Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (15 page)

Leaf-rotter. ’Twas a coarse oath for a
Quicken-tree to use, and he was sure it had naught to do with
dragons, nor, he prayed, did the awful stench of the thing that had
scrabbled after them. If dragons scraped and stank and lurked in
fetid places, he was doomed.

They were nearing the place where he’d left
Shay, when a high-pitched hum streaked across the black emptiness
in front of them. He stopped and pulled her closer to his side. She
did not balk, but followed his lead, keeping her one hand in his
and holding on tight. Thus she clung and shivered and no longer
thought to fight him. Thank God.

Her skin was soft, her fingers fine-boned yet
strong as they clasped his. And the smell of her, lavender-breathed
and something more, something essentially female at its core. No
one at Strata Florida had thought to warn him about the scent of
women, though they had warned of plenty else: the fire in women
that made men burn, the lasciviousness of the female nature, and of
mysteries too profane to be told.

Pointed ears and slender curves. Woad
tattoos. Leaves and twigs in tangled hair. How many nights had he
prayed that the monks had not lied?

He stared into the darkness ahead, waiting,
the iron dagger grasped in his fist. If there was danger to others
in the wild blood pulsing through his heart, he feared she would be
the first to feel it. ’Twas more than simple lust she roused in
him, he would swear it, though she roused him easily enough. He’d
won and lost that monkish battle with himself enough times over the
years to recognize its sweet edge, but the yearning he had for the
girl went beyond lust—or so he’d thought. With her plastered up
against him as close as anyone had ever been, her panicked breath
warming his shoulder and melting his resolve, he wondered if in his
inexperience he had simply underestimated the power of crude
desire.

Shay had stolen a kiss from her in the guise
of comfort. Dared he succumb to temptation and try the same? Dared
he turn and draw her close and set his lips to her cheek? Soft skin
there, to be sure, and not so far from her mouth. Would such a
touch be enough to ignite the lasciviousness of her nature as the
monks had warned?

Somehow he thought not. More than likely, she
would gut him and be done with it. Aye, she was not one to be
trifled with. She’d proven that the first night at the well, going
for her knife against the blade-master himself. He should have
taken greater heed.

The hum came again, farther away, and he
wondered if they would not both be better served if he set his hand
to getting them out of the cavern alive, rather than trying to
immolate them with lasciviousness.

Monks, he thought. What could they know of
women’s natures?

“C-come,” she suddenly said, slipping around
him on the stairs and pulling him along by the hand. She was still
shivering like a leaf in the wind. Not much fire there to burn a
man, he granted.

In three steps, she led him off the stairs
into a tunnel that twisted into the earth. ’Twas a novelty for him
to be led anywhere by a woman, though Madron did her best to try.
He followed the maid more out of a dubious impulse to stay near her
rather than the common sense that told him she’d already gotten
herself lost once and needed his help. The tunnel grew
progressively narrower and lower, curling in on itself, until they
came to the end of it with him crouching for lack of headroom.

“ ’T-tis safe to light the b-blades here,”
she told him, and he believed her. They were out of Crai Force.
Holding both crystal hilts in his hands, he squeezed and ignited a
lambent glow. The heat was slow to build, but ’twas there, coming
to life between his palms.

A shuddering sigh escaped her, and she
reached out with her hands, opening them to the light, warming
herself as if he held a fire.

“ ’Twas n-near frozen I was,” she
stammered.

With good reason as far as he could tell,
looking her over. Her hair was sopping wet, her clothes sodden.
Water dripped off the hem of her silvery green tunic, pooling on
the floor. The warm puffs of her breath made small vaporous clouds
in the cold air.

“Are you hurt?” he asked. She didn’t look to
have a mark on her—unlike himself—but that didn’t mean she’d
escaped her ordeal unscathed. Nor could she be any too happy that
’twas he who had found her. He doubted if she would have fought
Shay so fiercely.

“Nay.” She shook her head, and water fell
from her leaves and twigs like a fine rain. “I am of a piece.”

