Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (38 page)

Damn grateful she was to be let out of Carn
Merioneth, if only for an hour or so. Mychael ab Arawn had started
a turmoil in her heart that she scarce could bear. She’d sent
prayers of thanks to the gods when he’d left for Lanbarrdein the
day before, for there had been some doubt that he would.

She’d expected him to he angry when he awoke
and realized she was gone. She had not expected the storm that had
descended on Merioneth with his return from Bala Bredd. He’d stood
in the bailey and cried her name, until not a soul in the castle
could doubt what they had done.

She’d weathered the storm by hiding on the
wall-walk with Naas. And then he’d left with Tabor, and the storm
had passed, except for the havoc wreaked on her heart. She’d done
the right thing, of that she had no doubt. Her only doubt was
whether she would survive it. Ailfinn would come, though, and set
her free.

Until then, she would be haunted by memories
of Bala Bredd. Already they slipped into her dreams and wound
through her days, remembrances of his touch, his kisses, until all
she wanted was to put her mouth once more to his and fall into the
wondrous wonder that was Rhiannon’s son and no one else. She wanted
him pressed against her, to feel the lithe strength of his body and
the heat of his skin. She wanted to taste him and feel his breath
flow into her. She wanted to kiss him and love him again—and she
wanted it with a fierce ache she couldn’t assuage. No one else
would do. She, a Liosalfar warrior, had become little more than a
love-bit maid, a sorely love-bit maid. Pitting her skills against
the Riverwood captive’s wits would be a welcome diversion from the
sorrows of such love.

Trig had warned her that the captive was a
bald Culdee like Helebore, but to Llynya’s relief, all similarity
ceased with his religious bent and his pate. The monk in the alders
had fine white teeth he’d bared at the scouts, and a firm mouth
he’d used to voice his threats, of which he had many, some so
bloodcurdling—especially those detailing the methods of
evisceration he would apply to each and every one of his captors
that he caught—that a few of the younger scouts had not held up.
’Twas another reason Trig had been forced to bring her. Having been
blooded in battle, she was unlikely to falter under a frightful
diatribe no matter how gruesome.

She climbed to another branch to better her
view. Below her, the monk sat on a downed limb, his finely arched
eyebrows drawn together in a fierce scowl, his dark eyes flashing
in icy rage. ’Twas a wonder to her that the trees had held him at
all. From what she’d heard, he’d done everything except rip the
alders out by their roots to get free. He’d thrashed about the
enclosing coppice until Trig had feared for his safety, though all
to no avail. The forest would have him for its own, until Rhuddlan
released him. How he’d gotten in with the bramble nearly complete
was apparently a question Madron would answer. Trig had found faint
signs of enchantment not far from the alders, on a path leading to
the giant’s cairn where the Bredd flowed into the earth.

Nay, he was not like Helebore, Llynya
thought, looking him over. The man’s body was not crooked and bent,
but strong and straight. His face was not wrinkled with age and
stained with debauchery, but was fashioned with clean, angry lines.
’Twas no young man’s face, but ’twas not so old either, despite the
loss of his hair. As a child in the woods, she had used a child’s
form of deep-scent a few times on men and found that those who
skulked through forests usually had hearts full of hunger or fear,
depending on whether they were the hunter or the hunted. The monks
traversing the woods were equally divided between piety and
avarice, incense and ale. Some few had lust on their minds. She’d
come across a group of lepers once, and they’d smelled of slow
death, rotten flesh, and pain. Moira had shooed her away and then
gone back with
rasca
to tend them. Princes smelled of
battles fought, pilgrims’ thoughts were of the Christian God.
Traders smelled of the road and their goods. ’Twould be interesting
with her now greater skill to see what this one was about.

He knew they were there, a half-dozen of them
hidden in the trees. She could smell the awareness on him, see the
subtle cocking of his ears and the tension in his muscles, held so
still beneath his brown cloak.

She slipped down another branch to bring
herself closer to him, and Trig signaled a warning. The man, too,
shifted in his alertness, his head coming up a bare degree. No
fool, this, if he’d sensed her silent step.

