash of anger that he had carelessly included me in his lying answers to Vortigern, had shattered the tenuous tolerance—if not trust—it had taken me weeks to build in Vortigern’s mind.

And now I simply stood and stared down at the man before me.

My one true, clear memory of my mother is of her saying fiercely to someone—to Gamma, I think it was—Women have no honor. We have those we love, and those we hate, and that is all.

Perhaps it is true. I had chosen to be here, for Britain’s honor, for the salvation of Britain’s throne. And yet it was now a taste bitter as bile on my tongue that the cost of so doing had been to sit idly by while this man was beaten and lashed and burned with a red-hot brand again and again.

That I had had to grit my teeth or bite my lips until blood came to do it was scarcely recompense to the prisoner now. Still less a likely way of persuading him to put his fate in my hands and accompany me into the night.

I could have left him. Even if he woke, he could do nothing to prevent my simply turning and walking from the room.

But I had brought this man here, to this bed where he lay bound hand and foot and awaiting death. Vortigern would have killed him eventually in any case, of that I had no doubt. But if he died like this, it lay on my hands, not Vortigern’s. And I knew I could not walk away now, not unless I woke him and attempted to persuade him—somehow—to make his bid for freedom along with mine.

The prisoner’s head turned restlessly, a spasm crossed his face, as of pain, and he muttered something too low and indistinct for me to make out the words. And without thinking, I laid a hand across his forehead, as I would have done with any other wounded man in my care.

Both blessing and curse, I have heard the Sight called, and surely it had been so to me before that night. But just then, at that moment, I was willing to count it blessing entire. The moment I touched the prisoner’s brow, a feeling, huge and powerful raced through me, as though something inside me were falling, falling into a space where I heard the echoing heartbeat of the earth itself.

The captive man was fevered, still; his skin was hot against my palm.

And for a moment, I Saw only the memory of how he had lain here, hour upon hour, before sleep had claimed him: I saw the rigid, still-muscled control in the taut line of his shoulders, felt how he had been galled almost past endurance by being tied here thus, naked and helpless in the dark. And yet had held himself absolutely, utterly immobile, because if he allowed himself even a moment’s slackening of control he would fall to struggling like a wild, frantic bird beating against the bars of a cage.

I should perhaps have been cautious of reaching out with the Sight, after what had happened before in the prison cell. But the liquid fire feeling was still racing through me, echoed by the a circling current, a deep chiming voice that seemed to say, Yes. Go on.

And then … then, as I reached towards him along the lines of the Sight, I felt it: a swelling, a blossoming of that jagged inner darkness I had sensed before.

His whole body went rigid, and his eyes went wide and blind, though along that echoing channel that had opened between us I could catch snatches of what he Saw: swords clashing, horses screaming, wounded men crying as they crawled through churned earth and leaked their life’s blood from a dozen and more wounds.

He would not be as like to call this a blessing. But it meant that after the first moment of breathless shock, I was able to draw the bone-handled knife I had brought and cut the ropes that bound him. And through all, he lay mute, rigid, and staring blindly at whatever ghosts I had conjured with the moment’s touch.

I thought at first I would not be able to shift him, even after I had cut him free. But I tugged and pulled at his arms, and finally, after a furiously hissed order from me he did lurch upright, and even allowed me to propel him in a kind of jerky, stumbling rush out the door, past the two guards who still slept the sleep of the profoundly drunk and drugged.

* * *

THE PRISONER RELIVED in dream the days before his capture and imprisonment here, of that I was almost sure. I caught occasional flashes from him, enough to know that he had been plunged into a waking version of the same nightmare he’d been trapped in before I came. A dream memory of a battle’s fearful aftermath, of fighting his way through a field of the dead and dying. Buzzing flies, ravens pecking at dead, staring eyes, and the awful, throat-clogging reek of blood.

I closed my mind to it as much as I could as we made our way across Vortigern’s camp, weaving a path through the pitched tents of the warriors, past the reeking pens where the livestock were corralled.

Vortigern’s warriors had not, you may be sure, foregone to carry their slave girls and army harlots along to this remote place. Vortigern allowed it, since without it many of them would not have stayed, might even have turned on him to overthrow his rule. He had even, in the last weeks, taken to doling out measures of his own expensive wine. On nights after the tower walls had fallen yet again, I had watched his warriors drink themselves into an angry, sullen stupor—or drag their slave girls off and use them hard enough to make them scream.

