Dark Moon of Avalon Read online

  She could still feel the crushing weight of what she’d felt seeing the bloody marks of torture on Trystan’s back—the torture he’d endured at Marche’s hand, but her fault. And Trystan would be able to put the pieces together as well as she could herself. If last night’s attackers had been driven by the thought of Marche’s gold, the men who had attacked and hurt Hereric might have been as well. Tell him about Marche’s offered reward, Isolde thought, and Trystan will hold himself accountable—even more than he does already—for Hereric’s broken arm. And not only that, but for Kian’s lost eye as well.

  Hereric groaned and stirred again, trying to rise, and Isolde put a hand on his forehead to sooth him. In a low murmur, she started to tell the story of the daughters of Llyr, one of the countless other tales she told for the injured man these last days. The words were so familiar that she scarcely needed to think about what she said, though—and as she sat watching the labored rise and fall of Hereric’s chest, and looking down at the streaks of red climbing up the broken arm, Isolde set aside all thoughts of Trystan and Marche—for the time being, at least. Because now she had to acknowledge what she’d feared all along. Though she’d not told Trystan this, either. But she couldn’t save Hereric’s arm—he was either going to lose the arm or die.

  THE SUN CLIMBED HIGHER IN THE sky. Isolde wiped Hereric’s face again with water, managed to coax him into swallowing a few mouthfuls of honey wine, and set up a makeshift tent from a pair of blankets to keep him in the shade. She poured water into her cupped hands for Cabal to drink, gave him a torn-off piece of stale bread, and checked the big dog’s bandages again, finding them still dry and the cut in his back scabbing over cleanly. Some time in the middle of the day, she slept a little, still sitting at Hereric’s side—but only lightly, because her every muscle was tight, continually waiting and listening for some sound or sign that the men who had attacked last night had found them again.

  Dusk was falling and the evening shadows drawing in by the time Trystan returned. Hereric was tossing restlessly again, but all the same, Isolde had been watching for Trystan, looking up every few moments to scan the surrounding reeds. Even still, she hadn’t realized how worried she’d been until she saw Trystan walk into the small circle of their camp and felt an almost dizzying rush of relief.

  He moved wearily, his steps a little dragging, and Isolde could feel—

  Nothing.

  Startled, Isolde tried again, watching Trystan and reaching for the space where she felt the echo of Sight. She could feel, still, the grinding throb of Hereric’s pain and the prickling heat of his skin. But nothing at all from Trystan—though he still held his right hand motionless, as though guarding against hurt. And watching him move to take a place nearby on the ground, she realized that she’d only guessed that morning that he’d injured his hand in the fight. And that back at Dinas Emrys she’d had to ask him whether he was wounded at all.

  Reaching with his left hand, Trystan took the cup of honey wine she poured for him, and Isolde studied him again. Save for the stiff right hand, he showed no other sign of injury, and she could see his gaze traveling round the small clearing, ticking off the details of their surroundings and keeping watch as she had done for any sign of alarm. But the nothingness she felt watching him wasn’t just the simple absence of pain, but as though a shadow had fallen, blotting out her connection to the Sight itself.

  Before she could do more than wonder what further strange twist of the Sight this might be, Trystan spoke, nodding towards where Hereric lay on the ground, his face looking like bleached bone in the fading light.

  “How is he?”

  A cloud of the stinging insects were swarming around the bandages on Hereric’s broken arm, and Isolde waved them off. “He’s all right,” she said. “The fever’s rising, though. I’ll be happier when we can get him up off the damp ground. Were you able to mend the rudder?”

  Trystan slapped at one of the buzzing swarm that had landed on his arm, swore, and then shook his head. “No. I’m sorry. It’s a bigger job than I thought—and there’s not much in the way of wood around here that’s not rotted through with the damp.”

  “I’m sorry,” Isolde said. “About the rudder, I mean.”

  Trystan shrugged, his gaze still traveling round the camp, his head tilted as though he were listening for something far off. “Not your fault. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have better luck, but I’m afraid we’re stuck here for tonight.”

