Chalice 2 - Dream Stone Read online

  Madron had no need to consider his words. She already knew them to be true. Llynya had smelled the violence of his years, and she herself knew him to be an impostor and a thief. Yet she would bargain for what knowledge she could.

  “Answer my questions, and I’ll have no more need of you or our bargain, Corvus. Or do they call you Raven where you are from?”

  “Some do. Some call me lord.”

  He could be a lord, she silently granted. He had the arrogance for it, and a disturbing sense of power about him. “And where is that?”

  He relaxed back against the wall, then looked around. “About as far from here as you can get.”

  “When?” she asked, the more pertinent question.

  His answer to that was a question of his own. “What possible difference can that make to you, my dear medieval gaoler?”

  She rose to leave, and he let out another short laugh before acquiescing with an answer. “A time far from this one, lady.”

  “The future or the past?”

  “Am I so rustic?”

  “The future,” she conceded, settling herself back down. “How many years?”

  “I don’t know. No,” he said quickly when she started to rise again. “It’s true that I don’t know. This is the year 1198 anno Domini, and I come from 627 T.R., the six hundredth and twenty-seventh year after the Trelawny Rebellion. What the difference is between those two times, I truly don’t know, except that it must be great. I have visited planets in less time than it would take you to reach the continent.”

  “You have traveled to the wandering stars?” Despite herself, she was startled.

  “And farther.”

  For an instant, Madron felt a measure of fear. He was from much longer away than she had imagined. With effort, she refrained from looking up to the sky, where the evening star would rise in a few hours. Had he been there? she wondered.

  “Why did you come?” she asked instead. “What is your purpose?” Danger always had a purpose, and he was undeniably dangerous.

  “The choice to come here was not mine,” he told her with a wry intonation, “and my only purpose is to return.”

  “Someone sent you here, against your will?” The possibility had not occurred to her. Yet had not Morgan ab Kynan entered the weir against his will? Or had he had any will left by the time the lightning had snaked out to snare him? By all accounts his wounds had been mortal.

  “Time makes a very effective prison, lady, a chance for eternal penance.”

  “You are a felon.” ’Twas a statement, not a question.

  “Of the highest order,” he freely admitted. “In my time, I’m a wanted man in two solar systems, and a demigod in half a dozen more.”

  She gave him a highly skeptical look, and he laughed again, dismissing her skepticism with a chain-rattling wave of his hand. “Think what you will.”

  “I am aware of the solar system. This one at least.” She made her own broad gesture. “My father was a well-traveled man, as you must have noted from his book. ’Tis your claim of divinity I find doubtful.”

  His interest, never mild, peaked with the lift of his finely arched brows. “You are Nemeton’s daughter?”

  “Aye.”

  “The chrystaalt, then, ’twas you.” He leaned forward again, his expression fiercely intent. “You have more?”

  “Aye, but before you have so much as a taste, I will have your knowledge of the weir.”

  “So you know it is to be eaten and not just burned?”

  She nodded. “What I do not know is how much is eaten and how long before the journey the traveler should eat it, and whether there are other necessary preparations.”

  His expression hardened, and he looked away, but not before she saw a flicker of pain cross his face.

  “ ’Tis not an idle question,” she prompted.

  “And it is not a journey I would advise,” he said roughly, turning back to her. “I can assure you, lady, there is nothing in the future for you. It is a dark and dreary place.”

  “Yet you want to return.”

  “It is my time. And I want what is mine.”

  “Are you so sure you can return from whence you left?”

  “Yes.”

  At her inquiring look, he deigned to elaborate.

  “However much the wormhole may deviate on its course, the connection it makes in time is the same. If I return to my time, sixteen years will have passed from when I left. That I know. Whether I will be dead, alive, or mad when I get there cannot be known, so take heed.”

