He didn’t want the others to see him struggling with the animal. Their souls, their belief, were in danger here. He reached up with both arms and pulled Owyn’s son, unresisting, from the saddle. He threw the young man over one shoulder and carried him, splashing and staggering, almost falling, out of the pool, and he laid him down on the dark grass at the water’s edge. Then he knelt beside him, touched the disk about his throat, and prayed.
After a moment, Alun ab Owyn blinked. He shook his head. Drew a breath and then closed his eyes, which was a curious relief, because what Ceinion saw in his face, even in the darkness, was harrowing.
Eyes still closed, voice low, utterly uninflected, the young Cadyri said, “I saw him. My brother. There were faeries, and he was there.”
“You did not,” Ceinion said firmly, clearly. “You are grieving, my child, and in a strange place, and you have just killed someone, I believe. Your mind was overswayed. It happens, son of Owyn. I know it happens. We long for those we have lost, we see them … everywhere. Believe me, sunrise and the god will set you right on this.”
“I saw him,” Alun repeated.
No emphasis, the quiet more unsettling than fervour or insistence would have been. He opened his eyes, looking up at Ceinion.
“You know that is heresy, lad. I do not want—”
“I saw him.”
Ceinion looked over his shoulder. The others had remained where they were, watching. Too far away to hear. The pool was still as glass. No wind in the glade. Nothing that could be taken for music now. He must have imagined it himself; would never claim to be immune to the strangeness of a place like this. And he had a memory of his own, pushed hard away, always, of … another place like this. He was aware of the shapes of power, the weight of the past. He was a fallible man, always had been, struggling to be virtuous in times that made it hard.
He heard the owl again; far side of the water now. Ceinion looked up, stars overhead in the bowl of sky between trees.
The Erling horse shook its head, snorted loudly, and walked placidly out of the pond by itself. It lowered its head to crop the black grass beside them. Ceinion watched it for a moment, the utter ordinariness. He looked back at the boy, took a deep breath.
“Come, lad,” he said. “Will you pray with me, at Brynn’s chapel?”
“Of course,” said Alun ab Owyn, almost too calmly. He sat up, and then stood, without aid. Then he walked straight back into the pool.
Ceinion half lifted a hand in protest, then saw the boy bend down and pick up a sword from the shallows. Alun walked back out.
“They’ve gone, you see,” he said.
They returned to the others, leading the Erling horse. Two of Brynn’s men made the sign of the disk as they came up, eyeing the Cadyri prince warily. Gryffeth ap Ludh dismounted and embraced his cousin. Alun returned the gesture, briefly. Ceinion watched him, his brow knit.
“The two Cadyri and I will go back to Brynnfell,” he said.
“Two of them escaped from me,” Alun said, looking up at Siawn. “The one with the bow. Ivarr.”
“We’ll catch him,” said Siawn, quietly.
“He went south, around the water,” Owyn’s son said, pointing. “Probably double back west.” He seemed composed, grave even. Too much so, in fact. The cousin was weeping. Ceinion felt a needle of fear.
“We’ll catch him,” Siawn repeated, and cantered off, giving the pool a wide berth, his men following.
Certainty can be misplaced, even when there is fair cause for it. They didn’t, in fact, catch him: a man on a good-enough horse, in darkness, which made tracking hard. Some days later, word would come to Brynnfell of two people killed, by arrows—a farm labourer and a young girl—in the thinly populated valley between them and the sea. Both the man and the girl had been blood-eagled, which was an abomination. Nor would anyone ever find the Erling ships moored, Jad alone knew where, along the wild and rocky coastline to the west. The god might indeed know, but he didn’t always confide such things to his mortal children, doing what they could to serve him in a dark and savage world.
Chapter IV
Rhiannon had known since childhood (not yet so far behind her) that her father’s importance did not emerge from court manners and courtly wit. Brynn ap Hywll had achieved power and renown by killing men: Anglcyn and Erling and, on more than one occasion, those from the provinces of Cadyr and Llywerth, in the (lengthy) intervals between (brief) truces among the Cyngael.
“Jad’s a warrior,” was his blunt response to a sequence of clerics who’d joined his household and then attempted to instill a gentler piety in the battle-scarred leader of the Hywll line.
Nonetheless, whatever she might have known from harp song and meadhall tale, his daughter had never seen her father kill until tonight. Until the moment when he had slashed a thrown and caught sword deep into the Erling who’d been trying to bargain his way to freedom.
It hadn’t disturbed her, watching the man die.
That was a surprise. She had discovered it about herself: seeing the sword of Alun ab Owyn in her father’s thick hands come down on the Erling. She wondered if it was a bad, even an impious thing that she didn’t recoil from what she saw and heard: strangled, bubbling cry, blood bursting, a man falling like a sack.
It gave her, in truth, a measure of satisfaction. She knew that she ought properly to atone for that, in chapel. She had no intention of doing so. There were two gashes on her throat and neck from an Erling axe. There was blood on her body, and on her green gown. She had been expecting to die in her own chambers tonight. Had told Siawn and his men to let the Erling kill her. She could still hear herself speaking those words. Resolute then, she’d had to conceal shaking hands after.
Had, accordingly, little sympathy to spare for Erling raiders when they were slain, and that applied to the five her father ordered executed when it became evident they were not going to bring any ransom.
They were dispatched where they stood in the torch-lit yard. No words spoken, no ceremony, pause for prayer. Five living men, five dead men. In the time one might lift and drink a cup of wine. Brynn’s men began walking around the yard with torches, killing those Erlings who lay on the ground, wounded, not yet dead. They had come to raid, take slaves, rape and kill, the way they always came.
A message needed to be sent, endlessly: the Cyngael might not worship gods of storm and sword, or believe in an afterworld of endless battle, but they could be— some of them could be—as bloody and as ruthless as an Erling when need was.
She was still outside when her father spoke to the older, red-bearded raider. Brynn walked up to the man, held again between two of their people, more tightly than before. He had broken free once—and saved Brynn from an arrow. Her father, Rhiannon realized, was dealing with a great anger because of that.
“How many of you were here?” Brynn bit off the words, speaking quietly. He was never quiet, she thought.
“Thirty, a few more.” No hesitation. The man was almost as big as her father, Rhiannon saw. And of an age.
“As many left behind?”
“Forty, to guard the ships. Take them off the coast, if necessary.”
“Two ships?”
“Three. We had some horses, to come inland.”
Brynn had dressed by now, was holding his own sword, though there was no need for it. He began to pace as they spoke. The red-bearded Erling watched his movements, standing between two men. They were gripping his arms tightly,