Dawn of Avalon Read Free Page B

boy, it was all right to try to kill me. But now that you know me for a girl, I’m suddenly too delicate to dress a bloodied sword cut?”
    I did manage to keep my touch gentle, though, as I pushed the prisoner back onto the straw. To my surprise, he did not resist. Perhaps he was only too much exhausted from the fight with Bron. I added, more quietly, “Lie still. Please. And let me help you.”
    For a moment, visions of burned settlements, broken bodies and homes danced like sparks before my eyes. Our harpers are full of laments for a warrior slain in battle, but murdered mothers and babies lie in silent graves. “I only wish this were the worst thing I’d seen.”
    The prisoner had torn out three stitches that would need to be reset. I threaded a needle and could feel Bron’s eyes on me. I had known him as long as I had known Gamma, since I was four years old. He had taught me to draw a bow and arrow, to throw a knife and spar with a wooden staff.
    And now, even without the Sight, I could have read the silent look he gave: a silent apology for bringing us to this moment with his slip of the tongue, mingled with a dubious, Good luck to you, lass. I hope you know what you’re about.
    I began. “When the Roman legions marched away and abandoned Britain, the land was left prey to barbarians on all sides. Constantine, Prince of Brittany, crossed the channel to Britain with an army two thousand strong, and defended the land, became Constantine Waredwr— Britain’s deliverer and High King.
    “But then Constantine was killed. Murdered by Pictish assassins. His throne was seized by Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu, he who calls himself Vortigern now. Only Constantine’s nephew, Uther Pendragon, was left to oppose Vortigern’s claim to the High Kingship of Britain.”
    I stopped and did risk a glance upward, then, holding the prisoner’s gaze even as my mouth twisted just slightly, “My father, whatever he may think of me or I of him, does love Britain. He has struck at Vortigern’s forces again and again. He would be here, now, storming the fortress—setting you free—were it not that any open attack on a hill as steep as this one would mean certain death.”
    I waited two, then three beats of my own heart; three, then four of the prisoner’s harshly-drawn breaths.
    I was used to anger from wounded men. When a man has nought else but his pride, he guards it at all costs. And a man rendered infant-helpless by a battle wound has little left to him but his pride.
    I was used, too, to the youngest of the wounded men—little more than boys, really, cut down as they struggled to wield too-heavy swords—looking at me with pleading in their eyes. A look that said, plain as speaking, Tell me you can make me whole again. Tell me I’m not going to die.
     This man, though—I had heard my father’s Saxon slaves tell fire tales of monstrous beings who claw their way back from the grave, unable to die or feel pain. It might have been one of those creatures I spoke to now.
    I laid a hand—just lightly—across the newly stitched wound.
    The Sight, Gamma had called the power she had taught me. Once it flowed like the first thaw of spring, a bounty from Britain’s earth, a song as many-voiced and bright-colored as the throb of the ocean or the cry of the wind.
    Now men looked on the earth as naught but a slave, to be fought over and stripped of its spoils. And the Sight was a tide that sometimes ebbed, sometimes swelled, that would not come on command and did not always show true.
    Still, I had found, sometimes, that I could catch a memory from a warrior’s pain—See the battle or the sword fight where the wounded man had taken his injury, sometimes hear a quick echo of the man’s thoughts at the time he got the wound. Fear and pain, often. Surprise, always. A warrior ever imagines the Morrigan’s raven wings will pass him by, however many of his companions fall.
    Now, though— 
    I heard the prisoner’s indrawn breath, a sharp