Now we are home

I know it has been forever.I am sorry,once again.Life has been busy,I had some things I needed to get done...

Also, I had written myself into a corner I wasn't sure how to get out of. I am not yet out of it, but I think I have found a way to navigate the maze now. This is not my best chapter ever. I had to stop fiddling with it at some point. Hopefully, things will improve again from now on. I am already hard at work with chapter 28.

If you are still reading this, thank you for your patience. I do hope updates will come regularly again, but knowing my history, I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me.:(

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Arthur's face was a mask of cold fury. Anyone who did not know him as well as Lancelot might not have been able to tell, but after so many years of friendship, he knew his king's face better than his own.

They had assembled in the Hall of the Round Table, even Taliesin had been brought from his sickbed to attend council.

Bedwyr was fidgety. He kept looking towards the narrow windows, his hands, loosely clasped on the table, were twitching uneasily and he was worrying his lower lip with his teeth. Earlier, he had asked Arthur for permission to take a fresh horse and ride back out to find out how is sister was faring. Only with some delay had Lancelot added his own voice to the plea. It had taken him a moment to remember that the woman they were speaking of was the mother of his 'son'. Arthur had not allowed it, at any rate. There were questions that demanded answers without delay, he had told them sternly, and Bedwyr had acquiesced. The looks he was now giving Arthur, however, were far from friendly. Next to him, Taliesin sat slumped in his chair, white as a sheet and with a fine sheen of cold sweat on his face. The fact that they had drug him here spoke volumes about the depth of Arthur's anger.

Tristan stood apart from them all, his expression one of quiet and detached amusement. Lancelot would have liked to have spoken with him, since his and Marian's journey must have been quite as exciting as his own, but the scout was studiously avoiding him.

Gawain and Galahad had been quietly talking amongst each other, but they fell silent at once when Arthur rose to his feet and let his gaze linger on each of them in turn.

"Lancelot," the king addressed him, "your son and his aunt are seen to?"

The sick feeling had never really abated, and it returned in full force as his thoughts returned to Gwydion's pleading eyes. He had left Aeronwy and the boy with Vanora. Bors' woman saw too much, he knew, but if she suspected that anything was amiss, she would keep it to herself.

"Vanora is looking after them, my liege," he answered and did not miss the tender expression that fleetingly crossed Bors' face. The sharp thorn dug deeper into his heart at the thought of Marian. He was haunted by the sight of her walking away at the gate.

Arthur gave him only the briefest nod before turning to Bors. "Guard the door, Bors. No one leaves the room until this meeting is concluded."

Cei and Lamorak exchanged glances, then turned worried eyes toward their king.

"My liege," Cei said cautiously, "Surely there is no need..."

"There is every need!" Arthur's voice was like the crack of a whip. They could all see the anger and unease in his eyes now. "You call me your king! Yet many of you keep secrets from me while trying to control my hand. You would use me, hide behind my title, yet keep me in the dark." His burning green-eyed gaze lingered on Bedwyr, who squirmed in his seat, and Taliesin. The bard merely returned the look quietly.

"My faith tells me that these things are, if anything, evil sorcery. More than that, it is against anything I have ever learned to believe in the existence of these things. Yet I cannot deny the evidence of my own eyes. So I ask you: What have you not told me?"

Cei and Lamorak looked confused still, but Bedwyr and Taliesin exchanged yet another glance. Then, the latter sighed deeply and placed his hands flat upon the table. He looked like a wraith in the dim light.

"We kept many things from you, your grace, but we did it with good intentions. Therefore, we hope you will allow us to remedy the situation... and find it in your heart to forgive us."

OooOooO

The red-haired Saxon turned the young woman's corpse over with the toe of his boot. Her fine hair, matted on one side with her blood, moved gently in the breeze. Brown eyes stared into nothingness, unseeing and devoid of life.

"Pity," the man commented, "she might have been useful."

Next to him, the demon wearing Morfudd's skin flapped a hand dismissively. "Never, Aldwulf. I know her kind. She would have swallowed her own tongue before opening the way for you. I told you, did I not?"

Aldwulf Fflamdywn bared his teeth at her. "Your advice so far has not been the best, witch. You lost the girl carrying the knight's bastard, Arthur and his queen still live and your... toy... in Camelot is unreliable at best. More likely, he is already a mouldering corpse in the ground. I wonder if should not send you after him."

