“I’m not sure,” Ardanos said. “Someone seems to have tried to arrange for the Prefect’s son to . . . disappear -”
“The Prefect’s son?” Lhiannon raised one thin eyebrow as if wondering why anyone should care. “To protest, or to make trouble for our people? Wouldn’t it be more like Bendeigid to murder the men who came to take away the levies?”
“He found the lad trapped in a boar pit and saved his life, and now the boy is a guest in his home.”
Lhiannon stared at him for a moment and began to laugh. “And your son-in-law Bendeigid does not know?”
“The lad looks enough like his Silure mother to pass for one of ours, and he’s self-possessed enough not to give himself away. But he’ll need to do some healing before he can be moved. If anything happens to the youngster, who’s never, as far as I know, done anything much either good or ill, you know as well as I do that we’ll be blamed for it. We get blamed for everything else, all the way back to and including the sack of Troy, and the very fact that the Legions are here and not back in Gaul where they belong. There are all the old atrocity stories that go back to the deified Julius – may he rest in peace,” Ardanos added with a fierce grin that meant, she was certain, the exact opposite.
“Still, there is an element of rebellion,” he said. “You don’t see it, placed as you are; I don’t see it much, living among Romans as I’ve done for so long. But it’s my business to watch the winds. To see signs and omens. For instance – where ravens fly at midnight; I speak of the secret society that worships the Lady of Battles.”
This made her laugh. “Oh, Ardanos! Those half-crazy old men who sacrifice to Cathubodva, telling fortunes and looking for omens in dead birds’ guts – as bad as the Legions with their sacred chicken-coops – no one has ever paid the slightest attention to them -”
“That’s what they were,” Ardanos said. He told himself that he welcomed being able to tell Lhiannon something she did not know. In the old days, the priestesses had been equal with the Druids in their councils, but since the fall of Mona they had learned to be secret in order to survive. On occasion, the Arch-Druid even had to act on his own. Ardanos wondered sometimes if they might not be carrying it too far – if the priestesses might carry out the decisions of the Council better if they had a voice in making them. Then he would not have felt so alone with the problem.
“That is surely what they were, not three years ago. Now suddenly, instead of old priests and sacrificers, they’re a group of young men, not one of whom is over twenty-one and most of whom were born in the Holy Island, who think they are reincarnations of the Sacred Band —”
“Those children! Born as they were, it would not surprise me.” Her smooth brow wrinkled as she began to understand.
“Exactly so,” he continued. “That boy Cynric whom Bendeigid is fostering is one of them, and my son-in-law, who always did have a touch of the fanatic, has lost no opportunity to share his politics with the boy!”
Lhiannon turned white. “How, may I ask, did that happen?”
“I never knew it would make any difference; it was before my daughter Rheis married Bendeigid, and I did not know him so well. By the time I realized how much trouble either of them could make, it was too late. Cynric’s all set to begin where his foster father leaves off. He and Bendeigid between them managed to find most of the other boys – and there were the Ravens, with a name and an organization ready to hand . . .
“If anything should happen to me, or to you -” He shook his head, grimacing. “Who could stop them from trying to avenge their mothers’ shame on Rome? Already folk from here to the lakes are going about telling one another that these men are reincarnated heroes.”