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Chapter Text

Early Spring, 530 CE

Northern Cymru

It was happening too quickly.

When his father first broached the idea, back at the first thaw, Bedwyr had told himself he had months to turn Arthur’s mind. Weeks, at the least, to convince him this mission was folly, dangerous beyond anything they’d agreed to before.

He had tried. Unite the southern lords? It’d be like trying to herd wildcats. Each had his own agenda, his own ambitions for power and wealth. Their concerns were different from those in the north, more rolling, arable land, more coastline. They wouldn’t even sound like the folk of the north, their Cymrish twisted by distance and time apart.

Worse, most had converted to the religion of the Christ, a faith from a land so far away it was irrelevant to Cymru. What could a people from a green and temperate land possibly take from a dogma born in the desert? From beliefs that claimed a single being had created everything—everything! laughable—and then let his human son be executed in his name. And to what end? To create such guilt and fear among the surviving populace that they would live their lives like sheep? Not to mention, give a heaping portion of their livelihood to the clerics of this faith. That anyone in Cymru couldn’t see through that aspect was shameful. They deserved to be sheep.

Then let them be sheep to Arthur, Uthyr had said. While Arthur had at least pretended to hear Bedwyr out, Uthyr had cornered him daily, arguing for his scheme. Bedwyr’s voice had grown hoarse from shouting. Arthur was no shepherd. A warrior, yes, one who had led large contingents of fellow fighters against invading Saxon dogs. But those men had already been united against a common enemy. Arthur was good with individual warriors and could cajole them into doing just about anything, usually by example.

But men who were arguing amongst themselves when predators were prowling around their halls? Men who spent more time in churches than training yards readying themselves for the battle that mattered? It was a fool’s mission, and they were no fools.

Too bad he hadn’t been able to convince Arthur of that. Now spring was fully here, clamoring with lambs and the ring of armor being prepared, and his chances of holding Arthur here, of keeping him safe in the north, were slipping away like the last drops of snow melt down the rushing mountain streams.

Not that he wasn’t trying to put off the inevitable as long as possible. He wasn’t above keeping Arthur in the yard, engaged in round after round, slipping and sliding in the slush until they were more mud than men.  He might have hacked his sword edge on a rock—secretly (twice)—before delivering it to mistress Britte for repairs with a recalcitrant shrug.

But when it came to distraction and delay, he’d always known what worked best on his cub.

“Ah—yes—there.”

The words made tiny clouds in the chilly air inside the shepherd’s hut. The flocks were being kept closer to the village during the lambing, the beasts wandering up the far hillsides on the fairest days, and Bedwyr congratulated himself on his ingenuity. With this hut, and with his tongue.

Arthur’s fingers shoved into his hair,  gripping tightly. No words this time, only moans, and Bedwyr allowed himself a grin against Arthur’s stones before he got back to the task at hand, sucking on one until his man hissed, then pulling the other into his mouth. Arthur writhed under him, pushing against his face, and then his words were back, begging.

Wouldn’t do to give in right away, though, so he licked lower.

“Fuck, Bed. Don’t…”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t stop. Gods, don’t stop.”

He lapped hard at the tender skin, tight and pulsing under his tongue. He pushed, teased, eased up, then dove back in, growling. He’d never been good with logic, never been a quick thinker. Had lost most of the debates he’d had the misfortune to get drawn into, unless they’d devolved into a physical skirmish.

But this… This he could do. This, he’d mastered when his opponent was this man. In this small, private arena, he was champion, one who never gave in until he’d rendered Arthur boneless.

When the tight muscle gave way to his efforts, he spit on two fingers and slid them into Arthur’s heat. Arthur groaned, clenching around his fingers. His voice choked off as Bedwyr finally took his cock into his mouth. Bedwyr worked on him with lips and tongue, with two fingers, then three, trying to draw out the moment. Distract…delay…deny…

The thing he always forgot was that doing this affected him as much as Arthur, and this time when the begging came, it pulled him to his knees as easily as if Arthur had wrestled him into position. Arthur’s cock slapped wetly against his belly, forgotten as Bedwyr took his own in a slick grip. “You want this?

“Yes.”

“Can’t hear you,” he said, desperate to stretch time.

“Just fucking fuck me,” Arthur snarled, “or get on your back.”

Desire licked up his spine and, groaning, helpless, Bedwyr pushed into him in a single thrust.

Arthur arched, head pressing into the straw of the bedding, his hands on Bedwyr’s hips, fingertips hard and bruising. Under their direction, Bedwyr drove into him, again and again, because this too he’d mastered: taking orders from this man. His man, his cub, his polestar—the bright point around which his entire life revolved and had done so even before they’d discovered each other like this. Possibly before they’d even met. The gods’ ways were mysterious, and in moments like this one he was content to surrender to their designs.

But those moments always ended too quickly. He enjoyed all of a dozen heartbeats collapsed on Arthur’s chest, slippery with sweat, his mind as foggy as his breath and stupid enough to hope Arthur might be up for a snuggle and a nap.

Arthur grunted under him. “That was…exceptional.”

Bedwyr smiled to himself, careful to hide it. He burrowed closer, sighing. “Aye.”

Arthur’s laughter jostled him, vibrated into his cheek. “Modest.”

“Modesty is for monks.”

“Which, thankfully, we are not.”

“Praise the gods.”

Arthur hefted him up for a kiss, a slow, sweet thing until he bit Bedwyr’s lower lip. When Bedwyr made a noise of protest, went in for another taste, Arthur pushed at his shoulders. “Up. Off. I was due to meet Mama half an hour ago.”

“Why?”

But he knew why. This venture to the southern reaches might be a diplomatic mission, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t go fully armed, and Britte was the one making sure that happened. He sat up, watching as Arthur pulled on his clothes, mourning each bit of bare skin lost to leather and wool. Bedwyr had succeeded in tugging half of Arthur’s hair out of its queue and was mildly scandalized when Arthur made no effort to tie it back again.

“She’s going to know what you were up to.”

Arthur leaned down and kissed him. Then grinned. “Just as I know what you’re up to?”

And with a wink, he left Bedwyr to a victory as empty as the hut.

Chapter Text

Arthur smiled to himself as he strode down the path. Oh, he knew what Bed was doing. What Bed had been doing since their parents put this mission to them. Despite what Bedwyr might believe, he was no fool rushing into a rash decision, eager to subject them to the whims of lords he didn’t know. Men who would likely keep on as they chose, despite their alleged admiration of Arthur and his men’s deeds.

But he wasn’t going to forgo whatever temptations Bed used to lure him to distraction, either.

That would be foolish.

He was still chuckling when he ducked under the roof of his mother’s workshop. The scents of heated metal and living smoke struck him with such familiar force he half expected to turn and discover his grandfather Wolf at the grinding wheel, or standing at the workbench, his great shoulders hunched by concentration and age.

As much as he might have liked to pull Wolf aside, ask his advice or Marcus’s for this next mission, they weren’t here and hadn’t been for half his life. His father had had advice before he passed, and Uthyr was nothing but advice these days. And he would heed it, but the one who knew him best, better maybe than Bedwyr did, was here, hammer and tongs in hand, long silver braid swinging as she worked.

“You’re late.” She glanced up when he reached her side, then made a startled second glance at his hair.

“Bed says hello.”

She snorted, shaking her head. Went back to her work. “I doubt he said any such thing.”

Grinning, he retied his hair into something like order. He hadn’t succeeded in making her blush; only his father had ever been able to do that. Well, and Uthyr a few times since they’d returned, something he’d tortured Bed with until Bed shut him up with better uses for his mouth.

“Has he changed your mind yet?”

“No.”

“Good. Any word of the others?”

“Philip says they should arrive later today. I’m surprised we haven’t seen the lads yet—I was sure they’d run ahead of the men.”

“Maybe they aren’t as restless as you were.”

“Mama.”

She brought over his shield, showed him the repairs she’d made to it, but she had something on her mind. Finally, she met his eye again. “What is he like?”

“Medraut?”

“Aye.”

“Your grandson?” he teased.

“Of course that Medraut. Honestly.”

“I’m sure Papa told you about him.”

“And so have you, and Uthyr, I just…” She hesitated, a rare enough thing that he straightened, took notice.

“What?”

“It’s only… Uthyr’s quite taken with his grandsons, and they with him. To hear him tell it,” she conceded with a wry look.

“I think you’ll like him,” he said.

She nodded, one cheek pinched on words she wasn’t saying.

He leaned close. “He’s very excited to meet you. He’s wanted to from the moment I told him you were a smith. And since he was scarcely five years old then, he’s been waiting an age.”

Medraut had been sitting on Bed’s knee, his pale face alight with the story fire in his mothers’ hall, his younger brother asleep in Gwen’s lap. It would be years before Arthur would admit Medraut was his, begin to do the things a father should do. Sharing Britte’s vocation had been a meager morsel, given without thought, but Medraut’s eyes had shone with surprise and delight.

“I hope you haven’t built me up into something I can’t live up to—”

Boots sounded on the path outside, and they turned to find Bedwyr approaching, flanked by the boys.

Arthur smiled at his mother. “Suppose we’ll find out.”

Bedwyr brought them into the workshop. “Mistress. Caught a couple stray goats coming over the saddle.”

Gally sent him an annoyed glance, but Medraut didn’t seem to hear the jibe. His gaze was pinned to Arthur’s mother. He approached her, hands clenching at his sides, and bowed his head. “Grandmother.”

It was quiet, but Arthur heard her sharp inhalation. She stared at the top of Medraut’s dark head for a few heartbeats, then laid her hands on his shoulders. “Let me see you.”

She studied him for a long moment, Medraut holding up impressively under her scrutiny. At his age, Arthur would have been jumping out of his skin. Finally, she shook her head and cupped his cheek. “Welcome,” she said softly, gifting him a rare smile. “If it weren’t for this raven hair, I would think your father had slipped back in here as a lad somehow.”

Medraut grinned at Arthur, and a deep pride rose in Arthur’s chest. He itched to embrace the lad but held off, not wanting to embarrass him.

“Son.”

“Father.”

He wondered what it might be like to hear something less formal, Papa or Ta, but he would take it.

Medraut stepped back and gestured behind him for Mama’s benefit. “This is my brother, Gally.”

“Galahad,” the lad said, predictably. He came forward, chin high with the unearned confidence of younger brothers everywhere, and gave Mama a nod. “Auntie.”

Mama’s brow rose. “Your great-aunt anyway. I suppose Auntie will do.”

He nodded again, then turned to Arthur. “Uncle. May we go find Grandfather?”

“In a moment. When did you leave the others?”

“This morning. They were too slow.”

Behind him, Bedwyr rolled his eyes.

“But we saw Philip in flight, so we followed his path—”

“Hold,” Arthur said, just as Bedwyr scanned the path outside the workshop. “Remember what I told you?”

Gally’s gaze widened, flicked to Mama. “But I thought…”

“Yes, she knows,” he said, lowering his voice. “As do Uthyr, Tiro, and Mora. But you must not mention shifting even if you’re alone with one of those four. Even your grandfather’s shieldmate doesn’t know that shifters exist, and they’ve fought alongside each other for decades. We can never know who could be listening around a corner. I won’t hesitate to send you back to your mothers if I believe you might put anyone in danger. Understood?”

Gally blinked but held his head high. “Yes, Uncle.”

“Yes, Father,” Medraut said.

“All right. I’m glad you’re here. You’ll probably find Uthyr in the armory.”

Gally bounced toward the path. “Come on, Medraut.”

But Medraut didn’t move right away. “May I come back and watch you work?” he asked Mama.

Mama’s expression said she didn’t know what could be so interesting about her work, but also an interesting blush was spreading across her cheeks. “You may.”

Bedwyr took the lads off to find Uthyr, and Mama watched them go. “Matthias told me he resembled you, but Arthur…” She shook her head again. “He’s the very image of you.”

“I was the last to see it, evidently.”

“He’s a sweet lad. And Galahad…”

Arthur chuckled. “Not too rude, I hope.”

“No, just young. Young and cocky. Can’t imagine where he might have gotten that.”

Arthur raised his hands. “Not my fault. I’m just his uncle.”

She hummed, skeptical. “An uncle he wants to emulate.” She picked up her tools again. “They’ll both have the girls of the village in a flurry tonight.”

The boys, too, he thought as he took his leave to follow them. Even if there were no boys of his own bent, novelty made a fellow interesting, and those two couldn’t be newer to the mountains than if they’d dropped from the sky.

Chapter Text

“Mother’s hall is bigger.”

Medraut elbowed Gally. “Don’t.”

“It is. She hosted three hundred at the last festival. This is smaller even than Uncle Arthur’s hall at the refuge.”

“That villa was built by Romans.”

Gally sent him a look that said maybe the Romans should have built everything.

This hall was smaller, objectively. The space was narrower, shorter, the ridge-line of the roof closer overhead. It was darker and smokier, and much more crowded.

But Gally was putting too much weight on all of that. A lot of things were just the same: the great fire pits, the sounds of people and hounds, the scents of roasting meat and spilled ale. The sense of common belonging, of common history and purpose.

“They couldn’t build it bigger, Gally. There aren’t as many trees here, and they aren’t as tall. Come, let’s look at the heads.”

The mounted heads of past hunts hung on the back wall. Most were stags with great branching antlers, but there were a few others, too. Gally let himself be dragged to them, and they discovered a couple of boars, their sharp tusks curving from under their lips, and some sort of wildcat whose spotted coat that had seen a better day.

“Morbid,” Gally said.

“I bet every one of them has a story.”

“Sure, until they were killed.” Gally leaned close. “Doesn’t it bother you to see them? They could’ve been shifters.”

“Hush.” He gave Gally a severe look. “Remember what Father said.”

If he hadn’t been watching Gally so close, he might have missed the tiny flinch at Father. It had been there since the day his Arthur had claimed him, or rather since the day Medraut had joyfully told Gally about it, not realizing how it might hurt him. How it might set him apart or put him on the outside of something. Medraut had decided to do what he could not to let it come between them—they were still brothers and always would be, forever.

He was about to turn Gally away from the trophies when a hand landed on each of their shoulders, and they both jumped in their boots.

“Here you two are!”

They were spun about to face a woman they hadn’t met yet. She wore the same wool tunic and skirts as the other women here but still had a cloak on. A long plait hung over her shoulder, the same color as Father’s hair. She was tall, too, taller than any other woman here except maybe Grandmother.

“Aunt Mora?” Medraut said.

The woman grinned. “Just so. I was over the mountain, treating a patient.” She studied Gally, then nodded. “You look just like your mothers.”

Which was not what Gally wanted to hear right now, judging by the set of his jaw.

She looked at Medraut. “And there’s no mistaking whose you are.”

“Excuse me,” Gally muttered and stomped off.

Aunt Mora watched go, brows high.

“Sorry. He’s just tired.”

“No, he’s just a younger brother and in a new place and wants badly to be part of the band of heroes around that fire over there. I know what ambition looks like. And envy.” She turned to Medraut, gave him a gentler smile. “Shall we join them? You can introduce me.”

He did, walking her from man to man, each of whom stood and nodded to her, greeting her with the respect owed to their leader’s sister. They didn’t know her like they knew his mothers, but he suspected they’d soon be joking with her in the same way. Especially Safir, who was always on the hunt for mortifying tales of Arthur’s boyhood.

Safir said as much to her now, and the gleam in his aunt’s eyes promised a bounty of misery for his father.

She shared a couple that soon had everyone around the fire pit howling with laughter and Arthur protesting loudly.

“You were three! You heard that from someone else!”

“Doesn’t make it any less true,” she said, grinning at him.

“Aye, laugh,” he said to his men, then pointed a thumb at his sister. “This one used to collect rocks.”

“Better than black eyes,” Uncle Bedwyr said, “from your own shield.”

The men took over the teasing, and Medraut was glad to see Gally laughing too. He’d been awfully serious lately.

“So.” Aunt Mora nudged his arm, bringing Medraut’s attention back to her. “What do you want from this journey?”

So many things. Too many things. Definitely more than he wanted to admit, even to her. But he’d already managed a few of them. “I wanted to see where Father grew up. He and Uncle Bedwyr have told us so much about these mountains. Grandfather Uthyr, too, and Grandfather Matthias. And I wanted to meet Grandmother Britte. Watch her work.”

“I saw her when I came in. She said you spent time in the smithy this afternoon. What was that like?”

“Wonderful.”

“Was it?”

There was laughter in her voice, but he couldn’t imagine why. Grandmother was a wonder. “I’ve never met a woman smith before. Never seen one, not even in Lord Rhys’s town, and you can meet just about any sort of person there. But she’s so skilled—more than any of the men practicing down the mountain. She could make anything. She could remake Father’s sword!”

Aunt Mora’s brows rose. “Do you suppose?”

He nodded, looking around the hall for his grandmother. She’d been visiting with folk earlier but sat now next to Grandfather. He was whispering something in her ear that was making her smile.

“And how to you find the mountains?”

“Grand. Higher than I thought. And everyone’s been so welcoming.”

She nudged him again. “Especially the girls, I wager.”

He ducked his head, felt heat creeping over his cheeks that had nothing to do with the fire before them. The girls had greeted him and Gally with wide, shy eyes and burbling giggles. He’d tried to be kind to them, polite at least, because Gally hadn’t had the patience to be.

To his relief, Aunt Mora let it drop. “So you’ve seen the mountains, met our folk. Met your grandmother and watched her work.” She leaned close. “Now, tell me, nephew: what is it you really want?”

So much, too much. He looked at his hands. They were twisting around his cup, making the ale inside slosh. He stilled them. Took a deep breath and met her steady gaze.

“I want to make him proud of me.”

His words hung between them as Aunt Mora drew a breath of her own. She seemed to assess him in that moment, and it felt as if she could see things about him that he couldn’t. Know things. Her gaze flicked to Father before settling on him again.

Finally, she smiled. “Good luck, then.”

Chapter Text

It was all coming together. Uthyr allowed himself to settle back into the furs of his chair and take in what he’d set in motion.

Arthur’s men sat around the fire pits, enjoying meat, ale, and the warm welcome of these folk of the mountains. Some of the mercenaries had looked strange at first, especially to those who didn’t leave these heights to fight the summer campaigns. Some of his folk had never seen a man whose skin glowed as deeply as Morien’s, or even men who chose to wear their hair shorn close to the skull, as Agravain and Gawain did. Not since Marcus Roman had lived among them.

But they were Arthur’s most trusted, and his people had folded them into their community their own. Some had made it easy; Safir could make himself welcome deep into enemy territory, so ready were his charms. His brother Palahmed didn’t give of himself so easily, but his reserve was a watchful one, thoughtful but not aloof, and that only bolstered folks’ trust in him. And then there were the lads.

Uthyr watched his grandsons as they studied the trophies of past hunts. He’d known that Galahad would chafe here. It would naturally feel confining when a boy was accustomed to the larger, more luxurious spaces of the river towns, and Galahad had a natural pride about him. A younger brother’s ambition, too. He wanted to impress, wanted to be part of something greater than himself. Wanted, perhaps, just to be out from under his mothers’ daily influence. What lad didn’t? Some, he supposed, but a nephew of Arthur’s and Bedwyr’s? A grandson of his own? Aye, the lad wanted, and Uthyr would help him on his way.

Medraut had made a good start. He was eager as well but in a steadier way. Maybe he took his cues from Bedwyr’s cautious nature or Palahmed’s deliberative one. Whatever the cause, it would temper the aspects of his nature he’d gotten from his father. At his age, Arthur had had more natural talent than Uthyr had witnessed in any other young man, himself included. He’d honed his own skills through practice and more practice, while Arthur had been blessed by the gods with a strong raw material that had needed only shaping, honing. Quite a lot of it, but the ongoing result spoke for itself. Uthyr had sparred a bit with each grandson this afternoon, and the hints were there in Medraut. They would begin by training up his physical advantages—his height and reach—and finesse would come later.

He leaned over to Britte until he could smell the smithy in her hair, the residue of work that strengthened their people. He drew a deep breath, drawing his own strength. Reached under her plait to tickle the warm skin of her nape. “Look at all you’ve given us.”

She shook her head minutely. “What?”

“Your sons. Our grandson. Aren’t you proud?”

“I have no right to pride in their being. Not even in their accomplishments. Those are their own.”

“Britte.” He chuckled against her ear, felt her shiver under his touch. “Your blood runs in their veins. They wouldn’t be alive to accomplish things without you.” He kissed her ear. “Take your due.”

She drew a breath. “Maybe I’ll take my due from you.”

He grinned and sat up, just enough to meet her gaze when it flashed to him. “That so?”

“Just so,” she said and cocked one eyebrow at him.

Gods but she could level him.

He leaned close again. “I feel a sudden need for my bed. You, wife?”

She turned her head to murmur in his ear. “Not too weary from the day, I hope.”

“Never too weary.”

Her breath huffed against his cheek. “Shall we make our excuses, then?”

~ ~ ~

The house Mistress Britte had shared with Matthias had long since been claimed by a growing family, and Uthyr’s old house—the one Bedwyr had grown up in—had long since been given over to Huw. Several families had offered their beds to Arthur’s men, but they’d decided to sleep as a group in the hall, just as any  other visitors might do. He’d considered pulling Arthur away to the shepherd’s hut, but its rickety bunk was better for afternoon dalliances than for restful sleep.

So Bedwyr found himself staring at the beams of the hall in the low glow of the embers from the fire pits, running out of options. He’d tried to convince Arthur away from this mission south with words, calm and logical ones first, then increasingly loud and frustrated ones. To save his voice, he’d moved on to distraction, but all that had gotten them were dozens of very satisfactory climaxes. Which he was not opposed to. Only, he’d hoped for some delay. Some extra sliver of time in which he might tempt Arthur north instead, to a border run to poke at some Saxons.

None of it had worked in his favor, and the other men were going to be no damned help. Safir could scarcely wait to set out, and Morien was happy to serve as a magpie scout in the air. Cai had taken to newly trustworthy status with fervor, and he’d spent most of tonight murmuring plans with Agravain to serve as an escort south, ready to shift into their wolf forms as needed.

Bedwyr’s best prospect for aid had been Palahmed, always protective of Gawain and cautious of schemes that seemed half-formed. Bedwyr had laid it on thick during the story fire, emphasizing every possible peril that could befall their group and Gawain specifically. Palahmed had listened in silence, nodding at encouraging intervals. When Bedwyr had run down a truly impressive list of hazardous outcomes, the man had met his gaze…

…and smiled. “Love can make a man desperate. Believe me, I know. But we’ve always known this was coming. You know how best to protect him, and it isn’t holding him back.” He tapped a fingertip to the stump of Bedwyr’s wrist.

He hated the uncertainty of it all. It nipped at the edges of his mind all day, then came out in force at night, like rats made brave by the cover of darkness, to gnaw what was left of his confidence to shreds.

He waited until they slept, every man but especially his own, and then slipped as quietly from his bedroll as he could. He found Arthur’s sword leaning against the wall with the other men’s weapons. Taking it up, scabbard and all, he left the hall by the rear door.

In the shed there, by the accusing glare of the moon, he took his dagger to the wire that criss-crossed the grip of Arthur’s sword. Plucked at it until he’d mangled the strands, destroying a fair bit of the leather underneath as well.

Love can make a man desperate.

Love and fear, he thought. Sometimes he couldn’t tell one from the other.

Chapter Text

Britte held the blade to the grindstone and smiled at the sparks that flew from its edge.

Well, not at the sparks so much as in their direction. Try as she might to concentrate on her work this morning, to be completely and wholly present in the finishing of this piece, her mind kept wandering back to the evening previous. To the mischievous light in Uthyr’s eyes, to the thin excuses they’d made to their friends and which had fooled none of them. To the hardness of the door against her back and Uthyr against her front when he’d gotten her inside their house. To his laugh of delight as she shoved him onto the bed, unwilling to wait any longer to get her hands on his skin.

Gods, but it felt good. To be wanted, and to wish to be wanted. To be able to welcome it, and to want in return—

“Nice to see someone smiling this morning.”

She startled, pulling her foot off the pedal of the grindstone, as Cai ducked under the eave of the workshop. He’d caught her in her reverie. She’d wager he hadn’t seen Uthyr this morning; the man had been whistling when he left the house shortly after dawn. “Are you well?”

“Oh, I’m fine.”

“Agravain? He hasn’t had bad news of Lura?”

“No. The last Gareth spied of her, she was settling in nicely at Gwen’s.”

“What, then?”

He set a sword and scabbard on the workbench with a clatter. Not his own, though. Even in its sheath, she’d have recognized the crosspiece anywhere.

The grip too, but not today.

She touched the ends of what had been the wire wrap. She still remembered watching Wolf weave it, sworn to secrecy before he presented the sword to Marcus on their wedding day. Now the wires stood out around shredded leather like the spikes of a teasel. “What happened? Did an animal get to it?”

“In a way.”

Cai had a wry smile when she met his eyes, and the truth sank into her belly. “Bedwyr.”

“Bedwyr.”

She closed her eyes to the mess of the grip. If Bedwyr had hacked at the edges of the blade, she wouldn’t be able to fix it. She understood, in theory, how Wolf had managed the steel. She’d made a few pieces with the same twisting and folding of the metal, just as practice, but they’d always looked crude compared to his masterwork. Reluctantly, she pulled the sword from its scabbard. Opened her eyes.

Exhaled in relief. Bedwyr hadn’t damaged the blade.

“I don’t suppose you got it here before Arthur saw it?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“They are at the shepherd’s hut. Morien flew up, scouted the situation for us, but it was bad enough he returned in a blink.”

“How bad?”

“Arthur threatened to lock him in the armory and leave him there until next winter.”

She sheathed the sword. “Send him to me.”

“Arthur?”

“Bedwyr.”

Cai chuckled. “May I stay and watch?”

She gave him a look that quelled his mirth.

Half an hour later, Bedwyr trudged into the workshop, head down. “Mistress.”

“Ah. Bedwyr.” She set aside her work. “Come around back.”

He followed her to the shed behind the smithy, only joining her on the bench there after she’d patted it a second time. They were shielded from the path here. Better for a quiet word.

“I’m sorry, Mistress,” he said. “For creating more work for you.”

 She glanced at him sidelong to find his great shoulders, so like his father’s, hunched with embarrassment, his brow pinched in remorse. “I forgive you.”

He let out a breath but kept staring at his clenched fist.

“When Matthias told me he wanted to trek north, to find Cai, to reunite him with Arthur, I didn’t know what to think of it. It made no sense. Cai had been gone for so long, and Arthur was no doubt on a mission, and Matthias was in his sixth decade and ill on top of that. There was no logic in it, only emotion. And for me as well.” She sighed, settling back against the wall. “I was so frustrated that he wouldn’t listen to reason, angry that your father was backing him. Mostly, though, I was frightened.”

Bedwyr’s fist jerked on his knee. She reached out and took it between her hands.

“The thought that he might not make it back to me seemed so likely, so certain, I was out of my mind with fear. I had to trust in him to survive the journey, to return to me. Want to know a secret, Bedwyr? I didn’t trust him. I felt no certainty at all, not until he rounded the corner of the path again, until I could touch him with my hands. You can do better.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” he said, sounding completely miserable.

“No, I mean that you can do better than I did. You can go with him. Stand at his side. Shield him if it comes to that, simply back him if it doesn’t.”

Bedwyr was quiet for several breaths. “We’ve run at danger before and come away again. It’s what we do. But this mission feels different, Mistress. I can’t—” He shook his head. “Usually, I can see out the other side. Imagine victory, or at least getting away with our heads intact. This one… When I try to, it’s all murk. As if I’m at the bottom of a deep lake, can’t swim, can’t rise, can’t find him. All I feel is dread.”

“Is he not your light?”

“Of course he is. He’s fire itself.”

“Then stand with him. Then, at least, you’ll be able to see the next few steps.”

He didn’t seem convinced, and she could hardly blame him. She was no poet, no leader who could string together words into the strong cords that pulled folk along with them.

But one thing she knew for certain.

“This dread you feel? This fear taking root in the marrow of your bones? It’s the price of love.” She tightened her grip on his hand. “And love won’t be cheated.”

Chapter Text

A cat saw many things. A black cat at night?

Many, many things.

Perhaps not so many as Philip might see on his flights, or Morien, or Gawain’s younger brothers, but Safir had one advantage over them: he could crawl into close spaces. Between buildings, behind wall hangings, underneath furniture.

Things Safir learned in his early weeks in the mountains:

Lord Uthyr and Mistress Britte enjoyed a happy marriage bed.

When Philip returned from his nightly aerial forays, Tiro woke and told him a tale to help him fall into sleep.

Arthur’s sister Mora slept alone, the cot in her tiny hut protected at each of the four cardinal points by a polished granite pebble.

Uthyr’s shieldmate Huw lived in a large house with two women. They took turns sharing a bed, but at least once a week, all three piled into the largest bed and it was nearly dawn before they fell into exhausted slumber.

Young Galahad was restless at night, often rising to walk across the hillsides, while his brother Medraut slept the deep sleep of a lad who’d spent his energy well in the training yard.

Arthur and Bedwyr slept facing each other when they arrived. They still did, though Bedwyr lay awake late into the night now.

Cai and Agravain volunteered for extra watches, which they often undertook in their fur.

Sometimes Gawain moaned with a nightmare and could only be soothed back to peace by Palahmed’s soft murmurs.

And Morien slept lightly, which of course Safir already knew. But it was still amusing sometimes to slip back into their combined bedrolls still in his cat form and startle Morien awake with a night-chilled nose to his bare belly.

~ ~ ~

“What was it last night?”

Gawain chewed on the thick strip of dried venison and tried to remember. It had seemed so vivid just before Palahmed had awoken him with the safe circle of his arms, and whispers warm and reassuring at his ear. Now, in the light of morning, only vague images swirled in his mind. The gray-blue of a northern sea, the rattling shush of rising surf. A slick, dank odor. “My father, I think.”

It was as good a guess as any.

Palahmed leaned close, his shoulder pressing into Gawain’s. “He can’t harm you now.”

Gawain nodded, but it was one thing to understand that in the daylight, when he was surrounded by people and guarded by these craggy peaks. A wholly different thing to feel that certainty in his dreams, when he could never shift, never shrink out of his father’s bruising grip, sink teeth into his wrist. When he felt utterly alone, sure that he would be buried by earth or sea or both.

