“I understand your mother,” she said unexpectedly. “I understand her all too well. I live in constant fear that I will be kept prisoner as she is, because I am dangerous and powerful, and because I am a woman. I would not betray Lleu even if { Llstant f I wanted to; he is my sole ally, my one defense against such a fate. But you, Medraut, you have been offered the regency of his kingdom, you have power in your hand. So why?”
I drew my fingers across Lleu’s cheek and lips as though I were touching something beautiful and delicate, an exotic flower, a piece of old silk, the skeleton of a leaf. “For a word. For my father’s word. For something I want Artos to say. I want him to admit, before all, that it is his own iniquity that keeps me from the kingship. That the shame is his, not mine.” I paused, my fingertips trembling above Lleu’s still face, and then went on speaking as though to myself, as though she were not there. “And I want Lleu to be afraid of me, to know and admit to my authority. I want—” I hesitated again, lost. I did not know what I wanted. “Lleu’s grown so confident and cruel.”
“He’s not cruel!” Goewin said.
“He is,” I said. “He is ever conscious of his beauty, his power. And he never quite stops sneering at me for my being so… scarred.
“I might end by killing him,” I finished bitterly. “I would do it if I had a reason, if I were given the command. He would deserve it.”
“He would not. You fret like a jealous child,” Goewin whispered roughly. “I am as much in the way of your kingship as Lleu is. Take me in his place. Let him go.”
“I couldn’t take you,” I said slowly. “I am too much afraid of what I might do to you.”
“What could be more terrible than anything you might do to Lleu?” she asked.
I looked at her hard and straight, perplexed, unable to believe her so naive. Then I took her face between my fevered palms and held her close, so that we must look directly at one another. My hands moved down her throat, across her shoulders, until at last they were cupped gently beneath her breasts; and then she knew what I might do to her. “I am your sister,”
she said.
“You see how it happens,” I said, and let her go.
She sat still for a moment, her eyes lowered, as though in prayer. Then she carefully set the horn cup on the floor away from us, and moved back to her place between Lleu and the cave wall. She lay on her back with her eyes closed and said in an icy voice, “If you don’t bring Lleu back alive and unharmed I’ll kill you, I swear it, surely, I will find a way to kill you.”
“I fear you as little as you fear me,” I whispered.
XII
Peak and Forest
MORNING, NOW. LLEU WOKE up and was sick. I began to help him dress, but he shrank from the touch of my hot hands over his bare arms and back; Goewin, watching, barked out, “Let him go!” I glanced at her with half a grin, but shrugged and gave Lleu his dry shirt and jacket and then drew away. Afterward he crouched dejectedly next to the fire with his head in his hands, not yet able to eat or to stand. Goewin said to me severely, “You who never lie, have you thought what quarry you will bring away as proof of this week’s hunting?”
The young lion raised his head with an effort and answered in quiet, “Has he not?”
I took Goewin outside to speak to her alone. I wanted to be certain she knew her wa ~;
“Why would he wait,” Goewin asked, “once he knows what you intend?”
“He won’t know that,” I said. “I will not follow the road. I cannot risk a direct route.”
“Oh, Medraut,” she sighed. “Where will you go?”
The high moors and valley below us lay blanketed in snow, several inches deep. The clouds were thin, but covered the whole sky, so that the sun glinted weak and silver through a misty screen and gave neither warmth nor much light. It was enough, though. “Today I mean to strike out across open country.”
“Where you can find your way by following the sun and the sound of water, and no one will be able to find you.”
“Just so.”
“Then all I can do—”
“Obey my word.”
Goewin left before we did. I made her take Lleu’s horse as well as her own, so that she was forced to travel slowly, and so that Lleu must remain dependent on me. The Bright One, my prisoner, betrayed his fear only in the way he clung to his sister when she embraced him in farewell: his face hidden against her shoulder, his hands clenched in fierce and frantic fists.
After she had gone we too set out, descending through a narrow pass with steep, rocky sides as though we traveled among the bones of the land itself; rocks tore through the snow like dark, fleshless elbows and knees. After this stark gully we emerged onto a gently sloping moor, still in sight of the distinct black ridge called Shivering Mountain. Here I turned across the moor that spread before us, smooth and white and apparently endless. Beneath the snow the ground was treacherously uneven. We journeyed slowly, more slowly than we had the day before. When we lost sight of Shivering Mountain it was difficult to have any idea of where we were, for all directions led to the same seamless white horizon. We passed a high point on the barren slope and continued down a similar expanse of emptiness.
We stopped to eat in the shelter of the fallen entrance to a disused mine. Within our sight the horizon was at last broken by a few low, unnatural mounds of earth that rose from the level ground, ancient burial chambers or ruined huts. “Where are we?” Agravain asked. We had said little to each other during the morning’s journey; the wind made it difficult to speak when we were in the open.
“Are you lost too?” Lleu murmured. “I thought you were leading this venture.”
“Where are we, Medraut?” Agravain repeated.
“Old Moor. This way is shorter.”
Agravain said, “It’s more difficult.”
Lleu looked up at me, silent. He frowned a little, as though he were trying to map his way through a fog, trying to fathom what I was thinking.
“It is more difficult,” I acknowledged. “But also more beautiful.”