  He jerked his head towards where the big dog was asleep on another blanket near the remains of last night’s fire.

  His eyelids were slightly reddened with sleeplessness—or maybe, Isolde thought, with the effects of all the wine he’d drunk the night before. But his jaw had hardened, and his tone was expressionless and flat. Not your fault, he’d said, but Isolde wondered abruptly whether he did blame her for the broken rudder.

  She seemed to hear above the twilight stillness the shriek of wood on wood as the other boat had drawn alongside, and see again in the deepening shadows of the two armed men clambering over the guard rail. She shivered. Even now, she couldn’t think what else she might have done but cut the mooring lines—but still, that was why the boat lay beached and damaged now. She couldn’t either call it entirely unfair if Trystan did blame her—though she knew the small spark of anger she still felt would kindle and catch fire once again if it were true.

  Seven years ago, she would simply have demanded an answer, even if it meant the start of an argument. Now, though, with them back to exchanging brief, stiffly polite words whenever the occasion absolutely demanded that they talk—as they’d done since this journey began—she couldn’t make herself ask. It was a pointless question, after all. At best, she thought, I’d only dredge up a memory of Trystan’s drunken sleep that would make me angry and not able to trust him all over again.

  “That’s all right,” she said instead, matching Trystan’s tone. “It’s—” She glanced round them. “It’s a good place to camp.”

  From somewhere amidst the reeds, a cricket started to sing, echoed a moment later by the shrill cry of a marsh bird. Trystan watched her a moment, his blue eyes shadowed by the gathering dusk, and then a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “A good place to camp?” he repeated. “Even for you, that has to be the most unconvincing lie I’ve ever heard.”

  Isolde pressed her lips together, then gave up the struggle and laughed. She pushed a stray lock of hair back from her brow. “All right. This is, without question, the most uncomfortable place I’ve ever spent the night—and I include nights I’ve spent in a hospital tent on the hill above a battlefield, with two dozen wounded men in my care. But at least we’ve been safe here, so far. How’s that?”

  Trystan’s mouth relaxed in a rare, unguarded smile, and Isolde felt something twist tight in her chest. Something she had to push far, far away. “Better,” he said. “I—”

  Before he could finish, Hereric groaned again, this time struggling to sit up and then screaming in pain as the movement jarred his broken arm. In an instant, Isolde had sprung up to kneel beside him, putting a hand on his good arm and speaking in a low, soothing murmur, trying to ease him back down. This time, though, her voice didn’t seem to reach Hereric. He jerked away from her touch as though frightened, screamed again, and then without warning struck out with his good arm. In health, Hereric was strong as a draft horse, with broad shoulders and arms banded with muscle. Even weakened by fever as he was, his blow was enough to knock Isolde backwards.

  Trystan, too, had risen at once and dropped to the ground on Hereric’s other side, and now caught hold of Hereric’s arm before he could swing again.

  “Is that how you treat a lady when she’s trying to help you, man? Be your own fault if she gives you up as a bad job.”

  Trystan’s face was stark, his mouth grimly set as he watched Hereric’s agonized struggles. His tone, though, was easy, good-humored, and almost unconcerned, and Hereric’s frantic movements subsided. Slowly, Hereric turned his
head, his bleary, fever-bright gaze finding Trystan’s face, and his breath went out in a sobbing rush as his good hand fumbled to make a series of his word signs.

  “That’s all right.” Trystan clapped Hereric lightly on the back. “Just lie back, now, and we’ll have you well in no time.”

  The bunched muscles of Hereric’s shoulders relaxed, and he let Trystan ease him back down onto the blankets.

  “Here,” Isolde said quietly. She had poured a measure of the poppy mixture into a cup of wine, and now put it in Trystan’s hand. “Can you get him to swallow some of this?”

  Trystan slipped an arm under Hereric’s head and shoulders, holding the cup to his lips, and bit by bit the wine and poppy went down. When about half the cup was gone, Hereric let out another sigh and his eyelids drooped closed. Trystan took his arm away, lowering Hereric’s head and shoulders once again.

