Guy Kay - Ysabel

“And now what happens? I name you both, is that it? And then a battle? That is why we are alive again?”

A challenge in her now, almost anger.

“That’s why he couldn’t answer before,” Kate whispered. “About his name.”

This time Ned reached out and took her hand. It lay quietly in his. They watched together. It was necessary to leave, he knew, and impossible.

The woman had turned this way again, towards the smaller man. The moonlight was on her face.

“What shall I call you?” she asked.

Her voice had lost that softer nuance again. She was controlling him, all of them. Wilful, teasing.

“Shall I name you Becan because you are small? Or Morven, one more time, since you came from the sea?”

“I had a different name when I did that,” he said mildly.

“I remember.”

“When I first came.”

“I remember.”

“And I…I have been…you have called me Anwyll.”

She lifted her head. “Beloved? Do you presume so much? That I must name you thus, because I foolishly did so once?”

Not truly angry, Ned thought, but he wasn’t sure.

“I only said that it was so, upon a time and more than once,” the man murmured. He didn’t lower his head. “You must not imagine I forget.”

Kate Wenger made a small sound beside Ned. No one moved on the plateau. The torches burned, smoke streaming on the wind.

“More than once,” the woman agreed finally. “Named so, or not. Before that scar and after. By the sea and from the waves.”

And Ned Marriner, hidden in the darkness of their downslope and hearing this, thought that if, before he grew old and died, a woman spoke to him words like these, in such a voice, he might say he’d lived a life worth living.

The woman named Ysabel was gazing upon the man. She shook her head, slowly.

“‘Anwyll’ must be earned again, surely, by one of you. Or neither, perhaps. But I will not name you Donal here: not a stranger again after so long. Little one, lean and alone, clad in grey, you shall be Phelan one more time. My wolf.”

“This is all Celtic,” Kate whispered.

“I know,” Ned murmured.

He was thinking wolf, how it suited.

The moon was high, so much sooner than it should have been. But what did should have been mean tonight? He watched the woman, who was not Melanie any more, turn to the other man.

“Gwri for your hair?” she said, that teasing tone again. “Allyn, or Keane, handsome one? Briant, for strength…Would you like one of those?”

It was as if she was testing, tasting names on her tongue. Playing with them. One long leg was thrust out to the side, a hand on her hip, head tilted, looking him up and down.

“You have cause to remember that last,” he replied, and threw back his head, laughing at his own jest. Ned thought she’d be angry again, but he was wrong. She laughed too. He didn’t understand her at all, he realized.

“Let me kill him here,” he said, gesturing with his hand in a wide sweep. “Grant us leave to fight. This is a sacred place tonight.”

Ned couldn’t see her face, but he heard the smile in her voice. “Ah. And so we are given your name,” she said. “Take it. Cadell you are and have always been, my warring one.”

Wolf and warrior. There was a silence where they stood, like figures in a tableau. Ned saw a shooting star, a fireball, streak slowly across the western darkness of the sky beyond and disappear. Like a child, in need, he made a wish upon it.

“Very well. That is done. Thank you, my lady. If we are to battle now, might someone be good enough to offer me a blade?”

It was the lean one speaking, brisk, matter-of-fact, the man they could now call Phelan. Ned swallowed, hearing that, the crisp courtesy of the words. But there was so much beneath them. The night could explode right now, a red, electric violence.

Go now! an inner voice was crying.

“A sword? Of course. With joy,” said the one called Cadell. “I cannot tell you how much joy.” He paused, then added, almost gravely, “You know that I will kill you.”

“I know that you will try.”

Someone—the small figure in the white robe, Ned saw—stepped forward holding an unsheathed sword across his palms like another offering. He’d handed the stone bowl to someone else. It was as if he’d been waiting for this, as if he’d known it would come. Perhaps he had. Phelan came forward to claim it and begin.

But in that moment a very long dance—the torment and the glory of it—was altered on that plateau. It would be a while before Ned Marriner realized that this was so, and longer still before he understood why, and by then it was almost too late.

“No,” said Ysabel.

Phelan stopped, a hand extended towards the hilt of the offered sword. He didn’t touch it. Both men looked at her.

She said, quietly, “Not a combat. Not this time. And not by armies gathered to you. It pleases me not.”

“I need to kill him, love,” said Cadell. There was urgency in the words. He pushed a hand through his hair again. “Now that you are among us it is on me as destiny, as a longing.”

“Then master it, if you are a man,” she said bluntly.

His head snapped back, as if the words had been a slap to the face.

“My lady, we are brought back to fight for you,” said Phelan softly. “We have always known this. It is what we are.”

She wheeled on him this time. Ned could see her again, the fury in her.

“You are brought back to be deserving of me—the one more than the other—in my eyes! Will you deny that? Will you challenge it?”

He shook his head. “You know I will not.”

Silence again. It was time to go, Ned knew. It was past time. He didn’t want to die here.

He heard her say, “I have another test, of love and worthiness. Of…longing.” She glanced towards the bigger man on the last word, and then back. “Tell, how do you long for me, my wolf?”

“I have told you,” he said.

“Hai! Listen to the Roman! I will say it as many times as you are willing to hear my voice,” the one called Cadell cried. “Our people—yours and mine! — do not squeeze words as coins from a miser’s hoard.”

The Roman. Yours and mine. Pieces of a puzzle, Ned thought. If he lived long enough to work it through.

Ysabel looked at Cadell and then back to the smaller man. She didn’t smile this time. It was as if, Ned thought, she was waiting, expecting something now, because of what had just been said.

It came. Phelan spoke, looking across her at the other man, ice suddenly in his voice. “Words, did you say? I know your words. I remember some of them. Do you? These, perhaps: Kill them all. God will know his own.”

He stopped, letting the sound fade, drift like the smoke. Then he added, softly, “A hoard, is it? What sort of piled-up treasure, tell us all? Dead women and babes? Charred flesh? Blackened bone? A hoard such as that, perhaps?”

“Oh, God,” Ned heard Kate whisper hoarsely.

Ned didn’t get it. No time to ask.

The bigger man was smiling, even in the face of this—golden, beautiful, unshaken by that rage. Ned could see a wolf in him, too, suddenly.

Both of them, he thought.

“Poor little man,” Cadell said mockingly. “My victory that time, wasn’t it? I do think it was. A difficult memory? Can’t escape? Trapped within walls? With those who so foolishly trusted you? And I never spoke those words. You know it.”

“You acted upon them. You killed because of them.”

The other man shook his head slowly, in elaborate mock-pity, then took a stride forward. “Will you chide me—will you do so—for deaths? Will you, Marius? For women and children? You will do that here? In sight of it?”

And with that name spoken, Ned understood.