Tuathal Techtmar, High King of Inis Fáil, sat on his carved chair with his queen beside him. The dozen council lords assembled around him watched as the king considered the man who knelt in front of him and read again the scroll in his hand. It was filled with small, infuriated letters.
Outside the Great Hall at Tara a storm that had been brewing for days unleashed a howling rain and wind. The man kneeling before the High King was soaked with it. “Do you know what is in this?” the king asked him.
Madog coughed. The rain pelting the shutters and the roof thatch two stories above the open hall made the hearth fire smoke. “No, lord. I was bid to bring it to you, and I bought my life with it, so I didn’t ask.”
“Dangerous weather for sailing,” Tuathal said, “this late in the year. You’ll not likely get home again before spring.”
“If there’s aught left of it,” Madog said. “I brought my wife’s brother to her with a festering wound in his ribs that he may die of, and two cousins at the bottom of the sea and all the cargo confiscated. Four living men went to the slave market and the Roman who sent you that sold me back the rest for the price of the voyage. It was an ill business start to finish and I a fool to listen to kings.”
“Lost cargo is your affair,” one of the Inis Fáil lords said. “No one will be paying you for that.”
“I did not ask!” Madog snapped. He had spent his own silver and only a little of Loarn’s to buy it. Loarn was to have paid him when they landed. “I have two boats on the bottom as well and still I did not come here to ask for silver.”
Tuathal nodded. “However, you are owed hospitality.” He looked at the lord who had spoken, a man with a lined face over a dark mustache speckled with gray. “Fiachra, find this man lodging and see that he is fed and clothed until he can chance a voyage home. I would not have him lose another boat, or his life, since he took such risk to come to me.”
“Come then,” Fiachra said. Madog followed him.
“What news did he bring other than his own disaster?” another of the lords demanded. Cassan was younger, even more finely dressed than the king, with blond hair spilling over his shoulders, gold at his throat and wrists, his scarlet shirt belted with links of enameled silver.
Tuathal didn’t answer until he had seen Fiachra escort Madog out. “That Rome is most unhappy,” he said then.
Cassan grinned. “And if that message is from your tame Roman, he is unhappy too.”
“He was my general and yours,” Tuathal said. “You knew him well enough to understand that he does not make idle threats.”
“So, it is a threat?” Dai asked. He was dark-haired, as plainly dressed as Cassan was gaudy. Sitting side by side they seemed reversed images of each other, reflected in sunlight and dark water. All of them had followed Faustus’s command when Tuathal took the High King’s throne.
“A statement of facts,” Tuathal said, “and the facts are that he has bottled up the boatmen who have been buying weapons in Inis Fáil and so we will have no more trade there. He sympathizes with my lords who have been supplying them, for their loss of income.”
The lesser kings of Laigin and Connacht, Eochu and Conrach mac Derg, stirred angrily and Eochu said, “You gave the trade your blessing, High King!”
“I did, nor do I retract it. Sell all you can, if you can, but that route is closed.”
“When you refused the fianna their right to come home again from Britain,” Conrach said, “there was nearly war between their fathers and you. The weapons trade was your concession.”
“I do not withdraw it,” Tuathal said again. “Make contact with Loarn of the Silures if you will. If you can.” The tribes of West Britain and the lords of Hibernia had raided each other for centuries. There was little if any trust between them. Madog’s family had been the go-betweens.
The queen spoke for the first time. “The fianna who made alliance with the tribes of Britain have taken up holdings in the highlands there now, among the Cornovii,” Baine said. “Your sons have fared none so ill.” The mainland Cornovii’s war with Rome had left them defeated, with the predatory Gaels of the fianna in their lands. They would not be got rid of again. And Rome had no hand there now, if it ever had that far north. “They build a new kingdom there,” Baine said. “Content you with that.”
Eochu grumbled under his breath, but the queen’s word held power. She was the old king’s daughter – he whose throne Tuathal Techtmar had taken in battle – and a royal woman, and at certain times the earthly body of the Goddess.
“Are you forgetting,” Tuathal asked, “why it was that I forbade the fianna to go to Britain, and why it was that I refused them return when they disobeyed me?”
