She gave him a last kiss, piled her tools and newly forged weapon into her satchel, and left him to die, laughing gaily all the way home.
Morgana and Brenna McEgan were roused from sleep perhaps an hour short of dawn by an urgent pounding on the door of the cottage where they, along with Riona Damhnait, had arranged to spend the night. The fisherman who owned the cottage, the same man who had captained the sloop which had ferried Medraut and Lailoken to Dalriada, answered the summons with alacrity, while Morgana and Riona both stumbled out of bed to see what the alarm might be.
"A thousand pardons," a young voice gasped from beyond the open door, "but I must see Queen Morgana immediately!"
It was Cleary, the young cleric who had recorded the marriage and treaty arrangements.
Morgana exchanged a worried look with the Irish Druidess before stepping into the light of the fisherman's oil lamp.
"What is it, Cleary?" she asked quietly, images of multitudinous possible disasters running through her mind.
"Father Auliffe sent me," the lad explained, voice shaking. "There's trouble, Queen Morgana, perhaps very bad trouble. I was to room with Lailoken, your new minstrel, and I thought it peculiar when he slipped away in the middle of the night. Saddled his horse, put his belongings on a packhorse, and left very fast indeed, down the coast road toward Caerleul. I might not have thought anything amiss, but a rider has come from across the border with Strathclyde, bringing dreadful news from Dalriada. Oh, Queen Morgana, I can hardly bear to tell you what's happened." The boy's eyes swam with tears and his hands shook.
She rested a hand on his arm. "Tell me."
"It was a boy, Queen Morgana, a young Briton taken into slavery across the border between Strathclyde and Dalriada. He and his whole family were taken, sold to a farmhold just outside Fortress Dunadd. He said they woke this morning to the sight of carrion crows, thousands of them, and the wind carried a sickly stench. His master rode into Dunadd and found..." Cleary gulped, voice trembling. "The whole town was dying, everyone. People in convulsions, vomiting, paralyzed, a terrible plague or... or..." he cast a mortified glance at Riona Damhnait, who had gone ashen in the lamplight, "or perhaps some terrible poison. Everyone, Queen Morgana, from the royal household at the fortress to the lowest fisherman's hovel.
"The boy's master promised him not only his freedom but the freedom of his whole family if he could ride overland through Briton territory and carry a message in time to King Dallan mac Dalriada." Cleary was openly weeping, now. "The abbot, Father Auliffe, fears treachery, Saxon treachery. And none of us know Lailoken so very well. Why should he ride away so quickly in the middle of the night, just before news of this disaster at Dunadd could reach us? The abbot sent me to fetch you and Riona Damhnait, while he brings King Medraut and Queen Keelin."
Morgana felt faint with shock, compounded infinitely by Brenna McEgan's utter horror. The look in Riona's eyes was one Brenna had seen only too often, a look of sanity strained by news so dreadful, by betrayal so deep, the mind could not properly take in the scope of disaster.
"Has King Dallan already sailed?" Morgana whispered, praying that he had not.
"He has. I ran to the shore first, hoping to stop him and deliver the warning. He had already said his good-byes to Queen Keelin, saying he did not want to wait longer and miss the tide."
Brenna's memory flashed to a sharp image, of Lailoken handing a wine cask to the Irish king, of the look in the minstrel's eyes when Father Auliffe had insisted they share the communion wine, instead. The wine had been poisoned, she could see it clearly, now, when it was too late. Lailoken must be hosting Cedric Banning, there could be no other explanation for his swift departure—or the mass destruction of the entire Dalriadan capital. How had he accomplished it? Weapons of mass destruction were a terrorist's stock in trade—Brenna knew that only too well—but what weapon could Banning have concocted in the sixth century? Nerve agents or even something as ordinary as mustard gas required chemistry far beyond the reach of anything Banning could possibly have access to, here and now. She tried to focus on the symptoms, to deduce what kind of poison he might have used. Morgana, at least, knew something of poisons.
Witch's bane? she wondered grimly. It's potent, but how could he have acquired such an immense supply and delivered it?
"Oh, dear God," Brenna moaned, making a sudden connection between the cask of wine, the bottles she'd glimpsed in Lailoken's "peddlar's" pack, and the most toxic poison in the world—easily grown inside sealed bottles of rotten food. In the time he'd been here already, Cedric Banning could have grown more than enough to poison a whole town, and then some. "He's grown botulism!"
"What is this word, botulism?" Riona demanded in a hard, cold voice.
Morgana had pressed hands to her cheeks, which felt clammy and cold, even to her own fingers. Brenna had to answer, as Morgana knew nothing of it, either. "If one allows food to rot inside a sealed container, a potent poison grows in it. He must have mixed dirt in with it, to ensure the botulism would grow and produce the toxins." Morgana, grasping desperately at some explanation that would prevent further disaster to Brythonic-Irish relations, added in a shaking voice, "If Lailoken is a Saxon agent, dear God, he must be a Saxon agent, they've already shown themselves capable of the worst kinds of slaughter. A man who could order infants hacked into pieces could order anything. And I was a fool and trusted Lailoken, sent him to the very people I wanted to make peace with."
She lifted ravaged eyes to meet Riona's gaze. "We must sail after Dallan mac Dalriada at once. I have to stop him or anyone else who might drink from that wine cask. Pray God he has not already tasted it. And riders must be sent after Lailoken. I want him found and brought back to me, alive and in chains." She turned to the fisherman and his family, who watched silently, eyes wide in naked horror. "Can you take us out tonight? Is your boat fast enough to catch the Irish king?"
"God will lend us wings," he choked out, "for catch him we must." He hurried away, shouting orders and sending runners to rouse his crew for immediate departure.
Morgana turned to the Irish Druidess, dreading what must be said next. Riona Damhnait held her gaze for a long, ugly moment, gauging Morgana's words and the genuineness of the emotion behind them. After a long and dangerous moment beneath a shuttered, thoroughly reptilian stare, something softened behind the other woman's eyes. Tears came, for the first time.
"I do believe you know nothing of this."
Morgana could only shake her head. "Would I be willing to sail after Dallan mac Dalriada myself, otherwise?"
"The Saxons truly are such barbarians, they would slaughter a whole town of innocents?"
Morgana wiped wetness from her cheeks. "To sow dissention between our people, to ensure we are busy fighting in the north, so they have free rein in the south? Oh, yes, I believe they would stoop to anything to destroy us. All of us."
"Then they must be stopped," she said, with such utter coldness, Morgana shivered.
Brenna recognized that sound. It was the sound of an Irish soul roused to vengeance. God help them, it was something bred into the Irish, bred into their Irish bones and blood, centuries of cold-hearted rage at wrongs committed, determination to strike back at an enemy, whatever the cost. Had Brenna inadvertently tried to prevent the birth of one set of Irish hatreds only to help spawn another? Would the mass murder of an entire Irish colony, which should have been destined to hold power in the Scottish Lowlands for centuries to come, change history sufficiently to destroy everything Brenna had known, everyone Brenna had loved? Had Banning already succeeded in carrying out his mission?