Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (20 page)

Caradoc hadn’t liked being away, hadn’t liked
it a’tall. The wormhole had a hold on him, and he’d suffered for
not being near the swirling abyss. But he’d made it back, and the
skraelings had returned, and together they would track down the
Quicken-tree and force them to unlock the seals and show him the
way back into the hole. That was his reward for watching and
waiting and sending word. Then the power would be his again and the
skraelings could go to hell.

He unwrapped the package they’d given him,
and a ripple of unease circled around the cavern. Beel grunted and
moved away from him on the bench. Thus ’twas with care that Caradoc
peeled away the outer layer of leather to reveal a leaf-encased
pot. One by one he lifted the leaves and watched them crumble into
dust. The thing was old, very old—plunder from a long ago war,
they’d told him—probably too old to do him any good. The pot was
made of clay and was cracked in a hundred places, and it crumbled
away as well when he removed the last layer of leaves. All that
remained was a hardened lump of some transparent golden resin,
smoothed into a flat-topped ball by the pot.

He started to taste it, but Igorot made a
harsh sound and gestured toward his leg. Caradoc put it there
instead, inside his chausses next to his wound, and lo and behold,
the pain immediately lessened. Not so much at first, but enough to
note the difference. Slowly, the stuff melted against his skin. The
faintest smell of the forest drifted up to him, a fragrant, leafy
ribbon winding through the foul stench of the skraelings.

Igorot and the others moved farther away,
taking their knuckle-bones to the other side of the fire. Beel
heaved his bulk up and trundled to the far end of the cave. Only
one came near him, the captain, Lacknose Dock, whose mostly missing
nose had been replaced by a silver half-cone.

The greenling stopped by the bench and
reached out for a handful of Caradoc’s hair, grabbing up in his
long-clawed fist the copper stripe that ran through the dirty
yellow strands.

“We go now to Slott, Wyrm-master,” Lacknose
Dock said, and tugged on the length of hair.

Caradoc jerked free with a snarl and rose to
his feet. ’Twas about time. He would bargain with Thousand Skulls
and be done with underlings.

Lacknose Dock did naught but smile, a
fearsome, toothy thing, and, growling a set of orders, led the way
out of the cave.

R
huddlan strode
across the upper bailey of Carn Merioneth, a full quiver held
tightly in his fist, his destination the ancient yew by the
northwest tower. The Liosalfar had brought sore tidings up from the
caverns this night: Bedwyr dead and Nia captured; Trig and Math
wounded; Sha-shakrieg back in the deep dark—and worse.

Worse, aye, enough to bring an end to them
all: damson shafts cracked and smoking, and skraelpacks.

No skraeling would venture into the caverns
of Merioneth on a dare or for treasure. Nay, they only came for
blood, and only when driven by a master. The trick for Rhuddlan
would be to find out who wielded the whip.

As for why the spider people had returned, he
had to look no farther than himself. Many years had passed since
the price on his head had lured Sha-shakrieg into the deep dark,
yet he had known they would come again, a new set of warriors to
test their mettle against the Scourge of the Wasteland. He oft
wondered if spider children still sang songs of Rhuddlan’s
Retribution and his march to the Salt Sea. The day he burned
Deseillign to the ground and poured a hundred years’ worth of the
Sha-shakrieg’s water into the sands had been the end of the Wars of
Enchantment, just as the Wars of Enchantment had been the end of so
much that had gone before—or so he’d thought.

He would burn the skraelings out of the
caverns, if needs be, but the smoke rising from the crystal seals
would require another’s intervention—Ailfinn Mapp’s. The seals were
the Prydion Magi’s most ancient watch, and he feared only a great
distance or great travails could have kept her from her duty.

Throughout the castle grounds, the
Quicken-tree were hanging lanterns on their willow huts and in the
trees, bringing a semblance of the stars down to earth on the crisp
autumn night. While the Liosalfar awaited him at the yew, others
moved here and there, tending the groves they had planted in the
spring, saplings of oak, hawthorn, and hazel, of rowan and fir
brought from Riverwood. Lilting evensongs filled the air, sung to
keep the young trees warm the whole night long, to entice three
years’ growth out of one. Honeysuckle and elder had been planted
along the inside of the wall. Wild grasses had been strewn
throughout the wards and had reached the golden ripeness of their
first harvest.

