"What did she look like?" Lleu asked.
"You question like an old woman!"
He frowned and tossed his head, and said, "Don’t tell me, then."
"She was ‘very dark, but comely,’" I told him softly, thinking too of the evenings over the old books, hymns chanted, stories told. "‘Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.’"
We both sat silent, gazing at the fire, while the sweet words of the Song of Songs echoed on the cold and quiet air. Lleu whispered then, "How would she admire you if she learned of this week’s hunting?"
I whispered in return, "She would not admire it."
"Did you love her? Have you ever loved anything?"
Yes. Yes. All the wrong things. The hunt, and darkness, and winter, and you, Godmother.
"Oh, be careful, little brother," I breathed. "You are hurling your slight weight against a very thin scale of ice."
"I am chancing for my freedom in any way I can," he answered.
He sat awake and watched all through that night.
The morning came gray and changeless. We traveled on foot through still more bare, deserted forest; Lleu walked in a private haze of exhaustion. Snow covered the trees and forest floor as far as could be seen, and drifted across our vision. There was only soft light, the ft u walkedlight one dreams by, gray clouds, or snow, or blue shadows, but never the true light of the sun. In the afternoon we left the dale and struck out over another stretch of empty moorland. Lleu rode behind me as he had the first day, but now I gave him no support or help. He kept himself upright in the saddle through sheer strength of will, riding doggedly, dazed with weariness.
Before dark we came upon a small, round hill, wider and lower than the mounds we had passed earlier. Here we dismounted. Lleu did not resist when I laid my hands on his shoulders to rub gently at the tense muscles across the back of his neck. "Will we stop here?" Agravain asked. At the bottom of the slope the rise of land cut off some of the wind, though it was still cold and could not compare to the protection the forest had offered us.
"Climb," I said. "There’s better shelter back of this ridge."
Agravain led the horses, and I guided Lleu the little way to the top. The mound was not a hill but an earthen rampart around a bowl-shaped trough. The outer ridge formed a wall about the hollow of the hill, and sheltered there an ancient ring of stones. Those that were fallen now squatted balefully, but a few still stood upright or pointed at drunken angles to the sky. Lleu stood shivering beneath my hands at the top of the ridge, staring at this old and forgotten shrine. He murmured, with something like despair in his voice, "We are to shelter here?"
"The earthworks cut off the wind," I said.
"I think I would rather freeze."
Agravain gazed at Lleu with amused derision. "They’re only stones," he said. "You’re not going to be sacrificed."
"No." Lleu shook himself free of my light hold and said, "How far are we from the road?"
The road was less than a mile south of the circle, but I would not let him know this. "Close by," I answered. "We will reach it tomorrow."
"How close?" he pressed.
"I will not tell you," I answered directly. "You have won this much, this far; but I will give you neither bearing nor hope."
We set camp beneath one of the angled stones. The air was very still. There was no wood for a fire and only the lanterns for light. Lleu took charge of these, appropriating all our steel and flint. He put out the lights but for one, which he set close by him. He kept a hand on the grated lid of a dark lantern, lightly drumming his fingers against it. I could not imagine how he would drive himself through the night.
"He must try to sleep a little," I said quietly to Agravain. "If you and I rest in turns, one of us should be able to take him at last."
But that night was almost as hard for me as it was for Lleu. My cough had grown deep and harsh; it hurt me to swallow, and sometimes even to breathe. Once, when Agravain woke me from a fitful sleep to take my turn at watching Lleu, I struck his hand aside storming, "Don’t touch me!"
Agravain muttered with distaste, "I wouldn’t. I’m not your mother."
That brought me full awake. I said maliciously, "How you envy me!"
Agravain answered with the fierce devotion that had driven him to serve you at the start. "I do. And I envy the Bright One, for I know how she’ll use him once he is under her sway."
Lleu glanced up in undisguised horror. "What does she want of me?" He ground his hands into his eyes and leaned back against the old stone, pale and miserable. "Ah, God, you are both damned."
"And you with us," Agravain murmured bitterly.
"No, my soul is my own responsibility," Lleu replied, equally acid, glaring at me. "I have not sold it yet."
I heard in his clear voice an echo of your impatience, an echo of your disdain. Lleu gazed at me and Agravain, where the two of us crouched stiff and shivering in the shadow of the dark rock. "You hope to catch me unaware. I swear you will not do it."
In abrupt, unchecked anger, Agravain dealt his cousin so fierce a blow that Lleu fell sprawling in the snow, stunned. He pressed one hand to his face even as with the other he drew his hunting knife, an easier and less exacting defense than his bow. I uttered in a terrible voice, "Agravain!"
