Meri (24 page)

“What was that I heerd, girl? Why was ye singin’ like tha’?”

Meredydd didn’t answer her.

“Tha’ was Wicke work, weren’t it? Ye was singin’ up spirits
and demons, weren’t ye?” The woman was working herself into a frenzy. “Ye’re
goin’ after my Ruhf, ain’t ye? Ain’t ye? Ye’re plottin’ inyx against ’im. Oh,
God, I know it. I know it! She’s a Wicke too, tha’ little one, in’t she? I told
tha’ boy. I
told
him he shouldn’t take ’er
in here, regardless. Speak to me, creature! Don’t be plottin’ in silence.”

“I’m not plotting anything,” said Meredydd at last, her arms
full of provisions. “I’m here for Gwynet. And if your son stays where he is,
nothing need happen to him.” She didn’t know what prompted her to add that, but
it seemed to silence the old woman.

Meredydd slipped back into the nether regions of the store
with her booty and spent several minutes feeding and watering Gwynet and caring
for her comfort. The water, bread and cheese alone, were enough to bring some
semblance of life back into the girl, but Meredydd knew she needed more than
that. She needed poultices. She spent additional time making some of those with
water and tea leaves, placing them on the worst of Gwynet’s wounds. Then she
let herself back into a Weaver’s meditation and sent some of her own energies
through the poultices. Finally, she sang a Sleep duan.

With Gwynet resting quietly, Meredydd slipped back out into
the store. The stoveside chair was empty. Ruhf’s mother was nowhere to be seen.

Terrified all over again, Meredydd dashed through the front
doors, out onto the walkway and up the street toward Hadder’s place. She did
not meet Ruhf or his mama on the way and prayed they would still be within when
she got there.

They were, and it appeared that the old woman had just
arrived, for she hovered crookedly over her son, filling his ear with
something. As if he felt Meredydd’s eyes on him, he looked up toward the door
and froze, an expression that was half rage and half terror on his face.

“It’s her!” cried a pale voice from near the hearth. “The
Wicke!”

The Cirke-master! Meredydd faced him across the long room,
her reason for being in Blaec-del flooding back into her brain. She had nearly
forgotten. He would have it with him, she knew, tucked up under his voluminous
robes. If she could just force him to produce it.

At his table near the end of the bar, Ruhf Airdsgainne had
come to his feet. “I’m thinkin’ there’s only one way to treat a Wicke,” he
said.

“Stopper your face, Ruhf,” said Hadder. She stood behind the
bar, calmly washing mugs. “I doubt it’s a good idea for you to boast of a
thinking brain while the Cirke-master’s here to witness the lie.”

Ruhf glowered at the house-mistress and pressed his hammy
fists into the table top. “The girl’s Wicke. My ma just now heard her
runeweaving inyx over Gwynet.”

“From what I hear, Gwynet might need some weaving done in
her direction,” countered Hadder quietly. “Meredydd told me how you chased them
out of the glen.”

Ruhf’s glare took on an element of bemusement, as if he wasn’t
sure how to take Hadder’s odd mood. “And what care you?” he asked finally. “Cirke-master’s
right. Girl’s Wicke. Needs takin’ care of.”

“Oh, there’s a good many things in this town that need
taking care of, I vow. But Meredydd, here, is not one of them.” She looked at
him finally, her eyes coming to roost on his face with an almost audible snap.

Against the table’s eroded top, his fists pumped like
misshapen hearts. “You partial to her for some reason, Hadder?”

“She’s bewitched!” interjected the Cirke-master, reaching
beneath his robe.

“And you’re besotted,” Hadder snapped, setting a pair of
mugs down with a loud bang.

Ruhf jumped and Meredydd tensed, her eyes scampering wildly
back and forth between the three other players in the scene.

Hadder continued to heckle the little cleirach. “You and
your idiotic Wicke-hunt. You’ve pored over those old tomes and listened to
those hoary legends for so long you eat, sleep and breathe superstition. That
little girl is no more a Wicke than I am.”

There was a muffled chuckle from around the room at that and
one patron started to say, “Well, tha’ we always reckoned—”

Hadder’s black scowl silenced him. “Sit down, Ruhf,” she
said, “and finish your drinking. You, too, cleirach.”

