Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (40 page)

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the
Dark-elves split up to flank her. In a lightning-quick dash back to
the north, she changed direction, but three were too many to
escape. They countered every move she made and began drawing close,
tightening their circle. When there was no place left for her to
run, she turned to fight, her sword in one hand, her dreamstone
dagger in the other.

“
Shadana
,” she prayed, trying to watch
her back and her front and both sides at once. She’d ne’er seen
Dockalfar before—all of them supposedly having died in the Wars—and
they were more awful than anything she’d imagined, sharp-toothed
and dirty, with a faint green cast to their skin. The biggest one
had no nose, only a rough piece of silver to cover the hole in his
face. Trolls, she might have thought,
uffern
trolls, except
for a certain fey cast to their faces and their speed. For certes
naught but an elf could have caught her.

But the smell of them!. Murder and mayhem and
rot. ’Twas all she could do to keep from retching.

The two smaller ones slipped coils of rope
from across their shoulders, while the bigger one sidled closer,
sword in hand. She lashed out at him with her long blade, forcing
him back while trying to keep the other two in sight. She darted
and dodged, but on her fourth parry with the noseless elf, the
other two snaked their ropes around her wrists and dragged her to
the ground.

“Sticks!” She squirmed and cursed and got in
a couple of good kicks before they were able to bind her ankles.
Her heart was beating so fast ’twas near to bursting. Captured.
She’d been captured. She swore again to keep the sob from escaping
her throat.

The noseless one took her dreamstone dagger
and pushed her hair up away from her ears. He let out a pleased
grunt at what he saw. His gaze locked with hers.

“Ye should’a stayed in Yr Is-ddwfn,
aetheling, with the rest o’ yer pointy-eared kind.” He spat on the
ground and rose to his feet, leaving the other two to finish
trussing her up after Ratskin had taken her sword. They wrapped a
length of dirty cloth over her mouth, and she almost fainted from
the explosion of rank and fetid smells.

“Lacknose,” one called out. “She’s turnin’
blue.”

The big Dark-elf came back and looked at her.
“I’d turn blue too, Ratskin, if ye wrapped yer filthy food sling
over me mouth. Frey, get it off her.”

Like the other two, Frey was blond-haired,
but was missing an eye. Ratskin had all his parts with the addition
of soft gray hair growing in patches on his face. Some dire
happenstance had befallen them that they were all thus
disfigured.

Frey took the sling off her, but immediately
replaced it with his own only slightly less rancid one. Ratskin’s
he used as an extra binding around her legs. Ropes bound her arms
to her torso.

The horn to the north had grown silent, but
Trig’s yet sounded from the south, the calls moving toward the
alder copse. He would pass her by, unless the smell of the
skraelings alerted him. The skraelpack had caught up with her and
the Dockalfar. She could see them gathering ’round Frey and
Ratskin, peering over the Dark-elves for a look at their
prisoner.

They were terrifying to a soldier, their
teeth barely contained within their overlarge jaws. A few wore mail
hauberks. Others had boiled-hide gambesons sporting spiked bosses
to protect them. Each was fully armed with spears, daggers, and
swords. Two of those leaning over Ratskin had morning stars looped
over their belts. A few others, she realized, were female, as
equally armed as the men and with no more pity in their gazes.

Lacknose growled an order in a language she
barely recognized as derived from the ancient common tongue. ’Twas
harsh in his mouth, a scramble of hard letters and short sounds,
but the skraelings responded as one, falling into line and heading
toward the river. Frey slung her over his back like a sack, and
everyone made way for him to take his place at the front of the
pack.

A new chorus of horns sounded from the west,
from Carn Merioneth, answering Trig’s call. Kynor, she fervently
hoped.

“That puts ’em on two sides of us, mayhaps
three,” Ratskin grumbled.

“He’s right, ye know.” Frey looked to
Lacknose. “And every scout they ’ad in Riverwood is headin’ in this
direction by now.”

“Aye, but we’ll not be in Riverwood for them
to find,” .Lacknose said. “There’s a hole into Lanbarrdein not a
quarter league hence. We’ll lose them in the dark.” With a barked
command, he doubled their pace.

Doomed, Llynya thought. She was doomed.

