There are days my pain is so elaborate…

that the salt of my tears tastes not of my own

but like that of my ancestors—

and the women who dealt

with this sorrow before me.

~Segovia Amil

Chapter Twenty-Four

Geraint didn't know he'd been asleep until he was abruptly awakened.

He had tossed and turned for a long time, his mind full of many conflicting emotions after the day's conversations and events, and oppressed by an odd sense of being not quite alone. Probably it was only his imagination…but he kept glancing at the lintel of his door, where Angharad's pendant was hidden, worrying that he should find a better place for it - buried, maybe, or behind a loose stone in the wall. When he finally drifted away it had been a restless sort of sleep, a drifting in and out of conscious awareness, a slow shift from the dark silence of his hut to strange and disturbing half-awake dreams, full of images of fire and flood. He thought himself trapped inside a ring of giant stones, pinched and prodded by invisible hands, dragged into the earth by eldritch creatures who retreated, shrieking horribly, as a great tremor shook the ground. He awoke with a shout and sat up in a panic; the noise of the tremor was still going on…no, it wasn't. Someone was beating at his door.

Angharad's voice called frantically and he scrambled off his pallet and stumbled, clumsy with sleep, to the door, which he flung open, immediately flinching backwards with a cry of surprise. Angharad it was, glowing in the light of her golden sphere, looking almost as wildly desperate as the first night she'd come here — but she was flanked by her sister and another woman, a stranger. Instantly he was conscious that he was clad in nothing but his leggings, and he backed away in panicked embarrassment, swiping at the ground for his shirt and stuttering apologies.

Angharad swept breathlessly into the hut and threw her arms around him. "Oh, thank goodness," she exclaimed, inexplicably, and then released him with barely a glance; she turned to the doorway and reached over the lintel, swept her hand across its edge and pulled down the small parcel of linen. The other two women followed her inside somewhat more sedately; Eilwen grinned at him as he fumbled with his shirt, whose inside-out dishevelment remained stubbornly uncooperative with his awkward efforts to don it. "Well-met again, Geraint of Gallau," she purred.

"Indeed, milady," he stammered, wishing the floor would swallow him. "I am honored."

Her gaze scanned the entirety of him with obvious approval. "Don't feel you have to dress on our account."

"Eilwen," the older woman reproved mildly. Geraint dared to glance at her, and pieced her identity together in a quick succession of observations: tall and stately, dark-haired and clear-eyed, suffused with a mature, serene beauty of middle age despite being rather windblown at the moment. The set of her mouth and the arch of her brows reminded him strongly of Angharad's, but the softness in her face made him sure he did not look upon the queen. The aunt, then, the priestess. He averted his eyes from her face at once, and bowed.

"Angharad," the woman said, with a solemnity that did not altogether mask a touch of amusement, "would you kindly present me to our host."

Angharad, engaged in untangling the silver chain from its wrappings, looked up, startled. "Oh. I—oh! Geraint of Gallau." Her face colored as she registered his state of undress for apparently the first time. "My aunt, Arianrhod, Daughter of Llyr and High Priestess of Rhiannon."

"Well-met and welcome, my lady," Geraint murmured, without rising; Arianrhod stepped forward, reached out and tipped his chin up.

"You may look at me," she said quietly, without condescension. "Stand up, my dear. Well-met, indeed, Geraint of Gellau. I have heard much of you, and would that we had met under less intrusive circumstances. Forgive us for this, and be at your ease. Though by all means," she added, with a sideways glance at Eilwen and a humorous quirk of her mouth, "put your shirt on."

Rather awed, he hastened to comply, conscious of Eilwen's disappointed sigh, and restored himself to decency as Angharad turned to him and blurted out, "I'm sorry to have woken you. It was rather urgent."

Geraint shook his head, baffled. "So I guessed. I wasn't asleep, not deeply. I can't explain it, but…I felt as though it was watching me." He indicated the pendant in her hand with a nod. "Odd, I know, but…I couldn't shake it off. It made me restless."

The women exchanged significant glances. "Did anything strange happen?" Angharad asked him tensely.

He glanced at each, subconsciously sensing the charged atmosphere that hung about them, his curiosity piqued by the uniqueness of the situation. He had an odd sensation that the little hut was not large enough to hold them all. "No," he said slowly, "nothing. Though I assume this surprise visit means you expected otherwise."

