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it up for lost& but the cloth did not burn.
Her eyes widened in disbelief. Fire encircled the silk like a sheath, flames
and heat swirling around, spiraling up, sparks of light flashing off the gold
and silver threads, but the silk itself remained untouched.
When the flames died, Dain floated the scarf again, in the air and up and
about, an indigo swallow soaring through the aftermath of his magic.
She watched him, her heart beating faster. He was as Ragnor had said after
all, a sorcerer, a practitioner of the dark arts she'd read about in the
parchments hidden in the convent's manuscript room, the place where she'd
found her red book.
Heresies for sure, and pagan magic too, the cleric who had shown the
parchments to Ceridwen had said, translated and transcribed by an
eleventh-century monk who had thought he had an eye for ancient history. The
church had disagreed with bell, book, and candle. Ceridwen hadn't known that
day what to believe of the cleric's disjointed and breathless ramblings,
except when he'd loosed his braies, she'd known enough to run.
Curious, she'd gone back when the lustful cleric was well and truly away, and
she'd found wonders within the heresies, story upon story woven into a
fantastical whole, along with faded illuminations showing a time of not one
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God, but of many gods and goddesses and the mighty wars of enchantment they'd
fought.
In the beginning, she'd found great comfort within those worn pages, for they
recounted the stories of her childhood, stories about the Children of Don, the
Mother Goddess; about Ceraunnos, the "Horned One";
about Ceridwen, her namesake and the mother of the great Druid Taliesin. Those
tales had beeri told over and again by a beautiful mother to her children, her
gentle fingers combing through their fair hair, her voice falling like an
angel's sigh upon their ears. Rhiannon had been her name, and Ceridwen missed
her still, her loss having left an emptiness nothing had ever filled.
The years had passed slowly, and Ceridwen had spent many days eluding the
prioress so she could explore the nooks and crannies of the scriptoria, but
the deeper she'd delved into the century-old parchments, the less comfort
she'd found. Obscure references to Carn Merioneth had been written in the
margins of one of the manuscripts, leading her to another one written in the
same hand and bound in red leather. The finding of that book had set her upon
her present doomed course, for what that scribe had reported as myth, Ceridwen
had known to be fact: Carn Merioneth had been a land of golden apple trees,
its orchards praised far and wide for the sweetness of their fruit; a land of
amber honey and forests rich in game, home to hart and hind, fallow deer, roe,
and boar. All this and more had been protected by a palisade of beauty and
grace built on the cliffs above the wildIrish Sea and it had all been
destroyed by a giant who rose up out of the dark night wielding a flaming
sword.
With such truth from the past facing her, how could she not believe what the
book had gone on to foretell of dragons and blood and evil men and her own
grim future? And if perchance the history of Carn
Merioneth had simply been told by one who had been there, and the prophesy was
no more than an imaginative tale, how had that person known ofpryf? For the
dark mystery of the deepest caves below
Carn Merioneth had been written upon the pages of the red book as surely as it
was written in her memory and on the walls of that long-ago tunnel.
Damned book. No power on earth could make her call dragons, and the only blood
she would deal in was the blood of Christ her Savior in Holy Communion. As for
evil men, who could it be besides
Gwrnach and Caradoc, and as she loathed the father for his murderous
destruction of her home and family, she loathed the son.
Yet her fate had arrived, in the guise of a handsome rogue whose smile had
brought a blush to even
Abbess Edith's sour face, and she had not eluded it. Since the night the good
woman had put Ceridwen into Morgan ab Kynan's hands, betrayal had become the
watchword of her life. The betrayal of all she'd learned in childhood, the
betrayal of the convent's teachings, and the most painful betrayal of all,
that of a mother who had filled her head with dreams that had become
nightmares, and then left her to face them alone.
Her gaze followed Dain as he moved around the table. If she couldn't escape
the nightmare, she would have to fight, and within the depths of such a
master's knowledge could lie the seeds of her salvation, if
she had the strength and the means to use them against Caradoc.
The Boar was reputed not to fear any living man or beast, but if the red book
was true and she dare not doubt it any longer he would have need of magic, and
she would rather give him magic than her blood.
Dain had such magic. He had just proven as much, despite his earlier denials.
He may not be Light-elf or tylwyth teg, but neither was he a mere leech. A man
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