Chapter Two: Tal

Mathrafal Castle, Powys

Dafydd hadn’t even bothered to change his clothes. That was my first thought the afternoon my brother and I really became rivals.

I’d changed my shirt, washed my face and hands, and changed my shirt again when I got our father’s summons. Presentation was vital. But Dafydd showed up in his leather blacksmith’s apron, nails and palms seamed with soot.

Dafydd never worried about what side of himself to present to Mathrafal Castle as he greeted high men and the help alike. He actually seemed to think he had more in common with the latter than the former, even as the elder prince of Powys.

Absurd.

From behind the throne room doors came the blunted sound of bickering. “They’re fighting about something in there,” Dafydd said dully.

“Just another day,” I said under my breath, nodding at one of my father’s high men as he slipped into the throne room past us. The sounds of argument grew louder as the doors opened.

But before I could follow, Dafydd caught me by the sleeve. “Are you friendly with Elgan?” he asked, frowning.

“Keep your voice down,” I hissed. “And yes, I’d like to be. I’m hoping he’ll invite to me to his hunt this summer. Father doubled his holdings last year.”

My brother snorted. “Of course. And now you have to court his favor, court his daughter—”

“Maybe. If Elgan doesn’t get overeager and deplete the new fields, she might end up rich enough to be worth my time.” Inside the throne room, the squabbling turned into shouting. “What was her name aga—?”

Dafydd shook his head and pushed through the iron-studded doors.

He had no patience. He had no discretion. It didn’t matter.

Unlike me, Dafydd wanted nothing my father had to offer.

Unlike Dafydd, I wasn’t our father’s favorite. I wasn’t even legitimate. But in Powys, a bastard prince could become king, if he was clever about it.

So I was clever about it.

I found the throne as empty as the rest of the bannered red-stone hall. My father, King Cadell, paced the length of the high table. He was blond, like Dafydd, with braids in his hair and a scar running through his right eyebrow and a gold hoop in his right ear. His eyes were bloodshot from drinking the night before with the chieftains who now sat around the huge yew table.

“My king,” said one, “we should press the Foxhall into service.”

“No need to bring the hags into it,” said another—Elgan. “We should levy a tax.”

“We can afford to recall troops from the southern border!” said a burly chieftain. “Powys has cowed Brycheiniog. King Meirion poses no threat to us; is his nephew not imprisoned beneath our very feet? We—”

My father interrupted him. “Prince Dafydd. Prince Taliesin. You’re here—no, stand.” He held up a hand when I started to sit next to Elgan. “Neither of you will be here long.” Face heating, I backed away.

Ordinarily, this room would’ve been crowded—peasants paying taxes and making petitions, kitchen varlets tending fires, soldiers delivering reports and taking orders. Men of little stature trying to attain more.

Ordinarily, my father’s men didn’t look like children waiting to be punished.

Maybe today wasn’t just another day.

Either Dafydd didn’t notice the tension in the room, or he didn’t care enough to be delicate about it. “Dad, what’s happened?”

“An attack,” Dad bit out. “And one that is apparently bound to kill me.”

“An attack?” I straightened. “Who? Where?”

Beside my father’s empty throne sat his magician, Osian. Cross-legged, half naked as always, he was studying a spread of bones carved like the phases of the moon. “From Mercia,” he said. “But I don’t know where. The attack has not yet fallen.”

I’d always been wary of the magician. With thinning light hair and strange light eyes, he looked almost elderly, though he was actually younger than Dad. His tattoos had always unnerved me, too, his white, ropy-muscled stomach and thighs and neck and arms inked in red and green with Welsh dragons—the afanc and gwiber, the ceiliog neidr and draig goch. Wings, scales, nostrils, curling tongues bursting flame.

Osian never wore more than a loincloth, the better to show them off. The better to remind everyone at Mathrafal of his power, even when he wasn’t lighting fields on fire or butchering flocks of sheep to fuel his magic.

“One day last week, I performed my nightly sacrifice. A raven—an unsighted one,” Osian clarified unnecessarily, as if all the magical monsters hadn’t been missing from our kingdom for a decade. “I wrung its neck, and in its broken bones, I foresaw an attack from the east, beyond Offa’s Dyke. In my vision, I saw your father dead on an enemy spear.”

Dafydd and I gaped.

Osian always did this, made pronouncements without seeming to watch how they landed. Though, given his connection with my father—the connection that let them sense the other’s feelings, see or speak to or even speak through one another—maybe he’d decided tact was pointless.