“Look at me.”

He could never resist that low command.

Palahmed’s gaze was as dark and steady as ever. “No one will harm you, as long as I live.”

Gawain blinked, self-conscious here in the hall, with folk going about their morning. He swallowed. “Spar?”

Palahmed saw through his deflection as easily as he did when they trained, his gaze sharpening. But also those tiny crinkles appeared around his eyes, the hint of a smile, always just for Gawain. “If you’re dying to lose.”

~ ~ ~

Cai slipped back into the watch tower just before dawn and shifted back. Agravain draped a woolen blanket around his bare shoulders, chafing Cai’s skin to dry it.

“Can’t get your hair. You’re too tall.”

Cai smiled down at him, smug. “You don’t usually complain.”

He didn’t. Cai was lanky in all his limbs, in every part of him, and it only gave Agravain more territory to explore. The next watch wouldn’t arrive until after sunrise. He raised Cai’s arm, pressed his nose to the warm, damp hair there. Gave it a swipe of his tongue.

Cai groaned. “Don’t you want my report?” he said, his voice barely even.

“I’m waiting,” he said, sucking a nipple into his mouth. Cai’s body jolted. Agravain helpfully steadied him with two hands on his arse.

Cai tried to give his report several times over the next quarter hour, but between increasingly erratic breaths and full-body tremors and the way his jaw hung agape as he watched Agravain sink to his knees and swallow him down…

It would be difficult for anyone.

“So, what did you see?” Agravain asked as Cai lay panting on the floor of the watch tower, but Cai only shoved him onto his back to return the favor.

~ ~ ~

Aye, well, good to know his eldest brother wasn’t worrying overmuch about Gareth’s wee niece. He banked away from the watch tower, screeching a warning as he did. The next watch was coming up the path.

Gareth had ranged to the southeast overnight but hadn’t noticed anything strange. If anyone among the Saxons or the southern tribes of Cymru had planned to get up to no good last night, they’d taken one look at the rain coming over the mountains and decided to enjoy their crackling fires instead.

He had some time yet before he was due to report to Lord Uthyr, so he winged toward Eryri and the other peaks at her shoulders, and enjoyed an hour riding the swells of air that surged up the western slopes of the mountains. From this vantage point, he could see why Bedwyr and Arthur loved this place. Solid, dependable, ancient stone. Lush grass coming into its springtime green. Deep water whose surface rippled in the wind.

Not so different from his own home. There was even the tiniest hint of salt on the air, though he could only catch its scent in his hawk form, and only if he concentrated.

He would get to smell the sea tomorrow night when he swapped routes with Gahers and ranged north to the river lands. He would also get to peek in on his niece. At least her uncles were concerned with her welfare, poor wee lass.

He snapped at the wind, as close he could get to laughing, and swung about to return to Uthyr’s settlement.

Chapter Text

Gwen watched as Gareth galloped around the hall, Lura riding his shoulders, alternately giving orders and shrieking, and she braced herself for bedtime.

Lura was not going to drop into sleep easily tonight.

Which didn’t really bother Gwen. She missed her boys, and she missed the years when they were younger and would cuddle up to her for bedtime tales, always asking for another, no matter how many she’d already told. Back then, she hadn’t appreciated those moments as much as she might have done, delegating bedtime stories to Morien sometimes.

But she was glad Medraut and Gally were seeing the mountains for themselves, finally, and getting to spend some time with their grandfather. Gally didn’t know yet that he wouldn’t be traveling south with Arthur and Bedwyr, as Medraut would be. She hoped that getting in some training with his grandfather might soften that blow when it came.

For now she got to have another young one in her household, in her charge. Lura didn’t always want to cuddle. Sometimes, she wanted only to listen as Gwen told a tale, or talk about one she’d heard over the evening fire, or tell a tale herself. Always, she held tight to the driftwood dolphin her father had carved for her, leaping it over imaginary waves.

Leaping, much as Gareth was doing just now, from bench to table to floor again. Gwen gripped the arms of her chair, glancing up when Elain’s hand came to rest on her own and squeezed.

“Better you than me,” Elain said.

Gwen snatched her hand away. “Thanks for nothing. You have a meeting, I suppose?”

“She prefers you, my love.”

“Only because we’re cousins.”

Elain leaned in, kissed her neck, sending a shiver down her back. “You’re softer. Better for snuggling.”

Gwen pulled back, gave her a narrow look. “Is that so?”

“Just so,” Elain said, her gaze flickering over Gwen’s curves, warm with firelight. “Save a tale for me.”

She would, but she said, “We’ll see.”

Lura’s uncles dropped in often enough that their parting was no longer a traumatic event. Tonight Lura gave Gareth a kiss on the cheek, demanding he pass it on to her father, and then another for Cai. Gareth grinned, said he couldn’t wait to deliver them. Satisfied, Lura skipped off to her bed chamber, bidding a good night to everyone she passed.

By the time Gwen caught up to her, the child was down to her shift and sitting in her bed. Her dolphin swam in the air before her. “I like Uncle Gareth,” she declared.

Gwen settled next to her, touched a knuckle to the girl’s rosy cheeks. “I can see that.”

“Uncle Gahers tells better jokes, but he stops to flirt with ladies and Uncle Gareth doesn’t.”

“Maybe you should let him.”

“He doesn’t want to flirt with ladies.”

Whether she meant that Gareth would rather play the doting uncle, or she recognized a different preference in him, Gwen couldn’t say. It wouldn’t have been the first time Lura had noticed something most children her age wouldn’t. But for now, she let it go. “Would you like a tale?”

Lura scooted close, leaning against her. Her small body felt both slight and heavy. “Cousin Gwenhwyfar?”

“Yes?” Gwen said, tucking her closer.

“Have you ever wanted to be a shapeshifter?”

Instinctively, Gwen glanced at the doorway, listened for footsteps outside. “Lura, remember that we can only talk about this here, in your chamber.”

“I know.” Lura looked up at her. “That’s why I’m asking now.”

Gwen bit back a smile at the girl’s tone, the one that implied Gwen had missed an obvious fact. Gwen gave her a little squeeze of reproach. “Just making sure.” She followed the up-and-down arc of the wooden dolphin. “I don’t need to be a shapeshifter. I live in a town.”

“Shifters live in towns.”

“I know,” she said, though it was more theoretical knowledge than firsthand. For Lura too, she imagined. “It just seems like something that would come in handier in the forest, or the countryside, at least. And would be safer. Fewer people about.”

“But have you thought about it?”

Gwen stared at the top of Lura’s head. The way she said things sometimes, as if she already knew the answer. “When Bedwyr first told me about shifters, after he became one, I thought he was teasing me. It seemed too fantastical.” She’d thought it was some great joke Bedwyr and Arthur had dreamt up over a long, dull winter, a wager they’d made between them over how long they might get Gwen to believe them. But then Bedwyr had shown her, and her world had expanded in an instant.

“It isn’t.”

“Oh, I know. And, yes, I thought about what it must be like. To be able to smell things on the wind from miles away. Hear the crackle of dry grass under someone’s boot across a meadow. Feel their footsteps as a tremor under my own.”

“Swim the whole sea.”

Ah. Gwen smiled. Of course this was why Lura had asked. She had told Gwen the tale of her namesake. “Do you think about what it must be like to be a dolphin?”

“I would swim everywhere. Meet all the sea creatures. Swim away from the terrible ones very swiftly.” She demonstrated with her toy before letting it come to rest in her lap. “But not very many people know the charm.” Lura’s thumb tapped her leg, then her forefinger, long finger, heart finger.

Four. Four people.

Morgawse, Gwen’s aunt and Lura’s grandmother, who had turned Gareth and Gahers.

Mora, who’d turned Cai.

Philip, who’d turned Bedwyr.

And the person they each had learned the charm from.

“Mistress Mabyn is dead, Lura. She was a powerful woman, but I doubt even she could manage such a feat from beyond her pyre.”

“I know that.”

That tone again, only this time it caused a curl of unease in Gwen’s belly.

“Grandmother, Cousin Mora, Master Philip…” Lura recited, as if she had read Gwen’s thoughts. Then she fell silent.

“Well,” Gwen said, hoping her voice sounded lighter than she felt, “who’s the fourth, then?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Why not?”

Lura looked up at her, dark eyes wide. “Because I can’t say the charm over myself, can I?”

Chapter Text

Arthur turned his sword over, smoothed his fingertips over the new wrap on its grip. “This is fine work, Mama.”

“It should hold, anyway,” she said, dusting her hands on her apron.

He smiled at her. “Take the compliment.”

“It’s only a wrap.” She frowned fiercely at the grip, wouldn’t meet his eyes.

He laid the sword on the workbench. When he kissed her cheek, she jerked her head back.

“What was that for?”

“That was for you. From me.” He looked at the sword. “I’m sorry you had to re-do it. Bedwyr never should have—”

“Bedwyr and I have already talked about it.”

“I know. Still.”

“Well, no need to think on it.”

Cai had told him about that day, how Mama had asked him to send Bedwyr to her and how Cai had spied long enough to see her lead Bed to the shed behind the smithy. Arthur and Cai had chuckled over what she might have said, agreed that they wished they could have eavesdropped.

She’d done it quietly, so as not to embarrass Bed. Being sat down on the shed bench by Mistress Britte would have been mortifying enough. Bed had certainly been more amenable to training and preparation since then, if not enthusiastic.

But now he realized she had talked to Bedwyr so Arthur could focus on other matters. Larger matters than his man’s eternal stubbornness.

“What did you say to him?”

“That’s between Bedwyr and me.”

“Come on, just a taste. Did you call him young man? Please say you did.”

She didn’t have time to respond, though, as Gally chose that moment to storm into the smithy.

“Uncle Bedwyr says I’m not going south with you.”

Arthur sighed. He and Bed were agreed on this, but it would have been nice to tell Gally together. “Show your respect.”

Gally blinked, then nodded to Mama. “Aunt Britte.”

“Galahad.”

He drew a breath and huffed it out, glaring at Arthur as if he knew Arthur still thought of him by his boyhood nickname.

Of course, he did. Gally was still a boy, which was the pertinent fact here. “Your uncle spoke true.”

“But why!”

“Because you’re too young yet to travel so far from home.”

“I’ll be with you. I’ll be with all your men.”

I would be one of them. Arthur could see the argument in the working of the lad’s mouth. He was just wise enough not to say it. “Your mothers would have my neck.”

“So you’re afraid of women now?”

Arthur squared himself up. “Apologize.”

Gally glared, but said, mulishly, “Fine. You’re not afraid of women.”

Gods help this lad. “That was not the problem with your words.”

The expressions flitting across Gally’s face made it clear he didn’t understand. He also didn’t want to ask for clarification. Arthur put him out of his misery.

“Do you believe women are so beneath your consideration that you might never fear one? Or that I might not? Because I can tell you I feared your Aunt Britte most of my boyhood and a fair share of my life since.”

“Oh.” Gally frowned at his boots. Squared his own shoulders and looked at Mama. “I’m sorry, Aunt. I was disrespectful.”

“I forgive you,” she said.

Absolved, Gally stepped closer. “I’ve been training. I’m almost as strong as Medraut, and I’m quicker than he is anyway. And not just with a blade. I can run faster and hide better. And I can see at night, almost as well as—” He lowered his voice. “Almost as well as Safir can. And you can trust me. I would never betray you.”

“I know you wouldn’t, lad.”

“I can be useful, Uncle. In ways… in ways you can’t even imagine.”

“Galahad,” he said, and the boy straightened. It gave Arthur a tug to see the hope in him. He knew that hope, knew that unfounded self-assurance. Had a daily reminder of it in Bedwyr’s stump. “I know you can be useful. That you want to serve. Prove yourself. This will start as a diplomatic mission. And if I thought that was all there was to it, I would consider it. But—”

Gally started to say something, but he cut him off.

“But we’ll be staying in the south for the campaign season. The southern lords won’t trust me the way I trust you. Fighting alongside them will be our best chance to gain that trust. And right now, I can’t risk your safety in battle.”

“But, Uncle—”

“I won’t risk it. And not because of anything your mothers might have to say about it. I won’t risk it—I won’t risk you—because it wouldn’t be right.”

Oh, the fire in the lad’s eyes. If Gally could have incinerated him in that moment, Arthur had no doubt he would.

“Do you understand?”

“No.” Gally’s voice shook with the rest of him, all trembling, youthful rage.

“You will. I promise it. I’ve stood where you do just now, Galahad. I rushed in before I was ready, and your Uncle Bedwyr paid the price.”

“I wouldn’t do anything so stupid!”

The moment he shouted it, his jaw clapped shut. He stood nearly as still as Mama did. The words hung among the three of them like sparks.

He would make it up to the boy. He’d given a lot of attention to Medraut in the past couple of years, rightfully so—he’d needed to prepare him. But when this season ended, he would begin Gally’s training in earnest. Better to direct the lad’s determination than let it run wild.

“You may stay until we light the fires to welcome spring. Then Morien will escort you home.”

Gally glared at him a moment longer, his eyes bright with welling tears, before he turned and stalked away.

Mama whistled low. “I remember that look.”

“Did you want to chain me to a post?”

“Wasn’t talking about you.” She smiled. “I gave Wolf such headaches, pushing to be his apprentice. But I wasn’t asking to risk my life.”

“And he was wise enough to listen to Grandfather and take you on. Gally will just have to wait. He’ll get over it.”

He sheathed his sword, thanked his mother again for her work. Rolled his shoulders as he left the smithy. He and Bed were overdue for a conversation.

With any luck, it wouldn’t end with weapons drawn.

Chapter Text

Bedwyr was trying to ignore his father’s glances, trying to focus on the leather shield grip he was conditioning with lanolin, but the dozenth time he felt Uthyr’s gaze on him, he set the shield on the worktable.

“What.”

Uthyr shook his head and went back to his own work. “Nothing.”

“Goat shit. Out with it.”

“It’s only…” Uthyr shrugged in a falsely casual way. “I’m reminded of those times—not many, mind you—when Britte and I, shall we say, don’t see eye to eye on a matter. It can affect every part of our days—and nights—and we’ve discovered, over even just the few months since our wedding, that the most effective method for coming back into agreement is to give our minds a rest, and let our bodies take charge—”

“There you are.”

Bedwyr looked gratefully at Arthur, standing in the doorway to the armory. “Praise the gods,” he muttered.

Arthur’s eyebrows rose.

Uthyr set down his tools. “I’ll just go see how they’re faring in the training yard.” And he left.

Arthur watched him go. “What was that about?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

“Your mother, and how they solve their problems by going to bed.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Never mind.” He crossed the armory to lean against the worktable. “We need to talk.”

“If this is about Gally, I would’ve rather shown a united front, but you weren’t there. I didn’t think it wise to give him hope.”

“No, you did right. He sought me out, and I told him the same.” Arthur gestured to the space between them. “We need to sort this out.”

“By going to bed?” he asked, half hopeful.

No hint of a smile in response.

Bedwyr sighed. “I thought not.”

“I need you beside me.”

“I am beside you.” At Arthur’s unimpressed look, he indicated the shield. “I’m helping to prepare, aren’t I?”

“You’re going through the motions, yes. But I need to feel you’re in this with me.”

“I’m always in this with you. We’re bound.”

“Damn it, Bedwyr. Stop talking around it.”

Those dove-gray eyes bore into him. He looked away.

“Why are you so against it?”

“I have a bad feeling about this one.”

“Since when do you let your feelings dictate your actions?”

Since fucking always. Slowly he raised his stump between them.

Arthur didn’t brush it aside, but considered it with those lovely eyes before grabbing it, holding it firmly against his chest. With his free hand, he gripped the back of Bedwyr’s neck and pulled him into a kiss.

Bedwyr tried to free his arm, but Arthur wouldn’t relinquish it, so he clutched at Arthur’s tunic as tightly as he could. His man’s heart beat against his stump, and Bedwyr felt his own kiss become desperate. Arthur’s mouth was just as fierce on his, but certain, his teeth calming, his tongue drawing Bedwyr closer to him, into him, panting against him.

He didn’t notice when the kiss ended, only that some moments later they stood with their foreheads resting on each other and Arthur’s breath warm on his lips.

They worked side by side for the rest of the afternoon.

~

A few days later, their people lit the great fire to celebrate day and night coming back into balance. Snow still clung to the mountains, and the weather in the lower reaches was still unpredictable, but this had always marked the beginning of the campaign season for his father’s men. It would stretch until night overtook day again in autumn, and so after their people had celebrated deep into the evening and the ale casks, couples slipped away to their beds to enjoy a final night together.

Bedwyr drank more than he usually did, enough to avoid notice but not so much that he found himself standing on a table, his arms slung around two others, singing bawdy songs, as some were doing.

Safir was going to regret every step down the mountain path in the morning, when he had to escort Gally back to his mothers.

His nephew looked unhappy, but there was nothing for it. Such was the fate of lads everywhere who stood on the uncertain ground between boyhood and manhood. Limbs growing like reeds, sore to the bone, hair sprouting under their arms and voices cracking treacherously like ice underfoot. They could run for days but couldn’t yet hold up a sword long enough to fend off a man who’d been fighting for a decade or two already. They possessed instincts, but instincts that mostly led them into trouble as surely as if they’d been a map. The confidence was the worst of it. So sure for the lad, so annoying to his elders.

But Bedwyr had had the same, and Arthur and Cai and every other man present including Uthyr, if the tales Huw told were true. Gally needed to bide his time, and doing so would be both the simplest and most difficult thing he’d ever done. Getting him back down to the bustle of the river towns would help. He needed distraction.

“You need distraction,” Bedwyr told him, bestowing the wisdom with an uncle’s reassuring pat on the back.

Gally stared at him with a nephew’s thin forbearance. Just as he opened his mouth to respond with something snappish, Medraut appeared at his brother’s shoulder and cajoled him into joining a group of young people huddled nearby for a game involving whispers and sweetcakes.

At some point, Arthur took hold of Bedwyr’s sleeve and pulled him outside. Together, they stumbled to the far side of someone’s chicken yard, shielded by nothing but the night, and enjoyed a very sloppy climax apiece. He clutched Arthur’s warmth to him afterward, intent on drawing out the moment. Exposed as they were on the grassy hillside, as ill-clothed as they were to be lying in the snow-melt under the chilly glitter of stars, this still felt safer than the unknown ahead of them.

No man could slow time, though, and when Arthur rose with a soft groan and gave him a hand up, they walked back to the hall, found a relatively quiet bit of floor, and slept.

The next morning, a small party headed down the northern path. Safir looked a bit green. Morien, who had retired at a responsible hour, was as bright-eyed as he was smug. Gally trudged behind them, stormy as a thundercloud.

Three days later, Bedwyr waved farewell to his father and the rest of their people, and set off beside Arthur on the opposite track, and with their men behind them, started the long trek south.

Chapter Text

“He’ll be all right, you know.”

Elain pulled her gaze from Galahad and smiled at Morien. “I know. And we knew this was coming, him having to watch while Medraut gets to join Arthur. We just didn’t foresee it coinciding with this mission south. And Arthur might not have let even Medraut tag along this soon, except…”

“Except,” Morien said, then added, gently, “He’s your son, too.”

“Of course he is.” Didn’t she know that? Hadn’t she raised him, didn’t she feel a hollow spot in her belly, wondering if he was safe?

Laughter sounded up ahead and hope leapt in her. But it was all Safir, as it had been since they’d set out along the river an hour ago. The fellow was doing his solid best to cheer Gally, but the boy was resisting his efforts as stubbornly as he did everything else that was in his best interest. She had thought it’d do him good to get out of the hall, away from the talk of vulnerable borders and the impending campaigns to protect them, away from the speculative chatter that had sprung up around this journey Arthur and his men were undertaking. Everyone had an opinion and was eager to express them. Gally had let himself get drawn into an argument last night, one that devolved into flying fists and bloody noses. Morien had dragged the two apart, and then stayed firmly by Galahad’s side for the rest of the evening.

She assumed the other lad involved had said something about Gally being left behind, but he refused to confirm it. Not a surprise. He’d gotten into other scraps, some in which she suspected he’d been defending her or Gwen against thoughtless comments. Gally had always been very concerned with matters of right and wrong, and of justice, and so she knew he must be in pain. He wasn’t old enough to join Artur’s men, or even to try to prove he should, but if he thought himself capable, he would be struggling. She longed to grip his thin shoulders, so like her own at his age, to make him meet her eyes so she could reassure him. But he was so brittle right now, so certain to turn and run if he believed she meant to coddle him.

“How did your mother just send you away? And so far!”

“Distance doesn’t seem as perilous to those who can fly.”

She tried to imagine what that must be like, for a journey from one frontier of the old empire to its opposite to seem a matter of course. That reminded her of what Gwen had told her, that Lura had claimed to know the shifting charm. They’d shuddered afterward, wondering over the lass’s imagination, though Gwen being Gwen had extracted a promise from Lura that she wouldn’t use it. They might at least protect her from other children’s ridicule.

Which brought her back to her son. How she wished she could protect him. “Even if he could fly, I don’t think I’d be able to do it.”

Morien chuckled. “I was much older than Gally. It was time.”

It will never be time, she thought.

Fortunately, she still had a few years to come around.

~ ~ ~

It took an eternity for Lura to fall asleep.

Bad enough he had to share a chamber with her—a distant cousin, a girl child, and six years old—but she sang to herself and her dolphin dolly late into the dark. Galahad had things to do, places to go. She’d given him the means to do it, but still. How difficult was it to give in to dreams and leave him to his business?

Finally, just when he’d nearly given up, he realized she’d stopped singing. She had curled up under her blankets, just a bit of pale forehead visible. She always slept like that, as if she were trying to hide. Fine with him. She wouldn’t hear him slip out.

He went his usual route through the less-traveled corridors and was soon out in the chilly spring night. He breathed deep but kept walking, making for the abandoned little chapel that stood between their lands and Lord Rhys’s. His mother went there sometimes when she needed to think, but nobody else used it. He needed to think, too, and he did that best in the air. Fog lay thick around the chapel when he got there, like a misty cloak. He hid his clothes against the stone of the outer wall, then crouched close to the ground and shifted.

It was his very favorite thing, this ability, this form. Feeling himself grow, spreading his wings wide and wider still, made him feel powerful. He could do anything like this.

Well, not handle a sword or shield, or even a knife or spoon, but what did he need those for when he had fire?

Lifting himself into the air, he rose quickly into the dark sky.

~ ~ ~

He didn’t fly south, as Lura thought he might. That made sense, she supposed. The Myrddin of the mountains patrolled those skies, and her uncles sometimes. So, when Galahad turned north, she just watched and listened as if she were the one who was winging through the night, land and sea sliding by underneath her, wind in her ears and salt in her nose.

But then she saw the ships.

Not many, not a whole fleet. Not even moving—they had pulled into an inlet some way up the coast. But she would know the sails anywhere, remembered the great cauldrons the women swirled the sail cloth in, only pulling it out on long poles, steaming, when the red dye had taken hold of the wool.

She opened her eyes, stared at the beams until these eyes grew accustomed to the dark chamber. Then she got up and made her way to cousin Gwen’s door. The guard knew her and let her pass, and Gwen was sitting up in bed by the time she crossed the room. Gwen reached out and she climbed on the bed, snuggled close. Gwen was always warm. Not as warm as Papa, but much softer.

“What is it, sweetling? Did you have a nightmare?”

She wasn’t sure how to answer that. She wasn’t sure how to answer a lot of her cousin’s questions, but that didn’t matter tonight.

“Grandmother is coming,” she said, then held on tight as Gwen reached over to wake up Elain.

Chapter Text

For the first time in his life, Uthyr didn’t want to leave on campaign.

When he was young, he’d wanted to prove himself as a warrior. After he’d deposed his father, he’d needed to prove he could lead. Every year, something had pulled him. While it was always to beat back the Saxons, to defend Cymru’s borderlands, he was usually coming out of his skin by the end of winter, craving a fight in which he wouldn’t have to pull his strikes.

Arthur and his band had left on their own journey a few days before, and so he too must leave. His men were ready. They had said their usual farewells to their women and families, and if he waited much longer, they would begin to wonder why he hesitated.

They could guess easily enough. It was obvious to anyone with half their wits that he was besotted with his wife. More difficult to admit was that, for the first time he could recall, he was afraid he might not make it back.

 Nonsense, she would say. He was no more likely to die during this season than in any previous season, except that he was a year older. A year creakier in the joints, achier in the bones. His muscles took longer to recover from exertion these days, not to mention his head after an evening’s ale.

But the plain truth was that now he had something to lose he’d never had before.

Every spring, as they strode out of the village, a few men would let their emotions show. Most of them unwillingly because they were teased for it. He had done his share of prodding the younger ones if he caught them with wet cheeks or even just reddened eyes, caught them peeking over their shoulders for once more glimpse of their sweetheart. Most of the older men were subtler about it, kept to themselves, kept their words short and their gazes on the track until they were well away from home.

He wasn’t sure which group he would fall into this time, and he hoped to all the gods it wouldn’t be the weepy one. He should be strong enough not to care, but a man flayed so deep as he was didn’t have much armor left.

At the evening fire, he made himself cross to Huw, told him they would leave in the morning. Huw nodded, said he would tell the others, and then Uthyr spoke quietly in Britte’s ear, and they left the hall. In their chamber, she lit a lamp. They undressed each other slowly, slowly because they couldn’t seem to stop kissing, and only slid into bed when they grew chilled. He spent the next several hours worshiping her body, trying to memorize it for the long moons ahead. The softness of her skin under his lips, the taste of her, the guttural sounds that became breathy the longer he licked, the deeper he stroked. The feel of her quaking against him, all around him.

They lay entwined afterward, whispering, worried perhaps that speaking any louder would invite the morning and its responsibilities too soon.

“You will return to me,” she told him.

“I will,” he said, because it was as much an order as a prediction.

It wasn’t until he was trudging down the track, the familiar weight of his gear on his back, a less familiar stinging in his eyes that had nothing to do with the sun rising before him, that he realized what she’d done. He had needed that order, that objective to guide and motivate him, and she’d given it to him as certainly as if she were the ruler of these mountains.

Well, she was, and the ruler of him too. So, he would keep his promise.

At least he didn’t have to worry about her safety. The mountains would protect her.

~ ~ ~

For the first time in her life, Britte didn’t want to smith.

Her earliest memories were of Wolf at his anvil and of wanting to stand at her own, to work beside him. Once he’d agreed to apprentice her, she had worked, without cease. Through her girlhood, through her courtship with Matthias, through all her pregnancies. The only stretch of idleness had been their journey from the stronghold to this place, when she’d chattered nervously to Wolf about work the entire way until he’d stopped walking one day, set his hands on her shoulders, and told her if she said another word before they reached the mountains, he was going to tell everyone she was a goatherd.

She hadn’t, and he hadn’t, and they had settled into work swiftly here. She’d scarcely paused for Mora’s birth, had worked through every happy and difficult moment. Had used it to grieve for Matthias.

She could tell herself this current resistance was because most of her work was done until the war bands returned in the autumn. Oh, there were things to do, tasks that must always be put off until the warriors’ weapons were readied. But with Uthyr gone off to the east and her sons to the south, uncertainty threatened to overwhelm her good sense. In the past, she would have found Matthias, shared a word, a moment of touch, but she couldn’t now, just when pieces of her heart were marching away from her in every direction.

Mora was here, at least, and Philip. She would find one of them, come up with some reason for it, and then get back to those broken hinges—

A loud groan sounded nearby. Her fingers stilled on the ties of her apron. The sound came again, only now it was more of a gasping grunt, or a grunting gasp. It was so like a noise Uthyr had made the night before that her core tightened for a moment. But concern took over, and her feet were carrying her to the shed behind the workshop before she consciously placed the location of the sounds. She rounded the back wall of the building, and her boots slid to a halt.

There was a man lying face-down on the packed dirt there, a large man, tall by the length of his legs. Only there were also two other legs beneath his, tangled with his, and honestly, didn’t folk have better places to do this than behind her smithy?

“Get up!” she snapped.

The two startled, and she barely had time to realize they were both men before the big one on top got to his feet. They scrambled with their clothing, the larger man shielding the other. He had long, blond hair and great broad shoulders. He was taller than she was, taller even than Matthias had been, and then he turned around.

Her breath froze in her chest.

“Wolf?”

Had she summoned him with her thoughts, called him back from the grave?

His eyes were the same pale blue, his beard the same shade of rain-damp wheat. But this man’s brow was different. He wasn’t quite as thick through the middle as Wolf had always been, and the trousers and boots were wrong. Also, he was younger than she was. Then the other man stepped around to stand beside him. Not Marc. Similar build, similar hair if lighter, but his skin… She was sure she’d ever seen skin so smooth on someone who wasn’t an infant. He looked as if he’d been polished—

The big man raised his hands, looked at hers, and she realized she was gripping her hammer.

“Mistress Britte?”

It sounded strange, and she tightened her hold on the hammer. “Who are you?”

The big man grinned at the other and nodded, then bowed to her. “I am called Sten. Sten ap Syren,” the man said, slowly and with care, then gestured to his companion. “This is Giom ap Pawl.”

Strange names, stranger accent.

“You are Britte? Smith and mother of Arthur?”

“I am.”

Both men murmured something under their breath. The shorter one looked faint.

“We are very happy to meet you,” the big man said. Then, “Is Cai here?”

Gods be good.

They were Saxons.

She backed away and began shouting for help.

Chapter Text

While the others rested, Medraut’s father led him to a high rock. When he’d scrambled up and stood on top, the land rolled away in every direction. Their mountains already seemed smaller behind them. Other mountains had risen in the southwest, hills and river valleys to the south and east.

“This is all Cymru?”

His father nodded. “But not all of Cymru. Remember the northern reaches along the coast.” He gestured eastward. “And over there—”

“The border.” Medraut swallowed, scanning the unbroken green. At home, the border with the Saxons felt safely far away. From here, though, it was difficult to tell where the territories met. But he could see one thing clearly: the land was beautiful. “I wish Gally could see this.”

His father sighed, a soft exasperated sound that made Medraut wish he hadn’t said anything. “Gally’s time will come. Every man here had to wait, and so must he.” Arthur set a hand on his shoulder, turning Medraut to face him. “In the past year, how many people have remarked on how tall you are.”

