The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (19 page)

Ceridwen stared at the girl in astonishment. Dance with lightning?

“Now hold still,” Llynya gently chided, pushing Ceridwen’s chin around to keep her braidwork even.

Ceridwen’s gaze immediately returned to Dain. Dancing with lightning. She could well imagine how amazing such a sight must have been: Lavrans calling down a deadly bolt of sky fire and taming it to his will, his dark robe billowing in the wind, his face alight with the force of nature’s blazing radiance—and the lightning, twisting and turning a path across the earth, the air sizzling in its wake as it fought the reins of his magic.

By the grace of God, that was the trick she needed, whatever the cost.

~ ~ ~

Dain let his last sentence trail off into silence, noting that his friend was not listening. Rhuddlan’s attention and his eyes, whose irises were so clear a gray as to be almost colorless, the hue saved only by the verdant rim reflecting into the middle, were fixed across the grove on Ceridwen ab Arawn. Flames from the campfire cast a tracery of shadows across Rhuddlan’s profile, alternately concealing and revealing his high brow, finely chiseled cheekbones, and narrow jaw. Blue paint covered a strip of his face from just above his eyebrows to the bridge of his thin, slightly upturned nose, running from temple to temple and into his pale hair. ’Twas a badge of his high standing, the same badge Dain wore on the night when he became Quicken-tree.

He looked past Rhuddlan to where Ceridwen sat among the women, and he knew what held the other man’s gaze. She was lovely, ethereal with her hair reflecting the moonlight. The feeling of contentment in the camp had softened her eyes and brought a liveliness to her features he had not seen before. He’d felt the same his first time in the hidden forest where Nemeton had once held sway, as if he’d come home. The Quicken-tree had generous spirits and a rare talent for bringing strangers into their midst and making them part of the fold or, more precisely, part of the warp and weft.

Llynya was braiding her hair. Madron would give him hell for that, but he wasn’t going to stop the sprite. A woman alone needed all the protection she could get from whatever quarter. He was glad they’d come, though it seemed Rhuddlan had nothing more urgent to speak of than the growing of trees and how far to extend The Bramble this coming year, the careful work the Quicken-tree did of weaving each bush and shrub into the next. He had spoken no more of the trouble in the north, but Dain was acutely aware that Ceridwen’s future lay in the same direction.

“How fares Elixir and Numa?” Rhuddlan asked, returning his attention from across the grove.

“Well, as always.”

A smile curved one corner of the Quicken-tree’s mouth. “If I’d known you would call them so strangely, Dain, I would have given you their true names and insisted you use them.”

“Numa has taken a fancy to the maid,” Dain said, grinning himself.

“Aye, she’s always been a smart one.”

Dain made a noncommittal sound, his gaze having drifted back to the women.

Moira finished with the salve on Ceridwen’s face and reached to unwrap the bandages he’d used to splint her ankle. ’Twas too soon. He made a move to rise, but Rhuddlan’s hand on his arm stopped him.

“Moira will do her no harm,” the Quicken-tree leader said. “The lady needs to be tended.”

Dain hesitated but a moment before sitting again. “By her own admission,” he said, “she is no lady.”

“She has gentle manners and a fair face,” Rhuddlan observed. “What more needs a lady?”

Dain laughed. For all that his friend had been staring at the maid, there was much he had not seen. “A less sharp tongue is counted a necessary virtue by many, and yon maid’s tongue is sharper than a well-honed blade.”

Rhuddlan turned aside to pick up the flagon of honeymead Shay had propped against the roots. “Her mother’s was the same, when ’twas needed,” he said, refilling his cup.

The statement fell into a pool of silence... and sudden understanding. Dain should have known.

Thoroughly bemused, he drained his own cup in one swallow. He gave his friend a measuring look, and as he did, he realized it was much the same look Rhuddlan had been giving Ceridwen all night, apparently with good reason.

“Wasn’t me you wanted at all this e’en, was it, Rhuddlan?”

“You’re good enough company.” The reply was typically oblique.

“How did you know I had her?” Dain asked, refusing to be dissuaded.

“Moriath,” he said, calling Madron by a name only he used for the witch.

“Ah,” Dain murmured. “So the witch arranged our meeting in the wood.”

