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Legend of the Pendragon

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Table of Contents

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PROLOGUE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Sample: Cold My Heart

Book eight in The Last Pendragon Saga

Legend of the Pendragon

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by

Sarah Woodbury

Legend of the Pendragon

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CADE AND HIS COMPANIONS have reached the final reckoning. He must either rise to the promise of his birth and become the legend that prophecy foretold—or face the ultimate destruction of his country and his people.

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LEGEND OF THE PENDRAGON is the eighth and final installment in The Last Pendragon Saga.

Cast of Characters

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Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon—King of Gwynedd

Rhiann ferch Cadfael—Queen of Gwynedd

Penda—King of Mercia

Peada—Penda’s son

Oswin—King of Northumbria

Siawn—ruler of Caer Dathyl

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Cade’s Companions

Taliesin—seer/bard

Goronwy—knight

Catrin—seeress

Dafydd—knight

Angharad—Dafydd’s wife

Bedwyr—knight

Hywel—knight

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The Sidhe

Arianrhod—goddess of the silver wheel of time and fate, daughter of Beli and Dôn

Gwydion—Arianrhod’s brother, son of Dôn

Efnysien—trickster god, grandson of Beli

Nysien—Efnysien’s brother

Mabon—son of Arawn and Arianrhod

Arawn—King of the Underworld

Manawydan—half-brother of Efnysien, grandson of Beli

Beli—Welsh sun god, ruler of the Otherworld

Prologue

Arianrhod

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“FATHER—”

“You have meddled quite enough in the human world for now, don’t you think?”

Arianrhod bent her head. She should have known better than to appeal to her father’s paternal instincts, as he had none. At times like these, it was best not to think of Beli as her father at all. He was the sun god, whose presence gave light and whose absence meant darkness and death. Gwydion, the coward, wasn’t even here to back her up. He was exploring other options, whatever that meant.

Meanwhile Beli paced back and forth before the great hearth in his receiving room. “First Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon and then Taliesin. What did you mean by giving your son to him? That was not my intent!”

Arianrhod kept her eyes on the ground. “I apologize, Father. I must have misunderstood.” She could feel his gaze boring into her, but she refused to look at him. Beli, who was also the lord of the Otherworld, was not to be trifled with, especially when he was on fire with rage. And yet, she could not remain silent. “Efnysien—”

“Efnysien! He has done as much or more for this family than any other! Did he not sacrifice himself in the black cauldron and save us all? Next you’ll be accusing Nysien of treason.”

Efnysien was a blackguard, known throughout all worlds for deceit, betrayal, and mercilessness. His brother, Nysien, on the other hand, was a close companion of Gwydion and was light to Efnysien’s dark. It was hard to believe the two brothers had come from the same mother. And it was Nysien, of all the sidhe, who feared his brother the least.

“I would never do that, Father, and I don’t understand why—”

Beli pointed at her. “I will not hear another word!”

Arianrhod subsided as Beli wanted, but her insides were churning. She glanced to the doorway where her mother, Dôn, waited, hands folded patiently in front of her. Dôn nodded, and Arianrhod took the motion as a dismissal. Her mother always had the right soothing words to calm the fire that burned in Beli. Arianrhod would be foolish not to leave her to it.

She looked up once more into her father’s eyes and then looked away again—but not before she saw something flicker in Beli’s eyes, the emerald green turning momentarily to smoky gray. She disguised her surprise with a twitch of her skirt and a flourished spin on her heel, but her heart was shaken. The madness had overtaken her father again. She had noticed it happening more and more often lately, even if nobody but Gwydion acknowledged it. Something was wrong in the very heart of the Otherworld.

Chapter One

Caer Wydr

(Dôn’s Castle in the Otherworld)

Taliesin

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MABON LEANED IN TO Taliesin and whispered conspiratorially: “I don’t seek the Treasures for myself.”

Taliesin hesitated a few steps from the top of the stairs and then continued climbing. He struggled daily against pride, but he couldn’t deny that he prided himself on his equanimity and his refusal to rise to whatever insults or provocation Mabon chose to throw at him. There were times when Taliesin willfully masked uncertainty with poems and songs designed to distract and confuse his listeners—as well as bring them insight if they cared to look further. But still, he shouldn’t have been surprised that Mabon could see right through him. He was sidhe after all.

This latest comment was pure Mabon. He kept his secrets, and then, for no apparent reason, chose to reveal them. The key was, as with Taliesin’s own poems, to see the thinking behind the action and to understand that, like Taliesin, his purpose was to confuse and deflect. It occurred to Taliesin only now that like was drawn to like, and it was a sad commentary on his own character that he was able to understand Mabon—because he understood himself.

But if Mabon was choosing this moment to justify his personal quest for the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, it was because there was something else that he didn’t want Taliesin to know.

“Explain,” Taliesin said.

“I admit that I used them,” Mabon chortled to himself, a response that in a child might be amusing, but in a god was disconcerting in the extreme, “but that was temporary until such a time as I could pass them on to my master.”

“You mean Efnysien. Yes, I know.”

Mabon’s expression turned haughty. “If you know so much, why do I bother speaking?”

Taliesin grasped Mabon’s upper arm and stepped with him across the threshold into the room at the top of the stairs in the castle of the goddess Dôn. They found themselves in a vast garden, and when Taliesin looked up, he saw the ceiling was open to blue sky. No snow fell here, and the temperature was balmy enough that he was too warm in his cloak, where before he’d wanted to clutch it around himself.

Horrified—not at the warmth but at the change in location—he spun around. Where the doorway to the stairwell had been, there was now an archway, adorned with trailing vines and red flowers. Dôn’s castle was gone. Goronwy and Catrin were no longer coming up the stairs behind Taliesin and Mabon because there were no stairs to come up.

Taliesin hurried to the trellis and would have cursed if he hadn’t known the danger of taking any god’s name in vain at such a juncture. Instead he called upon his patron, Gwydion, with faith and hope, waving a hand to reopen the door and allow his friends to come to him.

Nothing happened.

Taliesin frowned. He hadn’t initially intended for Catrin and Goronwy to come to the Otherworld with him at all, but now that he’d brought them, he couldn’t just abandon them, even if it meant leaving Mabon here and not pursuing the Treasures any longer. He recalled the spell he’d used to open the door in the crypt, hoping to part the veil between the Otherworld and the human one, in the hopes of reentering the crypt at the abbey and returning to Dôn’s castle that way. He would have to face the snow alone—along with whatever obstacles she’d placed as guards around the castle—but the possibility of danger couldn’t keep him from his responsibilities.

Frustratingly, there was no response to this request either, and he was forced to acknowledge that there was no further point in trying. He’d invoked Gwydion’s name and been granted entrance when he’d created the doorway underneath Valle Crucis Abbey. Gwydion had to know that Taliesin was here. Why was he withholding his favor now?

Taliesin checked the location of the sun, worried all of a sudden that they’d already been in the Otherworld for too long and that time was passing in a way his senses weren’t registering. Days could have gone by without him knowing. Years maybe. With Gwydion’s abandonment, he was as adrift from his moorings as he’d ever been.

Bracing himself to face what Mabon had in store for him, now that he’d isolated him from his friends, Taliesin swung around. The child-god had remained a few feet away, standing with his hands on his hips and that supercilious smile he wore whenever he was feeling particularly satisfied. Taliesin wished Goronwy were here to wipe it off. But then Mabon’s eyes moved from Taliesin’s face to a point over his left shoulder, and his face paled. Something had to be very bad to discomfit Mabon, and Taliesin spun back around to see what it was.

A man stood ten paces away, where the door to the stairwell had been, and where a moment ago there’d been no one. Taliesin hadn’t had the wherewithal to open a way between the garden and someplace else, but this man had to have done exactly that. Taliesin’s eyes narrowed as he took in the man’s appearance. He was shorter than Taliesin, dark-haired, brown-eyed, not particularly muscular and even a little soft around the middle. He wasn’t handsome; he didn’t shimmer with godlike power. He was just a man.

And that was the problem.

A god who didn’t need to look beautiful, who had no interest in projecting power or authority, was far more to be feared than Mabon with all his childish needs could ever be.

“Don’t come any closer.” Taliesin’s voice held the tone of Command.

“You never should have thought that you could go your own way, that you could come here without attracting attention,” Mabon said from behind Taliesin. His voice held pride and that same irksome satisfaction that drove decent men mad. His demeanor was that of someone who’d pulled the wool over another’s eyes, but Taliesin couldn’t figure out what the trick had been. He felt inside himself that he’d behaved logically, and it had been his idea to come to the Otherworld.

Hadn’t it? Taliesin thought back to all of his interactions with Mabon since Arianrhod had appeared in the road from Dinas Bran.

“Do you think I mean to harm you?” The man, whom Taliesin had concluded by now, in part from Mabon’s reaction, was Efnysien himself, put out a hand in apparent welcome. “I assure you that is far from the case. It’s the last thing I want. I seek only to talk, to hear your wise counsel.”

Taliesin hesitated. It had been foolish of him to show what he was thinking by invoking his magic, and now he felt even more foolish for slowly lowering his staff at Efnysien’s calm words.

“Why would you want to speak to me?” Taliesin felt as if he was forcing the words through frozen lips. Mabon was a trickster, but Efnysien was the consummate deceiver.

“To enlist your help.” Efnysien tipped his head to one side so that he could see Mabon behind Taliesin. Taliesin took a step to the right so the two gods could greet each other properly. He would just as soon not be the focus of Efnysien’s attention anyway. “Thank you for bringing him.”

Mabon bowed deeply. “You are most welcome, but it was my honor.”

“You will be well rewarded for your faithfulness.”

Mabon straightened. “I would ask—”

Efnysien wagged a finger at him, cutting Mabon off before he could complete his sentence. “Now, now. You know that I cannot give you back your power. It would immediately call attention to our doings, wouldn’t it?”

“What doings are those?” Taliesin said.

Efnysien’s expression turned very grave. “A corruption has spread throughout these domains. I know you have felt it, even seen it at the times it has penetrated the barrier between this world and the human one.”

Taliesin struggled to keep his breathing and his response even. Efnysien wasn’t lying, but it was he who was the corruption’s source. “You are speaking of the darkness.”

Efnysien bobbed his head. “For long years I have watched it, observing its spread. Of late, it has gained strength. Something—or someone—is feeding it.”

“You are.”

Efnysien threw back his head and laughed. “I? You blame me for the darkness?”

Taliesin managed not to recoil. That Efnysien could laugh at the darkness made Taliesin’s limbs ache with cold—and fear, truth be told—though in this moment he didn’t know if he was more afraid of Efnysien or the darkness. Taliesin had seen it and felt it—coiling, oily, evil. When it had come to him underneath Dinas Bran, he had collapsed under its power. He’d been overcome with a sense of despair that had made him unable to move, think, or feel anything but its suffocating blackness. Only the quick thinking—and quick feet—of Cade had saved him. He didn’t ever want to go near it again. In fact, he would have preferred never to think or speak of it.

But Efnysien laughed again. “I can assure you that I neither began it nor drive it. While I would control it if I could, it is beyond my power.” He sobered and stepped closer, closing half the distance between them. “I should be flattered that you think me capable of creating such an entity.”

“Then what hope have we to stop it?” Taliesin forced himself not to take a step back.

Efnysien might look like a mortal, but he was sidhe, and Taliesin could sense the magic in him. While Taliesin wasn’t ever one to ask for help, and he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d relied on anyone else, especially when it came to his powers, he wished Catrin and Goronwy were here. One or the other might be able to see through the illusion Efnysien was projecting or tell him the truth about who he was from his aura. If Taliesin hadn’t been trying to keep his expression serene, he would have narrowed his eyes as it occurred to him that perhaps this was the reason Efnysien had separated him from his friends.

“It is my hope that you will consent to help me gather the Treasures. Only then might we contain the darkness.”

“Me?” Taliesin struggled to contain his surprise that Efnysien had actually admitted to wanting the Treasures, and for a purpose with which Taliesin could not argue.

“Why not you? Are you not the most accomplished gweledydd in Britain? Do not the words of your compositions have power in and of themselves?”

Taliesin canted his head in silent admission. He shouldn’t have been flattered, but even as he struggled against accepting the accolade, the ancestors inside him preened. It wasn’t as if Efnysien was wrong. And yet ... “What good will my magic be if yours cannot touch it?”

“Raw power isn’t enough, at least mine isn’t enough. Never before has any sidhe welcomed a living human to the Otherworld, but the time has come for sidhe and human to unite if all of us are to be saved.”

Taliesin rubbed his chin. “I don’t understand.”

“You will soon enough.” The god turned and started walking away towards the far end of the garden. He spoke over his shoulder, “The darkness was contained for some time beneath Dinas Bran because of your magic.”

Taliesin swallowed, recognizing that Efnysien’s comment was far from being a by-the-way. He started forward before the god was no longer in earshot. “My lord, I fear you have misunderstood. It was my power that released it from wherever it had been caged.”

Efnysien didn’t stop walking. “You contained it.”

A bitter taste filled Taliesin’s mouth. “I fear you are again incorrect. It is not contained. As we entered the crypt beneath Valle Crucis Abbey, we felt a shaking in the earth, and when we reached the Otherworld, the ruined towers of Dinas Bran greeted us.”

Taliesin could only pray that Cade and his companions had left the castle in time. He took some comfort in the fact that Efnysien was talking to him, because if Cade were dead, then the threat he presented to Efnysien’s plans would have disappeared and he wouldn’t be competing with Efnysien for the Treasures. In that case, Efnysien would have gone elsewhere for counsel.

Efnysien made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “The darkness was rattling its cage. That is all. It was its last attempt to escape into the human world through that path. It has given up and has moved elsewhere.”

Taliesin’s heart sank. “Where has it gone?”

“I believe you call the place Caer Fawr.”

Mabon had remained silent while Taliesin and Efnysien talked, but now he laughed openly. “Cade is to be crowned at Caer Fawr.”

Efnysien bent his head in gracious acknowledgement. “So I understand.”

Taliesin grimaced. Efnysien had been wise to save that bit of information until late in the conversation, burying it amidst the flattery. But Taliesin saw the truth now: the fall of Caer Fawr was a very real threat, and thus, he had no choice but to assist Efnysien. He had told Cade to leave Dinas Bran, and now it seemed he had sent him into a trap. Again, he felt manipulated, even as he looked back over everything he’d said and done and found no fault in his decision-making.

Regardless of what Efnysien proclaimed, however, Taliesin knew without question that it was he, not the darkness, that wished to disrupt Cade’s crowning, and if Taliesin agreed to help him, Efnysien would betray him before the end.

He had to assume it.

For the crowning of the High King meant far more than simply the anointing of a new leader. A king might rule, but without the favor of earth and heaven, he would never achieve his full potential and would ultimately be forgotten. In addition, the crowning of a true High King had ramifications in the Otherworld as well as the human one, something the people in Britain’s long-ago past had known very well but which they’d forgotten with the spread of Christianity.

Cade was such a king, whose coming had been foretold as the one who would unite the people of Britain like no man had since King Arthur. To see him crowned High King was the entire purpose of Taliesin’s existence.

Efnysien claimed that the darkness was actively fighting against such a rule, and so it might be. But what Efnysien did not know was that the darkness had been held back not by Taliesin’s power, but by the ancient Treasure buried with Joseph of Arimathea.

Taliesin looked down at his hands, both of which were clenched around his staff. All his life he’d felt like a ship at sea, buffeted by the winds of war and fate that had overtaken Wales with the coming of successive waves of conquerors. The Thirteen Treasures of Britain had remained a beacon throughout, calling to him to collect them and renew the power the Cymry had lost when they’d turned from the old gods to the Christ.

Now, as he smiled at Efnysien and pledged to aid him, he saw that he’d gotten it all wrong. He had feared the new religion for the way it separated his people from their own souls. But what he understood now, and perhaps what Cade had been trying to tell him all along, was that the power in the Cup of Christ was the same power that he’d always believed in. Its history was Taliesin’s history, and it—and the other Treasures—represented the past and future simultaneously. They were his Treasures and Cade’s Treasures at the same time.

Efnysien planned to collect the Treasures to gather power to himself, and maybe he really did hope to hold back the darkness with them. But he would be no more successful than Taliesin or Cade would be—alone, that is. Inadvertently, the truth had been revealed beneath Dinas Bran. The only way to contain the darkness was side-by-side as Taliesin and Cade had been then. By uniting the old and the new. By faith.

Chapter Two

Bedwyr

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“YOU’RE BACK!” BEDWYR looked up from his stool by the fire in the great hall at Caer Gwrlie where he was lovingly polishing his sword with an oiled cloth.

Taliesin stood a few paces away, swathed in the green cloak Rhiann had given him because she liked the way the color matched his eyes. He didn’t respond to Bedwyr’s welcome, however, instead looking wildly around in a very un-Taliesin-like manner. “Cade! Cade! I need you! Help me!”

Bedwyr paused in mid-stroke, his surprise enough to allow the oil to pool in the long channel on his sword and then drip onto the floor. “I’m here, Taliesin! What can I do?”

Taliesin had real fear in his face, and he looked over his shoulder for a heartbeat, as if someone was following him or might overhear. “You must be wary and very careful. You seek the last Treasures, but they aren’t what they seem, and the price to attain them may be very high.”

“How so?” Bedwyr gave up on the sword entirely.

Oddly, Taliesin wasn’t looking at him, but somewhere over Bedwyr’s left shoulder. But then Bedwyr swept his gaze from one side of the hall to the other a second time, and saw that it had transformed itself—and this hall was one he knew far better. They’d all spent too many sleepless nights at Caer Fawr not to recognize the shape of it, including the way the walls had been newly rebuilt and whitewashed, and the tapestry showed King Arthur’s victory at Mt. Badon. The beams in the ceiling were so new they were not yet smoke blackened.

Instead of a central hearth, however, which had been in place when Bedwyr had last been here, the center of the room was occupied by a slab of stone that resembled an altar more than anything else. Even more startling, Treasures, including the two swords, Caledfwlch and Dyrnwyn, had been placed around it, almost as if they were guarding the slab, along with several of the other Treasures. The newly acquired golden chariot, however, was missing.

Out of thirteen Treasures, the companions currently had knowledge or possession of eleven: the Cup of Christ, known to the druids as a drinking horn, lay buried beneath Dinas Bran. Cade regularly carried both Caledfwlch and the mantle, while Dafydd wore Dyrnwyn, the flaming sword. Hywel held the knife, while Goronwy had acquired not only the halter and chariot, but the whetstone and Rhiann’s single chess piece. The cauldron resided in the caverns beneath Caer Dathyl in the possession of Cade’s cousin, Gwyn, and the eleventh was Bedwyr’s dish.

Of course, if this was Taliesin’s vision, which he was projecting to Bedwyr for reasons known only to him, then he didn’t know that they had found the chariot, the halter, and the dish. It was dawning on Bedwyr, too, that Taliesin had quested through the barrier between the Otherworld and the human world to speak to him. Bedwyr hadn’t known that was possible for the seer.

He opened his mouth, prepared to tell Taliesin that they’d found three more Treasures since they’d last seen him, but before he could speak, Cade stepped out from behind one of the pillars that supported the roof of the hall. It seemed that he’d been leaning up against it, just out of Bedwyr’s view, all this time.

Callously, Cade hadn’t responded to Taliesin’s initial plea for help, but now he moved to stand just in front and to the left of Bedwyr. Neither he nor Taliesin acknowledged Bedwyr’s presence. It was as if Bedwyr was watching a scene playing out behind a veil that separated the hall at Caer Fawr from where Bedwyr sat at Caer Gwrlie. His friends were close enough for him to touch, but at the same time, they couldn’t have been farther away.

And then it dawned on him what was really happening here: he was eavesdropping, against his will and theirs, and neither Cade nor Taliesin could see him.

“What do you fear?” Cade said.

“What the poem doesn’t tell you is that only one wish is granted to each owner of the crock or the dish. Beware of what you wish for.”

“Now you tell me,” Bedwyr growled. He had spent his life performing acts of bravery that most men would have cowered at. And yet, those moments between finding the dish and successfully hiding it again had been some of the most anxious of his life. His feeling that he could never allow the dish to fall into the hands of the Saxons was almost physical. They were a people he could never understand, who could not be trusted, and who looked upon him and his people as less than human.

Now that he thought about it, however, knowing that he could never wish upon the dish again was comforting rather than disconcerting. He had never been comfortable with the power of the Treasures and had been happy to leave the world of the sidhe to Cade and others. And it meant, if Taliesin was correct, that he could handle the dish without fear that his thoughts, which to some degree he knew he couldn’t control, might be manifested in the fulfillment of a wish he hadn’t truly meant. That didn’t mean, however, that he wanted to handle it again. In fact, the very thought had him recoiling and his stomach churning. Better that nobody touched it ever again.

Cade and Taliesin were still conversing, though fear was still consuming Taliesin. He cowered close to the ground, glancing over his shoulder every few heartbeats. “I need your help. The last of the Treasures are here, so this is where you must be.”

“How do I get to you?” Cade said.

Taliesin started to fade away. “You already know the answer, Cade. You’ve always known that this is where it had to end. You must sacrifice yourself.”

Cade leaned forward and spoke urgently. “You’re saying I must die?”

Taliesin had been genuinely fearful a moment ago, but now he looked merely disgruntled. “After all this time, do you really understand so little? The least will become the most.” The bard had become no more than a shadow of himself. “Believe me, your death can’t come too soon.”

Cade threw out a hand. “Taliesin! Wait—”

Bedwyr jerked away from the fire, knocking over his empty cup with an involuntary twitch of his hand. If he’d been able to breathe, his breath would have caught in his throat. He whipped his head around this way and that, much as Taliesin had a moment ago, but he saw only his friends and companions, all of whom should have been asleep but weren’t, despite the early hour.

“What is it, Bedwyr?” Cade glanced at him from across the fire, a quill in his hand and a piece of parchment on a board in his lap he was using as a desk. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Did you see him?” Against all expectation, Bedwyr had remained sitting on his stool, though his sword had been discarded on the ground. He’d also dropped the oiled rag, and it lay dangerously close to the stones that ringed the hearth. He reached down and snatched it away from the flames before it lit.

“See who?”

“Taliesin.” Bedwyr had started to breathe again, but even as his color returned to normal, the ramifications of what he’d just witnessed hit him. Feeling uncharacteristically petulant, he clenched his fists in frustration at Taliesin’s cryptic warnings and not so cryptic demands.

Cade tipped his head. “All was quiet until you spoke just now.” He paused. “You’re saying that you saw Taliesin?”

Bedwyr raised his head. “If it was a vision, which now I see it must have been, it couldn’t have been more real. Has Taliesin ever said anything to you about ...” He stopped, unable to think how to phrase his question and deciding even as he asked it that it might be better to say nothing more.

But it was too late. Cade was never one to let anything go. “About what?”

Bedwyr sighed. “He came to me, just now. Except—”

“You keep starting sentences and not finishing them. Bedwyr, spit it out.” Cade finally set aside his pen and parchment and gave his friend his full attention. At their intent conversation, Goronwy and Catrin, who had been talking quietly nearby, moved closer too.

“He wasn’t speaking to me. His words were for you, and you were there with me. You don’t know any of this? While I was sitting here, you never noticed anything wrong? It wasn’t really you Taliesin spoke to?”

“No.” Cade leaned back in his chair, studying Bedwyr. “What did he say?”

Bedwyr still wasn’t ready to answer that. “You believe me?”

Cade barked a laugh. “How could I not after all I’ve been through and all we’ve been through together? Though ... the power required to quest through the barrier between the Otherworld and this one is far beyond the abilities I would have attributed to anyone other than a sidhe—even Taliesin.”

That had been Bedwyr’s thought too, and he chewed on his lower lip, trying to work out how to explain what he’d seen. “He begged you to help him.”

Cade’s eyes narrowed. “Taliesin asked for help?”

Bedwyr nodded.

“Why?”

“He said that you needed to come to him, that it was necessary if you were to gather the rest of the Treasures.”

“I’d already planned to go.”

“I know, but—” Bedwyr shook his head. “He was terrified. I’ve never seen Taliesin afraid before. Or known him to ask for help.” Bedwyr swallowed hard. “He said you had to die—to sacrifice yourself—to do it.”

Cade stared at him. “You’d better tell me everything.”

Chapter Three

Hywel

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CADE’S EYES NARROWED as Bedwyr related the entirety of the dream, and it was as he finished that Hywel knew he could no longer remain silent. He had long since given up trying to sleep.

“I don’t believe it. That doesn’t sound like the Taliesin I know.” He rose to his feet from where he’d been lying on a pallet off to one side of the central fire. Taliesin had told Bedwyr that he wanted Cade to join him in the Otherworld, which was fine as far as it went. That was already Cade’s plan. But if Cade needed to die to do it, that was not Hywel’s plan at all. “And besides, the poem says nothing about dying, only sacrifice: He who travels to the deepest reaches of the Underworld shall find heaven.

You forget. Before the poem says that, it says, he who seeks to slay another shall slay himself,” Cade said. “Taliesin has ever been one not to shirk at telling a man to do hard things.”

“Dying would not be the ultimate hard thing for you.” Hywel pulled up his own stool and put his hands to the fire. The warmth was welcome, and a contrast to the cold feeling in his gut. “Besides, that line you quoted doesn’t refer to you, but to your enemies. It is Arawn who sought to slay you and slew himself instead.”

Cade was looking at Hywel like he was a total stranger.

“What?” Hywel said.

Cade shook his head. “Nothing.” He turned to Bedwyr. “Are you absolutely sure it was Taliesin who came to you, Bedwyr?”

Bedwyr stilled. “I—I thought so. If not, I don’t want to think who it could be—” He shook his head too. “He knew you, my lord, even if neither he nor you acknowledged me.”

Hywel made a maybe motion with his hand. “Or—and it isn’t my intent to play devil’s advocate, but merely to state a perspective—it could have been a carefully constructed ploy to make you think that. Mabon is a master of illusion, and he has been in the human world long enough to know how to delude people.”

Bedwyr chewed on his lower lip. “Mabon does want the Treasures, and Taliesin did ask Cade to come so that he could help collect them.” He looked up at Cade. “He specifically said that the last ones were the most important.”

Hywel scoffed. “The crock and the hamper? Why would those be?”

Bedwyr made a face. “He became upset when Cade asked him that very question.”

Cade looked at Hywel, his expression turning wary. “That does sound like Taliesin, doesn’t it?”

“It wasn’t Taliesin,” Hywel said.

A woman’s voice came from behind him. “I don’t know that you are really one to judge, Hywel.”

He turned to see the lady of Caer Gwrlie, Taryn, approaching. Her husband had died the previous winter, along with her only child, a daughter. Hywel had become privy to the tale by mistake. When they’d first arrived, out of politeness, he’d inquired as to the whereabouts of her husband, since Cade had asked Hywel to see to the disposition of the men. Naturally, he’d assumed that a man would have been the best person to speak to.

Rather than accepting his condolences, however, Taryn had lifted her chin and sneered at him, doubting his sincerity. He had no idea what had put her off him, but every word that had come out of her mouth since then—if directed at him—had been disparaging. She was kind to everyone else. At first he’d wondered if Taryn’s animosity was a front for an underlying interest (not that Hywel was interested), such as Angharad conveyed to Dafydd at their first meeting, where she’d treated him badly at the urging of her sister, even though she hadn’t wanted to.

As last evening had worn on, however, Hywel had been forced to conclude that her animosity to him was due to something else entirely. Slender, with golden hair and blue eyes, she was several years younger than he, and, in Hywel’s estimation, far too young to rule such a large portion of eastern Gwynedd. Cade, however, had looked her up and down in that summary way of his and proceeded to confer with her as if she’d been a trusted companion all along.

And now, here at a far too early hour of the morning, she seemed to be completely oblivious to the fact that she was interrupting what should have been a private conversation—if not secret. And insulting Hywel again.

