Three Wells of the Sea Series Box Set: Three Wells of the Sea and The Salamander's Smile

by Terry Madden

  “They’ve not returned,” Maddoc said.

  “Then we assume the beachhead is gone. The Bear should be at our door by midday tomorrow.”

  Nechtan looked to Marchlew for a response. A calm, compliant shrug was all he offered. He stroked his dog’s head, saying, “My son will ride with you, Nechtan. For I know well you’ll keep your nephew safe. Heir that he is.”

  Marchlew’s beetling eyes said far more than his words.

  With a glance at Kyndra, Nechtan said, “His mother has requested he be among the swords protecting the fortress.”

  “A king must show his worth in the field or he is no king. You should know that better than anyone, Nechtan,” Marchlew said. “You’ll see to it that Talan lives out the day, for you’ll put Talan’s life above your own. And then I’ll know you’re the man you claim to be.”

  “We leave at moonrise,” Nechtan said, “and hope the red crow doesn’t fly by night.”

  Nechtan found Dylan alone in his chamber. Lyl had taken the harp and gone to Kyndra’s garden, he said. Nechtan followed. A cold wind kicked at the fallen leaves and stripped the last flower petals to sail like snowflakes. A distant harp tune led Nechtan to a path that wound through a maze of ancient garden walls where thickets of holly branches, heavy with dark red berries, had breached the purity of Kyndra’s moon garden.

  He found Lyl with his harp in her lap, the hood of her cloak pulled up against the evening breeze. Her back was pressed to an old starwood tree, bare and gnarled, its white blooms long blown away.

  “I told Marchlew you lack the mark.” She said it without looking at him. She strummed the harp a full trill.

  “What did you trade, Lyl?”

  She finally looked up at him and set her palm against the harp strings to still them. “Something you never wanted in the first place.”

  “No riddles, tell me.”

  “Your throne.”

  At first, he was stunned, but gave in to a wave of confused laughter. “You’ll put Talan on the throne? But Lyl, you brought me back to save it.”

  She gave him a sidelong look. “Did I?”

  He sat down on the leaf-covered turf beside her and hugged his knees, because if he didn’t, he might shake her.

  “Let me get this right. If I survive the day, I’ll step aside and Talan will be crowned in my place.”

  “Yes.”

  The weight of a kingdom rolled from his shoulders like rainwater. “What kind of king will such a boy make, eh?”

  “You were no older.”

  “No, but I was more… humble.”

  She laughed at that. “Humble? Maybe in the Otherworld.”

  “If that’s all it took to win that fat bastard,” he said, “I should have offered him the throne when I first arrived.”

  But Lyl wasn’t laughing anymore. Her hands closed tightly on his.

  “The green gods are capricious as children for they never grow old, never die,” she said softly. “They play us like game pieces, grow weary of us, then tip the board and spill our blood.

  “They wanted me to call you back, Nechtan. And just as surely, they gave up a guardian to Ava’s spear. They made her she-king. They set all this in motion. They want tomorrow to come. Why?”

  “Perhaps they want the Ildana to perish, tribe against tribe, brother against brother.”

  “They’re jealous of us.” She said it with surety, as if it was a revelation she’d just come upon. “We live, we die, we change. We take our heart’s lessons from one life to the next, from one world to the next. But the green gods… they will be children forever, changeless as star and stone, and we seek only to appease them, to avert their eyes from our daily struggles so they won’t toy with us.”

  “Perhaps it’s not the doing of the green gods,” he said, “but the Old Blood.”

  A light flashed in Lyl’s eyes. “From beyond the roots of earth? The Old Blood have ways unknown to us, aye. But to sacrifice a guardian?”

  Nechtan knew the stories. When the third well swallowed the Old Blood, it swallowed their magic as well.

  “Ava slew a guardian,” he said. “But you raised a man from the dead. No servant of the green gods has ever done such a thing.”

  “The Old Blood… the green gods,” Lyl mused. She touched the harp strings. “Or the Crooked One.”

  “He’s nothing but a tale told around winter fires.”