“No.” Rhuddlan took a long draw off his cup, then wiped his sleeve across his mouth. His was a face that hid the years, retaining the freshness of a youth Dain knew to be long past by the streaks of gray blended into Rhuddlan’s silverish-gold hair. “She is still expecting you, probably none too charitably by now, but I wanted to see the woman taken from Usk Abbey.”

Dain didn’t like the sound of that. He thought the chit’s life was complicated enough without drawing the interest of yet another, especially another man.

“I have not known you to bother yourself with lost brides of Christ, Rhuddlan. What is she to you?”

Rhuddlan’s answer was a long time coming and arrived in a voice full of ill fortune. “Not enough of her mother’s daughter, for my needs. Nor enough of her mother’s daughter for what lies in her path.”

The words were no sooner spoken, the breath of them still on the wind, than a frisson of prescience skittered upward from the base of Dain’s skull and rolled over into a fleeting vision: serpentine coils moving through dark obscurity at unfathomable depths, their power great and ponderous.

The sight held him for an instant, no more, creating a strange pulling tension in his limbs before he shook free. Disconcerted, he reached for the flagon.

“And what have you seen in her path?” he asked, easing the question into a semblance of calm. His damned gift of sight never gave him a clear vision. Aye, he could have told Ceridwen that he had magic, just not enough. ’Twas the first time he’d felt tangible force with one of the murky pictures, though. That unusual turn he attributed to being in Nemeton’s grove. The bard had left traces of magic everywhere for the unwary to trip upon, a subtle insight Jalal had despaired of him ever discerning. He never had in the desert, not even with Jalal there to guide him, but Dain had no other explanation for some of the happenings in Deri, including those on Beltaine that drew him back year after year to a wildness he was never sure he would survive.

Rhuddlan gave him an inquisitive look. “More important, I think, is what you have seen.”

Dain didn’t answer the implied question. The Quicken-tree leader’s intuition unnerved him at times, reminding him too much of his desert master.

Rhuddlan relented and lowered his gaze to the small fire they shared. “I have seen danger in her path,” he said. “Danger, hardship, and trouble.”

The trouble part Dain understood. The maid was the very essence of trouble. He himself could distill it no finer. Nor was hardship difficult to accept. Everyone’s life was full of hardship.

But danger was altogether different, implying a threat.

“Danger from what, or whom?” he asked.

Rhuddlan shrugged. “Mayhaps herself.”

“She is not foolhardy,” Dain assured his friend, “only desperate.” And more keenly intriguing than he ever would have imagined when he’d first seen her hanging from D’Arbois’s chains. Everyone in Wroneu Wood and half the people out of it wanted the maid. No wonder she was skittish, being tracked as she was, and being caught all too often. Numa had known her worth, sensed it immediately with her female intuition.

“Then mayhaps the danger comes from her desperation,” Rhuddlan said.

There was truth in that. Desperation made a dangerous companion, but the maid didn’t strike him as the type to do herself harm.

“Or mayhaps from her betrothed?” he suggested, despite his still strong doubts on that score.

“She is to be wed?” Rhuddlan’s head came up, his quickened interest somehow more disturbing than his prophesy of doom.

“Aye, to the lord of Balor Keep.”

Disgust crossed Rhuddlan’s features. “Gwrnach is too old to breed her, though ’twould seal his fate to get a son on Rhiannon’s daughter.”

Dain felt his own disgust rise at Rhuddlan’s words, disgust edged with an unwanted anger.

“’Tis not Gwrnach,” he said, hiding his irritation by feeding a few stray twigs into the flames. “Gwrnach is dead. His son is lord now.” The breeding of Ceridwen ab Arawn was none of his concern.

“Balor has a new lord?”

“Aye, the old one was gutted and left to rot on the ramparts.”

“By the son?” Rhuddlan questioned, his eyes piercing in the flickering light of shadow and flame.

“Caradoc,” Dain confirmed.

An unholy smile spread across Rhuddlan’s face. “Then his fate was met as Nemeton foretold, that the destroyer would be devoured by his own spawn.”

Well versed though he was in unsavory deeds, Dain felt a chill at the satisfaction in Rhuddlan’s voice. ’Twasn’t like the Quicken-tree to rejoice in another’s demise.

As if sensing his uncertainty, Rhuddlan turned and met his friend’s gaze, the smile fading into a grim line. “No one will mourn Gwrnach.”

Dain knew the words to be true. “’Tis said the corpse hung from Martinmas through St. Winnals before someone buried what was left of him.”

