“He could not live,’ Camlin said, facing Marrock’s glare, wiping his blade clean in the sand. ‘He has seen us, knows our numbers, our strengths. He saw the wolven.’ He nodded at Storm. ‘She’s a surprise that has helped save our necks more than once today.’
Marrock was pale, stiff with anger. ‘Right or wrong, it was not your decision,’ he said. ‘We are no cut-throat rabble. You will wait for a command, is that clear?’
Camlin held Marrock’s gaze, then nodded. ‘Aye, chief,’ he said.
‘What do we do now?’ Anwarth asked, voicing Corban’s own question. ‘We have no boat to escape with.’
‘It’s either steal one or cut inland and walk to Domhain,’ Halion said.
They discussed the options back and forth: Marrock wanting to steal a boat from the village, Halion advocating fleeing inland.
‘Fleeing to Domhain does not seem to have been the safest choice,’ Marrock said.
No one knows what to do, Corban thought. All of us exhausted, scared.
‘For what it’s worth,’ Camlin said into the silence, ‘I think there’s more chance of staying alive if we cut across land. I’m not saying we’ll make it to Domhain, but I think we’ll stay alive longer that way.’
‘But we would move too slowly,’ Marrock said. ‘We do not have enough horses, even if those that you hobbled are still there. We will be chased, and those doing the chasing will be mounted. We would be run down within a day.’
‘Aye, there is that. But let me have a few hands and I think I could steal us a few extra horses – there were paddocks along the river – my vote is that horses are easier to steal than boats.’
They discussed it a little longer, until Heb finished the conversation. ‘Talk can accomplish much, but all it will accomplish here is our deaths,’ he said. ‘It will not be long before the men sent to find us are missed.’
‘Heb is right,’ Edana said.
‘For once,’ muttered Brina.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CYWEN
Cywen was on her hands and knees collecting eggs in the garden. Buddai thought it was an invitation to play and was swatting at her with a paw. Absently she told him to shoo.
Days had begun to pass in a kind of haze for Cywen. Two nights had passed since she had been questioned by Nathair. She had filled most of her time since then with routine chores – cleaning the house, tending the garden, working at the stables. She was worried about Shield, Corban’s stallion. He was such a fine mount, too fine, and there was more than one of Owain’s men with an eye on him. It would be a grief too far if one of them were to take Shield from Dun Carreg. She must keep him here, safe for Corban’s return. Somehow that was important to her.
In her mind she had spent almost every waking moment going over the questions Nathair had asked her – about Gar, about Ban. Nathair and Sumur were linked to her family, somehow. And it was obvious that Sumur knew Gar, though that should have been almost impossible.
And behind all of this was the thought, the possibility, the hope, that Corban and Gar and her mam were hiding in the tunnels beneath Dun Carreg. It was a vision that she clung to, that helped her to rise from sleep every day and put strength in her limbs. All she wanted to do was get a torch and go searching for them, but on the morning after her meeting with Nathair she had noticed a shadow following her as she’d made her way to the stables. Conall. That night someone else had stood in the shadow of a doorway opposite her house. All night. She was being watched and she could not lead people – the enemy – to the hidden tunnels where Edana might be hiding.
But she could not wait forever; her need to know was a physical sensation in the pit of her stomach. And with that, suddenly, she was done waiting, a plan forming in her mind.
She took the eggs indoors, the last of the day melting into dusk. Quickly she gathered all she needed: a bundle of rush torches, flint and tinder, a bag to put it all in, and buckled her belt of knives across her shoulder. She gave Buddai a thick marrow bone she’d traded for with the butcher earlier. Then, as the shadows were dissolving into night, she stepped into her back garden and agilely scaled the rose wall at the garden’s far end, slipping almost invisibly through her neighbour’s courtyard and into the street beyond.
Cywen stood staring at the beach. Something was wrong, different.
She had entered the tunnels through the hidden doorway in the fortress high above, made her way slowly through them, and now she was standing in a cave that looked out on the beach and bay. It was still night, dawn a long way off, although she had spent long hours searching the tunnels for her kin. Only at the end had she found evidence that they had been in the tunnels at all – the dead wyrm and warrior nearby, lying in the cavern at the end of this cave. But they were not here now. She felt drained, defeated.
They were gone.