The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy)

by Janzen, Tara

  “Truly, I expected better for two hundred marks,” Caradoc said. “She is such a small, pale thing. Even in full health, the rigors of the north may be too much for her.”

  Dain acknowledged the complaint with a tilt of his head. “She is normally not so pale and will recover. This is but a relapse, a not unheard of occurrence in cases of this sort.”

  “Rotten teeth caused the vapors?”

  “Aye.”

  Caradoc made a noncommittal sound. “I suppose I owe you for the man.”

  “Morgan kidnapped him. I but made the suggestion.”

  “He spoke of you while under my knife.”

  “Ragnor?”

  “Aye. He thinks ’tis you who tortures him.” Caradoc looked up with a vague smile. “He’ll no doubt go to hell with your name on his lips.”

  “He is still alive?” Dain thought back to Gwrnach’s fate.

  Caradoc shrugged. “Alive? Who is to say? He breathes and sweats and shivers. If he had eyes, mayhaps he’d cry, and if that is alive, so be it.”

  The callous sentiment brought back in force the memories of another time and place. “You learned much in the desert prisons.”

  “Too much,” Caradoc agreed, and fell silent. The savagery of Kalut ad-Din had been well known on the caravan routes.

  Ceridwen stirred on the bed. Helebore murmured something, and she stilled.

  “And you?” Caradoc asked. “I oft wondered how you fared after our capture.”

  “We all survived, you, and Morgan, and me, and that is more than most who were taken at Jaffa.”

  “Ah, yes, survival.” A soft, low chuckle came from the Boar’s throat. “The things we do in the name of survival, eh... bedzhaa?”

  The last word was spoken so quietly, with such gentleness, that ’twas more air than a word, a mere continuation of a breath exhaled at length. Yet Dain heard it. He heard it as he’d always heard it, as a whisper in the dark, as the name of a slave. Bedzhaa. Swan.

  He suffered a momentary loss of the present, an instant when the walls around him were not the cool, damp stone of a tower, but the hot, dry wool of a tent in the sands; when the voices he heard were of the caravan, not of the March. Then, as quickly as it had happened, it was over, and the chamber he saw was his own, far from any master. He looked down at Caradoc, prepared to meet a condemning gaze, but found his old friend intent on his betrothed, his eyebrows drawn together in a thoughtful scowl. Morgan knew, Dain thought. Even with all his innocence, he could not have been blind to the merchandise of Jalal’s trade.

  “I am going south to Cardiff,” Caradoc said without glancing up, “and will return in a fortnight for the maid. If you value this place, she will be fully healed when I come.”

  “A threat?” Dain looked down with an arched brow. Caradoc also knew, the bastard, and he’d called him swan.

  “A warning for D’Arbois.” The Boar took a great swallow of wine and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. A belch followed. “I will not take the Hart Tower, but if the maid dies, the rest of Wydehaw will be forfeit.”

  “Milord,” Helebore said, turning to Caradoc. “Come quickly.”

  Dain tensed. The urgency in the medicus’s voice was an ill-omened thing at this stage of their game. He stepped forward, ready to intercede for Ceridwen, but Caradoc stopped him with a restraining hand.

  “A moment alone with my bride.”

  ’Twas what Dain had feared, and Ceridwen. He stood by, an unfamiliar helplessness taking the place of his surety as the Boar and his leech bent over her. The damnable helplessness was what came from caring.

  Their voices were low, with Helebore doing most of the talking. Dain could see a part of Caradoc’s face, and his expression did not change, until the leech slipped his key under the shoulder edge of Ceridwen’s chemise and lifted the cloth.

  “Dragon,” Dain heard him whisper, “and the dragon’s sister, here and here.”

  A slow smile spread across the Boar’s face. An unholy light flickered to life in his eyes. “Without doubt then, she is the one,” he said.

  “Aye, milord.” Helebore laughed, a grim, rasping noise. “The marks of magic prove it.”

  If by “marks of magic” he meant the bite wound Ragnor had inflicted on her shoulder, then Helebore was even more of a charlatan than himself, Dain thought. Yet the definition disturbed him. Why would Caradoc concern himself with marks of magic on a bride?

