“Senara…”
At the name, Gaius jerked involuntarily. In the next moment he tried to conceal his reaction, but no one was watching him. Eilan had stepped forward and thrown back her veil.
“Stop!” she said clearly. “I can tell you who the Roman came for. It was I!”
What is she saying? Gaius stared at her in horror. Then he understood that she must be trying to protect Senara, and perhaps the child. In that moment she had an unearthly beauty. In comparison, Senara’s unformed prettiness was a star paled by the full moon’s majesty. As had happened sometimes in the moment before battle, Gaius saw his own heart with a terrible clarity. He cared about Senara, but his desire for her had not been love. In the younger woman he had only been trying to recover Eilan as she had been when he first knew her, the maiden that time and his own mistakes had put forever beyond his grasp.
In the shocked silence, the only sound was the crackling of the fire. For a moment some powerful emotion contorted the Arch-Druid’s features, then he mastered it and turned from Eilan to Gaius.
“For your sake and hers, on your honor I ask you to tell me if this is true.”
True…For a moment the word had no meaning. Torn between Rome and Britannia, he did not even know who he was himself. How could he know whom he loved? Slowly Gaius straightened and met Eilan’s clear gaze. Her eyes seemed to be asking him a question. At that, all the tension went out of him in a long sigh.
“It is true,” he said softly. “I have always loved Eilan.”
For a moment Eilan closed her eyes, dizzied by a tide of joy. Gaius had understood her, but he had not spoken only for the sake of Senara. She had seen such a look—such an expression of wonder—on his face once only, when he held her in his arms on that Beltane so long ago.
“Have you betrayed us all along, then?” Bendeigid hissed, bending close to her ear. “Were you lying when you swore to me that he had not touched you? Or did it begin later, when you were a sworn virgin of the temple? Has he been teaching you Roman lies along with his love-talk, and treason with his caresses? Did you lie with him in the sacred precincts, or in the Sacred Grove?”
She could feel her father’s fury, but she seemed to see him through a wall of Roman glass. In the end it had all become so simple. She was living under sentence of death already, and had faced its terrors. Now that the time was come, she was not afraid at all.
“I lay with the Sacred King once only,” she said calmly, “as was my right, at the Beltane fires…”
“What do you mean?” Miellyn exclaimed behind her. “It was Dieda who had to be sent away—it was Dieda who had a child!”
“It was not!” The shocked echo of speculation ceased as Dieda hurried to the Arch-Druid’s side. “They made me agree to the deception. I took her place while she went away to have the baby, and when she returned, they exiled me! She has queened it over the Forest House ever since as if she were as chaste as the moon, but it was all a lie!”
“But I always served the Goddess, not the Romans!” Eilan cried, her composure cracking at the threat to her child. She saw fury replacing the questions in Bendeigid’s eyes as he turned on her. The people crowded closer, trying to hear; voices rose in query or condemnation. Rumors of trouble among the Romans had made them like tinder that any spark could set aflame. If she appealed to them, would she set in motion the very catastrophe she had suffered so to avoid?
“Why should I believe you, bitch?” snarled her father. “Your whole life has been a lie!”
He lifted his hand to strike her. A bulky form burst through the line of Druids; Huw, with his cudgel upraised to defend her one last time. But more priests were running between them. Before Huw could reach Bendeigid, bronze blades flared in the firelight, came away a deeper crimson, and stabbed once more. Again the Druids struck, and again, and Huw, still struggling towards her, fell without a cry.