  Nechtan absently touched the bracer that covered his wrist. The look in her eyes betrayed a fear he understood completely, perhaps better than she did.

  “Whoever, whatever used us, Nechtan, it was for some purpose.”

  He let his fingers trace her chin and cheek, so red with the cold.

  “You don’t always have to understand,” he said. “I would gladly have them use me again, to have this chance.”

  She wiped tears away. “The green gods will ask a price,” she said. “Know that I never meant for you to pay.”

  “I pay gladly. But Lyl, I need to know one thing.” He had rehearsed the question in his mind, but the words always dribbled away into selfish coddling. He finally said, “Why did you bring me back? If not for the throne, why?”

  She set the harp aside and took his arm in her lap. She unlaced his bracer and ran two fingers over the sensitive skin of his wrist. “If you’re not the king,” she said at last, “then I’m not your solás and we’re not bound now, you and I. Death will unmake us again soon enough, Nechtan.”

  Her fingers brushed the tender skin inside his elbow, slowly, then down to his open palm. His breath stopped. The breeze touched the strings of the harp where it leaned against the tree, playing the faintest of tunes that spread through his skin like Lyl’s touch, playing at the deep strings of his soul.

  “Let him guard truth and it will guard him.” Lyleth spoke the charge of the king, words he’d not heard since his crowning.

  “Let him strengthen truth, and it will strengthen him.”

  As she spoke, her hands moved up his shoulders to the soft depression at the base of his throat and lingered there. She traced his brow, his cheekbones, his lips, like a blind woman reading his features with her fingers.

  He was a frozen pool in winter, melting under her touch.

  “Let him exalt truth,” she declared, “and his land shall not wither.”

  She kissed each of his palms in turn, then pressed them to her cool cheeks.

  “I brought you back to hear the truth from me, my lord. But I was too afraid to speak it.” She was so close. “Listen, now.”

  Her eyes streamed into his and touched him where soul and bone meet. She brushed his lips with hers, and then tasted his mouth fully.

  His body answered for him.

  She pushed him down to the dying moss and he pulled her with him, knowing that having her could never be enough.

  Her lips parted his and she whispered into him.

  The dark veil of her hair hid them while he freed himself of his laces. She slid her leg astride him, and beneath the folds of her skirts, he found her hips and pulled her to him and in three thrusts, he’d broken the chains of their duty.

  “Not to be unmade,” he whispered to her.

  The day had died, and night stole over the eastern fingers of the Pendynas before they’d spent themselves completely.

  Nechtan held her, her head tucked under his chin, his breath playing at her hair. He felt the hot wet of her tears on his neck as she whispered, “The moon rises.”

  Clouds raced before the eye of night, and like petals from a starwood tree, snow began to fall.

  Chapter 31

  In single file, Ava and two thousand warriors of the southern tribes passed between rocky crags fondly called the Ballocks. Marking the pass into the highland vales of Cedewain, the route required a thorough scouting before Fiach agreed to move forward. No doubt he thought Nechtan would leap upon him from the rocks, for at this point, confusion and distrust reigned.

  Certainly, Lyleth’s escape smelled of treachery, thou
gh Fiach claimed she’d cut the ropes that bound her with a knife she found in Nechtan’s boot. The only evidence that protected Fiach from suspicion were the prints of bare feet beside the dead guard. Small feet.

  Fiach had sent men after her. The fact that they had not returned was more than suspicious. Lyleth could not have killed a dozen men, but Fiach could have ordered them to spare her, aid her even, and see her all the way to Marchlew… and Nechtan.

  The rumor had spread, with some coaxing from Ava, that Lyleth was the one who had slit Irjan’s throat, mistaking her for Ava in the darkness of the tent. But Fiach knew the truth. He was no fool. And Ava suspected he understood just as well her reason for killing the old woman.

  The road widened into a valley specked with sheep. Fiach, as if feeling her distrust, rode up beside her.

  Testing her theory, she said, “If they’re coming, they’re here already.”

  “I agreed to fight the northern tribes, not the Bear.” He was as clever as she predicted.

  “Will you just bend over and present your ass to him?” She examined Fiach, looking down the length of her nose.