So many times. Usually, it was a friend of his mothers, and their attention made him shuffle with embarrassment. But then, he always remembered that his height linked him to his father, and to Grandfather Matthias, and then he felt proud.

Arthur nodded. “Aye, I thought as much. I heard the same. Medraut, this is your time to stretch into those long legs. To learn how to use your reach. Have you noticed you’ve surpassed your Uncle Bedwyr?”

He had. It had startled him, and he’d made a strange grunting sound, then a cough to cover it, and then Uncle Bedwyr had asked if he’d swallowed a frog. “In height only.”

“Sure. But here’s a secret.” Arthur leaned close. “Folk look up to tall men, and in more ways than just craning their necks. It isn’t always justified, and not everyone is impressed by it. But enough are that you can let it feed your confidence.”

“But…”

“What?”

“It’s not something I’ve earned,” he said, feeling weirdly ashamed of something he couldn’t control.

For a moment, his father just looked at him, and Medraut wondered if he’d said something wrong. If he sounded ungrateful for the natural gifts he’d inherited. But then Arthur smiled. “Every one of us has a gift we haven’t earned. Gawain is quick. Safir could charm a rabid weasel. These are gifts straight from the gods, and that’s all the more reason to develop them. To use them in service to our people and to what is just.”

That made him want to straighten his shoulders, to stand even taller. When he did, his father laughed and set an arm around his shoulders, heavy and warm. “Watch, and listen, and learn as much as you can, Medraut. And use your gifts. This is your time, and I’ll tell you another secret.”

“What?”

“I envy you.”

Medraut drew back, surprised. “Me?” Impossible.

“You. It’s hard, that learning. It can be frightening and frustrating and miserable to your bones. But it can be exciting, too, and each discovery only happens once. And you have so many of them ahead of you.”

He could scarcely wait now. He looked out over the land to the south. “Surely you still have some ahead of you too.”

“Well, I’m not dead, son.” He smiled when Medraut laughed, then nodded at Medraut’s pack. “Bring out the map Master Philip gave us. Let’s see what might be lying in wait. And Medraut.”

“Yes?”

“No more talk of Gally. He’ll have his turn in time.”

~ ~ ~

Is there any left?

Gods, man, leave some for the bees.

Bedwyr sat back on his haunches and inhaled deeply of the warming nighttime air. It turned out that bears could belch. It’s spring. They can make more.

Good thing, Arthur said, since we’ve scraped this tree clean.

They rarely did their watches in their bear forms. Their senses of hearing and smell were keen, but it still disconcerted him not to be able to see farther than a few steps ahead, and less at night.

But this night, for some reason (well, because Arthur suggested it), they’d shifted and almost immediately caught the scent of the combs. The tree housing them was scarcely more than a rotten stump and the bees drowsy and weak. He and Arthur had swiped out the crunchy combs with their claws, stuffing their mouths until the rich, dark winter honey coated the fur of their chins.

They really needed to find a stream, or their bedrolls would be sticky disasters.

We’re not much of a watch, Bedwyr mused as they ambled toward a faint tinkling of water.

The worst. Agravain ’s next, he’s going to smell it on us.

Bedwyr bumped Arthur’s shoulder. When Arthur turned to look at him, he gave Arthur’s snout a curling lick.

If we go that route, we ’ll be out here all night.

Bedwyr could think of worse things. Much worse things and many of them, but he would keep them to himself. His cub smelled delectable. You’re a walking, talking trap, you know that? He nuzzled him behind the ear.

Don’t, Arthur huffed, or I’ll have it in my hair.

Too late.

They did their best at the little stream, but in the end, they had to shift and rinse their hair.

The hair on their heads, and faces, and chests, and—

“How’d I get honey on my cock?” Arthur muttered.

As invitations went, Bedwyr couldn’t recall a better one.

It wasn’t until they were making their way back to the camp that he realized Philip hadn’t met up with them as planned that evening. He wondered briefly what might have distracted the old owl, but then his thoughts turned to moonlit streams and his man lying on the bank, panting orders like the best sort of commander, and he decided Philip must have his reasons.

Chapter Text

Philip was walking to the hall with Tiro, quietly discussing the flight he would make this evening to meet with Arthur, when they heard the shouts. The sound was so unusual, underscored by alarm and a sense of danger he could feel in his spine, that his feet rooted themselves to the path and his mind raced—Uthyr had left, the warriors with him—

Fortunately, Tiro was better trained for the unexpected and took off in the direction of the noise. Philip followed, trying to take care with his steps (when was the last time he’d had to run; he couldn’t recall), and was surprised when Tiro veered toward the smithy.

When Philip reached the workshop, Tiro had drawn his dagger and was standing between a distressed Britte and two men Philip didn’t recognize. “Are you all right, Britte? Have they harmed you?”

“They asked for Cai!”

He had expected Britte to say the men had drawn weapons on her or otherwise threatened or her, and her words didn’t make sense. Others were arriving now, standing well clear of the strangers.

Britte stepped closer. “Their accents are strange,” she murmured, watching them with suspicion. “The big one asked to speak to Cai, as if he knows him. From his… time away.”

With the Saxons, she meant. Philip’s attention snapped to the two. One was very tall, with a muscular build and a determined expression. With his long, blond hair, he could have been a cousin to Wolf. His companion was shorter, about Philip’s height, and compact. His frame reminded Philip of Marcus’s, and a fool was any man who had underestimated the Roman’s wiry strength. His features were set in tense lines.

Philip raised his palms to the strangers in a gesture he hoped conveyed diplomacy. “I am Philip. I serve as the Myrddin here.”

Recognition flashed across both men’s faces, and the shorter one said something to the other, too quickly for Philip to discern the tongue. Had they known Philip’s name or only his title?

“I am called Sten,” the tall man said. “My friend is called Giom.”

Not a Saxon name, that second one, as far as he knew, but Sten. That one could be. And Saxons employed mercenaries as much as any other people. Palahmed, Safir, Morien—none were native Cymru but fought for them all the same and were trustworthy. He would begin there.

With caution.

“Will you follow me to my house? You can rest there, and we can speak at leisure?”

The men nodded and stepped toward him docilely enough. Tiro shot him a questioning glare, but this was Philip’s particular arena. Tiro could continue to guard them if he wished. Philip needed a few answers, though, and he would rather find them out without an audience.

“Britte, will you join us, please?”

Philip led their small procession to the house he and Tiro shared, nodding to his neighbors with a calm he didn’t quite feel. He would have to explain these two when he emerged. It wasn’t every day a fellow heard Britte shouting like she had. The last time he’d heard it, they were losing the old stronghold in Armorica to a greedy king.

Before he had even shut the door behind them, the tall one—Sten—said, “Is this the home of Arthur ap Matthias?”

Britte straightened from where she’d begun stirring up the coals in the hearth.

“This is our home,” Philip said, gesturing to Tiro. “This is Tiro, my companion.”

Another glare from Tiro, no doubt for revealing a tactically useful fact. Or perhaps for baldly stating the nature of their relationship.

But it didn’t seem to faze either man. Giom gave Tiro a respectful nod. Sten smiled wide. “Good to meet you. We hear of the stories you make by the fire.”

Tiro grunted, not yet won over.

Sten turned back to Philip. “I mean to ask, is this place, this… town…” He stopped, seemed to gather his thoughts. “Arthur is here?”

“What do you want with Arthur?” Britte demanded.

“We wish to join him,” he said, and Giom nodded.

Britte frowned. “Then why did you ask for Cai?”

Philip held up his hands again, and the two newcomers looked at him expectantly. He decided to be direct. “Are you Saxons?”

“No,” they said together.

Britte huffed. “Very convincing.”

She was right, of course. No Saxon surrounded by Cymry would admit to their true identity. Philip gestured to the bench on one side of the table. “Sit, please.” He took a stool opposite them. Britte remained standing by the hearth, close to the iron implements there. Tiro stood at the door, arms crossed.

“I’ll be candid with you,” Philip said. “You are strangers to us. Cymrish is not your native tongue. Our Cai… he spent time among the Saxons, briefly. When you asked for him, we assumed you were Saxons.”

Giom turned to Sten and spoke a low stream of words in a tongue he was much more fluent in. Whatever he was saying had Sten looking a bit abashed. He looked at Britte and clasped his hands together. “I am sorry that we frighten you. We are not Saxons. We come from… far away.”

“Where?” Britte said, and Philip could see the rest in her expression, that the Saxons, too, came from far away.

“I come from a land to the north. Very far north. Not on this island. Giom comes from…” He frowned, then jerked a thumb toward one side of the house.

“West?”

Sten nodded. “West. Yes.”

“Hibernia?”

Sten didn’t seem to know the name, but Giom said, “Yes, Hibernia.”

Philip studied him. He’d met folk from the island to the west. They tended to be smaller in stature than Giom and dark-haired, as Gawain and Agravain’s people were on the Orcades. And, he must admit, none of them had been as handsome as this man. None of his features were striking, but taken together, they were quite refined. He reminded Philip of the marble statues that had graced his boyhood city.

He cleared his throat, glanced at Tiro.

Who gave him a particularly knowing look, before glaring at the backs of the two men’s heads again.

Gather your wits, man. “Arthur is not here. He and his men are conducting a mission.”

“Cai also?” Sten asked, and Giom elbowed him in the side.

“If you want to join Arthur, why do you keep asking for Cai?”

Now Giom’s words to Sten weren’t so hushed. But neither did he seem a man cornered. He appeared more exasperated than threatened. Sten responded, softly. One by one, he gestured to each person in the house—Philip, then Britte, then Tiro—then waited. Finally, Giom drew a deep breath and nodded.

Sten turned to Philip. “Arthur has a secret. Bedwyr has the same secret. And Cai, and Gawain, and Safir… And you.”

A shiver drifted over Philip’s skin.

“We wish to join Arthur because we have this same secret.”

“This secret,” Philip hedged. “Is it that you’re companions? Like Tiro and me?”

“No,” Sten said. “Well, yes…” He set a hand on Giom’s, in a gentle way so familiar. “But no, Master Philip. You know which secret. I am new to your tongue. I ask for Cai because I can talk to him”—he tapped at his temple—“in my head.”

“I knew it,” Britte said in a rush, “they’re wolves.” She grabbed the iron poker by the hearth. Tiro’s hand went to his dagger. Sten sprang to his feet, toppling the bench and his man, and striking his own head on the beam overhead. He grimaced, rubbing his skull. Giom scrambled to stand, but instead of making an aggressive move toward anyone, he clutched Sten’s shirt. Whatever words he was speaking, he was imploring the man. That they might leave, Philip guessed.

It was the vulnerability in it that ultimately turned his mind in their favor. Britte was formidable and Tiro armed, but these two men probably could have taken all three of them on. Certainly, if they decided to shift.

But they didn’t. And so, after the moment stretched a dozen racing heartbeats, Philip said, “I know where Arthur is. I’ll escort you to him.”

Chapter Text

Two ravens.

No. Two birds, but only one is a raven. The other is an ordinary blackbird. It perches on the woven reeds of a garden fence, singing, then hops down to peck at the soil. The raven lands beside it, feathers blue-black in the sun, and it watches the blackbird, eyes like polished beads. Then it drives its great sharp beak into the blackbird’s body, pinning it to the earth for several heart-stutter moments.

The raven flies away.

Moonlight, cool and bright, silver soft like a breeze on his cheek. He smiles up at its source, proud and unworthy. His love for the moon overwhelms him, so that he can only lie on the grass and wonder at it.

A shadow crosses the pale of the moon, and his heart shivers. The raven has returned. It is impossibly agile, darting at the moon, wheeling away, confusing the moon into turning this way and that, crescent, full, crescent, full—

The raven snatches one of the moon’s beams in its awful beak and flies off. The beam trails behind it like a ribbon made of spider strands. The moon turns away, goes dark.

Soon, he grows cold. It seeps into his marrow until he’s shuddering so violently he can scarcely walk. Then he spies it: there, on the mountain peak, a flame.

He climbs and climbs, keeping it in his sight, letting it draw him to its warmth, until he clambers atop the final rock. What he took as a single flame is a bonfire, crackling and enormous. A chair sits before it, carved of an oak trunk. Its wood is smooth under his touch. Its heat sinks into him, chasing away the chill. As it soothes his aches, the fire keeps him company, popping and sizzling, lighting up the night. The very best companion.

But also, he realizes too late, a beacon.

Before he can shout to the bonfire to shrink, to make itself small and insignificant, to protect itself from its proximity to him…

…the raven lands at his feet.

~

Uthyr woke, gasping. Stared at the starry figures in the sky as he grasped at the dream.

In the way of dreams, though, the images faded swiftly to shapes, then to frustrating smears of color that too soon blended into a gray nothingness.

A few strides away, the coals of their campfire glowed deepest red. The small lad in him, the one he’d long ago pushed down, wanted to poke at the campfire, to puff it back to life until the shadows fled.

Instead, he lay awake, listening, his mind a jumble, until the sky grew lighter of its own accord and his men began to stir.

~ ~ ~

Gwen stood on the dock, her household guard arrayed behind her.

The morning was unusually warm, humid as spring always was in Rhys’s town, and sweat prickled at the back of her neck. She resisted the urge to tug the fabric of her tunic away from her skin, kept her gaze trained on the mouth of the inlet.

After Lura’s uncanny revelation about her grandmother, Gwen had waited impatiently for one of her uncles to make their usual foray over the river lands in their hawk forms. They always dropped in to visit with Lura — the child was the most beloved niece of Gwen’s acquaintance — and this time it’d been Gahers. She had brought him and Lura to her chambers, where she asked the girl to recount her dream.

The two had spoken to each other in the blunt, growling sounds of their northern tongue, and by the time Gahers raised his eyes to meet Gwen’s again, his expression had progressed from curiosity to a concern more serious than she’d ever seen on Gahers. He’d left immediately to scout up the coast and returned in just a few hours with the confirmation that, aye, a ship carrying Morgawse was traveling toward them. A ship bristling with armed men.

Elain had wanted to send an equally armored contingent, but Gwen had eventually argued for a friendlier welcome party. Elain had argued well into the night and into their bed, but had finally relented on the condition that she herself would be armed, along with the few guardsmen. She was behind Gwen now, speaking low to Gally, who had insisted upon joining them, leaving Gwen to hope their other decision had been the correct one.

Everything in her had wanted to leave Lura in the safekeeping of their household, within arm’s reach of their head cook or their master of horse. Maybe even locked in the pantry or one of the stables.

But they had asked Lura what she wished, and though she’d trembled a bit, she’d squared her narrow shoulders and said she wished to greet her grandmother.

Gwen squeezed her hand now, her small fingers clammy but brave. She was unusually quiet, the most watchful among them, her dark eyes scarcely blinking.

Gwen knelt beside her. “You can still go home. Gally will escort you himself.”

“Galahad,” he said, then, “Why me?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Lura said. “She’s here.”

They followed her gaze to find a boat crossing the inlet from the northern bank. It looked heavy, sturdy, a high-walled craft unlike many of the trading ships that docked here. As they watched, the sails were lowered and oars sprouted from the sides, and slowly but neatly, it came to a rest beside the dock. Ropes wound around mooring posts and a bench became a plank, and then a woman as sturdy as the boat was walking unaided onto the dock.

She strode directly to Lura, ignoring the rest of them. She didn’t kneel, didn’t smile. “Lura.”

“Grandmother.”

Gwen could see the resemblance. To Lura, of course, and to Agravain and his brothers, but most of all to her own father. Like Uthyr, Morgawse wore her black hair long, tied back simply. Silver streaked its length, but hadn’t yet touched the woman’s eyebrows. She had the same strong brow, the same proud chin, and when she turned her gaze on Gwen, the same dark eyes.

“Welcome, Aunt Morgawse.”

Morgawse studied her for a long moment, assessing something, and then her features underwent a startling change. Gwen would have called it a smile if it had been at all pleasant. “Gwenhwyfar. Your father’s messages were too few, when he bothered to send them, and yet I would know you anywhere.”

She opened her arms. The salt-rimed drape of her cloak spread like wings, and Gwen was wrapped in it before she realized Morgawse had offered no such comfort to her own granddaughter.

Chapter Text

There were certain things in Palahmed’s life that he very much appreciated. Steady coin was always good. A half-full belly, just enough to take the edge off hunger. A beautiful sunrise. And, of course, Gawain splayed out on lush grass, his skin glistening in the moonlight with dew and sweat, his pulse beating beneath Palahmed’s lips.

One thing he could do without: Khalida’s refusal to leave Gawain’s proximity, even at moments like this one.

“Would you stop staring?” Palahmed growled at her.

Her ears perked slightly, but otherwise she stared at him, unaffected.

“Perverted beast.”

Gawain chuckled. “She’s only protecting me. I would think you’d respect that.”

“I’d respect it a great deal more if she would avert her gaze. Scan the horizon for threats,” he added pointedly toward the hound.

“Maybe the biggest threat is lying on top of me,” Gawain said, grinning.

“I’ll show you a threat.”

He sucked at the base of Gawain’s neck. Gawain gasped, his body arching up into Palahmed’s. “Gods, that's good.”

“I’ve scarcely begun.”

“You’ve begun and finished,” Gawain murmured. “Now you’re starting over again?”

“I’m taking full advantage of half an hour alone.” Khalida whined softly, and he raised his head just long enough to glare at her. “Mostly alone.”

Lowering his head, he got back to it. They really did have just a quarter hour left before they were expected back. He’d hiked them in the direction they’d come from, in case one of the others wanted to scout forward a bit, but it wouldn’t keep Safir or Morien from finding them if they took too long, Morien out of a protective loyalty, Safir out of pure mischief.

He had his own mischief to make. He’d let too many years pass denying them these moments, and he was determined to make up for it every chance he got. His own body wouldn’t be able to enjoy release again so soon, but Gawain’s would. All hail the glories of youth, and so on. He would resent it if Gawain didn’t freely share his pleasure with him.

He mapped a meandering but purposeful route down Gawain’s chest, over his ribs, around his navel, to the tender skin at his hip. His hawk writhed under him, pleading in the low, urgent tone that fired Palahmed’s blood. Gently, he pushed his nose into the humid softness of Gawain’s sac, nuzzling until his stones drew up tight. He swiped his tongue over the ridged skin, then up the length of Gawain’s shaft, before taking him fully into his mouth.

Gawain groaned, one knee pushing into Palahmed’s side as he tried to shove closer. No need. He had his hawk in a firm grip, his hands full of the flexing muscle of Gawain’s arse, urging him to fuck deep. In his periphery, Khalida rose to her feet. “Off with you,” he grumbled, but Gawain must have thought the words for him, because he grunted, punching into Palahmed’s mouth, giving him just as much release as he had a quarter hour before. He swallowed greedily, then pressed his forehead to Gawain’s belly, penitent, always.

A soft whuff sounded a short distance away, the sort Khalida made when she was uncertain, as when Gahers teased her before Gawain called him off, or when she encountered an animal she hadn’t come across before. Probably some nocturnal creature common in these southern hills, but Palahmed rolled away, gave Gawain’s thigh a light smack, then rose to rearrange his clothing.

As Gawain was doing the same—more of a job because Palahmed couldn’t resist exposing as much of his skin as possible without removing his boots—a broad shadow glided past overhead. The owl called, low, traced a circle above them, then landed a few paces away. Philip shifted into his human form.

Palahmed’s pulse kicked. He was accustomed to Philip carrying messages to and from Arthur. What was unusual this time was that he hadn’t continued on to their camp. “What is it?”

“No cause for alarm. I’m, eh, sorry if I interrupted your time together.”

“’S all right,” Gawain said gruffly, and Palahmed knew that if it’d been light out, his cheeks would’ve been rosy. He handed the Myrddin his cloak, and Philip nodded in thanks, drawing it around his wiry form.

“I’m accompanying two men to meet with Arthur. I didn’t want them to startle you.”

“Southerners?” He turned to look down the track.

“From the north and west, actually, and distantly.”

A moment later, their shapes emerged from the darkness but halted when Khalida barked again. Gawain called her over, held firm to her collar.

“Come,” Philip called to them. “Meet the… patrol.”

Palahmed heard the wry note in Philip’s voice—they’d been doing very little patrolling, after all, but then all his attention was on the two strangers.

One was very tall, looming over them as he neared. Everything about him was broad. The other was nearer to Palahmed’s height. Even in the dim light, Palahmed could see how fine his features were. He wore no armor but a dagger at his belt. The larger man wore a sword and shield. Palahmed’s hand itched to pull his own weapon. Instead, he stepped closer to Gawain.

“This is Sten ap Syren,” Philip said, gesturing to the larger man, “and Giom ap Pawl. Sten, Giom, meet Palahmed and Gawain.”

The shorter man drew a swift breath, his gaze pinned to Gawain, and then he breathed something in a foreign tongue. Palahmed didn’t speak it, but he knew reverence when he heard it.

“Good to meet you,” this Sten said. His companion nodded, at Gawain, and said, “Very good.”

Narrowing his gaze, Palahmed slung an arm over Gawain’s shoulders. “This is Khalida,” he said, waving toward the hound.

It did the trick, freeing his hawk from their attention. The big man grinned suddenly, teeth bright, and dropped to one knee before Khalida. Taking her head in his great hands, he ruffled her ears. “Hallo, Khalida!”

Did Khalida stand her ground, comport herself like a beast inured to the scent of blood, the smell of death?

No, the damned dog began to dance from paw to paw, tail wagging as if she were still a puppy.

Sten’s laugh sounded like thunder. “Ya, you are fierce!”

Some battle hound.

Philip handed Gawain’s cloak back to him, said he would fly ahead since his feet were bare. Once the Myrddin had lifted himself into the night sky, Palahmed led the strangers back toward camp. It wasn’t until they’d arrived that he realized the two men must be shifters as well.

By that time, Bedwyr had his dagger pressed to Cai’s throat.

Chapter Text

With the cool steel of Bedwyr’s blade against his neck, Cai would have liked to say he was surprised, but he wasn’t. Bed had always been protective of Arthur and always would be. Cai would do the same if Agravain were in danger.

He was a bit disappointed, though. He’d thought he’d proven himself trustworthy by now. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe, as far as Bedwyr was concerned, he never would. Never could.

But he wouldn’t stop trying.

“Here they are,” Philip said, and all heads turned toward the track and the figures emerging from the shadows.

The blade jerked at his throat, and he couldn’t even blame Bedwyr for it. There was Palahmed and Gawain, and a man about Palahmed’s height. But the fourth man was a large fellow—easily as tall and broad as Grandpapa Wolf in his day. He wore a sword and shield, but his hands held none of the restlessness of a man who felt he needed to use them.

Philip introduced the big man as Sten, the shorter one as Giom, and Cai breathed relief. He didn’t know the names, at least. He shoved Bed’s blade aside and stepped around the campfire to approach the two strangers as Arthur did the same. Agravain came to stand next to Cai, his quiet presence grounding, and soon all their men had flanked the newcomers.

Their reactions as Philip gave them everyone’s names were curious. Nods to Gareth and Gahers, then to Safir and Morien. Oddly, grins for young Medraut, then serious nods again to Agravain. Twin flashes of recognition for Cai, but not because they knew him. Philip had told them all the two were wolf shifters, and that they had asked for Cai when they arrived in Uthyr’s village. But somehow Cai had known they were wolves, deep in his bones, when they met his eyes in the firelight.

Philip introduced Bedwyr, and the weight of their gazes slid to him. The shorter man, Giom, glanced down to Bedwyr’s stump—just a flick of the eyes, before nodding to him. Which brought them to Arthur.

Cai had witnessed this several times, mostly in Rhys’s hall, this moment when someone met Arthur for the first time. At first, he’d envied his brother the rapt silence, the gaping jaws of the thunderstruck. Then he’d decided he was glad he wasn’t the one who had to live up to the tales.

This Sten fellow recovered first, smiling with apparent delight. “My lord, it is an honor to meet you.”

“An honor,” Giom said.

“I’m no lord. You may call me Arthur.”

The big man nodded eagerly, Giom with a reserve that reminded Cai of Agravain.

“But first,” Arthur said, “you’re going to shift. You”—he nodded to Sten—“will go with Cai. Giom, is it? You’ll go with Agravain.”

Cai didn’t miss the alarm that flashed across Giom’s features. What was he worried about? Cai was the one who’d be alone with the largest wolf he’d ever met, most likely.

But he’d promised to protect his brother, and he would.

He shared a glance with Agravain, then gestured for Sten to follow him.

~

Some while later, he found Agravain already sitting with Arthur and Bedwyr. Cai eased himself onto the ground with a groan. “Good gods, the fellow can talk.”

Arthur chuckled. “Give you his life story, did he?”

“Practically. Youngest of four brothers. A seafaring folk from somewhere even farther than the Orcait, and all wolf shifters.”

Agravain frowned. “From the outlying islands?”

“No. From how he described it, the lands across the narrow sea extend farther north than we realized. Is Philip still about? His maps might need a revision.”

“I sent him home once Agravain reported back.” Arthur looked at him closely. “You don’t recognize him.”

A statement of fact, not a question, and Cai was glad to hear it. “No. I’ve never met him. Never heard of him. And I think I would have. None of the Saxons chattered like that.”

“Lucky you,” Agravain said. “I had to interrogate his companion.”

“Aye?”

Agravain sighed. “Aye, but I think he was only nervous. He didn’t volunteer anything, and I’m not convinced he met Sten where he said they met—”

“A market town in Hibernia?” Sten had claimed the same, but the image he’d painted seemed plausible. “Fellow craftsmen, looking for trade and maybe a bit of adventure, is the tale I got.”

“Not too much adventure,” Bedwyr grumbled. “Hold, craftsmen? Do they even know how to use those weapons?”

“About as well as Khalida does,” Cai said. “But they might be good to have along anyway. Did Giom mention what it is they do?”

“No,” Agravain said.

“Some interrogator you are,” Cai said, and Agravain bared his teeth in a way that always sparked Cai’s pulse. “I don’t know how they left the mountains without telling Philip. Or Mama.”

“Why? What do they do?” Arthur said.

“Sten over there is a smith, and Giom’s his apprentice.” The big wolf had spent most of their conversation describing his craft, fed pointed questions by Cai. It hadn’t taken long before the fellow’s obvious understanding of the thing had surpassed Cai’s. He’d been effusive about Mama’s skill. She had outfitted them for their trek, so Cai supposed they’d had a few days to study her handiwork. “At least we’d have someone with us to make repairs.”

Arthur considered that, looked at Bedwyr. Something passed between them, and then Bed sighed. “Fine. But they’ll have to shield each other. My slate is full.”

Arthur grinned at him. “You could give them lessons.”

“You fucking give them lessons.”

Cai caught Agravain’s eye. If they moved quietly, they might sneak away while these two were bickering—

“Oh,” Arthur said, dashing his hopes, “one other thing. While we were waiting for you, Philip shared something else. He believes they’re bound, as Bed and I are. As you two are. Maybe not by blood or even oath, but…” He shrugged. “Could be one more reason they sought us out. But it adds another layer of loyalty between them, so when they need to shift, I want one of you to shift as well.”

And then keep their ears perked. Cai was well ahead of him on that front. The big wolf and his companion were who they said, he believed that much. But there was something about them he hadn’t quite sniffed out yet, and he wasn’t going to be satisfied until he had.

Chapter Text

Lura wasn’t supposed to climb onto the roof, but she wasn’t supposed to be in Cymru either, so it was an evening to be naughty.

Grandmother was in Cousin Gwen’s sitting chamber, talking to her and Cousin Elain. Their words had swirled like eddies in tide pools, where the water didn’t really come in to shore and didn’t go back out to sea. It was something grownups did sometimes when they didn’t know each other, or when they wanted to say something, but they thought it wasn’t yet time. It was boring, Lura thought, and frustrating.

Tonight it was also scary, because Grandmother hadn’t left the Orcait since she’d first come to live there. She was here for a reason. A lot of reasons, maybe—Lura could imagine one for every finger and every toe—and she wished Grandmother would stop wasting words and just say it.

Not that she really needed to hear the reason, because on the journey back to their town, Grandmother had walked beside her. Her shadow had loomed over Lura’s like one of the old god stones.

“I’m not angry with you, Lura,” she said. “I’m disappointed.”

Papa never lied to her like that, and neither had Grandmother, on the islands. If she was lying now, she was doing it on purpose. It was important, maybe important enough to make her leave the Orcait. And when she had finished saying empty words to the cousins, she would say the true ones to Lura.

She didn’t think Grandmother would tell her men to snatch her. They had given up their weapons to come into Cousin Gwen’s big hall, like they were supposed to. They were behaving, for now.

But if Grandmother had sent Jorri to take Lura back when Papa and Cai had escaped with her, she hadn’t come all this way herself to go home empty-handed.

Which was why Lura was on the roof of the bedchamber she shared with Galahad. She had tried to signal for him to follow her from the hall, but he had ignored her. He did that sometimes, even when she knew better than he did.

For a boy twice as old as she was, he was wrong a lot.

~ ~ ~

With map in hand and Morien flying overhead, Medraut climbed the next rise.

The hills were gentle now, with more forest than his grandfather’s mountains. Even with the cover, Arthur had only agreed to let him scout forward if someone accompanied him. That would have made Gally cranky, but Medraut didn’t mind. His father’s band carried out tasks in pairs. Two sets of eyes were safer than one, four hands more efficient than two.

Well, except for Uncle Bedwyr; he was pretty capable with just the one, but still.

At the summit of the rise, Morien was hovering. He seemed to be tipping one wing toward whatever lay to the south, and when Medraut topped the hill, he saw why. A broad valley stretched below, a river winding down its middle in gleaming curves. Clustered along one section of the waterway lay the buildings of a large settlement, at least as big as his mothers’.

He retreated to the forest and the path he’d made from their camp. As he studied the map, Morien landed just inside the trees and shifted.

“What do you think?” he said.

Medraut pointed to a place on the map, just south of a bend in the river. The map maker had drawn a crude building there, walls and a roof. “I think it’s this one.”

“Are you certain? We’ve been in the forest; we could have missed it.”

“It’s possible, but if I’ve judged the distance correctly—”

He stopped short as he looked up at Morien and found him smiling.

“I have, haven’t I?”

“Maybe.” But Morien’s smile widened.

Medraut huffed, his pleasure at the discovery overtaken now by embarrassment. “You already knew where we were.” Of course he did. He’d flown the short distance last night and spotted the town. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“Because you wanted to scout it.”

