The Salamander's Smile (Three Wells of the Sea Book 2)

by Terry Madden

  Dish should be the one with her blood on his hands, his heart torn to pieces with the task Merryn had assigned.

  Connor wiped at his tears, then headed out the door with the pan of Merryn’s blood.

  Using his cellphone to light his path, he made his way to the toolshed to fetch the shovel he’d left there.

  The flock awakened and bleated as he crossed the broad sloping pasture that bordered the brook. Here, Merryn’s forest grew. A great hazel tree watched over all, its catkins hanging like ornaments in the pre-dawn gray. Lyla’s tree. Merryn had been clear on the exact place he was to plant the acorn. There was a clearing of soft ground between Lyla’s tree and the brook. Not too close to the water, or the seed may be washed away when it flooded. He finally found a spot with few stones and dug the hole as she had instructed. Repeating the words she had taught him, he placed the acorn and its oyster shell into the earth, poured her blood over it, and covered it with soil.

  Dawn broke scarlet.

  And Connor watered the newly turned earth with his tears.

  **

  “Just listen to me.” Connor held out his dirty palms.

  He thought about removing Dish’s gag and decided it would be better to wait.

  Connor glanced at Merryn’s corpse as if for instruction. But her face wore a tired gratefulness to be gone from this world.

  “She’s in the womb of the earth now,” Connor said. “It’s her way across.” Every explanation he had rehearsed sounded ridiculous. “Merryn was never just your aunt. She was Old Blood. She and Lyla Bendbow, the woman in the picture of the well stone that Clyde Pritchard took—the two of them found a way to get back across without the well. She knew if she couldn’t find a way to open the well, she’d find another way across.”

  Connor pulled the gauze from Dish’s mouth, and an angry cry drained from him. Several minutes passed before he could speak.

  “What are you saying, Connor? Old Blood? Why did she never tell me this?”

  “She thought you’d try to stop her. You’d have tried to stop me.”

  Connor untied the electrical cord from Dish’s wrists and half expected a fist to crash into his face again. But Dish allowed Connor to help him into his wheelchair.

  “Of course I’d try to stop you. But—”

  “But if you stopped me, then Merryn would continue to be trapped in this world with the rest of the Old Blood. She was exiled with all of them when Black Brac sealed the well. They were to live in the land of the dead forever.”

  “I know the story. But if Merryn is Old Blood, how does she think this will get her across to the other side?” Dish pointed to the dark stain of blood on the rug.

  Dish dragged the back of his quaking hand across his mouth, pushed his chair to Merryn’s bedside, and took her hand.

  “It was a spell, some kind of magic of the Old Blood,” Connor said. “You should have been the one. She meant for you to do it, but since the accident—”

  “Since the accident, I’ve not even visited her. I’ve locked myself away. I know.”

  “She needed someone. Someone who had seen the other side.”

  “You. Of course.”

  “She sent Lyla first. Back in 1955. The two of them figured out how to cross over. ‘A tree grows both up and down,’ she told me. The roots sprout into a tree, a mirror image, on the other side.” He thought he should tell Dish the whole truth about Lyla Bendbow, but decided to save that for another time. There was only so much Dish could take in right now.

  “So Merryn will be a tree on the other side?”

  “I’m not sure what happens after that. That’s all she told me. It’s like some kind of bending of the rules, going in through a secret door or something.” Merryn had never told Dish any of this, it appeared. “Haven’t you ever wondered what happened to the Old Blood after they were banished from the Five Quarters? Haven’t you wondered if a random stranger on the street might be one of the Old Blood?”

  “I never really thought about it,” Dish said. “I reckoned they forgot their past as we all do.”

  “Most of them, yes. But their druada were charged with remembering, with finding a way back for all of them. Their king brought this on them with his truce—”

  “’For so distraught was King Tiernmas by the coming of the Ildana and the spilling of his peoples’ blood,’” Dish recited, “’that he chose the land of night, and left the day behind.’ Yes, we know this in the Five Quarters.”

  “She never told me all of it,” Connor said. “She never told me why the Ildana banished a whole people forever.”

  “It was not King Tiernmas’s choice to live in exile, as the epics say,” Dish said. His face took on a stony look that Connor had never seen before. The look reminded him of Nechtan, the king he’d watched die on a battlefield in the other world. “The Old Blood had turned to an old magic, one that used blood as its currency. Sacrifice.” His eyes went to Merryn’s cooling body. “All that lives will die. All that dies will live again. Unless the life force is stolen and reshaped into something else. I’ve seen it myself. Ava’s soulstalker shaped a red crow from the blood of a druí named Finlys who was tortured and killed. A beast that did her bidding; it watched us with Ava’s eyes.”

  The realization made Connor weak. He collapsed to the sofa, saying, “What I just did was some kind of blood magic?”

  “Clearly, and to think otherwise is daft. All I’m saying is that the Old Blood struck fear into the Ildana with it. If Merryn was Old Blood, and druada as you say, she would know how to use it.”

  Connor took the stone blade from his belt and handed it to Dish. “Merryn said all her memories were in this blade. She just had to find it from one lifetime to the next.”

  “Then she’ll be missing it when she gets to the other side, won’t she now?” Dish inspected it, holding it up to the morning light that assaulted the east window. “A soothblade, Lyl called it. She said the Old Blood once used it to cut the truth from people.”

  “Or it recorded their truth,” Connor said.

  Dish handed it back to Connor as if holding it unnerved him. “I’d best call for help. And you’d best be prepared to explain.”

  **

  The constable, a middle-aged local man named Alfred Trewin, found the note on the table beside Merryn’s hospital bed just as planned. He also found the sharp paring knife Connor had placed on the floor in a pool of blood. Connor explained that he had taken a room at the hostel in the village, so he wasn’t here when it happened.

  “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 b
lood 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 sleep, 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.