Daughter of the Sea

XXXIII: Trial

Royal regalia — a sparkling pile of silver and pearl, abalone and opal — spread across her dressing table like so much treasure dredged up from a wreck. Angharad sat before it, gazing at it without admiration, willing herself to be still though all she wanted was to hurl every glittering fetter across the room, smash it into the stone wall, possibly followed by her own head, if she could manage it. Elen stood behind her, twisting her hair into an elaborate system of coils and curls, fastening jewels into the bright waves at intervals.

Eilwen stood at her window, looking down upon the courtyard. She was arrayed in the ceremonial garments of her rank: clinging white linen, embroidered and girdled in silver, her arms and flushed expanse of neck and bosom adorned in coral ornaments. Blue and turquoise gems glimmered in her dark hair. Ordinarily she wore formality with an amused air that made her awareness of her own beauty and its effect on those within sight of her evident, but now she was frowning, her foot tapping in a miniature expression of the tension in the room.

"So many people," she muttered, "and so few enchanters. It doesn't seem possible, somehow."

Angharad grimaced. "It's no worse than it has been since the beginning. Better the monster you know that the one you don't." She looked at her manicured nails, tapping on the tabletop, and felt oddly as though they belonged to someone else.

"I can't believe it, though," Eilwen persisted, "and it makes me suspicious. There must have been more, and something happened to prevent them. Some mishap on the journey, or some dark plot to—,"

Angharad sensed Elen move sharply, and glanced up into her mirror in time to see the fleeting remnant of a significant look that had passed between servant and sister. She turned her eyes away from it dully, relegating the emotion it spawned to the same confined and bound space that she forced her physical discomfort to stay, when she could.

It was pointless to avoid the subject of dangerous journeys when it was forefront in all their minds, yet no one wanted to acknowledge the truth: Geraint had been gone over two full weeks - his continued absence confirmed by her mother's own guards, who were sent out periodically to see whether the cove was still uninhabited. Never had days groaned past so interminably while rushing, all the same, like sand grains through an hourglass, every one carrying with it a fragment of her hope...if she could be said to hope at all for him, when escaping from the gwyllion and coming home meant falling into her mother's trap. She had wracked her brain trying to think of a way to warn him away from his own hut without alerting the queen, and come up empty. Arianrhod and Eilwen had attempted magical protections of their own, but as he remained invisible to their scrying, their abilities were hampered, and every day that went by made it less likely he would ever return at all.

They had been dark days. By daylight she had buried her grief under a thick veil of nothingness that wrapped her heart like armor. But nights were endless torment, when all distractions were stripped away and an awful future stretched ahead of her, a path she must walk alone. She wept until she had no tears left. She ceased to hope that he would return and only begged for assurance that he was alive, petitioned every deity she knew for some sign that she had not sent him to his doom, sought answers in magic and vision and dream but found only the same elusive mysteries. Elen, vigilant, slept beside her every night, and more than once Angharad had looked upon the sleeping face of her familiar, faithful companion and almost resented her for preventing the swift end she had contemplated.