Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (39 page)

“Sixteen years,” he answered her, and at that
she shifted her position in the tree, revealing her face between
the leaves. She was marked with a blue stripe, a diagonal line of
paint crossing from her brow to her chin, as on the others he had
seen. Still, for a moment the similarity of features fooled him:
the shape of her nose, her mouth, the angle of her cheekbones, the
curve of her brow and cheeks and chin. Then the differences became
clear. Hair that should have been light was a rich dark brown and
full of a wild mélange of sticks and leaves. Eyes that should have
been gray were green and far too innocent to be Avallyn Le’s. The
woman herself was slight, hardly more than a girl.

Disappointment settled in him like a lead
weight. “From through the Weir Gate?” she asked, too young to
control the excitement in her voice.

“Think what you will,” he told her, turning
away, unable to bear looking at her. Pain clutched him, clawing its
way up out of the abyss where for sixteen years he’d kept it sealed
with silent fury. Death it would be for all of them. Her voice, her
damn voice had tricked him into a moment of hope, and for that they
all would die.

Avallyn!

He sank back down onto the fallen branch, his
shoulders slumping forward, his chin dropping to his chest. The
wild girl wanted to probe him, did she? Well, let her look her
fill. Let her poke around in his mind and tremble at the terrors
she would find there.

He relaxed his guard, his hands coming up to
cover his face.
Avallyn
. Time was mocking him, sending her
likeness through a stranger.

He had to get back.

Llynya heard his muffled groan, smelled his
suffering, and wondered if the man was mad. Emotions had crossed
his face like quicksilver, from rage to wonder, to an unknown
victory that had lit like fire in his eyes, and then to ultimate
defeat.

“Why are you here?” she asked, and received
naught for a reply. “Are you lost?”

The last question elicited a strangled cry
from the monk. Deranged, for certes, she thought, but yet of
another time, and she would know from whence. The trees did not
lie. He was a danger.

Daring to go a step beyond caution, she took
a breath and held it, a tried and true method for strengthening
deep-scent. Breath after gently held breath, she searched through
the void for a hint of something more, and was near ready to pass
out or give up when the something more came to her. ’Twas faint, so
faint, a mere sigh passing through the vast emptiness, not even
enough to name as a scent. ’Twas enough to follow, though, and she
did, drawing it deeper inside herself. Within the moist confines of
her lungs, the scent ripened to a full breath of the ether.
Success. The grasp of the timeless stuff wound around inside her,
tenderly at first, a welcome relief from the hard search, but soon
it tightened. She gasped a fresh breath—too late!—trying to release
herself and could not. From full breath it strengthened into a
wind, taking harder hold, and from wind to storm—
sín
—pulling
her inexorably in its wake, racing her toward the dark edge that
suddenly loomed up ahead. No void at all, she realized with growing
terror, but a fathomless canyon snaking across the inner landscape
of the man’s past. Light streaked past her, shooting up out of the
abyss. One final bolt burst upon her mind in a blinding flash and
she was over the edge... falling... falling... falling through
time.

Nennius heard a pained gasp and jerked his
gaze to the trees to find the wild girl slipping from the branch.
He lunged for her, and ’twas to him she fell before one of her own
could reach her. The others came streaming out of the alders,
dropping down into the clearing with bows drawn and swords at the
ready, but his blade was at her throat before they landed.

She stirred within his fierce embrace, coming
around from her little journey in his mind. He’d been probed by
better—in truth, he’d had his memories ransacked and raped more
than once, before he’d learned to wall them off—but he’d ne’er been
invaded by one with such a light step. A skill such as hers could
prove useful, if he lived long enough to use it.

His gaze raked the cadre of soldiers
surrounding him. Nemeton’s wild folk were taller than he’d been
able to discern with them in the trees, fair featured and slender.
One had long pale hair. The others were dark like the girl. All had
blue-painted faces. Sunlight and shadows mixed across the shifting
colors of their clothing, allowing them to fade into the backdrop
of the forest. He could scarce keep all six of them in view.

“Hold,” he growled, drawing the girl tighter
against him. She struggled and he stopped her with a bare bite of
the blade against her jugular. Not enough to cut, but enough to
assure her of the possibility of death.

