Deathly cold was the night Gaius rode from Cair Mora, the castle of the Duke of Tintagel, with only one knight of Camelot for company. The full moon blazed in the cloudless sky, flooding the land with a harsh white light. Look well, it seemed to say to the physician, see clearly what you are about to do.
The babe was sleeping, swaddled and heavily bundled against the chill, full of mother's milk and soothing herbs. It had been unwise to let Duchess Vivian take the child to breast, Sir Lionel had protested, but Gaius had allowed it anyway. A hungry infant was more likely to cry and bring unwanted attention, he had argued, and they could not afford a wet nurse. The fewer people who knew of the king's indiscretion, the fewer loose ends there would be to tie up.
Duke Gorlois had been away on campaign for so long that none thought it strange for his lady wife to reduce the size of her household. She had concealed her belly easily enough for the first few months, and then sealed herself in her quarters, complaining of a wasting sickness. The size of her staff had dwindled yet further, and she had turned away all visitors. But she could not turn away the king and the royal physician, not when word of her supposed illness had escaped to them.
Duchess Vivian and the king had grown unwary. Their most recent tryst had been poorly timed, and Gorlois had been away for too long for his wife to be with child now.
How many times had Gaius warned Uther?
"Sire, Duke Gorlois has been one of your truest allies and closest friends. He has fought for you all his life. You owe the security of your western coast, and the integrity of your kingdom, to him. Your obsession for his wife does not become you, neither as a man nor a king."
"Enough. You are my physician, Gaius, not my conscience."
"Then let me speak as your advisor. Gorlois is an important vassal. He brings many barons and knights to your cause. Any insult to their lord's honour will turn them against you. Further, Vivian Du Bois is of an old House, more powerful even than Gorlois'. Her elder brother Tristan covers himself with glory in the Holy Land. The younger brother Agravaine rises in the court of the King of Mercia. The younger sister Ygraine studies to take the veil, and will be Abbess of a great convent in the Church. What will this House do when they discover how you have besmirched their honour?"
"The Duchess consented-"
"After you had sent her husband to the front lines, and threatened to divert his reinforcements. She warmed your bed to save her husband's life. Is this honourable, is this knightly?"
"Enough, Gaius! Speak to me of solutions, or not at all! You could not even persuade Vivian to empty her belly. That damned fool of a woman will be the one to hang should this come out. Her husband cannot touch me. Had you done as I instructed and given a draught to one of her chambermaids-"
It was Gaius' turn to interrupt. "I am a physician, sire! I will not destroy an unborn life if the woman will not consent to it!"
"Then you will deal with the consequences. Vivian is convinced the child will be a girl, and her intuitions on such women's matters are usually correct. I have persuaded her that the infant will be sent to a convent far away, never to know its true provenance. She will deliver the babe into your care. She will trust you, because of your physician's oath. You will see to it that the child meets a peaceful end along the way."
"Sire-"
"It is decided. Sir Lionel will accompany you. You can give the babe a draught, to make it sleep and never wake, or it can be done by the sword. The choice is yours."
The choice had always been Gaius'. He had chosen to follow Uther, even when the man had taken Camelot by force from his father and brothers. That was how the Dragon Kings had claimed their throne of old: by wresting it from their kin. In recent memory, some of them had softened, adopting the fashion of primogeniture from the nations in the South. Uther's grandfather King Brys had been such a one, naming his eldest son Aragal an heir apparent while still living, and setting the younger sons to peaceful occupations where they could not threaten the crown prince.
But King Aragal, Uther's father, had favoured the old way. Like their ancestors, like the Caesars and Franks, he did not name one son alone his heir, but thought to split his empire between all his children. His successor would be whichever son emerged as stronger than the others.
And Uther had been stronger than anyone had predicted. He was a throwback to the warrior kings who had founded the Pendragon line. His ambition and bloodlust, once awakened, could not be doused. He had not been satisfied to humble his brothers and give them minor estates, or to send them into exile. He had destroyed their forces and hunted them down, one by one, and butchered them with their wives and children. And then he came for his father, not satisfied to wait for his inheritance.
Gaius remembered the siege of the Citadel. Uther's forces had surrounded the walls, and burnt the outlying farmland for miles. The villagers inside the gates had screamed and raged as their livestock and crops were reduced to ash. This is madness, Gaius had thought. How can Uther do this to his own people? Will he be king of a pile of corpses? He had watched from the towers as the red glow seeped into the night sky. Some of these mercenaries came from Cenred's kingdom. Did they march through Ealdor on the way here? Hunith…
Uther's army had catapulted the rotting corpses of beasts and men over the city walls, spreading plague among Camelot's populace. One of Uther's magicians, the great enchantress Nimueh, had used her spells to send poison into the wells and rivers. The wealthier citizens turned to their reserves of ale and beer, but the poor died either of thirst, or of drinking venom which ate into their veins and turned their flesh putrid. Uther's armies cut off supplies, and an evil rot spread into the food stores, sent by sorcery. Those people who survived were reduced to eating dogs, then rats, then gravel. Parents locked their children indoors, for if a child went missing, each man feared that his neighbour had turned cannibal. Gaius and Alice had worn their fingers to the bone, working days without sleep, pooling their knowledge, augmenting their physick with sorcery, trying to preserve as much life as they could. It had not been enough. Thousands had died.
Gaius should have known that a prince who could slaughter his own people would not balk at taking his own child's life. Yet still he had followed Uther and served him all these years, thinking to turn him to a gentler path. He had been the king's advisor, and physician, and accomplice, and had kept his lord's secrets, and shared in his evil acts.
