Never ever mistake her silence for weakness,

Remember that sometimes the air stills,

Before the onset of a hurricane.

~Nikita Gill


Chapter Twenty-Eight

Angharad paced before her hearth, reading over and over the strange scrawling on the page she held…the page she had slid from beneath the stack of documents where Regat had hidden it, snatched while her mother had spoken with the boy at the door and hastily folded into a pocket of her gown. Arianrhod had seen her, of course, holding her eyes until her mother had turned back around. Angharad had known she would follow her, and waited in her chambers for her aunt's soft knock, which came within minutes. The princess let her in, and held out the parchment without a word, waiting for confirmation of what she already knew.

"Father's notes. Oh, Llyr. She told me they were gone." Arianrhod's grey eyes filled with tears, but sentiment did not override swift understanding as she took the page and scanned it. Her eye flew immediately to the same symbol that had caught Angharad's attention in the first place. "The sign, Angharad!" She traced the three-spiraled knot, inked in the center of the page, surrounded by twelve dark blobs and scribbled runes. "Dagrau Rhiannon. He knew."

"I'm not sure," Angharad said. "The name appears nowhere, and remember, I had visions of this symbol before we ever knew what it meant. But somehow, he was onto something. Look at this." She pointed to a set of lines in the margins, clearly grouped to be verse, and read aloud:

The bones of Llyr, enthroned,

in the stones of Llyr, entombed,

Only the blood of Llyr

Can for his shame atone.

Cleave the tomb;

The fruitful womb

Shall bring Llyr home.

"It does look as though he was trying to break into the king's barrow." She shook her head, in mingled reverence and disbelief, and laid the parchment down again. "'His shame' — surely that refers to the desecration of his body." She was pacing now, scuffling the carpet in front of her hearth, unseeing, turned inward. "And if the Dagrau really are Rhiannon's tears, well, she wept over that, so the story goes; perhaps that's how they came about. But this bit about bringing him home. Do you think your father intended to…to bring his bones back, somehow? Lay him to rest properly? It's rather a noble thought, but maybe he only wanted the gems, and there's nothing about them, except the symbol. It's all so muddled." She threw her hands up in confusion. "And 'fruitful womb?' That sounds like your jurisdiction. What do you make of it?"

Arianrhod was holding the page, but seemed to be seeing something far away. "Such language," she murmured, "nearly always denotes either the goddess, or the sea. But how it is all connected…I don't know," she admitted, with a sigh. "If only we could see the rest of it! Surely he had more than this."

"He did. There were several pages with this handwriting, but I didn't realize what I was looking at until I saw this symbol. I didn't dare take more than this one."

"Best keep it hidden," Arianrhod sighed. "I wish I'd thought to press her a bit harder. That was clever thinking, about your dream," she added. "You did not really dream all that, did you?"

Angharad waved a hand impatiently. "No, of course not; I would have told you. When I saw what she was looking into, I thought perhaps I could throw her off. The last thing we need is her sending her own emissaries to Pentre Gwyllion. I only hope she doesn't miss this one page. Look how she reacted when she saw me holding it. She doesn't want to discuss any of it; that's certain; it wouldn't have done any good to ask her about the rest." She sat on her couch before the hearth, troubled. "I don't like to keep lying to her, Aunt."

"Nor I," Arianrhod said, shaking her head, "but needs must. I hope it will not be for much longer. From certain things she said after you left, I think you were successful, at least, in turning her from the path of investigating that place." She sat next to Angharad, resting an arm around her shoulders. "How are you managing, love?"

Angharad shrugged. The fear and grief that had split her heart asunder gnawed at her, crouching always in the corner of her mind, whispering sinister and despairing predictions. She felt paper-thin and dried-up, with no energy left for tears or for hope. "I got up this morning. I suppose that's something."

Her aunt squeezed her shoulders. "It's far too soon for him to have returned today, you know, even if everything's gone well."

"I know."

"And there's no reason to assume it hasn't."

"No."

"Then you needn't ride to the shore yet. We have plenty of supplies. Come down to the grove and let the girls minister to you."

Angharad mulled this prospect over: the plucked harps and herbed wine, the perfumed bath and the soothing rubdown, the meticulous grooming of hair and skin. She found she had no heart for it now. "No. Thank you. I want to keep thinking about this. Just…burn some extra grass for me."

Arianrhod sighed. "Where is Elen? I don't like leaving you alone."

"In the solar, weaving or some such thing. I made her go. She fussed so much about it all yesterday I thought she'd be ill, and the hour she spent on my hair made both of us cross. She needs a rest from me. Don't worry. I'll send for her before I do anything terribly stupid, so she can scold me out of it."