“Ye draw yer last breath when ye draw her
blood,” the pale-haired man said, unsheathing a dagger with his
left hand even as he held a sword in his right. Both were deadly
looking blades, razor sharp, each edge glinting with a streak of
light. In the dagger, the light continued on into the crystalline
hilt and flashed from between the man’s fingers, violet edged in
blue. Nennius had not seen its like before.

“I’m taking the girl and leaving. Try to stop
me, and she dies,” he swore, pressing closer to the alder tree at
his back. The light from the crystal hilt was preternaturally
bright, near as bright as the sun. He wanted to raise his arm in
front of his face, but dared not remove his dagger from the girl’s
throat.

“And where ye be goin’?” the pale-haired man
asked, coming a step closer, the fool.

Nennius pushed his knife a hairbreadth deeper
into the girl’s skin, and the man stopped. “The Weir Gate, the
wormhole,” he ground out. “She’ll take me there.”

A quick look passed between his opponents,
and in the next instant the crystal appeared to shatter, filling
the glade with a thousand sharp, swirling daggers of light. They
stabbed into him, and he cried out, dropping the girl. He tried to
escape by turning away, but could not. The light was everywhere,
glancing off every leaf, every limb, in a dazzling, dizzying
display. It flowed over him and cut into him and forced his gaze
back to the very heart of the blade. A pulsing brightness flickered
to life in the hilt’s core, the gleaming crests of waves on a
storm-tossed sea. They crashed against a rocky shore and dragged
him under into darkness with the moon’s pulling tide.

Llynya looked at the man collapsed beside
her, still shaken from what she’d seen in his memories and ever so
grateful for Trig’s timely cast of dreamstone sleep.

“Disarm him,” the captain said to the others,
striding forward. “Check him from the top o’ his head to the
bottoms of his feet and take every weapon ye find.” He knelt by
Llynya and smoothed his palm over her brow, checking her. “Ye
slipped.”

’Twas a show of concern and a condemnation
all in one, and as much consideration as she was going to get. She
could have told him she’d done far more than slip, but that
admission would do naught but work against her. She’d proven rash
enough for one day without letting him know she’d once again leaped
before she’d looked and near done herself in.

“He’s from another time, Trig, I saw it
through the deep-scent. He’s been through the wormhole.”

Trig’s gaze narrowed on her. “Aye, and that
must ’ave been a pleasant trip for ye.”

“Scary at first,” she confessed, “but then it
evened out.” Evened out into more of the endless fall, a weightless
traverse of space and years, the same that she felt when her
connection with Morgan grew strong and threatened her with
despair.

She knew how to find him now. She’d seen the
way of it in Nennius Corvus Gei’s memories. The paths of time clung
to the monk, if monk he was, soft shreds of knowledge twined
together into a wavelike ribbon that connected him from where he’d
been to where he was.

Morgan would have left such a trail.

“So he’s a traveler,” Trig said, looking the
man over. “I knew Nemeton’s daughter was in this. Mayhaps ’tis
Madron I should bring out to question him. Like her father, she’s
ever been waiting for one of the lost magi to return.”

“He’s no mage, Trig. He’s got violence all
around him, through and through.”

“He’s got naught to do with skraelings
either,” the captain said. “E’en I can smell that much. Well, we’ll
not learn more ’til he wakes, but for certes there was reason
enough for the trees to hold him and reason enough for us to do the
same. Pwyll and Lien.” He turned to two of the scouts. “You take
the day watch on him. He’ll come ’round quick enough, and we’ve got
more than him to worry about. Llynya, it’s back to Merioneth with
ye. Kynor, go with her. The rest of ye, up in the trees. We’ll
check the border to Afon Mawddach.”

~ ~ ~

Downwind, Lacknose Dock watched the
Quicken-tree emerge from their brambly copse and take off to the
south. Grumbling started in the ranks as the greater Liosalfar
troop disappeared into the trees, grumbling he silenced with the
baring of his teeth and a hand signal that promised death to any
who disobeyed his orders. Frey Dock, his second, reinforced the
promise with a threat of his own. Caerlon had sent them into
Riverwood for one reason, to get the aetheling. When the skraelings
struck the holds of the Quicken-tree, it would be in force, from
all directions, with total victory as their goal, a victory Caerlon
had told them would be theirs if only two of the warriors could be
captured aforehand and taken out of the fight.

