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

by Terry Madden

  “I arrived very early and let myself in,” he said. “And found her there.”

  Dish shot him a contentious glance.

  “And you heard nothing, Mr. Cavendish?”

  “I was asleep. Awakened by Connor’s reaction,” Dish said, “his cries for help.”

  “Why was a paring knife left on her table a ’tall?” Trewin asked. He was short and round, and his uniform shirt was wrinkled. All good signs, Connor thought. He would probably write it off to suicide quickly.

  Connor started, “She—”

  “Liked fresh peaches,” Dish said. His voice trembled. “I cut one up for her last night, and left the knife there without a thought.”

  That was a better explanation than Connor’s.

  Trewin picked up the knife with latex gloved hands and deposited it into a plastic bag. Another bag held the letter which Merryn had written before she left the hospital. Connor had never read it, but knew that everything they had discussed would be explained there—her yearning for freedom from the disease of old age, the pain, the loss of those who’d gone before. She would leave no one suspect but herself.

  “’Tis a pity,” Trewin said. “Such a lovely lady. I remember she was in the quilting club with me mum some years past. But the end can drag on so painfully, eh?”

  The coroner arrived, and at Trewin’s signal, they moved Merryn’s body to a gurney and took her away.

  But Connor couldn’t shake what Dish had said. The Old Blood used blood sacrifice and shaped souls to their will. Wasn’t that exactly what Merryn had asked him to do? And he’d gone along with it without question. He had killed her and used her blood to send her soul across the Void.

  It was mid-morning by the time Trewin had finished his questions, leaving Dish and Connor on the porch of the cottage.

  Dish let his head fall into his hands. “Take me to the tree,” he said. “The one you said was Lyla’s.”

  “You know who Lyla is, right?” Connor asked. Stupid question. It was obvious.

  “How else could Lyl have resurrected me? She said she used ‘the words of waking stone,’ some spell of the Old Blood,” Dish said, bitterness in his voice. “When I came back here saying I’d seen Lyleth… that was proof to Merryn that her blood magic worked, that she’d succeeded in sending Lyleth, Lyla, across. She’s been ready to go herself ever since. She just needed someone to send her.”

  “Me,” Connor said, feeling like the butt of some cosmic joke. “Invitations to use her cottage. Lessons in Old Welsh, excursions to draw standing stones all over Britain.”

  Dish pointed toward the bend in the brook at the bottom of the pasture. “You’re going to have to carry me.”

  Chapter 7

  Lyleth followed at a safe distance behind Talan’s small company. If any of them looked back, they would see nothing, for she kept to the trees and beyond the bends in the road. On foot, Nesta kept pace with Lyleth’s horse. She had trained for endurance, it seemed. Not unusual for a druí. Lyleth had attempted to leave her behind more than once and thought she’d lost her in the steep climb out of the Long Vale. But when Talan and his men stopped to water their horses, Lyleth was forced to stop out of sight as well. It wasn’t long before Nesta came huffing along behind her. The woman was like a tick.

  Nesta was breathing so hard Talan’s men could probably hear her.

  “You are determined, aren’t you?” Lyleth whispered.

  “The High Brehon… ordered me… to stay with you.”

  “To keep me from what?”

  “He worries…” Nesta’s breathing began to slow, and she wiped at her nose. “He worries you’ll raise the chieftains.”

  She’d been following Lyleth ever since she’d left the Wistwood. Had Nesta seen her hand over the silver to the woodsman? Could she have missed it? Or could it be that Nesta had seen to it the woodsman would not take the message north? The thought caused a sick fear to well in her. If the judges were nothing more than Talan’s watch dogs…

  “And what if I do raise the chieftains?” Lyleth asked. “Do you not think they deserve to know it was their king who murdered their children?”

  “There are other things afoot, druí. Things more fearsome.”

  “Oh, aye. The king is something to fear, I can tell you that.”

  “I intend to stay with you.” The look in Nesta’s mismatched eyes said there would be next to nothing that would stop her. Lyleth respected that in a sister of the greenwood. She was just following her orders like a good servant.

