Page 58 of The Road to Avalon
Cei’s honest face creased in a frown. “Where is he, then? Why isn’t he with you?”
Merlin.Left behind. Lost. In danger. What had that wise woman at Caer Guorthegirn said? That I had to choose between my man of magic and my son. I’d chosen. And now perhaps I’d lost them both.
“We had to leave him in Caer Legeion with Morgawse,” I said. “He… he took ill.” I couldn’t tell him yet that his sister lay dead by Merlin’s hands. Even if he’d hated her, she remained his sister and a royal princess, and Merlin had killed her. He hadn’t had to, but he’d done it, nevertheless. How easily had love turned to hate.
Cei’s eyes pierced my soul. “Without Merlin, how can we know what you say is true?”
What?He thought I waslying? My indignation rose, before I remembered how I’d considered lying myself. How I’d thought I’d be prepared to say anything to save my child. I licked my lips. “Because itistrue.” Now I sounded as though I were justifying a lie. “Because Llawfrodedd and Archfedd were there when he said it. They can tell you it’s true.”
Cei shook his head. “No. Arthur was right. The boy wouldn’t have run if he hadn’t been guilty.” His anguished blue eyes, that matched the sky outside, narrowed and grew cold. “You’re going to have to face the truth. HekilledLlacheu, Gwen. Not in combat. He could never have beaten him like that. No. He crept up behind him in the dark and slit his throat. Like a coward. And then he ran. As a coward would.”
I stared at him. He didn’t believe me. Despite what I’d said, he thought I was lying out of motherly love. He was party to the death of my son. The son he believed a murderer of the worst kind. The world swirled again for an instant, and I fought it back into focus. I mustn’t faint. I mustn’t. I had to see my son. My firstborn child. My baby.
I pushed myself off the wall. “Believe what you want. Iknowthe truth, and it’s you and Arthur who have committed the crime. Look after Archfedd.” With determined steps, I shouldered my way past him and out into the hot, sunlit day.
In the farmyard, I stopped for a moment to get my bearings, blinking at the brightness. To the right lay the horselines I’d already seen, strung out between this barn and the next, the horses standing idly in the sunshine, back legs crooked and tails swishing at the irritating flies. To my left, a new horseline was being set up with Llawfrodedd in charge. He stopped and stared across at me, his jaw set, and his face pale with grief.
I turned away.
Opposite the barn lay the farmhouse, its weathered door firmly closed. No sign of Arthur.
In a lean-to beside the farmhouse huddled the farmer’s family– a burly, balding man, his pregnant wife, five children from a snot-nosed toddler to a scrawny boy of eleven or twelve. Under my gaze, they looked away, all except that oldest boy, who met my stare for a moment, his eyes wide and frightened. Maybe they feared a man who’d execute his own son and would do the same to them if they put a foot wrong, even if he was their High King.
A man who’d executed his own son, possibly in front of them.
Dead.My son lay dead. How could I keep forgetting the finality of death? I’d never see him again, never talk to him, hold him close, tell him I loved him. Everything that had made him unique and mine had gone.
I took a hesitant step and nearly stumbled, heaved a breath, straightened, and walked toward the farmhouse, my heart thundering.
No one tried to prevent me, but every man stopped whatever they were doing, and every eye drilled into me. I drew myself up straighter. I was a queen, a warrior queen, and they wouldn’t see me hesitate again.
The door had a rough wooden latch the farmer must have fashioned himself, worn smooth by age and greasy hands. With shaking fingers, I raised it. My hand, disembodied from the rest of me, pushed on the silvered wood, and the heavy door swung open on worn leather hinges. For a long moment, fear kept me motionless on the threshold.
Then I stepped through and the door swung closed behind me.
The long room that made the living area of the farmhouse stank of soot, rancid tallow and dog. Two tiny windows in the foot thick walls stood open to the left and right of the door.
I blinked as my eyes struggled to accustom themselves to the paucity of light, and my gaze went everywhere but to the table in the center, as though it and I were two like-poles on a pair of magnets.
A partition wall of split logs separated this living area from what would be a bedroom for the parents. Against one wall, the children’s small beds lay tumbled as though someone had dragged their occupants from them in a hurry this morning. The hearth fire lay cold and untended, full of powdery ash.
There was only the table left. I forced my eyes to look.
Arthur stood at the foot of the table, staring at our son. A couple of smoking tallow candles burned at the other end. By Amhar’s head. Bythe head.
Arthur didn’t look toward me, and the gloom made it difficult to see his face.
Instead, I took in my son.Mine.My anger rose, curdling, boiling, fomenting in my churning heart. Arthur had relinquished any right to claim Amhar as his own when he’d had him executed for a crime my boy hadn’t committed. The hot hatred welled up so vividly, I feared it might come spilling out of my mouth, like vomit. I pressed my lips together to hold it in.
I’d seen dead bodies enough times, God knew. I’d seen Llacheu’s body lying on that midden and kissed his lifeless corpse before his burial. And yet, this was worse. If Llacheu had been murdered, then so had Amhar, and his murderer stood before me. Needless deaths, both of them.
I took in every detail. I couldn’t help myself. Now I was looking, really looking, I had to see everything, couldn’t tear my eyes away. Now the magnets had opposite poles.
A dead body ceases to look alive. You’d think it would look asleep, but it doesn’t. Something is lost, some vital spark that makes a sleeping person human. There’s little of humanity about a corpse, still less one that’s had its head severed. The person you loved is gone forever.
Someone had wrapped Amhar’s neck tightly with a scarf. If I hadn’t known, hadn’t already seen, I might have thought his head still attached. But I had seen, and that scarf didn’t manage to make his body look right, correct, like a body with a head still attached. And Ididknow. Under that innocuous scarf someone had cut through the living flesh and bone and killed my son.
Arthur.He’d told me once that if he condemned someone to death, he had to be the one to carry out the order. He’d done this.
