The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (23 page)

“That won’t be necessary,” Madron said, twisting her hair up into a tidy knot. “I have seen the book before, and in truth, the Latin passages are mine.”

He didn’t think so, not the book in his hand. “’Tis one she brought with her out of Usk,” he explained, which meant to him that it must be a very different red book than any Madron might have written in. Good friend that she was, no nunnery would have had her.

“Aye, that’s the one. The one from Usk.” The already much younger-looking woman walked over to the cupboard and poured scented water out of an ewer onto a piece of white linen. To that she added a few drops of oil from a vial. “I put my father’s prophesies to page while I was exiled in the abbey. He gave me the book, thinking a Catholic scriptoria was the safest place to keep older truths from being forgotten, and a convent the best place to keep his daughter from being condemned for his own misdeeds.” The cloth prepared, she wiped the age and lines from her brow. “Little did he understand the pious ladies of Usk.”

“A convent, Madron?” Dain couldn’t keep the doubt from his voice. If Madron was the kind of woman coming out of Usk, no wonder Ceridwen was unlike any novice he had known.

“Only until no amount of my father’s gold could induce the nuns to keep me.” She laughed softly, folding the cloth into clean quarters to wash her cheeks and chin.

No one could have that much gold, he thought, and she laughed again, casting a glance in his direction. The witch was disconcerting.

He turned his gaze back to Ceridwen. She was slumped in her chair, her chin tilted up, her mouth partway open like a child’s.

“Is she virgin?” Madron asked.

Damned disconcerting.

“Aye,” he said, not wanting to wonder what made Madron think he knew. Ceridwen was not the first maid he’d checked, but she was the first he’d checked strictly for his own knowledge.

“You would do well to keep her that way. ’Twill only go hard with her if Caradoc finds her virtue breached.”

Ceridwen stirred, nestling her cheek deeper into the ermine. The scar down the side of her face showed silver in the candlelight, her lashes gold, her mouth soft pink.

“Mayhaps she won’t go to Caradoc,” he said, watching the chit and debating once more whether to keep her. Caradoc could find another bride.

“Nay, Dain,” Madron said quietly, turning to face him. “She is not for you. She will go north, and she will marry Caradoc.”

“Why? I see no reason for it. The Boar can find a different bride.” He didn’t attempt to hide the belligerent edge creeping into his voice. He was getting damned tired of people telling him what to do with the maid. He was the one who had saved her from Ragnor, wasn’t he? Without him, she would have been long since dead, and the rest of them could have traveled to hell and back without finding a trace of her.

“No,” Madron said, the conviction in her voice irritating him further. “The true keepers of Balor must be returned. Ceridwen was born there.”

The maid had been born in Balor?

“What is this land to you?” he asked. Madron had some stake in the maid’s future, and he would know what it was.

“’Tis a sacred place, rightfully known as Carn Merioneth, the place where my father died,” she answered, and he thought the stew was getting thick indeed. Carn Merioneth and Balor were one and the same. All Caradoc—and Madron and mayhaps Rhuddlan too—wanted was for Balor’s chicken to come home to roost. “He held a position of great power there once,” Madron continued, “and I would have it back.”

“Why not Wydehaw? The tower was Nemeton’s.” And was now his. If she wanted to bargain with the maid for her father’s legacy, let her bargain with him.

“Wydehaw is the map, Dain,” she said. “Merioneth marks the treasure itself. There are not enough of us left to win a man’s war of axe and bow. That much was proven fifteen years ago. Marriage is our best recourse now and the maid is the key.”

“No one wins at war,” he said, ill-tempered. “And damn few win at marriage, especially political marriage. In both, ’tis merely a matter of who loses less.”

“This time, it shall be us.” Madron moved back toward the fire and the chairs, using the cloth on her hands. Her fingers were long and slender. The bracelets were gone. She wore no rings. “With Ceridwen ab Arawn residing in the mountain of stone called Balor Keep, we can once again take up the reins of duty that have been left slack too long.”

“We? Madron?” He dared to mock her with a smile and an arch of one eyebrow. “No one comes to your door. No one waits outside. In truth, I have never seen anyone other than the good Sheriff of Hay-on-Wye try to ally himself with you, and the alliance he wants would not take much of your time and little more than a lift of your skirts. No doubt he is the reason ’tis not safe for you in the woods at night.”

