A Heart in Sun and Shadow (Cymru That Was Book 1) (21 page)

As she searched, she’d decided on a method to start ruling stones out. She’d place the ones she’d found two by two into a spiral and try to get a better idea of which might match up. Sighing, Áine looked out over the beach. She wasn’t even done by a third, and night was coming on, bringing with it the tide.

With a start she realized she’d broken one of the rules of being near the sea; never put your back to the waves. She knew the tide was far out now with the waves’ rush receding. Áine turned to the ocean and squinted into the setting sun.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. There, at the low tide line stood three large, white stones. They were half her height and easily as big around as she. Áine looked down at her makeshift pouch full of white stones and shook her head.

“It can’t be that,” she said aloud, “Don’s tits, is it so simple?”

Áine carefully set down her pouch behind the high-tide line and brushed off her skirt. She walked down the beach, the wet stones slippery with seaweed that clung to her feet.

The water lapped against the far edge of the stones and dug into the silty areas between them in little eddies. She examined each stone. They were laid out in a perfect line with each the same distance apart. No sea life grew on the stones and she could find no blemish on any of the exposed surfaces.

Áine pushed on the right-most stone and managed to rock it in its base. She bent and wrapped her arms around it, then pressed upward from her thighs to lift the rock. It shifted with a sucking sound but she couldn’t yank it free. With a growl, Áine released the stone and walked toward the top of the beach.

She stripped off her dress and boots and laid them near where she’d hooked her pack. Then she found a somewhat flat length of driftwood and walked back down to the stones.

The breeze off the ocean made her shiver, but Áine thought having a dry dress and shoes was more important than avoiding a little discomfort. The tide had turned and she would quickly run out of time to get these stones free.

Áine dug into the silt and gravel at the base of the first stone. Water rushed in, chilling her feet. She ignored this and kept digging. Water swirled around her ankles before she thought she might have freed the stone enough to lift again. This time, her shoulders and thighs screaming at the effort, she pulled the stone free from its silted cradle and managed to waddle up the beach to the tide line. Áine dropped the stone far less carefully than she would have liked and sat down hard.

Her hands hurt and she sucked the grit from a wound on her left pointing finger where the nail had half broken away. Spitting out her mouthful of blood and dirt, Áine stared down the beach. One stone down, two left. She rose and clenched her teeth.

The second stone was mercifully less entrenched than its sister had been. The waves brought the water up to her knees and she resisted their pull back into the sea. With the second stone down safely at the beachhead, Áine took a moment to call a ball of light. She grinned wildly as it worked a second time, the globe flickering above her head. It moved as she moved, casting strange shadows and lending iridescent patterns to the waves.

The tide had stolen Áine’s digging stick while she carried the second stone. She found a new one but even with her light, she couldn’t see what she was doing with the dark water swirling in, some waves up to her waist now. She’d forgotten how quickly tides rose.

Áine blinked back tears and tossed her stick away. She thrust her arms down into the water, snorting through the waves that crested over her head as she worked to dig free the stone. She tested it and finally it popped loose, growing heavier as she lifted it from the water.

She barely remembered how she got to the top of the beach. Her feet had long since gone numb and her shoulders and legs were one mass of pain. The sharpest pain came from the ankle she’d injured in the flood those months ago. Áine dropped the stone beside its sisters and stumbled to where she’d left her gown. Wet, gritty fingers dragged it over her head and she crawled up the embankment into the grass.

Her dreams gave her feathers and she flew far away from discomfort toward the warm pulse of her own heart.

* * *

Hafwyn stood in the doorway and watched her sons as Emyr saddled a horse in the courtyard. Idrys stood nearby, his black body tense as he watched an owl that rested in the eaves of the barn. The morning air just after dawn was still, the occasional bleat of sheep all that broke the silence. Hafwyn shivered. New leaves had started to green the forest beyond Clun Cadair but still her sons spent their days ranging restlessly across the cantref, searching for Áine.