  The answer he came up with did not set well: Caradoc had been taken in by the vile ex-monk. Dain used all manner of soothsaying and conjuring to live at the expense of other people’s money and peace of mind. He didn’t like to think of Ceridwen going to a man with no more sense than to fall to someone like himself. It showed the excess of superstition she feared. Equally disturbing was Helebore’s use of the alchemical allusion of the dragon and the dragon’s sister to describe the scars. Morgan and Madron had both said the match was meant to return Ceridwen to her family home. There had been no talk of dragons or magic, except in the red book.

  “Aye, aye, milord,” Helebore continued, nodding at something Caradoc had said. “But I brought my best bleeders, and if I could but set them on the maid for a moment” —he pulled a pair of shiny, wet leeches from a stoppered gourd hanging from his belt— “we could have a small measure of her bl—”

  Caradoc’s hand went around the man’s throat with lightninglike speed, cutting off the medicus’s words and breath. When Helebore began to twitch and pale, the Boar released him.

  “No,” Caradoc said, then, looking very pleased with himself, he finished off his wine and set the goblet on a bedside table. “A fortnight at most,” he said to Dain, walking over and clapping his old friend on the shoulder. “I would trust no one else with her keeping. Mayhaps you should come with us when we return to Balor, to celebrate the wedding.”

  “Mayhaps,” Dain agreed, and truly thought he might, to ease his mind on the situation, and mayhaps dissuade Caradoc from dwelling so much in the past.

  “Priest,” Caradoc called back to the medicus. “Let us be gone, that we may more quickly return.”

  “B-but...” Vivienne stammered. They all turned to look at her. “But you have just arrived.” She lifted her hand in a small gesture. “Surely you need a day, if not two, to refresh yourselves before continuing your journey.”

  Soren looked over his shoulder at his wife, not believing his ears. Here was salvation being thrown at their feet, and Vivienne was throwing it back. He quickly strode to her side. “The man has business in Cardiff, lady. Upon his return, we will be better prepared to entertain him in an appropriate style.”

  “Yes, of course, milord,” she said, her voice strained, “but—”

  He silenced her by pinching her arm. Her face reddened with outrage, but the ploy worked in distracting her from her doomed course of action and letting everyone else get back to their original plans.

  Dain felt Helebore move up behind him and instinctively turned to face the man.

  “The stitching, sir, on the maid, ’tis most fine,” the medicus said. “The finest I have ever seen. Where did you come by such skill?”

  Up close, Dain detected a gray cast to the man’s skin and brown stains in the corners of his mouth. He smelled near as bad as Ceridwen. “In the East, from a Saracen physician.”

  “You were a Crusader?” The leech’s dark eyes rolled up at him. “A defender of the faith?”

  “For a time.” Dain fought the urge to move away and wondered how Ceridwen had borne having the man hover over her.

  “Side by side at Acre, we were,” Caradoc added. “Knee-deep in the infidels’ blood.”

  “A memory best left in the past,” Dain suggested, though his attention was on Helebore. The man was drifting away, meandering toward the Druid Door, apparently uninterested in the conversation he had started.

  “Aye, bedzhaa.” The Boar’s voice grew soft and gentle again as he spoke the hated name close to Dain’s ear. “I would leave it all in the past
, if the past would but leave me.”

  There was no mistake this time. Dain turned and met Caradoc’s gaze straight on, admitting to nothing either in a look or words, but he saw much revealed in the other man’s visage. Pain lurked in the variegated depths of Caradoc’s eyes, along with disgust and a fascination Dain wished he had not seen. Above and below and beyond it all, wildness reigned, a strange, restless wildness he’d once felt himself.

  Before he could back away, the leech cackled, a quietly deranged sound that echoed in waves throughout the chamber and caused all within the curved walls to turn and stare.

