The next day, the visits began.
George came nervously to the first one and brought the kitten, partly to give his hands something to do and partly because the little devil would not be left behind. “Imp” would be his name, he decided, as he walked. He was certainly black enough for the traditional role.
Rhodri escorted him to a suite of rooms, isolated at the back of one of the endless corridors in Llefelys castle. It was filled with books and worktables and reminded him of Ceridwen’s house at Greenway Court. A faint smell of something chemical lingered over the woodsmoke of the fireplace, almost but not quite drowned by the scent of moldering books.
Morien welcomed them in and led them to a chamber that was set aside for less… messy research. George saw projects on the shelves gathering dust, and some dust-free specimens which he was sure had, until recently, occupied the table in the center of the room. “We won’t be disturbed here. I’ve found it wise to site my quarters far from casual visitors.”
One end of the wide walnut table was set aside for paper, pens, and ink. Nine chairs fit around it, and most were already occupied.
George had been surprised that they weren’t gathering in one of the more official rooms in the castle, until Morien’s remarks about privacy sank in.
Morien had given pride of place at the head of his own table to Llefelys and shifted to a chair at his right hand. A seat was open at Llefelys’s left for George. Hard under his eye, he thought, where he can get a good look at me.
Ceridwen sat next to the empty spot and beyond her was a stranger, gray-haired against dark weathered skin, dressed in dark blues, coat and weskit.
Across from them, a round little man in black kept Morien company, a smile on his face as he studied the newcomers. Next to him, a woman in an olive-colored gown, heavy with colorful floral embroidery, shifted restlessly in her seat. Her dark brown hair was elaborately arranged.
George stopped to look at them and swallowed nervously. Ceridwen had told him, “Be yourself. Let them look at you and answer their questions.”
She’d warned him, they’d want to talk with Cernunnos if he’d let them, and to look at his forms if he wouldn’t. “They’re going to want to know all about you. You don’t have to volunteer anything, but you won’t be able to keep any secrets, they’ll be able to tell.”
He only had Ceridwen as a model of her kind. They liked to call themselves scholars, healers, but he assigned them mentally to the slot called “wizards” and was intimidated accordingly.
Well, he had a job to do. He straightened up and let them take a good look at him, complete with the kitten on his shoulder. He bowed to them generally, the kitten scrambling to stay in place in the process.
Ceridwen rose, and the strangers rose with her. She addressed them. “This is Gwyn ap Nudd’s huntsman, the human, George Talbot Traherne. He is the great-grandson of Gwyn by a human wife.”
Turning to George, she said, “Let me present Cadfan, the senior of our guests.” The gray-haired man in blue bowed.
“This is Briafael, and Heledd.” The man in black and the woman each nodded to him. He took his seat, and the grilling began.
They took George through his life before he found the way that brought him to Gwyn’s domain, just before the great hunt at Nos Galan Gaeaf, a few months ago. Cadfan asked about his fae powers, his inheritance from Gwyn, and quickly dismissed them—weak glamour and not much else.
But they were very interested in his relationship with Cernunnos. George suggested that they wait until they were done speaking with him before trying to speak with the horned man, and they agreed.
“So, you think your skills with the beasts and with the ways come from Cernunnos?” Briafael asked.
“I do. My kinswoman Rhian, Gwyn’s foster-daughter, has been junior huntsman for Gwyn these last few months, and she has a strong beast-sense, but mine is different.”
Ceridwen said, “He can speak with the rock-wights directly, and no one else can.”
“Maelgwn can speak to Cloudie,” he objected. “But then he was a child when he started, and that may make an exception, a special case.”
He recounted for them his discovery of the god within him and the gradual understanding of his powers with the ways that had emerged when he helped the rock-wights recover their lost child.
“Your information about the ways is both new and disturbing,” Heledd said, “and yet I believe you are speaking the truth, that rock-wights are not legendary creatures, that they make the ways for their own purposes, and are much like ways themselves, from a way-ownership point-of-view.”
Cadfan asked him directly, “Can you make ways?”
‘No,” George said. “I know Cernunnos can, though his are different from the rock-wight ways. Cernunnos’s have no passage between end points. They’re more like doors than tunnels.”
He glanced at Ceridwen and she nodded for him to continue.
