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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Angharad was waiting at the cove when Geraint returned from his morning trek to check his snares and fishing lines. His heart rose at sight of her; then he paused, slightly perplexed. Instead of greeting him in her customary way - or ways, rather, for she had turned out to be creative and thorough in her demonstrations - she only glanced up at him with an inscrutable half-smile, waved, and remained where she was, sitting cross-legged and barefoot on the blanket she had spread upon the green grass near the garden. She turned her attention immediately back upon the object in her lap, and he hurried about setting his snared game in the weir he had built in the brook, there to stay cold until he could attend to it later.
When he drew near he saw that she had a length of parchment spread across her knees, her head bent over it studiously. He crouched beside her, slid an arm around her shoulders. "I'm sorry I wasn't here."
"It's all right." She looked up, kissed him in swift, distracted welcome, and added, with a certain note of amusement, "I've just been keeping a promise. Meditating on this." She indicated the document in her lap.
"What is it?" He glanced over the parchment, scrawled thick with lines of ink.
"At the moment," she sighed, "a source of frustration. It's the treaty that was made ages ago with the Fair Folk, and then recorded in writing after my grandfather's banishment. I've been looking it over all morning, trying to decide if it says what I think it says. I'm not sure I trust it."
"What's not to trust?"
Angharad made a vague, impatient gesture into the air. "For ages it's been our understanding that the entire northeastern quarter of the island was forbidden to human habitation, set aside for the Folk. But I can't find it anywhere in here, and now I'm wondering why it was ever tacked on in legend. According to this, it's only the stone ring itself that we're barred from." She pushed the parchment toward him abruptly. "Here, you look. Tell me what I'm missing. I've looked at it so long I feel as though I'm going blind."
Geraint took it and scanned the lines; tightly-spaced script like many-legged insects crawling across the page, the work of a meticulous and, he decided, rather uptight individual. The event may have been a traumatic one, but the scribe who had recorded this treaty had betrayed no emotion in any stroke or dash of his—or her, he amended, remembering where he was—work. There could be no doubt of its thoroughness or accuracy.
"No," he said, "you're right. It's only Pentre Gwyllion mentioned here. What're the Dagrau Rhiannon?"
"Another frustration," she grunted. "'Tears of Rhiannon', in translation. Something the gwyllion helped protect, apparently, but I've never heard of them. Or it. A treasure of some kind, I suppose. It seems to have been the cause of this whole thing, and now we're still held to the terms even though it's lost or forgotten, for all I know. A nice bit of irony, that."
Geraint sucked his teeth, contemplating. It was a nice bit of irony, instinct told him; there was a story in it, somewhere, and it plucked at his mind with delicate fingers, a puzzle to piece together. "Didn't your grandfather travel there to find a source of power?"
