by Terry Madden
He took a bite of the stew.
It was done. He’d eaten of fairy food (the grasshoppers couldn’t possibly count), and now he’d never be able to return to the other side. And he couldn’t care less. There were parsnips and apples and sprigs of mint and small onions and savory hunks of pork and the combined effect was one of utter taste bud euphoria. He must have groaned in delight, for the people at the other end of the table were definitely watching him now.
While he waited for the alewife to refill his bowl, he stole glances at Fiach. Lyleth’s back was to Connor so he couldn’t read her face. Fiach sat in the shadows. His red hair was hidden for the most part by his cloak, except for a braid that trailed over his chest. It rang with a soft chime from the tiny bells that dangled from it. Fiach had a rugged face that might have been handsome when it wasn’t all twisted up in frustration at the woman who sat across from him.
Their argument gained volume until Connor heard Lyleth demand, “You’ll send word of Talan’s madness to IsAeron and the northern chieftains. They must know.”
“To what end?” Fiach cried. “War?”
Lyleth proclaimed for all the guests to hear, “When he wakes the Crooked One, there will be war, Fiach. For the Sunless will stand by his side and this plain will see slaughter once again.”
The common room fell silent. A few hushed whispers erupted as they recognized their lord at last, his cover blown.
Fiach took hold of her hands, but she shook him off. “Will you take me to my daughter?”
When he failed to answer her, she stood and proclaimed to the attentive crowd, “The king has loosed a pestilence on your land—”
Fiach’s arm closed around her as he said, “All right. All right. I’ll take you to her.”
As Connor dug into his second bowl of stew, he wondered what it was Lyleth intended to do once she had her child within reach. Everything he considered would have consequences, not only for Lyleth, but for Connor too, and he wished not to share in them.
He put down the horn spoon and stared into the bowl of stew.
The food of this world could not possibly keep him here. He was walking around wearing a corpse. No amount of brick dust could conceal that. His beard had stopped growing, meaning his cells were not dividing. The small amount of sleep he found was marked with an expanse of darkness, a void that kindled a familiar terror. Why familiar? How long would it be before this flesh started to decay? Hopefully not before he found a way back. He fostered a small hope that this child of Lyleth’s might be able to send him.
**
Dylan wasn’t well enough to accompany Lyleth, so it was decided that Connor would stay back with him and see to his recovery. Besides, keeping Lyleth hidden from Talan would be hard enough without having to conceal Dylan as well. It made sense that Connor and Dylan would wait at the alehouse for Lyleth to return.
Fiach paid the alewife for the room and gave Connor a pouch of silver coins.
The first thing he did was to take back the photo of him and Iris at senior prom. It wasn’t sentimentality; it was a link to that other world he had to keep foremost in his mind.
Lyleth had given him lengthy instructions for the changing of bandages and poultices and steeped teas. Dylan’s fever had already fallen, so Connor felt confident that he could handle it.
Dylan was a talker. Connor heard about how he had met Nechtan, how he had met Elowen, their years on the Isle of Glass, their lessons with the druada there. Dylan was training as a weapons master, and Elowen was training to be a healer.
In two days, Dylan was strong enough to walk to the common room for his meals. The alewife had made pigeon pie, and though Connor was skeptical, it tasted like nothing served in the land of the dead. Special pigeons, no doubt.
“You and Elowen were planning to marry?” Connor asked Dylan between bites. The memory of Elowen’s kiss replayed like a video loop in his head.
“Aye. At Lúghnasa.” Dylan’s sadness was palpable.
It was a poor choice of questions. “We’ll get her back,” Connor told him. “Angharad sent her, she can get her back.”
Dylan pushed his food around the plate with his meat knife. “What about you? You have a woman in the land of the dead?”
“Not really, no.”
“Do men and women… you know, enjoy each other’s flesh there?”
Connor had to laugh. What did Dylan think the other world was like? “Aye,” he said. “People make love, get married, have children, all that.”