“For fear of Rome,” Eochu snorted. “Rome has not the power there now to even hold the north.”
“Not now,” Tuathal said. “But Faustus Valerianus and I marched with general Agricola and if our old general had not been recalled to Rome his next conquest would have brought him here. Rome fears a governor with too many legions under his command and so moves them about like men on a Wisdom board, patching up holes in their border that have been opened by the last withdrawal when some general got too great. That tide may well come in again after a few years. I would not give Rome reason to look our way once more. And we have had this conversation, Eochu, and I will not have it again.”
“Leave be, Eochu,” Cassan said. “You were wrong then and you are wrong now.”
“The arms trade was a fine income while it lasted,” Dai said. “From what the boatman said, it is ended now. Take your profit and be content.”
Cassan eyed Tuathal. “Is the High King going to read the message aloud?” A few of them spoke Latin; none could read it. Tuathal, who had spent his adolescence in Julius Agricola’s charge, was a rarity among his people. That marks on papyrus could speak unsettled Cassan a little. It was too close to magic – something only Druids had the power to handle, and they disdained it.
Tuathal ran his eyes down the scroll for a third time. “I am not,” he said.
The wind was still howling when the evening meal had been eaten and the council lords urged to the guest house to continue their drinking there, if they would. The fire in the queen’s chamber smoked, throat-rasping gusts that blew sideways in the draft from the shutters. The sleeping quarters were on the second floor in a gallery over the Great Hall. The wind whistled in the wickerwork that formed the inner walls.
“Bean-sidhe,” Baine’s maid said, brushing out the queen’s hair before her silver mirror. “It’s a wicked night.”
“Any hag that comes here will start with the fools in the guest house,” Baine said.
They could hear the sounds of men growing steadily more drunken even over the voice of the wind. Tuathal had not summoned them; they had lingered at Tara after the autumn court, and now with the boatman’s arrival clearly would not go away again until they had found out everything they could and quarreled and made poems about it. Baine heard Dai’s voice, loud and argumentative, and a hoot of laughter from Cassan, and someone’s voice declaiming muffled verse. Only Owain had had nothing to say on a matter to do with the greater island across the water. He had found his woman again but otherwise he had shut away his old life and the clans he had ruled in Britain in a closed chest somewhere in his mind. Anyone who bade him open it risked being bitten.
A torch just visible from her chamber doorway illuminated the High King’s shield and a sword hung on the wall below it. Her father’s skull, picked clean years ago by the crows, sat in a niche among other skulls, ancestors and enemies, some both at once, in the stone staircase that rose from the hall to the sleeping chambers. Baine had been married to the High King for six years now, had given him a daughter and a son and a pair of twins who had died borning. There was little that he thought that he did not tell her, and so she was not surprised when he came to the chamber door.
She took the hairbrush and sent Olwenna to bed. After a moment she laid it down and turned to him. “You did not come just to watch me brush my hair.”
“I like to watch you do that,” he said, leaning in the doorway. “But no. I am too restless for bed until you come with me.”
A howl of laughter, an angry shout, and more laughter came on the wind from the guest house. Then the sound of a table being overturned.
“There will be blood feud over some chance insult if we aren’t lucky,” Tuathal said. His voice was irritable, a man far beyond his patience.
“You lived too long among Romans,” Baine said placidly. She had told him that before. “Feuds keep the fianna employed. With no one to fight for, they are dangerous.” The fianna – young and without land of their own – fought in service of lords to whom they swore for a season. Unoccupied, they were a liability.
“Very well, Most Wise,” Tuathal said. “We will see who is standing in the morning.”
“Owain will stop anything that goes too far. They respect him.” She was dressed for bed, her night shift puddled around her feet like the snow that would come soon. She smiled up at him. “There were a great many letters on that message from your Roman to say merely that the boats are stopped. Did he really offer condolences for the lost coin?”
Tuathal took the scroll from his shirt. “I will read it to you.” He sat in the chair opposite her and pulled the table with the flickering oil lamp closer to his side. He laid the scroll in his lap and put a hand on it to keep it open. The oil lamp sent fluttering shadows over the letters.