Angharad looked upon the pendant clutched in her hand with wary curiosity, as though she had never seen it before. "I don't know what we expected," she sighed, a sound of mingled frustration and fear.

Eilwen had removed her cloak and thrown it over his stool; from somewhere beneath it she produced a large book, leather-bound. "You never apologized for waking me up," she remarked to her sister, "and I didn't get dragged out here in the middle of the blessed night just to admire the view - delightful though it is," she added, with a wink at Geraint. "Come, let's get to work."

"Outside," Arianrhod directed decidedly, "and to the sand. It's far too close in here."

They filed out, and Geraint followed as Angharad bade him with a silent backward glance. She paused outside the door to wait for him, taking his hand and drawing close to him as the little party moved toward the beach. There was unmistakable tension in her arm and shoulder, in the tightness of her grip. "What is it?" he whispered. "What is all this about?"

Angharad shook her head. "I don't even know where to begin. But I'll explain once we know more. In a moment, I hope."

Arianrhod halted at a stretch of smooth sand just before the reach of the lapping waves, crouched low, and laid her hands upon the ground. The sand shifted itself around her contact, folding into rippling patterns that spread out in a symmetrical design, sinuous and intricate, as though drawn by an invisible hand. Geraint stopped short at the sight, the hair on his arms and the back of his neck prickling with unease. Angharad squeezed his hand. "It's all right," she whispered.

"I'm sure it is," he whispered back, "but it's uncanny, if you aren't used to it."

Eilwen, materializing on his other side, tossed him a saucy half-smile as she passed them. "If that bothered you, you'd best back up and sit down for the rest." She hesitated, looking at the symbol, and glancing around it. "There's nowhere to put the book, Aunt."

Arianrhod motioned toward them. "We need the jewel in the center. Let him hold the book and the Pelydryn."

Geraint felt Angharad stiffen and she glanced at him, exclaiming, "Can he?"

"We've no stand. It's unusual, but I don't think it will harm anything. Or him," Arianrhod added, as if it were an afterthought. "He is favored."

Before he quite knew what was happening, Geraint found himself pulled forward. Eilwen pushed the open book into his elbow and he clutched it automatically, looking down at its blank pages in surprise. Angharad faced him, chewing anxiously at her lip. "Are you willing? I won't command this of you. We can find some other way."

"What am I agreeing to?" he asked, bewildered.

A little amusement broke through her anxiety. "Only to hold the book and the light. Our hands will be full. It won't be dangerous, just...strange to you."

"I'll do whatever you need," he murmured, and the quick flicker in her eyes told him she heard every layer beneath the words. Her hand in his shifted, and a cool, smooth sphere was pressed into his palm. He held it up curiously as she cupped his hand in both of hers, and the warm golden light bloomed between them like a miniature sun.

"Just hold it here," she instructed, positioning his hand; he glanced down and exclaimed in surprise. The book's previously blank pages, illuminated, were now thick with scrawled text, none of it comprehensible to him.

"How—," he began, but she shushed him.

"Don't speak. And don't move, no matter what happens. I'll tell you when it's safe." She turned pages searchingly. Arianrhod and Eilwen crowded in, their gazes upon the book. The air around them felt so charged he would not have been shocked if sparks had crackled from their hair and clothing.

"That one," Arianrhod said presently, and the page-turning halted. They all looked thoughtful, scanning it, murmuring affirmation, and Angharad held up the silver chain, the crescent rotating at its end, winking in the moonlight. She laid it in the center of the symbol in the sand, and the three of them gathered around it, joining hands.

What followed seemed to Geraint, forever after, like the recall of a vivid dream; moments of intense color and sensation haphazardly broken by spaces filled with the certainty that something had happened, but with no memory of what. He knew Angharad had given him one more very long look, her finger pressed over her lips in a reminder of his silence. He heard their three voices chanting strange words, had a vague sense that the sound of the surf nearby had changed in response, though he could not have articulated what that change was, any more than he could have described the nature of their speech. Light flowed and ebbed in dizzying patterns, now blinding him with brightness, now with its total absence. Vibrations buzzed beneath his feet, and he thought once that the tide had suddenly engulfed them all and submerged them, but before he could panic the sensation was gone and he was blinking confusedly at the ground, where the pattern in the sand had changed. From the silver pendant, a line of light spiraled, stretching outward until it parted into arms that reached for the two other spirals that had appeared near it. He started with recognition; it was the same symbol Angharad had drawn for him, many days ago.

