by Terry Madden
Talan held his arms out, and the High Brehon began to undress him. Stripped, his pale body looked too vulnerable for the transformation he would undergo. Talan’s soul, if it was still inside that body at all, would not be able to withstand what was to come.
Talan pushed Nesta’s body from the stone, and Angharad lifted her salamander so the creature was perched on top of the bloody cromm cruach.
“Cleave star from stone…” Connor recited. The prophecy of the well stone. It was time.
The child skipped and danced around the stone, dragging her fingers along its rough surface. Connor knew she was drawing the flow to her fingers, drawing the stored energy that held the Crooked One inside, drawing the flow from Nesta’s soul. It was a great unmaking. Like pulling one thread from a sweater and unmaking the whole.
When at last she stopped, a knot of stone worked free from the cromm and landed in her hand like a fat apple. The child held a green gemstone high over her head.
“The star,” Lyleth said aloud.
It was Lyleth who had set the stone from the sky inside the cromm cruach. It was she who had cast the binding, and now her daughter unmade it as easily as if she were playing ring around the rosie. At that moment, Connor was certain who lived inside the body of that tiny child. Lyleth had birthed the distant past, awakened the first spirit of the land, she who was long ago forgotten, silenced by the green gods who were brought to these shores by so many invaders. She who sleeps beneath the folds of field and forest, in the twitching muscle of the doe, in the rustling feathers of the heron, in the widening eye of the hunter, in the lullaby sung by a new mother. Consort to kings who rule by her grace alone. She wedded them all and demanded a faithfulness she tested in the darkness of their souls and in the horrors of battle.
So ruled Black Brac, and Nechtan. Even Tiernmas. And now Talan. By her grace alone. The land.
A smoldering green fire ignited the gem until it blazed brighter than the dawn in Angharad’s fist.
The child opened her hand, and the star rose into the inky sky of dawn.
As it did, the chiseled gray stone decomposed into fine powder, like chaff from the heads of grain. It drifted in a gray cloud and was dragged off by the wind in long twisting streamers. The great stone, the head of the Crooked One, was blowing away.
“Now come to me, Angharad!” Lyleth cried. “Come!”
The child did come, and Talan did nothing to stop her.
Lyleth knelt before her, tears streaking her face as she gripped the girl in a tight embrace.
“In this world, you are my mother,” Angharad told her, “but in all the others, I am yours.”
“I won’t let you go,” Lyleth cried, still holding her.
“But you must. Because he comes.”
Talan was on his knees, reaching into the hole left behind by the stone. He retrieved an age-darkened casket from the place where the cromm cruach had stood. Streamers of stone dust swirled about it as he lifted it high over his head.
Connor said to Lyleth, “You’ve spent a thousand years preparing for this day.”
“So have you,” she said absently, still clutching her child to her.
They could never escape through the judges and the Sunless who gathered on the opposite shore of the pool, circling it. There would be no escape from what would happen next. The battle had fallen silent in every direction as all watched the ascension of the star into the dawning sky.
Talan removed a yellowed bundle from the casket. He cut the strings, and the hide that covered the head fell away. Hair the color of sunrise spilled out as Talan raised the head high for all to see. Bloodless, withered flesh as dark as bog water hung from the skull.
Memories crowded Connor’s mind. He had watched as the axe had severed Tiernmas’s head from his body. He recalled that his beard and warrior’s braid were woven not with silver bells as the Ildana preferred, but with the feathers of a swan, with shells and acorns. He could still hear the sound of Tiernmas’s laughter, a great thunder that made everyone laugh in turn. He remembered Tiernmas yearning to learn how to sprout a seed in his palm. He’d sat for hours, holding the acorn in his fist and willing life to come, willing it to take some of his flow and waken as the sun calls life from the soil.
And now Tiernmas was the acorn.
As Connor watched, decayed masses that had once been a wreath of flowers round the young king’s head, blushed with color, their petals opening.
