Three Wells of the Sea- The Complete Trilogy

by Terry Madden

  Connor knotted his hands in the horse’s mane as tightly as he could while Dylan hoisted him up, pushing his rear end so hard that Connor almost went off the other side.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He lay over the horse’s neck to keep himself from blacking out.

  “You gonna stay on that horse?” Iris asked.

  “If I fall, Dylan will throw me back on.”

  The rising specter of Caer Sidi grew larger as the four of them crossed the plain. Beams from the sunstone sent spears of light to the ground far beyond its south-eastern walls. Connor imagined himself prone beneath that light, imagined it sizzling into his skin and into his soul. That would recharge him, give him the strength that had been sapped away in the making of the dragon.

  Now he just needed enough energy to get there.

  From what he could see, Dish and his army had reached the gate, but from this distance, it was impossible to parse what was going on. He thought he saw the dragon circling above but was unsure. He had to get himself out there. Had to help. But his body was made of lead. He was as paralyzed as Dish.

  Once they knew what was happening at the walls, he could try to reach Celeste again. But to do that, he would be lying somewhere with a noose around his neck, about as vulnerable as he could be. No, he had to get inside Caer Sidi. Then, perhaps…

  Iris rode beside him in her stylishly holey jeans. The breeze played at her wild hair.

  “A week of no coffee,” she proclaimed, “is like tightening a vice around your head a little more every day.” This was her way of saying she wanted to talk.

  “Sorry, Iris,” Connor said distantly.

  “It’s not your fault they haven’t discovered coffee.”

  “I mean…all of it. You. Here. This.” He indicated the battlefield ahead, and the likely death that waited for them all.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I followed Dish right into that burial mound. I knew what was going on.” She shrugged and pushed a strand of green hair over her tiny ear. “I thought it would be a paradise here. Not a fucking wasteland. But other than that…and the caffeine headaches…”

  Connor managed a smile, and noted her furtive glance at Dylan who rode ahead of them.

  “He’s a great guy,” Connor said. “Reminds me of my brother, Dylan. Maybe he is my brother. You remember him, right?”

  “How could I forget?” she said with a sad smile. “But what about sparkly girl?”

  “Sparkly girl?”

  “Elowen.” Iris stressed the wrong syllable, but managed a recognizable version of the Ildana name. “You know, she sparkled over there, in the land of the dead. I called her sparkly girl and I guess it was funny there, but—hah.” She screwed her face up into a grimace.

  “Oh, yeah. Well,” Connor said. “She’s got some things to sort out. Things I can’t help her with.”

  “Like how she feels about you?”

  He nodded sadly.

  “You don’t feel the same way.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Oh, I feel,” Connor said, lowering his voice so Elowen wouldn’t hear. He didn’t know how much English she’d learned while she was in the land of the dead. She was riding beside Dylan, very likely sharing a similar therapy session with him.

  Connor worked hard at formulating the words. “I’m not who she thinks I am.”

  “No, you’re the fucking Wizard of Oz. So what?”

  “I can’t even—”

  “Can’t even begin to explain,” Iris finished for him. “I gathered that. It’s dark and secret and horrible and you’ve done things no one should ever do while wearing somebody else’s body.”

  “Iris, I left Celeste sleeping in a pile of dead bodies. When they find her, they will kill her—”

  “She tried to kill Dish! Are you protecting Celeste now?”

  “Celeste is Celeste because of me,” he snapped. “Everything she believes, everything she knows, I taught her. Anything she’s done is my fault, Iris.”

  “Jesus, Connor. It sounds like that old Catholic crap we used to get fed at St. Thom’s. ‘The sins of the father visited upon their children’ and all that shit. You can make dragons, for chrissake. Dragons!”

  Connor shook his head. “You don’t understand…I am the father of all this, this shit!”

  Elowen glanced at them with a questioning look. Iris smiled and waved at her.

  “This goddess showed you how to do this magic,” Iris said. “How can you say it’s wrong?”

