Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (32 page)

He’d spent a terribly long time with Madron
in her hut that afternoon, before Tabor had arrived with the
ponies. When Mychael had finally left the Druid woman’s quarters,
Llynya had seen him slipping a phial into his breast pocket. A
simple, no doubt, and she dearly wanted to taste it and discover
what Madron had given him. Some witchery potion for certes, mayhaps
something to more securely bind him to Druid ways—or to Madron
herself.

Llynya didn’t like the thought of that
a’tall. She’d gone back to the tower while he’d been unloading the
ponies and made him a simple of her own, the dose she’d promised
him in lieu of Aedyth’s. She’d left it on his tower-room door, but
he’d not gone back to his room before making his escape through the
postern gate.

He’d gone to see Moira that afternoon too,
and come away with a bundle of Quicken-tree cloth he’d taken with
him when he’d left Carn Merioneth.

Fool boy. He should not be wandering beyond
the curtain wall by himself after dark. Nigh onto most all of the
wolves had strangely disappeared out of Riverwood four days past,
but there was aught besides wolves to fear. And if he was going for
a swim, he’d be even more vulnerable, in the water without weapons,
naked as a newborn ba—

She pulled herself up short, a blush
full-blown on her cheeks. What was she thinking? She couldn’t spy
on him if he was naked.

On the other hand, if he was naked, she
should spy on him, if she was to keep him safe.

“Bagworms,” she muttered, caught betwixt and
between and annoyed at herself because of it. She’d seen plenty of
naked men of all shapes and sizes and ages, from the newest babes
to the oldest warriors. With Moira and Aedyth, she’d done her share
of tending to aches and pains, and she’d swum in Bala Bredd with a
dozen or more naked Quicken-tree and not thought a thing about it,
because nakedness was not thought of by any of the
tylwyth
teg
.

But Mychael ab Arawn was not
tylwyth
teg
, and she’d ne’er kissed a Quicken-tree man the way she’d
kissed him. It changed everything, that kiss, and to secretly look
upon him naked with lust in her heart would be as close to
Christian sin as she hoped ever to get.

And truly, it was lust she felt for him.
She’d held him in her hand and felt the spell of sex magic rise up
in both of them, the power and the heat and the longing, until his
had spilled into her palm. It had all gone too fast, but she’d
thought of little else all day—and of how such kissing could have
come to a far different end, one in which she had not run away.

Aye, she wanted the Druid boy for her own,
and mayhaps that was the biggest change in her. She no longer could
have sat in a tree all night and blithely watched over lovers in
the glade below, not without thinking about Mychael and his
kiss.

Her only hope, then, was to catch him before
he got in the pool, smooth over the part about following him, and
convince him to return to Carn Merioneth posthaste. Thus she took
off into the woods and arrived at the pool just in time to see him
dive—bare naked—into the water. The curses of “sticks” and “more
sticks” fell from her lips. Thoroughly frustrated, she paced the
shore, waiting for a chance to catch his attention, determined to
make a clean breast of it. She’d followed him, aye, but for his own
good. She’d seen him naked, aye, but purely by accident and not for
long, and with the mist and the night, she’d not seen much. Truly,
not much at all.

Her foot landed on something soft, and she
stopped to see what was cushioning her step. ’Twas his clothes.

Of course, she thought with an exasperated
sigh. They lay in a haphazard pile near a small ring of stones, a
fire ring. She knelt down and brushed her bootprint off his tunic
and, in the brushing, felt Madron’s phial. She paused, but for no
more than half a moment, not long enough to give her reticence a
chance to bloom into restraint before she had Madron’s gift in her
hand.

Settling comfortably onto the leaves and pine
needles carpeting the ground, she crossed her legs, rested her
elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand, and gave the phial a good
looking over. ’Twas sheathed in a leather casing—cow’s leather,
poor thing—with the top sealed by a round of beeswax, a typical
configuration of Madron’s. The leather was an abomination, as
always, but Madron was Druid, not
tylwyth teg
. Llynya
sniffed around the seal. The beeswax came from a hive in the
northernmost reaches of Riverwood, where the bees harvested sweet
clover and heather, and she wondered that Madron traipsed so far
afield.