To Tuathal Techtmar, High King in Hibernia, from Faustus Silvius Valerianus, primus pilus of the Second Legion Augusta, greetings.
I send this message by a man who has sworn to deliver it and has excellent reason to make good on that, to inform you that the arms smuggling from Hibernia to West Britain has been put a stop to and if I catch any of your countrymen aiding a new operation I will not hesitate to execute them in the most horrible manner possible and send you their heads.
“Some would take that as a challenge,” Baine observed.
“Precisely why I did not read it to them.”
The new king of the Silures is intent on throwing off Rome’s hand, taking advantage of the lack of a permanent governor. I am intent on stopping him. What you intend, I have no idea, but if it is to aid rebellion, you should reconsider. You marched with Julius Agricola, along with me, and you paid me to train your war band when you sought your father’s throne. The highland conquest, I am sorry to say, has been undone for lack of manpower. I would not like to see your victory similarly overturned, but if you are counting on the same lack of numbers to prevent that, don’t try your luck. Your countrymen were an undisciplined rabble except for the ones I trained personally. They fight each other like stoats in a barrel but they will not stand up to a properly disciplined force. Furthermore, the emperor never takes well to a revolt and legions which are now in Germany may be in Hibernia in a matter of weeks if the emperor gets a notion in his head.
Baine looked over his shoulder at the small black marks flickering on the page. The words Tuathal read from them were as fiery and elaborate as a poet’s recitation. It was like sending the poet to declaim your message. Tuathal went on reading.
While I regret not to have killed more of them because they cost me many good men, your Gaels now running loose among the Cornovii have rendered the Cornovii incapable of troubling us further since they now have troubles of their own, an unintended consequence that I appreciate. My scouts’ information suggests that their new kingdom there has begun to encroach on the Epidii as well, unfortunately for the Epidii, who are kin to your people and thus gave them free passage. Their assumption that they would all pass through to settle elsewhere appears to have been erroneous.
“You knew that would happen when you forbade them to come back,” Baine said. “I told you and the Druids told you.”
“I didn’t need either of you to tell me. I had hoped to inconvenience Rome.”
In sum, please keep your boats off West Britain and your fingers out of Rome’s pies.
You may convey my condolences to your lords over the sudden restriction of their income.
Your friend, Faustus Silvius Valerianus
“If they attempt to keep the trade moving directly,” Tuathal said, “I won’t be able to stop it. He actually knows that. It is a fine balance to keep.”
“Between men like Eochu and Rome?”
“I am not an emperor. You told me yourself that I cannot rule here like a Roman. I have no wish to draw Rome’s eye, but I also have no power to forbid them if they decide that Loarn won’t play them false.”
“They are as likely to play Loarn false and he knows it,” Baine said. Trade between West Britain and Inis Fáil usually fell somewhere between an armed standoff and an outright raid. It was a sign of the importance of the arms and grain to Aedden and then Loarn that they had paid to use the boatmen as go-betweens.
“If he wants weapons badly, he will pay enough that no one plays false. That is what is in Eochu’s head, I expect. Where they will land is a different matter, unless Loarn can convince Cadal of the Ordovices to ally with him.”
“There is bad blood between the Silures and the Ordovices, isn’t there?”
“There is bad blood between the Silures and nearly everyone,” Tuathal said. He stood and stretched. “Come to bed. I do not care if Loarn throws off Rome, as long as the trouble he makes does not come to my shore.”
Baine stood and gathered up the trailing hem of her night shift in one hand. She gave Tuathal the other. “Will you send a message back to your Roman?”
“It is late in the season to risk anyone’s life on the water just to spite Faustus.” Tuathal blew out the lamp. The fire in the hearth was banked and gave only a warm glow for light to see their way to bed. “In the spring,” he said, laying her down on the furs that piled the wooden frame, “I may perhaps remind him that it was I who warned that his northern rebels were recruiting a war band in Inis Fáil. It is possible he has forgotten that.”
“He hasn’t,” Baine said sleepily. “But he can’t afford to let that rule him any more than you can.”
