by Adam Golden
“There are things yet to prepare at the convent,” Airmed said in the Prioress’s easy, confident voice. “Things still to be deciphered, troublesome ends yet to be knotted. Your time here will be short compared to theirs, and when it is ended you will be refreshed, renewed. We all will. I promise.” The voice sounded earnest. She was a monster, and mad with it, but Airmed was sincere.
Rhiannon opened her mouth to speak, though to say what she wasn’t sure. There had to be something, but before she could think of anything, the girl wearing the old woman’s form spun on her heel and marched out of the circle of light cast by the braziers, followed closely by the tall Maiden toting her burden and the rest of the guards.
The entire chamber seemed to hold its breath as the sound of retreating feet grew farther and farther away, and then there was a long stretch of silence. Rhiannon looked about her for the movement she’d seen before. “Caoin?” she called. “Caoin, are you out there?”
She jumped at the sound of sudden weeping and cast her eyes about searching. It was the old man, the one who’d spoken up. His withered old hands gripped the root where it exited his chest and he seemed to be pulling himself forward and then pushing back, sawing the rough wood through his insides. It must have been excruciating but he didn’t stop.
“Old man! Why?” Rhiannon asked, horrified. “Stop that. Please, stop, talk to me . . . help me. Please.”
“I . . . can help no one.” He wheezed as he pushed himself backward on the root. “I . . . deserve this.” He wailed as he took hold of the root again and pulled himself forward. “She was right . . .” he sobbed. “My fault . . . Miach . . . oh Miach . . . I killed you. Should have tried harder . . .” He slouched around the stake that held him and sobbed.
“Old man . . . tell me. I need to know.” Rhiannon pleaded, going so far as to pull herself, inch by blinding, terrible inch, on her own root in order to get closer, but the old wreck was lost in his grief.
“He cannae, lass,” a deep bass rasped. Nuada, King of Tuatha De looked up at her with those blazing electric eyes from where he still lay prone among the roots. “We’re dead men lass, e’ry one o’ us. Long dead. Though Dian Cecht there be nae as dead as he might wish.”
“Do you know . . .” Rhiannon asked, shifting her weight on her feet to try and relieve some of the torment on her chest, “what this is about? Or how I can escape? I have to stop this.”
The Fae king wheezed out a laugh full of anguish that made Rhiannon want to weep. “Aye lass, I know ye do, who knows that feelin’ better ‘an I?” He shook his head piteously. “Centuries I ruled, an’ good years they were, or so it seemed t’me. We built, we explored, an’ we fostered Life. The planes flourished, t’was a grand time . . .”
“What happened?” Rhiannon asked.
“What always happens.” The tortured king sighed. “Same as I’ve seen a hundred times, on a hundred different worlds. We overreached. We thought ourselves beyond things like jealousy or greed or avarice. Least ways we did until we made the blasted thing . . .”
“The Crann Bethadh,” Rhiannon prompted. “The First Focus. That’s when it all went wrong?”
“Aye. Nae . . . I dunnae know anymore,” Nuada said. “The rot must’ve been there long b’fore, but I didnae see it ‘til that blasted thing was done. It was too much, too much power, too much control. We were as gods, child, but in the face o’ what we made? We were nothing. Twigs in the whirlwind.”
“And some of your people wanted to use the Tree to control the Pattern?” Rhiannon asked.
“Wanted to? Nae lass, they did. They always were, right from the moment they conceived the damned thing. Whole races, whole planes sprang into existence by their command. The Fomori worked in secret at first, nudging creations this way an’ that, usin’ the Tree to make and destroy as they liked.”
“The Fomori . . . wait . . . Fomorians?” Rhiannon asked. “The demons? They were Tuatha De?”
The battered king nodded. “Aye, so they were. Just as your Spriggan were Pyski once. History’s a wheel, girl. Even th’ Red Man’s sunderin’ o’ the Pattern could nae change that.”
Rhiannon opened her mouth to ask another question but closed it again and cocked her head, listening. There was a sound, something out in the darkness, something shuffling. Whatever was out there was light on its feet and trying to be quiet, but stealth is a learned skill and whomever was out there hadn’t mastered it.
