Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (4 page)

Nennius only smiled and made a blessing sign
over the man before leaving the cell. Latin, indeed. Outside, he
lifted his face to the sun. The scent of heather was on the wind,
and the sound of ocean waves breaking on the island’s eastern
shore. He stood for a moment, silent and waiting. When the first
cry came, a gasped breath of agony, he began making his way toward
a small hollow of land no more than a stone’s throw from the cell
door. Gruffudd’s cries would get louder, much louder, before they
ceased for all eternity, and Nennius would as soon not have his
ears overly taxed by the guardsman’s death throes. There had been
no help for the man’s demise. Nennius could not afford to have a
lunatic running around speaking of serpents and demons and
Helebore, and to have his name linked to all of it. The Culdees had
been strangely skittish of late—with good reason it seemed, what
with worms moving in the deep—and throwing suspected heretics off
cliffs was the quickest way to ease a bit of ecclesiastical
skittishness.

The afternoon was growing late, a crispness
in the air heralding the cool night to come. The summer just
passing had been peculiarly long and warm with a fair balance
between sunshine and rain, a fecund combination, as if the earth
had drawn the sun’s rays to it more fully than in other summers, as
if the land had called only the perfect measure of moisture from
out of the clouds. Now he understood why. The books had told him
pryf
were a blessing to Earth’s gardens.

He smiled. Worms.

The harvest had been bountiful on Ynys Enlli
and no doubt throughout Wales. ’Twould be a good year to travel,
even in battle-ravaged lands. When men’s bellies were full, they
were far less suspicious and far more generous, whether the request
was for food, or shelter, or information.

Purple heather and saffron gorse brushed
against his robes as he walked the narrow path that led to a
well-worn bench tucked into the hollow. A kelp-strewn beach
stretched out below the windswept bower, welcoming the incoming
tide, while across the sea the Lleyn Peninsula rose above the
horizon. Nennius sat on the bench and let his gaze follow the dark
rise of land to the south until it disappeared. A thousand emotions
flooded through him, making him feel more alive than he had in
years, as if he were pulling free from a long and arduous half
sleep where the line between memories and dreams had grown
dangerously thin, where the nightmares were of forgetfulness, not
death.

He’d been so close all this time. His books
had not led him astray as he’d oft feared, but had held true. A
land called Merioneth was there, just beyond where he could see,
nearly due east according to Gruffudd, and beneath the castle keep
once called Balor lay the long-sought end of his exile, the
wormhole, the tunnel through time—his chance to go home.

One treasure only the fair maid took from the
dragon’s trove—the double-edged favor of the beast’s untempered
love.

October 1198

Carn Merioneth

Merioneth, Wales

W
olves howled in the
darkness. From his vantage point on Carn Merioneth’s east wall,
Rhuddlan of the Quicken-tree watched the fleet forms weave their
paths through the moonlit forest. Swift and deadly, the shadows
were hunting, coming down out of the mountains of Eryri to claim
the land from the river to the sea. Wolves alone were naught to
fear—but the wolves were not alone. Here and there, Rhuddlan caught
sight of a more upright shape running with the animals. The man
beside him nocked an arrow into his longbow.

“Hold, Trig,” Rhuddlan commanded softly. He
was tall and slender and wore no badge other than his bearing to
proclaim his rank as king. Gray marked the pale blond of his hair
and was woven into the five-strand plait on the left side of his
head. A long green cloak was thrown over his shoulders.

“Ye know what they are.” His captain’s voice
held an edge of impatience. Trig was as tall as his sovereign, but
broader in girth, with a squarish face bearing the scars of a
long-ago war. He, too, wore a
fif
braid streaked through
with gray.

“Aye.” They both knew. Men were running with
the wolves. The question was, Why?

When Rhuddlan said nothing else, Trig snorted
and lowered his bow. “It’ll be our heads on pikes, or worse.”

“ ’Tis too soon to be worrying about pikes.
Find your bed, if you wish. I’ll wait with Naas.”

Trig grumbled again. “She’s been at it all
night and seen naught. More ’an like, she’s gone full blind on
ye.”

Rhuddlan let him leave with his complaint
unanswered. Dawn was not far off, and if Naas was to see for him,
it had best be soon, or they would have to wait the month out in
hopes of another clear night with a full moon.

Behind him on the wall-walk, the old woman
tended a fire of hot burning coals. She was small, a bundle of
greenish gray cloak and dark gown huddled next to the flames. The
brazier holding the fire had been forged of a rich alloy, giving
the bronze a fey, purplish cast. The shallow rim of the pan was
circled ’round with dragons in relief, all of them spouting ruby
flames into billows of smoky quartz. Magic was to be done in the
night. Rhuddlan but waited for the old one to pull it down out of
the sky and into her cauldron.

The last wolf disappeared into the northern
woods, and Rhuddlan turned toward the upper bailey of the castle.
Light from the full moon slanted long, dark shadows across the
grass and the scarred remains of what had once been Balor Keep.
Since taking the demesne in May, he’d had his people destroying the
structures built by the previous ruler, Caradoc, the Boar of Balor,
and by the Boar’s father, Gwrnach, except for the stone wall. That
great defense he would leave for time and the old white-eyed woman
by the fire to dismantle. He had need of it for now.