  “I can assure you that I have no intention of throwing myself into the Weir Gate. ’Tis knowledge only I would have.” With her father’s untimely death, she’d been poorly prepared should a traveler come and need her help. She did know the value of the salts, if not their method of use, but there was far more to traveling through the gates of time. There were calculations to be made that increased a traveler’s chance of coming out of the wormhole, of landing in a solid place. There were astrological considerations that could determine the most auspicious time for the journey. There were even ways of manipulating the wormhole. All that knowledge and more was written in the stone of the mother rock somewhere in the farthest reaches of the deep dark, but Madron could not foresee a time when she would be so desperate that she would undertake such a perilous and possibly fruitless journey. Far better, to her way of thinking, to glean what she could from the books and the unexpected traveler. Convicted felon or nay, he had been through the wormhole.

  “Most of what you want to know is in the books,” he told her. “Everything except the truth about the journey itself, and that, lady, is a journey through hell, complete with fire and brimstone.”

  “The universal salts are supposed to ameliorate the physical crisis of passage. Did they not give you any?”

  “The chrystaalt? They buried me in it,” he said with a harsh laugh. “Be careful how much of the stuff you keep in one place. I think the worms can smell it at half a parsec, like a shark smells bait. It brings them screaming across space to devour the cache—and any incidental attached to the pile.”

  “And that’s what you were, an incidental?”

  “No,” he said, his eyes darkening with the memory. “I was the raison d’être for gathering the salts, the sum supply of two worlds to ensure that I was taken, swallowed—”

  “By the wormstorm, eh?” ’Twas Naas, coming up the knoll. “Took the long ride down the gullet, did ye?”

  “Naas,” Madron warned, scrambling to her feet when the old woman passed her by and kept on toward Corvus Gei.

  “Pish.” Naas dismissed her with a flick of her wrist and walked right up to the man. The old woman was not so far above him even with him sitting and her standing. “Ye’ll not hurt me, now, will ye, boy?”

  Madron was not so sure. Naas was no more than a jumbled bundle of rags and wispy hair. In what was surely the foolhardiest of actions, she took hold of Corvus’s chin, her bony fingers biting into his beard-stubbled skin.

  “Did ye know what it was that got ye? Did ye know about the worms, boy? Did the priestesses breach that trust as well?”

  To Madron’s surprise, Corvus made no move against the old woman, other than to lift his head to more squarely meet her gaze.

  “I knew nothing of worms and time, until I reached here. Your secrets are as well hidden in the future, grandmother, as they are in this time, the domain solely of religious fanatics.”

  “Fanatics.” Naas chuckled. “Yer a smart one then, smart enough to have survived, smart enough to find the way home. They won’t expect that now, will they?”

  Corvus smiled truly then, and a more predatory expression Madron had never seen. “They staked me out to die on that mound of chrystaalt, to die or to be eaten by the worm and tossed out of time, and for that they will die.” The pleasure he took in the thought was beyond doubt. It suffused his face like a light from within. Murder, at least, was part of his business.

  Naas chuckled agai
n and released his chin. “Ye’ll find they die no more easily than I, but they made a mistake to send their dregs to me. Ye must have been the last one through before Rhuddlan sealed the weir, and it’s back to them I’m sending ye. The quicker the better. Come, Madron. The time of Calan Gaef is nigh enough for our purpose. Get yer salts. I’ll bring the boy.”

  Madron could do naught but stand and stare, dumbstruck, as the old woman checked his chains. “We’ll need the smithy for these,” she muttered, giving them a good rattle.

  “Naas. No,” Madron finally managed to protest. “He is Trig’s prisoner, not ours. You can’t have his irons struck off.”

  The old woman shook her head. “Nay. Trig’s got naught to do with travelers. That’s yer bailiwick, sweetling, and mine. Meet me in the boar pit, quickety-split, and we’ll take a route none will follow.”

  When she still didn’t move, Naas leveled her white-eyed gaze on Madron and looked at her hard, until Madron felt a tremor of fear similar to the one induced by Corvus earlier.

  “Obey, Madron,” the old woman commanded. “ ’Tis not a request I make.”