Ruhf’s mother all but howled at that. “Hadder don’ know
aught! I was there not ten minute back. This heathen crept into my son’s store
an’ made free with the place as if she owned it. Stealin’ stuff from the shelves
for tha’ wee vermin he keeps. Then she went back there an started singin’ them
Wicke songs, chantin’ and carryin’ on like a Dark Sister. I heerd it, I tell
you.”

There was silence in the room but for the crackle of a newly
laid fire and the collective breathing of what Meredydd suddenly realized was
about twenty people. It was darkening to evening, and the wayhouse was quite
full of patrons. And every one of them was, at this moment, staring full at
Meredydd-a-Lagan.

Some instinct prompted her to use that to advantage and so
she made her eyes big and round and frightened and turned them to the
Cirke-master, raising a hand to her amulet and rubbing it as if in fear.

He smiled a cold, oily smile. “She admitted to me she used
crystals and knew medicinals,” he said. “And see how she fondles that talisman
she wears? Ah, but she know’s it’s no match for the Star of the Sea. She’s
afraid.”

Meredydd brought her backbone straight enough to crack. “I
am not,” she said, and made her voice wobble just a bit. She made a feint
toward the front door. The Cirke-master and Ruhf moved at the same time,
twitching toward her. She feinted again as if contemplating escape.

“So she knows medicinals,” said Hadder sanely, her elbows
resting casually along the bar. “I’d be glad of that if I were you. I
am
glad of it. She’s done great wonders for my
Flann.”

Ruhf’s head jerked toward her, suspicion crowding into his
eyes.

Hadder smiled. “Great wonders.”

The Cirke-master, impatient with their banter, moved a few
steps toward Meredydd, his hand still beneath his robes. “Here girl,” he
whispered. “Here, I’ve something for you.”

“Flann’s brain-fevered,” snarled Ruhf. “Stupid girl an’ her
damn magic buck.”

“Brain-fevered, is it?” Hadder came upright. “She’s no more
brain-fevered than I am, Ruhf Airdgainne. She’s scared spitless of you, that’s
all. Did you really think I was stupid enough to believe that Tell of hers? I
knew it was you who fathered that child. But I thought the girl was willing
since she was too scared to say otherwise. I know better now.”

Ruhf stared at her for a moment in shocked silence, his jaw
clamping and unclamping. In that moment, the Cirke-master pulled the
star-crystal from beneath his robes and held it out before him like a shield.
Light struck it from every angle, shattering into myriad tiny shards of dancing
color.

Meredydd gasped and held up her hands as if to ward it off.
The Cirke-master took another step toward her; he was still half a room away;
and Ruhf Airdsgainne roared with every ounce of sound in his large body.

“Flann told?” he shrieked, rage flushing from every pore.

Hadder laughed. “Flann? No, Ruhf. For all she is to me, she’s
still a coward and probably always will be.”

“Then it was
you
!” He
thrust his finger at Meredydd. “It was that damned Wicke! By God, I’ll have
your blood!” He shoved aside his table as if it weighed nothing at all and
started toward her.

Hadder moved too then, rushing down the bar toward the door,
haranguing the big man as she went. “Leave off, Ruhf, or I’ll have
your
blood! You’ll not harm the cailin in my
house, nor will you remove her from it.”

He froze, meeting the woman eye to eye across the counter.
The cleirach, too, had stopped, peering at the two, his trembling hand still
outstretched with Meredydd’s jewel in it. She stared at the crystal, licking
her lips, wishing she knew how to strip it from his hand without having to
cross the room to get it. The Wisdom amulet lay, inert, beneath her hand and
nothing came to mind.

“Well then,” growled Ruhf, “if I’m not to harm your pet Wicke,
I shall see to my own.” He turned his face to Meredydd. “Hear tha’, Dark
Sister? I’m goin’ home to my little Gwynet. Do ye think she’ll be pleased t’
see me?”

The light of the crystal failed, leaving her in sudden,
soul-chilling darkness. Her entire body shook with rage and terror.

She felt black inside, empty.

“Leave her alone!” she cried, and felt as if she could shoot
fire at him. “Leave her alone or I’ll—”

“Ye’ll what, Wicke?” He took one step toward her, then
another. “What can ye do to me tha’ ye wouldn’t already have done if ye could,
eh? Oh, I believe ye can sing and dance and lay on herbs. But I don’t think ye
can lay a finger or an inyx on ol’ Ruhf.”

