Chalice 2 - Dream Stone Page 4

  Unless ’twas Nemeton’s elusive path into sanctuary.

  Stifling another curse, he turned his face from the dawn-lit sea and stared down the dark throat of the Dragon’s Mouth. Power of another sort awaited there, the power of timeless knowledge, raw and dangerous, and that yoke and those reins he would grasp with all his wild, damned heart, if he but could. ’Twas the magia mysterium of a religion thought to be long dead, the religion of another age. In truth, its life flowed as surely and strongly as the Savior’s blood had flowed upon the cross.

  Blood. That was his first curse, the bane that twisted through him like rivers of fire when the madness was upon him. He was Magus Druid by blood, his mother’s blood, and the blood had begun to tell.

  A movement in the far shadows of the cave caught his eye, and for an instant his pulse quickened. Then a clear voice called to him from out of the darkness.

  “Malashm. Good morn.”

  No dragon this, he realized, his mouth curving in wry concession. Grim musings were unlikely to bring him what his months of searching had not, and he was filled with little but grim musings these days. Aye, and he was probably a fool indeed, looking for beasts that in truth were most likely conjured out of naught but a slip of sight and the beginnings of madness.

  The speaker drew nearer, discernible only by the pale daylight glancing off silvery green cloth, but soon enough Mychael saw Shay’s ready grin and the blue woad slashing diagonally across his face. No one else would bother to search him out. The rest of the Quicken-tree thought his heart too dark. He’d heard their whispers of Dockalfar, and knew they spoke of an ancient enemy that had once ruled the caverns below.

  “You’re up early,” he said by way of greeting, easing his arm away from his side and hoping the pain would not come again.

  Shay’s grin broadened. “I came down to watch you brood, for no one does it better than thee.” Eyes greener than a forest full of trees flashed with amusement. A five-strand fif braid was worked into Shay’s hair on the left side of his head, a silky black plait amongst the loose strands hanging to his shoulders. In his hand he held a small pot of woad, its wax seal broken.

  “Early though you be, you’re too late by half,” Mychael chided him. “My morning brood is over, and I shall not partake again until eventide.”

  “My good luck, that,” the boy said, walking out onto the cave’s ledge and into the watery light reflecting up from the sea. A high wall of rock on the north side protected the natural bowl of the opening, allowing tufts of vegetation to take hold in the crevices: sea campion and thrift, scurvy grass and vetch. “There are fair tidings on the wind this morning,” Shay went on, picking a leaf to chew, barely concealing his excitement. “Travelers. We could take to Riverwood and be the first to find them. Might be our last chance for a while.”

  Riverwood was the Quicken-tree name for the forest that spread on either side of the River Bredd along Merioneth’s eastern border. The trees had previously been clear-cut from the castle walls for defense, but Rhuddlan and his clan were coaxing them back.

  The mention of travelers sparked Mychael’s interest. It also explained the boy’s painted face. Rhuddlan commanded they all be marked thus when they ventured beyond the great wall. Much was afoot in the woods these days.

  ’Twas true also what Shay said about their last chance. They were to the deep dark again on the morrow, a place beyond the world of Men, though unlike the forest and mist-bound prison Rhuddlan would contrive for Merioneth. ’Twas beyond and below a mighty ridge line demarcating the deeper cavers that Moira, one of the Quicken-tree women, had told Mychael was called the Magia Wall. Time in the forest would be good preparation for the days ahead without the warmth and light from the sun, while they searched for broken damson shafts in the deep dark. Rhuddlan had shown great concern over the broken shaft Mychael had found back in the spring, and not a fortnight passed that he didn’t send a troop of Liosalfar into the caverns to look for more. Mayhaps, Mychael thought, in Riverwood’s cool bowers he would find some succor for the night’s besetting aches. For certes, there was no better excuse for avoiding those who would bend his ear with their talk of duty.

  “Have you food?” he asked before agreeing. Shay was ever hungry, having reached the age when no amount of eating seemed to suffice, and there was naught like an empty stomach to bring adventure to a quick halt.

  “Enough to share,” Shay assured him, patting the pouch hanging from his belt.

  “Then we are to Riverwood.”

  Grinning, Shay tossed him the small pot of woad.

