The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (31 page)

He had stopped swearing and was looking at her, his gaze far too serious for what she had in mind next.

“You had this dream?” he asked.

“Yes. When I fell asleep in Madron’s cottage.” If he wasn’t going to get on with teaching her magic, then she needed to get on with her own preparations. To that end, she gave him what she hoped was a wistfully charming smile. “Since you cut yourself, does that mean I get the knife?”

Without a word, he handed her the blade. His lack of hesitation surprised her, but neither did she hesitate in the taking of it.

She fit the dagger to her hand, liking the weight and the balance of it, as always. A smile came to her mouth. There had been a helper in the abbey garden, a boy who had liked knives. He would have loved this one, except she doubted if anyone used such a fancy piece for playing mumblety-peg. Childhood games were long past her, but a woman still had need of a knife. She was glad to have this one as a gift instead of having to steal it again. Her sins were mounting at an alarming rate as it was.

“A sword as fine as this dagger could cost a man’s whole fortune,” she said, rubbing her thumb along the haft.

“Or a man’s life.”

She glanced up from beneath her lashes, distracted from her new treasure by the sudden weariness in his voice. “You’ve seen one?”

He nodded, swearing softly and bringing his hand up to rub his temples. Was a move he’d made often in the last few days, one indicative of a throbbing head. He was prone to the malady, and she felt remiss.

“Lavrans?” She leaned forward and put her hand on his cheek, giving in to a wayward impulse she immediately regretted. To touch him was to remember him not as the cynic he played so well, but as the Prince of the Light-elves, he who enchanted demons and saved maidens. ’Twas that part of him that made her yearn for love.

He looked up, over the top of his hand, but not at her. She followed his gaze across the room to the oak-and-iron chest chained at the foot of his bed, then brought her attention back to him. He swore again, closing his eyes and lowering his head, and the tips of her fingers slid into his hair. She caressed his temple with her thumb, another impulse she could not resist.

“Are you well?” Concern made her voice gentler than she liked. At least she told herself it was concern and not the slow ache she felt building inside.

“Aye,” he answered, not sounding at all truthful. With the slightest of movements, he turned his mouth into her palm, flooding her senses with awareness. His lips were soft, his breath warm against her skin.

Heat poured through her. She wanted to lean closer and take him in her arms, cradle his head next to her breast; to glide her fingers through his hair, dragging the long, dark strands away from his face, then bend low to kiss his brow. When he’d kissed her across the river from Deri, he had kissed her as a man as well as a sorcerer, and after her dream of him as the savior with a sword, she’d had no more fear of him. She had only the want of him, a need unlike any she’d felt before, undeniable. Thus compelled, she did lean closer, bringing her face ever so much nearer to his.

His breath grew shallow, and slowly his eyes opened, the gradual lift of his lashes mesmerizing her with hope and promise. Her heart pounded. Surely he would kiss her again.

Yet when their eyes met, it wasn’t longing she saw in his gaze, nor weariness, but a regard so cool, she felt the icy chill of it.

She quickly pulled away, embarrassed beyond measure, and growing even more so when he lounged back in his chair. ’Twas what came from being raised in a nunnery, she thought with disgust, this inability of hers to understand or predict him, or to keep herself from her own awful foolishness.

“Forget this dream you had,” he said. “It can do neither of us any good.”

“Dreams cannot harm you, magician.” Damn him. He had felt nothing, and she could scarce see straight for still wanting him. He was more changeable than the weather. She should have more sense than to think of him the way she did. She should have more sense than to think of him at all.

“Mayhaps,” he agreed. “But for some, the whole world is a dream, and who can deny that there is harm in the world?”

“Do not speak in riddles to me.” She would not cry. She’d had enough of tears. He was the one who had kissed her, was he not? She had not gone out of her way to kiss him. But then it never stopped at kisses for a man. A sister at Usk who had been widowed twice before taking her vows had told her so. With Dain, the kisses she longed for would no doubt turn into something beastly that she dared not desire.

“You do not want riddles?” He reached for his cup of wine. “Then hear the truth, Ceridwen. I also dreamed in Madron’s cottage.”

She stopped her silent railing and glanced up at him. “A dream like mine?”