  He watched the injured man’s slow, steady breathing for a moment, then turned his head to look at Isolde. “Did he hurt you?”

  Isolde touched the place on her cheek where Hereric’s blow had caught her. There might be a bruise there in the morning, but only a faint one. She shook her head. “It’s nothing. He must have thought I was the one causing the pain in his arm. It happens, sometimes. At least he knew you, though.”

  “I suppose.” Trystan sat back on his heels, turning again to look down at Hereric’s face. The darkness was drawing in around them, deepening the shadows about the Saxon man’s sunken eyes.

  “What did he say to you?” Isolde asked. “Or rather, sign?”

  Trystan grimaced. “Said he was sorry—he’d not recognized me at first. And that his arm hurt so much it was making it hard to think.”

  Isolde hesitated, but only for a moment. Trystan had to be able to see the truth as well as she. And besides, she couldn’t keep simply adding to the list of topics she was stopping herself from speaking to him about. She drew in her breath. “Trys, he’s not going to get better unless he loses that arm. We’re going to have to take it off—and soon. I don’t think it can wait even a full day more.”

  Trystan straightened with a jerk and looked at her across Hereric’s motionless form. “Do what?” And then, as Isolde started to answer, he shook his head. “Take off his arm? Out here? That’s madness. Do you know what the chances are of a man surviving an operation like that?”

  “Of course I do. I know exactly what the dangers are. But it is a chance of surviving, at least. Without it, he’s none at all.”

  Trystan’s mouth tightened. “A chance of what? Life as a one-armed mute? I’d sooner cut his throat now or have you give him a brew of something that would finish him off. He’d be better off dead.”

  “Maybe you think he would—but you can’t make that choice for Hereric. It’s his life. Only he can say for sure.”

  Trystan shook his head again. “Hereric earns his way by his sword—and his hands. As I do. Take that away, and what has he got left?”

  Isolde suddenly remembered Evan, a bony, long-faced man with a drooping mustache who had been one of Con’s bodyguards. Evan had lost a foot to an arrow wound gone bad, and had dragged himself from his sickbed and tried to drown himself in a water butt afterward. And for the entire three weeks he’d lain in Isolde’s care, he’d snarled curses at her morning, noon, and night for pulling him out of the water and saving his life. That was another of those times she’d had to fight to keep from losing her temper with one of the wounded in her care—horribly sorry for Evan though she’d been.

  Now, facing Trystan in the chill, gathering darkness of the marsh, Isolde’s mouth twisted. “Yes, I know that argument. I sometimes think that’s all men know how to do—fight and hurt and hack each other to pieces with their swords. So you think Hereric is only of use as long as he can kill? Take that away, and you might as well put him down like a wounded dog?”

  Trystan held himself very still, and Isolde had the impression that he was working to keep anger in check as well. “That’s not what I meant.”

  She’d rarely known him to lose his temper when they’d been growing up together, either. He might get angry, but he’d always manage to keep himself under tight control. Now Isolde wished he would simply shout back at her. Seeing Trystan’s effort to maintain his calm only made her angrier still.

  “Maybe not,” she flashed back. “But you’re not God—nor yet even Hereric’s blood kin. You can’t decide on your own whether he lives or dies.”

  A muscle jumped in Trystan’s jaw. “What about you? Haven’t you ever wished you left well alone and let someone die—because all you’d done was just prolonging their agony a little more?”

  Isolde’s breath caught, and she realized, with a brief twist of irony, that she had ended up blazingly furious—and half able to believe Trystan the man Cynlas had thought him—after all. “That’s a horrible thing to say.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?” Between them, Hereric flinched and muttered in the depths of his drugged sleep, and Trystan drew in his breath. When he went on, he spoke more quietly, though his voice was still hard and deadly calm. “Isa, Hereric’s already had his tongue cut out—and it left him as simple as a six-year-old child. You want to see what’s left of him after you cut off his arm?”

  Isolde shook her head. “Trys—” All at once, all the fear and strain and exhaustion of the past night and day seemed to rise up and crash over her in a wave, and to her horror, she felt tears come into her eyes. She blinked them savagely back, keeping her gaze locked on Trystan’s. “I’m a healer. I can’t just sit by and let Hereric die if there’s a chance I can act to save him. I can’t.”