No matter how their mother argued with them, they both seemed as determined as the other that Áine would return to them, that she was out there to be found. Hafwyn had tried to gently raise the idea that perhaps the curse had been too much for Áine to bear. But even sensible Emyr was convinced that Áine wouldn’t run from such a thing.

“Not her,” he’d said, a grim echo of his brother’s words the night before.

“Good luck, my sons,” Hafwyn whispered as Emyr waved to her and turned his horse toward the woods, Idrys a shadow racing ahead.

She folded her arms tight over her own conflicted heart. Áine had been like the daughter she’d lost, and she’d brought joy back into Idrys. But she was also a wisewoman, a woman outside ordinary society. Wisewomen had freedom other women didn’t, but they had obligations that came with that freedom that precluded a hearth and children. A chief should not marry for love alone, but for the good of the cantref and the people.

Hafwyn sighed as the barn owl stretched its wings and took flight toward the woods. Idrys’s smile warmed her memory and shamed her thoughts. She was the mother of a chief, this was true. But she was a mother first.

It had only been a few months. If Áine returned, Hafwyn would welcome her back.

Tiny yellow larks singing on bent stalks of grass woke Áine. She sat up slowly in the early morning light and groaned. Her muscles had stiffened in the night as she slept on the cold ground. She stretched her arms and looked at her hands. They were red with chill and bits of dying skin clung to abrasions along her palms.

Her feet hadn’t fared much better. Áine stumbled down to the retreating sea and rinsed the dried blood from her bruised feet in the waves. None of the cuts was more than a surface wound. The pain in her ankle worried her more.

Áine massaged the old injury as she turned to contemplate her three prizes. She shook her head. Breakfast, then she’d examine the stones. Pulling an apple and a loaf of bread from her pack, Áine sank down into the grass again.

She felt better for having eaten. The sun rose higher as she chewed the last bite of apple, swallowed, took a deep breath.

Áine wasn’t sure if she wanted two of the large white stones to be the two she sought. She could lift them, that she knew. But it hadn’t been the shortest journey from Seren’s cottage to the shore and Áine didn’t trust this place nor Seren enough to leave one stone behind. If she could determine which were alike, she’d have to devise a way to bring them both at once.

“Too many ifs,” she muttered.

Áine rose and put her apple core back into the pack and then removed the coil of her red belt. She slid down to the white stones and measured the girth of the first with the dyed leather. The second and third both measured the same. Áine tried the length, but all three were the same. She put on her belt and then, ignoring the stabbing pain in her leg, carried each stone up into the grass, shoving them up the embankment to where she could examine the rocks without fear they’d chip.

Áine resisted the urge to kick the third rock in frustration. Each was exactly alike another as far as her methods could tell. Tesn had always told her that the fey cannot tell a direct lie. Seren had said only two white stones are exactly alike on this beach, but Áine now had three. She sank down into the grass and stretched her sore leg.

“Think, silly girl,” she said aloud, “two of these have to have something different from the third.”

She’d found them all in a line, well below the high-tide mark, so that was the same. It came to her suddenly. The second stone had been less deeply buried in the silt and gravel. Thank the gods she’d preserved their order as she’d moved them. She hoped that something so simple could be the answer. But it was all she had to go on. Now she only had to get them to Seren.

“Only,” Áine snorted and, sighing, rose to her feet. On a wild hope she held her palm out toward the first of the stones. “Rise!” She willed it with a cry.

Nothing happened. Áine shoved down disappointment’s bitter seed and shrugged. It had been worth a try. Now she needed to get serious and find a way to move the stones. Áine had no intention of leaving one behind for later; she didn’t trust Seren half so far. No, she’d have to bring both at once.

Áine contemplated carrying them herself, one after another, going a little ways and then returning for the second stone and repeating until she reached the cottage. But the deep ache in her healing leg warned her that such a feat might be more folly than sense. And her feet were swollen and bruised badly enough that her boots refused to settle onto them, even loosely laced.