“From mid-November to March?” Rhuddlan repeated, surprise evident in his tone. Dain understood. ’Twas an ungodly long time to let a family member hang.

“Aye.”

Rhuddlan’s gaze shifted past him to the river track. “From Ngetal to Nuin,” he said in a distracted voice, using the ancient time of trees. “Just over a month past.”

The sound of women’s laughter, and of one woman in particular, came from across the grove, drawing Dain’s attention away from the unpleasant conversation. Shay and Llynya were performing acrobatic feats for an appreciative audience, with none more appreciative than Ceridwen.

The forest at night suited her in a way that disturbed him, bringing mystery and depth to a face already too alluring by half. Llynya had woven a garland of oak leaves and set it upon her brow like a wondrous, disheveled crown. Freshly budded leaves in soft and bright shades of green dangled and curled around her gamine face; they circled her head in a living fillet and trailed down her back in a swallow’s tail of entwined petioles. She was transformed, sitting in a nimbus of silvered lantern light, looking very much the grove priestess he had told her she was not. Her skin glowed, her hair flowed down across her breasts to her waist in a river of white-gold braids, and her mouth... Her mouth beckoned.

Shay was out to impress, walking backward on his hands, then lofting himself into a back flip. Ceridwen let out a sound somewhere between a gasp and a squeal as he landed within inches of her. The boy was handsome enough and obviously taken with the fair-haired maiden. The wide grin on his face proved as much. As for Ceridwen, all Dain saw was delight, which was more than she had allowed him when he’d performed for her. It had not occurred to him that she would prefer acrobatics to magic.

She’d called him a fool, while she laughed for Shay.

Dain could walk on his hands. Not that he would, of course. But he could. Ridiculous.

He thought of Rhuddlan’s words, and of Ceridwen’s red book, which was in his saddlebags. Damnable thing, it had spooked the maid into the rash act that had landed her in her current tangle of affairs. Madron would know how much of it to believe and guard against, and how much to discard. The witch would also know about things Rhuddlan had not clearly said, and she was not as given to riddles.

Moira finished rewrapping Ceridwen’s ankle and looked up at the maid, saying something. Ceridwen replied with a smile, turning her foot ever so slightly into the light and giving her toes a little wiggle. Dain had to stop himself from jumping up and protesting, though it was clear the movement had not brought her any pain.

Llynya caught his eye and winked, then leaned over and whispered in Ceridwen’s ear. They were a sight, the sprite’s dark mélange of braids and not-so-decorative leafy twigs, and the pale fire of Ceridwen’s hair topped with a lush green crown. She lifted her gaze as Llynya spoke, a slow rise of gold-tipped lashes. He waited, watching their upward sweep and the gradual revealing of ocean blue, until her eyes met his through the trees.

’Twas all the excuse he needed.

Startled to find Lavrans looking at her, Ceridwen quickly lowered her gaze, but not quickly enough. He had already risen. She should have believed the sprite and not given in to the urge to find out for herself if what Llynya had whispered was true: that he had not taken his eyes off her.

His boots came into her line of vision before he knelt down at her side, speaking to Moira.

“May I see the salve?”

“Aye, ’tis
rasca
,” the cherub-faced woman said, giving him the small clay cup. A leaf was pressed partway over its top. “From the rowans.”

He dipped his fingers in and rubbed the salve between the tips as he brought them to his nose. From beneath her lashes, Ceridwen saw the barest smile curve his lips.

“The rowans, Moira?” His smile broadened as he tilted his head, and his hair came undone, sliding in a slow fail down the front of his gambeson.

“Mayhaps a few other things are in the mix,” Moira admitted, and a giggle escaped her. “You may keep it for the maid.” She clapped her hands, rising, and in moments she and the others were gone, dispersed into lean-tos and huts or disappeared into the trees.

Even Llynya had deserted her, Ceridwen noticed, not seeing the sprite anywhere.

“Moira has a lot of secrets she won’t divulge,” the sorcerer said, relaxing to sit cross-legged on the rug, far too close to her. His knee actually touched her. Ceridwen would have moved, but before the thought could form into an action, she was paralyzed by his hand lifting her foot into his lap. “I see she used some of her own cloth in your bandage.”

“Aye,” she said, a mite breathless from the shock of having her heel pressed against his thigh and her calf laid along the length of his. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Aye.”