“He hunts me, true,” she admitted, drawing a footstool near and sitting close to Ceridwen. She took the maid’s hand in hers, turning it over and tracing the lines crisscrossing the younger woman’s palm. “But the sheriff is easy enough to elude. I speak of the Quicken-tree.”

“Rhuddlan wanted to keep her, lack or no lack,” he told her, as if her choice of allies might need reconsideration.

“Rhuddlan and I often disagree on the best way to proceed, but never doubt that we have the same goal in our hearts.” Finished with Ceridwen’s right hand, she took up the maid’s left and performed the same gentle investigation.

“Often disagree?” Dain begged to differ. “I have yet to see the two of you agree on anything.”

“There is Edmee,” Madron said, her gaze intent on the maid’s palm.

Of course.

Dain swore silently, lowering his chin toward his chest. He began rubbing his temples with an absent, massaging gesture, a poor attempt to combat the sudden pain he felt. Edmee was Rhuddlan’s daughter. Good God.

The maid had been in Deri that evening, which was not unusual. He should have guessed her parentage long ago.

“If Ceridwen is so important, where were you when Ragnor abducted her?” A change of subject was the best he could manage.

“The maid is like quicksilver to hold,” Madron said. “Twice she escaped her cousin, and I managed to shoo her back. ’Twas my preferred plan, for Morgan to take her north under the protection of the Gwynedd prince, for my own involvement to be imperceptible until she was safely wed. Then she escaped once more, and the beast got hold of her before I could intervene. Fortunately, she was quickly given to you and there is no safer place in all the world for Rhiannon’s daughter than Nemeton’s tower.”

“My tower,” he corrected her, looking up from beneath his hand. Damnable aching head. Madron must have some valerian for an infusion.

“Only for as long as Rhuddlan and I allow.” She inclined her own head to see him clearly.

“You never opened the door, and neither did Rhuddlan. ’Twas I who managed to pierce its secrets and free its lock.” Coup, he thought, and the end of it. “Do you have any valerian, Madron?”

“Aye,” she said, looking at him more closely. “Poor thing. What is it? Your head?”

“Aye.”

“Drink your posset, ’twill help. There is more water than wine in it, and milk always soothes. I’ll fix you an infusion shortly.” She went back to searching Ceridwen’s palm, her fingers light upon the maid’s pale skin.

He began to relax, thinking he’d won. Then she spoke.

“Neither of us opened the Druid Door, because neither of us can live comfortably among men. Rest assured we can open it if necessary, and believe me when I tell you we can close it, Dain, seal it for a thousand years, and not even your best tricks could gain you entrance.”

The pain came back doubled. Madron and Rhuddlan could lock him out of his tower.

Paying him no mind with a deliberation he found exceedingly aggravating, Madron smoothed her hand over the sleeping maid’s brow. “She has her father’s eyes, you know, so blue they look silver.” Her fingertips trailed down a soft cheek, her thumb caressing the tips of the golden eyelashes. “So pretty,” she murmured, then sighed and drew her hand away. “Do not challenge me in this, Dain. She will go to Caradoc, and she will go untouched by you or any other man.”

As he’d thought, Madron knew much, and none of it to his liking.

“You wrote much about death and destruction,” he said, “and blood and dragons. This is what she fears so much, this bit of Nemeton’s fancy.”

“’Tis no fancy, but neither does she have reason to fear.”

“So you say there are dragons?” he asked skeptically.

She gave a graceful shrug. “In a manner of speaking.”

And he’d thought Madron not given to riddles. “What manner of speaking is this thing called ‘
pryf’
?” he asked, pressing for a less vague answer.

“The word translates as worm or worm animal,” she said with a glance more candid than her reply.

A fair enough metaphor for a dragon, he thought, reminiscent of lindorms and serpents and snakes and God knew what else, some real, some not. The witch seemed disinclined to differentiate.

“Time, by its very passing, changes itself,” she continued. “What my father thought would be, has not all come to pass. As long as she is pure, Caradoc will not harm her. Like all men, he knows his future lies with his children. He wants those children to be of Rhiannon’s blood and for there to be no doubt that they are also of his.”

“Aye,” Dain said, scoffing. “The book speaks much of a maiden’s blood.”