“How would you know as you have never met Taliesin—” Hywel broke off as Bedwyr made a slashing gesture in his direction.

Taryn ignored Hywel and spoke directly to Cade. “I can’t say if Sir Bedwyr’s vision was a true one or a dream, but I find that I’m beginning to understand the Treasures. Taliesin isn’t wrong. Isn’t the crock the same vessel into which the Christ dipped his fingers at the Last Supper before Judas betrayed him? And, like Lord Bedwyr’s dish, does it not fulfill the bearer’s every wish?”

Feeling at a disadvantage on his stool, Hywel stood. In doing so, he loomed over Taryn, despite the fact that he himself wasn’t so very tall. “So the legend says.” He was trying to keep his dismay that she was so familiar with their quest out of his voice. Likely, he had not been successful.

She again paid him no attention, acting as if he hadn’t spoken and refusing to take the hint that she wasn’t wanted. “And was it not the hamper that allowed the Christ to feed the multitude when they came to listen to him preach?”

Cade rubbed his chin, apparently unconcerned that Taryn was expressing knowledge of the Treasures that she should not have. “Yes. Ever since Taliesin and I concluded that the drinking horn and the Cup of Christ beneath Dinas Bran were one and the same, I have begun to wonder more and more about the origin of the rest of the Treasures and the differing names by which they have been known to different peoples in their particular times and places. Those were conclusions I myself had drawn.”

Taryn nodded. “I know that you had already decided to travel to the Otherworld. It seems now that you can do nothing else.” She turned her gaze on Bedwyr. “And that means that you must return to Chester.”

Bedwyr, already unhappy over the vision, looked ashen, prompting Hywel to grasp Taryn’s arm. “Why would he do that?”

Taryn stuck her chin in the air, ready undoubtedly with yet another defiant answer, but it was Catrin who spoke. “Taryn is right, Hywel. We need it.” She paused. “I need it.”

As one, the companions turned to look at her, and Catrin lifted one shoulder, a sad smile on her lips. “If I am to open a way into the Otherworld without requiring any of us to die, I need tools. The dish will make a powerful scrying bowl, maybe even more powerful than the one I used in Dôn’s palace.”

“I don’t know what the priests will think about that,” Hywel muttered.

Catrin approached closely enough to put a hand on Hywel’s arm. “I don’t either, and I don’t pretend to understand your faith, but our options have been reduced to very few. We have very little time now to act.” Her words were spoken so gently that Hywel’s heart ached to hear them. It was almost as if she had a similar talent to Taliesin, though where his voice could carry the tone of Command, hers had the power to move men’s hearts. Certainly, he was ashamed to have his discontent overflow onto her.

Bedwyr bowed slightly to Catrin. “I will take that as comfort.” He looked at Goronwy. “If we’re going, we should go now, while under the cover of darkness.”

Goronwy canted his head to Cade. “Will you come with us, my lord?”

Cade shook his head. “I will stay to protect Caer Gwrlie.”

Taryn, who momentarily had lost her tongue as Catrin was speaking, now spoke again, directing her words to Cade. “Nothing has changed in the last hour, my lord, at least not for the better.”

Cade nodded, but Hywel frowned, annoyed that he didn’t understand what they were talking about. It appeared he’d slept more than he’d thought and missed something. “What’s going on?”

“Trouble—and a problem far more immediate than our need to puzzle out Taliesin’s visitation.” Cade indicated to Taryn that she should lead the way out of the hall, and, as they approached the door, Hywel could hear movement of men and horses outside before she even opened it. Once they entered the courtyard, they were confronted with far too much activity for such an early hour of the morning. Men hurried this way and that, carrying weapons and supplies. Near the stable, a horseman was preparing to ride.

This close to the solstice, the sun rose early, and the sky was turning gray, even though it had to be hardly four hours since midnight. The sun hadn’t quite risen, however, which was why Cade could wander freely. Another half-hour and he would be forced to retreat inside or under his cloak. But first he gestured everyone up to the battlement, where they could then gaze down upon the field below Caer Gwrlie.

To the northeast, tents had appeared overnight. The flags of Oswin of Northumbria and King Penda of Mercia, Oswin’s new-found vassal and a newborn Christian, flew above the tents on long poles. Cade’s feckless uncle had united with his former enemy. They’d known it had happened, of course, since he had turned on Cade at Chester, but to have marched overnight to Caer Gwrlie required a more robust alliance than mere expediency.

Oswin had already overrun the tower on the isolated mound to the east of Caer Gwrlie itself. It was an outpost that was almost a castle in its own right, and had, in fact, once been one. Too many Saxon assaults had forced the castellan to build a stronger fortress on the plateau to the west, upon which they currently stood. If Cade had intended to be crowned here, he would have had many lords and men at his disposal, but this wasn’t Caer Fawr, and the plateau behind the castle held only cattle and sheep.

Hywel ground his teeth. “Why didn’t you wake us sooner?”

“What good would that have done?” Cade said. “I don’t have to sleep, but you are no good to me without it, and you have gone with far too little these last few days.”

Hywel contemplated the force that occupied the plain before them and then looked at Taryn, who was eyeing the oncoming army with far more equanimity than he was, despite the fact that it was her fort under siege. “Don’t tell me you can fight too?”

“Too?” she said. “I confess that my father did not see fit to train me in the use of any weapon more substantial than a knife.”

Before Hywel could thank God for small favors, Catrin said, “He allowed for the training of your mind. That’s what matters most.”

Taryn gave Catrin a rueful look. “That was my mother’s father, I’m afraid.”

Catrin smiled that gentle smile of hers. “Then we can be grateful to him.”

It was a close decision, but Hywel decided not to scoff. He respected Catrin, and it seemed to him that she and Taryn had reached some kind of accord. Besides which, if he were ever to have a daughter, he could see the purpose of doing as Taryn’s grandfather had—though he also saw the benefit of teaching her the use of a bow.

So instead of putting up any woman’s hackles, which even he knew was a losing proposition almost all the time, he changed the subject. “What could Oswin possibly hope to accomplish by besieging us here?”

“It does seem absurd, doesn’t it?” Cade’s eyes remained on the banners before them.

“He could prevent you from being crowned, my lord,” Goronwy suggested.

“Not with the chariot, not that he knows we have it.” Cade shrugged. “As it suits my purpose, it would be hypocritical of me to complain.”

“How could a siege possibly suit your purpose?” Bedwyr glared at Cade. “Not a single one of us is going to let you go out there and get yourself killed.”

Hywel hastened to put in his objections too. “You may have a death-wish, my lord—or Taliesin may have one for you—but don’t think we’re going to let you pursue it.”

Cade blinked, and then he laughed and put out a hand to both of them. “I assure you, such an idea was the farthest thing from my thoughts. If I had laid the trap myself, Oswin could hardly have walked into it more completely.”

“How so?” Goronwy said. “Or hadn’t you noticed that you have only two more dawns until your crowning.”

“Because,” Taryn said, putting herself forward again, “If Oswin and Penda brought their army here, who’s guarding the dish?”

Hywel gazed over the wall, chewing over Taryn’s conclusion. He knew that Bedwyr didn’t want to retrieve the dish and had fought hard not to, but it was as if some greater power was conspiring to ensure that it could happen. Was it God? Or Fate? Or maybe even one of the sidhe. “My lord, tell me truly. Did you foresee these events? Or did Taliesin? Is this why you agreed not to return last night—because you thought this might happen and you knew the decision was temporary?”

“It was always only temporary.” Cade shook his head. “I have none of Taliesin’s gifts, Hywel. I didn’t know that Oswin would come, though I confess to wondering if he might value me so highly as a prize that he would risk it.”

“If I had known sooner that Oswin was here, we could have gone to Chester and returned already.” Goronwy headed towards the steps back down to the courtyard. “I’ll ready the chariot.”

Hywel made to go with him, but Cade put out a hand to stop him. “Is the knife secure?”

“Always, my lord.” Hywel put a hand to the small of his back. He’d bound the sheathed knife there against his bare skin, underneath his armor, padding, and tunic. Only if he were stripped naked would anyone find it. The blade itself had been used to wound the Savior, and Hywel knew as a sacred truth that a condition of ownership was never to use it in battle, not even in self-defense. But over the last few months, he’d grown to accept—and trust—the way it appeared to augment his senses. Right and wrong had become more easily measured, and when he didn’t wear the knife, he missed it.

“We will hold off Oswin until you return,” Cade said, “which I sincerely hope will be soon. We have two days to set things right, and we need to hurry. Taliesin may want me to come to the Otherworld, but it is no less than I had already decided. Once you return here, we will see what can be done about our main task.”

“My lord.” Taryn took a small step forward. “Why don’t you simply take the chariot to the Otherworld? Goronwy and Catrin came from there with it. It should be a simple matter to return.”

Hywel swallowed down a scoff. The girl must be an imbecile to think that they hadn’t thought of that already.

Cade, however, was more charitable. “It doesn’t. We tried it.”

Taryn looked away, towards Oswin’s troops, and Hywel heard her mumble, “Saxons or sidhe. It’s hard to choose between them as to whom I distrust more.”

Hywel found a surprised laughter bubbling to his lips. It was the first thing she’d said with which he couldn’t disagree.

Chapter Four

Taliesin

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EFNYSIEN FLUNG OPEN the treasure chamber, and Taliesin, even though he felt he should be above such things, gasped. Efnysien was unmoved, seeing as how a sidhe of his stature could have little use for gold. Mabon, of course, adored gold and laughed as he entered the room.

Taliesin, however, remained on the threshold. “Why are we here?”

“I have heard that this room contains a Treasure, but I have not found it. I want you to find it for me.” As he spoke, Efnysien waved a hand airily, but as he stepped across the threshold, he looked behind him in an almost furtive fashion.

In a moment of revelation, Taliesin realized that Efnysien didn’t have permission to be here. The idea gave Taliesin confidence. Anything that discomfited the god was good with Taliesin.

Once inside the treasure room, however, Taliesin found it hard to maintain his calm exterior. No collection on earth, not even that of the mightiest Roman king, could compare to what he saw before him. These were the treasures of earth and heaven—and everywhere in between. He moved deeper into the room, away from Efnysien, his eyes searching. If there were any Treasures here, he didn’t want to find them while Efnysien was looking.

Typically, Mabon was drawn to the gems and the gold, glittering in innumerable baskets and pots of every shape and size and covering every surface. The Welsh had an affinity for rubies, and any one of the hundreds in the hall would have been fit for a king. Taliesin wasn’t looking for gems, however. The Cup of Christ had been made of nothing more exciting than plain clay, polished smooth from age and use, and Hywel’s knife had once been the tip of the spear that had pierced Christ’s side. Taliesin had learned by now that many of the Treasures had gone through several manifestations over the centuries and could be hidden in plain sight.

And while it was true that Caledfwlch and Dyrnwyn were gem-encrusted, the cold steel of their blades was nothing if not utilitarian. They were meant to be used. So would be the other Treasures: the hamper, the crock, the dish, and the halter. The chariot was another matter. He realized now that he had a memory of it—not his own, but that of one of his antecedents who’d brought its knowledge down through the ages.

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HAIL AND FIRE,

And rain destructive.

Wind blasting the tops,

Of leaves and shrubs.

Through it all

A chariot cuts

Golden as sunlight

Fleet as a deer

Its wheels floating above

The field of corpses.

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“WHAT WAS THAT?” HIS hands sunk deep into a sack of emeralds, Mabon turned to look at Taliesin.

Taliesin hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud, and he glanced behind him to Efnysien, who was watching him with an expression that could only be described as thoughtful. Taliesin turned back to the room, reminding himself that the Otherworld was a perilous place for a mortal, even a so-called gweledydd such as Taliesin. Men could be deluded, confused, and deceived, as he realized now this treasure room was supposed to do to him. Efnysien was getting the measure of him, and Taliesin had to acknowledge that he wasn’t immune to the riches in the treasure house. Mabon had been easily led, but Taliesin would be lying if he didn’t pride himself on being a more difficult man to judge.

But he was a fool.

Efnysien wanted the Treasures, and he was looking to Taliesin to lead him to them. As if he could read Taliesin’s mind, Efnysien spread his arms wide. “Find me whatever lies hidden here. Together we will take the Treasures and defeat the darkness. She cannot withstand our combined strength.”

Taliesin froze in mid-step, which he hastily tried to mask by ducking under an overhanging trellis made out of silver and gems. The move also hid him momentarily from Efnysien’s view, though that hadn’t actually been his intent. But it did fetch him up next to Mabon, who looked at Taliesin, eyebrows raised. He’d caught Efnysien’s use of the word, she, as well.

“What does he know that we don’t?” Mabon said, implying that he and Taliesin were on the same side.

“A great deal, it seems, which shouldn’t surprise us.” Taliesin glanced back. “I cannot ask him, however.”

“I can.” Mabon squared his shoulders. “See what you can find. Arawn is my father, you know, and I’ve been in his real treasure house. I’ll have you know this isn’t it. This is the one for the greedy.” Amazingly, he turned on his heel and sauntered towards Efnysien, with all the appearance of intending to question him just like he’d said.

Stunned at Mabon’s frank admission, knowing that he’d spoken the truth, Taliesin fought down both the urge to say thank you and any thought that they could ever be allies. Still, he took advantage of Mabon’s momentary lapse in judgement and headed in the opposite direction, deeper into the recesses of the room. As he walked, the chamber expanded upwards and outwards until he realized he couldn’t see the walls anymore. He looked back. Mabon and Efnysien were hidden from view, though he could hear them.

“Have you found something?” Efnysien said, his voice faint.

“You said she just now in reference to the darkness. Why?”

A jangling sound echoed among the great pillars, as if a pile of gold or an artifact had been knocked over. “Did I? I must have misspoken—”

And then Taliesin lost the rest of the conversation because Arawn, Lord of the Underworld, stepped out from behind a pillar, a finger to his lips. He needn’t have worried that Taliesin would give him away. He had no breath to speak. While Taliesin was a tall man, though not burly, Arawn was built more along the lines of Dafydd—large in every way—and the aura he projected was larger still.

Arawn waved a hand. He didn’t open a door, as Taliesin had tried to do in the garden. Instead, all sounds around Taliesin were silenced, and it was as if the two of them existed in their own world, which perhaps they did.

“If you have come here seeking the Treasures, they are not here.”

Taliesin bowed. “Your son implied as much just now, my lord.” He and Cade had gotten the best of Arawn a few months ago, but it was never a good idea to be dismissive of a god, especially when one was in the heart of his domain.

Arawn studied him. “I never would have expected you to disobey Beli, but I must nonetheless thank you for returning my son to me.”

If Taliesin had imagined a meeting with Arawn, this would not have been the way he would have expected a conversation to go. “I don’t know that Mabon would thank me himself, my lord. He is without his powers still.”

Arawn waved a hand, this time dismissively, though red sparks trailed from the movement. “That can be remedied easily enough.” Then his eyes narrowed. “How did you open the door to the vault?”

Taliesin kept his eyes averted from Arawn’s. “You give me too much credit, my lord. I was brought to this chamber by Efnysien.”

Arawn didn’t reply, and Taliesin risked a glance at his face. His chin was up, and he was looking beyond the dome he’d created towards the entrance to the chamber. “How did he hide himself from me?”

“Excuse me, my lord?”

Arawn brought his gaze back to Taliesin. “I did not see him until you named him. I thought him a harmless companion of my son. I looked at him without seeing him.”

Taliesin swallowed hard. “Efnysien is a master of disguise.”

“He has never before turned his skills on me. It is as Gwydion said.” Then his eyes narrowed again, and he spoke before Taliesin could stutter a reply. “So it is he who wants the Treasures. Why? What good are they to him? My son is easily blinded, but Efnysien should be little troubled by human trifles.”

“He says he must gather them to defeat the darkness.”

Arawn’s attention snapped back to Taliesin. “What do you know of it?” His voice couldn’t have been more urgent.

“I have seen it. I do not know its origin, only that it seems malevolent—and directed at King Cadwaladr.”

Arawn scowled, whether at Taliesin’s description or simply at the mention of Cade. “And now Efnysien brings you here. It can’t be because he wants to control the darkness. He already does.”

“Such was my initial supposition, but he claims not.”

“Perhaps if I spoke to him—” In the space of an indrawn breath, the cone of silence vanished, Arawn grabbed Taliesin’s arm, and they arrived in front of Efnysien and Mabon.

“How dare you bring this human into my treasure house!” Arawn’s face distorted into a mask of such hatred that Taliesin’s breath caught in his throat again, and he would have pulled away if Arawn’s grip hadn’t been so tight—and if he hadn’t still been reeling from the sudden movement. To all appearances, Arawn was on fire with rage. Each of his fingers that were clenched around Taliesin’s upper arm was burning with power, such that Taliesin was afraid to look lest he see holes in his shirt from the god’s fingertips. And yet, this had to be an act.

Efnysien merely sneered. “This is not your business, Arawn.”

“That is my son!” Arawn thundered the words as he pointed at Mabon. “You involve him. You involve me!” And to punctuate the last word, he launched a ball of fire at Efnysien, who raised a hand to block it.

Taliesin found himself thrown to the ground, tumbling over a table upon which golden candlesticks had been displayed. Mabon shrieked and dove the other way, ending up at his father’s feet.

“You are revealed, Efnysien!” Arawn shouted. “You escaped my cauldron, but you cannot escape me!”

Arawn was referring to the tale where Efnysien, like Arawn at Caer Dathyl, had fallen into the black cauldron. He’d died to the human world that day, which seemingly had compelled him to resort to using others, such as Mabon, Camlos, and Hafgan, to be his errand boys among mortals.

Efnysien laughed bitterly, transforming himself from the insignificant being who had greeted Taliesin in the garden to a man more on the scale of Arawn: taller, though less handsome, with black stringy hair and wild eyes filled with malice. Where Arawn had used fire, Efnysien’s weapon of choice was a twisting whip, which shot towards Arawn’s knees.

Up until now, Arawn’s blast of fire had kept Efnysien at bay. But maintaining its power kept all of Arawn’s attention, and for all that he was in his own domain, he didn’t see the flick coming. The point of the whip sliced him across the shins with such force that he staggered, and he lost his concentration and aim. A second slash caught the Lord of the Underworld on the face, flaying open his cheek.

Taliesin had less than a heartbeat to react. He rolled towards Arawn, and, even as his ribs hit the side of Arawn’s calf, he shot his staff into the air and bellowed, “Amddiffyn!”

A shield ballooned around Taliesin, Arawn, and Mabon, who’d remained on the other side of his father’s feet. Never say that Taliesin couldn’t learn new skills. He hadn’t ever made a shield like this before, but one of his gifts had always been to adapt what others could do by instinct into something that he could create by force of intellect. When they’d crossed the field to Dôn’s palace, Goronwy’s golden globe had bathed them in a gentle warmth. This shield was white, created out of desperation, and made of the raw essence of Taliesin’s power.

The initial shield was strong enough to block every crack of Efnysien’s whip and held long enough for Taliesin to get to his feet. Then he pushed more of himself into it. Efnysien’s eyes were wide with a mania that would have been terrifying even if he’d been human.

Then an iron hand came down on Taliesin’s shoulder. “Thank you, gweledydd, but I do not need your help!” And with that last word, Arawn flung Taliesin towards the open doorway through which they’d entered the hall. Taliesin sailed through the air, feeling no more corporeal than a breath. He landed hard on his left hip on the other side of the threshold, and the door slammed shut in his face.

Still clutching his staff, he sat up, only to realize that he hadn’t been sent into the corridor but had arrived in a banquet hall as large as the room he’d just left, with hundreds—if not thousands—of feasting guests. Though he had never been here before, he knew what it was: this was the true Otherworld that Mabon had longed for. This was the stronghold of the sidhe. He shook his head, mumbling under his breath, “Can’t a man go through a door and simply end up in the next room?”

Apparently not.

And then, as Taliesin dragged himself towards the wall, propping himself against it to catch his breath, a whisper of warm air moved around the back of his neck, and Arawn’s voice came low in his ear, “Find the spider; defeat the darkness.”

Chapter Five

Goronwy

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“I CAN’T TELL IF YOU’RE disgruntled about going to retrieve the dish or excited,” Catrin said as they reached the bottom of the stairs down to the courtyard. “It’s as if I’m looking at two different people at the same time!”

Goronwy turned to help her down the last step. “You’re right that I’m reluctant to return to Chester—and Bedwyr is even more so.”

“He did only narrowly escaped capture and death. I can understand his reluctance.” Catrin paused. “And the excitement?”

Goronwy wrinkled his nose at her. He still felt like pinching himself that such an amazing and beautiful woman could be his. And because it was that kind of a day, before she could hop down to ground level, he picked her up and swung her around. She laughed at first, but had to stop when he kissed her long and hard before ultimately setting her breathless on her feet again.

She laughed up at him. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Her directness had him sobering. “You know why. It’s why you aren’t coming with me today.”

She gave him a hollow look. “The chariot.”

He nodded. “It’s a marvelous thing, but—”

“The more you use it, the more you want to. I feel it as well.” She looked away. “I keep thinking about last night—all those journeys we made. Riding in it was almost like ... the manifestation of desire.”

He said gently, “We know by now, if we know anything at all, that a man can’t interact with the world of the sidhe and remain unchanged. Just look at Cade. Or Taliesin, who lives so much in his own head that it’s a wonder he ever strings a coherent sentence together—and there are few enough of those as it is.”

“Does Cade know how we feel?”

“I haven’t told him.”

“We shouldn’t, not until this is over.” She tugged on the edge of his cloak. “You stay safe, sir.”

He couldn’t mistake the love in her voice. “I intend to.”

Then her smile faltered. “I mean it. And I meant what I said to Bedwyr too. This should be a dawdle, but—”

He put a finger to her lips. “Let it be, Catrin. You and I understand each other.”

She met his gaze. “I’ll be waiting for your return.”

“In and out before the sun rises. We’ll back almost before you even notice we’ve gone.” Goronwy gave her a kiss on the forehead and then headed towards the stables where the golden chariot and coal black horse had pride of place. He’d noticed that none of the stable boys would go near them. Goronwy knew of nothing preventing anyone else from taking the chariot for their own purposes, but nobody had done so—or even considered it as far as he knew.

Goronwy harnessed the horse, and then Bedwyr and Hywel arrived and climbed into the carriage. Bedwyr gripped the golden rail so hard that his knuckles turned white, but at a look from Hywel, he visibly relaxed. Goronwy tried to smile reassuringly. The tug behind the navel when the chariot whisked its riders away left some queasy, Bedwyr among them, though Goronwy hadn’t had a problem with it. Like the excitement that afflicted him when he was near it, he was pretty sure that he should never get used to that either.

“Though I didn’t argue about it last night, I thought we were wrong not to go back. This is the right thing to do. Your grandfather would have wanted you to retrieve it,” Goronwy said.

Hywel nodded and said bracingly, “Cade knows what he’s doing. We’ve trusted him this far. No point in doubting so close to the end.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Bedwyr said, though Goronwy thought his words lacked conviction. While he knew nothing of Bedwyr’s grandfather, if the man wasn’t proud of Bedwyr, he was a fool.

Goronwy had a fleeting thought that if they all went to the Otherworld with Cade, Bedwyr could see him and find out for himself. Goronwy too had loved ones he wouldn’t be sorry to encounter again—if that were even possible. From what Goronwy had seen of the Otherworld so far, it was nothing like he’d imagined. It had presented him and Catrin with fear—not a loving reunion with those who’d left the physical world.

“Wait!” Taryn entered the stable at a run. “I’m coming too.”

“You absolutely are not,” Hywel said before anyone else could answer.

Taryn gave him a withering look. “You might have need of me, and it’s silly not to take one more when you have room.”

“Why on earth would we have need of you?” Hywel said.

Goronwy put a hand on Hywel’s arm. “She is Penda’s daughter, Hywel.” And then at Hywel’s surprised look, added, “Sorry. I thought you knew.”

“No.” Hywel frowned. “Does Cade know who you are?”

“Of course,” Taryn said. “We’re cousins.”

“All the more reason for you to stay at Caer Gwrlie, since it is your father who besieges it.” Then Hywel’s eyes narrowed. “Is that why nobody seems unduly concerned at his presence—because they assume he isn’t serious about waging war against his own daughter?”

Taryn’s eyes sparked. “If he thinks I will surrender this fort to him just because he asks, then he should think again.”

Her hurt and anger were impossible to miss, to the point that even Hywel was forced to acknowledge it, and his tone softened. “It could be dangerous, Taryn.”

She stood statue-still, the brief emotion of before suppressed. “My father can think what he likes of me, but you have no business holding my birth against me. I know Chester well—and I know my brother.” She canted her head. “Any soldier would be loath to kill Penda’s daughter, bastard or not, unloved or not.”

Goronwy had no idea what had set these two against each other, but he stepped in anyway. “She is known there, Hywel, and she can help us.”

Hywel turned on him. “You are blind too. She’s Penda’s daughter! How much more likely might it be that she will betray us?”

“I won’t.” Taryn’s tone showed that Hywel had hurt her with his doubt.

Hywel ignored it and kept his attention on Goronwy. “Why do you accept her so easily?”

“Because Cade does.” Then, at Hywel’s continued stubborn look, Goronwy added, “She knows everything anyway. Cade laid out our quest for her last night, even before Oswin’s men arrived. We came to her for refuge. It was only fair that she should know why.”

That Hywel finally seemed to accept, and he turned back to Taryn. “Cade wants you with us, then?”

“Of course.”

He grunted. “You should have said so in the first place.”

Taryn’s laugh rang around the stable. “You shouldn’t have needed me to.”

Goronwy nudged Hywel that he should assist Taryn into the chariot since he was closest. “She’s half-Welsh, Hywel. You, of all people, should know better than to make assumptions based on a person’s birth.”

“Time’s a wasting.” Bedwyr said from the far corner of the carriage.

Rolling his eyes ungraciously, Hywel took Taryn’s hand, almost lifting her into the cart. She was so slightly built compared to the heavy men around her that her weight barely shifted the bed of the chariot. With four of them, it was now crowded, and Hywel seemed to be mastering his aversion. He didn’t move away from her—and even went so far as to brace an arm on either side of her in case the chariot shifted in flight.

Goronwy allowed himself a faint smile to see them, and then, without asking if his companions were ready, he recalled the clearing outside the watchtower—and they were gone.

Chapter Six

Bedwyr

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A HEARTBEAT LATER—OR two or ten, it was impossible to tell—they arrived in the clearing where they’d been yesterday, at that time surrounded by Penda’s men. This time, in the early hours of the morning, they drove straight into two guards who’d been standing in the glade, and who threw themselves in opposite directions to avoid the horse’s stamping hooves.

Bedwyr and Hywel had their swords out and were leaping from the chariot before it came to a halt. Bedwyr subdued his charge without having to hurt him, and Hywel soon had the second’s hands tied behind his back. Then he looked up at Bedwyr. “See anyone else?”

Bedwyr’s eyes scanned from one side of the clearing to the other. “No.”

Taryn dismounted from the chariot, looking pale but resolute, a wickedly long belt knife clutched in her hand.

With Goronwy’s help, Bedwyr wrestled his captive towards the side of the chariot and propped him against a wheel. Goronwy straightened, surveying the two downed men. The one Bedwyr had captured still looked dazed, but the second’s eyes flamed with defiance. “Lord Peada said you’d return!”

The companions looked at each other. “That sounds ominous,” Goronwy said. “We’d better hurry.”

Bedwyr bobbed his head. “Hywel and Taryn, with me.”

Hywel scoffed. “Why do you need her?”

Bedwyr was trying to be patient with Hywel, but he was bored with the pair’s animosity when it was obvious to anyone with eyes that they were attracted to one another. Otherwise, they would have been indifferent. “I need you to guard my back, and I want her hands. I held the dish once. I’d rather not do it again, even if I no longer have the power to make a wish.”