He turned away and glared at the wall of fog rising beyond the burned remains of the little cabin. If the woman they had slaughtered really had been the only gatekeeper, Avalon lay beyond their reach still, although they had reached the island. It was not the outcome he had been hoping for.

The demon merely smiled at him and placed a gentle hand on his shoulder, ignoring his attempt to shrug her off.

"You caught the Raven, did you not?" she murmured, her lips only a hair's breadth away from the shell of his ear. "If we can clip his wings, our lives will become much easier. As for the child... he was not essential. If we have the means to break him, it would be easier still to go after the father."

The wind began to blow and howl in the trees, scattering apple blossoms everywhere and whipping the embers in the burned out cabin back into flames. Aldwulf Fflamdywn turned and looked down into what looked like Morfudd's eyes. At their feet, the corpse of Carys bore silent witness to the unholy alliance between the sorcerer and the demon.

OooOooO

Lancelot felt sick. The dusty sunlight pushed eager fingers into Arthur's hair, making it seem grey before its time. His face was still and white as bone. At the far side of the table, Tristan was watching the others with inscrutable hazel eyes. He alone seemed somewhat at his ease, his hands clasped loosely on the table in front of him.

Gawain and Galahad kept exchanging glances. They were uncertain, each checking with the other whether or not what they had just heard was to be believed. And Cei and Lamorak looked about as ill as Lancelot felt.

Taliesin had just finished speaking. His brow was glittering with sweat and it was obvious to all that he was in considerable pain. His hands, gripping the table with all his strength, looked like the fingers of a skeleton. Bedwyr had spoken very little, leaving the unpleasant truths to the bard's skilled tongue, yet even for Taliesin's skill, it had been unpleasant.

"You don't believe that utter rubbish, do you?" Bors, still leaning against the doors, feigned disinterest. Lancelot dimly recalled him making fun of a scared Christian's prayer for salvation. Beneath all the bluster, Bors looked quite like that man had back then.

Not that he could blame him. In halting words and with great reluctance, Taliesin had spoken to them of the spirits of the land, of the Old Gods and those, who still followed their ways. He had told them of magic, of demons, and of those who knew how to force or coerce the spirits to do their bidding. He had spoken of those who could see the future, of men who could throw themselves into the air and fly as ravens, and of evil beings that were not of this world, looking for an evil sorcerer to open a path for them.

Arthur had not once interrupted him. He had sat there, unmoving, and waited for the tale to come to an end. Then he got to his feet, slowly, a man defeated but still proud. Lancelot felt his heart constrict. He had grown up amongst a people who believed in the spirits of the land and so he was, while shaken, still somewhat able to grasp what Taliesin had spoken of. Arthur, however, the devout Christian, who had grown up with the teachings of the church and who had always dreamed of Rome, had to be utterly at sea.

Lancelot cast him a questioning look. In that moment, they were brothers again. Arthur understood that he was being offered help, but he shook his head, a nearly imperceptible smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, a private, simple smile meant for Lancelot alone.

"I will speak no more of this," the king announced, "until I have had some time. I trust you all understand. Also...", at this, he leant forward, his hands flat against the tabletop, "I am commanding each and every one of you to keep silent about what you now know." His gaze found Taliesin. "Lancelot, take Taliesin to Gweir's house. The rest of you, go about your business, but be alert. Something is wrong... and it might not be kept out by walls of stone. You, Bedwyr, may go and look for your sister. Bring her to safety."

OooOooO

Marian watched them approach. She saw Lancelot take the barely conscious Taliesin into her father's house and waited. He had seen her, she knew, and he would come. Or he would not. In any case, there was nothing she could do.

It was quiet in this corner of the fortress. She sat only a stone's throw from her father's front door on a low wooden bench and was mending his shirts. Her eyes were itchy and tired, but sleep was an impossibility. Therefore, she might as well keep her hands busy.

For some reason, she felt curiously empty inside. Had someone plucked her heart from her chest and crushed it underfoot when she wasn't looking? Yet she did not feel angry, either. Disappointed, perhaps. Like a child might feel after waking from a lovely dream to discover that the world was quite as before, without streams of honey and never-ending summer.

She should have known. Or at least, she should have guessed. In all the time she had spent with Lancelot, he had never pretended to be something he was not. She had experienced what it might have been like to tumble into his bed, lured by dark eyes and a voice like a caress, and it had only been his insistence that with her it should be different which had stopped him. Different. Other women had tumbled into his bed, then, and why should not one of them end up with child? Lancelot and the women, those were tales often told in the tavern, quite a few of them told by Lancelot himself. It was her fault, really, that she had built him up in her mind to something he wasn't. A shining knight, a virtuous man who only ever desired her...

