Chapter 50: THE WOUND’S WITNESS

The rain came before dawn, a cold weeping from a grey sky that washed the blood from the grass and turned the churned earth of Badon into a slick, dark mirror. Arthur stood at the edge of the new-turned mound, his cloak heavy with water, the spear planted before him like a sentinel. The tree—Cynfael’s tree—rose from the centre of the chasm’s scar, its leaves a green so deep it seemed to drink the light rather than give it. The bone-white hand had not moved since it first broke the soil. It lay palm-upward, fingers slightly curled, as if waiting for something to be placed within it.

Gwladys came to stand beside Arthur, her boots squelching in the mud. She carried a leather satchel heavy with herbs, and her dark hair was plastered to her cheeks. She said nothing for a long while, only studied the hand with the careful attention of a woman who had learned to read wounds before she learned to read scripture.

“It is not a corpse risen,” she said at last. “There is no rot, no pallor of the grave. It is alive, Arthur. It breathes.”

Arthur grunted. He had not slept. The weight of the spear’s song was still in his bones, a vibration that would not fade. “Cynfael’s hand?”

“I cannot say.” She knelt, reaching out as if to touch the fingers, then stopped short of contact. “The skin is too pale, too smooth. It is not the hand of a man who held a blade. It is the hand of something that has never known sun or wind.”

“Then what does it want?”

Gwladys rose, her face troubled. “It is not a question of want. It is a question of what has been awakened. The seed Cynfael swallowed—it was not meant to grow in him alone. It was meant to grow in the earth, through him. The door did not close because the door was never meant to close. It was meant to open, and open wider.”

Arthur’s jaw tightened. He had driven his spear into the earth to seal the chasm, and for a time it had held. But the ground had trembled again in the night, and the hand had emerged with the first light. He had not slept for fear of what might rise next.

“Myrddin said the doors are not all meant to be closed,” Arthur said. “But he did not say which ones.”

Gwladys looked at him then, and there was something old in her gaze, something that had little to do with the healer’s craft she had learned at her mother’s knee. “He did not know. Or if he did, he did not trust himself to speak it. Myrddin has seen too many futures twist into ruin to risk naming one.”

“Then we are blind.”

“No.” She gestured to the tree. “He is not blind. He is growing. And what grows can speak.”

Arthur turned to the tree. Its bark was smooth, unmarked by the usual knots and scars of age, and the leaves rustled though the air was still. He stepped closer, and the spear at his side—the spear that bore his name—began to hum. A low, insistent note, like the drone of a distant horn.

He stopped before the trunk. The surface rippled, not with wind but with something deeper, a pulse that matched the beat of his own heart. He reached out and placed his palm against the bark.

The world lurched.

He was not on the field of Badon. He stood in a cavern of roots, a place where the earth’s bones were laid bare, and the air was thick with the smell of loam and old stone. Before him, entangled in the roots, Cynfael hung suspended, his eyes closed, his lips parted. A faint green light pulsed beneath his skin, moving in rhythm with the roots that held him.

“Cynfael,” Arthur said.

The young man’s eyes opened. They were no longer the grey of a Gwynedd sky. They were the deep green of the tree’s leaves, flecked with gold.

“You should not have come,” Cynfael said. His voice was not his own. It was layered, resonant, as if many voices spoke through him at once.

“I made a vow.”

“Vows bind the living. I am no longer wholly living.” Cynfael tried to smile, but the roots tightened, and the smile became a grimace. “The seed grows. It feeds on me, but it also feeds on the wound. The wound in the hill. The wound in the earth. The wound that was opened when the grey druids drank from the old thing’s blood.”

“The grey druids are dead or scattered.”

“The wound remains.” Cynfael’s eyes flickered. “Aelle’s sorcery did not create it. It only opened a path to something that was already there, waiting beneath the hill. The old thing was not bound by the druids. It was bound by the land itself, by the songs the first people sang to keep it sleeping. Those songs have faded. The people who knew them are dust. And the door… the door is not the only one.”

Arthur felt a chill that had nothing to do with the rain. “Where are the other doors?”

“Everywhere the old thing bled into the earth. Everywhere its roots reached. There is one in the hills of the north, where the stones weep. There is one in the marshlands of the east, where the water burns. There is one beneath the tor where you first spoke my name.”

Arthur’s hand tightened against the bark. “If I close them, will you be freed?”

Cynfael was silent for a long moment. The green light beneath his skin pulsed faster. “If you close them, the seed will die. And I will die with it. But the old thing will not die. It will only wait again, and the waiting will make it hunger more.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“You are to do what you have always done.” Cynfael’s voice cracked, and for a moment it was his own, raw and young. “You are to fight. But not with the spear alone. You must find the songs that were lost. You must find the people who still remember them. The grey druids tried to silence the land. You must make it sing again.”

The roots began to tighten, and the cavern began to dissolve. Arthur reached for Cynfael, but his hand passed through empty air, and suddenly he was back on the field of Badon, his palm still pressed against the tree, the rain cold on his face.

Gwladys was watching him. “What did you see?”

Arthur lowered his hand. The tree’s leaves were still, and the bone-white hand had not moved. But the wound in the earth—the scar where the chasm had been—seemed deeper than before, as if the ground had settled, revealing more of what lay beneath.

“I saw him,” Arthur said. “And I saw what I must do.”

He turned from the tree and looked toward the north, where the hills rose grey and indistinct. Somewhere beyond them, the stones wept. Somewhere beyond them, another door waited.

“We ride north,” he said. “And we find the songs that were lost.”

Gwladys said nothing. But as Arthur walked toward his horse, she looked down at the bone-white hand, and for the first time, she saw the fingers move. They curled, slowly, deliberately, into the shape of a cradle.