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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Trigger Warning: suicidal ideation
Angharad lay, staring at nothing, listening to her own breath in the silence of her chamber.
Eilwen and Arianrhod had left, very late, after getting her settled and breaking the news to Elen, who had not been able to refrain from a single, bitter "I knew it," before biting her tongue, for all appearances to keep from saying more that she might regret. She had helped ready Angharad for bed in unwonted silence, offering none of her affectionate scolding or pertness, and Angharad heard her sniffling to herself quietly throughout. She felt oddly cross about her own impulse to comfort Elen, to reach out with conciliatory words. What was there to reconcile? If anything, she herself was the one in need of comfort, but there would apparently be none forthcoming from this quarter.
"I didn't do it on purpose," she had murmured finally, when Elen moved to retire to her own chamber. The girl had paused, looking at her sadly.
"But you didn't not," she said, "and you're not sorry."
Angharad had lain back into her cushions, tempted to say something defensive, and paused to consider. "No," she sighed, "I am not."
Elen had taken up her candle and disappeared without further comment.
Alone in the darkness, Angharad thought, and her thoughts tangled and twisted one into another until they melted into nothing but feeling. But even feeling did not know what it wanted, and the tears that wet her pillow were mingled of grief, fear and hope.
It should not be so. A new life should be a thing only of joy. I am inside-out, she thought. Made of everything at once, and nothing. It made her angry, but anger that, yesterday, would have set the cold embers in the hearth ablaze now simply clenched in her fists and her chest, a dark and formless vise. Fear that Geraint had returned and been captured, that even now there might be guards dragging him, bound and bewildered, before Regat, made sleep impossible. Arianrhod had promised she would stay and watch for the guards' return, sworn she would allow nothing to happen to him. But it was cold comfort in the face of her mother's wrath.
At some endless hour she rose, sleepless, lit the Pelydryn, and pulled her grandfather's sheet of parchment from beneath the mattress where she had sequestered it. It was creased now from much folding and re-folding, the ink blurred in spots from the continued pass of her fingertips as she read over its scrawls, the stubborn words that would not unlock their mysteries. Of all the things that chafed at her, the helpless lack of anything to do about her situation had been the worst, and it had become her nervous habit, since Geraint had gone, to ponder the pages at every opportunity, hoping that some clue to their meaning would become clear if she just meditated upon it long enough.
She traced the triple spiral with a racing heart as she read the words again, and noticed the last line with a sudden jolt that prickled over her scalp. "Cleave the tomb," she whispered, out loud, "the fruitful womb shall bring Llyr home."