He had, but this made him feel like a small boy again, back when he would show Morien something he’d found in a nearby stream, some rock or beetle that Morien, as a man grown, would have been well aware of. Quickly, he rolled up the map and shoved it under his belt. “I’m not a child. Don’t need to be appeased.”

“No, but practice is good.”

“You told Father, didn’t you?” Morien would have done—his loyalty was to Arthur, not to Medraut. “That’s why he let me scout today.”

“I did. But…” Morien tapped his shoulder. “He let you scout yesterday, too, when you went out with Gareth.”

“I suppose so.”

“I suppose so,” Morien said, in a tone that sounded an awful lot like Gally.

Gods, did he sound that petulant? The possibility was even more mortifying than his nondiscovery. “You’re right. Thank you, Morien.”

He walked back to camp, following Morien’s magpie form as he ducked among the limbs of the forest. After a while, his pride in properly interpreting the map returned, and even though his father already knew how close they were to the settlement, Medraut looked forward to confirming it.

His father had just clapped him on the back, congratulating him for a success slightly diminished by the fact that camp was packed and ready to break come dawn, when a hawk landed with a graceless thump at Arthur’s feet.

Gahers shifted, already speaking. He broke off, coughed to steady his voice, then said, “Mother’s come south.”

His brothers whirled at his words, their faces taut and pale as parchment.

“Everywhere is south of the Orcait,” Gareth said.

“Not everywhere,” said the newcomer Sten, and his companion elbowed him.

“She was on a ship nearing Rhys’s,” Gahers said, then looked at Agravain. “Lura dreamed of her arrival.”

Agravain cursed. He began to strip his clothes.

Gawain stepped toward him. “We don’t know that she’s for Gwen’s.”

“We do know. I know.” He turned to Uncle Cai. “Lura won’t be safe, I have to—”

“Go,” Cai said. “I’ll follow.”

Agravain shifted into his wolf form before he’d shucked his boots, but sprang free of them and was off to the north without another word.

And without permission. When Cai looked to his brother, Arthur shook his head. Medraut couldn’t read whatever passed silently between them, but Cai looked away first, glancing at Sten and Giom before nodding at the ground.

“Gareth, fly to Gwen’s. You can be there before Agravain. Report back when you can, to Philip if you need to. He can find us if Agravain needs your help.”

Then Gareth was off, too, leaving the camp quiet behind him.

Medraut hadn’t met this Morgawse, but he’d heard tales of her. Some from Lura, some from her sons, and a few from Uncle Cai, who didn’t trust her. From the pointed look Uncle Bedwyr was giving Arthur just now, he didn’t trust her either.

And they believed she was headed to his mothers, where Lura was sheltering. But also…

Also where Gally was.

Medraut closed his eyes, tried to calm his pulse. There was no reason he should feel nervous for Gally’s safety. He was a son of Cymru, and their mothers’ guards would protect him, but Medraut felt uneasy all the same. He wished he could tell his father, but the words dried up on his tongue.

Arthur had let two capable men leave to deal with the situation. Which a mother no man among them trusted, Medraut would have liked to point out, but his father would only say he was being irrational and overprotective. He’d probably sigh the moment Medraut mentioned Gally’s name and ask if Medraut truly wanted to be on this mission.

So he held his peace, even though it didn’t feel peaceful at all.

~ ~ ~

Aunt Morgawse was a formidable woman.

She didn’t look so different from other old women in the town, Galahad decided. There was silver in her hair, and she groaned when she sat on the cushioned chair. Her face was wrinkled, and the skin on her hands looked thin, so that he could make out the weaving of blue veins underneath when she accepted the ale cup from him. Her teeth were stained brown at the gums when she smiled.

But there was something about the way she carried herself, even when she was sitting down, and it was making his mothers act strange.

Of course, they were harboring a fugitive from Aunt Morgawse’s islands—from her own household, her own blood—so maybe this was guilt he was witnessing. Interesting. He couldn’t remember either of his mothers ever looking guilty. Usually, they went about their business, confident in their words and decisions, as rulers should be. But even with guests of the highest status, he’d never seen Mama so deferential, or Mother so twitchy.

The deference was deserved, he thought. Morgawse was Mama’s aunt, sister to Grandfather Uthyr, and a ruler in her own right. She might not handle weapons like Grandfather could do, but she could make a big group of warriors sail her south. She could order them to do just about anything, and they would obey. And she was the one who had taught Lura the shifting charm, so she could do a whole lot more than give orders.

Which was probably why Mother’s hand kept twitching toward her belt, where her dagger usually hung. As host, she wore nothing more than her eating knife, and as guest, Morgawse wore the same. So did Mama, and so did he, and soon they would all be using them on the supper Mama had ordered when they returned to the hall.

He hoped Lura didn’t come back for it. She’d slipped away like a mouse from a larder cat, hugging the wall as if her grandmother wouldn’t see her go. She had—he’d watched the whole thing. Which only proved that Lura was too much of a baby to appreciate this opportunity.

Morgawse was powerful, and resourceful, and wise, and Galahad shared her blood through his great-grandfather Emrys. Rumor had it she’d formed an alliance with the Saxons and so was as much as enemy as they were, yet Mama had greeted her as family.

Here, in this chamber, they were walking a political blade’s edge that sent a thrill down his spine. Uncle Arthur didn’t think he could do this, have a simple conversation with someone who might be ally or enemy. He wasn’t old enough or smart enough or…whatever enough.

But he was, and he would show them as much. And why did folk act as if they could never learn anything valuable from an opponent? Simple fight-training proved that wasn’t true.

So while he was disappointed when Mama inevitably told him to fetch Lura for supper, he was equally pleased when Aunt Morgawse stood and said she would come with him. And when she asked after his training and lessons, and listened as he told her about his progress.

Outside his bedchamber, where he knew they’d find Lura, Morgawse put her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him with unmistakable pride.

“What a fine young man you are, Galahad,” she said. “What a shame the adults in your life won’t give you a chance to prove it.”

Ally, then.

I’m a dragon, he almost blurted.

But that could wait.

First, supper.

Chapter Text

The town rivaled Rhys’s in size, Arthur thought as they approached the outskirts. As with any settlement along a river, most of the structures stood near the water, but this town was large enough that they began to come upon huts well before then.

The river valley was intensely green with spring growth. Among the usual sheep and goats grazing in the lush grass of the outlying pastures were dozens of cows, a new calf next to each one. A wealthy lord’s domain, then.

Bedwyr seemed to think the same. His dark eyes scanned the livestock briefly before studying the buildings of the town. His gaze caught on something, narrowed, and Arthur followed it to a tower taller than the other rooftops. Not a watch tower, too low in the valley for that. It would be one of the churches Philip had described, where the Christians gathered to talk to their god. Or listen to their priests talk, more usually.

Bed’s eyes flicked away from the church with disinterest, and Arthur could admit that religion’s ways seemed strange. Why huddle in a building when the beings who might help you were outside, and everywhere. In the sky, the forests, the meadows, the lakes and rivers. Underground, if a fellow cared to seek those gods out, and in the sea. Even at one’s own hearth. No intermediary necessary, either, though there were wise folk, like Philip and Mabyn before him, who could interpret the signs that came as answers to requests for help.

Arthur generally only sent such a request before battle, or on the rare occasion he and Bedwyr were separated for some reason. He didn’t need much and wanted even less.

The more a man wanted, the more he had to carry, and he preferred his pack light.

Their band was beginning to draw attention, in the form of stares from the young shepherds. A town of this size must see all sorts, but Arthur supposed a group of armed men dressed in the clothing of the north might catch a lad’s eye.

Or a lass’s. “Who are you?” one demanded. No belligerence, only curiosity. As he neared, Arthur saw she stood among a small herd of goats, holding one of the kids tucked against her side. A younger sibling clung to her skirts, peeking at him from behind her.

“We’ve traveled from the mountains in the north, Lord Uthyr’s domain.”

The girl frowned. “Why aren’t you fighting with him?”

“We’ve come south to offer our swords to the lord here.” The scheme: fight amongst them, gain their trust, their loyalty, then use it to put an end to their in-fighting. But no reason to give away their plans. “To help drive back the Saxons,” he added.

“To kill Saxons, I hope.”

“I hope so too, lass,” said Bedwyr.

The girl grinned at him. One of her front teeth was only halfway grown in. “I’m Geli. What’s your name?”

“Bedwyr ap Uthyr.”

She repeated Bed’s name silently. Then her eyes grew wide, her gaze dropping to the leather cuff Bed wore over his stump. She gasped and turned back to Arthur. “You’re the Bear?”

If only she knew how true that was. “I’m Arthur. Arthur ap Matthias,” he said with a nod. “Good to meet—”

“And you’re Palahmed the Fierce!” she said, skipping back down their queue. Arthur would’ve been offended, except he was enjoying the startled expression the Saracen wore. “And this is Khalida,” she said, “so you must be Gawain the Swift.”

Gawain blinked.

“And you two look like him, so you’re Gareth and Gahers.”

“Gahers and Gareth, actually—”

“And you’re Morien the Brave, obviously, so then you’re Safir of the Honeyed Tongue.”

Morien laughed aloud. Safir bowed with a flourish.

“And one of you is Cai.” She squinted first at Sten, then Cai. When Cai raised a hand, she stared at him for a long moment, then tsked at him.

Bed snorted.

“Agravain?” she asked Giom. He shook his head a touch late, for she was already deciding against it. “Too pretty.” She dismissed Sten with, “Too tall,” and marched back past Medraut. “Too young.”

Arthur could scarcely wait to tell Agravain he was known to children in the south as old, short, and ugly.

The girl murmured something that sent her younger sibling scampering toward the nearest hut. He thought they were about to meet her parents and was ready to beg off, but then she was ducking through the fence and waving them forward. “Come. I’ll bring you to my lord.”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her they could surely find the hall themselves. Evidently, Uthyr had told it true: their names were known here, and something of their characters. He wouldn’t deny her the chance to present them to her leader.

And so they filed after her, an odd procession of a dozen armed men led by a small lass with crooked plaits and a goat kid tucked under one arm.

As escorts went, it could have been worse.

Chapter Text

The Saxon was forgotten as soon as Arthur slashed his throat. Stepping back, he took stock of his men in the swift, unconscious way he’d been doing for years now.

Morien, always easy to spot for his height, fought alongside Safir, their quarry on his knees and wishing for a quick death.

There, Gawain, flanked by Palahmed and Khalida, three against two Saxons, the hound’s muzzle darkly wet with enemy gore.

Gareth and Gahers, taunting a fleeing man who stopped to shout something back but then turned and kept running.

Cai, shoulder to shoulder with Sten, as they strode toward him.

Bed, at his own shoulder, always.

Arthur grinned at him. “What a rout.” A clear victory, nothing anyone would be singing about soon. “Probably should have let him come.”

“Probably not,” Bed growled.

“Gwen’s in the river lands, my love. Can’t slice off your stones from there.”

“Don’t be so certain.”

Despite some very logical arguments from the lad, Arthur hadn’t allowed Medraut to join this fight. Not because Gwen had threatened dire consequences should he come to any harm. Arthur would have to let Medraut come along, and sooner than later—wouldn’t do him any favors to be seen protecting his son over those of other men—but he’d wanted a skirmish or two to work out how these southerners fought. So, he’d played Medraut and Giom off each other a bit. Taken each aside and asked him to keep an eye on the other at their camp. He hadn’t mistaken the look of relief on Giom’s face; apprenticing to a smith didn’t make one a warrior. Neither did being that smith, but at least Sten had size to his advantage.

Medraut had been disappointed, but he wouldn’t be for long. Some of the southerners, the wealthier men, rode into battle on horseback, but most fought on foot, as in the north. There had been a prayer beforehand from one of their priests, a tedious stretch of words during which Bed’s bored expression had become an impatient glare, but then it was fighting and shouting and muddy, bloody grass, and that was just the same. He would let Medraut join them next time, with Cai to shield him.

Judging by the way Sten was gesturing excitedly and Cai’s weary nods, he just might welcome the change.

“How’d you fare?” Arthur asked as they drew near.

Cai’s “fine” was completely overtaken by Sten’s broken but exuberant retelling of the past half hour and their vanquishing of four entire Saxons. Arthur bit down a smile at Cai’s pleading stare. It said, Don’t make me do that again. Or, Haven’t I repented enough? Maybe just, Make it stop, I beg you.

Sten paused for breath, and Arthur clapped him on the arm. “Well done,” he said, and the big man beamed.

When they reached camp, Giom shot to his feet from the log where he’d been sitting next to Medraut. He rushed toward Sten, seeming to realize at the last moment that he was surrounded by watchful men. His hands clenched at his sides. In the end, he clutched Sten’s forearms, and Sten brought his forehead down to meet Giom’s. They murmured something, too low to hear and not for anyone else’s ears anyway, and Arthur turned to meet the eyes of some of the southerners watching.

Uthyr had publicly supported his bond with Bedwyr for years. If tales of them and their band had reached these folk, then surely they’d heard that most of the shield pairs were blood-bound. If not, they would learn it soon enough.

Well, why make them wait and wonder? He grabbed Bed behind the neck and pulled him into a hard kiss.

Bed stood still for a heartbeat before he kissed him back. When they broke apart, Arthur gestured for Medraut to follow, and they made for the lord’s campfire to discuss the battle.

~ ~ ~

His cub was pushing his luck, but what was new about that?

It had been a rout, the Saxons wielding their weapons like the scythes and rakes they were no doubt more accustomed to. But a skirmish was a skirmish, and Arthur didn’t fight halfway. He’d been a sight to behold, as always, and Bedwyr could hardly wait for nightfall to show him the effect it had on him. As always.

As they crossed camp to talk with the local lord, he gripped Medraut’s shoulder and, feeling magnanimous, delivered the words the lad had been waiting to hear. Maybe he should have waited, should have let Arthur do it himself, but looking at Medraut’s face right now was like seeing Arthur’s again, all those years ago, when he ached to fight, to prove himself.

Besides, not so terrible a thing to be the uncle who gave him the good news.

Medraut barely let him finish. “You won’t regret it!”

“I’d better not,” he said and sent a silent apology to his sister.

They found the lord, a gregarious fellow called Gruffydd, surrounded by his own men, but when he saw them approaching, he beckoned them into the circle. Bedwyr’s limbs always went a bit loose after battle, and the campfire felt good. A cup of ale was pressed into his hand, and he drank it down gratefully. Then swiped Medraut’s from his grip, chuckling when his nephew squawked.

Lord Gruffydd smiled at Medraut. “I trust you’ll be joining us next time?”

Medraut stood tall, chest puffed, and the resemblance to Arthur on that long-ago winter night was like a spike in Bedwyr’s chest. He caught Arthur’s gaze and nodded, but Arthur let the lad speak for himself.

“Yes, Lord Gruffydd. It will be my honor.”

“What it’ll be, my boy, is your best effort. You have some tall boots to live up to.”

Medraut grinned at his father, and Arthur slung an arm around his shoulders.

It was a strange thing how love and pride and fear could tangle so tightly, and though he’d tried, Bedwyr had never been able to pick them apart.

He lifted the cup in his hand and swallowed the ale around the knot in his throat.

Chapter Text

His father was going to let him fight, finally.

So why did a small part of Medraut, the same part that didn’t enjoy thunderstorms the same way Gally did, wish Arthur had put him off another skirmish or two?

He knew why, it was just humbling to admit, even to himself, that that frightened part of him existed. Was currently squirming under his skin as they marched inexorably closer to Saxon territory. He clenched his muscles, then tried breathing deep gulps of the cool misty air of the forest track, but the clenching and the gulps turned on him, and the next thing he knew, he was kneeling beside the trail, retching into the bracken.

He wasn’t quiet about it, and he could hear the low chuckling of men long past their own first battles. Not loud—they wouldn’t give away their approach, but still mortifying. Would anyone notice if he crawled under that shrub and died of embarrassment?

A hand landed on his back, gentle but nonnegotiable. “Happens to everyone,” his father said. Not, Would you like to go back to camp, for which Medraut was glad. On his knees, armor askew and face burning, he might have taken the offer. After a moment, his father squeezed his shoulder, and he stood. Spat once, twice into the brush, then nodded and made his feet move again.

They joined the single-file queue a bit farther back from where they’d been. He didn’t know the men immediately before or behind them, could only just make out Morien’s and Uncle Cai’s heads up ahead. “I’m sorry,” he muttered at his father’s shield.

Arthur turned just enough to wink at him. “I did the same. So did your Uncle Bedwyr, don’t let him tell you different.”

It should have made him feel better, but now he was back to thinking about the coming fight, trying to remember everything he’d been taught in the training yard. He wanted to show the men who’d taught him that he’d been paying attention, wanted to recount it to Grandfather Uthyr when they returned, earn a clap on the shoulder, tell his mothers and have to fend off their embraces. Tell Gally every detail so he could be ready when his first chance to carry arms came along.

Also, he very much wanted to survive it. That would be enough, he thought, flexing hands that felt too numb to grip his sword.

At some signal at the front of the queue, the warriors came to a gradual halt. As they stood waiting for the murmured message traveling from man to man, he felt even worse. His father should have—would have—been up there, in the know and able to contribute to the battle scheme, if not for Medraut’s weak stomach. He opened his mouth to apologize again, but then Arthur turned, leaning down slightly.

“The guard has reached the ridge,” he said, low. “They’ve spotted a Saxon camp below. We’re to assemble, quietly, and wait until nightfall.”

Medraut nodded, his heart beating in his throat. More waiting.

His father raised an eyebrow, flicked his gaze over Medraut’s shoulder.

Right. He turned and gave the message to the next man. That man passed it along, as did the one behind him, and a short while later, the queue began to move again until it delivered him to the mass of armed men taking cover at the ridge.

At some point, he must have fallen asleep, for he came awake to his name and another warm hand on his arm. He startled, grabbed for his sword, but Uncle Cai stilled his hand.

“Shhh, it’s early yet. I just wanted to give you a chance to gather yourself.” He settled onto the ground beside Medraut with a soft groan. “Do you have any questions?”

Everything in Medraut’s mind was a question just now. Uncle Cai must have seen the helplessness on his face because he nodded and said, “Let’s talk through some scenarios.”

They did, whispering back and forth as night deepened. They had no fires, of course, but now and then he could make out a star through the canopy. It occurred to him in one breath that he might not see the sun again, but then Uncle Cai was tugging him into a more useful line of thought and another fighting configuration. Eventually, men began to stir, and then there was more purposeful movement—men moving from cluster to cluster with orders to make ready, and his uncle helped him to his feet.

Cai stretched, and he followed suit, trying to warm up his muscles, chase away the tingling in his fingers and toes without fully waking up his innards. He hadn’t eaten before he’d fallen asleep and couldn’t imagine doing so now, though a few around him were chewing on crusts of breads, rinds of cheese. He tried not to think about it. Tried to be grateful for Uncle Cai, even though that small thunderstorm-leery part of him wished his father would shield him. But Sten had stayed at camp with Giom to repair several pieces for the ongoing campaign, so Cai needed a shieldmate anyway.

Medraut was still at least a hand-span shorter than his uncle and, well, a complete virgin to battle, so he had definitely gotten the better end of the bargain here.

One by one, his father’s men gave him a word of encouragement. Then they were filing silently down a narrow track toward the valley below, banked Saxon campfires surprisingly visible, even through the trees. At the creek below, their forces split to surround the Saxon camp, but he was relieved to notice his father’s men stayed together. In fact, they walked just ahead of and behind Medraut. A matter of their natural bond as a war band, he supposed, but he wasn’t too proud to be grateful for it.

Eventually, they came to a halt again, a long, broad arc of shieldmates. He stared through the trees, tried to see movement among the Saxons. Could make out only the soft breathing of the men around him.

“Medraut.”

He turned toward Cai’s whisper, and his uncle leaned close.

“Breathe.”

He did.

And again.

“Stay be my side and guard my legs. That’s all you need do. Understand?”

Suddenly, his heartbeat calmed. He had one purpose this night, one task.

He could do this.

He nodded, and his uncle’s teeth flashed like moonlight.

“Let’s earn your ink, then,” he whispered, and Medraut found himself grinning back.

Chapter Text

The first time Arthur met his son, he’d stared at the bundle in Gwen’s arms, unable to imagine he’d helped create such a thing—a whole person, someday. He felt nothing like his own father, a man who seemed to have been born to nurture others. All Arthur had had to offer in that moment was his sword.

Some things never changed.

“Where is he?” he gasped, tugging his blade free from the Saxon’s chest.

“He’s fine,” Bed growled. “Dog, left.”

He turned at Bed’s directive, an instinct honed over the decade and a half they’d shielded one another, and met the two Saxons there before they could flee. He’d believed this sleeping camp in the forest would be a good first opportunity for Medraut, but now he was only seeing all the ways it might have been a terrible choice. Too dark, too many places for a Saxon to hide. He’d imagined the night and the trees would serve to protect the lad, but now it only felt crowded and close, and he longed for an open meadow with sun shining down to help him spot his son’s dark hair. But hair like a raven’s wing is invisible at night. Lucky that Cai’s shone in the light of the campfires like a beacon, and there was Medraut, flanked by his uncle on one side and Morien on the other.

Arthur drew a breath, finally, and then his sword worked in concert with Bed’s, steel flashing in arcs of firelight, his shield thudding against his shoulder, his thigh, bruises he would find tomorrow, added to all the others. He fought with an urgency he hadn’t felt in a long while. Not panic, not quite, but a fury that overtook his limbs when he imagined a Saxon coming at his son, making his eyes widen in the dark with fear or pain, piercing skin that had just begun to show the hint of a beard. Not even a beard, just two smudges at either end of the boy’s upper lip.

He was the lad who’d dropped his sword in the training yard last month, scrambling after it only to be shoved onto his back, a warning blade at his throat.

The bright young mind that reminded Arthur so much of his father and of Philip, curious about everything.

The kind boy who’d spent much of his youth with a protective eye on his younger brother.

The chubby wee thing who’d toddled across one of Gwen’s carpets and fallen into Bedwyr’s steady grip giggling, in the spring after the winter after the summer he was born, on their final visit before leaving on campaign again.

Arthur slashed and hacked, using every advantage of his reach to clear this wood of invaders. Of threats to Cymru. With every swing, every stab, more Saxon prayers gurgled into silence.

“I think,” Bedwyr said, groaning for breath sometime later, “you’ve successfully created a firebreak.”

Arthur paused, looked around them. Began to make out the wide swath of clear ground in a rough ring around Medraut.

“I would’ve shielded Cai,” Bed said.

“Why? Let’s end this.”

He ignored Bed’s knowing smirk to root out any remaining trouble.

~ ~ ~

It was one thing to track Arthur’s progress south using the landmarks his uncles described on their visits. It was a whole other thing to fly that route night after night, as soon as he could sneak away. He would be pushing his luck to get back before dawn this time.

Galahad winged hard toward the southern stars, nose down, feet tucked, repeating the landmarks in his mind like a tale he would need to remember later. The sleeping dragon, then Eryri. The foothills beyond, the forking stream, the shining lake, the bluff with the notch in the face. The big town on the wide river, the deep, textured darkness of the forest beyond. The moon wasn’t quite new, but he didn’t want to wait for that. It’d take another two nights at least, and now he had two people he needed to prove himself to.

Aunt Morgawse had settled in for an extended visit, and he was glad for it. When everybody else kept telling him to be patient, that his time would come, she was the only one who understood his plight. He had something to offer—now, not later—and she seemed to see it too. When he felt trapped in his mothers’ skirtfolds, he would seek out his aunt. She treated him with respect, not like a baby, and she was interested in what he thought and how he trained. Even gave him advice sometimes, in a voice pitched low, just for his ears.

He was worthy, she said, and Arthur would be proud of him. She told him that she already was proud of him, and so on every flight he made south, he also swung eastward to pin his grandfather Uthyr’s position on the land below. Reporting this tidbit to his aunt the first time delighted her. He liked delighting her. Everybody else was too preoccupied right now for delight, or even appreciation. But not Aunt Morgawse, and when she gave him that secret smile, the one with the wink, he felt… acknowledged.

The camp was empty when he reached it. Or nearly so. A few men milled about, speaking in murmurs he could barely make out. Circling high overhead, he looked for signs, listened for sounds under the wind. Finally, as he swung to the southeast, he heard them. Weapons clashing, men shouting.

Even with his heightened senses, sharper in his dragon form than his other one, sound was tricky at night. It seemed to bounce off everything, so that he was past the far border of the forest before he realized the battle noise was behind him. Below, men punched out of the trees, running due east. Some ran with weapons, some without, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine the surprise attack the Cymry had used, creeping up on them as they slept.

Something about that sort of tactic had always shamed him. He knew that war was war, and those fighting it needed to use every advantage, but still. Men should meet one another in daylight, he believed. Show their faces, meet their enemies’ gaze. The only time he’d said such a thing in the hall, the seasoned fighters had chuckled at him, called him a green lad. He’d never mentioned it again, which was probably why it seemed to burn like a coal under his breastbone.

Banking against the breeze, he wheeled about to return to the forest and locate the skirmish. He was nearly to the tree line when a cloud obscuring the moon slid away from it. The faint light glinted off his wing. He blinked, narrowed his eyes on the forest.

So he noticed too late that the Saxons running below were no longer running. They had stopped and every one of them was looking up at him. Pointing.

His heart lurched in his chest, and he belched fire.

Shouting erupted below and the Saxons began to run again. Galahad was winging hard for home, his blood pounding behind his eyes, before anybody in the forest heard the ruckus.

He hoped.

Chapter Text

The moment he could, Bedwyr took hold of Arthur’s arm and dragged him away from camp.

They had celebrated, Arthur had thanked Cai for shielding Medraut, and the lad had gotten his first ink, some symbol only the gods knew the meaning of. Gruffydd’s men were drunk on ale and victory both, composing songs of their own bravery, and Bedwyr had better things to do.

Such as fuck Arthur as soon as possible.

It seemed to take a lifetime to lose the sounds of revelry behind them, but when they did, he stopped and pushed Arthur down onto the forest floor. He knelt after him, grimacing as his knee struck a tree root.

“Wish we had a proper bed.”

“What’s a bed when we have moss so thick?” Arthur mused. “What’s a roof, with the stars overhead?”

“All right, poet.”

Arthur laughed against his mouth as Bedwyr kissed him, pinning him to said moss.

“What’s a blanket, when I have your heavy arse draped over me?”

“Shut up, shut up.” He shoved Arthur’s shirt up to get at his skin. Warm. Always so warm. He lapped at the salt of his sweat, found a nipple and sucked, hard. Arthur tensed under him, arching up, fingers gripping Bedwyr’s hair.

“Not that I’m complaining,” he gasped, “but you seem more enthusiastic than usual.”

“Battle lust,” Bedwyr mumbled between scrapes of his teeth and fingernails down Arthur’s flat belly. With the practice of years, he began to pick at the knot of his laces.

It was a legitimate excuse, battle lust. Old Marcus Roman had called it survivor’s lust. Same thing. And they’d witnessed it enough over the years—experienced it enough themselves—that Arthur wouldn’t question it. Wouldn’t dig just that little bit deeper for the true reason Bedwyr couldn’t fill his hands adequately with Arthur’s body just now, couldn’t get enough of the taste of his skin, his hair, the sound of his voice, the heat of him. His cock slapped Bedwyr in the chin as he freed it, and he took him down greedily. His own cock strained against the wool of his trousers. He probably looked a fool, rutting against the earth, but Arthur’s amusement had turned fully into cooperation, and he was too busy pumping into Bedwyr’s mouth to tease him.

He pulled off. “I want to fuck you.”

Arthur nodded, jaw slack, and began to roll over.

“No.” He held him in place. “Like this.”

It didn’t take long to ready him—they’d had plenty of occasion to practice this too—and then he was pushing inside him, sucking a breath at the tight heat. Always there, yet always a shock. When he opened his eyes, he was braced over Arthur, who was staring back at him. Tiny pricks of starlight were reflected in the gray of his eyes.

Gods, he was so beautiful. How did everyone around them not fall in love with this man? How had it taken Bedwyr near an entire winter in a cramped shepherd’s hut to do so? And now this added complication, this phenomenon he hadn’t expected to become a bellows to his lust.

Seeing Arthur’s love for his son in every strike of his blade, in the way he’d tried to put his body between Medraut and every dog in the Saxon camp. He wasn’t even certain Arthur understood the depth of his own feeling. Bedwyr would never know such a thing, not for a son, but seeing it in Arthur made him want to protect it, to guard it until Arthur could make sense of it.

And to do everything he could to encourage it.

He kissed him and began to stroke.

~ ~ ~

With a nod to Morien, who was keeping an eye on Medraut and Medraut’s ale cup, Cai slipped into the forest. The southerners had men posted on the perimeter just as their folk in the north did, but, well.

A pair of eyes that could see in the dark wouldn’t hurt.

He headed eastward to the frontier (not westward, as Bedwyr had done, Arthur in tow; he hadn’t needed excellent night vision to notice that and would spare his heightened hearing in the bargain). He made his way down from the ridge and across the stream. From shadow to shadow, he wound his way through the forest, skirting the area that would smell of blood for days to come. Onward, eastward, though he couldn’t have said what he was seeking. Maybe just wanting to ensure the Saxons truly had retreated, get a glimpse of the land distant, when the forest ended.

It would—they could see that much from the ridge near their own camp—and it did. He could make out partially civilized land rolling away toward the eventual sunrise. Not cultivated but definitely cleared.

Clear of men, too, but not empty. A strange tangle of scents hung in the air. Stepping out of the trees, he tipped his nose to the sky and inhaled.

There was the sour stench of fear. Another scent like a metal coin on the tongue, something that reminded him of the surge of relief he felt whenever he survived a fight. But something else mingled with those two, something like the smoke from his mother’s smithy but more acrid. It clung to the back of his throat. Pawing at the grass, he snorted, trying to dislodge it.

Stinks, doesn ’t it?

Cai leapt away from the voice. Then, remembering himself, turned to face the wolf.

It stood several paces away, watching him. The thin sliver of the waning moon made its eyes shine.

Sten?

Who?

Not Giom then, either.

What happened here? he asked. As any passing shifter might? Aye, good choice, Cai.

