Chalice 2 - Dream Stone Page 28

  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.

  “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 elfi
n 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.

  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.