know how to defend myself, Bron and Gamma between them had seen to that. But I had no chance. Behind me, the door to the cell banged open. And then the prisoner was all at once jerked backwards, landing with a dull thud on the dirty, straw-strewn floor. Bron straddled him—braided hair, white druid’s robe and all—and held a knife to his throat.
The prisoner fought, and of a certainty he fought well, with a fierce, concentrated economy of movement. Once he did land a blow on Bron’s jaw, hard enough to snap Bron’s head back and make him spit a mouthful of blood.
But the nameless prisoner was weak, feverish after a week of imprisonment and starvation and interrogation at Vortigern’s hands. And for all Bron had passed sixty winters a season or two back, he knew more wrestling holds than most men learn in a lifetime or more.
When the brief, snarling scuffle ended, the younger man still lay flat, panting and winded, with Bron pinning him flat to the ground.
The prisoner was staring, eyes narrowed. “If you’re a druid, I’m—”
Bron grunted and shifted his grip on the hilt of the blade. “Right now I’d say all you should be caring about is that I’m the man with a knife at your throat. And that it stays there until you agree to show the lady a bit o’ respect.”
The prisoner’s eyes flared wide. His jaw went slack, and then his head turned—slowly. “Lady.”
I ordered myself to draw a slow breath, despite the hollow sliver of fear pressing up under my ribcage. I could not, in conscience, be angry with Bron. I knew it even before the prisoner spat out the word. Bron was oath-sworn to protect me, to guard my life with his own, and had volunteered for this mission without even being asked. Volunteered though it meant walking a knife’s edge, where one slip might mean both our lives.
And I could see in his face, the tight set of his gray-stubbled jaw, that he was mortally afraid he might have made such a slip now.
Vortigern would not leave us alone here long, of that I had no doubt. If he did not come himself, he would certainly send a guard. Which meant that, of a surety and for good or ill, I had now no choice but to win this wounded, half-crazed prisoner’s trust.
“You were right, in a way,” I said, and met the prisoner’s gaze. “I am of Uther Pendragon’s line. I am Morgan. His daughter. And this”—I tilted my head—“Is Bron. My bodyguard.” I drew a breath. “Will you tell me your name? Whose war band you belonged to?”
Something—just for a moment—flickered across the prisoner’s angular face.
But then he moved, ran a hand across his face as though he were peeling the show of feeling from his skin and flinging it from him.
“Why should you think I ever belonged to anyone’s war band?”
Bron grunted at that, rubbing the reddened mark on his jaw where the nameless prisoner’s blow had landed. “Think we can rule out ‘bard’ or ‘scholar’ for what you might ha’ been before this, anyway.”
I watched the younger man, searching his gaze. But he did not move, not even by a fraction of a muscle. No expression on his face, nothing in the blue eyes.
And time was slipping away. I could feel each precious moment I had here dripping away, like water through clenched hands. A bare handful of moments in which I might persuade the prisoner not to blurt out the truth of who I was the moment Vortigern or one of his guards stepped into the room.
I let out a breath. “You’ve opened the leg wound again.” I gestured to the bandages I had used on the prisoner’s upper thigh. That wound he had already carried when he had first been captured and dragged into Vortigern’s prison cell: a deep cut made by a long dagger or sword, and already some days old when I had seen it on that first day.
But he jerked back and even tried to rise when I moved to unfasten the pin I had used to hold the bandage in place. “A lady shouldn’t—”
“So when you thought me a