“Hello?” Rhiannon called as loudly as she could, which wasn’t very loudly at all since every breath and shift of her torso brought spikes of agony. “Please,” the Pyski called, “we need help . . . please.” Quick shuffling feet scurried deeper into the darkness. “No! Please, don’t go!” Rhiannon begged, simultaneously ashamed of herself and utterly willing to do whatever was necessary if it meant even a chance of getting free. “We’ll die here!” she pleaded. “And many more will die too . . . please, I don’t want to die like this.” A few tentative, unwilling steps closer to the light. Rhiannon thought she might be able to make out the shape of a person, maybe . . . or . . .
“You dunnae die here . . . or I dunnae think so.” The voice was soft, quavering, and familiar in a strange way. It was high and nervous.
“Can you help us?” Rhiannon asked urgently. “Can you get us down?”
“I cannae, I dunnae know how . . .” the voice said. The words came in a panicked rush, and Rhiannon thought they sounded farther away. She was getting spooked.
“It’s alright,” Rhiannon said, trying to make her voice gentle and unthreatening despite a sense of rising dread that this child would flee, and she would be trapped here forever with these living corpses. “It’s alright,” she said. “Are you from the convent? A novice out exploring? Are you afraid of being punished?”
“I recall the convent right enough, least I think I do,” the girl said in a tremulous voice. “But I dunnae think I am from there. Everythin’s so hazy, full o’ holes. Like a dream. I woke in a tunnel full o’ roots, heard screamin’ and followed it. The rest . . . I dunnae know . . .” She sounded dazed, far away.
Shock. “Are you hurt, lass?” Rhiannon asked
“I dunnae think . . . Nae, not hurt, but sure’an I feel terrible strange, heavy, sluggish. T’is nae right . . .”
“What’s your name, love?” Rhiannon asked, trying hard to keep her voice soothing, and inadvertently parroting a softer species of Caoin’s gentle brogue.
Dian Cecht’s quiet sobbing grew into piteous wailing again and Rhiannon had to bite down on an angry snarl for fear the girl would bolt like a startled rabbit.
“I . . . I cannae remember!” she shrieked, her voice high and brittle with alarm. “. . . cannae remember my own name. Nor me Ma or Da, nor . . . anythin’ really. Just snatches o’ places and people, strangers, I think. Armies o’ them.”
“Alright then, love, no worries,” the Pyski said gently. “I can help. I’ll help you find out what you’ve forgotten, I swear I will, but I need your help too. Please darlin’, I’m hurt, and I’m scared too. Please don’t leave me here alone. Mayhap we can help each other, we’ll be brave together . . . alright?”
The silence that followed was choking. Rhiannon held her breath, waiting. Please, please don’t leave me down here . . . please!
“Alright,” came the skittering frightened voice.
Rhiannon jerked with triumphant shock, and barely swallowed the blistering scream the movement tried to force from her.
“I’ll help ye an’ ye will help me. . . ?”
“I will, love, I will. I swear . . . oh . . . please . . . yes, thank you. Thank you!” The Pyski felt hot tears on her face; she was jabbering like an idiot. She didn’t care a whit. The child was going to help. She was going to get Rhiannon down!
What happens then? the still rational part of her brain whispered. You’re stabbed through the heart.
The girl’s hesitant shuffling grew closer. It sounded as though she were over Rhiannon’s right shoulder. Out of her view.
The Pyski heard a horrified gasp and a single sob.
What a horrid sight she must be for the child. “Easy, love. It’s alright,” she coaxed. “Come around here, let me see you.”
For an instant that felt like an eon, nothing happened, and then Rhiannon saw a blur of pale-white flesh in the corner of her eye and carefully turned her head to look. The girl was eleven, maybe twelve years old, lithe to the point of boyishness and pale as a sheet. She was also stark naked and shivering. Her face was narrow and angular, her eyes wide with fright as they stared, glued to the jagged protrusion of root bursting from Rhiannon’s breasts. The Pyski was too stunned to even feel it in that instant. Those cheeks, that nose, different but . . . not. The posture, the bearing, it was all different, too hard, too heavy but . . .
“Caoin?”
