"I am pleased to hear it," Riona nodded gravely, returning her welcome with a handclasp.

Keelin smiled and said in delightfully good Brythonic, "I thank you, Queen Morgana, for your welcome. I am honored to be chosen as the means of bringing our peoples together."

Morgana, surprised by the girl's fluency, gave her a warm embrace, smiling at the nervous tremors shaking the girl's shoulders and knees. Morgana, too, had trembled on the night of her betrothal and marriage at the standing stones. "You are lovely, child. Welcome." She turned, then, to Dallan mac Dalriada. "Let us go to the standing stones, where treaties are made and marriages arranged, and draw up the details of alliance."

The king glanced up the hill, then spoke quietly. Riona Damhnait said, "Dallan mac Dalriada wonders where the wedding party is? Surely your illustrious brother, war leader of the Britons, would wish to see his nephew wed? Is it possible he does not approve of this alliance?"

Morgana had been expecting the question, or one like it. "He is not here because he does not know of the wedding or the alliance plans. Artorius ap Uthyr Pendragon is at Caerleul, busy preparing for battle in the south. When he is presented with news of this marriage, he will have little choice but to accept it, for I am sovereign queen of Galwyddel and no man, not even my brother, has the right to refute my decisions."

When Riona translated, the king's eyes widened, then he began to chuckle.

"Dallan mac Dalriada appreciates your courage, Queen Morgana, and salutes your wisdom. He, too, has secrets to keep from kin in Ireland, who may be just as shocked to learn of Keelin's marriage."

"We are agreed, then, that this union is best done privately, then presented to the world as a fait accompli?"

"Oh, yes," the answer came back, "we are quite agreed." He said something further to his daughter which Riona did not translate, but the girl blushed prettily in the moonlight and smiled shyly at her betrothed.

Morgana had never seen Medraut so radiantly happy and thanked God—and Brenna McEgan, whose idea it had been—for it. "In that case, let us draw up the marriage agreement and seal this handfasting."

They climbed the long slope of land to the stone circle, where Cleary had set out his parchments, pens, and ink, the thin-scraped vellum gleaming white in the bright moonlight. He had lit oil lamps, as well, sheltered in the lee of the standing stones, the better to see his work. Dallan mac Dalriada nodded his approval of the arrangement, speaking quietly to his Druidess, who turned to Morgana and said, "I would be grateful for a copy of the agreed-upon details, that I might translate it into Gaelic ogham script."

"Of course."

That settled, they settled down to business.

Chapter Fourteen

The fortifications at Caer-Badonicus went up with astonishing speed. Covianna Nim had never seen so many men in one place, hundreds of them, with more arriving every day from the kingdoms of the midlands, bringing arms and armor, long pack trains of supplies to be cached in the summit's new granaries, groaning wagonloads of rough-dressed stone blocks, ripped hastily from quarries for miles around and ferried by the hundred-weight per horse, thousands of stones to build walls and barracks on the high hill.

Nor had she seen so many labor for so many hours without stopping, day and night, working in shifts to haul the stones laboriously to the top of the five-hundred-foot hill. Five layers deep, the walls went up, mazelike, the outermost layer studded with whole forests of thorny hawthorne branches, hacked down by women and children and carried on mules, on ponies, on grunting, waddling sows that stood as tall through the shoulder as some of the ponies and had to be goaded along by children with swine prods, anything that could carry a load of thorned nastiness.

Paving stones lined every inch of space between the long, snaking, concentric stone rings, joins made impervious to water with barrels of heated pitch. The cisterns were roofed over, forming a massive conduit that ringed the whole eighteen acres of summit, a feat of engineering the Romans themselves would have been proud to claim. And even before they were roofed over, they had begun to fill with rainwater from the hundreds of shallow channels dug every few inches across the entire top of the hill. Water flowed in spidery lines and snaking rivulets, pouring steadily into the cisterns.

Myrddin had ordered waterwheels built every few yards around the perimeter to lift the runoff into the cisterns from the top. A small army of boys was charged with keeping the wheels in constant motion, round the clock, with buckets mounted on timber spokes lifting the spilloff from deep, narrow troughs along the very edge of the summit, butted up against the innermost wall. The boys chanted songs in the days-long driving downpour, keeping up the rhythm of cranking the ponderous, groaning waterwheels.

Dripping buckets lifted water from ground level up to the top of the first cistern, pouring gallon after gallon down into the stone-lined channel between the first and second walls. From there, it flowed through drains down into the lower circumvallation cisterns, gradually filling up the whole, massive stonework system. When the cisterns failed to fill fast enough to suit Myrddin, he ordered wells dug around the long base of the hill, with more waterwheels to lift the thousands of gallons necessary to complete the job properly. Horses worked treadmills to keep these larger waterwheels moving, until the immense, layered conduit was finally full.

The waterwheels were immediately torn down, the timber used for roofing the houses and barracks going up all across the summit. Great wooden gates had been carefully built into the walls, as well, many more of them than necessary. Most were false gates, set along the edges of the walls in a mock facade, to fool the Saxon armies as to the purpose of those few, critical gates slated to deliver Emrys Myrddin's surprise. Runners came daily to the hill fort, gasping out the news of fighting and skirmishes all along the northern borders of Sussex and Wessex, the unexpected Briton strength forcing the Saxons to march west, right toward the trap being so carefully prepared for them. Emrys Myrddin was everywhere, directing, advising, overseeing the work day and night, only pausing to eat and rest when Covianna Nim insisted.

"You will collapse, Myrddin, if you do not eat and sleep, and where will Britain be, then? Come, lie down, I'll sing you to sleep."

At such times, she would guide him, usually stumbling with weariness, up to her rooms in the very first building finished on the summit, serving as her dispensary to treat the injuries sustained by the construction gangs. In those private rooms, she and Myrddin did a great deal more than eat and sleep. The sport they shared did him good, relaxing him and drawing him ever more delicately into her own trap.

And while he was distracted by her not inconsiderable charms, she bled him dry of every secret she could wheedle loose, pillow talk shared between lonely druidic professionals with no one else to share or understand the problems of their work. Given Myrddin's flattery-susceptible ego, larger than the whole of God's wide heavens, coupled with his long-standing infatuation with her, it was very simple to persuade him to share everything Covianna wanted to know.

He whispered the teaching epigrams between kisses, between couplings which were sometimes hard and fast, but more often slow and lazy and deeply satisfying—and always profitable. She learned the secrets of his wizardly lore, much of which consisted simply in knowing what men and women—be they superstitious peasants or kings with fine, classical educations—would do under given sets of circumstances, then uttering pronouncements calculated to achieve the desired outcome. Parable after parable slipped from his lips to her ears, deepening her understanding of how to manipulate people and situations.