For King & Country (20 page)

His eyes widened. "What do you mean?"

"Liaison with Ganhumara can bring you nothing but shame, disgrace, and outlawry, if your indiscretion or her adultery are discovered. I have in mind a far more advantageous union which would benefit you immediately and benefit all of Britain in the long run."

"What sort of union?" he asked curiously as the shame and high color in his face began to fade. "There's not a princess of blood royal anywhere in Britain who would have the son of a condemned murderess with no land to offer." The bitterness in his voice was sadly understandable, as was the flare of stubborn pride.

"Perhaps not in Britain, but there are other shores, Medraut, and other alliances."

"Brittany?" He frowned. "The Celts of mainland Gaul would draw a branding iron down their daughters' cheeks before consenting to marry them off to a creature like me."

"No, Medraut, I do not speak of Brittany."

His brows drew even lower in confusion. "What then?"

"Aside from the Saxons, where lies our greatest danger?"

"The Picts."

"Ah, you see the immediate danger, yes, but not the root cause. The Picts have become a deadly threat only because they are forced south from their own lands."

His eyes widened. "The Irish? Of Dalriada?"

"Indeed. And the enemy of my enemy is a potential friend. A potentially powerful friend. We must find a way to convince this enemy that the Saxons are as great a threat to Eire and Dalriada as they are to Britain. A people looking to expand their borders are generally far happier to marry into a throne and colonize peaceably than to risk their sons' lives in war to drive a native population out. And if they are not happier to begin with, they often can be persuaded to see the advantage of gentler intermarriage, particularly when both groups have much to offer as concerns the safety of the other."

"Do you really think you can persuade the Irish to assist Britain without treachery such as the Saxon
foederati
used?"

"I do not speak of hiring mercenaries, Medraut. I speak of alliance through the marriage bed."

"But—"

"You will have a great deal more to offer a Dalriadan princess than you now imagine."

His eyes widened once more. "You'll
give
me a piece of land?"

"More than a piece, should this alliance work out. I have one son to inherit Gododdin and one to inherit Ynys Manaw. What I do with Galwyddel is my own affair."

Her nephew gasped. "
Galwyddel? All
of it?"

"Most of it, I should think."

He sat down hard on the edge of his bed. "Oh! Aunt, I—I hardly know what to say!"

She laid a finger across his lips. "Say nothing, nephew. I should not have to warn you about the need for discretion in such a proposed alliance."

He shook his head, then nodded vigorously. "I understand, yes."

"Good." She placed a kiss against his brow. "I have had so little time, Medraut, to attend to your needs and education as I ought. Marguase's crimes were none of your doing, but I fear you have been desperately hurt by them and I forget, sometimes, to tell you that you are much honored and beloved."

Tears sprang to his eyes and he turned his glance swiftly away to hide them. He groped with one hand and squeezed hers, able to make no other reply.

"I will see you, then, in the royal villa, when Cutha arrives at Caerleul."

Covianna Nim was still concealed in the shadows of her room, whose door she had just begun to open, when Medraut burst into view and slammed open the door to his own room, clearly in a state of extreme agitation. He was deeply aroused, flushed and erect beneath trousers and tunic, and desperately unhappy in his agitated state. Her curiosity piqued, Covianna started to step into the corridor only to melt back into the shadows when Morgana swept into view, in a state of cold-eyed anger. The queen of Galwyddel and Ynys Manaw, stepsister to a far better woman whose destruction Morgana had helped bring about, thrust open Medraut's door and closed it again behind her. For the first moment or two, she could hear Morgana's voice, too low to understand the words, then the voices in Medraut's room went even quieter. Deeply intrigued, now, Covianna waited patiently, hardly daring to hope that she had finally been presented with a way to strike back at Morgana and the stepbrother who had murdered Medraut's mother—a mistress of dark arts who had trained Covianna for a time at Glastenning Tor, a relationship Covianna was quite certain neither Morgana nor Artorius knew about and one she had been extremely careful to keep secret.

For years, Covianna had bided her time, had made Artorius a "wondrous" sword of Damascus steel that she herself had pounded on the anvil, after wheedling from Emrys Myrddin every tale he could recall of the fine Damascus blades produced by the smiths of far Constantinople. Her lips twitched in amusement as she recalled Myrddin's fond tales, whispered in the glistening aftermath of some of the finest lovemaking Covianna had ever enjoyed.

