Chapter 87: The Thread That Points North

The thread of light hung in the air like a splinter of ice, thin and white and terrible, and it pointed north.

Cynfael saw it from beneath the hill, where the door breathed and the roots drank and the seed inside him turned toward the light as a flower turns toward the sun. He lay in the dark with his cheek against cold earth that was not cold, that was warm as a body, and he felt the thread pass through the stone above him like a needle through cloth. It did not burn. It sang. A single note, high and pure, and the note had a direction.

*Walk,* said the voice that was not a voice. *The door is waiting.*

"I have walked," Cynfael said. His mouth was dry. He did not know how long he had been below. Time moved differently here, where the dead remembered and the earth listened and the seed in his belly put out roots that were not roots but something hungrier. "I have walked until my feet are stone. Where does it lead?"

The voice did not answer. The thread did.

He rose. His legs were stiff with cold and with something else, something that had settled into the marrow of him while he slept. He could feel it now—the seed, the warmth at the center of him, the small persistent pulse that was not his heart but beat beside it, patient as a second sun. It had grown. He did not know how he knew, but he knew. What had been a kernel was now a knot. What had been a knot was now a root, and the root reached down through him into the earth and up through him into the dark, and he was no longer certain where Cynfael ended and the land began.

He followed the thread.

The tunnel sloped upward. It was not a tunnel he had walked before—or perhaps it was, and the earth had rearranged itself in his absence, as earth does when it dreams. The walls were veined with pale stone that glowed faintly, not with the green light of the door but with the memory of light, the way old embers remember fire. He touched one and felt a name. He touched another and felt a battle. He touched a third and felt a woman weeping, and he withdrew his hand quickly, because the weeping was familiar, and he was afraid it was his mother's.

The thread led him through chambers where the dead lay in rows, their hands folded on their breasts, their faces turned toward the north. They were not skeletal. They were not decayed. They were preserved in the earth's amber, sleeping, waiting, and Cynfael understood with a cold clarity that they had been waiting for him. Or for what he carried. The seed stirred as he passed, and one of the sleepers—a woman with a torque of twisted gold at her throat—opened her eyes.

She did not speak. She looked at him, and in her look was a question, and the question was: *Is it time?*

"I don't know," Cynfael whispered.

The woman closed her eyes. The thread pulled him on.

He climbed. The earth pressed close. He climbed until his breath came short and his hands were raw, and then the thread passed through a crack in the stone above him, and he saw the sky.

It was night. The stars were out, hard and bright and indifferent, and the air was cold with the first breath of winter. He pulled himself through the crack and lay on his back on the hillside, gasping, and the thread of light rose from his chest and pointed north, unwavering, a needle set in the wound of the world.

He was in Gwynedd. He knew the shape of these hills, the smell of this heather, the way the wind came down off the mountains like a hand across a face. He was not far from his father's hillfort—from his hillfort now, if any of it still stood, if any of his warband still lived. He should go there. He should find his men, his sword, his place in the world of the living.

But the thread pointed north. And beneath the thread, beneath the pull of it, he felt something else: a heartbeat. Not his own. Not the seed's. A third heartbeat, small and distant, like a child's fist against a door. It came from the north. It came from wherever the thread was leading.

He stood. His legs held. He began to walk.

He had not gone a mile before he found the first sign of what had happened while he was below. A farmstead, burned. The roof beams had fallen inward, and the thatch was ash, and the animals were gone—not stolen, he saw, but gone, driven off or scattered or simply vanished, as if the farm had been lifted up and set down somewhere else. There were no bodies. That was worse than bodies. There was a single footprint in the mud by the well, and the footprint was not a man's. It was too long, too narrow, and it had too many toes.

Cynfael knelt by the print. The seed warmed in his chest, and the earth beneath his knees warmed in answer, and he heard—faint, far off, like a voice across water—a word in a language he did not know but understood.

*Cradle.*

He rose and walked faster.

The thread led him over the hills and down into a valley where a river ran black under the stars. He followed it through a wood where the trees had been marked—not carved, not cut, but marked, their bark peeled back in spirals that made his eyes hurt if he looked at them too long. He did not look. He walked with his gaze on the thread, and the thread did not waver, and the third heartbeat grew stronger, closer, until he could feel it in his teeth.

Near dawn he came to a ridge and looked down and saw the camp.

It was not a British camp. The banners were Saxon—the white horse, the running wolf—and the fires were Saxon fires, banked low for the night, and the sentries walked Saxon walks, heavy and sure. Aelle's camp. Or what was left of it. Cynfael had heard the name at Badon, had seen the Saxon chieftain from a distance, a grey man with a grey beard and eyes like winter. But the camp below him was not the camp of a beaten warlord. It was the camp of a man who had found something new.

In the center of the camp, where the chieftain's tent should have been, there was a stone. It was not a large stone—no taller than a man—but it stood upright in the trampled earth, and it glowed with a faint green light, and the thread of light that had led Cynfael from beneath the hill bent toward it like a reed in a current. The thread did not point north anymore. It pointed at the stone.

And beside the stone, with his back to Cynfael, stood a figure in a dark cloak, and the figure was speaking to the stone in a voice that was not quite a voice, and the stone was answering.

Cynfael's hand went to his belt. His sword was gone—lost below, or taken, or simply not there, as things were not there in the country beneath the hill. He had nothing but the seed and the thread and the third heartbeat, which was so loud now that it seemed to fill the valley.

*Cradle,* said the voice in the earth. *Cradle. Cradle.*

The cloaked figure turned.

It had Myrddin's face. But the eyes were not Myrddin's eyes, and the smile was not Myrddin's smile, and when it spoke, its voice was the voice of the shadow that had worn the druid once and sought to wear Aelle now, and it said:

"Welcome, Cynfael ap Bryn. We have been waiting for you. The cradle is almost ready. It needs only one more thing."

The third heartbeat stopped.

The thread of light went dark.

And in the silence, Cynfael heard Gwladys scream.