by Terry Madden
Since Nechtan remembered nothing but pain, he borrowed freely from the old stories in the Cycles of the Sea.
“’Twas just like Cynvarra tells,” Nechtan went on. “Colors your eye’s never seen, music that touches you like a woman’s lips, ships that plow the seas of the sky.”
“And flames that sing?”
“Oh, aye.”
He didn’t tell Dylan about the boy so like him, or the cold white light, or the snakes. Better for him to think the Fair Lands were truly fair.
“I’ve heard that women in the Fair Lands are more beautiful than the Asrai,” Dylan said. “Are they?”
“I’ve never seen one of the Asrai, and I doubt you have either.”
“But they have women, surely?”
“’Twouldn’t be the Fair Lands without women, now would it? They’re like… like moonlight on the sea, exquisite in their grace and wisdom, and willing to give their love if you possess an honorable soul. But they’re just as deadly as those who dwell on this side.” Nechtan’s lies were worthy of a bard. “Learn to handle the women here first, lad.”
The trail broadened, so Dylan rode up beside him. “Can I ask you something, my lord?”
“You’ve been asking all day.”
“There are rumors. About you and your solás.”
“This sounds like a question I won’t answer.”
“It’s just that some say you brought a curse upon the Quarters.”
Nechtan rode on, pushing through a stand of young fir trees. “Oh, I brought a curse, truly. I cursed the Quarters when I married Ava.”
“Then you never broke your bond with your solás?”
Nechtan took hold of the rein on Dylan’s horse and brought them both to a halt. He said, “My solás has given her life to serve me. To serve this land. You’ll not disrespect her.”
There were no more questions that afternoon.
Nechtan plucked and gutted the goose while the boy built up the fire.
“Mounted men don’t sit still and wait for you to shoot them like this goose,” he was telling Dylan. “And unless you’ve got bodkin points on those arrows, you’ll have only a few hits that’ll bring them down.” He indicated the locations with the point of his knife. “Armpit, neck, face.”
“I’ll remember.”
“I owe you protection,” Nechtan said. “And I fear the day will come soon when I can’t provide it. This isn’t your fight, lad.”
“It was my choice to serve you, my lord, and I don’t regret it.”
Nechtan knew there was nothing he could say that would change Dylan’s mind. He had been the same way once.
Smiling, he tossed a fistful of goose feathers at Dylan and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “You’ll practice with that bow instead of sleeping from now on.”
“As you say, my lord.” Dylan beamed.
The boy on the other side had followed Nechtan too, into a well beside the sea. That event had replayed in his mind a hundred times, for it was the only one that made any sense. On a wide sea strand, he and the boy found a well. Nechtan remembered thinking he’d found the third well, the portal that swallowed the Old Blood so long ago, locking them away in exile in the land of the dead.
When he first awoke here in the real world, he thought he had succeeded and passed through that lost portal. But if that were so, Nechtan should be as powerful as the Old Blood; he’d be able to fly on Wren’s wings and call down a storm from the sky. He’d done a bit of testing and found he bled like everyone else, and flying… he smiled at the thought. No, this body Lyl had given him most certainly could die. Again.
But the boy on the other side was still trying to follow; Nechtan could feel him, even see him in Dylan’s eyes. What was the boy from the other side trying to tell him?
The coals were still too hot, but Nechtan skewered and fixed the goose above them and took to sharpening his weapons. The fire singed the meat, but hunger would make it taste fine.
“Perhaps they got away.” Dylan stared into the fire and wiped at the grease on his mouth. “I told Elowen of the bridge to the west.”
“Aye, perhaps.”
“I’m glad Elowen’s with her,” Dylan said. “‘Tis good, that. Her sling’s not to be trifled with. I’ve watched her with it.” He gave an impressed whistle.
“Lyleth had no intention of getting away, lad,” Nechtan finally said, and cut another piece of meat.
Dylan stopped chewing.
