Judit looked at him, then at Kendra, and finally over at Athelbert. After a long moment, she nodded her head, once.
"Do it, fool," Kendra said promptly to her older brother.
Athelbert swallowed again. "She needs to drop the sword first," he said, cautiously. He still looked ready to flee.
"She will. Judit?"
Judit dropped the sword. There remained an entirely forbid-ding bleakness to her narrowed gaze. She pushed windblown hair back from her face. Her tunic was green, belted with leather above the riding trousers she liked to wear. She looked, Hakon thought suddenly, like Nikar the Huntress, swordbride of Thunir, whom, of course, his family no longer worshipped at all, having come from bloody sacrifices to the… less violent faith of Jad.
Athelbert took a breath, managed an almost indifferent shrug. He closed his eyes and spread his legs, braced to absorb a blow. Gareth managed to lever himself into a sitting position to watch. He wiped at his eyes with the back of one hand. Kendra had an odd look to her ordinarily calm, fair features.
Judit, who would one day be saluted the length of the isle and across the seas as the Lady of Rheden, be honoured through generations for courage, and mourned in poets' laments long after the alignments and borders of the world had changed and changed again, walked across the sunlit morning grass, not breaking stride, and kicked her brother with a booted foot, hard (very hard) up between the legs where the sword had almost gone.
Athelbert made a clogged, whistling sound and crumpled to the ground, clutching at himself.
Judit gazed down at him for only a brief moment. Then she turned. Her eyes met Hakon's. She smiled at him, regal, gracious and at ease in a summer-bright meadow. "Did you four drink all the wine?" she asked, sweetly. "I have a sudden thirst, for some reason."
It was while Hakon was kneeling, hastily filling a cup for her, splashing the wine, that they saw the Cyngael come walking up from the south, on the other side of the stream.
Four men and a dog. They stopped, looking towards the royal party on the grass. Athelbert was lying very still, eyes squeezed shut, breathing thinly, both hands between his legs. Looking across the river at the dog, Hakon suddenly shivered as if chilled. He set down Judit's cup, without handing it to her, and stood up.
When your hair rose like this, the old tale was that a goose was walking over the ground where your bones would lie. He looked over at Kendra (he was always doing that) and saw that she was standing very still, gazing across the river, a curious expression on her face. Hakon wondered if she, too, was sensing a strangeness about the animal, if this awareness might even be something the two of them shared.
You might have called the wolfhound beside the youngest of the four men a dark grey, if you'd wanted to. Or you could have said it was black, trees behind it, sun briefly in cloud, the birds momentarily silenced by that.
Ceinion of Llywerth squinted, looking east into sunlight. Then a cloud passed before the sun and he saw Aeldred's older daughter recognize him first and, smiling with swift, vivid pleasure, come quickly towards them across the grass. He made his way through the stream, which was cool, waist-deep here, that she might not have to enter the water herself. He knew Judit; she would have waded in. On the riverbank, she came up to him and knelt.
With genuine happiness he made the sign of the disk over her red hair and offered no comment at all on its unbound disarray. Judit, he had told her father the last time he'd been here, ought to have been a Cyngael woman, so fiercely did she shine.
"She doesn't shine," Aeldred had murmured wryly. "She burns."
Looking beyond her, he saw the younger sister and brother, and what appeared to be an Erling, and belatedly noted the crumpled figure of Aeldred's heir in the grass. He blinked. "Child, what happened here?" he asked. "Athelbert…?"
His companions had crossed the stream now, behind him. Judit looked up, still kneeling, her face all calm serenity. "We were at play. He took a fall. I am certain he will be all right, my lord. Eventually." She smiled.
Even as she was speaking, Alun ab Owyn, the dog at his heels, walked over towards Aeldred's other children, before Ceinion had had a chance to introduce them formally. The high cleric knew a brief but unmistakable moment of apprehension.
Owyn's son, brought east on impulse and instinct, had not been an easy companion on the journey to the Anglcyn lands. There was no reason to believe he would become one now that they'd arrived. A blow had fallen on him earlier this year, almost as brutal as the one that had killed his brother. He had been direly wounded within, riding home to tell his father and mother that their first-born son and heir had been slain and was buried in Arberthi soil, then drifting through a summer of blank, aimless days. There had been no healing for Owyn's son. Not yet.
He had agreed, reluctantly and under pressure from his father, to be an escort to the Anglcyn court for the high cleric on the path between the sea and the dense forest that lay between the Cyngael and the Anglcyn lands.
Ceinion, watching him surreptitiously as they went, grieved for the living son almost as much as for the dead. Surviving could be a weight that crushed the soul. He knew something about that, thought about it every time he visited a grave overlooking the sea, at home.
Kendra watched the young Cyngael come over to them, the grey hound beside him. She knew she ought to go to the cleric, as Judit had, receive his blessing, extend her own glad greetings.
She found that she could not move, didn't understand, at all. A sense of… very great strangeness.
The Cyngael reached them. She caught her breath. "Jad give you greeting," she said.
He went right past her. Not even glancing her way: straight brown hair to his shoulders, brown eyes. Her own age, she guessed. Not a tall man, trimly made, a sword at his side.
He knelt beside Athelbert, who lay motionless, curled up like a child, hands still clutching between his legs. She was near enough, just, to hear her older brother murmur, eyes closed, "Help me, Cyngael. A small jest. Tell Judit I'm dead. Hakon will help you."
The Cyngael was still for a moment, then he stood. Looking down at the heir to the Anglcyn throne, he said, contemptuously, "You have the wrong playmate. I find nothing amusing about telling someone their brother is dead, and would lie in torment eternally before I let an Erling… help me… with anything. You may choose to eat and drink with them, Anglcyn, but some of us remember blood-eaglings. Tell me, where's your grandfather buried, son of Aeldred?"
Kendra put a hand to her mouth, her heart thudding. Across the meadow, in morning light, Judit was standing with Ceinion of Llywerth, out of earshot. They might have been figures in a holy book, illuminated by clerics with loving care and piety. Part of a different picture, a different text, not this one.
This one, where they were, was not holy. The lash of the Cyngael words was somehow the worse for the music in his voice. Athelbert, who was, in fact, considerably more than simply a jester, opened his eyes and looked up.
Hakon had gone red, as he was inclined to do when distressed. "I think you insult both Prince Athelbert and myself, and in great ignorance," he said, impressively enough. "Will you retract, or need I chastise you in Jad's holy name?" He laid a hand on his sword hilt.
Aeldred's younger daughter was considerably milder of manner than her sister, and was thought, therefore (though not by her siblings), to be softer. Something peculiar seemed to be happening to her now, however. A feeling, a sensation within… a presence. She didn't understand it, felt edgy, angry, threatened. A darkness in the sunlight here, beside it.