There was no rot inside the great wall of
Carn Merioneth, but Riverwood was decaying at an alarming rate. The
bramble would not be enough to save it, and now Rhuddlan knew
why.

“Owain.” He greeted the man striding toward
him from across the bailey.

“When did Trig get back?” Owain asked,
falling in beside him. The man’s rough-hewn face wore age beyond
his years and scars of battles past. He was stocky and dark-haired,
larger than any Quicken-tree, which had proven a boon when they’d
fought Balor, a boon soon to be needed again.

“Early this eventide,” Rhuddlan answered.

“Morgan?”

The Cymry captain always asked, holding out
hope that one day when the Liosalfar came up from the caves they
would have tidings of his prince.

“No,” Rhuddlan replied. “War and worse.”

“I’ve not come across worse than war.”

“You will shortly, if you choose to stay,”
Rhuddlan said grimly. “Are there still villeins south of the
Dwyryd?”

“Aye, but they’ll be gone a’fore winter sets
in too hard.”

Owain had proven to be an invaluable liaison
between the
tylwyth teg
and the few of Balor’s cottars that
remained. In the aftermath of battle, when the Quicken-tree had
claimed Carn Merioneth from Caradoc, the keep and castle grounds
had been looted and pillaged by both the free men and villeins of
Balor, an action encouraged by Rhuddlan. He’d wanted nothing of
Caradoc’s and for a fortnight had kept his soldiers well out of
sight in the caves. The deserted castle had been easy pickings for
even the faintest-hearted serfs. The thieves had not been inclined
to stay in the demesne and await their new lord’s displeasure.

As to the farms, Merioneth’s legendary bounty
had perished under Balor’s rule with the
prifarym
sealed
behind the weir, until naught but the most meager subsistence could
be wrung from the ground. There had been little to hold the people
of Balor to the lost keep, especially in the spring when winter
stores had grown thin.

“And the band of thieves seen lurking in
Riverwood a sennight past?” Rhuddlan asked.

“Wei and I set ’em a running, and for certes
they’ll have tales to tell.”

Rhuddlan knew that many who had fled Balor
had tales to tell of the strange new ruler in Merioneth. For the
rest, time and the bramble would do the deed as Cara Merioneth slid
farther and farther from men’s minds. The forest would grow and
become impassably dense, until men remembered only that ’twas
easier to get to the sea by going north or south around the woods,
until Carn Merioneth became no more than a memory. Within the span
of those years, any remaining cottars would die, their children
would leave, and according to Madron, a vital link would be lost
between this world and the other, between Men and their gods.

Rhuddlan had once thought so too, that naught
but the passing of time tamed a land’s gods, and he’d been willing
to enhance time’s passing and thus disappear more rapidly into a
veiled existence embodied by myth—an inevitability he’d foreseen
long ago for the
tylwyth teg
. Men, he’d reasoned, would find
another way to manifest the natural laws, or they would break those
laws and suffer their own demise.

A time of Quicken-tree and the other clans,
of
Fir Bile
and
aes sídhe
, would come again, a time
when the voices of trees would be heard once more, a time when to
lay one’s hand upon the earth would be to feel the heartbeat of the
Mother, a time when stones would speak of Deep Time.

Aye, he’d thought all those things and
reasoned himself right in his decisions, no matter that Madron did
not agree. This night, Trig had proved him wrong. Waning gods
needed to fear another force besides time. It came padding into his
woods on wolves’ feet and snaked out of the ground on wisps of
smoke, and if left unchecked would destroy them all.

Too many years had passed since he’d looked
beyond the borders of his own lands. For too many years he’d given
way before the world of Men, feeling the end of the Fifth Age
drawing nigh. He’d been wrong. The last battle of enchantment had
not been fought.

Together, he and Owain neared the yew tree
where the Liosalfar were waiting. Trig was with them, along with
others of the Quicken-tree, three Ebiurrane, and Madron.

“How’s the boy?” Owain’s naturally hoarse
voice took on an edge.

“He’s well enough,” Rhuddlan said, knowing
Owain asked of Mychael. The two had formed a bond, the older man
and the younger one, both Cymry, the one trained in battle, the
other learning. “Moira has him. He’s tired and needs stitching, but
fared better than most.”