  “Come.” She offered Nesta a hand and pulled the woman up behind her on the horse. Better to keep an enemy close, Nechtan used to say.

  The road dropped from the mountains into the orchards of IsAeron and forced them to keep a greater distance due to the lack of forest cover.

  Lyleth couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “What is it the judges find so fearsome?”

  “Some say you seek to raise another king from the dead,” Nesta said.

  Lyleth laughed. It was an interesting choice of accusations. She would not admit that she had considered trying to bring Nechtan back again, but knowing the price she was paying now, her child, she’d thought better of it. But another king?

  “What other king?” Lyleth demanded.

  “You carry a soothblade.” Nesta pronounced it like a damning judgment.

  Lyleth considered telling her the truth, that it had been Ava’s, that Dylan had found it beside her body in the bottom of the longship as they crossed the sea to Rotomagos. An artifact, a weapon of the Old Blood that Ava had found or bought from someone. Lyleth had never wondered much about it.

  “I found it,” she said.

  “What do you intend to do with it?”

  Do with it? Besides cut out Nesta’s tongue? “Skin rabbits for supper.” What was this woman fishing for?

  By end of day, they’d followed Talan’s troops through IsAeron, bought apples from a farmer, and now headed out over the vast plains of Emlyn. The grasslands offered no cover. Herds of horses and cattle grazed the endless green sea, meadow midges spiraled in dark clouds, and song thrushes snatched them on the wing. Villages rose up beside the road. As Lyleth passed through, townsfolk were shuffling back to their labors and talking about the passing of the king. Where was he going? To see Fiach, chieftain of Emlyn? Lyleth had not seen her old lover since he’d left her to die, bound to Nechtan’s rotting corpse. Certainly, they would both prefer to see the other dead. There was no chance she could walk into his fortress, Caer Emlyn, and make any demands of him. But what of Talan? Did he fear reprisal from the northern chieftains? Did he suspect they would see his hand in the death of their children on the Isle of Glass? Maybe he planned to raise Fiach’s army and prepare a defense.

  When dusk cooled the air, Lyleth stopped and dismounted in a small copse of willows, and Nesta slid to the ground beside her. She would let Talan and his company move out of sight. Their tracks would be easy enough to follow in the morning.

  She dragged the saddle and bridle from the horse and reluctantly tied a hobble between the mare’s front legs. With the herds that pastured freely here, her horse could easily decide to join them.

  “I suppose I’ll have to share my supper with you too,” she said to Nesta. “Or are you too frightened of me to take my food?”

  Lyleth reached into her rucksack and pulled out a loaf of traveler’s bread, pulled it apart, and tossed half to Nesta along with one of the bitter apples she’d bought.

  The Brehon took it and bit into it hungrily. Through a full mouth, she asked, “What is it you hope to accomplish by stealing your child from the king?”

  So, Nesta had come to that logical conclusion. Of course, Lyleth would like to take her child away from that monster. But she wouldn’t get far.

  “Tonight would be a good night for me to steal her away,” she said with a mocking tone. “I could creep into their camp, for I’m sure they’ve stopped for the night as we have, scoop up my child, and run. Simple. Go to slee
p, Brehon. You’ll need your rest. I might make you run again tomorrow.”

  **

  By the look of their tracks, Talan’s company had taken the road east into the grassland known as the Plain of Slaughter. Many believed it had been given such a name to commemorate the last battle between the Old Blood and the Ildana, the place where the Old Blood had laid down their weapons when they knew they were beaten. The ground upon which Lyleth and Nesta rode had known troubles long forgotten by men, but not by the land, nor by the grass that whispered under the touch of a summer breeze.

  Rocky moorland sank into marsh here, so Fiach, the chieftain of Emlyn, had built a raised causeway to traverse the wetlands. The timber road ran north, skirting the Red Bog until it joined a road that vanished into dense forest on the northern edge.

  “He’s not headed for Caer Emlyn.” Nesta voiced the obvious.

  She rode behind Lyleth once again, but now slipped off the horse to the causeway. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she gazed off to the east where the heat of midday shimmered above the marshy ground.

