Gwyn sat with Edern and Angharad in her rooms in the afternoon, speaking with a low voice despite the closed doors between them and any listeners.
“So Lludd has blocked your messengers?” Angharad said. “He has invaded your own domain here and holds your other lands hostage. That should have all the great lords up in arms at the abuse of one of their own. How can they sit easy?”
Gwyn shook his head. “They pretend it’s just a family quarrel and refuse to become involved. They don’t think it can happen to them.”
Edern said, “Forgive me, brother, but they don’t think you can win against him. It’s been too long. They don’t want to take the risk. And some of them are envious of your possession of lands in both the old world and the new.”
It was a sound analysis, Gwyn thought. He nodded. “Just so. Most of my armed force is in Annwn, of course, not here. The pressure has to be brought to bear from another direction.”
Angharad started at that. She smiled slowly as if an idea had occurred to her. Gwyn raised an eyebrow at her in question, but she shook her head.
Gwyn looked down at Eurig’s first hasty note. They’d passed it back and forth among themselves trying to make sense of it.
“First we have an unknown agent trying for the master-tokens. He’s killed by the defenses. Then we have a fire at the kennels. That’s it, that’s all it says.” He looked at them and said, not for the first time, “Eurig would have followed this up with an update after the emergency was dealt with, and that must be when Lludd’s blockade locked it up.”
Edern said, “My courier through the Family Way came back, saying he couldn’t get out at the far exit.”
Angharad said, “But that comes out in the kennels. How could it be blocked at that end?”
With a knock for warning, a guard opened the doors and let in a courier for Gwyn.
He bowed and presented a sealed letter. “From the lady Ceridwen, my lord.” He was let out of the room by the guard who had waited for him to finish his business.
Gwyn opened the message and froze as he read it.
Angharad asked, “What is it?”
“Brother?” Edern said.
Gwyn ignored them and thought hard. No more hounds. They must have destroyed the kennels. That’s how the Family Way got blocked.
He crumpled the note in his hand. Lludd’s presence in all of this was obvious. Was this the end of his realm? No hounds meant no great hunt, and that was the chief obligation of the Prince of Annwn.
He needed to know more about what Cernunnos thought of this.
Were any of his people killed? Eurig’s first note of alarm didn’t say.
He glanced at Angharad, still waiting patiently and now a bit alarmed for him to respond. If Lludd dared to kill Cernunnos’s hounds, how could he leave Angharad here at his mercy?
He had to tell them. “George says Cernunnos woke him in the early morning with the news that the hounds were gone.”
“That would be the same time Eurig sent his note, more or less, allowing for the difference in times,” Edern said.
“Gone?” Angharad said. “Killed?”
“George thinks so,” Gwyn said.
“That’s horrible. Were any people hurt?”
“He doesn’t know.” His glance included both of them. “He says Cernunnos is now impossible to restrain. He’s bent on revenge.”
Edern muttered quietly, “I wouldn’t want to be our father.”
Gwyn spoke directly to Angharad. “You’re not safe anymore.”
Angharad said, unconcerned. “I can defend myself. You are not to worry about me.”
Two days later, Gwyn attended his father’s morning assembly to gauge the mood of the crowd. By now the word had traveled widely about Lludd’s invasion of Gwyn’s estate and the closing of the Travelers’ Way, what had only been threatened before. It was a public way and there were plenty of way-tokens available, but Lludd was letting nothing pass in either direction.
Gwyn thought it was only a matter of time before Lludd proceeded to send his own men into Annwn, but that was where his strength lay and he was confident in Eurig’s ability to hold a defense against any assault from a narrow fixed point of access.
He considered having Rhodri close the way for him, but he had no method of reaching him to tell him so and was reluctant in any case to remove his only potential way back, as long as the Family Way was unavailable. Rhodri and the rock-wights were on their own. He wished them success but there was nothing they could do now that would help. He was on his own, too.
But he did have allies, beyond the pitifully small group he’d brought with him. He was surprised by the number of lords, Lludd’s vassals, who came up to him at the assembly with condolences over the hounds. They were discrete about it, of course, but their sympathies were clear and, he believed them sincere. They were genuinely alarmed, he was sure, by their king’s actions against one of their own.
The famed hunting lords, those who were in attendance, were particularly outraged at the destruction of the pack and the sacrilege against Cernunnos that they read in it. Some of those that got the news earliest, that George had visited on his hunting tour, passed along personal notes of sympathy for George, from their huntsmen, for Gwyn to send to him.
This morning, Lludd was enjoying himself. Gwyn listened to him boast with false concern about Gwyn’s “misfortune” with the hounds, as he called it. Gwyn avoided all reaction, a task made more difficult by Creiddylad’s resumption of her place by her father’s side, as if nothing had happened.
Lludd’s sycophants and all of those not in sympathy with Gwyn gave him a respectful hearing. Between them they created a hum of appreciative response that made the great hall echo. The sound bounced off the bare walls, recently whitewashed. Gwyn had always found the place chill and barren, but Lludd had never softened it. The robes of the lords in attendance provided the only color.
The noise in the room altered, and he looked around to see what had occurred. There was a commotion in the main entry. Angharad had walked briskly in, flanked by her two guards as always. She carried a large scroll of papers under her arm. She was followed by her room-servant, the one she’d taken on as an apprentice—assuming they ever got out of there—and at least a couple of dozen workmen. Half of them carried long lengths of timber and two ladders, and those she directed to a prominent bare wall along one side of the hall, in full view of the throne. They set to work, and Gwyn realized they were erecting a scaffold of some kind.
