Needful as night’s end. Needful as night.
Two subtle offerings in the triad game, then a song, improvised as they listened. Three young people here, on the cusp of their real existence, the possible importance of their lives. And two of them would very likely have been lying dead tonight, if he’d been a day later on the road, or even a few moments.
He ought to kneel and give thanks again, feel a sense of blessing and hope. And those things were there, truly, but they lay underneath something else, more undefined, a heaviness. He felt tired suddenly. The years could creep up on you, if a day lasted too long. He opened the letter again, the red, broken seal crumbling a little.
“Whereas it has for some time been our belief that it is the proper duty of an anointed king under Jad to pursue wisdom and teach virtue by example, as much as it is our task to strengthen and defend …”
With the lamps doused, there wasn’t enough light to read by, particularly for a man no longer young, but he had this committed to memory and was communing with it more than actually considering the contents again, the way one might kneel before a familiar image of the god on one’s own stone chapel wall. Or, the thought came to him, the way one might contemplate the name and stone-carved sun disk over a grave visited so many times it wasn’t really seen, only apprehended, as one lingered one more time until twilight fell, and then the dark.
In the dark, from the corridor, she knocked softly then entered, taking the partially open door for the invitation it was.
“What?” said Enid, setting down the tall candle she carried. “Still dressed and not in the bed? I’d hoped you’d be waiting for me there.”
He stood up, smiling. She came forward and they kissed, though she was kind enough to let it be a kiss of peace on each cheek, and not more than that. She wore some sort of perfume. He wasn’t good at naming these woman-scents but it was immediately distracting. He was suddenly aware of the bed. She’d intended that, he knew. He knew her very well.
Enid looked at the wine cups and the wide-necked flask. “Did he leave any for me?”
“Not much, I fear. There may be some, and water to mix.”
Enid shook her head. “I don’t really need.”
She took the seat her husband had so recently vacated to go out with whichever girl had been waiting for him. In the softer light she was a presence sitting near to him, a scent, a memory of other nights—and other kisses of peace when peace had not been what she’d left behind when she went away. His restraint, not hers, or even Brynn’s, for these two had their own rules in this long marriage and Ceinion had, years ago, been made to understand that. His restraint. A woman very dear.
“You are tired,” she said after a moment’s scrutiny. “He gets the best of you, coming first, and then I arrive—always hoping—and find …”
“A man not worthy of you?”
“A man not susceptible to my diminishing charms. I’m getting old, Ceinion. I think my daughter fell in love tonight.”
He took a breath. “I’ll say, in sequence, no, and no, and … perhaps.”
“Let me work that out.” He could see she was amused. “You are finally yielding to me, I am not yet old in your sight, Rhiannon might be in love?”
There was something about Enid that always made him want to smile. “No, alas, and yes, indeed, and perhaps she is, but the young always are.”
“And those of us not young? Ceinion, will you not kiss me? It has been a year and more.”
He did hesitate a moment, for all the old reasons, but then he stood up and came forward to where she sat and kissed her full upon the lips as she lifted her head, and despite his genuine fatigue he was aware of the beating of his heart and the swift presence of desire. He stepped back. Read her mischievous expression an instant before she moved a hand and touched his sex through the robe.
He gasped, heard her laugh as she withdrew her touch.
“Only exploring, Ceinion. Fear me not. No matter what you say to be kind, there will come a night when I can’t excite you any longer. One of these visits …”
“The night I die,” he said, and meant it.
She stopped laughing, made the sign of the sun disk, averting evil.
Or trying to. They heard a cry from outdoors. Through the window, as he quickly turned, Ceinion saw the arc of a thrown and burning brand.
Then he saw horsemen in the farmyard and screaming began.
ALUN THOUGHT HE’D SEEN his brother this way before, if not quite like this. Dai was restless, irritable, and afraid. Gryffeth, staking out the left side of the just-wide-enough bed, made the mistake of complaining about Dai’s pacing in the dark and received a blister-inducing torrent of profanity in return.
“That wasn’t called for,” Alun said.
Dai wheeled on him, and Alun, in the middle of the bed (having drawn the short straw), stared back at his brother’s straining, rigid outline through the darkness. “Come to bed, get some sleep. She’ll still be here in the morning.”
“What are you talking about?” Dai demanded.
Gryffeth, unwisely, snorted with laughter. Dai took a step towards him. Alun actually thought his brother might strike their cousin. This anger was the part that wasn’t quite as it had been before, whenever Dai had been preoccupied with a girl. That, and the fear.
“Doesn’t matter,” Alun said quickly. “Listen, if you can’t sleep, there’s sure to be dicing in the hall. Just don’t take all the money and don’t drink too much.”
“Why are you telling me what to do?”
“So we can get some rest,” Alun said mildly. “Go with Jad. Win something.”
Dai hesitated, a taut form across the room. Then, with another flung, distracted curse, he jerked the door open and went out.
“Wait,” Alun said quietly to Gryffeth. They waited, side by side in the bed.
The door swung open again.
Dai strode back in, crossed to his pack, grabbed his purse, and went back out.
“Now,” said Alun, “you can call him an idiot.”
“He’s an idiot,” Gryffeth said, with feeling, and turned over in bed.
Alun turned the other way, determined to try to sleep. It didn’t happen. The tapping at their door—and the woman’s voice from the corridor—came only moments later.
IT WAS OBVIOUS from Helda’s expression, and her darting glances at Rhiannon, that she was concerned. Their young cousin had thrown herself on her bed as soon as the four of them had returned from the hall to her chambers. She lay there, still in the green, belted gown, an extravagance of light blazing in the two rooms (with Meredd away, forever now, among the Daughters of Jad, Rhiannon had claimed the adjoining chamber for the other three women). She looked, if truth were told, genuinely unwell: feverish, bright-eyed.
Without a word spoken the three had resolved to humour her, and so nothing had been said in opposition to her immediately voiced demand for all the lights to be lit, or the next request, either.
Rania