The chanting had stopped, and a significant, weighted silence took its place. Geraint glanced at each woman's face in turn; in the strange and unearthly light they seemed almost identical, their colors bled out, features altered into masks of power, terribly beautiful, terrifyingly severe. His head swam dizzily, and a primitive, visceral instinct made him drop, without thought, to his knees.

The movement seemed to startle Angharad awake; she shook herself and broke away from the triad, dropping her companions' hands and crouching beside him, calling his name. She took his face in her hands and turned it, and when he looked at her she was herself again, familiar, forehead furrowed in concern. He blinked, feeling a little sheepish, and stammered out, "I...I'm sorry...I'm all right, just..."

"Overwhelmed," Eilwen interrupted, from nearby. "You did well, for a novice." He looked up to see both the others likewise transformed to their everyday - he could not truthfully call it ordinary - appearance, and Eilwen's cheeky grin flashed briefly before she turned to Arianrhod. "What do you think? Confirmation, isn't it?"

Angharad stood up, but her hand stayed on his head, pressing it protectively against her side, and Geraint curled an arm around her hips, breathing in the scent of her: warm and comforting and human, whatever she had been a moment ago. Arianrhod, about to speak, seemed to hesitate as she glanced at them both. "It is," she affirmed at last, "confirmation. But not direction. And now we must choose one, with little to go on."

"There is only one that makes any sense," Angharad said, with a tension in her voice and figure that told him she expected an argument, "and that is to consult the gwyllion. We've danced around it enough. It must be done, and soon. The only question is who will go."

"And whether to tell Mother," Eilwen added soberly, but Arianrhod was shaking her head, looking distressed.

"She must not know. She must not be told any of this." She knelt to retrieve the pendant. The spiraling light in the sand vanished the instant the jewel left the ground, and the woman cupped it in her hand reverently. "Dagrau Rhiannon," she whispered, gesturing with one hand to her breast. "How could we have forgotten?"

"Perhaps we were meant to," Angharad said. "This is only one of them. If there really are three, imagine the power of them joined. It could be dangerous beyond imagining."

"We don't know what this one does," Eilwen remarked flippantly, "besides make you dream in riddles. For all we know the three of them together might do no more than make rabbits out of raindrops. I'm not saying it's likely," she added, at a frown from the High Priestess, "but it's possible."

Geraint stirred, and Angharad shifted as he rose to his feet, leaning into him unconsciously. He gazed at the gem glittering in Arianrhod's hand, piecing things together. "I take it," he murmured, "this is the thing that treaty was intended to protect?"

"Yes. That is...it's what the Fair Folk were guarding at Pentre Gwyllion, we think," Angharad answered, as the other two woman looked at him in surprise - at speaking of all of it so openly to him, he assumed. Angharad fielded their looks with a slightly obstinate frown. "Or part of it. What we just did was a spell to reveal a thing's true nature, and the result was clear, when you take my dream into account. This is one of the Dagrau. But we still don't know what it does, or where the other two are. Only that they may be something Arawn wants, and that is why he's attacking us, according to Achren. And I'm sure he's not hoping to make rabbits," she added scathingly in her sister's direction. Eilwen rolled her eyes and shrugged.

Geraint winced. "Then Achren is here."

"She was at the castle when I returned this evening," Angharad said flatly, "and I'd rather not talk about it, to be honest. It wasn't pleasant, and if you never meet her, count yourself fortunate enough." She sighed, and squinted, rubbing her temples. "But it's not a total loss. I don't think we would have solved any of this without her information."

"Does she know of this?" Geraint asked in alarm.

"No. Nor does my—," Angharad paused, and turned a puzzled frown upon her aunt. "Why do you say Mother must not be told? It is not what you said before."

Arianrhod looked gravely at the pendant, her face a mix of reverence and worry. "That was before I knew your dream...before we even suspected what we had." She clasped the jewel against her chest, her eyes glittering with unshed tears. "Oh, my dears. We are at war, and war is not the domain of Rhiannon. She is life and love, birth and healing." She shook her head. "I do not know the power or purpose of this jewel, but it is a gift from the goddess, and to use it as a weapon would be blasphemous, would twist its nature. It must not be used for such work, but...I know my sister," she sighed. "Regat would seek a way to utilize its power in our current struggle. She cannot be allowed."