“But—” Hywel began.

“The same blood that flows in Cade’s veins flows in hers,” Bedwyr said matter-of-factly. “I’m thinking that the dish will know it.”

Hywel pressed his lips together, still doubting, but he gestured that Taryn should follow Bedwyr while he brought up the rear. Bedwyr glanced back just before he ducked through the doorway. Goronwy was back in the chariot, scanning the nearby woods for threats.

The tunnel led ultimately to the City of Chester, and Bedwyr could hardly believe they’d been there only yesterday. It felt like a lifetime ago. Before finding the treasure, he’d been a different person. Cade had commented once that ownership of Caledfwlch had changed him. Bedwyr hadn’t entirely understood how that could be until now.

Hywel lifted the torch, which the soldiers outside had left burning, from its sconce by the door. “I’ll walk a ways down the tunnel to make sure nobody is along it.” Before he passed through the doorway, however, he lifted his chin to point to the door. “Somebody wasn’t happy.”

The door was slightly off its hinges, as if it had been slammed hard against the wall of the cave several times. Bedwyr could imagine both Penda and Peada (who were known for their out-of-control tempers) doing exactly that. He didn’t envy Taryn having Penda for a father. That thought prompted him to glance down at her. “Have you ever been here before?”

The girl shook her head. “I didn’t know the tunnel existed before last night when King Cadwaladr told me of it. I thought I knew every nook and cranny in the city.” She gave a slight laugh. “I missed the most important secret!”

“You should probably call him Cade.” Bedwyr went right to the stone. This end of the tunnel was lit by a second torch, which they needed because Hywel was already out of sight. “He is your cousin.”

“He doesn’t feel like my cousin.”

Bedwyr grunted his understanding as he swept away the dirt and opened the secret compartment. The box was still there. He sucked in a breath, hesitating, and then lifted it out. As he stood there with the box in his hands, he felt a tug behind his navel, not unlike the nausea he felt riding in the chariot. Before, he’d been so fearful of discovery and in such a hurry, that he’d mistaken the feeling for one of awe.

“Perhaps you ought to make sure it’s still inside?” Taryn’s voice quavered as she spoke, a match to Bedwyr’s shaking hands.

He held out the box to her. “Lift the lid then.”

Her lips pressed tightly together, she did as he asked. The dish was as he’d left it, down to the smoothed edge that he’d touched—just that once, but once had been enough. He sucked in a breath to see it, but then a whoosh of air blew past him, lifting his hair, extinguishing the torch, and slamming the door shut. Taryn gave a squeak, and they both jumped.

Then the sound of metal clashing came to them from farther down the tunnel.

“Hywel?” Taryn swung around, calling into the darkness.

Hywel answered with a shout, but Bedwyr was too far away to make out what his friend had said.

Feeling caution and fear in equal measure, Bedwyr reached for Taryn’s arm, but he couldn’t find her in the darkness. Then he felt a cold breath on the back of his neck. “Thank you for finding it. I’ll take it now.

He swung around, the box clutched to his chest, but there was nobody there. Somehow, he’d known that before he’d turned, but he couldn’t help himself. He backed towards the tunnel’s entrance, his heart in his throat. The voice he’d heard had been Taliesin’s, except the phrasing was not his, and Bedwyr knew deep inside himself that the voice’s intent had been malicious.

“Go! Go!” Hywel came racing down the tunnel towards them, sword in hand and a bloody gash on his upper left arm, with which he still held a torch. Blessed light filled the confined space, and they all ran, Hywel pushing Taryn ahead of him.

But they exited the abandoned watchtower at the exact moment that a company of Saxons surged out of the woods to the north and surrounded Goronwy and the chariot, which had remained parked where they’d left it in the middle of the clearing. All of a sudden, there were too many Saxons between them and Goronwy. They could not reach the chariot.

“This way!” Bedwyr turned towards the water, cursing himself for getting caught in the exact same situation—in the exact same place—as yesterday. Once again, they were backed up against the river.

Over the heads of the horde of Saxons, Goronwy met Bedwyr’s eyes for a moment. Then, at Bedwyr’s nod, Goronwy gripped the reins and blinked out of sight. Oddly, none of the Saxons even broke stride. Meanwhile, Hywel was holding Taryn behind him, sword out, protecting her. Bedwyr held the box tight to his chest.

Then a second company of men spilled from the watchtower, Peada in the lead. When he saw Bedwyr, Taryn, and Hywel near the water’s edge, he grinned. Crowing to his men in Saxon, something along the lines of I told you so, he sauntered towards them.

But Taryn was having none of it. She darted out from behind Hywel to step in front of Bedwyr, her belt knife in her hand. “Stay away, Peada!”

Bedwyr stood right at the water’s edge. It was probably the first time in his life somebody was protecting him instead of the other way around, and certainly it was the first time a woman had sworn to die before allowing harm to come to him.

“Sister, I see you have chosen the wrong side again. Care to reconsider?”

“I have chosen the right side, Peada.” Venom dripped from her voice. “You will not get the box without taking casualties.”

“I’d rather that you just gave it to me.” Peada looked past Taryn and Hywel to Bedwyr, who meant to answer defiantly, but the same creeping sensation he’d felt in the tunnel rippled down his spine again.

A cold breath whispered on the back of his neck, making his hair stand on end. “Save yourself. Give it to him.”

Bedwyr had a fleeting thought that whatever creature—demon, sidhe, evil incarnate—was speaking was referring to his soul, not the dish. It didn’t matter, however. He wasn’t going to give up either of them without a fight. He took a slight step back and felt the heel of his boot sink into the mud of the bank.

Peada’s eyes narrowed, and his eyes flicked left and right. Bedwyr could see left and right just fine, and both sides contained far too many soldiers, any one of whom might throw themselves at him at any moment to stop him from diving into the river.

So that was exactly what he did. Yesterday, because too many of Bedwyr’s men couldn’t swim, the river hadn’t been a way out, but today was a different story. Bedwyr knew how to swim, and it was his understanding that flowing water dispelled magic. With the box tucked awkwardly under one arm, he launched himself towards the middle of the river, barely avoiding the rocks that jutted out near the bank, and then dove under the surface, his free hand scything through the water and his feet frantically kicking. His armor, boots, and cloak became instantly waterlogged, adding fifty pounds to his weight, but he fought his way into the middle of the channel before daring to look back.

None of Peada’s men had come after him. Bedwyr thrust his fist into the air in triumph—and then was immediately sucked under the surface, pulled into the depths of the river by something that had him by the knees. He kicked out with his legs, trying to twist and throw the creature off. He didn’t know why it still had hold of him, and he could only conclude that the current here wasn’t strong enough to wash the demon away. Desperate—more so than when he’d plunged into the water to escape Peada—he fought with all his strength. Then, his lungs bursting with the effort, he found himself turned upside down, and he banged his head on a rock on the river bottom.

Suddenly, all was quiet.

Somehow, the pain in his head made him less anxious, not more, and he relaxed, giving into whatever it was that held him. He turned on his back, the dish resting on his chest, and floated. With his eyes open, he could see the surface of the river many feet above him. He thought of his wife and his friends, all of whom he’d long since determined were worth any sacrifice. That was why he’d gone into the water in the first place. Dying here might save them, and it certainly would keep the dish out of Peada’s hands. They’d never find it in the middle of the river.

And with that thought, the creature’s grip on his body broke. For a last few moments of consciousness, Bedwyr didn’t move, and then he truly came to himself and realized that his heart was about to burst from his chest.

He surged upwards at the very moment that a hand reached down below the surface towards him, and he recognized the ring on the third finger as Goronwy’s. Bedwyr didn’t know how long he’d been under—some amount of time between a dozen heartbeats and a lifetime—but Goronwy had found him. Grasping his friend’s hand, he allowed himself to be pulled to the surface, coming up a foot from the chariot, which was riding the current of the river as if it were a road.

Gasping for breath, he plunked the box in the bed of the carriage, but before clambering inside, he gazed up to where Goronwy hung above him, one hand grasping the rail and the other holding onto Bedwyr. “What do you see?”

Goronwy frowned. “I see a wet and bedraggled friend who needs my help.”

Bedwyr shook his head jerkily. “I meant, what do you see? What does my aura look like? A demon spoke to me, demanding that I give the dish to Peada, and I had to shake him off.”

“Your aura appears as it usually does.” Goronwy gave a heave and hauled Bedwyr onto his stomach next to the box.

He hung there a moment, breathing hard, and then pulled the rest of his body onto the platform. Every limb felt like it had a rock chained to it, and if he hadn’t been so worried about the fate of Taryn and Hywel, he would have stayed on his knees. Instead, he grasped the rail next to where Goronwy was standing and pulled himself to his feet.

“A demon, you say?” Goronwy’s eyes were on the bank. Peada remained where he had been, though perhaps a few paces closer to the river, staring. Oddly, his eyes appeared to be looking considerably upstream from where Bedwyr and Goronwy stood. Meanwhile, Hywel and Taryn had just disappeared into the tunnel, guarded by a dozen of Peada’s men.

“It was a demon with the voice of Taliesin,” Bedwyr said.

“Do you think it was the same one who came to you in the hall?” Goronwy said.

“How many could there be? Though I feel like I should defer judgement on the vision until I see Taliesin in the flesh.”

Goronwy let out a breath. “Let’s get going. The sooner we deliver the dish to Cade, the sooner we can wipe that sneer off Peada’s face.”

Chapter Seven

Taryn

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THEY WERE HEADED BACK down the tunnel, captive amidst a host of Saxons. Peada stalked a few paces ahead, rage in every line of his body. Her brother had successfully laid a trap for them, and he’d still lost the dish. He hadn’t known about the chariot, of course, thinking that they had to pass through the woods to reach the clearing, rather than appearing suddenly in the middle of it.

Back at Caer Gwrlie, it had become evident to her that the chariot was invisible to anyone who wasn’t supposed to see it. Thus, when she, Bedwyr, and Hywel had exited the anteroom to the tunnel, the Saxons who’d poured from the woods had completely ignored Goronwy in the chariot, and when Goronwy had pulled Bedwyr out of the water, Peada had been looking many yards upstream. To him, they’d been invisible.

Even if she made sure it didn’t show on her face, Taryn couldn’t suppress the feeling of satisfaction that rose up within her to have triumphed over her brother. For two people with the same father, she and Peada couldn’t have grown up more differently. He was the petted firstborn son, and she was the product of Penda’s ill-conceived liaison with her Welsh mother.

As her grandfather, Arthur, had explained before one of her obligatory trips to her father’s court, Penda despised her not because she was illegitimate nor because she was Welsh. After all, his sister, Cade’s mother, had married two Welshmen in succession. No—he hated her because she reminded him of his humiliation.

While Taryn’s grandfather had been angry at her mother for giving herself to Penda, she’d been all of fifteen, starry-eyed enough to believe Penda’s lies that they had any kind of future. But it was for Penda that Arthur had reserved his greatest wrath. He had driven him from Gwent with his tail between his legs, having denounced him in open hall. Years later, Penda had gotten his revenge on Arthur by demanding Taryn’s presence at his court and claiming his paternal rights. He’d done so only because she was valuable as a pawn to marry off at the first opportunity—and the law, whether Welsh or Saxon, required her grandfather to deliver her, since she was, in fact, Penda’s daughter.

In the end, she’d been given at fifteen to the lord of Caer Gwrlie, a man thirty years her senior. She’d been his fourth wife. None of the others had produced a child at all, and though she’d given him a single daughter, he had never implied disappointment. He had treated her well, in fact, and his had been a far better home than her father’s court. Five years of being the mistress of her own house had also gone a long way towards stiffening her spine. She would not cower again before her brother.

“How did you know we were coming?” Hywel called ahead in Saxon to Peada.

Peada continued to stalk, and he didn’t turn around or answer. Back at Caer Gwrlie, Hywel’s behavior had been not too dissimilar from Peada’s—and exactly how she would have expected him to behave, knowing who he’d been as a boy. But if she had to choose between Hywel and her brother, Hywel would win every time. And since Taryn figured that things couldn’t get much worse than they already were, she prompted Peada, “Answer him.”

Peada spoke over his shoulder. “You have a traitor in your midst.”

Hywel and Taryn glanced at each other. It simply wasn’t possible that anyone could have told Peada that they were coming, since they hadn’t known themselves until that morning. Not unless that person could fly.

“Who is it?” Hywel said.

Peada snorted. “Why should I tell you?”

“Because you have captured us, and we have nobody to tell,” Taryn said promptly.

“A cousin of your king. Goronwy is his name.”

Hywel’s eyes narrowed, and though he didn’t deny the accusation, he scoffed under his breath, though in Welsh, so Peada wouldn’t understand. “Impossible.”

“The chariot—” she began.

“He would never,” Hywel said sharply. “Did he not just rescue Bedwyr? And I don’t see Peada with the dish.”

Taryn nodded. “Then who?” With their hands bound behind their backs and Taryn hobbled by her inability to lift the hem of her skirt, she and Hywel couldn’t keep up, and Peada soon outpaced them.

“A sidhe could have told him.” Hywel’s eyes flashed. “A sidhe who can make himself look like anyone, not that Peada knows what Goronwy looks like.”

“Mabon?” Taryn whispered.

“Or this Efnysien. Except, I would have thought one magician sidhe was enough.”

“At least Bedwyr got away with the dish. What happens to us now doesn’t really matter.”

Hywel pressed his lips together. For the first time, Taryn sensed approval from him, a welcome change from the constant animosity he’d directed at her so far. He continued to stump along beside her, and then said (grudgingly), “You did well back there.”

“Did you think I would betray you to save myself?”

Hywel glanced at her. “I was trying to give you a compliment.”

She tipped her head, swallowing down what she’d been about to say, something along the lines of it’s about time you spoke nicely to me. Instead she said, “How is it that you speak Saxon?”

Hywel made a huh sound in the back of his throat. “My father once served Penda.”

That was not the answer she’d been expecting. “And here I thought you didn’t trust me because of my Saxon blood.”

“You and Cade share the same blood. I don’t trust you because I have been given no reason to do so.” He paused, tipping his head as he eyed her. “Until now.”

“Am I supposed to be grateful?”

“Why did Cade tell you everything?”

“That I’m his cousin is not enough?”

“Peada is his cousin too.”

“I grant you that.” Taryn bent her head in a partial bow, laughter on her lips. He had her there. Then she paused, trying to find the right words. “My grandfather and Cade’s foster father knew each other well, and whenever they met, Cade took it upon himself to befriend me. It always seemed to be a time when I needed a friend.”

Hywel didn’t look entirely satisfied with that answer. In truth, Taryn wasn’t either. All she knew was that when Cade had walked into her hall, he’d taken one look at her and wrapped her up in an embrace. Then, side-by-side with Rhiann, whom she’d also known as a girl, since her father had been the King of Gwynedd, Cade laid out the journey they’d been on, including who he really was.

A sidhe.

Taryn had been incredulous at first, but Rhiann’s expression hadn’t wavered, and Taryn had had no choice but accept the truth of Cade’s story. Caught between Welsh and Saxon herself, Christian and pagan, she’d had to walk the line between two worlds to survive too, though to a far lesser extent than Cade himself.

They reached the end of the tunnel, but with Taryn’s long skirt and her hands tied behind her back, traversing the stone steps was going to be impossible. She looked upwards towards daylight and simply shook her head.

The guard behind Taran wasn’t having that. He grabbed her left elbow and made to drag her upwards, but Hywel, who’d been a pace or two ahead, spun around and planted himself in front of the guard. “She is a princess of Mercia. Untie her hands.”

“Out of my way, traitor.” The guard shoved at Hywel with his left hand, the implication being that the guard knew Hywel’s father and who he’d once been to King Penda.

Hywel tried to take a step backwards, but as he was on the stairs, all it did was overbalance him, and he sat down hard on a step, still blocking the guard’s progress and clogging the passage. All the soldiers ahead of them were by now through the guardhouse, but the commotion brought Peada back inside. He stood at the top of the stairs with his hands on his hips, glaring down at them. “Hurry up. You’ve already wasted enough of my time.”

Taryn lifted her chin. “If you want me to climb the stairs, you have to free my hands.”

Peada released a disgusted snort, perhaps the twentieth since he’d taken her and Hywel captive, and gestured with one hand. “Do it. She isn’t trained as a fighter. What harm can come of it?”

The guard who’d grabbed Taryn’s arm snorted his disbelief, but he worked at her bonds until they loosened. Two other soldiers grabbed Hywel’s arms on either side and lifted him to his feet. Taryn raised her skirt like the lady she was, and they finally made their way up the stairs and out into the street.

The sun had fully risen by now, and Taryn looked around with interest. It had been a few years since she’d been here, but she hadn’t lied to the others that she’d known the city well once. The populace wasn’t large enough to fill the whole of Chester, which was why portions of it, such as the guardhouse over the tunnel, had been allowed to fall into ruin.

Peada led them east, towards the city center. Now that he was home, his stalk had become more of a strut.

Taryn made sure to lag behind a little bit, with the intent to imply to the men around her that she was tired or weak. Hywel, whose guards no longer held him, stayed with her, though he kept flicking his eyes at her. She tried to let him know that she had a plan, even if it wasn’t a very good one, and at one point she muttered in Welsh, “Just follow my lead.”

She thought he guffawed—albeit under his breath. He didn’t argue, however, and when she started to hobble a little bit more, he slowed further. Since they’d come out of the guardhouse, she had made sure to stay on the right side of the road, and now she began to sidle even more towards the edge of the street. Then, three blocks from her father’s hall, she bent to her ankle. By now, most of the soldiers had moved on, impatient with her lack of progress, and only a handful remained to guard her and Hywel. None of these were happy about their less-than-glamorous task. They would all be looking forward to a good breakfast in the hall, seeing as how they’d probably missed it earlier because of apprehending Taryn and Hywel at dawn.

She put a hand on the wall of a nearby house and bent forward, one hand around her waist. That prompted one of the soldiers to finally take an interest, “What’s wrong with you? We need to keep moving!”

“I’m cramping,” she said.

To a man, the soldiers’ faces blanched, and as one they turned slightly away. If Taryn hadn’t been so focused on reaching for the spare knife in her boot, she would have laughed. All she’d meant them to think was that she had a stitch in her side from walking, but if they were disconcerted by the thought of womanly ailments, she wasn’t going to dissuade them.

Hywel, meanwhile, had turned away too, but it wasn’t because he was embarrassed. He’d eased closer to shield her movements from the eyes of the soldiers. He half-faced away from her, and as she glanced to his tied hands, he flexed them, revealing that he’d worked his bonds loose himself and was only waiting for the right moment to drop them.

“Ready?” she said in Welsh.

“Down the alley?”

“Now.” She swallowed the word in the instant she said it and abruptly bounded away, skirts lifted and the knife with which she’d intended to cut Hywel’s bonds clutched in her right hand.

He followed in the same breath, though one wrist still trailed the rope that had bound it. Twenty yards along, she ducked to the right, through a derelict house, came out in an alley on the other side, and kept going. The soldiers pounded along behind them, but they’d been taken by surprise, and their heavy armor slowed them. Hywel was fleet of foot for such a well-built man, and she had the sense that he would have outpaced her if he’d been alone.

“Here!’ As they ran side-by-side, she handed him her knife, which he took willingly. Then she tugged on the sleeve of his shirt. “This way.” She weaved through a series of yards, huts, and an industrial works for leather.

A startled apprentice leapt out of the way, and Taryn put out a hand to him. She didn’t speak, however, since the fumes from the leather working were making her eyes stream with tears. Once out the other side she turned due west—

—at the same time that a soldier came out of a nearby alley. “Stop!” He must have taken a different route in hopes of cutting them off.

Hywel threw the knife at the soldier with a terrifying accuracy. It caught him in the throat, and he went down.

Taryn stopped, gagging. Hywel had barely broken stride, so now he came back for her, caught her arm, and kept her moving. “Where are we going?”

She was a hair’s breadth from puking, but she managed to say, “To ground.” A few yards on, she pushed open the door to an abandoned house and led him across the tiled floor into the garden. Then, sweeping away detritus with her foot, she revealed the handle of a trap door. Her hand to her heart, she allowed herself a relieved breath. “I was afraid there for a moment that I’d led you astray.”

Hywel shot her a sardonic look. “I’m not sorry yet.” He bent down and pulled on the handle. Stairs went down into darkness.

“I left a lamp at the bottom, long ago. It could still be there.”

“Either way, we are out of time.” Hywel tipped his head to draw her attention to the shouts of men, discernable beyond the house’s walls.

“They shouldn’t come in here,” Taryn said as she headed down the stairs. She let out another relieved sigh as she saw the lamp sitting where she’d left it on a table near the bottom of the stairs.

“Why is that?” Hywel followed, though he held the trap door up slightly, letting in a narrow shaft of light, until she lit the lantern.

“Oh.” Taryn gestured dismissively. “Everyone thinks this place is haunted.”

Chapter Eight

Cade

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FROM HIS YEARS OF GROWING up at Bryn y Castell, Cade had known not only Taryn, but also her grandfather and her husband, both of whom had been friends of Cynyr, Cade’s foster father. Her husband’s family had ruled from their eastern stronghold since the time of King Arthur, and Morgan had married Taryn in an attempt to stave off the depredations of her father, Penda of Mercia. Over the years, Cade had heard many times of Morgan’s unhappiness with the encroaching Saxons, and he’d been deeply troubled by the growing power of Northumbria. For good reason.

This morning, however, while Cade waited for Bedwyr and Goronwy to return from Chester, Cade was starting to regret that he’d sent Taryn with them. With Taryn unable to speak to her people about what needed to happen next, all authority devolved onto Taryn’s captain of the garrison. Dai was a stalwart fellow, but unimaginative.

“You want us to flee, my lord? My lord’s family has held this land for a thousand years!”

That was a gross exaggeration, but Cade let it go in favor of pressing the important point. “Fortresses can be rebuilt. People are irreplaceable. I don’t know about you, but I see no path to victory when we have seventy men and they have eight hundred.”

“I heard from your men that you fought for your uncle yesterday.” Dai was struggling with his competing impulses to be polite to the soon-to-be-High-King of the Britons and incredulity. “How can he be attacking you today?”

“Because I have what he wants—or he thinks I do. Penda also wants to prove himself to his new master—prove that he can deliver me as he promised.”

“That’s absurd!” Courtesy gave way to outrage. “Penda is newly baptized! By giving Oswin the opportunity to capture or kill you, he puts his immortal soul in peril. As does Oswin! How can Christian be fighting Christian?”

Dai was pointing to the many centuries of warfare throughout Europe, dating back to Roman times, where pagan invaders had overrun Christian kingdoms until the invaders became Christian themselves and peace was established. That hadn’t happened in Britain, however. Saxons were still Saxons, and the Britons still Britons, regardless of their shared faith. Their differences were too much to overcome.

“I can’t see the Saxons stopping fighting each other all of a sudden any more than our people refrained from fighting among ourselves after the Romans left.” Cade didn’t add that as High King, it would be his job to keep the peace.

“If that’s the case, all the more reason to stop him here before all Wales is overrun.”

“Wales isn’t going to be overrun. There are armies just on the other side of the mountains. The whole of the country is in motion, traveling to my coronation. I could have an army here by the end of the day, which Oswin and Penda should know if revenge hadn’t completely clouded their minds. Even now, I have sent a team to strike into the heart of Chester and take Penda’s greatest treasure while he is absent.”

Dai subsided for a moment, but then he lifted his head again. “We leave nothing for the Saxons.”

“Agreed.” Cade gave a sharp nod. “Nothing.”

Dafydd rapped on the door frame and then pushed at the half-open door. He was such a large man that his shoulders took up nearly the width of the space, and his head nearly touched the lintel. “Oswin has raised the white flag. He says he wants to talk.”

Dai looked to Cade. “I still say we should send him packing.”

“How? No.” Cade shook his head. “What we need more than anything else is time. Send word that we will meet as the sun sets.”

Dafydd bowed, knowing the reason for the delay, even if Dai didn’t. Cade was still a creature of the night. Once the sun had fallen behind the hills to the west, he was free to move about without his sheltering cloak. Otherwise, if the sun shone, he would have to wear it, which meant that he’d be invisible. Not an ideal way to have a conversation with an opposing king.

The delay would also give Cade enough time to accomplish the rest of what he intended to do today, which could commence the moment—

Dafydd was back. “Goronwy and Bedwyr have returned, my lord.”

“Good.” Cade strode forward and accepted the cloak that Dafydd handed to him as he went by. Together the two men reached the front door of the hall and stopped, still within the shelter of the doorway. Goronwy alighted from the chariot, followed by Bedwyr, who was soaking wet and holding the precious box containing the dish.

Rather than throw on the cloak, Cade waited for the pair to come to him. “What happened?”

Goronwy’s expression was grim. “They knew we were coming.”

Bedwyr held out the box to Cade. “It is in my mind that this is the most dangerous thing I have ever held, but we have to use it again.”

“Where are Taryn and Hywel?” Cade accepted the box’s weight.

“That’s why we have to use it,” Bedwyr said.

“I call myself a coward for leaving them, but I couldn’t do anything else. Peada’s men were too many, and we couldn’t let them acquire the dish,” Goronwy said. “And as I said, they knew we were coming.”

“How?” Rhiann appeared at Cade’s right shoulder.

“I don’t know.”

Cade turned to her, thinking that perhaps her gentle hands were most qualified to carry the box, but she took a step back, hands up, shaking her head. “Not me.”

He tipped his head. “Someone has to.” But when she shook her head again, he kept the box, looking meanwhile at Bedwyr and Goronwy. “Come inside and tell me everything.”

But as they retreated inside the hall, Dai approached, his eyes on the box and his face animated with an expression that looked disconcertingly like greed. It surprised Cade, largely because the companions were already bristling with Treasures, so he wouldn’t have thought that one would have been more attractive than another or garnered particular attention.

The more Cade thought about it, however, the more he had to acknowledge that Bedwyr was exactly right. The most dangerous thing in the world to grant a man was what he wanted. Be careful what you wish for wasn’t just a child’s singsong. Now that Cade himself was in possession of the dish, the power of the wish was very real.

“Might I trouble you for a quiet room where my companions and I might confer?” Cade said to Dai, deciding that he couldn’t ignore the man’s lustful expression, and the sooner he removed the dish from his vicinity the better.

Dai looked momentarily disgruntled, but then he nodded. “Of course. I’ll send for food and drink too.”

“And some dry clothes?” Bedwyr asked.

Dai bowed. “Of course, my lord.”

Fortunately, the room was down a passage off the great hall and didn’t require Cade to go outside to reach it. They collected Angharad and Catrin on the way, thinking that any decision they made regarding the Treasures should be made together.

Bedwyr, who was still wet, went to the fire, where the combined efforts of Angharad and Catrin managed to get him out of his water-logged armor and padding. Meanwhile, Cade set the box in the middle of the table and lifted the lid. The dish was just as Bedwyr had described: more plain than beautiful, with a crack in the rim that allowed him to see the red clay from which it had been made. It looked like nothing special.

Bedwyr looked towards the box. “I prayed to be rescued yesterday, and I was.”

“We were always coming,” Cade said.

“Such have I told myself every hour since then,” Bedwyr said. “I am still struggling to believe it.”

Cade had more experience than he liked with the intersection of fate, legend, and grace and fell back on quoting Taliesin, “Without the prophecy, would the man still act? Or does the prophecy determine the action? Only one who knows himself can answer. I might suggest that for prophecy we could substitute wish.”

Bedwyr hadn’t been present for that first conversation with Taliesin, and his expression turned thoughtful. For Cade’s part, he had long since grown used to acting on competing viewpoints simultaneously. As he’d said to Taliesin months ago, he knew himself. He would wish for what he needed, and then he would behave as if he hadn’t wished at all and act as if the success or failure of an endeavor depended upon that action.

