Chalice 2 - Dream Stone

by Tara Janzen

  But how to go about getting one, that was the vexing question. They’d been arguing in the tower just before he kissed her, but she had no heart for arguing this night.

  He’d nearly kissed her the time she’d cut him in Crai Force, but she knew that had been “in spite of” and not “because of” her dagger work. Nay, she did not want to hurt him, not ever again.

  What she wanted was to kiss him, once, twice, thrice, and on and on, until the sun rose over Glyder Mawr and silvered the scree. Given her reaction last time, though, she doubted if he was still inclined to kiss her.

  Sticks and rot, she thought, her mouth tightening. There had to be a way besides Massalet’s flirting. She’d never flirted with a man in her life. ’Twould make her feel a perfect fool. ’Twas best, mayhaps, to try to win his friendship, and then, as a friend, she could outright ask him for a kiss.

  “Does your cheek pain you a’tall?” she asked, her concern real even if her motives for asking were highly suspect.

  “Not much,” he said around a yawn. Putting his hands together, he stretched his arms out in front of him. Lean, supple muscles flexed and contracted beneath his tunic. At the apex of his stretch, he groaned, a soft, intimate sound, an animal sound full of animal pleasure. The vibrations of it echoed through her, and she near melted on the spot.

  “Moira put something on it,” he continued, relaxing from the stretch and taking up the catkins. “Something besides rasca to take the pain away. ’Tis mostly her stitches I can feel anymore, not the dagger cut.”

  They sat for a while in companionable silence, so companionable—what with the fire crackling and the wind soughing through the trees all cozylike—that Llynya nearly convinced herself they’d already reached a stage of friendship. Then she did a quick review of their encounters over the last sennight and decided that although there was some sort of relationship between them, it could not yet be classified as friendship.

  “I’ve seen some of the Quicken-tree move in that special fast way you did in Crai Force with your blade,” he said, looking up from the fire, his eyebrows drawn together in thoughtful confusion. “But none of them are as fast as you. Not even close. I remember ’twas like a lightning strike when you cut me.”

  “ ’Tis called ‘quickety-split,’ or ‘tlas buen’ in the elvish tongues,” she said, struggling with a twinge of guilt. Rhuddlan might still have her wrung and hung for cutting one of their own. “The Yr Is-ddwfn aethelings have always been the fastest of all the tylwyth teg. The Quicken-tree have lived too long in the world of Men, for eons and eons I s’pect, and there’s been marriages and such between the two, sort of like the one between your father and mother, who though she was not exactly elfin was the closest I’ve ever seen a priestess be. Near faerielike, she was, a rare faerie blodau, not one of the little woodland beasts. The mingling up has made the Quicken-tree and the other clans stronger in some ways and weakened them in others, but they can still run circles around men.”

  “You knew my mother?” he asked, leaning forward, his sudden, eager interest reminding her of his long-ago loss. She nearly reached out and touched his cheek, but held herself back. Under no circumstances could her feelings for him be misconstrued as maternal.

  “Aye, and I loved her too,” she said, glad they shared such a bond, though she’d not seen Rhiannon or gone to Merioneth for years before he’d been born. Ailfinn and she had wandered far and wide after leaving Yr Is-ddwfn, returning to Merioneth only to find it had been lost to Gwrnach. “She told the most wondrous stories and played the sweetest harp. You could hear the stars singing in Rhiannon’s harp. She had soft hands, and a soft, soothing voice, and her hair was like a beautiful golden cloud. I ne’er saw hair like that again until Ceridwen came to Deri. I gave her a thousand braids that night to keep her safe.” She paused, stirring the fire with a long stick and giving him a sidelong look. “You know, you could use a braid yourself, a fif braid. ’Tis one of those fair, subtle things that bind you to the trees.”

  “Binding, knotting, braiding, and brambling,” he said, smiling again. “The Quicken-tree are ever weaving the world together. To what end do I dare bind myself to the trees?”

  “Well, you’ll walk through them a little easier, if they know you’re there,” she explained. “Most times they don’t bother with a man. Men’s lives move too fast for trees to care much about, but if you’re fif braided, kind of like how all of them are wound up together on this patch of earth or another, they’ll notice you more, and sometimes they’ll talk to you a bit.”

