by Terry Madden
Dish ran his hands over the rock face and as Connor drew nearer, he saw that water seeped from somewhere behind the cliff and ran out to form the pool.
“Hey, there’s fish in there.” Connor pointed. Two silver minnows swam circles around each other and vanished under the overhang of the cliff. “How can they swim behind the rock?”
“The pool goes under it, a wellspring,” Dish said. “I’ve run this beach a hundred times. It’s never been here before.” Connor followed Dish’s glance at the purpling sky. “Dusk,” Dish said.
“Yeah, so?”
“The threshold of night.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Dish emptied his pockets of keys and cell phone. “I can’t explain it,” he said, pulling off his socks and shoes.
“What are you doing?”
Dish waded into the shallow water and scooped up a handful and put it to his mouth. “It’s fresh.”
“Well, don’t drink it, it’s probably full of sewage from that strip mall up on PCH.”
Dish sat down in the water and gave a shout.
“Bloody cold.” He pushed his legs under the rocky ledge, just his head showing above the water. “And deep,” he said, “very deep.”
“You’re outta your mind. That’s like sticking your legs under your bed in the dark.” Connor looked up to see the rest of the team heading toward them. “It’s getting dark, Dish. We gotta go—”
“Christ!” Dish pulled his legs back, tried to stand, but stumbled and fell on his ass in the pool, arms planted in the sand behind him. He exploded in a jubilant hoot. “I can’t believe it!” Dish said. “Here? In Malibu?”
“What the hell?” Connor said. “What was it?”
“Something’s alive in there.”
“Yeah, we saw two fish go under the rock—”
“Bigger.” Dish was grinning like a kid who’d found his friend’s hiding place. “A bloody guardian…”
“A guardian of what?”
Then Connor saw it. Where water clung like pearls to Dish’s goose-prickled wrist, the faintest trace of blue began to appear, like some invisible person was drawing on him with a blue pen. At first, the lines looked like they followed the veins of his arm, then they twisted, thickened and darkened. An image began to bloom. It looked like a tattoo.
“Dish!” Connor was on his knees beside him. “Your—your arm…” He pointed.
Dish pulled off his wristband and traced the image with a quaking finger. His breath came faster and faster.
“Bloody hell…”
He scrambled to his knees and thrust his arm into the pool, frantically scrubbing at it with wet sand. When he finally held his arm up to the fading light, his skin was red and blotched, but underneath, the image was clear. It had a long tail that knotted around itself. A dragon? No, it looked more like a horse, but with a fish tail.
Dish traced the design again. “It’s not possible…”
The team would reach them in minutes.
Dish looked right into Connor’s eyes. “It’s the cold.”
He crawled out onto the sand and struggled to pull shoes on his wet feet.
“Cold doesn’t make tattoos, last I heard,” Connor said.
“I don’t know, all right?”
“Maybe a jellyfish stung you,” Connor said. “What’s a guardian?”
Dish’s eyes met his for a long moment, but held no answer. He took the sweatband from his left wrist and pulled it over his right. The two bands covered most of the mark, but not all of it. Connor could hear the other guys breathing hard and coming up behind him.
Dish clutched Connor’s arm. His eyes overflowed with confusion, but there was something else, a spark of wonder like you only see in little kids.
“This is between you and me, Connor.”
“Sure.” His answer was mechanical. Connor felt like he should be waking from a dream. Fog condensed on his skin and he could sense every drop. His mind raced. Dish was hiding something… something incredible, impossible, maybe. Dish’s look said he knew what Connor was thinking. He let go of Connor’s arm and dragged his quaking palms down his face saying, “Let’s go,” then took off down the beach.
Connor followed, but glanced over his shoulder more than once at the pool behind them.
The insides of Connor’s knees were chafed raw from running in wet jeans. He lay on his top bunk, trying to read the assigned pages for Dish’s class. He’d stopped reading a week ago, certain he’d be expelled by now. There was going to be a quiz in the morning. He thought he should try to pass it, but the words on the page blurred and the only thing he could see was the tattoo on Dish’s wrist. What was the guardian Dish was talking about? And what did it have to do with that tattoo?