“Let me see that likeness square again,” Dylan wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and pointed at the money pouch Fiach had left.
Connor pulled the faded photo from the pouch and handed it to Dylan.
“She looks like your woman to me.” Dylan grinned.
“We’re friends… mostly.”.
“Sure ye are.” Dylan gave him a wink. “You look almost human with color.” He handed the photo back.
Connor tried to smile at the joke.
That afternoon, while Dylan napped, Connor made his way to the stable behind the ale house. Lyleth had locked two horses and Brixia into stalls there, in case they had to leave in a hurry, she’d said. He heard Brixia’s whinny long before he saw her.
“You need to stay here for a while longer,” he explained to the little horse. He’d stolen a carrot from the kitchen, and she took it from him greedily. If Connor wandered the town with a pony behind him, he would draw even more attention.
She reached a soft muzzle over the stall gate, and Connor stroked it. “I promise,” he told her. “I won’t go anywhere without you. You might be my ticket home.” After all, this was the pony that had jumped into the torrent and gathered Connor up in a net of silver fish. This was a magical being, and she had the power to take him back across the Void. If she would take him back right now, would he go? Merryn’s funeral must have happened by now. Was Elowen missing Dylan the way Dylan missed her? Was anyone missing Connor?
He made sure to freshen up his brick dust before he exited the alehouse into a tangle of narrow lanes. Laundry hung to dry from windows, for the day was warm and intensely beautiful. The swarms had yet to reach this far. The light that glanced from the slate rooftops showered the air with gold, and tiny flowers grew from the stone walls and cascaded in falls of color. The air was an elixir, and he inhaled deeply. He followed the outer wall of the town until he found the market square. Word of the approaching swarms was all anyone talked about, and the bread and cheese vendors had sold all their goods by midmorning as people stocked up for certain famine.
It was in the square he overheard two men talking about the Red Bog.
“Fiach’s drainin’ it,” one man said. He loaded sacks of flour onto a handcart.
“Why?” asked the other.
“The bugs.” The big man swabbed his brow. “They come from the bog. Breed in the water and all.”
“They can’t stop it now. The swarms are well past the bog. Fools.”
They were right. Draining the bog would have no effect on the swarms. There must be some other reason to do it. What was it Lyleth had said? The blood of the twelve knights became the water that circled the cromm cruach? Connor had a distinct feeling it wasn’t Fiach who’d ordered the bog drained.
With one of Fiach’s coins, he bought some whortleberries in a cone of green leaves and popped them in his mouth as he walked. He might have sighed out loud with the burst of flavor that filled his head. God, he loved this place.
He had wandered from the market to a row of weavers’ cottages. Women sat on their stoops with cloth for sale, their drop spindles twirling in succession. One of the women glanced to the end of the lane, then back at Connor. He looked, but no one was there. Yet it was easy to read the young woman’s face. Someone was following him.
He dropped a silver coin in her hand, and she gave him a length of green cloth. He draped it over his shoulder and walked away.
He stepped inside a tavern across the street.
The few patrons glanced at him, and their conversation came to a halt. A stranger in town. Just like in the movies.
“I’ll have ale,” he told the barkeeper. What else was on the menu here besides ale?
He took a seat with a clear view of the door. But they didn’t come from the door.
An arm closed around his throat, and a knife was pointed at his eye. “You’ll not make a sound, or I’ll stick ye. Where is she?”
Connor turned his face away as he drove his elbow into the man’s gut. The knife sliced his cheek before it fell to the floor. Connor spun and let his fist go. It made loud contact with the guy's jaw. His foot landed in his crotch just as he realized there were two of them.
The other guy drew a weapon that looked like the love child of a sword and a dagger. Thin and sharp and short. He slashed at Connor.
He was used to fighting drunks with switchblades, but this guy wasn’t drunk, and that wasn’t a switchblade.
The tavern had cleared out.
