Free Dawn of Avalon by Anna Elliott Page B

image of Bron I had carried away with me, to the gruff echo of his voice telling me not to take foolish risks.
    Every time I shut my eyes, the remembered vision flickered against the lingering dazzle of torchlight: a man with wheat-colored hair and sea-blue eyes, slashing with his sword and facing his own death with flat, exhausted calm. 
    I focused on the helmeted guards, willing all cracks in the grim, icy numbness away. I wore my boy’s tunic and breeches; my face was dirt-streaked and my cropped hair tangled with twigs and flecks of dry leaves. If the guards had not yet learned that Bron was not what he seemed, I might be able to lie my way past, as Bron’s serving boy. Or—
    The gate swung open, and a third man stepped through. Another guardsman, wearing the same leather helm. He spoke to the sentries; I caught just the low murmur of their voices, though the night wind snatched away the words. Their gestures were quick, though, jerky and excited.
    And then the sentries turned and followed the third man inside the fort at a run, leaving the gate without its guard. 
    How long I stood there I have no idea. It might have been the briefest of instants, or considerably longer; time seemed to have frozen along with my body as I stared at the unguarded gate, my heart beating a sickening rhythm in my ears.
    And then I ran as the sentries had, all exhaustion fallen away in a moment, up the steep path to the fortress walls. 
    What I would have done had they barred the gate from the inside—I have no idea of that, either, truly none. I had no time for plans or even for thought, beyond those of concentrated purpose. But the massive wooden doors were unbarred. One of the doors even hung a little open, still shivering with the guardsmen’s push.
    * * *

I HAVE THOUGHT, and often, on how easy it is—too easy by far—to forget the suffering at the heart of so many harpers’ tales. To forget that real men and women once earned the telling of those stories, in grief and pain and tears.
    And yet this I will say: that I wish I had a harper’s words to tell of the scene that met my eyes within the fortress walls.
    I had glimpsed, in vision, Merlin fighting twenty and more of Vortigern’s guards with a stolen sword. I had relived the memory of it with every beat of my heart on the journey here. And yet no vision could have matched up to the reality before me as I pushed open the gate with all my strength and stepped inside.
    He wore still the ragged breeches, but fought bare chested, like some blood and flesh vision sprung from the old warriors’ tales. Bron’s swirling blue whorls and spirals still marked his skin.
    He fought on the open square of churned and muddied ground where Vortigern’s warriors daily sparred with spears and swords. The light of surrounding torches turned his loosened hair to a gleam of gold amongst the leather helms of Vortigern’s men, showed the patch of sticky scarlet from a gash in his side.
    And I can say that he wielded the sword like harnessed lightning. Or that he fought like a striking eagle, screaming out of the sky. But no words—perhaps not even a harper’s—can match up to the reality of how he spun and slashed and beat back attack after attack from the surrounding men, all the while with his own death plain in his gaze.
    All around him were littered the bodies of those who had fallen to his blade, leaking their blood out onto the soil, some crying and dragging their own spilled guts behind as they tried to crawl away; that is one part of battle the harpers do not often sing. 
    Vortigern stood back and to one side, hurling curses at his own men, urging them onward, to attack, to kill the prisoner where he stood that the walls might stand. And they tried, the Goddess knew they tried, tripping over the bodies of the fallen, slipping and sliding in spilled blood.
    One man here or there would get close enough to strike a blow, to open another gash in Merlin’s arm or his side. But then