Connor’s roommate, Aaron, was busy uploading pictures of his new “Bathing Chimp” sweatshirt to Facebook.
“Check it out, Connor.” Aaron tipped his laptop so Connor could see the page from his perch on the top bunk.
“That’s just fuckin’ stupid.”
Aaron launched his dirty boxers at Connor. “At least I don’t go running in jeans.”
Hours later, Connor was wide awake. Aaron was talking Chinese in his sleep and Connor was thinking about the pool on the beach. He had tried to convince himself that Dish had had an old tattoo removed and what Connor saw was the shadow of it, visible only because of the cold water. But the mark he had seen was sharp and dark blue. The head of a horse, the tail of a fish. Connor had watched it appear like the disappearing ink he used to make when he was a kid. Maybe something in the water brought out the image like lemon juice did with disappearing ink. That didn’t explain why it was there in the first place, or why Dish came unglued about it. Connor had seen something he shouldn’t, and sooner or later, Dish would have to explain.
Connor stared at the ceiling and the glow-in-the-dark stars left by the last inmate. They brightened as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Their green glow tricked him into feeling that a vast expanse of space opened before him. He was a cliff diver, falling into nothing.
He jerked awake.
Down the hall, a door closed and a key turned in a lock. He heard footsteps. Connor checked his phone. 4:19 a.m.
He eased down from the top bunk and cracked the door just in time to see Dish slip out the emergency exit at the end of the hall.
Connor followed.
Standing on the cold steel grate of the fire escape, he watched Dish’s car head through the fog and out the school gates.
Where you go, I go. Wasn’t that the deal?
His breath fumed in the cold night. “Where you going, Dish?”
Chapter 2
Lyleth pulled her hood close and jostled with the crowd. Through the narrow lanes of Caer Ys, tradesmen, fishermen and farmers flowed toward the walls of the keep that crowned the island city. Lyleth was but a droplet in this river, and the multitude would carry her on, nameless as rain. It was worth the risk, for today the grieving queen would address her people, still mourning the death of Nechtan, a king they had loved well. Whatever the queen’s proclamation, it would certainly be crafted as proof of her innocence in her husband’s murder, or perhaps to support the charge that it was really Lyleth who had killed Nechtan. Either way, the informer Lyleth had come to meet would have to wait.
Caer Ys was unchanged by a summer of grieving for its murdered king and Lyleth’s exile hadn’t tempered the aroma of peat smoke, roasting chestnuts and oyster stew. Pipers appeared on the walls of the keep, calling the crowd to the square below with a somber rendition of the Battle of Glen Ardach.
The smell from a fishmonger’s basket confirmed the haddock he carried might have been fresh yesterday. Lyleth tried to slip between him and a woman bouncing a babe, but someone called out and the fishmonger and his basket swung round, sending Lyleth into a pile of grain sacks.
“Ah, forgive me, lass,” he said. “Oaf, me wife calls me.”
He offered two meaty hands to pluck her up, but as he di
d, his eyes went to her wrist. She tugged at her sleeve to cover the mark, but it was too late. The man’s eyes flashed from the tattoo to her face.
She held his gaze and he held her hand fiercely while people eddied around them like snags in a river.
“If you loved your lord,” she whispered to him, “you’ll let me pass.”
“Loved Nechtan well, I did.” But he glanced at two guards leaning against a nearby wall.
“The queen offers four fifties in gold for me, aye,” Lyleth said, “and I’ve nothing to offer you but the blessing of the green gods.”
The fishmonger snuffed and pursed his lips. “I’d take two fifties and let ye be on your way.”
Lyleth wrested her hand free, and taking hold of his tunic, pulled him so close she could smell last night’s ale on his breath. “Look at me,” she demanded through clenched teeth. “Is it a murderer you see?”
His eyes softened. Trapped as they were by Lyleth’s, he had no choice but to see the truth, for she willed it to pass between them like a conjured breeze.
