AVERIL’S DREAM BECAME the waking world so smoothly and inevitably that for a long moment she wondered if she had waked at all. In the dream the black fleet sailed on its shield of calm toward the walls of air, turned that shield into a battering ram and struck again and again at the weakness in the wall. When she woke to a frosty dawn, servants waited with a bath and breakfast and clothes fit to ride in. They even had weapons for her: a hunting bow and a long knife and a sword that balanced well in her hand.
Gereint and Riquier were already clean, dressed, and fed. She could have battered them with questions, but the answers were all there in her dream.
The queen’s guard gathered in front of the palace, down by the edge of the river. Boats waited, full of armed men, and a tall ship with a golden prow that flew the queen’s banner and—to Averil’s astonishment—the silver swan of Quitaine.
“No more secrets,” Gereint said as if to himself.
She wondered how wise that was. But she had not spoken since she woke, and no words came to her now. In silence, surrounded by guards, she embarked on the ship.
She did not feel like a prisoner. Everything she had done since her memory began had led to this. Her silence was not passive; it was the silence of waiting, of gathering strength and remembering every scrap of knowledge and skill and wit she had.
Her feet rang solidly on the deck. The queen’s mages were there already, with Peredur in their midst. He wore armor like a knight—or a Paladin.
There were Knights of the Rose, too, with Squires and Novices in attendance. More of them manned the boats behind, among the knights and men-at-arms of Prydain and companies of oddly shaped and accoutered creatures who conducted themselves as if they had every right to be there.
So they did. This was their realm, too.
It was a simple thought and perfectly logical, but as she thought it, something profound shifted. She had a long way to go before she fully accepted the wild magic or its people, but the deep discomfort was gone. She would be not only obliged but honored to fight beside these wildfolk, if it came to that.
The queen was the last to arrive, but only by a few moments. Like Averil she was armed and dressed to fight. Among the men at her back was her nephew Goronwy.
Averil’s shoulders tensed, but as she caught Peredur’s eye, he nodded just visibly. The mages would watch him. She was not altogether comforted, but she was more at ease than she had been—especially as she felt the rising of Gereint’s vigilance.
Gereint, she trusted. If he was on guard with the powers he had, they might possibly be safe.
SUNRISE FOUND THEM well down the river from Caermor, riding a swift wind toward the sea. It was a swifter wind than blew in the world’s air, and the river’s current had ample help: folk of the water bore the ships onward.
The queen’s fleet grew as it sailed, until at midmorning it stretched as far back as the lookouts atop the mast could see. People lined the banks to cheer it on. There were no flowers to cast on the water, so close to the door of winter, but they flung wreaths of holly and bay and stalks of mistletoe, laden with old magic.
One wreath caught a vagrant breeze and came to rest on Gereint’s head. He reached to pluck it off, but one of the queen’s men stopped him. “That’s the luck, lord,” he said. “You don’t want to turn it away.”
Gereint did not know what the man meant—if he was a man: he had a certain look to him that said otherwise. But he sounded so sure of himself that Gereint shrugged and let be. The sharp-sweet scent of bay wafted around him; the air seemed rather brighter and a fraction less cold.
Maybe there was luck in the thing. They could use all of that that they could get.
The walls of air were still holding, but the enemy was relentless. The fleet raced to reach the sea before the king’s ships broke through and came to land.
Gereint had never known a ship could sail so fast. The timbers creaked with the force of their speed; the wind whipped his face. It caught the garland of bay and plucked it off.
Too late he snatched at it. It was gone. He hoped the luck had not gone with it.
They made their own luck. He straightened his back and wrapped his mantle tighter around him.
Many of the queen’s mages had taken shelter below, out of the bitter wind, but the queen stood with Averil as near the prow as they could go. Neither seemed to feel the cold. Averil’s red-gold plait and Eiluned’s coal-black curls streamed out behind them. Gereint could not hear what they said to one another, but Averil’s joy in the wind and the speed sang in his heart.
It was a kind of healing, and she had needed it. She always had been happier running toward danger than away from it. It seemed Eiluned was of the same mind.
They had left the mortal world some time since. The river had turned to a stream of silver, and the wild magic flowed through and beneath and above it. They sailed between worlds, as once Gereint and Averil had ridden with the remnant of the Rose through the heart of the Wildlands.
