There were no more interruptions. Under the dimming of the sun and the rising of the nearly-full moon, the wizards stood within the boundaries of the circle and invoked a dome of protection that was faintly visible as a haze in the air.
Gwyn stripped off his clothes, handing them to his brother Edern, until he was barefoot and clad only in breeches, and stepped to the edge of the dome. To his left, he saw Gwythyr do the same. Ceridwen made an opening in the dome for him, as Derlwyn did for Gwythyr, and then they were alone in the broad space, their audience protected from any stray result of their battle.
Every time they met, some things couldn’t change—Gwythyr was stronger and older. He’s won before, Gwyn thought, when I was uncertain of my power and my right. There’s no room for doubt now.
He had already removed his glove, but no one could see the thunderbolt etched on the back of his hand from a distance. Is it enough, he wondered. I can’t kill him, that’s not allowed. So little time to experiment.
I’ve only felt the thunderbolt, he thought, not Taranis himself. I must earn his support, I suspect.
Gwythyr watched him with an expressionless face, and Gwyn only grasped that he’d been caught unaware as he began to gasp for air. He’s smothering me from a distance, he realized. That’s new. Wake up, you fool, and concentrate. He called up his own power and pushed against the barrier, freeing up space all around him to breathe, and then with an extra exertion dispelling it.
In one smooth expansion he continued the pressure directionally outward and wrapped Gwythyr in a binding to keep him from movement. He’d been working on transitions and he seized the opportunity eagerly, only to watch in dismay as Gwythyr’s fingers, still moving, wove a counter against his will and broke the binding. He didn’t recognize that spell.
Gwyn frowned and took advantage of Gwythyr’s concentration to raise dirt into the air and blur his sight, then he moved aside and cast a ring of glamour, projecting his image all around his opponent. Each image moved as he did, with a seemingly solid surface. It was a largely defensive maneuver and he took a moment to breathe to consider his next move.
Gwythyr didn’t give him that respite. He used the same dirt, raising it and casting it through all the images until only the real Gwyn remained. Then he focused and pushed against him remotely, and Gwyn staggered. More of this and he would lose his footing.
Gwyn reached for a counter and then stopped. This was playing by the old rules, and he was done with that. He straightened up and stood his ground.
“Enough,” he declared aloud. “We will do this no longer.” He would not seek permissions, he would no longer cooperate with this endless ritual contest. It was time to break the balance and move on.
Gwythyr was startled by the statement and raised his hand in a gesture to continue, and Gwyn clenched his right fist and split the ground at his feet with a thunderbolt, blinding in the twilight. The sound echoed within the enclosed dome, the crack fading to a dull rumble, and he could hear the murmur of the crowd that followed even through the dome. The royal thunder had been missing for more than 1500 years, longer than the lifetime of many who were there.
Gwythyr jumped but took a step forward, and Gwyn stopped him again, blackening the grass at his feet and leaving it smoking. Gwythyr turned to come at him from the side, and Gwyn, unmoving, blocked him with a third lightning strike.
Stubbornly, Gwythyr lifted his foot to try again, and Gwyn launched a flurry of strikes in a harsh glare, pounding a circle all the way around him to deafening effect.
Gwythyr stopped, overmatched, and acknowledged defeat with a bow of his head. He stood tall and unflinching, waiting for a fatal strike.
Gwyn paused for a long moment. No, I will not, he told himself. With difficulty he throttled the temptation to just kill his age-old opponent once and for all. He returned Gwythyr’s bow, and thunder rolled through the sky above the dome as he turned away and walked to the edge.
The wizards dropped the dome before he reached it, and he returned to his place in his section. He donned his clothes once more, his brother Edern acting as his servant.
Once Gwythyr had returned to Lludd’s ranks, Gwyn faced the circle again and opened a way for George, with Cernunnos’s help, a few paces into the circle.
“Huntsman,” he called. “Your duty, please.”
George took a step toward the way. Like all of Cernunnos’s ways, it was shallow or passageless, and he could see a world of green through it.
He paused and glanced at Rhian. Let her come, he asked Cernunnos. She’s earned it.
From deep within a voice intoned, bring her. In payment of my debt.
George held out his hand in invitation and she took it. Together, they entered the way.
They passed into a supernaturally vivid version of the natural world. All around them was a soft light, like diffuse sunlight, but somehow unearthly. Eden, George thought.
He stood in a small meadow with a pond, surrounded by verdant trees. His beast-sense seemed without limit. He could perceive every creature around him, for what felt like miles. All of them, not just the mammals and the birds, but insects and tadpoles. Lizards on the trees. Fish in the ponds, each a different flavor or color. It was a dense web of life, layered like multiple coats on an oil painting, each contributing something. Here it didn’t overwhelm him, as a limited version had in the forest in Gaul. He felt like it supported him. This is what it feels like to Cernunnos, he thought.
