The Golden Rose by Kathleen Bryan

Author:Kathleen Bryan [Bryan, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2008-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

19

THERE WAS NO use in sulking, or in blasting down walls with temper, either. Averil retreated to her chambers in the palace, barred the door and flung the shutters wide and let the cold and the damp blow in.

It helped her to think. She was more hurt by Gereint’s refusal than she wanted to acknowledge, though she stopped short of calling it a betrayal. He was only practicing obedience to his commander.

She pulled herself up short. It was not as simple as that. He believed what the rest of them were reciting like doctrine. He opposed her from his own heart, not just his superiors’.

They had never been at odds before. There had been squabbles, yes, but they had always gone the same way in the end—her way.

Gereint had grown a mind of his own. And she did not like it at all.

Very well then, she thought as she paced the borders of the room. She was alone. She had left all allies and possible allies behind in Lys, where she might be pawn or puppet, but she was also a duchess who might become a queen. Here she was no one; she had no rank, no place, no wealth or fortune but what she could beg of the queen’s charity. No one on this side of the sea would help her.

The web of the Knights was secure inside her, but it would not yield to any will she laid upon it. The Knights had agreed: Prydain was their battlefield, and the Isle had to fend for itself.

They offered no objection to her scrying toward the Isle—and no wonder. There was nothing to see. The walls of air were raised and secured. Storms roared around them, driving ships astray and even destroying them—as she had discovered to her grief.

Nothing that she did or tried could pierce those walls. They rose in the landscape of the mind like a dome of glass, clear enough to see the loom of the mountain and the whiteness of foam about its edges, but shadowed where the Ladies’ vale and the port should be. As far as she could tell, it was a deserted island of sheer black rock with a lake in its heart.

She could not find the Ladies’ magic at all. It was thoroughly and completely warded. No matter how she cried out or to whom she ventured it, she received only silence.

With Gereint she might have succeeded. But he was walled off from her, too. The deepest part of him was still there, but it was mute, like a stone, heavy and impervious.

The king was going to break that dome of perfect glass, slide his serpent magic beneath it and crack it like an eggshell. And there was nothing at all that she could do about it. She could not even warn the Ladies.

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