More than his tattoos or his near nudity or even his magic, that brutal honesty was why I’d always avoided him. Not that I didn’t hate the magic as well. It stank like earth and the air before a storm, sounded like a pot on the boil. I looked forward to his twice-yearly departures, when he presumably left to search for long-gone unicorns or take naked forest walks.

“Did you see when this would happen?” Dafydd asked.

“The leaves were green,” said Osian. “It was spring, or a very wet summer. There was no moon.”

“This spring?” I asked. “Next spring? Five springs from now?”

“This year.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I cannot say.” Osian shifted, glancing significantly at Dafydd.

But Dafydd didn’t acknowledge the look. “Could you ask the forest to show you more?” he suggested. I frowned, unsure what he meant.

Osian cracked the knuckle of his left thumb, then his right. His left hand was tattooed all over with gwiberod in green ink; the right was covered in dreigiau goch in red.

“I cannot,” he said simply. “My magic is gone.”

Silence.

Without thinking, I met Dafydd’s eyes.

When we were young, Dafydd’s white skin had had an almost bluish cast to it. The past few years at the forge had left his arms and face tanned, sometimes burned.

Just now, my brother looked bloodless. Gray, like a corpse. But despite everything, for my part, I felt almost relieved.

I knew the loss of Osian’s magic was a blow to the throne. I was still planning to dance at its funeral.

I understood now why today wasn’t just another day.

But why had my father called us here?

“Gone?” Dafydd seemed to choke on the word. “Magic is Powys’s only sure defense. What do you mean, it’s gone?”

The chieftains murmured angrily. One rose, face purpling. “Our only sure—?”

“Do you know why?” I interrupted.

“Prince Taliesin.” Osian turned his odd light eyes on me. “You’ve been a sharp one since you were just young. Do you know whence my magic comes?”

I shrugged. “I assumed it came from your sacrifices. That missing nail of yours. The animals you kill every day to be sure my father won’t be joining them.” Osian rubbed idly at the empty spot at the end of his right index finger; last month, he’d sacrificed the nail for a spell.

“The beasts are fuel for the fire, so to speak,” he said. “But my magic is tied to Pendwmpian Forest. It is the source of my seeing and working.”

Pendwmpian. I bothered with very little outside Mathrafal, but I knew I’d heard the name before, and recently.

“According to our scouts, Mercia has felled Pendwmpian. The last tree was cut two weeks ago,” Osian said. “My vision was fragmented, cloudy—I suspect it was the forest’s last effort to reach me before its spirit departed.”

“Wait.” Suddenly, I remembered where I’d heard the name. “Didn’t we grant the Mercians logging rights to Pendwmpian? Because of its proximity to the dyke?”

Dad’s jaw worked. “Only to the northeast quadrant.”

Meaning: We had extended Mercia a concession.

Meaning: They had ignored it and taken what they wanted, as they always did, and the loss of Osian’s magic was the consequence.

My boots suddenly became extremely interesting to me.

“Do neither of you have anything to say?” Dad burst out, beginning to pace again. “Welsh magic is already on the wane because of their cursed dyke, and now my magician, who has aided me since before you two whelps were born, is useless on the eve of an attack during which I am apparently fated to die. All because the Mercians could not keep to their agreement.”

I tried to look nonchalant, like I wasn’t imagining a spear piercing my father’s chest.

I didn’t want him to die. I especially didn’t want him to die before he’d named me heir.

A cold thought. But I had more than one parent to worry about.

“We did debate the matter at length, my king,” said one chieftain. We did warn you, he didn’t say.

There had been discussion here in this room, he meant. Among my father’s men.

Because there was no negotiating with the Mercians. It was true now, and it had been true ten years ago.

About a decade earlier, their King Offa had redrawn the border between Mercia and Wales with an earthwork running from sea to sea. The dyke became the new eastern boundary of the Welsh Marches—our kingdom of Powys, Gwynedd to the north, and Brycheiniog to the south—and it had severed more than a few Welsh villages, forests, moors, lakes, and rivers from the eastern edges of the petty kingdoms. Upon its completion, all our magical creatures had gone to ground. My father also believed the dyke was responsible for the loss of our magic.

Offa mocked us with what amounted to a wall running from one end of Wales to the other. And we had “agreed” to the new boundary, as if we’d had any other choice.

It was an eight-foot-tall, 180-mile-long insult.

“I’m listening, Father.” I didn’t know what he wanted me to say.

“Taliesin, always listening. Always planning.” But Dad wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the burns on Dafydd’s arms, the soot lining his palms and brow. “And Dafydd, always somewhere else, hard at work on something that does not matter.”

