Chalice 2 - Dream Stone

by Tara Janzen

  No. War was never simple—and naught but victory ever sufficed.

  He again nudged the fallen man. Wyrm-master. “Stept Agah wielded the blade as a Dragonlord,” he said to Caerlon. “Not a Wyrm-master.”

  “ ’Tis but Lacknose Dock’s jest,” Caerlon said, shooting the captain a withering glance. “I recognized the man for what he was right off, but Lacknose Dock dared to doubt and call him Wyrm-master.”

  No, Slott thought again, war was never simple, and in those last months of battles, he remembered oft wondering if Caerlon had gone as mad as the rest of the Dockalfar.

  Take an army into the past to win a war long lost? ’Twas madness itself—but then, what was war, if not madness? And what was madness, if not the coming of Dharkkum?

  A slight shiver sent a tremor across his shoulders. With his sorcery Caerlon had devised a crack in the damson crystal shafts. Clever, clever Caerlon, to bring the wrath of Evil Incarnate up from the bowels of the earth on them. But could the elf-mage control what he had wrought?

  Slott slanted a hooded glance in the elf’s direction. Time would tell.

  He looked down at his freshly branded vassal and gave the man a testing push with his toe. “The aetheling will die, if she has naught but this to fight by her side,” he said.

  “Aye, lord,” the fair greenling agreed, a faint smile curving his lips. “We can only hope it so.”

  Elixir Vitae

  Chapter 10

  Dawn crept into Riverwood from over the mountains, gliding into shadows and grykes and transforming night-drowsy dew into sunstruck drops of brilliance. The almond scent of warming meadowsweet filled the air, along with the fresh, rushing sound of water.

  Nennius stopped every few feet along the banks of the Bredd, the light licking ahead as he observed some new twist in the foliage. Long stretches of the wood had been made impassable by the twining and winding of shrub branches and flower stems, grass stalks and petioles. Even the tree limbs appeared to be reaching for one another, closing in and battening down the woodland hatches.

  He lifted his hand and fingered an intricate plait of willow scrub. ’Twas not nature’s work. Magic was afoot.

  Behind him, his horse chewed on a bit of grass, tearing it out of the ground and waiting patiently with her heavy load. He’d not left his books on the island, but had proceeded carefully, bringing everything he might need to devise his journey home. He’d also taken the precaution of shaving his head. The wormhole had marked him with a blazing white stripe through his coal black hair, making him instantly recognizable to anyone who knew the consequences of passing through a weir gate. He’d entered the land of such a gate, and he would not have himself revealed and his purpose discerned before its time.

  An azure damselfly swooped in to hover over the autumn-yellowing leaves, then darted to the south, leading Nennius’s gaze to a giant’s cairn of boulders tumbled across the river. Staring at the dam through the tangled coppice in which he stood, he cursed under his breath. The river disappeared beneath the cairn, and the track winding along its banks had been his hope that morn. He’d spent two days bushwacking paths to no good end, searching for a way through to the castle on the cliffs. His camp beneath a gritstone crag high on one of the mountains gave him a clear view to the sea, but had shown him no route through the damnably tangled forest.

  There’d been fires the night before, and runners leaving the keep by the light of the moon. They had headed in all directions, unhindered by the bramble that so thwarted him. The thought had come to catch one of the runners and by his own patented means extract directions through the maze of trees and bracken. He’d been stayed only by the fleet-footedness of the bastards, certainly not by any compunction. He would kill them all, inside the keep and out, if it would further his cause.

  Fucking primitive people with their rough earth magic. Gruffudd’s demons. Nemeton’s princely wild folk. He would show them magic. They’d probably constructed some damn religion around the great worms. That religion had not survived, he could assure them of that, but it would be one more obstacle for him to overcome when he reached the castle—and he would reach the castle.

  He looked again to the pile of rocks barring his way and noticed a faint lightening in the near shadows. Tugging on the mare’s reins, he strode farther down the river, until he came to a clear space where the brake and bramble turned back in upon itself in a leafy arch. ’Twas not a large opening, but he was well pleased for having found it. An odd scent was in the air, of burnt earth and something rare. He knelt down and sifted his hand through the dirt at his feet. There were burn marks on the ground, and a few scorched leaves lying about. He sifted through the soil again and brought a handful to his nose. The odd scent deepened around him, winding its way out of the burnt smell in ever-increasing strength.