She released him slowly and he yielded, showed the respect of his palms and stared at his boots. “I’ve seen no one here, solás.”
Touching his shoulder in passing, she whispered, “Stars and stones keep you.”
Her blessings were as impotent as her curses. It hardly mattered now, for as closest advisor, solás, to a murdered king, she found herself in hiding. And this fishmonger would be loyal only long enough to raise the guards.
High on the wall of the keep, the pipers finished their tune and were replaced by guards carrying baskets from which they showered fists of coppers on the crowd below.
A mad scramble followed, sending a tumble of men into a turnip stall. Blows were traded before guards could stop it and Lyleth took advantage of the distraction to vanish down a web of alleyways.
A blacksmith stepped from his shop and wiped soot from his hands, saying, “She’ll name us a king today, that’s what she’s about.”
Beside him, a ‘prentice boy squinted into the sun. “Who’d that be?”
“It matters not to me, long as she leaves me in peace. I’ve no time for a throne.” The smithy belched and laughed and slapped the ‘prentice so hard the boy fought to keep his feet.
No, a smith certainly had no time. A fortnight ago, the queen had ordered every smith in Ys to work till his steel ran out, forging spearheads, axes and blades. Did no one else see what she was about? By law, the throne of the Five Quarters would be ruled, not by a man named by the queen, but by a man named by the judges of the wildwood.
The queen, however, clearly had other plans.
On the battlements, the pipers trilled a short tune and the queen materialized. Ava spread her arms wide in a mock motherly embrace while her unbound yellow hair billowed as if she would take flight. This woman who had come to Caer Ys as Nechtan’s bride, a frightened girl from the northern wastes, now held the crowd in a hushed thrall.
“She’s broke her grieving,” an old woman said, pointing at Ava with a palsied hand. “It’s been no full turn of the sun’s wheel.”
Indeed, Ava had cast aside all signs of mourning. She wore a gown of deep ruby with a cloak of sheerest mousseline that fluttered with her hair.
A hush fell over the crowd as two soldiers hefted a large basket before Ava’s feet.
“Your king is chosen!” Ava shouted. The wind dampened her words, but could not kill them entirely.
The crowd grumbled and hushed.
Ava reached into the basket and struggled with a thick chain. She braced her feet and lifted the head of an enormous eel, a head as big as a man’s. She took two steps to the edge of the wall and extended both arms. The thing at the end of the chain spun slowly, the gills splayed under feathery feelers that wagged in the breeze, the mouth agape to show a yellow throat and needle-sharp teeth the length of the queen’s fingers.
“Behold a guardian!” Ava shouted. “Slain by my hand!”
The crowd erupted and passed the queen’s words to those out of earshot.
“In the name of all mothers…” The smithy made the sign against evil.
The eel’s head was fresh, not a preserved oddity. It splattered pink blood down the battlements, its leathery flesh bunched around a white eye.
To those with eyes to see, there was more to this creature. Lyleth hid in the shadow of a hay cart and watched the spiny feelers of the eel grow into hair, long dark tresses that streamed in the breeze. The white eye turned blue and human, but still dead and staring. A well guardian. Ava would have people think she took its life, that the green gods had made a sacrifice of one of their own, and in so doing, the gods had chosen Ava as king. How was that possible?
Lyleth glanced at the blacksmith.
“I seen nets bring in stranger beasts,” he said with some diffidence. “Makes it no guardian.”
“It’s the biggest sodding eel I’ve set me eyes on,” the ‘prentice said.
Lyleth still saw the gray flesh of a bruised girl. The eyes, muddy with the film of death, fixed on Lyleth and the lips curled. She mocks me.
“Our mourning for Nechtan is done,” Ava proclaimed.
“It’s not done,” Lyleth said aloud.
Behind squinty eyes the blacksmith took in Lyleth’s features. “I know ye…” he said. “Nechtan’s own solás.”
