Garden, the two Templar Knights following him back to the castle keep and likely returning to Caer Llion.
Trembling with wrath, Deirdre watched them go. It was as she had feared. Philip Plantagenet wished for a bride, and for reasons she could not fathom, he had chosen her. It would not happen. Not if she had her way. Deirdre had never met the High King, but if he was anything like John Lewis Hugo, she wanted no part of him.
The fire she had banked for her father’s benefit roared back to life, lending her strength. Deirdre needed advice from someone she could trust.
She needed ages of wisdom.
Deirdre stepped to the edge of the Rosemere, eyeing the ancient rose bush, and began to hum. It was a rich melody, one of the oldest, a call for the dead. She anchored herself to Annwn, drawing on its life as well as that within her. She grew weak, the life force she possessed being slowly drained to conduct the magic, but she stood resolute as she had so many times before.
Her request did not take long to be answered. The Merthyr Garden fell away. So too did the azure of the sky and the crimson of the rose blooms, the world reduced to shades of gray.
Instead the water of the Rosemere flickered and swirled, sluggish at first but picking up speed as it circled the dead tree at its center.
Then the world sunk in on itself, absorbing the light of the day and inversing it until a shape as dark as midnight hovered on the surface of the water. It stood proud as it rose into the air, a true form coalescing into a woman draped in folds of a black cloak, floating as though in a breeze. A cowl tried to hold red locks of long hair from a white chiseled countenance, but strands of it flitted wildly across her mien. It was a beautiful face, one Deirdre knew well. As she breathed in the odor of rotting mulch and darkness, the gray eyes of the shade peered at her.
—Child—
The voice was inside her head, spectral, the sweetness Deirdre remembered replaced by dryness. Even now, after so long, a part of her yearned to step forward into the pool and embrace the woman, but she held her ground, knowing the danger.
“I am here, Mother,” she said.
—You have the stink of corruption on your flesh—Deirdre didn’t know what her mother meant, then remembered John Lewis Hugo touching her cheek and felt revulsion all over again.
“Yes, I do.”
—You have been kept alive to enact great harm—
The shade’s emotionless voice penetrated deep into Deirdre.
“What do you mean, Mother?”
—What would you know of me, Child—
Deirdre paused, unsure how to proceed. In death, there were events hidden from her mother, both past and future. Never had she pronounced such a dire prediction. The dead also rarely spoke linearly—a question could lead to a wholly different avenue of discussion—the riddles maddening to unravel.
“Who wants me alive? What harm?” Deirdre pleaded anyway. “Mother, do you mean Philip Plantagenet? John Lewis Hugo? Who?”
—A lord of shadows is in the world once more, stirring evil—
“A lord? I don’t understand!”
—I know not, Child. It is not for me to know. Or you—
Deirdre frowned, thinking.
“What am I to do about this marriage proposal?” she asked instead, hoping for the help she had come for.
—You will love, Child. It will be the love of your life—
She almost laughed. “With Philip Plantagenet?”
—The lives of the Outworlder King and my Child are intertwined like vines, to be cut at the harvest—
“No…that cannot be, Mother!”
The Rosemere hissed at her vehemence. The dead did not like being angered once called. Deirdre stood her ground. They could not harm her, not unless she disengaged from the pool or stepped within its boundaries to enter their world.
Deirdre took a deep breath.
“I refuse to believe I will be with Plantagenet,” she said. “That is not my destiny.”
—A destiny is dark until the present sheds light on it—
“Mother, what am I to do?”
—Nothing you desire will come to be. Only what you fear will come to pass—
“You are saying I cannot prevent what comes?”
—Look here. Death—
In her mind’s eye, she saw a vision. Smoke blew across a battlefield littered with bodies of the dead and dying. The scene possessed no sound, but Deirdre imagined wailing on the air. Bloodied twisted creatures milled among bodies of men and Tuatha de Dannan alike, their limbs unnaturally angled by savage intention. She was in the battle,