Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (13 page)

And, he vowed as another breath of lavender
wafted to him, he would stay away from Llynya. The elf-maid stirred
another brew to life in his veins and added fuel to a fire already
racing out of control.

In camp he’d made a point of laying his bed
as far from hers as possible, yet he kept awakening and searching
out her sleeping form. Thus each night by the dying embers of the
cookfire, he’d seen her sigh in her sleep and wondered at her
dreams. He’d watched her hands unfold as she drifted beyond dreams
into a deeper realm and wished he dared go near to see her thus
revealed—with naught but the sweet essence of oblivion about her.
And always, he traced the curves of her body with his eyes,
following their mysterious paths into shadows he couldn’t delve. He
understood the physical longing inherent in love, but how could he
be smitten with no more than what had passed between them? Or was
it only lust that made him ache?

Not so her. She watched him like a hawk,
true, but with a wariness in her eyes he well understood. He knew
what he had become, and he knew his looks were far from a maid’s
desire. Those few who dallied with him in Carn Merioneth did it on
a dare and never long enough to suit any need. The night he’d
spoken with Llynya by the well was not the first time a maid had
backed away from him with a warding sign.

Better to forget the girl and spend his days
wandering the deep dark, where there were answers to be found
without the distractions of lavender.

Shay stopped at the top of a rise in the
tunnel and warned him of stairs ahead. Trig had said they would
encounter such. ’Twas rough-hewn work left over from an age when
the deep dark had been an oft used route, before the coming of the
old worm. The sound of the waterfall grew ever louder as they
descended the stairs, the passage leading them through a brief maze
to the entrance of the cave, a looming emptiness easily felt in the
surrounding rock.

Mychael pressed his hand against the wall to
read the marks that could be found at the beginning of every cavern
in the deep dark. The cave named Crai Force was not so big, a
quarterlan only. The water was good and tended to flood in spring.
He walked forward slowly, with Shay a half step behind, smoothing
his hand along the rock, expecting at any moment to hear the
scuttling of tua. When he stepped inside the body of the cave, his
expectations fell away. Shay had been right. Something was wrong,
and it had naught to do with tua.

“
Meshankara mes,
” the boy whispered,
drawing his sword. Battle was near.

Or just past, Mychael thought. The smell of
fear and valor was unmistakable, even to him. He took Shay’s hand
and made a sign in his palm.
How many?

Shay answered with two quick movements of his
fingers.
More than five. Less than ten.

Mychael slipped his iron dagger from its
sheath. Only five could be the Liosalfar. He traced a cross on the
boy’s shoulder, left to right, down to up—they would search to the
north, toward the falls.

Not fifteen paces in, they discovered Bedwyr,
bound in some strange way and badly hurt. Shay dropped to his knees
beside the older man and began slashing away at the bindings.
Mychael pressed his hand to Bedwyr’s neck, but could feel no more
than the faintest flutter of life. He moved his hand farther down
and felt the wet, sticky pool on Bedwyr’s chest.

His mouth thinned to a grim line. The battle
had not gone well or Bedwyr would not have been left to die by
himself in the dark, insensate and alone as the life ebbed out of
him onto the cavern floor. For all their enmity, Mychael would not
have wished such an end for the man. Shay cut the last thin fiber
off Bedwyr’s body and began murmuring strange words under his
breath.

Mychael silenced the boy with a finger to his
lips. They were not alone. He tilted his head to one side,
listening beyond the weak sound of Bedwyr’s dying breaths and
beneath the rushing of the waterfall. He did not have a
Quicken-tree’s sense of smell, but his hearing was keen, and he
heard something, a high-pitched, continuous hum seeming to come
from above, beginning directly overhead and running to the north.
Rising to his feet, he signed for Shay to stay with Bedwyr and set
a course for the falls. Four other Quicken-tree needed to be found,
mayhaps some who could be saved.

Quick and silent, he wove a path through the
dripshanks hanging from the ceiling and jutting up from the floor,
skimming his fingers over their smoothly rippled surfaces to mark
his way and gauge his distance from Shay.