“What are you going to wish for?” Rhiann said.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Cade looked at his wife, reading in her his own desire to put aside their current quest and focus on the child inside her. That would be a thing to wish for: that the child was well; that he was not crippled as his father was by gifts from the sidhe.

“We need Hywel and Taryn safe,” Bedwyr said immediately.

Goronwy turned to his friend. “If that’s our concern, we can save the wish and simply go and get them in the chariot.”

Cade pressed his lips together, knowing that he had to say something, but also knowing that his friends weren’t going to like it. “We have to leave them to their fate for now.” And then at the chorus of protest, he added, “Peada won’t harm his sister.”

Bedwyr took a step forward, his fists clenched. “You don’t know that.”

“I do—and even if I did send you back for them in the chariot, we don’t know their current circumstances. Are they in the great hall at Chester or in a cell?”

“Cade is right,” Rhiann said. “When Goronwy came to us at Chester, he hovered in the air because the horse and chariot wouldn’t fit on the wall-walk. What if they are being kept in the tunnel, or a basement? What happens then?”

Goronwy rubbed his chin, slowly nodding. “There’s still too much we don’t know about how the chariot works.”

Bedwyr closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “What is your plan then, my lord? What of the giant army on our doorstep? Do we wish them away instead or ask that they sicken? Or die?”

Cade gave a low laugh. “And is it even right to ask for anything?”

“It would be irresponsible not to, given the lives that will be lost if it comes to a fight,” Goronwy said.

Dafydd patted his sword. “It is strange, my lord. I have had no trouble using this in battle. Why should we treat the dish differently?”

But Bedwyr shook his head, not ready to concede anything. “I still don’t know if it was Taliesin who came to me, but, regardless, I believe his warning about the dish’s power.”

“Just wait until we have the crock too,” Rhiann said.

“May we be so fortunate.” Catrin straightened from her position by the fire. “Meanwhile, time passes. Bedwyr went to retrieve the dish in the first place because we wanted to use it to reach Taliesin. Is not our most important task collecting the Treasures? Can we possibly expend a wish on anything else?”

Cade looked around at the others, most of whom were finally nodding. He grimaced, feeling that his choices were much reduced, whether he liked it or not. He put a finger on the dish. “I would be taken to Taliesin.”

Nothing happened.

He removed his finger, frowning. “I felt nothing. Does someone else want to try?”

As one, his companions shook their heads and leaned away from him.

“Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe this isn’t actually a Treasure,” Cade said.

“It is a Treasure.” Bedwyr stumped forward a few feet so he was standing beside Cade and could look into the box. “But I don’t think it works in the same way the other Treasures do. Just because you wish for something and that wish is granted, doesn’t mean that it will happen immediately. What if I wished to see my wife again? Or a man wished that his wife would conceive a son? Those wishes could not be achieved immediately.”

“You’re right.” Cade let out a puff of air in what passed as a sigh for him. “We already know that time does not pass in the Otherworld in the same way as it does here. We should go about our business as usual and expect nothing.”

Catrin frowned down at the dish. “There’s a lot not to like here. No wonder Taliesin viewed it as dangerous.”

Then the door to the room flew open, banging against the wall and rebounding such that Dai, who stood framed in the doorway, had to catch it. “Oswin’s army is leaving!”

Cade jerked up his head and stared at Dai. Several of the companions took steps forward, and Goronwy said, “You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.” Dai stepped into the room, his eyes again on the open box. “What did you do?”

Cade carefully closed the lid so Dai couldn’t see the dish inside. “As you know, I was set to meet with him this evening. I had no thought of anything else.” Then Cade’s gaze went to the others, all of whom were looking at him with expressions ranging from amazement to utter wariness. Before anyone could ask, he said, “I didn’t ask for this. I swear it.”

“We believe you,” Goronwy said. Then he turned back to Dai. “Do we know why he’s leaving?”

Dai shook his head. “One of the watchers on the wall just told me. They’re leaving everything behind that isn’t easily portable.”

Goronwy frowned. “A sickness, perhaps?”

“Or a haunting.” Bedwyr spoke in an undertone, his eyes on his feet.

Cade picked up the box and tucked it under his arm. “Regardless, Dai, it seems you have the situation well in hand. It is no longer necessary to flee the fort, and we will leave you in peace.”

“What about Lady Taryn, my lord? When will she return?”

“Soon,” Cade said, on the basis of no knowledge whatsoever.

Dai’s face flushed with excitement. He thought he’d witnessed a miracle, and perhaps he had, though it was not one of Cade’s doing. He bowed low. “I will see you at Caer Fawr, my lord.”

Cade bent his head in acknowledgement. “Yes, you will.”

Goronwy’s eyes watched Dai’s retreating back, but his words were for Cade. “We haven’t been thinking clearly. Our minds have been so full of magic that we have ignored what’s right in front of us—and how we used to go about things. There was a time when you wouldn’t have asked what was going on and accepted not knowing. You would have thrown on that cloak and gone to see what Oswin was up to for yourself.”

Goronwy’s words cleared Cade’s mind, and he turned to his friend. “That is why you will return to Chester in the chariot. Not to rescue Taryn and Hywel—but to find me answers.”

Chapter Nine

Goronwy

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GORONWY DIDN’T LIKE splitting up again. He certainly didn’t appreciate being separated from Catrin in such perilous times, but it was clear that their obligations had diverged. It was absurd that Oswin and Penda were retreating from Caer Gwrlie, having marched through the night to reach it in the first place, but the two forts were only a little more than ten miles apart. Oswin’s cavalry, Penda and Oswin among them, could be back in Chester in less than two hours. He and Bedwyr needed to get to Chester and back by then.

“The rest of us will start south for Caer Fawr immediately. The lords of Wales are already gathering, and I’m late as it is.” From within the safety of the stable, Cade pulled off the cloak and held it out to Goronwy, who took it.

Even as he tucked the cloak under his arm, however, his expression remained dubious. “How are you going to manage without it?”

“The day is overcast, and I can hide within a regular cloak like I used to.” Cade scoffed under his breath. “You’re right that I haven’t been thinking clearly. Magic is a tool, but it can’t be our only one.”

“Says the man who just handed us a magic cloak.” Bedwyr shook his head ruefully.

“Cade is right.” Rhiann entered the stable, Catrin at her side. “With the cloak, you stand a greater chance of success and could return here before we’ve even ridden a mile.”

Cade took Rhiann’s hand. “One of the greatest gifts these Treasures have given us is the ability to share them when we need to. Accept the gift.”

Giving way, though not without the appropriate eyeroll, Goronwy stuffed the cloak into his rucksack. Then his eyes met Catrin’s, and, as Cade and Rhiann moved away, she boosted herself up to the level of the chariot for a kiss. “I wish I could go with you.”

“Safer that you don’t.”

She looked at him with such love that his heart ached. She’d said that riding the chariot was the embodiment of desire—and it was—but that desire was fleeting and could never compete with how he felt about her. Then she dropped to the ground. “I, for one, feel better that you have the cloak.”

Goronwy grumbled under his breath, “It’s one more Treasure that we risk losing if it falls into the hands of the Saxons.” Nobody else seemed to share his concern, however, so he lifted a hand, pictured the clearing by the tunnel, and vanished.

Goronwy and Bedwyr arrived in the same spot where they’d last seen Taryn and Hywel. This time, they didn’t run anyone over. In fact, there was nobody about at all. It was almost disconcerting—and Goronwy would have been suspicious if he wasn’t so pleased. They set off towards the tunnel, but Goronwy looked back, frowning. “I hate to leave it unguarded.”

Bedwyr, who was striding ahead, scoffed. “It’s hardly unguarded. Nobody can steal it if they can’t see it.”

Goronwy loped after him. “What did you say?”

Bedwyr stopped at the cave’s entrance. Looking back, he repeated what he’d said, which Goronwy had, in fact, heard clearly the first time.

“Why can’t anyone see it?”

Bedwyr looked at him incredulously. “How should I know?”

“Can you see it?” Goronwy caught his arm.

“Not unless I’m with you; not unless you want me to. When it’s parked, I wouldn’t know it was there.” Bedwyr shrugged off Goronwy’s hand. “Now I can’t.”

That the horse and chariot turned invisible when Goronwy was away from them went a long way to explaining why nobody had gone near it at Caer Gwrlie. Pleased, and in better spirits than he’d been since he’d learned of Bedwyr’s vision, Goronwy followed his friend into the tunnel.

In a typical example of Peada’s undisciplined thinking, it too was unguarded. The arrogant prince had lost what he’d wanted, and now saw no point in posting men here when he had soldiers at the Chester end of the tunnel. It hadn’t occurred to Peada that Goronwy and Bedwyr would return to rescue their friends—since he wouldn’t have. Not that they were officially supposed to be rescuing Taryn and Hywel. Goronwy understood why Cade said it wasn’t a priority, but for his part, Goronwy had no intention of leaving Chester without them.

“What are we going to do when we find them?” Bedwyr said, clearly of the same mind as Goronwy. “We can’t fit four people under the cloak.”

“I’ll call the chariot to come get us.”

Bedwyr laughed. “You can do that?”

Goronwy grinned at his friend. “Didn’t I tell you? Catrin and I spent half the night experimenting with the chariot’s capabilities. It is linked to us now, to her and to me, and if I call it, it will appear.”

Bedwyr snorted. “No, you didn’t tell me. You might have mentioned it earlier.”

“As could you have mentioned that the chariot was invisible.” Goronwy stumped along beside him. “Truth be told, such power makes me uncomfortable. And I wonder now if its influence over me is indicative of the power residing in the rest of the Treasures.”

“In what way?”

“What constitutes a claim? Cade’s ownership of Caledfwlch is clear, but what about the others?”

“Are you saying that the dish is mine? That’s why what Cade wished for hasn’t come true?”

Goronwy shook his head. “I don’t know that for certain. I’m just wondering out loud.”

“I suppose I did wish for Oswin to leave,” Bedwyr said dubiously. “But Taliesin said we got only one wish—and besides, I didn’t touch it again.”

“Maybe from now on, you’ll always get what you wish for.”

“God forbid.” Bedwyr held up a hand. They’d reached the Chester end of the tunnel and the ancient door at the bottom of the stairs up to the guardroom.

Goronwy’s special talent in the realm of the spirit was in regard to auras—seeing the true nature of things. It had been with him from birth, but he’d denied it until yesterday, when Taliesin and Catrin had forced him to reconsider. In the past, he’d attributed his martial prowess to dedication and hard work, rather than a preternatural ability that tapped into the Otherworld. He was thankful now that he hadn’t been punished for his hubris.

It did seem, however, that he’d been rewarded for using his innate abilities, in that his heart had been opened to and by Catrin. He had also acquired the halter and chariot, two Treasures of inestimable worth. Now, he scanned the stones around the tunnel and saw no imminent threat. There was a man on the other side of the door, but he was mortal and common—neither good nor evil.

Bedwyr motioned that Goronwy should prepare himself for a confrontation. The two men had long practice working together, and they arranged themselves to gain the utmost advantage of surprise if the other side of the door proved dangerous. With two fingers, Bedwyr pulled on the latch with a slight tug. It creaked slowly open, implying to anyone on the other side that wind was responsible. Nobody called a warning, and Bedwyr and Goronwy hesitated another moment in the darkened tunnel, waiting. Then, with Bedwyr backing him up, Goronwy crouched and peered upwards. He could just make out the guard’s boots. It looked as if he’d propped his feet on top of a fallen stone, and he himself was sitting on a stool and leaning back against the wall.

Goronwy glanced at Bedwyr. “How’s your Saxon?”

Bedwyr grimaced. “Not good.”

“Wear the cloak. Let me do the talking.” Goronwy straightened, rested his sword on his shoulder, and started up the stairs, whistling a camp song.

As his head poked up above the level of the floor, the guard, who’d already dropped his feet to the floor, stood. “Who are you?”

“Aelric,” Goronwy said, in his best Saxon accent, which wasn’t nearly as good as Hywel’s or Cade’s, but which he hoped would do for now.

The guard didn’t recognize him, which shouldn’t have been surprising since Goronwy’s only appearance at Chester yesterday had been during the rescue, and then again even more briefly today. Both times, the Saxon soldiers would have been looking more at the chariot than at the man driving it—if they had been able to see either at all. But then the guard’s mouth fell open, and Goronwy heard Bedwyr’s feet on the stair. He turned to see that Bedwyr had defied his command and left off the cloak.

The guard pointed. “Wait! He’s—”

Goronwy swung around and cut off the man’s voice with a right jab to the jaw from his gauntleted fist. The Saxon went down hard, crashing into the stool on which he’d been sitting. He lay still where he fell, and Goronwy put two fingers to his neck. He had a pulse and was breathing, but was unconscious.

Goronwy looked back at Bedwyr. “What were you thinking not to wear the cloak?”

“I’d rather not use it if I don’t have to.”

“I would have said that time had come.” Goronwy swallowed down a groan at his friend’s stubbornness. “Help me haul him into the tunnel.”

The two men carried the unconscious guard back down the stairs and left him on the other side of the door. Then they raced back up the stairs to the doorway that led to the street. Poking out his head, Goronwy looked left and right before pulling back.

“What do you see?” Bedwyr said.

“Have a look.”

Bedwyr replaced Goronwy and had to look for only a few heartbeats. Then he closed the door and leaned against it. “I count at least twenty people, soldiers and civilians.”

“And those are the ones we can see.” Goronwy tipped his head at his friend. “Are we here to do Cade’s bidding or not?”

“We are.”

Goronwy shook out Cade’s cloak. It shimmered in his hand, cascading to the floor. He had seen Cade disappear under it more times than he could count, but this was the first time he would use it himself.

“All things being equal, I would have nothing to do with the world of the sidhe ever again,” Bedwyr said.

Goronwy put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “So I said for many years.” He laughed softly under his breath. “And look where that denial got me.”

Chapter Ten

Taryn

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“HAUNTED?”

Taryn didn’t know what response she’d expected from Hywel, but hauling her backwards and putting her behind him so he could go first hadn’t been it. He’d done it even though he had no knife, since he’d left the one she’d given him in that soldier’s throat. Hywel peered into the darkness beyond the circle of light thrown out by the lantern.

She poked at his back, which was oddly rigid to the touch. “If you listen closely, you can hear soldiers marching and the screams of the druids they killed.”

Hywel glanced over his shoulder at her. “This was a sacred spot?”

She shrugged. “This was the center of pagan worship in the area before the coming of the Romans. Or so the story goes.”

He took a step into the underground room, lowering his guard slightly and looking around curiously. There wasn’t much to see. The dirt floor stretched out of sight under the city, the roof supported every few yards by pillars.

“You’re not afraid?” Taryn said from behind him.

“I’m as Welsh as you are,” Hywel said. “Why should I fear the druids?”

Taryn held herself still, listening. She’d been down here many times to retreat from her father’s court, and nobody had ever come after her because of their fear. It had been her place, so she almost hadn’t brought Hywel here at all, and wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been in danger. They clearly still were, if the shouts of the soldiers chasing them were any indication. They hadn’t moved on, but they hadn’t opened the trap door either.

Hywel turned to look at her. “Did you know that soldier I killed?”

Taryn raised the lantern so she could see him better. To her surprise, he was looking at her with a gentle expression. She swallowed. It was hard to hate him when he looked at her like that. “I’d seen him before, but he wasn’t a friend.”

“I had no choice. He would have stopped us, or at the very least, given us away, but I’m sorry you had to see him die.” He reached out a hand and took the lamp from her.

She shrugged and looked away. “It is the way of men.”

Hywel’s feet scuffled in the dirt as he began to move along one wall. “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Insist on thinking the worst of me? Why do you dislike me so?”

Me dislike you?” Taryn practically spat out the words. “It’s you who’ve had nothing but disdain for me since we met.”

Hywel looked back at her, his eyes narrowed. “That’s only because you contradicted everything I said from the moment I opened my mouth. All I wanted to do was express my condolences for the death of your husband, and you threw my words back into my face.”

The genuine pain in his voice pulled her up short. Had she? Taryn studied him for a moment, and then she found herself grinning—not at the memory of her husband’s death, but as she realized the truth. “You don’t remember me at all, do you?”

He looked at her warily. “We’ve never met before.”

“Oh yes, we have, though upon reflection, it’s no surprise you don’t remember. Ten years ago, your father was one of many Welsh lords attending a conference to which my grandfather had been invited as well. Cade was there too, though not Rhiann. As your father’s only son, you were invited to sit in the pavilion while the kings met. In between times, all the girls vied for your attention and did everything they could to catch your eye—even more than Cade’s.”

Hywel appeared genuinely flummoxed. “They did not.”

“I assure you they did, and you responded by being sneering and superior to all and sundry. I overheard you and another boy rating us on our looks and pedigree.” She laughed mockingly. “I didn’t rate very high, for all that I was a princess of Mercia.” She canted her head. “And Gwent.”

Hywel blinked. “King Arthur of Gwent was your grandfather?”

Taryn frowned at his surprise. “How could you not know that?”

“I try not to gossip.” Hywel shook his head. “How did your mother, a Gwentian princess, end up in the bed of the King of Mercia without him marrying her?”

“According to my mother, they were desperately in love. But Penda was already married, and when he went to my grandfather to explain, to say that he would care for her, my grandfather threw him out on his ear. Penda is nothing if not prideful, and love turned to disdain—for my grandfather, for my mother, and, ultimately, for me.”

Hywel had been staring at her as she talked, but now his whole demeanor changed. Some of the stiffness left his shoulders, and he looked down at his feet. “Nothing I ever did was good enough for my father. I remember that conference, but do you know what I remember of that week?”

She shook her head.

“It was one of the worst weeks of my life. In the evenings, my father would question me as to who’d said what and why his words were important. I was never able to answer him properly.” He gave a sardonic laugh. “I never have been able to answer him properly.”

He lifted his chin to meet her eyes, and she couldn’t look away, even though the pain he was showing her was akin to hers, and her father had broken her heart many times.

“My father’s anger had far more to do with the fact that he’d left Penda’s service and was looking to me as proof of how he’d bettered himself and had no regrets, but I didn’t know that at the time. What you saw as arrogance was, in fact, utter misery. Before I became one of Cade’s companions a few months ago, my father and I had been estranged for years.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know. Believe that I speak the truth, however, when I tell you that I understand.”

“I know you do, and I’m sorry too. It was wrong of me to resent Cade’s acceptance of you. Unfair and undeserved—”

A man’s voice resounded from somewhere above them, calling in Saxon. Another man answered, and then a third. Hywel looked up. “They’re right above us.”

Taryn backed towards him, her eyes on the trap door. “We should keep moving.”

“Is there another way out?” Hywel lifted the lamp higher, trying to project the light as far as the opposite wall.

Taryn felt a little sick. “There’s a door at the other end, but I’ve never been able to open it.”

More shouts came from above them, and it seemed as if more men had arrived.

“They’re at the trap door.” Hywel grabbed her arm and pulled her deeper into the room.

Taryn hustled beside him, taking two steps for every one of his as his long legs ate up the distance. She was prepared to extinguish the lantern the moment the trap door opened, but for now they needed the light. Without it they would be faced with utter blackness. “I wish we had some kind of weapon.”

They reached the door. “So do I, but we’re lucky to have gotten away at all.” Hywel lifted the latch and pushed.

Nothing happened, just as she’d warned. Frowning, he pressed against it with his shoulder, at first with small force, and then harder. “You’re right. It’s blocked.”

“What are we going to do—” Taryn stopped speaking as she caught sight of the expression on Hywel’s face. He wasn’t looking at her but to something behind her. She spun around to see the air in front of them shimmering. Then a doorway coalesced out of nothing between them and the nearest pillar. The lantern went out of its own accord, and she clutched at Hywel’s sleeve as he put her behind him again.

A man stepped out from the doorway that had been created. With a thrust of his hands, he enveloped them and him in a golden bowl-shaped sphere, which provided its own light. “Now we can’t be seen or heard.”

Taryn was frozen where she stood, and Hywel’s throat worked. “My lord,” he managed. Then he bowed, and belatedly Taryn curtseyed. Beyond the golden sphere, the trap door opened, and a man came down the stairs, sword out. Taryn put her hand to her mouth, trying not to shriek.

Hywel wrapped an arm around her waist and whispered in her ear. “I truly think they can’t see us.”

And that seemed to be the case. A second man had brought a torch, and he waved it around, to the point of coming halfway across the room with it, looking for any sign of the two of them. Taryn felt like he was looking right at her and could hardly believe he wasn’t raising an alarm.

“I swear, my lord. They came in here!” The apprentice from the leather shop stumbled down the stairs, accompanied by yet another of Peada’s men.

“Then where are they?” The first Saxon, who seemed to be the leader, glared at him.

“Do you know who I am?” said the being—and Taryn swung her gaze back to him, deciding instantly it would be wrong to call him a man. She hadn’t forgotten that he was there, but the sight of the Saxon soldiers had temporarily drawn her attention.

“No, my lord,” Hywel said.

So this wasn’t Taliesin. Her heart raced even more. On second inspection, he didn’t look much like a bard, as he wore polished armor, each link twinkling in the light he’d created, and a great sword at his hip. This was a warrior of the sidhe. In fact, this was the warrior.

Gwydion trained his eyes on her, and such was the intensity of those blue eyes that Taryn feared at any moment they’d bore right through her. “Well done. You recognized me on very few clues.”

Taryn swallowed hard and curtseyed again. “My lord.”

Hywel either had already figured out who Gwydion was too, or he was more implacable than she, because his expression didn’t change.

Gwydion’s gaze took in them both. “You will come with me.”

“Why?” The question burst from Taryn before she could stop herself from asking it.

Gwydion’s eyes were piercing. “Do you not want to save your cousin?”

Taryn swallowed. “Of course, I do.”

“Then you must leave this place. It is ... uncomfortable.” He raised his chin to point at the soldiers, who were now quartering the room. “And unsafe.”

“How is it that we might be of assistance, my lord?” Hywel said.

Gwydion bent his gaze on Hywel. “You bear the knife, do you not?”

Hywel licked his lips. “Yes, my lord.”

Taryn looked at him. “But—”

Hywel squeezed her hand, telling her without words not to ask her question. She had been going to express surprise that he bore a knife that he hadn’t used. At the very least, he could have pulled it out a moment ago when they faced danger.

“Good. It was at one time in the possession of my father. My hope is that he might feel a connection to the one who bears it now.”

Taryn’s face paled as she realized to what knife Gwydion was referring. She hadn’t known.

Hywel had maintained an almost preternatural calm from the very first, but this seemed to dismay him. “Do you mean Lord Beli?”

Gwydion gave a curt nod. “He has lost his mind and does not know me. Someone must remind him of who he is. I’m hoping that someone can be you.”

Chapter Eleven

Goronwy

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GORONWY HAD NEVER WORN the cloak. He’d imagined it would feel like the other Treasures: a bit of a shimmer and a shiver accompanied any contact with them. But as it settled around his shoulders, it caressed him, as if a beautiful woman was whispering in his ear. At first he liked it and wondered that Cade didn’t wear the cloak all the time. But then as he and Bedwyr set off down Chester’s main street, the caress became a scrape, rubbing at the back of his mind. He had to stop himself from swatting at his neck, as if an invisible horsefly besieged him.

“I feel it too,” Bedwyr said in a low voice. “I can’t wait to take this off. I don’t know how Cade stands it.”

“Maybe it feels different to him.”

“I have shivers up and down my spine.” Bedwyr gave a sharp shake of his head. “And we are no closer to finding Hywel than before.”

“Patience. Cade’s task first. Let’s get to Peada’s hall.”

The streets contained more than enough people to make Goronwy uncomfortable, since they had to make sure they didn’t get in anyone’s way, but not as many as there might have been if Oswin’s and Penda’s men had returned. At the same time, the townspeople were subdued, keeping their heads down and hastening from one shop to another or poking their heads out of their windows before slamming the shutters closed. As far as Goronwy knew, they had nothing specific to fear, but a gloomy miasma hung over the place. Perhaps that’s what happened when a city lost its Treasure, even if the people there hadn’t known they’d had it in the first place.

“I didn’t see a single townsperson yesterday,” Bedwyr muttered under his breath. “Penda had already sent them away.”

“I would have said that he wasn’t a good enough king to worry about the welfare of his people, but he does care.” Goronwy grunted. “Who would have thought it?”

Bedwyr had been directing their steps, since he’d been here recently, but now they halted before the entrance to the former Roman principia, the headquarters building. The great hall, with its double doors, lay on the north side of the complex. Opening the doors from beneath the cloak would call attention to themselves, to say the least. But then Goronwy and Bedwyr turned at the sound of running feet. Three men were racing towards them down the colonnade.

Hastily, Goronwy and Bedwyr moved to one side of the double doors to allow the two soldiers who guarded them to pull them wide. The lead soldier had outpaced his comrades by ten yards, so he went through the door first, and then Goronwy and Bedwyr slipped in after him, just getting in ahead of the soldiers who followed.

They hustled through the courtyard after the soldier, and, fortunately for them, so many people were moving by now that the sound masked their own footsteps. Peada was sitting at the high table, which was doubling as a command center. Bedwyr grabbed Goronwy’s arm and dragged him to one side along the wall. It was just in time too, because someone had jostled his other arm and was looking confusedly around—until someone else bumped into him, and Goronwy lost him in the bustle.

The lead soldier reached the dais and went down on one knee with his head bent, soon followed by the two men with him. “My lord.”

Peada had stood at the commotion, and he leaned over the table, both hands flat and supporting his weight. “What is it? Did you find them?”

“We tracked them to a house on the western side of the city, but—” he swallowed, “—we lost them.”

Peada’s expression darkened. “How.” It wasn’t so much a question as a command.

The soldiers were reluctant to answer. Finally, the man behind the lead soldier said, “There was a golden light which blinded us. For a brief moment, I saw three people within it. Then it collapsed and was gone.”

His eyes narrowed, Peada turned to a man who’d been perched beside him, one hip on the table. “What say you?” The man was tall, handsome, and bulky—and the fact that Peada looked at him above all his other counselors indicated that he was someone special.

The man scratched at the back of his head. “Interesting. One of my brothers is interfering. The question is who.” He also had cold eyes, and it wasn’t that the man’s aura was black, so much as that he barely had an aura at all. Goronwy had never encountered a person who so fundamentally lacked the essence of life. Which meant that he wasn’t alive. This was a sidhe—and Goronwy supposed it didn’t matter which one. If he was here with Peada, that meant he was working for Efnysien.

Peada glared at him. “You promised me that this would work! And now we’re worse off than we were before! Why do I keep listening to you?”

The man on the table kept his gaze on Peada. He didn’t move. He didn’t speak, but as he looked at the prince of Mercia, Peada suddenly colored and looked down. “My apologies, my lord. I spoke without thinking.”

The man bobbed his head once. “You are forgiven. This time.” He straightened. “I will speak to my master of it.” He walked towards a rear door of the hall and disappeared through it. It was only after he left the room that the power emanating from him became truly evident. Goronwy heard sighs all around him, as if everyone was finally able to take in a full measure of air.

He tugged on Bedwyr’s sleeve, and they went through the rear doorway too.

“Perhaps Taryn and Hywel were taken against their will,” Bedwyr said in an undertone as they crossed the threshold. “They could be lost in the Otherworld, with no way back. Neither of them has magic.”

“Hywel has the knife,” Goronwy pointed out, “unless it was taken from him.”

“It wasn’t. Of that I am sure. Peada would have been crowing.”

“And how is it that Arianrhod told Taliesin that the Otherworld was closed to humans and vice versa? I’m struggling with the idea that any sidhe could then have taken Taryn and Hywel there—” Goronwy lifted his chin to indicate the direction the sidhe had gone, “—or that one of Efnysien’s emissaries is here.”