I was so suddenly despising of his blind and adoring obedience to you, and so jealous of my brother’s strength of spirit, that I ignored Lleu’s disadvantage. What reason had Agravain to hate Lleu, other than that you desired he should?
"Any hurt you deal the prince," I said in quiet fury, "I will deal to you." I struck Agravain carelessly across the face. He stared at me in astonished resentment. "Do you understand that?" I asked in the same voice.
"Yes, sir," he muttered.
"Perfect," I said. "Don’t hit him again."
Lleu moved back to his place by the lantern, certain of the knife he held, and sure of nothing else. "What game do you play now? Whose side are you on?" he demanded angrily of me.
"You must think that I answer to the queen of the Orcades as a dog answers to its master," I said bitterly. "But I will not see you harmed without reason."
"You have threatened to kill me!" Lleu protested.
"There is reason for that," I answered.
In the morning we came to the straight, paved Roman road that runs directly to Ratae Coritanorum. It was barely recognizable beneath the snow; around us the moorland was desolate as ever. Lleu gave a little sigh, trying to conceal his relief. But Agravain guided the horses to turn south along the road. Lleu shook his head. "What are you doing?"
"I am leaving you," Agravain explained with elaborate precision. "My mother is waiting for me, and I am taking the horses and continuing south. On foot it will take you two days to reach Camlan."
"All right," said Lleu. "I will seek shelter and rest in Aquae Arnemetiae; it cannot be more than seven or eight miles north of here." He turned as though to walk away, but I laid one hand lightly on his shoulder and said, "I will join you."
"Sir?" Agravain questioned stonily. "You will not come with me?"
"What for?" I sneered. "It is no triumph to return from the hunt without having made a kill. I have no desire to journey to Ratae Coritanorum without the required trophy."
"What am I to tell the queen?" Agravain cried harshly. "Why would you come so far in such a venture and then turn back?"
"But I am not turning back," I answered, "merely aside, to follow my own will."
"Wait," Lleu interrupted. "What do you mean? You can’t be following your own will if you take the road with me."
"I can. I can ransom you myself."
He glanced at my hand lightly resting on his shoulder, his expression agonized. "You would kill me yourself, if my father refused your demands?"
"I would," I said quietly.
"I am still free."
I took his face between my hands. He did not try to turn away, but regarded me through dark, desolate eyes ringed with smudges of blue shadow. "Yes. You are still free," I repeated in quiet.
"Come with me, then, I don’t care," he said with reckless, passionate courage. "I would rather die by your hand, I would rather have my death prey at your heart forever, than be instantly forgotten by your heartless mother."
"You must understand how defenseless you have left yourself," I whispered. It was chilling to hear him speak so bluntly of his own death, he who was afraid of the dark.
"I understand," Lleu said with bleak clarity. "We are alone, and it is dead of winter; and only by my own faltering strength can I keep from falling prisoner to you. When finally I fail I will be yours, hated and envied, for you to use as you will. So I wait on your fury."
"Brilliant," I said. "Agravain, here we leave you."
"How dare you!" Agravain said. He seemed suddenly as young as Lleu, and as desperate, about to be left alone in the wilderness in an unfamiliar land.
"I dare because I have drunk my fill of the queen of the Orcades," I said vehemently. "You can go back to your mother and you can tell her that I am no longer her ward. Tell her that I owe her nothing. Tell her that my treachery is of my own making. She drew me in and now I am up to my neck in it, but I am in it for myself and not as her minion." I went to the horses, untied certain of the satchels and slung them over my shoulders, and then tied blankets and furs together in a bundle that I could carry on my back. "Take the horses, Agravain. We’ll walk."
I took Lleu by the elbow and started up the road through the snow, leaving Agravain staring after us in puzzlement and anger. Now I was alone in the wasteland with my young brother, and we walked slowly north toward the higher hills; or toward home, or toward death, into the wind.
XIII
Aquae Arnemetiae
LLEU AND I WALKED without speaking, as we had for the last three days; except now our silence was mutual, shared, something that did not separate us but rather bound us together. The oppressive cold and silence never abated. Only the old road that we followed made the landscape different. Now and then the roof of a cottage or shepherd’s hut appeared huddled under the shadow of a low hill, or a stone wall marked off the boundary of a snow-covered field. Otherwise the barren white wasteland about us remained unaltered, the monotony of the moor unbroken.
But once Lleu stopped, astonished, staring at the blank road before him. He blinked and put a hand to his temple. "What was that?" he said.
I watched him, intrigued. "What do you think it was?" There had been no sound, no movement, no sudden shaft of sunlight.
"I thought—" He frowned, rubbing at his forehead. "It was a flash of color, across the road—a bird or butterfly, green and gold and scarlet. But it’s gone…" He hesitated, hearing the madness in his words. "You didn’t see."