Bound into the Blood

Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Angharad felt the sudden release of tension in George’s body and raised an eyebrow at him.

“He’s gone,” he told her, uneasiness obvious in his voice.

She rose heavily to her feet again, and he stood up with her and gave her his arm in support.

“Come with me,” she said. “You’ve been cooped up in here with this far too long.”

She dropped the papers onto the chair they came from and led the way out the back door onto the wide veranda where they could sit and admire the garden in the fading light. Imp padded at her side and she let him out too, but the other animals remained in the cool interior of the house.

She took one of the large wooden armchairs and George followed her lead, sitting next to her and watching her to see what she intended. He had one leg up and crossed over the knee at the ankle, and the loose foot jittered nervously.

Imp bounded down the broad steps out into the garden, and she smiled faintly, wondering what he was trying to hunt. She reached out a hand to her husband over the little table that stood between their chairs and took his hand when he offered it in response.

“Is Cernunnos truly gone?” she said. “I think he’s not used to not getting his way and he’s just sulking.”

George turned his head to watch Imp, then lifted it in the direction of the kennels, not visible through the high solid wall dividing his garden from the lane. His eyes glazed slightly in the manner she’d come to associate with his beast-sense, and she heard the excited noise of the hounds in response.

“Ives won’t thank me for that,” he said, pointing his chin at the clamor. “But I can still talk to the hounds and hear them.”

He paused for a moment. “And the ways… I can feel them all, like normal.” His mouth quirked. “Nothing normal about it, is there? Still, nothing’s changed.”

“And those are gifts from Cernunnos, aren’t they?” she asked, knowing the answer.

“I’ve always assumed so.”

“What about the forms?”

He started. “After what you just read about my father?”

“If it’s true,” she said, placidly. “And you’re not your father, are you?” That helped, she could see. He was spooked by an assumed guilt that didn’t belong to him. Now he began to calm down, and his foot stopped jiggling.

He released her hand and rose from his chair, glancing up to check the height of the porch roof over their heads. He invoked the deer-headed man and looked at her with his altered senses.

She heard her own intake of breath and wondered what he could smell. It must be a very different world to inhabit. The deer-head dipped and he pulled up the horned-man, and the broad alien face with its antlers looked as it always did. He dropped the form and remained standing, pursing his lips and putting his thoughts together.

“Empty forms,” he said to her.

“But that’s not unusual, is it?”

“No, it’s not. He only inhabits them when he has some need. Or sometimes, upon request.” He stared out into the garden for a moment with an unreadable expression, then turned and smiled at her, and sat down again.

“You’re right, I get it. Not really gone, then,” he said. “It was just so abrupt, as if I’d never see him again.”

Imp’s explorations had been brought to a halt by the scolding of a red squirrel The sudden explosion of fury attracted her attention and drew a chuckle from George. “He’s swearing at Imp, in ‘squirrel.’ I can hear the intent.” He tapped his forehead.

“I was thinking about roses this morning,” he commented. “Is it true you don’t see them at court, that Gwyn doesn’t like them, because of his father?”

Angharad nodded. “I miss them,” she said. “I painted them so often as Lludd’s court artist. In bud or overblown, all the colors… Such a luscious flower. And such a lovely scent, spicy or sweet, depending on the variety.”

She looked over at George. “It’s too bad about Gwyn and roses. No one wants to offend him. It’s not that he would say anything, I think, it’s just that people know…”

“He’s king now, and separated from his father,” George said firmly. “He should let it go.”

That was unexpected, she thought. I suppose he’s right. We do have a habit of deference in the court, don’t we.

Imp returned and hopped into George’s thigh for an ear rub, then walked across the little table to Angharad and took his customary place in her lap. “No more room here soon,” she warned him.

They sat in companionable silence for a few moments.

“My father is family,” George said, quietly. “No less than our daughter coming. There must have been a time when he looked at my mother this way, before I was born.”

He rubbed his face. “How can I not look into this? My mother’s pregnancy, the death… What actually happened?”

He paused, as if waiting for Cernunnos to react. “Cernunnos has all the power he needs to stop me, I know that. But, damn it, I thought we were getting along better, after Gaul.”

