Page 60 of The Road to Avalon
Instead, I spoke four words into the pregnant space between us. “He didn’t do it.” And left.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Outside the farmhouse,the glaring sun, nearing its zenith, beat down on me without mercy. The door banged shut, and I halted, uncertainty flooding over me. I’d walked away from my son, left him lying there alone. Ought I to sit by his body, as we’d done for Llacheu? Could I even bring myself to do that? If I didn’t look at him dead, could I hold him in my heart as he’d been alive, preserved forever in his golden boyhood?
I glanced around, finding every head bent to avoid my gaze, the men busy with their horses or their saddlery. Not looking. Embarrassed. No. Worse than that. Ashamed. Their shame washed over me in a sister wave to my uncertainty.
I sucked in my lips, pressing them between my teeth, fists balled by my sides. No. That wasn’tmyboy lying on that table, broken and still. What had made him my boy, my Amhar, had flown. And I didn’t want to see his lifeless face, his still hands, his silent chest. I didn’t want to touch his stiffening body, kiss his cold cheeks, smooth his soft hair.
But that was all wrong, because Idid. I wanted him warm and alive and smiling at me about something he’d done or seen. I wanted him laughing with Archfedd or his friends. I wanted him back. Alive.
Never again.
All this time I’d been worrying about losing Arthur, and capricious fate had been saving this up for me like some spiteful trick. Smoothing Medraut’s path to Camlann. Or was that Nimuë’s path to power? I couldn’t tell.
Cei stepped out of the barn and halted, the only one brave enough to look at me.
I squared my shoulders, set my jaw, and strode toward the barn, halting three feet in front of Cei. “Tell me everything.” To my amazement my voice came out authoritative and cool, as though I hadn’t just left my son lying dead on that table. I’d put away my grief and let cold determination take its place. For now.
Cei glanced back into the shadows of the barn. Llawfrodedd was sitting with Archfedd, holding her tight against his body, with one hand in her hair, and her tear-stained face pressed to his chest.
Cei’s broad shoulders sagged. “Walk with me.”
Luckily for him he didn’t try to take my hand or put a supportive arm around my shoulders. If he had, I would’ve hit him or maybe something worse. My sword hung by my side, and I had my dagger tucked in my belt. I’d killed before and felt ready to kill again. Bugger that two wrongs didn’t make a right– it would have taken very little to have had my sword tip at Cei’s throat.
We walked through the horselines. None of the silent men looked up. Leaving them behind, we followed the dusty road for fifty yards or so, before he halted beside a solid Roman milestone. Maybe he felt he couldn’t talk to me so close to where everything had happened. Maybe he felt guilty. He bloody well should.
“Well?” I said, still hanging on to my cold calm. “Tell me howyoulet this happen.” Throwing the blame, at least in part, onto Cei seemed so obvious. I needed someone to blame so why not him? And he was not without guilt.
Cei’s Adam’s apple bobbed. His stubbly, gray-streaked ginger beard almost covered it. At some time this morning he’d taken off his mail shirt, but sweat beaded his brow and darkened his underarms. I still wore my mail shirt, and looking at him brought more sweat springing out on my body in sympathy. Too hot for the undershirt and woolen tunic I had on under my mail.
His gaze fell to where his fingers fiddled with the end of his thick leather belt. “I don’t know where to start…”
“At the beginning,” I snapped. The anger still boiling in me served to keep me calm and focused. If I didn’t stay angry, I’d collapse and sob like Archfedd. I couldn’t let myself do that. Not yet. “Tell me how you caught him.”
Cei cleared his throat. “After we’d scoured the obvious places in Dumnonia, we… Arthur… thought Amhar might have fled to Morgawse in Caer Legeion. We went there first, but we didn’t find him.” Hot color rose to his cheeks. “We searched the house from top to bottom. She wasn’t happy. Arthur didn’t believe our sister when she said the boy had gone. And he’d been there all right– we found traces of him.”
I bit my lip. “Was Morgana with her?”
He nodded, and bitterness tinged his voice. “She was, and her child. She had the look about her of a cat that had got the cream.”
Not anymore, she didn’t. But I didn’t tell him that. She was his sister, after all. That could come later.
“Go on,” I said, holding onto my sanity by mere shreds of self-control.
He shifted his weight and his hands clasped and unclasped, his leather belt forgotten.
I sucked in my lips to prevent myself from speaking my mind. He wouldn’t like what he’d hear if I did. He was Amhar’s uncle, but he’d tried to tell me my son was guilty. HebelievedAmhar had killed Llacheu. Didn’t he? Or was he saying all this to support Arthur, the brother he loved? Would he do that? Back up Arthur at the cost of my son’s life? Right now, I felt ready to believe anything of anybody.
I fixed my gaze on his contorting face, determined not to falter, but to find out the truth.
He bit his lower lip. “Morgana and Morgawse sent us off west, along the coast. Arthur said he didn’t believe them. I didn’t either, but we both thought it could well have been a double bluff, so we went anyway. Be just like Morgana to let us think she was lying when it was truth.”
He had that right. The unwelcome image of Morgana’s death flashed into my head. Of her head snapping back, of the loud crack as it broke, of her body twitching on the mosaic floor beside the table where her sewing lay, still with the warmth of her touch on it.
I mustn’t think of her. She didn’t matter. She’d gone. I had to convince myself of that. Although now, what did anything matter? I steeled myself. “If you were heading west, what made you come this way?”
Cei cleared his throat again and spat a gob of phlegm into the dust. “We rode west as far as we thought he might go, with him not knowing the land. Then we turned east again and picked up his tracks. They hadn’t lied, after all. He’d ridden west and then doubled back into the valleys. He had no idea of how to travel without leaving a trail a mile wide. He was all too easy to follow once we’d found it.”
