Princeweaver

Chapter 29

TWENTY-NINE

Oak.

Symbolic of strength and endurance. The Cyngaleg oak is said to be the

oldest tree in the Isles of Mhrydain.

The oak is also the symbol and insignia of the current second heir to

Khaim, the unusually named Prince Osian. His bannermen carry a white

standard, emblazoned with three blue-black oak leaves.

Personal writings of Lowri gan Hywel

TWENTY-NINE

‘How is he?’ Aldreda was polished to a fierce point by purpose, a hunter in every inch of her ashen regalia.

Meilyr held his collars closed, the abashedness at being caught in his sleep-robes fading. ‘Come see for yourself, Majesty.’

Osian was propped up in bed, wearing a grim but determined expression. ‘You have news.’

‘For a start, you’re not nearly as awful-looking as I expected.’ Aldreda stood at the foot of the bed and glanced at Meilyr. ‘Your work, I assume. Thank you.’

Meilyr bowed. ‘His stubbornness as much as any act of mine, Majesty.’

‘I believe you.’ She assessed her brother, a less petrifying task in the subtle forget-me-not colours of dawn. ‘I don’t exactly have news, save Captain Radnor and other members of the court have called for the prince consort’s arrest.’

‘Meilyr had nothing to do with—’

‘I argued you would be dead if he had planned it. It was enough, for now, especially since Gelens also refused to condemn him.’

Why would Lord Gelens of all people not accuse Meilyr outright?

He knew Osian wondered it too, but Aldreda went on, ‘I am going to flush out the rats that did this. For personal pleasure, if nothing else. I have begun the questioning of every single person, from the cooks to the serving staff, who could even have imagined the contents of your cup. So far, it has proven about as fruitful as our other little court investigation, but I am not finished.’ Her attention returned to Meilyr. ‘You see this as separate?’

‘I do, Majesty. I believe if a sorcerer wanted Prince Osian dead, they would have used sorcery. I can see no reason why they would deviate now.’

Particularly if they had gained access to someone as elevated as Osian.

‘That plant, then. You said it was rare, not something commonly used as a poison?’

‘Not commonly grown or found, even. I only know it because of my work.’

‘There are easier poisons to use?’

‘Very much so, though a poison drawn from fox’s tears would be harder to trace, and harder to cure.’

‘You managed well enough.’

‘A misstep by whoever is behind this,’ Osian said. ‘Meilyr’s work is no secret at court, but his talents…’ He swallowed a cough.

‘You did handle it remarkably.’ It was not suspicion in her but consideration. Recalculation. It made him uneasy. ‘Thank the gods,’ she finished.

‘Do not fall too harshly upon those who likely had nothing to do with this,’ Osian said, drawing her attention away.

‘But someone did, and likely more than one someone. If I have to make them fear me more than they fear their masters, so be it. How do you feel, anyway?’

‘Burned from the inside and gutted for good measure,’ Osian said. ‘And ready to press on. The blessing ceremony is days away, and there is still a sorcerer—’

‘Highness Cadogan, what would you advise for your patient?’

Osian wilted in foreseen defeat.

Meilyr told Aldreda, ‘He is past the danger, but his body needs to heal. I would advise continued bed rest, and plenty of cleansing fluids.’

‘You heard your husband. Stay there, and do as you are told. Meilyr Cadogan, I leave him in your capable hands.’

She marched from the room, leaving them behind in the wake of husband.

Osian swallowed roughly, jolting in a put-off cough.

Meilyr handed him a fresh tisane. ‘I had to tell the truth.’

The prince made a small, dismissive gesture. ‘I understand. I do not have to like it, but I understand.’

Meilyr set the emptied cup aside.

Osian said, ‘I have been wondering, why is it called fox’s tears?’

‘It is translated from Cyngaleg. The plant features in an old story of two lovers, a man and a fox spirit, who are betrayed by someone close to them.’

He thought again of the glimpsed fox in the gardens, and the overwhelming dread that had engulfed him.

‘A happy story?’ Osian asked, mildly sardonic.

Only then did Meilyr register what he had done. ‘I… could not say.’

There was something sad in Osian as he weighed a decision and made it. ‘Before, you said you had been reminded of Cyngaleg stories, when we investigated the alder.’

It was a gentle press, a desire without demand. A space on the bed beside him, where Meilyr had already settled so many times.