“Those were Fiach’s men behind us,” Nechtan said. “She’ll make them believe they caught her and then she’ll make them take her to Fiach.”
“But why? You need her with you.”
“Lyleth might be good with a bow, but words are her best weapon. I discovered that the hard way.” He had to smile just thinking of it.
“Would I be pryin’ if I asked how, my lord?”
Dylan’s face said he’d given the boy a good fright earlier. Nechtan almost felt sorry for it.
“I spent my summers on the Isle of Glass from the time I was ten until I was old enough to go to battle. I learned the history of the Ildana, music, poetry, philosophy, ciphering and weapons. Enough to call myself a literate lordling. But Dechtire’s students, those training for a life as druada, they only saw us in the summers, and bore us dullards very little love.
“Lyleth, being Dechtire’s darling, was assigned the task of teaching me the poem The Maid in the Crystal Coracle.”
“Ah, ‘tis one of my dearest,” Dylan said.
“Well, then you would have fared better than me. Lyl inserted a verse of her own. I suppose it was a test of sorts, to see how well-lettered I was. When I failed to catch the added verse…” He let out a long sigh. “Well, let’s just say the part where the maid returns home in her crystal coracle was far different in Lyl’s version. She didn’t return as a maid at all. And I, not knowing the true version from Lyl’s version, recited it before Dechtire herself.”
Dylan’s mouth hung open. “Then what happened?”
“I milked the goats for the rest of that summer and made it my sole purpose in life to exact my revenge.”
“Did you?” Dylan sucked the marrow from a bone.
“Oh, I tried. Thought I had the perfect trap set. Lyl was working in the kitchen, preparing a meal for a guest, the high druí from Arvon, a rather pompous man. She was preparing a specialty of hers, plover eggs in pastry. I’d helped her gather the eggs that day, so I pretended to be interested in how she prepared this delicacy.
“I noticed she sprinkled the pastry with melted butter, then cracked an egg in the middle and bundled them up like little packages before she set them on the hearthstone to bake. So, while she wasn’t looking, I replaced the cup of melted butter with melted beeswax. It was difficult, because I had to keep it so hot.”
“Did she find you out?”
“Lyl served Dechtire and the visitor her little pastries. And when the druí took a bite, his teeth stuck in the wax.”
Dylan’s laughter sounded like music.
“What did Lyl do, you might ask?” Nechtan said. “She convinced the druí that beeswax was a proven cure for baldness, him being in most dire need of it. It was a new cure taken in the southron lands, says she, and she only sought to aid him, as was her duty as a greenling.”
“Did he believe it?”
“And, he ate three more. Then after supper, she tried to give me a black eye. At least I’m better at some things.”
“Then how did you seek such a scamp as your solás? If I’m not too forward in askin’, my lord.” Dylan held up his hands in mock self-defense.
The why’s of their friendship never seemed to matter when they were young.
“I spent my winters aching for the spring,” Nechtan said, feeling tightness in his throat. “I wanted to get back to the island. To Lyl. The girl found the best climbing trees, she caught bigger fish than me, told better stories than I’d ever heard, shot a bow better than me…” His voice trailed off, remembering the secrets t
hat pass between friends, and the laughter.
“And she could speak to the green gods?” Dylan added.
“Oh, she spoke, aye, the question was always did they hear? Lyl never believed the gods bothered themselves with the trifles of men. She thought they enjoyed our suffering. She said the only reason men worshipped the green gods in their groves was to be certain they would look the other way, not meddle in their personal affairs. She was a bit of a rebel in the ranks of the greenmen.”
“Then how did such a hooligan become your solás?”
He could never envision anyone else at his side but this wild, willful girl.
“One autumn,” he said, “I sailed south from the Isle of Glass, leaving behind a girl, breastless, straight of hip and scrawny as me—my best friend, and when I returned at Beltaine, she was gone. Shapeshifted into a woman, a creature commanding great fear.”
Dylan laughed and tossed his bones away. “And what happened then?”