"They twist the soft and hard irons together," he had murmured, trailing fingertips across her breasts. "Fold them time and again, eight, sixteen folds per blade, but the finest smiths swore while deeply in their cups that the only proper way to temper such a blade was to lift it smoking and white from the forge and plunge it into the belly of a drunken slave."

"Barbaric," she had murmured, planning to put the notion to the test at the first possible opportunity. And she had done so, testing the procedure first on a sow tied to the anvil, then on a captive doe, a goat, every animal she could think to try it on, and with decent but far from satisfactory results. Determined to win the secret of Damascus for the smiths of her hereditary clan, she had procured a criminal at great difficulty and forged a blade in
his
belly, gagging him carefully beforehand to still the screams. Better results, but not the perfection she sought.

Then Myrddin's exact words had come back to her: the belly of a
drunken
slave.

Lips twitching with satanic delight, she had ridden out from Glastenning Tor to arrange an assignation with one of the princes of Dumnonia, a foolish and drunken young sot who would be entirely amenable to accompanying her in a bout of alcoholic and sexual revelry. That he was a cousin of Artorius only made the seduction all the more delightful. She lured him to Glastenning Tor, to her own private forge deep in the labyrinthine caves beneath the great hill, where water rushed through underground rivers, welling up as the sacred springs of the Tor, blood-red with iron in one place, white as milk from chalk deposits in another.

She seduced him with her body, with endless flasks of wine and sultry laughter, led him down into the caverns to show him a secret he would never forget, and allowed him to watch while she forged her greatest Damascus sword blade yet, smiled above the pounding of hammer against folded steel as he drank and exclaimed and drank some more, filling his belly full of liquid.

And then she plunged the sword into it and the young fool died with a terrible scream and a hiss of steam erupting from the wound. She laughed as he died, his blood pouring across Covianna's hands, then she tested the blade and found it perfect, a blade that sang in her hands and bit deeply to dismember the fool who had helped her forge it. The pieces of Artorius' young cousin she dropped down a sinkhole to vanish into the roaring water which boiled past beneath the stone, smiling as she did so.

This sword, she would gift to Artorius and laugh each time he praised it. One more gift did Covianna offer her great enemy: a scabbard of silver and precious wood imported from the shores of Africa, carefully lined with sheep's wool left in the grease to oil the blade and treated most carefully, indeed, with a concoction boiled down from the sap of the Druid's plant, mistletoe. After it had sat in the sheath for a few hours, she nicked a goat with the blade. It bled to death despite her considerable effort to stanch the wound.

Ten years it had been since she had gifted that blade to Artorius, and eleven battles had he won with it, eleven battles for which she had made very certain to renew the "magical" properties of sword and sheath—"for luck," as she laughingly assured him. The great Artorius, against whom no one could stand in battle, the magnificent Caliburn shining in the sunlight like living flame as he cut down foes who could not stand against the sword's power... And all that "magic" was nothing more than the boiled sap of a common plant found on nearly any oak tree in Britain. She planned, one day, to reveal the secret to Artorius, at the worst possible moment for his inconvenience and comeuppance. Preferably as he lay dying at her feet.

Until that time came, she would simply have to content herself with stirring up trouble within his family. No one had ever guessed the fate of the poor princeling of Dumnonia, whose kin mourned him and puzzled over his mysterious disappearance. And now, it appeared that young Medraut and Morgana were about to hand her another golden opportunity at revenge. She waited patiently until Morgana swept from the room, then slipped across the corridor, tapped at the door, and stepped quickly inside.

Medraut started violently on seeing her, mouth working to try and form some coherent greeting while his face washed scarlet and his hands trembled.

"Have I come at a bad time?" Covianna purred, gliding across the room to rest a hand against his heart. It was pounding with some violent emotion, terror most likely.

The boy stammered and swallowed hard. "W-what did you want?"

"Poor lad, they treat you contemptibly." She smoothed back his ruffled hair and smiled up into his eyes. "How you remind me of your mother."

His eyes widened. "You knew my mother?"

Covianna laughed softly. "Oh, yes. Marguase was instrumental in my education. Did they never tell you, she taught healing at Glastenning Tor?"

He stared in open astonishment. Clearly, they had not.

