by Terry Madden
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 and 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.
“Why is he… gray?” Dylan asked Lyleth.
“Gray?”
Connor looked at his hands, his wet jeans and shoes. It was true. He looked like he’d come from a mud wrestling pit.
“I should wash.” He tried to stand but fell back to the soft turf. As he did, he felt his cell phone under his butt cheek and fumbled to get it out of his pocket. “Shit.” He tried the button. Nothing. Of course. What was he expecting, 3G? He tossed it to the mossy ground.
“We need to eat,” Lyleth said, and tossed him a skin of water as she left. “I’ll be back.”
But water didn’t help. He rubbed at his skin with a cloth, and it was still gray. Unlike his first visit to this world, he had a body this time, and they could see him, but his skin was gray like a corpse.
Dylan asked him, “What did you do with my Elowen?”
“The girl in the water? Elowen?”
“You saw her!” Dylan gripped Connor’s forearm with what was probably all his strength. Connor read the threat in his eyes. “Tell me.”
“You’re not, uh, pretty enough…”
Oh, shit, his Welsh was worse than he thought. Dylan’s murderous scowl softened to a mocking grin. “Cul shean!” Then he spat.
It didn’t take much to imagine the translation.
Lyleth returned with a bag filled with grasshoppers. “Breakfast.”
“He saw Elowen,” Dylan told her.
“He’ll tell us what he can of Elowen, when he can. Leave him be. Now we best eat so we have the strength to get out of here.”
“A simple question requires a simple answer,” said Dylan. “He saw her. Where is she?”
Connor’s vocabulary wasn’t up to the explanation. “I saw her in th
e water,” he said. He touched his mouth. “She kissed me, and I am here.”
With a growl, Dylan erupted, his fingers closing on Connor’s throat. But Connor threw him off easily.
“Stop this instant!” Lyleth demanded. “You’ll reopen that wound, and I can’t stop it again.”
“I know nothing of your Elowen. I only know we traded.” He wanted to say he had nothing to do with it. But the translation came out, “My responsibility in this is invisible.”
“Here.” Lyleth handed the bag of grasshoppers to Connor. “Pull off the legs and wings and throw them in there.” She produced a small, round-bottomed pot from her sack. “We won’t get far if you spend your strength fighting over something you can’t change.”
“Where are we going?” Connor said. “You can send me back, surely.”
“I don’t know how you got here, so how can I send you back?”
“Dish… Nechtan—”
“Don’t speak of the dead,” Lyleth said. “His world is not mine, nor mine his any longer.” But the look on her face didn’t match her words. What was going on? There were so many things he wanted to ask her. Merryn, the trees, the Old Blood…
“You can’t die,” he managed to say.
“Oh, can’t I now?” she scoffed.
“You can’t come back if you die. Nechtan knows—”
In reply, Lyleth held a soothblade to his throat. “You’ll not speak of him, or I’ll send you back where you came from.”
Connor nodded. Lyleth and Lyla were one and the same. The blade in her hand must be Lyla’s. That would mean Lyleth had brought the blade across with her when Merryn planted her tree. That seemed impossible. Then he remembered that Merryn’s blade was stuffed in his own belt.
“I have something to show you.” His hand moved to the knife, but Lyleth took it from him.
She held Merryn’s soothblade up beside hers. They were nearly identical, and Merryn’s was just as green as it had been on the other side, even more so.
“Where did you get this?” As soon as she asked, Lyleth clamped her fingers over Connor’s mouth. “Don’t answer. Come, we must eat and leave this place.”
Silently, she handed back Merryn’s soothblade and pointed at the grasshoppers.
While Connor sat plucking appendages from insects, Lyleth built a fire and tended to Dylan, exposing what looked like a knife wound to his back which she re-dressed with something that looked like cotton.
“Can I ask what happened here?”
Lyleth gave him a steely glance. “You cannot.”
Connor tossed the grasshoppers into the pot, glad he’d had bangers and mash for breakfast. Squeamishness was never one of his problems, but he was thankful that it would be a while before he was hungry enough to eat these. And then again, the old folktales said that people taken to the Otherworld should not partake of the food and drink there, for if they did, they wouldn’t return. He wondered if grasshoppers counted.
Watching his own colorless hands at work made him feel as though he watched a puppet. His gray skin against the green of the grasshoppers. It was like looking at himself in the moonlight while the rest of the world was lit by a brilliant sun. Maybe that was it. He was muted by the vibrancy of this world, evident even in the faceted eyes and ornately patterned exoskeletons of these grasshoppers. He could really see them, the infinite fractals of their form, the way they were woven into the fabric of this place in a way he was not.
“I don’t think I’m real,” he said flatly. “If so, what am I?”
Lyleth took the pot of squirming insects from him and set it in the coals, saying, “Not every question has an answer, Connor.”
**
Lyleth looked like she’d been knifed herself, almost as pale as Dylan with dark shadows around her volatile blue eyes. The long rope of her dark hair was tangled with twigs and moss she’d probably gotten from diving into the bog after Connor. But beneath it all, he saw that she’d aged as much as Dish had in these six years.
Connor had eaten a few of the crunchy grasshoppers to satisfy Lyleth. They would be better with salt and chili powder.
