I caught Medraut’s dagger wrist and dragged it down. “No! Either tell me the meaning of this foolery or else have done with it!”
But in the same instant the man on the step behind me reached forward and caught up something that lay like a snowflake on the threshold of the doorway, and when he held it up to the torchlight with a small puzzled laugh, I saw that it was a wood anemone, one fragile white windflower already beginning to wilt. And I knew that there could be no shelter for me, from what lay beyond that small deep-set door.
There was the light grating sound of a key turning in the lock, the door was flung open from within and the softer light of a fat-lamp flowed out into the stairway to mingle with the flare of the torches, and Bedwyr stood in the doorway, naked under a hastily flung-on cloak, and with his drawn sword in his hand.
There was an instant’s silence so intense that it pressed upon the ears, and in the heart of it — the stillness at the heart of the storm — Bedwyr and I stood face to face. I think that he was scarcely aware of the other men, only of me, and of Guenhumara standing against the wall behind him. “I did not know that you had returned to Venta,” I heard my own voice saying in the stillness, “but it seems you have your reasons that I should not.”
I rounded on the young men crowding the stair. None of them were against me especially; they were against the Queen and Caesar’s captain, because Medraut had taught them to be. Only Medraut had known that the blow was aimed at me, and the rum of the other two only incidental. “You have done your night’s work, now get out!” I shouted at them, and their faces stared up at me, surprised, angry, resentful, out of the gloom of the stairway. “Get out,” I said again, more quietly, “back to your kennels — and for you, Medraut — you too have done your night’s work, and most nobly! I would say that surely there can be no more cunning spy among all the Little Dark People than you have proved yourself, but the Little Dark Ones I have always counted as my friends, and I would not seem to insult them now.”
The white mask was haggard, and I will swear that there was sweat on his forehead. He had lowered the torch somewhat and the copper glare of it beat like a gong in both our faces, and for one instant it was as though his eyes flashed open upon me and I saw in them twin blue sparks lit by the flames of hell. Then the veil, the inner lid, descended again, and he said humbly, “If I have done ill, let my father forgive me. I could not bear that men should laugh behind your back — your own men; and even the Sea Wolves who must come to hear of it, and think the less of Artorius Augustus who let himself be cuckolded by his dear familiar friend!”
“And doubtless all that you told to your dupes who were here just now,” I said. “You have taken great care for my honor, somewhat less for your own. Now get out of my sight, and for God’s sake keep out of it, for if you come near me again for a while, I think that I shall kill you.”
He stood staring at me while the torch spluttered in his hand, and for a moment the muscles worked about his jaw and throat as though there was something more that he would say. Then he turned, with one long look at Bedwyr in passing that could not quite conceal his triumph, and ran down the curling stair as though the hounds of hell were after him.
Bedwyr still stood unmoving, as though on guard before the small deep-set doorway. “Get back inside,” I said.
I saw him swallow, but he did not move, and deliberately I drew my sword and brought up the point to his throat. “Get back.”
His hand tightened convulsively on his own sword hilt, and it hung by a hair, whether or not the next instant we should be fighting for the doorway.
Then Guenhumara cried out harshly, “Bedwyr! Do as he says!”
He hesitated an instant longer, then with his eyes still leveled on my face, took a step backward, and another. I followed, with the point of my sword still kissing his throat, until both of us were within the room; then crashed the door to behind me, and stood leaning against it, looking from him to Guenhumara and back again. The place was a store chamber, half full of cloth bales and raw fleece; several of the fleeces had been pulled out from the stack and piled to make a couch, and on the black ramskin spread uppermost of all, lay a broken garland of wood anemones. I saw all that by the soft light of the fat-oil lamp, yet I never looked at anything but Bedwyr’s face and Guenhumara’s.
“Did you ever go to Coed Gwyn at all?” I drove my sword back into its wolfskin sheath and my own voice seemed to rasp at my throat as the blade rasped against its casing. “Have you had good hunting in the Arfon hills, this half winter past, or was there richer hunting here? Did you merely lie up within a day’s ride of Venta, until I was safely away and the Queen could send for you?”
Bedwyr spoke for the first time, tossing down his own sword, since the sheath was not on him. “The hunting was good in Arfon, and I returned from it yesterday, not even knowing that you were away.”
“A fortunate chance!” I said. “And it seems that you wasted little time in making good use of it!”
Silence took us by the throat. Guenhumara still stood pressed against the wall as though impaled there, so that I might almost have thought to see the spear shaft between her breasts. Her unbound hair fell in a strong tawny smoke about her, and her eyes, straining to mine, seemed mere blind black holes in her deathly face.
“Artos,” Bedwyr said at last, “I plead no excuses for either of us; to do so would be a waste of breath. Guenhumara and I have loved each other, tonight. But I swear to you before whatever gods there be, that this was the first and only time.”
I laughed, and the sound of the laughter was foul and brutal in my own ears. “Did love come on you so suddenly, then? Did you sup with her to keep her from another lonely evening, and find too late that Sasticca had mingled mandrake in the wine cup? How is it then, that all men know what has been going forward? Even my armor-bearer cried out to me not to go with Medraut tonight, knowing well enough what I should find!”
Bedwyr showed neither shame nor anger, only grief in the haggard lines of his face, and of all strange and unexpected things, a certain grave kindliness. He could afford to be kind. “No need for mandrake,” he said. “The care that is between Guenhumara and me grew slowly and in the dark.”
“In the dark!” I echoed bitterly.
“But not as you mean it. Listen to me, Artos, whatever comes after, listen to me now. For more than ten years, you and I and Guenhumara have been closer to each other than to any other living soul, and Guenhumara is a woman. We did not know, any more than you knew, the thing that was happening, until you brought me to her, sick with my wound after Badon.”
“And you had all the summer together, while I was sweating on the war trail.”
“And we had all the summer together, while you were sweating on the war trail. Was that our fault?”
I thought of the autumn evening and the light nonsense that we had tossed like a golden ball, to and fro. “So that was why you went back to your own quarters?”
“Yes, when you came back I knew that I must go because she was yours.”
“You forgot that easily enough tonight. Your memory, it seems, is not of the best.”
“I had been up in the mountains alone, all the end of winter, all the bitter waking spring, sleeping alone and eating my heart out. And when I came back, and saw her again, I forgot that she belonged to you, and remembered only that my love clung to her, and hers to me.”