Frost Against the Hilt (The Lion of Wales Book 5) Read online

  “We could ride from the fort and attack now—surprise them like we did at Buellt,” Huw said.

  “That might have been a viable strategy at Buellt,” Cador said, “but we are not ready, and after Buellt, the Saxons won’t be as unprepared as we might like. They know how to fight, and we would find them organized against us by the time we reached the field.”

  “Now that Modred is here, we could stay inside the fort and make him take it from us.” Anwen was back in her breeches. She held her bow in her right hand and wore her quiver, replenished with twenty arrows. Like most women, she had braided her hair to keep it contained and had again wound her braid around her head and pinned it. She didn’t want any strands in her way when she reached to her quiver to pull out an arrow.

  Cador looked past Huw to his niece. “You heard the captains’ council with the king. Modred doesn’t want the fort. He wants Wales. He outnumbers us, so he could simply surround us and starve us out while he sends the bulk of his men west. While we sat inside our walls, we would lose the country. Under such circumstances, our people would be right to beg Modred to be their king because we would have abdicated our responsibility to protect them.”

  Huw felt for Anwen’s hand and squeezed once. “Besides, most of our men are not inside the fort. Exposed as they are, even if they maintain the high ground, they will have no choice but to fight.” He let go, because even that sign of comfort was too much familiarity on such short acquaintance. But then she surprised him by reaching for his hand herself and entwining her fingers in his.

  “Better that we choose the ground and the time.” Cador kept his gaze outward, though Huw had no illusions that he didn’t know what was going on between him and Anwen.

  “Has there still been no word from my father and Nell?” Huw said.

  “No word.”

  “How many men have come to fight for us?” Anwen said.

  “Some two thousand,” Cador said.

  Huw shook his head. “Not enough.”

  “No,” Cador said, “but more come every hour.”

  Huw shook his head. “Modred’s men are here. We are all but out of time.”

  Thirty years ago when Arthur’s force had defeated the great Saxon army, it was said that King Arthur carried the cross of Christ on his back for three days in the victory. Arthur himself had told Huw the true story of that battle as they sat up late the night before. It hadn’t been a fight Arthur had been looking for, being the last of a dozen that he’d fought against the Saxons over the course of a spring and summer in the year before Myrddin had been born. Uther, Arthur’s father, and Ambrosius, who’d been king at the time, had ordered Arthur to Mt. Badon to defend the pass into Wales while they had led a stronger force south and east, having heard rumors of a gathering of Saxon armies. Then, as now, they were hoping to end the Saxon threat in one go.

  Unfortunately for Arthur, it had been at Mt. Badon where the Saxons had gathered, not Bath, where Ambrosius and Uther had gone. Though outnumbered, Arthur had used the men he had to great effect, particularly his archers, and what had started out as a sure Saxon victory had become a Welsh one and a rout for the Saxons. Underneath the covering fire of his archers, Arthur had led charge after charge. With the victory at Badon, the Saxons had been defeated for a generation, and they hadn’t risen again until Modred had begun his rebellion.

  Thinking of that long ago day, Huw looked towards the Lawley, the mountain that rose up to the northeast of Caer Caradoc. Now that the light was fading, here and there he could make out the flare of a campfire or a torch. “Lord Cador, how many men did the Saxons bring against Arthur when he defeated them at Badon?”

  “We had perhaps a tenth of the numbers of the Saxon force. King Arthur has faced these odds before and won.”

  Anwen smiled. “As my Saxon stepfather tells it, it wasn’t Arthur’s skill that won the day, but a great trembling in the earth, which opened up and swallowed half the Saxon army whole. I wish that would happen here.”

  Cador laughed. “It didn’t happen then. It won’t happen tomorrow. We can’t think to rely on miracles.”

  “Then we’ll have to make our own,” Huw said.

  Cador had been nothing but steady and sure in his belief that they could win, but Huw’s words had him swallowing another laugh. “How?”

