Gwenhwyfar (31 page)

“Cataruna can do anything if she puts her mind to it,” he said with admiration. “Of course, you chose the right place, she tells me.” He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Mind you, we’re going to be right miserable before she is finished.”

Gwen was not certain she wanted to hear the rest, but Ifan told her anyway.

“She’s calling the rains. They should be here soon. And now that you are here,” he added with a smirk, “We can call the waters.”

Cataruna had spent the time while Gwen was gone in preparing her ground, creating a ritual circle by cutting into the turf and peeling it up, setting in a stone for an altar, and four more at cardinal points.

As directed, Gwen took her place at the southernmost stone; Ifan and Cataruna took west and east respectively, leaving Bronwyn with the north. And from that moment on, once Cataruna cast the boundaries of the circle itself to seal the power in, it was unlike any ceremony Gwen had ever taken part in before.

While Ifan played a small hand-drum, he and Cataruna chanted in a language that was nothing like anything that Gwen knew. The words sounded as if she
ought
to recognize them, but she didn’t; she did, however, get the sense that she knew the gist of what they were chanting without knowing the words.

It was vaguely disconcerting. After a while, she decided that they must be using one of the secret languages of the Druids, a tongue much older than the one Gwen knew.

As for the sense of what they were chanting—

They were begging the waters to rise to the surface and cover the land here. Begging the gods to allow this to take place, and asking the waters to remain this way for two fortnights.

This was not an exercise of power as such. This was more like going to an ally and asking for help.

At least that was how it felt to Gwen.

She began to lose herself in the chanting, and although it was broad daylight, she began to feel as if she were walking in a dream. A silvery mist crept over the valley, seeming to form from nothing and, in defiance of the bright sunlight, growing thicker by the moment. Soon it had closed in around them and rose to obscure the sky and the sun. Tiny sparks of glittering color hung suspended in it, winking gold and green. Each time she blinked, she got glimpses of . . . something else scuttling through the mist, just out of view. Something, or rather multiple things, just out of the corner of her eye, that vanished when she turned to look fully at them. She didn’t get enough of a look at any of these things to have said successfully what they were, but she did know that they weren’t, and had never been, human.

And she started to feel things from them; not all of them were particularly friendly. They weren’t inimical to the four of
them,
but as Gwen listened to the chanting, she understood that Ifan and Cataruna were striking a bargain with these creatures: For as long as the waters stood above the ground here, they were being given leave to do what they willed with any human (save the four of them) who tried to cross that they could catch and hold.

She shuddered a little; at first there was no acknowledgment from the creatures, but then, between one moment and the next, the circle was surrounded by them.

Their shapes faded in and out, ghostly and transparent at one moment, solid in the next. Nearest were the Gwragedd Annwn, the Ladies of the Lake, golden-haired and so fair of face that Gwen felt utterly coltish and rough hewn in their presence. Small wonder that they came; they were the guards and guardians of the Ladies at the Cauldron Well and were surely on speaking terms with Cataruna. They were tall, as tall as Ifan, and looking on them, Gwen suddenly wondered if the white-gold hair she shared with her sisters and Eleri had come not from Saxon blood but from these creatures. There were more of the Ladies than there were men of their kind, and bards were full of tales of love and marriages between their race and that of mortal men. They were said to live in their own villages at the bottoms of lakes and ponds, guarding some of the entrance points between the world of mortals and Annwn, the Otherworld. One of the High King’s two famous swords was said to have been given to him by them . . . though Eleri had always said, no, it was not the sword that had been given but the sheath, which was by far the more important of the two. The sword Caliburn signified only because it had been Uther’s, and been driven into a stone by the Merlin—only the lawful heir to Uther could pull it out. But the sheath—Caliburn’s sheath—was said to be able to heal any wound. And it would make a great deal of sense for such a thing to have come from the hand of one of the Gwragedd Annwn.

Their faces were solemn, a little stern, and all their attention was on Cataruna and Ifan. Gwen was just as pleased. She did not want the attention of the Folk of any kind. Yet she could not help it, feeling an odd kinship with these creatures that only grew the more she was in their presence. If they felt it as well—

One of them cast a sidelong glance at Gwen, who felt warmed and chilled at the same time. Then she returned her gaze to Cataruna. Cataruna, who shared Eleri’s blood. Blood that, Gwen was now sure, was shared also with these ladies of the Fae. It was to this blood, it must be, that she, her mother, and Little Gwen, owed their curiously youthful looks . . .

And it was Cataruna’s blood they had answered to, not whatever she and Ifan had chanted.

Equally lovely were the Swan Maids and Men, who flocked close beside them. Again, there were a half dozen of the Maids and only two of the Men; among the Folk of Annwn, there were often such disproportionate numbers. They were silent and stayed farther back in the mist, their golden eyes glittering and betraying their difference from humanity.

But near to Gwen were a pair of the Ceffyl Dwr, the Water Horses, who were more mischievous than nasty. Initially appearing as a pair of tangle-maned black stallions, they caught her looking at them, and in a blink she found herself staring at youths who initially seemed very handsome and who both winked at her as if they knew her. Looking closer at them, she noted their water-weed-entangled hair and hooves instead of feet.

They grinned at her, and one of them made slight, but suggestive movements with his hips. She flushed a little, and looked away, and heard them laugh.

