by Tara Janzen
’Twas taking a bit longer than Naas had planned, though, to find the cache she sought. They had been up one side of the Canolbarth and down the other, a good trick of late. Soldiers were everywhere, and she knew she, too, must soon hasten to the weir. Sounds of battle were echoing through the rock. The tylwyth teg could hold against the skraelings, of that she had no doubt, but Ddrei Goch and Ddrei Glas were cresting the waves of the Irish Sea, and none alive were prepared for the dragons in their battle against Dharkkum, not even Mychael ab Arawn, not yet.
Messengers were continually being sent from Mor Sarff to Merioneth, and she heard the passing news. Fighting was rampant all along the eastern wall of the Serpent Sea and north along the Wall into Dripshank Well. Twice the skraelings had been repelled from the damson cliffs, but the pryf nest had been invaded and a skraelpack was yet holding out in the labyrinth. Lanbarrdein had been breached from beneath the falls by boat and barge, and Slott was sitting upon the King’s Pool throne.
The Druid boy had come out of the ice. He and Llynya had sailed onto the sandy shores beneath the gates mere hours ahead of the Troll King and his Dockalfar captains.
“There, ye think?” she asked, pointing down the tunnel to the next band of rose quartz.
Snit nodded at her side. A raggedy man-boy he was, more fully grown than he appeared, sharp-eyed and sharp-nosed, with dark scraggly hair and thickly lashed green eyes. He had a fif braid tied with a Quicken-tree riband, and his dagger was always ready to hand.
“It’ll be a squeeze,” she warned. “But if ye find the book, the reward will be great.”
“Boons and prizes, ye said.” The retort came back at her with a narrowed gaze.
Naas cackled. “Oh, I’ve got baubles and pretties aplenty for ye. Aplenty, oh, aye.”
Following along behind them, Madron watched the byplay with barely restrained impatience. Naas and the boy had searched a hundred places in the Canolbarth so far, all to no avail. They were looking for a book, and though Naas had not named the tome, Madron knew there were few books of such importance that they could keep the old woman from the battle raging below. ’Twas one of the Seven Books of Lore. It had to be, specifically, the Chandra Yeull Le, the Yellow Book of Chandra, the Merioneth priestesses’ book.
Three of the Seven Books had been presumed lost for centuries, if not millennia. Naas, though, would not have kept the Elhion Bhaas Le from Ailfinn, and in truth, no lonely hole in stone could have kept the Indigo Book hidden from the Prydion Mage on its own. Great intent had been required to conceal the mage’s book of secrets. The Treo Veill Le, the Green Book of Trees, had been lost in the weir, lost in time, leaving only the priestess tome unaccounted for.
Why Naas suddenly needed the Chandra Yeull Le when she’d known—at least generally—where it was, and why she hadn’t brought it forth before now, was a mystery Madron would like answered, though ’twould surely be at Naas’s discretion. The crone did not bend to anyone’s will, and she’d spoken to no one except Snit since they’d come below. Nearly as intriguing, and for certes more disturbing, Naas had taken Mychael’s Red Book of Doom from the Druid boy’s hiding place in the boar pit and brought it with them, along with the newly recovered Blue Book of the Magi.
Madron had thought it a blessing to have known the whereabouts of the Red Book, but to be suddenly close to having three of the seven at hand gave rise to all sorts of possibilities. There was power in knowledge, and the Seven Books were steeped in knowledge from the Ages of Wonders and the Dark Age, times so far in the past they were lost to this world—except mayhaps in dreams, where memories that were passed down through the blood were wont to rise.
As to Naas’s newfound confidant, Madron had known about the will-o’-the-wisp and somewhat of his origins, but unlike Naas, she had not felt a need to trap him. Ceridwen and Lavrans had both spoken of their friend in need who had seen them safely through the bowels of Balor during the battle, and then disappeared.
“Up with ye then,” Naas said when they reached the second vein of quartz and its narrow crack.
Corvus Gei came forward and helped the ragged boy up into the opening.
Madron watched the small hunchbacked figure disappear into the luminescent stone with Naas’s dreamstone. ’Twas on the hilt of her dagger like the other Quicken-tree’s, but Madron kept hers on a gold chain. For her purposes, a necklace was a more subtle means of enchantment.