  “It’s a weapon. And when it’s pointed in the wrong direction—”

  “Oh come on!” Iris shouted. “Then point it in the right direction. She’s even brought you back here! Why do you think Angharad and Brixia led you back? To join up with that crazy dude with the detachable head? No. No, she brought you here to make dragons. To stop this crooked fuck from taking over Dish’s land.”

  “No,” Connor swallowed hard. “She didn’t bring me here to make dragons, Iris,” he said. Dylan and Elowen had brought their horses alongside them, no doubt sensing trouble.

  Connor said, “If Tiernmas kills me. He consumes my greenflow, the way I did with those plants. What he will become is beyond any dragon you’ve ever dreamt of. And if I can’t control that…”

  Iris arched a pierced eyebrow, and sucked in her lower lip. “Well. Then. Maybe we’re fucked. But that hasn’t happened. We won’t let it happen.”

  Connor shook his head. “No, no. You don’t understand.”

  “I’m pretty clear on that point. I don’t understand.”

  As Connor explained, first in English, and then in Ildana for Elowen and Dylan, their three faces blanched. Their eyes flashed to each other, trying to share the fear that was building. He explained what would happen if Dish and Lyl failed to get inside, failed to get their hands on the labrys and decapitate Tiernmas.

  “Energy,” he summarized, “has to flow in both directions to maintain balance. With Tiernmas…he will consume it all. He will invert this world and bud off another.” He gestured as if turning something inside out. “If you take the skin off an orange and invert it, it has a completely different structure and properties. He would do that to this world. It would be existence without death, just bleak being on the inside of the orange skin.”

  “Why is the inside of the orange worse than the outside?” Iris asked.

  “Okay, maybe it’s not worse, it’s just…alone, without the balance of another world on the other side. There would be no orange side anymore.”

  When he’d finished, they were all strangely silent. Iris surreptitiously wiped at her eyes then fished in the pockets of her jeans, muttering, “Damn. No more cigarettes either.”

  The sun touched the hilltops to the west. The four rode in silence, wary of any possible attack.

  Connor’s gaze was fixed by Caer Sidi, the fortress he had only known as a city beneath the ground. His thoughts drifted to his early days there when he was nothing more than Tiernmas’s hired companion. He was charged with getting the fragile young man out into the fresh air, playing hounds and hares with him, and teaching him to defend himself as best he could with his weakened spine. If nothing else, Connor was guilty of doing this job far too well.

  He remembered the day Merryn arrived. Hiding in the shadows, Tiernmas had watched her dismount from her horse. She radiated a warm beauty and yet seemed so unsure, for she would become Elgar’s solás.

  “Why don’t you introduce yourself,” Connor had suggested to Tiernmas.

  “And assault her with this twisted figure?”

  Tiernmas was soon the object of an awkward introduction, forced upon him by Elgar.

  Merryn was bound to Elgar in the age-old ritual, and Tiernmas’s brother was crowned king of the Old Blood. Merryn’s tattoo was still pink when Elgar sent her to deliver his terms of surrender to a warlord in the Southern Marches. The old Tartussian had been raiding Emlyn for decades, and now Elgar demanded he surrender his lands to him or die. Merryn, charged with delivering Elgar’s ridi
culous terms, was imprisoned, and the warlord’s reply was sent with one of her fingers. It would be two years before Elgar set out to free Merryn, blaming the war on her failed negotiations, even as she wasted away in some cell in the Southern Marches.

  Nothing ate at Tiernmas more than knowing where Merryn was, who had sent her, and that, impaired as he was, he could not even go to war to get her back.

  But Connor had gone to war. Riding across these plains brought it all back to him now. The battle that had killed him—and the goddess who had led him back to his body, and tasked him with living again.

  “There,” Dylan said, rousing Connor from his near-sleep state. “Someone comes. Who is it?” He’d drawn his sword and lowered his shroud.

  Connor strained against the bright sunset to see two riders moving toward them, followed by a ragged band of foot soldiers.

  “It’s Fiach,” Dylan cried. He dug his heels into his horse and took off toward them.

