by Terry Madden
“I should think—”
“I took you from the Otherworld, Nechtan. That’s the truth of it.”
Nechtan listened while Lyleth recounted how she had transformed Wren, his favorite hunting bird, into a body that in all outward appearances save one was identical to the flesh he had last inhabited. He stood and paced. “Then I’m a wraith, like the hobgoblins in the caves of IsAeron?”
“No, you’re a man, just as you were.”
“Are you certain of that? Why am I unmarked?” He thrust out his arm.
“I don’t know.”
This was far too much to take in. Circling the fire, he watched his shadow, a dark reminder of his reality, and it made him wonder if he cast a shadow in that Otherworld, and if he did, were they one and the same. How could any of this be real? He dragged his hands through his hair and yanked at it, feeling the resistance of his scalp and the skull beneath. He was a jumble of impulses, and his memories were nothing but painted doorways in an endless hall.
“It’s been how long since my… death?”
“Five months.”
“When you took me away, I was but a babe there in that Otherworld.”
“Time is a trick of the flesh,” she said, “woven by the wheeling of the stars. A heartbeat in one world can span a lifetime in the other. You might have been an old man, or a babe at the breast.”
A horrible disquiet spread through him. It was no dream. The boy was still screaming in Nechtan’s head. A trumpet wailed while ice that wasn’t cold flew everywhere and covered them both.
“You’ve taken to playing god now,” he said. “Tell me why.”
“Ava murdered you.”
He laughed. “Ava? She’s little more than a girl.”
“Perhaps when you married her.”
“How?”
“Irjan is no healer. She’s a soulstalker.”
He sat down beside her and poked the fire to flame. “Soulstalkers were invented to frighten children into being good.”
Lyl dug through her satchel and pulled out a small horn vial and tossed it to him.
“Black hellebore root,” she said. “It stopped your heart. You took a blow in the practice yard while sparring.” She touched the new scar at the base of his neck. “Here.”
He popped the cork and sniffed the acrid stuff. He knew nothing of poisons. In truth, there was a dark curtain drawn around his last days, maybe even weeks. They were jumbled with memories of the Otherworld and a wide, endless seashore.
Lyl had brought sausage, bread and hard cheese and Nechtan ate like he had indeed slept for five months. She told him that Ava killed the guardian of Mogg’s Eye with nothing but a fishing spear, and now she called the chieftains to swear fealty to her as she-king.
“Why would you let Irjan treat me?” he said. “It’s you who puts me back together every day.”
Lyleth looked into the fire. “I wasn’t there.”
Something in her tone told him he would not want to hear why.
“Do Marchlew and Pyrs come at Ava’s call? Marchlew would surely protect Talan’s claim.” Nechtan’s nephew was all that was left of the blood of Black Brac.
“The rumors say they raise an army.”
“And you’ve called me back to make certain they do?”
“I called you back to lead them,” she said. “Irjan has put the Bear’s game piece into play. Ava commands your men.”
“You think the Bear sent Irjan to murder me so that Ava could take the throne for him?” He washed down the bread with mead. “You’ve granted the old bastard brains he doesn’t have, Lyl.”
“When did you stop trusting my instincts?” She started packing the remains of their meal in the satchel. “Emlyn and IsAeron join their forces with Ys. Would these men follow Ava if they knew you lived?”
He tried to read her. He wanted to see in her eyes another reason for this desperate act. But Lyleth was never miserly with the truth.
“I died once for this land,” he said, “wasn’t that enough?”
“Your life belongs to this land no less than mine—”
“What of the land beyond the well? What of that land? What of those people? You murdered me there no less than Irjan murdered me here.”
“Aye. I murdered you in the Fair Lands that you might set right what you left undone,” she said. “I consider the fate of the Five Quarters more pressing than your happiness, my lord, for this is my duty, a burden you laid upon me.”
He kicked at a bundle beside the fire and knew by the sound it was his harp inside, and not just his harp, but something more. It spoke to him in a discordant hum.
“What choice do you leave me?” he said.