  “What if we light three times as many fires on the Lawley tonight as we have men to sit at them, and even more on the Long Mynd.” Huw gestured to the mountain in front of them. “Never mind that we may never have the men to sit at them, we will sow doubt in the minds of Modred’s men.”

  Anwen’s eyes were bright as she looked at Huw, understanding instantly what he intended. “They will think we have more men than we have, and even tomorrow on the battlefield, even if they kill hundreds of us, they will be wondering how many more we have to send against them.”

  Cador fisted one hand and pounded it into his other palm, more light in his eyes than when he’d come up to the wall-walk to greet Huw. “You have a bit of your father in you, don’t you?”

  Huw gave a low laugh. “If what we believe about Modred’s numbers is true, I pray to God that it turns out to be more than a bit.”

  Chapter Eleven

  16 December 537 AD

  Nell

  Nell and Myrddin crouched in a ditch in the darkness, twenty feet from the nearest sentry posted on the outskirts of Modred’s encampment. Their own army lay less than a mile to the southeast within the safety of Caer Caradoc or on the mountains beside it. As the darkness had overtaken the hills, cooking fires had sprung up, and Nell’s spirits had lifted. Far more lights shone out in the darkness than she’d hoped she would see. The men of Wales had come to support Arthur in one last battle.

  “If we get separated, meet me at that hollow tree we passed,” Myrddin said.

  “I remember it.”

  “You do realize that this is one of our crazier ideas.” Myrddin’s tone was casual.

  She gave a low laugh. “Yes.”

  “This could be where we meet our deaths.”

  Nell took in a deep breath and let it out. If she lived to be eighty, she would never forget the sight of Modred driving a knife into Myrddin’s throat. And she knew that it was the same for him, seeing her die by Modred’s hand. It didn’t matter that these were dreams. They were as real to each of them as the other’s face.

  But that fear didn’t change what they had to do, or that this course was the right one. She’d had no visions at all since they’d left Chester, just as when they’d approached Buellt a few days ago. But while the dream of Arthur’s death had haunted her for twenty years and this one of Myrddin had consumed her for only a few days, it was no less potent in its power—or potentially crippling.

  “If we don’t do this, we’re dead anyway soon enough—if not on the battlefield tomorrow then later, in another battle before another mountain.” She turned her head to look at him. “In all the long years of dreaming of Arthur’s death at the church, we both found strength to do difficult things because to not do them would bring that future closer. We didn’t care about our own deaths because we knew already they were inevitable. If that was true then, it is even more true now.”

  “When you put it that way—” Myrddin hefted the satchel they’d brought for carrying the armor and was up and running at a crouch towards the back of the closest tent. Nell stayed hard on his heels. They’d been waiting for the guard to face the other way, which he had done for just a moment when someone called to him from within the ring of torchlight.

  She and Myrddin had been watching this tent for some time, so they knew that it was empty. Myrddin slashed at the fabric with Nell’s knife, and they went through the hole he created almost without stopping. Light filtered through the half-closed front flap, but anyone outside looking in would see only darkness.

  Myrddin shifted, the shape of him unfamiliar in his borrowed leather armor and Saxon helmet, which were the best that could be salvaged from Urien’s depleted a
rmory. As if Myrddin knew what Nell was thinking about, which wouldn’t surprise her at this point, he said, “I think I’ll keep these bracers. I like them.”

  “Pray you don’t ever need them,” she said.

  He ducked his head. “Nell, you know I will. No matter what we achieve tonight, there will be a battle tomorrow, and I will fight in it.”

  Nell looked down at the grassy floor of the tent. She did know that. Huw would be fighting too. They were here only to make that battle more winnable, not to avert it. Even if they came upon Modred alone in his pavilion, the plan wasn’t to kill him. Maybe that was something to consider again, since there were two of them now.

  No. Better to accomplish what they came for—quick and easy and back to Caer Caradoc before midnight.

  “Come on,” Myrddin said. “The camp will never be busier than it is now.”