  The man was running his hands over Nemeton’s ruse of the Ptolemaic cosmos, a series of planetary symbols burned into the wood of the Druid Door. He touched the metal-studded planks below the gargoyle, and unintelligible words poured from his lips. His fingers slid into every nook and cranny and skimmed over the top of each iron rod, tracing the patterns of the symbols, feeling his way through the mystery. When he finished Saturn, Helebore rolled his eyes back at Dain. Malevolence burned bright in the dark orbs, and a knowing Dain had never expected to see.

  But the leech did not see all. With a silent gesture, Dain sicced the dogs on the defrocked priest and had him chased from the tower. The next time Helebore crossed the Hart’s threshold, Dain would kill him.

  Chapter 15

  “Queen on color,” Dain reminded Ceridwen, unnecessarily, as she set up the chessboard. He sat across from her, slumped down in his chair, his legs splayed out toward the hearth with one knee slightly bent. His chin rested in his right hand, while he juggled a knife with his left.

  Was what had made her misplace her Queen in the first place, she thought peevishly, the damn knife. Up and down, the blade rose and fell with one graceful flip at the apex of its rise, the differing metals of gold, silver, and steel catching the sunlight streaming through the window and scattering it in bright rays. He called the dagger “Damascene.” It was the one she’d stolen the night before he’d taken her into Wroneu, the one with which he’d been teaching her a bit of knife play. Strange enough that the blade even had a name, let alone one so exotic.

  ’Twas her new word, “exotic,” and a highly practical one it was for someone living with Dain Lavrans. He defined the term with his strange concoctions and mysterious ways, with his enigmatic gaze and the fluid grace of his movements. Everything about him seemed of another world.

  The night in Wroneu had changed the way they dealt with one another, brought them to an uneasy alliance she appreciated, but did not truly understand. He would not speak of that evening, except to tell her there was naught to fear, but she had not forgotten that he’d said Madron was no longer his friend,

  “You have beaten me twice a day for the last three days,” she complained. “I see no reason to continue playing games. ’Tis the teaching of magic you bargained with, not chess.”

  “I only beat you once yesterday.”

  “Because we only played once,” she informed him with a long-suffering sigh.

  “Chess is magic,” he argued. “It teaches you how to see the future.”

  Her interest piqued for a moment, then dissipated with understanding. “The future of a battlefield, nothing more.”

  “Life is a battlefield.”

  He had become boorish beyond measure since Caradoc’s leaving, hardly speaking, and when he did speak, his words were cryptic or worse. The playing of chess was the only thing that kept him from pacing the chamber or staring for hours on end out the window to the forest and hills beyond. Something must await him there to hold his attention so dearly, though she knew not what. At night, ’twas the waxing moon he gazed upon, the forest being lost in shadows. Strange man. Naught could await him on the moon. She didn’t know what to make of his brooding or his increasing restlessness, but she’d reached her fill of his game and of being ignored.

  “You are trite in victory,” she accused him. “I will play no more.”

  “No more chess?”

  “No.” She crossed her arms over her chest. The action had been unconscious, but once she’d done it, it felt right. She was making a stand, reinforcing her defenses.

  To her surprise, he smiled, the first sign of life beyond moroseness she’d seen in days. She was immediately suspicious, with good reason as his next words proved.

  “Then catch the knife, Ceri.” The smile turned sly. “If you dare.”

  She looked at the dagger, and he tossed it higher than before, making it spin in the air. Sunlight burst upon the blade and blazed along the sharp edge from hilt to point, but only for an instant. Quicker than not, the whole of it fell into shadow, then completed its next arc and caught the light once more.

  He had dared her to put her hand into that dangerous whirl and snatch the blade before it could fall back into his hand. She wished she did dare.

  He had lied to her. The leech had touched her all over with his damned key, and someone—the Boar, she was sure, though she hadn’t dared look for fear of screaming—had squeezed her thigh. Dain hadn’t liked hearing that any more than she’d liked enduring it, voicing a word so crude she’d added him to her prayers, though she knew he would like that even less.

  He had cheated her too. Not while playing his damned game of chess, but that they played it at all when there was so much else for them to do. She had less than a fortnight to glean what knowledge she could from him. They should be in his lower chamber, concocting magic potions for her to use.