Who, you mean. Arthur the Bear happened. Sent my people running, what few he didn ’t slaughter.

He hadn’t killed that many, Cai thought grumpily.

But he won ’t be the Bear for long.

Cai felt his hackles rise. Forced them down, lest they give him away. Why not?

Because he has a new sigil now. That stink in the air, like coals forced too hot? The beast that breathed it—it ’s all they can talk about now. How it appeared right up there, above our heads, spit its proclamation in fire and smoke, and then flew off to the north. No one among them will challenge Arthur anytime soon.

A beast in the sky? One that breathed fire?

Cai’s fur stood on end, and he could do nothing to stop it.

What sort of beast? he asked, though he already knew what the wolf would say.

A dragon, of course. The wolf tilted its head thoughtfully. Seems your Pen y Ddraig has an heir after all, and word of him is setting the night alight.

Chapter Text

Lura wished she could climb onto the roof again, but her Papa wasn’t letting her out of his sight.

There were some things about his visit she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind cuddling on his lap, as she was doing right now. Cousin Gwen was soft, and Grandmother was strong, but somehow Papa was both. With his arm around her and his heartbeat against her ear, she felt as if nothing could hurt her.

She also liked that he brought news of Cai, and that Cai had sent kisses for her, heaps of them separate from Papa’s, so many she could have strung a necklace with them.

And sitting on Papa’s leg, she could almost forget what Galahad had been doing this very night when Papa arrived.

Almost.

It helped that the words between her father and grandmother had none of the careful, mask-like politeness she heard when Grandmother and Cousin Gwen spoke to each other. No, Papa had thrown open the door of Lura’s bedchamber, interrupting the tale Grandmother was telling her to help her sleep.

“What are you doing here!” he demanded, though it didn’t really sound like a question.

“Visiting kin.”

When Grandmother said that, Papa spat on the floor, and then they were off.

Lura had heard a lot of arguments in her life. Their great hall in the Orcait had hosted many folk and almost as many arguments. Something about winter and ale and being on an island with family and strangers alike set people’s teeth a-baring. But this argument was different.

For one thing, they weren’t shouting but were keeping their voices low; it was deepest night and someone else’s household, so she supposed they were that polite, at least. For another thing, the argument was very much about her, and every time Grandmother said she had simply wanted to see her granddaughter, Papa’s arm tightened around her a little more. Which made it even more obvious he was wearing somebody else’s clothes. They didn’t smell like him, and anyway his feet were bare, and she could tell by the canny way her grandmother noticed that that she knew why.

And then she just said it.

“So you fucked the wolf?”

“Don’t call him that,” Papa said, though he kind of snarled it and proved Grandmother’s point.

“The better to blend in with Saxons?” she said. “Maybe you’re the danger here.”

“This innocent act doesn’t serve you, Mother. You were negotiating with them.”

“I was using them to an end, as any sane and intelligent ruler would.”

“You would have married Lura off to one of them.”

“Still could. The offer stands.”

His arm tightened another notch, and Lura had to burrow into him to breathe. “Not while I live.”

Her skin tingled as she waited for what Grandmother would say to that…

…but she didn’t get the chance. For just then, the shutter over the window rose, and Galahad rolled across the sill. He landed on the carpets with a thump and a grunt, naked as a salamander. He stood up before he seemed to realize the lamp was lit and the room had two more people in it than usual.

His dark eyes went round, and his hands dropped to cover his eel-bait. He swallowed hard.

“Cousin Agravain,” he said.

Papa growled again.

But for some reason, Grandmother smiled. “Mild night, lad?”

~ ~ ~

Arthur’s joints felt loose and lovely as they strolled back to the camp. “We should do that after every battle.”

“We do, nearly.”

“Not like that.” He reached down and pinched Bed’s meaty arse. Then, wanting one more taste before they arrived, he stopped and hauled Bed against him. “You are fucking magnificent, do you know that?”

Bed shook his head but kissed him thoroughly, possessively, and if they weren’t careful, they were going to drop on the path and go at it again.

Not a terrible notion, except for the wolf that crashed from the darkness just then.

Bedwyr leapt back with a yelp. He still didn’t recognize that white marking on Cai’s left ear, apparently, but Cai shifted before he could sound the alarm.

Bed bent double, hands on his knees. “Gods damn you, Cai.”

“Later,” Cai said, ribs flexing on heaving breaths. “I wanted to get to you before it reached camp.”

“Before what?” He looked down the dark path, senses alert. “Is Medraut safe?”

“He’s fine. Or should be—I came straight here.”

“What’s wrong?”

Cai drew a deep inhalation and raised his hands. “Hear me out. I went to the Saxon camp.”

Bedwyr straightened. “Why?”

“I was restless. Wanted to be certain they’d truly retreated. They had; their camp is deserted of anyone living. So I went beyond it, to the far edge of the forest. To the cleared land.”

“Where you saw…”

“A wolf.”

“One you know?”

Next to him, Bed’s hand clenched into a fist. “One who knew you?”

“Neither. But it was a shifter, and it had a tale to tell.”

Arthur’s shoulders slumped, and he sighed. Looked all around them, peering into the trees. “Right, yes, we sneaked off for a fuck. Where are the rest of them? C’mon, you lot!” he called. “Prank’s over.”

Cai took hold of his arm. “Arthur, I’m serious. I could smell it.”

“The wolf?”

Cai shook his head. “It appeared in the sky as the Saxons were fleeing the forest. It hovered there and spit fire and then flew off toward our mountains.”

“What did?” Bedwyr said.

Of all the things Arthur might have predicted Cai would say, “a dragon” wasn’t among them.

“A white one, pale as the moon. They believe it appeared because of you. According to the wolf, you’ll find no further fight in this territory.”

Arthur turned to gather Bed’s reaction. This time his prediction was correct: disbelief.

“It was an owl, maybe even Philip. They were bleary with sleep and panic,” Bed said with a dismissive wave. “Does things to a man’s mind.”

 “Its scent hung in the air, Bedwyr.” Cai looked at Arthur. “Like an overblown fire pan.”

“They employ shit smiths,” Bed grumbled. “What a surprise.”

Cai ignored him, held Arthur’s gaze more intently than he had since those moments several months ago when he’d begged forgiveness. “Brother, something happened in the sky tonight, and word of it will spread. I just thought you should be ready.”

“For the word,” he asked, “or for the dragon?”

Cai’s exhalation rose in a cloud. “I don’t know.”

Chapter Text

They spoke their strange, harsh words to each other as Galahad stood still as a stone, and then Lura’s father stood up and carried her from the bed chamber. The door smacked shut behind them, and the sound released Galahad’s body from its frozen state.

He grabbed for the tunic on his bed. “Why is he—”

“Cht,” Aunt Morgawse said, short and sharp, one finger on her lips. She cocked an ear toward the door, or the corridor beyond. After a long stretch of heartbeats, she lowered her finger. Her shoulders settled, too, and then her hands in her lap. Fingers entwined. “He believes I came to snatch Lura back to the north.”

“Did you?”

“Of course I did. Agravain is a man and may choose to run about with whomever he wishes. My granddaughter, however, is still my subject and belongs in the Orcait.”

He pulled the tunic on. Found to his alarm that his own hands were trembling. He clutched the nearest thing to stop them, which was… the tunic. His mind was a jumble of thoughts and pictures, and from the corner of his eye, he could see the rumpled blankets of Lura’s bed. Medraut’s bed. Whatever. The bedding looked exactly like what it was, evidence someone wasn’t where they should be, except why would he think Lura should be there, he didn’t even like sharing a chamber with her—

He drew a deep breath. Met his aunt’s eyes. “I forgot to check on Grandfather.”

“That’s all right. He’ll be easily found again when next you go out.”

Would there be a next after he told her what he’d done?

“Galahad.”

“Yes, Aunt?”

“Sit down.”

He sat on the edge of his bed. The lamp wick on the stand in the corner crackled.

“Did something happen tonight?”

It poured out of him like flood water over a dam, how he’d successfully followed the landmarks and found the southern camp, and then the fight in the forest, and then the Saxon cowards running for their lives from the eastern side of the forest. How he’d realized too late that they’d spotted him, that he’d flown too low on a night still too bright, and how they’d been shouting as he fled.

The more he spoke, the more stupid, thoughtless acts he admitted to, the angrier he’d figured Aunt Morgawse would become. Dismayed, disgusted. Disappointed, at least.

But he was learning quickly that his aunt’s reactions couldn’t always be predicted.

When he ran out of words, she was smiling.

“I thought you would be upset,” he said.

“Oh no, my lad. Far from it. Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

Nothing that would make her smile. “No.”

“You breathed life into the sign of our house.”

“Breathed fire, you mean.” The back of his throat still tasted of coals.

She chuckled, as merry as if he’d made a joke. But then she leaned toward him, her eyes gleaming in the low light. “Not only did you prove the might of our name, you took that proof to the Saxons. And to the southern lords. Galahad, my brave lad, you did more in one night to unite the tribes of Cymru than any warrior could do.”

“Unite them?”

She sat back, waved a hand, her rings glittering. “They’ll assume it’s proof of Arthur’s power—”

His fingernails dug into his palms.

“—but who knows what might happen over the course of a campaign season? Who knows what they might begin to believe if you make another appearance, and then another, and another. If you time it just so. If, perhaps, you use your fire intentionally, and not only for Saxon eyes. Eh, nephew?”

Go south again. And not only that but reveal himself on purpose. If he could do that, he might finally prove to Uncle Arthur that he belonged amongst his most valued men, amongst his shapeshifting warriors.

As swiftly as his excitement built, it collapsed under practical concerns. “I can’t keep going farther and farther and still make it home each night. My mothers will notice.”

“Not if I tell them I’ll get out from under their feet and repair to Arthur’s villa east of Rhys’s. And that, in exchange for trusting them with Lura’s safe care, I request you accompany me to the villa. You’ll be able to come and go as necessary. What say you, Galahad? Will you do this for your grandfather’s house? For all of Cymru?”

Chapter Text

Turned out, fighting got slightly less terrifying with practice.

It helped that Medraut had Uncle Cai on one side and Morien on the other. Medraut was taller than most lads his age, but those two men were taller still, and when their weapons were slashing through the air, he felt as though he were in some fantastical bubble of blades, untouchable.

Well, not entirely untouchable. A Saxon axe managed to hack through his shield during his third skirmish and nicked his forearm. But so high was his blood running that he didn’t realize he’d been struck until all was said and done.

“Huh,” he said, staring at the trickle of blood.

Safir leaned close, peering at his arm. “Where did you say it was again?”

“Right there!” he said.

“I don’t see anything.” But when he straightened, Safir grinned and ruffled Medraut’s hair. “First scar in the making. Something to show off to the lasses come harvest.”

A big hand landed on the back of Medraut’s neck. “Enough, you,” Morien said to his man, then steered Medraut toward a fallen tree limb. “Sit. I’ll make a poultice.”

Morien maybe should have made one for himself, for he looked a bit green, but Medraut knew better than to talk back to him.

The best part of fighting, he decided, were the evenings afterward, when everyone sat around the fires, drinking an extra measure and recounting moments of the battle. He’d listened to a lot of tale-tellers over the years, folk who had come through his mothers’ hall and told stories for a night’s meal and a bed by the hearth. They’d come from all over the world, those tellers, and they’d brought with them amazing tales.

But there was something about his own people that couldn’t be bested when it came to weaving a tale. Like clever spiders, spinning words into entrancing threads that met and overlapped and doubled back to cross again, until they’d created a web no listener could hope to escape.

Not that he ever wanted to, especially since, as they moved south with Gruffydd’s men to join other lords and their bands, the tales began to feature his father. How Arthur had taken on four men, then six, then eight, killing them with single strikes, cutting swathes through the enemy the way a farmer reaped his grain at summer’s end.

Maybe it was being compared to a corn-cutter, but his father always raised his hands as though to quiet the teller. “This victory belonged to every one of us,” he would say, or something similar, to the point that soon the tales described not only his feats on the field but his humility too.

The first time someone called Arthur humble, Uncle Bedwyr snorted loudly. When Arthur looked at him with mock affront, Bedwyr rolled his eyes. “My arse,” he muttered.

The second best part of this campaign was that on the days when they trekked from one skirmish to the next, his father always made time for training. Though he spent time sparring with each of his men, and with men of the south, he always drew Medraut into the makeshift training yard for a few rounds. His father was strong, and quick, and seemed to know a heartbeat ahead what Medraut was going to do. But he got a few strikes in, weak and occasionally accidental, but strikes nonetheless, and the pride in Arthur’s eyes when he did so warmed him from the inside out.

“We’ll make a warrior of you yet, son.”

On second thought, it wasn’t the evening fires or the training. It was hearing that—son—that was the best part.

And then, toward the end of his sixth skirmish, which had begun in a forest then moved onto a broad, grassy plain, the terror came swooping back in.

Chapter Text

Bedwyr had had his doubts about this mission at the start. Unite the southern lords? He couldn’t understand how his father could believe they would decide to come together behind a group of mercenaries, even if word of their exploits had reached the south. A mercenary was no diplomat.

But Uthyr seemed to have known something Bedwyr hadn’t, that these lords were, for the most part, warriors themselves. And so were Arthur and his men, skilled warriors. The southerners wouldn’t follow a sell-sword, but they might gather behind a man whose prowess in battle was impressive.

Arthur was making an impression. Not a surprise, he did so wherever he went, damned cub. Uthyr had known he would, and Bedwyr wished he’d foreseen it too.

Maybe he had. He could admit—to himself, in the dark of night—that he’d known the more folk who witnessed Arthur at work would fall under his spell. Hadn’t Bedwyr and long ago? He could hardly blame them for being dazzled.

At least they hadn’t gotten wind of Cai’s fantastical tale of a fucking dragon. Gods, that was all they’d need to lose their collective minds, and Bedwyr had no interest in trying to help herd that sort of mob.

Luckily, when the imaginary flying lizard didn’t show itself the next night or the one after that, Arthur seemed to let it go. They found a rhythm. Fight, win, fuck, trek south, fight again.

Bedwyr did love a rhythm.

In a reversal of their usual pattern, he lay sated but wide awake while Arthur slept soundly beside him. The stars wheeled past overhead, obscured now and then by wisps of cloud. Even so, his gaze was snared again and again by the bears in the northern sky. One large, one small. He would have liked to believe he was debating which of them was Arthur and which was him, but what had caught his eye and wouldn’t let go was the long tail of the Ddraig that curled between, separating the bears, trapping each within a broad curve of stars.

It was a long time before he slept.

In the morning, the scouts reported that the Saxons had retreated beyond their previous location. Though Arthur couldn’t share it with the southerners, Gareth had flown north along the line of their skirmishes and revealed privately that those Saxons hadn’t tried to reclaim the territory they’d been driven from. And so they moved on, ever southward.

Each new lord who joined them introduced them to the next. Sometimes it seemed friendly enough, but other times—most of them—he could sense a tension between the two men. The lord whose hall they came to this evening met them outside the carved wooden doors, gave the war parties an undisguised narrow eye.

“We hold our border just fine,” Cynwrig said, boots planted wide on the threshold, and Bedwyr wondered why the man wasn’t currently fighting to hold that boundary, it being late spring.

“That’s not what we hear,” said Alun, his neighbor to the north.

“You’re losing your senses, then, or need better messengers. The Saxons give us no trouble.”

Bedwyr glanced at Arthur, worried he would speak up, but his cub was only watching the interaction closely.

“We’re no fools, Cynwrig. Two summers ago, you controlled the second river to the east. Now, you don’t.”

“Swampland,” this Cynwrig growled. “No good for crops or forage. We save resources not bothering with it.”

“And you allowed the Saxons to settle that much closer,” Alun said. “Perhaps you’ve struck up a friendship with them?”

“Trade,” Cynwrig said, belligerent, “and only when it favors us.”

“Well, then, you won’t mind if we move on through.”

“Yes, move on.”

“After a night in your hall, of course.”

Cynwrig’s eyes widened to be caught out. No lord could deny hospitality to visitors without causing a stir. “My hall is large but will not accommodate an army,” he hedged.

Alun dismissed that with a light wave. “Our men are accustomed to sleeping on the ground. They can find suitable spots around your settlement.”

He might as well have said they planned to lay siege to Cynwrig’s town, based on how the lord’s hands began to fidget, his gaze flickering suspiciously over the long queue of warriors.

“But may I suggest,” Alun said, still light, still friendly on the surface, “that you welcome our guests from the northern mountains. We are honored to include among our victorious band Arthur the Bear and his men.”

He gestured to Arthur, and Cynwrig’s gaze snapped to him. His jaw gaped for several breaths before he gathered his wits with obvious effort. Forgetting the need to guard his hall, he strode over to stand before Arthur.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, young man. I’ve heard much of your exploits.”

“Hardly anything exciting,” Arthur said with a false modesty every one of their trusted few had heard before but which would fool Cynwrig. “We defend Cymru. That is all.”

Alun snorted, disbelieving, and Cynwrig shook his head, in agreement with his neighbor over this, at least. “You and your men are welcome.” He looked at Bedwyr, a twitch under his eyelid. “Uthyr’s son?”

“Aye.”

“And this is my son,” Arthur said, drawing the lad forward. “Medraut, meet Lord Cynwrig ap Catell.”

Cynwrig’s eyes widened again at Arthur’s acknowledgment of his lineage. He squared his shoulders anew. Still had to look up to meet Medraut’s eye, though, and Bedwyr bit back a smile. “The very image of your father, lad, though perhaps you come by your raven’s hair through… your mother?” The man’s confusion was apparent, and Bedwyr wondered how much of his bond with Arthur had made it into the tales here.

Medraut bowed slightly. “Her hair looks like the full moon, my lord. But my Grandfather Uthyr’s hair is yet black.”

“Of course, of course. A house to be proud of. Please.” Cynwrig stepped to the side, every bit the welcoming host now. “Come inside. We’ve ale aplenty and a thirst besides for new tales.”

As the various southern lords instructed their men to camp where they could for the night, Bedwyr followed Arthur into the hall. It was humid and noisy, and a hitch in their rhythm, but they soon had ale and roasted meat and a solid roof overhead.

At least he wouldn’t have to stare at the stars tonight.

Chapter Text

A few things became apparent fairly quickly.

Cynwrig was no war lord, nor even a warrior. He enjoyed his hall and the variable company it drew. Enjoyed the exotic fripperies folk from afar offered for his attention. In those ways, he was like Rhys, the glaring difference being that Rhys would pick up a blade and do his duty for Cymru if called upon.

Cynwrig had instead surrendered a wide strip of territory to the Saxons in exchange for a peace he claimed was certain but seemed anything but. The land was wet and difficult to cultivate, but that wasn’t its most valuable aspect: it gave its owners river access, and a lot of things could be moved swiftly by water.

All of this had put the lord in conflict with every one of his Cymrish neighbors. They were, Arthur had to admit, not tripping over themselves to befriend one another either, but they agreed on one thing: Cynwrig was a liability.

He was also easily manipulated. In three days, they convinced him to take back the surrendered land by force, and all it took were a few tales.

Arthur knew that Bedwyr believed he secretly enjoyed the stories about them and their men. The tales were near-pure fantasy, some based on a grain of truth, others completely fabricated from breath and fancy. For instance, every tale about Morien emphasized his dark skin, sometimes to a comically repetitive degree. But then those same tales would claim he’d once feasted on seven lions and used the resulting strength to convert every man, woman, and child on the isle of Hibernia to the religion of the Christ. (When asked by a rapt listener if it was true, Morien had shrugged as if to say, You can see my skin for yourself… draw your own conclusions.)

In another, Palahmed and Safir had slain every conceivable sea monster during their journey from Arabia to Cymru. Gawain and his brothers had spent their boyhoods felling giants in the north using slings and eagles’ eggs. In one of the most popular, Arthur had been discovered in the forest as a babe and raised by a cranky wizard before being shoved across the threshold of some unsuspecting young couple who’d prayed for a son. Cai barked at that one, and they agreed to fill in Philip on his crankiness at the very next opportunity.

Yes, the stories were entertaining. But it wasn’t until they were in Cynwrig’s hall that Arthur realized the potential power in them, and not just as a means to free ale and shelter for the night.

And so, three days later, he found himself—by agreement among the southern lords—leading their combined contingent of warriors toward the territory in question, Cynwrig riding his favorite horse beside him.

When they camped at the first river, Arthur brought the lords together to solidify their strategy. The marshy land between the rivers was drier some distance upstream and down, and the waterways shallower as well, so they would split to cross. Then march toward each other and the Saxon settlement and drive the dogs back to their eastern origins.

“Do you think it’ll work?” Bedwyr asked him as they unfurled their bedrolls that night.

“I think we’ll get water in our boots. Maybe we should’ve taken Cynwrig up on his offer of horses.”

“Fuck that.”

Arthur chuckled at Bed’s discomfort. “What’ve you got against horses?”

“Same thing as the last time you asked. They’re unpredictable, moody beasts.”

“Hmmmm.”

“I’m predictably moody, thank you very much.”

Arthur grinned and leaned close to his ear. “Oh, I know it. And after this skirmish, I’ll be predictably hot-blooded. I trust you’ll know what to do with that?”

A slow smile lightened Bed’s rugged features. “Sooner you sleep, cub, the sooner we’ll find out.”

Cynwrig proved himself as much of a dead-weight pain in the arse as Arthur expected him to, but since he managed to founder his horse in a stretch of deep muck, he didn’t hold them back, either.

Despite the lord’s mishaps, or maybe thanks to them, the rest of the plan worked. Their two long flanks met each other just before dawn, wedging themselves between the second river and the Saxon settlement on its banks. Then they sent up a battle cry and charged the structures.

Systematically, they flushed the folk from their beds. Women and children fled eastward into the surrounding forest. They let them go, fighting only the men who chose to remain and try to defend their homes. Meanwhile, the army’s flanks curled deep into the forest, and as they advanced as a unit, they pushed the Saxons out of the settlement, funneling them toward the east, too.

Simple in the telling, but not easy, and leaving the settlement behind them brought as much uncertainty as relief as he and Bedwyr, and every man of their company, drove the Saxons deeper into the still-dark forest. But they outnumbered the invaders by a factor of ten, and soon came blinks of daylight ahead that signaled the sunrise and the edge of the trees.

To their credit, the Saxons didn’t give up easily, and he and Bed were still hacking and slashing when they emerged onto the broad, rolling meadow past the tree line. The dog they were fighting was a particularly large cur armed with a spear. The fire-hardened tip of it caught in Arthur’s shield, making a swipe to the fellow’s thigh awkward. The Saxon glared at him, teeth bared in savage desperation, and then he glanced upward, eyes going wide.

Arthur had seen such tricks before and wasn’t going to fall for this one. The Saxon let it go on too long, gawking and gaping, making quite the show of it as Arthur shoved at him to free his shield.

Then the man let go of his spear and took several blind steps backward. Arthur turned and followed his terrified gaze.

Hovering in the sky was a great winged creature the color of polished bone.

Arthur grabbed Bed to pull him back, scanned the men around them for Medraut, for Cai. The moment he spotted them, a gust of air hit his cheek, and he looked up just in time to see the creature—the dragon—whip its long tail, flap its leathery wings, and dive toward the earth.

It came to an impossible halt in the air only a few paces in front of him. It seemed to float there, weightless, the movement of its wings sending ripples through the tall meadow grass as it stared down its long snout at something on the ground.

At the Saxon.

A moment later, the beast sucked in a breath that sounded like the pull of a bellows, and then a deafening stream of fire blasted from its mouth.

~ ~ ~

Agravain strode swiftly through the dim corridors to Lura’s bedchamber. Now that he’d spoken to Gwen and Elain, he didn’t want to wait a moment longer.

He expected to have to rouse his daughter, but when he entered the chamber, he found her awake, staring at the beams under the roof.

Or, not awake but in some sort of dreaming state, for he had to jostle her shoulder.

“Lura lass. Lura.”

She startled, gasping. “Papa?”

“Nightmare?”

“N-no.”

He tugged her to his chest anyway and discovered she was trembling. She felt so small against him. “Are you sure?”

“Aye, Papa.”

He smoothed her hair. Had to believe he was doing the right thing. “How would you like to have an adventure?”

“What kind of adventure?”

“Well, I was thinking it’s past time you met your Grandmother Britte.”

Lura pulled back. Her eyes were wide, dark pools. “Truly?”

“Truly.”

Her grin was sudden, and the gap where she’d lost a milk tooth a few days before nearly stopped his breath.

He was doing the right thing.

He just hoped Mistress Britte would agree.

Chapter Text

It had looked him in the eye.

That was what Arthur couldn’t forget, what no one around him would let him forget it. Through the chaos of the beast’s departure, the stench of roasted human, the belligerent shouting toward the fleeing Saxons who, the boisterous camp.

The dragon loosed its fiery breath, killed Arthur’s enemy, and then hung there in the air, great broad wings flapping almost lazily, keeping it aloft somehow, and pinned him in place with huge, unblinking eyes. He’d stared back, body rigid, sword and shield up but irrelevant, certain he would be next. He had shoved Bed to the ground and was grateful he might survive. Hopefully, someone had Medraut by the collar, dragging him to safety.

Of course, Bed had scrambled up to put his body between Arthur and the beast, but not before it dipped its snout in what seemed a nod and hauled itself into the sky. Flew off to the north, growing so small so quickly that Arthur stood dazed for a moment, wondering if he’d imagined it.

He hadn’t, unless it had been some collective delusion shared by every man in the southern forces. To a man, they stood facing north, watching the creature’s departure.

The men of the camp swirled around him now, voices an excited babble. But for all their movement, for all that he could feel their gazes on him, no one approached him, not even the lords. Maybe that was because Bed had planted himself next to Arthur on this log by the fire, his expression daring anyone to come closer. Not only Bed, actually. Now that he looked around him, Arthur found himself surrounded by his men. They spoke more sedately to each other, voices edged with something like caution. Gahers was the first to approach, trailed by Gareth.

“May I follow it?” Gahers said, low.

“No,” Gareth said.

“Didn’t ask you,” Gahers said, watching Arthur intently.

“It’s long gone,” he said.

“It’ll be back.”

Would it? If the Saxon wolf had told Cai true, this wasn’t the dragon’s first appearance.

And, in his bones, he knew it would return.

“If it shows again, I want you both to follow it.”

Gahers looked disappointed, Gareth not much happier. Arthur stood, needing to move his restless limbs. He beckoned for Cai and Medraut to join him. Bedwyr rose and followed them through the crowd. Those in the camp watched them with a curiosity Arthur could feel on his skin. He set a hand on the back of Medraut’s neck, found the lad trembling.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.” He looked up at Arthur. “Was that truly the Ddraig?”

“I don’t know.”

He’d listened to tales of the Ddraig his entire life, of its power, its ruthlessness, its utter loyalty and protectiveness toward the folk of the northern mountains. He’d gazed at the stars in the night sky that defined its long curve, snout to tail, and wondered if the stars could coalesce into a body more suited for his own world.

And then, along the way, his ideas of the Ddraig had gotten mix up with the Pen y Ddraig who’d had ultimate authority over his being, and slowly but surely Uthyr had become the dragon to him, a man and the symbol of his house, in one.

He hadn’t believed the dragon a real being since he was a lad, and a young one.

Now, though.

“Take Sten and Giom,” he said to Cai, “and shift tonight. Range as far as you dare into Saxon territory. Find their wolves.”

“What!”

“Pretend to be of a distant Saxon tribe if you have to. Find out if there have been other sightings, what they’re saying about it.”

“I told you what they’re saying. They’re frightened, they won’t fight you.”

“They just did. I want to know how widespread the tales are. I want to know what the tales are.”

Cai was staring at him as if he were insane. Bedwyr, too.

“Look,” Arthur said, “I don’t know what that creature was. Do I want to believe it’s the Ddraig? Yes, frankly. Do I believe it? Not yet. But I don’t have to believe it if they do. We’re here to unite the southern lords. That’ll be a far sight easier if the enemy believes we have otherworldly allies.” He looked to the darkening sky to the north. “Tell them what you witnessed. Embellish all you wish. Shouldn’t be difficult for Sten—he seems a born tale-teller.”

“What if he is, brother? What if they disappear on me?”

“Then we already know what they look like. In both forms.”

“But what if…” Cai frowned. “What if the Saxon wolves recognize me?”

“Use it.”

Cai blinked. Arthur wrapped a hand around the back of his neck.

“I trust you, Cai. And this is something only you can do.”

A few heartbeats, and then Cai let go a shaky breath. “All right. We’ll leave tonight. But they’ll notice we’re missing.”

The two tallest men in camp, plus the prettiest? Most likely. “I’ll give them a half truth, that you’re scouting. Go on and tell Sten.” He turned to Medraut. “Go back with him. And stay close to Morien, eh?”

Medraut nodded. “Yes, Father.”

When they’d melted into the shadows, he turned to Bed. “Say it.”

“Say what?”

“Whatever your objection is.”

“Who says I object?”

“Historical precedence.”

Bed snorted, shrugged shoulders that still looked stiff. “Seems as good a plan as any.”

Arthur drew deeply of the cool night air. “What in the gods’ blood was that thing, Bed?”

“I don’t fucking know. But I was sure you were a dead man. That we all were.”

Arthur slipped his arms around Bed’s body, solid as the mountains that had made him. Bed’s arms came around him too, his hand fisted in Arthur’s shirt. His hair smelled of smoke and sweat, the skin of his neck tasted of salt.

“I’m still restless,” Arthur said. “Shift?”

Bed was still for a few breaths, his hold firm, but after a moment he nodded and followed Arthur deeper into the forest.

Chapter Text

The wolves ranged far that night, just inside the lands the Saxons claimed. Their settlements were easy to see; they tended to clear great swathes of surrounding land for planting and pasture. Even easier to smell, smoke rising from their huts, scents of farm animals and their manure, sharper odors of humans and their own waste.

Cai was reluctant to draw too close to the settled places. He’d come upon the Saxon wolf nearer the tree line, and if he had to seek out another such shifter while keeping an eye on his two charges, he’d rather stick close to the forest.

Every hundred paces or so, he sent out a thought, listened for a reply. They trotted north, joined eventually by the swelling quarter moon, but no response came to his calls. Not that his mind was silent, though. Difficult, in the company of Sten.