Connor felt tears streaking hot on his cheeks.
“I can’t be here, Lyl. Please.”
Lyleth drew her soothblade and set it to Connor’s throat.
“Do it,” he begged her. “You have your daughter, now do what you promised.”
Her eyes went to Angharad, then back to Connor. Angharad softly took the soothblade from Lyleth’s hand.
“He must go back,” the child said. “He can hide in the land of the dead. And heal there.”
“Why would you want me to heal?!” Connor demanded.
Sound emanated from the severed head as a sonorous growl, like the deep tone of a war carnyx sounded in a cavern.
There was singing coming from those across the water. The slaughter of Fiach’s troops had ceased, and Connor saw the warlord among those who watched. Fiach stood there with an axe in his hand, blood-streaked and gape-mouthed as they all were.
The brehons intoned a discordant tune, sounds more than words. The tones were carried from one hooded figure to another, giving the illusion that it traveled like a wave around the closing circle of worshippers who stood on the edge of the water.
As the noise built, Talan strode before the High Brehon, bearing the head aloft.
Insects converged upon the island in swarms so dense Connor could scarce see the people across the water any longer.
The High Brehon lifted the silver axe, the labrys of the divine land, the weapon that had severed Tiernmas’ head a thousand years before, paraded the object before those watching from the other side of the water.
“Talan!” Lyleth cried. “You cannot do this!”
Talan turned to her, and for the briefest of moments, Connor saw the eyes of the boy he had seen six years before, the frightened boy as his horse reared and toppled him. Talan was still inside that flesh. Perhaps this was the only way he could be free. And Angharad knew it.
Talan knelt on the muddy ground.
The High Brehon let the silver axe fall. It cut through Talan’s neck like butter and buried itself into the mud with a resounding thud.
Talan’s head rolled away. The mouth worked, but no sound came out.
But Talan’s body regained its feet and stood. It staggered. The headless stump streamed maggots rather than blood as the High Brehon reverently placed the head of King Tiernmas upon Talan’s neck. A white snake crawled up the body’s leg to his arm, then wrapped around the neck like a scaled torc sealing flesh to flesh.
The eyes fluttered open, eyes the color of a deep forest pool. He smiled at Connor.
“You’ve come,” Tiernmas said in a ragged voice. “My love for you is boundless. You’ll serve me as you always have.”
“No,” Connor said.
He made a grab for Dylan’s short knife, but Dylan caught his wrist. “Kill me, Dylan.”
“You mustn’t,” Angharad said.
The child stood before Connor, her hand on his cheek. She said in her tiny voice, “You command the water horse. Tell her it is time.”
Brixia stood beside Connor, her eye fixed on him. She spoke through the green flow, and he to her.
“The exiles will return,” Angharad said.
“The exiles will return,” Connor replied.
He nodded to Brixia, and she set out to race the circle of the island, just at the water’s edge, faded ribbons fluttering behind her. Faster and faster she ran. Connor felt her, cutting through the fabric of time and space, peeling back the layers of conjuring that forced the two worlds apart.
The ground beneath them began to move. But where
was the salamander?
Countless beetles darkened the sky and gathered as a swirling cloud around the Crooked One. As he stretched out his arms, they alighted on him, covering the pale flesh of Talan’s body with a mass of insect bodies. They latched on to him, bit into his flesh and anchored themselves, shedding their souls into the great maw that was Tiernmas, remaking him, rebuilding him from the green flow.
Within moments, the pale skin was clothed in iridescent, chitinous armor.
“What’s happening?” Lyleth cried. She had not released Angharad, but clutched the child to her breast.
But Connor saw the salamander for the briefest of moments. It was there beside Talan’s severed head. It lapped at the blood, then turned to look at him. The blood of a king.
Before Connor could answer Lyleth, they were falling.
It was as if the earth beneath them had ceased to be. He was suspended in air, struck by rock and clods, falling, falling.
