her way he turned and trotted back to the Queen’s table. Lilli saw him speak to Merodda, then take up his station for serving the meal. Lilli herself was supposed to eat at one of the tables reserved for unmarried women of noble birth. Instead she grabbed a chunk of bread from a serving basket as a page carried it by and left the press and clamour of the hall.
Outside the sun was setting, dragging cold shadow over the courtyard, one of the many among the warren of brochs and outbuildings. Lilli hurried past the cookhouse, dodged between storage sheds, and slipped out a small gate into a much bigger court, the next ward out, ringed round by high stone walls that guarded pigsties, stables, cow sheds, a smithy, a pair of deep water wells – everything the dun needed to withstand a siege.
At the gates of this ward someone was shouting. When Lilli saw servants hurry past with lit torches, she drifted after them, but she kept to the shadows. Down at the wall, the torchlight glittered on chain mail and a confusion of men, arguing about who would do what, a debate the captain of the watch finally ended – he ordered his guards to man the winch that opened the enormous iron-bound gates. They creaked open a bare six feet to let an exhausted rider stumble through, leading a muddy horse.
‘Messages for the King,’ he croaked. ‘From the Gwerbret of Belgwergyr.’
Servants rushed to take his horse. Lilli trailed after the messenger and the watch captain as they hurried up to the main broch.
‘Good news, I hope,’ said the captain.
‘Bad,’ the messenger said. ‘His Grace the gwerbret’s lost more vassals to the false king.’
Lilli felt suddenly sick.
She trailed after the messenger and his escort as they hurried to the great hall. By then all the important lords had gathered around the King. On his cushions at the table’s head Olaen, a pretty child with thick pale hair, was eating bread and honey. At either side of him Lilli’s two uncles – Tibryn, Gwerbret Cantrae, and his younger brother, Burcan, the Regent – sat as a matched pair between the King and the rest of the gwerbretion and other such powerful lords who dined at this table. Both of them were handsome men, tall and warrior-straight, with the wide-set blue eyes they shared with their sister, Merodda, but unlike her they showed their age in grey hair and weather-beaten faces.
As the guards hurried up, everyone stopped eating and turned to look. The messenger knelt before the King, then pulled a silver tube out of his shirt and handed it to Olaen with a flourish. Burcan leaned forward and snatched it, then gestured at the man to speak. The great lords huddled around, narrow-eyed and grim. At the Queen’s table the women fell silent and turned, leaning to hear the news. From her distance Lilli could hear nothing of what the messenger said, but a rustle of talk broke out, first at the royal table, then spreading through the great hall: more lords gone over to Cerrmor. With a curt nod, Burcan dismissed the messenger. King Olaen was watching the Regent with eyes full of tears.
Lilli saw her mother turn and leave the Queen’s table, hurry up the staircase, and disappear into the shadows at the top. With a wrench of will, Lilli forced herself to follow. On the far side of the hall, near the stairway, a page was seating the messenger while a serving lass brought him ale. Lilli hesitated, then stopped beside the messenger, who hastily swallowed his mouthful of ale and started to rise.
‘Oh, do sit,’ Lilli said. ‘You must be exhausted. I just wanted to ask you if Tieryn Peddyc of Hendyr’s gone over to the rebels.’
‘Not him, my lady. He’s steady as a stone.’
‘I’m so glad. He’s my foster-father.’
‘Ah.’ The rider smiled briefly. ‘No wonder you wanted to know. He and the Lady Bevyan are in good health and as loyal as ever.’
‘My thanks.’
Lilli hurried away and climbed the staircase. Maybe Bevyan would come to court, then, with her husband when he joined the muster. She hoped – no, she prayed so, as hard as she could to the Lady of the Moon. Merodda had sent her and her wet nurse to Bevyan when Lilli had been a few weeks old; until she’d seen twelve summers, Bevyan had been the only mother she’d known. If only I could have stayed with Bevva – her eyes threatened tears, but she squelched them and at the top of the stairs paused for a moment to catch her breath. The fear clutched at her heart again, but she had nowhere to run or hide. With one last gasp, she hurried down to her mother’s chambers.
Merodda herself opened the door. She was carrying a long taper in a holder, and in the candlelight her face, her hands, glistened like wax.
‘Good. You’re prompt tonight.’
In a pool of candle-light near the chamber windows stood Brour, the man her mother called her scribe – a skinny little fellow, with an oversize head for his body and wispy blond hair, so that at times he looked like a child, especially since his full lips stuck out in a perennial pout. Merodda laid her hand on Lilli’s shoulder and marched her down the length of the room. On the table in front of Brour, among the candles, stood a grinding stone, a chunk of something black that looked like charcoal, and a flagon of water. Apparently the scribe had been making ink, and a prodigious amount of it at that. He put a handful of powder ground from the ink block into a heavy silver bowl, then added water from a pitcher a little at a time, while he pounded and stirred with a pestle.
‘Here she is,’ Merodda said.
Brour put his tools down on the table, then considered Lilli so coldly that she took an involuntary step back. Her mother’s hand tightened on her shoulder. In a hand black with dry ink Brour took the taper from Merodda and held it up to consider Lilli’s face.
‘No one’s going to hurt you, lass,’ Brour said at last. ‘We’ve just got a new trick we’d like you to try.’
‘You have strange gifts, my sweet,’ Merodda said. ‘And we have need of them again.’
For a moment Lilli’s fear threatened to choke her. She wanted to blurt out a no, to pull free and run away, but her mother’s cold stare had impaled her, or so she felt, like a long metal pin pushing into her very soul.
‘Come now!’ Merodda snapped. ‘We women must do what we can to serve the King.’
‘Of course, Mother. Of course I want to.’
‘Of course? Don’t lie to me.’
Lilli blushed and tore her gaze away.
‘But I don’t care if you do or not,’ Merodda went on. ‘Let’s get started, shall we?’
Brour grunted and set the taper down among the others. On the table the candles danced and sent light glinting onto the black pool in the silver bowl. Lilli found herself watching the glints, staring at them, caught by them while her mother’s hand slid from her shoulder to the back of her neck. She felt her head nodding forward, pressed down by the weight of a hand grown suddenly heavy. The ink pool seemed to surge and heave like waves on a black sea that swelled to fill her sight, to fill the room, it seemed, and then her world. As she sank down into the blackness, she heard Merodda’s voice chanting, low and soft, but she could distinguish not a single word. The syllables clanged like brass and seemed to reverberate in her ears, foreign sounds linked into alien words.
In the blackness, a point of candlelight, dancing – Lilli swam toward it but felt her body turn to dead weight, as if she hauled it behind her when she moved. The point brightened, then dilated into a circle of light that she could look through, as if she’d