"Not officially, of course," Covianna smiled, toying with Medraut's fine tunic and the muscle beneath it, "but Marguase learned the art from the Nine Ladies of Ynys Manaw, and when she came to Glastenning Tor as pupil, she took me under her wing for private tutelage."

Medraut seemed incapable of speaking. A terrible, burning look of longing had come into his eyes, a hunger for some snippet of news about his mother, whom he scarcely remembered, having been so young at her death.

"Sit with me, Medraut," she urged, drawing him to the bed and urging him to sit beside her. "Your mother was a beautiful, brilliant woman, a lady of much education and ambition. The others were always jealous of her achievements—so jealous, they began accusing her falsely."

A jolt ran through the boy, shocked surprise and a wounded look that amused her.

"Oh, yes," Covianna purred, "even then, there were false accusations about black arts and satanic rites. You must be wary of what others tell you, others who stood to gain by her disgrace and death."

Medraut shot an involuntary look toward the door. "You can't mean..."

"Morgana?" she said gently. "I do not accuse her, no. But Marguase was firstborn and half sister to Artorius, who preferred Morgana to her stepsister. Marguase knew her own mind even as a young girl and often was at odds with her half brother. Perhaps your mother was not, after all, suited so well to governance as Morgana. Whatever the truth of Artorius' preferences, you must realize, of course, that to Artorius, the security of Britain is an all-consuming passion. When the accusations of poisonings and black arts began in earnest, it certainly suited the Dux Bellorum to remove her and place Morgana on the throne of Ynys Manaw and Galwyddel."

Desperate hurt and confusion had swamped the boy's eyes. "Artorius has always been kind to me," he protested weakly.

"And why should he be anything else? He does, after all, carry the guilt of having persuaded your grandfather to execute his own child."

Medraut bit his lip. "It's true, then, that Marguase was the child of Igraine and Gorlois? I have sometimes wondered if perhaps Uthyr Pendragon had sired her, as well as Artorius."

"No, she was Gorlois' true heiress. It broke your grandfather's heart to order her bound to the rocks and drowned by the tide. He died soon after, in the fighting when the Irish tried to invade Ynys Manaw, leaving the throne to Morgana. Poor Igraine was dead already, of course, had thrown herself into the sea in her shame at giving birth to Artorius, got on her by ravishment at Uthyr's hands. Morgana was daughter of Gorlois'
second
marriage, greatly favored by your grandfather in his dotage. As Artorius' stepsister—not
half
sister, as was your mother—Artorius was free to, shall we say, deepen his friendship with Morgana? Theirs is a close relationship, very close."

The doubt in the boy's eyes was delicious. Doubt and a growing, subtle fear of incestuous feelings for a man and woman who were, after all, not blood kin at all, but whose "deep friendship" would certainly have brought both their reputations down in ruins had Covianna been able to prove anything. Covianna had all but given up hope, but Medraut's current vulnerability presented tantalizing possibilities to explore.

Medraut sat frowning for long moments. "What are you trying to tell me, Covianna? I can't see that any of this changes my situation. My grandfather disinherited my mother, leaving the throne legally to Morgana, not to me. He had that right."

"Yes, perhaps he did," she said softly, reaching down to stroke his hand gently, a gesture which sent a shiver through him and an unmistakable surge through his loins. It was not difficult to guess what had caused his initial arousal and Morgana's ire. The looks between Medraut and Ganhumara had not been lost on her. His passions had been whetted and Morgana had clearly interrupted, leaving him unfulfilled and vulnerable. A situation she could make delightful use of, to be sure. "Yes, perhaps he had the right to disinherit Marguase and, thereby, you as well. But it is a pity, all the same. You have the makings of a fine king, lad."

The look he gave her burned with confusion.

She smiled up into his eyes, then leaned forward and kissed him, gently at first, trailing fingertips across his groin, then with more urgency as he hardened under her hand. The union was fast and furious, as she had fully expected, and cataclysmic for the boy, who apparently was still a virgin, given his awkward fumbling under her skirts and inexperienced thrusts, not to mention the swiftness of denouement. She bit his ear and dug her nails into his back, disappointed in the extreme but feigning excitement as he pumped away. "Ah, such a king you would make," she breathed into his ear. "Such a fine and virile king. You deserve no less."