He hit the water hard and submerged. He opened his eyes, floated among debris. Shrubs and stones rained down, falling past him.
Someone’s hands were on him. Dylan.
Dylan pulled him back to the surface. He choked and gasped and looked toward the sky. A distant blue disk appeared at the rim of a crater that streamed water and rocks down on them from the island above. The small island and its pool had sunk into the earth. Now Connor floated with all the others in the middle of a pool of crystal water. And opening in all four directions were caverns lit with dim phosphorescence.
Tiernmas crawled from the water, his flesh fully reshaped into the god-man Connor remembered. The insects had fallen away, had given their multitude of lives to the rebuilding of the body that stood before them. Only the snake remained, its tail in its mouth at Tiernmas’s throat.
“Come with me,” Tiernmas said to Connor, and reached a hand to him.
Connor reached out for him in return.
But Lyleth took hold of him by the hair and dragged him across the water to the other edge of the well. She grappled with him to pull him out like a landed fish onto the smooth stones that edged the well.
“Where is she?” Lyleth cried.
“There!” Dylan pointed at the child, clamoring over a fall of rock near one of the tunnels. She turned to look at them and waved her tiny hand. It was as if she stood upon a precipice.
“Angharad!” Lyleth cried and started after her.
Connor caught Lyleth’s wrist with all the strength he possessed. “You cannot follow where she goes.”
As he said it, a swarm of bees descended from the world above them. They coiled around the child, wrapped her in the will of a god, and then were gone. Child and bees.
Across the water, Tiernmas stood watching. He stooped and picked up the head of Talan and held it up to them. The eyes blinked at them, and Connor saw tears running from them just before Tiernmas cast it into the water.
Every creature is vulnerable to the hand that shaped it.
After a long look at the world above, Tiernmas headed into the caverns that opened from the great chamber of the well.
He stopped, turned and looked over his shoulder at Connor, saying, “You’ll follow me, Connor. For you are the only one who can stop me.”
Lyl had drawn her soothblade and was sawing at the rope that acted as a tourniquet around Connor’s arm.
“What are you doing, Lyl?”
The rope fell away, and a searing pain spread down his arm as the blood returned. It spurted forth, dripping into the well.
“You told me once that the only way to kill that thing is to become one just like him. Is that right?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then it’s time to make another blood beast, like the rabbit with wings, because I’m going after him.”
Lyleth was pulling off her tunic as she cried, “Draw, blood scribe!”
Chapter 29
With Peavey and Iris keeping watch for Celeste and her Sunless, Dish clawed at the dirt beside Elowen and Bronwyn. They dug with shovels and hand trowels Peavey had fetched from the shed. It didn’t take long to expose the flat face of the well stone, held tightly in the grip of roots from a blackthorn growing on the mound of the cairn above. The stone was called a kerb stone, a string of which usually lined the border of ancient cairns.
“Stars and stones,” Dish whispered, and ran his fingers over the chiseled figure of the water horse. Dirt fell away, and the runes became clear.
“How do we get behind it?” he asked, hoping the salamander would have the answer.
But his question was met by a chorus of frogs which had grown so loud, it nearly drowned out his voice. He thought he could smell the forests of the Felgarths, could hear the sound of the surf on the shoreline of the island of Ys. He could wait no longer to cross the threshold, to finish what he’d started a thousand years before.
The frogs converged, crawling over him, throwing themselves at the stone. But the salamander woman strode through them as they cleared a path for her. She pointed through the trees to the east to where the stars of the constellation equuleus were just appearing in the near darkness. And there, between two pale white stars, rose a star of sea green, just like the one on the salamander’s forehead.
She raised her tiny arms and beckoned the pale light.
Dish watched with the others as the light drifted like a beam of green pollen from the star to alight on the stone, to fill the grooves of the design with green light.
“Fuck,” Iris said, and began to back away.
The stone dissolved into light which pushed into the cairn’s inner chamber like a verdant dawn, like the shaft of the midwinter sun in the great tombs of the ancients. As it did, frogs from every part of the wood streamed past Dish, all entering the cavern that had opened before them.
