Chapter Sixteen
The English, in their newspapers and their political meetings, spoke of the Welsh resistance as if it was one organization, with a single leader, unified objectives, and a set of universally approved tactics.
In fact, as Taz knew, Cymry didn’t have a single resistance organization, any more than it had a single royal family or a single college of mages.
Instead, each former Cymric kingdom had produced its own resistance, and often more than one.
All of them wanted home rule for Cymry, but they could not agree on the details.
A king, or a Cymric parliament, or both.
A single ruler, or parliament, or one for each kingdom. Voted for, inherited, or appointed.
Nor did they have a single opinion on the use of force, nor its legitimate targets.
Taz, along with most people in Cymry and almost everyone in England, was chilled by the actions of a group called Y Ddraig Goch.
In English, the Red Dragon. The Red Dragon had taken responsibility for a couple of high-level assassinations, to which His Britannic Majesty’s government had responded with brutal reprisals on villages believed to have harbored the movement.
Five men were hanged after only the briefest of drumhead trials, and a pregnant woman was shot—the soldiers said—trying to escape.
Trying to flee a group of drunken soldiers intent on raping, said the illegal Cymraeg newspapers that nonetheless managed to circulate.
The Red Dragon countered with a bomb, left in a suitcase at the door to a postal collection booth. When it exploded, it killed eleven people, including a boy who had been selling newspapers. None of them were in any way involved in government or the military.
A letter published by one of the London newspapers claimed to be from the Red Dragon. It assured the British public that the killing was revenge for the Welsh deaths. “If your government kills the innocent in Wales, then innocent people will die in England and Scotland,” it threatened.
The situation had escalated from there and, according to Taz’s friend Daffyd, today’s important meeting was to bring representatives from all the different groups together to decide whether they should condemn or praise the Welsh Dragon’s actions.
Once Sephie and Taz were out of earshot of anyone who might guess that she had understood the Cymraeg conversation, she shook her head and grimaced. “Might as well herd cats into a room and persuade them to agree to march out of it in pairs,” she said.
They certainly marched into the village in pairs, two delegates for each of more than a dozen groups.
Taz and Sephie only saw them from a distance.
While many of the villagers had been seconded to serve the hall where the meeting was held or the rooms where the delegates stayed, he and Sephie were kept well away from any contact.
Nor could they leave the village. Guards had been doubled on the gate, the pass, and the mountainsides. Hebog was taking no risk of an interruption to the meeting, and no wonder. Some of the most powerful leaders in Cymru were all together under one roof.
Sephie’s opinion proved to be prophetic, or perhaps just logical, for three days later, on the last day of the meeting, the groups had formed three strong voting blocks, each opposed to the other two.
One group, the smallest, fully backed the Red Dragon. Taz’s friends, who had served in the hall where the meeting was being held, thought one of them probably was the Red Dragon.
“It might be all three,” Taz suggested. “That is, if you are right that the Red Dragon is just a war name to protect their agents.”
It was what Sephie had suggested when they had discussed it the night before. She made good sense.
Of the remaining two groups, one believed that violence against military and government targets might win Cymric freedom more quickly—that one was backed by Prince Ymrs ap Draig, the most powerful mage in Cymry and of the bloodline of the kings of Gwynedd, Deheubarth, and Powys.
That group was adamantly opposed to any actions that might injure or kill ordinary people, especially children, arguing that it turned public opinion against the Cymru, but they believed the military had signed on to fight, and were fair game for resistance, and that the government was responsible for decisions that affected the Cymru, and so should be prepared to bear the consequences.
The third group felt that any violence, except in immediate self-defense, diminished Cymru support amongst those English and Scots politicians who were likely to vote in favor of home rule for Cymry, and amongst the constituents they represented.
Some of them might also have religious reasons for peaceful protest, but the essence of their argument to the meeting was entirely practical.
In the end, the attendees to the meeting could not agree, and the delegates left for their own lands.
But not all of them, as Taz discovered when a messenger from Hebog found him and Sephie in the village bakehouse, peeling turnips, parsnips, carrots, and potatoes to go into the pot with leeks and lamb.