  Chrystaalt.

  He sniffed again and smiled. Dear Gruffudd had indeed brought him treasures beyond imagining to have led him here. Someone in Merioneth had power he could use. Nemeton had written of universal salts, but Nemeton was gone from this time. Could it be that he had left a peer behind, someone with access to his paraphernalia and goods? Someone with the knowledge to use them?

  Nennius looked up, his gaze scanning the woods around him. He knew there were scouts in the forest, but for the most part, they let the trees do their work for them. An itinerate trader with a brace of donkeys had come up the road from Cymmer Abbey a day past. Nennius had watched from his morning camp as the trader had tried first one worn path and then the next to make his way through the woods. He had given up at midday and continued on to Castell Aber la.

  The scouts had left Nennius alone as well. Yet he wondered: Did they know of this small breach in their green rampart? ’Twas neatly hidden in the shadows of the giant boulders, right along the edge of the river. Not many would come this way.

  He rubbed the chrystaalt-scented soil between his fingers, then withdrew a scrap of parchment from a pouch on his belt and twisted the loam inside it. He made two more such packages from the burnt earth, careful not to miss any. A bit of incongruous rot fouled his third measure. He scraped off what he could, then twisted the parchment closed and stored it with the others. Given time and even a rudimentary still, he could recover the pure chrystaalt and add it to his own hard-held grains. Or mayhaps he would discover the one who had burned it and commandeer his supply. Any traveler was better off for being fortified with chrystaalt. For the journey he intended, even a small quantity could mean the difference between merely a rough passage and a trip through the vortex of hell.

  Worms, enchanted woods, and chrystaalt. Another smile curved his mouth. Merioneth was truly a land of plenty, and all of it there for the taking. His taking.

  ~ ~ ~

  ’Twas warm and fragrant, the world of dreams, and smelled more like apples than not. Llynya shifted on the bough that held her and let the warmth of morning sunshine take up where moonlight had left off in the night. He’d kissed her in her last dream—Mychael ab Arawn—and tasted of catkins’ dew. Quite sweet, his mouth had been, quite sweet.

  “Bagworms,” she muttered, not opening her eyes in hopes that yet another dream would come her way—one without the plaguing archer in it. He’d cast some Druid spell on her, no doubt, that thoughts of him came to her so easily and so often, bothering her even in her sleep.

  She stretched and rolled onto her side. The lazy drone of bees drifted up from the herb garden below, along with the mingled scents of marjoram, thyme, and sage, and through and above it all ran the redolence of lavender. ’Twas not such a sore affliction, her need for lavender, except in the deep dark.

  The deep dark.

  “Sticks!” Her eyes flew open, and she immediately squinted. The sun was a bright ball of full morning light shining down into the bailey. “Double-sticks!”

  She swung to a sitting position and made quick work of straightening her clothes. She needed a pack to replace the one she’d lost in Crai Force. She needed provisions, including a suppl
y of lavender. Gods, but an elf shot arrow or two would have been nice.

  She squinted up at the sun again. Aye, she had some catching up to do. Rhuddlan had been gone for hours.

  “Ho, there!” A lilting, singsong voice cried up from below, and her spirits sank. She’d been found before she could make good her escape. “Llynya, ho!” ’Twas a Quicken-tree boy, Gwydion, waving wildly up at her. His hair was as black as coal with a stubby braid sticking out above his left ear. She lifted a hand in a desultory greeting, the mood of which was completely lost on the small interloper. “Trig wants ye at the p’cullis posthaste.”

  His message delivered, the boy ran off, skipping and leaping through the orchard. No doubt there had been the promise of a honeycake for a job well done.

  She sank back down onto the apple tree boughs, releasing an aggravated sigh. Her goose was cooked, and mayhaps her gander too. The portcullis was a grim place, a gaping maw of iron teeth and murder holes. ’Twas not where she would choose to go of a morn, even if she didn’t have other more pressing plans. The long way around would take her by Aedyth’s hut and the hearthfire, though, and she could gather the needed lavender and food.