“Come,” the salamander said to him, her copper eyes like a cat’s in the dim entrance to the cairn.
Bronwyn gripped Dish’s shoulders. “Don’t go, Hugh. Please.”
“I must, Wyn.”
“But what will I do when the police come?”
“You called them?”
“Just now. I figured you’d be gone before they arrived. We can hold Celeste off for a bit, but not forever.”
“Stop right there!” It was Iris. She clutched the pistol in both fists and held it out before her.
Dish looked up to see Celeste and her Order of the Green. They stood on top of the cairn, looking down on them.
Iris called, “Come no closer.”
“Or what? You’ll blow my brains out? Just like Hollywood?” Celeste started down the slope of the cairn toward them, saying, “Then it will only take me a bit longer to cross. The well is open. The way is clear, and all of us who have been exiled will either cross here or through the door of death. So shoot.”
Iris looked to Dish as if for guidance.
He said to Celeste, “You’ll stay back until all of the Old Blood have passed.”
“Oh, will I?”
Iris fired. The shot echoed through the twilight and Iris stumbled from the recoil. She’d fired into the sky.
“You will,” Dish told Celeste, “or Iris will make you take the long road back the Five Quarters. You’ll be far too late then to enter the fray, born as a babe. Far too late to lead the rebellion of the Sunless.”
Dish glanced at Bronwyn, hoping she truly had called the police.
With quaking hands, Iris pointed the gun at Celeste.
“You’d best get moving,” Peavey said to Dish. He stepped beside Iris and eased the gun from her trembling hands. “I’ll watch them.”
He dragged his dead legs behind him into the opening of the cairn, then turned to look over his shoulder. “Come on, Iris.”
“Come? You mean cross?”
“That’s what I mean. If you want to.” To Elowen he said in Ildana, “It’s time. Let’s be gone.”
The stream of frogs had begun to thin, and Dish knew his only chance of living on the other side would be to reach it wi
th them before the Sunless followed. He started to crawl in. The passage was narrow and slick with mud and reminded him of the way into the underground cavern he and Lyleth had followed through the Felgarth mountains. Once inside, his eyes adjusted to the dim green phosphorescence that lit the circular chamber with a barely palpable light.
Upright stones carved with spirals and chevrons circled a flat stone upon which lay something that he discerned as bones only when he drew closer.
At his back, cold air disturbed the dust, and as he glanced back down the corridor, he saw Iris and Elowen appear in the chamber.
“Where’s the well?” Iris asked.
Dish felt panic rising in his gut.
He looked around the chamber for the salamander, but could not see her.
He crawled to the bones, looking for water, anywhere.
Two battleaxes had fallen from the skeletal hands. He knew those axes. They had once belonged to warriors of Emlyn, two men Nechtan had slain in a tavern on the banks of the River Rampant. As he picked them up, everything became clear. Nechtan’s axes. Nechtan’s bones. All covered in frogs.
He looked into the center of the chamber to find the salamander. The tiny woman danced a circle, like ring around the rosie, singing in the most exquisite voice, an impossible melody. As she danced, the dry dust beneath Dish grew damp. Water began to drip steadily from the stones over their heads, dripping into a stone bowl beside Nechtan’s bones.
“It’s happening,” Elowen cried. “It’s opening.”
“Holy shit,” Iris said.
Within moments, they were floating in a bottomless pool lit by green starlight. His dead legs and the weight of the axes bore him down. The water was thick as honey, and he drew a deep lungful.
He felt the salamander-woman swim past him, her tiny hand touching his skin so lightly, beckoning him downward. As he sank deeper, another light suffused through the water, coming from below. In that light, he saw a thousand frogs swimming past him, downward. But there, a figure was swimming upward, toward them. It was another salamander. As the two met, they embraced, their bodies spiraling around one another until they burst into a whirlpool of light.