‘Such stories,’ Meilyr said slowly, ‘are forbidden to be schooled or spoken.’

Osian smiled softly. ‘What if I were to offer a royal pardon? Indefinite.’

Meilyr’s heart thumped.

Osian’s sadness took on more definition.

‘My mother told me some, gifted to her during her stays here when she was a child. I wish I could remember far more than I do. Though it is not fair, I think, that I should have learned such things in the safety of a castle, whilst the people these stories belong to were forbidden them.’

Meilyr perched on the covers, disbelieving.

Osian bared yet more of himself. ‘I am thankful,’ he said, ‘that you know some of them. Thankful we could not take them from you fully.’

Meilyr plucked at the stitching of his tunic to keep from reaching for him. ‘I had no idea, about your mother.’

‘I think you can imagine why.’

He could. Sympathies for Cyngalon in a queen of Khaim…

‘My parents—’ Meilyr’s voice caught, and he swallowed. ‘Stories handed down to children… Some are not so different to those told in Khaim, I think.’

‘But some are.’ That openness again, should Meilyr choose to step into it, like Osian’s hand offering to lead him into the next step of a dance. ‘In fact, I remember some being quite terrifying.’

A very bad idea unfurled inside Meilyr, but with it came a strange exhilaration. He wanted to share with Osian, as devastating as that was. ‘Do you happen to know the tale of Blodeuwedd?’

Osian’s eyes lit up, brighter than any dawn. ‘Barely…’

‘Once,’ Meilyr began, ‘before the Otherworld drew away to the west…’

He told the tale of Blodeuwedd: of her birth through the blood of a

once-infamous sorcerer, enspelled with flowers of meadowsweet,

broom and oak. Created to be the bride of a cursed hero, she fell in

love with another, was tricked and conspired with him to kill her

husband, and ultimately met a bitter end: not death but worse. Cursed by

the sorcerer, trapped in the shape of an owl, her lover murdered before

her eyes.

It was little more than a fable: blood and flowers. He could feel his voice take on the careful cadence of his parents’ retellings, the words swimming in Cyngaleg beneath the surface. Words passed from grandmother, to mother, to son.

His heart ached in a grief too large for his body.

Osian focused on him intently. There was no suspicion, only his seascape eyes, fixed.

In the aftermath, the fire crackled. It had begun to rain.

‘Thank you for telling me,’ Osian said.

‘The story or the truth, My Prince?’

‘Perhaps both.’

There was no blade at his throat, no call for the crownsworn. Only Osian, and their closeness on the bed, and the heady haze of something forbidden.

That night, over more cawl and golden henbane, talk brought them

again to stories.

‘There was one about a forest coming to life?’ Osian remembered, brimming with an almost boyish excitement and energy that would have seemed impossible the night before. ‘And a battle, I think?’

The relief at his progress alone made it easier to reply, though Meilyr still refused to look at his reasoning closely. ‘That one is older than the tale of Blodeuwedd, and perhaps even more of a fable.’ He could feel Osian’s eyes, and did not dare meet them. ‘If you would care to hear it?’

‘If you would care to share it.’ Osian was careful, dampening his interest even as it glowed fiercer than the hearth.

Something stirred closer through the dark. A secret. A danger.

A hope.

‘Once,’ Meilyr began, ‘before the gods and the spirits slipped away to the Green Wastes of the west, a sorcerer angered Arawn, the ruler of Annwn. The Otherworld…’

He told the tale of Cad Goddeu, the Battle of the Trees. The tale of a sorcerer using their blood and ancient words of power to command an entire forest to march for them: to fight Arawn and the Tylwyth Teg.

It was certainly no more than a story. An entire forest manipulated was unimaginable, even with every drop of a body’s blood spilled. But it had always been Celyn’s favourite.

Osian was quiet beside him after he finished. ‘There are stories of Khaimfolc who once found ways to communicate with trees,’ he said at last. ‘But awakening them with blood…’

Surely Meilyr had shared too much. Surely the prince knew.

‘This sorcerer,’ Osian said, careful. ‘A forebear of… Myrddin, or something altogether different?’

Meilyr’s breath caught. No one from Khaim would call him Myrddin, surely.

Osian looked almost sheepish. ‘It helps to know a little of the old names.’

