Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (24 page)

He lifted his hand and fingered an intricate
plait of willow scrub. ’Twas not nature’s work. Magic was
afoot.

Behind him, his horse chewed on a bit of
grass, tearing it out of the ground and waiting patiently with her
heavy load. He’d not left his books on the island, but had
proceeded carefully, bringing everything he might need to devise
his journey home. He’d also taken the precaution of shaving his
head. The wormhole had marked him with a blazing white stripe
through his coal black hair, making him instantly recognizable to
anyone who knew the consequences of passing through a weir gate.
He’d entered the land of such a gate, and he would not have himself
revealed and his purpose discerned before its time.

An azure damselfly swooped in to hover over
the autumn-yellowing leaves, then darted to the south, leading
Nennius’s gaze to a giant’s cairn of boulders tumbled across the
river. Staring at the dam through the tangled coppice in which he
stood, he cursed under his breath. The river disappeared beneath
the cairn, and the track winding along its banks had been his hope
that morn. He’d spent two days bushwacking paths to no good end,
searching for a way through to the castle on the cliffs. His camp
beneath a gritstone crag high on one of the mountains gave him a
clear view to the sea, but had shown him no route through the
damnably tangled forest.

There’d been fires the night before, and
runners leaving the keep by the light of the moon. They had headed
in all directions, unhindered by the bramble that so thwarted him.
The thought had come to catch one of the runners and by his own
patented means extract directions through the maze of trees and
bracken. He’d been stayed only by the fleet-footedness of the
bastards, certainly not by any compunction. He would kill them all,
inside the keep and out, if it would further his cause.

Fucking primitive people with their rough
earth magic. Gruffudd’s demons. Nemeton’s princely wild folk. He
would show them magic. They’d probably constructed some damn
religion around the great worms. That religion had not survived, he
could assure them of that, but it would be one more obstacle for
him to overcome when he reached the castle—and he would reach the
castle.

He looked again to the pile of rocks barring
his way and noticed a faint lightening in the near shadows. Tugging
on the mare’s reins, he strode farther down the river, until he
came to a clear space where the brake and bramble turned back in
upon itself in a leafy arch. ’Twas not a large opening, but he was
well pleased for having found it. An odd scent was in the air, of
burnt earth and something rare. He knelt down and sifted his hand
through the dirt at his feet. There were burn marks on the ground,
and a few scorched leaves lying about. He sifted through the soil
again and brought a handful to his nose. The odd scent deepened
around him, winding its way out of the burnt smell in
ever-increasing strength.

Chrystaalt.

He sniffed again and smiled. Dear Gruffudd
had indeed brought him treasures beyond imagining to have led him
here. Someone in Merioneth had power he could use. Nemeton had
written of universal salts, but Nemeton was gone from this time.
Could it be that he had left a peer behind, someone with access to
his paraphernalia and goods? Someone with the knowledge to use
them?

Nennius looked up, his gaze scanning the
woods around him. He knew there were scouts in the forest, but for
the most part, they let the trees do their work for them. An
itinerate trader with a brace of donkeys had come up the road from
Cymmer Abbey a day past. Nennius had watched from his morning camp
as the trader had tried first one worn path and then the next to
make his way through the woods. He had given up at midday and
continued on to Castell Aber la.

The scouts had left Nennius alone as well.
Yet he wondered: Did they know of this small breach in their green
rampart? ’Twas neatly hidden in the shadows of the giant boulders,
right along the edge of the river. Not many would come this
way.

He rubbed the chrystaalt-scented soil between
his fingers, then withdrew a scrap of parchment from a pouch on his
belt and twisted the loam inside it. He made two more such packages
from the burnt earth, careful not to miss any. A bit of incongruous
rot fouled his third measure. He scraped off what he could, then
twisted the parchment closed and stored it with the others. Given
time and even a rudimentary still, he could recover the pure
chrystaalt and add it to his own hard-held grains. Or mayhaps he
would discover the one who had burned it and commandeer his supply.
Any traveler was better off for being fortified with chrystaalt.
For the journey he intended, even a small quantity could mean the
difference between merely a rough passage and a trip through the
vortex of hell.

