Shadow on the Crown. Patricia Bracewell

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       Eve of St Hilda’s Feast, November 1001

       Near Saltford, Oxfordshire

      She made a circuit of the clearing among the oaks, three times round and three times back, whispering spells of protection. There had been a portent in the night: a curtain of red light had shimmered and danced across the midnight sky like scarlet silk flung against the stars. Once, in the year before her birth, such a light had marked a royal death. Now it surely marked another, and although her magic could not banish death, she wove the spells to ward disaster from the realm.

      When her task was done she fed the fire that burned in the centre of the ancient stone ring, and sitting down beside it, she waited for the one who came in search of prophecy. Before the sun had moved a finger’s width across the sky, the figure of a woman, cloaked and veiled, stood atop the rise, her hand upon the sentinel stone. Slowly she followed the path down through the trees and into the giants’ dance until she, too, took her place beside the fire, with silver in her palm.

      ‘I would know my lady’s fate,’ she said.

      The silver went from hand to hand, and against her will, the seer glimpsed a heart, broken and barren, that loved with a dark and twisted love. But the silver had been given, and at her nod, a lock of hair was laid upon the flames. She searched for visions in the fire, and they tumbled and roiled until they hurt her eyes and scored her heart.

      ‘Your lady will be bound to a mighty lord,’ she said at last, ‘and her children will be kings.’

      But because of the darkness in that heart across the fire, she said nothing of the other, of the Lady who would journey СКАЧАТЬ