  “Talk?”

  “Aye.”

  “About what?” he asked, his voice rising on a note of incredulity.

  “This and that,” she said with a lift of her shoulders. He stared at her for a long time before the doubt faded from his expression. “They talk to you, don’t they?”

  “Aye, and Rhuddlan, and Madron, and most any of the tylwyth teg who take the time to listen.”

  A sigh escaped him as he looked up at the trees. The dark crowns of pines, and oaks, and a few straying beeches carved out their silhouettes against the night sky, curving around the pond in an uneven horizon.

  “A fif braid will tie me to the Quicken-tree as much as the forest, won’t it?”

  “Aye,” she confessed.

  He lowered his gaze from the trees back to her. “Some of them would not be so glad to see me walking into Carn Merioneth with my hair braided.”

  “Naas gave you a dreamstone, and Moira made you a suit of clothes with a whole wild iris woven down the sleeve,” she asserted, stirring up another batch of sparks. “No matter if Rhuddlan himself wanted you gone, he could not go against those two.”

  Another smile curved his mouth, but ’twas wry, lacking any semblance of delight. “ ’Tis not Rhuddlan who would have me gone. I think he would as soon I was reborn a Quicken-tree so he could be my uncontested liege lord with full power over me.”

  A turn of events he was not inclined to allow, she’d realized days past.

  “He’s fair enough as a liege lord, but the braid will make you no more his than you are now,” she assured him. “ ’Tis a protection for you, is all, and it only ties you closer to the Quicken-tree because they are all tied close to the woodlands and meadows, to the fens and grykes, mosses and moors. I heard tell once of an Ebiurrane who went so far north there were no trees, no green living thing. One night, she became lost in a blizzard of fierce snow and ice. At dawn, when she was nearly frozen stiff with the cold, she heard the trees of home calling her. She heeded their voices and was guided to safety. If you ever needed sanctuary in the forest or out of it, the braid will make it easier for the trees to guide you.”

  “A fif braid will help the trees mark me a path into sanctuary?” he asked, looking up from the flames, his eyes dark with the keenness of his gaze.

  “Aye. They know the way from every which place to every other and e’en the places in between, like Yr Is-ddwfn.”

  “Yr Is-ddwfn? The place where you’re from, is it a sanctuary, then?” His curiosity was fully alight now, and of a sudden she realized a misunderstanding had taken place. She could have kicked herself for not being more careful.

  “Aye, I suppose it’s a sanctuary of sorts,” she told him, backing off a bit from her tinker’s pitch for the braid. Aedyth thought him a darkling beast, but Naas had told her a different story that afternoon while they’d sat on the wall and watched Mychael and the others unload Tabor’s ponies, a story of priestesses and dragon’s blood, and Mychael’s searching of the Dragon’s Mouth for a map of Nemeton’s.

  Neither treebound refuge nor Yr Is-ddwfn could protect him from himself, and the dragonfire that burned through him was implicitly his, a bloodspell from Ddrei Goch and Ddrei Glas conjured in an ancient time and running through his veins.

  “It’s a sanctuary of learning and some might say of enchantments,” she went on, avoiding an outright blighting of his hopes. “The Prydion Magi found it near the end of the Dark Age, though they be
lieved it to have been there even in Deep Time. ’Twas the dragon spawn, the pryf, who opened the path to Yr Is-ddwfn through the wormhole.”

  “I’ve been in the wormhole,” he reminded her, “and I never saw a path.”

  “You wouldn’t have, unless you’d been taught, even if ’twas right in front of you. Ailfinn Mapp, the great Prydion Mage, tried to teach Nemeton how to find the path, but for all that he learned, he was ne’er able to learn the way to Yr Is-ddwfn.”

  “So Yr Is-ddwfn isn’t Nemeton’s sanctuary?” he asked with a furrowing of his brow, coming around to the truth quick enough on his own.