Connor picked up a chair and brandished it, hoping to snag the blade in the legs.
“Tell us where she is and we won’t hurt ye much.”
“Who?”
But the first guy had recovered his feet and came at him again. Connor was forced to break the chair on him as the second guy lunged with the knife-sword.
Connor knocked his arm away with a stiff-armed block, then bear-hugged him, making his blade unusable. Forced into hand-to-hand combat, Connor hoped for a slight advantage.
Pulling the guy backward onto a table, the assailant had to drop the blade, or it would break his wrist as it hit the table. Connor’s back lay in a puddle of ale. He rolled right and landed on top of the guy who was bigger than the first one and had bad body odor.
Connor found the stone soothblade at his belt and held it to the guy’s throat. “Who” was the only word he managed to say before something crashed down on his head and everything went black.
**
When Connor came to, there was no one in the room but the fat barkeeper. The two thugs were gone.
“What happened?” he asked, feeling his head pound as he tried to stand.
“I called the guards,” the barkeeper said. “The two bastards were gone when they got here. Now, get out.”
Connor had a sudden sinking feeling. Where is she? They were looking for Lyleth. Which meant they might have found Dylan.
By the time Connor found his way back to the alehouse, news had come from the battlements of the city walls. An army was approaching. They carried the flag of the water horse. Talan’s army. All gates were closing, and people in the alehouse were speculating why Fiach would order his city closed to the king’s army when the king himself was inside the fortress.
“What’s happening?” The alewife dried her hands on her filthy apron and followed Connor to the room he shared with Dylan. “They come here looking for ye,” she said.
“And what did you tell them?” Connor asked.
“Them ruffians? I said ye’d gone to market. Both of ye.”
“Who are they?”
“How should I know?” the big woman said. “But ye might want to find another place.”
Connor burst into their rented room to find Dylan playing a board game with the alewife’s son.
Connor gathered their things, which were few, and with an arm around Dylan, they headed out the back door of the alehouse.
“And what do you think to tell Fiach’s guards?” Dylan asked as they moved slowly through the back alleys toward the fortress.
“We’re messengers.”
“From where?”
“From the Isle of Glass, of course.”
The gates to the fortress of Caer Emlyn lay within the city walls. Townsfolk had gathered outside, seeking either answers or refuge or both, fearing the king’s army meant to attack for some reason. Getting inside might be harder than Connor had thought. Dylan leaned on him heavily. Just the walk from the alehouse had tired him. He had insisted that Connor strap on his sword, not realizing that men on the other side don’t routinely learn how to sword fight. But Connor strapped it on anyway to settle Dylan’s mind, and for show if nothing else.
“I bear news for the ear of my lord, Fiach,” Dylan argued with the guards. “I must speak with him alone.”
“Who sends such news?” the guard asked. By the look on his face, he’d pegged Dylan and Connor as beggars. Connor had decided it was best if Dylan did all the talking since his accent drew undue attention.
Dylan said to the guard, “I have information—”
“Grasshoppers? We know of the grasshoppers. And we know of the king’s army.”
“No, please.”
“Go beg somewhere else!”
Two guards grabbed them by the neck and tossed them into the gutter. Connor landed face-first in a pool of rain and horse piss.
“Shit!”
He got to his feet, wiping his face on his cloak. He offered a hand to Dylan.
“Your face,” Dylan whispered. “You’re gray again. And your face is bleeding.”
Connor touched his cheek where the knife had caught him. It came away red. Connor had recently arrived from the land of the dead. This had to be an advantage.
He found a horse trough and splashed himself, then wiped at his face with his cloak, rubbed to be sure he’d removed any streaks of brick dust.
“What are you doing?”
“Just play along with me.”
He walked back to the guards and said, “My servant wished to protect me, but I see I must reveal myself.”
The guard clearly saw Connor’s pallor, like wet modeling clay. He imagined the bright red blood he felt trickling down his cheek made him look even scarier. He said evenly, “I bear a message from the Otherworld.”