Meilyr regathered himself. ‘Myrddin was a… gwehydd, yes. A sorcerer. It is likely his power expressed itself differently, but…’

‘Gwehydd.’ Osian tested it on his tongue, rolling it perfectly. Just as his mouth had perfectly formed Myrddin. Pedr. Macsen.

Meilyr.

Meilyr had kissed that mouth not so long ago.

He looked away. ‘It means weaver. It is the Old Cyngaleg word for those with… magic.’

His heart was very fast, for several reasons.

‘Thank you,’ Osian said. ‘For the story.’ His ensnaring eyes were brilliant in the dim: starlight and fairy-fire off water. ‘May I ask something else?’

‘Something else, My Prince?’

‘About… Cyngalon. Cyngaleg.’

The rain hushed on the windows, the wind holding its breath.

Meilyr’s pulse rebounded in a vestigial warning. ‘You may ask me anything.’

‘I was thinking about names. Myrddin has a part in Khaimlic stories, but under a name bent to our tongue.’ Osian paused, then came at it directly, careful but unflinching.

‘I know Cyngaleg naming traditions were forbidden by the ruling of King Uhtric, my great-grandfather. You have this look whenever someone calls you… Cadogan. Is there another name that you would rather be called?’

The warning twitched and curled into itself. But even as Meilyr’s body responded, there was no threat in Osian, only a desire to understand. A desire that pressed softly against the space before Meilyr’s skin, allowing him to withdraw.

If he chose to.

‘To even have such a name would be treason,’ he whispered, breathless.

‘Not to me.’

Osian meant it.

If Meilyr was truly honest with himself, intimacy had always terrified him, even as it remained the thing he longed for most. But nothing was ever safe.

He was never safe – to be around, or to allow another beyond the walls he had grown around himself: climbers tight to an old farmhouse, shielding even the doors and windows.

Osian read him easily. ‘I did not mean to press you.’

‘No,’ Meilyr said, ‘it – it is all right.’

Another thought slipped into his mind and must have escaped onto his face, because Osian’s voice changed, gaining a wistfulness. ‘You are wondering about my given name,’ the prince said.

‘Forgive me, it is far from my place—’

‘Not at all. It was a gift from my mother. I was her only child. The king, my father, loved her so fiercely he did not question it – would not allow others to question it. A Cyngaleg name for an heir of Khaim. I do not have to ask you to imagine the talk.’

He did not. Meilyr’s heart reached for him, as he kept his body very still.

‘There are those, naturally,’ Osian continued, ‘that imagine my mother had an affair with a Cyngaleg man, with me as the get. Wystan is one of those people.’

Several fragments of talk knitted themselves together. The rumours.

‘I knew my mother, though she died when I was seven. If it were true, she would simply have told me. And though there have been times I wished, even prayed my father was not…’ He caught himself. Steadied. ‘No, I am very much his son.’

Immense, complicated emotions brimmed in Osian.

Meilyr touched his arm. ‘I had no idea. I always thought…’

‘That it was perhaps a means to make me more approachable to the populace, or that I chose it to match the title I would ascend to. No, it was her gift, and though often it has been suggested I change it – a good, strong Khaimlic name – I will never consider it. A name is a gift, and I know you understand that more than anyone.’

He did. His entire chest strained with it.

Osian. A name brought to Cyngalon from the isles to the north, fashioned by Cyngaleg tongues into its own form. A name given with love, to a boy who would be named prince.

Little deer.

‘It suits you,’ he said quietly. He remembered the care inlaid into the old green book of flora. ‘She must have been a remarkable woman.’

Gently, Osian said, ‘She was.’

The sharp scent of the tisane was the final push to douse Meilyr in memory: his own mother, her mane of curls expanding with smoke and focus as she brought the sweet-sharp ingredients to boil.

Her eyes as bright and brilliant as emerald valleys lit with dew, her smile and her laugh – her beloved laugh, that rang like rain across leaves in his mind.

The one sound he prayed he would remember beyond his dying day.

Though she died when I was seven.

Osian turned his hand so they held one another’s wrists, instinctively natural.

The last few days had changed something. The last days, and that kiss, and the terror of the Great Hall – had uncovered a weed, deep-rooted and flowering oh-so daringly.

Oh-so dangerously.

Meilyr broke contact first. ‘It has grown late. You should rest, My Prince.’