With Dylan on his back, he waded into the bog behind Lyleth, the pony named Brixia at his side. Except for the water snakes and the half-submerged antlers and various dead things, crossing the bog was easy.
“Deer die in this place often?” he asked.
“They got trapped in the bog ages ago,” Lyleth said, wading beside him. “Sank into soft ground and here they stay, waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Connor’s feet found mushy purchase on the far bank and Lyleth took his arm, heaving him and Dylan into a bed of cattails.
Her look said that question would have to wait with the others.
Eventually, they climbed onto an elevated causeway made of miles of rough-sawn planks. Lyleth surveyed the ground around them as if looking for something or someone.
“The green witch. She took my horse.”
“Who?”
But Lyleth’s look was answer enough. She set to changing Dylan’s soaked dressing one more time. “It’s several leagues to Caer Emlyn. Can you carry him that far?”
“Through water is one thing.” Connor figured Dylan was near his own weight. It was too bad Brixia wasn’t bigger. “I can carry him for a while. But it would be easier to drag him.”
Within an hour, Connor had cut and lashed together two sturdy willow branches to form a makeshift travois. The hard part was finding a way to suspend Dylan between them. With Lyleth’s help, he lashed a series of green, pliable withies between the two poles with his shoelaces and sweatshirt strings. He laid Lyleth’s cloak over them, and they eased Dylan onto his new bed.
Soon, Connor was heaving against the poles and slogging over the causeway in unlaced shoes while Dylan bounced along, certainly in pain, but uttering not a word. He was either very stoic, or he’d passed out. The sound of the poles over the planks was like someone strumming a washboard. And still, Brixia stayed right at Connor’s side. Every time he glanced at her, she returned the look.
All plants in every direction had been stripped to the ground which writhed with worms of all kinds, and grasshoppers like the ones they’d eaten. The beauty of the place was rapidly being devoured, and Connor sensed this was a new development.
There were bugs of every kind, many he’d never seen before, crosses between dragonflies and beetles, aphids and spiders, scorpions and centipedes. Big, small and everything in between, crunching under his feet, catching in his hair. He had to keep his mouth closed, or they would be in there too.
Having used her cloak as a stretcher, Lyleth now batted insects away from Dylan as they walked, maintaining a slow pace in an effort to keep Dylan as comfortable as possible.
“You’re sure he’s still alive?” Connor asked.
“The pain has carried him away,” Lyleth said. “He still lives.”
“Tell me.” She finally spoke when they were miles from the bog and darkness was closing in.
“Tell you what?”
“Nechtan. He’s well?”
“I thought I wasn’t to talk about the dead.”
“We’re away now. The stones can’t hear us.” Her look softened as if she was remembering something sweet. “Tell me,” she said again.
The causeway finally ended and met up with a muddy road.
They walked until they couldn’t see the road any longer. Connor had blisters on his hands, and his shoulders and back burned. In that time, he had explained Dish’s—Nechtan’s—life on the other side. How he was a teacher, how he’d shut everyone out including Connor, how he’d never walk again.
“I left him sitting under your tree. That’s when I found Elowen.”
“What tree?” she asked.
She didn’t know about the trees?
“You and Nechtan, you knew each other before. Maybe many times. But in the Otherworld, you were Lyla Bendbow, and he was Clyde Pritchard.”
She turned a puzzled face to him.
> “You don’t remember the Otherworld?”
“No one does.”
“Well, um…” How to tell her everything she needed to know? Merryn should have realized that sending her across wouldn’t guarantee she’d remember her past. He glanced at the soothblade at her belt, realizing she didn’t know how to retrieve the memories from it. She remembered nothing of how she got here or why she’d come, and Connor wasn’t even sure how to begin this conversation in his limited Old Welsh. He’d have to think about it.
Lyleth stopped walking. She stood there in the middle of the road for many minutes, staring into the gathering darkness, and Connor realized they had left the bugs far behind. Nothing but crickets here.
“We’ll stop for the night,” Lyleth said. “And you’ll tell me about Merryn. About the trees and why she needed such magic.”
With Brixia at his side, Connor collected dry wood and stacked it the way he’d learned to do in the Boy Scouts. As he turned to ask Lyleth how she would light it, she appeared beside him with a rushlight and struck it on a stone. The flame consumed the leaves he’d gathered until bright warmth penetrated him.
He asked her, “You don’t remember anything at all of the Otherworld?”
“As it should be. See what it’s done to your ‘Dish’? Memories are a curse.” She went back to tending to Dylan. She dribbled fresh water mixed with honey into his mouth and placed a damp cloth on his forehead. In the shadows cast by the firelight, Connor could see a vague resemblance to that old photo of Lyla Bendbow. Something in her eyes.
“But you’re Old Blood,” he blurted.
Lyleth froze, the dripping cloth in her hand.
“You and Merryn,” he said. “You are druada of the Old Blood. Exiled with the rest. You stored your memories in the soothblade and found it every time you were reborn. You and Merryn have a plan—”
“It’s not possible,” she said.
He pulled the soothblade from his belt. “This one is Merryn’s. And that one—”
“Cannot be mine. It was Ava’s. Dylan found it beside her body after she cut herself.”