  Resigned to her posthaste summons and hoping for a menial task—for she could yet catch Rhuddlan in the caves—she swung down from her branch and dropped to the ground, landing with practiced lightness. To the west was the herb garden, and she detoured from her path to pick some sage.

  A small stone chapel stood between the curtain wall and the neat rows of herbs, its masonry banked with thyme and overrun with creepers turning scarlet with the shortening of the days. The pink, clustered flowers of the thyme were abuzz with bees. The sage was farther to the north and less well frequented. She bent and pinched off a couple of gray-green leaves for her pouch and a couple to chew. The chapel was not a place of the priestesses, who, like the tylwyth teg, had worshiped with the trees. Aedyth guessed that it had been built by Gwrnach, father to the Boar, as the Boar himself had shown no bent for holy things.

  Aye, Llynya thought, her mood souring. Caradoc had shown no bent at all except for the unholy, and that he had relished. If he had survived his descent into the wormhole, she would yet have his gullet slit by her blade—for ’twas he who had sent Morgan to his doom.

  Three had fallen beyond the graven rim of the weir that day, Lavrans, Morgan, and Caradoc. Only Lavrans had arisen, found and pulled to safety by Mychael. The other two had been lost. Where they’d gone, or when, or whether either had survived their wounds were questions that had been left unanswered, and reasonably so by Quicken-tree standards. But she was Yr Is-ddwfn, and in an age long past the Yr Is-ddwfn had used the gates of time and the weir of the wormhole to travel with an ease unknown to others before or since. They had known the secrets sought through the ages of men. The old priests on Anglesey looked to the stars to re-find the ways. Llynya knew her oracle was not to be found in the heavens, but was carved in stone and lay hidden in the labyrinthine heart of the deep dark. She would find the walls written on in an Yr Is-ddwfn hand, and through them make her way into the weir. She would find Morgan, and if the chance arose, she would kill Caradoc. She’d given his hairless devil-priest, Helebore, to the old worm to crush, and if the Boar did not die easily on her blade, she’d do the same to him.

  Tucking a bit of sage in her mouth, she left the chapel grounds and struck out across the bailey. The smell of honey wafted to her on the air, coming from some cook’s baking. Children played in the sunshine and scampered through the wild grasses, while older girls and boys shooed them off and worked at the harvest. Llynya recognized the richly amber jhaen grass used for seedcakes, and the rust-colored redbuck best eaten as morning porridge. Less abundant were the long stems of kel with their drooping white panicles and blue-green leaf blades, a rare gift from Naas. All would be hand-threshed and winnowed.

  With a season of work, the Quicken-tree had turned the wards of Balor into nascent meadows and woodlands. Most of what had been inside the wall, she’d been told, had been burned at the summer solstice for an Alban Heruin festival of uncommon brightness. By all accounts, the unkempt buildings of wattle and daub and thatched roofs had taken to the torch with ease. Those in the lower bailey had been torn down and dragged into the upper ward to make a pyre for the abominable keep. Only the worst of the lot remained untouched, the boar pits and Helebore’s chambers. Naught but time could sanctify those foul catacombs with their endless maze of tunnels running through stonework and earth alike.

  Talk had been going around even in May of a will-o’-the-wisp in the tunnels, sighted by the children more often than not. Llynya hoped to see it one day herself, though why a will-o’-the-wisp would choose such a mean dwelling was beyond her comprehension. Mostly they were forest phenomena.

  She passed near the postern tower in the west wall, rounded a halfwall, and stopped. Her first instinct was to sneak back behind the halfwall and find another route, for Mychael ab Arawn had made no quick getaway that morn either.

  He was sitting on a low bench in a patch of sunshine, his back resting against the great stone curtain, his legs splayed with a bucket on the ground between them. A water ladle rested against the wooden slats of the bucket, and as she watched, he brought it to his mouth for a long drink, spilling a good bit of it down the front of his much patched tunic. The second ladleful was poured over his head in a steady stream, not the first he’d dispatched in that manner from the looks of him. On his third try, he dispensed with the ladle altogether, bending over and using his cupped hands to splash his face before running his fingers back through his hair.