Her eyes offered no hint of the affection he thought they shared. She turned away, poked at the fire, and sent a shower of sparks into the night.
“None,” she said at last. “And I will suffer your curses till the end of my days, but this fight is no less yours than mine. We leave for Cedewain at dawn.”
From behind them, a chatter of loose rock sounded from the cliff. The horse startled and Lyl was on her feet. Nechtan swept her behind him.
“I see you brought no weapons with these trousers,” he said.
He suddenly found a dirk in his hand, and glancing over his shoulder, said, “I love fighting with a meat knife, Lyl.”
She had already nocked an arrow and drawn, and it occurred to him that his span of days in this world might be shorter than Lyl had planned.
Chapter 7
With three fingers ready on her bowstring, Lyleth crouched beside Nechtan in the long shadow cast by the offering stone. She scanned the edge of the clearing, just within light’s reach, to see the plow horse spook at something. Night had fallen hours ago, and the moon wouldn’t rise for some time yet. They would be easy prey for highland rogues here, with steep mountains at their back and only one trail out. Perhaps what they heard in the woods weren’t rogues at all, but Ava’s men who had followed Lyleth to the well.
“How many?” Nechtan whispered.
She tried to feel a subtle disturbance of the air, but it had been many years since she had used her skills of far sensing. A trodden blade of grass, the ceasing of cricket song, wings in flight, all could be sensed by one who shared the earth’s skin.
The horse’s panic stirred the still night and drowned the footfalls of those in hiding. But the horse’s ears were sharp.
“The horse hears only one,” she whispered, “on the north side.”
“Stay here.” Nechtan moved out of the firelight and stole into the trees.
Beside the well, the fire flared and coughed embers into the night, and by its light, Lyleth saw a shadow dart from one tree to the next, then a rock burst against the offering stone inches from her head.
Nechtan glanced back from his position in the trees, and even in the dim light, she could see him smile. It was doubtful Ava’s soldiers would be slinging stones.
Lyleth spied the figure again, moving from tree to tree at the base of the escarpment. She buried an arrow in a tree as another rock caromed off the stone. Showing herself for an instant to draw another shot from the rogue’s sling, she allowed Nechtan to close in.
The sound of a scuffle and curses echoed round the glen, and Nechtan stepped into the firelight carrying a boy under one arm like a sack of grain.
“Our assailant.” He set the child on his feet, and the lad wiped his nose on his sleeve.
Lyleth relaxed the draw on her bow and felt the warmth of fresh blood seeping through the makeshift bandage. She adjusted her cloak to hide it.
“Alone, are you not, lad?” she said.
“I’m no lad!”
The child stepped nearer the fire. Not a boy; it was a girl-child. The tangled mat of hair might be sun yellow when clean, and her skin was the color of new cream beneath a blanket of freckles. She couldn’t be more than twelve summers old. She wore the rags of a shepherd boy and smelled no less fragrant.
“My apologies,” Lyl
eth said, “but lad or lass, you’ll come to a bloody end as a robber. I came near shooting you.”
“Why’d ya think I was here to rob ye?”
“You were flinging stones at us,” Nechtan said.
“Maybe I jes wanted to scare ye.” Even through her mighty lisp, Lyleth heard the accent of Arvon, or perhaps it was the isles north of there. Either way, the girl was a long way from home.
“If your rocks had found our heads,” Nechtan said, “you’d have done more than scare us.”
“You rob pilgrims?” Lyleth said. “Is that how you live in these mountains?”
“I don’t rob nobody. Pilgrims leave offerin’s. The guardian don’t eat much, and truth be, she don’t eat nothing a’tall, as I can tell.”
“There’s not enough food left here to feed a bird, much less girl,” Nechtan said. “What are you doing in these mountains alone, lass?”
“Same as you, maybe. Samhain offerings to the green gods. But sure I wasn’t workin’ old magic, like ye.” She nodded at Lyleth. “He was a bird and now he’s a man.” The girl grinned at Nechtan. “Can ye fly, too?”