He looked down at the floor. “I suppose I like him, after a fashion. We’re very different, but we were developing a reasonable partnership…”

“He’s become family to you, too, hasn’t he?” Angharad suggested.

He glanced sideways at her. “Yes, I guess so.”

He leaned back. “But Conrad, or Corniad, or whatever it really is, and Léonie—they’re my blood, my parents. If there’s any possibility my father is out there, I can’t ignore it.”

Angharad remembered her own children, turned against her by Lludd, King of Britain. She thought of the treachery of Gwyn’s sister Creiddylad. “Don’t be so trusting,” she told her husband. “Family doesn’t always deserve your affection or your loyalty. You can’t make them something they are not.”

He looked at her sympathetically and she knew he was thinking of her children.

“Yes, it’s true,” he said. “But I have so little family. I can’t just throw them away unexamined.”

He leaned forward briskly and clenched his hands. “I’m going to make a list of exactly what I need to find out,” he told her. “And when I’m ready, I’m going to go to Mariah Catlett’s house and do some research. The deaths took place in the human world—there must be more trace of them there.”

“And Cernunnos?” she said. The god’s behavior worried her.

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Yes, well, if he doesn’t kill me first just for looking,” he answered ruefully.

“What do you think of this division?”

Gwyn ap Nudd, King of Annwn, sat back in his chair and let George examine the map of his territories, expanded to the coastline in the far south, where Florida would be in the human world. George looked across the table in the council room at Ceridwen, Gwyn’s scholar and healer, the woman he thought of as the court wizard. Her ageless face was unreadable, as usual.

“Your work?” he asked her. She nodded.

“This is the territory that Gwyn is thinking of ceding to Llefelys,” she said.

Gwyn’s uncle, the king of Gaul, had helped him break away from his father Lludd and establish himself as an independent king in the new world. The cost to Gwyn was territory and the services of the rock-wights to create a travel way from Gaul across the ocean.

On the map, the southern line wavered along from the coast near where Charleston would be and extended west along the bottom of the Appalachians.

“So, you’re giving him the southern coast. How far west?”

“Our own domain is not bounded on the west,” Gwyn said. “You know that Madog’s old territory is our first crossing of the Blue Ridge mountains.”

“But it will be bounded eventually, by the ocean if nothing else. I recommend that you set a western boundary for Llefelys.”

At his gesture, Ceridwen passed him a blank page and her steel-point pen and inkwell. George sketched out a very rough map of the continent, and talked as he drew.

“I’m assuming none of this is significantly different between the human world and here.” He lay his hand on the narrow sliver of eastern coast and piedmont. “You currently occupy about, oh, a seventh of the width of the continent. And not very much, north to south. North of, say, here,” he drew an imaginary line across, north of the Great Lakes, “the winters are harder and at some point crops become impossible.”

“And, of course, south of here,” he continued, pointing at the isthmus of Panama, “there’s a whole ’nother continent, also very large.”

He leaned back and looked at Gwyn. “All of your father’s kingdom would be roughly the same size as the territory you currently claim for Annwn. It’s a tiny fraction of the entire continent. Same for Gaul. So, are you going to claim it all and figure out how to settle and govern it later, or are you going to let others have a piece? And how big a piece, for your first territorial ally, Llefelys? What about relations with his successor? What about your own heirs?”

“Thank you, great-grandson. Yes, we have been considering all of this,” Gwyn said, with his usual unflappable dignity.

George handed the pen and ink back to Ceridwen. “I’m glad I don’t have your problems,” he said with a smile. “The human world isn’t much of a guide. The demographics are so different, and the economics, too. We cared a great deal about river travel and mountain passes when we settled all this,” he waved his hand in the air to include the local countryside, “but with the rock-wights, that just may not be an issue for you, or not an important one.”

Gwyn shrugged. “We shall have to find our own path, then, as I thought. I foresee great changes ahead. The new ways the rock-wights are providing are already changing the trading networks, even though we’ve barely started. Some of our own people and many of the immigrants are taking advantage of them to settle near the new way-openings. Like the re-building of Edgewood, they each make individual choices for their own reasons, but the result is new blood and new energy precisely where we need it, as though we had assigned them there.”