Angharad twitched. "There is Achren, too," she pointed out. "The more who know, the more opportunities she has to dig it out. Mother mayn't have been lying when she told her we had no other power, but she wasn't exactly honest either, and Achren suspected it."

"Liars believe no one," Geraint muttered an old bardic quip. He hadn't meant to say it aloud, and when three pairs of raised eyebrows turned toward him he cleared his throat hastily, his ears growing hot. "Sorry. So...this thing is powerful, then. And you hope that the Fair Folk can explain it somehow?"

Angharad nodded. "They gave it to Mother at her wedding. She had it set in my pendant at my ascendancy — the crown heir always has something unique to mark her symbol, by tradition, but she apparently wasn't aware of the significance, and still isn't. But this is also, we think, the thing my grandfather was searching out, that got him banished. Why would they give us something they'd accused him of trying to steal? After practically starting a war over it?" She paced, voice rising angrily, and he knew the questions were rhetorical, but they ate at him with a burning curiosity equal to her agitation.

"And we can't just go ask them about it!" she continued, almost shouting it. Arianrhod and Eilwen both held their hands up in calming gestures, as though there might be Tylwyth Teg hiding in nooks and crannies nearby to overhear and take offense. "We're left with nothing but questions because they've arranged an agreement that forbids anyone from contacting them!"

"No it doesn't," Geraint reminded her, "it just forbids any of you."

Angharad stopped short, glaring at him in consternation at being directly contradicted. "Well," she sputtered, after a moment, "yes, all right. But it makes no difference for—,"

"I could go to them for you," he interrupted quietly.

Silence. Angharad, after a second's careless dismissal, froze as his words fell into a void, uncontested by anyone. Her mind attempted to wrap around them. She felt her own heart beat...once...twice...like slow, painful steps taken through ice water. Dread fell over her in a suffocating cloak. "No, you couldn't," she declared — too quickly, too decidedly to mask the fear behind the words. "Don't be ridiculous; you...you aren't..."

"I do not fear the gwyllion," Geraint answered; he spoke as a man would to an unbroken colt, low and steady, and it frightened her even more, this solid, dispassionate reasoning. "I want no Fair Folk treasure, and I am no descendant of Llyr. They can accuse me of nothing."

"They may try," Arianrhod said unexpectedly.

Angharad whirled around to her, stunned at the implied agreement, in disbelief. What was happening? How was it even under consideration? "They will not. He's not going. It's not his affair. It's nothing to do with him," she exclaimed, stepping in front of Geraint protectively.

Arianrhod hesitated, obviously unwilling to speak. Her voice caught and wavered, but she forced out the words. "It does seem a strange choice, yet... consider it, dearest. If there is anyone more qualified to act as your ambassador and also fulfill the terms of the agreement, I cannot imagine who. He seems to know most of the details of the matter. And certainly he has a personal interest - more so than any of our other allies, who are too far away to be of use for some time, even if it were possible to contact them, even if they are willing."

Such plain terms, stark and practical; like a butcher's diagram for carving up a heart. "You know it's too dangerous," Angharad gasped out. "He has no knowledge of how to deal with them." Geraint's hands closed over her arms; she felt his solid warmth at her back.

"I have as much experience with them as any of you," he muttered, "which is none. But knowledge of them I do have, and the wit to match them, perhaps...at least to try."

"And if you failed?" She twisted around to face him again, in anguish at his obstinacy. How could he stand here calmly arguing for his own potential doom? Not counting her grandfather's fate, the gwyllion were said to devour unwary mortals: only one of many denizens of the Folk with a reputation more foul than fair. Even among those whose names were not feared, the truce between their realm and that of humans had always been an uneasy one, subject to the caprice of creatures to whom human standards of goodness and decency were alien. Suddenly she sympathized with her mother for shunning them and all their work.

"If you believe so much in all your stories, you know also what is said of them. Their distrust of us, and their senseless malice," she burst out, gripping his shirt and nearly shaking him in her passion. "If you never return we will have gained nothing, and I will never know—," Angharad broke off, the words choking her, threatening to burst out into sobs. "I will not allow it," she insisted, when her voice returned, forcing its way out with a vengeance. "You owe nothing to this land or its people to put yourself at such risk."