And now his choices had brought him to this. This unwanted child. This life he must take. Yet another sin of Uther's he must share in, coward that he was.
They rode for the better part of the night, over fen and heath, through forest and stony valley, until they came to a wild place in the moors, far from any village or human habitation. There were no structures here but great stone circles and collapsed towers, built by the Old Folk, or the giants, or the Sidhe, depending on which tale you believed. But Gaius was a man of science.
It was very common for infants to die after their birthing, despite petitions to the Holy Virgin and the saints, despite herbs and charms, despite talismans of oak and sorcerer's medallions. If the child died before a priest could baptise it, it could not be buried in holy ground, in spite of all the tearful pleas of the parents. Some of the common folk, who remembered the Old Religion, brought the corpses of their children to places like these, on the outskirts of villages. They buried their children in small mounds under the green turf, praying that the old, capricious gods of the Fey and Sidhe would be kinder than the god of the New Religion, and take their unbaptised children to a better world. It was known that the Elfkind coveted children, and it was better for them to take those already dead than to steal those still living.
Gaius did not know what had brought him here. He was a man of science, not superstition. Did it matter if he abandoned the baby in a stone circle, or threw it a pigsty to be eaten by a hungry sow? Either way the child would perish. Was he trying to convince himself, like a mother driven out of her mind with grief, that if the child was left here, some spirit of the woods would take pity on it, and lead it under the hills into the land of Faery?
Duchess Vivian had said, "Just let me hold her, Gaius. Let me take her to my breast. Just once. I won't ask anything more. I know what Fate has in store for her. I have seen shadows… "
There was something queer in the blood of the women of House Du Bois. Du Bois. It meant 'of the wood.' Their ancestors had left Albion when a Saxon army had vanquished their kingdom. They had fled across the Narrow Sea, to Frankenland, to the place called Brittany. Leaving their old gods behind, they had been baptised, and in place of their Brythonic name, they had titled themselves Du Bois, in the tongue of the Franks.
But though they now worshipped in stone churches, it was whispered that deep in those forests of Brittany, certain of their women gathered in stone circles, and kept older and secret rites, which only sorcerers knew. Their family had returned to Brython as a respected and powerful House, with ties to the Saxons, the Normans, the nobles of Brittany and Anjou, as well the king of Camelot himself. Nevertheless, strange rumours persisted about their women...
Nothing fey or eldritch had appeared in Duchess Vivan's haggard face as she had rocked and patted her suckling child to sleep. "Lavender's blue, dilly dilly," she had sung in a low, sweet voice, "lavender's green. When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen."
Now, Gaius left the horses and Sir Lionel behind, and walked on with the babe bundled in his arms. The knight looked suspicious, yet relieved. It was not as though Gaius could smuggle the child away. There was no human dwelling for miles around. Leaving a bairn out on a night as cold as this was certain death. Sir Lionel would escape this stain on his conscience, and his knight's vows would remain unbroken. Gaius would break his physician's oath instead, as he had done so many times before in his king's service. The shining honour of the knights of Camelot must not be diminished. What was the value of a useless old man's conscience beside the chivalry of a knight?
Picking his way through the labyrinth of stone, Gaius came out in one of the larger circles. The child opened her eyes, and, as if sensing her Fate in that uncanny way of the women of her tribe, she began to bawl. She was a healthy babe, with a lusty cry that spoke of a good set of lungs. Her tiny arms and legs trembled in their swaddling, as though she was already desperate to move them. She was a fighter, full of fire, like her father. Her complexion was rosy and healthy, and she had thick blonde curls.
If she had been a boy, a firstborn son, perhaps Uther would have found a way to preserve her life. But in the end she was of no use to him.
"I'm sorry, little one," Gaius whispered. "I wish I believed in the gods, so I could pray for absolution. But there is nothing for me. Just an endless abyss, nothingness."
On an impulse, he held her to his chest, and rocked her gently from side to side.
"Lavender's blue, dilly dilly," he sang in his untuned, coarse voice. "Lavender's green. When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen. If you should die, dilly dilly, as it may hap. You shall be buried, dilly dilly, under the tap."
The child subsided, yawning widely. He bent down and placed her on a mound of earth in the centre of the stone ring. She watched him with wide brown eyes, full of understanding. He could not endure their gaze, turning and walking swiftly away. She began to cry, then, as the chilly dew soaked into her swaddling clothes, and the cold night wind blanketed her.
When Gaius had passed the boundary of the stone circle, and begun to descend the stepping stones back to the horses, the crying stopped, and he paused.
Don't look back. Wash your hands of this. It is done.
He remained frozen for a long time. The wind changed direction, seeming to come from within the stone circle itself. And then he heard something that chilled him more than the winter.
There was a voice coming from inside the stone circle, unlike anything he had ever heard, repeating his own words, mocking him. A voice which had the music of weeping lute strings in it, and the gentle murmur of thunder before storms, and the howling of wolves.
"Lavender's blue, dilly dilly, lavender's green. When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen."
He turned. There was a woman in the stone circle, holding the child in her arms. The hood of her robe was thrown back, and Gaius saw the thin gold wreath upon the woman's brow, the blue woad markings, the sickle at her waist. He did not need to see the oaken staff in her hand, or to recognise the embroidered triskelions of her vestments, to know her as a High Priestess of the Old Religion.
The woman whirled, and bore the babe away, swiftly stepping between two standing stones, disappearing from Gaius' sight. Space had parted and closed before her like a veil, revealing for an instant paths of light that Gaius could barely perceive with his own fumbling, clumsy knowledge of the Art Magic.
Then the old physician was alone in the frosty night, but for the groaning of the wind and the sighing of his own troubled thoughts.