She had a bit of lavender in one of her
baldric pouches, but not enough to set her apart from what grew
wild in the woods. She’d not needed it of late. ’Twas as if
Mychael’s kiss had turned her mind from malaise—though she would be
the last to suggest that the turn had been for the better. A fine
choice it was between malaise and lovesickness, for the two were
much alike, except one could be ameliorated with lavender and the
other by naught but a kiss.

As for the man, he smelled clean and of the
forest, rare enough for a monk. The Quicken-tree had brought him
seedcake and catkins each day, and he smelled of those too. The
trees had given him plenty of room to prowl. He’d paced a path from
one end to the other of his arboreal prison, and the scents of
crushed vegetation rose up around him in a green swirl.

She inhaled more deeply on her next breath
and let her eyes drift closed. He had distilled salts on him and
dried meat—her nose wrinkled in distaste—which explained the smell
of blood. His wineskin held grape of uncommon strength; the scent
alone was nearly intoxicating, fruit with a sharp, pungent
underlayer. His heart held little more than an all-consuming anger.
He had pouches of herbs, some she recognized and, oddly, some she
did not. After the herbs came the first trace of deep-scent, a
redolent melange of spices from faraway lands, saltwater seas, and
the smell of dust coming off an endless, winding road. A
pilgrimage, she would have thought, except the spices she smelled
were from beyond any point of Christian pilgrimage. They spoke of
the east to her, a place far, far away, past the goddess mother
mountain and the great grass plains, a place where no man of Wales
had ever gone.

Curious, she leaned closer. The leaves around
her fluttered in warning. She wondered at that and anchored herself
more firmly to the branch. Slowly, she breathed him in, one layer
after another, her nose sifting through the thousand mundane scents
of life and his more exotic wanderings, until she came to the end
of them into a space of nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Not even the smell of his anger was in that
space.

She opened her eyes and gave him a quizzical
glance. Was he blocking her? And if so, how? Her training was only
half-completed at best, but Aedyth had not mentioned any way to
block scent. Llynya tried again and did no better. He had an angry
present, a few rich and exotic years before that, and then nothing,
as if his life had barely begun.

Strange, she thought. No man stepped full
grown onto the earth’s stage. Every man had a past—except this
one.

Reason enough, mayhaps, for the trees to
tremble and keep him from Merioneth.

From the other side of the clearing, Trig
questioned her with a hand signal. Unready to concede defeat, she
shrugged and made a motion to wait. Riverwood had captured a fine
mystery indeed. Death stole a man’s future. What could steal a
man’s past? Naught that she could think of, for even if a man
forgot himself and all that had come in his life, his past did not
forget him. It clung to him, a gossamer sheath impressed upon his
soul.

She looked at the captive more closely,
wondering. He had a present, and his future was proven by his every
passing breath. Within the protective copse ’twas certain he would
live to see another day. ’Twas only his past he’d lost.

Or escaped.

“
Shadana
,” she whispered, drawing
herself back with sudden understanding. ’Twas time. He’d lost his
past by coming through time.

A surge of excitement coursed into her veins,
and in a twinkling she’d dropped down another branch. There should
be a scent somewhere. Hadn’t she smelled as much on Mychael? The
faint trace of ether from out of the weir that yet lingered on him?
If what she thought was true, this man should have even more, not
nothing.

At her movement, the alderwood captive
suddenly turned, staring up into the thickly woven tree branches.
She stayed perfectly still, balancing on a supple limb, watching
him. With his head now in the sunlight, she could see what forest
shadows had hidden from sight—he was not bald, not truly, not like
Helebore had been. An all-over stubble sprouted on his pate like
dark spring grass. His head had been shaved.

For piety’s sake? she wondered. Or for
subterfuge?

Just how great a threat was this man who had
worked so hard to find a way through the bramble, and whose lack of
hair disguised what she knew should be there—the telltale stripe of
the weir?