Lyleth slipped down an alley and lost herself in the tangled crowd at the edge of the square. Even if the smith called the guards, she would reach the city gate before they could close it. She envied Nechtan his slumber in the Otherworld, and as she pushed toward the gate, she wondered if he remembered anything of the troubles he’d left behind for her to right.
The gatekeepers were busy with a cotter who’d not enough coin to pay his tariff. Lyleth passed through the gate in the shadow of a manure wagon. She had to believe that Rhys still waited for her at the tavern on the quay, and that he’d brought what she’d asked for.
Chapter 3
Connor opened his blue book and tried to answer the essay prompt on the board, but he couldn’t help watching Dish who sat at his desk by the window, his red pen tap-tapping on someone’s essay, his eyes on a storm building over the Pacific. The blue stain of the horse-fish tattoo still peeked from under the cuff of his dress shirt, reminding Connor what had happened on the beach two days before had been real. He’d rehearsed several casual approaches he might use to bring it up to Dish, but the look in his teacher’s eyes always stopped him, and Dish was acting stranger every day.
Pencils scribbled over blue books. Every now and then Connor looked up from his own blank page and caught Dish staring at him. The strange thing was Dish didn’t look away, as if he didn’t even know he was staring. Connor went back to his doodle.
The past two mornings, Dish had slipped out of the dorm about 4:15 a.m. The second night, Connor tailed him all the way to the school gates and finally realized there was no way to follow on foot. Dish could be going anywhere.
This morning, Connor had set a trap.
He got up before 4:15, listened for the emergency exit door and the sound of Dish’s car as he drove off. Stationed in the bathroom right across from Dish’s room, Connor fell asleep on a toilet. At 6:13, he heard the emergency door rattle shut and footsteps in the hall.
He timed his stumbling out of the bathroom perfectly so he ran right into Dish.
“You’re up early, Dish.”
“As are you.” Dish unlocked his room and started to slip inside. He was soaking wet.
“Went for a beach run?”
“See you in class, Connor.” No eye contact, just a closed door in the face.
So, Dish was going back to the beach every morning. What the hell was happening to him?
Connor looked up from his essay-doodle as the bell rang.
After the other kids had stacked their blue books and filed out, Connor opened his and placed it on the desk in front of Dish.
Dish’s eyes flitted from Connor’s lame sketch of the hor
sefish tattoo to Connor’s eyes. Dish bit his lower lip and handed back the drawing.
“I googled ‘threshold of night,’” Connor said. “Dawn and dusk are considered important times of day for magical rituals. Something about a thinning of the veil between the worlds.”
“Yes.” Dish leaned back in his chair and exhaled. “Especially for the Celts, did you find that as well?”
Connor leaned on the desk and pointed at Dish’s arm. He whispered, “What is that thing, Dish?”
“I want to explain if I can. But there’s something I must find before you’ll believe a word of it.”
The door to the classroom opened and some giggling girls swarmed in, asking Dish for help on their essays.
“We’ll talk later,” Dish told Connor.
The day plodded on. Three o’clock bell, then four o’clock run. Dish led the cross country team up a fire road that wound into the Santa Monica Mountains, and by the time they got back to campus, Connor could barely put one foot in front of the other, but he couldn’t wait for dark.
A long shower was followed by dinner. Study hall came and went, then lights out. Connor set his phone alarm to vibrate at 4:00 a.m. and put it under his pillow.
He startled awake from a deep sleep, pulled on his running shoes, and lay in wait. 4:08, Dish’s door clicked open. From the fire escape, Connor watched Dish get in his car. It was parked at the far end of the overflow parking lot, probably so no one would hear him come and go.
As soon as Dish drove away, Connor shoved a piece of binder paper into the emergency exit, bounded down the fire escape, and hit the pavement at an easy jog.
The moon overhead gave him plenty of light.
He took off as fast as he could without taking a header on the winding road that led down to Pacific Coast Highway. Maybe Dish was into some weird cult, or kinky sex or something. Either way, Father Owens would fire him in an instant if he knew about all this.