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

by Terry Madden

  Whoever it was, Brixia was clear about what Lyleth was to do.

  She went back in the water and felt for the hand which had gone limp and still. She ran her hands over the sculpture, seeing a vague green glow brighten the water behind her touch. Clothing that had been sculpted of stone suddenly floated in the water. She took the arms and dragged against the dead weight of what was, indeed, a man.

  Hauling him onto the shore, she saw he was the same color as the mud. With him on his side, she forced water from him in a slow dribble, pounded his back so it came in gouts, until his eyes opened at last.

  Brixia nickered to him and nuzzled his hair.

  His odd clothing was the same gray as his skin, and he began shivering in the cold breeze. He was a young man, tall and long-limbed. His hair and thin beard were a darker shade, though still gray. But his eyes… they were the color of newly forged copper. And she’d seen them before.

  He groaned and managed to say, “Lyleth.”

  Chapter 11

  The persistent buzz of insect wings resounded inside his head. A room filled his view, indistinctly. What room? Talan rolled over and vomited. He wanted to see the little man swimming in the bucket, drowning in his bile. He reached in, felt for his tiny twig-like bones, but there was nothing but liquid, foul smelling and mortal.

  “Where is he?”

  “Gone, gone where there is no dawn. Gone, gone where the Sunless spawn.” The galling drone of the little man’s voice hammered behind his teeth.

  “No! You promised! I did everything you asked!”

  “Everything and none! Everything and less!”

  Talan scrambled from bed. What bed? Where was he? In a room of simple furnishings. He unlatched a shuttered window that opened onto a painfully bright day, overlooking a village and grasslands… of Emlyn, surely. He had been in Emlyn. At the Red Bog.

  He found a mirror beside a wash basin.

  “Speak to me, bastard. Tell me why he denied me!”

  He thrust out his tongue but saw nothing but eyes peering from the anus of his throat.

  A voice rasped from his gullet. “He hungers like a beast, while the green gods feast. Your gift slipped away to the lands of clay.”

  “I did as you asked!”

  “She poisons you!” the little man shouted. “She poisons me!”

  “Who?”

  “’Tis the taste of your bile, of the salamander’s smile.”

  “Salamander? What are talking about?”

  With that, the little man planted barbs like fish hooks into Talan’s tongue and rolled it back, stuffing it down his throat.

  Talan tried to grasp his tongue, pull it out, but fell to the floor, battling a coiled snake, its scales, cool armor that sheathed rigid muscles. It clenched and filled his throat, its fangs buried in the roof of his mouth.

  He cried without sound. And the room went black once again.

  **

  “Come, cousin,” a small voice said. “Fiach has prepared a feast in your honor.”

  It was the child. Her green eyes burned holes in her face.

  “Come.” She helped him to sit up. He was back in the small bed, the bucket of vomit gone, his body clean and in a new linen tunic.

  “Can you speak?” she asked him.

  No trace of fear peeked from the child’s eyes. The little man had strangled her servant, cast her into a bog pool to drown while the child watched. As cold-blooded as her mother, maybe more so.

  He tested his tongue without opening his mouth, making a humming sound. He let his lips part, let the words issue forth like a stream of piss.

  “You said you would rid me of this—creature. You failed me, cousin.”

  “The leech-soul’s hold on you is stronger than I thought.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Caer Emlyn. You need rest.”

  Caer Emlyn. Fiach then, had seen him like this. A mad dog. Perhaps Lyleth was right. The child was too young to make the decisions of a solás. Perhaps the little man was right, she was trying to poison him. Did she know that her mother was dead? That Talan had killed her? Certainly, Fiach knew by now that Lyleth was dead at the hands of ice-born raiders. It was ice-born raiders, not Talan. Not Talan, but the little man who arranged it.

  “What did you tell Fiach?” he asked the child.

  “That you took ill on the road.” She stroked the beard stubble on his cheek with her tiny hand. Talan had no memory beyond that of letting the beautiful girl slip beneath the brown water, the pang of regret he felt that the little man swiftly strangled out of him.