She closed her eyes and took a breath,
quickly discarding the initial scents, working her way toward the
void. Be careful! she warned herself, remembering what had happened
at the well with Mychael.

But nothing happened in that empty space that
lay beyond rich spice and road dust. Nothing.

Frustrated with her failure, and more than a
little irritated with the monk, she stepped to the next lower limb,
barely above him now, barely out of his reach. Around the glade, a
half-dozen arrows were instantly nocked into bows with a
simultaneous swoosh from quivers and click of ash on yew. Out of
the corner of her eye, she saw Trig’s glare and his signal to get
back up into the trees, a signal she ignored at her peril—but
ignore it she did. She would know this man.

Nennius felt the sudden rise of menace in the
glade, recognizing full well the sound of bows being drawn, just as
he’d recognized that one of his captors was probing him in a
strange way, touching him with the perceptions of an extra sense.
That one lurked too near. Mayhaps ’twas time to give Nemeton’s wild
folk a taste of fear.

He slowly rose to his feet, his hand slipping
inside his cloak for the dagger sheathed on his belt. They’d been
too quick before to impale, but after three days of listening to
them scurrying about the trees, he knew which way to toss his
blade. He would have this one. His hand closed on the haft.

“Who are you?” An imperious feminine voice
sounded from above, freezing him with his knife half-drawn. “And
what brings you into Riverwood?”

Regally disdainful, haughty beyond wisdom,
and full of reckless courage—he knew that dulcet-toned voice.

“State your purpose, stranger,” she blithely
commanded, and his heart raced. Memories tightened in his chest. He
scarce could breathe. How could it be that she was here? In this
time. In this place.

She had been walking away from him, her cloak
billowing in the wind, the sun glinting off the golden strands of
her hair, the sand rising off the dunes.

How close had she still been when the vicious
storm had hit and sent time snaking off its course, sucking him
back to this primitive age?

“Speak your name now.”

“Nennius,” he croaked, then remembered she
would not know him by such. “Corvus,” he amended. “Corvus Gei.”

Only she, of everyone he knew, had never
trembled at the name. After all these years, would she still deny
him his due?

“What brings you to Riverwood, monk?”

Monk? Did she not recognize him then, even by
name, the underworld lord of the whole friggin’ parsec? The weir
was a conflagration that could nip and sear a man’s or a woman’s
memories, but even with him dressed in plain brown robes, he would
have expected some spark of recognition from her. They’d spent so
much time at each other’s throats.

“Show yourself, Avallyn Le Severn,” he
demanded, using his own imperious voice and taking a step
forward.

Six arrows shot into the ground at his feet,
coming from all sides and forming a barrier between him and the
tree that held her. The sound of six more being nocked and drawn
quickly followed. His nemesis had always inspired an obscene amount
of loyalty.

He’d followed the river with her name from
its source to the sea when he’d first come to England, thinking the
river was the reason he’d been led to Wales, the land of the Cymry.
But the river had revealed nothing of the weir, nor of why it held
her name, the royal bitch he would have once given his life
for.

Love he’d offered her, and been denied.

“Avallyn,” he warned again, searching the
tree above him, looking through leaves and limbs for a glimpse of
her. A green shod foot came into view, a boot with silver rings
interlaced at the short cuff. A length of slender leg followed,
with a tunic made from the gray-green cloth all the wild folk wore.
He strained to see her face, his breath held against the damn hope
building in his chest. Could it really be that she’d been snatched
out of time along with him?

“How long have you been here, monk?”

His hopes rose even higher at her question.
The wild folk knew exactly how long he’d been there, three days.
The alders had no sooner closed the path than the scouts had
converged on him. Yet she asked, and in her mouth, the question
took on new depth.

How long had he been there? Long enough for
his fortune to have been stolen and his armies dispersed or taken
over by one of his rivals, probably Strachan, the filth, or Van the
Wretched. Long enough to have learned patience, a virtue he
singularly lacked in the future. Long enough to have planned his
return and the deaths of those who had sent him here.

Aye, he’d been in the past long enough.