Page 76 of The Bear's Heart
“No!” I shouted, looking round for Merlin. He’d disarmed Olwyn and two warriors were dragging her to her feet. Between them she hung like a sack of dirty washing, deflated, harmless, ancient. Mad.
“My boy,” she sobbed. “You killed my last boy.” She struggled in the arms of the warriors. “He might have been a murderer, but he was my boy.”
Arthur stretched out his free hand toward me, his eyes full of pain. “Tell me it’s not true,” he said, as I stared at him in horror. “Tell me he was lying.”
Over his shoulder I saw Bretta, triumph in her face, staring at me.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Cei and Merlinhelped Arthur into the great hall and hauled off his tunic and undershirt. Where the blade had sliced along his ribs just under his armpit, the wound was bleeding freely.
By the fire, Maia stood clutching the angry baby whose howls rose to the rafters.
“For God’s sake, feed him,” Cei said, as he and Merlin pushed Arthur down onto a bench. Blood was running freely down his chest and forearm.
“I can’t,” I gasped, unable to take my eyes off my husband. “Can’t someone else?”
Merlin rounded on me, angrier than I’d ever seen him. “Of course they can’t. He’s your baby. Feed him now and get him to stop that infernal wailing. He’s your responsibility.”
I sat down hurriedly on a bench, opposite Arthur, and Maia handed me a very red-faced Amhar, who took what felt like forever to get latched on. The action of his suckling began to calm me. I lifted my eyes to my husband.
He met my gaze across the table, eyes brimming with hostility. “I’m not dying. Look to your child.”
My child. Not his. Not ours. Mine. I’d never heard him speak like this before. Why was he doing it? Tears formed, but I fought to hold them back. I didn’t want any of them to see me cry. To know how much his words had hurt me. I had the sense to know that he was the most important thing now, and stopping his wounds bleeding took priority.
Bedwyr had come in behind Cei and Merlin, and now he expertly set to work on Arthur. He had Cei put pressure on the chest wound while he cleaned the cut on Arthur’s arm with alcohol and stitched it. By the time he’d done that, the bleeding from the wound in Arthur’s chest had all but stopped. He was lucky. The knife had sliced down his ribs, missing all the vital organs and arteries. His breathing returned to normal, and he wasn’t coughing up blood. I heaved an inward sigh of relief, and, contented at my breast, little Amhar fed on, oblivious to the events around him.
Bedwyr produced a pad covered in healing honey– much cleaner than a pad would have been before my arrival– and bandaged it in place over the knife wound after he’d cleaned and stitched it.
I switched the hungry Amhar to the other breast, my eyes fixed on Arthur’s still angry face, trying to read what was going on in his mind. What could Melwas have said to him that had affected him so badly? I struggled not to give credence to the thoughts tumbling through my head.
“You’d best get outside to show yourself to your people,” Merlin advised. “They need to know you’re not badly wounded.”
Arthur shot me an unreadable glance, but said nothing, and got to his feet, waving Cei’s helping hand away. With Merlin by his side, he walked to the doors and stepped outside. A great cheer went up as the waiting people welcomed the sight of him. But my heart was aching. A suspicion of what Melwas had whispered with his dying breath nagged at me. I’d seen Arthur’s reaction, the cold fury in his eyes, the pain. But only he had heard those words, and only he knew for certain what poison Melwas had spewed before he died. But if it was what I suspected, how could Arthur believe it? Whatever it was, Arthur’s whole attitude to me had changed in that moment.
And now Melwas was dead, and his words lived on, written in fire on Arthur’s heart.
*
Manhandled by thewarriors, Olwyn was dragged off to the fortress lock-up and thrown unceremoniously into the cell her son had occupied so recently, a cell still reeking of his night soil. When they later came to retrieve her, they found her dead on the floor. Perhaps her poor miserable heart had given out at last, after all the years of suffering at Melwas’s hands. Why she’d rushed to avenge his death we would never know.
From the accusing look in Arthur’s eyes, it was apparent Melwas’s words had done their damage. That he’d said something about me was abundantly clear. I nursed a horrible suspicion of what it was, but until I spoke to him by myself, I couldn’t be sure. However, for the remainder of the day Arthur studiously avoided me, immersing himself in the promised retribution to be inflicted on Melwas’s people.
As promised, he had Melwas’s head impaled on a spike by the gates of the fortress, and his naked body thrown into a ditch outside Din Cadan, where foxes, or perhaps a brave wolf, might find and eat him. He dispatched a squad under Cei’s command to Dinas Brent to evict what remained of its people and burn the fortress to the ground. “No one,” I overheard Arthur say, “will set himself up as ruler of the Isle of Frogs again. From now on it’s a part of Dumnonia.”
That evening, with Amhar fed and sleeping in his cradle, I lay awake, waiting for Arthur to come to bed so I could finally talk to him alone. I had a long wait, but eventually, in the dark of the night, I heard the familiar scrape as he opened the door and came in.
The glow of the brazier showed me his grim face as he crossed the room to the chest of clothes where he kept his wash things. Was that all he’d come for?
I sat up in bed. “Arthur.” I kept my voice low because of Amhar. I’d thought of asking Maia to take him so I could have it out with Arthur, but common sense and a feeling of unease had told me to keep him with me. The look on Bretta’s face still danced before my eyes, and unless my son was with me, I couldn’t be sure he was safe.
Arthur turned his head to look at me. With the light was behind him, I couldn’t read his expression. He made no move to come closer. In the crib, Amhar made a puppyish snuffling noise, and Arthur’s gaze strayed toward him.
“I’m not staying.” His voice was strained. “Go back to sleep.”
I was angry– angry he was shunning our bed, angry he hadn’t told me why and given me a chance to refute whatever it was that had caused this. “Why?” I couldn’t keep my feelings out of my voice, even though I knew I sounded both aggressive and defensive at the same time. “What have I done?”
Something about him told me his whole body had stiffened. He stood very still, his profile toward me as he looked at Amhar.