Bedwyr was dying, killed by an unknown foe.
Four Quicken-tree were unaccounted for. He told himself a
quarterlan cavern would make no easy end of Trig and the others,
for a small cave could not hide much, even in darkness, but he
feared the worst.

The noise came again from above, louder and
closer, and he froze in place, not daring to breathe. His fist
tightened on the iron knife. Whatever was up there, he’d not
encountered it before, and mayhaps it was as good at blind scouting
as he and Shay, needing little more than a scent or a sound to find
its prey.

Or mayhaps ’twas a dragon.

A thrill of excitement coursed into his
veins, speeding up his pulse. The beasts could kill. He knew that
as surely as he knew the same awful truth about himself. But would
they hum? In his dreams, they only ever screamed, letting out
sky-scorching flames with keening cries that nigh cut through his
heart.

The second noise faded to the north as had
the first, and he followed, moving swiftly before he lost the way.
He tracked it to a narrow arch made of two large dripshanks welded
together at the top. Slipping through, he held his dagger at the
ready. Spray from the waterfall misted the air on the other side,
wetting the rock underfoot and dampening his face—and bringing to
him a scent he’d feared he would not find... lavender.

She was near. He could only hope the others
were with her and she was not alone.

~ ~ ~

Llynya crouched in the curve of a rock wall
on the far side of the falls, having forded the stream to escape
Trig’s fate. Her captain lay bound and gagged somewhere to the
south, completely wrapped in Sha-shakrieg threads. The same had
happened to Math and Nia—but they’d taken Nia, hauled her to the
roof of the cavern and stolen her away.

They’d killed Bedwyr. Llynya knew that for
sure. She’d seen the silver bolt cut through the dreamstone light
in a blinding flash and slice into Bedwyr’s chest.
“
Thullein,
” the bolt was called, named for the substance
from which it was made, an ore mined by the Sha-shakrieg and forged
in the far reaches of the desert with underling magic. Before the
Wars they would come to the deep dark to dig for
thullein
,
taking it back to the wasteland beyond. She’d been on her guard for
nearly an hour, wracking her memory for bits and pieces of the
Sha-shakrieg stories told around the campfires in Deri, and she’d
come up with very little to cheer her. The spider people had been
banished after the Wars of Enchantment, after their allies the
Dockalfar had been overcome by the Liosalfar, which made the
Sha-shakrieg unlikely to favor any Quicken-tree. ’Twas said elf
shot, a precious stone mined by the
tylwyth teg
beneath the
dragon-back of Mount Tryfan, was the surest way to kill them, but
she had no elf shot arrows. Not many carried them since the Wars
had been won. Rhuddlan had a quiver full, but Rhuddlan wasn’t
anywhere near the stick-forsaken deep dark.

A high-pitched hum streaked through the air
above her, and she instinctively ducked, though logic told her a
half-hand less of height would make her no more invisible when she
smelled like a perfumery. ’Twas her saving grace, the lavender she
carried, and had become a curse as well. She needed to keep herself
so well infused in the caverns that she couldn’t smell her way out
of bed. None had guessed this newfound weakness, or recognized her
need of the herbal for what it was. Rhuddlan would have forbidden
her to come if he’d known, and Trig would have refused to bring
her, both with good reason. How many Sha-shakrieg were in the
cavern and their location was as big a mystery to her as why they
had not already tracked her down and bound her. She could smell
naught besides herself.

“Sticks,” she swore under her breath. She was
near as helpless as a babe, yet she dared not falter. Sha-shakrieg
or no, if she could not master the labyrinthine heart of the
darkness and find the written words of the Prydion Magi, the great
wormhole would forever be beyond her reach.

When Ailfinn had first brought her to
Merioneth, the trail she and the mage had taken from Yr Is-ddwfn
had wound around the Weir Gate’s inner walls, a trail hidden inside
the wormhole. She’d felt the power of the hole then, swirling in
the inner core just beyond where they walked.

The path she would take now was far more
dangerous, for it wasn’t that slip along the side into Yr Is-ddwfn,
but a leap straight down the wormhole’s throat. To survive the
plunge into the flux of time took preparation. To not only survive,
but to follow in Morgan’s tracks, would take the knowledge of the
ancients.