  “Where do you think he’s headed, Brehon?”

  “The Red Bog.” Nesta pointed across the expanse of reeds and low willow. Lyleth shaded her eyes and strained to see. In the distance, the long shadows of a stone circle rose on a swell of marshy land. The glint of steel flashed. Nesta was right.

  “What business can Talan have in such a place?”

  “I’ve made a mistake,” Nesta mused. There was fear, or maybe it was excitement, in her voice. “’Tisn’t you who’s going to raise him. We should go.” Nesta reached a hand up to Lyleth, seeking help to mount up.

  Lyleth took her hand and held it. Nesta’s intentions were expertly hidden from her. Not a glimmer of emotion rippled the water of her soul. Lyleth dropped her hand. It was time to lose this green sister. She set her heels to the horse and called over her shoulder, “Go then.”

  Nesta pursued her, saying, “It’s not a place for those who worship the green gods.”

  “Who says I worship the green gods?”

  “Nothing but old magic slumbers in this place. He can be about nothing good.”

  Nesta had said the judges feared Lyleth was seeking to bring another king back from the dead. Certainly not the king of this place.

  Every stone and stream is the embodiment of the god of place. A rare plant dug from its native soil will never grow elsewhere, for it suckles at the paps of the unseen, as varied in humor as wasteland is to wooded mountainside. And the gods of this place were once the gods of the Sunless, and the Crooked One, their king.

  It all became painfully clear. “It’s Talan who seeks to use the words of waking stone. To raise the king of the Old Blood,” Lyleth said to herself. Her heart beat faster. She urged her horse into a trot and realized the sound of its hooves on the planks would carry across the bog, so she halted, and dismounted.

  “Take the horse,” she told Nesta, “and go.” Lyleth dropped the reins, arranged her bag and bow on her shoulder, and jumped from the causeway into the soft marsh.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” Nesta called from above. “You mustn’t cross the water.”

  “Try to stop me.”

  Lyleth turned and headed into a sea of reeds. As she waded deeper, she held her bow over her head in an attempt to keep the string dry, a necessity if she was to use it. Willow thickets provided cover as she meandered across a succession of peat-black hummocks and stagnant pools until she was forced to swim across open water, still holding the bow overhead. Once across, the mud and peat sucked at her legs. She felt something cold brush her arm. The submerged rack of a long-dead deer ripped through her trousers. Dragonflies rode on her hair and bowstring and took in the fading daylight on the stems of black bog rush and pipewort. A flock of warblers broke the silence with their song and moved off to the south. She resorted to pulling herself forward, grabbing hold of snags and branches of half-submerged willows, until she entered a bed of cattails and marsh lilies.

  Peering through them, she saw Talan and his company on the north shore of the island. There was Angharad, stroking the neck of her pony to calm it. Dylan and Elowen had left their horses behind, and they flanked Angharad protectively. The soldiers’ horses whinnied and jigged nervously until the men dismounted to let them flee. The animals charged back into the water and began paddling out of the bog.

  Lyleth made her way onto the mossy shore of the island, crawling from the cattails into the shadow of one of the standing stones, the Knights of the Stoney Ring, as they were called.

  There was Talan. He reached up to Angharad as if he were her father and took her from the pony. He carried her. She must be resisting, Lyleth thought. Elowen was talking, imploring, but Lyleth could only catch words here and there.

  “I beg you,” Elowen repeated.

  Talan carried Angharad to the center of the ring of stones where the cromm cruach stood. “The Crooked Head” was a low, rounded stone that suggested a head, and it rose from a pool at the center of the island that was said to have been formed from the blood of the fallen during the battle a thousand years before. It was here that Black Brac defeated the Old Blood. After the battle, the severed head of the Old Blood’s king, the Crooked One, was encased in clay, then lead, then gold. After the druada had covered it in their charms and carvings, it turned to solid stone and was left here, guarded by the twelve Knights of the Stoney Ring. The Crooked One’s body was cast into the deep water, into the Void between worlds. Some said it searches through eternity for its head, or for another body to take as its own. The Crooked One was god of this place now.

