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choice but to answer in kind. She rubbed her eyes, trying to clear them. “I think you’ll need all your wits about you on the morrow. This could easily mean war.”
    â€œAnother war,” amended Colan bitterly.
    Lynet could not bring herself to answer that. She looked out to the hall below where the folk — those who had not collapsed under the weight of too much beer — laid out their blankets and pallets. Nearly all were women and girls. There were too few men, even when you counted the tinners who stretched out by the fires among the dogs and the little boys bedding down beside their mothers. More wives than their husbands had been up to their knees in the stream this morning, heaving out the great baskets of earth. If things went on much longer, it was they who would be doing the planting, and either the stream or the fields would not have enough hands.
    Another war, and the steward of Cambryn gone again.
    Gone still.
    â€œYou should have made them wait for father, Colan,” she whispered.
    â€œHow could I, Lynet?” Colan asked her softly. “Father will not live forever. Today or tomorrow, it is we who will rule. Our neighbors and our people must come to trust us.”
    Trust you, you mean. I am beyond such trust.
    â€œWe rule nothing,” she murmured, taking refuge in dutiful piety. “We hold all in trust of the queen.”
    â€œAye,” said Colan sourly, setting his cup carefully down on the table. “And where is she, our good queen, Guinevere?”
    Lynet understood it. If in the minds of Cambryn and its neighbors Queen Iseult had been too much present, Queen Guinevere who had inherited Cambryn from her father was too long absent. “Queen Guinevere is where she has ever been, my brother. She is at Camelot.”
    â€œAnd here we wait on her pleasure, in all things. I tell you, Lynet, she should have come back to us before this.” He spoke not to her, but to the hall. “These yearly poundings from the raiders, the outrage against King Mark … we are battered enough we may soon break. None of the wounds made by her marriage have healed clean in this place.”
    Lynet nodded. In the early days of Arthur’s rise, before the battle of Badon, few had believed his claim that he was the son of the great Uther Pendragon. One who did though was, King Leodegan of Cambryn. As part of his support to the young warrior, he gave Arthur his only living child in marriage. His decision nearly split Cambryn in two, and this new feud between Kynhoem and Treanhal was but one outgrowth of that old choice. But Lynet was not so foolish as to know it was most surely urged on by a matter much closer to hand. The fact that Queen Iseult had deceived her lord with a man from Camelot had torn open poorly healed breaks in Cambryn, causing the gall to flow afresh.
    None of this was aided by the fact that Iseult’s betrayal and what came afterwards had clearly altered King Mark’s reason. For nearly two years he had locked himself into Tintagel like a monk in his cell, riding out hardly ever, speaking even less. Queen Iseult’s body had been sent back to her father, and since then the raids of the coast had begun again, and worsened for now they were interlevened with those the Saxons made. This was why Father had gone to Tintagel along with the other lords of the Dumonii. They went to plead with Mark to take a new wife, to get an heir, to rally himself and his men to the protection of his land. They were desperate. They knew, all of them, that if this went on, Mark would fall, and if Mark fell, the Dumonii would dissolve into squabbling cantrevs and chiefdoms, and the Eirans and the Saxons would pick them off at their leisure. Even Arthur might not be able to stop that work once started.
    If Arthur moved at all. Lynet’s jaw tightened. There was doubt. Even she had heard it. After all, what recompense did Arthur give Mark for the damage Sir Tristan had