Worms, enchanted woods, and chrystaalt.
Another smile curved his mouth. Merioneth was truly a land of
plenty, and all of it there for the taking. His taking.

~ ~ ~

’Twas warm and fragrant, the world of dreams,
and smelled more like apples than not. Llynya shifted on the bough
that held her and let the warmth of morning sunshine take up where
moonlight had left off in the night. He’d kissed her in her last
dream—Mychael ab Arawn—and tasted of catkins’ dew. Quite sweet, his
mouth had been, quite sweet.

“Bagworms,” she muttered, not opening her
eyes in hopes that yet another dream would come her way—one without
the plaguing archer in it. He’d cast some Druid spell on her, no
doubt, that thoughts of him came to her so easily and so often,
bothering her even in her sleep.

She stretched and rolled onto her side. The
lazy drone of bees drifted up from the herb garden below, along
with the mingled scents of marjoram, thyme, and sage, and through
and above it all ran the redolence of lavender. ’Twas not such a
sore affliction, her need for lavender, except in the deep
dark.

The deep dark.

“Sticks!” Her eyes flew open, and she
immediately squinted. The sun was a bright ball of full morning
light shining down into the bailey. “Double-sticks!”

She swung to a sitting position and made
quick work of straightening her clothes. She needed a pack to
replace the one she’d lost in Crai Force. She needed provisions,
including a supply of lavender. Gods, but an elf shot arrow or two
would have been nice.

She squinted up at the sun again. Aye, she
had some catching up to do. Rhuddlan had been gone for hours.

“Ho, there!” A lilting, singsong voice cried
up from below, and her spirits sank. She’d been found before she
could make good her escape. “Llynya, ho!” ’Twas a Quicken-tree boy,
Gwydion, waving wildly up at her. His hair was as black as coal
with a stubby braid sticking out above his left ear. She lifted a
hand in a desultory greeting, the mood of which was completely lost
on the small interloper. “Trig wants ye at the p’cullis
posthaste.”

His message delivered, the boy ran off,
skipping and leaping through the orchard. No doubt there had been
the promise of a honeycake for a job well done.

She sank back down onto the apple tree
boughs, releasing an aggravated sigh. Her goose was cooked, and
mayhaps her gander too. The portcullis was a grim place, a gaping
maw of iron teeth and murder holes. ’Twas not where she would
choose to go of a morn, even if she didn’t have other more pressing
plans. The long way around would take her by Aedyth’s hut and the
hearthfire, though, and she could gather the needed lavender and
food.

Resigned to her posthaste summons and hoping
for a menial task—for she could yet catch Rhuddlan in the caves—she
swung down from her branch and dropped to the ground, landing with
practiced lightness. To the west was the herb garden, and she
detoured from her path to pick some sage.

A small stone chapel stood between the
curtain wall and the neat rows of herbs, its masonry banked with
thyme and overrun with creepers turning scarlet with the shortening
of the days. The pink, clustered flowers of the thyme were abuzz
with bees. The sage was farther to the north and less well
frequented. She bent and pinched off a couple of gray-green leaves
for her pouch and a couple to chew. The chapel was not a place of
the priestesses, who, like the
tylwyth teg
, had worshiped
with the trees. Aedyth guessed that it had been built by Gwrnach,
father to the Boar, as the Boar himself had shown no bent for holy
things.

Aye, Llynya thought, her mood souring.
Caradoc had shown no bent at all except for the unholy, and that he
had relished. If he had survived his descent into the wormhole, she
would yet have his gullet slit by her blade—for ’twas he who had
sent Morgan to his doom.

Three had fallen beyond the graven rim of the
weir that day, Lavrans, Morgan, and Caradoc. Only Lavrans had
arisen, found and pulled to safety by Mychael. The other two had
been lost. Where they’d gone, or when, or whether either had
survived their wounds were questions that had been left unanswered,
and reasonably so by Quicken-tree standards. But she was Yr
Is-ddwfn, and in an age long past the Yr Is-ddwfn had used the
gates of time and the weir of the wormhole to travel with an ease
unknown to others before or since. They had known the secrets
sought through the ages of men. The old priests on Anglesey looked
to the stars to re-find the ways. Llynya knew her oracle was not to
be found in the heavens, but was carved in stone and lay hidden in
the labyrinthine heart of the deep dark. She would find the walls
written on in an Yr Is-ddwfn hand, and through them make her way
into the weir. She would find Morgan, and if the chance arose, she
would kill Caradoc. She’d given his hairless devil-priest,
Helebore, to the old worm to crush, and if the Boar did not die
easily on her blade, she’d do the same to him.