  As when she’d dreamed of infiltrating the camp, they were doing it in the evening when it was busy. That might seem counterintuitive, but if they were to steal Modred’s armor, it had to be when he wasn’t there—not when he was asleep and might wake to shout an alarm, or when almost no one was about and the few stray people who were would be looked at closely. In the bustle of the camp, with Myrddin dressed like a Saxon warrior and Nell in a hooded cloak, they could blend in among the Saxons. Coincidently, they each looked just as the other had dreamed: she was attempting to pass for a camp follower, and he for a Saxon man-at-arms.

  With darkness coming so early this time of year—Wales had hardly eight hours of daylight even including the murk before dawn and after sunset—the men of Modred’s camp hadn’t stopped working just because it was dark. Soon it would be mealtime. Here on the eastern side of the camp, they were close to the kitchen fires, and the smell of stew wafted towards them. The men would be fed stew and gruel—as much as they could eat—in preparation for the battle tomorrow. Sadly, from Nell and Myrddin’s perspective, none of the soldiers would be given much in the way of beer or mead. Modred needed them sober for tomorrow.

  The pair left the relative safety of the tent, Myrddin’s arm draped casually across Nell’s shoulders. Several people close by eyed them, assuming they knew what they’d been doing inside that tent. It was such a far cry from what they had actually been doing that Nell almost laughed, which was probably to the good since it made her relax a little.

  “Where’s Modred’s pavilion?” she said to Myrddin in an undertone. “It isn’t in the exact center of the camp?”

  “No—that’s the command center. It’s this way. I saw it from the hill before it grew dark.”

  “That’s one way this camp is different from the one we dreamed.” Nell started to feel a bit of hope.

  And then there it was, located in the northeastern quadrant. Nell and Myrddin took a circuitous route, cutting through some other tenting areas and campfires, so as not to come directly at it. They also wanted to make sure that Modred wasn’t inside. When they were fifty feet away in the shadow of another tent, they stopped. Modred was there, actually. But as they watched, he ducked out the opening and headed towards the command pavilion located fifty yards away. As he walked past them, men bowed in greeting, and many stood in order to follow after him. Clearly something was happening.

  “I think he’s going to speak to the men,” Myrddin said.

  “You get rid of the guard while I get the armor.” Nell spoke in an undertone into his chest. He’d kept his arm around her, and they’d been nuzzling each other as if she was his woman. Which she was, of course, but never had she paid so little heed to his attentions.

  Nell took a step towards the tent, but Myrddin pulled her back, handing her the satchel. “Let me go first.” With sure strides he approached the sentry, who was standing three paces from the entrance, holding a pike and looking straight ahead. “You are relieved, soldier.”

  The man blinked. “But I just came on duty.”

  “Beorhtsige’s orders. He wants you at the meeting with the others. I’m to take your place.”

  “The king has left, so the tent is empty.”

  “I will guard it with my life,” Myrddin said.

  The man handed him the pike and hastened away after Modred. A heartbeat later, Nell crossed to the tent and ducked through the doorway. Straightening, she took in Modred’s quarters with a glance. They were orderly. Furs and blankets, empty of women (thankfully), were layered on the bed to one side. A table stacked with maps and papers, for when he brought his captains inside to consult more privately than in the command tent, stood in the center, and to Nell’s left was a cross-shaped armor stand holding the armor of which she’d dreamed.

  It had been King Arthur, in fact, who’d given the different pieces their Roman names when Huw had asked about the images on the walls of the manor house in which Modred had kept them at Wroxeter. These included a metal cuirass to protect the chest and back, manicas (levered shoulder armor that protected a man’s arm from neck to wrist), thigh pads, and shin guards, all in a silver metal that had been polished until it gleamed. It wasn’t iron, the metal from which everything British or Saxon was made. It was steel, the secret of which had been lost after the Romans had departed Britain.

  She touched the cuirass and realized her mistake. It would be impossible for her and Myrddin to sneak this armor out of the tent—much less the camp—without calling attention to themselves. This wasn’t normal mail or even leather armor, which could be bent, manipulated, or stuffed into a bag. The cuirass alone was too big and bulky for the satchel she’d brought to hide it in.