  He had kissed her, and then he’d not kissed her again, and that was the most unforgivable misdeed of all.

  She watched the knife flip hilt over point and wondered when a person should make her move, if she was going to try for the Damascene.

  “If I catch it, can I keep it?” she asked, her gaze not leaving the dagger. His movements were so smooth, should make it easy for someone to reach in and grab the damn thing. Every flight of the blade was like the last, the rise, the hilt over point flip, the instant of stillness at the top, then the descent.

  “Yes,” he promised, “but only if you do not cut yourself in the catching of it.”

  Aye, there was always a trick with him.

  She watched and waited, biding her time and calculating her chances. ’Twas a good knife, and she needed a good knife. The thought of escape had been growing ever stronger in her mind With the return of her health, she had no reason to stay unless he taught her something besides chess, and she had many reasons to leave.

  To look upon him the way she did was a sin, remembering the feel of his mouth on hers, the taste of his kiss. Her mind strayed too often to the night of his bath, to the water streaming down his body and the soft, guttural sounds of pleasure he’d made. He had given the carnality of her nature a face, and she was ashamed. To remain with him was a weakness of both the flesh and mind, and could come to naught but damnation, no matter that her heart yearned along with her body.

  The Damascene rose and flipped and fell, over and over. He never missed. The ivory grip ended in a hilt worked in both gold and silver, the metals chased and crosshatched to took woven, or braided. The design was familiar, strangely so, and not because she knew the dagger.

  Then she remembered where and when she’d seen the hilt before.

  “I had a dream about you,” she said, and the knife clattered to the floor. He jerked his hand back and swore, but ’twas too late. He’d been nicked by the blade. “At least I thought it was you, but maybe it wasn’t,” she mused. “The knife was in it for sure, except it wasn’t a knife, but a sword.” He bent over to pick up the Damascene, still muttering obscenities. “It had the same ivory hilt, though, the same gold-and-silver pattern, and we were on a beach by the ocean, except it wasn’t the sky above us, but the earth. There was more that is harder to remember, and all of it feels more like a memory than a dream, which I know sounds odd, but that’s exactly what it’s like.”

  He had stopped swearing and was looking at her, his gaze far too serious for what she had in mind nex
t.

  “You had this dream?” he asked.

  “Yes. When I fell asleep in Madron’s cottage.” If he wasn’t going to get on with teaching her magic, then she needed to get on with her own preparations. To that end, she gave him what she hoped was a wistfully charming smile. “Since you cut yourself, does that mean I get the knife?”

  Without a word, he handed her the blade. His lack of hesitation surprised her, but neither did she hesitate in the taking of it.

  She fit the dagger to her hand, liking the weight and the balance of it, as always. A smile came to her mouth. There had been a helper in the abbey garden, a boy who had liked knives. He would have loved this one, except she doubted if anyone used such a fancy piece for playing mumblety-peg. Childhood games were long past her, but a woman still had need of a knife. She was glad to have this one as a gift instead of having to steal it again. Her sins were mounting at an alarming rate as it was.

  “A sword as fine as this dagger could cost a man’s whole fortune,” she said, rubbing her thumb along the haft.

  “Or a man’s life.”

  She glanced up from beneath her lashes, distracted from her new treasure by the sudden weariness in his voice. “You’ve seen one?”

  He nodded, swearing softly and bringing his hand up to rub his temples. Was a move he’d made often in the last few days, one indicative of a throbbing head. He was prone to the malady, and she felt remiss.

  “Lavrans?” She leaned forward and put her hand on his cheek, giving in to a wayward impulse she immediately regretted. To touch him was to remember him not as the cynic he played so well, but as the Prince of the Light-elves, he who enchanted demons and saved maidens. ’Twas that part of him that made her yearn for love.

  He looked up, over the top of his hand, but not at her. She followed his gaze across the room to the oak-and-iron chest chained at the foot of his bed, then brought her attention back to him. He swore again, closing his eyes and lowering his head, and the tips of her fingers slid into his hair. She caressed his temple with her thumb, another impulse she could not resist.