“Like I told you,” George said. “Letting people decide what works best for them is more effective than trying to make them do what you want. Give them opportunities that make sense to them, and they’ll resettle elsewhere or come from abroad, especially the best and brightest of them, the ones you want most.”

He cleared his throat. “Seething Magma tells me that you’ve already gone beyond the original set of new ways from your alliance agreement. She wouldn’t tell me any more, told me to ask you about it.”

Ceridwen looked at Gwyn, and then replied. “We’ve moved past that. Have you been to Mariah Catlett’s place recently?”

George was puzzled. Mrs. Catlett was Gwyn’s human agent, and now his, too. She lived in the caretaker’s house on the Bellemore estate, Gwyn’s occasional dwelling in Rowanton, Virginia.

“No, I haven’t been there since we returned from Britain a couple of months ago. We’ve been too busy with the kennel rebuilding. I was planning to go soon.”

Ceridwen coughed into her fist. “I suggest you make a visit, at your earliest opportunity. We’ve found something the rock-wights want even more than the books on earth sciences you brought them.”

At his quizzical glance, she shook her head. “I’ll let you see for yourself.”

Alright, George said to himself. If she won’t tell me, then I guess I know what I’ll be doing tomorrow afternoon. He contented himself with glaring at her.

Gwyn chuckled at the byplay, but then he sobered and steepled his fingers, tapping his lip before saying, “Thank you for telling me yesterday what you’ve discovered about my grandchild, your mother.”

Gwyn paused, but he clearly had more to say, so George just nodded and waited.

“I’m concerned about Cernunnos’s reaction. Has there been any change?”

George frowned at the necessity of discussing it in public, but of course this was important to Gwyn. Cernunnos was not just the patron of the great hunt. This entire kingdom of Annwn was really his, granted to Gwyn’s rule. George’s predecessor as huntsman, Iolo ap Huw, had shared no special relationship with the god, but George did, and Gwyn’s worries about any alteration in that were reasonable.

And hard to answer. “Nothing’s changed,” George said. “I believe he’s still there, since I still have those skills I think of as his and I can call up the empty forms.”

“But?” Ceridwen prodded.

He continued reluctantly, “But there’s been no feel of him at all.” Silly to feel abandoned, he thought, since I knew nothing of Cernunnos nine months ago, and I’m sure he thinks little of me. But you do get used to someone who’s living in your head much of the time.

“You intend to continue looking into your father’s past?” Gwyn asked, his tone neutral.

George looked him square in the face. “I have to, sir. He was your grandchild’s husband and my father. He’s not your blood, but he is mine. I can’t leave it alone. Could you, if it were you?”

Gwyn pursed his lips and made no reply.

George made it for him—what of the great hunt? Would Cernunnos still be alienated at the end of October, at Nos Galan Gaeaf? Would the great hunt fail? And what might that do to Gwyn’s rule, based on Cernunnos’s endorsement?

“I’ll try to sort it out quickly, sir. I don’t want to damage my relationship with Cernunnos, either.” He couldn’t stop himself from adding, with a quirk of his mouth, “I miss the guy.”

“What do you advise?” Gwyn asked Ceridwen, once George had left. “This quarrel between Cernunnos and my huntsman is… disturbing.”

Ceridwen looked at him. “I don’t know that it’s possible for anyone to interfere in it. They come together, as a single body, at least when Cernunnos is present.”

“But could he abandon my great-grandson altogether?”

“I don’t see why not, if George lost his favor,” she said. “And who knows where he was while George was growing up in the human world? George will die some day, after all, and Cernunnos will need to seek another.”

She addressed what she assumed to be his primary concern. “Iolo had no direct knowledge of him, and he was a fine huntsman. And Cernunnos showed no displeasure with those hunts.”

Gwyn nodded and considered for a moment.

“I can’t understand such loyalty to a father he hardly knows,” he said at last, his voice puzzled.

Ceridwen smiled to herself. “Considering your own father, I’m not surprised.”