Tucking a bit of sage in her mouth, she left
the chapel grounds and struck out across the bailey. The smell of
honey wafted to her on the air, coming from some cook’s baking.
Children played in the sunshine and scampered through the wild
grasses, while older girls and boys shooed them off and worked at
the harvest. Llynya recognized the richly amber
jhaen
grass
used for seedcakes, and the rust-colored redbuck best eaten as
morning porridge. Less abundant were the long stems of
kel
with their drooping white panicles and blue-green leaf blades, a
rare gift from Naas. All would be hand-threshed and winnowed.

With a season of work, the Quicken-tree had
turned the wards of Balor into nascent meadows and woodlands. Most
of what had been inside the wall, she’d been told, had been burned
at the summer solstice for an Alban Heruin festival of uncommon
brightness. By all accounts, the unkempt buildings of wattle and
daub and thatched roofs had taken to the torch with ease. Those in
the lower bailey had been torn down and dragged into the upper ward
to make a pyre for the abominable keep. Only the worst of the lot
remained untouched, the boar pits and Helebore’s chambers. Naught
but time could sanctify those foul catacombs with their endless
maze of tunnels running through stonework and earth alike.

Talk had been going around even in May of a
will-o’-the-wisp in the tunnels, sighted by the children more often
than not. Llynya hoped to see it one day herself, though why a
will-o’-the-wisp would choose such a mean dwelling was beyond her
comprehension. Mostly they were forest phenomena.

She passed near the postern tower in the west
wall, rounded a halfwall, and stopped. Her first instinct was to
sneak back behind the halfwall and find another route, for Mychael
ab Arawn had made no quick getaway that morn either.

He was sitting on a low bench in a patch of
sunshine, his back resting against the great stone curtain, his
legs splayed with a bucket on the ground between them. A water
ladle rested against the wooden slats of the bucket, and as she
watched, he brought it to his mouth for a long drink, spilling a
good bit of it down the front of his much patched tunic. The second
ladleful was poured over his head in a steady stream, not the first
he’d dispatched in that manner from the looks of him. On his third
try, he dispensed with the ladle altogether, bending over and using
his cupped hands to splash his face before running his fingers back
through his hair.

Wet, he didn’t look nearly as fierce as he
had on the shores of Mor Sarff, she mused. In truth, he looked fair
peaked.

A child’s laughter drew her attention toward
an adjacent gallery arch, and quickly enough, the boy Gwydion came
bounding through with half a dozen young hounds leaping about him
and nipping at his heels. Trig’s bitch had whelped in early summer,
a litter of black pups carrying the blood of Rhuddlan’s mighty
hound, Conladrian, in their hearts. The boy giggled as a pup
latched on to his hose and near dragged his braies down. Another
nipped the first, and they all went tumbling, the whole of the
ruckus heading straight for Mychael. Llynya caught his pained look
at the impending invasion and couldn’t resist the inner dare to
saunter over.

Gwydion landed at the archer’s feet in a pile
of pups when she was but halfway there. She heard Mychael swear, a
sweet, chiding curse, and saw him reach out to tousle the boy’s
hair. Gwydion laughed and prattled on about the morn’s adventures,
and between each “Mychael, ye know this,” and “Mychael, ye know
that,” the archer graced the child with a smile, a warm curve of
mouth and flash of white teeth that near made her stumble—her, the
lightest-footed elf in the forest. The word “p’cullis” was the last
she heard, before Gwydion was off again with the dogs.

“
Malashm
,” she said, hunkering down
and helping herself to a ladleful of water, wondering if she dared
hope for such a smile for herself. ’Twould do her heart good, but
such wasn’t to be.