“Enough so to make me wary.” He drank and set the cup back on the table.

“Is this why you are no longer friends?”

“Aye.”

’Twasn’t much as explanations went, but it was something. “The thing with Caradoc. What does it matter to Madron if we wed?” She asked her most pressing question, trying to take advantage of his willingness to speak, if not exactly discourse on the matter.

“She was Nemeton’s daughter, and believes if Caradoc is wed, then she can be returned to Carn Merioneth.”

“Nemeton’s daughter?” she said, taken aback by his answer. “I think not. Nemeton’s daughter was named Moriath.”

“’Tis another name the witch has, Moriath, though only Rhuddlan calls her thus. They have known each other for many years—” He rubbed his head again, as if the pain had suddenly increased. “At least fifteen, for certes. But what do you know of Nemeton?”

“He was the greatest bard in all of Wales and often came to Carn Merioneth,” she said, excitement spilling over into her voice. She’d been right. It was Moriath she’d seen in the cottage. “Everyone knew of him, and for a short time Moriath stayed with us. She was the one who brought Mychael and me south and put us in the religious houses.”

“Aye, she was at Usk,” Dain said, and swore silently. He’d fallen into a hornet’s nest of intrigue with the maid at the center of it all.

“Did you say anything to her about the red book? Did she know of it?” the chit asked, leaning close, her face alight. Then just as quickly she moved away, a pink stain upon her cheeks.

“She wrote it,” he said. “At least the Latin parts.” Another unfortunate telling of truth he surmised from the startled widening of her eyes. “’Tis not what you think, Ceri. She but put her father’s stories to the page, which may have naught to do with you. I have heard stories of a Ceridwen as the mother of Taliesin, a mythical being who some say is also the Merlin of Arthur’s court. There is a Ceridwen as keeper of a magic cauldron and another as—”

“They are the same,” she interrupted him. “Taliesin’s mother and the cauldron keeper are the same woman.”

“And neither one of them is you,” he said, making his point. He saw no reason to frighten her with Madron’s unconvincing reassurance that if Ceridwen married Caradoc, her blood would remain her own.

Christ, but he hated the whole of it.

“You must take me to Moriath,” she said. “I have to talk with her.”

“No.” He dared not take her back into Wroneu. In truth, he didn’t know what to do with her. “There were dangers beyond the ocean in my dream, Ceri, and I know not why Madron showed them to me, or what they mean, or if ’twas really a dream.”

“If not a dream, then what?”

“Mayhaps a threat. Or it could have been a vision. I have a small gift of sight.”

“Small?” Obviously, Ceridwen didn’t like the sound of that. “Erlend told me you were a great diviner, feared throughout the March of Wales; famed throughout the borderlands and the shires beyond.”

His lips twitched with the beginnings of a grin he barely held in check.

“I would not put too much store by what Erlend says,” he opined drolly. “Or spend too much of my time listening to his prattle.”

“His prattle is better company than your silence. As for visions, I have no gift at all, so how do you explain what I saw?”

“Madron.”

“She has magic then?”

Dain grimaced. “All with you is magic.”

“It would be, if you would uphold your end of our bargain.”

He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Magic is mostly damned hard work and nothing to be bargained with.”

“Magic was your half of the bargain, sorcerer, not mine. You promised the lightning dance.”

Their eyes held across the chessboard for no more than a moment before he relented. ’Twas Ceridwen’s easiest victory yet over him.

He pushed himself out of his chair and stood. “Aye, then, before we jump into the thick of it, why don’t we begin with something no less volatile, but much less likely to immolate you.”

“Immolate?”

“Burn to a cinder,” he elaborated, gesturing toward the trapdoor with a broad sweep of his hand.

’Twas about time, she thought.

~ ~ ~

What was Madron’s game, Dain wondered, to have warned him off, and then to have given him and the maid the same dream? It had all come back to him as Ceri had spoken of his sword, come back far too clearly for his peace of mind: the smell of the dark place, the danger of it, the way the walls had moved, the utter surety of his own death. With the clarity of the dream, he’d also remembered the moment in Deri when he’d felt and seen the same dark place.

