Whitemantle. Robert Goldthwaite Carter

your solemn word that what you witness here tonight will remain with you alone unto death.’

      ‘I do so promise.’

      Gwydion gathered himself. He stood gaunt and twisted as a winter oak as he drew the earth power inside him for a long moment. Words of the true tongue issued from his mouth. Cunning words coiled like ivy, blossomed like honey-suckle, gave fruit like the vine. Then he stepped around the crates, gathering up a charm of woven paces and waving hands, dancing out in gestures and speaking a spell of great magic that began to fall upon the two effigies.

      A crackle of blue light passed over woman and child as they lay side by side. Will seized Lord Dudlea’s arm when he started forward, knowing he must not let the lord interfere once that blue glow had enveloped them.

      A noise that was not a noise grew loud in their heads. And slowly, as Gwydion danced and drew down the power, shadows flew and the tent filled with the tang of lightning-struck air. Their skins prickled and their hair stood up, and slowly in those two strange beds of straw the cold whiteness of marble became tinted as living flesh is tinted, and the wax of death began to give way to the bloom of life.

      Will felt the unbearable tension of great magic. He closed his mind against it, but it tore at him as a storm tears at a hovel. Willow, tougher by far, hung onto the lord’s flailing arms, holding him back as his wife and son rose up from their coffins like spectres. Lord Dudlea called out. His eyes bulged in helpless horror as a weird light played blue in his wife’s eyes. Something moved the boy’s lips, then jolted them again as the figures floated free above the ground. But just as Will began to think they could not hold the lord any longer, a shuddering racked both woman and boy and they fell down as if in a faint. Yet now they were moist and soft and alive, and as the noise and light vanished away they began to breathe again.

      ‘Oh, joy!’ Lord Dudlea called out as he attended his kin. He reached up to touch the wizard’s robe. ‘Thank you, Master Gwydion! With all my heart I thank you!’

      Will opened the tent and stepped out as soon as he could. Willow went with the wizard to join those by the fire whom Gwydion said must now have their minds set at ease. They left Lord Dudlea to his family, and Will stood alone under the moon and stars, trembling, a mass of glorious emotions coursing through him. The power that flowed at Gwydion’s direction was truly awesome, and Will reminded himself that it was not every day the dead came to life again.

      

      They parted company in the early morning.

      Lord Dudlea took Gwydion’s hand. With bowed head, he pledged himself. ‘I shall keep my word, Crowmaster. I shall wait for the army that now marches south towards Trinovant, and I shall offer service to Duke Richard of Ebor.’

      ‘Is that wise?’ Will asked. ‘You were his captive before you escaped. Then you joined the queen against him.’

      ‘It was the king’s court to which I fled, not the queen’s.’

      ‘Oh, indeed? Rumour has it that you tried to arrange the murder of Richard while he was still in the Blessed Isle.’

      The lord’s eyes opened wide and his wife looked to him as if she had been betrayed by a foolish act carried out in her absence. ‘That rumour is a lie.’

      Gwydion looked upon the lord pityingly and spread his hands. ‘A lie, John Sefton? We have not even taken our leave of this clearing and already you have betrayed your promise to me. Is it so hard to be true to your word?’

      ‘Forgive him, Master Gwydion,’ Lady Dudlea begged. ‘I have been his staff. Without a wife to oversee his policies things naturally go awry with him.’

      The wizard smiled. ‘It would be better if you let him be, lady. Grown men must learn to rely on their own consciences. It seems to me that the main question you now have before you is this: how will Lord Warrewyk receive you when next you meet? He murdered a great many of the queen’s friends after the battle.’

      Lord Dudlea met Gwydion’s eye. ‘However he looks upon us, I shall lay myself upon the king’s mercy. If that means pleading for the Duke of Ebor’s mercy too, then that I shall do also.’

      ‘Do you think he has the strength to do the right thing?’ Willow asked when they were out of sight.

      But Gwydion only smiled.

      

      The wizard took them south on unfrequented roads, ones that went the longer way around but avoided the great chapter house at Verlamion. For that Will was grateful. He disliked and feared the Sightless Ones – or ‘red hands’ as the common folk privately called them – and he knew that at Verlamion they would be as thick as wasps about a honey pot.

      The company spent the morning journeying through fruitful farm land. Will knew that if the weather kept dry for a month this part of the Realm would see a good harvest. But then, when the reaping and threshing was all done and the nights began to close in and leaves began spreading red-gold in the hedges, then out would come the Sighdess Ones with their tally sticks and counting frames to take away the best portion of the bounty from the churls who had grown it.

      At Aubrey End Will announced that he could feel the presence of a green lane. The flow of earth power was strong in the soil and Gwydion marked the place with his sigil in the bole of a tree. The lign tasted, Will said, like that of the elder, and Gwydion said that, unless he was very much mistaken, they would soon cross the lign of the rowan too, and this they did before they had gone another league.

      Will looked along the lign and knew it for the same stream of dark power that flowed through Ludford, many leagues to the west. And when he looked eastward he knew they could be no more than a couple of leagues west of Verlamion. A shiver passed through him. Gwydion had said that the Elders of the great chapter house there would stop at nothing to bring to book the defiler who had cracked their Doomstone. Will had not cared that it had turned out to be none other than the lid that sealed the tomb of their revered Founder. He had only wanted to break the lorc’s stony heart that day, and he had saved many a life by his actions.

      They came to the banks of the River Gadden well before noon. It was here that Will felt yet another lign prickle his skin. This one was fainter and harder to follow, but it seemed to trend a little south of east, much as the rowan lign had. There was no doubt in Will’s mind that it was the yew lign, the same that passed close by the Vale.

      ‘Keep up!’ Gwydion called back, flicking the reins of his horse.

      ‘Master Gwydion, I can feel the Eburos lign.’

      ‘What of it?’

      ‘Nothing – except I thought it was our task to find more battlestones.’

      ‘There is no time to tarry at present. We must reach Trinovant before nightfall!’

      ‘Then ride on ahead of us!’ Will told him. ‘We’ve a young child to consider. And this old nag’s already tired out.’

      The wizard waited for them to draw abreast. ‘I would rather you came along with me,’ he said with exaggerated patience. ‘This is not a safe time for anyone to be on the road. News of the battle has yet to reach these parts and there will be much uncertainty in men’s hearts.’

      Will saw that Gwydion’s impatience was unsettling his horse. It had soon taken him fifty paces ahead and was champing to get on further still.

      Willow watched the wizard with concern. ‘He’s getting grumpier by the hour,’ she whispered. ‘I hope he’s all right.’

      ‘He’s worried. And is it any wonder, when things have gone so far astray?’

      He partly meant their quest to rid the Realm of battlestones, but he was also thinking of the unspeakable bloodshed that had followed the fight at Delamprey. While a greater battle had been narrowly prevented, the murder of so many noble prisoners at Lord Warrewyk’s hands had blighted the victory. Will was sure that act had sown the seeds of revenge – seeds that must eventually be reaped as a yet bloodier harvest.

      So far as the