Chapter 4: The Spear’s Answer

The column of fire guttered and died as if a great hand had snuffed it, leaving only the afterimage seared into Cynfael’s sight. The war-horn’s echo rolled away into the hills, swallowed by the patient dark. He stood alone on the bare summit, the spear still in his grip, its ash-wood shaft now warm as a living limb. The ring of cold iron on his finger had stopped its screaming. The land, too, had fallen still—but not silent. He could feel it now, a vast and sluggish heartbeat beneath the turf, like a beast dreaming in its den.

“You see it, then.” The voice came from the shadows of a tumbled cairn. Cynfael spun, spear levelled. Myrddin stepped into the starlight, his scarred face half-lit, his eyes the grey of winter seas. “The land. You see it as it truly is.”

“I see a fire that should not have burned,” Cynfael said, his voice hoarse. “I see a horn that no man blew.”

Myrddin tilted his head, studying him with a patience that made Cynfael’s skin crawl. “The horn was blown. By a king who has yet to be crowned, and by a foe who has yet to land. Time is a skein, boy. The threads tangle.”

Cynfael lowered the spear, but did not sheathe it. “You knew. You knew what would happen if I touched it.”

“I knew what might happen. There is a difference, though few care to learn it.” Myrddin gestured to the spear. “That is the *Gae Bolg*’s lesser cousin, a thing of the old people, forged before the legions came. It was buried to keep it from the Saxons’ new masters. The druids who turned to Aelle would pay much for such a weapon. They would pay more to unmake it.”

“Then why leave it for me to find?”

Myrddin’s smile was a thin, bitter thing. “Because the land chose you, Cynfael ap Bryn. Not I. It has been waiting for a hand that could hold it without being consumed. Your father could not. Your grandfather went mad trying. You are the first in three generations to touch it and still stand.”

The words settled like stones in Cynfael’s chest. He thought of his father’s rages, the way Bryn had stared at the hearth-fire for hours without blinking, muttering to voices no one else could hear. He had thought it the grief of a widower. Now he wondered.

“And what does the land want?” Cynfael asked.

Myrddin’s gaze drifted east, where the first pale smudge of dawn was beginning to bleed over the Black Mountains. “To be defended. To be remembered. The old gods are not dead, boy. They are sleeping. And the Saxons have found a way to wake them—twisted, hungry, and bound to their will.”

Cynfael felt the spear pulse in his hand, a single throb like a second heartbeat. “The fire. That was them?”

“That was a warning. Aelle’s druids have raised a beacon on the coast, a thing of blood and oak. It calls to the sea, to the dark places beneath the waves. They mean to summon something that has not walked this island since the ice retreated.” Myrddin’s voice dropped. “And Arthur rides to meet them at a ford called Llongorth, three days’ march from here. He does not know what he faces.”

Cynfael looked at the spear, at the ring, at the old man who seemed to have stepped out of a bard’s tale. “Then we warn him.”

“We do,” Myrddin said. “But you must understand the price. The spear will take from you as it gives. Every vision, every waking of the land’s dead—it will cost you a piece of yourself. Your father paid with his mind. Your grandfather with his soul.”

Cynfael thought of the fire, the horn, the grinding voice that had spoken in his skull. He thought of the Saxons burning his mother’s hall when he was seven, of the ash and the screaming, of the long years of running and hiding and sharpening his hatred. He had spent his whole life preparing to fight a war. He had never once considered that the war might fight him back.

“Then I will pay,” he said.

Myrddin’s eyes flickered with something that might have been pity. “They all say that. The land is patient. It will collect.”

They descended the hill as the sun rose, painting the mists gold and amber. Below them, the valley of Gwynedd lay spread like a torn cloak, its scattered farmsteads still smoking from the raiders’ passing. Cynfael saw it now with new eyes—the lines of old earthworks beneath the pasture, the standing stones half-swallowed by gorse, the faint shimmer of something like heat rising from the barrow mounds. The land was crowded with ghosts. He had always known it. Now he could see them.

By midday they reached the Roman road that still ran, cracked but true, toward the southeast. Myrddin had procured two shaggy ponies from a farmstead whose owner asked no questions and received a single silver coin for his silence. They rode hard, following the old stones, past abandoned villas where vines choked the mosaics and fallen statues lay like slain warriors in the grass. The road was empty but for them, yet Cynfael felt eyes upon him from every copse and hedgerow. The land was watching.

On the second night, they made camp in the lee of a ruined watchtower, its roof long gone, its walls scrawled with faded Latin prayers. Cynfael sat with his back to the cold stone, the spear across his knees. He had not slept since touching it. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the column of fire, heard the horn, felt the grinding voice.

“Myrddin,” he said. “At Badon. What happens there?”

The old man was silent for a long moment, feeding a twig to the fire. “I do not know. The threads tangle too tightly. I see a hill, and a great slaughter, and a king with a broken sword. I see you, standing in the rain, and the spear—” He stopped.

“And what?”

Myrddin looked up, and for the first time, Cynfael saw fear in those winter-sea eyes. “I see you falling. And I see the land rising to catch you. That is all I know.”

Cynfael gripped the spear tighter. Somewhere in the darkness, a wolf howled—long and lonely, like a soul searching for its body. And beneath it, so faint he might have imagined it, he heard the sound of marching feet, and the clink of mail, and the low, guttural chanting of a tongue that had no home in this island.

The Saxons were coming.

And Arthur, somewhere ahead, was riding to meet them.