Deeper in the mist, she also got glimpses of what might have been Nykers, although it was hard to tell. There was something out there, dark and ugly and hunched over, with a hunger about it and a malevolence. It might have been Nykers or it might have been Groac’h, the females of the same sort: ugly, evil creatures who made a habit of snatching folks and drowning them. Some said they were the spirits of the drowned themselves, others that they were the dark cousins of the Gwragedd Annwn.

Even the Gwragedd Annwn, for all their beauty, were known for being chancy to bargain with. But they would at least stop to bargain with you; the others would pull you under before you even knew they were there.

And so they came, flocking thicker and thicker about, as Ifan and Cataruna chanted, only staring, never answering, until at last one of the Lake Ladies
did
step forward and reply in the same tongue, in a voice like a nightingale.

Ifan and Cataruna stopped chanting, listened, and then Cataruna replied.

The Lady spread her arms wide and sang again. Ifan looked startled. Cataruna, speculative.

The Lady repeated herself. Gwen concentrated as hard as she could, trying to pull sense from the words. When the Lady was done, she stared across the circle at Cataruna. “She wants to make a marsh of this place
permanently?”
Gwen spoke in hushed tones, as the cold mist collected around them, chilling her.

Cataruna nodded, but it was Ifan who replied. “She says that we mortals have pressed the water peoples hard. She wants a grant of this land and the right for the water folk to do as they will here for as long as Eleri’s blood flows in our people.” Cataruna took a deep breath. “I told her that I have not the right to make such a bargain, for I am not a war chief, only the Lady of our land. But I told her that you can.”

Gwen considered that, as all of them, mortal and fae, watched her expectantly. “I’m not likely to give land away, for all that Father’s given me the right to. I’ll be having a bargain of this.” Inside, she shook at her own temerity, daring to bargain with the Other Folk. But they didn’t respect anyone who didn’t bargain, at least, not in the tales. Cataruna repeated her words in the language of Annwn. The Lady nodded, as if she had expected this.

Gwen considered every possible way in which she could phrase her bargain. The good part was that this area hadn’t been claimed for farming, and any herders who were using it could come to King Lleudd for other grazing lands. But the point was, if she closed this—treaty, she supposed it must be—she’d be opening this place to who knew what sorts of dangerous creatures. And even if, as some claimed, the beings of Annwn were not fae at all, but just mortals with a great deal of the Gift and the Power and some ugly odd shapes . . . well, that made them all the more dangerous.

“Tell the Lady . . .” She faced the speaker squarely and looked into her cold eyes, the color of lake water before a storm, and she did not, not for a single moment, doubt that the Folk of Annwn were not of the world she knew. “Lady, this is the bargain I will be having. By the right my father, King Lleudd, gave to me as a war chief and able to make grant of land, I give you and yours this valley, to be covered with water and made your own. In return I will be having this: No creature that lives here is ever to
take
a child, a youngling, a maiden, or a woman. No creature that lives here is ever to
take
a man that comes in peace, with no ill will toward my people or those of Annwn, nor those that pledge to the High King.”

There was muttering behind her, discontent from those dark shapes that would not let themselves be seen. Anger, even, of a sort that put the hair up on the back of her neck. Nevertheless, she continued. “But for those that would trouble my people, and those that will not pledge to the High King, or those that are oathbreakers of that pledge, whether they are an army bringing upon them war and sorrow or merely thieves and rogues who would bring them loss and grief, should they put so much as one toe in your waters, they are yours. Take them, drown them in deep waters, harry them across the marsh, drive them mad with fear and despair. That is my bargain. Take it, or not.”

Cataruna repeated all she had said, but the Lady had already nodded as if she understood it all, and turned back to the others.

Gwen waited patiently, feeling colder by the moment, as the otherworldly creatures conferred. The mist roiled darkly around all of them now, and the sounds of their voices rose and fell. Both Cataruna and Ifan looked a little bewildered, as if they had not truly expected this to happen.

Well, and I cannot blame them. Who would?
She had never seen these beings even once in her life before—though both of them surely would have, the Ladies, at least. But the others? Who did she know had ever confessed to seeing a Swan Maid or a Water Horse? And to see so many of them . . .

And then to have the temerity to bargain with them?

She reminded herself of who she was doing this for. And why.

Finally, the muttering stopped. The Lady turned back to them and sang. Gwen did not need Cataruna’s translation. It was a bargain.

She stooped, seized a handful of the soil at her feet, and took a little knife from a sheath in her boot—not iron or steel, which was anathema to these folk, but a flint knife she used for skinning game, for it was easier to keep at a razor edge. She cut her thumb across and bled onto the handful of dirt, squeezing it tight. “My blood upon it,” she said, binding the bargain.

The Lady stepped to the edge of the circle, cut her own thumb with a knife very like Gwen’s, and added her blood to the handful of soil. Gwen noted absently that her blood was as red as any mortal’s, and not blue, or green, or starshine.

Gwen stooped down again and patted the handful of soil into place, opening the circle. The Lady clapped her hands, the mist swirled around them so thickly that for a moment Gwen could not see anything at all—

And then they were gone.

And her boots were beginning to get very damp. She looked down, and saw that water was rising around them.

Fast.

“Back to camp!” Ifan said, as the mist thinned, but only in the direction of their campsite. Gwen had no wish to argue with him, for the water was already at her instep and rapidly rising to her ankle. All four of them ran up the way that had opened in the mist and did not stop until they were well out of it.

Only then did they pause and look back down at the valley.

For as far as the eye could see, it was covered in that thick mist, which the setting sun was now turning to gold. There were things moving in it. She shivered. She pitied March’s men if they did try to cross here.