Dawn of Avalon by Anna Elliott Read Free Book Online

on, the only answer I could find just now. “We wait. What else can we do? Vortigern’s guardsmen will be out and combing the forest for you soon.”
    He nodded once, moving as though the effort were almost too great, but then rubbed a hand across his face as though he were trying to keep alert.
    “Your father’s men?”
    “I don’t know.” Now that we had stopped moving, I was realizing how utterly exhausted I was, as well. I heard a quiver in my voice, and gritted my teeth to stop the words shaking any more. “I don’t know what’s happened to them. They should be here.”
    All the might-be ’s seemed to flash in an instant through my mind: my father’s warriors lying dead somewhere out there in the brooding forest, staring up at the lightening sky with sightless eyes. Vortigern’s men tearing aside the branches that concealed our refuge, here, and dragging us out and back inside the fortress walls.
    I pressed my eyes closed, then looked at the man opposite me. “You See the future. Don’t you?”
    “Is it the future?” I had the impression he spoke without conscious control, as though the words had wrenched themselves free to hang between us in the dim stillness. He ran a hand down his face again and went on. “I don’t know. I don’t know whether what I See actually comes to pass. I don’t—”
    He had regained control now; he stopped, gritting his teeth as though biting off any further words, then looked down at the ground and said, in a different tone, “The ground here—it’s wet. We should make sure it’s safe to stay before we do anything else.”
    I followed his gesture and saw he was right, the tunnel’s earthen floor was muddied, the footmarks my father’s men had left filled with little pools of dirtied water. At least it showed they had been here, and not long ago.
    “Do you have flint?” the prisoner asked.
    I dug in the pack I had brought and found flint and tinder both, wrapped in a scrap of oilskin to keep dry. A branch from the covering at the tunnel’s mouth and a torn length of my cloak made a makeshift torch. When he had it lighted, the prisoner led the way along the muddied ground, deeper into the center of the hill.
    The torch’s flame cast wild, dancing shadows on the earthen walls, and my heart quickened, all weariness forgotten, for truly I did not know what we would find. My father’s men worked slowly, bracing the walls as they went, and knew what they were about. But there are ever dangers in work of this kind, and a sudden cave-in could have buried them. 
    The air grew danker and chill as we made our way along, my companion holding the torch aloft. And then he stopped, so abruptly that I bumped against his back.
    “This must be why they stopped work—why they’re not here now.”
    I looked past him, and saw that the tunnel ended, not in the cave-in I had feared, but in a wall of solid gray rock, glistening and dripping with moisture in the fire’s dancing orange light. I should perhaps have been frightened. We were deep underground, and there was always the danger that the seeping water would cause the tunnel walls to collapse.
    But there was a strange, austere … beauty, I suppose, in the scene before us. As anything ancient and immovable must be called beautiful, in its way. The torchlight glinted off the rock’s smooth, rippling face, sparking the drops and running rivulets of water to glowing jewels.
    It was like a strange, earth-weighted sanctuary, or a shrine to some god of roots and rock and earth. And I felt, standing there, as though we did indeed stand in the singing presence of one of the Old Ones, who had passed from flesh into spirit to dwell forever in hollow hills like this one.
    Perhaps my companion felt it, as well. Or perhaps he was only too exhausted for words. But we neither of us spoke, not until we had made our way back along the tunnel, back to the sunlight that poured through the entrance like some age-old answer to whatever lay