  “Even kings grow ill, cousin,” Angharad was saying. “But you’re better now. Color returns to your skin.” She pinched at his cheeks to bring a blush.

  “No, no.” Talan pressed her tiny hands between his. “I failed. The gift was not received, the god is enraged, and I am his prey. Don’t you see? He will not set me free.”

  “Let the gods battle their own,” the child said. “You are but a man. And I will set you free.”

  **

  Mock joy was the only way to describe the look on Fiach’s face when Talan stepped into his expansive revel hall. Unadorned but crafted of fleshy pink stone in the shape of a six-pointed star, the timbered joists of the ceiling culminated in the single adornment, the carved heads of six horses joined like vines. They gazed upon the tables far below. Simple. Elegant. In a way like Fiach.

  It required every fiber of control Talan still possessed to appear healthy and strong before this chieftain of Emlyn. Fiach could not know that Talan’s head rang with a ceaseless roar, that every voice was muffled as if he were locked in a box and rested at the bottom of a lake.

  “Rude of me,” Talan said, trying to modulate his voice so he did not speak too loudly, “to arrive unannounced with a dozen mouths to feed.”

  “Your presence is…” Fiach’s voice was distant, his warrior braid dressed up with tiny silver bells that sounded all the way to the soles of Talan’s feet. He could hear nothing else, just those bells, though Fiach was speaking, asking him something, waiting for a reply, his eyes expectant, lined at the corners as from many years of laughter. When were those years of laughter? With Lyleth? How Talan longed to know such laughter that could etch lines in his soul.

  Perhaps Fiach had said something about ‘a gift’ or some nicety. He bowed and sustained the showing of his palms, then said something else Talan could not hear above the ringing. He looked to Angharad for assistance.

  “We thank you for your hospitality, my lord,” Angharad said with a bow.

  “You have met my solás, I should think.”

  “She has looked after your needs better than most grown women,” Fiach said. Was that an admiring smile he cast at Angharad? Of course it was, she was flesh of Lyleth’s flesh, and everyone knew Fiach had never lost his desire for Nechtan’s solás. Angharad was surely an extension of her mother to Fiach, even though a reminder that her love never had been his.

  “She is young,” Talan said. “But she is the trumpet of the gods, most surely, just as her mother was.” Perhaps now was not the time to bring up old wounds, but it shifted the focus from Talan’s troubled mind to Fiach’s lustful past. No one was perfect. Talan’s tongue wagged on, though he didn’t want to, “She is rumored to have been fathered by you, yet we all know better.” It was easier to talk than to listen, and it made Talan appear well and of clear mind. How long could he wrest control of his tongue from the little man? But was that Fiach’s wife there behind him? “Forgive my rudeness, lady…”

  “Seryn.” Fiach ushered the demure little thing forward. “This is my wife, my lord.”

  Clearly with child, Fiach’s first probably, at least lawfully. She bowed deeply and showed small white palms, saying, “Come, join us at the table, my lord.”

  Talan knew Fiach had married but had yet to look upon the chosen woman. For a man of Fiach’s prowess, he certainly had the choice of every nobleman’s daughter in the land. Yet he married the daughter of a lord from
the Summer Country, no doubt to stabilize the border he shared with them. Certainly wise.

  The meal was very land-locked. Grains, mutton, apples, greens. Talan forced himself to eat, feeling the revolt of the little man at the taste of earthly fare, knowing he would see it again in the bucket in his room.

  When Seryn had stepped away to see to the next course, Fiach leaned close and whispered, “I am beyond saddened by Lyleth’s savage death, and ready to seek revenge upon the ice-born at your word, my lord. Does the child know?”

  “I have not spoken of it to her,” Talan said, “I thought it best.”

  Angharad sat across the table, picking the nuts out of her bread.

  But Talan felt his gorge rising. He held his napkin to his mouth.

  “My lord?” Fiach was saying. “Are you feeling ill again?”

  “I’m fit. Take on the ice-born? Is that what you said?”