What could be done? The girl had seen everything. Rummaging in the satchel, Lyleth found the remainder of a loaf, which she held out to the girl, saying, “What you saw must be kept between us.”
The girl’s eyes flitted between Lyleth and Nechtan, waiting for the snare to spring. At last she said, “O’course it does,” and snatched the bread like a starving dog. Sitting on her heels beside the fire, her eyes darted about like one who’s been alone in the wild for some time.
Lyleth cut some sausage and the child took that too, biting first into bread, then sausage until her cheeks filled like a squirrel.
“What else have you seen, lass?” Nechtan asked.
“I come up from the village at Kirkaveen.” She took another bite of sausage, and measured them both while she chewed. “There’s soldiers there,” she said, “asking after the dead king’s solás. And there’s a druí here looking much like the dead king’s solás to me eyes. And she’s about raising to life the dead king. Fancy that.”
Nechtan turned to Lyleth. “You passed through Kirkaveen?”
“I did,” Lyleth said, “I bought that sausage—” A hole opened in her gut. “Rhys… it’s the only way she could know.” Ava would have sent men to Dunla’s meadstead as well.
“We must go.” Lyleth struggled to her feet, the wounds on her arm and chest throbbing. She stuffed the food back in the satchel. “Now.”
“You’d be going north, I should think,” the girl said.
Lyleth tried to read the girl’s intentions, but food was her only focus. “It’s best you not know where we go, lass.”
“Any fool knows you’ll take the dead man to Cedewain where Marchlew raises his army.”
“It’s half a day’s ride back to the glen below,” Lyleth said, “then another day east to the main road—”
“We can’t take the road.” Nechtan was pacing again.
“There’s no other way.”
“Oh, but there is.” The girl grinned.
Her name was Elowen. She’d been living alone in the highlands for a year, or so she said, and she knew a way through the mountains that most others didn’t. If they could reach the northern slopes of the Felgarths, they were only three days’ ride to Cedewain and Marchlew’s forces.
Before she’d left Dunla’s, Lyleth had hired a messenger to ride north. Once there, he was to plead with Marchlew to hold any attack until Lyleth arrived. “I told him I had information that would change his plans,” she told Nechtan.
“But you didn’t know if your old words would work, did you?”
“I didn’t know they’d work until you tried to drown me.”
Marchlew bore Lyleth little more love than he did Ava, and the hope that he would stay a revolt at her request was unlikely. He might have moved south already in an attempt to plead his case before the judges, for Marchlew’s son was also Nechtan’s nephew, and by Ildana law, the boy had a rightful claim to Nechtan’s throne. If it was true and the forces of the north made ready for battle, it mattered not whether this man Lyleth called back from death was Nechtan or some demon wearing his body. There would be war just the same. But Lyleth would see to it the northern tribes had a king to lead them.
She adjusted the quiver on her back and the bowstring cut into the wounds on her chest.
“You’ll come with us,” she said to the girl.
“Nay, not I. You’ll be needing your big horse on t’other side. You’ve far to travel, she won’t fit where you go.”
Elowen pointed to the edge of the firelight where Dunla’s mare cropped grass. The plow horse wasn’t alone; there was a pony beside her, smaller than the ones that work the tin mines in the summer country, its coat the color of wet slate with a mane and tail of cream.
As if hearing her thoughts Elowen said, “That’s Brixia. She comes and goes as she pleases. Perhaps she’ll go with ye, she knows the way.”
Elowen set to rummaging through Lyleth’s satchel.
“What are you after?”
“This.” Elowen pulled out the crystal flask, uncorked it, and poured the mead out on the ground. It was done before Lyleth could stop her.
“The mead—”
“You don’t need it no more. Your man’s here.” Elowen nodded at Nechtan as he snatched the sack from her.
“You trust her?” he whispered to Lyleth.
“Do we have a choice?”
“You told me I have no choice in any of this, remember?”
Elowen scampered to the edge of the well and waded in. Lyleth could hear water glugging into the flask.
