Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [128]
And then, far too soon, it was time to be off to her fate. It was with mixed relief—for she was finally able to put on her warrior gear—and regret that she mounted Rhys; and with a guard of her own warriors, the escort sent by Arthur, and a half dozen horse keepers, she set off with the herd of grays for the stronghold of the High King at Celliwig.
The land lay barren before them, not yet covered with a sheltering blanket of snow, the trees bare, the grasses sere, the sky for the most part sad and gray. The only birds were rooks, crows, ravens, and now and again a wood dove. There was nothing festive about their group, either. They might as well have been riding to a parlay or a possible battle as to a wedding. Or perhaps to a funeral.
At night, she kept very quiet, quieter even than her usual habits, and listened to the men talking. That was how she learned that it was not only the Merlin who had been struck down, but that the senior Druids were dying, getting ill, or outright vanishing.
This was the first she had heard of such a thing, and it rather took her aback. But when she asked one of the escort, a fellow named Neirin, what he made of it, the man just shrugged.
“They’re all old, lady,” he pointed out. “There’s nothing mysterious about old men dying.”
She certainly couldn’t refute his logic, although there was still something about it that bothered her. But surely if something was wrong, the Druids themselves would be falling all over themselves to get to the bottom of the matter . . .
They passed within a few miles of the Isle of Glass, and she was tempted to detour to pay a visit—but there was no guarantee that Gwyn would come out to see her, she had already had just about as much of the Ladies as she could stand, and Gildas was, in fact, waiting at Arthur’s Castle to wed them by the Christian rites, along with Aeronwen to bind them by the Old Ways.
She was just as tempted to detour to the great Henge, but again, there was not much there to see. She did not have the Gift to see the Power in the Stones outside of the time of a major ceremony. There was no School or Convocation of Druids permanently in residence there as there was at the Cauldron Well. Other than marveling over the construction itself, there really was nothing to “see.”
So in the end, she bypassed both places and kept on the straight road.
The nights were the hardest. Not because they were cold, though they were, but because she knew that every time she slept, she was that much closer to the end of her former life. But rather than feeling desperation, she felt only a deepening melancholy.
Until, finally, it was over. The road finally brought them within sight of Celliwig and the hill on which Arthur’s castle stood.
At first, she was not at all impressed. There was a hill; on top of it, the walls of the more permanent version of the Roman-style fortification she was altogether familiar with, and just barely visible above that, roofs that appeared to be tiled. It was disappointing, actually. She had expected, from all the tales, to come upon some enormous artificial mountain of stonework, looming high above the plain below.
It did seem odd that there were no men patrolling the top of the walls, however.
It wasn’t until she saw small dots moving atop the walls that she realized her mistake. It wasn’t small. It was enormous—not in height, but in size. Probably the individual buildings were no taller than Castell y Cnwclas, but they were each just as large, if not larger. And there were as many of them, at least, as there were huts in the village. Clustered at the foot of the hill were houses and huts, indeed, enough to make up twenty villages the size of the one she had known.
Now she was very glad that she had fought in so many big engagements; if she hadn’t, the sheer number of people would have been daunting.
Before they even reached the city of Celliwig—for it was a city,