He looked at Rhian. Her eyes were wide and shining, and she was just another creature to his senses, as he must be to hers.
Are these real animals, he wondered, or the spirits of animals, or maybe the master-mold of animals? He half-expected to see Coyote step out from behind a tree, grinning.
Instead, a red deer made its way to them across the meadow. It was impossibly vivid, its antlers unblemished, the outline of its body faintly glowing.
Is that your real form, George asked Cernunnos-within.
A meaningless question, came the reply. Me, for now.
Thank you for letting us see this, George thought. He felt a pang of loneliness for his hounds, and Cernunnos echoed it.
As if in response, three white hounds with red ear-tips ghosted into view and George and Rhian followed where they led, into the margin of the woods and then to a small clearing where two dams lay, nursing their puppies, in the light that seemed neither quite sun nor moon.
The red deer came with them and watched from the edge of the clearing. Choose, he told George.
He glanced at Rhian. She looked to him for guidance, and he tapped his forehead and pointed toward the nearer dam. He walked over to the other one and watched the mother and her whelps. The little squirming minds were all different, even at this age. He sat down cross-legged in front of them, noting distantly that he felt no pain from his wounds as he did so. The puppies climbed all over him eagerly.
He lost himself in their minds for a while, taking comfort for the loss of his hounds in their uncomplicated gusto for life. He watched them tussle with each other and explore the nature of hands that petted and tickled and soothed.
After some time, Rhian tapped him hesitantly on the shoulder and he looked up. She had a bitch puppy in her arms that was busy washing her face, leaving paw prints on her brand new gown. He glanced at the whelp with his beast-sense and approved, nodding his head.
When he looked down, there in his own lap was one persistent dog puppy, a male both steadfast and fearless. He was playing king-of-the-mountain with George’s knees, claiming him from his litter-mates with fierce little snarls.
George picked him up and cradled him in his arms as he stood up. He faced the red deer with Rhian.
These, he thought to him silently, and bowed.
They followed the deer back to the meadow, to the way which George could barely detect, so vivid and blinding was the sense of all the creatures here. If this is what it was like for Cernunnos all the time, then the loss of his hounds must be like a dark blot staining his world. His heart went out, beyond his own loss, in sympathy for the god.
George stepped back with Rhian through the way into the moonlit circle, each of them carrying a whelp, and blinked, disoriented at the loss of that extraordinary web of life. He shivered as if he had encountered chill air after a warm bath and turned without conscious thought to re-enter the way, to go back, but it winked out of existence, and he stopped in his tracks, dismayed.
George turned again and gradually focused on Gwyn, still in place in front of them, where he had opened the way. No one seemed to have moved, but it felt like hours had passed in Cernunnos’s realm. Was it just a few moments here?
A rumbling noise from the new way behind Gwyn caught his attention. A quick glance verified that Seething Magma was still in place, next to Llefelys’s encampment, so what was this?
He reached out with his beast-sense, still wide open from his recent journey, and recognized Gravel as she completed the transition within the way. She was not alone.
Behind her immense bulk came Dyfnallt, mounted, and then the hounds emerged, the whole pack, and the welcome feel of their personalities soared across his mind like so many shooting stars. George stood there, stunned, his mouth hanging open. His knees weakened and he staggered, then he shoved his puppy into Rhian’s arms on top of hers, and took off at a run, ignoring his injuries.
He dodged Gravel and planted himself before the way exit, in the middle of the path. The pack swarmed his position like water seeking a drain. He barely registered the passage of Brynach, Benitoe, and Maelgwn, but he did notice Ives drive by with a wagon, and felt the presence of the four dams and their whelps aboard. Behind him, he heard Rhian cry out in joy.
Cernunnos erupted as the deer-headed man and they knelt down within the pack, reaching out and touching every hound as they circulated, rejoicing in each other after ten weeks apart. George couldn’t understand how they could be alive, and he sensed Cernunnos’s matching confusion, but it didn’t matter. He lost himself in the pack for several long minutes before he finally stood up again and pulled back the antlered form.
A tug on George’s way-senses alarmed him and he felt someone try to claim Gravel, and fail. Gravel turned rapidly in place. It was like watching a rock pile change direction, uncanny that something so large and apparently massive could move so quickly.
*WHO DARES?*
George winced at her outrage and saw the direction of her attention. Derlwyn, at Lludd’s side, couldn’t hear her thought but he blanched at her sudden focus on him. Of course, George thought, he was a way-finder, too, and had tried to take advantage of the confusion.
“Mag,” he called, “It was Derlwyn.” He pictured him for her and called her out into the open circle where they ran less risk of harming the bystanders.
*That’s him, the one who invaded the Academy.*
Tell them, he bid her, privately.