"Very well." Her aunt stood, mouth twitching a little, no doubt in relief at the spark in her tone. "I must get back. Try to rest more before tonight if you can manage it. I daresay whatever Achren has in mind, even if it's effective, won't be pleasant for us."

Angharad chewed her lip and nodded silently, and after Arianrhod left she draped herself over the couch, picked up the parchment again and stared at the scratches and scrawls of ink.

Only the blood of Llyr could atone. Yet the blood of Llyr was forbidden to enter. Why?

And did it even matter? Perhaps it was all a distraction when they needed to be focused on Arawn. Perhaps he wasn't trying to get to the gem at all but something else. Or perhaps Achren was lying, as everyone knew she might.

Pushing the precious page out of sight beneath the couch, she laid her head wearily on her elbow and stared into the fire, both dreading and desiring sleep. What little she had managed since the previous day had been laden with strange dreams, vivid and disturbing, yet none that showed her the one thing she desperately wanted to see.

Geraint would be in Pentre Gwyllion by now if he were anywhere.

What was happening to him?


A silver blade flashed in the darkness. Angharad recoiled, shutting out the sight. The grip on her hands tightened, and she opened her eyes again, staring straight ahead, forcing herself to concentrate. Her mother and aunt were focused on Achren, who stood in their midst upon the tower, holding her right hand high. A dark rivulet dripped from her closed fist into the bowl upon the altar. In the colorless light of an almost-full moon, blood was as black as ink.

There were pebbles and earth in the bowl, the haul the page boy had brought for the queen's inspection earlier. Freshly-turned from their own fields, the soil was dark and rich, smelling of dampness and the promise of life and growth. The drops sizzled upon it when they landed, and the smell changed, roiled into a nauseating combination of blood and earth and molten metal. Angharad stared at it in horror, wondering what, exactly, was being wrought. The strange magic seemed to pool in the bowl, drift over its sides, invisible but tangible to her mind, mingling itself into the soil, binding to its stones and earth like ligaments to bone.

The earth of Llyr, she thought. The bones of Llyr…fearfully, she pushed the thought away. She could not think of that now; this process needed all her strength and attention.

Achren muttered words in a strange tongue, her eyes shut, head thrown back. Her hands traced patterns in the air, left a smear of ghostly light behind them that lingered on for seconds after. Long nails clawed into the earth in the bowl, brought up a fistful and held it before her, entwined in glowing strands. Magic pulsed on every side, so thick and potent it felt like a solid thing one could reach out and touch, manipulate like clay. It strained against the boundary placed around it, seeking a weakness.

The fistful of earth returned to the bowl and Achren crushed it flat. She clapped once, and then in a broad sweep of her full black sleeves, gestured out and down. The air crackled; the magic, invisible, swept outward. Angharad felt it dive into the stones of Caer Colur as though they were a channel, roaring down though the castle foundations and into the surrounding earth, spreading out in ringed waves of power. The floor trembled beneath them and from below, there were startled shouts from more than one sentry on the walls. A rumble like distant thunder rose up from every direction.

Words of power rang upon the air as the woman before her bent over the bowl, her hands, now trembling, gripped its sides briefly as though for balance and then plunged into the earth it held, compressing, compelling. Angharad gasped; knew the very foundations of the island shifted, for the gnawing fires were being forced down, away, out into the surrounding sea, a thing she felt in entirety of mind and body. The water roared at the intrusion, churned into clouds of vapor and steam, writhed up in swells and smashed against the cliffs in fury all over the coast; she saw it, in her mind's eye, felt the impact in her lungs and her gut and her knees and her very soul, felt it in the stunned terror and instant annihilation of untold numbers of small and voiceless creatures of the depths, in the screams of seal and dolphin and whale. The outraged sea deafened her and she nearly dropped to her knees, numb with horror, for endless seconds that seemed each to hold an eternity.

"Mind the water," Regat's voice pealed out, deep and sharp and sudden. "It will move toward the mainland. We must turn it back."

In a whirl of realization Angharad turned her attention, following the command; she felt the disturbance in the sea, the roiling, crushing weight of water suddenly displaced, moving as its law demanded; out, away; it was rolling toward their neighbor in a wave of obliteration.

She felt, in their sympathetic connection, the shock and dismay that poured from her aunt, her mother's instant and expert gathering up of power; their own power, fluid-quick, strong and sweet. It filled her up, and she joined her own mind to it, pushed her will into it and let it surround her. Their arms rose; they spoke words she knew well, though had never used; words that spread a spiraling wall of magic through the water, haltering its force. It was strong but it obeyed them, for they sought not to halt but merely to guide; they channeled it, turned it, pushed it north toward the open sea and released it, and the wave passed on like a ripple, undetected beneath the infinite depths.