The truth of that was easily seen in the
welts running across Trig’s and Math’s skin. The wounds had turned
purple, and Rhuddlan knew they burned and ached far worse than a
knife cut. A thread had caught Trig across the face, singeing a
line through his left eyebrow. Hair would not grow there again.

The worst of Math’s wounds were around his
neck and down his arm. He was being cared for by Aedyth and Elen in
a lean-to not far from the yew. Unlike Trig, a grizzled
silver-haired warrior who had long since been beyond the limits of
suffering, the younger man’s eyes had been glazed with pain when
they’d reached the surface. Trig’s eyes had shown only anger.
Nearly three days had passed since the battle in the quarterlan
cavern, and the worst of the thread’s damage was done. Soon naught
would be left but the scars.

Rhuddlan looked toward the lean-to as they
passed. Aedyth was pulling Math’s long dark hair up and away from
his neck and applying a fresh coat of
rasca
and salves.
Under the healer’s guidance, Elen was bandaging the young man’s arm
with dark green Quicken-tree cloth, the purest available, without a
trace of the older silver threads running through it.

Like to heal like, Rhuddlan thought, for the
base material of the cloth and the Sha-shakrieg fighting threads
were the same, the larval silk of
pryf
. The Quicken-tree
used the silk in its natural state. The spider people carried
theirs deep into the wasteland, to a place far past Deseillign
where sulphurous poisons bubbled up from the ground. There they let
it steep in vats of
bia
sap through the cycles of the moon
before winding it up into deadly whorls.

No Liosalfar had been marked by fighting
threads since the Wars of Enchantment, when the Sha-shakrieg had
fought by the Dockalfar’s side, not since Rhuddlan had earned his
own such scars.

Rhuddlan stopped at the yew and faced the
warriors who had gathered to await his orders. He saw Llynya scoot
farther into the shadows, as if that would hide her from his gaze.
She would have to be watched, with skraelings loose in the land.
Kneeling, he shook out the quiver of arrows, letting them fall on
the grass beneath the tree. One of the Ebiurrane, a fair-haired
woman named Fand, her face marked with a diagonal stripe of blue
woad, leaned in and chose the first arrow. Its shaft was straight
and true, born in the heart of an ash tree and marked with runes.
Its flights came from the black wingtip feathers of snow geese, its
deadly point from beneath the dragon-back of Tryfan—elf shot.

“I will go to Llyr in the north, and tell him
the tale told here this day,” she vowed, then rose to her feet and
in a twinkling had melted into the shadows and was gone.

Llyr had lost both a son and a daughter in
the Wars. Rhuddlan knew he would come.

A Liosalfar of the Quicken-tree, Prydd, chose
next. Brown haired, he was past the stages of youth, entering his
middlin years. “To Brittany, Rhuddlan, as ye command,” he swore,
holding up an elf shot arrow. “To the Daur-clan, to tell them of
Sha-shakrieg in the deep dark and skraelings, and of worse to
come.” He stood, and Rhuddlan dismissed him with a nod.

Too many years had passed since he’d last
seen any of the Daur-clan. Rhuddlan knew not if they would come, or
even if Prydd would find them. The seas had changed and pushed the
Daur-clan farther inland on the continent. Rhuddlan had seen for
himself how the ocean had risen up and swallowed the forest of
Mount Tombe, making it an island surrounded by quicksands and
coveted by Christian priests. Nemeton had been the last traveler
from Brittany.

Madron walked out of the shadows of the yew
and knelt by the scattered arrows. Rhuddlan tensed. He knew what
she was about, and he would not allow it.

Graceful fingers grasped an arrow, and the
white silken sleeve of her kirtle flowed down across the top of her
hand. “To Anglesey,” she said, meeting his gaze. Her eyes were
green like a Quicken-tree’s, but she claimed no lineage other than
that of her Druid father. Her hair, a burnished auburn, was held
back from her face by a gold fillet wrought in the same pattern as
the golden crests emblazoned on her butter-colored gown.

“Aye, the Druids must be warned,” he agreed,
albeit reluctantly and not without a trace of warning. “But I would
as soon send another. I have need of you here.”