THERE WAS NO use in sulking, or in blasting down walls with temper, either. Averil retreated to her chambers in the palace, barred the door and flung the shutters wide and let the cold and the damp blow in.
It helped her to think. She was more hurt by Gereint’s refusal than she wanted to acknowledge, though she stopped short of calling it a betrayal. He was only practicing obedience to his commander.
She pulled herself up short. It was not as simple as that. He believed what the rest of them were reciting like doctrine. He opposed her from his own heart, not just his superiors’.
They had never been at odds before. There had been squabbles, yes, but they had always gone the same way in the end—her way.
Gereint had grown a mind of his own. And she did not like it at all.
Very well then, she thought as she paced the borders of the room. She was alone. She had left all allies and possible allies behind in Lys, where she might be pawn or puppet, but she was also a duchess who might become a queen. Here she was no one; she had no rank, no place, no wealth or fortune but what she could beg of the queen’s charity. No one on this side of the sea would help her.
The web of the Knights was secure inside her, but it would not yield to any will she laid upon it. The Knights had agreed: Prydain was their battlefield, and the Isle had to fend for itself.
They offered no objection to her scrying toward the Isle—and no wonder. There was nothing to see. The walls of air were raised and secured. Storms roared around them, driving ships astray and even destroying them—as she had discovered to her grief.
Nothing that she did or tried could pierce those walls. They rose in the landscape of the mind like a dome of glass, clear enough to see the loom of the mountain and the whiteness of foam about its edges, but shadowed where the Ladies’ vale and the port should be. As far as she could tell, it was a deserted island of sheer black rock with a lake in its heart.
She could not find the Ladies’ magic at all. It was thoroughly and completely warded. No matter how she cried out or to whom she ventured it, she received only silence.
With Gereint she might have succeeded. But he was walled off from her, too. The deepest part of him was still there, but it was mute, like a stone, heavy and impervious.
The king was going to break that dome of perfect glass, slide his serpent magic beneath it and crack it like an eggshell. And there was nothing at all that she could do about it. She could not even warn the Ladies.
“LADY?”
Averil called on all her reserves of discipline to suppress her temper, focus her mind, and greet the royal servant who bowed before her. It was hard; she felt a little strange, as if something was stopping her from reining herself in.
She thrust the thought aside. She was exhausted, she was frustrated, she was thwarted at every turn. How could she not be in an ill temper?
“Lady,” the queen’s servant said in her silence, “you have a message. The boy who brought it was bidden to wait for your answer.”
Averil took the bit of folded parchment from Dame Grisel’s hand, and nearly dropped it. It crackled with magic, a signature as clear as ink on a page.
There was something oddly familiar about it, but she could not recall where she had seen this thing before. On the Isle, she supposed—or, she thought with a slight shiver, in the Wildlands. There was a distinct air of wild magic about it; but there was a great deal of that in Prydain. “Who sent this?” she asked.
“The boy belongs to her majesty’s master mage, lady,” Grisel said: “the Myrddin, he’s called.”
Averil was intrigued in spite of herself. “Indeed? That doesn’t sound like a title from one of the orders.”
“It’s not, lady,” the woman said. She dipped in the curtsey that womenservants favored here, and withdrew before Averil could call her back.
Averil opened her mouth to do it even so, but shrugged and let it be. She dropped to the edge of the bed and peered at the letter in her hand. The seal looked like a drop of blood, glistening and alive, with the image of a hawk in flight impressed on it.
She hesitated before breaking the seal, but no storm of magic burst upon her. The letter was written in a round old-fashioned hand by a scribe of fair skill, and it was brief and to the point.
To her grace of Quitaine, greetings and good health: We have heard of certain difficulties and besetting frustrations. There may be no cure for these, but a diversion might please you well. The boy will lead if you will follow.
Averil ran her finger along the written lines. The magic in them tingled. There was wild magic there, and no mistake.
She had never heard of the Myrddin. For all she knew it was a lie or an ambush.
The air in the room shifted. She looked up to find the doorway filled by a pair of broad shoulders in a blue mantle. Doors, she thought distantly, needed to be larger where Gereint was—or he needed to stop growing like a well-watered tree.
Half of her wanted to drive him back where he came from. The other half was far more relieved than it strictly wanted to be.
