Chapter 85: The Furrow's End

The furrow began at the edge of the camp where the horses had been tethered and the ground was churned to mud, and it ran north.

Cynfael saw it first because the earth spoke to him even when it had no words. He had crawled out of the tent before dawn, his palms pressed flat to the frozen turf, and felt the long wound running under his hands like a seam of heat in a cold corpse. It was narrow, no wider than a man's forearm, and the sides were smooth as though a blade had been drawn through the soil by a god who did not hurry.

Arthur found him kneeling there. The king wore no crown and never had, but the spear was in his fist, and the grey light of morning made the scars on his knuckles look like rivers on a map.

"You feel it," Arthur said. It was not a question.

"It feels me." Cynfael rose, and the seed inside him turned once, slow and heavy, like a stone rolling downhill. "It began at Badon. It ends—" He stopped. The word would not come.

"Ends where?"

"I don't know. Somewhere north. Somewhere it wants to be fed."

Myrddin came out of the mist with his hood down, which was rare, and the ruin of his face caught the dawn like old parchment. He carried the stone in his closed fist still, and Gwladys walked a half-step behind him with her own hand cupped, carrying what could not be seen.

"The furrow is a mouth," Myrddin said. "The land has opened it because it was asked. I asked it."

"You said the land was listening," said Arthur. "I did not hear you say you had spoken to it."

"I spoke with a stone, not a tongue. There is a difference. The stone remembers the first furrow ever cut, when men learned that if you break the earth in a line, something will grow along it. The land remembers being planted. It wants to be harvested." Myrddin opened his fist. The stone lay in his palm, grey and veined with something darker that might have been iron or might have been old blood. "I offered it a bargain. A furrow for a furrow. Ours for theirs."

Gwladys spoke for the first time. Her voice was quiet and had a healer's flatness, the tone of a woman who had held too many hands while they cooled.

"There is no 'theirs.' There is only the land, and it does not bargain. It waits. It has always waited."

"Then you know something I do not," Myrddin said.

"I know that my mother's mother's mother fed it once, in a year when the harvest failed, and it took what she gave and gave back nothing, and the village starved anyway. The old gods do not keep ledgers. They keep appetites."

The antlered figure stood at the treeline, where it always stood, neither closer nor farther than before. It had not moved toward them in three days. It had moved only toward Gwladys, one slow step at a time, patient as a shadow at noon, and now it stood with its crowned head tilted as though listening to the furrow too.

Arthur looked at the thing for a long moment. Then he turned his back on it, which Cynfael thought was either the bravest thing he had ever seen or the most foolish, and perhaps those were the same.

"We ride north," Arthur said. "We reach Aelle before the shadow does. That has not changed."

"It has changed," Cynfael said. "The furrow runs north. So does Aelle. So does the thing with no face. We are not racing it. We are following it."

"Then we follow it faster."

They broke camp in silence. The horses shied from the furrow and would not cross it, so they rode wide around it, and Cynfael watched it run beside them like a vein in the world's wrist. By midday it had widened. By dusk it was deep enough that a man could have lain in it and pulled the earth over himself like a blanket.

They made camp in the lee of a ruined Roman wall, one of the long ones that had once held back the Picts and now held back nothing at all. Cynfael could not sleep. He walked the perimeter with his father's blade on his hip and the seed burning low in his chest, and he found Gwladys sitting on a fallen stone with her hand open in her lap.

"What is it?" he asked, though he had asked before and gotten no answer.

She looked up. In the firelight her face was young and old at once, the way the land was old and the spring was young.

"A name," she said. "I think. It is the memory of a heartbeat, and the heartbeat had a name, and if I say it, something will happen that cannot be undone."

"Then don't say it."

"I won't." She closed her hand. "But it wants me to. It has wanted me to since Badon. And the antlered thing wants me to as well. And the thing beneath the hill. And Myrddin, though he will not say so. Everyone wants me to speak a name, and no one will tell me whose it is."

Cynfael sat down beside her. The seed turned again, hot now, and he pressed a hand to his chest as though he could hold it still.

"I swallowed a seed because a keeper told me it would bind me to the land," he said. "I did not ask whose seed, or what it would grow into. I think that was the mistake. Not the swallowing. The not asking."

Gwladys almost smiled. "You are wiser than you look, heir of Bryn."

"I am more frightened than I look. It is not the same thing."

The earth trembled. It was small, a shiver, the way a horse shivers off a fly. But Cynfael felt it in his bones, and Gwladys felt it in hers, and across the camp Myrddin woke with a cry and clutched his stone.

Far to the north, in the hall of Aelle, the shadow with no face had stopped walking. It stood at the head of a long table where Saxon chieftains argued over mead and plunder, and it set one borrowed hand flat on the wood, and the wood began, very slowly, to green.

Aelle looked at the wood. He looked at the thing that wore a face he had known as a man's. He did not run. He was a Saxon, and Saxons did not run from gods. But he did reach, slowly, for the axe at his belt, and the shadow smiled with its borrowed mouth, and said, in a voice that was almost Aelle's own: "You will not need that. We are going to Badon. But not the way you went before."

It turned its head south, toward the furrow, toward the seed, toward the cupped hand of a healer who held a name she did not dare to speak.

"Walk," it said. "The door is waiting."

And far away, in the dark beneath the hill, the door that breathed drew one long breath in, and did not let it out.