Carefully, she rolled the beeswax up to
reveal the potion. ’Twasn’t much to look at, darkly green with bits
of whatnot floating on top, but the smell was enough to set her
back. Herbaceous and pungent, it reminded her of nothing so much as
one of Dain Lavrans’s concoctions,
aqua ardens
, water that
burned. The mage had ever been distilling something in his lower
chamber, and often enough it had been
aqua ardens
. The herbs
in the potion were mainly of the cooling variety.

Cautiously, she touched a little of the stuff
to her tongue. Naught happened at first. Then it warmed, giving her
a tingly sensation. The warmth spread as far as such a small taste
could go and cooled. The basic infusion was refreshing, mostly
benign, except for a couple of ingredients: a hint of mushroom
spore she knew to come from an ancient faerie ring in Wroneu Wood,
and a salt she could not precisely define. The herbs were potent
enough to be helpful, but not harmful. On the whole, the potion had
about it the taste of Moira’s
gwin draig
, dragon wine, yet
with an edge Llynya was not sure the Quicken-tree woman would
countenance—except mayhaps for a Druid boy. Moira and Madron oft
had their heads together over one simple or another, and this one
could very well be a compilation of the two women’s. There was
naught of a binding spell about it, and for all its potency, she
did not think it could hurt him. Someone should be with him,
though, if he ever decided to use it. Men were not oft prepared to
go where mushroom spore might take them. ’Twould be best if he
wasn’t alone if that time came.

Her curiosity satisfied, she resealed the
phial and returned it to the pocket of his tunic. The white wool
from his much-altered monk’s habit was patched and worn, roughly
woven and scratchy beneath her fingers. Moira’s patches of quilted
Quicken-tree cloth were luxuriously soft and thick in comparison,
and Llynya found herself wishing all his clothes were so fine. She
folded everything in a pile: tunic, shirt, a buckled baldric,
chausses, braies, and reached to set the cloak on top. ’Twas a good
piece of Quicken-tree cloth, dark green shot through with silver.
But ’twas more than just his cloak, she realized when she lifted
it. Moira’s bundle was wrapped inside. She took a peek, wondering
what the other woman had made him.

A flash of purple caught her eye at first
look. She was ever inclined to investigate things like flashes of
purple and, it seemed, anything having to do with Mychael ab Arawn.
So she lifted a piece of the cloth and discovered, to her surprise,
that Moira was more prone to binding spells than Madron. The
Quicken-tree woman had finished the edge of the cloth with
intricately knotted braidwork known to weave a binding fate. The
stitches along a seam were fine and delicate, worked one over the
other, then back again to recross, the whole of it making a
never-ending knot in one of Moira’s strongest patterns. Then there
was the purple.

Llynya lifted another length of the cloth and
discovered a tunic sleeve, a marvelous sleeve more like her own
than what any of the Quicken-tree wore. To get a better look, she
shook the tunic out, and a cascade of wild iris rippled down into
her lap—purple petals delicately veined in saffron yellow, calyxes
and stems intact, sword-shaped leaves woven into the cloth like
verdured blades.

The plants graced naught but the outside of
his left sleeve, from shoulder to wrist with each corolla pressed
into
a
perfect
fleur
-de-lis.
More of
the sword-shaped leaves had been woven as narrow panels into the
front of the tunic and as a stripe down one of the chausses, their
supple greenness contrasting with the cloth. ’Twas wondrous and
strange that Moira should make him such clothes.

Llynya smoothed her fingers over the tunic.
’Twould keep him warm, much warmer than sheep’s wool, and the
shimmery green cloth would hide him in the forest as well as it did
any of the
tylwyth teg
.

The sound of a splash at the far side of the
pool drew her head up. He was swimming through the shadows where
the cliffs angled out over the water, but even the added layer of
darkness couldn’t hide the pale gold of his hair. He levered
himself up onto a rocky ledge for another dive, and moonlight ran
down the length of his body in a silvery stream.

He was beautiful, she thought, bathed in
mist, the steam curling around his feet and legs and twining about
his torso like a silken veil. She brought a handful of his clothing
to her nose and watched as he dove, entering the water even more
quietly than he’d left it. The scent of violets came to her from
his tunic, telling her his clothes were worked in iris even down to
the roots. The cloak smelled solely of him, of man and musk, and
she brought it closer to her face.