My father’s expression was all bitter disappointment. Dafydd watched him, silent and stolid as a cow.

“What angers me most is that Mercia thought itself safe to do this—felling one of our magical forests, cheerfully violating an agreement not one year old.” Father thrust a hand at us, speaking now to his men as they picked their teeth or dug their knives into the table. “My two sons are our future. And when Mercia looks at our future, they feel no fear.”

“Father.” I spoke carefully, sensing his mood shift toward something precarious. “What are you going to do?”

“I am not going to do anything. This attack is a threat to my life. But the two of you—” He broke off, eyes glinting, shaking his head at Dafydd and me.

My heart hit the pit of my stomach.

“Tradition mandates that when a king dies, his lands are divided evenly among his sons, though only one is chosen as heir. I have not yet named my successor. But the promise of that tradition has made you too comfortable,” my father said. “So I am going to break it.”

“What do you mean?” Dafydd’s voice was steady, but there was dread in his eyes.

“I mean that you and Taliesin will solve our problem,” Father said. “The Mercians’ constant incursions, the slow leaching of magic from our land. I have had enough of concessions and agreements that do not profit Powys. So whichever of you can destroy King Offa’s miserable dyke and restore magic to Wales will accede to my throne and inherit all of Powys when I die. The one who fails will be his candler.”

The high table exploded.

Frantic whispers filled the space between shouts of confusion and complaint. This changed everything for my father’s men. Everything they expected about the future.

It could completely upend mine.

Candling was done to purify places so used-up or polluted magic couldn’t inhabit them—salted fields, fouled wells, and the like. Some said it was a trick that magicians had learned from housewives, who lit flames to burn dust and filth out of the air. Others said candling was an homage to dragon fire, which scorched a place to ruin so it could come back to life. The king’s candler spent his life traveling from one damaged place to another, where his job was simple: to light a candle and wait as it burned down, at which point magic could return.

A candler’s job meant leaving everything behind. Home. Friends. Family.

My heart was pounding. I couldn’t be candler. I couldn’t.

I had to think. Quickly.

“But we already have a candler. Your cousin—” I racked my brain. “Bronfraith.” It was such a minor role, I could hardly remember his name.

“Old, and likewise in need of a successor,” Dad bit out.

“You could just recall our forces from the north and south,” Dafydd said, challenging. “You could withdraw troops from our borders with Gwynedd and Brycheiniog. They aren’t a threat. We’d have the numbers to defend ourselves, whenever the Mercian attack fell.”

“I could,” Father agreed, eyes glittering, mouth a grimace. “I could do that, if I wanted to. Because I am king. And if you were king, you could make that decision.”

Dad crossed the room and stood nose to nose with Dafydd, the son with his eyes and his hair and his shoulders.

I might as well not have been there at all.

“But you don’t want to be king, do you, Dafydd?” Father said, so quietly only the three of us could hear. “Tal wants to be king. You want to play at peasant in your forge and pretend that you don’t sleep in a feather bed and that laundresses don’t wash your clothes. You simply want to inherit a parcel of land when I’m gone and not be bothered with any of this.”

Dafydd didn’t deny or confirm what he said, didn’t apologize or defy. He just stood there.

“Well, son,” Father breathed. “How about now?”

And that was when I knew that Dad’s plan had nothing to do with me.

He only wanted to force Dafydd’s hand. It didn’t matter what happened to me, or anyone else, if Dafydd would agree to be his successor.

“Nothing?” Dad asked, his whisper growing loud. “Tal has a plan, I’ll wager,” he said, finally turning to look at me. My thoughts raced.

I hated that his attention made my chin lift, my spine straighten.

I hated that the slightest bit of effort on Dafydd’s part would be welcomed the way all my trying never, ever had.

“I’ll speak to you in private very soon,” I said. I had to be discreet. I had to be patient.

Patience. Discretion. They were foreign concepts to Dafydd, but essential to an effective scheme.

I’d learned this from my father. But my mother was why I’d absorbed the lesson.

Dad huffed a laugh, seeming to approve for just a moment. And then, as quickly as it had landed on me, his attention was gone.

Briefly, I dared a look at my father’s men. I’d spent years politicking for their favor. I’d wanted it even when I’d only hoped to become king and failing meant being a prince forever until I became lord of some nowhere patch of ground.

I would need their favor now. Because now, becoming king was the only acceptable outcome.

The throne. My father’s respect. My mam’s safety.

Everything hung on my next move.

“Go,” Father said. “Go, Dafydd and Taliesin, and prove that our enemies should be afraid.”

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