Sunrise of Avalon by Anna Elliott

Author:Anna Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Chapter 12

THIS IS THE MAN.”

Isolde looked up to find Octa’s gaze, watchful and cold as a snake’s, fixed on her. The Saxon king wore a tunic with ill-cured wolf’s fur at the neck and cuffs. His greasy, white-streaked hair was loose on his shoulders, the ends of his mustache and beard still matted together with what looked like black pine pitch. He gestured to the man who lay sprawled amidst the filthy piles of straw on the floor. “Can anything be done for him?”

Isolde looked down at the unconscious man, seeing, even in this dim light, the cuts and puffy, darkening bruises on his face, bad enough to nearly obscure his features, the angry, black-crusted lashes on his back, the marks heavy-booted feet had left about his ribs. His hands were tightly bound behind his back at an angle that must have been excruciating, or would have been, had he been aware enough to feel anything at all.

The small stone-built room stank of rotting straw and human waste and, stronger than all, a thick, acrid smell of despair and fear. Isolde had to summon every scrap of will not to react to the faint challenge she could see in Octa’s coldly pale eyes.

That was the purpose, the entire purpose, in his summoning her here. She knew it, and she still had to call up a memory of all those who depended, just now, on her staying alive—on not drawing Octa’s wrath while she was entirely under his power.

Rhun . . . Madoc . . . Kian . . . Eurig . . . Cath . . . the tiny spark of life that would be quenched if she were careless enough to lose her own. All of them flashed through her mind. But it was the memory of Trystan she held to—Trystan, as she’d Seen him in the scrying waters the night before, bruised and bloodied and wearing his battle face, all feeling, all emotion plainly shut down.

The remembrance steadied her, somehow, made it easier to push her own churning mix of anger and fear far, far back, until she could move to kneel beside the unconscious man as though he were just another wounded soldier, like any of the countless others who had come into her care.

Which in a way he was. A wounded, unconscious, bleeding man, with hurts to assess and tend, like any of the rest. Save that he lay not in her infirmary or even in a tented battlefield medicine station, but in a fetid, damp, stiflingly hot prison cell.

She had been dressing in her room that morning when Ulf brought word that Octa was summoning her. She was to attend him at once, and bring whatever medicines and herbs she had with her. Isolde thought there might have been a trace of reluctance in the guardsman’s voice as he repeated Octa’s order. But that might have been only her own imagining. Certainly if he recalled, in speaking to her, anything of the night they’d spent laboring to save the life of his horse, he’d betrayed no sign of it either by word or look.

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