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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Geraint didn't know he'd been asleep until he was abruptly awakened.
He had tossed and turned for a long time, his mind full of many conflicting emotions after the day's conversations and events, and oppressed by an odd sense of being not quite alone. Probably it was only his imagination...but he kept glancing at the lintel of his door, where Angharad's pendant was hidden, worrying that he should find a better place for it - buried, maybe, or behind a loose stone in the wall. When he finally drifted away it had been a restless sort of sleep, a drifting in and out of conscious awareness, a slow shift from the dark silence of his hut to strange and disturbing half-awake dreams, full of images of fire and flood. He thought himself trapped inside a ring of giant stones, pinched and prodded by invisible hands, dragged into the earth by eldritch creatures who retreated, shrieking horribly, as a great tremor shook the ground. He awoke with a shout and sat up in a panic; the noise of the tremor was still going on...no, it wasn't. Someone was beating at his door.
Angharad's voice called frantically and he scrambled off his pallet and stumbled, clumsy with sleep, to the door, which he flung open, immediately flinching backwards with a cry of surprise. Angharad it was, glowing in the light of her golden sphere, looking almost as wildly desperate as the first night she'd come here — but she was flanked by her sister and another woman, a stranger. Instantly he was conscious that he was clad in nothing but his leggings, and he backed away in panicked embarrassment, swiping at the ground for his shirt and stuttering apologies.
Angharad swept breathlessly into the hut and threw her arms around him. "Oh, thank goodness," she exclaimed, inexplicably, and then released him with barely a glance; she turned to the doorway and reached over the lintel, swept her hand across its edge and pulled down the small parcel of linen. The other two women followed her inside somewhat more sedately; Eilwen grinned at him as he fumbled with his shirt, whose inside-out dishevelment remained stubbornly uncooperative with his awkward efforts to don it. "Well-met again, Geraint of Gellau," she purred.
"Indeed, milady," he stammered, wishing the floor would swallow him. "I am honored."
Her gaze scanned his bare chest with obvious approval. "Don't feel you have to dress on our account."
"Eilwen," the older woman reproved mildly. Geraint dared to glance at her, and pieced her identity together in a quick succession of observations: tall and stately, dark-haired and clear-eyed, suffused with a mature, serene beauty of middle age despite being rather windblown at the moment. The set of her mouth and the arch of her brows reminded him strongly of Angharad's, but the softness in her face made him sure he did not look upon the queen. The aunt, then, the priestess. He averted his eyes from her face at once, and bowed.
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