At her side, Corvus did not appear to be suffering from the same impatience that beset her. He’d been very subdued since descending into the caverns.
And who in his position wouldn’t be? she thought, knowing what awaited him. The pouch of universal salts she’d been instructed to bring weighed heavily on her mind, if not her girdle. Rhuddlan had sealed the tunnels that led into the Weir Gate, but Naas was not concerned with ether seals. The battle was to be considered, but battle alone was no deterrent to their goal. Morgan ab Kynan, the Thief of Cardiff, had met his doom in the very midst of battle.
A journey through hell, Corvus had called the wormhole, and his greatest desire to descend again was near to being granted. Madron knew all the Christian visions and levels of hell, having spent many years in Usk Abbey in South Wales. Corvus must know the same from his time on Ynys Enlli, yet he still used the horrific place to describe what awaited him.
“Hand me your light, child,” Naas said, her hand out for Madron’s dreamstone.
Madron slipped the chain over her head and gave the crystal to the old woman, as anxious as she to see if the book would be found.
“How are ye, Snit?” Naas called into the nether regions of the crack.
The muttered reply she got in return seemed to suffice. She set up a tuneless humming and absently looked up and down the tunnel. When her gaze settled again on the opening, she bent forward and rapped Madron’s dreamstone on the quartz, and a sudden vibration set the whole vein of rock humming, the sound of it streaking down into the darkness behind the little hunchback, until a cracking sound rent the air and he let out a squeal.
“Well, there ye have it,” she said. “Just a cheap priestess spell.”
“ ’Twas a seal?” Madron asked, surprised.
“Aye. One not meant to last so long.”
“For the Chandra Yeull Le?”
Naas shot her a discerning glance. “Don’t look so smug, child.”
“But I thought the book was stolen by a Douvan king.”
“And what do you think the price was for its return?”
The price must have been great, Madron thought. No king would squander such a prize, and no wonder the priestesses had hidden it and let the world go on believing it lost to thievery.
But would it still be where they’d put it? Thousands of years had passed. Their Age and all its glory had disappeared but for the remnants lingering in Merioneth. For certes their seal had not held—if the white-eyed woman had finally chosen the right spot to look.
Naas suddenly cocked her head.
“Rich, rich, rich,” came the sound of Snit’s voice echoing off the crystal walls of the narrow passage through the rock. ’Twas accompanied by the soft tramping of his feet. “Baubles, she said. Pretties, she said. Rich, rich, rich.”
Corvus stepped forward, and Naas lifted Madron’s dreamstone high to light the opening. Quick enough, Snit was there and handing over a cloth-bound package nearly half his size.
Naas’s hands trembled as she set it on the floor and began untying the ribands holding the wrapping in place. Slowly, the layers of silvery green cloth slipped away, revealing the unmistakable luster of gold and a fortune’s worth of sapphires, amethysts, garnets, and pearls. The jewels encrusted the hammered gold cover in a symmetrical pattern, leaving hardly a place bare of brilliance. Beads of gold outlined the border and drew the eye into the cover’s central gold figure, a naked woman. Stars shot out from the hands of her outstretched arms; a crescent moon crowned her head. Rivers of milk flowed from her breasts. From her womb came the peoples of the earth and al
l the beasts, man and animal alike twined ’round with flowering vines that sank their roots deep into the earth she stood upon. Radiance surrounded her, fine lines depicting light chased into the gold like the sun’s rays.
“Now we can go to the gates of time,” the old woman said, gathering the priestess book into her arms.
~ ~ ~
Mychael slogged through the sands of Mor Sarff. Dead skraelings were everywhere, and indeed, in places their blood poured like small rivers into the Serpent Sea. Battle had helped bring him around from his odd detachment, as had the sleep he had gotten on the Daur ship, but his blood still ran strangely cold, and his skin was not so warmly flesh-toned as it should have been. He had an icy grip on his sword. ’Twas as if his dragonfire, the source of so many of his doubts and so much of his pain, had gone out, smothered by the dark smoke.
If ’twas true, he should feel free, when all he felt was bereft. He’d lost something vital in the Dangoes, something of his life. It had been taken by the swart thread of darkness that had descended in the ice cave.