~ ~ ~

Nennius stood over the four dead soldiers,
his breath coming hard, his arms throbbing from the force of the
blows he’d delivered with killing strength. The sword he’d borrowed
dripped blood at his side. He shook his head, trying to clear the
last of the pale-haired man’s friggin’ enchantment from his brain.
He’d come back to consciousness in his alder prison with naught but
two scouts left to guard him, two who were obviously not up to the
deed. Behind him, the two wild boys were sprawled in the grass,
wounded, but not dead.

One—Pwyll, he was called—had been shot in the
leg with an arrow. Poisoned, by the looks of the wound and the
boy’s face. He’d gone white with sweat dampening his dark hair and
pouring off his brow. He’d been the first to fall from his perch,
and ’twas his sword Nennius had taken. The other one, Lien, was
more sorely hurt. He’d fought a brace of the enemy in the trees and
jumped to Pwyll’s rescue when two more of the smelly brutes had
broken through the alder wall. Thus they’d fought side by side,
Nennius and Lien, and killed all four of the soldiers while Pwyll
had blown his horn.

The other wild folk were returning. Their
warhorns echoed through the forest, coming closer, but Nennius
doubted if they would arrive in time to save Lien. The scout was
losing blood from a sword cut on his side, lots of blood. An hour
earlier, Nennius would have finished the boy off himself. Now he
stood and watched and hoped the scout would live. To his practical
advantage and to save his own skin, allies had been made out of
enemies. ’Twould be a shame to lose them nearly as quickly as
they’d been converted.

One of the deformed attackers twitched, a
death spasm, and Nennius stuck him again for good measure. Then he
walked back to the boys, collecting the food they’d brought to him
at daybreak.

Holding first one and then the other, he gave
them each a drink of the sweet, fresh-smelling water they had plied
him with each day. Pwyll managed to swallow. Lien could not. For
himself, Nennius took a swig of brandy off the flask he’d carried
from Ynys Enlli. Stiff stuff, it probably would have killed the
scouts on the spot, and he wanted them to live.

Aye, he dearly wanted them to live.

To that end, he took Pwyll’s crystal dagger
and made a swift incision on the boy’s thigh where the arrow
protruded. Once he’d located the barbs, he extracted the arrowhead
with a minimum of damage. He poured some of the sweet water into
the wound—the stuff had a quality about it that made Nennius
believe it could do naught but help—and bound the wound with a
strip of cloth he cut off Pwyll’s cloak. Suturing would have to
wait.

For the other boy, there was not so much he
could do. He cleansed the gash in Lien’s side with the sweet water,
bound him with green cloth, and wrapped him in his cloak to keep
him warm before sitting down beside him. ’Twas thus Nennius
arranged himself to be found by the returning wild folk, with a
blooded blade lying across his lap and a dying wild boy cradled in
his arms.

F
lowstone rolled in
smoothly rounded waves down the narrow passageway of Mychael’s
descent, a frozen river cresting and eddying in the blue light of
his crystal dagger. ’Twas slow going, but shorter than retracing
his and Tabor’s path through the Canolbarth. Singing along as the
pony-master was, Mychael doubted if Tabor would note his leaving
until he reached the Cavern of the Scrying Pool.

A botch that was, he thought. Since the
freeing of the
pryf,
naught had been seen in the pool. Steam
rose and wafted as it always had, but the water was murky, swirled
through with muddy currents that even Madron and Moira had not been
able to clear. In the spring, Madron had taken him there on
occasion to teach him the songs of his mother and the chants of her
father: songs to open windows onto faraway places and chants to
guide those who sought to reach them. Nemeton had been such a
seeker. Madron said he had traveled far and wide before coming to
Wales with a Lord D’Arbois. On that journey, happening on the place
where the Wye and Llynfi rivers met, he’d called a halt and thereby
saved the retinue from a blizzard of uncommon fury—or so the tale
had always been told. For three days the snows had fallen, rent
with lightning and resounding with thunder. The hours before each
dawn had been filled with rains of ice, the nights in between lost
in banks of fog. When ’twas over, Nemeton had prophesied great
victories for whoever ruled the small keep on the bluffs above the
rivers. D’Arbois had taken the prophesy to heart, routing the old
baron and winning Wydehaw for his own.

Sín
. The making of storms. Madron had
tried to teach him the way of it. ’Twas a skill the witch held in a
small degree, and apparently he held in none. Mychael had yet to
raise a wisp of fog under even the best of circumstances. Just as
well, to his way of thinking. Godless witchery was not his goal,
though Madron had assured him there was no godlessness in all of
nature or witchery.