The bare black trees were rimed with ice, and Llamrei’s pony picked its way carefully over the frozen ground, but the sky was clear. A break in the weather that the Druids said would last had set her on the track to Bryn Epona.
A hare in its dark winter coat sat motionless as she passed, while a flock of crows watched her from the high branches, but nothing else moved. She kept a wary eye out, nonetheless, bypassing the Roman checkpoints on the main roads and the scattered outposts that supported them, following deer tracks and the little rivers that wound through the mountain valleys. Past the last outlying Silure village she was unsure of her welcome and slept in the woods, avoiding Roman and tribal settlements both. A burst of cawing made her spin her head around, but it was only a hawk circling overhead. The crows launched themselves at it in a series of furious dives, harrying it from their roosts.
Caer Gai was near the end of her journey: a Roman outpost on a low shoulder of land above a river, guarding the ford where a well-used chariot track swung north to Bryn Epona. She skirted through the woods around it, swam her horse through the icy water above the ford and, shivering, picked up the road once she was well past. She found a yew tree and tucked a green sprig through her belt, and more in her pony’s bridle and saddle trappings. From here, Cadal’s men would be well aware of her presence.
Cadal’s mountain hold was set into a ragged slope encircled by seven concentric rings of mud-and-timber wall, now slighted in accordance with the peace treaty. A banked chariot track passed through each gate and six courtyards holding byres and dairy, ovens, granaries, woolshed, and smithy. A stream flowed down the mountain to pass through the mid-level of the hold on its journey and supplied water to the population within. It had taken Roman siege engines to force Cadal’s surrender. Even with the walls broken to rubble in places it was still impressive, and the lower gates were manned by a spearman who barred her way.
“What business?” he demanded. “Silure,” he added and spat.
“I am Llamrei, captain to Loarn,” she said, evenly. He was still a boy, she saw, not more than a year from his spear-taking, with a boy’s arrogance. “He sends me to Cadal with a greeting and a message.”
“And what might that be?”
“That might be for Cadal’s ears,” Llamrei said.
He grinned, looking her up and down. Llamrei laid her hand on her belt knife.
“Prove it,” he said.
Llamrei pulled off her glove and held her right hand out to show him a heavy gold ring, its red stone carved with the horned moon. “You may tell him I wear this,” she said. Cadal would know it, even if this boy was too young to remember. Bendigeid had worn it, and after him Aedden and Loarn.
A wagon with a load of firewood came up the track. The spearman waved the driver through. “Tell Cadal there’s a Silure whore to visit him.”
Llamrei’s face darkened but she didn’t answer. The worst she was likely to get was insults, until Cadal had spoken to her. After that, matters were uncertain, but she doubted that Cadal would allow Loarn’s captain to be ill-used. That would start the war that Cadal was trying to avoid.
The sentry jerked his thumb at the skulls set in Cadal’s gateposts. “You can talk to them while you wait.” He grinned at her.
The wagon driver, older and possibly wiser, took note of the wealth of gold and fine clothing worn by the Silure messenger, and of the silver trappings on her pony’s saddle and the yew sprig in her belt, and sent a passing child running to take Cadal the message that a Silure envoy waited at the gate.
After a while, someone came down the track to fetch her and Llamrei followed him. At the top courtyard one of Cadal’s hounds took the pony’s reins, staring at her with curiosity. “I’ll rub him down and give him a feed, lady,” he told her. “And put him up where it’s dry.” A faint rain had begun to spit down.
“Thank you. He will appreciate that.”
Another spearman halted her outside Cadal’s hall and held out his hand for her belt knife. She gave it to him.
“Stand still.” He ran his fingers down her boots and pulled out her other knife. He nodded at her. “Go in.”
Cadal received Llamrei where he had once made council with Bendigeid against the Romans, and he nodded when she sat in the chair he offered and showed him the ring.
“I would not have doubted you,” he said. “I remember you.” She had been among those who accompanied the king to that council. “You serve Loarn now.”
“I serve the king.”
“Is it not the same thing?”