“Prince Ymrs wishes to speak with both of you,” said the messenger.
Ymrs Ap Draig was the current ruler of Gwynedd, the highest-ranking living member of the family that the English called the Pendragons, the most powerful mage in Cymry, and the man with whom Sephie’s father had conspired to capture the lady catalyst.
The resistance in Cymry might disagree on policy and outcomes, but they were united on one point: Ymrs Ap Draig was a hero. Taz was almost dizzy at the thought of meeting him.
“Yes, of course,” said Sephie, while Taz stood speechless. She was right. What could they do but agree?
The mage prince waited for them in the hall where the meeting had been held. He sat alone in a chair at the head of the table, though his attendants gathered at the far end of the room.
Taz had seen the man from a distance before, but not close up. He was in his late sixties, but he appeared younger—still handsome, still vigorous, his face all but unlined, the hair that had reportedly been a flaming red in his youth now faded to the color of golden sand, but still thick and full.
Even seated, he appeared tall and broad, filling the chair with his body and the room with his presence. Taz could smell the king’s mage gift—spice and woodsmoke. He could feel the weight of it, see the red and gold aura.
Bowing did not seem a courtesy but as necessary as breathing. Beside Taz, Sephie curtseyed.
“Come closer,” said Ymrs, in English. “I would speak with Miss Thornton. Both of you, in fact, but Miss Thornton first.”
They approached his end of the table. Sephie made what even Taz recognized as a court curtsey. His own bow was clumsy by comparison.
Ymrs smiled. “Very pretty,” he said. “Your father said you were a beauty.”
Sephie’s eyes widened and she lifted her chin. “You spoke of me with my father?”
“Say, rather, that he spoke and I listened when he was trying to convince me to marry you to my nephew to breed a pack of children in the hopes one of them would be an heir.”
Taz shut his mouth on his protest that Sephie was his, but Sephie gave a fearless and noncommittal reply. “My father was ever ambitious.”
“I told him I had no intention of playing chess pieces with my family, and my nephew would find his own wife,” said Ymrs. “No need to ask if you are disappointed, Miss Thornton. I can sense the bond between you and Taliesin. You smell of magic but also of mutual attraction, and sparkle with it, too. Your magic is not the gift your father described as faint and near useless, but something much stronger. Was your father wrong, or has something woken your gift?”
“Both, sir,” Sephie said. “I was never as useless as my father thought. Just different.” She clamped her mouth shut, as if she had suddenly remembered her agreement with Taz not to discuss their bard mage bond.
Taz, too, had been beguiled by Ymrs’s voice, and only now remembered that he was said to be an enchanter and a witch, as well as a sorcerer.
Ymrs did not press the matter, but simply gazed at Sephie in silence, his brows slightly drawn together as if he was thinking deeply.
After a moment, he nodded his head. “You are both bards,” he declared.
“A bard mage pair, in fact. How intriguing. You have not told Hebog, I take it? Or you have and he doesn’t believe you? ”
Taz and Sephie exchanged glances and remained silent.
“Hebog and I are reluctant allies at best,” the mage king said.
“We agree on freedom for Wales, and disagree on almost everything else. He puts up with me because he hopes to use my influence to build his own power, and I allow him close to me so I can keep a watch on him. If your mage power is a secret from the man, you do not have to fear me telling him.”
He sounded sincere, but then so did Hebog when he chose to use charm rather than force. Which he did when he was outclassed or outnumbered, and Ymrs was neither.
Sephie did not seem to have Taz’s reservations. “We have told no one, Your Highness,” she said.
“Good,” said Ymrs. “Keep it that way.”
*
Delia had set watchers, and even so, she kept glancing out of windows in the hopes that she would see her beloved.
Jasper was at the College of Mages—had been there for three days.
She was certain he would be home today, though.
Not because he had sent a message, but because the bond between them carried the lift in his mood at the prospect of coming home.
Since their marriage, they had been connected, and able to speak mind to mind when they were close. The same bond meant she always knew what he was feeling. The thread of her catalyst power also contributed, though London was at the extreme distance that she could reach.