  Madron had always considered herself apart from the Quicken-tree, not subject to them, any of them. She suddenly realized how wrong she’d been. She thwarted Rhuddlan’s kingship whenever the need arose. Such was not an option with Naas, not in this instance, and Madron wondered if it ever had been. With a bow of her head, she left to gather what they would need for a journey to the Weir Gate.

  Naas returned her attention to the man she would drop though the gates of time. “Ye must have been a frightful bad one for the White Ladies to send ye here. I could kill ye for them, but like them I try to keep my conscience clear before the gods. And I guess ye know as well as me that putting ye twice through the wormhole will probably do it for us.”

  His dark eyes never wavered. “Yes, I know.”

  “Auch.” Naas suddenly turned her head. “Did ye hear that?”

  “No.”

  Naas grinned. She’d heard it, loud and clear, the snap of a twig. The will-o’-the-wisp was hers.

  Chapter 22

  Worse and worse, Llynya thought, looking down from her hiding place, a scooped-out hollow of rock on a ledge overlooking the Wall. Skraelings were still filing into the cavern below, some marching up and down the trail, some starting cooking fires. She and Mychael had veered off the main passage into a labyrinth of narrow corridors to escape the last skraelpack they’d come upon, but it seemed there was to be no end to the skraelings. The Wall had been the main road into Rastaban before the Wars, when Rastaban had been a resting place between Riverwood and Tryfan. Whoever now ruled in the Eye of the Dragon had taken the Wall for his own.

  There were no Dockalfar below, though, and mayhaps there was hope in that.

  No fire lizard either, and there was definite hope in that.

  She scooted back and signaled Mychael forward to take her place on the ledge, to take the watch. ’Twas the first chance they’d had to rest, and she’d used the time to make them an infusion of lavender. The two of them had huddled over the dreamstone blades to heat a cup of water, then shared the warm tea and a seedcake in the reflected glow of the skraelings’ torchlight. She’d made sure he drank most of the tea, but even her few sips had done much to restore her. From her baldric pouches, she had shared acorns from the mother oak in Deri to give him strength, and had burned feathers for protection.

  When needed, they were only using Ratskin’s blade in the corridors, keeping Ara sheathed. The yellow dreamstone was hard to distinguish from the yellow light given off by the torches, and any skraeling who did happen to see it would think it belonged to one of their Dockalfar masters. For certes the skraeling who could think beyond that simple reasoning had yet to be conjured.

  Mychael crawled out onto the ledge and knelt beside her. Light from Ratskin’s blade glinted off the silver rings she’d woven into his fif braid, rings of protection plaited into his hair to keep him safe. She didn’t doubt their power, only whether or not there was enough in the finely incised runes to do the job at hand. Ammon, Bes, Ceiul... one rune for each ring, the runes of refuge. She’d chosen them with care after talking with Naas.

  She handed him one of the honey-sticks she’d been looking for in her pack, and he sucked on the end.

  “We can’t stay here,” he said, handing the sweet back. “If we can’t find a way to the surface soon, we have to take our chances on the other side of the Wall.”

  “Aye,” she said with a shrug, praying they would find a way up into Riverwood. The other side of the Wall was sure death, with so many skraelings about. There was another way for them to go, but ’twas so terrible, it hardly bore thinking about. She finished off the honey and packed the empty horsetail stem into one of her pouches.

  A commotion down on the floor of the cavern silenced them both. Shoulder to shoulder, they watched a raucous changing of the guard a hundred feet below, the only ritual of which seemed to be the passing back and forth of leather jacks and ale gourds.

  “They haven’t seen us,” Mychael said, his voice a low whisper not meant to carry beyond the ledge.

  “Nay, I don’t think so either.” She, too, whispered. “If they get drunk enough, we might be able to get by them without raising any alarm.”

  “Aye.”

  They continued watching in silence. A cookfire was spitting and crackling with the fat dripping off a couple dozen roasting rodents. There was much jostling around the fire, the trick being to snag a rat’s tail when it was finally crisp enough to snap off, but before it fell into the fire. Legs were the next delicacy, and half a dozen smoking drumsticks were making the rounds at any given moment. Every charred carcass taken off its spit was replaced with another squealing animal lifted out of the rat cage.