Wales, she’d gone on to say, had been her
father’s truest home, and Wydehaw his truest place in Wales. He’d
built a tower at the castle and studied there for many years before
tragedy struck and sent him north. He chose to stay in Merioneth to
be close to the last of the Magus Druid Priestesses and the
long-forgotten men of Anglesey. And in all her father’s travels,
she’d said, he’d laid his traces of magic to mark the wonders he’d
found.

As to his sanctuary, Madron had been the one
to show Mychael the mark “
Ammon
” wound through Ddrei Glas’s
and Ddrei Goch’s serpentine scales. It was part of a map Nemeton
had been laboring to piece together before his death, the journals
of which had been lost when Carn Merioneth had fallen. She’d
searched both Anglesey and Wydehaw many times in the past fifteen
year’s and come up with naught. Nor had she been able to find
anything in Carn Merioneth since their return in the spring, though
she and Moira had searched the place clear through, and even Naas
had lent a hand.

Mychael and Lavrans had spoken of Nemeton’s
tower, the Hart of Wydehaw Castle, of its Druid Door and the great
celestial sphere in its eyrie, and of the walls carved with all
manner of words and numbers in receipts and obscure formulae.
Mychael greatly desired to search the Hart for himself, being well
aware of the inherent sanctuary of castle towers, and mayhaps there
would yet come a chance for him to delve the mysteries the bard had
unraveled, though how he would convince the current lord to allow
him access to Nemeton’s tower remained to be seen. Having gone from
a Welsh monastery into the otherworldly realm of the deep dark, he
knew little of the English and even less of Marcher lords. Lavrans
had given him the secret of the Druid Door, and provided he could
actually open the mighty thing, that deed alone could suffice.

As for his lessons from Madron, with each
turn he’d taken toward madness, he’d been less inclined to spend
time with the witch. He was Druid, aye, but no priest as she would
have him, and no witch of nature’s ways. He knew words of power and
the power of a man’s voice raised in chant; he’d felt such power at
Strata Florida every evensong, at every spoken prayer. Between the
Christians, and the Druids, and the Quicken-tree with all their
many songs, he saw no difference in putting a voice to whatever
sacred thing they would honor. But for himself, he feared what had
chosen him was neither honorable nor sacred, but was only power—raw
and unyielding. He was a strange mix, and mayhaps knowing none
could claim him as their own, all the gods had abandoned him, left
him to the dragons, to fight and die with the beasts.

The worms were their spawn, the Weir Gate
their doing. Since Rhuddlan had sealed the tunnels to the great
wormhole, his wildness had only grown. In the past at least he had
been able to find a measure of peace in the smaller weirs, which
had since disappeared.

Peace, the promise of gods.

Nay, he’d not told Llynya all of the
wormholes and their dangers, and he’d told her naught of the bliss,
of the stars he’d seen; nor of the turnings of the Earth and how
the timeless flow moved inside him in the weir; nor how the tides
once washed through him, a full cycle, and had shown him the course
of the Moon. ’Twas the sense of salvation itself he’d found, to
slide into the Earth’s wisdoms and from there into the Heaven’s. He
would give much to sink himself into that peace once more. Yet in
the end, the dragon’s path always led to war, to war and the river
of blood. That truth, too, was in the mighty weir, swirling around
the core on smoky tendrils of dragon’s breath.

Sanctuary might be found there... or battle.
For certes battle would be found in the damson shaft if Rhuddlan
had broken the Sha-shakrieg web and gone on. Mychael knew he would
then be bound to follow and to fight. Thrice cursed he was, with
the dragon’s gift of war, the Merioneth priestess blood that had
brought him hence, and that he had always been as he was
now—alone.

He rounded a curve into a steeper descent and
bore right along a narrow ledge that took him above the flowstone.
The smooth expanse of rock wound downward at an ever sharper angle
until it joined the gigantic flow of opalescent gemstone that made
up the north wall of Lanbarrdein. The ledge skirted the flow and
dropped down into a cavern on the other side of the north wall.
’Twas called Dripshank Well for the maze of dripshanks pillaring
and arching across its main room, and because of the sinkholes that
beaded its surface like a string of pearls. ’Twas through Dripshank
that the River Bredd found its way into Lanbarrdein, and he could
hear the river running far below him in the dark. Mychael had
traversed the cavern’s trails many times, it being a direct link
between Riverwood and the deep dark and a quicker way to the
surface than going through the Canolbarth.