For certes Rhuddlan had not helped her cause.
He’d sealed the eight tunnels leading to the wormhole with gossamer
sheaths, one for each shimmering, pearlescent spoke of the weir
gate, lucidly transparent but seals nonetheless. Seals she did not
know how to open or break.

And Mychael ab Arawn would scarce look at
her. ’Twas the warding sign she’d given him, she was sure, that had
offended him beyond measure. In four days, she had not managed to
speak one word to him, let alone enlist his aid. Every glance she
gave him was met with his turning away, yet she found herself
glancing at him more and more often. The Liosalfar did not
shadow-paint themselves for descent into the caverns, and without
the woad on his face he didn’t look so fierce, but bore a deeper
resemblance to his sister—silver-haired and golden-skinned and
uncommonly fair of face, the way she also remembered Rhiannon, his
and Ceridwen’s mother. His eyes shone blue in dreamstone light, not
gray, furthering her memory of the beautiful Lady of Merioneth.
Long before Rhiannon had become a mother, she’d told her tales to
Quicken-tree children. Llynya remembered a soft-voiced maiden and
the enchantment woven by her songs and the melodies she played upon
her harp. She remembered, too, the wondrous stories of faraway
places and faraway times, of magical beasts and the women who tamed
them, of wild, fell creatures and the heroes who slayed them.

’Twas with that same sense of enchantment
that she oft found herself watching Rhiannon’s son. He was no
darkling beast as Aedyth had warned, yet Llynya could not help but
wonder if he could be tamed to a woman’s hand. Not hers, of course.
Her future—what little there was of it—lay in a far different
direction, and even if it had not, she was singularly lacking in
womanly skills. No, ’twould be for another to give him the gentle
succor of a female’s touch, which he sorely needed. Any child could
see that.

Still she would speak with him if she could,
and try to win him to her cause, but even Shay had been unable to
parlay a meeting between them. Trig, being captain, was an unlikely
candidate for such a mission, and Bedwyr did naught but watch him
with unconcealed animosity.

Or rather, he had watched Mychael ab Arawn.
No mortal man concerned the warrior now.

The reality of her situation descended again.
Mychael had saved her once, but none was likely to find her now.
Even she didn’t know where she was; she’d run blindly. She’d tried
to cut Trig free, and Math. Threads had snagged her each time, not
enough to hold her, but she’d lost her pack in the last tangling
up, and with it her biggest stash of lavender. ’Twas best now to
bide her time, to wait while the Sha-shakrieg made their retreat,
which she thought the humming noises were a part of—the shooting of
threads from one part of the cavern’s ceiling to another in the
making or unmaking of a web.

She started at a scraping sound to her left.
’Twas the second time she’d heard such beneath the rush of the
falls. She peeked over the wall as she had before, squinting her
eyes as if that would help in the darkness, but she saw naught and
smelled naught, so she quickly scrunched herself back down into her
damp cubbyhole, making herself as small as possible.

’Twas said spider people ate elf children if
they caught them in the deep dark, and she wondered if they would
recognize that she was no longer a child. Nia was not a child. They
would not eat her, but Llynya shuddered to think what other
tortures they might inflict.
Poor Nia!

Her hand trembling, she dipped into her
baldric pouch for a pinch of her herbal. She’d touched one of the
spider people on her flight to the falls, stumbled over him, the
dead one, and she’d thought to retrieve Bedwyr’s blade. The
Sha-shakrieg’s clothing had been fine and soft in a way much
different from Quicken-tree cloth, but when her fingers had brushed
against his skin, her blood had run cold and she’d abandoned all
thoughts of getting Bedwyr’s dreamstone back. ’Twas only his arm
she’d touched, and in shape ’twas much like her own, except bigger.
In texture, ’twas not. He’d been covered all over with whorls, flat
disks of spiraled flesh running up his arm.

Shuddering at the memory, she found a flower
in her pouch and placed it under her tongue, not daring to chew.
Mayhaps ’twould be a long time before she could replenish the sack,
and without the smell and taste of lavender to hold her fears at
bay, she would be overcome with despair.

~ ~ ~

Mychael had lost her scent, and something
akin to panic set in. Trouble though she might be, he would find
her. She should never have been brought so deep.