  “My swords are already shaken,” Fiach said. “They’re spinning tales—that Nechtan will sow dragon’s teeth and call forth a host of the dead to fight beside him, that he’ll free the Old Blood from the greenwood and waters—”

  “Then your men will piss themselves when my father takes their rear.”

  “How many ships would he bring?” Fiach asked.

  “The autumn seas are treacherous, even for their longships. How many would he risk to take the land he’s always lusted after? What do you think?”

  “Then we take Caer Cedewain before the Bear does,” Fiach said, “and hold it against him.”

  “And if Nechtan and Marchlew wait for a siege?”

  “Then we draw them onto the field,” Fiach said.

  Cedewain was comprised of a maze of river valleys that trickled down from the great spine of the Pendynas range. Scattered pastureland divided vast forests, all prime for ambush. Caer Cedewain, Fiach said, sat at the eastern end of a long narrow glen bordered to the north by a river and to the south by a nearly impenetrable greenwood. Once they passed the Ballocks, scouts took to the woods, flanking the main body of troops.

  The Bear would be beaching his longships to the east now. If Lyleth had made it to Cedewain, then Nechtan would know the Bear was coming, and he wouldn’t want a siege any more than Fiach.

  Evening made stilt-like shadows of their horses’ legs. Ava leaned toward Fiach, saying, “I know a way to assure you Nechtan will leave his walls and meet us on the field.”

  Fiach raised a pretty eyebrow.

  “Burn every shepherd’s hut,” she said, “every hunter’s hovel, every millhouse and pigsty. Slay their flocks and put their children to the sword. Leave nothing standing between here and Caer Cedewain. Nechtan will come for you.”

  Fiach’s face paled. “You would kill your own?”

  “They are not my own, nor yours. Do you serve me, Fiach?”

  Here was the test, and the struggle was written on his face. She watched his throat work as he swallowed and gazed at the horizon; he dragged the back of his hand over his mouth. Were his fingers quaking? She liked to think so.

  “As you command,” he said at last. He wouldn’t meet her eyes, but dug his heels in and burst away from her at a trot.

  It was nightfall when riders approached the camp bearing fir branches, a sign of truce.

  “Ice-born,” Jeven said.

  Ava felt the blood drain from her face.

  They were indeed ice-born, all thegns of some renown by their arm rings. Jeven talked quickly, informing her that a thegn named Rua wished to discuss terms. Ava’s men had yet to lift a sword in battle and the ice-born wanted her to surrender.

  She knew Rua too well. Named her father’s “Thegn of the Wastes,” Rua had eaten the Bear’s scraps for a decade. As was the custom, Ava was betrothed to the beast before she was old enough to marry, for Rua had proven his brutality in countless summer raids of the Five Quarters. His prize was to be Ava… until Nechtan had arrived in Rotomagos.

  Ava had often wondered if that slight had turned Rua against the Bear. And now, he brought demands, most certainly, but were they his? Or the Bear’s?

  Rua was accompanied by thirty men. Ava could slay them all easily. But Jeven warned her these might be a fraction of the men who had landed on the beaches or pushed upriver, deep into the woodlands of the Five Quarters. Killing them would start this battle far too soon.

  Ava dressed in a blue damask gown trimmed in fox. Her serving girl, a dirty thing found among the camp whores, held a mirror. Ava ran her hands over the form beneath the bodice and skirt, but the distorted image of a royal cunt mocked her. What was she trying to do, seduce the man? She couldn’t seduce them all. She must command them. She was done with this game. Rua would treat with a she-king. And he would either submit to her, or make his way back to his longships with Ava slashing at his back.

  “Unlace me,” she ordered the serving girl.

  “My lady?”

  “I said, unlace me.”

  The girl did as bidden. Ava slipped the gown from her shoulders and let it fall to the ground. Candlelight washed over her sallow skin, revealing her protruding hipbones, the soft blonde forest between her legs, her withered breasts, and pink nipples hard with the cold. Her flights with the red crow had ravaged her, and she felt she looked upon another woman’s body. She’d freed herself of its demands and no longer had need of it, just as her body no longer needed her soul.

