Page 79 of The Road to Avalon
The memory of what we’d been told about her came back to me, from where it had been shut away after the events of the past weeks. “You were riding out a lot with Medraut and Amhar, weren’t you? Didtheybring you this way? Was it someone else’s idea to come to Ynys Witrin, not yours?”
Archfedd met my gaze again, eyes wider still.
Reaghan sniffed. “I-I think Medraut said he wanted to come here…”
Why was I not surprised? Medraut was like his Aunt Morgana– a spider at the center of a web, but was it a web of his own spinning? Not that she’d be doing any more spinning of her own.
“Why did he want to come here?” Archfedd asked.
Reaghan looked up at her. “He said he was considering becoming a monk.”
“What?” I had to scoff at that. Anyone less likely to become a monk would have been hard to find.
“I didn’t believe him,” Reaghan muttered, sounding annoyed. “I’m not stupid. I thought… I thought helikedme.”
“Oh, Reaghan,” I said with a sigh. “He’s a slippery customer and if he wanted you to think that, it was for a reason. I’d better tell you why we’re here.”
I told her everything. The fight between Llacheu and Amhar, their deaths, which she hadn’t known about, and which made her cry again, our frantic efforts to save Amhar, the loss of Merlin, and Arthur’s adoption of Medraut as his heir and decision that Archfedd should marry him.
When I’d finished, we all sat in silence for a while. A few flies buzzed, a skylark’s bubbling call carried on the warm air, and the summer sun beat down on us as though nothing at all were wrong in the world.
At last, Archfedd broke the silence. “Mami, do you think Medraut could have encouraged Amhar to attack Llacheu? Is that what you’re saying? Did he– did he have something to do with what happened to my brothers?”
Reaghan’s eyes flashed. “Did Medraut kill Llacheu?’
I looked from one girl to the other, wishing I could be certain. “I don’t know. His mother swore he didn’t. You heard her, Archfedd. She made me say I believed her before she’d tell me where to look for Amhar. I think Ididbelieve her then, just for a while, but now I’m not so sure.” I paused. “I think he might have.”
“But why did he bring Reaghan here?” Archfedd asked. “Did he want her to stay here?”
Reaghan wriggled in discomfort. “He frightened me,” she said. “We came here, but he told Amhar to wait in the lake village– that he wanted to take me to the island by himself.” She licked her lips. “Amhar always did what Medraut told him. I thought Medraut wanted me to himself. I thought helikedme.” She clasped her reddened hands in her lap. “But when he got me here, he told me that if I didn’t join the religious house of Bec Eriu, he’d kill my mother. He said no one would ever know he’d done it. He had a secret poison he’d give her, and it would look like her heart had given out. He said it would be easy, and he’d done it before, in the past, and no one had known it was him. He said Morgana had given the poison to him a long time ago and shown him how to use it.”
Oh my God.
Archfedd frowned. “But why? What would he want you shut up here for?”
Reaghan shook her head. “I don’t know, but I could see in his eyes that he meant it. He frightened me. I didn’t want him to kill my mother. I said I’d stay.”
She looked me in the eye. “I think hemusthave killed Llacheu, whatever my aunt Morgawse believes. When he looked at me, I could see in his face that he has it in him to kill. I don’t mean in battle– all men can do that. I mean deliberately and sneakily. Coming up behind someone with a knife, or slipping poison into their food or wine. I think he could. I think he did.”
I had an answer to Archfedd’s question, but I wasn’t going to share it with them, despite the temptation. In forcing Reaghan into a religious house, he’d been getting rid of another possible Pendragon heir. Reaghan was right in her summing up of his character. He’d murdered Llacheu and set Amhar up to look like the culprit, and now he intended to mop up the surviving heir by marrying her. And there appeared to be very little any of us could do about it.
And then there were none, to paraphrase Agatha Christie.
Chapter Thirty-Three
We took Reaghanback with us to the abbey. No way was I leaving her at Bec Eriu with that cold-hearted woman in charge, and she wasn’t sorry to come. The little room where we slept became more cramped than ever when a third narrow pallet bed was moved in, but the girls both seemed happier at being together.
Something of their old camaraderie returned, and at nights when there were no services taking place, they lay and chattered together like the girls they’d both once been. Reaghan lost her downtrodden attitude, and Archfedd began finally to put the deaths of her brothers behind her. Never forgotten, but pushed gently to one side so she could pick up the threads of her life, such as it was within the confines of the abbey.
Arthur and Cei returned about a week later, and, thanks to Gildas’s watchman, we had enough warning to ensconce ourselves inside the church, the two girls hiding from sight in our bedchamber.
“You’re my wife,” Arthur tried, possibly thinking to appeal to my sense of duty. Good luck to him on that one.
“I know that,” I said, folding my arms and leaning on the doorpost. Gildas had come to oversee our meeting again, and Arthur was keeping his distance. “Tell me something new.”
Intense irritation radiated out of him. “As my wife you are obliged to do as I say.”
I shook my head. “In your dreams.”