Too much darkness, he thought, filling another lamp with oil. When he lit the crystal globe, the lamp cast a shattered glow of fractured beams around the walls of the lower chamber. They danced over Ceridwen’s body and wove themselves through her hair where she stood across from him at the table. He’d started her off with the making of
rihadin
, one of Jalal’s most closely guarded concoctions, compact packages of mineral powders, fire oil, and resin used to change and deepen the colors of flames. Bits of charcoal, sulfur, or wax were sometimes used, depending on the desired effect. Saltpeter could be added, though he’d been strongly advised against it, and his own experiments had proven the admonition to be based on sound reasoning and in favor of self-preservation, unless one was intent on a certain amount of destruction.

A number of candles were already flaming, adding their meager light to the work at hand. He hung the lamp from a chain above them and set about filling his alchemy still with wine. ’Twould be
aqua ardens
he made for her.

He had never doubted Jalal’s magic, or Madron’s, only his own, and yet he’d underestimated the witch. Her dream had awakened something in him. He’d felt it hovering on the edge of his consciousness these past few days, a mystery, mayhaps magic, but a magic more dangerous than any he had imagined. Not so for Rhuddlan. More than the Quicken-tree leader’s intuition had been at work in the grove that night. Rhuddlan had known the contents of Dain’s fleeting moment of sight. Dain’s own intuition, jogged into awareness by Ceri’s dream, told him it was so.

Madron. Rhuddlan. Ceridwen. And Madron as Moriath, the one who had taken Ceridwen to Usk. The three were part of some whole, their lives knotted together for some purpose beyond a simple marriage. But what? And where was the dark place that bespoke of his death?

Rhuddlan had gone north, not to return until Beltaine, Dain remembered, and Caradoc had come from the north.

He glanced up from his still to where Ceridwen worked on the other side of the table. The maid had brought strange forces to bear on his life. She mocked him with her need for the powers of salvation he could not give himself, yet he’d be parting with her against his will.

Nimble fingers, nimble mind, she’d grasped the concept of
rihadin
immediately. She had smirked and called him “charlatan” when he’d shown her the how of it, yet she still believed his tricks were magic and asked him how he conjured his exotic powders. She had enough faith in him and the God she prayed to for the both of them, and mayhaps that was why he was loath to let her go. In Arabic, she was
alkemelych
, “small magical one.”

Mayhaps he would go north with the wedding party.

“Christ’s blood,” he muttered, surprising himself with the idiocy of his thoughts. The maid had turned his mind to lust and his powers of reasoning to pottage. He had long since stopped yearning for death, and there was no reason to court it now, especially for a woman he could not have, let alone keep.

He forced his attention back to his work, luting the stillhead with a paste made of flour and water. His hand shook, and paste dropped into the cold brazier beneath the still. He swore beneath his breath, but let it lie. He should not have kissed her palm. He’d known that even as he’d pressed his lips against her skin, drawn by her scent and her closeness. She made him weak. A woman less easily dissuaded would have had him on his knees in minutes, but a woman less easily dissuaded would not have been Ceridwen ab Arawn.

She was visceral, slipping into his veins to wreak her havoc and bring him damn little peace.

May Eve would be upon them soon, before the week was out, and she would be gone shortly thereafter. He felt the heavy ripeness of the earth building with each passing day, and he wondered if Rhuddlan also trembled with the coming of Beltaine. Each year his own awareness heightened ever more intensely, entwining him deeper with mysteries that always lurked just beyond his ken. Yet this year they were drawing close. More of Madron’s doing, and Rhuddlan’s, and the maid’s, and the Druid force brought to bear on the coming of spring.

Nemeton’s grove and Nemeton’s tower held the same secret, albeit in different forms. Dain had realized that much the first time Rhuddlan had taken him to Deri for Beltaine. He’d behaved the perfect dissembler on the occasion, calling the Quicken-tree’s goddesses and gods for them with much pomp and legerdemain, employing every trick he knew, turning the flames of their fires into rainbow hues—aye, and they’d liked that well enough to request it year after year—roiling up great clouds of smoke and using his voice to make the trees talk, which the whole of Quicken-tree had found exceedingly humorous, much to his irritation. ’Twas only later he’d realized that to them, the trees had their own voices and his had been sorely out of tune.