Page 102 of The Road to Avalon
I looked at Bedwyr. “You have to throw it away. It’s fated. You have to do it for Arthur.”
Arthur gave a small nod. “It’s tainted.” He coughed up a little more blood. “I’m dying. Cast it back from whence it came, so no one can touch it again. Ever. It brings ill luck.”
I bit my lip.No, you’re not dying. Not if I have my way.
“You need to go now, Bedwyr,” I said, urgency pressing in, and terror that what I so wanted to happen wouldn’t. “Go with him, Con. Show him where we found the sword. That’s an order.” I looked at Cei. “You have to go back down the hill, all of you, and don’t return until morning.” My gaze moved on to Archfedd. “You too. All of you.”
Bedwyr and Cei looked uncertain. Their looks said they thought me mad. Our warriors hung back, eyes worried, hands resting on the pommels of their swords.
Arthur lifted his hand toward Llawfrodedd.
I nodded to him, and the young man stepped forward and went down on his knee before his king.
Arthur licked his lips. “Marry my daughter, Llawfrodedd. Rule with her as king and queen of Dumnonia. Cei will help you.” He had to pause to regain his breath. “I always thought he’d make the better king.” His sad eyes moved past Llawfrodedd to Archfedd. “My little Chick will make a fine queen.”
Llawfrodedd bowed his head. “My Lord.”
Archfedd choked back a sob. “Father.”
He held out his hand and she came to him, kneeling by the stretcher, her tears falling on his hands.
“Kiss me goodbye,” he said, his voice weakening. “You won’t see me again alive.”
She bent and kissed each cheek. “Goodbye, Father. I love you.” With Llawfrodedd’s help she struggled to her feet, the tears falling freely. He put his arm around her and held her close. I had no worries about them. She’d wear the crown she’d seen on her head in her grandmother’s scrying glass and wear it well. My crown.
“Now go,” I said to them all. “Go and don’t look back.”
They went.
I waited, sitting quietly by Arthur’s side. When they’d vanished from sight, I turned back to him. His eyes had closed again. “I won’t let you die,” I whispered. “I won’t. I’ve brought you here for a reason.”
Exhausted from the effort of talking, he didn’t respond. For a moment, terror clutched at me, and I had to check his chest still rose and fell. It did.
Was I mad? Here we were, already within the circle of ancient standing stones, and nothing was happening. Had I brought my dying husband all the way up here for nothing? Just to sit here alone with me while death crept up on him with the departure of the day?
In the west, the sun had almost vanished below the horizon, its last shafts of light arcing across the land in piercing spears of brightness as night settled over the marshes. What did I have to do? How could I make this work like it had before? I stared around in frustration, but the dark stones remained just stones.
The last rays of light died, and darkness fell, wrapping us in her gentle mantle.
Silence, like a blanket muting the world.
Bereft, I lay down on the grass, curled against Arthur, and closed my eyes. “I love you,” I muttered. “I love you, and I won’t let you die. I love you. I love you. You can’t die. You can’t.” Like a mantra, I kept repeating the words. They burned themselves inside my head, they stood in letters of fire inside my eyelids, they hung almost touchable in the cool night air. And as I muttered the words, my fingers found the ring on my finger and turned it.
A gentle rumble broke the silence, like a distant explosion, and beyond it a single piercing note rent the air. The ground beneath me shook, and I hung on tight to Arthur, anchoring myself to his stretcher’s solidity, my face pressed against his side.
The shaking stopped. I opened my eyes. Gray stone walls rose around me, and an archway opened onto dim gray sky.
Chapter Forty-One
For a fewlong moments, I lay motionless on the cold flagstones, not daring to believe it had worked. My chest heaved as though the air I had to fight to force in was too thick to inhale, and the sound in my ears of my heartbeat’s frantic pounding lessened.
My breathing steadied. I’d done it. We were here. Both of us.
Or were we?
What if all I’d done was take us forward to the first time a tower had stood on the top of the Tor? What if we were somewhere like the fifteenth or sixteenth century? Or some other time without the medical skill to help Arthur?
I levered myself into a sitting position and twitched back the blankets still covering Arthur. The old door had come with us. He still lay strapped to it, the spear shafts holding his broken leg firm. Fresh blood had seeped through the dressings on his wounds, and his eyes remained closed. I touched my fingers to his face where cold sweat beaded on deathly pale skin. Was he not meant to have traveled with me? Might I have done something terrible in bringing him through the portal?