Then they had been fleeing a battle; now they sailed toward it. Gereint hoped it was a good omen.
There was no better or faster way to come to the sea. The river was molten and the sky was full of light. Peredur beside him stood taller and fairer and far brighter than he ever stood in the plain light of day. It almost hurt to look at him.
Everyone was shining, even the most mortal and least magical of them. The strongest mages and the wildfolk were shapes of light. Gereint looked down at his own hands and blinked: they were as bright as Peredur’s.
They were all drinking magic as they sailed, drawing in the strength of the land and the water. Gereint wished for earth to set his feet on, but that would come soon. The sea was a spreading brightness ahead of them.
It was barely noon, and they were nearly there. The river lost its molten look and turned again to dark water flowing between winter-bare banks. It was broad now, threading through a wilderness of sand and reeds. The air smelled of salt and spume.
This was a desolate country, and yet it was rich in magic. Wildfolk loved such places, where humans were loath to go but their own kind could thrive.
There were few left here, with the walls of air trembling and ready to fall and the black fleet nearly upon them. They had fled to safer shores—and so, perhaps alarmingly, had the gulls that in gentler times flocked the strand. In their place stood ranks of the queen’s levies, mortal and otherwise, gathered from the towns and villages of this southern coast.
They had taken their stand in and around the squat bulk of a tower that stood on the last low headland. From there, the queen’s men said, the tribes of ancient Prydain had beaten back Romagna’s invasion and driven it clear across the sea to Lys.
They would do it again, God and the old gods willing. The queen’s fleet emerged from the mouth of the river, drew up in a wall along the shore and dropped anchor.
The sea that could have battered them to bits was a slow and gentle swell. All the storm and tumult raged just past the horizon, where Prydain’s great defense rose invisibly but palpably to heaven.
THE QUEEN’S MAGES reckoned they had another day at most before the black fleet battered its way through. They gathered from all the ships and the army and met in the tower, in a high round chamber full of firelight and warmth.
The warmth was welcome. Cold seldom troubled Gereint, but the wind off the sea was edged with ice. It was a relief to be out of its reach.
This was a guardroom, ringed with benches, with a long trestle table by the hearth in the center. There the mages sat with the queen at their head, filling their bellies with brown bread and strong yellow cheese and drinking the guardsmen’s ale. A scrying glass stood on the table near the queen; it looked out like a window on the black fleet.
Gereint could see the fleet without the aid of a glass. So could Averil. She sat near the queen, listening and saying nothing, while the mages debated strategies.
Some wanted to bring down the walls and loose the queen’s forces upon the enemy before this day waned; to strike while the land’s magic was at its height. Others preferred to let the black fleet exhaust itself in breaking the walls, so that when it came, it would find the defenders fresh and strong.
Both arguments had their merits. Gereint was not a general, but he was a mage, and he was Averil’s protector. He watched her, not exactly uneasy, but not in comfort, either.
She had been close to breaking since she escaped from Lys. Her mood was less chancy now that she was freed of the spell, but that might be more dangerous rather than less. She had the too-perfect calm of a woman whose mind was made up.
He could not tell what she was going to do. That disturbed him. By the nature of their magic they could have few secrets between them, but she had found a way to keep a part of herself hidden—which meant that whatever she was contemplating, she knew he would object.
He could only guess at it and stay close. When she rose under pretext of needing the privy, he followed. She could hardly have failed to expect that: she sighed where he could hear it, but she did not try to send him away.
Her excuse had been genuine enough. When she emerged, she descended the narrow stair past the guardroom to the lower hall, then out of the tower.
Even though Gereint had been braced for it, the wind took his breath away. It blew off the land, which explained why the same powers that had calmed the sea had made no effort to quiet the gale. Even if the black fleet broke through, it would be hard put to sail to shore against the force of that blast.
Gereint wrapped his cloak as tightly as he could and took comfort in the solidity of earth under his feet. He was no sailor and never would be.
Averil did not go far: only to the edge of the sandy shore, where reeds lay flat in the wind and the waves rolled sluggishly in and out, smoothed and flattened by the magic that lay over them. One of the smaller boats from Caermor was drawn up there, tipped on its side for a sort of shelter, but its crew had gone off elsewhere.
Gereint suspected they had gone into the water; a fair few of the others had done so, seeking their own element to escape from the wind. Now and then as he looked out over the sea, a sleek head broke the waves, looked about as if to get its bearings, then submerged again.