“Arianrhod lied,” Bedwyr said flatly, “or something has changed, and nobody has bothered to tell us what.”

“Or she was, herself, deceived.”

Goronwy glanced back as the main doors to the great hall opened yet again, allowing a knight with his helmet tucked under his arm to enter the room, followed by a guard of six. The newcomer came to a halt before the dais, tapped his heels together once, and dipped his head in a nod. “Your father and King Oswin return, my lord.”

Peada stared at the messenger. “They are victorious so soon? Did they acquire any Treasures?”

“No, my lord. They received your message that Chester was under attack.” The man’s lips pressed together in a thin line.

Peada was aghast. “I sent no message.”

“Clearly.”

Peada swung around, looking towards the doorway in which Goronwy and Bedwyr were still standing, though they were still under the cloak and Peada couldn’t see them. The sidhe, of course, was long gone.

Then Peada swung back, and his eyes went again to the initial three soldiers, who’d risen to their feet by now. Peada’s color was high, and he seemed about to speak, but Goronwy saw the exact moment that he realized he had nothing to say. What was he going to command them? That they find Taryn and Hywel, who had traveled—against all expectation—to the Otherworld? That they should send word to his father that Chester wasn’t under attack? The situation was unsalvageable.

“Leave him to his fate,” Bedwyr said in Goronwy’s ear. “We’ve learned enough. It’s time for us to go.”

Chapter Twelve

Catrin

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CATRIN STOOD UNDERNEATH the archway in the crypt at Valle Crucis Abbey and motioned with her hand, calling forth poorly remembered words that Taliesin had used to open the way into the Otherworld when they’d come through here with him. She waved her hand again and again, changing the words, their patterns, and ultimately not using them at all. To no avail.

“Enough. We will try something else.” Goronwy slipped his arm around her waist. It was a relief to have him returned safely from Chester, even without Taryn and Hywel. It was amazing how quickly she’d grown used to having him near her—and to the fact that he wanted to be near her.

“This already is something else.” Catrin took in a breath and closed her eyes, allowing her senses to spread out from the core of her being. The closer they came to the summer solstice, the more difficult it was for her to peer past it to what else stirred in the world of the spirit. Though not as sacred a moment as the winter solstice with its promise of a world renewed, it was still a holy moment to crown a High King, and Catrin could feel its coming in her bones. “The forces here aren’t the same as yesterday’s. Can you feel it? Something has changed.” She opened her eyes and looked at Goronwy. “Does the crypt seem any different to you?”

Goronwy shook his head regretfully.

“If we’d kept up with Mabon and Taliesin, if I hadn’t been afraid of the darkness in the crypt, I would have been there when Taliesin opened the way, and then I could be more sure that I was saying it right.”

“But we didn’t, and even if we had kept up, who’s to say that the magic would have worked a second time?” Goronwy said. “Gwydion is not your patron, and you are not Taliesin.”

“Perhaps I should ask Arianrhod or Dôn.” Last night, when she and Goronwy had experimented with the chariot, they’d started the evening with such exhilaration and hope. But after several hours of working with it, they’d found themselves troubled, uncertain, and wary. Perhaps the last wasn’t a bad thing to be, but she was coming to realize that using the Treasures didn’t infuse her with glory. The chariot gave them very specific gifts, but it didn’t give them everything. It wouldn’t take them to the Otherworld.

Goronwy hugged her again. “I would say, rather, that we weren’t meant to go.”

Upon Goronwy’s and Bedwyr’s return, which had happened some five miles from Caer Gwrlie, Cade had sent the bulk of his men onward, but had taken the opportunity of the presence of the chariot to make one more stop. The news that Taryn and Hywel had gone to the Otherworld only increased his urgency to get there himself. He, Rhiann, Bedwyr, Goronwy, and Catrin had squeezed themselves into the bed of the chariot and taken it to Valle Crucis Abbey for that very purpose, in the hope of replicating the journey of yesterday.

A few heartbeats after giving the command, they were barreling along an adjacent pasture. The real abbey lay in front of them, unfortunately not the beautiful setting in the Otherworld where they’d found Dôn’s palace. This time, however, the monks were more friendly to Cade than they had been to Taliesin, and nobody needed to threaten or use magic as Taliesin had done in order to gain admittance for the women, and they had all filed together into the crypt.

Goronwy turned to Cade. “Taliesin may have asked for you, but he isn’t making it easy to get there, is he?”

“In the world of the sidhe, there are no guarantees.” Cade canted his head. “As I’m sure you recall, he said that for me to achieve it, I had to die.”

Rhiann gripped her husband’s arm. “If anything tells me that it wasn’t Taliesin who spoke to Bedwyr, that would be it. Surely you must see it? If Taryn and Hywel went to the Otherworld at the behest of a sidhe, then everything Arianrhod told us is false, and all she would have to do is appear before you and summon you. She hasn’t done it. Thus, you aren’t meant to go.”

“If Taliesin is anything he is unpredictable,” Cade said with a dry edge to his voice—but then he reached for Rhiann’s hand, telling her that his words had not meant to be dismissive of her. “Short of cutting off my head, however, I don’t know what else to do.”

“It is Cade or Bedwyr to whom the dish truly belongs,” Catrin said, “so perhaps that’s why it won’t work for me. One of them must find the words to say.”

“Halloo!”

They all turned at the familiar voice. A grin transformed Cade’s face as the bulky shape of his foster brother, Rhun, appeared around a curve in the tunnel. “You came!”

“Of course I came. I told you I would.”

Goronwy and Catrin had visited Rhun last night, as part of their experimentation, so they’d already laid out for him everything that had happened. Thus, it had been a simple matter to send one of the monks out to the main road to waylay him as he and his men rode past, heading south from Denbigh, where they’d broken their journey from Aber.

The two men embraced, slapping each other on the back and hugging each other hard, though Rhun got the better of Cade, being burlier. Then they stepped back, and Cade turned serious. “How is your son?”

“He is a strapping lad, but he wants nothing to do with his father as yet. Bronwen sends her love.” Rhun turned to Bedwyr. “Aderyn quite misses you, heaven knows why. She asks that you come for her as soon as you are able.”

Bedwyr’s face split into a rare smile.

Rhun turned back to his brother. “You’ve been getting into absurd amounts of trouble since I left your side.” He’d been talking jovially, but now he sobered. “Curses upon Penda that he gave up Chester to Oswin.”

While the two men were speaking, Catrin went back to the dish. She hadn’t wanted to touch it in the first place, and she stilled her mind, refusing to wish for anything at all. It was amazing how hard that was. Humans wanted. It was at the essence of who they were. To deliberately not want was something a mind could achieve only through training. Fortunately, Catrin not only had the necessary training, but in her years alone, before she’d met Goronwy, she’d taught herself not to wish for anything, knowing that if she did want things, she would live in continual disappointment.

Then she looked up at Cade. “My lord?”

“What’s this?” Rhun asked.

“Another attempt.” Cade approached with that relaxed stride of his and knelt across the dish from Catrin, careful not to touch it or slosh the water inside it.

Rhun followed. “To do what?”

Goronwy moved to intercept Rhun, whispering to him, though not so low that Catrin couldn’t overhear. “I told you last night that Cade sought a way to the Otherworld, to Taliesin and the last of the Treasures. That’s why we came here—to attempt to replicate our journey with Taliesin in hopes that it will lead us to him.”

“I don’t like it.”

“None of us do. But with Cade’s crowning imminent, it is too great a risk to leave Taliesin there alone. Not with Efnysien out there working against us. And we still don’t have the last two Treasures.”

Rhun did a good imitation of Bedwyr, growling under his breath—a curse, Catrin thought—though he did well to swallow down the bulk of it.

“Are you ready?” Cade touched Catrin’s arm.

With a nod, Catrin returned her attention to the dish. She hadn’t touched it since she’d set it on the stones of the floor, but she could feel its power, and it was more than a little unsettling—even more because it looked like nothing more than an ordinary clay dish. She took in a breath. “Are you ready?”

For the first time, Cade looked worried. “I’m not at all sure what to say.”

“I have found, when it comes to the world of the sidhe, to just let it come.” She turned to look up at Rhiann, who’d remained hovering a few feet away. “I think it’s better if you are closer to him than I am. You two are bonded. It will give him power that is different from what he normally carries inside him.”

While Cade took his knife from the sheath at his waist. Rhiann knelt in Catrin’s place. The Queen of Gwynedd was very pale, and Catrin didn’t know if it had to do with what they were trying to do in the tunnel or simply the toll her pregnancy was taking on her. Still, her gaze was steady, and she remained as resolute as any of them, even as Cade cut the fat part of his left hand with the knife.

He didn’t bleed much, but it was enough to get three drops, drip, drip, drip into the water. Then he began to recite words that grew in force and power the longer he spoke. They resounded among the stones.

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AT THE HOUR OF DAWN,

Between the bird of wrath and Gwydion

They walk in darkness

To seek the gweledydd.

Arianrhod, of beauty and serenity

Comes forth for the saving of the Britons,

From her hands a rainbow streams,

That washes away the violence from the earth.

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CADE SQUEEZED HIS HAND and three more drops of blood dripped into the water, making rings that circled out towards the rim of the bowl. Everyone held their breath, hoping against hope that the door to the Otherworld would open. How could it not after those words?

But the silence continued, and the darkness. Neither Gwydion nor Arianrhod appeared, and the only door available was the one that returned them to the mortal church.

Chapter Thirteen

Rhiann

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AFTER THE FAILURE UNDERNEATH the abbey, Cade sent the bulk of Rhun’s men on their way to Caer Fawr—with all the horses, while Goronwy ferried everyone else in the chariot.

There didn’t seem to be any point in going anywhere else. Cade was going to be crowned high king come what may.

Evening was coming on by the time Rhiann, Catrin, and Cade alighted from the chariot within the shadow of the fortress, so Cade wouldn’t be caught out in the last rays of the sun. He had his cloak back, but he hadn’t wanted to wear it if he didn’t have to—in large part because the point of coming to Caer Fawr was to be seen. Still, he swung it around his shoulders and vanished, for safety’s sake, just until the sun set completely. Then, as Goronwy too disappeared (with a wave), off to retrieve Bedwyr and Rhun, they climbed the stairs to the wall-walk to look over the battlement.

As always, it was strange to have Cade present and yet invisible—though Rhiann really thought she was getting used to it. It wasn’t as if she could hear him breathe, but he was still a presence beside her. She put a hand on her belly, feeling the faint fluttering of the baby, as if he could tell that his father was near as well.

Catrin heaved a sigh, stretching her back and staring up at the clouds above their heads. “We are running into the moment that you are to be crowned High King, my lord—and it needs to happen, even if we fail in every other respect.”

“I know,” Cade said. “I have come around to understanding that.”

“Most are already here.” Rhiann gestured beyond the plateau upon which the fortress of Caer Fawr had been built. All of Cade’s vassals in Gwynedd, and even more kings and lords from throughout Wales, had made the journey. Flags flew below them in the fields where three months ago the great battle against Mabon and Cade’s uncle, Penda, had taken place. Tents stretched from one end of the valley to the other.

“The crowning of the High King is an event that hasn’t occurred in a generation, not since your father, Cade.” Then Catrin lifted her chin to point to the wooden structure to the left of the hall, which had been refurbished as a guesthouse. Alcfrith, Cade’s mother (and Rhiann’s stepmother) had just stepped from the door.

Rhiann drew in a breath. She had forgotten that Alcfrith would be coming from Aberffraw. In fact, she realized now that in her worry about her friends and their quest to collect the Treasures she’d forgotten all about the ceremony that would be required for such a magnificent event.

With Rhiann’s upbringing at Aberffraw, more as a servant than as the daughter of the house, she had never been one to think about how she looked or what others thought of her. But this time they had to care about appearances, and she smoothed the skirt of her dress and hoped it wasn’t too sullied from the events of the day. Then she hurried down the steps into the courtyard towards her mother-in-law/stepmother.

“My dear.” Alcfrith beamed at her.

Rhiann hadn’t realized Cade had followed until he reached the stones of the courtyard and removed his cloak. The western wall was high enough to cast a long shadow, and he stood within it, gazing at his mother. Rhiann looked back at him, and the look of love and concern on his face nearly broke her heart. He had lived his entire life without Alcfrith. He had been well-loved by his foster mother, but that still didn’t make his need to be loved by Alcfrith any less.

Then Cade smiled and transformed his expression to one of joy. He loped forward, and even if Alcfrith didn’t completely understand the limitations of his gift/curse, she met him halfway, still in the wall’s shadow, and allowed herself to be caught up in a hug. Cade twirled her around before setting her back on her feet. “I’ve missed you! When did you arrive?”

“Yesterday.” Alcfrith’s look of genuine pleasure included Rhiann as well. “My children.” With one arm around Cade and the other around Rhiann, she squeezed them both. “Your father dreamed of this day, Cadwaladr, even as he knew that the very fact of your crowning implied that he would not live to see it. He would be so proud of you, my son.”

“I hope so.” Cade looked towards the hall, which had been decorated with banners and flags too, all showing the red dragon of Wales. Cade had claimed the symbol for his own—mostly because his choice had been to accept it or to be run over. The prophecies had foretold his coming, and whether or not he became the king of legend, he would go through the motions as if he believed in them.

“My lord!”

Rhiann turned to see who had spoken this time, and her face lit to see another missed companion, Siawn, the ruler of Caer Dathyl, crossing the courtyard towards them from the barracks.

Cade gave his mother another hug while he waited for Siawn to reach him. After a hearty, Rhun-like embrace, Siawn said, “Some of the kings have been muttering that you weren’t going to come. That you were playing us for fools.”

“And what did you think?” Cade looked at his friend with understanding eyes.

“That you would come. Who am I to doubt after what we’ve been through?” The pair had been imprisoned together in the dungeon of Caer Ddu. No danger or doubt could ever break that bond.

Cade, however, looked away, and his eyes grew distant. “I had hoped, actually, not to be here quite yet. Events overtook me, and I could not wait any longer. Perhaps it’s just as well. My presence will appease the barons.”

“I heard that Dinas Bran is rubble,” Siawn said.

“And Chester is in the hands of Oswin of Northumbria,” Rhiann said, “though his behavior since has been peculiar. He besieged Caer Gwrlie, where we had retreated, overnight, but then left this morning without firing a single arrow.”

Siawn frowned. “I admit that sounds odd, but no more than what we’re experiencing here.” He gestured to Caer Fawr’s great keep. “Nobody will enter the hall. It has an uncomfortable aura.”

If the observation had come from anyone else, Rhiann might have dismissed such a vague concern, but Siawn had been to Caer Ddu, and his castle sat upon a rock under which lay a portal to Arawn’s cavern. He’d seen the black cauldron. A person would be foolish not to listen to any strange sense he articulated.

And now that Rhiann thought about it, since they’d arrived, she hadn’t seen anybody going in and out of the hall—and she realized too that she hadn’t looked at the doors even once because they made her uncomfortable.

“What do you see?” Cade turned to Catrin, who had come down from the wall-walk and whose eyes were already fixed on the hall.

“Nothing I can point to.” She shook her head. “Nothing tangible. When Goronwy returns, we can ask him—”

“I see a creeping darkness,” Alcfrith said from behind them.

They all swung around to look at her, and Cade said, “Mother?”

“Darkness has followed me all the days of my life, except for the last few months, when for the first time I’ve finally been able to see the sun.” She gestured helplessly at the surrounding palisade wall. “Until I came here.”

Rhiann reached for Alcfrith’s hand, the motion intended to be comforting, even as her eyes went again to the doors of the hall. Just then, a last ray of the setting sun shot over the top of the mountain to the west and lit Caer Fawr’s gatehouse, bathing the battlement in golden light. Her breath caught in her throat at the beauty of it. But the moment the golden ray shone on the keep, it was swallowed into nothingness. The light could not reach it. Rhiann shivered.

Then the sun sank below the western hills and was gone.

“You saw that?” Free of fear of the sun, Cade handed his cloak to Rhiann to put away. At her quiet nod, he added, “My mother and Siawn are right that something is very wrong. I can feel it too, even if I can’t explain it.”

Rhiann’s hand went again to her belly, afraid all of a sudden for her unborn child. Cade saw the motion and pulled her into his arms. Then he spoke to the others over the top of her head. “I want everyone to stay away until we know more.” He looked down at Rhiann. “You must trust me now.”

She looked up at him. “What are you going to do—”

He cut off her question with a kiss. As always, he took her breath away, but this time, the kiss was tinged with something else. Sadness? Regret?

When he released her, the look he gave her told her that she’d guessed right, and she wanted to wrap her arms around his neck again and never let him go.

Her eyes grew wet with tears, and he brushed away the first one with his thumb. “Cariad, I do what I must.”

She nodded to let him know she understood, even if she didn’t really. Then, leaving her trembling, he strode towards the hall. Taking the steps three at a time, he reached the porch. The great hall at Caer Fawr had been built on the highest point of the rock and was oriented so that the main entrance faced northeast. When the doors were opened, the rising sun on the summer solstice—two mornings from now—would shine directly through them to the exact center of the floor where Cade would be crowned. Cade pulled on the doors, and they opened easily.

The instant the doors swung wide, however, a black cloud billowed out, shrouding Cade from view. The cloud looked not so much like smoke as a swirl of sand and dust. It spun around Cade, engulfing him in its power.

As Cade disappeared, Rhiann felt a pang in her belly that had her sagging to her knees. Sobbing Cade’s name, she clutched at Alcfrith, though she didn’t turn her face away. Siawn, meanwhile, raced up the steps—to be thrown backwards once he reached the top. As his back hit the stones of the courtyard, the black cyclone receded into the hall, and the big double doors slammed shut.

“Cade!” Rhiann screamed his name, and then, pain or no pain, she staggered to her feet and ran forward.

Alcfrith came with her, still holding her arm. Siawn had fallen flat on his back in the courtyard, and he moaned and pushed to a sitting position, holding his head where he had struck it on a rock. Catrin went to him first, but Rhiann shrugged off Alcfrith in order to follow Cade’s passage up the steps, the hem of her dress held around her knees so the fabric wouldn’t impede her movement. She tugged on the doors, but they wouldn’t open, and then she pounded on them, screaming Cade’s name.

Eyes blazing, she turned to Catrin, who was still on her knees beside Siawn. “Can you open them? It has to be magic that keeps them closed.”

Catrin shook her head jerkily. “I couldn’t open a doorway at Valle Crucis Abbey. I fear I shan’t be able to do so here either.”

Alcfrith approached and pressed her cheek to the door. Then she put out a hand to Rhiann. “He’s alive. I know it.”

Such was Rhiann’s desperation that she wanted to believe it. She pressed her cheek to the door too, hoping to feel what Alcfrith felt. Then a flash lit up the courtyard, and the golden chariot returned. Bedwyr and Rhun leapt from the carriage, and, before Goronwy could disappear again, Catrin bounded towards him and spilled out the story of what had happened.

Warily, the rest of the companions approached the double doors where Rhiann and Alcfrith waited.

“What do you sense, Goronwy?” Catrin said.

“Nothing untoward.” He put out a tentative hand to the door.

“It won’t open. We tried.” More tears fell on Rhiann’s cheeks, and she brushed them away, angry—and at the same time sad—that Cade wasn’t here to do it.

“We will batter them down if we have to.” Rhun grasped one handle and Goronwy the other. The two men looked at each other, and after a silent one, two, three, they pulled. Everyone staggered backwards as the doors easily swung open, leaving the companions looking uncertainly into the darkness of the hall.

Cade lay on his back on a stone altar in the middle of the room.

Rhiann ran forward just ahead of the men and threw herself across her husband. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe, but that was of course the way he was. He was like a corpse when he was asleep.

“Is he—is he alive?” Rhiann looked to Goronwy.

But it was Alcfrith who answered. “Of course, he is. His aura is pale, but it’s there.”

Rhiann gaped at her mother-in-law. “You can see auras?”

“Only his.” Alcfrith gently stroked a stray hair from her son’s forehead. “My beautiful boy—”

Rhiann turned to her friends. “We can’t let anyone else know what has happened to him.”

Rhun gestured down the length of Cade’s body. “It isn’t as if we can keep this a secret.”

“I didn’t mean—” She swallowed, her resolve hardening into certainty. “We will tell everyone that he is meditating in preparation for his crowning.” Then Rhiann looked down at her husband’s face. “That gives us all of a day and two nights to find out how to wake him.”

Chapter Fourteen

Goronwy

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THEY’D MANAGED TO PUT off a formal meeting of the lords and kings of Wales the previous night, but now it was unavoidable, even if it was the last thing that Goronwy wanted to lead. With Cade unresponsive, however, reassuring his subjects had become of paramount importance. Tomorrow’s dawn would bring the solstice and his crowning. So far, they’d successfully squelched any rumors that things weren’t well, but everyone was starting to wonder why they couldn’t see Cade for themselves. Goronwy wished Taliesin were with them. He could have quoted prophecy, intoned a line or two, and sent everyone on his way confused but confident that all was well.

“King Cadwaladr is preparing himself,” Goronwy said firmly.

Rhun nodded, backing him up. “The plans for the crowning ceremony are well under way. Your thoughts should be directed towards preparing yourselves and your subjects for a new High King.”

Nobody guffawed or called them out for their deception. They would have if they’d known, the lords of Wales never being ones not to grasp an advantage if it could be found. It wasn’t that men were faithless by nature. It was just that, before Cade’s coming, they’d lost and lost and lost again. They were looking to Cade for hope—they were crowning him out of hope—and they feared above all else to find it dashed again.

With somewhat heartened expressions, the gathered lords dispersed—all except one. Tudur, the faithful king of Merionnydd, planted himself in front of Goronwy.

“What’s really happening?” His eyes were narrowed, and he pointed his chin defiantly. “You are a terrible liar, Goronwy, and Rhun is worse. Perhaps you’ve pulled the wool over the eyes of my compatriots, but not me. Tell me the truth.”

Goronwy smiled ruefully, acknowledging the choice he faced. They could continue to lie to Tudur, but he had fought demons outside Caer Dathyl after the defeat of Arawn. He knew what the Otherworld could unleash.

“And here I thought I was getting better at it.” Rhun snorted under his breath. “My friend, he is in the Otherworld, seeking Taliesin and the last of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain.”

Tudur let out a breath. His eyes went from Rhun to Goronwy and back again. “If he has forsaken us for such a task, I cannot doubt that it is important, but what could be more important than his crowning?”

“Without all thirteen,” Goronwy said, “Cade will be crowned High King and Wales will be safe for a time, but it won’t last. Wales will fall to the Saxons.”

“And with all thirteen?” Tudur’s expression was painfully hopeful.

Rhun grunted. “Taliesin says we will ultimately lose to the Saxons anyway, but without the Treasures, we will cease to exist as a people. With them, we have a chance to rise again.”

Tudur looked away, chewing on his lower lip. Then he looked back to Goronwy and Rhun. He squared his shoulders and his expression cleared. “Thank you for trusting me with the truth. I will do nothing to betray that trust, and I will speak to the others to encourage their continued confidence.”

Goronwy bowed, thanking him and sending him on his way. Then he turned to Rhun. “You’ve been married a while.”

Rhun raised his eyebrows. “I have.”

Goronwy swallowed hard, feeling suddenly foolish and more out of his depth than he’d been with the barons. “How did you ask Bronwen to marry you?”

Rhun’s face lit with a smile. “I asked her father first, of course.”

Goronwy bobbed his head. “Catrin doesn’t have a father living.”

“Then you should just ask Catrin.”

“How?” The word came out almost a howl.

“Ask Catrin what?”

Goronwy swung around and was horrified to find his love standing innocently by a tent pole. Rhun guffawed and clapped him on the back as he departed. “You’ll figure it out.”

Goronwy clasped his hands before his lips, looking at Catrin over the top of them. She gazed back in that calm way of hers, asking nothing of him, simply waiting. She had never looked more beautiful, even with the shadows under her eyes from lack of sleep and too much worry. More than anything he wanted to wrap her up in his arms and kiss her until the shadows went away.

That thought decided him. He dropped his hands and strode forward until he stood a foot away from her. He took one of her hands in his and brought it to his lips to kiss her knuckles. “Will you marry me?”

And he was delighted to report to Rhun later that after she’d said yes and been the one to kiss him thoroughly, the shadows were entirely gone.

Chapter Fifteen

Cade

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“IT’S A FINE BATCH OF mead they’ve made tonight. Don’t you agree?” A huge man with golden armbands and a flowing cloak settled himself on the bench opposite Cade and set a large flagon down on the table.

Cade had a matching flagon in front of him, which he hadn’t noticed until now. He grasped the bone handle and took a sip. Pure nectar slipped down his throat. He’d never tasted anything as wonderful, so he took another sip while the big man laughed. “Nothing like a full flagon of mead.”

“You do have a point.” Cade took another long gulp before touching his flagon to that of his new friend. “What’s your name?”

“Manawydan. And yours?”

The name meant something to Cade, but he couldn’t quite place it, so he simply answered the man’s question. “Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon.”

He lifted his flagon to take another sip, but before he could, the man, his jaw hardening into granite, reached across the table and grabbed Cade’s wrist. “What are you doing here?”

Cade gaped at him, uncertain about what had caused this sudden change in attitude. He twisted his wrist to break Manawydan’s grip. “I’m drinking, just like you.”

Manawydan clearly didn’t like that reply, because he continued to glare at Cade. Then he half-stood to look around the room. “You aren’t supposed to be here yet. I have to get you out of—”

“You’ll have to excuse my friend. He is clearly not himself.”

A hand came down on Cade’s shoulder, and he turned to see a gangling man looking down at him with such seriousness that Cade was forced to think something truly was amiss, and it wasn’t just that these two strangers were alarming him for no reason. He flicked his eyes from one to the other, looking for a polite way to inquire as to what was wrong without giving offense. “Excuse me ... do I know you?”

The tall man glanced at Manawydan, and they shared what Cade could only describe as a knowing look. Superior. Irritating. Cade found himself suddenly angry that both men were treating him as if he was an ignorant child who could be managed and coerced if they said the right words.

But then the gangly man leaned down so that he was looking directly into Cade’s face and said: “He will not die; he will not flee; he will not tire. He will not fade; he will not fail; he will not bend; he will not tremble.”

It was as if someone and poured a bucket of icy water over Cade’s head. He gasped and blinked—and surged to his feet as the memory of who he was and why he was here overtook him. As Manawydan had done a moment ago, Cade’s gaze swept the room. They were surrounded by people of similar height, moving between the tables in their revelry. He could see for himself that he was in a great hall that made Caer Fawr look like a peasant’s stable. It was gilded, with walls lined with rich tapestries. The vibrant colors assaulted his senses, as did the noise of the many guests. “I’m in the Otherworld, aren’t I?”

He didn’t need Taliesin’s nod to know the truth. The memory of touching the rim of the dish in the private room at Caer Gwrlie returned to him. He hadn’t wished that Oswin and Penda leave. He hadn’t prayed that Hywel and Taryn were safe. That all would be well with them could only come about as a side effect of him gathering the last Treasures.

No ... he’d asked to be taken to his friend, and here he was. He hadn’t specified how it would happen, however, and though he’d thought he’d been clever in his request, if he’d known more, he would have chosen to have things work out differently. He would not have chosen to be dragged into the Otherworld by the darkness. His thoughts went to Rhiann, who would be shattered by his absence, and to his unborn child. All of this, everything he was doing, was ultimately for his son.

Still, he was here now, and he embraced Taliesin, who held himself stiffly at first, and then as Cade pounded his back, he loosened slightly. “I’m not displeased to see you again.”

“How long have I been here?” Cade asked.

“Days,” Taliesin said. “Or hours. It is impossible to tell.”

“You told Bedwyr that I should come,” Cade said.

