500 THE SKIRLING OF BAGPIPES THROBBED LIKE AN OLD WOUND IN the chill spring air, so constant that one forgot it until a touch, or a memory, brought the pain of loss to consciousness once more. King Leudonus was dead, and the Votadini were gathering to mourn him. The great dun on the rock of Eidyn was filled with chieftains, and the gorge below crammed with the skin tents and brushwood bothies of their followers. Morgause, marshalling provisions and cooks for the funeral feast, settling quarrels over precedence and ordering the rituals, was too busy to question whether what she felt was grief, or relief that he was gone. These past ten years she had been a nurse to him, not a wife, watching his strength fade until he lay like a ruined fortress, never leaving his bed. And as the rule of the Votadini had passed into her hands, Morgause had become not only the symbol of sovereignty, but its reality. In his day, Leudonus had been a mighty warrior, but in the end death had taken him from ambush, with no struggle at all.
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