Lailoken's eyes glittered. "Your pleasure is my command." The minstrel turned and strode away, exiting the corridor past the baths and disappearing around the corner.
Brenna warned silently, Trust that one at your peril.
Morgana replied, 'Tis greater peril not to make use of him. Trust, however, will never enter the bargain. Of that, you may be sure.
The queen of Galwyddel turned in search of her royal nephew. Morgana found him in his room this time, pulling on his boots, having already donned his best tunic and trousers. He tried to stammer out an apology, face and throat scarlet as he waited for further reprimand. Morgana reminded herself that he was very young and infatuated with a viper who presented herself as sweetness itself. She closed the door behind her, giving them complete privacy.
"As to your affair with Ganhumara," Morgana began quietly, "allow me to give you a word or two of warning. She covets an heir and scorns Artorius' common blood to give it to her. She has never forgiven her father for marrying her to the illegitimate son of a Sarmatian war leader and will not stop until she finds a fool credulous and smitten enough to give her an heir with royal blood in its veins—and you, Medraut, are a grandson of kings. If you show the common sense of which I know you to be capable, you may well rule as a king in your own right, far sooner than you might guess."
His eyes widened. "What do you mean?"
"Liaison with Ganhumara can bring you nothing but shame, disgrace, and outlawry, if your indiscretion or her adultery are discovered. I have in mind a far more advantageous union which would benefit you immediately and benefit all of Britain in the long run."
"What sort of union?" he asked curiously as the shame and high color in his face began to fade. "There's not a princess of blood royal anywhere in Britain who would have the son of a condemned murderess with no land to offer." The bitterness in his voice was sadly understandable, as was the flare of stubborn pride.
"Perhaps not in Britain, but there are other shores, Medraut, and other alliances."
"Brittany?" He frowned. "The Celts of mainland Gaul would draw a branding iron down their daughters' cheeks before consenting to marry them off to a creature like me."
"No, Medraut, I do not speak of Brittany."
His brows drew even lower in confusion. "What then?"
"Aside from the Saxons, where lies our greatest danger?"
"The Picts."
"Ah, you see the immediate danger, yes, but not the root cause. The Picts have become a deadly threat only because they are forced south from their own lands."
His eyes widened. "The Irish? Of Dalriada?"
"Indeed. And the enemy of my enemy is a potential friend. A potentially powerful friend. We must find a way to convince this enemy that the Saxons are as great a threat to Eire and Dalriada as they are to Britain. A people looking to expand their borders are generally far happier to marry into a throne and colonize peaceably than to risk their sons' lives in war to drive a native population out. And if they are not happier to begin with, they often can be persuaded to see the advantage of gentler intermarriage, particularly when both groups have much to offer as concerns the safety of the other."
"Do you really think you can persuade the Irish to assist Britain without treachery such as the Saxon foederati used?"
"I do not speak of hiring mercenaries, Medraut. I speak of alliance through the marriage bed."
"But—"
"You will have a great deal more to offer a Dalriadan princess than you now imagine."
His eyes widened once more. "You'll give me a piece of land?"
"More than a piece, should this alliance work out. I have one son to inherit Gododdin and one to inherit Ynys Manaw. What I do with Galwyddel is my own affair."
Her nephew gasped. "Galwyddel? All of it?"
"Most of it, I should think."
He sat down hard on the edge of his bed. "Oh! Aunt, I—I hardly know what to say!"
She laid a finger across his lips. "Say nothing, nephew. I should not have to warn you about the need for discretion in such a proposed alliance."
He shook his head, then nodded vigorously. "I understand, yes."
"Good." She placed a kiss against his brow. "I have had so little time, Medraut, to attend to your needs and education as I ought. Marguase's crimes were none of your doing, but I fear you have been desperately hurt by them and I forget, sometimes, to tell you that you are much honored and beloved."
Tears sprang to his eyes and he turned his glance swiftly away to hide them. He groped with one hand and squeezed hers, able to make no other reply.
"I will see you, then, in the royal villa, when Cutha arrives at Caerleul."
Covianna Nim was still concealed in the shadows of her room, whose door she had just begun to open, when Medraut burst into view and slammed open the door to his own room, clearly in a state of extreme agitation. He was deeply aroused, flushed and erect beneath trousers and tunic, and desperately unhappy in his agitated state. Her curiosity piqued, Covianna started to step into the corridor only to melt back into the shadows when Morgana swept into view, in a state of cold-eyed anger. The queen of Galwyddel and Ynys Manaw, stepsister to a far better woman whose destruction Morgana had helped bring about, thrust open Medraut's door and closed it again behind her. For the first moment or two, she could hear Morgana's voice, too low to understand the words, then the voices in Medraut's room went even quieter. Deeply intrigued, now, Covianna waited patiently, hardly daring to hope that she had finally been presented with a way to strike back at Morgana and the stepbrother who had murdered Medraut's mother—a mistress of dark arts who had trained Covianna for a time at Glastenning Tor, a relationship Covianna was quite certain neither Morgana nor Artorius knew about and one she had been extremely careful to keep secret.
For years, Covianna had bided her time, had made Artorius a "wondrous" sword of Damascus steel that she herself had pounded on the anvil, after wheedling from Emrys Myrddin every tale he could recall of the fine Damascus blades produced by the smiths of far Constantinople. Her lips twitched in amusement as she recalled Myrddin's fond tales, whispered in the glistening aftermath of some of the finest lovemaking Covianna had ever enjoyed.
"They twist the soft and hard irons together," he had murmured, trailing fingertips across her breasts. "Fold them time and again, eight, sixteen folds per blade, but the finest smiths swore while deeply in their cups that the only proper way to temper such a blade was to lift it smoking and white from the forge and plunge it into the belly of a drunken slave."
"Barbaric," she had murmured, planning to put the notion to the test at the first possible opportunity. And she had done so, testing the procedure first on a sow tied to the anvil, then on a captive doe, a goat, every animal she could think to try it on, and with decent but far from satisfactory results. Determined to win the secret of Damascus for the smiths of her hereditary clan, she had procured a criminal at great difficulty and forged a blade in his belly, gagging him carefully beforehand to still the screams. Better results, but not the perfection she sought.
Then Myrddin's exact words had come back to her: the belly of a drunken slave.
Lips twitching with satanic delight, she had ridden out from Glastenning Tor to arrange an assignation with one of the princes of Dumnonia, a foolish and drunken young sot who would be entirely amenable to accompanying her in a bout of alcoholic and sexual revelry. That he was a cousin of Artorius only made the seduction all the more delightful. She lured him to Glastenning Tor, to her own private forge deep in the labyrinthine caves beneath the great hill, where water rushed through underground rivers, welling up as the sacred springs of the Tor, blood-red with iron in one place, white as milk from chalk deposits in another.