He stood unmoving, and his eyes drowned her in heartbreak. "I would do it," he whispered, "not for them, but for you."

"You cannot," she cried hoarsely. "These are matters for those who understand magic, who know our history, who can—,"

"Angharad," he sighed.

"No." She wielded the word like a lash, in sudden fury, pushing him away. "I will not lose you to them." She turned again to her family, commanding frantically, "Tell him. Tell him it it is madness."

Eilwen and Arianrhod looked from her to him and back again, and glanced at each other; their expressions, grave and silent, spoke for them, in a shattering cacophony. No help from that quarter; only betrayal; for all their talk of love, now they would willingly make a sacrifice of him, of her own happiness. Fear and rage choked her, pulled themselves from her throat in a wordless, broken sound of despair; she tore away from them all and stumbled across the sand blindly, toward the water. Waves of blazing grief shook her and she tossed them to the sides, heedless, leaving a trail of incinerated sea grass smoldering in her wake until there was nothing left to burn.

The cold shock of seawater engulfing her feet made her gasp, but she pushed forward instinctively, without willing away the waves. The water was too yielding, too welcoming; she gathered up her passion like a net and flung it around her until the sea churned, the swells rising up in walls that threatened to topple toward her in a reckless, destructive collapse. Let them! Let them pound her to oblivion, along with everything else that had forsaken her. She screamed into the depths, drowning her pain beneath the roar of the water.

Geraint's arms locked around her from behind; she struggled against them like a caged animal. A single gesture and she could have wound him in water and swept him away, but her anger broke within his grasp, shattered like foam against the cliffs, and she had no strength, in body or will, to effect more than a perfunctory resistance. He pulled her backward, fighting the sucking draw of the current, her name tumbling from his lips like a prayer, over and over, a ward against the thunder and crash of spray. Dimly she felt the movement and shape of magic that was not her own, and knew that Eilwen and Arianrhod had stepped into the water also, calming its fury, quelling its power; saving her, unbidden, from herself.

Geraint dragged her bodily to the solid ground and collapsed to his knees; she tumbled alongside, sand scraping ankles and knees as she fell against him, clutching blindly at his shirt, his shoulders, sobbing. He rocked her like a mother with an infant, arms secure, breathing broken things into her hair.

"I won't go...if you can't let me...I won't. I won't leave...I swear it...Angharad. We'll find some other way."

She shook, and shut her eyes, but the truth stared at her, even in the darkness. She had burned through her own defenses, her energy spent; she had nothing left to fend it off. There is no other way.

None that served their need so well. Everything Arianrhod had said was true, more even than her aunt knew; he was as bound to her as her own breath, his presence in any place the closest thing to her own. If her gem indeed bore the essence of Rhiannon, no man had more right to discover its secrets than he who had awakened that same spirit within her. If someone must go to Pentre Gwyllion...and it could not be one of Llyr, lest they break faith with the Fair Folk...then it must be he.

Geraint would go, of his own volition. He would walk into peril, to creatures that could devour him if they pleased, or drag him into their realm in thrall forever. He would take her heart with him, and if he never returned, she would have to live without it, somehow.

She shivered and grew still, and cold, and silent, thinking. No heart. Nothing to break, when she had to stand and pledge herself to another man. Nothing to pain her, for whatever interminable time followed. It might be easier, really, to live without a heart.

Her mother had done it for years.

Welp.

Sorry about the wait on that one.

But I hope the intensity makes up for it.

Will try to get back into a predictable rhythm now that holidays are past. I have great inspiration and motivation just now, so high hopes. My gratitude to those who have continued to review and correspond over this - you know who you are - which really keeps me in the groove - and on that note, if you have been reviewing and NOT getting my responses, check your inbox on site, because I have not been receiving email alerts of private messages, and I believe the same glitch is occurring for others as well.

Also, for those who follow me but not other authors, a shout-out for those who enjoy the Gwydion/Achren pairing (or even find it the least bit intriguing) to go check the work of ZosiaDetroit, who has a new story in that category that is excellent - be aware, it is M-rated so it doesn't show up in the general category unless you change your filters. It's nothing I'd be embarrassed to show my grandmother, but then my grandmother was pretty badass. And though I've never been much of a Gwydachren shipper except in some AU realm, Zosia makes that realm very plausible, and undeniably...*cough* tempting. Great read.

On to further adventure...