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“And my family’s accursedness?” She tried and failed to keep the resentment from her voice.
“Bah! Accursedness! Talk like that makes us sound like a gaggle of old superstitious crones.”
Their bodies bent close, Sabrina noted Sister Ainnir’s infirmity, the bony, liver-spotted hand, the weakness of her grip. Had this day’s work been too much? Or had she always been this frail and Sabrina refused to notice?
“We make our own fate, child.”
She sounded so certain. So confident. And why shouldn’t she? Sister Ainnir had probably been here when they’d laid the first stone, or at least she gave that impression. Unfathomable wisdom. Indefatigable strength. She’d always been. Would always be. Like everything here. The buildings. The gray-robed sisters. The chapel. The toll of slow, sonorous bells.
It was what Sabrina loved about the order. The sense of forever in every mortared stone. The unaltering eternity as if time stopped within its walls. As if nothing could penetrate the sanctity and protection of this place. It was that very permanence that had attracted her to a life as a bandraoi priestess.
When change had battered Sabrina’s well-ordered world like a hurricane tide and all she’d known and everyone she’d loved had vanished in a fury of blood and tears, the sisters of High Danu had become a harbor from the storm. Serene. Steady. Safe.
Only recently had she occasionally found monotony in the steady tread of passing time. Frustration in the rigid order. But these moments were rare and stamped out as soon as they surfaced. She knew where she belonged. And it was here.
They climbed the stairs to Sister Ainnir’s chambers. Opened the door to a breath of perfumed air and the warmth of a fire recently stirred to cheerful life.
“I can manage from here. You go back now. Try to get some rest. There’s naught more we can do for him tonight, but watch,” Sister Ainnir said.
Sabrina smiled. “Thank you. For everything.”
The priestess covered Sabrina’s hand with her own. The clarity in her clear gray eyes revealing nothing of her body’s weakness. Instead they bore a steady unflagging strength that seeped through Sabrina’s skin into her bones, her tendons, her muscles. A gift of renewal when all her body craved was sleep.
“Your reasons for coming to us may have originated in a need to escape a painful past, but have you not found a home here?” Sister Ainnir asked. “A sisterhood in all but title?”
“I have. This life is all I’ve ever wanted. I’ve always been more comfortable here than among the airs and graces of Society’s elite. I can be myself. I don’t need to try to fit into someone’s else’s mold.”
“Then the Sister Brighs of this world be damned.”
Sabrina laughed. “You make it sound so easy.”
The old woman chucked Sabrina’s chin as she might a child’s. “If it were easy, we’d have young women beating down our doors to get in. It’s the difficulty keeps the riffraff out.”
Where was Lazarus? A missed meeting. No follow-up letters. Not one telltale clue.
Máelodor reached with his mind as far as he dared, yet no answering touch met his seeking fingers of thought. Only an empty echoing silence, a frozen, endless abyss spiraling always downward until his very skull flexed against the pressure. He surrendered to his body’s frailty. He would eat. Rest. Begin the search for his mage-born Domnuathi again in the morning. He might feel death at the other end of their tenuous connection, but that was misleading. As long as Máelodor lived, Lazarus lived.
And Máelodor would find him. It was only a matter of time.
Which was all on his side.
He heaved himself from his chair to hobble painfully to the window. His prosthesis ground against the stumped remains of his leg, and the cold gnawed at bones grown brittle and twisted, but he refused to remain in his chair another moment.
Dusk fell early in the mountains, but the moon’s reflection against the snow shone ghostly across the forested hillside. Furnished light enough to see by. To measure the man about to appear before him for instructions.
Across the valley, lights flickered from a few scattered homesteads. Strung out across the Cambrian Mountains like glimmering jewels set against the primitive isolation of the Welsh highlands.
The ancestors of these people had fought with a ferocity and a cleverness that kept them free for ages. Romans. Vikings. Saxons. Normans. They’d all tried to tame the wild Celtic nature. All had broken upon their shore and been turned aside.
But in all the eons of kings and warlords and princes who’d passed into and out of history, only one was remembered with the passion of the devoted. One stood higher. Burned brighter. Gathered followers long after there was naught left of their hero but bones.
Arthur.
Those who held the full knowledge hadn’t let his demise hinder their dreams. The Nine and those devoted to them understood that death was temporary. Power was forever. And if Arthur returned, there would always be men and women who chose to follow his banner. With Máelodor to guide him and his own charismatic aura, the High King would march at the head of an army, and a world once again dominated by Other would be in reach. No longer the ignominy for the Fey-born of the cart’s tail or a pitch-soaked scaffold. Instead, control. Command. Supremacy.
A new golden age.
Arthur was the key to success.