Llyr shouted at him from up on the wall of the pryf nest, pointing to the southeast. Mychael looked, then waved back at the Ebiurrane lord. The Kings Wood elves were returning from Dripshank Well, and Mychael had been given orders to use them to hold the eastern shore.
The Dockalfar and their skraelpacks had retreated back onto their ships. ’Twas the third time the tylwyth teg had repelled them. Each time it took the enemy longer to regroup, and Llyr had ordered rest and food in the interim before the next assault.
Fires were lit all along the shoreline, from the rocky cliffs of Lanbarrdein to where the Magia Wall bordered Mor Sarff on the east. The great expanse of the damson cliffs shimmered with dreamstone light, with flames from the fires reflecting on the crystal trails cut into its face. Treilo of the Wydden had arrived during the last attack and his troops had routed Slott from the King’s Pool throne. The Troll King now sat on his barge, floating again on the Serpent Sea. He was such a daunting sight, overlarge with his tail slapping against the waves and raising fountains of water, his cries of hunger sending a shiver down every elf’s spine, that Llyr had wondered aloud if he’d not been better left in Lanbarrdein where none could see him.
There were still skraelings in the pryf nest, but those the worms hadn’t crushed were being searched out by the Red-leaf clan.
The Daur had moored their ships along the coast, from Lanbarrdein to the crystal-cliffed headland of the Weir Gate. The ships of the Dockalfar had clashed with theirs on every assault, with two kharrs lost to three of the skraeling halvskips. Those of the Daur crews who hadn’t drowned were fighting with the Quicken-tree on the sands, for ’twas Trig who had held the gates of time against the repeated invasions.
Everywhere along the shore and cliffs, Liosalfar were taking their repast and tending to their wounds. At the first notice of battle, Nia had been taken to Merioneth to be cared for by Aedyth and Moira. Few others were left above beyond mothers and children.
Llynya was with the Quicken-tree on the sand. She was sitting with a group of Liosalfar around one of the fires, sharing a silver flask of the Red-leaf’s potent brew. Her hair was messier than usual, more unbound, dark swaths of it falling to her waist. Dirt streaked her face. Mychael started to lift his hand to her as he passed, but a chill rippled through him, killing the impulse before he could act on it, and his hand remained at his side.
She’d been hurt. One of the warriors was tending a cut on her arm. She winced as the Liosalfar smoothed rasca on the wound, and a spark of some nameless emotion flickered in his breast. Then it, too, passed, and he walked on, rubbing a hand down his left side, trying to bring warmth to the cold scar that had once held dragonfire.
Shay had come only a few hours behind Treilo, bearing both joyous and somber tidings. The mere sight of him had cheered the Quicken-tree. Ailfinn had been found and freed, he told them, which heartened all the tylwyth teg, for even the most battle weary among them smelled the thickening smoke drifting up from the south. ’Twas to this, the deadliest threat, that the Prydion Mage had set herself, taking Rhuddlan, Wei, Owain, and the Sha-shakrieg as her companions to Kryscaven Crater. The elves would not have their king to lead them in this battle—and mayhaps never again. None underestimated the danger Ailfinn was leading her company into by taking them to the southern basin.
Mychael, too, smelled the reeking smoke. He’d seen the dark, ephemeral wisps floating in on the waves, forming and re-forming with the vagaries of the wind. He’d felt their cold caress during battle, tiny brushes of the lifeless night blown leeward onto the shore.
The skraelings were not immune to its frigid bite either. They flinched with the same horror as any other living creature when the dread stuff brushed against them. Yet ’twas their lord who had unleashed the smoke. Caerlon was his name. Treilo had brought the information back from Rastaban, learned from skraeling deserters.
Mychael started around the headland toward Dripshank Well and met the returning Kings Wood elves.
“Ho, Mychael,” the man in the lead hailed him. ’Twas Kenric, one of the trackers. Like most of the Kings Wood elves, he was heavier built than the Quicken-tree and carried a yew longbow nearly as tall as himself. His hair was still dark, framing a face with broad cheekbones, a square chin, and a once broken nose. For one so young, his gaze was surprisingly shrewd. The Kings Wood tunics were varying shades of brown, with Kenric’s being a rich russet color.
“Kenric,” Mychael called back. “We are to the Wall.”
