IT HAD BEEN a lovely plan. Averil had seen it as clearly as in a scrying glass. Most likely she would die for it, but she told herself that did not matter.
Gereint dragged her back to cold reality and a less palatable truth. He had a way of doing that. She did not have to be pleased, but she could concede that he was, on occasion, wise.
She was still contrary, and wild enough to lean across his bit of half-magical, half-mortal fire and catch his face in her hands and kiss him until they were both dizzy. There was no thought in it to speak of, and no wisdom whatever.
She sat back abruptly on her heels, breathing hard. “That was for luck,” she said.
He mirrored her posture, but he seemed to have forgotten the kiss as soon as it was over. Even as she sparked to temper at the fickleness of the male, he said, “Do you feel that?”
“What?” she said nastily. “The way I just did that, and you barely noticed?”
His brows drew together, but his attention was still elsewhere. “Look,” he said.
There was no escaping it: his magic coiled itself around hers and forced her to see. The heat of her temper went cold.
Things moved deep in the earth, flexing supple bodies far below the world of light. Powers were awake and coiling upward. The walls of air guarded sea and sky, but there were no defenses beneath the earth.
Prydain’s mages, whether of the orders or the wild magic, had committed a signal error: they had looked outward and upward, but not downward. Serpent magic was magic of the deep places, of rivers flowing underground and caverns beyond mortal knowledge. It crawled beneath the walls and drew up strength from the earth’s heart.
“The fleet is a diversion,” Averil said. She was less shocked than wry. “The real attack is coming from below.”
Gereint sprang to his feet, pulling her up with him. “We have to warn the queen.”
Averil could not argue with that. When he would have let go her hand, she knotted her fingers more tightly with his. They ran back together into the tower.
THEIR ARRIVAL INTERRUPTED an argument that had not changed or resolved itself since they left. Averil cut across it unceremoniously. “Never mind the fleet,” she said. “Look below.”
Some of the mages and generals would have turned their dissension on her, but she ignored them. The only ones who mattered were the queen, the Knights, and the mage whose proper name was Peredur. For them she cast what she knew into the scrying glass on the table.
The rumble of outrage died abruptly. In the silence, Eiluned’s indrawn breath was unexpectedly loud. “Ah yes. Of course. Why should he do more than pretend to challenge us with a fleet when he can wield the deep magic?”
“You know of such things?” Averil asked.
The queen nodded. “We thank you for this.”
“Let us help you,” Averil said.
“We will need all the help we can find,” said Peredur before the queen could say otherwise—and she did mean to: that was clear in her eyes. If she had had her way, Averil would have been carried off to safety with the levies and, most important of all, the Mystery that must not fall into Clodovec’s hands.
But Peredur forestalled any such word. His calm stare dared the rest to disagree.
No one did, not openly. Even now, after the fall of the Rose had taught the orders a terrible lesson, it was difficult for them to turn their minds toward the ways of the Serpent. Averil was no different, but fate and chance had set her in the vanguard of the battle. She had to face what she had never been raised or trained to face.
Without Gereint she would have been as much at a loss as any of them. Magic was all the same to him, and no part of it troubled him more than any other. She had to cultivate that, for her own safety and the salvation of them all.
Through him she felt the slow surge and roll of the powers beneath. At the same time she was aware that the kingdom’s defenses were buckling. All too soon they would fall.
“When the deep rises,” Gereint said, “the sea will overwhelm the land. Your fleet may be able to ride it out, majesty, but is there room on the ships for your levies?”
“How much time do we have?” Eiluned asked.
She did not demand to know what a Squire was doing, speaking out of turn. That was not only wise, it was gracious.
Gereint bowed to it, even as he said, “Until nightfall at the most.”
Eiluned nodded. Her face was grim. She turned to the commander of her fleet, a sturdy, weathered person on whose cheeks was a faint sheen of scales. “My lord, do what you can.”
“At once, majesty,” he said, and was gone as quickly as a fish darting through bright water.
The commander of her levies was on his feet already, as human as her admiral was not. “I’ll move the rest as quickly as I can,” he said. He slanted a glance at the mages. “With such help as these may offer.”
“The paths between the worlds will open for you,” said Peredur.
When the general withdrew, a handful of mages went with him, but Peredur stayed. Averil surprised herself with relief. Whatever she might think of him, he was a great power. She wanted him nearby, and not focused on duties that lesser mages could perform.
There was still that gnawing doubt and that inborn unwillingness to trust him. As they dispersed with dignified haste to the army or the ships, Averil deliberately chose to be the last to leave. Gereint waited for her—and so, as she had hoped, did Peredur.