Taliesin’s eyes narrowed. “I did not. You’d better tell me everything that has happened since I left you.”

So Cade did, though the farther into the story he got, the more grim became Manawydan’s and Taliesin’s expressions. As the sidhe and bard continued to gaze at him, Cade sensed a bond between them, though the two couldn’t have been more different on the surface—and perhaps in every way but the one that mattered.

“Efnysien,” the two said in unison.

And then Manawydan added, “He is a master of illusion.” He gestured to his own body. “I myself am unable to change my appearance to suit my surroundings, but he does so at will.”

“Like Mabon,” Cade said.

Manawydan snorted. “Mabon makes himself look beautiful. Efnysien has no physical vanity. It’s power that he craves. While Mabon is like a child who needs attention and cares not what he does or who he hurts to get it, Efnysien delights in confounding others, tearing down their pleasures and ruining their joy for its own sake.

That was the most succinct summation of Efnysien’s character Cade had ever heard. The grief in Manawydan’s voice as he’d spoken, however, was unmistakable.

“And yet, he is your brother,” Cade said.

Manawydan bent his head. “I could no more wish him harm than I could wish it upon myself.” He sighed. “But here we are.”

Taliesin’s visage remained grim, and he related what had happened to him in Arawn’s treasure room.

Manawydan rubbed his chin. “I must get you back to your world as soon as possible. Efnysien brought you here in an attempt to keep you from your crowning. He cannot be allowed to succeed.”

“He claims to have nothing to do with the darkness,” Taliesin said.

Manawydan scoffed. “Efnysien lies as easily as he breathes.” He strode off towards a doorway at the far end of the hall.

Cade hustled after him, and when he caught up, he went so far as to grab Manawydan’s arm to stop him. “You can’t send us back yet. If I am to be crowned High King without possession of all thirteen Treasures, Taliesin assures me that it will be the end of Wales. Can you instead help us finish what we started?”

“What do you think I’m trying to do?” They reached a long corridor, and Manawydan hurried them along it. It was the longest corridor Cade had ever seen, stretching what seemed like miles into the distance.

While they jogged down it, Cade looked left and right through the open doorways on both sides. Each seemed to lead to a different place, many far removed from the palace. He saw an ornate pavilion in the desert, an enormous round hut in a forest in the pouring rain, a snowstorm, and ... a great hall not unlike the one they’d just left, though smaller. It could have been the hall at Aberffraw. Despite the urgency of the moment, he stopped to marvel at the glory of it.

Taliesin stepped close to Cade’s right shoulder. “Your father is there, in the center.”

If Cade had retained the ability, he would have taken in a breath at the sight of Cadwallon. He took a step forward, almost not of his own volition, and then he became aware of a whispering urge at the back of his neck, telling him to enter the hall. Cade’s mother had claimed that his father would be proud of him, but here was a chance to find out for certain.

“Cade.” Taliesin’s voice was sharp. “Is this really what you want?”

Cade jerked his head around, startled. He blinked at his friend, as if he’d just woken up from a deep sleep. “No. Even if it was, I can’t have it.” As he started again after Manawydan, who hadn’t stopped to wait for them, he put a hand to his mouth. That had been a close call.

“You chose correctly.” The sidhe glanced at him as he came abreast again. “You are the one foretold.” And when Cade didn’t answer, he added, “I know you are wondering why your father is not with the Christ.”

“He was a believer—”

“Is this not heaven to him? Is it not a worthy task for his soul to care for his people in death as he did in life?” Manawydan shot him a sardonic look. “Your Christian heaven isn’t a place. It’s a state of being.”

“I thought—” Cade strode along, each stride seemingly longer than the previous one, “I thought the sidhe hated the coming of the Christian god?”

No more charitable than before, Manawydan expression turned withering. “You are sidhe and Christian, and even you do not understand.” He shook his head. “It is no wonder that the common folk are astray.”

“Please.” Cade put out a hand to Manawydan, though he didn’t quite touch him as he’d done earlier. “Explain.”

Manawydan stopped and turned to look at Cade. “The ancient power that made the universe is as old as time. Older than we are. In humanity’s youth, he was too great and terrible for any mortal to comprehend, so he called us forth to help shape men’s minds. Not all could be reached by such means, however, so he called forth the Christ.” He laughed mockingly. “But humans misunderstood his purpose, and they killed him.”

Cade felt an utter sadness radiating from Manawydan as the god continued, “We are not in competition with the Christ. Denying one does not make the other greater. We have striven to make humanity see that.” He sighed. “Instead, we fade more into the mist each day—”

“Hold!”

They turned towards the sound. Three soldiers with chiseled gray faces stood twenty paces away at the end of the corridor. However, it was not they who had spoken. Another tall man, this one almost as slender as Taliesin and more handsome than any man had a right to be, with gray eyes and black hair, stepped between two of the soldiers and cocked his head at Manawydan.

Manawydan stepped in front of Cade shielding him with his body. “What are they to you, brother? Do not harm them.”

Cade searched through his mind for who this could be, brother to Manawydan, but not Efnysien, from whom Cade hoped Manawydan would actually run. All the sidhe were kin, but not all of them claimed brotherhood.

“I am under orders from Beli. He would speak to them. Go back to your forge. This is not your business.”

Cade leaned forward to whisper to Manawydan. “Is this—”

Manawydan cut him off with a gesture, his eyes narrowing, but three more identical gray soldiers appeared behind Taliesin and, with swift movements, one of them bound Taliesin’s hands behind his back and stuffed cloth into his mouth, preventing him from speaking.

“Surely this isn’t necessary, Nysien.” Manawydan spoke calmly. He was a sidhe, a craftsman and a warrior—and an advisor to kings. He didn’t fear anyone or anything. “These men are humans. They have no power here.”

Cade pursed his lips. Where Efnysien was capricious and vindictive, Nysien was the exact opposite, or so Cade had always understood.

“You know better than that, brother.” Nysien’s eyes snapped. “It is not your place to disobey what Beli has commanded.” He motioned that the soldiers, chess pieces, should take Taliesin and Cade away.

As he was herded away down a new corridor that had appeared to his right, Cade glanced back at Manawydan. He’d remained where he was, looking after them, and his eyes were thoughtful.

Chapter Sixteen

Taryn

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TARYN FOUND HERSELF on her knees in an anteroom, her arms around her waist, struggling against the compulsion to vomit onto the floor. Hywel crouched beside her, giving the appearance of attempting to comfort her, but he was struggling too. He leaned his forehead into the wall at Taryn’s back and closed his eyes.

Gwydion stood in a nearby doorway and peered out. When he looked back at them, Taryn couldn’t mistake the impatience in his face. She took in a gasping breath and forced herself to her feet. Side-by-side with Hywel, who held her hand, they faced him, and it was hard to tell whether she was supporting Hywel or he her. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was best to think of them as supporting each other.

It had taken courage for Hywel to ask her outright why she didn’t like him. Not many men would have done that and instead would have gone on ignoring the distance between them and pretending that he didn’t care. Hywel clearly did care, and in the space of a few sentences, she’d gone from rubbing him the wrong way with every word she said, to being a companion. She could feel the change in him—and in her, truth be told—and it was a relief to swallow down her biting retorts instead of speaking them out loud. She no longer wished to get a rise out of him.

Hywel looked around. “Are we—” he paused, and Taryn could almost see his thoughts turn inward. “We’re not in the Otherworld, are we?”

Gwydion scoffed. “Of course not. Why would I need your help if we were there? This remains your world.”

“We are still uncertain as to why you would need our help at all,” Taryn said, sure that she could speak for both herself and Hywel in this. “Neither of us have any magic about us.”

Gwydion’s eyes narrowed. “I forget how limited your vision is. The human soul is itself more powerful than any force I could bring to bear here.” He canted his head. “Especially your souls.”

“Why our souls?” Hywel almost laughed in his incredulity.

“Do you not bear the knife of Llawfrodedd the Horseman?”

Taryn didn’t know who Llawfrodedd was, but her stomach curled at the way Gwydion spoke so reverently of his knife.

“I am his descendant,” Hywel said.

Gwydion spoke again, and for all his greatness and the way his voice seemed to echo around them without him actually raising it, his voice was gentle. “He was my brother in spirit, if not in fact. He and I guarded the great herds of Britain, before his betrayal and death after the fall of King Arthur.”

Gwydion wasn’t referring to her grandfather, of course, though he bore the same name, but to the great savior of the Britons.

“But then why me?” Taryn asked in a small voice.

“Aren’t you, in turn, the rightful owner of the whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd?”

She swallowed. “The whetstone was my grandfather’s, but I am not his only heir—”

“You have no idea of the power of the blood within you. In your veins run the great lineages of Wales and England, of Welsh and Saxon, Christian and Pagan.” He bobbed his head towards Hywel. “As it does in his, and King Cadwaladr’s. There is power there that those who focus on purity of blood can never understand.”

Taryn looked at her feet. If he hadn’t been a god, she would have said that he was speaking foolishly. Though ... she had to admit that Cade and Hywel, as two examples of mixing Saxon blood with Welsh, were two of the most handsome men she’d ever met.

Then Gwydion surprised Taryn with a flash of a grin that transformed his face and left her gasping at his own beauty. “And even were that not true, it is hard to imagine a more perfect pair to aid me. You both, of all my allies, can walk right into the enemy camp without fear.”

His words in no way helped Taryn understand what he wanted from her, but as Gwydion pushed open the door that led from the anteroom, she felt as if they had no choice but to follow him. They entered a fort’s great hall, and the dais was to their right.

Taryn found herself clutching Hywel’s hand even more tightly. “Whose hall is this?”

Hywel himself had already come to a halt, a pace from the closest table where men—mostly soldiers—were eating and drinking, in extremely high spirits. Gwydion jerked his head to indicate that they should keep moving, but like Hywel, Taryn was in no mood to do so. She’d recognized the man seated at the center of the high table as well as Hywel had: it was King Penda of Mercia.

Her father.

Gwydion returned to them and tsked impatiently. “You see my problem?’

“No, I don’t!” Taryn said. “You’re a god. Just go up and ask for whatever you want, and he’ll give it to you.”

Gwydion waggled a finger at her. “That might have worked at one time, but your father has had his ear bent by more than one of my brethren. I do not share Mabon’s silver tongue, and while I am able to dim my power, I find myself unable to render a disguise.”

“What about your sister?” Hywel said. “She persuaded Cade easily enough.”

Gwydion’s expression darkened. At first Taryn thought it was from Hywel’s flip comment, but then he answered Hywel seriously, and she realized she’d misunderstood.

“She cannot come. She has been ... constrained.”

He couldn’t have said anything more disturbing if he’d tried. Hywel let out a breath. “What do you want from us?”

Gwydion glanced again to the high table. Penda had been joined by a second man, this one tall and well-muscled, though with a white beard. Gwydion lifted his chin to point at the newcomer. “You see that man?”

“Yes,” they said together.

“Who do you guess he is?”

“Oswin of Northumbria,” Taryn said without hesitation.

“Indeed.” Gwydion grasped Taryn’s arm and tugged her along the wall. “That is what everyone thinks, but he is Beli, lord of the Otherworld. My father.”

Taryn found her breath catching in her throat, and she put the back of her hand to her mouth, struggling to regain her composure and master her surprise. Hywel simply looked at Gwydion and said, “How?”

“He has been bewitched into thinking he is Oswin of Northumbria. The real Oswin remains at his fortress in Deira, nursing a fever that he can’t shake, with no idea that my father has led his men halfway across Britain to conquer Chester.”

Taryn gestured to the soldiers around them. “Why are they here instead of at Caer Gwrlie?”

Gwydion’s expression turned sheepish, making him look almost human. “I don’t have Mabon’s or Efnysien’s ease with magic, but I am not without skills. That was a sleight of hand from me. They believe themselves to be victorious.”

“How?” Hywel appeared to be having trouble saying anything else.

“A suggestion in their drink. It will wear off by the time the summer sun rises, but for now, they will spend the night convinced of their victory.”

Taryn felt sick. “What—what day is it? When is the solstice?”

“At tomorrow’s dawn, Cade is to be crowned High King.” Gwydion canted his head. “Thus, the urgency of your task.”

Hywel didn’t even blink at the way time had slipped away from them, instead asking, “What of our friends?”

“Cadwaladr has a task greater than the defense of one fort. I knew I had to free him, and I also needed my father momentarily constrained.”

“Taryn and I still don’t understand what you want us to do.”

“Beli has forgotten who he is. You are here to remind him—and before you ask, he cannot see me for myself, not under the enchantment Efnysien has put him under.” Gwydion fixed Hywel with his gaze. “I have gone to him in the privacy of his tent, begged him to wake, pleaded with him to recognize me. Each time, he has ordered his men to put me in chains. While it is a simple matter for me to escape, I have not the power to force my father to return to the Otherworld.” His hands clenched into fists. “I am better suited to fixing problems that can be solved with a sword.”

Hywel grunted, indicating that he completely understood, but Taryn gave a little shake of her head. “How are we to do what you cannot?”

Gwydion put a hand under her chin. Because he was touching her, she couldn’t move or think. He looked deep into her eyes. “Together, you will think of something.” He dropped his hand. “I must go. Even I cannot be in two places at once.”

And then he was gone.

“This is so not where I want to be,” Hywel clasped her hand again in his, “but at least I’m with you.”

Taryn couldn’t help herself. She laughed.

Chapter Seventeen

Rhiann

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“THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING else we can do!” Rhiann was on the edge of losing her temper, something she never did.

Catrin saw it and caught her hands. “If there were, we would be doing it.”

“We can find the last Treasures,” Rhiann said.

“Tell me where to look, and I will be in the chariot in a heartbeat,” Goronwy said. “But I’m out of ideas.”

Rhiann took in a shaking breath and put her face into her hands. She’d stayed beside Cade all night and throughout the day, afraid that she wouldn’t be there when he woke. If he woke. Each corner of the table was guarded by a man-at-arms, all of whom had traveled with them from Dinas Bran to Chester to Caer Gwrlie to Caer Fawr. It was a wonder they weren’t each asleep on their feet. Like Rhiann was. For the first time, she resented being pregnant. Far more than the changes to her body, the baby had turned her into an exhausted, weeping mess to the point that she barely recognized herself.

Which, of course, Catrin noticed. “You need sleep.” She brushed a lock of hair back from Rhiann’s face.

The suggestion only made Rhiann more irritated, so she took a breath and let it out. “What I need to do is think.” Then she waved a hand in apology. “I’m sorry. This isn’t your fault. It isn’t anybody’s fault.”

“Except maybe Cade’s,” Dafydd said, and then before Rhiann could become angry again, he held out a hand to her and hurried to finish the thought. “He asked to go to the Otherworld, remember?”

“Yes, of course. We all heard him.” Rhiann turned back, her arms folded across her chest.

“So, we have to think that he’s with Taliesin right now. He knows the truth. It doesn’t matter in that sense what we think or what we know. They’re together.”

Bedwyr eased back onto his heels. “So I can stop fretting about whether or not the vision I had was true or false.”

Dafydd spread his hands wide. “I know that we don’t have all thirteen Treasures, and I know how important they are for Wales’s ultimate destiny, but for our purposes, the few we have here will have to be enough.”

“What are you talking about, Dafydd,” Goronwy said. “Enough for what?”

“To create a space to which he can return. Let Taliesin worry about getting Cade back here. It was his idea to crown him on the solstice in the first place. Do you think he’s going to forget that?”

Rhiann still didn’t really understand where this idea had come from, but Bedwyr raised a hand. “Are you talking about recreating my vision here in this hall?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We will make it look just as you saw it.” Dafydd snapped his fingers at his friend. “Even if it is your feeling now that the voice was not that of Taliesin, Bedwyr, it’s possible that by revealing himself to you, the sidhe gave away the very thing that he fears—the necessary steps to defeat him.”

That made sense to everyone. As her friends went about arranging the Treasures they had with them as Bedwyr directed, Rhiann approached Dafydd and put a hand on his arm. “You are a true friend, Dafydd. Cade knows it.”

“Thank you, but I do know that.” Dafydd sighed as he unbuckled the belt that held Dyrnwyn at his waist and handed it to Goronwy. “We have come too far down this path to balk now. We have one last throw of the dice, winner take all.”

“Or we lose all.” Bedwyr had overheard.

Dafydd shrugged. “Maybe so, but does it matter so much? I think Taliesin would be the first to say that the lesson—and the beauty—is in the journey.”

“One last throw ...” Rhiann’s voice trailed off as her eyes went to the dish, which Catrin was carefully setting on the floor, still within its box. It called to her, but Rhiann resisted yet again. Even more than before, she agreed with Bedwyr, and Cade, and Taliesin that the dish was the most dangerous of the Treasures. She would wish Cade awake, but she didn’t trust her own desires, and she could see how what she wanted might be exactly the wrong thing to wish for. Cade had chosen this path, and it would be wrong of her to make him deviate from it because she was afraid of what was happening to him.

Over the last few months, she had come to recognize that suffering wasn’t always to be avoided. She could see it in her own life: her father, in his treatment of her, had led her to become the woman that Cade loved. If that was the outcome of suffering, than she wouldn’t ask her former self to be spared a single moment of it. But if the girl who cried into her pillow at night had been given the opportunity to wish away her trials, she would have done so. And that would have been a mistake.

Rhiann retreated to a padded bench to think. When Bedwyr had spoken, she’d misunderstood at first and thought he meant to recreate the vision in the hall. Maybe if they couldn’t create a door to the Otherworld, they could at least project into it like Taliesin had.

Rhiann herself didn’t know how to do that, of course. She didn’t know if it was even possible, and she was just about to ask Catrin if she had any ideas, when her friend, who was sitting nearby, suddenly stiffened. Her eyes became fixed on Angharad, who’d just entered the hall with a basket of linen cloths, intended for the ceremony tomorrow.

“What is it, Catrin?” Rhiann asked, but Catrin’s only answer was to rise to her feet and walk forward.

At the sight of Catrin coming towards her, still with the same immobile expression, Angharad froze, as discomfited by Catrin’s behavior as Rhiann. “What is it? Why are you looking at me?”

“Because of him.” Catrin pointed, and then Rhiann could see too. Catrin hadn’t been staring at Angharad at all but at the man who’d arisen behind her.

Angharad spun around and gave a little shriek, backing into Dafydd, who caught her shoulders from behind.

“My lord, Manawydan.” Goronwy, who’d moved up beside Catrin, bowed low. Hastily the rest of the companions copied him. “To what do we owe this honor?”

“Ah, good. You can see me. My mother—” he gestured to something in front of him that they couldn’t see, “—assumed I knew how to use the mirror.” Manawydan’s mother was Penarddun, known as the fairest of the sidhe. Many stories had been told about her magic mirror, and Rhiann found her head bowing at the idea that they were in its presence, if even peripherally.

Goronwy cared about only one thing. “Have you seen King Cadwaladr and Taliesin?”

“That is why I am here.”

Rhiann’s head came up, hope rising in her despite her best efforts to quash it. For his part, Manawydan’s eyes had moved to the altar where Cade’s body lay. He lifted his chin to point at him. “I had to see for myself.”

If Rhiann could have leapt through the mirror and shaken Manawydan, she would have. As it was, she managed to refrain and merely said, “See what, my lord?”

“That what he said was true.” His expression turned grave. Like all the sidhe, every emotion was exaggerated, and the pity in his eyes sparked tears in Rhiann’s own. “You must be strong and careful. I can’t find Arianrhod or Gwydion, Beli is behaving erratically, and I don’t know whom I can trust. It has never been my way to rely on humans, but it is in my head that you are our salvation as much as we have been yours.” Then his eyes fastened on the chariot, his expression brightening, and he asked, “You have found it useful?”

“More than useful,” Goronwy said. “We would like to express our thanks to you for allowing us to take it.”

Manawydan canted his head magnanimously. “But I see that you do not have all the Treasures yet, or at least they are not all there.”

“We are missing the crock and the hamper,” Goronwy said.

Manawydan pursed his lips. “That at least I can help you with. Arianrhod told me that she left the latter for you.” And though the companions gaped at him, he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Efnysien hasn’t thought of everything.” Then Manawydan smiled with satisfaction, nodded to all and sundry, and was gone.

Chapter Eighteen

Rhiann

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FOR ANOTHER FEW HEARTBEATS, Rhiann stared at the spot where Manawydan had been. Then she looked at her friends.

Dafydd was frowning. “We would have remembered if Arianrhod left us the hamper.”

Angharad scoffed. “She gave us Mabon instead.”

“She gave me the black arrow,” Rhiann said. “I used it, and was grateful to do so, but an arrow isn’t a hamper.”

Goronwy swept a hand through his hair in a sign of frustration. “The sidhe seem unable to speak in anything but riddles.”

Catrin turned to him. “Manawydan has never been one for riddles, though. Maybe he meant what he said.”

“He said he couldn’t find Arianrhod,” Rhiann said. “Could it be because she’s here with the hamper?”

“He said she gave it to us,” Angharad said. “That means in the past.”

“The last time we saw her, she was washing the tunics of our warriors. Perhaps she will be there again,” Rhiann said, getting excited.

“The sidhe are banned from contact with the human world,” Angharad pointed out.

Dafydd scoffed. “We’ve heard a great deal about this ban, but I can’t say that it has affected us or anyone else so far. It might as well not have been decreed at all.”

Angharad stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the place where Manawydan had appeared. “Maybe it wasn’t.” She turned to look at the others. “It sounds mad, I know, but what evidence do we have that the world of the sidhe has been closed to us?”

“None,” Dafydd said, “and bountiful evidence that the border is wide open.”

Catrin frowned. “At Valle Crucis, I could not cross the barrier by my own power.”

“But you did with Goronwy in the chariot coming the other way,” Dafydd said. “We don’t know what the rules are, but that’s not to say there aren’t rules.”

“And if there are rules, they do appear to be made to be broken.” Rhiann gave a low laugh. “What if Arianrhod’s message that the human world was closed to the sidhe wasn’t meant for us at all, but for only Mabon? She had to speak it to everyone, naturally, but maybe the only one she wanted to believe it was her son?”

“Why would that be?” Bedwyr said.

“So Mabon would be deprived of his powers,” Catrin said.

Angharad put her hand to her mouth and turned to look at her husband. “If Arianrhod wanted him contained for a time, maybe she had no other way to do it.”

“I don’t see how that would work.” Dafydd narrowed his eyes at his wife. Rhiann knew that his possession of Dyrnwyn was a concession to what he couldn’t see. It didn’t make him any more comfortable with the world of the sidhe than he had ever been.

“Mabon and everyone around him believed he was deprived of his powers, so he didn’t have them,” Angharad said. “Isn’t that what Arianrhod was getting at when she explained about the wall going up between the two worlds? Humans are no longer thinking of the sidhe, and because they are not, the sidhe are losing their power here.”

“I might not believe that if I jumped off the highest tower I would kill myself, but that won’t stop it from happening, cariad,” Dafydd said with a laugh.

Rhiann almost laughed too at the very clear husband tone Dafydd had used with Angharad. He was trying to be rational and reasonable, but Rhiann understood what Angharad was saying, even if he did not. “I grant you that, Dafydd, but the world of the spirit is much less clear cut.”

Catrin nodded. “Beliefs hold a power not granted to the physical world. Did not the Christ say believe in me and thou will be granted eternal life? How could a simple belief change the course of a person’s soul? And yet, no Christian questions that it can.”

“I am not one to dwell on matters of the spirit, but I think Angharad is right, at least about the barrier between the world of the sidhe and this one,” Bedwyr said. “A malevolent spirit whispered in my ear. There is no barrier.”

“I say it’s worth trying to speak to Arianrhod. We are perilously close to being out of time.” Goronwy turned to Bedwyr. “Let’s go.”

Catrin put out a hand. “No, Goronwy. You weren’t at the river the last time. This is a task for the rest of us.”

Rhiann looked past her friend to where Cade lay on the altar, and her heart ached. She would give anything for him to wake up and tell her not to go, that it was too dangerous. But he didn’t, and it wasn’t—to the point that Goronwy and Bedwyr had no objection to them going with only Dafydd as escort, just like before.

A quarter of an hour later, the four of them met at the postern gate, went through it with a simple nod to the guard, and headed down the path that led to the river. Rhiann had been thinking of the battle last March even before Manawydan had brought up Arianrhod’s gifts, and now memories filled her—along with a rush of fear and anxiety.

When Taliesin had announced that Cade’s crowning would be at Caer Fawr, Rhiann had pleaded with him to hold it somewhere else. But Taliesin had insisted, and now Rhiann wondered if the ideas driving that decision had really been his own. Or if the whisper in their ear had come from Arianrhod—or Efnysien.

They came around a hillock that shielded the river from view of the path. The last time they’d been here, Rhiann had been the first to recognize Arianrhod in her form as a crone, and first she, and then Catrin, had thrown themselves into the water to reach her and prevent her from washing the tunics of their warriors. Today, the island in the middle of the river was empty of anything but rocks and a few straggly bushes that had found purchase on the bank.

“She’s not here.” Rhiann took in a breath. “I’m sorry.” It had been a short walk, so she wasn’t so much apologizing for the journey as for raising hopes.

“Don’t be so quick to give up.” Angharad followed the bank until she reached a fallen tree. Lifting her skirts, she walked across it to the central island. After a quick survey of the scrubby grasses and various rocks, she crouched and began to scrape away gravel and dirt at the very center, the exact spot, in fact, where Arianrhod had spoken to Rhiann and where she’d found the black arrow.

Catrin started forward too. “Wait, Angharad. I’ll help.”

Rhiann made to cross the stream as well, but before she’d gone two steps, a cold, black mist rose all around her, and her feet were stuck to the ground. She put her hand to her throat, finding herself choking on whatever reply she’d intended to make. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.

And then a silky voice came at the back of her neck. “You cannot help him. Go back to your needlepoint and your weeping. Struggling is pointless. It is over. All is lost.” The words dripped with ice, and a wave of despair so profound came over Rhiann that her knees sagged, and only a faint presence of mind stopped her from lying down on the ground right there and then.

“Rhiann!”

Her name came faintly, and she thought she recognized the voice but couldn’t place who was speaking. Then she found herself lifted up. Some part of her thought to fight whoever was carrying her, but it seemed like too much effort. All she wanted to do was sleep, maybe forever.

And then she was plunged into cold water, real and immediate. The voice and the mist vanished. Sputtering and shrieking, she struggled against her captor.

“Rhiann! It’s me! It’s me!”

Dafydd had her clutched to his chest, and once she realized it, she stopped fighting him. Her hand to her heart, she took in deep breaths, and then Dafydd put her on her feet. They both ended up hip deep in the channel. Water streamed from their clothes and hair, and she stared at him as he stood soaking wet in front of her.

He shrugged. “Water diffuses magic.”

Catrin and Angharad were staring at her, open-mouthed, both on their knees. Angharad was elbow deep into a hole.

With Dafydd’s hand on her arm, Rhiann staggered up the bank towards her friends. “A black mist and an even blacker voice overcame me. If Dafydd hadn’t carried me into the water, I don’t know what would have happened.”

Catrin’s expression was very grave. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Nobody did but me. How can we defeat something we can’t see?” Rhiann put a hand to her belly, relieved to feel the baby kick. She had been a fool to risk him, to think that any journey they made, no matter how short the distance, could be without peril.

“The same way we always do,” Dafydd said. “By keeping an eye out for each other.”

“That’s been enough until now, but who’s to say how long it will be—” Rhiann stopped talking as Angharad gave a triumphant shout and pulled a tunic bearing the dragon crest out of the hole she’d dug.

Catrin took it from her friend. “One last gift from Arianrhod?”

“Is it a gift ... or something else?” Dafydd said. “It isn’t floating downstream.”

“And is it still Cade’s?” Brow furrowed, Rhiann felt the hem. The weave was fine, but it wasn’t a tunic she personally recognized. “What does it mean? What are we supposed to do with it?”