  And some still worshiped him.

  As Talan approached the pool with Angharad in his arms, Lyleth nocked a wet arrow on her bowstring. She would drop Talan where he stood if he tried to enter that water with her daughter.

  Elowen raised a cry as both she and Dylan were held back by the soldiers. Talan seemed to be whispering to Angharad, smiling and laughing as Angharad nodded slowly. Then Talan set her on the ground.

  The child didn’t run.

  Now she had a shot. Lyleth pulled and took aim at Talan. But he went down on one knee, speaking to Angharad, her tiny hands in his. He wore no armor, no finery, but a black woolen surcoat over simple linen. Like a bard or a scribe.

  Lyleth relaxed her draw on the bow.

  As if in reply to Lyleth’s thought, he removed his surcoat and dropped it in the mud. Bare-chested, he led Angharad to Elowen. Words were exchanged that Lyleth couldn’t make out, but then Elowen cried out, her hands over her mouth. Two guards had Dylan on the ground, one having dropped him with the pommel of a sword.

  “You’ll not harm him!” Elowen cried. “I’ll do as you ask, just don’t harm him.”

  Dylan was face down in the mud as Angharad took Elowen’s hand and led her toward the stone where Lyleth was hiding. For a moment, she believed the child knew she was there. For a moment, she considered snatching the child up and running. But where? The soldiers would see to it they didn’t get far.

  Lyleth pressed her body flat against the cold stone. When she peered around it again, Angharad had stopped twenty paces away. The child turned Elowen so her back was to Talan who was coming toward them.

  “Stars and stones keep you,” Angharad told Elowen. “Kiss me farewell, sister.”

  “Farewell?”

  Elowen knelt, and Angharad held her face between her tiny palms. She kissed Elowen on the lips.

  Elowen’s eyes widened as Talan’s arms closed around her from behind and started dragging her toward the inner pool. She fought him, digging in her heels and slipping in the mud.

  Dylan tried to rise from the muck, but was laid out again by the guards, his hands bound behind him.

  Yet Angharad showed no fear, nor tried to stop it. She watched placidly, her little hands clasped as if in recital, as a guard bound Elowen’s wrists and Talan placed a cord around her neck.

  “No,” Lyleth said, and moved from the shadow of the stone t
o draw back her bow. Aiming at Talan, her hand began to quake. Her fingers refused to release the draw. Kill the king? She would die in moments at the hands of his guards, leaving Angharad motherless. But Elowen would live. She would care for Angharad.

  As she opened her fingers to release the string, a strong hand grabbed her by the hair. The nocked arrow dropped from Lyleth’s bowstring to the mud as she was dragged back behind the standing stone.

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  It was Nesta.

  “Talan feeds the Crooked One,” Lyleth cried under her breath. “He’s trying to free him!”

  “And you should be thankful. Your daughter’s not the sacrifice.”

  Across the mossy island, Elowen gasped, her hand clawing at her throat as Talan tightened a garrote around her neck. He held her until she stopped convulsing, then gently, with the tenderness of a lover, he let her slip beneath the pool.

  Chapter 8

  Rain clouds rode the midday breeze, and Connor figured they’d get drenched just when they reached the brook. He couldn’t help wondering what Dish hoped to find under Lyla’s tree. Merryn had been dead for less than eight hours, and Dish had already launched into an unexplained search. For what?

  With Dish draped over his back, Connor clutched the man’s lifeless legs in piggyback style, but they were like swinging dead weights and threw off his balance. The sheep bleated in fear and ran to the far end of the pasture and Connor gave up trying to avoid the piles of poop.

  “You’re choking me,” Connor managed to say.

  “Sorry.”

  Dish loosened his grip around Connor’s neck. He was heavier than he looked. Connor hoped Peavey wasn’t around. He tended to spend a good deal of time at the brook. He had instructions of his own from Merryn, and one he had made very clear: Connor was not to interfere with Peavey’s doings at the brook. Merryn had insisted Dish was never to know about Peavey’s true nature. But Connor had never shaken the feeling that he’d met Peavey before. There was something incredibly familiar about the old man.