  Skraelings were murderous and brutish, and given half a chance, Llynya knew her fate would have been no different from the rats’. An uncontrollable shiver coursed down her spine.

  “Are you cold?”

  “Nay,” she said quietly, tightening her hands into fists to keep them from trembling. How many skraelings could she take in an open fight without any Dockalfar to hem her in?

  Not enough, was the answer. Not nearly enough.

  She counted close to a hundred below, two packs. Half would leave. There was little cover on the trail, and mayhaps she and Mychael could take out a goodly number of the remaining pack with his bow. They had the advantage of the higher ground.

  But what of the next skraelpack? And the next? They could not fight all the way to the Rastaban trailhead, the only certain path out of the caverns that she remembered from her studies with Wei, and so help her, she would not be captured again. If they did fight, ’twould be to the death. She would die by the blade, not over the flames or between Slott’s jaws.

  “Llynya?” She turned to face Mychael, and he reached out to caress her cheek. “You’re crying.”

  ’Twas true. She tried to brush the evidence away, but he stayed her hand by clasping it with his own. His grip was warm, too warm, but strong, backed by an arm banded in the iron stars that had saved her from Ratskin—proof enough of his next words.

  “I will fight to my last breath to keep you safe.” His vow was intent, but no more so than his gaze when she met his eyes. Dragonfire flickered in their depths, amber rings of lambent flame ignited by the blood of his line.

  He was the Dragon. The scar running up the side of his neck burned with the stirring of Ddrei Goch’s fiery breath. But his body, for all its sinewy strength and layers of hard muscle over even harder bone, was no dragon’s body, and she feared it could not survive the fierceness of the beast.

  “If they come, you quickety-split.” His hand tightened on hers, adding force to his words. “They’ll not catch you, not skraelings. Make their heads spin with how fast you are.”

  “Nay, I’ll not leave you.”

  “You did at Bala Bredd.” ’Twas no accusation, but a statement to aid his cause. Foolish boy, she
would be twice damned if he died in her place.

  “Aye, and for the same reason I left you that morn, I’ll not leave you now.”

  His brow furrowed in a silent question.

  “Love,” she answered him, sliding her hand around his neck and drawing him near. “For love I left you, and for love I’ll stay.”

  Confused, Mychael nonetheless welcomed her kiss. Weary, he let her bear him down into the stone hollow, let the soft weight of her be a blessed relief. Love. She spoke of love and he was filled with it. His arms slipped around her, his hands tracing the curves of her body. He’d never known such delicacy, nor such strength as she had, so female, all softness and giving but for the sharp edge of her need. Her hands were in his hair, holding him for all the kisses she would bestow. She slung her leg over his hips, pressing into him, and he was instantly aroused.

  Taking his pleasure, he opened his mouth over hers and drew her tongue inside, a deep pull and release, reminding him of their night at Bala Bredd. To his amazement, she gave him the memory back double, finding him beneath his tunic and braies, her hand closing around his phallus to stroke him in a rhythm that matched his slow, sucking kiss.

  Shadana... He arched against the soft curve of her palm and filled her hand.

  “Mate with me,” she murmured, and the words swept through him like tinder fire, fast and hot, and as seductive as her touch.

  ’Twas insanity itself, what she wanted, but the stroking of her hand was irresistible. Every caress teased him to distraction and pleased him beyond reason. Soon, he promised himself, soon he would set her aside. Until then, he only prayed that nothing came upon them from out of the dark.

  As if she’d read his mind, she glided her hand over and around him once more, stopping at the head of his shaft.

  “Mate with me,” she said again, taking him farther over the edge by smoothing her finger across the tip of his glans.

  Witch. She’d not done that at Bala Bredd.

  She retraced her path, and reason fled. He would have her as she had him. He would know her again as he’d known her on the shores of the mist-bound lake.