“I felt I’d lost my best friend.” He struggled with the feeling even now. “It was different.”
“She no longer spent time with ye?”
“It was probably the other way round. She asked me to go swim in the sea, like we always did, but I found excuses not to go.”
“But why?”
This was something he couldn’t explain, certainly not to Dylan. What if he had made Lyl understand how he felt about her then? What could have come of it? Her father was a nameless man who took the fancy of her mother one Beltaine Eve, planted Lyl in her belly, and was gone. Lyl was a greenwood babe, servant of the land, not a fit partner for Nechtan by all the customs of his people. It was the first time he felt the chains of his birth. And he had accepted them like a whipped dog.
He swallowed hard and looked into Dylan’s expectant eyes. “I wasn’t meant to be king.”
“But ye were,” Dylan said with all the earnestness of youth. “And ye are again. For when Lyl gets to Fiach, she’ll convince him that you live.”
“Whatever Fiach does, he’ll do for Lyl, not for me. She’ll try to turn him,” Nechtan said. “Because if she doesn’t, Marchlew and the men of the north will be outmatched.”
“Fiach loves her.” By the look on Dylan’s face, he knew he shouldn’t have said it. Yet, Nechtan needed to hear it.
“That he does. But I’ve given the man more reasons to hate me than most. It doesn’t change what she’s asked of me, what she’s asked of you. Does it now?”
He shook his head. “Nay, my lord.”
“Play us a tune.” Nechtan tossed the lad’s satchel to him.
“Me smallpipes are too loud, I think. And Elowen’s got the harp.”
Dylan fumbled in the bag and pulled out a small blackthorn whistle, like the ones children learn on. The sound was simple, yet so full of the subtle forces that had shaped the branch it came from. Life is like that, a breath blows through our bones and makes us live again, a touch gives us voice.
Lyl used to tell him that starlight was like music: neither is real unless it touches one with ears to hear and eyes to see. He never understood it until now. In Dylan’s music, he heard echoes of his existence, this one and many others, like ripples on a pond that strike a wall and roll back to meet the others still coming.
Nechtan had surrendered to this grand plan of Lyl’s. This task she’d set for him would be over in a few days and once again, he’d be rocked in the cradle of death, forgetting Lyl in the deep sleep of another life. He longed for that forgetting. For he had nothing left in his soul worth giving her.
In Nechtan’s dream he was weightless. Sunlight drove green spears of light through the water around him. He was swimming with Lyl in the Broken Sea. They were supposed to be working at their recitations for Dechtire, but the sun was so warm, they’d left their clothes on the black sand beach and thrown themselves into the waves. In the dream, she was swimming for the surface.
He kept swimming after her but got no closer. He could see it, that boundary of sky and water. His lungs felt close to bursting.
Lyleth turned and looked back at him, a smile on her face. She took his hand and led him to the surface where he gulped in air. Between sea and sky, she kissed him and he knew he was no longer a boy. He knew that he was heavy as any stone, and she, weightless as starlight.
Chapter 23
Connor didn’t want to join the other students on their hospital visit; he wanted to remember Dish as he was the last time he saw him, on the other side. Connor had replayed that encounter in his mind over and over. The absoluteness of it had dulled, like a dream that’s so vivid right after you wake but becomes muted over time. The look in Dish’s eyes burned through it all, the certainty they had recognized each other’s souls.
“Dish knows you’re there even if he’s not awake,” Brother Mike said, trying to convince Connor to come to the hospital. “His soul will sense you.”
On the off chance that Mike was right, Connor climbed into the overcrowded school van. Besides, Bronwyn and Aunt Merryn might be at the hospital, and if Connor could show Bronwyn the photo of the water horse that matched Dish’s tattoo, she would have to believe him, maybe even allow him to talk to Merryn for a few minutes.
Connor had called Bronwyn several times after he found the book, but she never replied to his messages. That could only mean she was giving him the crazy guy brush-off, or maybe it was the scene he’d made with the insurance investigator. Either way, Brother Mike said she hadn’t gone back to England yet. She was waiting for Dish to “take a turn.”