  Naked, she stepped out from behind her bed curtain into the outer room of her tent. Fiach, Jeven and Gwylym froze at the sight of her.

  The silence was thrilling.

  “I am your king, and you shall arm me,” she said to Jeven. She glanced at Gwylym and saw red flush his cheeks. He moved toward her with a cloak in his hands.

  “No, Gwylym. It’s the duty of my solás to arm his king.”

  She challenged Jeven with a look and motioned to her rank armor that hung from the stand at the entrance to the tent.

  Jeven didn’t hesitate. “As you say, my lady.”

  The others busied themselves, stealing glances, while Jeven took Ava’s smallclothes from her extended arm. He knelt, like a dutiful servant, holding out her britches. With one hand on his shoulder, Ava stepped into them. He made no move to avert his eyes, a thing she admired in this greenman.

  He pulled them up around her hips and tied the drawstring. The trousers followed, then the gambeson and mail. Finally, he buckled her sword belt.

  Draping the heavy dreadnought cloak around her, he whispered, “Your crown.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He took it from the box and settled the circlet on her head, then offered his palms. She should have placed her trust in Jeven rather her father’s slave, she thought. For Jeven’s loyalty was bought by the green gods. He owed Ava his soul.

  “Bring him in,” she told Jeven.

  Before she saw him, she heard Rua and his man approach, for a skald was singing a runo immortalizing Rua’s feats of brutality. In fact, as he drew nearer, she understood the song, describing the beheading of Nechtan’s father in the Silver Marches. Other than Ava, Jeven was the only one of her counselors who understood high Skvalan, or Rua would have been dead before he reached the tent.

  Jeven’s eyes met hers, saying clearly, Beware.

  She stood tall as the flap opened and a granite block of a man darkened the doorway.

  Rua’s scaled hauberk of walrus ivory chattered when he moved. Hair the color of iron rust was knotted at the back of his head, exposing a pink scar that ran above his left ear, across his eye, to his mouth. His left eye was milky and likely blind from the blade that sliced it. His beard failed to grow around the twisted flesh, and she couldn’t help wondering what Ildana warrior had left that scar. It was enough to make her smile.

  “You’ve travelled far from the sea,�
� she said. Her native tongue felt thick as cold fat on her lips.

  Rua’s eyes openly worked up and down her armored form as he paced a circle around her, measuring her like a heifer at a fair.

  “Behold, the she-king, spawn of the Bear,” he finally said. At last, he offered his palms, dropping his chin to his chest but bending no knee.

  She wanted no ears but hers to hear what this man had to say.

  “Leave us,” she told the others.

  When the golden-haired skald balked, she said in Skvalan, “Go. I’ll care for your lord.”

  Jeven hesitated, honest concern in his eyes. Did he think the man would murder her with a thousand Ildana outside the tent?

  “Go,” she said to him, and he and the ice-born lad finally followed Gwylym out. “I assume there are more than your thirty warriors in the forests of Cedewain,” she said.

  “Is that a question?” He locked his hands behind his back and took up pacing again.

  “Not one I think you’ll answer. Tell me… what news do you bring from my loving father? Does he gain any ground against the wasting sickness that plagues him?”

  Rua stopped pacing, poured himself a cup of ale from a waiting pitcher, and took a deep swallow. “The Bear will not rest in death until this land is his.”

  “This land is mine.”

  He bellowed a laugh, making the little bells in his moustache tinkle. “And you are his, woman. The spawn of his loins.”

  “I belong to no man, thegn.”

  “Do you not, warrior queen? I’ve heard that your husband wanders the moors like a wraith. You failed to kill him properly and he crawled from his barrow, alive.”

  She forced a laugh. “What would you know of my husband’s death?”

  “I know the gods didn’t choose his hour.”

  No, the Bear did. Through Irjan.

  “My father waits for me to put down Marchlew’s rebellion,” she said, “so he can claim this land for himself. Or do you come offering his assistance?”

  “Not assistance, exactly.”

  “Tell me, then. Exactly. What brings you to creep through the woods of Elfael? Speak plainly, man.”