On their way north, he learned that Sten had three older brothers, all of whom he held in great esteem. Over hills and across streams, along the edges of field and through the forest, he regaled Cai with tales of his boyhood in which his brothers featured prominently. The eldest was calm and brave, the second fiercely competitive, the third a trickster, the root of every prank.

As Cai listened, he wondered if, someday, well into their old age (gods allowing), Arthur might tell such a tale of his boyhood. If he’d be able to sort through his memories and find anything admirable to say about Cai. He would never speak of Cai with the adoration Sten had for his brothers, but maybe their boyhood wasn’t where those memories would lie. If he could prove his loyalty now, in their prime, maybe over some distant future fire, Arthur might smile over Cai’s name.

Maybe.

What about you? he asked Giom. Any brothers?

One, Giom said. Younger by a few years. A pain in my arse.

Ah! Now here was someone he might have something in common with. How so?

Loud, boisterous, always seeking attention. Always getting it.

Cai huffed. Sounds familiar. Does he still live?

He does. He’s… a carpenter. In the west.

Wolf shifter?

Yes.

And your father?

Dead. He was, well, a healer.

Cai stopped in his tracks. Turned to Giom. Truly?

Giom dipped his chin. He traveled to, um, battle sites. Or perhaps places under siege? Tried to help the wounded.

The warriors?

No, the local folk. The ones caught in the conflict.

Cai turned and continued on, trying to reconcile that. What sort of folk wouldn’t be involved in a conflict if their warriors were fighting? Everyone had to defend their homes if the need arose. Of course, it had never happened in Uthyr’s mountains. No Saxons had ever made it even as far as their lookout towers, let alone their houses or hall. But if they had done, his people wouldn’t have been “caught” in a conflict not their own. It would have been their fight too.

Maybe it was different in the west. It was possible, he guessed, that a lord greedy for wealth or drunk on power might pick a fight against the best interests of his people. Not a lord worth following. Sounded like something Lot would have been capable of.

Or Morgawse, for that matter.

My father was a healer too, he said, but as he turned them back toward their camp, he could think only of Agravain and Lura, and hope they were all right.

~ ~ ~

Lura tripped, lurching forward. Agravain caught her by the wee pack she wore on her back. She was strong, his lass, even stronger than she’d been on the islands, thanks to Gwen’s care. But she was a child, and these were mountains, and they had been mountains for several days.

“Time to ride,” he said.

Stripping the clothes and boots his cousin had outfitted him with, he stuffed them into Lura’s pack and shifted. Shivered with it, shaking out his fur, and then she was clambering onto his back. He wasn’t a large wolf, not as tall as Cai at the shoulder, but he’d found he could carry her more easily in this form than in his other. Hold fast, he thought, though she couldn’t hear him, and he continued up the track.

They were close. At this point in the journey up the mountains with Cai and his father, Matthias had seemed to gain vitality, as if the breeze up the mountain were filling his sails, lifting him toward home. These heights weren’t Agravain’s home, but they had raised Cai and with luck they would keep Lura safe. He aimed his nose at the highest peak ahead, the one Cai called Eryri, and tried to imagine the wind was pushing him along too.

A summer afternoon wasn’t the best time to travel as a wolf. No settlements lay nearby, but there were plenty of sheep and goats grazing these uplands. Shepherds watching them, presumably. Good fortune was on their side, though. Either the shepherds were napping in the sun or occupied on the slopes over the ridge. He didn’t cause any commotion greater than to startle the sheep, who scattered toward distant clusters of trees.

When they were nearing the tower whose lookout had spotted Matthias, he veered from the track. Using a heap of boulders as shelter, he eased Lura from his back and shifted. Once he was dressed again, he lifted her up against his chest. She dozed there as he pushed onward into the late-day sun.

As expected, the lookout spied their approach. After a brief exchange, nods of recognition, he made his way along the wider, more worn path leading into the village. He heard her hammer long before her workshop came into view.

Others in the village saw him first, their faces brightening when they realized who he was, softening at the sight of Lura. She stirred, and he set her down. Taking her hand, he led her to the smithy.

Mistress Britte stepped onto the path just before they reached her workshop, hammer in hand. She squinted at him curiously before her eyes widened. “Agravain.” Her knuckles went pale on her hammer, and he held up his free hand.

“Cai is well.”

She exhaled, sharp, then glanced down, seeming to see Lura for the first time. “Your daughter?”

“Aye, mistress.” He stopped before her, looked down at Lura, who was staring at the woman. “Lura, this is Cai’s mother, Mistress Britte.”

“Hello, Grandmother.”

Britte drew a short breath, blinked. Then a shy sort of smile reshaped her features. “Hello, Lura.” After a moment, she turned to him.

“I need a favor,” he blurted before she could ask. “A big one.”

Chapter Text

Never in her life had Britte been talked into something so quickly.

She might have been embarrassed by it, or at least reprimanded herself over her haste, but everyone in the village had fallen victim to Lura’s charms in a single evening, so perhaps she’d give herself ’til tomorrow to have regrets.

The child had taken to her new surroundings with surprising ease. She’d had to do so at Gwenhwyfar’s, Britte supposed, so she’d had practice. And her Cymrish was very good, better than her father’s, so that worked in her favor. She was a forthright little thing, spoke to adults and children alike with a direct gaze and serious expression, and gods, but her eyes were Uthyr’s own, dark and arresting. By nightfall, his people were ready to throw down their lives for her.

The need for that protection was more concerning. The notion that Morgawse had traveled south for the first time since she’d left the mountains felt ominous. She’d done so to retrieve her granddaughter, Agravain said, and for a potential marriage to a Saxon, no less. Uthyr had sent messages to her occasionally over the years, updates on family and the place she’d once called home, but he’d never issued an invitation. Before Agravain left for the front again, Britte set a double watch at the towers.

He was stoic about it, but her heart had pinched for him even so. Her sons were grown, capable men, but that never made it any easier to bid them goodbye. He’d spoken a few gruff words to Lura in their own tongue, instructions to behave, no doubt, and then Britte had taken charge of the safety of a six-year-old girl. One who called her Grandmother.

Well, she could hardly do a worse job of it than Morgawse.

In all honesty, she hadn’t had to do much so far. Lura had introduced herself to nearly everyone, making her way around the hall like a visiting exotic, to the delight of everyone she spoke to. At the moment, she was sitting beside Tiro. He’d bent his silver head down to her dark-haired one, and they might as well have been two old friends swapping memories, the way Tiro was grinning.

“Precocious.” Mora sat down beside her, handed her a cup.

The summer ale tasted crisp and tart. “She is. Philip will have to turn right back ’round to go tell Uthyr.” Agravain had wanted to do it, had felt responsible for his mother’s arrival, but she’d convinced him to return to Cai. Philip could reach Uthyr more quickly, and selfishly she wanted Cai to have his shieldmate back by his side.

“She’s already asked to see my apothecary.”

“I’m sure she won’t be any trouble.”

Mora hummed doubtfully.

“Maybe it’s time you took on an apprentice.”

“You should talk! And a girl of six? Gods.”

Britte smiled at the horror on her daughter’s face. “Wolf helped me make a bracelet when I was younger than that.”

“Then you take her on.”

“I have done, and I’ve no idea what I’m going to do with her.”

Just then, Lura stood and gave Tiro a little bow. He returned it gravely, and then she was crossing the hall toward Britte. She stopped before her and blinked sleepily.

“Right,” Britte said and took her hand.

A quarter-hour later, having washed her face and rinsed her teeth without being told to, Lura climbed onto Uthyr’s side of the bed. Took hold of Britte’s shift and burrowed snugly against her. In a few breaths, she was asleep, leaving Britte to stare at the beams overhead and wonder what Uthyr would make of the news.

~ ~ ~

Uthyr groaned and rolled his shoulder. What he wouldn’t give to be in his bed, for these hands on his back to be Britte’s. But for that to be so, the Saxons would have to give up their relentless attempts to carve scoops of Cymru’s borderlands for their own, and that wouldn’t be happening anytime soon.

For now, he had this log to sit on and a campfire and Huw’s nine gnarled fingers to work out the knots. It had been a mild summer, on the dry side, and firm earth was easier to fight on than mud. And they’d only lost two men to the dozens they’d taken down so far. He was grateful for all those things.

He was not grateful for the dreams.

The raven, the raven, always the fucking raven. The gods were trying to tell him something, practically beating him over the head with it, but he hadn’t been able to figure it out. Couldn’t be about the Saxons; nothing about them reminded him of the bird, not in shade nor intelligence nor temperament. When he thought of dark, sharp, and keenly observant, he thought of Rhys. But Rhys was one of his oldest friends and a magpie besides. As was his son. Of the winged shifters he knew of, none were ravens.

As if summoned, an owl made its mournful call, just audible over the rumble of the camp.

Uthyr had had a lifetime’s practice of keeping his reactions to himself. This one was difficult, with Huw pressing on muscles that instantly wanted to tense. Uthyr tried to enjoy Huw’s blunt elbow under his shoulder blade for a while longer, but it was no use. Thanking him, he rose and made the usual excuse.

He walked deeper into the forest than necessary for a piss, but he was the only man out here who knew about Philip, so they kept these meetings discreet. That they’d only just had such a meeting had his gut wanting to twist. He shuffled as swiftly as he could toward the soft and now very human whoo! whoo! until he found the old fellow naked under a spruce.

“Britte’s fine,” Philip said, then shivered.

Uthyr’s heart settled back into his ribs. He stripped his shirt and handed it over. “Then why are you back so soon?”

Philip wrapped the fabric around his shoulders. “Agravain arrived at the village yesterday with his daughter. He left her in Britte’s care.”

Unease slid through Uthyr’s gut. “Gwen decide she’s had enough?” he asked lightly. But he knew before Philip spoke why Agravain would relocate his lass.

The same reason he’d done it the first time.

“Morgawse has come south.”

The raven.

Of course it was her.

“Where is she?”

“She was at Gwen and Elain’s, but then moved herself and her men to Arthur’s villa.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, but she took Galahad with her.”

“Insurance.”

“Yes. That’s what she said.”

What she said, but gods only knew what her endgame was.

“Uthyr, she plans to marry the girl to a Saxon.”

His spine went straight and chilly as an icicle. “The fuck she will.” He began to pace. “Does Arthur know she’s there?”

“No, we only just learned it from Agravain. He left again straightaway. Should be back with them by tomorrow, if luck holds. He’s going to set the hawks to watching the villa in turns.”

There had to be a reason Morgawse had chosen the place. Maybe only because it was empty and a day’s ride from Gwen’s. “She doesn’t know the child’s been removed to the mountains, I take it?”

Philip shook his head. “I flew there first. She’s still there and so are her men. Britte has set extra lookouts.”

Uthyr exhaled, but the relief was a shallow one. His wife was fierce, but his sister? Ruthless.

And not to be trusted, with a Saxon alliance in the making.

“I’ll send four men home tonight. If she sets so much as a toe past the gate, I want to know.” He looked up, caught the glint of stars through the treetops, and felt in a sudden pang how far-flung all those he cared about were just now. “And fly south. Bring me news of the lads. Tell me it wasn’t a mistake to send them down there.”

Chapter Text

Cai had thought he’d heard all of Sten’s tales of boyhood misadventure, but Cai had been wrong.

After the fifth (maybe the sixth?), he turned to the smaller wolf. Are any of these true?

Giom huffed. Your guess is as good as mine.

Of course they’re true! Sten’s ears stood straight up, indignant.

Cai lifted one brow.

Well, most of them.

Giom’s knowing chuckle filled Cai’s mind, and he turned back to the forest path. He should ask Agravain for more stories of him and his brothers. Surely, stuck on an island, four boys would have gotten up to some mischief—

A scent struck his nose that stopped him in his tracks.

He sniffed the cool, predawn air. Summer grass, warm earth stirred up underfoot, a squirrel somewhere near… and then there it was again. Strength, family, home.

His wolf came bounding around a curve down the track, and Cai didn’t think but launched himself forward. He thumped into Agravain, knocking them both to the ground. They rolled about, nipping and snarling, until Agravain sat up suddenly, glared at the other wolves.

Make yourselves scarce.

They trotted off, and Cai licked Agravain’s nose. They were helping me to scout.

And now they can fuck off, Agravain said, his eyes gleaming.

Cai shifted, and Agravain followed, and then Cai was pinned on his back, Agravain kissing him fiercely. Cai broke it long enough to ask, “She’s safe?” and for his man to nod, before he clutched at his short hair and kissed him back.

 It’d only been a couple of weeks, but it felt like months. His hands moved over Agravain’s body, trying to get their fill of the hard, compact muscle of him. Of his heat and authority. Agravain shoved his face into Cai’s neck, drawing a breath. He bit his shoulder lightly, then not so lightly.

“I missed you,” he growled, and Cai’s chest swelled. He gripped Agravain in hands still desperate.

“Show me how much.”

Agravain smirked, could see right through his cockiness. His eyes narrowed, and he looked as if he might punish Cai a bit, make him wait, but then Cai’s cock prodded him in the stones, and he groaned. “Just remember that you asked for it.”

Agravain fucked him there on the forest floor with the hard strokes Cai loved, each one ensuring his back would be covered with scrapes and scratches for days. Then he turned Cai onto his knees and entered him again. Slowed his strokes and rolled his hips just right, until Cai was scrabbling at the pine mulch. Pleasure flooded everything from his brain but the filth Agravain was panting into his ear. In return, he could offer only helpless groans and pleading whimpers, but they seemed to spur Agravain on. His strokes grew quicker and faster, a brutal stutter, and Cai braced a hand on a tree root. His cock slapping his belly, aching, needing, and then, finally, he was coming. He made a mess of himself and everything under him but forgot it when Agravain drove into him hard and groaned. They froze like that, two bodies forming a single arch, before collapsing onto the ground.

Agravain’s weight on his back had never felt so good. Cai reached up, wrapped a hand around the back of his neck, squeezed, and Agravain pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Cai laughed, sending leaf litter flying. “Why?”

“I wanted to go about that… I wanted to take my time. Now I won’t be able to try again ’til nightfall.”

Cai rolled over, dumping Agravain off his back. His body felt warm and languid. When he tipped his head to the side, Agravain’s eyes were half-lidded but watching him. Cai kissed him.

“I can wait,” he said, grinning. “Besides it’ll take you that long to believe what’s happened since you left.”

~ ~ ~

The bloody thing kept coming back. Kept spitting fire, kept driving back Saxons. Kept giving Arthur a good long stare just before it left again.

Made Bedwyr’s heart stop every fucking time.

Didn’t help that everyone around him had lost their minds. Well, Palahmed excepted, but he knew the value of caution. A fellow didn’t simply take the appearance of a creature like that as a sign of good things. Wasn’t as if it had introduced itself, said, Why, hello, yes, I too despise this Saxon plague. Who knew why it was doing what it did? It always flew off too swiftly for either of their hawks to follow, so they didn’t even know where it was coming from.

Maybe it had no reason, maybe it just enjoyed killing things. What would keep it from deciding to turn that fire on the Cymry? It made his skin crawl to begin with—no living being should be that color—but trying to predict its next move had Bedwyr’s innards as loose as if he’d eaten bad berries. It always flew off too swiftly for either of their hawks to follow, let alone Philip, who’d witnessed it the previous week. The old owl couldn’t fly that fast, but he’d set out immediately to tell Uthyr.

Bedwyr couldn’t even guess what his father’s reaction would be.

They moved south along the borderlands. They reclaimed stretches of land the Saxons had taken recently, and some they’d claimed not so recently. As they trekked and fought and won, as Cymru grew and the eastern dogs retreated, more and more men joined the campaign. There was a new lord at the campfire every evening, exclaiming over the dragon and its support for their cause. Its acknowledgment of Arthur.

Then one night, as Bedwyr was sitting next to his cub before the fire, rubbing an ache in his stump, one of the lords knelt on the ground in front of them and pledged his loyalty to Arthur.

Arthur went still. The excited babble around them quieted as men noticed the lord on his knee, head bowed. One by one, the lords approached, knelt, pledged. Arthur turned to Bedwyr, his expression calm but gaze burning.

They had done it. They’d come south at his father’s behest and united these lords, and summer was still high and hot.

Bedwyr wasn’t ready to celebrate. They had fought hard, but powerful men weren’t humbling themselves, giving over their authority and autonomy, just because Arthur was skilled with a blade.

They were awed by a flying beast that might turn on them at its whim.

A beast Arthur had no control over.

Someone pressed a cup into Bedwyr’s hand. He took a trembling gulp and glanced at Palahmed. The man looked as uneasy as Bedwyr’s roiling gut.

Gods help them all.

Chapter Text

“A dragon?”

Philip nodded, but the man had to be mad.

“You’re mad.”

“I saw it, Uthyr.”

He sat heavily on a stone. The chill of it crept through his trousers.

His earliest memory of his father (his only good memory of the man) was of Emrys showing him the dragon in the stars. Of learning what the sign of his father’s house meant and knowing—knowing!—that it was his, too. He’d grown into a man with the strength of that belief in his bones, the fire of the Ddraig in his blood, and as soon as he’d thought Bedwyr might grasp it, he’d taken his son out one autumn night and drawn it in the sky for him.

If he were honest with himself, Uthyr wasn’t certain he’d believed such a beast might exist in the world of people. The largest flying creature he’d ever seen was an eagle, and things with scales lived in rivers and under rocks. In caves, where they’d skittered away from him as a boy, or when he’d managed to grab one once, left him holding its tail.

The deepest slice, of course, wasn’t that dragons existed. He hadn’t known that shapeshifters were real until he’d caught Rhys at it. This ache in his chest wasn’t shock or fear. No, he’d felt this pain precisely twice, first when Betrys died, then again when his children left him. It was the ache of abandonment.

He was the Pen y Ddraig. The dragon was his. It had been his for his entire life, men knew him by its name. Yet it had never appeared to him, let alone to his enemies. Not the way it was doing for Arthur.

He’d known this day was coming from the moment Arthur had lifted his grandfather’s sword in his hall. He’d sent the man south to save Cymru from herself, after all. To do the work of the Pen y Ddraig without the title.

No wonder the dragon had shown itself. It had to, to make up for Uthyr’s failure.

He heaved a sigh.

“I’m sorry,” Philip said quietly.

“Don’t be. We knew he would achieve this. I should have backed him.”

“Go with him, you mean?”

“I thought it was his challenge to meet. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Maybe I didn’t want to be there when he succeeded.”

“There’s no shame in that.”

“Isn’t there?” Worse, maybe he hadn’t wanted to be there if Arthur failed. Hadn’t wanted to be allied to the attempt. “I should have named him before he left. And I should’ve gone with him.” He peered through the trees toward the camp. “How many days south are they?”

“Ten, perhaps?”

His men wouldn’t grumble. They respected Arthur, liked him. In hindsight, a few had seemed surprised they weren’t accompanying him south.

Huw would give him that look, the one that said told you as much, but what else was new?

“Let Britte know where I’m bound.”

“Of course.”

He drew a deep breath, tried to shake off a sense an unease creeping up his back.

“Tell me something I might take pride in, Myrddin. How are my grandsons?”

~ ~ ~

Galahad sprinted through the forest, small sharp rocks biting into his bare feet, a reaching bramble clawing at his cheek.

As soon as he showed himself to Arthur, his hawk cousins had tried to follow him north. For some reason, he hadn’t considered that possibility. Maybe Aunt Morgawse had because all she said was, “Fly faster, then.”

He’d tried. He was more powerful in the air than the hawks, so for several nights he was able to outpace them.

But tonight one of them had tried something new: he’d flown north some distance—maybe to the spot where he’d previously lost Galahad—and waited. When Galahad flew past on his way home, the hawk had taken off after him.

He’d had only half the time to put miles between them, and his shoulders hurt now. So did his lungs and legs and feet, and all he could think about was the gap between the forest and the nearest wall of the villa.

He gasped a prayer and burst from the trees.

It wasn’t the best approach, what with the two willow fences and the low stone wall, and before those the dewy slope he slid down on his arse after his feet betrayed him. But he cleared it all, and just as he was nearing the main building, risked a glance over his shoulder.

A hawk thumped down a couple of strides behind him. Its shape swelled to a man’s, and Galahad yelped and turned back to the villa. The door to the kitchens lay ahead, a low, dark arch in the wall. Only a few steps more—

A heavy weight hit him in the back, dragging him to the ground. His cousin grunted as Galahad landed on him.

“Got you! Gareth said you’d be for Eryri, but he doesn’t know everything.”

Gahers. Galahad threw elbows, heels, anything to try to dislodge him, but his arms and legs were tight bands around Galahad’s chest and shins.

“Stop struggling, you midge. As it happens, my mother’s in residence here. Wait’ll I tell her she’s got a dragon shifter creeping about.”

Hold, did Gahers not realize…

His mind raced. He could salvage this. Making his voice as young and innocent as he could, he said, “Cousin Gahers?”

The man on his back went still, and then he was turning Galahad onto his back and peering down at him. “Gally?”

“I—I was out swimming. At the little pond, you know the one. In the forest? With the spring?”

“Swimming.” Gahers frowned. “At night?”

“The moon’s full. It looks nice on the water.” He swallowed hard, took a chance. “Did you say dragon?”

“Aye.” Gahers shook his head. “I chased it from the south. Thought I’d caught it, thought you were a shifter, lad.”

“Er, no, I’m only twelve.”

“No, of course not, sorry, Gally.”

“Galahad.”

“Right. Galahad. Here, let me help you up.” Gahers knelt back, held out a hand. “You really need to be careful out here—”

A shadow emerged from the arched doorway and swung something.

Galahad scrabbled backward. “No! Wait!”

Whatever it was, it struck Gahers under the ear, and he toppled to the side.

Galahad stared at his limp form. He couldn’t tell if the man was breathing.

“Get inside.” Aunt Morgawse dropped what turned out to be a piece of firewood.

“I told him I was swimming. He believed me.”

“Go, Galahad.”

“Will he be all right?”

“Now, damn you!”

He scrambled to his feet and into the dark kitchens.

Chapter Text

Lura stared at the beams overhead, dark against the slightly less dark underside of the thatch. Her heart was pounding in her ears, her belly still queasy from the swooping flight of Galahad’s escape.

Well, she hoped he escaped. She lost sight of him as soon as he shifted back to a boy.

Slowly, the beating in her chest became less like a horse galloping and more like a gull spooked by a leaping fish. She lay in the middle of Grandmother Britte’s big bed, its blankets soft against her fingers. Grandmother hadn’t been sleepy after all, she guessed, or maybe she’d had her first sleep and was doing her vigil work as she sometimes did int eh dead of night.

Or maybe she had company. Lura sat up to listen, and there. Voices from the main room.

Had Grandfather Uthyr come home? Or was he Uncle Uthyr? He was Britte’s husband but also Grandmother Morgawse’s brother… She shook her head. It was confusing. She would call him whatever he asked her to, but she had to meet him first. She slid off the bed and padded to the bed chamber door. Opened it just enough to peek out.

It was only Master Philip, the one they called the Myrddin here. He was kind to her, and she liked him well enough, but he wasn’t Uncle Uthyr.

Grandfather Uthyr.

Whatever.

“A dragon!” Grandmother Britte said.

Lura gripped the door post.

“I swear it,” Master Philip said.

In her days here, Lura had noticed that Grandmother had many sorts of stares. Like when she was concentrating on her work in the smithy, that was one sort. Or when she was watching other folk in the hall at night, that was another. She gave Aunt Mora a different stare—two, actually—one that challenged and another, when Mora wasn’t looking, that was proud. A few times, Lura had seen the stare that said Grandmother was not impressed by something, or someone. She was glad she’d never been the aim of that one.

Then there was the stare Grandmother used on Master Tiro when he was telling a tale. That was the one she was giving Master Philip now.

“I know what you’re going to say, Britte.”

“You woke me for this?”

“I’m telling you—”

“How much?”

“How much, what?”

“How much did Uthyr pay you for this joke?” Grandmother stood up from the hearth bench and raised her arms. “Are there so few Saxons to fight? If he’s that bored, he can go have a chat with his sister!”

A shiver went down Lura’s back.

“Or he can come back here,” Grandmother said, “if he’s got nothing better to do.”

Master Philip gave her a wee smile. “Trust me when I tell you he’d love nothing more.”

“Well?”

“Look,” said Master Philip. “I know it’s difficult to believe. But I saw it myself, Britte—don’t give me that look, I’m not blind yet.” It was the kind of thing most people would snap, but the Myrddin sounded like he was making fun of himself. And like he knew Grandmother very well. “You can believe me or no, but Uthyr asked me to relay two things.”

Grandmother crossed her arms under her bosom. “Thing the first?”

“Uthyr has decided to go south, to join Arthur.”

“Oh.” Grandmother looked down and picked at a thread on her sleeve. “Good. United front, that’s smart. Thing the second?”

“He’s going to name Arthur the Pen y Ddraig.”

Grandmother’s arms fell to her sides, and her jaw dropped. This was a stare Lura hadn’t seen yet. “But… He’s…” Her mouth clapped shut, and she pointed at Master Philip. She looked as if she couldn’t make words for several heartbeats. When she did speak, it was a whisper. “Is he all right, Philip? Is Uthyr ill? Is he…”

“Britte—”

“Gods, is he dying?”

Master Philip chuckled, which Grandmother did not appreciate. This stare was a glare.

The Myrddin hushed and stood, his robe swishing against the flat stones of the hearth. “Uthyr is sound, only the usual aches and pains of the season.” He was holding his hands out to Grandmother as he spoke, and his knobbly knuckles looked like they probably ached too. “But he believes he should have shown Arthur the respect of the title before he left for this mission.”

“Arthur’s only thirty-three!”

“Uthyr claimed the title before he was twenty-five.”

“He’s Uthyr.”

Master Philip dared to smile again. “Do you truly not understand how widespread the tales of your son are? All of Cymru spins yarns of him now.”

“There’s taking stupid mercenary risks, and then there’s having the wisdom to lead people!”

“Was Uthyr so wise at twenty-five?”

Grandmother huffed.

“What I can tell you, Britte, is that Arthur has succeeded in uniting the southern lords. And this beast—this dragon, evidently—played a part—” He broke off suddenly, and looked right at Lura.

With a start, she realized she’d taken a step into the main chamber. Grandmother turned to her, and it felt as if she could see right into Lura’s heart, right into her mind, that if she stared long enough, she’d discover who the dragon was and that Lura could follow his flights because Lura had been the one who—

“Is there truly a dragon?” she asked.

Grandmother held out a hand, beckoned Lura closer. She let go of the door, though she didn’t want to, and approached her. Even when Grandmother knelt, Lura had to look up to meet her eyes. “You’re safe here, child.”

“But what if it flies here?”

“Uthyr wouldn’t…” Grandmother glanced at Master Philip, then pulled Lura against her. “Your Uncle Arthur won’t allow that. He’ll be Pen y Ddraig.”

“He can talk to the dragon?”

Grandmother didn’t say anything right away, and so Lura knew that when she did, it would be a lie.

It was.

“Of course,” Grandmother said and squeezed her. “That’s the best part of being the Pen y Ddraig.”

Chapter Text

Morien had a bad feeling.

He was no stranger to bad feelings. He supposed he’d experienced as many as any other man. Being pushed out of the nest by his mother hadn’t been all that pleasant. Neither had his father’s initial reaction when Morien arrived on his doorstep those many years ago. And there had been the variety of difficult emotions since then, but they were the sort that seemed typical for folks: sorrow, jealousy, anger, heartbreak.

It took him a while to recognize this most recent bad feeling because, well, his life had been surprisingly devoid of difficulties since Safir had come into it. Or, not since he’d come into it; Safir had been a right pain in his arse for a long time. A long time. But from the moment they’d found their common ground, their… agreement… Morien’s life had been quite enjoyable. The man was still a tickling annoyance sometimes, but—and Morien would never admit this to him—he sort of liked it. Having Safir’s attention and appreciation focused solely on him was so intoxicating, he might as well have glugged down some dubious potion concocted by a traveling mystic.

And also, the dragon was terrifying. Morien’s skin came over with gooseflesh every time it appeared, its scaly hide the same sickly pale shade as the mushrooms he knew not to collect when he foraged. Its wings crackled as it flapped them, and he could make out every delicate bone beneath the leathery undersides. It kept its hind legs tucked up as it swooped and hovered, but the claws curling from its toes looked sharp as knapped obsidian.

It had taken him a long while to gather the courage to look at its head. At the deep slice of its jaw, the gleaming teeth revealed when it drew back its lips. The nostrils that flared just before it breathed a fire almost liquid. The low crimson glow in its throat afterward as the creature coughed smoke.

The dragon had shown itself many times before Morien looked higher. Bedwyr and Palahmed had come down hard on the side of caution, trying to protect their partners from the thing. Their army had vanquished numerous Saxon settlements, sending those who managed to escape fleeing to the interior of their lands. The lords of the southern territories had begun to accrete around Arthur and this campaign, and then they had pledged their loyalty to him and the mission, and still Morien hadn’t looked at the dragon’s eyes.

And then he did and immediately wished he hadn’t.

A man might live a long, happy life in ignorance, but one discovery could send that ignorance—and the carefree existence it allowed—up in an acrid cloud of ash.

When he’d finally grown brave enough to follow the bony ridge of the dragon’s snout up to its eyes, dread had flooded his heart.

He knew those eyes.

He’d known them from their birth.

~ ~ ~

Aunt Morgawse shouted for her guards, then directed them to carry Gahers to the chamber she’d chosen for herself. She swept into the kitchens but stopped when she spotted Galahad.

“Wet your head,” she ordered.

“What?”

“You told him you were swimming,” she said as if he were Lura’s age.

But she was right, and he was lucky Gahers hadn’t noticed. He crossed to the pump in the corner and worked the handle until water gushed from the spout. He doused his head hastily and followed her receding footsteps through the villa.

When they first arrived, Aunt Morgawse hadn’t claimed the largest bed chamber as he thought she should. The chamber Uncle Arthur shared with Uncle Bedwyr boasted a hearth, several rugs on the stone floors and walls, high shuttered windows, and a wide bed piled with furs.

Morgawse had chosen the smallest chamber. No windows and no hearth, not even a brazier. He was pretty sure none of Arthur’s men slept there—they wouldn’t fit, not on the narrow bed that took up most of the space. Gahers lay there now, awake and clutching his head. Aunt Morgawse sat on the edge of the bed, petting his hair. She cooed in sympathy as if she hadn’t been the one who’d knocked him out cold.

