Web of Deceit Read Free Page A

swear. Still, I wish Morgan were settled, like her sister. She’ll be four and twenty by the winter solstice and I swear she shows no inclination to wed. She’ll drive me crazy with her passion for magic, and she fills her room with some very odd and ugly things. I fear for her, Gorlois. She dabbles with forces she doesn’t understand.’
    ‘And you do understand them, my lovely?’ Gorlois asked lazily and nuzzled the palm of her hand. His luxuriant moustache tickled her skin and she giggled once more, but distractedly, and her lovely face was soon serious again.
    ‘She doesn’t know her own strength,’ Ygerne whispered. ‘She’s too passionate and impatient to count the cost. She longs for power and will come to ruin if we don’t check her. We’ve cosseted our girl overmuch.’
    ‘That little spitfire should have been born a boy.’ Gorlois grinned at his worried wife with a satiated man’s indulgence. ‘What a son she’d have made! But I’ll not pine if she remains a child for a little longer. Like her mother’s, Morgan’s beauty is ageless.’
    ‘Nothing lasts forever, husband. Not beauty and certainly not love. It’s time that Morgan put away her childishness, else she’ll perish from her ownfoolhardy nature. Dark magic will devour her whole.’
    Gorlois ran his forefinger sleepily down the perfection of Ygerne’s cheekbone. ‘Any child of yours couldn’t fail to be beautiful and good. Now, go to sleep, woman, for your old husband is weary.’ Manlike, he rolled over and was soon snoring robustly.
    For several hours, wakeful in the thick warm darkness, Ygerne watched as her husband slept with the intensity and abandon of a child. When his eyes began to move under his closed lids she knew that he dreamed, and when his body thrashed and struggled in their warm, dark nest she knew that he battled unseen enemies. So she watched over him as the windy, rain-drowned night wore away to be replaced by a newly woven dawn that was fresh, highly coloured and vivid. Only then did the eyes of the Dumnonii queen close in sleep.
    And even in the thrall of her own dreams, she felt a compulsion to guard her beloved Gorlois, as if only the alertness of her pale eyes could protect him from some nameless horror. She could hear the monster coming as she slept, drawing ever closer to Tintagel on scaly talons, so that even in the safety of Gorlois’s arms she knew that neither husband nor wife would ever sleep in perfect peace again.
    Ygerne had not been the only soul who was awake during the long hours of darkness. In a narrow room, Morgan leaned on a wooden window ledge and stared out at the last of the storm. The darkness was impenetrable before the dawn, except when forked lightning sizzled and flashed into the sea. Morgan held her hand out into the darkness of the night and imagined that she could grasp that power and master it, until she was acknowledged as the most fearsome woman in the world.
    She smiled and sucked raindrops off her fingers as if tasting the sweat of the gods.

THE HEALER’S JOURNEY FROM DUBRIS TO VENTA BELGARUM

CHAPTER I
    AN UNPROMISING WELCOME
Men are in the shout (of war); the ford is frozen over;
Cold the wave, variegated the bosom of the sea;
The eternal God give us counsel!
    Black Book of Carmarthen
    The most eagerly anticipatedreturn toplaces of one’s past is often a bitter disappointment, for nothing stays the same. And so it was with Dubris, when the travellers returned after their sea journey from Gesoriacum.
    Spring had barely come when they set sail, so the healers wore thick cloaks to protect their chilled flesh after some years in warmer climes where even the coldest of winters lacked a true bite. But weather apart, Dubris had changed in the six years since their departure for the Middle Sea. The Saxons had arrived in a slow trickle of traders that had escalated into a flood of unchecked immigrants. Without having to strike a single blow, the Saxon stain had spread throughout