“Look at this!” Still on her hands and knees, Angharad was pushing aside more gravel and dirt. Cade’s tunic had been close to the surface, but Angharad was working to uncover a much larger area.

Dafydd knelt beside her and used his belt knife to dig into the soil, deepening the hole. At first Rhiann couldn’t see what their purpose was, but as they continued to work, they revealed the edges of a large wickerwork basket with a lid. In fact, as Rhiann crouched beside Dafydd, watching him work, she realized it was the very basket that had held the tunics they’d stopped Arianrhod from washing three months ago.

“Arianrhod did leave the riverbank empty-handed.” Catrin was no longer working, but knelt in the dirt with her hand to her mouth, watching.

Angharad and Dafydd cleared away the dirt enough to maneuver the basket from its hole. Rhiann was almost afraid to lift the lid, but the others looked to her to do it, believing that it was her right as the Queen of Gwynedd—or maybe just as Cade’s wife. She put out a trembling hand and raised the edge enough to peek inside. Then she hesitated, disbelieving, before fully removing the lid to show her friends the contents.

At the bottom sat five small loaves of bread, two fishes, and a carafe of wine.

They had found the hamper, the twelfth Treasure. All that remained was the crock.

Chapter Nineteen

Taliesin

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“HOW COULD NYSIEN, OF all the sidhe, do this to us?” Cade paced around the cell in which they found themselves. He wasn’t cursing, thankfully. Taking the name of any god in vain under these circumstances would be very foolish.

“If you would stop your pacing, perhaps I would be able to think,” Taliesin said.

Cade swung around. “And why did Arawn tell you to look for a spider? What spider? There are no spiders in the Otherworld! And even if there were, how is that supposed to help us?”

“If I knew, I would tell you.”

Cade paced around the small cell one more time before settling onto the bed, his hands hanging between his knees. His weight was so much greater than Taliesin’s that the front legs came off the ground for a moment before Taliesin scooted to the right to better balance out their weight. “Why do gods need the help of humans at all? What can we do that they can’t?”

“Maybe nothing. But maybe there’s a value to being underestimated.” He tipped his head. “And stealthy.”

“Stealthy? What’s stealthy about sitting in a cell?”

“The sidhe can sense when other sidhe are present, but us, not so much. One reason we were able to enter Arawn’s cavern without being stopped sooner was because the sidhe have to work hard to sense us. We’re like ants to them. We barely register except when we’re in a horde.”

Cade dug the toe of his boot into a crack between the stones. “It’s strange to think about it all coming to an end.”

“Dying isn’t that hard, Cade. I’ve done it more times than I can count, and it’s never the end.” Taliesin gave him a rueful smile. “It’s living that takes work. It’s living that hurts. That’s what so few people understand.” He paused, and then spoke even more gently. “I knew your father ... or rather, I remember him, because that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

Taliesin didn’t wait for an answer. “He was brave, of course, and charismatic. He loved your mother, if you’ve ever wondered. It just so happened that she was Penda’s sister, but I think he would have married her even had she been a peasant girl.”

Cade looked down at his feet. “But he died.”

“Cadwallon was proud and less wise than he needed to be. He saw a path to ridding Britain of the Saxons forever, and he pursued it, even when it became clear that the task he’d set himself was impossible.”

“They’re never leaving, are they?”

Taliesin shook his head. “There is no future where I do not see the Saxon boot on the back of our necks. It’s just a question of how long we withstand them, and how long it takes for us to rise again.”

“If ever.”

Taliesin nodded. “If ever.”

Cade turned his head so Taliesin could see his eyes, which were calm and completely unsurprised. “What about you, then? How long will you go on?”

“For as long as I am needed.”

“That could be forever.”

Now it was Taliesin’s turn to look down at his boots. Maybe now, finally, at the end as Cade had said, he could speak of himself to the one man who was going to save them all. “In truth, I don’t remember the beginning. I don’t remember the point at which I realized that I was myself, Taliesin, plus all those others. Was I three years old when it happened? Five? Young, anyway. As I was an orphan, like so many these days, I didn’t have a parent to notice the change in me.

“That’s not to say, however, that I wasn’t parented. How many men can say he had as diligent parents as I, whose very being contained dozens of wise men to guide him? I knew answers to questions before I’d had a chance to ask them. They can be annoying too, these old men, with their quarrels and their righteousness.”

“You don’t have to say anything more.” Cade’s voice was hardly more than a whisper.

“Don’t I? I’ve seen the curiosity in your eyes when you look at me. You’ve never asked, but I know what questions stick on your tongue: Who was it that took me from my mother’s arms? How is it that you can be both that old man and a young man of twenty-seven? What is it like to live all those lives, and yet, only one?

“You have taken pleasure in not answering,” Cade said.

Taliesin’s face split into a wide smile. “The King of Gwynedd is nothing if not perceptive.” Then he canted his head. “But then you should be. Are you not the promised one of legend?”

Cade’s gaze went all the way around the cell. “It doesn’t look like it right now.”

Taliesin laughed, genuinely, for the first time in a long time. “I’m thinking that this is exactly what the gods want.”

“For me to be caged?” Cade said.

“For you to be humbled.” While Cade may have never felt so helpless as in the last few hours, his sentiment was only a fraction of what Taliesin himself had been feeling all along. The more power a man held normally, the more sharply he felt the loss. “Each in his own way, you and I are the most powerful men in Britain should we choose to be, and yet here we sit.”

That caught Cade’s interest, and his expression turned from morose to thoughtful. “Daily I fight against the impulse to use my power—”

“—and then you come here to find yourself as powerless among the sidhe as any mortal man would be ... but then, perhaps you underestimate yourself.”

“Do I?” Cade rose to his feet, frustrated again. He rubbed his face with both hands and dropped them. “Why am I even here? You say you did not summon me, but if not you, who did—and why?”

“When we answer that question, we will know all the answers, I think.”

Cade folded his hands across his chest and leaned against the wall. “Let’s back this up and think about what we know: first, against all expectation, Nysien is in league with Efnysien.”

“Or we’ve been made to think he is,” Taliesin said.

“What?” Cade glowered at him. “Think he is?”

Taliesin gave his friend a rueful smile. “Nothing here is as it seems. Did you note that the soldiers who surrounded us were identical?”

“They’re chess pieces,” Cade said.

“They are, which means that Dôn is involved.”

“Why would she now be helping Efnysien, when it was his men who sacked her palace?”

“Maybe she isn’t,” Taliesin said.

Cade gestured to the cell. “It certainly looks like she is to me.”

“But as I just said, in the Otherworld, appearances can be deceiving. Efnysien himself is a master of disguise. Who’s to say what we really saw out there?”

“That is not helpful. Are you saying that Efnysien impersonated his brother?”

Taliesin raised his eyebrows, finding himself amused by Cade’s frustration. “The question is, which one?”

“But—” Cade saw more evil in a year than most men saw in a lifetime, but he was outraged by this. “That’s beyond villainous! He could have impersonated Dôn to convince Nysien to do her bidding. He could have been impersonating Nysien just now—or worse, Manawydan to learn our thoughts or influence our actions.”

“You realize that you’re speaking of a creature who slaughtered an entire castle of soldiers out of pique.” With a sigh, Taliesin lay back on the bed, finding it far more comfortable than he would have expected in a prison cell. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, and then the lure of sleep was too great, and he closed his eyes.

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The armies of Cadwaladr, mighty they come,

The Cymry are exalted, a battle they made.

A slaughter without measure they assailed.

The gweledydd foretells

That he will come to summon

One company, one council.

Arthur and Cadwaladr,

They will be honored until judgment.

Prosperity will attend them.

Death has been accomplished to the farthest reaches.

Disease and duty will deliver us.

Let gore be, let death be, their auxiliary.

Two Treasures;

Two dragons;

Two exalters of bright armies.

And still, one fortune, one faith.

One web of fate,

Just as the gweledydd foretold.

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AS THE LAMENT ENDED, the last words ringing in Taliesin’s ears, he shot upward from the bed. The poem had recalled to mind the last thing he’d seen before he’d closed his eyes. “Look!”

Cade glanced down at him. “Look where?” But even as he asked, he followed Taliesin’s pointing finger to the ceiling and saw what had Taliesin gasping for breath: barely visible against the gray stone, a gossamer web had been spun across one slab, and a black spider perched in the middle of it.

Chapter Twenty

Catrin

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“DO WE SHARE THE FOOD with the fort?” Catrin reached down and picked up the hamper by one of the handles.

Rhiann bent to grasp the other side. “If people are hungry, we feed them. That’s the hamper’s purpose. We don’t have to mention where the food came from.”

“We’re sure this is the Treasure?” Dafydd strode through the channel ahead of them. He looked left and right, always on alert for danger, though today there was none—at least from the physical world.

Angharad brought up the rear, still holding the dragon-crested tunic. “I’m convinced, but I wish Cade were awake so he could see it too. Or Taliesin were here. He would know.”

Catrin took in a breath and glanced at Rhiann, who smiled ruefully. For a very brief, blessed moment, both of them had forgotten about the peril Cade was in.

“It is my hope that when we have all the Treasures, Cade will wake,” Rhiann said, and now her voice held a hint of tears.

“I know. I have spent my life communing with a world I can see only out of the corner of my eye, and what I understand of it is a thimbleful of what there is to know.” Catrin glanced behind her at Angharad. “I feel somehow that the tunic is important too, so hang onto it.”

“At least Arianrhod wasn’t washing it in the river,” Angharad said.

Catrin nodded. “We can take hope from that fact.”

Once back at the fort, they put the hamper in its rightful place alongside the other Treasures around Cade. Catrin could feel the power coming from them. It thrummed in her mind, and as long as she was in the room, she could think about little else. Frowning, she turned to look at Angharad, and Catrin realized what it was about the tunic that drew her: she got the same feeling from it as from the Treasures as a whole, though the tunic should not have been sacred.

Still, the feeling wouldn’t leave her and, taking a chance, she took it from Angharad and approached the altar. The circle was a sacred symbol, perhaps the most sacred and powerful of any symbol Catrin knew, and the Treasures had formed one around Cade with such power that as she neared one of the gaps—the space between the chariot and the hamper—the thrumming in her mind filled the air as well and hummed around her.

Breath held, she passed between the two Treasures, and the humming turned to an overt throb. It seemed to block her passage for a moment, an invisible wall, but she made a gesture of peace with one hand, and she was able to step inside the circle. She let out the breath, reassured that the reason for the magic’s resistance had been protective, not evil, and reaffirmed that the decision to adhere to Bedwyr’s vision had been the right one.

She looked down at the king. In this gray, deathless sleep, he was almost unrecognizable. That didn’t mean, however, that he didn’t need care, and with the utmost gentleness, she shook out the tunic Arianrhod had dug up and laid it gently, dirt and all, across his chest like a blanket.

When nothing happened, she bent her head, admonishing herself for expecting a change in him. But then, though Cade didn’t overtly stir or open his eyes, his lips parted as a human’s might when a held breath was released. Cade made no other movement, and he certainly didn’t go so far as to speak, but as she stepped back from the altar, she noticed that he wasn’t as gray as he’d been. In fact, his skin tone was several shades closer to human pink than she had ever seen it.

“Catrin?” Rhiann’s voice came from behind her.

Catrin put up a hand, and then, with the same gesture of peace—the thumb and first two fingers upright, the fourth and fifth fingers bent—stepped outside the circle. Then she turned to Rhiann. “He looks better, don’t you think?”

Rhiann stood with clasped hands before her lips. “I want to say so.”

Rhun came up behind Rhiann and put a hand on her shoulder. Earlier, he’d been seeing to his men, so he’d missed Manawydan’s appearance. “He’s alive, and the Treasures are protecting him.”

“Or imprisoning him,” Rhiann said.

“No.” Catrin shook her head. “So much of what has happened in the last few days is beyond my comprehension. But the Treasures are benevolent. They want him to succeed. I can feel it.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Taliesin

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CADE REACHED A HAND up to the web and then drew it back. Even when he stood on the tips of his toes, his fingers couldn’t quite reach the ceiling. Then he gasped. “Did you see that?”

Taliesin blinked. The spider and web had melted into the stone upon which they’d been fixed. But they weren’t gone—they had become etchings. If Cade hadn’t seen it too, Taliesin might have thought he’d hallucinated them.

“Do they resemble the carvings that Gwydion showed you?” Cade asked. “Goronwy told me about them.”

“They’re no chess piece. I can tell you that.”

“True. But ... it is a carving.”

Taliesin scoffed. “Seeing one in the other would presuppose that Gwydion and Arawn are working together.”

“They have Arianrhod in common, and my sense was that Arianrhod’s animosity towards Arawn was not returned.”

Taliesin pursed his lips. “If this is the spider that Arawn told me to look for—and how could it be otherwise?—that means Nysien brought us here on purpose.”

Cade let out one of those forced breaths of his. “We should be ashamed of ourselves for forgetting our history.”

Taliesin nodded. “Nysien is not a son of Dôn, but he might as well be, seeing as how he is a close companion to Gwydion. If Efnysien is the worst of the sidhe, Nysien is the best.”

“Even more, because of that innate goodness, he has never feared his brother,” Cade said.

“Nysien didn’t betray us. He saved us.” Taliesin met Cade’s eyes. “Spiders are said to be under Arianrhod’s protection.”

Cade’s eyes returned to the ceiling. “Because they weave webs, as does she. She is the weaver of our fate.” Then he reached down, pulled the bed more into the middle of the room, and flipped back the mattress. With a gallant gesture, he indicated that Taliesin should stand on the bed. “After you.”

Taliesin snorted, but he climbed onto the bed anyway. It was a simple wooden construction: four legs, four rails, and wooden slats between the rails to support the mattress. The extra foot of height put him within easy reach of the image.

“Do you know what to do with it?” Cade said.

“I haven’t a clue, and I’m afraid of doing the wrong thing,” Taliesin searched throughout all his interactions with the sidhe, looking for an indication of what was supposed to happen next.

Cade gave a sharp nod. “This message: it’s for you, not me.”

“I would say so. Yes.” Taliesin reached up and traced the etching with two fingers. “Two Treasures; two dragons; two exalters of bright armies. And still, one fortune, one faith, one web of fate.”

Cade growled in disapproval. “I know that poem. It refers to my coming, or so they say.”

“It does refer to your coming,” Taliesin said mildly. “I thought you were done fighting the legend?”

“It seems to me that any legend falls short when it runs up against cold reality.”

Taliesin looked down at Cade, eyes narrowed. “You will not falter now, Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon. Not when so many depend on you.”

Cade looked at the floor. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to complain.”

“You did not choose this path,” Taliesin said, “but you have held to it with strength and grace. Don’t lose faith at the last pass.”

Cade raised his head and gave Taliesin the answer he wanted. “I won’t.”

Taliesin glowered at him. “See that you don’t.” And with that, Taliesin himself decided to throw caution to the winds and choose, just as he’d just asked Cade to choose. He thrust his staff upwards at the etching and shouted the title of the poem: “Mae'r ddraig yn disgleirio allan!” The dragon shines forth. A spider might be the gateway to Arianrhod, but the dragon belonged to Cade, and Arianrhod should know that it was her champion who called upon her.

Red-gold light burst from Taliesin’s staff. In the same breath, the web turned golden in outline, and then red. The light died, leaving the cell in what felt like far greater darkness, but the square of stone on which the spider and web had been etched had disappeared, leaving a gap that a man could fit through. A faint light came from the opening, but Taliesin couldn’t see anything beyond it but stone.

“Let me go first.” Without waiting for Taliesin’s approval, Cade climbed onto the bed, reached up to the stones that lined the hole, and leapt through it.

It wasn’t any great distance by Cade’s standards, but it was up instead of down, and he landed awkwardly on his stomach, half in and half out of the hole. He was on his feet in a crouch a moment later. “I don’t like it.”

“What do you see?”

“Another hall.”

Taliesin had moved around the palace from one room to another in the time he’d been in the Otherworld, but each room he’d entered had felt like a separate entity entirely. There was no cohesiveness to the rooms, and even moving on foot, crossing a threshold was never without peril, as he had experienced.

Still, when Cade reached down a hand to Taliesin, he grasped it and allowed his friend to haul him upward, staff and all, by the strength of one arm.

“It is a constant wonder to me why any mortal ever thinks he can fight you,” Taliesin remarked as Cade set him on his feet on the stone floor of an enormous hall—though to call it a hall was akin to lumping a bear’s lair and Arawn’s cavern at Caer Dathyl under the term cave. There were a hundred stone tiles between him and the far wall, each decorated in leaves, vines, and branches, painted green and brown. The walls and ceiling were decorated similarly. They had walked into a stone forest.

“I don’t know that I have ever felt less adequate than I do here. I might be part-sidhe, but how can I fight a chess piece? Or a creature as old as time itself?” Cade gestured to the decorations. “And what should I make of this?”

“I share your feelings,” Taliesin said, “for all that one could say I’m as old as time. I’m not. When Arawn and Efnysien faced off in Arawn’s treasure chamber, I put up a shield, but it was impossible to do anything else. In fact—” he frowned, “—I had no thought to do anything else.”

Cade clenched one hand and pounded it into his thigh. “It is the way that the sidhe meddle in a man’s thoughts that is the most aggravating. If you hadn’t come along, I might have sat in the dining hall forever, never thinking of anything beyond the mead in front of me. Is that why the darkness brought me here? So that I would while away eternity unthinking and uncaring?”

“I don’t know. I’m beginning to wonder, in fact, if the darkness is anything like we are imagining it to be—” Taliesin broke off as, from a carved circle on the floor in the center of the room, the all-too-familiar swirling black mass coiled upwards like mist from a cauldron, except it was opaque, and spun ever more violently with every revolution towards the ceiling.

Taliesin looked towards the hole that could take them back into the prison cell, wondering if retreat could be found there. Before he could make a move in that direction, however, the force of the wind flung his staff from his hand. It ended up twenty yards away, and he himself was lifted bodily and pinned with his back to the wall behind him. Unfortunately, summoning objects with his mind was not one of his gifts, and no amount of reaching out his hand towards his staff was going to move it.

His head clunked against the wall, and for a moment, he lost consciousness—or at least consciousness of his immediate surroundings. Instead, it was as if his mind had detached itself from his body. He floated above it, and away from it, and could see all things.

He saw Taryn and Hywel, inexplicably in the company of King Penda of Mercia. Arawn and Efnysien still fighting it out in an epic battle in the Treasure room, with Mabon having for once chosen the right—his father’s—side. He saw Cade’s body laid out on an altar slab at Caer Fawr, with the Treasures they’d collected around him. Surrounding him was an army of chess pieces standing sentry, protecting the sacred circle and Cade. It came to Taliesin that Cade could be in two places at once because he’d left the human part of him at Caer Fawr, while the part of him that was sidhe had come to the Otherworld.

... Or maybe it was the other way around.

Then with a rush, Taliesin was back in his body, watching Cade fight the wind as he struggled back to him.

“No, Cade!” Taliesin was hardly able to breathe, but he forced the words from his lungs. “There is only one Treasure left! You have to find it!”

“Not without you!”

Taliesin’s voice was an echo even in his own head. “Regardless of what happens to my body, my soul is invulnerable. You should have learned that today.”

Cade wavered, and their eyes met. Taliesin could see him warring with himself, reluctant to obey even though obedience was the logical choice.

“Do I have to remind you that so is yours?”

Between one heartbeat and the next, not that he had a heartbeat, Cade’s expression changed. He spun on his heel and strode across the floor towards the swirling darkness, and the wind did not affect him. He had no weapon, having left such tangible objects in the human world, and he held out a hand, not to keep the darkness at bay, but in welcome.

Taliesin closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall, no longer resisting the wind. His friend did understand, and he was going to do exactly what he should do, even if it cost him his life. No sacrifice was more honored in all the worlds of the spirit than that, and Taliesin could only pray that Cade’s faith would be rewarded.

Cade himself showed no such qualms. He walked right up to the darkness. And then into it.

Chapter Twenty-two

Cade

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CADE WASN’T GOING TO pretend that he didn’t know what had prompted him to walk towards the darkness: sheer recklessness. And desperation.

And maybe a hint of hubris coupled with a by God, he was not about to be made a fool of again! He could feel the power radiating from the swirling mass. He was in no way prepared to counter it. But he was in the Otherworld, and, for all intents and purposes, dead. As he’d watched the darkness rise out of the floor, he’d asked himself what was the worst thing that could happen. He could die again? He could be prevented from returning to his beloved? That already was his reality.

It was the spider that had given him hope—that and Taliesin’s assurance that there was more going on here than they’d understood so far. Remarkably, he wasn’t feeling fear at all—and hadn’t even when they’d been captured by the chess pieces. Maybe it was part of the unreality of being a conscious human being in the Otherworld. Maybe it was the assurance Manawydan had given him in showing him his father’s fate. It was a gift that few humans had ever been given, death being the last unknown for every soul.

Of course, Cade would be foolishly arrogant if he didn’t acknowledge that he wasn’t a typical human. Nor was Taliesin, who held within himself the souls of many men. Death hadn’t ended their existence for them either. It was a comfort Cade looked forward to sharing with his companions.

Then again, nothing is as it seems, he reminded himself—and he stepped into the whirling madness.

Sheer power assaulted him on every side, and it was all he could do to keep his feet. The whirlwind was a tangible thing. He put his forearm up before his eyes, trying to block the worst of the wind from buffeting his face. His lungs felt constricted, and he blessed Arianrhod for changing him so that he didn’t need to breathe.

You bless me?

You whom I changed.

Tortured.

Hung neglected on the twisting strands of Fate?

The voice echoed all around Cade, but he continued on, heartened that the voice had been Arianrhod’s. He hadn’t heard from her in months, and it was a comfort to know that she was still with him.

And at that thought, the winds lessened, caressing him instead of whipping him. He took two more steps, the pressure dropped, and he was able to stand fully upright. He found himself in the middle of the room, standing within the circle on the floor through which the maelstrom had initially come. Though the swirl of darkness had expanded to many times its original size, here, in the center within the circle, all was calm.

And he wasn’t alone.

Arianrhod stood before him in all her glory. She was encompassed in a halo of light that was more than an aura. She was light. She wore a dress of silver and gold threads, and in the palm of her hand lay a spinning golden disc.

He stared at her, struck dumb by her beauty and power. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to even begin to process what he was seeing. But Arianrhod smiled, and the power of her approval hit him in the stomach like a blow. In that moment, he would have gladly laid down his life for her, but at that thought, a part of him laughed—because he knew he already had.

Then she dimmed her light, and the worshipful feeling passed, leaving him gazing at a girl hardly older than Rhiann. She still held the spinning disc, but her expression, if anything, was forlorn.

“What do you want with me?” he said.

She canted her head. “You’re assuming that it was I who summoned you.”

“You are the darkness,” Cade said. “I can’t begin to understand the hows and whys of it, but it is your will that has sent me on every path I have taken since you changed me in that cave.”

“You misunderstand,” Arianrhod said. “I am as much a prisoner as you.”

Cade’s eyes narrowed. “You brought me here.”

“This—” she gestured to the billowing walls around her, “—brought you here.”

“How is this not you?”

Arianrhod fixed her eyes on him. They were blue and fathomless, and they drew him in. All of a sudden, he was falling, as if he’d dived off a high cliff. But instead of water or stone at the bottom, he saw a swirling blackness, and he knew if he continued into it, he would be consumed.

With a thud, he returned to himself, back on his heels, staring at Arianrhod.

“You see now?” she said.

“The darkness—”

“Is at the center of every creature’s core. It is the animal within each of us that we strive every day to overcome. Efnysien has discovered how to bring my core outside myself. He didn’t lie when he told Taliesin that he didn’t create or control the darkness. He merely unleashes it so he can watch me destroy myself and everything I love.” She laughed derisively. “It seems, at my essence, my greatest wish is to destroy you.”

“How do we stop ... it?” Cade shook himself. He’d almost said you.

“How did you stop it at Dinas Bran?”

“One might argue that I did not, since the castle lies in ruins, but—” Cade swallowed down mention of the Cup of Christ and said, “It was the drinking horn.”

“The drinking horn ... and you, Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon.”

Cade stomach sank. “You give me too much credit.”

Arianrhod gave a sharp shake of her head. “It is why you need to gather the last of the Treasures, and why Efnysien has used every art and device within his purview to retrieve them. They are the only check on his power—and, quite frankly, mine.”

“I know already that it is Efnysien, not Mabon, who wants to overthrow Beli.” Cade had a sudden fire in his chest to meet this Efnysien and rip him limb from limb.

Arianrhod put out a hand to him, and immediately Cade’s ire cooled. “I wrenched control of myself from Efnysien when Arawn engaged him, and even as Efnysien has imprisoned me inside myself, I used the small bit of control I still had to trap us in this room.”

“Efnysien doesn’t know either of us is here?”

“Arawn remains loyal. While you were drinking in the hall, a battle was raging throughout the Otherworld.” She gave a knowing nod. “But Efnysien is coming now.”

Cade turned in a complete circle, surveying the small space, desperate for options and not seeing any. “How is it that Efnysien has so much power?”

“How would we know good if we had never seen evil?”

That wasn’t the answer Cade wanted to hear and part of him didn’t believe it. There had to be more to Efnysien’s power than he’d learned so far. “Why didn’t you tell anyone what Efnysien was doing to you?”

“I know it is happening only when it is happening. I regain control, but until recently, the moment I freed myself, I forgot.”

“Why don’t you free yourself now?”

She canted her head. “He has caught me in this circle.”

Cade looked down at his feet. He had noted the circle initially, of course, but now he could see the deep purple light that shone from the carving in the floor. “Why could I enter?”

“Its power is tied specifically to me.”

“Circles can be broken.”

“Not this one.”

“If you really believed that, why bring me here?” He bent to the floor and ran his fingers around the rune at his feet. The outside was a complete circle, but inside lay a series of concentric circles, though none were complete.

He frowned, tracing them again. Writ large, they looked something like a maze, or the ramparts that protected Caer Fawr. He bit his lower lip and went back over the etching again, this time tracing the blank spaces between the lines rather than the lines themselves. As he worked through the maze towards the center, he felt his hand begin to shudder and power surged into his fingers and then up his arm.

The image lifted out of the floor, intangible itself, and with every inch it rose, the swirling darkness around them receded, until at last it dissipated entirely. In the hole in the stone where the circle had been was now a recessed space. Inside the space lay a ceramic bowl with a lid. A crock, in fact.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

Cade looked up to see a tall man with greasy black hair and a maniac grin stalking towards him. Cade glanced at the goddess. The fury in Arianrhod’s face could have cut glass.

Efnysien’s eyes, however, were polished onyx. “The last Treasure. And you found it. I knew I could count on you. Give it to me, and I will let you go home.”

Chapter Twenty-three

Hywel

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“I STILL THINK GWYDION is out of his mind,” Hywel stood in the quiet of the anteroom with Taryn, “but I think I have an idea. Come on.”

They had initially retreated back here to think and confer, and now he led her outside. Both of them pulled up short, however, at how dark the day had become.

“What—” Taryn began.

Hywel was surprised too, but he had slightly more experience in the ways of the sidhe than she. “Time doesn’t pass in the Otherworld in the same way as in the human one.”

“We aren’t in the Otherworld.”

“Aren’t we?”

Taryn looked disconcerted. “Gwydion said we weren’t.”

“Then explain the hour,” Hywel said shortly. But then he tipped his head and looked sheepish. “He magicked this place to contain Penda and his father. We know that.”

“This is pre-dawn light, Hywel.” Taryn grabbed Hywel’s arm in desperation. “Sunrise is coming, and we are still here!”

“So we should hurry.” They reached the kitchen door.

Taryn still held his arm. “Are you going to tell me our plan? Do we pretend to be servants?”