  ~ ~ ~

  East of the Dragon’s Mouth, deep in a forested glen, a heavy blanket of fog drifted over the River Bredd in the pale light of dawn. The thick stuff curled through the rushes lining the river’s bank and wound its way ’round the leaves and limbs of the overhanging trees.

  Llynya, sprite of the Quicken-tree clan, lay splayed in the crotch of a wych elm, resting her head on her arm, lazily dragging her hand through the vaporous mist and leaving tiny whorls in the wake of her fingertips. Below her, old Aedyth snored softly in a leafy bower tucked next to the trunk. ’Twas a homecoming of sorts that day. The healer and she had been in Deri to the south since mid-May, and though Aedyth had done her work well, Llynya knew she still had much of her strength to reclaim, much of herself to mend.

  A heavy sigh escaped her, the breath of it blowing the tiny whorls to smithereens. She was not ready to face all that awaited her in Carn Merioneth, to face the changes wrought in herself these past months, but the day would see itself come whether she was ready or nay, and in truth, she dared not delay any longer. Ailfinn had been summoned, and the mage would not countenance Llynya’s quest; indeed, she had the power to keep Llynya from it. For all the mage’s many enchantments and calling upon of unseen forces, she was a pragmatic soul, and Llynya’s needs had never weighed against Ailfinn’s plans.

  Her gaze fell on the runes and leaves encircling her wrist and trailing up her arm to disappear under her tunic’s sleeve. The tattoo was fully healed, leaving naught but the dark blue of woad marking her skin. Aedyth had performed the ancient rite in Deri. There had been pain, but Llynya did not fear pain. Pain could be borne. That she had failed in her sworn duty could not. She had come back to right a wrong, or meet her death in the trying of it.

  “And what of you, my fat little sweetings?” she asked the row of plump birds gathered on a nearby branch watching her. “Chick-a-dee-dee-dee, hmm? Zzhee-chee-chee.”

  She reached out her hand and tickled one soft white breast, and the bird fluffed itself into a ball of feathers. The middle one flew onto her finger, and the last hopped closer to the first to wait its turn. Llynya didn’t disappoint, but gave them each a thorough going-over, rubbing their throats and the crowns of their black-capped heads.

  “Pretty babes,” she crooned. “Shall I tell you a story while Aedyth sleeps the morn away?”

  Dark eyes watched her expectantly and not so much as a twitter or a tweet of dissent escaped the birds, all of which Llynya took for acquiescence.

  And so she began, “A long time ago, in a land far and away across the waters, there lived a great Elfin King who had seven fair daughters...”

  ~ ~ ~

  Mychael and Shay heard the voice at the same time. Dawn had not yet spilled into the deeper reaches of the glens, and they walked through a woodland made ethereal by night shadows and drifts of fog that grew thicker the closer they came to the river.

  “ ’Tis a woman,” Mychael said as they both stopped.

  “Mayhaps,” Shay said, looking puzzled. He raised his nose into the soft breath of a dawn breeze.

  For Mychael there was no mayhaps. The lilting tones could belong to naught except a woman. How could Shay doubt it? He knew the boy’s hearing was as keen or keener than his own.

  “Aye, I think you’re right,” Shay finally agreed, sounding worried. “I fear there is naught left of the child in her. It may be that I am too late.”

  Too
late for what, Mychael didn’t have a chance to ask. Nor did he have time to ask the identity of her. Shay disappeared before any of the words could form on his lips. He slipped into the fog as quickly as that, leaving not a trace of his passing, a common occurrence when one consorted with tylwyth teg, the wild folk by one name, and elves by yet another. He’d spent time with the Ebiurrane clan farther north these last few months and found them no different, except in the deep dark. Even those among the Quicken-tree who were Liosalfar warriors, the Light-elves, stuck close to one another in the deep dark.

  Druids and elves. Jesu, but he’d thrown in with a pagan lot.

  Trusting Shay to his own path, Mychael waited in the copse of hazel, listening. His hand absently touched the new and wondrous dagger on his belt. ’Twas sharp-edged steel with a dreamstone hilt, a Quicken-tree knife, the fighting blade of a Liosalfar. It had been a gift that morn from the ancient white-eyed woman, Naas. She’d caught him and Shay as they’d crossed the bailey on their way to Riverwood, saying naught but the name Ara when she clapped it into his hand. That done, she’d disappeared back into the shadows of the great wall.

