“Who?”
“Morwen.”
Marcella tore another bite from her cony and chewed, while Rhiannon pondered the inflection of Marcella’s words. A flicker of emotion—sadness?—crossed Marcella’s lovely features, and then it vanished, replaced with a brand of steely temperance that was entirely her own.
“We grew up together,” she said, and Rhiannon blinked back her momentary shock, because it couldn’t be possible. Marcella was too young. Even on closer inspection, it would seem the paladin was no older than Rhiannon…
With furrowed brow, she examined the woman’s soft, smooth face—lacking even a hint of crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes.
Startling her even more, Marcella claimed to be seventy-three, attributing her “youthful appearance” to a bit of alchemy, and good dewine blood.
Listening intently, Jack held his tongue, his gaze alternating between Rhiannon and Marcella, though if any of this was a surprise to him, he gave little indication of it. Looking bored, he tossed a mauled bone into the flames, and watched the fire flare over the grease.
“Alas, I must confess… we were close—very, very close.”
Rhiannon stopped chewing only to stare open-mouthed at the paladin, wondering what it was she was trying to convey. Something about the way she said the word… close… gave Rhiannon pause.
“She wasn’t always the way she is now. As a girl, she was… well…” She shrugged. “She was Morwen.”
She said it with such tenderness that Rhiannon had to work hard to swallow the bite of food she had in her mouth.
“What… happened?”
Rhiannon had meant the question drolly, but Marcella responded very soberly. “One evening… whilst I was out with your grandmother, foraging for herbs for my potions, your mother and Emrys borrowed her grimoire…” She averted her gaze now, tears brimming in her eyes. “She was never the same after… and well, Emrys… neither was he.” She hushed then, swiping a tear from her cheek. “We were fifteen.”
“So, then, you knew her… before?”
Before the change that made her a Witch Goddess.
“Aye,” said Marcella, with a nod. “Quite well.” And then she said again, with meaning, “Quite.”
Rhiannon blinked over the revelation, realizing how little she knew of her own mother. Clearly, this woman had loved Morwen—truly loved her. The very notion was… unthinkable. Not only because—well, she was a woman, and so was Morwen, but… because it was impossible to imagine Morwen as a maiden in love.
Really, their kind were not pietists. She’d heard many such Beltane stories about free love under the stars—maidens and stags, stags and stags, maidens and maidens… it was simply that… well… she was talking about Morwen.
Rhiannon blushed hotly, and Marcella offered a hint of a smile. “We were young,” she explained. “Both of us filled with so much wonder and love for our Craft. Alas, I was never very skilled… So much as I adored the Craft, it never came so easily to me as it did to Morwen.”
She broke off then, looking angry, ripping another bite from her cony, before casting the bones into the weeds. Afterwards, she sat chewing, the tension in her body unmistakable, clenching and unclenching one fist, until at last, she pierced Rhiannon with a pointed glance. “As you already realize… she is no longer who she was. But what you cannot know… is… her true form… she’s Sylph.”
“Morwen?”
“Cerridwen.”
Swallowing with some difficulty, Rhiannon’s lips parted, then closed again, realizing intuitively what it was that Marcella was telling her: Her mother wasn’t a witch aligned to aether… she was of the aether.
“So… you see… this is why there are two Pendragon sisters aligned to aether.”
Rhiannon considered that another moment, before Marcella added, “’Tis also why it was possible to bind Seren and to deceive your mother. Even considering what she was, Morwen never suspected there could be two.”
Blinking again in shock, Rhiannon felt as though she might purge the contents of her belly.
“This is also why I agreed to remove you from Blackwood… to keep you safe—not merely for Cael. But rather… because… well, in truth, neither you nor your sisters have any notion what you are capable of… and neither do we.”
“We?”
“The Guard, of course.”
Rhiannon’s gaze shifted to Jack. His brow was furrowed as though this did surprise him. He stopped chewing and sat ruminating.
“Alas, you above all are an anomaly, Rhiannon. Born of two true-blood dewines, and bearing the hud of three…”
Rhiannon recognized truth in her words…
She and her sisters were each born with dewine blood, but her mother was in fact the essence from which they drew. They were demigods, like the cauldron-born fae… but Morwen… she was a Goddess, in truth.
“You share her blood,” Marcella reasoned. “And yet, despite that your sister is to be Regnant, you are, indeed, an aberration. It could well be that, after five years, those manacles have weakened your affinities, but I cannot rest easy until I know your heart. As Jack here has said… you might, indeed, be England’s salvation… but it could be that you will be its doom.”
The look she gave Rhiannon was unmistakable, and the knife hilt at her boot glinted ominously against the firelight. “You, Lady Blackwood, are the reason I hunt my own kind.”
Silence permeated the forest about them—a silence so complete that the flame in the pit sounded like a roar.
“And, by the by, before you think to judge me,” Marcella added, “consider that before we are done, one of you—either you or your sisters—will put a blade through your mother’s heart. Therefore, you are no better than a huntsman. Either you will spill Morwen’s blood, else she’ll spill yours, and for the good of the realm… I am prepared to slay you all.”
19
Warkworth Castle
Exhausted from having awakened this morn to the ear-splitting sound of a babe’s wails, Seren retired early, leaving her sisters to compare notes about their insatiable newborns—Elspeth’s scarcely older than Rosalynde’s.
Troubled by Isolde’s words, she retrieved the sword from their workshop and took it into her chamber, laying it down gingerly upon the bed she normally shared with her husband. No doubt, the sword was a poor substitute for Wilhelm, though she needed its presence tonight in order to work through the growing turmoil in her heart.
Unlike Rhiannon, she had not spent her entire life preparing for the life of a priestess. She did not know what that should entail, nor did she comprehend what should be done to entreat the Goddess for her prophesied gifts.
She, more than any of her sisters, had been dutiful to Elspeth’s mandates to refrain from practicing the Craft. Although Rhiannon had seemed to enjoy defying Elspeth at every turn—Rosalynde, as well—she and Arwyn had been less inclined to put their eldest sister into a fit of apoplexy. For Seren, it had never been worth the argument or distress, particularly when she’d thought her affinities so weak.