“Otherworld?” The guard was transfixed. A crowd began to gather.
“I wear the flesh of a dead man,” Connor said, thumping his chest. “I stepped from the Red Bog fully alive. I’ve come as a messenger from my lord, Nechtan. He sends word to Fiach alone.”
Mutterings and gasps.
“If Fiach wishes to end the pestilence, he will hear me.”
Not just two guards, but a small battalion accompanied them through the gates, through a vast outer ward and into the hall which was on the third floor of the keep. Connor couldn’t help but think of early medieval castles, simple and yet so elegant in the stonework. Carved rafters and hearths people could sit inside. It helped to distract him to consider the architecture rather than what he would say to Fiach.
But Fiach wasn’t the only one waiting for him in the hall. There was no mistaking the man sitting beside him. He was an older version of the one Connor had met on a battlefield six years earlier. Connor could never forget that face. It was burned into the synapses of his brain with frightening crispness.
Connor had watched an ice-born warrior strike the head from this man’s shoulders. And yet here he sat. Sallow and sickly, but alive. He could only be Talan.
Things started to fall into place in Connor’s mind.
On that day, Talan had worn a helm of polished silver studded with gems, and when the ice-born warrior brought him down, his head and his helm had been separated from his body by the fall of an axe. But not for long. Talan had risen from the bloody snow, taken up his head and fitted it neatly to the stump of his neck.
Nechtan’s nephew was no man. But he was the king.
“What news from the land of the dead?” Talan asked. “How fares my dear uncle?”
Fiach was talking to Connor with his eyes, urging him to hold whatever he had to say for later. Connor couldn’t agree more.
“He is well, my lord.” Connor offered a jerky imitation of the strange bow of the Ildana, a dip of the head and showing of the palms. But what was the lie to be?
He swallowed hard, licked his lips, worked over at least five different possibilities at once.
“Well, messenger?” Talan leaned forward in his chair.
Dish h
ad described Talan as a cocky, inexperienced adolescent who had no need of a razor. Clearly, six years had passed in this world as well as the other, for the king was a man now, his dark hair falling over his shoulders, a single thin braid tied with tinkling silver bells over his left ear, just like Fiach’s. A symbol of something, no doubt, maybe prowess on the battlefield. A simple circlet was the only indication of Talan’s royalty, and his crystal blue eyes seemed to focus on some unseen horizon, not on Connor.
“You do speak Ildana?” Talan repeated slowly.
“Somewhat,” Connor managed to say. Then a bit late, “Sir.” He sensed that Dylan had remained at the entrance to the hall when he had seen Talan. At least, Connor hoped he had, for Talan would know him as the man he had knifed in the back after drowning Elowen.
Talan got to his feet and circled Connor. Only then did Connor see the little girl standing behind his chair. Angharad.
Talan was taller than Connor, but slighter of build, his arms and legs thin as a praying mantis. Connor began to think he’d be this bug’s next meal. There was a smell about him. Rot masked by a sweet spice and rosewater, a smell that might as well have originated with Connor’s own body.
“Speak then,” Talan commanded. “What news do you bring from my uncle?”
One single lie presented itself to Connor with persistent clarity. And Dish would surely be proud of it.
Chapter 17
Lyleth had seen little beyond the kitchen since she’d arrived in Caer Emlyn. Fiach’s seneschal had introduced her as a new kitchen maid, so wandering too far was unwise, for there were many in this castle who would know her on sight. Wearing the cap and kerchief of a servant helped somewhat, and she begged the cook to keep her in the kitchen rather than serve at table. From the corridor that linked the kitchen to the hall, she was able to glimpse Angharad sitting beside the empty space where Talan usually sat. Angharad wore a sullen face and picked at her food, her legs swinging from the bench. Fiach had begged Lyleth to be patient, he would arrange for her and Angharad to meet when it was safe to do so.