The Broken Kings: Book Three of The Merlin Codex by Robert Holdstock Read Free Book Online

or boar-savaged, I must cease whatever I’m doing to come to its aid.”
    “More or less,” Urtha acknowledged. The High Woman shook her head, smiling faintly. There was always more to these rules than was implied in the simple words that described them.
    “Do you know why these bindings were placed on you?”
    Munda nodded soberly. “I was rescued from raiders by your hound, Maglerd, and taken to safety across the river. Kymon was rescued, too. My brother Urien was killed and dismembered by the raiders, and the hound that tried to protect him was slaughtered alongside him. I was protected just across the river, and my grandfather came and took me back, but it was a gift from the Matronae, the Mothers of the Dead, that saved my life. I entered the Otherworld before my time, and I am forbidden from entering it again until it is truly my time.”
    “Well remembered. So now you must explain to me: Why did you choose to ignore the geis ?”
    Silence. Father and daughter engaged each other in a long moment of visual inquisition. Finally Munda lowered her head. “I was curious. I felt drawn to the doors of the hostel. When I entered, I became afraid. By then, I had stepped across the bridge to the place itself. It is in the middle of the winding river.”
    “What drew you? Why were you curious?”
    “A dream voice. Singing. I remembered the happy times under the protection of the Mothers, when I was being hidden on the other side of the river. When our fortress was being attacked that time. I thought they were calling me. I wanted to go there. I felt as if I belonged there. And for a while I thought I was wrong. The hostel was a vile place, and the faces that looked at me, and the smells, and the sounds, that laughter … it was a bad place. I was terrified and fled. But I fled from what was strange, and beyond my experience. My brother was more afraid than me. When we were back in our own land, I realised that I’d had nothing to fear.”
    The wren on the rafter took careful note of all of this.
    Silence.
    Urtha then said, “How I wish your mother was here. She would be proud of you.”
    “Proud of me?”
    “Proud of your courage. You have had an unpleasant experience. But who knows? Perhaps a valuable one. You think you have made a great mistake, and here you are, mournful and woebegotten. But why? You have had a moment of inspiration, of encouragement, not of warning. And you haven’t broken your geis. ”
    She looked perplexed. Urtha shrugged, awkwardly from his position of friendly encounter. “A geis cannot be half broken. I’ll have to ask Cathabach about this, but I’m sure I’m right. Fully broken, yes, but not half. Not like a golden crescent moon, a lunula that can be cut in half, like the half of a lunula that hangs around your neck, the other half on your brother’s.”
    Munda reached to touch the amulet on its leather tie. The sun-metal gleamed in the light. The fragment, cut from an amulet older than time, was her prized possession, a gift from her father, half of an emblem that had been part of this family since the time of Durandond. It was her tie to her brother. It was a precious thing, a connection between Urtha’s surviving children, which the king himself hoped would always keep his family united.
    “When I cut that piece of gold in two,” he said quietly, “I was both breaking and making a bond between the two of you. Halving gold is easy. Halving a taboo is not. And that is my decision. The hostel was in the middle of the river, you said. Halfway across. Well, halfway is neither here nor there, if you follow my judgement, daughter. You have broken nothing.”
    Munda flung herself upon her father, wailing with delight. Urtha collapsed backwards, looked up at the High Woman, who merely shrugged. She should have had her say, but there hardly seemed a point in it.
    “Get off me, girl! You’re too heavy.”
    Munda stood and made a sign of respect to the sprawled king, then turned and ran