Gahers groaned and said something Galahad couldn’t understand. Aunt Morgawse replied, her voice soft and motherly but gruff with the tongue of the northern islands. One of her guards arrived with a cup, which she handed to Gahers and watched him drink. The guardsman brushed past Galahad to stand with two others in the corridor.

“Now, son, what’s brought you here in such a rush you ran into the villa wall?”

Gahers protested, but his mother said only, “In Cymru we speak Cymrish,” and Galahad stood taller. She’d done that for him, so he would understand their conversation. Maybe she wasn’t as cross with him as he’d thought.

Of the four brothers, Gawain spoke the best, in Galahad’s opinion. But Gahers managed serviceable Cymrish as he told his mother she was under threat by a vicious dragon.

“Vicious! What makes you believe so?”

“I’ve seen it kill Saxons, dozens of them.”

“Dozens,” Morgawse echoed, raising her eyebrows at Galahad. “So many?”

He shook his head. It was a ridiculous exaggeration. He’d killed the one, but he’d been so sickened by the smell he hadn’t done more than scorch the ground after that. It had been enough to send the enemy running. That and their belief that Arthur’s forces fought with the Ddraig’s blessing.

“Maybe not dozens,” Gahers allowed, “but if it found out you’ve welcomed Saxons in your hall, it might not take kindly to you.”

“And what makes you think it would come here?” she said.

“It always flies north after a battle. I wanted to follow it the first time, but Arthur wouldn’t let me. Gareth and I tried after the second time, and the third, but it wasn’t until tonight I managed to tail it so far. It was over the forest just outside! I could have sworn it landed in the trees.”

Aunt Morgawse chuckled, lifting her open hands. “As you can see, we are quite safe. Not a dragon in sight.”

It took everything in Galahad not to shrink back from the door post. Even so, Gahers noticed him then.

“Sorry, lad. Didn’t mean to tackle you to the ground. Or, well, I did, but only because I thought you were… anyway, sorry.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“We’re all fine,” Aunt Morgawse said, sort of sighing, looking at Gahers as if he were still a little boy doing silly things. “But since there’s a dragon about,” she added dubiously, “what news of our Lura?”

“Oh, she’s well. Mistress Britte—”

Gahers broke off and went still.

His mother went still too, her hand hovering in the air above his head. Slowly, she drew it back and calmly twined her fingers in her lap. “Mistress Britte?”

“Is… is visiting Cousin Gwen. And Lura. They’re getting on like thieves.”

“Are they.” Aunt Morgawse looked at Galahad full on then, but he could only shrug. “So, if I were to return to town to visit my granddaughter, I might meet Uthyr’s new wife?”

“Aye.” Gahers looked at him, too, but Galahad couldn’t know why. “At Gwen’s.”

Aunt Morgawse rose suddenly from the bed and strode toward Galahad. Stepping past him, she grabbed the sleeve of one of the guards, tugging him down to murmur something in his ear. Nodding, the man left. Aunt Morgawse turned to Galahad. “Did you know?” she whispered.

He tracked Uncle Arthur and Grandfather Uthyr, not the grumpy old smith. But he could feel Gahers watching him, so he only gave his head a little shake.

His aunt’s gaze seemed to go flat, and she walked past him as if he weren’t there anymore.

“Feeling better?” she asked Gahers. She didn’t sit down again.

“My head hurts,” he said.

“As does mine,” she sort of growled, and Galahad saw the man’s shoulders tense.

Heavy footfalls sounded in the corridor as the guard returned. He was carrying something under a cloth. He handed it to Morgawse still covered.

“Get up,” she said to her son.

“What is that?”

“Up, Gahers. We’re leaving.”

Morgawse called out, and the two guards came into the chamber. Gahers sat up at that, then froze when his mother drew away the cloth.

She was holding a bird cage.

Gahers bolted from the bed, but he was no match for the guards. In a heartbeat, they had him on his back, pinned by his arms and legs. Morgawse knelt and curled her hand over his throat.

“Shift.”

Gahers struggled.

“Shift!”

“No! Mother, please—”

“Do as I say, or I kill him.”

She was pointing at Galahad.

His heart kicked at his ribs, and he almost bolted, himself. But the chamber sat at the end of the corridor, and his escape was blocked by the third guard. Gahers was looking at him with wide, wild eyes. His back arched as he tried to swallow against his mother’s grip. Finally, he nodded.

A moment later, Morgawse was locking the hawk in the cage. She pulled the cloth back over it and stood. “Make ready,” she said to her guards. “It’s a journey of five days, at least.”

The men had gone before Galahad’s logic caught up to him. “Mama’s only a day away, not five.”

But she only shook her head in disgust. “Keep up, Galahad. If you can.”

Chapter Text

The mouse scurried from tree to tree, and then waited there, deep in the forest. When the two bears ambled into the small clearing, the mouse twitched its whiskers, anticipating.

Nothing happened right away. The bears nosed around the undergrowth for several hundred of the mouse’s rapid heartbeats. Now and then, the first bear would swing its great head toward the second, or the second would lift its chin sharply toward the first. They were roughly of a size, the mouse noticed, though the second bear had darker fur than the first, nearly black but with some silver strands at its muzzle and down its broad back. This second bear’s front right leg was shorter than the rest, with no paw.

The mouse quivered under its cover of dry leaves.

The first bear pushed its shoulder into its companion’s. When it got no response, it did it again, forcefully enough so the second bear rounded on it, lip raised to bare its teeth. The first bear feinted, and the second took the bait, charging it. They hit the ground with a great thump and scuffle, and then, between one blink and the next, they were no longer bears.

They were men. One with long copper hair, the other with black hair, silver in its beard, and one hand.

The mouse allowed itself a wriggle of self-congratulation and turned to go, for it would take a while to scamper back. But the sounds from the clearing changed, and it paused, curious.

The men had been growling a moment before, not unlike the bears, and grappling like wrestlers at the fair. Now they were locked body to body, muscles taut through their pale skin as they stared at each, teeth still gleaming. Arthur relented first (easy enough, he was on top) to bury his face in Bedwyr’s neck. Uthyr’s whelp struggled, tried to throw his man off, but Arthur only seemed to relax, spreading his gangly limbs and making himself heavy, all the while nuzzling at his shieldmate’s throat.

Bedwyr grabbed his hair and pulled him up, glaring at him. He said something, and the mouse perked its ears, but the words were too low a rumble to discern. Their meaning became clear soon enough, though, as Arthur slid down his body. The man’s cock lay hard on his belly, as red and angry as he was. Arthur lifted it in his long fingers, gave it a slow swipe of his tongue, and then closed his mouth over it.

The mouse shivered. It had seen such things, in night-shadowed niches off the hall. Heard these sounds in the stables, when the hands working there thought they were alone and well-hidden. Once, it had followed its prickling senses through the church and its burial yard to the smaller building where the cleric and his subordinates slept to find the holy man engaged in a different sort of blessing.

And the mouse had known this about these two. Had heard they were blood-bound and assumed it extended to the physical. Not as much of a revelation as that they were fellow shifters, after all.

But it was one thing to speculate, quite another to witness.

Bedwyr was still growling, still clutching Arthur’s hair. He chuffed orders— suck it harder, take it deeper— and the mouse thrilled that their so-called leader might lower himself so.

What he did instead was somehow worse. Arthur slowed his movements. Gentled his lips, murmured soft words. Worshiped his shieldmate’s cock as if it were the most precious thing on God’s earth.

Bedwyr came on the loud groan of a man tortured, so neither of the two heard the owl’s cry, but the mouse did. Awareness shot through its body, and it burrowed more deeply under the loam.

In the clearing, all was quiet until, eventually, one man rose and left.

~ ~ ~

Medraut thought his life couldn’t get much stranger, and then Sten sat down beside him at the campfire and asked how he was faring.

The query itself wasn’t so strange. How goes it? was a fairly typical thing to ask someone, especially after a challenging day, when everyone gathered around the fire to celebrate the fact they’d survived.

It was also the sort of thing a person might ask just to start a conversation. To break in. To fit in. As the newest men to join Arthur’s band, Medraut could understand why Sten or Giom might wish for a handhold they could use to bond to the others. (Of course, they could contribute plenty as smiths, and they did, working tirelessly into the night to repair weapons as well as they could while the forces moved farther south.)

No, it wasn’t Sten’s first question that nearly knocked Medraut off the log he was sitting on, but what he said shortly afterward.

It wasn’t unusual for Sten to say weird things. Cymrish wasn’t his mother tongue, and though he’d made an obvious effort to learn it, sometimes it caught his words in its web and garbled them. The man had a good humor about him and was the first to laugh at himself when he said something silly or confusing.

He wasn’t laughing tonight.

First, he said, “Giom doesn’t want me to say this.”

Then he said, “It could change all that comes after.”

And while Medraut was trying to puzzle that out, Sten said, “You must talk to this dragon.”

Medraut stared at him, and then he laughed. “It’s a dragon.”

“I know this,” Sten said.

“It doesn’t speak.”

“Are you certain?”

He wasn’t, he supposed. Just because it hadn’t uttered a word didn’t necessarily mean it was mute. But the newts he’d caught on the riverbank as a boy hadn’t spoken either, and besides, if the dragon were going to say something, wouldn’t it speak to his father?

“Why me?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you,” Sten said.

“Why not?”

The man looked immensely uncomfortable for a moment, gripping one big hand with the other, then said, “For reasons.”

Medraut sighed and looked around the fire. On the surface of things, the men were jubilant. They hadn’t had such a successful season against the invaders in living memory, and also, he suspected, every single one of them was feeling the same shuddery elation he was that a dragon—honest and truly—had decided to fight their cause with them and therefore hadn’t turned them into lumps of charcoal.

Not yet, anyway.

Maybe that was why there was also a thread of tension just underneath the levity. Uncle Bedwyr was making no secret of how little he trusted the creature, though he’d been circumspect enough that the lords hadn’t caught on. He and Arthur went into the forest together most days to shift, and maybe to argue too, Medraut now realized, for his father often came back to camp alone.

What if Medraut could do something to ease the tension? He would be helping his uncle, his father, and himself, frankly, because even though the dragon was fighting with them, it didn’t precisely feel friendly.

But it couldn’t speak!

“It can’t speak, Sten.”

The broad man turned to the campfire, squinting at it. After a long moment, he seemed to make a decision. When he looked at Medraut, his blue eyes shone fiercely.

“Imagine first time you meet me I am in my wolf body. Do you believe I can speak?”

~ ~ ~

Arthur strode back into camp, the taste of Bed on his tongue.

They still had that, at least.

Cai fell in beside him. “Where’s your shieldmate?”

“Sulking.”

“The only man I know who complains about success.”

And about getting his cock sucked, but he wouldn’t share that. Might scar poor Cai for life. “Thank you. I told him as much. Made him even grumpier, if you can imagine it.” He scanned the camp, almost subconsciously noting the locations of each of his men. Everything seemed in order, everyone content enough, though Medraut was sitting next to Sten, his expression slightly alarmed. “What do you suppose Sten just said to him?”

Cai snorted. “Only the gods know. He’s got three brothers at home and a wealth of tales about them. Ask me how I know.”

He looked at Cai sidewise. “Speaking of shieldmates, where’s yours? You two have been slipping into the forest a fair amount yourselves since he got back.”

A blush rose on Cai’s cheeks. When they were younger, he would’ve denied it. He did shake his head now too, but a little smile curved one side of his mouth. “Shut it. He and Gareth are playing some impossible strategy game from their soggy homeland.”

“Someone’s jealous,” he said, elbowing Cai in the ribs.

“Am not. Arsehole. Anyway—”

Arthur grinned.

“—the men are ready to set out tomorrow morning. We’re all looking forward to proper beds and proper food, cooked by someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Arthur’s belly growled at the prospect. “A fresh berry pudding.”

“Honeyed sweetcakes.”

“Butter.”

Cai groaned. “Butter.” He shook his head. “Stop distracting me.” Taking Arthur’s arm in a firm grip, he veered them away from the central fire. When they were well away from the crowd there, he said, “Philip brought a message while you were in the forest.”

Arthur frowned. Philip always announced his arrival with his mournful call, but Arthur hadn’t heard it. “Suppose I was preoccupied.”

Cai was looking at him, unimpressed. “The pine needles in your hair told me that much. At any rate, it was good news. Uthyr’s bringing his men south to join the campaign.”

He wasn’t proud of the stab of possessiveness he felt—this was his campaign, his success—but it was swept away with Cai’s next words.

“And brother: he plans to name you the Pen y Ddraig.”

Chapter Text

If he’d thought things were happening too quickly before the campaign season started, now that they were in it—nearly past it—Bedwyr couldn’t seem to grasp hold of anything.

They’d beaten back the Saxons so soundly they were now headed toward Caerllion for an indeterminate amount of time and, in his opinion, premature rest from fighting. The days still were hot, the Saxons still armed and hungry for land and probably vengeance too, no matter what anyone claimed, and yet they were, what? Going to take half a month off to enjoy the delights of town?

He couldn’t say he wasn’t looking forward to fresh food, bread baked by masters of the craft, perhaps even a bed with a mattress. He’d be lying if he even whispered such things. But if they were occupied fighting, they would find themselves surrounded instead by these southern lords and their notions. And what good could come from that?

They needed to stay in one place, though, to wait for Uthyr.

Or so Arthur had proposed once he’d already been convinced to come to this next town. Uthyr would be able to find them more easily, he’d argued, as if Bedwyr’s father didn’t have four different bird shifters in his acquaintance who could lead them directly to his heir.

Of course, they hadn’t seen Gahers for a few days since he’d chased the dragon north, but that was the least of Bedwyr’s concerns just now.

In a matter of a week or two, the man walking next to him would become the Pen y Ddraig. His shieldmate, his… his Arthur would take on the mantle Uthyr had worn for most of his life.

It was right. He knew it to the marrow of his bones, had expected it and prepared himself for it. He could say with complete honesty that he didn’t envy Arthur the title. He held no jealousy for it, nor resentment that his father considered Arthur the heir to that title. Sometimes, blood didn’t matter. Sometimes, a man proved himself the better choice, and a wise leader recognized it.

As did a wise partner.

But a man blood-bound to another on the rise was justified in scanning the horizon for every possible threat. And the horizon was suffocatingly close.

Arthur laughed at something the lord at his other shoulder said. If Bedwyr had thought they were surrounded by clinging, fawning southerners now, it was about to get worse. Word had spread through camp that Uthyr was headed south, that he intended to pass his authority to Arthur, and messengers had been sent to every corner of Cymru with the tidings. They would converge on Caerllion, those many lords, to witness the transfer of power, and Bedwyr could sense them gathering like fingers around his throat.

How could he hope to keep Arthur safe from that many? He had his cub’s ear, for what little good that did, and their men would look after him as well, but the way Arthur was chumming around with the lords, well. Bedwyr preferred their odds on a battlefield of Saxons.

“Just over this rise,” said Lord Cynwrig from his fat pony. “Prepare to be stunned.”

Bedwyr rolled his eyes, but then they topped the rise.

He had been to towns. This was something altogether different. Maybe even a city. The sprawl of buildings stretched as far as he could see, from the bank of a river so wide as to be a bay, to the edge of the forest far to the west. Ships lined the harbor like dozens of pups suckling at the teat, and more were coming and going on the broad stretch of water, their sails painted in every shade imaginable. And he had thought the docks at Rhys’s impressive.

Everywhere he looked, there was movement. It reminded him of the time when he and Cai were lads and they’d discovered a rotten tree standing in the forest. Being boys who wished they were warriors, they’d challenged each other to topple it. They’d swung at it with fallen limbs of other trees, and when Bedwyr managed to knock the top off, termites had swarmed out, scurrying and then flying, landing on them both.

He hated that his eyes sought solace now in the steady, unmoving church at the center of the settlement. Easy to spot, though, thanks to its spire that pointed right at the midday sun.

“It directs the minds of the townsfolk to God,” said the monk that traveled with Cynwrig.

“Hm,” Bedwyr said. “I always thought sheep were too busy shitting where they eat to notice the sky.”

The monk glared at him, his outraged gaze scraping Bedwyr up and down, and then he jerked his robes around him and moved primly away.

Bedwyr smiled for what felt like the first time in weeks. He looked sidewise to share the joke with Arthur, only to be met with a flat, gray stare.

“What?” Bedwyr turned forward again. “Don’t pretend you haven’t said the same,” he mumbled.

Whether Arthur heard him or not, it didn’t matter, for the lord next to him began to extol the wonders of the city’s indoor baths, and the trajectory of Bedwyr’s evening was set. They would spend the next several hours in a series of pools, surrounded by strangers of dubious motive, naked of any protective clothing or weapons.

He thought of the termites, and his skin set to crawling.

Chapter Text

Arthur settled back again the smooth, stone lip of the great pool and sighed. His breath swirled the mist before him briefly before more steam rose in its place. The heat of the water permeated his muscles as every concern in his mind drifted up and away to mingle with the voices of the other bathers in the cavernous space.

He could get used to this.

They had their hot springs in the mountains, and they made a point to enjoy hot baths at Caron’s at the end of each campaign season. This structure was something else entirely. It reminded him of the first time he’d spied Caron’s brothel; he’d never seen a building with two stories before. This one didn’t have a second level, but its roof had been built as if it had. It soared overhead, a great stretch of beams so high they might as well have been a forest canopy.

That would have inspired awe enough, but the walls and floors were covered in tiny, colorful tiles that looped and curled in decorative borders, highlighting intricate mosaics of warriors battling fantastical beasts. A lion with three heads. A great fish big enough to swallow a ship. A creature whose body resembled a goat but one with wings and the head of a woman, her hair streaming wild, her mouth full of fangs. He was grateful he only had to fend off Saxons.

“Gwen would love that one,” he said to Bed, pointing to the image.

Bed grunted.

Arthur had drawn him aside as soon as Cai told him of Uthyr’s intentions. It had felt enormous—still did—and he hadn’t wished Bedwyr to be blindsided by the news. And he wasn’t. He’d scarcely reacted.

But that was the thing. It was exciting, what Uthyr planned to do, what it meant for their future. They would rule the mountains. Maybe even more, if they made the right alliances. In just one campaign season, and not even a whole one, they had united the tribes of the south, and now lords from all over Cymru were traveling to Caerllion to witness his elevation.

Was it too much to believe that someday they might order the construction of a bath complex like this one? When he was a lad, his grandfather Marcus had told him about baths he’d seen when he’d served in the Roman army and the one he’d refurbished in their villa stronghold across the narrow sea. The latter hadn’t boasted mosaics, but he and Papa Wolf had enjoyed it well enough. Marcus had considered it an essential part of civilized society.

Surely the grandson of a Roman soldier was due the same if he could bring about peace for all of Cymru.

He glanced sidewise to Bed, found his proud brow furrowed in worry.

He would convince him.

He would.

~ ~ ~

Safir nudged Morien’s shoulder. “Only you would be so watchful in such a relaxing place.”

“Not only me,” Morien said.

Safir’s slow smile was salacious, and his gaze flicked about the great chamber. “You got me. I’m enjoying the scenery.”

“That’s leering, not watching.” And Morien wasn’t the only watchful one. Neither Bedwyr nor Palahmed had completely let down their guards either.

“Technicality. I’m going to fetch a cool drink. Bring you one?”

“If you would.”

“I would so much more.” Safir winked at him. “But that’s for later. Back in a heartbeat, love.”

Morien followed his rascal’s progress, subtly glimpsing Safir’s fine arse as he climbed from the pool, then took his advice and closed his eyes. Safir was right: a few minutes wouldn’t hurt. And he didn’t even know what Morien had been wrestling with for the past several days. No sense in raising the alarm until and unless he could confirm or disprove his suspicions. And he’d missed his opportunity to follow the dragon north, so now he would have to wait for it to return.

Wait in this very relaxing hot bath, and then perhaps in a large, soft bed shared with a certain unrepentant rogue.

Warm water lapped at his arms, and he smiled, lifting a hand from the water to take the cool cup.

“Morien?”

Not Safir. He came out of his reverie with reluctance. Medraut sat next to him on the underwater bench along one side of the hot pool. The lad’s shoulder didn’t quite reach his own, but it was only a matter of time. Medraut was peering through the steam to the opposite side of the pool, and Morien didn’t have to follow his gaze to know who he was looking at. It was easy to find Arthur in every crowd. He was a beacon.

“I need to tell Father something, but I can’t seem to find him alone.”

A beacon, indeed. “He’s popular these days.”

“I know. I haven’t gotten to train with him since we left the last battle camp.” Medraut grinned, but it fell just as quickly. “And I don’t know how to broach this.”

“What is it you need to tell him?”

“It’s about…” Medraut edged closer, lowered his voice. “It’s about the dragon. Sten believes it’s a shifter.”

On instinct, Morien glanced around them. Dozens of men were currently enjoying the baths. It was as social a spot as a lord’s hall, and between the stone walls and the water, sound traveled in strange ways in the steamy chambers. But even the nearest were some distance away, and all occupied in their own conversations. Still, he pitched his voice to a murmur.

“Why would Sten believe so?”

“He didn’t say.”

In his few weeks around the fellow, Morien had found him gregarious and jovial. Eager to help where he could and quick with a tale. Morien liked to believe he was a good judge of character—Safir being a critical lapse, of course—and he hadn’t found a reason to suspect Sten or his companion of malicious intent.

But also, he knew Sten wasn’t simply sowing mischief.

“What should I do?” Medraut asked.

Morien would need to keep a sharp eye out and head the beast off when it returned. Because it would. He would, the little troublemaker. No need to expose him to Medraut, though, if Morien could reason with him.

Safir was strolling along the mosaic floor toward them, three dripping cups in hand.

“Leave it with me,” Morien said and ruffled Medraut’s wet hair. “Enjoy town while you can. You never know when you’ll see another this grand.”

Chapter Text

Cousin Gahers didn’t look well.

Galahad couldn’t be sure, he supposed. Gahers was still in his hawk form, so he couldn’t say as much with actual words. But he was still in the cage, and that was enough.

During the day, the cage hung on a hook at the end of a pole, which Aunt Morgawse carried over one shoulder. For the first two days, Galahad had watched the cage swing with her short strides. Inside, the hawk had wobbled, riffling his wings for balance but to no avail; the cage was too small to spread them. Then he slid from side to side, striking the iron bars. Eventually, by day’s end, Gahers lay on the floor of the cage, exhausted.

Fear slithered through Galahad’s belly. When he was very tired, he had a difficult time holding on to his dragon form. If Gahers grew too weak and shifted, the cage would break his body. Or would he get stuck halfway to human? Was that possible?

Possible or not, it was an awful prospect, and on the third morning of their trek to the mountains, Galahad asked if he could carry the cage. Aunt Morgawse shrugged; she had the key, after all, on a cord around her neck, so it wasn’t as if he could open the cage and let his cousin escape.

It was harder going than he’d expected. Between the iron and Gahers, the cage was heavy. No matter how Galahad walked, it would begin to swing. After an hour, he slipped the cage from its hook to carry it by hand. It felt even heavier that way and dug into his fingers so that he had to keep switching hands, but when the sun sank low and they made camp, Gahers was still standing.

Galahad carried him again the next day. He didn’t know whether Aunt Morgawse had forgotten how far away Grandfather Uthyr’s domain was, or if she’d overestimated her stamina for the journey, but this was going to take nearly a week. She did seem to slow down as they approached the uplands, but Galahad thought maybe it had more to do with her mind than her body, for she’d been quieter for the past two days. When they stopped each evening, she would walk some ways off by herself, leaving her guards to set up camp.

Leaving Galahad to try to talk to Gahers.

“Can you understand me?” he asked this fourth evening.

He’d asked the night before, too, but the hawk hadn’t responded. It seemed tonight would go the same way, for Gahers stood stone still for a long moment, staring hard past Galahad. Sighing, he reached into the pouch at his belt, pulling out the dried meat he kept there.

Gahers made a soft, crackling sound.

Quickly, Galahad slipped the bit of meat between the cage bars. Gahers stepped on one end, grabbed the other with his beak, and tore off a strand. He swallowed it whole. Galahad fed him more, until Gahers ruffled his wings and ducked his head toward the fine feathers of his breast.

“Cousin, can you understand me?”

Stillness.

Then, the slightest nod from the hawk.

Galahad exhaled in relief. He shot a glance at the guards, but they were arguing over one of the tent cords and where to stake it. Galahad fetched his water-skin and dribbled some onto the floor of the cage. Gahers drank. Drank some more. Then, finally, cocked his head and looked at Galahad with one eye.

“I’m sorry you’re in there,” he whispered.

Gahers seemed to glare at him. After a moment, he stamped a foot on the cage floor, twice. One stamp might have meant frustration, maybe blame too, but two stamps looked more like impatience.

“I don’t know what to do. She’s going to take Lura back and marry her to the enemy. Who knows when she’ll let you out of the cage. Meanwhile, I should be in the south, helping Uncle Arthur beat back Saxons. He might lose if I’m not there—”

Gahers let out a loud squawk.

The guards straightened. “You,” one of them barked. “Here. Help.”

He sighed and rose, wishing he’d thought about what he should say to Gahers. It would’ve been better to ask him questions he could answer aye or no, through some system of foot stamps or beak taps against the bars. Why did he never think of these things in time to do them right? He would never convince Uncle Arthur to let him join the cause unless he thought it through first and carried things out in the right order.

As it turned out, he didn’t have to decide between staying or going. Aunt Morgawse decided for him.

When she returned from her solitary walk, she marched directly to him. “It’s time you return to your uncles.”

“But what about—”

He shut his mouth. He wasn’t sure if he’d been about to ask about Gahers or Lura, but either way, he would’ve betrayed himself. Betrayed the fact he didn’t fully trust his aunt anymore, not the way he had before.

She drew her shoulders back, one hand wrapping the key to Gahers’s cage in a fist. “You leave my affairs to me, lad, and attend to your own.”

He stared at her fist. Gahers and Lura were both in danger. But Lura had Grandfather Uthyr’s whole settlement to protect her, Mistress Britte most of all, and she was formidable. And all Gahers had to do was not shift back to human. When Galahad caught up to his uncles’ men, he would tell Cousin Gareth, and the hawk would come back for his brother.

And so, when night had thrown its cloak over the land, Galahad shifted and left the camp. When he rose into the sky this time, his clothes were clutched in his claws.

Because his affairs required a conversation, and it wouldn’t do to show those claws unless he had to.

Chapter Text

By the time they reached the northern gate of Caerllion, every one of Uthyr’s joints ached. Hips, knees, elbows. Gods, even his thumbs ached, but that may have been due to the grip he’d taken up on his sword hilt the moment the city had come into view.

Uthyr was a proud man, and for the most part, he believed he’d earned that pride. He’d spent his life protecting his people, his children were kind, strong, and loyal, and he’d mostly kept his unfortunate obsession with Britte to himself until she could choose him for herself.

(Well, fair, none of that was precisely true, except for his children, and he doubted he’d had much to do with how they’d turned out.)

The point was, he was proud, and that pride took a bit of a beating as he and his men gaped at the sprawl below them.

“Gods be good,” Huw said. “And here I thought Rhys’s was big.”

Rhys’s settlement was big. Next to it, Uthyr’s stronghold in the mountains appeared modest.

This place made it look like a chicken pen.

He hitched up his belt. Said the one thing that might keep the men from drawing the same immediate conclusion. “Bound to have a good brothel,” he declared, and they cheered.

Britte would roll her eyes at the tactic. She probably had just rolled her eyes and didn’t know why.

He introduced himself to the guards at the gatehouse. Whether they recognized his name or had been told to expect his arrival, they informed him that at this time of day, he would find Arthur in the amphitheatre.

“And where is that?” he asked, mostly so he wouldn’t have to ask what in the gods’ blood an amphitheatre was.

The guard directed his gaze to a great round structure halfway between the river and the forest. “We’ve only the one, my lord, but I don’t believe you’ll miss it.”

Huw snorted, the arse.

As they walked deeper into the city, a few of the men peeled off in search of willing women. Most remained with Uthyr, though, drawn to the stone building that grew more imposing and impressive the nearer they got. When it loomed over them, he could hear the clash of weapons coming from inside the walls. He led his men through one of the openings in the circular wall to find what amounted to a huge, flat training yard. Surrounding it were banks of benches filled with people, arms and voices raised in happy shouts. In the center of the packed earth of the yard, Arthur and Bedwyr were sparring with Gawain and his Saracen.

“Grandfather!”

The call drew Uthyr’s attention to the benches at ground level, where a tall young man had risen and was jogging toward him. He stopped before Uthyr, grinning and looming as much as the building had.

“Medraut.” He took the lad’s arms in his hands, heartened to feel the muscle under his lightweight summer sleeves. He wore armor of cured leather but had left his weapon at the bench. His hair shone in the sun like a raven’s feathers, and his smile was Gwen’s. Everything else, though, was his father’s. “Look at you.”

Medraut blushed, an additional flush to the day’s warmth, and the color brought out a purplish mark on his cheekbone.

Uthyr touched a finger to it. “What’s this?”

“I stopped Sten’s shield with my face.”

“I’ll have words with this Sten.”

Medraut laughed. “Don’t, he feels terrible enough.” He leaned close to speak in Uthyr’s ear. “Do you truly plan to name Father the Pen y Ddraig?”

A cheer arose, and Uthyr looked past the lad’s shoulder just as Arthur fell but then rolled smoothly to his feet again, brandishing his sword as he did. The joy of the fight lit his features, and the crowd whooped their approval.

“I truly do,” he said.

And he knew just where he would do so.

~

That night—much later than his aching knees would have preferred—Uthyr sank onto the bed in the private chamber that had been reserved for him. The scents of fresh herbs rose from the ticking, and he nodded to himself. He’d spoken to each of the dozens of assembled lords to ensure their support for Arthur once the deed was done. Many cups of ale later, he was ready for sleep and eager to get on with the next day’s ceremony.

As he was loosening the laces of his boot, a knock sounded at the door. He stifled a groan as he straightened. “Come in.”

The door swung open, and Bedwyr stepped into the chamber. He closed the door behind him again. To Uthyr’s surprise, Bedwyr didn’t sit in the room’s single chair but crossed the chamber and sat down next to him.