And then she was being pulled back, and back, her feet upon stone, her body upon the tower. Angharad returned to herself with a gasp of exertion. Achren stood amidst them bent over the wooden bowl, her head bowed, face hidden within the silver curtain of her hair. They all breathed heavily, like those who have just run a long race.

No one moved or spoke. Below them, the concerned voices of sentries were joined by the sound of slammed doors and a few cries of alarm, as members of the household ran out into the courtyards to see what had happened. Finally Regat loosed her hands from the others.

"Is it done?" she asked heavily.

Achren's white face rose up, her eyes heavy-lidded and hollow. She still strained to catch her breath. "The rifts are sealed, for now. I do not assure you that the battle is over. He will recognize my work, and what he will do remains to be seen."

"You did not warn us that the effects would be so violent," Regat said, obviously displeased.

Achren shrugged, with the look of one too exhausted for argument. "You did not ask. I cannot predict or control all aspects of the process. The ramifications are what they are."

There was a note of faint, vindictive satisfaction in the words. The queen's mouth formed a thin, hard line at it, but she did not dwell on the matter. "I see. Then for whatever we have gained," she said grimly, as though unconvinced it was much, "I thank you. I would ask that you remain on until we see what, if anything, he attempts next."

"Of course," said Achren, her voice regaining a bit of its customary silk. "I do have vested interest, as it were." Angharad bristled at this, but at a glance from Regat, bit back the impulsive words at her lips. Achren noticed her agitation, and deliberately stepped close to her as she exited the circle, favoring her with a slow and contemplative smile that boded nothing pleasant. Angharad turned away from her contemptuously, masking her unease.

"What was the nature of that spell?" Regat demanded, as Achren moved to the edge of the parapet to look down, pulling her hood over her face to hide it from anyone who might look up from the courtyard. "It was nothing I have ever encountered."

"No," said Achren diffidently. "No, you wouldn't have. Only one native to this land could wield it, and you are aliens, sojourners of old."

"Llyr has borne us for two hundred years," Angharad retorted. "Your definition of 'native' is rather narrow, is it not?"

Achren did not deign to look at her. "Your common people are bound to the island," she acknowledged, "more, with every passing generation, as they mingle with their neighbors. But you Daughters are yet the Sea-people, a race apart, and none of your breeding with foreign magicians has yet tied your blood to this earth as deeply as mine. Indeed, no amount of it could. As you are bound to the sea, so I am bound to the land."

She turned to gaze back toward the east, motioned toward it with one arm. "Prydain is the land of my ancestors. Once, my family ruled it from mountain to sea, before came the invaders whose descendants still spread their accursed seed upon it. Its very bones," she said, "remember me. This island is formed from the earth at its edges. Once it was a part of Mona; now separate but kin. It recognizes me also, and heeds my commands, as the sea obeys yours.

"You should be glad of it," she added, with a little smile of mocking triumph, turning to look Regat in the face, "for with that spell I tied myself to your terms more securely than your own magic could. My magic is now bound to the island; my blood runs in its veins. So you see it is in my interest more than ever to aid you, for whatever befalls it will have its effect upon me."

Angharad exchanged an alarmed glance with Arianrhod, and saw her aunt perform a quick and subtle charm against fear, a furtive flash of her pale fingers in the air. Achren's words seemed to weave another spell, subtler and darker, over them all, as the implications behind them began to surface. Why would she bind herself like this?

A seat at the table. It was no bluff. Achren clearly believed what she had told them— there was no other explanation for her committing herself to something that could cost her so dear. And if the future she foretold indeed came to pass…Llyr, what have we done?

Such binding spells always worked both ways; as Achren might share in the fate of the island, so would Llyr share in hers. In which case this woman, under their noses — nay, with their permission! — had just made it imperative that they protect and defend her under every circumstance, or watch their kingdom succumb to whatever fate was meted out upon her. It rendered Regat's former terms useless — no matter what Achren did now, with their leave or without, they could not afford to allow her to reap the consequences.

Angharad looked at her mother, knew by her expression that she shared the same thoughts. Regat said nothing; her face went white, then hard and blank as stone. She would not, Angharad knew, give Achren the satisfaction of seeing her react to having her own terms so turned back upon her — for all the good such pride had done them and would do them still.

The princess backed against the altar and leaned on it dizzily.

A future hovered before her, its dark possibilities already apparent. A woman who did not age could bide her time until her prediction came to fruition, and then it would be what Achren demanded: a seat at the right hand of the High Queen she prophesied, a voice in her ear, a hand at her wrist…a noose around her neck.

She almost laughed, in bitter irony, at how neatly they had been snared.


I'd love to put something pithy here, but my brain is too punch-drunk with disaster prepping and doomsday scenarios. Which is, perhaps, appropriate for this part of the story. Hope it distracts everyone at least a little. Stay alive another week folks!