by Terry Madden
“Oh bloody hell,” he said. “Are you a member of that, that neo-druid group?”
“So was your aunt. The Order of the Green.”
He scoffed, “Merryn? The Order of the Green? I don’t think so.”
“It will be fun, you’ll see. The ancient Britons used to hold tribal gatherings on that day, you know,” she said. “So we’re trying to resurrect the old tradition of holding a fair on the first of August. It starts tomorrow. Runs through the weekend.”
“You’ll dance round standing stones and summon the Fae Folk. Right.”
The first of August was just about to roll by on his Starry Night app. He slowed the star chart’s wheeling as the date approached, and as it did, he watched the front hooves and head of the constellation known as Pegasus peek from the northeastern horizon. Above it, and hence rising just before Pegasus, was the lesser known constellation, Equuleus, the little horse. He flipped to the photo he’d taken of the salamander to see that the pattern made by the two constellations echoed the design on its back. These stars would rise at sunset on the eve of Lúnasa. Tomorrow night.
What was that Peavey, or Ned, had said? It’s not so much a place as a time. Didn’t an event need both?
As his app ran in fast forward, it appeared the two horses emerged from the animated lake on his mobile phone screen and into the sky. Depending upon the location, these horses would appear to rise from water. Water horses.
His gaze wandered to his wrist and the symbol left there by the green gods.
“Stars and stones,” he muttered.
“What you got there?” Celeste asked. She seemed to notice the tattoo for the first time, or pretended to.
“Folly of my youth.” He tried to laugh.
“Do tell. Were you once a member of the Order?” She took his hand from across the table and examined the tattoo, her fingers running softly over the blue ink and over his open palm in a sensuous manner.
“No.” He attempted to draw his hand away casually, but she held tightly.
“You are an interesting man,” she said. “Quite deep, I should think.”
He took a long swallow of his stout with his free hand. All he could think about was preparing for the rising of these stars, though he had no idea how.
Celeste was talking, continuing to caress his open palm and the tattoo on his wrist. “I personally think life is a road to self-discovery and unless we take risks, try on personas and ideals, we stagnate and fail to grow. What about you, Hugh?”
Thankfully, his phone lit up with a text message from Iris. People in the woods by brook. Come home.
**
The sky was still bright with long summer twilight when they started home from the pub. Celeste insisted she introduce Dish to the festival preppers who were undoubtedly the people Iris had seen in the woods. Dish agreed. It was time he confronted them. They’d been snooping around the brook and the cairn for long enough. The idea that these people had something to do with the Sunless seemed ridiculous. Peavey must have been mistaken.
The Order of the Green was a local group of self-proclaimed druids who borrowed rituals from witches, Native Americans, and anyone else who worshiped the forces of nature. Dish had a hard time believing Merryn would have anything to do with such quacks.
Celeste parked in the layby just where the brook crossed the country lane. Cars lined the road, stacked along the hedgerow, but there were no people to be seen.
“All in there,” she said, pointing through a stile in a rock wall toward a great pasture that led to the forest. “The Order has designated Trevaylor Wood as a sacred grove. The owner of the land is a member, so it works perfectly.”
“You might inform them that the land across the brook is not part of this farmer’s property. It’s my aunt’s. They’ve been wandering about over there recently.”
“Something to discuss with them.”
She got out of the car and pulled the wheelchair from the boot.
Dish leaned from the window. “I don’t do much hiking these days. Perhaps their, er, leader, could come here.”
“That’s not the idea, love.”
She reached through the window and placed a warm palm on his cheek as if they’d known each for longer than three days. Then she leaned in and gave him a long kiss. A surge of warm longing filled him; he felt his loneliness burst from behind a wall he’d been building these six years. Why had she brought him here? His confusion knotted with a forgotten desire. How could this be happening?
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
“Right back?” he said to himself. And then what? What was it she wanted from him? He couldn’t allow himself to hope it was him she wanted. Not with everything else happening now.
While she was gone, Dish texted Iris, told her where he was and that he would soon meet the strangers who had been roaming the woods and the brook at the end of the pasture. But before he could hit send, the car door opened and a large man reached in and took the phone.
“Sorry,” he said, and was joined by another large man, and the two proceeded to hoist Dish from the vehicle.
“What’s going on here?”
“We’re to help you to your wheelchair.”
“You don’t need my phone for that.”
They failed to reply, but roughly loaded Dish into the wheelchair, held by yet a third man.
“This chair doesn’t go off-roading.”
“We’ll manage.”
They started over the bumpy ground, squeezing through the stone stile and across a pasture crowded with tents and campfires and people with whistles and drums, streamers of green leaves and antlers lashed to tall staves. They stopped what they were doing and stared at him. A holistic bunch, they were in cotton and leather and tie-dye; a few wore necklaces of feathers and shells and bones, and one woman in particular held a knife with a stone blade. A soothblade.
“Stars and stones,” she muttered as he passed. Dish thought he heard the words in Ildana, or maybe the tongue of the Old Blood.
His heart began to race.