  Dain Lavrans—the man who had saved his sister from the Boar of Balor, who had helped her open the Weir Gate, who had taken her away to the far north—had owned such a blade, a dagger he’d won off Rhuddlan in a fight. Mychael knew not why the old woman had given one of the rare knives to him. Shay hadn’t balked at the priceless gift, but some of the other Quicken-tree might. Mychael knew Naas was a bit touched, and mayhaps it had been a mistake, an act of mild derangement. Mayhaps she’d thought he was someone else. The old woman was blind.

  Already, though, the dagger seemed like a part of him, and he would not easily give it back. It felt right in his hand, the weight of it, the coolness of the crystal, and the heat of it when he held it just so. It felt like it belonged to him, as if Naas had returned something he’d lost.

  The woman’s voice came again, diverting him, and he set off after it. ’Twas a faerie wood through which he tracked the storyteller weaving her tale of betrayal and enchantment, a landscape rich in buckler ferns and spleen-wort, primrose and pasqueflower. The smell of lavender drifted to him, while the sound of the river continually grew louder, a low rushing of water beneath the voice that led him onward through the trees.

  At the edge of a clearing where the Bredd eddied around a bend, he halted by an overgrown birch, his trail come to an end. Shay was not to be seen, but the woman was there on the other side of the small meadow—if woman she was.

  Stirred by the warming air, white drifts of fog washed up against a wych elm, alternately concealing and revealing the storyteller where she lay along the length of a thick branch. Wisps of the vaporous mist rolled down her body, skimming along her back, sliding over shimmery, feminine curves, and casting her in a pearly luster. Her hair, dark like Shay’s, was filled with leaves and twigs, the whole of it tangled and twisted and braided in an artless, falling-down pile on her head. So fey was she, seeming only partly of this world and mostly of another, he would not have been surprised to see ephemeral wings arcing gracefully from her shoulders.

  Fair maid, this, he thought. She was the beginning and end of a young man’s dreams—but was she woman or river nymph?

  Shay had mentioned travelers, but Mychael saw only the one, the dulcet-voiced being, conjured from mist and mayhaps his own imagination, telling her tale to a band of chickadees huddled on the branch in front of her.

  “... and ’twas then the sea grew angry and sent its waves crashing o’er the rocky crag,” she was saying, dramatizing the scene by scooping a handful of fog into a sizable wave and pushing it over the branch where she lay. “The sisters clung to one another, their slippered feet bruised by the sharp stones, their hearts growing cold with despair. ‘All is lost,’ the eldest cried, but the youngest beseeched her sisters not to lose hope, for surely there was yet some brave soul to save them.”

  As he watched her, the last of Mychael’s grim thoughts died, charmed to their demise by her grace. In their place came a sense of bemused wonder that grew as he moved closer. She looked to have taken a tumble from higher up in the tree with all her leaves and twigs, but other than that she appeared to be of a piece—a rare and lovely piece. He would gladly listen to her faerie lore and any other tales she might choose to tell. In truth, how often as a youth had he lain in a similar woodland place, far from prying eyes and monkish vows, and dreamed of one such as she to come and seduce him with love and a warm mouth?

  Too often to suit many at Strata Florida Abbey, he thought wryly, though no dream of his had ever been answered except by his own hand. In its beginnings he’d thought that the wildness in him was lust left too long unappeased, but he’d learned differently each time its hungering edge sharpened to a cruel degree and spread beyond his loins.

  And yet ’twas a sweet, seductive fancy to think one such as she could be his cure.

  Nearer the elm now, he saw she wore a tunic and leggings of silvery green Quicken-tree cloth. ’Twas why her curves shimmered. Her boots were dark green with double silver rings to cinch them closed at her ankles. She was no being conjured of river mist, then, or of his too long unfulfilled yearnings. The dress confirmed her tylwyth teg, as elfin as the seven princesses in her story, and without doubt the reason Shay had been out in the woods that morn. He wondered that her companions had left her alone. And where was Shay? The boy’s quick start should have placed him at the river long ago.

