The Pendragon's Challenge (The Last Pendragon Saga Book 7) (12 page)

She looked wildly around. “What’s happened? How can they not be here?”

“I don’t know.” Almost cat-like, Goronwy began to stalk about the small room. It was circular, and its only furniture was a table with a basin of water in it and a chest that when Goronwy lifted up the lid contained a bundle of rags wrapped around a length of old rope. Nothing else. The walls were plastered white and the floor was smooth wood, worn from feet treading on it for years beyond counting.

After making a complete circuit of the room, he returned to where she stood in the doorway. Out of fear that closing it all the way would lock them in as had the gatehouse doors, she hadn’t allowed it to swing all the way closed.

Goronwy put his hand on the door at head height and eased it open. He looked down the dark stairwell and then stepped back to let the door close.

Catrin breathed a sigh of relief when it didn’t seal. “There has to be more to this castle than what we’ve seen.”

“As in, where Taliesin and Mabon have got to? Yes, indeed.” Goronwy gave a derisive laugh, but she didn’t sense that it was directed at her.

“We should go back down to the hall.”

“I don’t think so,” Goronwy said. “There was no exit from there.”

“Then how do we get out of here?”

“I think that’s going to be up to you.”

Now it was her turn to laugh. “What do you mean by that? I have none of Taliesin’s power.”

“But you have different power—and it’s clear that you have power here. It was you who opened the door.” He turned in a circle, taking in a full view of the room. “Have a look. Maybe you’ll see things differently from me.”

“I’m not a witch, no matter what people have said about me.”

“You’re a seeress. So
see
.”

Catrin began to walk around the room as Goronwy had asked. She went first to the tiny window to look out. It faced west and showed her that they stood at least sixty feet above the ground, which remained snow covered, though the snow itself had stopped falling. The window was too small for either of them to fit through, and it led to a straight drop down, so it couldn’t provide a way out. She moved on to the trunk.

Goronwy had left it open, and she stooped to remove the rags. Instead of disregarding them, as he had, she was of the opinion that nothing in this room was here by accident. She knelt, laid the bundle on the floor and, with careful movements, unwrapped it. The rope he’d dismissed as useless was revealed to be a horse’s halter. As the halter was made of rope instead of leather, sliding knots replaced iron buckles to adjust the size to the horse.

Goronwy stood over her, his head bent and his fist to his lips. “I didn’t even see it.”

“You saw what you were predisposed to see. When Taliesin sang of a halter to tame any horse, you imagined rich leather adorned in gold and gems—” she gestured to the rope, “—not knotted hemp like a poor farmer might use to guide his broken-down carthorse.”

Angry voices echoed up to them from the hall below, and then a man bellowed in rage. “Where did they go?”

“You fool! You scared them away!” The woman’s voice was equally forceful—and equally angry.

The man shouted at her again. “I’ve been tricked! He told me I would find Treasures here!”

“You destroyed them!” The woman was fighting back, but if this was the man who’d killed the pawns, as it appeared it was, they needed to get out of there quickly.

Her hands shaking, Catrin hastily gathered up the rope and the rag wrapping and stuffed the bundle into her pack. Goronwy, meanwhile, strode to the door and looked out. “We need to get out of here, and not by the stairs, not without Taliesin or Cade to help us.”

Catrin clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. “Then how?”

“By
seeing
what nobody else can.” He pointed to the small table. “What’s that for?”

“It’s a bowl with water in it.” Catrin looked into it. At first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than a hand-washing bowl like any chamber might have, but then Catrin looked more closely at the etchings on the bottom and around the rim. They were hardly more than scratches, but she could still make out the spokes of a wheel and, within each set of spokes, was a rune from the old language. The bowl itself was made of bone, from what animal she didn’t dare to guess. She looked over at Goronwy. “This isn’t Dôn’s. It’s Arianrhod’s.”

“Can you make it work?”

Catrin laughed, though the sound came out more desperate than amused. “To what end? Scrying will not get us out of here—and besides, as I told you when we first met, I don’t do magic. I just sense it.”