Connor sat in the back seat of a van packed with kids and tried not to let too many parts of his body touch Iris. She hadn’t been very successful at holding her skirt (way too short for dress code) around her ass when she climbed into the backseat, and Connor had already seen enough of her to last a lifetime.
Malibu beach rolled by, a few surfers waited for the tide change and seagulls picked through trash cans. The sky spat rain and drops clung to the van window, making snail tracks that jiggled to bumps in the road. One fat drop merged with another and through the lens of the drop, Connor saw the beach roll by in miniature detail, but inverted.
Sky became sea and sea became sky.
Through the drop, he saw a man working a kite string, backing up to maintain tension and fighting it when a gust came. At his side a little boy reached up, clearly begging for the reins of the dragon fluttering overhead. They must have been desperate to fly a kite in the rain, but it was Saturday, and Connor imagined the man was the boy’s dad. He must have promised the boy they would fly it.
The wind was strong enough to whip the dragon kite into sputtering spirals, its tail lashing.
The van stopped at a light.
Dad handed the kite string to the boy and it took off, dragging the boy down the beach. He fought to hang on, until he finally let go and slammed face down in the sand.
The kite raced away, spun wildly, and finally ditched in the waves, far from shore.
The light turned green.
Connor looked at the boy again through the raindrop. Even upside down, he was crying.
Then it struck him. On the other side, Connor’s view of the world was like a kite’s that sailed, not through air, but through water, far beyond his body, seeing with his soul’s eyes, hearing with his soul’s ears. Inside out. Like his soul was his skin.
“Dish should have died.”
He must have said it out loud, because Iris pulled her ear buds free, saying, “What?”
He stared at her for an eternity. The pupils of her blue eyes (streaked with gold and green and dove grey) twitched in response to the changing light of this world, and he could see his own reflection in the pools of her corneas. Inverted. “Nothing.”
Scowling, Iris reinserted the ear buds and closed her eyes. Dish should have died that day. But human nature is programmed to fear death, to outrun the hungry lion, to cling to our body like a favorite shirt, to forget that other world and the fact that our life’s span is just one day i
n an endless journey.
Dish balanced with one foot in this world and one in the other, his soul held fast by a string, by ventilators and tubes. Connor understood just as clearly, that if the string was cut, Dish’s soul would pitch into the sea and be carried away by currents he couldn’t even dream of.
The nurse in I.C.U. only let two visitors in at a time, and Connor found Iris at his side going through the double doors. She had a teddy bear clutched to her chest.
Nurse Holly smiled at him. “Glad you’re back. How’s the collar bone?” she asked.
“Good.”
“But how are you?” Her look said she thought he ought to be chewing his fingers off or something.
“Good.”
Iris was already in the alcove talking to Dish, something about finding his true destiny. She sat on the edge of his bed and wedged the teddy bear under his arm, then planted both palms on his cheeks as if she could will him to open his eyes.
The tattoo was still there, looking more defined now that Dish’s skin hadn’t seen the sun in weeks.
The ventilator tube went directly into his throat through a hole now, but the steady rush of air and the rise and fall of his chest was the same—unnatural in a creepy way.
Iris finally looked up at Connor, her makeup running in long black smears down her cheeks. “What if he doesn’t want to wake up? What if he wants to stay with that chick forever?”
“He doesn’t want anything, Iris. He doesn’t even know he’s here.”
Gently, she took the teddy bear from under Dish’s arm and held it like a little girl as she wandered to the shelf full of cards. She positioned the bear in a jaunty pose beside some wilted flowers, but her hand came down with the little whiskey bottle Merryn had left. She had the top off before Connor could stop her. She sniffed it.
“There’s water in here.”
He tried to grab it, but she was faster than he expected. “What do you know about this water, Connor?”
“I know it’s not yours. Put it back.”
“It’s probably holy water from church.” She watched Connor for a response.