#daughter of the sea

Still working on commissions but this at least fits in here.

Angharad/Geraint and this one just makes me want to cry like a baby.

Angharad swept breathlessly into the hut and threw her arms around him. “Oh, thank goodness,” she exclaimed, inexplicably, and then released him with barely a glance; she turned to the doorway and reached over the lintel, swept her hand across its edge and pulled down the small parcel of linen. The other two women followed her inside somewhat more sedately; Eilwen grinned at him as he fumbled with his shirt, whose inside-out dishevelment remained stubbornly uncooperative with his awkward efforts to don it. “Well-met again, Geraint of Gellau,” she purred.

“Indeed, milady,” he stammered, wishing the floor would swallow him. “I am honored.”

Her gaze raked the entirety of him with obvious approval. “Don’t feel you have to dress on ouraccount.”

Another figure had risen, tall and stately and statuesque, and stood staring at her with eyes the color and temperature of a cloudless winter sky. Her face was finely-chiseled, white and hard and ageless as a marble statue. Long braids of hair, silver as moonlight, were bound around her head like a crown. Several more fell over her shoulders, glittering against her dark robes. Angharad blinked, and blinked again, trying to comprehend what she saw through the haze of magic that, she realized suddenly, emanated from this woman in a miasma. Her stomach churned, and she fought down a wave of nausea.

The woman smiled, a smile like a splinter of ice between her crimson lips.

The queen stood, and moved heavily to the casement. “I do not make such decisions lightly, Angharad. It does not please me to rely on the power of any man, nor do I wish to deny you all chance of happiness. When you have done your duty in regard to marriage, you may take your pleasure where you will, and none will dare gainsay you. But in this time of crisis, we must make decisions that would be…unthinkable, otherwise.” She turned her back to her daughter, her face to the window as though she would gaze out, but nothing was visible through the glass; nothing but black night and the fragments of raindrops shattered against the panes. Silence, thick and ominous, settled upon them both.

Finally Angharad spoke again, shakily. “This…this cannot be your only plan. Mother, what are you thinking? We’re well past a month since the scry. You’ve been putting me off for days; you must know something by now.”

Regat said nothing for a long time, her face still toward the window. Long trails of rain streamed down its outer surface, scarlet as blood in the lamplight.

(she)…then stood up and, with breathtaking form, shot twice, one arrow after another, without time for him to blink in between, into an irregular lump of turf thirty yards away. Even at that distance he could tell they both struck within an inch of each other, and gaped at her as she looked at the bow with obvious newfound respect.

“This is very good,” she said, handing it back to him.

Geraint had felt just a little indignant. “Did you think it wouldn’t work?” 

She had bitten her lip sheepishly. “I wasn’t quite sure. I’ve never seen one so…erm…primitive.”

He laughed in spite of himself. “Bowmaking has been around a long time, and was not always the high craft it is now. What do you think our ancestors did?”

Her expression had changed, irresistibly, into a slow, expectant, silky smile that melted away his indignation like wax in a flame. “I don’t know,” she purred, “what did they do?”

Shots fired. Willingly surrendered, he had composed a story for her on the spot.

Eilwen squinted at her, grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the altar, where the small driftwood fire was crackling with green and purple-tipped flame. She hummed a chant while her slim hands moved in ritual patterns, laid the bundle of grass inside the creamy, rose-streaked bowl of a scallop shell, and placed it near the fire to smolder.

“I need to get back to—,” Angharad began, feebly, and took a step back, but Eilwen grabbed her sleeve again, with an arch grin.

“Oh no, you don’t. You’ve not been here in a fortnight, anyway; you can spare half an hour to please me, even if you don’t care about slighting the goddess.”

“She barely saw them; barely saw the guards who did the same as they rolled open the castle gates for her; her eyes were on the sky and the dark wedge of blue nestled in the green arms of the horizon. Gulls screamed overhead like heralds. Angharad laid her heels in the horse’s flanks, clamped her knees to its sides. The salt air filled her streaming hair as the turf melted away beneath flying hooves.”