Page 11 of The Road to Avalon
He beamed at me as though I’d just bestowed a great honor on him, which only served to irritate me further.Little shit.Only not so little now. In an effort to get away from him, and hoping his horse would play up, I touched my legs to Enfys’s sides, and she sprang into a lively canter. But he had his horse in check through brute force, and together we cantered our horses toward where the river curved south in a wide silver ribbon edged with willows.
After five days of inactivity, Enfys wanted to have her head and gallop and was nearly as hard to control as Medraut’s fiery cob. I had a hard job holding her back. Medraut was in the same situation, as his black cob tugged at the bit and tossed its head, its nostrils flaring red. But we reached the riverbank in one piece and pulled our horses to a walk, steam rising and flies gathering to swarm around their heads.
For five minutes we followed the river downstream, letting the horses have a breather, until we reached where a sizeable flat-bottomed boat bobbed beside a rickety wooden jetty and a dilapidated house. Probably a crossing place, as a matching jetty, with no attendant house, protruded into the water on the far bank. A goat grazed on a tether in a small orchard, and the ripe smell of pigs hung in the air.
Far enough for me. I swung Enfys around and headed back toward the city gates, letting her trot, ignoring the problem Medraut was still having with controlling his own mount. Glad of it, in fact. Spitefully so.
However, his trouble proved short-lived. He brought the cob up so close to Enfys that his left knee kept nudging mine, hot and invasive and making my skin crawl. If she’d been Alezan, she’d have soon sorted that cob out, but she wasn’t. Pushing her over with my right leg didn’t help, either, because Medraut and his horse followed, and I didn’t seem able to get away from the burning contact that was making me want to slap him bloody hard.
Why didn’t I just tell him to bugger off? I wanted to, that was certain, but something held me back. Maybe it was the desire to find out what he was after, because it seemed evident to me that hewasafter something. I just needed to work out what.
With his horse mostly under control, he talked about the birds overhead, the crops, his horse, hunting– the things any young man his age would talk about. None of this seemed to require any contribution from me. But behind it all lurked something else– some purpose I couldn’t fathom. After another short canter, we slowed to a walk to cool off our horses before we arrived back at the gates. And that was when he put out his hand and grabbed mine.
I recoiled in shock, and tried to snatch my hand back, but he held on so tight it hurt, staring down at the ring on my finger. Enfys and the cob halted, and now I pulled with more force, and he let go. I glowered at him, my heart hammering.
Unfazed by my open anger, he grinned, looking more than ever like his dead uncle, Cadwy. Goodness, did he grin a lot, showing the large white teeth he’d inherited from his father. A sight too much grinning to be genuine. I was reminded of the line from Hamlet– “one may smile and smile and be a villain.” How very apt those words felt right now.
“I just wanted to see it again,” he said. “I’d quite forgotten what it looked like. The ring of the Ring Maiden herself. The woman who made my uncle what he is today.”
I tucked my hand away under my arm, not wanting his eyes on it. “The ring did nothing,” I snapped. “It’s just a story. Your uncle has forged his own fate. I’ve had nothing to do with it.”
He laughed, and this time I heard the spite in it. “Everyone knows that the man who holds the Ring Maiden is destined to be the greatest king ever born.” His thick lips curved in a smile that was almost a sneer, and my blood boiled with impotent rage I failed to hide.
Why hadn’t I seen all his smiles were the same? Only skin deep. That beneath his cheery exterior lurked the same bully he’d been as a boy. A leopard can’t change its spots. “That’s rubbish,” I snapped.
He snorted. “But he does have everything, doesn’t he?” His horse curvetted under his too tight grip on its reins. “He has you, the Ring Maiden, that bloody sword of destiny, and on top of that, he has the sword of Macsen Wledig– Excalibur.”
At a loss for words, I dug my heels a little too hard into Enfys’s sides and she sprang forward into a canter. I had to rapidly gather my too-long reins and didn’t look back over my shoulder to see if he was following. At the gates, I pulled her to a walk. A few people on foot were passing in and out, but not many. As I joined them, I finally twisted in the saddle to find out where he was.
He was standing where I’d left him, staring after me. Not for the first time that morning, a shiver ran down my spine, and I urged Enfys into a trot in my hurry to escape his line of sight, nearly knocking over a woman with two buckets of milk suspended from a wooden yoke. The milk slopped over the road, and she shouted with indignation, but I was through the gates by then and not listening.
Chapter Six
For the threedays following the Council, more meetings had to be held, and Arthur remained busy every day, leaving me to my own devices. I didn’t try another ride, afraid of repeating that disturbing encounter with Medraut, but remained within the comparative security of the Domus Alba’s walls. So, with nothing else to do, I contented myself with making notes on the thin strips of wood I always carried with me, and picking Merlin’s brain about what had gone on at the council and the other meetings.
Amhar begrudgingly accompanied his father, Cei and Merlin to several of these meetings, looking bleary-eyed and hungover from his nights on the town with his new friends. Arthur, who’d been known to get drunk himself from time to time, showed him no mercy. As far as he was concerned, if Amhar wanted to be out all night, he’d have to put up with performing his required duties during the day as well. He could sleep when he could find the time. Or not at all, as the case might be.
On the fourth day, we set off for home, somewhat increased in number and in bright sunshine. Not only had Medraut and Cinbelin joined us, but a dozen others, all young men of Medraut’s following, had decided the invite extended to them. Two were the Princes Bran and Cyngal of Ebrauc. Who knew how they’d persuaded their grandfather, King Garbaniawn, to let them come.
As our column followed the dusty road south, I deliberately steered clear of Medraut, keeping my gaze averted whenever I could, in case he’d decided I was his new best friend. But to my relief, he chose to ride at the rear with his followers, in a noisy group that now included Amhar. However, I couldn’t expect to avoid him without at least one person noticing, and that, of course, was Merlin.
We’d reached the last leg of our journey before he took the opportunity to speak to me about it. Bringing his horse up beside mine, he edged me away from where Arthur and Cei were discussing a possible hunting expedition.
The path stretched wide and green before us, braiding between huge oaks and beeches bright with their new growth of leaves, and our whole party had spread out. At the back, the young men had broken into a drinking song, their carefree voices rising toward the swaying branches. More than a little ribald, if anyone took the trouble to listen to the words.
“Why have you been avoiding Medraut like he has the sweating sickness?” Merlin asked, always one to come straight to the point.
I glanced across at Arthur, but he was still deep in conversation with Cei. “There’s something about him I don’t trust,” I said. “On the outside, he seems as though he’s matured into a nice young man, but he’s let his guard slip once or twice with me, and I don’t like what I’ve seen. All this cheery camaraderie is a veneer.”
Merlin regarded me thoughtfully. “You may well be right on that. I’m not blind. He has the feel of a man playing a part, and with a purpose he’s keeping hidden. But that’s not why you’re avoiding him, is it?”
I shook my head, bitter gall rising in my throat, and ignored his last sentence. “Well, we know what that purpose is, don’t we?”
Merlin nodded. “Ifthe stories are true.”
There we were again. It all came back to this every time. Did I really know what the future held for all of us, or were the stories from my time just the product of some fevered, late-medieval imagination– someone embellishing the story with their own twist? The fact that I had no way of telling was enough to drive me mad. Maybe it already had.
I couldn’t help my backward glance toward where the object of my disquiet rode beside Amhar, a position he’d held throughout our journey, as though Amhar were his new best friend. Did I just dislike him because of the stories, or was he truly as black as I wanted to paint him? “I suppose at least we’ll have the chance to keep an eye on him,” I muttered.