’Twas what he’d thought in Riverwood when
he’d seen her in the wych elm, though he’d thought her of a far
different kind of piece. Even knowing she was Liosalfar-trained had
not prepared him for her skill with a blade. Her first strike had
been like lightning coming out of the darkness. The ones that
followed had been equally fast. Over the months in Carn Merioneth,
he’d done his share of swordplay with the Liosalfar, and he’d not
seen any as quick as the girl. With a blade in her hand, her speed
defied belief, making him wonder if some other force was at work.
Mayhaps her dreamstone dagger was
druaight
, an enchanted
thing come up from the deeps of time. Madron had explained such to
him, how the relics of an earlier age oft resurfaced as things of
wonder.

He looked at the knives in his hand. His
blade, Ara, shone more subtly blue than Llynya’s, which leaned
toward green. Not so subtle was the difference in the hearts of the
crystals. The center of Ara’s hilt gleamed white. Llynya’s hilt
held a shattered violet flame, the color lightening as it crackled
up through the crystal, while remaining deep and unfathomable at
the core. But whether ’twas enchanted or nor, he couldn’t tell. It
felt no more unusual than his own glowing blade—a seeming magic to
him, though Trig had assured him the phenomenon was as natural as
rain. The way of it had simply passed beyond men’s ken.

Once the maid’s fingers were warmed, she
leaned back against the tunnel wall and began searching through the
pouches hanging from her belt and a green baldric bandoliered
across her chest. She rummaged for a while before pulling out a
soppy pinch of lavender and offering it up.

“It will ease you, if you like.”

When he shook his head, she stuck the petals
in her mouth. She was a mystery, aright, he mused, a mystery of
terror and tears quickly overcome, of fast blades and flowers.

“We’re safe here for the moment, long enough
to get warm,” she said, her head bent once more over her pouches.
She must have had a dozen of them, but had lost her pack.

“Safe from what?” he asked.

“The Sha-shakrieg.”

“Sha-shakrieg?”

Her gaze flicked up to meet his, and like
Shay’s, her eyes shone aqua in the dreamstone light. She held a
piece of seedcake in her hand, and it, too, was the worse for
having been dunked in the river. “Spider people.” She put the
seedcake in her mouth.

Spider people.
Sweet Jesu.
Mychael
squeezed the blades tighter and cast a wary glance toward the
tunnel opening. God’s ballocks. She’d trapped them. ’Twas what he
got for following his damned impulses. “What are spider
people?”

“A wasteland tribe from Deseillign,” she said
around the mouthful. “They were allies of the Dockalfar in the Wars
of—” She stopped suddenly, and he turned to find her staring at the
side of his face where she’d cut him, where the blood still
trickled down his cheek. Her own face paled at the sight.

He started to wipe the blood away with his
shoulder, but she stopped him.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait. I have
rasca
.” She reached for her pouches again, and he noticed
her fingers were trembling.

“Are you sure you’re not hurt?” he asked,
hoping she hadn’t just realized ’twas him tucked away with her in
this far corner of the cavern. Mayhaps the light was only now
strong enough for her to see. ’Twould be enough to startle anyone
who felt a need for warding signs in his presence, to find him
looming over her with a pair of daggers at the ready.

“Aye,” she said, though the wavering of her
voice belied the word. “ ’Tis just a bit of the scare left in me.
I’m not usually so skittish, but the spider people eat elf
children, and it being a while since they might have seen one, I
was afraid they would make a mistake and accidentally chew off my
arm, or take a bite out of me before they realized I was full
grown.”

Christe.
His jaw tightened, yet he
felt some relief. Compared to spider people, he must indeed seem a
savior. “You should have killed me, if you thought that.”

“I was trying, going for your throat. I don’t
know what’s worse, that I missed, which could have been the death
of me, or that I didn’t miss a little more, seeing that ’twas you.
Here, eat this.” She came up with another piece of wet seedcake and
gave it to him. He took the cake and found it sweet, still redolent
of clover honey. The taste heartened him. Next out of her pouches
was a small bundle of wrapped leaves tied with petioles, the
rasca
. He knew about the salve. Moira used it on everything
from scrapes to breaks, and its soothing touch would be
welcome.

“Come and sit, so I can tend you.” She
dropped to the floor to sit cross-legged in front of him, artlessly
arranging herself in a tangle of arms and legs.