“Naas.” He spoke her name, and the woman
lifted her strange gaze. Pale irises discernible only as rims of
milky luminosity were barely visible across the rising smoke. The
bones beneath her age-lined skin were delicate and finely
fashioned, giving her a fragile appearance. Pure deception, that
was, for few had Naas’s strength—and none had her singular skill
with fire.

She whispered something unintelligible, then
turned and added another stick to the flames. Sparks rose with the
wind and cascaded by him, a thousand brilliant stars slipping
through the merlons and falling to their death on the sward.

Trig was wrong. Naas was not blind, only too
replete with the past to see beyond the memories of her race. Those
memories ran through her veins and filled her eyes with visions of
life from a long-ago world, a world she brought forth through
burning heat and the light of the moon. Rhuddlan needed such
knowledge if he was to keep the wolves from the wall. He needed to
know what darkness threatened Merioneth, for the heralds of
darkness were there, creeping into his woods and lapping at the
shores of the River Bredd with black rot.

Yet ’twas not the rot in his woods or the
strangely mixed wolfpack they’d seen that night that stole his
sleep and put Trig on edge. Dangerous though they were, the men
were yet true Men; they had not been turned. Of the danger he did
fear, there had been no sightings. He’d sent scouts as far north as
Finn’s Road and as far south as the white horse, and none had seen
sign of skraelings, the fierce and dirty beast men that were all
that remained of the fell legions conjured by the Dockalfar, an
ancient enemy that had once ruled the caverns below. Nor had there
been any reports of disturbances in the troll fields of
Inishwrath.

Nay, ’twas not wildmen and wolves he feared,
but things unseen yet still felt. In the sky the tension had played
itself out in thunder and lightning,
mellt a tharanau
, a
summer of storms. Nearer to earth, the air held a certain
heaviness, the ground a certain softness, as if the Earth herself
was giving way to some greater force. Verily, one part of the Earth
had given way. In spring, after the battle to reclaim Merioneth,
Mychael ab Arawn had reported the breaking of a damson shaft in the
caverns. The damson shafts were pure veins of crystal set into the
matrix of the Earth by the mages of old. That one would crack was a
grim portent, but how grim, Rhuddlan could not judge. The crystal
shafts harkened back to a time long, long before his, but not
beyond the reach of Naas’s vision. To this end, he’d set the old
woman to her fire. Five months past, he’d looked to another for
answers. He had sent runners to the four directions in search of
Ailfinn Mapp, last of the Prydion Magi. The wandering mage was e’er
difficult to find, but that he’d had no word in nearly half a year
of looking, and that not even the old men of Anglesey had seen her
since the winter solstice, was another cause for worry.

Naas added another stick to the fire, and
Rhuddlan looked to the sky. Dawn still lay beyond the mountains,
but not for much longer. The morning stars were rising.

“Nothing lost, nothing gained. All is change.
All is change,” Naas muttered, drawing his attention. She reached
out with a rowan branch to stir the cauldron nestled in the
coals.

Rhuddlan followed the meandering path she
drew in the boiling water. Steaming ribbons of vapor curled around
her gnarly wand and drifted upward into the stars, streaming
through smoke and sparking flames. Of a sudden the old woman
cackled, a dry laugh bespeaking grim satisfaction rather than
delight, and a chill went through him.

“There ye are, my pretty one. There ye are,”
she crooned, gently stirring, stirring, stirring.

Rhuddlan saw no change in the water, only in
Naas, and moved to her side. Sweat had broken out on her
age-spotted brow; her eyes were wide and staring, reflecting the
dance of flames in the brazier. She’d started her fire at dusk,
building it piece by flaming piece to reveal the path he’d asked
her to tread, and finally, at dawn’s edge, it seemed she’d taken a
step.

“What do you sec?”

“A woman,” she said, her voice thinning to a
raspy whisper. “She’s weeping, she is, with blood running out of
her mouth.”

Blood.

Rhuddlan cursed to himself. He’d seen enough
blood in his life.

So had Naas, rivers of it from out of the
past, but she’d not seen blood like this. ’Twas shimmering, with a
pale iridescence about it, yet she knew ’twas blood that stained
the woman’s yellow gown and dripped from the chunk of red, scaly
flesh in her one hand. In her other hand, the woman held a knife, a
steel-edged dagger from a lost age.

Rhuddlan asked her another question, but she
waved him off, paying him no mind. Bothersome man. He’d asked for a
vision, and by the grace of the gods she’d conjured one in her
cauldron. Touch and go, it had been, touch and go the whole night
long, but she’d done it, and now he could wait until it was
finished.

“Aye, a vision they ask, but does they ask
the price?” she grumbled under her breath, all the while stirring
the small, twisted branch through the bubbling brew of water and
whatnot. Days were the price, a day off her life for every minute
she would look, and she knew well the passing of a minute. She
counted them in heartbeats and breaths—such was the cost of looking
into the past.

She knew the woman as well, not by sight, but
by her presence. Naas had seen High Priestesses before in her
cauldron. In truth, within the borders of Merioneth, it was a rare
stew that did not have a High Priestess floating in it. This was
their place, and though there were none left in the carn, they had
not let it go.

“Tears and blood. Tears and blood,” she
murmured in a singsong cadence. ’Twas the way of the cauldron to
show moments when the world had hung in the balance and lives had
hung by a thread. Rarely, Naas was given a mundane glimpse into the
past, but there was nothing mundane about a bloody, sobbing
priestess. “What’s happening here, then, hmm?”