Seething Magma spoke, loudly and clearly, in her unearthly voice. “Who dares to try and claim another being? We are not yours to use.” The little kitten riding along snarled and hissed on her behalf and, somehow, managed not to be ridiculous. “Are you all like Madog, then, greedy and without honor?”
The spectators were so quiet that he could hear their torches spit.
Give me a ride, Mag, he thought to her.
She stretched a pseudopod out like an elephant’s trunk and lifted him up to a cavity she made on her top surface, deep enough for him to stand in to the waist. It was like driving an intelligent tank and standing in the turret.
Slowly she flowed along the inside of the circle, past Beli Mawr who stood unmoving, until she paused directly in front of Lludd. The king had two rows of guards in place, and George called out to them in warning, “Her touch is dangerous and will do you harm.”
He gave them a moment to digest that and remarked silently to Mag, now we really are St. George with you as the steed, and a suitable dragon before us.
*This dragon is hardly worthy of the fight.*
He laughed out loud. “True.”
Forward, please, he bid her.
One guard tried to stop her and cried out and collapsed when he touched her surface. His companions hauled his unconscious body aside and the rest of the guards slowly parted before them as they approached Lludd, standing truculently in front of Derlwyn. Angharad waited close by his left hand, under guard. Creiddylad and Gwythyr stood their ground on the other side.
Mag plucked George off her back and placed him on the ground. He limped over to Angharad without sparing a glance for Lludd and took her by the hand. One of her guards made as if to move, and George swiveled his head and simply stared him down. The guard backed off and spread his hands in submission.
He held her hand firmly and turned to take her back with him.
Lludd clutched at his arm as he passed, and the horned man erupted and gazed down upon him. “Shall we meet in six months’ time, great king?” he said, in his deep hollow voice. “In the hunt?”
Lludd unhanded him wordlessly and backed away.
“Or you, my lady?” he continued, as they walked by Creiddylad.
She raised her hand to her mouth and froze in that position.
Gwythyr’s face was unreadable, but he bowed deeply to them as they passed.
Cernunnos let George pull him in and George and Angharad walked back calmly through the opened ranks of the guards, followed by Seething Magma.
George held himself firmly in hand until they were safely within Gwyn’s segment of the circle, and then he felt his control crumble. He enfolded her in his arms and rocked her back and forth, trying not to crush her. The smell of her hair was intoxicating.
“Shush,” she said, muffled by his body, “Shush, I’m fine. It’s over.”
He understood her words, but his body would not obey him, could not believe she was safe again with him.
He murmured, “And here I’ve gotten blood all over you. Such a brute.”
“It was shed for Rhian and me,” she said, making enough space for herself in his grasp that she could look at him. “How can that be wrong?”
Gwyn let George and Angharad enjoy a moment more together, then he tapped George’s shoulder. Beli Mawr was walking out well into the circle. That had never happened before.
George and Angharad drew apart and stood together.
Beli Mawr turned and faced Gwyn. He spoke loudly enough for all to hear. “What is it you seek, Gwyn ap Nudd ap Beli?”
Gwyn stepped forth and faced him. “Independent right in my own country and an end to this ceremony.” He gestured at the crowd.
Beli Mawr considered his grandson for an interminable moment. “Great lord Cernunnos,” he called.
George limped out of his place to stand with Gwyn and released the deer-headed form to Cernunnos.
“What say you?” Beli Mawr asked. “King of Annwn, at your granting?”
Gwyn held his breath.
Cernunnos dipped his antlers in assent.
Beli Mawr raised his voice. “Do we hear any objections?”
Even Lludd dared not speak.
“So be it,” he said. The sound of his voice carried everywhere like a passing wind.
Gwyn felt the old burden lifted. Freed of my guilt at last. I have paid for it, truly. Time to take on new burdens, he thought, suitable for a king.
Beli Mawr turned to face Creiddylad, standing with his son. “Your exile, my lady, is required. You are no grandchild of mine. Your father may do with you as he wishes, but you will never inherit goods nor rights. Who harbors you is no friend of mine.”
A sigh washed through the crowd, and Gwythyr stepped away from her. She looked truly lost, Gwyn thought, but he could no longer spare her any sympathy.
Beli Mawr turned his attention to Seething Magma and her mother.
“What of these rock-wights?” he said.
Gwyn answered, “They are their own people.”
He gestured at the two of them. “Allow me to present Gravel and her daughter Seething Magma.”
Beli Mawr bowed to Gravel. “My lady, you are very welcome here. It is a pleasure to see your kind again. May we all flourish together.”
Gravel flowed forward from her place and dipped her mantle. She formed a speech box as her daughter had done, and vocalized in a deep rumbling voice, “That is our wish as well.”
Beli Mawr strode back to his position in the circle and continued walking through it without a pause, away from the gathering. Heads bowed as he passed, and many turned to watch him walk away. As if everyone had waited for his signal, the assembly began to break up.