The rest of them gathered around Angharad at a long trestle table that the workmen set into place for her. They were dressed in working clothing, but it was of a higher quality than the others. As they reached into the bags they carried and began to pull out pouches of powder and bundles of brushes, he understood. These were her colleagues from the town, craftsmen and artists.
He began to have an idea of what she was up to, and he couldn’t quite smother a smile.
She had yet to acknowledge Lludd’s presence in the great hall. The clatter of her workmen behind her gradually defeated all conversation as every head turned to watch, mesmerized.
Lludd was as surprised as anyone. He watched her direct the workmen as they erected the scaffolding and they were well under way before he found his tongue.
Edern had slipped in unnoticed at the tail end of the procession and walked over to Gwyn, smiling. “Watch this. It’s going to be fun.”
Gwyn said, “Did you put her up to this?”
“She doesn’t need me for that.” He touched his brother’s arm. “Shush, it’s starting.”
Lludd rose, outraged.
“What are you doing, my lady?”
The workmen paused to listen, as silence spread through the hall.
She turned to face him from her workstation at the table as if taken by surprise. “Why, my lord king, you have often complained to me about the bareness of these walls.”
He had? Gwyn doubted it.
“I thought this would be a good time to correct that for you, with my own small efforts.” She paused for effect. “Isn’t that why I’m here?”
Well-played, my lady, Gwyn thought. Audible chuckles rose from the crowd and infuriated Lludd.
“I didn’t ask for this.” the king spat out.
Angharad replied smoothly, “But, my lord king, it is my duty to anticipate your wishes, is it not?”
Without waiting for an answer, she continued. “If you’ll please excuse me, I must start this now if I’m to be done in time for Nos Galan Mai.”
And with that, she turned away from him without waiting for a dismissal. Her manner was courteous, but the action was not. The workmen behind her resumed their work on the scaffolding and she began to unroll the scrolls of paper she’d brought and lay them out on the long table, leaning over them with her fellow artists.
Lludd remained standing, baffled, and the court maintained a discrete silence for a few moments.
She was his invited guest, Gwyn thought, and he would lose too much respect if he just imprisoned her outright. His daughter had abducted her husband—that story and the tale of the escape had circulated widely. Lludd did not claim responsibility for that, but many had no trouble seeing his hand in it. Just now he had been boasting about the death of the pack of her huntsman husband, and there she stood, visibly pregnant.
The mood in the court was ugly, and his father was politician enough to feel it.
Lludd dismissed his assembly in a foul humor and stalked off, Creiddylad behind him.
Gwyn returned throughout the afternoon to watch Angharad’s progress. The scaffold went up and that group of workmen departed, leaving Angharad with her colleagues standing each in his own spot somewhere along the scaffold.
She had made cartoons enlarged from her master drawing on very large pieces of paper, and used those to cover the chosen section of wall. She started the process of transferring the key lines from the cartoons to the bare walls by pricking along the lines and dusting the wall with charcoal and colored chalks through the paper.
Her room-servant, Bedo, worked with her, and Gwyn thought he detected other apprentices working with their masters. He nodded to himself—how often would they get an opportunity to work on a large mural in tempera? Every apprentice who could would be in attendance.
The scene being transferred was very large and it was hard to make out anything from a distance, just big pieces of paper marked with dust from charcoal. The picture itself was obscure, and she kept the master sketch with her, rolled up out of harm’s way.
She worked all that day and the next with her team, and Gwyn dropped in with Edern from time to time. She nodded at them when she noticed them, from a scaffold or from directing the work, her sleeves tied back and a cloth over her work gown.
By dinner on the second night she was just finishing the cartoon transfer. The court, in the midst of their meal, caught the change in activity as she climbed down from the scaffold and stood on the floor, staring at the wall and ignoring the diners. Gwyn watched them all turn to look.
Then she directed her workers, one by one, starting on the top row, to lift the paper cartoon pieces up from the bottom to let her see the transferred lines beneath. Then, at each nod, the craftsman took down that cartoon and rolled it up.
They quickly moved across the space, one row at a time, coming down to stand next to her once they were finished. She hadn’t shown them the master sketch either, so they were curious to see what their divided teamwork had produced.
At first, from the top, only bosky background appeared, a woodland scene, and then the tops of the outlines of the first figures. She’d timed it for the middle of dinner deliberately, Gwyn thought, and she had the complete attention of the court. She checked the last rows quickly, and then all could see the sketch.
It was a hunting scene, outlined faintly in charcoal and colored chalks to guide the actual painting that would follow. Cernunnos as the deer-headed man in Gwyn’s green livery and the hounds of the great hunt occupied the foreground, followed by a crowd of mounted hunters on a receding ascending diagonal to the right, toward the outer end of the hall as though they had just entered it.
On a receding descending diagonal on the left, the hounds pursued a shadowy distant figure. If you looked carefully, it seemed almost as though the rhythmic line of hunters-huntsman-hounds-quarry aimed at the throne itself.
The noise of conversation among the court resumed abruptly. Without comment, Lludd rose from his meal and left the hall.
As Gwyn squinted at the man pursued on the wall, he thought the resemblance to his father, even at this stage and with his face obscured, was remarkable. He couldn’t wait to see it in vivid tempera colors.