“Like I don’t do magic?” Goronwy looked down the stairwell one more time, then closed the door and dropped the bar across it. She had faint hope that a single piece of wood could stop a strong assault for long, but it made her feel better—safer that they were locked in. “We were separated from Taliesin and Mabon and brought to this room for a reason. That bowl is here for a reason. You may say you don’t do magic, but it looks to me as if Arianrhod is telling you that you should.” He lowered his voice. “I learned something new today. Maybe you are meant to too.”

Catrin stared at him through several heartbeats, each one pounding loud in her ears, and then she nodded. Taking in a breath to center herself and calm her racing heart, she looked again into the bowl and touched the water with one finger.

Immediately, she was thrown into the midst of battle. Men screamed and died all around her, fighting hand-to-hand on a wall-walk. She was standing beside Rhiann on a battlement in the pouring rain, even as Rhiann shot arrow after arrow into a horde of oncoming Saxons. There were too many to count, and as Catrin caught her breath, a Saxon ladder hit the side of the wall on which Rhiann was standing. At first Catrin had thought she was at Caer Fawr, but then she realized she was somewhere else entirely.

Catrin jerked as an arrow shot by her head, and as she did so, she pulled out of the vision. The runes within the spokes of the wheel stood out as if they were etched in silver, and she spoke them out loud as she deciphered them: “Halter and stone, blood and bone. And in the center are the symbols meant to represent a man and a woman.” Still breathing hard from what she’d seen, she bent her head, more shaken than she’d ever been in her life. “This isn’t going to work.”

Goronwy crossed the floor in two strides. “We have all those things! I am even a child of the blood as you are.” More shouts came from below, muffled now by the closed door.

“It isn’t that.” She shut her eyes, not yet willing to speak to Goronwy of what she’d seen. She didn’t know if the battle was happening right now, or if it was in the future. Either way, Rhiann’s need was desperate—more desperate, in fact, than Catrin’s own. “The stone we need is not ordinary. It’s the Treasure, and Cade has it. If he were here—”

She broke off as Goronwy pulled the stone from his pack. It looked like nothing more or less than a typical river rock, unchanged from when the two of them had removed it from King Arthur’s shield back on the road from Caerleon.

“How—”

“Cade gave it back to me, with the caution that Taliesin had insisted on it.” Goronwy frowned. “Half the time Taliesin claims that his sight has failed him, and then he does this—”

“I am a woman, and I have the halter. You are a man, and you have the stone. The bowl is made of bone, and I have a bone knife that is sharp enough to draw blood.”

“Surely a metal blade would cut more easily,” Goronwy said.

Catrin grimaced. “Iron blocks magic. Bone is what is needed.” She pulled the knife from a sheath at her waist and gave it to Goronwy.

He took it. “You’re sure about this?”

“The only thing I’m sure about is that we have very little time.”

Chapter Fourteen

Bedwyr

B
edwyr definitely could have been happier. He would have been a great deal happier if he had been on the walls beside Hywel, preparing to fight off the Northumbrian horde rather than down here in an underground room in the ruin of a building near the west gate.

Over two hundred years ago when the Romans had marched away from Britain, they’d left most of their cities as they’d been—stripped of all moveable goods, for certain—but intact. Whether building in stone or wood, they’d built to last, and they’d had no patience for anything that wouldn’t stand the test of time. This building, however, which had to have been a guardhouse, since it was sitting over an escape tunnel, was either an exception to that rule or had been deliberately destroyed.

Bedwyr was guessing the latter. He’d never asked his grandfather if Rheged’s army had destroyed the building on their way out, but it would make sense if they had. And yet, although two walls of the building had been knocked down, and the wooden roof was long gone, the room underneath the main floor was whole. Once they’d levered aside some of the larger stones, he’d been able to get to the trap door.

Above Bedwyr’s head, the entire city was seething with activity. Penda was preparing both to defend the city and to leave it. Peada, however, had come with Bedwyr, along with a giant of a man whom Bedwyr had picked out of a line of soldiers as the most capable of moving large items.

Peada was counting out the beats. “Pull!”

Bedwyr and the Mercian soldier, Wystan, pulled up on their respective crowbars which they’d hooked around the double trap doors at their feet. Wystan was so strong that his iron bar actually bent a little, and at last the doors moved a little too.