  “Nay. But mayhaps I could teach you the way there,” she said on a hopeful note, thinking she really should kiss him. She knew she could cheer him with a kiss. “Most anywhere, a thing is either there to see or it isn’t, but the path to Yr Is-ddwfn has a trick to it. There’s a place not very far inside the rim of the Weir Gate that looks to be either here or there, and if you squint just so”—she demonstrated with a crinkling up of her eyes—“and soften your gaze so you’re not staring too hard”—and she did just that, peering at him while actually trying not to see him so much as to see through him—“you’ll notice there’s a wee bend to the rock, and if you can find your way ’round that bend, which I’ll be the first to admit can be a bit troublesome on account of its not being too solid as rock goes and with the worms swirling all around, well, if you can do that, you’re practically there, and once there, you’ll be surprised to find it’s not very far from here. Not very far at all.”

  She opened her eyes and found him watching her with equal parts of puzzlement and amusement.

  “Well, that is how it’s done,” she said in her own defense.

  “I’ve no doubt,” he said, “but I think I know why the Druid never mastered the trick. I don’t suppose you have a less tricky method for finding the sanctuary that was Nemeton’s?”

  “Nay,” she admitted. “Naas says Madron has turned Merioneth apart trying to find her father’s journals, for therein lay his maps and such, but naught has come to light.”

  “Naas says?” he repeated doubtfully. “Naas never says anything. She doesn’t even talk to Rhuddlan.”

  “Well, she talks to me. We’ve been friends from when I first came to the Quicken-tree.”

  A grin twitched the corner of his mouth. “The trees talk to you. Naas talks to you. The chickadees and the doves talk to you. Is there anything or anybody who doesn’t talk to you?”

  “There was a man once,” she said, leaning forward and smiling herself, “but now he’s talking to me too.”

  He blushed, much to her delight.

  She scooted closer and slid her fingers through a length of his hair. His blush deepened, warming his skin and her fingertips, and once again she was struck by his beauty—by the high angles of his cheekbones, and the fine, near delicate line of his nose, by his dark lashes, and the equally dark arcs of his eyebrows, so in contrast to his fairness. He looked more from the far north than from Wales, from beyond the North Sea where his white-gold hair was common among men, where his cleanly carved features were not so unique. His eyes, so palely gray, held the barest rim of Ceridwen’s blue. Around the pupil was an even thinner line of amber. ’Twas the amber line that was wont to light with flame when the heat was upon him as it had been on the beach at Mor Sarff. This night he did not look so fierce and fiery, only warm from his swim, his body relaxed and at ease. This night he was a man who laughed.

  Fascinated by the changes wrought in the waters of Bala Bredd, she lowered her hand and touched the small white scar at the corner of his mouth. “How did you get this?”

  “I stumbled in the garden at Strata Florida and cut myself on a rock,” he said after a moment’s hesitation.

  ’Twas her touch, she knew, adding the husky edge to his voice. His temperature rose about them both in heated awareness, caressing her skin with the scents of desire and longing. She’d been wrong to think he didn’t want to kiss her—for he indeed wanted a kiss, a kiss and more.

  She glided her finger over the scar before removing her hand. “How old were you?”

  “No more than five or six. ’Twas the day Moriath took Ceri away from the monastery. When the monks locked the gate behind them, I panicked and went off running, trying to find another way out. Everywhere, the walls were too high for me to breach, until I found the garden. A small gate at the end of it lay open onto the fields, and I could see the road they’d taken.” A trace of his smile returned. “I nearly made it, but by the time I picked myself up from the ground, Brother John had caught me, and he didn’t let go of me again until I was twelve and too big for him to handle.”

  Llynya had heard tell long ago about Rhiannon’s daughter being at Usk Abbey, but no one had spoken of a son. It had been Ceridwen herself who had told Llynya that her twin brother was in Strata Florida.

  “Was it too awful, being in such a place?” she asked, repressing a shudder. “I’ve heard they tie women to stakes and burn them, and that they keep their God alive in vats of wine and bits of bread and eat and drink his flesh and blood.”

  “ ’Tis true, but no one was ever burned at Strata Florida. Our abbot did not abide by those ways. As for the wine and wafers, ’tis not as cannibalistic as it sounds, but is meant as a form of worship.”

  “I would as soon sing the Mother’s praises and walk gently in her woods.”