Chapter 22
The girl drew back, staring at the brown-haired Pyski skewered on her tangled root. There was something . . . something tickling at her memory. Do I know her? Those dark, earnest eyes, that face . . . it was different, hadn’t there been a beard? No, that didn’t make sense . . . did it?
“Caoin?” the Fae woman said again.
The name meant nothing to the girl, it didn’t cause that same tugging on her memory that the woman’s face did, but . . . maybe? Caoin? My name is Caoin . . . ? Even inside her mind it sounded like a question.
“Do you know me?” the woman asked. “Rhiannon. Do you remember?”
The girl shook her head. “I dunnae know. Yer face is familiar but not . . . nae. I remember . . . well, I can speak right enough can I no’? An’ I know ye are Pyski, I know what that is. An’ I heard ye speaking before of things: the Tuatha De, the Fomori, the Red Man . . .” The girl shuddered at the last one. “I know those things, at least some, but I dunnae remember me.” She stepped a little closer, staring into Rhiannon’s eyes as though trying to pull the truth of herself from them. “Was that me name? Caoin?”
The woman, Rhiannon, opened her mouth and faltered before she said, “It is the name I knew you by, but you were different then, you are . . . much changed.”
The girl nodded at that. She felt that. She had been different. She remembered being braver, surer, lighter. She felt weighted down, her movements clumsy, her limbs awkward, as though she weren’t accustomed to using them. “Tell me about . . .” she started.
“I want to . . . lass,” the Pyski gasped, her dark amber eyes full of tears she was obviously trying to hold back. “I do, but please, I need . . .”
The girl sucked in a sharp breath and made herself take in the tortured state of the other woman in its entirety for the first time. How was she keeping back the screaming? The girl could see her holding it back by sheer force of will and she didn’t understand how anyone could do such a thing.
“What . . . I . . . How?” she asked.
The Pyski woman reached out with both hands and the girl’s eyes went wide. “I should pull ye off?” she asked doubtfully. “Are ye certain? I . . .”
“I’m not,” Rhiannon said, shaking her head. “I won’t lie to you. I have no idea what will happen.” She swallowed looked up to meet the girl’s eyes and went on. “This root goes right through my heart. I don’t know why I’m not dead now.”
“Ye’r Pyski” the girl said. “Ye’r magic. Can ye nae just heal . . . ?” She seemed to recall that they could.
“The Light does not reach me here,” the Pyski woman said with a heavy sigh and a shake of her head.
“T’is the Tree.”
Caoin shrieked and spun at the sound of Nuada’s voice. She’d forgotten the Tuatha King.
“The tree . . . ? The Edgewood thicket?” Rhiannon asked.
“No thicket,” Nuada said, “one monstrous tree, twisted and warped by ages o’ dark magic.”
The girl looked about her and felt her shoulders hunching as though the great mass of roots were pressing down on her.
“The Crann Bethadh?” the Pyski asked. “They hid it here?”
Nae, not that. It feels . . .
“This monstrosity is Straif,” Nuada said, and the girl nodded to herself.
Yes, Straif . . . it feels like strife, like struggle and pain.
“I killed the Tree,” Nuada said, and looked tiredly at the girl when she gasped. “Ages past, at the end o’ the last war. All but that damned cuttin’. And from a cuttin’ o’ the cuttin’ Cethlenn’s Maidens made . . . this.
The girl was quivering now. “What is it?” she asked. Now that she was open to it she could feel waves of indifferent, random horror and suffering rolling off the snarl of a tree.
“A Focus,” Rhiannon gasped. “A focus of . . . pain? Death?”
“An’ change,” Nuada added. “Change is often destructive. Fer centuries the Maidens used the Straif like a cudgel, forcing the Pattern t’ the shape they chose fer it with war, death, an’ wanton destruction.”
“Until you took the Bough,” Rhiannon said. “That’s how they control this Straif?”
“Aye.” The girl’s eyes swung back to Nuada’s prone form as he raised himself up weakly to speak. “Without it they dunnae have the power.”
The girl looked to Rhiannon, her face screwed into a mask of concentration. “Could you use it to sunder the Pattern?” the Guardian asked, looking suddenly haunted. “Like before . . . Like . . .”