“I’ll take the well,” Elowen said, carrying the water like a prize. “We might need it. And I’ll take the big horse, too, and meet ye at the fork of the River Rampant.”
“You’ll bring our horse and our goods?” Nechtan laughed. “You’re a child, how can you know the road to the Rampant?”
“I know lots o’ things, dead man.”
Lyleth felt hot and chilled at once. The bleeding hadn’t slowed. “We have no time to argue.”
Nechtan caught her arm, whispering, “What if she sends us into an old mine shaft where her thieving brothers wait?”
“Then it’s good we’ve nothing left to take, now, isn’t it?” She gave his shoulder a light punch. “C’mon. We’ve no time.”
His grip loosened, and she felt his anger soften to confusion. He gave her a brief flash of a smile. She had forgotten how much she missed his smile, forgotten he once gave it so freely. The hurt they had inflicted on each other was far away from this man’s memory. If it wasn’t Nechtan’s soul inside that flesh, it was a fine forgery. But it would be a girl’s mistake to trust in a smile.
Elowen put two fingers to her lips and whistled for the little horse she called Brixia, and the plow horse came too.
“If you’re wrong,” Nechtan said to Lyleth with a waggish look, “it’d be a terrible waste of my good hunting bird.”
He set to work fixing their bags to the saddle.
“I hope you have strength enough to call fire, druí,” Elowen said, kneeling beside Lyleth. “The words weakened you. Drink.” She uncorked the flask of well water and held it out.
Lyleth caught the girl’s hand and held on. Elowen didn’t try to pull away, but gripped Lyleth’s hand in return.
“Ye think I’m thievin’ ye,” Elowen said. “Have a look all ‘round at me insides, druí.”
With the first wave of emotion that coursed from the girl’s hand to her own, Lyleth understood. Elowen was the get of a May Eve’s revels, just like herself, a greenwood babe, and the girl could see with touch, just as well. And now, they both peered into the empty box of each other’s heart.
“You’re not certain,” Elowen said.
“Of what?”
“That your dead man is king.”
Lyleth pulled her hand away.
“You touched him, surely, felt
his heart beat,” Elowen said. “Why would you doubt this man ye breathed back to life, druí? Perhaps he just doesn’t remember what he done.”
Lyleth looked at Nechtan, just out of earshot. He was fixing a makeshift bundle to the plow horse’s saddle, but he was also watching them.
Elowen’s face filled her view. She whispered, “Ye should tell him.”
Lyleth put the flask to her mouth. The well water was sweet and moved through her veins like light. She handed it back to Elowen, saying, “Show us the way.”
Through the darkness, Elowen led them beside a stream that spilled from the up-swell of the pool. Reflecting the feeble light cast by their makeshift torches, the stream meandered through a meadow thick with moss, where late autumn ferns and gooseberries grew, until it slipped between two massive rocks that leaned together like drunken giants.
“You must crawl through to the other side,” Elowen said. “The way opens farther on.”
Lyleth heard the stream cascade into the darkness beyond the opening.
“Stay to the left as far as ye can,” Elowen said, “then cross over. Brixia knows.” She hung the crystal flask of well water on the plow horse’s saddle. “Ye won’t need this for now.”
Nechtan lifted Elowen into the saddle and she looked like a doll astride the big horse.
“What will you do,” he asked her, “if you meet the she-king’s men on the road with that harp of mine?”
“I’m just a robber, as ye said.”
“And a fine one, at that.” He gave the horse a gentle slap to the rump and Elowen was gone, with nothing but the rising moon to guide her.
Nechtan waded into the stream, then disappeared between the rocks. Lyleth heard him splashing in a cavern below.
“It’s not deep,” he called. “Come.”
She handed down the bag of food, her bow and quiver, and slid through. He caught her ankles, then her waist and eased her into the frigid water.
Elowen’s pony, Brixia, was indeed coming with them. The size of a wolfhound, she got on her knees and kicked through the opening until she splashed through the shallows. The pony gave a wet shake, and hooves and feet churned up mud that smelled of roots and worms and silt deposited for millennia.