“The red book goes its own way, like time itself, story upon story, unheedful of man. You have done well by her, Dain. Do not concern yourself with her fate once she is gone from the Hart Tower. Where Ceridwen is concerned, there will be no blood spilled. Tonight I will give her knowledge, and naught keeps a woman safer than the power granted by knowledge.”

Safe from what, he wanted to ask, but he only looked at Madron, struggling with his anger and her advice. Ceri had been right. ’Twas a bad night to be out in the woods.

“May I have my dreamstone?” she asked, holding out her hand.

He did not answer, his jaw was too tight, but pulled the stone from his sleeve and let it fall and the chain ripple into her open palm.

She threaded the chain through her fingers and held the stone up to the firelight. Again the rainbows danced and spun.

“’Tis a pretty thing, is it not?” she asked.

“Aye,” he said, and as quickly as that felt its power, a rippling awareness that flowed into his body, warm and soothing and pleasantly seductive. That was Madron’s mistake, for he was wary of nothing more than seduction. “Damn you, Madron,” he swore, tearing his gaze away from the crystalline rock. “Don’t ply your trade on me, witch.”

“Mayhaps I will be damned for other things, good friend. But not for this.”

The lights were suddenly everywhere, glittering on Madron, in her hair and across her face, glittering on every cottage wall, flashing around him in rainbow hues, inescapable, creating a confusion of color and leaving but one island of serenity in the chaos, one sanctuary—the dreamstone. He looked back for no more than a moment’s respite, and a pulsing brightness flickered to life at the very center of the crystal, a white flame with an ebb and flow, and it came upon him with the sound of thundering waves breaking on a far shore, filling his vision with a white, frothing sea.

“Ceri?” He called the maid’s name, blindly reaching for her. Something crashed to the floor. Coins clattered. He felt his throat tighten.

“Don’t fight it, Dain. Let go, let go.” He heard Madron’s voice drifting to him over the tops of the waves. “Sleep and dream of naught.”

“Bloody damn witch,” he gasped.

Madron smiled and reached forward to close his eyes. “Aye,” she crooned.

M
adron sat on the footstool and looked at the pair of them slumbering side by side in the carved honey-maple chairs. There was much work to be done before the dawn, but their beauty held her for the moment. Dain, with his long chestnut-colored hair loose and flowing across his charm-marked gambeson, was from the earth, the hot center of it. His color was a deep dark brown—eyebrows, eyelashes, eyes, all the same rich shade as his hair, his skin lighter but having a tawny hue, his mouth like his skin but kissed to a silken texture with an underlying hint of rose. Ceridwen was ice and snow, river and sea, all things made of blue-white water and more so when mixed with air. She was the mist coming over the land, the fog-shrouded mystery of the open ocean, the dewdrops left by night upon the earth. Ephemeral, yet ever-returning. He was iron forged into steel; she was the cool temper needed to bring out its strength.

Thank the gods she was still virgin. Madron hadn’t realized how tempting the little one would turn out to be, or how strangely vulnerable Dain had become. He had never had his head turned before by a maid; though, in truth, not many tried to woo D’Arbois’s
sorcier
. Those with any intelligence about them reckoned him too dangerous, and women without intelligence failed to appreciate him. Then there was the Lady D’Arbois. That one had a conniving sort of cleverness to spare, and no good use to put it to other than making trouble. Dain avoided her neatly enough. Yet it seemed he had fallen to Rhiannon’s innocent daughter without so much as a sidestep.

The Hart Tower was the safest place for Ceridwen, but under the circumstances, the quicker she was away the better. Madron could do much to speed her on her journey north, much she hadn’t deemed necessary until she’d seen the look in Dain’s eyes as he’d watched the maid.

She would start with checking the damage Ragnor had done. Dain was truly skilled, and Edmee had kept her informed of Ceridwen’s progress, but she would do well to look for herself, as she was sure Moira or another of the Quicken-tree women had done.

The broken ankle was potentially the most damaging. If the bone did not heal, or the setting of it had not been good, Ceridwen would be crippled and always have pain. Madron had watched the maid walk across the cottage and had been surprised at the slightness of her limp. The injury should have been much worse, considering the mere fortnight of time that had passed since the beast had attacked her.