  Trystan watched her, still looking as though he worked to keep his voice even and quiet. “And that’s what being a healer means? You’ll grant Cynlas’s son a quick death, but not Hereric?”

  Isolde’s temper flared again. “It means, at least, that I wouldn’t give up on a friend because I was too much of a coward to take the chance on saving his life.”

  For what seemed an endlessly long moment, Trystan’s eyes met hers, his face giving away nothing of whatever he thought. Then, abruptly, he let out his breath and dropped his head into his hands.

  For the space of several of Hereric’s labored breaths, Trystan sat unmoving, so still he might have been carved in stone while the night stillness thickened all around them. Then, slowly, he raised his head. His face was still expressionless, but his eyes had the same look Isolde had seen in men newly returned from battle, who’d seen their companions cut down on every side.

  Trystan drew in his breath, then said, “When?”

  Something in his voice made even the last spark of Isolde’s remaining anger die out and a cold chill brush against the back of her neck. Impulsively, she reached out and touched Trystan’s arm. She said, “Trys, I didn’t mean—”

  His forearm was warm, even in the raw, predawn chill, and she felt a jolt run through her at the touch of his skin against hers, strong enough to tighten her heart. Quickly, she took her own hand away.

  For what seemed another endlessly drawn-out moment, Trystan’s eyes met hers, and she wondered whether he’d felt something of what she had. But then he shook his head and said, “It’s all right. I know what you meant. Just tell me what you’ll need for Hereric.”

  Chapter Eight

  ISOLDE BENT TO CHECK THE bindings of soft rags she’d used to tie Hereric down. She’d managed to dose him with a few swallows of poppy-laced wine, and he slept, but not deeply. Not deeply enough that he’d stay unconscious once they began.

  Trystan set down the lamp he’d lighted on the ground beside Hereric, and Isolde glanced up. They were in an abandoned fisherman’s hut that Trystan had happened on in his search for wood the previous day, an hour’s slow walk upriver from where they’d abandoned the boat. Part of the hut’s thatched roof was falling in, and the door was gone, but it was shelter, of a kind. And the hut stood beyond the marsh on drier ground—though the wattle and daub walls were still crumbling with dam
p and smelled faintly of must and decay.

  They’d spent the day in moving enough supplies here to last a few days, since Hereric would need time to recover before he could be moved. Isolde had helped Trystan fashion a carrying sledge for Hereric from an old blanket, and Trystan and Cabal had taken it in turns to pull him through the reeds to this place.

  Now it was near nightfall, and Cabal kept guard outside, lying in front of the open doorway. Isolde sat back to glance round the hut’s single small, square room. The floor was of beaten earth, packed hard as stone with years, and the place was empty save for a pile of old fishing nets in the corner, the strings half rotted through, and the roughly built wooden sleeping shelf where Hereric now lay.

  Isolde looked up at Trystan. “Are there any settlements nearby? I didn’t notice.”

  Trystan shook his head. “Nothing close. I saw a curl of smoke in the sky towards the east, but it was some ways off—half a day’s walk, at least, I’d say.”

  Isolde nodded, and turned back to study Hereric’s face, yellow as old tallow in the lamp’s flickering light. The ominous smear of green-gray still ran the length of his jaw, and his mouth ominously colorless and slack. Isolde could hear what her grandmother would have said at such a bedside. That already the Morrigan hovered over this man, beating her raven wings, marking him for her own. At best, Isolde thought, she might have burned a pine bough to free the soul and speed it on its way.

  For a moment, Isolde let herself look full in the face the fear that despite what she’d said to Trystan, this was the wrong choice after all. That Hereric would die, and they—she—would have put him through agony to no good cause. Then, deliberately, she locked the fear away. She’d chosen this course; there was no room for doubts now.

  Trystan, to judge by his face, must have done the same. His eyes looked smudged with tiredness, but their gaze was clear and still as he stood looking down at the unconscious man.