Most of battle was waiting. Gereint had learned that lesson in the flight from Lys. Along the shore, men and creatures not quite men took what shelter they could, rested and played at dice or knucklebones, or gnawed on rations, or tended fires in the lee of their boats.
While Averil sat with knees drawn up, clasping them and frowning at the sea, Gereint gathered the odd bit of flotsam and an armful of seaweed, dry and crackling, and woke fire in it. The fire he set would burn slow and long and magically warm.
She sighed as that warmth crept over her, a different sigh than had come out of her in the hall. Gereint squatted on his heels and spread his hands over the flames, letting them lick his fingers. “Whatever you’re up to,” he said, “at least let Peredur into it. He’s stronger than both of us put together.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“I know you don’t like him,” Gereint said doggedly. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t do whatever you want to do alone.”
“I don’t think he’s stronger than we are,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is.”
“He’s forgotten more magic than we ever knew.”
She shrugged, dismissing Peredur from her mind if not from Gereint’s.
He was not ready to give up, at least until she told him what she wanted to do. “The queen, then. Or Mauritius. You trust Mauritius. He’s a master; he knows what we are. If he brings in the rest of the Knights—”
“They have their own battle to fight. All of them do. Except us.”
“We’re as much a part of the war as anyone else.”
“Yes,” she said, “but what have they asked us to do? Nothing. If it weren’t for us, they wouldn’t know what was happening even now. We might not even be here.”
“Well,” he said, drawing out the word until she looked sharply at him. “We are young, and there are master mages everywhere. Even Mauritius doesn’t know everything we can do. Peredur does, I think—but he’s not going to betray us to the others. He’ll expect us to do that for ourselves.”
“I don’t intend to.” She hugged her knees tighter. “Will you fetch Peredur? I think I know what we can do to stop the fleet.”
It was a noble effort, he granted her that. If her voice shook, she could blame it on the cold.
But she could not hide what was boiling up so strongly from the heart of her. The harder she tried to conceal it, the less she succeeded.
“Oh, no,” Gereint said. “You’re not leaving the Mystery here and working up a glamour in the shape of it and handing yourself over to the king. That is absolutely mad.”
She did not seem perturbed that he had seen through her so easily. “Why? It’s the only logical thing to do. If he has me, he’ll abandon Prydain. He’ll take me back to Lys and return me to much the same life I had before. I’m still the only heir he has. He’ll marry me off promptly to one of his loyal servants—no illusion of choice this time, and no chance of escape. But I’ll be safe.”
“Certainly you’ll be safe,” said Gereint with a twist of disgust, “until they find the glamour and kill you for it. Which will be the moment after they see you. You’ve played that trick too often; they’ll be looking for it.”
“They won’t kill me.”
“Not your body, maybe. They do need that to breed royal heirs. Can you be so sure of your soul?”
At that she blanched. He pressed the advantage before he lost it. “Didn’t you learn anything from what they did to the ship? They’ll simply take you, burn away your soul, and keep on coming. The king wants the Mystery; he’ll stop at nothing until he gets it.”
“Yes,” she said in such a tone that his hackles rose. “I’m going to stop him.”
“No,” he said as understanding dawned. “Oh, no.”
“Why not?” she demanded. “It doesn’t matter what happens to me, if Clodovec is dead. Maybe I’ll only be close enough to him for a moment, but a moment is all I need.”
Gereint sucked in a breath and did his best not to bellow at her. “You are not going to kill yourself in order to kill the king!”
“I would hope to escape,” she said, “but if not—”
“No. No, and no. Even to save Prydain, you can’t destroy yourself.”
Her mind was like a castle under guard, with the gates barred and the portcullis raised. Gereint did his best to storm the walls. “What good will killing one man do, even that one? He’s far from alone—and there’s the Morescan with his own unholy alliance. If you dispose of Clodovec, you’ll only free the others to be worse.”
“Maybe,” she said, “if there were a working set to destroy all of the Serpent’s slaves when that one dies…”
“There probably is,” he said tightly, “but if it does exist, it likely takes more art and skill than either of us has, and more time than is left to us. Please, lady. There’s a battle coming, and it needs us both. Not you alone—and most of all, not you dead.”
She was wavering. Gereint opened his mouth to press harder, but thought better of it. It would be better for them all if she found her own way to sanity.