Her greeting was not precisely gracious, but she did not openly order him out. “Messire. What brings you here?”
He scowled. His mood was as confused as hers, and his temper was no sweeter, either. “You’re making my head hurt. You need to stop.”
“You didn’t have to come all the way here in the rain to tell me that,” she said. “Did your keepers let you go, then? Or are you running away?”
His jaw tightened. “I don’t want us to fight. But you’re being unreasonable. I know you were raised on the Isle and it’s your real home, but—”
“Fontevrai is home,” she said. “The Isle anchors all the magic in this part of the world. Has no one stopped to think of what will happen when it falls?”
“It’s not going to fall,” he said.
“The Rose did.”
That gave him pause, though not for long. “The Rose was in Lys, in the king’s own country, without the wild magic to help it. The Isle is in the middle of the sea.”
“That won’t stop Clodovec,” she said grimly. “If he wakes the Serpent, the whole world will be under its sway—sea, land, it won’t matter.”
“He has to find it first,” Gereint said.
“If he thinks the Knights still hide it, you know where he’ll come, don’t you? He’ll come here.”
“Then the Isle will be safe,” said Gereint reasonably, “and we’ll be where we’re most needed.”
Averil bit her tongue. She had just talked herself out of her own argument.
He knew it, too. He was kind enough not to gloat.
“I don’t suppose you know where it is,” she said.
He shook his head. “Nobody does.”
“Are you sure? Not Mauritius? Not the master of the Knights here?”
“They don’t confide in me,” he said fairly cheerfully, all things considered.
Of course Knights of the highest rank did not share their order’s deepest secret with a newly minted Squire. Averil was foolish for even thinking he might have the answer.
Then he said, “I don’t think they know. The ones who did are dead, and it seems they died without talking. That Mystery is hidden—maybe forever.”
“If it can possibly be found,” Averil said, “Clodovec will find it. He’s calling on every power he knows—and he’s not the only one. Some of the hounds that are running on the scent are Serpent’s men, but they’re none of his. This hunt is going to turn up its quarry or overturn the world in looking for it. Which is why we need the Isle. What else is left that keeps so much power in a single place?”
“It doesn’t share the power,” Gereint said. “The Ladies keep to themselves. Everything they do is secret. How does that help the rest of us?”
“They’re holding the world together,” said Averil.
“Do you really think they need help? Or is Ademar right? He says you want to go to the Isle and convince the Ladies to make you one of them like Queen Eiluned, so you won’t have to marry.”
“Ademar is wrong,” she said, “about Ladies and marriage, and about me. I know my duty. I may not like it, I may pray for it to be taken away, but in the end I’ll give Quitaine what it needs: a leader for its armies and a father for its heir.”
Gereint had the grace to look abashed and the strength not to let her words crush him. They had been no easier to speak than they must have been to hear.
Averil was tired suddenly of running in these circles. She held out the Myrddin’s letter. “Here. What do you make of this?”
The diversion succeeded. Gereint felt the magic in the letter: his eyes widened and his hand twitched. As he took in the seal, his eyes went even wider. “The Myrddin? He wants to see you?”
“Why?” Averil asked. “Do you know him?”
He shook his head. “Oh, no. He lives on a hilltop in Dyfed, away in the west of the kingdom. He only comes to court if there’s great need or a great rite: a coronation, the birth of an heir, the death of a king. If he’s in Caermor now, then something is happening.”
“Something is happening,” she said testily. “Clodovec wants to destroy the Isle.”
Gereint spread his hands and shrugged. “Maybe that’s it, lady. Are you going? The boy is still in the anteroom. He looks as if he means to wait for days.”
“What if it’s a trap?” she said.
“I don’t think it is.” He ran his finger over the parchment. “This is strong magic, but it’s clean. It doesn’t smell of serpents at all.”
“It could be disguised,” she said.
“It’s not.” He laid the letter on the table by the bed. “We should go. I think the Myrddin’s boy is not human, but I’m sure he needs to eat and drink and rest.”
“And I am a bad host for offering him no hospitality.” Averil let her breath out sharply. “We’ll go, then. Both of us.”
He offered no objection. Even as put out with him as she was, she felt for the first time in a year as if the world was in its proper orbit. Gereint was at her back. She was, at last, truly safe.