Obeying for reason’s sake and not because she
had told him to—for it seemed she had done naught but order him
around since she’d regained her voice—he sat down and gave himself
over to her ministrations. Mayhaps ’twas just her way of dispelling
her fears, which he was all for, and the rewards of being this
close to her were well worth the small annoyances. For certes the
scent of the lavender she’d eaten was like the very breath of
spring flowing into the cold, dark corner where they hid, and the
view was unsurpassed. Her eyebrows were drawn close in
concentration, two perfect black wings sweeping over long lashes
and aquamarine eyes. For a moment, he’d thought she was going to
cry again, but the crisis seemed to have passed, and without doubt
she’d realized ’twas he who had rescued her. That knowledge
heartened him even more than the seedcake.

She leaned in close, using the wet hem of her
tunic to clean his face, and a length of her hair slipped over her
shoulder. He watched it slide down and find a resting place across
his thigh, where it dampened the leg beneath and made his mouth go
dry. Aye, she stirred him, aright. Near ebony her hair was, a
startling contrast to the fairness of her skin. He’d felt silk
once, on a bishop’s robes, and was sure her hair would have the
same soft fluidity should he dare lift it with his fingers.

He did not, but he was sorely tempted to
steal one of her leaves. She had arboreal badges to spare, not only
in the live cockades of oak, hazel, and rowan in her hair, but in
the sinuous tattoos twining ’round her wrist and up her arm. He
could see long, curved willow leaves and pairs of lance-shaped ash
leaflets winding through the elfin runes marking her skin. A
delicately lobed oak leaf, glistening with river water and no
bigger than the center of his palm, dangled precariously above one
of her pointed ears—magical things, those, intriguingly pretty when
seen up close, and faintly erotic.

He shifted uncomfortably on the floor. Could
any Welsh maid entice him so?

With her fingers pressing the last of the
rasca
into Mychael’s wound, Llynya stilled, startled into a
moment of immobility by what she sensed. Her nose twitched. Not
daring to move anything else, she kept her gaze on the herbal and
the curve of his cheek, wondering at this unexpected turn and how
it was possible that a man with a four-inch gash across his face
who had been dunked in an ice-cold river from the waist down could
be aroused—and the even greater improbability that it was she
kindling his response.

Yet there was no one else about.

Mayhaps she’d changed even more than she’d
thought. More likely, she was mistaken. Would be a rare wonder
indeed if anything got through her nose in one fragrant piece.

Double-checking, she closed her eyes and gave
herself over to her next inhalation. Warmth flowed into her slow
and easy, a sweet-edged heat wrapping around her senses and tracing
a path that led to a memory she had forgotten...
a cool spring
night in the Mid-Crevasse glade, moonlight shimmering on the
entwined bodies of a man and a woman.

Her eyes opened, but this time the deep-scent
vision did not all dissipate. The warmth stayed with her, settling
into her veins and kindling her own response—a pleasant if
undeserved respite from her guilt. Guilt that she’d cut him like
that, when he’d saved her yet again. She was shamed by the deed.
’Twas the damned lavender making her scent-blind. Aboveground, she
would have known immediately that ’twas him, but she could hardly
admit to it. Neither was she likely to admit to the warmth she
felt. ’Twas disturbing, and she prayed Mychael had not her nose for
scents. As to the vision, she remembered the rest of it well
enough, how Ceridwen and Lavrans had mated in the foresty glade,
the salt-tinged musk scent that had drifted up into the trees, as
if they’d made union with the earth herself. Aye, and she was a
child indeed not to have foreseen such a possibility for
herself.

Unbidden, her gaze drifted a few degrees
lower, to Mychael’s lips—soft skin caressed by his breath, a gentle
indentation in the upper curve, the small nick of a scar near the
rightside corner. He wanted to kiss her. In truth, he wanted more
than a kiss.

And would she set her mouth to his? She knew
kisses. Morgan had kissed her in the boar pit beneath Carn
Merioneth, pressed his lips to hers in a sweet touch.

Aye, she was tempted to try kissing again,
mayhaps overly so. The fascinating changes she sensed taking place
in the small space between her and Mychael was a lure near
impossible to resist. Beckoned by the breath warming their shared
air, she moved a hairbreadth closer and sniffed ever so quietly,
more a trembling of her nostrils. The scents were soft and rich
with a restlessness not his alone. With a kiss she could taste the
mystery of those scents, let them dissolve on her tongue and flood
her senses. She had not felt the desire for such before, not with
Morgan, and not from Shay’s brief kiss. Was this, then, an
enchantment of Rhiannon’s son? Some Druid charm?