“Here to help your doddering father prepare for bed?”

“I’m here to ask you to reconsider.”

Bedwyr didn’t look at him when he said it, was staring instead at his hand, which rested on top of his stump, and Uthyr took the moment to study him.

He had noticed the silver hairs before, but they stood out now in the lamplight, at Bedwyr’s temples, in his beard. His profile looked very like Emrys’s. Like Uthyr’s, he supposed, though as vain as several women in his past had told him he was, he’d never looked at himself sidewise in a polished mirror. His son had a heavy brow with at least three scars he could see. His nose boasted a knot betraying a past break. His shoulders were broad, his arms bulky. His boots were planted wide on the carpet. He drew a deep breath and looked at Uthyr.

His eyes were his mother’s, dark and soft.

Unfair.

“You know I cannot,” Uthyr said.

“You can.”

“I will not. When will you accept that this is his due?”

“How can you accept it?”

“Because every man has his time, Bedwyr, and mine has come to a close.”

“So you just get to decide? You took it from Emrys when you wanted it, and now you’ll dump it on Arthur? Burden him with it?”

Uthyr huffed. “What sort of future would you have for him? Sell-swords live from coin to coin. Or would you have him hang about the mountains until he can no longer lift his sword?”

“What’s so terrible about a quiet life?”

A safe life, he meant. Bedwyr had spent most of his protecting Arthur. Uthyr was no fool, he’d seen it early. Frankly, it had made his decision that much easier knowing that, once Arthur came into his power and thus became a potential target to even more enemies, Bedwyr would be by his side. Would do whatever he must to preserve Arthur’s life and, by extension, Cymru.

He opened his mouth to say as much, but the evening’s ale caught up with his tongue, finally, strangling any coherent response.

Bedwyr rose and left, his hand clenched in a fist.

Chapter Text

Sunlight streamed through the window casing, warming a stripe across Arthur’s bare chest. He stretched, opened his eyes, and grinned at the rafters.

It was a good day to become the Pen y Ddraig.

He still couldn’t believe it was going to happen, wouldn’t until Uthyr said the words. But Uthyr never went back on a decision, and so the day was bound to end even better than it was beginning. He rolled toward Bedwyr.

He was feigning sleep. The fellow snored prodigiously these days, from the time he fell asleep to the moment he awoke. He was lying silent just now, his massive chest rising on shallow breaths. The pulse in his neck ticked rapidly. Arthur leaned in to his ear.

“I know you’re awake.”

Bed drew a deep breath, let it out slowly.

Arthur rolled on top, caging him with his body. Bed’s lashes had always been stupidly full, and this morning they were making his eyes look sad. Which wouldn’t do, on this, the most momentous day of their lives so far. Well, maybe second to their blood-binding, but awfully close, and he would drag Bedwyr to the ceremony bodily, chain their wrists together if he had to, until Bed recognized the great things this day would make possible.

But, more flies with honey, and so forth. Arthur kissed him.

He started slowly, seeking permission. Bedwyr’s mouth opened with a groan, and his arms came around Arthur, pressing him into Bed’s soft warmth. Gods, he’d missed it, and he burrowed in, tangling their legs, slipping his fingers into Bed’s hair and clutching hard. He ground against him as they kissed, and the hardness he’d woken with became an unbearable ache. He was about to ask, when Bed said, “Fuck me.”

When Arthur pushed into him, they both winced. They’d mostly sucked each other off this summer, or used their hands, so he’d nearly forgotten just how tight Bedwyr’s body was. Arthur held his body still, puffing pained breaths, but then Bed squeezed his arse and urged him to move. Slowly, slowly, he told himself, keep it gentle, and it wasn’t as if it was a hardship to stretch this time together, this stolen hour before the rest of Cymru required their presence. Bedwyr was staring at him, his expression fierce, almost hard, as if he were trying to memorize Arthur’s features. Arthur sank into him, over and over, dragging out slowly enough to, eventually, cause Bed’s eyelids to fall shut, his head back, his mouth open and panting. He held Arthur against him so tightly it was difficult to breathe, even more difficult to move his hips. So he changed his angle and drove in short, rapid thrusts that made his vision go gray as a snowstorm. Bed’s voice was one long groan now, his cock a hot bluntness between them. Then Bed’s muscles locked and he came, swearing through gritted teeth. Power surged through Arthur, and he drove in hard and let go.

He collapsed on top of Bed and smiled against the salt of his skin.

It was going to be a very good day.

~ ~ ~

Medraut had just broken his fast and left the great hall, when he turned a corner in the corridor and bumped into—

“Gally?”

His brother pulled him into a narrow side passage. “Galahad.”

Medraut laughed. “You’ve come for the ceremony!”

Gally frowned. “Of course I have.”

Happiness flooded Medraut’s chest. “Did Mama come with you?” She tended to see to diplomatic matters, so that Mother could stay home to rule.

“No, Aunt Morgawse sent me.”

“Hold. You traveled by yourself?”

Gally stood straighter. “Aye.”

He smiled at his brother’s obvious pride. He was proud of him, too, if he’d made his way to this city alone. Gally had always been confident. Seemed he was growing capable, as well. “You’ll just have to represent the river lands yourself, ambassador.” Medraut elbowed him. “Have you gotten taller this summer?”

Gally’s brow cleared. “I have done. And I’ve been training.” His gaze darted toward the corridor. “Where is Uncle Arthur?”

“He wasn’t at breakfast. Neither was Uncle Bedwyr, but they’re probably just busy with preparations. Everyone wants to speak to Father these days. But come, I was just about to gather my things and head to the amphitheatre. You can stand with us men—”

“I’ll meet you there,” Gally said. “I have to do something first. But Medraut.” He gripped his arm. “Don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

Ridiculous. “Why not?”

“Promise. Even if I’m late.”

Ah. He wanted it to be a surprise. Fine, then. It would be. “I promise. But don’t be late. It’s not every day a new Pen y Ddraig is named!”

~ ~ ~

A new Pen y Ddraig!

Galahad gaped as Medraut left the passage. Grandfather Uthyr was the Pen y Ddraig. A new one would only be named if he were dead or willingly passing on the title. Medraut had been too pleased for Grandfather to have died, so that meant… He was here, and he would be naming his successor.

Everyone wants to speak to Father these days.

Arthur was going to become the Pen y Ddraig. Today. At something called the amphitheatre.

First task: find out where that was.

He did, from a girl selling strawberries, once he’d slipped out of the lord’s hall and into the city. She winked at him, sneaking a ripe berry into his hand. Its sun-warmed sweetness flavored his search for what turned out to be a great, round structure open to the sky. People were already milling about outside it with the heightened babble of a festival market. He skirted the crowd, keeping to narrower lanes, and made his way uphill to the forest.

Inside the cover of the trees, he stowed his clothes and shifted. Small animals scurried to their nests and birds burst from the trees, but they needn’t have worried. His attention was on the round building down the slope, the one whose benches were rapidly filling with spectators. With witnesses to the greatness of the Ddraig.

Well, who was the Ddraig without a dragon?

In the distance, a roar of shouting sounded from the assembled crowd. Galahad stepped from the forest, his heart beating in the very tips of his wings, and lifted himself into the air.

~ ~ ~

If Uthyr had ever had a doubt, its niggling voice was drowned out by the cheering. Thousands of people had gathered, including almost none of his own, to see Arthur named his successor. The benches of the amphitheatre were useless, currently, every person in the place either on their feet or being held aloft, shouting and smiling. He stood in the center of the training ground, Philip beside him, holding Uthyr’s dagger. Arthur stood on Uthyr’s other side, with Bedwyr just beyond. Arthur’s men were arrayed behind him and Uthyr’s men behind them. He tried to store away every detail to tell Britte later. She had armed every one of them, the evidence of her skill gleaming at their belts and on their shields.

He leaned in close to Arthur’s ear. “Your mother would be very proud of you.” Belatedly, he added, “And your father, and his fathers.”

Arthur blinked at that, his jaw working. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I’ve never done this officially. Might still fuck it up.”

Arthur laughed, and in that instant, Uthyr could see the lad who’d been so determined to prove himself all those years before. But here was the man as well, whose face was creased with scars and joy both, and who looked as if he could conquer the world. He’d begun as he’d needed to, by uniting Cymru.

What wasn’t possible now?

Right, enough sentiment. He’d rehearsed the words he wished to say, forming and reforming them in his mind the entire journey south, and then he’d gone over them again with Philip the evening before. It was time to begin. He stepped forward and raised his arm for quiet.

The crowd in the amphitheatre gasped as one.

Well! Uthyr nodded to himself, impressed. Not a bad beginning. He opened his mouth to speak—

—and noticed that every person in the stands was staring into the sky behind him. He turned to follow their gazes, and his heart stuttered.

Flying toward him was the very sign of his house.

Philip had described it to him, but trying to imagine it and seeing it for himself were two very different things.

Pale scales, Philip had said, and they were, but that didn’t convey how those scales shone in the morning sun so that the beast appeared both silver and gold at the same time.

Broad wings, long body, but that hadn’t prepared him for a creature so large, or to reconcile that it flew with as much grace as it did power.

And the sound as its wing rose and fell, like the crackle of supple leather…

Sword-song filled the air as his men drew their weapons, but Arthur raised his arms. “Hold!” he called, and good thing. Uthyr’s voice was hiding in his throat.

As the crowd held its breath, the dragon followed the curve of the amphitheatre, and then it descended, its wings sending up clouds of dust, until its glinting claws touched the ground. Its nostrils flared as it breathed. Its enormous, liquid eyes held Uthyr’s.

Then it dipped its head slowly and bowed to him.

Even his father had never claimed to see the dragon, and Emrys had lied about many things. How many generations had it withheld itself from before deciding to acknowledge him? Before backing Arthur for all the world to see? Tears filled his eyes, and he let them fall. When the beast rose, he nodded to it.

It turned its unblinking gaze on Philip, who nodded as well. When the dragon seemed to aim its stare at the dagger in the Myrddin’s hand, Philip stepped toward it and set the blade on the dirt. There was a clacking sound, as of a striking stone on flint, and then a stream of fire burst from the dragon’s mouth to consume the dagger.

Uthyr flinched backward, and the onlookers cried out, but the flame extinguished as quickly as it had appeared. The hide grip smoked a bit, but somehow, the blade had not been destroyed. It glowed crimson. He looked up to find the dragon watching him, intent.

Expectant.

Though the hairs on the back of his neck still stood on end and his knees were threatening to give way, he bent and picked up the dagger. The handle was warm against his palm, the blade already cooling to gray. He looked out at the crowd, focusing on a single person, then another, and began to speak.

Perhaps he said the words he’d intended, or perhaps they were all out of order. The dragon lifted itself into the air again and hovered above where he and Arthur stood. The slow flap of its wings, the gentle bobbing of its body, were hypnotic, and the thousands witnessing the ceremony sat in rapt silence as he asked the gods to confer strength and power upon the new Pen y Ddraig, while helping Arthur to act with wisdom, compassion, and above all, a sense of responsibility for the folk of Cymru.

He pulled aside his shirt and used the dagger’s edge to draw a slice over his heart. Arthur opened his own shirt and held Uthyr’s gaze as he made the same cut on the young man’s chest. As he embraced him, pressing their chests together, the two ranks of their men knelt.

“May the blood of the Ddraig pass from me into you,” he said into Arthur’s ear. “May it fortify you for all the battles to come, great and small.” He lifted a hand to grip Arthur’s head. “Courage. I’m with you. Bedwyr is with you. Cymru is with you. And never forget: the dragon has chosen you.”

Arthur’s breath rushed hot against Uthyr’s neck. “Thank you, my lord.”

Uthyr stepped back, smiling. “You’re my lord now.”

Then he knelt, bowing his head to Arthur. From above came the sound of the dragon roaring its fire as all around them, Cymru chanted for the new Pen y Ddraig like a heartbeat.

Chapter Text

A cat saw many things. A black cat at night in the exuberance of a city celebrating?

So many things.

The great hall was the least of it, though there was plenty to enjoy there. Food scraps, gravy dripping through the table planks, plump mice for the chase if not the eating. Too many hounds, though.

And no Morien. Which was a great shame, for many of the revelers in the hall were shedding a layer of clothing with each successive cup of drink, and some of them were quite attractive. Safir would have liked to take that inspiration, along with Morien, to a private chamber and discover what they might create with it.

But his tall, quiet man had disappeared as soon as the naming ceremony had concluded. Said, “I’ll meet you in the hall,” and slipped out of the amphitheatre like a thief. Safir was no fool—Morien had left to chase down the dragon. Doing so had become almost a sport among their avian shifters.

Not that Safir envied them or their ability to soar high above the countryside. Not very often, anyway. There was plenty down here on the ground to fascinate a fellow.

The aforementioned increasingly naked revelers, for instance.

And the scandalized glances Palahmed kept sending their way, the protective arm he draped around Gawain’s shoulders, as if Palahmed had been some sort of saint as a young man.

Sten, rosy-cheeked and giving his man a twinkle-eyed look that was going to end well for Giom.

Uthyr, not toasting cups with fellow lords but huddled in conversation with his nephews, Agravain and Gareth. Their brother hadn’t made it back in time for the ceremony, but then, he hadn’t known it was going to happen, Safir supposed.

Slipping farther around the hall, he found Cai, who was looking fondly at Agravain, and then at Arthur, and then at Medraut, with not a trace of jealousy for any of them.

Medraut was scanning the great chamber, the doorways in particular, as if he was expecting someone. Perhaps only Gahers, but perhaps—and a much better perhaps, in Safir’s opinion—their handsome young Medraut had met a lass in the town. He blushed when Master Philip leaned close to ask the same, so probably.

Arthur was surrounded by the lords of Cymru, of course, but Safir found little intrigue in the political machinations happening there.

Far more interesting was Bedwyr, sitting beside Arthur and yet wholly apart, as if a stonemason had constructed a wall between them. He slumped against his chair, gazing across the hall with heavy-lidded eyes, and when he drained his cup, he reached for the pitcher to refill it. Drained that cup too, then found the pitcher empty. He heaved a breath, slid a glance toward Arthur that careened away—Arthur was still occupied—and stood up. He swayed for a heartbeat, the fingers of his hand on the table’s edge to steady him, and then he left the hall.

Gone to have a piss, most likely, but Safir followed him all the same.

Bedwyr did have a piss, a splattering affair against the outer wall of the hall, which was strange. Safir had found Bedwyr to be a modest fellow. He would be fairly drunk if he’d forgotten that, or worse, stopped caring.

So when he straightened from his lean on the wall to continue down the street, away from the hall, Safir trailed after him.

~ ~ ~

Eventually, Uthyr had to admit he was a man nearer sixty than forty, and it was time for bed. He bid a good night to those who’d outlasted him, gave Arthur one final clap on the shoulder, and made his way toward his bed chamber.

He had a new acquaintance to meet.

The lamp was lit when he arrived, and he shut the door behind him with a sigh. Unlaced his boots and toed them off, stripped his shirt as he strode to the bed. Picked up the soft bolster that would cushion his weary head.

“Hello, my lovely.”

He collapsed onto the mattress and fell asleep.

His dreams were a swirl of the day’s events. The morning sky, as clear and blue as a mountain lake. The scents of fresh bread and grilled sweetmeats. The roar of the witnesses, the stamping of their feet, and both reverberating through his body. The sensation of Arthur’s chest pressed to his, of their blood mingling, and of the younger man vibrating with the realization of what he could now achieve.

Wisps of cloud, a dragon pale as bone, the burn of smoke in the back of his throat. Overwhelming awe that, when it lifted, left him with a bone-deep relief.

The images faded to darkness, and he drifted on it.

Britte. He could scarcely wait to share it all with her. To watch her eyes glow as she imagined it.

To hold her against him.

The darkness seemed to recede. His mind fought that, could he not sleep a bit longer, but then he realized the darkness had formed edges, was taking on a shape. Head, shoulders, a flowing drape like a cloak. But then the cloak lifted, exposing bony legs, black claws. Slowly the cloak became feathered wings, and then the head turned, revealing a beak, long and sharp, and open on a raucous cackle.

It was glaring at him with a single gleaming bead of an eye, the raven, and it was standing in his own hall.

Chapter Text

Britte took a sip from her cup, the sweet summer ale cooling her throat but not her thoughts.

Lura was sitting in front of Tiro, entranced by the tale he was telling. Every bit as guileless as any of the children born in these mountains. And perhaps she truly was without guile. Perhaps she didn’t understand that the way she acted was different, the things she said, deeply strange.

As on that very afternoon. She’d been sitting on a stool in a corner of the smithy. She had seemed content there, playing with her wooden fish as Britte worked. She wasn’t in the way and besides, it gave Mora a rest from the child’s seemingly endless questions. Lura spoke in the smithy too, but to her fish in a low, secretive murmur Britte could scarcely make out over the ever-present ringing in her ears these days, so she’d left the girl to it.

It was only when she’d stepped away from her anvil to stoke the forge that she realized Lura was speaking differently from usual. Her wooden fish lay in her lap, and she was staring toward the path outside. “Pen y Ddraig,” she was saying.

Again, and again, and again.

Britte had thought she was perhaps trying out the words in the same way she sometimes did when she learned some new phrase in Cymrish. But something about the flatness in her voice had made the hairs rise on Britte’s arms. She’d knelt and touched Lura’s shoulder.

Lura had sucked a sudden breath and blinked, and then stared at Britte with wide eyes. “Uncle Arthur is the Pen y Ddraig.”

“Yes, that’s right, he will be.”

“No,” Lura had said, “he is. Now. Grandfather Uthyr just named him.”

Britte, gods forgive her, had sent the child off to Mora for the afternoon. It hadn’t helped; she hadn’t been able to concentrate on her work afterward.

Of course, neither had Mora. Evidently, Lura had been even more animated than usual.

And now they were in the hall, Britte sitting in the cushioned chair next to Uthyr’s that she never sat in in his absence—too stately, too aloof—but tonight it was allowing her to keep a watchful eye on Lura. Mora was having a much-needed drink on a bench against the far wall.

Britte would make it up to her. Repair that bent hearth-iron she’d noticed in Mora’s hut, perhaps—

A commotion at the door pulled her attention. In the darkness at that end of the hall, she could make out a clump of people who seemed to be dressed for travel. A voice rose, and a man she knew for one of their lookouts stepped toward her, but he was pushed aside by someone in a long, hooded cloak. That someone strode directly toward her. When they stopped before her, they pushed back their hood.

The newcomer was an older woman, roughly Britte’s age though much shorter. Her black hair was shot through with silver, her eyes…

Gods ’ blood.

The woman’s mouth twisted into something between a smile and a snarl. “Britte, I assume. I am Morgawse, sister of your husband and High Queen of the Orcait. I believe you’re hiding my granddaughter.”

Britte couldn’t help it: she glanced toward the story fire.

But Lura was no longer there.

~ ~ ~

It would have been much easier to walk if the damned city would stop tilting.

Bedwyr pulled up next to some workshop or other and rested his hand on the front post. Or meant to. The problem with posts was they weren’t wide enough, so his hand slid right past it. His shoulder struck the post, which saved his face, and then his elbow crooked around the wood, which saved his arse.

He stood for a moment, leaning on the post, then hanging away from it. He looked for the moon, but there were too many buildings. He could make out a few stars, but they kept winking in and out, and no matter how much he blinked, it didn’t help.

Out of nowhere, fire flashed across his path. He flinched back, but it was only a lad with a torch. He was shouting as if the world were ending, only he was happy about it, as were the three or four lads chasing him.

Bedwyr had had enough of sudden bursts of fire. Give him a nice, steady flame on a lamp’s wick. Or even a campfire. At least a campfire could light the night, keep a man warm, and cook his food too.

What had he been thinking about?

The end of the world.

No, Arthur.

Arthur and his bright fucking future.

He checked the lane for more brats with torches and, seeing none, took a chance and tested his balance. Only a little wobbly. He set off again.

The thing nobody seemed to understand was that putting a man in more danger than he’d been in before was not good. In any way. Unless he was a Saxon dog, but this one wasn’t. This one was his to protect and had been since he was born, and now he was tall as a tree with flaming red hair on top of that, so nobody even needed very good aim to hurt him.

Mistress Britte knew. Her hair had made her conspicuous in the village for as far back as Bedwyr could recall. That and her height and the fact she’d never backed down from a fight. All the same things that were going to bring trouble to Arthur now. He wished she were here now.

Only, she wouldn’t have stopped Uthyr. Wouldn’t have stood in the way of Arthur’s destiny. She had sat Bedwyr down and told him, like the coward he had been and continued to be, that his fear for Arthur was the price of loving him. And that love wouldn’t be cheated of it.

He knew she was right. She’d always been right.

But what if the fear took him over completely?

What if…

What if, in the end, all he had left to give was fear?

He was near the docks now. Could smell the dank brine of the tidal river. If he walked just a few steps farther…

Aye, here were the ships, masts swaying as they bobbed on the water. They made him dizzy, but it didn’t matter because he could see the sky here, finally. See the stars.

And there they were, Arthur and him, as they’d always been.

As much as he would have preferred they live the rest of their days in the mountains, swinging at Saxons now and then but mostly laughing and fucking and growing old together, this was Arthur’s fate. It was written in the stars, and Bedwyr had known that since he’d first glimpsed Arthur in his mother’s arms.

Arthur was the great bear in the sky, and Bedwyr was his companion bear, and the fucking dragon was part of it too.

Was his bear smaller because he was shorter? Or had his fear made him small? Didn’t seem to matter to the stars. They’d placed him there next to Arthur, forever.

No matter what happened, he needed to remain next to Arthur down here, too.

Forever.

A weight seemed to lift from him. He wasn’t reassured, and he wasn’t any less worried for his cub, but he did know his place: beside Arthur. In the hall, in their bed, and in the next campaign.

Resolved, he turned to go, but the motion put him off his balance, and he collided with someone. “Sorry,” he said, then blinked. The man glaring at him was Cynwrig’s monk. Gildas, he called himself.

“You’re drunk,” the monk spat. “And a sodomite.”

“You’re sanctimonious,” Bedwyr said, only slurring a little. “And an arsehole.”

He pushed past the man, intent on seeing Arthur again, intent on apologizing to him for not keeping the faith—their faith—when the monk whispered harshly, “Now.”

A moment later, something heavy struck the back of Bedwyr’s head. Before him, the lights of Caerllion fizzled into spots, then gray fog, then darkness.

The last thing he heard before he hit the ground was the yowling screech of a cat.

Chapter Text

Arthur was beginning to see why Uthyr had seemed so happy to retire to bed. Some of these lords really enjoyed talking. Mostly about themselves.

But he’d met enough men like them in his life to know that a little indulgence of a man’s pride went a long way toward garnering his loyalty.

Still, he was about to tip over with fatigue, and the cut Uthyr had made on his chest was burning. Philip had given him a small pot of salve. He had just enough life in him tonight to smear some on and then fall into bed. Or into Bed.

Lord Gruffydd leaned in. “What’s got you grinning, Lord Arthur?”

That he wasn’t used to yet. And oh, how Mora was going to rib him for it. She would never be able to call him my lord without rolling her eyes. “Just thinking of our people, back in the mountains.”

Gruffydd eyed him cannily for a man who’d been celebrating with everyone else this night. “If you proceed wisely, I believe you’ll find your people extending far beyond the mountains in the north.”

Wasn’t as if the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. How could it not, the way those folk at the amphitheatre had cheered his naming? Or how the streets had been stuffed with even more people shouting his name as they processed back to this hall? People loved a celebration, he’d told himself with nod to caution.

But only a nod. He’d felt intoxicated before they even got back to the hall.

And now he well and truly was, and dead tired, too. He stood. “I’m going to give the night over to the watchmen, my lords.”

He wished them good sleep over their protests and noted that all his men but one had already left. He roused Medraut on his way to the door. The lad came awake with a jerk.

“Time for bed.”

Medraut looked about the hall, frowning.

“You’d rather sleep here? I’d rather you didn’t.” Hospitality was a tradition, but a place this size called for caution. If he himself was more visible to the enemy now, so would be his son. “Besides, if your lass hasn’t shown yet, she isn’t going to tonight.”

“There’s no lass!”

“Yes, yes. Tell it to your pillow. Come on.”

They wound through the corridors of the building toward the chambers they’d been given as guests of honor. Medraut was bunking with Philip, Sten, Giom, and Gareth, and it gave Arthur some peace of mind that, if the hospitality failed, his son was sharing a chamber with a pair of wolves and two birds of prey.

Finally, they turned onto their corridor. He was about to wish Medraut a restful night, had his hand on his shoulder, when he heard voices coming from his own chamber. Low, urgent voices.

“Wait here.”

Gripping his dagger, he swung open the door. Whatever he’d thought he might see, it wasn’t Morien and Gally. They broke off their argument sharply and Morien nodded to him.

“I’m sorry, my lord.”

Arthur waved him off and crossed to his nephew. “When did you arrive?”

“There you are!” Medraut hissed from the doorway.

Arthur turned to him. “You knew?”

Medraut shrugged. “He said it was a surprise.”

“It is that.” He turned back to Gally, who wore a familiar mutinous expression.

Mutinous enough to give Arthur a bad feeling.

“You came alone, didn’t you?”

Gally lifted his chin. “Yes. And before you ask, Aunt Morgawse sent me.”

“Do your mothers know you’ve come?”

“No.”

“And Morgawse? Why would she suddenly not require your presence at the villa?”

“Because she isn’t at the villa, she’s…” His gaze slipped to the side.

“She’s…”

“On her way up the mountains. To fetch Lura.”

“What!” Medraut said. “How could you?”

“I’m needed here!” Gally said, glaring at him.

“Close the door,” Arthur said to Medraut before rounding on Gally. “You left your cousin vulnerable, not to mention your aunt Britte, to traipse the length of Cymru, and on top of all that didn’t tell your mothers you were leaving?”

“Gahers is with Aunt Morgawse. He wouldn’t let anything happen to Lura or Auntie.”

Maybe not. But Gwen was still going to have his stones for this. “So, Morgawse got word of the ceremony? Hold, were you there?”

Gally puffed up. “I was.”

“No, you weren’t,” Medraut said. “I looked for you.”

“Not well enough,” Gally retorted, then turned to Arthur. “Uncle, I’ve been training all summer with Aunt Morgawse’s guards. Sword, shield, staff, axe — I’ve trained in them all. I might not be as strong as Medraut, but I’m quick. And nobody even saw me travel here. I could scout for you!”

“Medraut saw you. Morien saw you.”

“After I got here. You’re the Pen y Ddraig, Uncle. If you say so, I can join your cause.”

“It was always up to me, and I told you in the spring: two more years.” Gally opened his mouth, but Arthur spoke over him. “Look. Lad. I know what you’re feeling. No, don’t say I couldn’t possibly. I was the younger brother too, remember. And Cai fought in his first skirmish when he was scarcely sixteen. Gods, how I wanted to be him. To follow Uthyr and prove myself. I had twelve years, just like you. I’d trained with sword and shield and staff and axe, just like you. I was ready, I was certain of it. I could taste it.” He cupped Gally’s cheek, still soft and smooth as a babe’s. The lad vibrated with immature fury. “Uthyr made me wait, and he was right to do so. But look, I had to wait until I was eighteen. You’ll be fourteen. That’s a fair bargain.” He turned to Morien. “Where’s Bed?”

Morien shook his head. “I don’t know. He wasn’t here when I spotted this one.”

The slice on Arthur’s chest flared, and he pressed a palm to it. Gods, he wanted to sleep—

“I’ve already helped you,” Gally said.

“The answer is still no.”

But Gally wasn’t listening. He’d started stripping off his clothes.

“What, you’re going to bunk here?” Arthur chuckled. “Your uncle Bedwyr will have something to say about that.”

“About this too, most likely,” Gally said, unfazed as he flung his clothes to the floor. What was he trying to prove? That he’d grown stronger? That he was unarmed?

Unease crept up Arthur’s back. The lad had always been determined, but now his eyes were shining with a confidence that went beyond youthful cockiness. What he was seeing in Gally must have been what Uthyr had seen in him when he’d claimed Grandfather Marcus’s sword.

The consequences of that brazen moment had changed all of their lives in an instant.

“Don’t do this,” Morien said to the lad, though he sounded resigned.

“Don’t do what?” Arthur asked.

“Gally?” Medraut said softly.

“It’s Galahad, and I don’t need a minder!” He turned his steely gaze on Arthur. “I’ve already helped you,” he said, “and you didn’t even know it.”

Then he knelt on the flagstones, all skinny arms and legs, and he shifted.

Into the dragon.

~ ~ ~

Bedwyr came to with the ground heaving under him. His fingernails sank into the wood beneath him, and even that seemed to send extra agony to his head, which pounded as if a drum were trapped inside it. Opening his eyes only made it worse. Light drove two more spikes into his brain. Then the ground rose again, his stomach lurched, and he vomited.

When the retching finally stopped, he lay his head on his arm and groaned. Slowly, other sensations seeped into his awareness.

Wind, on his forehead, down the back of his neck, making him shiver.

The creak of wood, the slap of water.

The sourness of bile, but when he turned from it, saltwater.

His name.

“Bedwyr. Bedwyr!”

Lifting his aching head, he opened his eyes, just a squint. He lay on slatted planks, dark with age, the pegged joints sealed with pitch. The sky wasn’t as bright as he’d first thought. In fact, the clouds overhead were the color of unpolished iron, low and heavy with rain and moving swiftly.

Someone kicked his leg. He rolled onto his back, which grayed out his vision for a moment. When it filtered back to him, he tried to make sense of what he was seeing.

Safir was sitting on a bench, naked, his hair plastered wetly against his cheeks. His muscles tightened rhythmically as he rocked forward and back, pulling on two poles, one in each hand.

No… not poles.

Oars.

“Bedwyr.”

Safir was breathing hard. His eyes were bloodshot and wide with panic.

Bedwyr sat up.

They were in a small boat, alone, and all around them, nothing but dark, choppy water that smelled of the sea.

No land in any direction.

Dread crawled up his chest to claw at his throat. “Where are we?”

Safir stopped rowing. His hands trembled on the oars, and the abject horror in his eyes made Bedwyr’s heart sink.

“I don’t know,” he said as the first cold drops of rain began to fall.