Most of the men were content to be serviced in a shadowed corner of the fire hall, or outside, since the winter’s chill had held off so long. But I could not be certain—not entirely—that one of the older of Vortigern’s chiefs might not prefer the comfort of his own tent with whatever woman he chose for tonight.

The night was dark, with only the faintest limpid crescent of a moon to light our way; that was an added blessing to count in our favor. But still my back felt as exposed as though I, and not the prisoner, had been stripped to the skin; with every step we took, I expected to hear a shout of alarm from behind, or the pounding of feet running after us in angry pursuit.

Once as I guided him along a tumbled cairn of moss grown stones—part of the ancient hill fort that had once stood here—he himself gave a half-shout. His eyes had a blind, agonized cast in the pale moonlight, and he jerked his arm up as though to fend off a blow.

The sound was naught but a rough, wordless gasp of air, really, but it sounded in my ears loud as a warrior’s battle cry and set my heart thumping. Still, I calmed him as best I could, spoke soft, soothing words as I would have done to a frightened child. Perhaps it helped, perhaps in some way he heard and was eased, I had no way of knowing for certain. The nameless man seemed no more aware of me than he was of the tents and heaps of raw building stones we passed. But at least he made no other sound. And he did not fight me off, but let me keep hold of his arm and guide his steps as I navigated what felt an agonizingly slow path towards the encampment’s edge.

It was ill chance, pure and simple, that we were caught.

Vortigern had not forces enough to maintain a constant and effective guard around the perimeter of his fort. He trusted in the rocky terrain, the steepness of the slopes on which Dinas Ffareon stood, the lack of tree cover, which would mean any attacking army would be slaughtered in a hail of arrows and spears before ever they gained the summit.

That, indeed, was the reason entire that Bron and I had come here at all.

Vortigern had concentrated most of his guard on the fortress’s southern side, where steep mountain paths led down to the River Glaslyn. He must needs maintain control of the routes by which he could resupply his fortress with fish and grain and ale if he hoped to survive there long.

And so I had led the prisoner to the northern perimeter of the camp, where the hill face dropped away in an almost sheer wall of rock. Surely Vortigern would not have troubled to post a sentry there.

But he had.

He stood in the shadow of the fortress’s rough wooden palisade, which ran along the boundary of the ancient hill fort and was as yet a half-completed effort, like so much else at Dinas Ffareon. My skin had long since grown clammy beneath the dark woolen cloak I had thrown over my head and shoulders, and I might have cannoned straight into the sentry had the moonlight not glinted on the hilt of the sword he wore at his belt.

I froze, one hand clenched tight on the arm of the prisoner beside me, willing him into immobility, as well. And for a moment, I thought we might be able to withdraw unseen. But it would seem whatever luck had carried us this far unhindered had run out, for the next instant the guard stiffened and straightened, then called out, “Who’s that?”

He was not expecting trouble, not coming from within his own encampment. That was the only advantage we had, the only reason he did not at once draw his sword. Still, the knowledge thudded through me like the beat of a war drum that I could not hope to bluff my way out of this. Let him come close enough to recognize either the prisoner’s or my face and he would have us impaled on his sword point in less time than it would take him to spit on our dead bodies afterward. And Bron’s death would immediately follow, of that I had no doubt.

Even as the thought flashed through my mind, my hands were already on the bow and arrow-bag strapped to my back, already plucking an arrow out and laying it on the bow’s stave, drawing the hemp cord back along my cheek.

The man must have seen it, dark as it was, or at least sensed danger, in the way men do who are trained for war. He did draw his sword, and took a step forward, head turning as he strained to see in the dark.

My arrow took him in the throat.

In that moment, everything seemed unnaturally razor keen and clear; even the faint stars above grew sharp as ice slivers, bright enough to hurt my eyes. I saw the man stagger backwards, hands scrabbling frantically at the bolt in his neck, saw the hot welling of blood around the wound.

I had already before that night seen men in their death-throes many, many times. Too many to count; any healer will say the same. But never had I had to stand by and watch a man die of a wound I had given him. Never had I seen a man wounded and in pain and done nothing to give him ease.