“What I can do is sense them, like any way-finder, except I can see them all, even the hidden ones. I have some control over them, even when claimed. I can move them, a little bit.” He watched their faces. “And I can destroy them.”
Their faces were expressionless. Of course, George knew they had expected this. “The ballad you may have heard was correct.”
Briafael looked at him, his face sober for a change. “You killed all the ways in Madog’s territory? Even the one that crossed the ocean?”
George stroked the kitten sleeping in his lap. “Yes, with Cernunnos’s help. One was a fence around the land, to keep his people in, like the later one Granite Cloud made for him at Edgewood that so crippled the people. A great many were experiments with Cloudie while he held her captive. But, yes, many were functional and one was very rare.”
Cadfan said, “How could you bring yourself to do that, to rob a territory of all its ways? Didn’t Gwyn object?”
“I asked him first, via my connection with Seething Magma. He agreed we needed to prevent Madog’s escape, that he was a worse evil loose than killing that way would be.”
He didn’t like their frowns at that. They weren’t there, they couldn’t know.
“You don’t understand,” he said, leaning forward. “Madog was a nightmare. He held his people at his mercy for more than a thousand years. They couldn’t escape. He did as he pleased with them, including breeding experiments and killings for sport. With the rock-wight child that he way-claimed, he could make ways at will, and he used that mostly to imprison his own people, and then the ones under Creiddylad’s rule in the territory Gwyn gave her.”
“Once he discovered that his captive had a larger, more powerful mother,” he continued, “he was eager to have her summoned to claim her himself. With her enforced power, he planned to encircle all of Gwyn’s domain, all of Annwn, and take over that title himself.”
He drove his point home. “The rock-wights can’t kill ways. Madog wanted to use me as a threat against the ways in the old world. He planned to own the new world, under his absolute control, and hold the old world hostage. All of you.”
He could see that the stakes were finally starting to penetrate. The roiling of Cernunnos inside distracted him. The god was still angry at Madog’s presumption.
“We’ve begun bargaining now with the rock-wights, trading information from the human world about earth sciences for way-creation. They’ve made new, functional ways in Dyffryn Camarch, Madog’s old territory. Those market towns are now connected by ways, like roads, built deliberately where they can do the most good rather than accidents to be found and built around, however awkward.”
Let them chew on that for a while, he thought.
“As soon as we can figure out how to make the rock-wights immune from way-claims, and we will, they will be free to make their own path through the world, with the fae and everyone else. They’re interested, now, in the doings of the ‘short-lived,’ as they call all of us, even you,” he said, nodding at the fae. “They want to find their relatives here, if any are left, and we have things they want, at least the human world does—science, knowledge from people like yourselves.”
There was silence for a few moments, and George looked down at the kitten, stroking the soft fur.
Heledd wasn’t sure whether to look at George, or at Rhodri as Gwyn’s ambassador. “What does Gwyn intend to do with them? And with you?”
“You’ll have to ask Gwyn directly,” George said. “I believe he plans to encourage their independence. To answer the other part of your question, Gwyn has not proposed doing anything with me. If you fear me, as a weapon, well… Madog and Creiddylad weren’t able to use me, um, us. Gwyn hasn’t tried. I am my own person, my own power, in my small way. You can surely kill me, but I wouldn’t worry so much about control. It’s not what one anomalous person represents that should concern you, it’s the momentous changes coming that will affect your world.”
He drilled it into them. “Besides, if you bargain with the rock-wights, too, you can get them to build ways as fast as anyone can destroy them. Think of it like that.”
Briafael said, drily, “Gwyn doesn’t want to control this new… resource?”
“I doubt that he could,” George said. “You haven’t met them.”
Ceridwen smiled faintly and added, “Gwyn is also eager to recruit skilled immigrants. Folks like us included. No affiliation required.”
That got their interest, George saw.
Rhodri suggested a break for refreshments. When they resumed, Briafael was the first to ask, “We would like to speak with Cernunnos, if he’ll honor us. How did you come to carry him?”
George told them briefly of his father, a gamekeeper in Wales, who had been killed with his mother when he was nine years old. “His name was ‘Corniad,’” he told them, and they nodded sagely—the horned one.
“But what was he?” Briafael wanted to know. ‘Was he Cernunnos himself?”