  “Aye, it seems a good way,” he agreed, “and one more suited to my nature, though in truth I suffered less harm at the hands of the monks than I have since coming home to Merioneth.”

  “You could go back,” she said, and immediately regretted the words.

  “Nay.” A shake of his head sent the silky length of hair she’d handled sliding over his shoulder. “I thought so once, but no more. Most men know naught of the enchantments living beyond the forest’s edge and beneath the hills they call home, and mayhaps that is the way it should be. They rarely pass into the realm of the tylwyth teg, and those brief trespasses are accounted as ‘magic’ and nothing more. But I would not go back and close my eyes to what I’ve seen.” He angled a shy glance in her direction. “That morning at the river, I thought you might have wings, so fey did you seem with the mist rising all about you, talking to a flock of chickadees.”

  Aye, he wanted her aright.

  “No river faerie me,” she denied, mayhaps too quickly, feeling a rare bout of shyness herself. She’d thought she was the only one entranced that morn. As to the other, wings weren’t so far removed from her family line that her shoulder blades didn’t tingle now and then. “Come. Let me give you a braid to bind you closer to the trees. I swear they’ll do you even less harm than the monks.”

  He nodded, and she took up a handful of his hair, pleased to finally be doing him a good turn. Working from the bottom to the top, she finger-combed the flaxen strands until they slipped like sunlight through her hands. His hair was straight and fine, not a wild tumble of curls like Ceridwen’s. The texture made her work both easier and more difficult. Fine strands were less apt to tangle up with one another, but more apt to slip free of the plait, especially when from the top of his head to his shoulders his hair was any number of lengths. ’Twas also any number of colors, all blond, from yellow and honey-gold strands to subtle swaths of lighter hues, of silver and palest ivory.

  Parting off a small section, she began plaiting a five-strand sinnet, half blond, half auburn. With the crossing over of the outside lengths toward the middle he would have a parti-colored braid and the most unusual plait that had ever been seen from Riverwood to Wroneu. For his added protection, because he was not tylwyth teg, she slipped a silver ring from one of her baldric pouches into the braid about a third of the way down. At two-thirds, she added another, small ring worked with runes, and started twisting in a green and silver riband of Quicken-tree cloth. Nemeton had never taken a fif braid. Lavrans had done such only for the fire festivals, and those had been before he’d dropped into the weir
and his hair had changed.

  That only left one other who could have compared.

  She made another pass with a length of auburn hair and riband, her smile fading. Wherever Morgan was, she doubted if anyone had thought to give him a braid; and if the truth were told, she doubted if Morgan was anywhere at all, but was yet suspended in some awful limbo far away in time and space. She knew little enough of what happened inside a weir, and Aedyth had known even less. Ailfinn knew. Ailfinn knew everything, but though the mage had been expected in Merioneth all summer, she had not yet come. Llynya hadn’t felt the Thief falling since leaving Deri, which might have been a fair portent, except for the unsettledness in the vicinity of her heart that had not left her since he’d disappeared into the wormhole.

  Nay, Morgan had not landed someplace in time, not yet.

  As she neared the end of Mychael’s braid, a gust of leaves—oak and birch, hazel, and a few straying rowan—swirled up around the fire, encircling them in an autumn dance of scarlets, ambers, and yellowing greens. The wind held the leaves for a moment before they drifted back to earth, falling about Mychael’s shoulders and in his hair.

  “The trees are glad to have you, whether Aedyth will be or nay,” she said, finishing the braid with another silver ring and bit of Quicken-tree cloth pulled from her baldric. Thinking of Morgan had taken the lightness from her mood. Yr Is-ddwfn wasn’t Mychael’s sanctuary, but Nemeton’s map—if it could be found—might lead him to a place where he could escape the fate of his dragonfire. Her escape awaited her in the wormhole, and Mychael had all but promised her that the wormhole, if she dared its graven rim, would be her destruction. For certes his deep descent of the weir had not been accomplished without risks and harm. She, too, would have to go deep, far deeper than the path to Yr Is-ddwfn. That morning, Mychael’s skin had still burned with the heat of the wormhole scars. Could she bear the same, if such was to be her fate?