A Long Cloud (The Lion of Wales Book 4) by Woodbury Sarah

Author:Woodbury, Sarah [Woodbury, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The Morgan-Stanwood Publishing Group
Published: 2015-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

13 December 537

Myrddin

They’d fallen far behind, but not for lack of effort. They’d started out from Buellt at least an hour after King Arthur’s abductors, and while they’d worked hard to catch up, the going had been rough. The Saxons and Welsh might have worn roads through the landscape over time, but the Romans had built theirs with rock and sand and, quite frankly, there was a reason they’d done that. Those roads were better.

“What can you see?” Myrddin said to Gareth, who was known for his perfect vision, which Myrddin no longer could pretend to possess.

“Wroxeter,” Gareth said.

Myrddin made a guttural sound in his throat. He’d known that, of course, and Gareth was being deliberately obnoxious. “I mean, what can you see on the walls?”

Myrddin had worried for the whole journey about the risk they’d taken in following a circular route instead of tracking King Arthur directly. But Gareth had been right that an ambush was well within the realm of possibility, and the consensus when Godric had questioned those in nearby farms and villages was that Modred was indeed at Wroxeter.

“Nothing that’s going to make rescuing the king with the few men we have any easier,” Gareth said. “We have to go in there. You know we do.”

Myrddin did know it, but the knowledge didn’t make him any happier. “What about waiting until nightfall and sneaking into the city over the eastern wall. That end of the city is far less well guarded.”

“You are thinking like a Welshman instead of the Saxon you’re pretending to be,” Gareth said. “Modred has spies in the lands around Wroxeter. Even now we are being watched. If we don’t ride straight to the gate, the guards will know something is amiss.”

“They could even fear that we have come for King Arthur and tighten their watch on him.” Godric said, having ridden up beside Gareth. The two men hadn’t become friends on the road from Buellt, but they’d learned to respect each other. “It would make it many times harder to free him.”

Even though riding as a Saxon had been Myrddin’s idea in the first place and he would have much preferred to stay in the shadows, he gave way. With the exception of Gareth, who retained his Welsh garb, though he’d removed the surcoat that proclaimed him to be one of Arthur’s men, they looked like a company of Saxons. Thus, a quarter of an hour later, as the sun was setting behind them, the company turned onto the high road and made directly for the bridge across the Severn River. The bridge would take them to the main gate at Wroxeter, located on the north side of the town. As they did so, to Myrddin’s huge relief, the four men of Godric’s company who had been sent to follow the wine drops trotted out of the trees to the north of the road and joined them.

“They’re there all right,” one of them said without preamble. “They took many short rests, and we took fewer, so we caught them ten miles before Wroxeter.

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