Meredydd quailed, knowing he was right. Even in
self-defense, a Weaver of Runes was bound by certain laws and precepts. A
violent inyx was not something she would cast, nor was it, in all truth,
something she had ever learned at the feet of Osraed Bevol.

With a last, longing glance at the crystal in the
Cirke-master’s trembling hand, Meredydd turned and fled the wayhouse.

She heard a roar from Ruhf and a wild screech from Hadder
and nothing after that but the pounding of her own feet on the slats of the
walkway.

She did not mean to collide with Ruhf’s untidy piles of
goods or knock them all down into the narrow aisle of his shop, but she did.
She did not mean to tear the heavy, dust-riddled blanket from the lintel of the
inner doorway, but she did.

She scrambled into Gwynet’s closet, calling her name, and
fell to the floor beside her. She shook the girl until she got a questioning
moan, then grasped her around the shoulders and pulled her to her unsteady
feet.

“Come Gwynet! Come! It’s Ruhf! Ruhf’s coming!”

Something of her urgency penetrated the other girl’s drowsy
fog and she gasped and stiffened.

“Can you walk?” asked Meredydd.

“Aye! I’ll try.”

And try she did. Meredydd half-carried her out into the
narrow corridor behind the store, dragging much of her sorry bedding with her.
Propping Gwynet against the wall, she felt for the back door. She found it
immediately and threw up the latch, forcing the door open on its rusty hinges.
It groaned mightily, but she ignored that and thrust Gwynet outside. Only now
did she disentangle herself from the bedding, leaving it lumped before the door
with a tail of blanket stuck between door jamb and latch. Then, with her arm
around the smaller girl, she headed southeast into the woods.

She thought she heard the clamor of a small mob and the
thudding of boots on boards as they slipped beneath a tall fern and turned due
south, but she could not be sure and she had no intention of achieving any
certainty. It was twilight now, and she dragged Gwynet back the way she had
come alone that morning, up the long, misty slope to the trail.

It was an odd sort of phenomenon, Meredydd thought, that
Gwynet only seemed heavy or unwieldy when she thought about her. As long as she
kept her mind on where she was putting her feet, or on picking landmarks out of
the near-darkness she felt the burden hardly at all. Still, she was aware that
they both needed strength, and so, she murmured an Infusion duan beneath her
breath, regulating her breathing and the rhythms of her body, content that by
so doing, she was regulating Gwynet’s as well.

She lost track of the distance and duration of the journey.
She only knew that one long step took her from tree cover to clearing and left
her staring at a familiar, watery glen. There was a fire and, before the fire,
a boy who stood and came to the water’s edge.

Shaking with relief, Meredydd paused to listen down the
trail. There was no sound but the nightbirds calling to each other in the trees
and the light passing of tiny creatures below them in the brush and the little
smack-smack
sound of fish leaping in the darkened
pool. The moon had not yet risen.

“What have you got, Meredydd?” asked Skeet from over the
water.

“A friend,” she answered, almost in a whisper. She turned
her attention to Gwynet then, and found the girl was close to unconscious. “Help
me, Skeet. Help me get her across the pool.”

There was a narrow, rock strewn fall that aided with that,
and Meredydd was able to hand Gwynet over to Skeet and then cross, herself,
getting only a bit wet and minding that very little. At the fire she blanketed
the younger girl and tried to get water down her throat with little success.
She was high with fever and her wounds looked even more grievous in the
firelight.

“She’s been hard used,” said Skeet soberly. “Wherever did
you find her, mistress?”

“In a village. A horrid, dark village with little light in
it. Poor souls,” she added.

“Ah. Then you’ve completed the Gwenwyvar’s task?”

Meredydd blushed so hot she thought surely Skeet could see
her face glow in the dark. “No. I shall have to return and try again. I found
the jewel, but I couldn’t bring it back.”

She closed her eyes and could still see the crystal winking
at her from just too far away while Ruhf Airdsgainne roared and moved
inexorably toward her—toward Gwynet.

But had it really been too far? she wondered. If she had
trusted the Meri, trusted the First Being to aid her, might she have been able
to get the jewel
and
rescue Gwynet as well?

The blush bled from her face, leaving it feeling cold and
whipped. Had she once again failed by disobedience? Had she now failed even
more horribly through lack of faith?

The moon chose that moment to show its face above the trees
and out on the pool a white wisp of ether curled and molded itself to a certain
shape and a name was whispered across the sparkling waters.
Mere-dydd
....