“The Red Man,” the girl whispered.
“I . . .” Nuada started. “Even with the Bough I dunnae . . .”
“And if one had other Foci? Bound by blood magic?” Rhiannon asked.
“Nae.”
The eyes of the Pyski and the Fae King swung to her and the girl realized she’d spoken out loud. She wanted to cringe back but . . . “Nae,” she said, pushing on, “the Red man used a drop o’ Creation, a spark o’ the power that formed existence itself. All the Foci in creation would nae be enough t’ unmake the Pattern.”
“How do ye—” Nuada started.
But Rhiannon broke in over the legendary king, “It doesn’t matter. Pull me off of this thing,” she said, reaching for the girl’s hands again.
The shivering that rocked every limb and shook her so badly it was blurring her vision had nothing to do with the fact that she was naked. “But . . . I dunnae . . .”
“Do I die here?” Rhiannon asked.
The girl froze. Her mouth hung open, she could feel it. Her body was tense, straining against something. Her fingernails dug painfully into her palms. Intuition like a falling stone brought a wave of deep, all-consuming sorrow.
The wail that tore itself from her burned as it rose to fill the massive cavern. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t see. She couldn’t stop it. The wailing of the prisoners ceased, consumed by the anguish rolling out of the petite human. She could see the Pyski woman screaming at her, eyes wide, pleading, but it felt far away, the knowledge. The grief. It pulled her with it like an undertow.
Do I die here? The question bobbed in her mind like a branch on a churning sea and she latched onto it.
“Nae.” She gasped, the clamor of her scream dying as quickly as it had come. “Ye dunnae, no’ today,” she shivered, “but ‘ware Rhiannon, fer when ye—”
“No. Don’t tell me,” Rhiannon said sharply. “Just . . . get me off of this damned thing.”
The girl took several long deep breaths and then nodded, shifting uncertainly on her legs, trying to brace herself as she took the slim Pyski’s strong calloused hands in hers. Her bare feet were soft, they hurt, the root strewn ground battered them as well as trying to snare and trip her with every shift she made. She set herself carefully and the Pyski squeezed her hand encouragingly.
“You can do it. You are stronger than you know,” she said.
“Aye, I hope t’is so,” the girl said through grit teeth. “Are ye ready?”
She saw the Pyski woman bite down on her lip. She was trembling, terrified, but she nodded, and the girl threw herself backward.
“STOP!”
The girl jerked and pulled h
er hands free of the Pyski’s grip. Her abused feet slid on the uncertain ground and the nude adolescent hit the cavern floor hard. The air rushed from her lungs in a great burning rush and she twisted onto her back, gasping like a landed fish.
Gods it hurts!
She could barely move, frozen in agony as her whole body bent itself to the task of filling her lungs.
Something twitched in the dark above her, skittering between the roots, moving down toward them at a remarkable speed. Something—no, someone—was coming. She couldn’t call out a warning or even point. She couldn’t do much except thrash weakly and stare at whatever it was.
* * *
Halos of brilliant yellow blazed before the Pyski’s eyes. The shriek that filled her ears, the same one that burned outward from her own lungs, cut off abruptly as the girl’s soft, fresh-skinned hands slipped from her own and her forward momentum was lost.
What . . . ? Is it over? No. She was still upright, pinned in place by the barbed spike in her chest. The Pyski looked about her, dazed. Why?
The girl who’d been Caoin lay sprawled on the ground and seemed to be convulsing.
“What . . . ?” There was someone else here. Rhiannon could feel them, the way one felt eyes on their back in the darkness. She heard the disturbance in the air as a body dropped expertly from above and landed smoothly between Rhiannon and the girl’s still gasping form.
Hervor. The Nordic warrior straightened to her full, imposing height, her raptor eyes widening just a fraction as she took in Rhiannon’s situation.
She’s shocked. The expressions were minute, but on Hervor’s stark face they might as well have been signal fires. The tall woman spun in a circle, taking on the horrors displayed in the dim orb of light offered by the braziers.
“Freyja’s mercy,” the northern woman gasped, turning back to Rhiannon, her reserved severe mask fixed firmly in place as she stepped toward the pinned Guardian.