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. . . he was certainly Lot’s son in spirit, if not in actuality.

“But if you do not, when the Saxons finally kill the old man, or the Ladies give up and let me spill his blood for the Land, the Old Stag will give way for the Young Stag, and I will be High King. Just as mother promised.” His eyes glittered, and inside her, she grew cold with fear. How had she never seen this before? How had she never seen how ruthless he was, how he would do anything, use any tool, to take the High King’s throne? Now, of course, it was far too late.

“I’m sure by now you are also wondering, ‘But what about the Druids?’ Since it was the Merlin who was so very eager to kill me in my cradle.” He laughed. “And of course, the Merlin managed to imprint his desires on the entire Druidic Council. I thought about that, too, well in advance of putting my plans in motion. I have been working at this for years. All of the Merlin’s cronies have tottered off to the Summer Lands, and I hold the young ones in the palm of my hand.” He spread his hands wide. “And now it all comes together. You, the High King’s queen, disposed of. The Druids, mine. The Ladies so concerned with fighting the encroachment of the Christ men that they ignore me. My wife in your place. All of it, building the stair that will take me to the highest place in the land.”

She was fighting hard now to even stay conscious. Her vision narrowed, darkened. There was a roaring in her ears. She couldn’t hear him anymore. Couldn’t see him.

So this is death, she thought bitterly.

And then she had no more thoughts at all.

She hadn’t expected to wake, so when she did, it was with a shock as great as the blast of cold air that struck her in the face. She struggled to move, to open her eyes, and plunged into despair when she couldn’t. Wave after wave of nauseating emotions washed over her. Panic. Terror. A deeper despair. She tried to force calm on herself, tried to get control, only to have fear wrest it away from her. Her ears were still full of a roaring sound, but under that, she heard the clopping of hooves, and her body was bouncing on a hard, flat surface, and rolling about a bit. So she was in that cart Gwenhwyfach had mentioned. She’d been incompletely poisoned. But she still couldn’t move. She was being carted off, to be buried alive. The thought of the frozen clods falling on her face, the earth filling her throat, her lungs, choking her—

She thought she would be submersed in terror forever.

But even the terror wore itself out. It ebbed, slowly. And that was when she realized that she could open her eyes again. And she could—barely—move her fingers and toes.

When she forced her eyes open, she couldn’t see anything but light filtering through a coarse cloth that covered her face. And she was tied firmly hand and foot—tied, in fact, to a pole that ran past her head and feet, so she couldn’t bend or kick. But she was awake, and she could move. That counted for something.

And that was when she realized that even if her hands and feet were bound, her mouth was not.

“Help,” she croaked, weakly. Then, “Help!” she yelped, louder. “Help! Help! He—”

The cart stopped. The cloth covering her face was pulled back, roughly.

“Now, now,” said Medraut, making no attempt to hide his gloating. “Surely you don’t want to leave my company so soon, Gwen?” He gave her no time to do more than gasp at seeing him. He reached down and wrenched her head back by the hair, stuffing one end of a horn into her mouth. “You’ll just need to go back to sleep for now. We have a way yet to go.” He let go of her hair and pinched her nose shut, then poured more of that cloyingly sweet mead down the horn. “Drink or drown, my love.”

She had no other choice. Choking, coughing, she drank. Some of it got into her lungs, where it burned terribly. As soon as he was sure the drugs were taking hold of her, he pulled the horn out of her mouth and smoothed her hair with a tender hand, wiping the tears of pain and rage from her eyes, and fastidiously