  She crossed back to the doorway and whispered to Myrddin. “I need your help.”

  Myrddin spoke out of the side of his mouth. “I can’t leave the tent unattended! Someone will notice.”

  “We have to risk it. The only way we’re leaving here with that armor is if you are wearing it.”

  With a low groan, Myrddin took a step back and then turned and ducked through the doorway. He straightened and stopped, in an almost identical pose to what hers had been. “Oh.”

  “Exactly.” She motioned with her hand to indicate that Myrddin should start stripping off his gear. “Hurry, before anyone comes.”

  While Myrddin unhooked his cloak and started unbuckling the bracers that he’d liked so much, Nell went to the door flap, intending to keep some kind of watch, but Myrddin snapped his fingers to gain her attention. “Never mind the door. I’ll need your help to get it on.” He shrugged out of his leather armor, leaving him in his shirt, overtunic, and breeches.

  Nell turned back to him, looking between him and Modred’s armor. She shook her head. “You’ll need to hide that you’re wearing it, so take off your shirt and tunic. You can wear the armor underneath everything, next to your skin.”

  Although the armor as a whole was unfamiliar, the Roman buckles weren’t dissimilar from what she was used to. Her hands shook, but she tried to breathe easy to steady them. By the time she finished, however, both she and Myrddin were breathing hard—mostly from the panic that threatened to overwhelm them. They had to get out of here, and acquiring the armor had already taken far longer than they’d planned.

  Myrddin swung his arms in a full circle. “The Romans knew what they were about. No wonder they conquered us so easily. This armor fits me like a glove and is much lighter than I expected—and more comfortable than that boiled leather I was wearing. I could turn a somersault.”

  “Let’s hope King Arthur thinks so too.” With some effort, she helped Myrddin get back into his shirt and tunic, both of which were stretched tight in places, since they weren’t made to go over metal armor. His leather armor, which had been too large to begin with, went over the top of it all. It was ridiculous to attempt to wear it, but if he was approached by any Saxon without it on, they would know instantly that something was wrong. No Saxon spearman in his position—in the lead up to battle—would ever go about without it.

  “Now I feel like I’m one of those statues we saw at Wroxeter,” Myrddin said. “I can ha
rdly move my arms, much less turn a somersault.”

  “Well, you don’t look like a statue, which is the point.” Nell fastened his cloak at the neck. “You simply look bulky.”

  Myrddin took a few steps. “I creak a little. Can you hear it?”

  She shook her head. “No more than usual from a man in armor.”

  “All right.” Myrddin walked stiffly to the exit. “I’ll take up the sentry position again. Give me a count of five and then come out.”

  Myrddin ducked under the tent flap and immediately was accosted by an angry superior. “How dare you leave your post!”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I needed to give the maid a hand.”

  Her breath in her throat, Nell crossed to the bed and lifted up the side of the mattress, thinking to hide Myrddin’s bracers under the bed (she hadn’t been able to buckle them over his armor) and at least delay their discovery. But as she did so, she kicked something hard that hurt her toe all the way through her boot. Bending, she flicked the furs aside and let out a gasp: Caledfwlch, King Arthur’s legendary sword, lay on the ground in its sheath. Modred had brought it from Wroxeter and cared for it so much that he was sleeping with it next to his bed.

  The captain outside was still talking to Myrddin. Despite rising panic that she was taking too long, Nell knew absolutely that she couldn’t leave the sword behind, so she grabbed it up and ran around the table with it to the back of the pavilion. Lifting up the bottom edge where there were no stakes, she shoved it outside the tent to lie along the edge in the grass—hoping as she did so that there wasn’t anyone outside to notice.

  Then she bundled Myrddin’s bracers into one of the blankets from the bed and bent forward so she could pass through the entryway as Myrddin had done—and ran headfirst into the superior officer. “Sorry! Sorry!” She rubbed at the top of her head with her free hand.

  The officer grunted at the impact of Nell’s head against his chest, though since he was wearing armor it had hurt her far more than him. “Watch where you’re going!”