  As Connor drew closer, he could see they would be in need of help. He was in no condition to render it, but Elowen and Iris dismounted and set to helping the wounded.

  Many of the men’s clothes were scorched, and some still wore the shrouds.

  “Fiach?” Connor asked. “Where’s Dish? And Lyl?”

  He was shaking his head. “Dead, I should think.”

  “And the dragon?”

  Fiach glared at him. “Turned,” he said.

  “That’s not possible,” Connor said. He slid from his horse’s back to his rubbery legs. Elowen was seeing to a man whose arm was badly burned. “The dragon could not be turned.”

  “We must take it off,” Elowen whispered to Connor, indicating the man’s arm.

  He nodded.

  “Could, or couldn’t,” Fiach said, “it did. And my men were its targets.”

  “I warded it with runes that should have prevented—”

  “You failed, blood scribe. And my army is decimated.”

  “Did you kill it?” Connor felt the heat of rage rise in his face.

  Fiach laughed, his teeth seeming whiter against his soot-covered skin. “Kill it? Now, that’s funny, blood scribe.”

  They did all they could for the men to make their journey back to the Caer Emlyn as comfortable as possible. As they did, Connor could think of nothing but the image of his blood beast turned against Fiach and Cyr…and Dish and Lyl.

  “You must come with us,” Fiach told him. “There’s nothing you can do there.”

  “No,” Connor said. “I mean yes. Yes, I can do something. I know a way in through the labyrinth.”

  “You failed to tell us about this entrance.” Fiach looked like he would snap Connor’s neck if he wasn’t on his horse.

  “You could never take an army through the labyrinth. A handful of people, by the cover of darkness, maybe.”

  “Then what?” Fiach demanded.

  “Then, I’ll end this.”

  Connor convinced Fiach to camp on the open plain that night so Elowen could treat his wounded.

  “You’re mad,” Fiach said.

  “Agreed.” Connor nodded.

  “I won’t ask it of any of mine, blood scribe. You can take your friend, there,” Fiach pointed at Dylan, “and the two girls.”

  Connor looked to his three friends who were seeing to the injured. If he went in alone, his chances of success rested solely with himself, someone he didn’t trust as much as he trusted those three.

  He couldn’t ask it of them. And he couldn’t take the best chance left to him to rid the world of Tiernmas.

  Connor’s strength was regenerating, but he would not be at full flow for some days, unless he took greenflow from something, or someone. Once inside Caer Sidi, there were the Sunless…

  With darkness fully fallen, Connor took his soothblade and a small sack of bread and water, and set out alone toward the walls of Caer Sidi.

  He’d gone no farther than the first stream crossing than he heard others behind him. Iris’s voice, speaking Ildana words as Dylan taught her.

  “Go back,” he said without turning around.

  “Hell no.” Iris said it in Ildana. “I didn’t come all this way to sit on the sidelines.”

  “You understand—”

  “This I understand, Connor.” The three closed the distance to him, their faces pale moons in the starlight. “We have to plan on not coming back. We all get it.”

  Dylan and Elowen wrapped their arms around him and Iris, and the four made a circle, their shrouded heads pressing together.

  “We must fight to the end, brother,” Dylan said.

  Connor swallowed the cry he felt rising in his throat, then nodded. It gave him hope that they might make it past the copper doors of the labyrinth.

  “Elowen,” he managed to say, “there are words I should say, but no time—”

  “And no need,” she said. “I hear them in my ears already.”

  “I’ve hacked at these walking corpses before,” Dylan said. “I know how to kill them.”

  Connor understood that they felt as compelled as he did to try everything in their power to end this. And he needed all the help he could get. He nodded again, but could not speak.

  He marked every weapon they carried with a rune of liberation. Runed steel was used by the most highly trained warriors of the Old Blood, for it was believed that if they killed with it, the soul of the victim could not attach itself to the warrior’s soul, or any of his family, as a curse-shade. Connor hoped it would work to prevent the Sunless from reanimating a corpse once it was released. He even marked Iris’s cellphone because she asked him to. But he was beginning to doubt that his runes would hold up against the Sunless who had overcome the wards he’d put on the dragon. But it was all he had.