“I doubt it,” George said. “Living with my mother for nine years?”
“Another avatar?” Cadfan suggested.
“I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it yet.”
They looked at each other. “May we…?” Briafael said.
George stood up and laid the kitten down on the warm seat. He invoked the deer-headed man first, his neck stretching forward and then up to support the weight of the antlers. He let them get a good look, and then pulled the form back to the horned man. As he did so, he felt Cernunnos rise to inhabit it, and he stepped aside. It was a more intimate experience now, compared to before his captivity. Both of them were present, though he let Cernunnos speak.
“You have questions?” he said, in the deep voice peculiar to this form.
Briafael’s ears shifted back in shock, and he rose and bowed. “Yes, great lord.”
“Ask.”
Briafael cleared his throat. “Why have you chosen to invest this man?”
“Those reasons are my own,” the horned man replied. Too bad, George thought, he wanted to know, too.
Briafael was taken aback and decided to approach the topic more indirectly. “You are focused on justice at the great hunt, and we have always believed that justice is your primary domain.”
“That is so.”
“And is this visible concern in the doings of Gwyn’s domain recently also about justice?”
The horned man leaned forward and, even though separated by the table between them, Briafael retreated a step.
“Gwyn’s domain? Gwyn ap Nudd is the Prince of Annwn. Do not forget who is the King.”
Llefelys watched intently, and nodded.
“I am sorry, great lord,” Briafael bowed. “I misspoke.”
“I have made my wishes plain enough about the suitability of the current Prince. Those who would remove him undertake a perilous course.”
He rotated his head with the great antlers, and fixed his gaze on Llefelys. “It is not the great hunt that is Annwn, nor even the hounds. I am Annwn. Nor is Annwn restricted to one place—justice will be found everywhere.”
Silence fell upon the room. George could smell the masked fear of the people at the table. They never realized how much their scents betrayed them. Only Llefelys sat calmly, controlled, as confident in scent as he looked. One king to another, George thought. He wondered what Lludd would smell like, and the horned man snorted.
George was out by the kennels when Ceridwen sought him after her guests had left. He was chatting with Tudur, Llefelys’s huntsman. Rhian, in an approximation of Gwyn’s hunt livery, stood by his side.
“I’m grateful, huntsman, for your kindness in letting my kinswoman ride with you for hound exercise or anything else she can help with. She will find experience in other kennels most valuable.”
“Please join us yourself, huntsman,” Tudur said.
“Whenever I can,” he replied. He turned to greet Ceridwen. “What does my schedule look like?”
“You won’t have much free time, George. She glanced at his companions. “May I speak with you a moment? Let’s go in.”
He left Rhian with her new mentor and started to walk back to the main building with Ceridwen. “Did it go as you expected today?” he asked.
“Cernunnos was a surprise but, yes, it did.”
He warned her. “I don’t think you’ll get him to repeat that declaration, or even appear, for every meeting.”
“I agree. I had the three of them today prepare a statement about his words. They will leave that with us to share for each subsequent meeting, just in case. Maybe that way we can continue to engage his attention by not going over the same ground each time.”
They walked together a short distance in companionable silence.
“What do you know about Cai, Angharad’s second husband?” Ceridwen asked him. “I was talking to Llefelys about him, after you left.”
“Nothing but the portrait hanging over her mantel. A tough looking man.”
She glanced at him. “You should talk to her about him, sometime.”
George said, darkly, “If I ever get her back.” He fingered his beard and privately vowed to keep it until he freed her. He didn’t trust Lludd to honor guest-right. It was so frustratingly indirect, empowering Gwyn to defeat Lludd so that he could live with his wife in peace. If this lasted much longer, he’d have a go at it himself.
He couldn’t think about what it might mean if Gwyn lost the challenge at Nos Galan Mai.
Ceridwen watched his face and made an attempt to lighten the mood. She said, cheerfully, “She’s holding her own—you’d be proud of her. You should see her chambers, they’re fairly haunted by pictures of you and Cernunnos. Lludd fears to visit her there anymore.”
George knew he was being handled but he smiled appreciatively anyway. “I can just picture it,” he said. He was always proud of her, Ceridwen had no need to urge him.
“Have you heard?” she said. “She’s found an apprentice, under Lludd’s very nose.”
