His eyes widened. "The Irish? Of Dalriada?"

"Indeed. And the enemy of my enemy is a potential friend. A potentially powerful friend. We must find a way to convince this enemy that the Saxons are as great a threat to Eire and Dalriada as they are to Britain. A people looking to expand their borders are generally far happier to marry into a throne and colonize peaceably than to risk their sons' lives in war to drive a native population out. And if they are not happier to begin with, they often can be persuaded to see the advantage of gentler intermarriage, particularly when both groups have much to offer as concerns the safety of the other."

"Do you really think you can persuade the Irish to assist Britain without treachery such as the Saxon foederati used?"

"I do not speak of hiring mercenaries, Medraut. I speak of alliance through the marriage bed."

"But—"

"You will have a great deal more to offer a Dalriadan princess than you now imagine."

His eyes widened once more. "You'll give me a piece of land?"

"More than a piece, should this alliance work out. I have one son to inherit Gododdin and one to inherit Ynys Manaw. What I do with Galwyddel is my own affair."

Her nephew gasped. "Galwyddel? All of it?"

"Most of it, I should think."

He sat down hard on the edge of his bed. "Oh! Aunt, I—I hardly know what to say!"

She laid a finger across his lips. "Say nothing, nephew. I should not have to warn you about the need for discretion in such a proposed alliance."

He shook his head, then nodded vigorously. "I understand, yes."

"Good." She placed a kiss against his brow. "I have had so little time, Medraut, to attend to your needs and education as I ought. Marguase's crimes were none of your doing, but I fear you have been desperately hurt by them and I forget, sometimes, to tell you that you are much honored and beloved."

Tears sprang to his eyes and he turned his glance swiftly away to hide them. He groped with one hand and squeezed hers, able to make no other reply.

"I will see you, then, in the royal villa, when Cutha arrives at Caerleul."

Covianna Nim was still concealed in the shadows of her room, whose door she had just begun to open, when Medraut burst into view and slammed open the door to his own room, clearly in a state of extreme agitation. He was deeply aroused, flushed and erect beneath trousers and tunic, and desperately unhappy in his agitated state. Her curiosity piqued, Covianna started to step into the corridor only to melt back into the shadows when Morgana swept into view, in a state of cold-eyed anger. The queen of Galwyddel and Ynys Manaw, stepsister to a far better woman whose destruction Morgana had helped bring about, thrust open Medraut's door and closed it again behind her. For the first moment or two, she could hear Morgana's voice, too low to understand the words, then the voices in Medraut's room went even quieter. Deeply intrigued, now, Covianna waited patiently, hardly daring to hope that she had finally been presented with a way to strike back at Morgana and the stepbrother who had murdered Medraut's mother—a mistress of dark arts who had trained Covianna for a time at Glastenning Tor, a relationship Covianna was quite certain neither Morgana nor Artorius knew about and one she had been extremely careful to keep secret.

For years, Covianna had bided her time, had made Artorius a "wondrous" sword of Damascus steel that she herself had pounded on the anvil, after wheedling from Emrys Myrddin every tale he could recall of the fine Damascus blades produced by the smiths of far Constantinople. Her lips twitched in amusement as she recalled Myrddin's fond tales, whispered in the glistening aftermath of some of the finest lovemaking Covianna had ever enjoyed.

"They twist the soft and hard irons together," he had murmured, trailing fingertips across her breasts. "Fold them time and again, eight, sixteen folds per blade, but the finest smiths swore while deeply in their cups that the only proper way to temper such a blade was to lift it smoking and white from the forge and plunge it into the belly of a drunken slave."

"Barbaric," she had murmured, planning to put the notion to the test at the first possible opportunity. And she had done so, testing the procedure first on a sow tied to the anvil, then on a captive doe, a goat, every animal she could think to try it on, and with decent but far from satisfactory results. Determined to win the secret of Damascus for the smiths of her hereditary clan, she had procured a criminal at great difficulty and forged a blade in his belly, gagging him carefully beforehand to still the screams. Better results, but not the perfection she sought.

Then Myrddin's exact words had come back to her: the belly of a drunken slave.

Lips twitching with satanic delight, she had ridden out from Glastenning Tor to arrange an assignation with one of the princes of Dumnonia, a foolish and drunken young sot who would be entirely amenable to accompanying her in a bout of alcoholic and sexual revelry. That he was a cousin of Artorius only made the seduction all the more delightful. She lured him to Glastenning Tor, to her own private forge deep in the labyrinthine caves beneath the great hill, where water rushed through underground rivers, welling up as the sacred springs of the Tor, blood-red with iron in one place, white as milk from chalk deposits in another.

She seduced him with her body, with endless flasks of wine and sultry laughter, led him down into the caverns to show him a secret he would never forget, and allowed him to watch while she forged her greatest Damascus sword blade yet, smiled above the pounding of hammer against folded steel as he drank and exclaimed and drank some more, filling his belly full of liquid.

And then she plunged the sword into it and the young fool died with a terrible scream and a hiss of steam erupting from the wound. She laughed as he died, his blood pouring across Covianna's hands, then she tested the blade and found it perfect, a blade that sang in her hands and bit deeply to dismember the fool who had helped her forge it. The pieces of Artorius' young cousin she dropped down a sinkhole to vanish into the roaring water which boiled past beneath the stone, smiling as she did so.

This sword, she would gift to Artorius and laugh each time he praised it. One more gift did Covianna offer her great enemy: a scabbard of silver and precious wood imported from the shores of Africa, carefully lined with sheep's wool left in the grease to oil the blade and treated most carefully, indeed, with a concoction boiled down from the sap of the Druid's plant, mistletoe. After it had sat in the sheath for a few hours, she nicked a goat with the blade. It bled to death despite her considerable effort to stanch the wound.

Ten years it had been since she had gifted that blade to Artorius, and eleven battles had he won with it, eleven battles for which she had made very certain to renew the "magical" properties of sword and sheath—"for luck," as she laughingly assured him. The great Artorius, against whom no one could stand in battle, the magnificent Caliburn shining in the sunlight like living flame as he cut down foes who could not stand against the sword's power... And all that "magic" was nothing more than the boiled sap of a common plant found on nearly any oak tree in Britain. She planned, one day, to reveal the secret to Artorius, at the worst possible moment for his inconvenience and comeuppance. Preferably as he lay dying at her feet.

Until that time came, she would simply have to content herself with stirring up trouble within his family. No one had ever guessed the fate of the poor princeling of Dumnonia, whose kin mourned him and puzzled over his mysterious disappearance. And now, it appeared that young Medraut and Morgana were about to hand her another golden opportunity at revenge. She waited patiently until Morgana swept from the room, then slipped across the corridor, tapped at the door, and stepped quickly inside.