Angharad of Llyr is heir to a matriarchy: a line of enchantress-queens that has ruled her island for centuries. Her destiny from birth: to rule as sole authority and ensure that her powerful bloodline endures for another generation. Devoted to her p...
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A sheltered wedge of land, protected from the winds by jutting black cliffs, sloped open toward the southern horizon in a triangle of bright green. Its lowest broad end was fragmented into salt-eroded boulders, the boulders into stones, into pebbles, into sand. Foam-flecked sheets of glassy water slid peacefully back and forth over the lowest sandy slope, the sea pretending, here, to be a completely different force than the thundering fury pounding endlessly at the stony feet of the cliffs.
At the highest point of green, close to where the stone walls met and joined, a tiny grey building sat at lonely and forlorn, like a forgotten jackstone left behind by a child giant. A stream ran nearby, broken and ancient crockery littering its banks. In the cleared space around it, tattered shreds of old netting, heaped in small piles or drifting over rocks, proclaimed it a former fisherman's hut. Decrepit, tumbledown, overgrown with moss and lichens, the stone walls looked in the process of sighing as they settled back into the landscape, eager to melt away until the last evidence of human habitation disappeared.
Just before the doorway of the hut, a young man was arranging a brace of fresh fish over the smoke of a small fire. Presently he paused, stretched, and surveyed the seaward edge of his sanctuary.
He'd been there a fortnight now. It hadn't been his plan, but...plans change. When a short pleasure-trip of a boat ride off the mainland turns into a blowing off-course by a sudden gale, a man has to change plans quickly and decisively, after all, and might as well stay equally open to whatever happens afterward. Geraint had always been one to take events as they came.
It had been a relief when his battered craft had reached this shore, when he'd been able to crawl exhausted onto the beach, throw down his oars with aching arms and thank Llyr himself for not dashing him against the cliffs. He could barely believe his good fortune when he saw the old hut standing there, waiting, as though just for him. Its roof had long since crumbled in, and he'd spent two nights stargazing before a drenching rain reminded him that comfort demanded a certain amount of practicality...starting with new thatch.
He'd set out on the next day, to search for supplies and try to determine where he was. There turned out to be a village within an hour's walk, whose inhabitants exhibited wonderment at the arrival of a tall and fair-haired stranger. They supplied both food and information, which he paid for in his customary manner, entertaining the entire population for an evening around the village fire, watching the children's eyes pop and the adults' sparkle as he told stories and performed his illusions. When he was done, the clamor over which household would offer him hospitality almost came to blows, so he laid the conflict to rest by declaring that he was quite happy in his own space, and had returned to his sheltered cove and fishing hut by moonlight, plied with gifts of food, blankets and tools, after promising to visit again. He was awkwardly aware that a handful of girls had followed him almost halfway back; they hadn't bothered to be discrete. At one point several of them loudly admonished an already-married member of the party to make her shameless way back home. Eventually the last stragglers had turned back, with disappointed remarks in his direction that made him blush. He was unused to such forwardness from females, but then, he'd never been to this island before.