  “I have done some investigating,” Fiach said, “and sent word to Pyrs. He says the raiders came from the isle of Rhunay, from what he has gathered. He seeks to mount a purge of that island. They’ve been allowed to establish fishing villages there during our peace, with Pyrs turning a blind eye to it all.”

  “And now they destroy the most sacred school of our people.” Talan worked up a mask of ersatz horror. But the little man had taken over his tongue. “They have murdered the children of chieftains and set to blaze the training ground of the green gods. And… they successfully killed the woman you tried to kill yourself not so long ago.”

  Fiach rolled back in his seat, his jaw hanging slack. “That I did, my lord. You are correct to remind me of it, yet I assure you, I remind myself of it daily.” His eyes flashed to Angharad, now licking honey from her fingers after dipping apples. She hadn’t heard, it appeared. Just as well, she’d find out her mother was dead soon enough.

  “But I agree in principle,” Talan added. “Retribution must be swift and thorough. Desmund and Maddoc will have it no other way for their children were among the dead.”

  “My men are at your service, my lord. And anxious.”

  After Talan had pretended to eat enough, he stood, his hands on the table for support, and the long bench of courtiers followed.

  “I shall see myself to my room,” he told Fiach, yet had no idea where his room was. He whispered, “I shall leave you to inform Angharad of her mother’s passing. The blow might be softened coming from such a… close friend as yourself.”

  Losing his way through a series of halls, Talan found himself in a courtyard where he glimpsed a green sister, led through a colonnade by the seneschal. She wore the gray cloak of the druada and a string of claws around her neck. She walked as one who does not touch the ground.

  “Good day, sister,” Talan said with a sneer.

  She turned to gaze at him, one eye protruding from her face. The eye stretched farther and farther outward until it snapped free of the ligaments that held it to her skull, moving toward him, lidless. Silver-blue as a dragonfly’s abdomen.

  —Seeing everything.

  **

  He awoke in a garden.

  Looking up through the bobbing heads of pink gillyflowers.

  Into the mismatched eyes of the druí. The things around her neck were talons, from different birds of prey. She removed the necklace, and with one of the talons, pierced the skin on his throat. He felt the blood gather in the hollow above his collarbone. She caught some on her finger and tasted it.

  He awoke again. A dream within a dream. He doubted anything was real anymore. But he was still here in the garden. Or perhaps he dreamed again.

  In the next moment, guards were lifting him from the flowers and carrying him away, back to the small room. He ordered them to shutter the window, and the room turned gray.

  In the shadows, he saw her. Not Angharad. The druí.

  “Get out,” he moaned, and the little man hammered against his gullet.

  She was at his side, kneeling beside the bed.

  “Who let this green sister into my chamber? Guard!”

  Her fingers were on his lips, hushing him, and whispering, “None but ye can set him free.”

  “Chisels,” he blurted—not Talan, but the little man. “I can break the stone.”

  “Drain the bog,” she said. “The water holds him.”

  Drain the bog? Drain the bog.

  “The cromm cruach is but his head,” the green sister said, “his body lies below. Free the body. Free him all.

  “I will be free?” he asked her.

  “Yes, love.” She stroked his hair, and her lips tasted of bog water. Her tongue on his, mating snakes, and she would drain the bog water from his soul and replace it with his own blood. Just as Angharad could not.

  Chapter 12

  A distant sun hung in a brackish, fluid sky. Connor’s heart didn’t pump anything, and his lungs were full of stone. The only sensation he felt was the flutter of wings against the cavern of his mouth. But his eyes saw. Brown flotsam drifted by and a frog shot across his stationary view, its ripples breaking the murky water that surrounded what could only be his white, outstretched arm of stone.

  An eternity passed. He could still taste the woman’s lips on his.

  The brown sun traveled across the brown sky and was gone.

  In the darkness, he should have been afraid. But stones don’t fear. Surely he didn’t lie at the bottom of the brook below Merryn’s farm, for the water there was clear and flowed happily.