Kenric nodded and turned to his troop, gesturing to the rope and wood-slat bridge the Red-leaf had made, connecting the shore of the damson cliffs to the eastern part of the Wall. The Red-leaf lived in the trees in the northern forests and used their ropes and abundance of wood to make walkways in the sky, bridging one arboreal abode to the next. They had strung a good many such bridges in the last two days: a bridge behind the falls at Lanbarrdein, another from the pryf nest to the top of the damson cliffs. They had bridged a canyon that opened up below Dripshank Well.
Mychael brought up the rear as the troop filed onto the bridge, falling in step with the Kings Wood trackers. A rough-hewn bunch and seasoned warriors, they expected nothing from him except that he would fight, which suited him well. The Kings Wood clan lived closer to Men than the other tylwyth teg. He thought mayhaps that was why Llyr had put them under his command. His position among the other elfin lords was not so simple.
He had once been their hope, but that hope had died. There were no dragons coming to Mor Sarff, and he was not the Dragonlord to answer the Daur’s call. Two days of pitched battle had brought no sign of Ddrei Goch and Ddrei Glas. He was alone, except for the growing darkness. ’Twas the only truth he’d brought out of the ice cave, that the darkness was a black death and he had been born to fight it—but alone, not with the dragons by his side as he’d thought.
In the fight with the skraelings and the Dockalfar, his blade had been blooded, aye, but not as it had appeared in his vision. He had killed a good many of the enemy, and as he had not been wounded, neither had many of the Liosalfar who had fought with him. Behind his blade they were as safe as was possible in a close fight.
’Twas that knowledge and the battle itself that sustained him, and where Llyr sent him, he would go, until the end came—and his end was coming. He sensed it with every breath. He had failed to call the dragons to him, and for that weakness he would die. He smelled as much of death as did the vile smoke arising from Kryscaven. The elf-maid had said Death had been in the ice cave, and she’d been right. ’Twas the touch of death’s darkness that he’d carried out of the Dangoes. ’Twas impending death that had frosted his hair and turned his blood cold.
Halfway across the bridge, he noted a rise in the wind. The waves capped below him, showing violet in the dreamstone light. The scent of salt strengthened, brought in from the Irish Sea down a long, dark channel. In front of him, Kenric stopped and looked to the west. The wind rippled along t
he tracker’s tunic.
The Kings Wood elf stood perfectly still, his eyes closed, until a fresh gust came up and caused the bridge to sway. His eyes opened as he reached for the rope railing.
“What is it?” Mychael asked, grabbing hold of the rope as well.
“Sín,” Kenric said. “There’s a storm on the open water.”
“Can a storm from the Irish Sea reach this far?”
“This one will,” the tracker said with grim surety, and continued across the bridge.
Mychael looked to the west and lifted his face into the quickening breeze. Aye, ’twas there aright. Sín, a storm.
He again turned his gaze to the sands. Llynya was watching him from where she sat next to Shay. She made no sign of acknowledgment, but her gaze was steady on him.
Sparks rose on the wind from the Liosalfar fire, sheeting upward in a glittering cascade, yet through the fiery veil, through the shadows and the chaos of soldiers traversing the sand, Mychael could see her clearly. She was the aetheling, and where the Liosalfar’s hope had died in him, it had been reborn in her.
Camp rumors had her drawing a magic sword out of the mother rock and saving them all. She was a good fighter, but he didn’t think she could fight the growing darkness and prevail, and in his heart he knew she couldn’t call the dragons and bring them to heel.
He let his gaze drift downward to her arm. Blood dampened the bandage. The easier battle had not yet been won, the one against Caerlon and the skraelings and the great Troll King riding out the waves on his barge, his skulls clinking in the breeze, and she was already wounded.
Nay, they should not have put the burden of victory on her. For as he had failed, so would she. As he would die...
He stopped the thought with a violent curse and walked on, turning his attention back to the Wall.
~ ~ ~
Llynya watched Mychael cross the bridge and climb to the trail on the other side. His was a ghostly figure among the Kings Wood elves. She’d given up crying, but the ache in her heart threatened to break her. Verily, it increased in strength and pain every time she caught sight of him, and if too many hours passed without her seeing him, the pain turned to panic.