‘Now answer the question.’
‘Queen Rhin has conquered Narvon. We are sailing to invade Ardan.’
‘How many of you are there?’
‘Over a thousand. Most have sailed.’
‘Why not all of you?’
‘Not enough boats. We’ve got to wait for those that left today to unload in Ardan, then come back for us.’
‘How many still here?’
A shrug. ‘Two, three hundred.’
Marrock nodded grimly. ‘And who leads you?’
‘Morcant.’
Corban stiffened. He knew that name. Rhin’s first-sword, the man who had duelled and lost to Tull, back in Badun on Midwinter’s Eve. The man who had led the ambush where Queen Alona had died. The man who had killed his friend, Ronan.
‘Is he in the village?’ Edana asked. She also knew who Morcant was. They all did.
‘No, he has sailed already.’
Marrock looked out to sea. ‘And why have you come after us?’
‘Thought you were spies of Owain. He cannot know about us.’ The man shrugged, causing Camlin’s knife to draw a drop of blood.
Marrock sighed and rubbed a hand over his face.
‘I have told you all I know,’ the man begged. ‘Please, let me go. I will say nothing about you, tell them I was knocked unconscious in the battle. Anything you want me to say.’
Marrock frowned at him. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Haf,’ the warrior said, his eyes pleading.
Marrock opened his mouth to speak, then Camlin cut the prisoner’s throat.
Dark blood spurted, the warrior gurgled and sank slowly to the ground, his blood soaking into the sand.
“He could not live,’ Camlin said, facing Marrock’s glare, wiping his blade clean in the sand. ‘He has seen us, knows our numbers, our strengths. He saw the wolven.’ He nodded at Storm. ‘She’s a surprise that has helped save our necks more than once today.’
Marrock was pale, stiff with anger. ‘Right or wrong, it was not your decision,’ he said. ‘We are no cut-throat rabble. You will wait for a command, is that clear?’
Camlin held Marrock’s gaze, then nodded. ‘Aye, chief,’ he said.
‘What do we do now?’ Anwarth asked, voicing Corban’s own question. ‘We have no boat to escape with.’
‘It’s either steal one or cut inland and walk to Domhain,’ Halion said.
They discussed the options back and forth: Marrock wanting to steal a boat from the village, Halion advocating fleeing inland.
‘Fleeing to Domhain does not seem to have been the safest choice,’ Marrock said.
No one knows what to do, Corban thought. All of us exhausted, scared.
‘For what it’s worth,’ Camlin said into the silence, ‘I think there’s more chance of staying alive if we cut across land. I’m not saying we’ll make it to Domhain, but I think we’ll stay alive longer that way.’
‘But we would move too slowly,’ Marrock said. ‘We do not have enough horses, even if those that you hobbled are still there. We will be chased, and those doing the chasing will be mounted. We would be run down within a day.’
‘Aye, there is that. But let me have a few hands and I think I could steal us a few extra horses — there were paddocks along the river — my vote is that horses are easier to steal than boats.’
They discussed it a little longer, until Heb finished the conversation. ‘Talk can accomplish much, but all it will accomplish here is our deaths,’ he said. ‘It will not be long before the men sent to find us are missed.’
‘Heb is right,’ Edana said.
‘For once,’ muttered Brina.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CYWEN
Cywen was on her hands and knees collecting eggs in the garden. Buddai thought it was an invitation to play and was swatting at her with a paw. Absently she told him to shoo.
Days had begun to pass in a kind of haze for Cywen. Two nights had passed since she had been questioned by Nathair. She had filled most of her time since then with routine chores — cleaning the house, tending the garden, working at the stables. She was worried about Shield, Corban’s stallion. He was such a fine mount, too fine, and there was more than one of Owain’s men with an eye on him. It would be a grief too far if one of them were to take Shield from Dun Carreg. She must keep him here, safe for Corban’s return. Somehow that was important to her.
In her mind she had spent almost every waking moment going over the questions Nathair had asked her — about Gar, about Ban. Nathair and Sumur were linked to her family, somehow. And it was obvious that Sumur knew Gar, though that should have been almost impossible.
And behind all of this was the thought, the possibility, the hope, that Corban and Gar and her mam were hiding in the tunnels beneath Dun Carreg. It was a vision that she clung to, that helped her to rise from sleep every day and put strength in her limbs. All she wanted to do was get a torch and go searching for them, but on the morning after her meeting with Nathair she had noticed a shadow following her as she’d made her way to the stables. Conall. That night someone else had stood in the shadow of a doorway opposite her house. All night. She was being watched and she could not lead people — the enemy — to the hidden tunnels where Edana might be hiding.
But she could not wait forever; her need to know was a physical sensation in the pit of her stomach. And with that, suddenly, she was done waiting, a plan forming in her mind.
She took the eggs indoors, the last of the day melting into dusk. Quickly she gathered all she needed: a bundle of rush torches, flint and tinder, a bag to put it all in, and buckled her belt of knives across her shoulder. She gave Buddai a thick marrow bone she’d traded for with the butcher earlier. Then, as the shadows were dissolving into night, she stepped into her back garden and agilely scaled the rose wall at the garden’s far end, slipping almost invisibly through her neighbour’s courtyard and into the street beyond.
Cywen stood staring at the beach. Something was wrong, different.
She had entered the tunnels through the hidden doorway in the fortress high above, made her way slowly through them, and now she was standing in a cave that looked out on the beach and bay. It was still night, dawn a long way off, although she had spent long hours searching the tunnels for her kin. Only at the end had she found evidence that they had been in the tunnels at all — the dead wyrm and warrior nearby, lying in the cavern at the end of this cave. But they were not here now. She felt drained, defeated.
They were gone.
Had they escaped into Havan, then made their way to the marshes in the west that everyone was saying were where Ardan’s survivors were fleeing?
A full moon silvered the bay and beach, shimmering on wave-tops and shingle alike. The only shape in the bay was Nathair’s ship, bobbing on the swell of the tide, huge compared to the fishing vessels on the beach. The fisher-boats were lined along the shore, none out at sea, as all able-bodied men had been taken to the fortress and forced into labouring at defences for Owain as he prepared for the coming of Queen Rhin. I hope she rips his heart out, she thought. Or the other way round. Either way it is one less that’ll need killing.
Then she realized what was different. A boat was missing, the only boat she’d ever had cause to look for.
Dath’s boat.
She checked again, studying the outline of each boat slumped in the shingle. It was definitely not there. So they had sailed away — her mam, Corban, Gar, Edana and the rest. But where to? The thought of following reared first in her mind, but follow them where? Perhaps they’d sailed west to the marshes, but perhaps they hadn’t. There was no obvious course, and they would have been scared, maybe injured among them, the need just to get away driving them.
She sighed, long and deep, then turned and made her way back into the cave, striking sparks into a fresh torch once she had turned a corner on the narrow path, hiding her from anyone looking from the beach.