  Mychael searched the clearing again, and found not the boy or a stray traveler, but something else altogether. From the curve of branch here, the twist of a stem there, he could see the Quicken-tree had been working in this part of Riverwood, no doubt at Rhuddlan’s bidding. He looked closer at the plants growing near him. Delicate fronds of buckler embraced spikes of hyssop. Twiggish, leaf-laden branches of broom shrub reached into the birch and entwined themselves with the tree. All around him the woodland flora commingled and held on to one another. ’Twas a bramble, woven by the Quicken-tree to protect a place, and probably why the fair elf lingered there, feeling mayhaps overly secure. For he had found her, had he not?

  His gaze returned to the wych elm. His thoughts on enchantment had turned ’round and ’round since meeting the Quicken-tree, but he had not seen any to match her.

  Or had he? Thoroughly beguiled, he retraced the mist’s caressing path. The leaves in her hair were green and fresh, glittering with dew. What he could see of her delicate profile between the braids and tangles was entrancing, the whole of her tugging at a memory he could not bring to the fore.

  “Alas,” she went on, “all the sisters but the youngest were washed into the furious sea to be drowned or dashed against the crag.” Her voice swelled with the desperation of the scene; a fair mummer she. “The North Wind, rendered helpless by the dark arts of the mage, blew his icy breath down upon the last princess.” And here she blew, puffing her cheeks out and turning the fog close by into a maelstrom of swirls and whirls.

  “Tee-zhay-dee-dee,” one of the birds blurted out.

  “For certes,” the storyteller replied with a sage nod, then went on. “But the mage had not bewitched all against the Elfin King. There were those of fair, kind hearts, Whistler, White-Eye, and Mast, brave chickadees, who heard the frightened cries, and daring all against the storm flew into the brunt of it to save the maids.” The little birds began preening themselves to an absurd degree. “Other birds followed, swooping down to the sea, where two dozen to the princess, they plucked the hapless sisters from the waves and saved them all. And if any should doubt the tale, the whole of the valorous flight is forever engraved in the hallowed halls of Fata Morgana’s palace.”

  At the mention of the legendary faerie enchantress, Mychael nearly crossed himself, but stopped a station or two short. In some ways he knew not what to believe anymore, and that conundrum was quickly made more complicated. Even as he lowered his hand, the dawn breeze swirled along the branch where the storyteller lay, l
ifting loose braids and tangled strands of hair up and away from her face and revealing the true rarity of the creature before him.

  Her ears were pointed—strangely, wondrously, and sharply enough to make him wonder what she was besides Quicken-tree. None other of Rhuddlan’s band had pointed ears. But if not Quicken-tree, what?

  “To this very day,” she told her avian audience, “elfin princesses and chickadees share a bond forged with the courage of Whistler, White-Eye, and Mast.” She might have gone on to say more, except for the call of a lark interrupting.

  She turned quickly at the sound, scanning the forest behind her and seeming to stare right through him. ’Twas then he recognized her. Months before, after the battle for Merioneth, he had seen her in these very woods lift the yellow off a buttercup with naught but her breath. At the time, he’d thought it a fancy of the light, but now he would beg to differ. A waiflike girl no longer, she’d well grown into the magic of the deed.

  Aye, she’d changed. Sprite, she’d been called then, and a sprite she’d been, but no more. He’d thought her gone from Merioneth forever.

  The lark’s call came again, and she pushed herself to her feet, a supple movement seeming to require little effort. The misconception was belied when, with the same fluid grace, she revealed her strength and agility by swinging herself up to a higher branch and landing in a loose-limbed crouch. The chickadees took flight, routed by all the disturbance. The lark, he knew, was Shay, and close by the sound of him.

  Llynya was the storyteller’s name, he recalled, first seen on the dark shores of Mor Sarff, a girl wielding a sword with desperate fury in the heat of battle. He’d killed his first man to save her life, drawn his bow as he ran, as she faltered on the sands, and loosed his arrow with an unholy prayer that it would find its mark. The man who would have hewn her in twain had fallen, and so had the next to take up arms against her. The one after that, he’d killed to save her companion.