  The sun rose on the opposite side of his view, and the blackness became brown again. The water sat stagnant, dimpled now and then by a water bug, or a snake, no, many snakes. They streamed over his head like kites.

  When two dark figures appeared, casting shadows over the dirty water, Connor knew he should feel fear. But he felt nothing, just as he had when Ned took him across and left him to wash up on the shore of that other world, lifeless as driftwood.

  One of the figures bent low over the edge of the pool and then stepped in. Through the murk, a woman swam toward him. Connor was sure she was looking for him, but wasn’t sure he wanted to be found.

  Detritus kicked up by her movement swirled into a cloud, and though he couldn’t see her, he felt her touch. On his hand, first. Her touch burned like fire and Connor wished she would stop because he was trying to breathe now. He sucked in water. The woman tried to swim away, but he grabbed her foot and held her, unable to move anything but his arm. He fell back rigidly to the muck, his insides thawing and drowning all at once. His mouth opened. The moth beat free of his lips and spiraled up toward the sky.

  **

  “Lyleth,” he croaked, and vomited water into the mud.

  He would laugh if he could. The woman who had pulled Connor out of the water was Lyleth? Or maybe it was just someone who looked like her.

  She rolled him to his side, and Connor’s eyes saw everything at once, every paisley, interlocking bit of this world. He certainly knew where he was, even if he didn’t know how he got here. It was Dish’s Five Quarters. And yet, this place was different. He looked off at the horizon where the sun was rising over a vast bog that swarmed with insects. A circle of standing stones ringed the shore like a clock face with one dark stone rising from the pool where she’d found him.

  And a pony nuzzled his wet hair.

  He croaked again, “Where am I?”

  Everything was alive here. Stones, clouds, wind. It all fit together into a seamless entity. The sky, the mud, even the rocks and dragonflies that clustered on the sedges beside him, all subunits of that which is bigger, that which is totally and completely alive.

  Lyleth swatted at the flies on his face, but she was holding herself outside it all. She wasn’t part of this great organism he sat upon. And for a moment, he feared that he wasn’t either.

  The pony that blew steamy breath on him was one he knew, too. It was the same one he’d seen when he walked this world before. Then, the pony was the only being here that could see him.

  He reached up a
nd placed his hand on its bony nose.

  “I know you,” Lyleth said at last.

  “And I know you, believe it or not.” He had understood her Ildana, but replied in English.

  Her face bunched in confusion.

  He repeated it in Old Welsh, hoping it was close enough to Ildana that she would understand him. The tongue of the Ildana was related, Merryn had explained, to the Brythonic languages which were remnants of the language brought from the Otherworld by the exiled Old Blood. He had studied Old Welsh with her every summer, just enough so he could read the poems of Taliesin and Aneirin. But the Old Blood had brought far more than language when they crossed the well—worship of the green gods and a culture that had spread south into what was now France and Spain. Was this world an analog of that one? Or maybe it was the same world, and he’d just been taken back in time?

  He added, “My name is Connor. I know Nechtan.”

  “Elowen!” A man’s weak voice called from the shade of a standing stone.

  “Come, Connor,” Lyleth said, and helped him to his feet.

  His legs were beyond stiff, and walking brought almost as much pain as breathing. So he leaned on Lyleth and wished Dish was the one here now to answer all the questions he saw in her eyes.

  She led him to the person bundled in a cloak and leaning against one of the standing stones, a cloud of midges like a halo around his head. Connor crumbled to the ground, feeling the world spin.

  “Who are you?” A young man pushed his hood back and glared at Connor, his sickly pale face growing more so under alighting flies. He was older now, but Connor couldn’t forget watching this man who had been just a boy then, drawing his bow as a wave of ice-born closed on a little island in a sheep pen. He was so much like Connor’s brother, even their names were the same.

  “You’re Dylan,” Connor managed to say. He searched for additional words. “I saw you once.” He could have added that it had been when Nechtan died but his Old Welsh was anything but fluent, and it was probably not wise to bring it up.