He glanced at her, a faint smile on his lips, before pushing open the kitchen door. “Not so much.”

He could see Taryn grinding her teeth, frustrated, but once inside, she was instantly recognized, and she smiled graciously when the cook bowed before her. “My lady, how may I serve you?”

Taryn gestured to Hywel, who said, “I need a moment in the pantry. I have a dish to prepare for the high table.”

The cook looked like he might refuse, but Taryn put a hand on his arm. “Just cheese and bread. It’s something my father specifically asked me to bring him.”

The cook still didn’t understand, but he wasn’t going to deny the request of Penda’s daughter. So far he hadn’t asked what she was doing here, and hopefully they would be gone before he thought any harder about it. “This way.”

A moment later, Hywel and Taryn were alone in the pantry. She stood with the curtain behind her, her arms folded across her chest. “Now what?”

“Now we find out if the knife is what everyone says it is.” He reached to the small of his back, pushed aside the wrappings that wound around his torso, and gently pulled out the Treasure.

Taryn frowned at it. The hilt was ornate, and the blade itself had a dual edge, tapering to a point. “It looks more like a spear point than a knife.”

“That would be because that’s what it used to be.” He looked over at her. She had talked so knowledgeably of the hamper and the crock that he’d assumed she knew the origins of all the Treasures. “This was the blade that pierced Christ’s side as he hung on the cross.”

Taryn put a hand to her mouth and stepped back. “How can you bear to hold it?”

“I bear it because I must.” He took a platter down from a shelf and a small block of cheese from the cheese round and began slicing. And slicing.

“Is it endless?” Taryn leaned closer, curiosity overcoming her fear.

“I guess it depends on how much cheese twenty-four men need.” He stopped cutting the cheese and now plucked a loaf of bread from where it was cooling on a rack. That too filled the platter far beyond the capacity of the single loaf. Then he returned the knife to its sheath and held out the platter to Taryn. “Will you take this to your father? I’ll be right beside you.”

Taryn sucked in a breath. He knew how she feared her father. That was something they shared, though he and his father had finally made amends. The wall between her and Penda, however, was far higher, and not of her making.

As she took the platter, she looked down at the food. “This is exactly what Gwydion wanted, isn’t it? He knew that as Penda’s daughter that my father would allow me to get close to him. Why didn’t he just say so?”

“The sidhe suggest; they manipulate; they conspire. They don’t command.”

“Arianrhod commands Cade.”

“Does she? Cade speaks of how prophecy foretells the future, but he also reminds us that individuals still must act. He went into the caverns beneath Caer Dathyl on his own accord. She never told him what she wanted. He had to discover it for himself.”

Taryn looked up at Hywel, wrinkling her nose. “It would be easier if they just said.”

“The rules that constrain sidhe are just different from the ones that hem us in.” He canted his head. “And nobody really likes being told what to do, do they?”

That garnered a much needed laugh. “No, they don’t.”

Penda and Oswin sat together at the high table, desultorily consuming a meal composed entirely of mead. In the time it took for Hywel and Taryn to cross the hall from the kitchen door, they drained their flagons and a nearby serving boy refilled them. Taryn was far too composed and her dress too fine to be a serving girl herself, but her platter was all anyone noticed until just before they reached the dais. The men who surrounded Penda and Oswin perked up, and everyone’s eyes fixed on the food she was bringing. It looked like ordinary bread and cheese to Hywel, but their acceptance encouraged him to straighten his shoulders and lift his chin, though he maintained his grasp on Taryn’s waist.

At first, Penda didn’t register who either of them were. His eyes, like that of his men, were on the food. But then, as Taryn set the meal before him and stayed where she was, opposite his seat, his eyes traveled upwards to her face and fixed there—as would those of any man who wasn’t blind. Then he managed to drag his attention away enough to see who had accompanied her. “You!”

Hywel bowed. “My lord.”

Penda’s eyes were flicking from Hywel to Taryn and back again, the food forgotten. Oswin/Beli, however, pulled the tray closer to him and began to eat like a man starved. The soldier beside him reached for a piece of cheese and got his hand slapped. Whatever spell Gwydion had hoped the knife would work on his father seemed to be taking effect, though it looked like far fewer than twenty-four people were going to eat if Oswin/Beli had his way.

Penda pounded a fist on the table. “You’ve come for my daughter’s hand, haven’t you? You can’t have her!”

Hywel swung his attention back to Taryn’s father. He could find absolutely no response to Penda’s words, but Taryn was far less set back on her heels, and when she spoke, her voice dripped with disdain. “King Cadwaladr is my liege lord now, not you, Father.” She lifted her chin. “I don’t need your permission.”

Cleverly, she had said no less than the truth and hadn’t actually confirmed or denied Penda’s assumption. Penda saw only the defiance, however, and his face suffused with blood. He surged to his feet. “You will not talk to me that way, young lady!”

Hywel had been rendered mute by Penda’s initial assumption, but that didn’t mean he was going to allow anyone—and especially Taryn’s father—to speak rudely to her. If he’d still had his sword he would have drawn it. As it was, he edged closer to the table, getting slightly in front of Taryn. “You are speaking to my beloved. Apologize.”

“I will not!”

Hywel turned his gaze on Oswin/Beli. “What say you, my lord?”

Oswin/Beli had continued to eat, even as his eyes had been drawn to the dispute. “Why should I involve myself?”

Hywel could see now why Gwydion had brought them here and asked them to do what he could not. While Gwydion could have marched up to these two kings in all his glory and overcome Penda with his power and magic, Beli, a god himself, wouldn’t have been swayed. What drove him wasn’t competition with other gods or power over them, even though he was the head of the council. The reason he’d raised the barrier between the human world and that of the sidhe—as permeable as it seemed to be—was because he believed humans had forgotten him.

And with that, Hywel knew what he had to do. He went down on one knee before the table, tugging Taryn down beside him, and intoned, “Oh great lord Beli, god of the sun, giver of light and bringer of death, I beseech that you throw off this mortal shell and return to the land of light from whence you came.”

Though it hadn’t been his intent, his voice rang out loudly in the hall, silencing everyone else. He looked up to see that Beli had risen to his feet and was gazing down at him with such a fixed expression that Hywel himself couldn’t look away.

Penda was oblivious to the undercurrents. “What are you going on about?”

“Silence.” Beli’s voice reverberated in Hywel’s ears. And then, with his eyes still on Hywel, he said, “Continue.”

Hywel’s breath caught in his throat. He wasn’t Taliesin. He had no idea at all what to say next. The words he’d said had come in a flash of insight, but the well was dry.

But then Taryn began to sing from beside him, and he recognized her song as a portion of Taliesin’s Lay of Beli Mawr:

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I have been in battle with Llyr and Gwydion,

As they turned the world to dust at their feet.

I have been with Bran in Ireland,

And seen our enemies fall.

I was among the gweledydd,

When they met amidst the ancient trees.

The Cymry are of one mind,

bold heroes.

Deliver them from tribulation

at the hands of their Saxon foes.

Manawydan and Arianrhod foresee it.

Three utterances, around the fire, will she sing before it,

Around its borders are the currents of the ocean,

And the fruitful fountain is above it.

The mead is sweeter than wine.

And when I shall have worshipped you, most high one,

May we be confirmed in our covenant with you.

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IF THE HALL HAD QUIETED when Hywel had spoken, now it was death-like in its silence. From the moment Taryn opened her mouth, revealing herself to possess a voice that had to have come from her Welsh mother, Hywel could feel the power of the words she sang. Even the Saxons, who had little singing among themselves beyond bawdy ballads sung by men who couldn’t carry a tune, could feel it.

Penda was the only one unmoved. He began to laugh mockingly, making it impossible to mistake his derision. Taryn and Hywel remained kneeling with bowed heads, not daring to lift their eyes to Beli out of fear that he shared Penda’s opinion.

Whump!

Hywel jerked up his head at the percussive power, and he stared at Beli, who was standing with his arm outstretched and his palm raised. Penda’s body lay slumped in a heap against the far wall of the keep, having seemingly been thrown there by Beli.

Hywel found himself reaching for Taryn’s hand again. Together they pushed to their feet and backed away from the table. Beli had grown in stature, with an aura radiating out from his form that even Hywel could see. And now that he and Taryn were a few feet away from the dais, he saw that all of the Saxons in the hall were slumped on the ground. Whatever Beli had done to Penda he’d also done to his men. Hywel and Taryn were the only ones left standing.

“Why did you come here?” Again Beli’s words echoed all around them.

Hywel steadied his nerves so he could answer without stuttering. “Your son, Gwydion, sent us.”

“Why?”

The word reverberated inside Hywel’s head. He resisted the temptation to put his hands over his ears, afraid that it would only exacerbate the echo.

“My lord,” Taryn said, “we serve Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon, who will be crowned High King of the Britons as the sun rises.”

“As I rise.”

Taryn bent her head. “As you say, my lord.”

Beli’s eyes scanned all around the room. “Where is Gwydion?”

“I’m here, Father.”

Hywel didn’t turn around. He didn’t need to because he could feel the power rising behind him. Caught between two sidhe was a place he’d never wanted to be and hoped he would never be again.

“How did I get here, son?” Beli said, and his voice sounded almost plaintive. “How long have I been among these mortals?”

“I do not know, Father. Long enough.” Gwydion moved forward to stand beside Hywel, who had to stiffen his spine so as not to lean away. “It took some time to realize that you’d gone.”

Beli’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t notice?”

Gwydion hesitated. “It seems Efnysien has been impersonating you for some time. He had us all fooled. Even Arianrhod.”

Beli’s eyes brightened for a moment at the mention of his daughter. But then the light dimmed again. “Why did she not come for me?”

“She did not know. And by the time she did, she couldn’t.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Taliesin

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AS CADE LIFTED THE crock from its hiding place, three thoughts occurred to Taliesin in rapid succession. The first was that Arianrhod had chosen Cade as her champion for a reason. The second was that Efnysien was lying through his teeth. The third was that he himself was no longer helpless.

With the darkness gone, no power held Taliesin to the wall anymore. He dropped to the ground with a solid thud, but as it coincided with another sardonic clap on the part of Efnysien, nobody else appeared to notice.

He scurried towards his staff, and the relief he felt to have it in his hand almost brought him to his knees in and of itself. He didn’t have time for emotion, however, so he spun around to look again to where Efnysien, Arianrhod, and Cade stood, Cade now holding the crock. Efnysien’s denials to the contrary, this was the source of his power, and the answer to all Cade’s questions. Taliesin wanted to call to him, to tell him what he’d seen, but while his throat worked, no sound came out. Perhaps a last residue of the darkness.

Arianrhod herself was much diminished from when he’d seen her last. It seemed to him that the darkness had done more than imprison her. It had also consumed her power, and she was a shadow of her former self, which had to be also as Efnysien had intended.

Typically, Efnysien laughed. “I know what is in your mind, human. You think to make a wish, but which one? Do you hope to return to your world? Wish for it, and you shall—but not with the crock, which you cannot bring with you.” He laughed again. “There’s no avenue to bring it with you.”

“My lady?” Cade said, though his eyes never left Efnysien’s face.

“I cannot help you,” Arianrhod said. “My power is spent, as he intended.”

Taliesin might have thought that her words would have been disheartening to Cade, but instead, the muscles in his face relaxed, the lines around his mouth and eyes disappeared, and such was his expression of peacefulness and serenity that Taliesin found himself breathing deeply too.

Cade’s eyelids fluttered, a clear indication that he was preparing himself for something that was difficult, but Efnysien appeared to see it as a sign that he was about to surrender. He grinned, sure of what Cade was wishing, and put out his hand, palm up, to accept the crock.

But then Cade’s eyes lit with what Taliesin could only describe as mischief. Taliesin didn’t know that he’d ever seen that look on Cade’s face before. Efnysien either didn’t notice, didn’t care, or just didn’t know Cade well enough to realize that something was very far amiss. The god’s smile widened, and he took one step forward—just as Cade let go of the crock.

If Taliesin had been given even an instant longer to react, perhaps he could have conjured a cushion of air to stop the crock’s fall. Perhaps, if Efnysien hadn’t been so full of glee at finally getting what he wanted, he might have responded more quickly.

As it was, even as the crock hit the stone floor and shattered into a thousand pieces, Arianrhod grew in stature. Power streamed from her like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, and with a thrust of her hand, she blew Efnysien backwards across the floor.

Cade hadn’t wished anything for himself at all. Instead, he had wished for the one thing Efnysien had never considered—because to expend a wish on another was so far beyond what he himself would have done.

Efnysien landed flat on his back, gasping, his arms and legs akimbo. Then, out of the stonework itself, vines sprouted that wound themselves around and around his arms and legs, pinning him to the floor. At first he struggled against them, but the more he fought, the more tightly they held him.

With a subdued Cade walking beside her, Arianrhod paced towards the fallen sidhe. Just as she reached him, a door in the right hand wall opened. In came Gwydion and Nysien, with an ancient and stooped man between them, holding their arms for support. As the old man lifted his chin, however, Taliesin met his eyes, which were so lit from within they were colorless, and Taliesin knew the man’s weakness for a ruse. Mabon and Arawn walked together a few paces behind.

Arianrhod acknowledged the newcomers with a flick of her eyes, and then she returned her gaze to Efnysien. “Why?”

Efnysien’s laughter was back, but it was as bitter and resentful as it had earlier been gleeful and triumphant. “Why not?”

The old man had reached him by then. Taliesin found his limbs trembling, and he clutched at his staff, using it as a crutch. He knew he should bow, but he found himself incapable of it.

Nobody seemed to be care about him at all, however, and Arianrhod put out a hand to the old man. “I am so sorry, Father, that I didn’t seek you sooner. I didn’t know.”

“Gwydion has told me much of what has passed in my absence, daughter. It is not your fault.”

“Beli. Surely, you don’t believe—” Efnysien tried to raise himself from the floor.

But the King of the Otherworld was not to be interrupted. “You sought to overthrow me. You impersonated me because you knew that the sun god must be contained if the darkness was to have free reign. You have wreaked havoc in our world and in the land of the living. You captured my daughter’s power in a Treasure, which a human was forced to destroy. You have caused such damage that you’ve forced your family to call upon humans for help. What you have done can neither be condoned nor borne.” He motioned with one hand, and Efnysien’s sputtering ceased. Beli had taken away his voice. “But it can be undone.”

Then Beli lifted his head, pinning Taliesin with his gaze. Less than a heartbeat later, through no effort of his own, the bard found himself standing beside Cade, though he still had neither breath nor voice.

“I would say that you two have been very foolish, but less foolish than most men.” Beli’s eyes were fixed on Cade. Thumb extended, he reached out a hand to Cade and drew a line in the air in front of him from forehead to breastbone. “See to your people, Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon, High King of the Britons.”

And then with a push of his hand, not unlike the motion Arianrhod had used to overcome Efnysien, Beli sent them into a white light, and they knew no more.

Chapter Twenty-five

Rhiann

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THE HALL WAS CRAMMED with people. They’d started coming hours ago, standing vigil around Cade’s body, and nothing short of actual fighting would have allowed the companions to stop them.

Truthfully, they hadn’t wanted to. Cade lay on the altar in the center of the room, surrounded by the Treasures they’d collected. Perhaps it wasn’t enough. Perhaps at the last moment Rhiann should have sent Goronwy to retrieve the cauldron from his cousin, or the drinking horn from beneath the rubble of Dinas Bran.

But she hadn’t, and now was the moment of reckoning for all the decisions they’d made.

Siawn arrived at Rhiann’s elbow. “It’s time.” As one of Cade’s companions who straddled the line between Christian and pagan nearly as fully as Cade did, the King of Caer Dathyl would lead the ceremony.

“How can it be time?” Rhiann said. “He isn’t here.”

“His is. He is not dead. He is king whether he is conscious for the event or not.”

Rhiann almost laughed at Siawn’s utter certainty, but she couldn’t mock him for it. And maybe he wasn’t wrong. This was all about prophecy, in the end, about faith. She wouldn’t falter until all hope was truly lost.

Before they could process forward, however, the western door into the hall banged open, and Taryn and Hywel stood gasping on the threshold, their eyes fixed on Cade’s body. “Is he—?” Hywel couldn’t finish his sentence.

“I don’t understand,” Taryn said a heartbeat later. “Gwydion promised—”

Siawn put out hand to them. “It isn’t over yet.” He started to pace around the altar, singing in Latin and swinging the metal thurible that filled the room with incense.

“The sun is rising.” Rhiann turned to the hall’s front doors, open to the outside air and through which a glimmer of light was showing. She put a hand to her belly, feeling her child stirring—and praying that he would not be yet another prince raised without his father.

The light rose in the sky outside, and then the first ray of the summer sun shot through the doorway and hit the altar, alighting on an etching of a dragon on the altar’s base. Rhiann hadn’t noticed it until now. Perhaps it hadn’t been there until now.

The hall began to thrum with power. Or magic. Or maybe hope. She had tried so hard to accept Cade’s loss, to tell herself that it really could be over. But she’d never believed it. She couldn’t believe it.

And now, as Siawn’s song was taken up by the assemblage, and the room was completely filled with sunlight, she didn’t have to.

Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon opened his eyes, his chest rose and fell as he took his first breaths in many years, and he rose slowly to his feet to stand before them.

High King of the Britons.

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“CAN YOU SING, RHIANNON of the raven hair?” Taliesin whispered low in Rhiann’s ear.

“I can sing.” Rhiann turned to him. “I can patch wounded men; I can pray over the dead.” She canted her head, changing her words from those she’d said months ago on the day of their first meeting. “Even over the grave of my father.”

“You neither let him into your house nor let him shiver outside in the cold.” Taliesin nodded and sat down beside her. “You did something far better: you forgave him.”

Rhiann’s eyes went to Cade, who was holding court in the center of the pavilion. They had moved the celebration to the field below Caer Fawr, purely out of necessity. Cade had been crowned, and the jubilation of his people had spilled far beyond the walls of the fortress. She hadn’t yet had a moment alone with her husband, beyond a joyful embrace and a hurried kiss, but she’d felt the difference in him even in such a short meeting.

His flesh was warm, and his breath had been hot on her neck. He had walked into the courtyard in the light of the morning sun and not flinched.

“It may not be long before he wishes that he was again immortal; that he had the strength of the sidhe within him,” Taliesin warned, reading her thoughts. “The Saxons aren’t going away. He will face them in battle again.”

She dragged her eyes back to the bard. “Then he will meet them as a mortal man, and he will die as one. His physical gifts were never the important ones anyway, you know.” Rhiann’s eyes went again to Cade, who seemed to realize he was being watched, because he turned and looked across the pavilion to where she sat. Just then the baby kicked, and she instinctively put a hand to her belly.

Cade saw the motion—and threw back his head in a laugh.

Rhiann kept her eyes on her husband, but she spoke to Taliesin. “He doesn’t regret one moment of what has happened to him. Arianrhod changed him, and Beli changed him back, but nothing of that is why he is High King.”

Taliesin looked at her for a moment, and then he laughed too. “Our roles are reversed, my queen. The student becomes the teacher. And the foundling child—” his attention too was drawn to Cade, “—a legend.”

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The End

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MYRDDIN COULDN’T SEE a damned thing in the dark, but Cadfarch’s eyes were more capable than his at night. The horse raced unerringly along the road at a gallop, his head pushed forward and his tail streaming behind him, while Myrddin pressed his cheek against the horse’s neck.

Ahead, off the road in a cleared, grassy patch, a torch flickered, revealing the shapes of three people hovering over a fourth. The woman hadn’t screamed again, but she writhed on the ground before them and even managed to lash out with her foot at one of the men, who cursed aloud. “St. Dewy’s arse! I’ll teach y—”

But the man didn’t finish his sentence. As Cadfarch’s hooves pounded on the stones of the road, the three men rose to their feet and turned to look at Myrddin. One reached for his sword, but the other two men were unarmed, having strapped their weapons to their saddlebags in preparation for molesting the woman.

Myrddin raised his sword and swung it at the armed man, who stupidly chose to stand his ground and catch Myrddin’s sword against his. The force of Myrddin’s blow threw him backwards and, before he could recover, Myrddin flung himself off Cadfarch to land hard in the grass.

Without pausing for breath, Myrddin slipped his sword under the knight’s ribs. The blade slid in easily since, while the man may have worn a sword, indicating his high status, he’d neglected his armor this evening. Perhaps, like his companions, he thought he’d have little need of it, and it would only hinder him in his carousing.

Myrddin pulled the sword from the man’s midsection and looked around for more men to fight, but the other two were already away. Well-horsed, and in train with a third horse, now masterless, they raced north along the road to Rhuddlan, preferring an ignominious departure to facing down an armed and angry knight.

The woman crouched in a ditch where she’d come to rest, her hands in front of her mouth and her eyes wide and staring. The dress she wore might once have been fine but the men had ripped the fabric from neck to waist, revealing her shift. At least no blood marred the front. Her eyes were shadowed but Myrddin didn’t know if the cause of that was the torchlight or men’s fists.

“It’s all right.” He spoke in Welsh, guessing at her nationality. “You’re safe.”

“I never thought—” she began in the same language, and then stopped, swallowing hard. “I didn’t think anyone would come.”

“I heard you scream.” Myrddin took a step nearer and though the woman shrank from him, she didn’t run away.

Moving slowly, as if she were a wild animal rather than human, Myrddin put a hand under her elbow and urged her to stand. Once upright, the top of her head didn’t even reach his chin. Then he stepped back, thinking to keep his distance so as not to frighten her.

“Let me take you home.” Myrddin checked the road. No sign remained of the men who’d run but that didn’t mean they weren’t close by, waiting for a second chance. It made sense to hurry.

The woman didn’t respond, so he grasped her left arm and urged her towards Cadfarch. Her feet, thankfully still shod in well worn-boots, stuck to the earth at first, but he got her moving and was glad that she wasn’t in such shock that she ran away screaming. Myrddin had lived a long and varied life, but even for him that would have been a first.

Myrddin bent to wipe the blade of his sword on the tail of the dead man’s cloak and then sheathed the weapon. The torch the men had carried sputtered in the grass beside the man’s body, so Myrddin picked it up in order to hold it close enough to illumine both the woman’s face and his. The light had almost burned out, but he still needed it. He wanted her to see that he wouldn’t hurt her, and he needed her to talk.

“Tell me your name.” He lifted the torch high. “And where you’re from.”

The woman pulled the ends of her torn dress together and then crossed her arms across her chest, shivering in the night air. Myrddin loosened the ties that held his cloak closed at the neck, removed it, and swung it around her shoulders so that the fabric enveloped her. She clutched at it while Myrddin lifted the hood to hide her hair which had come loose from the chignon at the back of her head. He didn’t bother trying to find her linen coif.

Myrddin gazed at her and then swept his eyes up and down to take in her appearance from head to foot. It was only then that the woman finally raised her eyes from the ground. They were a deep green that complemented her hair, and Myrddin acknowledged that he was correct in his initial assessment: she was beautiful.

He guessed that she was close in age to him, although she could have been younger. The events of the night had hollowed her cheeks and eyes but time and warmth could reveal her youth. Her diction, given the few words she’d spoken, was that of an educated woman.

“My name is Nell ferch Morgan. And I have no home.”

“But you must have once,” he said. “Did the Saxons turn you out of it?”

That, of all things he could have asked, garnered a real response. To Myrddin’s relief, it wasn’t tears she expressed, but anger.

“I come from the convent at Llanfaes, on the Island of Anglesey. The Saxons burned the Abbey to the ground and defiled the grave of Queen Gwenhwyfar.” Nell spit out the words, her biting tone compressing all her hatred of the Saxons into one sentence.

“You’ve come far.” Myrddin didn’t even blink at the Saxon sacrilege. Their barbarity was well-practiced and well known among his people. “Where is your father? Your family?”

“Dead,” she said.

“And the rest of your sisters?”

“I don’t even want to say.” Nell looked away from Myrddin now, her sadness conquering her anger. “They’re dead too. I knew of what the Saxons were capable, but we were too vulnerable—too unprepared for when they came. I managed to hide a few of my sisters at first, but—”

“But what?”

Nell gazed down at her shoes again, and a tear dropped onto the rough, brown leather covering her left foot. “I left them. I thought they would be safe in a nearby barn, so I went to see what had become of the convent after we escaped. To find other survivors. In my absence, the Saxons found them. And—and—” Nell stuttered, swallowed hard, and finished, even if Myrddin already knew what she was going say, “—took them.”

Myrddin studied Nell’s down-turned head, going over her tale in his mind. The garrison at Garth Celyn had smelled smoke blowing across the Strait, but the fog and rain had been so unrelenting, they’d not known what was happening. Perhaps, in Myrddin’s absence, the king had received word of this atrocity today. “You must come to Garth Celyn.”

Although she’d expressed no fear of him up until now, Nell paled. She shook her head and took a step back. “I don’t think so.”

“I saved you,” Myrddin said, nonplussed at this sudden reversal. “I won’t harm you.”

Finding Nell here might be fate—might be one more nail in his coffin—but as the wind whipped the dead leaves from the trees, bringing the strong scent of the sea and the smell of winter, Myrddin felt a change in the air. By lying on the road for longer than he should have, he’d been given the chance to save one life out of all those that might be lost between now and December 11th. Whether by her choice or his, Nell was riding home with him, even if he had to tie her up and throw her across Cadfarch’s withers.

Nell must have heard his thoughts. Without warning, she turned on her heel, dropping his cloak in order to hike her skirts above her knees. She headed for the trees that lined the road, running flat out along a trail that only she could see.

“Stop!” Goddamn it! Cursing, Myrddin started after her. Where she thought she was going to go in the middle of the night, in Saxon territory, with a torn dress, was beyond him.

In the end, it was an unseen root that undid her. She tripped and fell forward onto her hands. When it happened, Myrddin was only a few paces behind, unhindered by skirts and with longer legs. He came down on her back, pressed her to the earth, and grasped each of her wrists in order to hold her arms out to either side and contain her struggles.

“Get. Off. Me!” Nell rocked her hips back and forth.

As Myrddin was half again as large as she and had twenty years of fighting under his belt, Nell hadn’t a chance. “I won’t hurt you.” Myrddin repeated the words again and again until her movements calmed and she breathed heavily into the musty leaves. “My name is Myrddin. I serve Arthur ap Uther.”

Silence. Nell put her forehead into the dirt, arching her neck as she did so.

Myrddin could practically hear her thinking, although he couldn’t discern her thoughts. “If you were at Llanfaes Abbey, the king must hear of its burning. He would have my head for setting you loose east of the Conwy River.”

“Then don’t tell him.”

Now it was Myrddin who had no answer. Finally, he said, “That I cannot do.”

Nell mumbled something into the muddy leaves, something Myrddin didn’t catch, other than the word ‘men’, which she spat into the earth. He eased off of her and then stood, taking a step away from her to leave her free. She twisted onto her back and gazed up at him for a long count of ten.

He held out his hand. After another pause, she grasped his fingers, and he pulled her upright. Then he released her hand before she threw it from her.

“Will you come with me, or do I have to tie you up?”

It was dark under the trees so Myrddin couldn’t read her expression, but the words came grudgingly, subdued at last—at least on the surface. “I’ll come.”

They walked back to Cadfarch, who was waiting where Myrddin had left him. Myrddin swathed Nell in his cloak once again, swung into the saddle, and pulled her up after him. Nell had to rest on the saddlebags. It wasn’t the most comfortable seat but would provide her a better cushion than the horn at the front of the saddle.

Her hem rode up her legs, revealing the undyed leggings she wore underneath her dress. She tugged the skirt down before spreading his cloak wide for modesty. Myrddin waited for her to wrap her arms around his waist, which she eventually did, resting her small hands on his belt.

Cadfarch, of course, had no dreams of the future, good or ill, or any thought but when he might rest or next find his feed bag full. Uncomplaining, he pointed his nose west, in the direction of home.

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