The men pushed him toward an arbor of green withies that formed a portal into the trees. From here, he caught a glimpse of the sun setting over the pasture on the far side of the brook, Merryn’s farm. This place was directly across the brook and through the woods from the cairn and Lyla’s tree.
“I’ll have my phone back, now, if you please.”
But the men ignored him.
When the way became rougher, they carried his chair like a litter until they reached a small pocket meadow of bracken and mossy saplings. In the center of the clearing stood the stump of a dead tree, carved into what Lyl would have called ‘the Cernos,’ one of the frightful forest incarnations of the green gods. Its gaping mouth opened into the interior of the hollow stump. Polished black stones were set for its eyes, and ram horns fixed to its brow. No wonder early Christians classified the druids as demonic.
“I understand you’ve been visiting this part of the wood for some weeks now,” Dish began, directing his gaze at a man who wore a circlet of ivy, a designation of a high druid, or one of some rank. At least they had that part of the charade right.
“We seek the well,” the man stated. He was about forty with streaks of gray woven in his long hair and beard. He was working at the Merlin look, Dish surmised.
“There are wells aplenty in this area,” Dish said. “Madron is in the village—”
“You know the well I mean. And you know what’s needed to open it.”
He realized Celeste was standing behind him, her hands on his shoulders. She said, “He means the salamander, love.”
How could she know about the salamander? Were they Merryn’s kin, Old Blood? Even if they were Old Blood, they should have no conscious memory. Unless someone told them about what was to come. Someone like Merryn… or Peavey.
“Who are you and why should I answer any of your questions?”
Celeste moved one hand from his shoulder and returned it with a soothblad
e, which she pressed to his throat.
“Celeste,” he whispered. “Why? What is it you want from me?” What a fool he was. An utter, hopeless, crippled fool. And now he was at her mercy. Entirely.
She leaned close, her lips on his earlobe, whispering, “The blood of a king would be a welcome gift to the Cernos.”
Then he understood. They weren’t Old Blood. They were Sunless. And by the looks of it, their memories were fully intact.
“You think threatening to kill me will get what you want?” He laughed. “If you know anything, you know that opening the well is out of your hands, and mine.”
“Oh, but you’re wrong. We all play a part in its opening. Even you, Lord Nechtan.”
She took hold of his right hand, but he pulled it away. He shoved her to the ground and grabbed the rims of the wheelchair and tried to move it.
One of the men held fast to the handles of his chair. Dish punched a fist upward into his jaw and got the chair moving.
Celeste came at him with the blade, slashing wildly. He caught her arm and twisted it until the soothblade fell into his lap.
Before he could get his hands on it, something struck him on the side of the head. He and the chair tumbled over into a bed of bracken. He tried to crawl away, to get his hands on something, anything that could act as a weapon, but the thugs were on him, dragging him back to the righted chair and Celeste.
The men held his arms down as Celeste drew the blade over his wrist, cutting across the tattoo.
Dish growled with rage and pain, willing his dead legs to move, to carry him into the fight. But he sat, held fast to his chair by two men as his blood spurted over Celeste’s white blouse. He looked down at his wrist. Blood welled across the neck of the water horse tattooed there.
The ivy-wreathed priest caught his blood in a stone bowl. Flashes of Connor catching Merryn’s blood forced its way into his mind. Was Connor one of them? He refused to believe it. And now he would bleed out, his blood some magical draught for the Sunless.
“Blood of a king,” Celeste proclaimed, lifting the bowl to the high druid. “King of the Ildana, the usurping bastards.”
She handed the bowl to the druid and then straddled Dish in the wheelchair. She slid her bloody hands to his cheeks, and kissed him. Her tongue was a serpent. She tasted his soul, tasted his past, his failures and deepest desires. She was lying there beside him under the starwood tree while he made love to Lyleth, her hand was on the spear beside Talan’s as he drove it into Nechtan’s belly. And she stood beside him when he found Connor collecting Merryn’s blood in a baking pan.
As she released him, she said with undisguised mockery, “You never wanted the throne. What kind of king are you?”
She stood, and took the bowl of blood from the priest and, muttering words in the tongue of the Old Blood, she poured some into the gaping mouth of the Cernos.
Then she turned to him and said, “The rest is for the salamander.”
The blow came from behind him. Then there was silence.
Chapter 26
A stone’s throw from the shield wall at the edge of the bog, Lyleth, Dylan and Connor waited in the moonlight. Talan’s reply to Lyleth’s request to meet would come soon, and that reply might just as easily mean death for all three of them.
Lyleth slid from her horse and untied Connor. He was weak but conscious, and fell from the horse into her arms. She wrapped his arm around her neck, saying, “It will be over quickly. Dylan will see to it.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered.
Dylan took Connor’s other arm and together, they supported the dying man’s weight. Brixia nuzzled his face. They had tried haltering the pony and leaving her behind, but she had gone into a frenzy. Whatever would happen on that island would happen with Brixia at Connor’s side.
Fiach’s horsemen waited some distance behind them with orders to charge the shield wall when they saw the archers launch the first volley of arrows from the northern shore. But Lyleth knew it would take some time for Fiach’s archers to make their way in darkness around the bog to the woods without being seen. There would be no moon in the woods. How fast they could move and take up position was questionable. Lyleth figured the ritual would be over before they could take their first shot.