Marian snorted, cast the half-mended shirt aside and cursed herself an idiot. She had known, before she fell in love with him. He was the deadliest blade in Britain, perhaps only second to Tristan, and he was a known rake! Reality had indeed seen fit to slap her in the face just a little too late.

She did not look up when his footsteps approached. Only when he sat down next to her and she felt his sleeve brush hers did she look up at him.

It was odd that he should still be so beautiful, and yet so utterly changed. He looked tired, she observed passively, with circles under his eyes as dark as bruises. His glossy hair, dark as midnight, had grown quite long and brushed against the collar of his tunic. And those cruel, perfect lips curled into a slight smile. Marian remembered that she had once been afraid of him.

"I told you that I would only bring you grief."

His words hung in the air like wisps of fog, cold and unpleasant. Marian swallowed against the lump in her throat and forced herself to shrug.

"Yes, well... I rather thought you meant you'd die in battle, not bring home a bastard ere our wedding day."

Lancelot laughed, a sharp, unhappy sound.

"Would you rather I'd have done it after? Will there even be one? A wedding day, for you and me."

His voice softened towards the end. Marian thought that he spoke to her like one would speak to a skittish colt. And she found that she had no answer for him.

OooOooO

Arthur sat in his chair, his head bowed and his shoulder slumping as if the weight of the world had just descended on him. It might as well have. Guinevere was watching him quietly from across the room while she brushed her hair.

"You knew about these things, didn't you?" he asked her without looking up. "Magic, demons... evil spirits." He shuddered slightly. Ever since Bedwyr, Taliesin and Tristan had told him about what they had found in the woods and at the lake, a chill had settled deep within him that even the fire in the hearth would not dispel.

"Yes, I knew," Guinevere replied quietly. She put down the brush and walked over to her husband, hands gentle on his hair and her mere presence a better ward against the cold than the fire. "But I am a woad, my love. I am Merlin's daughter. Your Christian god is as strange to me as our believes and magics are to you. We will have to learn together."

Arthur frowned and got to his feet, brushing off her hands.

"Up until now, I never had to doubt my men. We had no secrets from each other. But did you see their faces? Taliesin would have preferred to swallow his own tongue before telling me just what he saw. He still hasn't told me how they caught him in the first place."

"Gwion will tell you," Guinevere answered, although her brow, too, creased in a frown. "He is just now learning to rely on other people. And the same can be said for Bedwyr and Cei and the rest of them. They are not Sarmatian knights, Arthur. They have not been at your side this long."

"And yet they call me king, and at the same time, they keep secrets like this from me. It turns me from king to court jester, and I will not let that happen. I refuse to be a puppet, even for those who call themselves my knights."

He started pacing in front of the fireplace. "How do you fight magic, Guinevere? Can you hurt a demon with a sword? I always considered fighting the spawn of hell to be the providence of God's holy angels."

A sudden noise in the hallway stopped Guinevere from answering. They listened quietly as the sound repeated itself, a strange scraping sound, and then, suddenly, a grunt of pain. The king and queen exchanged a look of alarm and Arthur swiftly strode over to the chest on which his sword lay while Guinevere went for the door. It crashed open before she had reached it and a hulking figure burst through. A dagger glinted in the candlelight, a deadly flash of silver descending towards the queen's neck. Arthur roared in fury and flung himself forward, although he knew he would never reach them in time. But Guinevere, far from helpless herself, had already ducked underneath her attacker's arm and thrust her shoulder into his midsection, while at the same time grasping his wrist with both hands and yanking him forward. The dagger fell from her assailant's grasp and she picked it up. A fist caught her in the side of the head and she saw stars for a moment. Then she turned swiftly and plunged the dagger into the would-be assassin's chest, stabbing him right into the heart, just as Arthur arrived at her side. The whole thing had taken only a few blinks of an eye. The assailant staggered... but he did not fall. He grasped the hilt of the weapon protruding from his body and pulled it out slowly. Before he had finished, Arthur, spurred on by Guinevere's scream of horror, moved again, swinging his sword in a brutal arc that separated the man's head from his shoulders. This time, he fell and stayed down.

As the head rolled across the floor and came to rest in a small pool of light near the open door, the face was finally visible. Guinevere grasped Arthur's shoulder hard enough to bruise.

"It's Eadwig."

...to be continued...