When the hall was empty but for the three of them, she faced him directly. “I suppose I owe you thanks for not sending me packing—though one might question your reasons for doing so.”
“One might,” he granted her. “Or one might reflect that even if we sent you away, you would escape and come back. You’re bound to this as we all are.”
“Even with what I carry?”
“Especially for that.”
She paused. Her hand wanted to clasp the Mystery beneath her chemise, but she clenched it tightly at her side. “Tell me now,” she said, “and tell me true: You knew this would come. You waited for us to discover it for ourselves. Why? Don’t tell me we had a lesson to learn. I take a dim view of lessons that destroy kingdoms.”
“Lady,” he said, “I knew this was possible, but I hoped our enemies would not. I didn’t think they had so much power or such knowledge.”
“What was it you taught us not so long ago?” said Averil. “Never underestimate your enemy.”
He acknowledged the stroke with a swordsman’s salute.
She was not charmed, nor was she amused. “I must know. If you are not going to fight on our side, if you are going to withhold knowledge that will save us, or worse, pass that knowledge on to our enemies, simply to teach us the error of our ways, I don’t care what the queen thinks of you. I will do my best to have you banished.”
“I know you will, lady,” he said. He was as sober as he could be, which was not very. For a being so purportedly old, he had a remarkably light heart.
“Tell me, then,” she said. “The truth. Have you betrayed us to Clodovec?”
“Lady,” he said, “I have not and will never betray you to the Serpent’s slaves—unless you ask.”
Averil’s breath caught. She could persist in disbelieving him, or she could gamble that Gereint was right: Peredur was their strongest ally.
Time was flying; the ships were nearly ready to sail. She let her breath out sharply. “Can you stop this?”
“Alone, no,” he said. “With you two, maybe.”
“We have to try.”
“Yes,” he said.
She nodded with swift decision—and no misgivings that she would allow herself to feel. Gereint was halfway to the door already. She strode after him.
THEY WERE THE last to board the queen’s ship. The sun was riding low, though there were hours yet to nightfall. On the shore, the levies were ranked and marching, beating a rapid retreat from the sea.
Even under the spell that bound them, the waves were higher, a slow ebb and surge like the breathing of a vast beast. The power beneath was rising inexorably. The black fleet had nearly broken through the walls.
The queen’s mages had scattered themselves through the fleet. A spell much like that which bound the Knights connected them one to another, woven through a shard of glass that each carried. The queen had sacrificed a goblet willingly to the cause.
The Knights had woven this new web into their own. They were scattered, too, so that every ship of any size had a Knight or a mage to guard it, with smaller boats within its orbit. Mauritius remained on the queen’s ship with Father Owein and Riquier.
They raised anchor all together, even as the last of the levies disappeared into mist and light. The tide tried to sweep them to shore, but the sea-folk helped carry those that had to rely on sail rather than oar.
The sea’s children might not be able to stay once the deep rose. All that did not fight for the queen were already gone. Like the levies, they had fled as far as they could go, well away from the thing that was coming.
For the moment those who remained held on, and the fleet held its line. The Archbishop of Caermor sang a mass; the slow and sonorous notes of the psalms echoed over the water.
The sea-folk did not flee from the constraints of the ritual. Averil took note of that. They floated in the sea, eyes glistening. If they had ears, those pricked toward the sound of chanting; such nostrils as they had flared at the smell of incense. A few even signed themselves with the Young God’s spear, tracing the shape of haft and guard in a blessed cross.
The waves were rising higher now. The spells that bound them were slipping free. The queen’s mages made no effort to hold them, nor to strengthen the walls of air.
Averil had taken station by the prow. One of the queen’s maids brought a fur-lined cloak, for which she was grateful. Warm and protected from the wind, she looked not across the sea but into the depths of her magic.
Gereint was there as always, but in body he stood with Peredur and Riquier and Mauritius, close by the queen. If Averil wished, she could hear what he said.
“It’s not another Serpent, is it—what’s coming up from below?”
“There is only one of that kind,” Peredur answered, “but it is a sort of serpent, yes: a cold-drake from the deep places of the earth. When it rises, it will lift the sea’s floor with it.”
“Unless we stop it.”
“Just so,” said Peredur.
Gereint went silent. Peredur had told them what he meant to do. His words coiled inside of Averil, ready to strike when the moment came.
She was afraid—terrified—but that fear was far away. For the moment there was only the wind and the cold and the fading sun, and the sound of ships battering a wall that was made of magic instead of stone.
She was ready when it fell, and yet it was a shock, snapping through her body. The great defense collapsed. Black sails filled the horizon, just as the sun touched it. On each sail was a sinuous shape, a silver serpent, turned to blood by the sunset light.