  With darkness fully descended, they continued across the wasteland of the bog toward the staircase cut from stone. Before they reached the stairs, Connor noticed a mounted figure following them.

  “Hurry,” he urged the others. “Someone’s coming.”

  They were halfway down the stairs when a familiar voice called down to them. “I’m coming with you.”

  Fiach’s sword arm was certainly welcome, as long as it wasn’t Connor he was preparing to dice up.

  Connor led his little party into the caverns, lit only by a single rushlight he’d dared to spark.

  Chapter 23

  Dish had forgotten he was even carrying the gun until Lyl had it in her hand and pointed it at Glaw.

  She managed to hit Glaw, or the thing that had been Glaw, but it didn’t stop him. Didn’t even slow him down. The bullet had gone through one cheek, tore off part of his nose and jaw, and exited. The ragged wound was healing before Dish’s eyes. Sounds issued from Glaw’s mouth that gradually became words. It was mending, not with flesh, but with roots and vines. The missing teeth were replaced by thorns. It must be the greenflow Tiernmas had sapped from the forest to the north that surged in him.

  Glaw bent over them and took the gun from Lyl’s trembling hands. Four of the Sunless were able to extract Dish’s leg from under the horse. It was clear that death was not to be his fate. Not yet, anyway. The leather strap that had anchored Dish to the saddle had chafed the skin raw on his lower back, and it hurt so badly he was glad he couldn’t feel the leg that was trapped under his dead horse.

  Two of the Sunless lifted Dish and dragged him between them. His arms felt like they would pop from their sockets.

  “Lyl!” he called.

  “I’m here.” Her voice came from some distance behind him.

  A rush of hope filled him. He thought they would kill her.

  What had been a battleground littered with the dead, was nothing but a churned bog. The only dead that had not risen were those that’d been decapitated, or burned so badly they were useless to the Sunless. The dead of Emlyn, Ys, IsAeron and the Old Blood were now under the command of the Sunless. All had been lost.

  Dish strained to raise his head enough to look ahead. They were almost to the br
idge, which was no longer burning. The timbers visibly grew back into place, just like Glaw had. As the Sunless stepped upon the planks, they sprouted leaves that grew and lashed the bridge together before turning to stone.

  They halted briefly as the bridge completed its repairs. Dish craned his neck to look up at the twin spires. They twined around each other, each one topped by a massive rough-cut stone that had flashed in the daylight. As darkness fell, they still retained some light, and emitted it as ghostly lamps.

  He recalled that Lyl had told him the legend surrounding the two gate stones. The golden beam that emerged from the central spire of the sun swept across the plain like a bright sundial. With the changing position of the sun throughout the day, it moved toward the fortress at noon, then back to the horizon with sunset, tracing a “V” pattern on the plain. But its path also shifted day to day, as the year progressed, and the sun traced its analemma in the sky. One could mark the days like a calendar with the light from the spire. But on a single day of the year, she said, the beam emanating from the central spire would strike the crystals mounted above the gate. When the light passed through both crystals, the fortress would heal itself, repair all breaches and be new again. The fortress itself was immortal.

  He had to wonder what day of the year that might be. The repairs to the bridge indicated there was a sufficient amount of self-healing magic without any coming from the sunstone. Was it Caer Sidi that healed itself? Or Tiernmas?

  Once inside, they crossed the outer ward.

  Dish tried to see the place Connor had marked on their map, the place where he’d hidden the labrys in a drainage channel. It should be on the north side of the barbican. The bright red of Celeste’s blouse caught his eye. She was leaning against the wall, surrounded by dead waiting to be raised.

  They moved through halls and corridors. It seemed an eternity that his dead legs dragged over flagstones and polished marble, leaving a trail of mud and blood. His dress loafers had fallen off, the socks with them. By the look of his left ankle, it had been shattered by the bulk of the horse.