When he surfaced about midway across the
pond, she raised her dreamstone dagger and tightened her hand
around it to make the hilt flash, identifying herself as
Quicken-tree. The colors of the crystal would tell him ’twas Llynya
of the Light-elves. She planned on staying until he left, so she
would as soon let him know he wasn’t alone. To her surprise, after
a moment he flashed her back. ’Twas then she realized he was not
nearly as vulnerable, nor as naked, as she’d thought. A quick check
proved his belt and dagger sheath nowhere to be found.

“Rotters,” she swore under her breath. She’d
been on a fool’s errand. He’d been running with the Liosalfar for
nearly half a year. He did not need her protection. No doubt he
could handle wolves and skraelings, the Sha-shakrieg, and a whole
band of marauding thieves and cut-purses with one arm tied behind
his back. Yet now that she’d so blatantly announced herself, she
couldn’t very well leave, not without looking even more the fool.
So she sat herself down by the fire ring to brave it out and
silently condemned herself as a half-wit ninny.

He slipped beneath the water and did not
surface again until he reached the rocky ledge that made up the
shore. The pool was depthless, or at least the bottom had ne’er
been touched by a Quicken-tree. A pillar of rock did rise to within
ten feet of the surface in the center of the pool, and ’twas from
there that the geyser sometimes blew out its steaming, mineral rich
brew. Mostly the hot water bubbled out of the pillar without
reaching the surface, making the pond warm and pleasant for
swimming even when snow was piled all around—none of which occupied
her thoughts nearly as much as the sight of him rising out of the
water.

“
Malashm
,” he said, wiping his face
and then slicking his hands back over his hair.

“ ’
Lashm
,” she said on a half swallow.
The water glittered on his skin and ran in rivulets down his lean,
angular body, defining the muscles in his arms and chest. Small
waves lapped at his abdomen and broke on the silver and leather
belt buckled around his bare waist. The hilt of his dreamstone
dagger glowed blue and white beneath the surface of the pond,
lighting the jut of the hipbone from which it hung and probably
more, if she’d dared to look, which she did not.

He didn’t seem the least surprised to see
her, or the least self-conscious about his undressed state, which
disconcerted her almost as much as the way he looked, like a pagan
water god ascending from his kingdom in the mere.

“Is everything aright at the keep?” he
asked.

“Aye,” she managed to get out, then wished
she’d prevaricated a bit. Of course he would think she’d been sent
by Trig to find him, and for certes she’d given herself away by
admitting there was no emergency that had sent her out in the
middle of the night and that demanded his speedy return.

He was quiet for a moment, his gaze holding
hers across the water. His right hand had settled around his dagger
hilt. His left was splayed across his midsection in an absent
caress that did damnably odd things to her insides every time her
gaze slipped the least bit. No doubt he was mulling over her reply
and realizing she’d come of her own accord and not on orders—a fact
proven by his next question.

“Are you staying for a while?” he asked,
cocking his head as if he was not quite sure what to make of her
being there.

“A while,” she said as nonchalantly as
possible, as if she had merely happened by with no particular
plans.

“Would you watch this, then?” He unbuckled
his belt and laid it on the rocks, dagger and all. “I’ll swim
better without it.”

At her nod, he dove back into the water with
a graceful arc and swam again to the far side of the pool.

Left at a loose end, she could think of
nothing more sensible to do than build a fire and gather a goodly
pile of sticks and fagots. The air was growing cooler and had a
certain crispness that ofttimes heralded snow. ’Twould probably not
reach Carn Merioneth or the lower reaches of Riverwood, but Bala
Bredd was a mountain lake, and the mountains could well be dusted
by morning. She lifted her nose into the night and closed her eyes.
Aye, there would be snow, and soon.

He finished his second lap of the geyser pool
and started another, swimming with powerful, even strokes—back and
forth, back and forth—until the fire was crackling and she’d long
since stretched out on her back on a makeshift pallet of their
cloaks, to watch the stars rather than him. Now and then she
wondered if he would swim the night away, but mostly she let the
rhythm of his strokes fade into the background as she tracked the
wanderers across the heavens and waited for his return.