Page 17 of The Road to Avalon
“You can tell me,” I said, pushing Enfys closer so I could lower my voice. “We don’t need to tell your father if it’s something private.”
She looked me in the eyes, her own narrowed and speculative. Maybe she was weighing up what to say. “I didn’t want to stay there without you.”
I blinked in surprise. “Why not? You’ve done that before. And you would’ve had Maia to keep you company at nights and Coventina and Reaghan during the day.”
She gave a little sigh. “I know all that. But I didn’t want to stay where Medraut was. Is.” She bit her lip. “I don’t like him.”
“Oh.” As I didn’t either, this came as no surprise. “But you’d hardly have seen him. Would it really have mattered?”
She regarded me from troubled eyes.
I waited, my breath catching in my throat with the suspicion that there was more to this than met the eye. “Why don’t you like him?”
She shrugged her slender shoulders. “I can’t rightly say. He’s polite to me, pleasant, offers to help if I’m carrying something, keeps asking if I’d like to ride out with him. But there’s something about him that… frightens me. Something under his skin, deep in his heart, inside his head. Something nasty.”
Her grandmother and aunt had the Sight, as did Merlin. Did she? Or was this merely women’s intuition?
“Easy to avoid him, though,” I said, trying to keep my voice light, but knowing in my heart that in a place the size of Din Cadan, this wasn’t true.
She shook her head. “That’s just it. It’s not. It’s like he’s waiting for me around every corner, dropping into step beside me, trying to make me talk to him.” She shuddered. “And when he looks at me it feels as though he sees me naked.”
Just as he’d done to me in Viroconium. I struggled to suppress the shiver that threatened to rack me, berating myself for not having noticed his attentions or her discomfort, recalling the way he’d looked at her on his arrival. Did he pose a threat she’d instinctively recognized when I hadn’t? Was that why she’d been so anxious to come with us?
“Do you want me to speak to your father about this? Get him to tell Medraut to keep away from you?”
Indecision filled her eyes. “No. I don’t think so. He hasn’tdoneanything to me. He’s never once tried to even touch my hand. I don’t think the way he looks at me is enough for me to ask father to be angry with him.” She paused. “Others of the warriors do that to me as well… sometimes. And I know they do it to other girls.” She gave a little mirthless laugh. “I suppose it’s something most young men do. But it doesn’t mean we girls like it.”
Like men the world over in any era. Women, especially pretty ones, were to be ogled, lusted after, competed for. Disgust rose in me. I’d experienced it myself enough times and laughed it off, but now it had happened to my fifteen-year-old daughter, all I felt was horrified shock.
Oh, how she was growing up. Perhaps she did need to be married and settled, with a protective husband and a child on the way that would deter the attentions of other suitors. But she could never avoid the attention her looks would bring.
“Is there any young man you really like?” I asked, having severe difficulty keeping my voice level.
A blush colored her cheeks, making her prettier than ever. “Maybe.”
I smiled. “Can you tell me his name?”
More blushing. Her hands came up to cover her face, letting her reins hang loose, hooked over one of the horns on her saddle. “Llawfrodedd,” she muttered, peeking at me between her fingers.
Aha. A romance that had been simmering since childhood. Even though he had a good six years on Archfedd, she’d begun a friendship with him that had endured into adulthood. Should I be surprised she’d come to admire him in a different way now?
She lowered her hands, her cheeks rosy.
I smiled and reached out to take her hand in mine. “And a fine young man he is for you to have chosen. Does he feel the same way about you?”
She picked up the buckle end of her reins again in her free hand. “I don’t know. I haven’t… we haven’t spoken of it.” She licked her lips. “Ithinkwe’re just friends still. I don’t know how to tell him I have… feelings… for him.”
I squeezed her hand and released it so she could gather in her looping reins. “Don’t rush things. He’ll realize you feel like that if you give him time. And I’ll wager he feels the same about you.”
She gave me a sideways peek. “Don’t tell Father, will you?”
“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” I said, my eyes on Arthur’s back where he rode ahead of us, chatting to Merlin and Cei. And most likely I wouldn’t tell him about Medraut, either, as she’d given me nothing concrete to say. Boys and young men tend to follow girls around, and what had Medraut done that any other young warrior wouldn’t have? Nothing. All we had to go on were our feelings.
Chapter Nine
The fortress ofCaer Dore sat on a high ridge of land overlooking the valley of the River Fowi. Much less impressive than Din Cadan, its two deep ditches and earth ramparts enclosed barely an acre. However, an impressive stone-faced defensive wall, revetted with huge timbers, topped the inner bank. Outside, a sprawling agricultural settlement meandered downhill toward the distant sea, and fields stretched east into the river valley and west toward the inlet of a hidden bay.
We’d crossed the river a good way upstream and arrived at the fortress by a ridgeway track from the north, the spread of what would one day be Cornwall laid out before us. Evening was fast drawing on, and out in the fields the hay lay forked up to dry, the sweet smell carrying on the still air. Just as at home. With Britain’s uncertain climate, the chance of a week without rain to get the hay dried and safely stacked was never to be missed, not even for a dead king.