  Wet, he didn’t look nearly as fierce as he had on the shores of Mor Sarff, she mused. In truth, he looked fair peaked.

  A child’s laughter drew her attention toward an adjacent gallery arch, and quickly enough, the boy Gwydion came bounding through with half a dozen young hounds leaping about him and nipping at his heels. Trig’s bitch had whelped in early summer, a litter of black pups carrying the blood of Rhuddlan’s mighty hound, Conladrian, in their hearts. The boy giggled as a pup latched on to his hose and near dragged his braies down. Another nipped the first, and they all went tumbling, the whole of the ruckus heading straight for Mychael. Llynya caught his pained look at the impending invasion and couldn’t resist the inner dare to saunter over.

  Gwydion landed at the archer’s feet in a pile of pups when she was but halfway there. She heard Mychael swear, a sweet, chiding curse, and saw him reach out to tousle the boy’s hair. Gwydion laughed and prattled on about the morn’s adventures, and between each “Mychael, ye know this,” and “Mychael, ye know that,” the archer graced the child with a smile, a warm curve of mouth and flash of white teeth that near made her stumble—her, the lightest-footed elf in the forest. The word “p’cullis” was the last she heard, before Gwydion was off again with the dogs.

  “Malashm,” she said, hunkering down and helping herself to a ladleful of water, wondering if she dared hope for such a smile for herself. ’Twould do her heart good, but such wasn’t to be.

  Mychael ab Arawn did naught but squint at her through one eye, then let his head fall back into his hands with an audible groan. Moira had worked a fine piece of stitchery on his cheek, using only the greenest threads. Llynya knew the woman well enough to know he’d been fed as well, but up close he looked worse than peaked. Gold and auburn strands of hair stuck out wildly from his head, run through with his hands and glistening with the water he’d poured over himself. Morning sunlight limned his face, giving him a wanly luminescent look, as if the light shone through his skin, not on it. Besides the stitchery on his left cheek, which had left him bruised, there were other bruises she could not explain. Blue smudges of weariness colored the skin beneath his eyes.

  What had he done in the night, she wondered, to have worked himself into such a state? For certes, his brief encounter with Gwydion may have cost him more strength than he had to spare.

  “You look like Christian hell,” she said, delibera
tely glib to hide her concern. Her bluntness got her another bleary-eyed glance. She reached behind him and plucked a sprig off the pennyroyal growing up the wall. “You might take a chew of this.”

  He brushed the pungent leaves away with an indecipherable grumbling.

  He looked feverish and uncommonly pale for one who had been in the caves less than a sennight. She stuck the pennyroyal in her own mouth, chewing it up with the sage, and gave him a closer scrutiny. What she saw only increased her alarm. His tunic was half unlaced and torn across the shoulder; his chausses were loose and sagging. A livid mark on the inside of his left wrist snaked out from under his sleeve and across his palm, and she wondered how far up his arm it went. Whatever fury he’d had on the march had burned through him well and good. He was no longer a storm rising, but a storm spent. If Trig had a use for him at the portcullis, she hoped it wouldn’t require quick thinking.

  Then again, Trig might have something really awful in store for him. Naught had been said during the meeting the night before of the mutiny at Mor Sarff. With only her and Shay to witness, she’d been relieved that the subject hadn’t come up, but it would. Trig would have his due. Better that the captain had taken it out of Mychael’s hide on the sands than this morn, when he didn’t look to have much left in him to take.

  She glanced over her shoulder into the yard. Mayhaps ’twould be best if he wasn’t sitting out in the middle of the bailey where anyone who was looking could find him. True, he’d already been caught by Gwydion and summoned, but the boy had gone in the opposite direction of the portcullis. If reporting back to Trig had been his chore, he’d forgotten, and if naught else, she could buy Mychael an hour or two to pull himself back of a piece. ’Twouldn’t hurt to put herself into his better graces either—if such was possible.

  “There’s an old fosse outside the wall that overlooks the sea,” she said. “ ’Tis hedged with a deep hazel brake. I could take you there, and Trig need ne’er know whether the boy found you or not.”