“No. Among your people maybe,” Llamrei said. “Among ours, the kingship is a living thing. It absorbs the man who is king.”
Cadal leaned back in his chair and touched a forefinger to his forehead, to the blue spiral of his own king mark. He was tall and battle-scarred, with tawny hair going gray. “That is the Old Ones’ blood in you,” he said. “We may give up the kingship if need be, in other ways than death.”
“So you think,” Llamrei said. “You may find differently when you try.”
Cadal didn’t answer until a slave had brought them cups of mead and a tray of bread and cheese. Then he said, “You have been a long way on the trail, Llamrei king’s-messenger. Eat before you tell me why you are come.” He waited until she had a mouthful of bread and cheese before he added, “If it is to war against the Romans again, Loarn knows my answer already and you have made a winter journey for naught.”
Llamrei chewed and swallowed, unperturbed. “That is your prerogative, king, but not why I am here. By what reason would Loarn trust you in war again?”
“Nor should he,” Cadal said, “when your people encroach on my hunting runs and thieve from my border villages, even under Rome’s nose.”
Llamrei shrugged. “A mutual occupation. The only border my offer has to do with is the one with the sea.”
Cadal stroked his mustache and his hand hid a grin. “So Rome has stopped up your weapons trade?”
“We will pay for a landing place on your coast.”
“Where?”
“Off Dragon’s Head.”
Cadal considered it. That might be safe enough with Rome undermanned; and the legions’ presence galled him like a burr under his harness. If the Silures drove Rome back… then the Ordovices might finish the thing. And if the Silures were beaten back into their own burned villages… that too would not trouble Cadal.
“I will think on it,” Cadal said. “And tell you in the morning.”
“If I am to sleep in your guest house,” Llamrei said, “I want my knife back.”
“I will put a guard on the door,” Cadal told her.
Llamrei cocked her head at him. “You would do so anyway, lest I go where I am not wanted.”
Cadal nodded. “It will serve a dual purpose, then.”
Llamrei’s mouth tightened. There was no guarantee that one of Cadal’s men, drunk and reckless, would not come looking for a right to boast to his fellows afterward. The laws of hospitality were stretched thinner than cobweb when it came to the bone-deep enmity between his people and hers. All the same, she said, “Very well.”
She was escorted to the guest house and when she was left alone with a bowl of stew, another cup of mead, and a pot should she need it, she took out the knife that was strapped to the inside of her thigh and put it to hand under the furs on the bed.
Llamrei half feared that the weather would turn and strand her among Cadal’s people, but the Druids in Bryn Epona consulted the stars and said it would hold, and it was doubtful they would lie. The Druids had stronger ties to their fellow Druids, even those of rival tribes, than to the affairs of kings. They wielded great power, including the ability to halt a war, but they rarely took sides, except against the Romans.
Cadal gave her his answer in the morning, and his price, to which she agreed in Loarn’s stead. He gave her back her knives and did not remark on the one that already hung on her belt. Loarn would send ships of his own to Inber Domnann in the spring and they would bring their cargo to shore at Dragon’s Head, the promontory west of Bryn Epona that jutted like a great beast’s snout into the sea opposite Inis Fáil.
It was past the solstice when Llamrei rode into Dinas Tomen, where the king’s court had settled for the winter as far from Roman reach as possible. Far enough, she hoped, to erode his interest in the Roman woman before spring came. She gave Loarn Cadal’s answer and terms, and went to the captains’ house across from the Great Hall to sleep until morning. She woke hungry, washed her face in the icy water barrel, and dressed in clean clothes.
It had snowed in the night – a storm that had followed on her tail for the last day – and the blanket of it covered the courtyard, crossed with footprints already filling in as the snow kept falling, shrouding the hillside below and the buildings in the lower courts. One more day, she thought, and she would have been caught. The scent of baking barley cake came from the hall, and she could sniff stew on the wind as well. Her stomach growled and she headed for the smell.
A sudden chill wind stirred the air, with icy flakes on its breath, and an insistent, unwelcome memory dogged her as she crossed the courtyard: of the starving winter when they had held out against the Romans in Dinas Tomen until they could hold no more, when everyone had been bone thin and Owen, who had been Llew’s spear brother, had died from starvation as much as sickness.