“Rest,” Peada said. “Are you sure there’s a tunnel down there?”

Bedwyr was bent over with his hands on his knees, but he moved a hand to point to one of the torches that he’d slotted into a sconce on the wall. “The flame flickers.”

Wystan nodded. “There’s a stiff breeze blowing through the cracks. It has to be coming from somewhere.

Peada’s eyes brightened. “Again.”

Bedwyr and Wystan pulled on the doors but, after a count of ten, Bedwyr dropped his iron bar. “We’re close, but I need you to find more men, preferably younger and stronger than I.”

Peada was up instantly to do as Bedwyr asked, climbing the rubble-covered steps to street level. Here in the basement, the steady drizzle that had started to fall from the sky wasn’t bothering them, but storms were as common in Britain in June as December, and it looked as if they were in for a big one. As far as Bedwyr was concerned, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Cade could fight outside during the day without his cloak only if the sun was hidden. Admittedly, rain was harmful to bowstrings, but it would make the ground mucky outside the city walls and the rungs of the Northumbrian ladders slippery. If the rain fell hard enough, it would also wash away blood.

 “How did you know about this tunnel anyway?” Wystan eyes narrowed as he looked on Bedwyr with suspicion.

Bedwyr wiped at the sweat on his brow. “Before your lot came, my grandfather was one of the defenders of this city. When I was still in the cradle, he told me the story of following this tunnel out of the city as the walls were breached.”

“He was a coward then.”

Bedwyr scoffed. “He lived to fight another day, didn’t he? He lived to father my father who fathered me, who is going to save your life and the life of your king—a man foolish enough to try to defend a city against overwhelming odds, just as the old King of Rheged did.”

Wystan remained unforgiving. “I would rather die than surrender.”

“Well—” Bedwyr grunted as he reached for the crowbar again, “—that’s where you and I will have to differ, and it’s also why your people will never conquer Wales. You would rather die heroically and stupidly than continue to serve your king.” He shrugged. “I understand, but I can’t respect that decision any more than you can respect mine.”

Still looking fierce, Wystan picked up the crowbar, hooked it around the door latch, and with a great shout, heaved. The door flipped upward and fell open on the floor with a bang and a cloud of dust. Wystan himself staggered backwards now that he had nothing to pull against.

Bedwyr grinned. “That worked well, don’t you think?”

Wystan glared at him. “You angered me on purpose.”

“I did, and you very obligingly rose to the bait.” Bedwyr bent to open the other half of the double-doors, revealing a stone staircase leading down. Bedwyr wrinkled his nose at the smell of mold and earth, but his sweaty face was cooled by the breeze, which brought fresh air into the room too. He heaved a sigh of relief that the tunnel was not only still open, but clear enough after all this time that the air wasn’t poisonous.

Peada returned, but stopped on the threshold to the room with the men he’d brought bunching up behind him. “Is it safe?”

“I suppose it’s time we found out.” Bedwyr grabbed a torch and set off down the steps with it.

Peada didn’t move, instead calling after Bedwyr, “It’s a quarter-mile to the Dee.”

Bedwyr didn’t look back. “Then I’d better hurry, oughtn’t I? The Northumbrians are coming, and you have men to gather. Why don’t you do that while you wait for me to return.” If they were going to flee the city, they needed to do it soon. “You coming, Wystan? Wouldn’t want anyone to think you were a coward.”

Wystan growled, and his heavy feet thudded on the stairs behind Bedwyr. “I don’t like tunnels.”

“If you fit, everyone will fit.” Bedwyr reached a door at the bottom of the stairs. A simple lift of the metal latch opened it. Though dirt had accumulated against the bottom of the door, it wasn’t so thick that one hard shove couldn’t push through it.

“They’ll be rats down here for sure.” Wystan sounded like Goronwy.  

Despite himself, Bedwyr was starting to like the Mercian. He shined the torch all around the stone ceiling and walls. The torch flickered in the wind, but the wick was fresh and well-oiled, so it stayed lit as he started forward down the tunnel. That the walls were still standing after all these years emboldened Bedwyr, and he picked up the pace. He could feel the pressure above him of the fight about to start, even though he couldn’t see the soldiers on the walls. They needed a way out, and this was it.