The rocks weren’t so heavy that she couldn’t pull them if she had a way to make a sled that would work over meadow. She recalled the fishermen who sometimes used long poles with a basket strung between to bring fish up the shore from the sea.

Áine looked around. There was plenty of long grass she could weave into a crude platform, but she had no axe with which to make poles. She slid down to the beach and searched among the driftwood piled at the high-tide line until she found two sticks that she could use. They both had branches coming off them that Áine painstakingly removed with the edge of a broken rock. One pole was nearly perfect, the thickness of her arm and not too waterlogged. The other was only half as thick but Áine hoped that, since it was greener wood, the spring in it would lend it strength and prevent it from snapping.

She took her makeshift cutting tool up into the grass after laying the poles alongside her chosen stones. Áine took a deep breath, said a small prayer to whatever gods might hear her in Cymru-that-could-be, and started cutting lengths of the meadow grass.

The sun lit the waves aflame as Áine carried a final bundle of grass to her workspace. She stood and watched the water as she took a long drink from her waterskin and ate another apple. Áine washed her sore, chapped hands in the sea and then called her ball of light. She had a long night of weaving ahead of her.

The grass was tough and stubborn in her hands. Áine grit her teeth and continued braiding and twisting, braiding and twisting. She needed a platform with sides to hold the stones as well as rope to help her drag the poles. When her hands became so sore that tears leaked unbidden from her eyes, Áine rose and walked down to the ocean again. Tucking her skirt up in her belt, she bent and held her fingers beneath the cold water. Phosphorescence danced around her fingers, mirroring the strange stars filling the sky above.

Loneliness pressed in on her heart and Áine bit back a sob. She would not be so weak, not now. She’d found the stones, she only had to transport them. Idrys would not give up, but it wasn’t his haunted, determined dark eyes she recalled in that moment. Instead the memory of Emyr’s wide smile and kind touch warmed her. Her hands and feet numbed by the ocean, Áine turned from the waves with a half-smile and went back to her task.

“I can free them,” she whispered into the night wind as it curled off the sea.

* * *

Áine finished sometime in the night and fell asleep curled in her cloak until the yellow birds and a warm sun woke her for the second time. She quickly ate part of a loaf of bread before she returned to her work. The poles were now bound with the grass rope in what she hoped was a platform sturdy enough for the stones.

Áine half-lifted, half-dragged the first stone onto her sled and tied it in with the makeshift net she’d constructed. She tested the sled with only the one stone. The stone shifted in its bindings but nothing snapped and the two tips of the poles slid across the grass well enough when she tugged.

Shaking her head, Áine took a deep breath. With a little luck, this might work.

Her luck held. With the second stone secure in its netting and cushioned from the other stone with her excess rope, Áine pulled her own haphazard harness on. She made a pad with her cloak to help keep the coarse rope from hurting her chest too much as she strung the largest strands around her shoulders and across her breasts. With another muttered prayer, Áine set out toward Seren’s home.

Her journey to the sea had taken half a day. Burdened with the sled and stones, Áine’s return took far longer. Her poles seemed to find each and every irregularity in the meadow and every hill posed a new test of her will. Her back itched, her legs throbbed, her chest burned. Sticky wisps of red hair clung to her cheeks and annoyed her eyes with every breeze.

It was late afternoon by the time Áine spotted the dark line of the forest in the distance ahead of her. She fought down a premature cry of triumph and pushed forward.

The forest was open enough that her poles only caught every ten steps instead of three. Áine had stopped, cursing under her breath, to free her sled from a hawthorn bush when she heard a cry. The cries continued, off to her left and out of sight, sounding very much like a young boy in deep distress.

Áine hesitated, wondering if this might be some trick of the fey Lady. The cries continued, echoing into the growing gloom. If this is a trick, Áine thought, but if it isn’t? She knew she was bound by her wisewoman’s rank to help those in need if she was able.

With another muttered curse, Áine made up her mind and slipped out of her harness. She unfolded her cloak and flung it over the hawthorn to mark where her sled rested in case she wandered too far. Then she set out toward the cries.