As she pulled open the door to the Great Hall, angry voices inside told her what had brought back that the memory. Llew stood stubbornly before the king, feet planted, fists curled, face dusky with fury.
“This is not your affair, Llew,” Loarn said, his voice tight, with a measure of menace.
“They are a danger to you!” Llew said. “The boy is a danger. Why will you not see it?”
Llamrei stamped the snow from her boots and saw Rhodri and Pwyll finishing their breakfast, dipping barley cake into bowls of thick stew. They watched Llew cautiously, and Loarn even more so. Llew and the king radiated anger like a shimmer of light around them, an energy that made Llamrei think of the Dancers, a force so elemental it would burn you if you could actually touch it.
Loarn didn’t move from his chair, but somehow he seemed to stand, towering over Llew. Llew held his ground.
“I will have the woman I want,” Loarn said. “She is of our blood, and you have no right to gainsay me.”
The others stepped in reluctantly. Llew looked ready to push the quarrel too far; his face twitched with fury.
“She was born to the Romans,” Rhodri said. “She isn’t worth it.”
“There are other women, King,” Pwyll suggested. He was the youngest of them, of an age with Loarn. “Women of your own people with whom you can also breed sons to come after you. Why not with them?”
“Because I do not want them,” Loarn said between his teeth.
Llamrei spooned stew into a bowl. “Have you spoken to Teyrnon of this?” she asked quietly as she did.
“Yes,” Loarn said. “He says it is possible. We are related only in the fourth degree.”
Llamrei ground her teeth. The Druids would rarely order a king not to do as he wished. They would warn him of what might happen if he did, but not forbid it, not in this case if the woman was suitable by blood. It didn’t matter if she was unsuitable in every other way. “What does Iorwen say?” she asked.
“Iorwen has gone to her husband’s hold for the winter,” Loarn said.
Llamrei noted that he had not answered the question. Iorwen no doubt had had a good deal to say – advice her brother was planning to ignore. For some reason the old god the Romans had unearthed came to her mind, and the idea that signs and upheavals came in threes. With the earthquakes and the old god, she had thought the Dancers made three, but perhaps it was this half-Roman woman instead. As if conjured by that thought, the floor beneath them rolled slightly and subsided. They waited but it didn’t come again.
“That!” Llew said. “That is what you have brought on us, King!”
“You are a fool, Llew,” Loarn said. “The tremors began before Aedden died.”
Llew was shaking. “It doesn’t matter.”
Llamrei took Llew by the arm. “Sit and eat. Your head will be clearer when you have, and then you may form an argument that makes sense.” When Llew glowered at her, she said softly, “I do not disagree with you.”
“There is something in what Llew says,” Pwyll added uncomfortably. “Take her to your bed if you will, if she will, but leave her with her people. If you marry her, the Romans will use her and the boy against you.”
“Pwyll is right in that,” Llamrei said and ignored the black look on Loarn’s face. Of all of them, she had the best chance of forcing him to listen. “The woman might do no harm if she is safely wed to you, but the boy is three-quarters Roman. They will use him if you bring this woman into Dinas Tomen.”
“She will bring the boy with her,” Loarn said. “To raise him here among us.”
“He is twelve,” Llamrei said. “It is late for that.”
Llew put down the bowl Llamrei had given him and stood stubbornly before Loarn’s chair again. “He will be a threat to your kingship and to the succession of your own sons – or Iorwen’s – as long as he is alive.”
Loarn stood too, pushing the chair back hard so that it nearly toppled into the hearth. His face blazed with anger. “That is enough! I will wed where I will. Do any of you want the kingship? Did you when Aedden died? I will have the one thing that I desire out of all the others I did not wish for.”
They were silent at that, even Llew. None of them were of the royal house, none could have been made king except in extraordinary circumstances if the royal line had died out entirely. And none of them would have wanted it if they could. None of them had lived with the possibility hanging over them, wishing for Aedden to get a son when he had not. Loarn knew it. “Leave me be,” he said now, quietly, and they did.