“Please,” Connor begged. “It won’t work. This is mad.”
A soldier stepped from the shield wall and came toward them. Lyleth brandished her soothblade, threatening to slice Connor’s throat.
“Bring him,” the soldier said, and the shield wall opened like the doors to a feasting hall.
Once past the men, they stepped into the bog, reflecting the moon in silvery ribbons.
The cattails were crawling with insects, and even by the moonlight, Lyleth could see the surface of the water was covered with them. The swarms had returned to their place of birth, it seemed, heedless of sleep and the cycle of day. The air smelled of bog water and crushed insects. As she moved forward, the bugs took flight, buzzing around her head, alighting in her hair. She tried not to think about the snakes she’d seen in the water the last time she was here.
When they reached the island, she could see little more than a forest of reeds. Through them, the moonlight reflected off two of the stone knights that rose from the perimeter of the wide, marshy island.
A hooded figure was there, leaning against one of the standing stones, guards flanking him on either side.
“You’ve come,” he called to her. It was still Talan’s voice, but it had changed. Lyleth wondered if Talan’s soul still clung to that body at all, or had the little man taken him completely.
She and Dylan dragged Connor forward until they reached a safe distance from Talan and his guards, two of which brandished spears. But where was Angharad?
“I’ve brought one who may be of some value to you,” Lyleth said, “or the lord you hope to wake.”
“You treat me so well, Lyleth,” the little man said. “I see only the gray man I tried to kill already. It seems he’s nearly dead as it is.”
“This man is the blood scribe who shaped Tiernmas into a king. The man who straightened his spine, turned him from twisted to beautiful. This man shapes blood.”
“And you think I should care.”
“Tiernmas will care. When he takes that sorry body of yours and leads this land.”
Talan, or the little man, considered this, pacing a circle round the stone.
“You’ve come to bargain with me. I thought you had brought me a gift.”
“Give me my daughter and I will give you the blood scribe. Fail to do so, and I will cut his throat just like I cut yours. Tiernmas will be displeased.”
“What if your ‘daughter’ doesn’t want to go with you? What if she’s come to play her part, to carry out the will of the gods, to do what’s right?”
“Where is she?”
After some deliberation, Talan finally said, “Come. You deserve to be part of this. You were here when my lord was imprisoned, weren’t you? You took part in the ritual of binding his soul to the stone, at least, that’s what Nesta tells me. It’s fitting you be here when he is freed.”
He turned and started walking toward the center of the ring of stones, his guards following.
“Where is Angharad?” she called after him. But he didn’t reply.
“What do we do?” Dylan asked.
“What else can we do? We follow.”
Connor had begun to shiver in his wet clothes. As Lyleth and Dylan carried him forward between them, he said through chattering teeth, “He’ll trade nothing. Just kill me now.”
“Shut up.”
A cluster of hooded men waited near the pool of the cromm cruach. Lyleth needed to see no faces to know who they were. Nesta’s brood, the judges of the Wildwood. And she must be among them. Deep channels had been dug from the inner pool across the island to the bog. A failed attempt to drain it. Four battalions of men held positions all around the island, vigilant in the event of a
ny attacks from across the water. Lyleth thought of Fiach’s archers. They might have taken up position by now.
Lyleth and Dylan dragged Connor past the edge of the circle of stones until they stood apart from the gathering. She scanned the Sunless for a child, but saw none.
“We have guests,” Talan told his followers, and indicated Lyleth and her companions. “Harmless spectators. Let us proceed. Dawn approaches.”
The westering moon ignited the bog mist with silver fire, and the sky warmed in the east. The threshold was opening. The time had come. Lyleth felt her hand going numb as she continued to hold the knife to Connor’s throat. Yet no one paid her any attention, their gazes had all turned to the figures by the water’s edge. The High Brehon, and Nesta beside him. But where was Angharad?
As if in response, the child appeared, stepping from behind one of the standing stones. She was dressed in a white gown, muddy at the hem, and she clutched something to her breast. As she drew nearer, Lyleth saw that it was the salamander, Ceinwen, her pet. No, not a pet. The memories she had gleaned from her soothblade had held those of the third well. Ceinwen was the guardian, and her sister waited on the other side to meet her in the void between worlds. When the two met, the wells would join, and the way between the worlds would open.
“Angharad,” Lyleth cried, and started to move toward her. But Dylan gripped her arm. She shook him off.
“Talan! Send her to me, and I will leave you this blood scribe. He will be worth much to Tiernmas, you know as well as I—”
“We shall let Tiernmas decide what he’s worth, Lyleth.”
“You see,” Connor moaned. “He wins. Cut me and be done with it, Lyl.”
But Lyleth released him to fall to the muddy ground. She took another step toward Angharad, but Dylan wrapped his arms around her.
“Let me go!” she cried.
“He’ll not touch your child,” Dylan whispered in her ear. “Look.” He pointed to Nesta who had cast off her cloak and now stood in the pool. She was naked but for the string of claws that hung around her neck.