The breath rattled in the dying man’s throat.

It was a horrible sound, horrible, and it seemed to go on an eternity while I stood there, too sick and frozen to move. I felt my muscles shaking, as with fever. Once the guard cried out, a low, choked cry of pain, and at the sound the prisoner beside me tensed and instantly thrust me behind him, one arm flung out to form form a barrier of protection across my body.

His eyes were wide and still blind in the moonlight. The protective gesture nothing to do with me, only part of the nightmare memory into which he’d been plunged. Still, it was an anchor to cling to, the warmth of his body against mine, the solid strength of the muscles of his arm.

Finally the guard stopped thrashing on the ground and lay still. And somehow I made myself move, forced myself to stumble past his body, drawing the prisoner with me beyond the fortresses defenses.

Rocks rolling beneath my feet, tree branches that scraped at my face and caught like claws at my hair and clothes: I felt as though I had joined the prisoner in the depths of waking nightmare, and in truth I remember little of the descent from the summit of Dinas Ffareon.

When I came to myself, we were, I suppose, perhaps halfway down, though well into the thick screen of trees that grew beneath the rockiest stretch of the slope. I was retching up the contents of my stomach into the carpet of scrub and dried leaves underfoot. Though—lest he do aught that would give away our position—I somehow managed to keep one hand holding tightly to the prisoner’s arm.

A strange sort of inverse, I thought distantly, of the way the prisoner and I had begun this in Vortigern’s prison cell on the morning before.

And then the prisoner woke.

I felt the arm I held quiver and jerk under my fingers, heard him give a choking gasp, like a swimmer breaking the water’s surface for air. And then he launched himself sideways at me, throwing me to the ground and pinning me fast, one forearm braced against my throat while his other hand held my arms down.

I could scarce feel shock for that, or blame him; the last he had known he had been stripped and bound and awaiting certain death; he had no idea what had happened or how we had come here, to this dark and deserted spot. But I felt still as though echoes of the dying guardsman’s last rattling breaths were being pounded into my ears like spikes. And I would never have killed him, would never have been here at all tonight if not for this man.

I brought my knee up, driving it hard against the prisoner’s cracked ribs. He cried out, a choked, raw cry that brought back echoes of the dying guard and made bile rise in my own throat all over again. But he rolled off me and lay half-curled on the ground, eyes closed, muscles shaking, jaw tight as though he were trying to hold back another groan or cry. The faint, silver light of moon and stars that filtered through the branches above showed a sheen of sweat on his brow.

I have said, and it is true, that he could not have stopped me leaving him lying bound in Vortigern’s chambers. I could have left him just as easily now.

He was fevered, weak, wounded, still disoriented and dazed. If I ran—and a faint voice in my mind shouted at my muscles to do it—he would never be able to follow.

And yet I stayed.

There are those who imagine the healer’s path one for the tender-hearted. To them, let me say this: you are wrong. I have been a healer all my life. And anyone over-kind or soft of heart would shred themselves to pieces grieving for the pain a healer must willingly see and cause.

I had, even before that night, sawed through muscle and sinew and bone to take off warriors’ legs or arms that had gone green and swollen with poisoned wounds. I had heard them scream, and yet gone on, because if the poison were allowed to spread beyond the affected limb, the men would die.

To a healer, compassion is neither gentle nor tender, but hard and keen as a blade.

But yet it was my healer’s vow that held me fast and kept me now from turning away. That, and the memory of Vortigern’s guard, clutching the arrow in his throat with lifeless hands. Once already tonight I had broken faith with my vows in denying comfort to him, a wounded man, albeit one wounded by my own hand. Now here was another man lying sick and hurting on the ground before me. And almost before I knew I had decided, I was dropping to my knees beside him on the ground.

“I’m sorry. I’m so truly sorry.” I smoothed the wheat-blond hair back from his brow, made my voice a soothing murmur, counterpoint to all the soft, rustling sounds of the night forest all about.

I had also lied to many a wounded man if the lie would give him a moment’s peace. But I spoke true now: I was sorry that I had lost my temper even for that brief moment. Now that I touched him again, I could feel along the thrumming channel still opened between us a glimmer of what he himself felt. Pain, of course, raw and stomach-churning from his many wounds. The lingering scum of nightmare, sticky as grease over his skin.

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