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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His boat, of course, was gone.
The narrow strip of beach at the foot of the cliffs had afforded little in terms of protective places to secure it, and though he had done his best, anchoring it to a jagged boulder in a hollow as far up the sand as he could, Geraint had not anticipated leaving it there for a fortnight. One or two days and it might have held, but the small craft and insufficient mooring was no match for the dozens of high tides that must have transpired in his absence — not to speak of more tremors that may have happened in the meantime. He stared at the empty sand, bereft of so much as a splinter of his transport, and silently cursed the gwyllion, the earthquakes, and the...no.
Not the sea.
He sighed, and turned his feet to the south.
The island seemed much bigger, traveling by land. He set his mind on Eilwen's declaration that it was a two-day journey, though he had his doubts; after all none of the island's inhabitants had need to measure a distance they were forbidden to travel, but if anyone knew, it would be the Daughters who ruled it. Nevertheless, if he marched always south, he was sure to come out somewhere near his intended destination sooner or later - hopefully the former, since he was out of food, and hopefully in enough time for his information to be of some use, if it were at all. He could not be quite sure, nor did he know whether Angharad would approve of the bargain he had struck. It had seemed, at the time, perfectly reasonable; brilliant, even, in the breadth of solution it offered. Now he thought upon it and wondered at his own confidence at something that sounded so fantastic, so beyond the pale; perhaps it had been a trick of the fae, the ulterior motive of the gwyllion all along, and he had doomed the island to an enchantment and entanglement that might only make matters worse. But it was no use fretting about it now. He had the answers, or at least some of them; what the enchantresses of Llyr did with them was their own decision.
And so he walked determinedly, swiftly, glancing and then staring hard, at times, at his surroundings, with a growing sense of bewilderment. Things looked...or felt...different, in a way difficult to pinpoint. Occasionally a boulder seemed to loom into his peripheral vision at an odd angle, but lay ordinary and innocuous when he turned his startled eyes toward it. A patch of moss or a tuft of brush that caught his attention, the way a window in a wall draws the eye, on further investigation bore no apparent difference from those surrounding it, yet it pricked at his consciousness, made him look again, and again, never quite satisfying him, as though its very ordinariness was a thin veneer over something strange and eldritch.
The perception dawned on him so slowly that he could not be sure it was real, and even as it continued, he questioned his senses, tried to push it from his mind. Nothing, it was nothing...but there it was again, an itch at the edge of his sight, a glimmering in places that had no business doing so. He began to glare rather irritably at such anomalies, suspecting that he was once again the target of some fairy prank. Hadn't they had their fill of sporting with him yet? If they were going to call his attention to various bits of landscape they might alert him of something useful, at the very least, like a patch of edible mushrooms. He sustained himself upon handfuls of green blackberries that grew in profusion, comforted by the notion that if they were enchanted they'd be riper and taste better, and steadfastly ignored the strangeness.