Lacknose had delivered the mewling
Wyrm-master, and the aetheling would soon be his. Blackhand Dock
had lost in making his bid for finding her in the deep dark, yet
there would be battle and blood aplenty once Caerlon had his final
prize.

“Caerlon the Clever,” Lacknose muttered to
himself. Too clever by half, and too clever for any of their goods
in the Wars, but the twisted princeling had finally conjured
something aright. He’d brought them Slott from Inishwrath. There
was naught like the Troll King to strike fear in the hearts of men
and elves, and while skraelings had once been the former, there was
no doubt that the Quicken-tree and all their kind were still of the
tylwyth teg
. A thousand nights of sweet supper they would
make for the Thousand Skulled One, until the great king was Slott
of the Two Thousand Skulls.

The Light-elf warrior he sought strode out of
the copse with another Quicken-tree, a young one, and Lacknose
signaled for his soldiers to move out. Two Liosalfar had been left
with a prisoner in the alders. He set four of the skraelpack to
their murder. Quick and silent, they knew, the way they’d killed
the two Quicken-tree scouts to the north that morn without a
warhorn blown. By nightfall, Rhuddlan’s captain would know he’d
lost the day’s battle with five dead; until then, he wouldn’t even
know his border had been breached.

Lacknose fingered the phial hanging off his
belt. Caerlon’s smoke potion had rotted through the bramble with
the same ease as it rotted through the undergrowth of Riverwood. A
fine weapon it was and a fine bit of strategy to rot the trees
right out from under the
tylwyth teg
.

Careful to keep downwind—for Quicken-tree
noses put a dog’s to shame—Lacknose, Frey, and the one other
Dockalfar, Ratskin, guided the skraelings on a parallel course with
the aetheling and her companion for a quarter league. Divide and
conquer, isolate and destroy, was the Dockalfar’s method. The trees
thinned out the farther they moved from the river, and as they
approached a small clearing, Lacknose knew the time and place for
their ambush had come. He lifted his hand to signal the attack, and
a horn blast broke the forest silence. ’Twas an elfin warhorn,
calling the Quicken-tree to arms and battle. The Liosalfar maid
turned with her sword drawn, and the horn sounded again, coming
from the alder copse.

Impossible! he swore to himself, that two
young Quicken-tree could outfight four of his blooded skraelings.
With a low growl, he sicced his minions on the aetheling and her
scout.

“
Khardeen!
” she cried, seeing him and
his soldiers rising up out of the forest gloom and bearing down
upon her. “Kynor! To the trees!”

The first horn calls were joined by others
from the south, but even a hundred horn blasts would not save her.
In a trice she was surrounded, before she and the boy could reach
the nearby birches, and Lacknose would have had them both—the
aetheling for Caerlon and the boy for Slott’s supper—if the girl
hadn’t pulled an elfin trick.

“To Merioneth! Quickety-split!” she said to
the boy, then herself disappeared into the woods in a twinkling,
breaking through the skraelpack line before the scurvy beasts even
knew she’d moved. The boy did the same, heading west to the castle
on the coast. The aetheling had gone south, and Lacknose went after
her, calling for Frey and Ratskin to follow. Dockalfar or
Liosalfar, the trick was the same, and no skraeling could do it.
Nor could one fleet-footed sprite outrun three Dark-elves. The boy
they would have another day.

Llynya ran with her sword drawn, not daring
to sheathe it. Leaves of gold and green swirled across the ground
in her wake as she leaped low-slung brambles and dodged trees with
the speed of a falcon. Half fly she did. Wind tore across her face
and spread her hair out behind her. ’Twas a pace she couldn’t keep,
being far better for running circles around men than outrunning
Dockalfar.

Dockalfar! And skraelings in Riverwood.

Skraelings, while deadly, could not catch a
Quicken-tree in the forest except on the end of an arrow, and then
only if they moved with due speed. Kynor had a good chance of
making Merioneth, but she was fearfully close to being caught by
the three Dockalfar who had taken after her.