Robert Carter - The Giants’ Dance

‘You speak as if I was pursuing gratitude, or fame, or that I did it for gain.’

The wizard put a hand on Will’s shoulder. ‘I know that your motives were not ignoble or unfitting. Nor is it my wish to lay blame on you. I am concerned for your safety. Now let me see that hand.’

Will unwrapped the strip of linen from his hand and the wizard looked at the angry redness of the wound.

‘Teeth,’ Gwydion said.

Will told him what had passed. The wizard spoke healing words and treated the wound with a kind touch and a pinch of aromatic powder whose sting made Will flinch.

‘It wasn’t the prettiest or best-tempered of beasts I’ve ever met with,’ he said. ‘But it seemed to me more pitiful than malicious.’

‘It seems that your kindness may have rebounded on you, Willand.’

‘That’s an odd sort of remark to come from you. Did you not once tell me that the Rede of Friendship lies at the very heart of magic? And is there not a common rede that says: “One good turn deserveth another”?’

‘In the natural world, but perhaps not so when matters have been twisted into their opposites by sorcery.’ Gwydion slapped his hand hard then held it tight.

‘Ouch!’ He recoiled from the sharp pain as Gwydion let go, but when he looked down the wound had almost gone. Only two purplish pits remained where the deepest punctures had been.

Suddenly, Will heard the sound of hooves. He wheeled about and made for the door.

‘Come on, Gwydion,’ he cried. ‘You told me to take notice of my inner feelings. That’s just what I’m doing!’

They headed for the back door and reached the yard at the same time. Two shapes loomed at the end of the yard. The lead horseman drew his mount up sharp and Will felt his right hand grasped in friendship.

‘Tilwin!’

‘Tilwin if you must, though I prefer my own name.’

As Will caught hold of the horse’s bridle his eyes fixed on a pale horse that walked through a pool of moonlight. It was Avon, and on his back was Willow.

Despite his surprise, Will embraced Willow as soon as she got down from the horse. Then his surprise turned to alarm.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked her, taking his daughter in his arms.

‘As you see, we’re as well as we’ve always been.’

‘I was worried about you—’ he turned a questioning eye on Morann, ‘—but I didn’t expect you to be brought here.’

‘Well, here we are,’ Willow said.

He cuddled the child. ‘She looks well.’

‘She’s fine! I was more worried about you.’

He looked to the wizard as he hugged Willow again. Gwydion’s silent sternness said much. When they all went inside the inn, Will hissed at Morann, ‘I only asked you to give her my message.’

‘That may be so, but you have a wife who is not so easily put off.’

‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but—’

Morann was blithely unconcerned. ‘I’m sorry we’ve arrived so late. It’s hard travelling on horseback along a dark road when there’s a babe-in-arms to cope with. And our journey was not without peril.’

‘Peril?’

‘Don’t worry. ’

‘What about that important errand in Trinovant you said you were going on?’

‘Things have already gone too far for that – as you shall soon learn.’

Fiddle music met them as they opened the door. There were better than two dozen folk in the Plough. Some were singing, others talking in huddles. One or two turned to look as the new arrivals came by, but Will led them along the passageway and down to the far end, where they squeezed one at a time into the inglenook, and so into the snug. It was only when food and drink had been brought to them, and after Dimmet had left, that Gwydion called down a fresh spell of privacy upon the room and the sounds of merriment faded away.

‘We were almost caught out as we tried to cross the Charrel south of Baneburgh,’ Morann said. ‘I spied a column of five hundred men or more.’

‘Five hundred?’ Will said in alarm.

‘At the very least. They were marching south and east under the Duke of Mells’ banner. From the way they carried themselves I judged them to be farmers only lately raised to arms, but there were veteran horsemen with them, hard men who had been set to chase down any of the column who might decide to stray. I thought it likely these riders would ask unwelcome questions if they spied us, so we went a longer way round.’

‘There’s no doubt that war is coming again,’ Willow said. ‘If a while ago they were taking men off the land by the dozen, now they’re taking them by the score, and even by the hundred.’

‘That’s right enough.’ Morann nodded. ‘I’d guess the Commissioners will be here in Eiton by the week’s end.’

Will took Willow’s hand, thinking about the harvesters who would be swept from the fields like so much chaff. Many of them would never return if the spectre of war was allowed to escape into the world. Willow asked what the wizard foresaw, and Gwydion told her about the battlestones and the significance of what had happened at Little Slaughter. She shook her head in concern at the news that Maskull was once more abroad.

‘Did you find the Dragon Stone?’ Will asked.

‘I entered Castle Foderingham and saw that the stone remained entombed there. I enmeshed it in fresh holding spells, and did all that I dared short of attempting to drain it. It now slumbers as deeply as ever it did.’

Will wondered what more there was to the wizard’s story. In particular, whether the Duke of Ebor had in the end given his consent.

He leaned across to check on his sleeping daughter. ‘Why did you bring her?’

She searched his face. ‘What else was I going to do?’

‘You could have left her with Breona.’

‘Will, she’s our child, and her place is with us.’

‘The work we’re about is perilous.’ He shook his head at her lack of understanding, still feeling the shock of the lesson that Gwydion had taught him. ‘I don’t want her to be put in danger.’

She gave him a hard look that stifled further comment. He glanced at Gwydion anticipating what the wizard would have to say on the matter. He did not have to wait long.

‘Tomorrow our fight against the battlestones must resume in earnest,’ Gwydion said. ‘Willow, you must stay here tonight, of course. But at first light tomorrow you should set off for home.’

‘As you can see, Master Gwydion,’ Willow said, unmoved by the wizard’s persuasion, ‘I’m well, and Bethe is well also. Far better than either of us would have been if a shooting star had landed flat on our village like it did on Little Slaughter.’

The wizard glanced at Morann with displeasure. ‘Be that as it may—’

‘So the Vale is no safer for us than anywhere else, I’d say.’

Will jumped in. ‘Gwydion’s right. It’s more dangerous for you to be here.’

‘Well, maybe there’s another thing that you should know,’ she said stubbornly. ‘You can thank Master Gwydion for his advice. But I’d say it’s my duty to go with my man and help him in whatever business he’s upon. That’s what I undertook to do at our handfasting, and that’s what I’m going to do. And as for Bethe, babies are a lot tougher than folk generally give them credit for. She’ll want for nothing on the road.’

At that there was silence. Then Gwydion laid both hands flat on the table. ‘It is right and proper that we have all been able to say our say tonight, but it is getting late now. Let us go to our beds and settle the matter tomorrow.’

When they emerged from the snug the dancing and music and eating and drinking were all finished. The inn’s big room was quiet and half in darkness. Will took Willow and Bethe upstairs and saw they were comfortable, then he went out through the darkened yard, down the lane, over a stile and into a grassy field in which an old oak grew. Overhead the stars of late summer twinkled. He asked them to tell him what to do for the best, but they only gazed down in pitiless silence.