The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (36 page)

He turned away from the door, looking once more toward the eastern window. A dawn wind breached the embrasures, its touch falling lightly upon his cheeks. ’Twould not be long before the horizon ran red with the first streak of day, and there was more work to be done. Yet he took the moment, lifting his face into the fading darkness of the night and letting the wind caress his lips with a sweet kiss from the coming morn.

~ ~ ~

Ceridwen listened to the silence, and her courage grew. Assuring herself that Dain would not kill her outright, she crept to the side of the bed and opened the curtains a bare slit.

All was quiet. Dain stood in the middle of the solar with a soft wind ruffling the sleeves and hem of his tunic. His hair was wild about him, long and tangled, proof of hands that had run through it over and over again in distraction—or despair. One torch burned bright in a cresset next to the hearth, its flame rippling in the breeze, its light glancing off the heavy, bronze-studded leather belt around Dain’s waist.

The gentling wind died down, and the chaos returned. Dain began pacing the breadth of the chamber, his strides uneven, roaming to some unseen will, until a destination seemed to present itself and he was once more on a true course.

“
Kvinde, nej!
” His hand came down hard on the door leading to the eyrie. The dogs wound themselves around his legs in abject subjugation, sleek white flowing against pitch-black, the two twining bodies lit by flickering torchlight. He issued his command again at each of the embrasures, then one final time over the hatch leading to the alchemy chamber. His voice shifted strangely, from here to there, even when he stayed in one place, making her uneasy, but the dogs responded without hesitation, following him step by step, fawning and cajoling, all but licking his boots in their eagerness to please.

With a sinking heart, she realized he had spoken true. She should not have put her trust where in the end it must be betrayed; the bitch was his. Totally. There was but one master in the Hart Tower.

From the hatch, he moved to the rows of shelves holding his simples and chose a small earthenware vessel. When he turned to the table, she got her first clear look at his face and drew back with an emotion she could not name, though the force of it raced through her. The chaos of his movements had invaded every aspect of his being. His eyes were fiercely intense, his breath coming short, the very bones of his face etched more strongly beneath his skin. With one broad sweep of his hand, he cleared the table of its contents, sending ampoules, pots, and cruets crashing onto the floor, their once fine forms reduced to thousands of shards and potsherds. Naught was left but the small brazier releasing fragrant fume-terres, the smoke of the earth.

Releasing a ragged moan, he dropped into his great chair, covering his face with one hand while he clutched the small pot within the other. For long moments, the only sound filling the air between them was his breath.

“I know you are awake,” he said at last, his voice dark with an edge of bitterness. “I can feel you watching me.” She blanched and drew back deeper into the bed.

“Hear this, Ceridwen ab Arawn. You will not leave this chamber until dawn breaks the sky again. If you try, the hounds will restrain you, doing whatever they must. Do not count on Numa’s loyalty to aid in your escape, for the bitch would as soon tear you limb from limb than go against my will in this.”

There was both threat and warning in his words, and the revelation of what he’d done with all his shouting and hitting of doors: He’d sealed the tower. Panic fluttered to life in her breast. She would not be trapped like the animal he had become, awaiting the return of Caradoc and damnation. The time for leaving was upon her.

“I gave my word that I would not try to escape,” she said, fighting to control her alarm and bringing all her guile to bear on the falsely spoken promise in hopes of making it appear genuine.

“And your word will be broken,” he said with utter conviction.

“I have not yet strayed,” she reminded him “And I have had the chance.”

Slowly, he lifted his head, staring through the darkness and the distance with eyes so bright, she trembled. He looked more beast than the Boar. “Your thoughts of love held you here, and I have taken them away. You will try your escape now, but I am warning you: Do not attempt to leave this tower before another full turn of the sun. The hills will be aflame tonight with the fires of Bel, and you will be consumed. I promise you this.”

Her face went from the paleness of fear to the red flush of anger. Love? How dare he speak to her of love.

“You have overvalued yourself.” She would not be made a fool of twice, no matter how badly he frightened her.

“No,
kaereste
,” he said, his gaze unwavering. “’Tis that I undervalued you. I thought I could not be touched. You have proven me wrong.”

If the words had been spoken in any tone other than that of desolation, she might have taken hope, but he had left her none. He sat alone at his table, his form unyielding, his bearing grim, leaving no room for another at his side.

In silence, he broke the seal on the clay pot, then dipped in the middlemost finger of his left hand and pulled it back out. ’Twas covered with a black unguent. Starting on the left side of his face, he put his finger beneath his eye and drew a thick line straight out across his temple to his hairline. With his right middle finger, he did the same to the other eye. The dark potion glittered in the light of fire and candle like a streak of the night sky across his tawny skin.

This was not the banding of the Quicken-tree, Ceridwen thought. It was something else, something much less fair, something baleful.

“What are you doing?” She pulled the curtains aside and slipped to the floor in her bare feet, curiosity overcoming caution. “What is this unguent you use?”

He did not answer, only dipped in his finger again and drew a second line from his right ear across his cheekbone and up and over the bridge of his nose.

She approached him carefully, not knowing how close she dared to get.

“Your courage is ill-placed in this,” he told her, and she wondered if she’d ever managed to hide anything from him, or if he’d been reading her mind from the first night.

“So what say you?” She kept her voice soft. “Am I in danger?” She was duly afraid, but strangely and suddenly, far more for him than herself. For herself, she was wary, and curious, so curious.

“Not if you stay in the tower with the hounds to guard you.” He finished the line by drawing it across his left cheekbone to his left ear.

“Will you be staying also?”

“No. I go to Rhuddlan’s camp.” A new line was started below the last, the three of them thick and rich.

She stopped at the table’s edge, well away front the broken glass and him. “And what will become of you in Deri?”

A short, harsh laugh answered her question. “The becoming has already begun,
chérie
,” he said, trailing the third line across the width of his face with unerring accuracy.

“And is this what you become? This striped, wild thing?” She made a small gesture of helplessness, not understanding what she saw in his face. Something stranger than the alchemical magic they practiced in the lower chamber was happening to him. The shadows, the low uneven light, and the pattern he was painting on his face were conspiring to disguise him. Verily, he seemed to be disappearing before her eyes.

“Wild?” With the reverence of ritual, he touched each of his fingers to the pot in turn, smearing their tips with unguent. “Aye, ’tis something wild I become, wild and fearsome.”

He looked down at his hands and slowly turned his palms toward the ceiling. The air stirred, setting the candle flame aflicker and causing the incense smoke to curl around and down upon itself, then rise up again in a winding trail. He lifted his arms, his fingers curved like unsheathed talons, his palms cupped, as if he were pulling something up from the air in front of him.

Ceridwen held herself close, her own hands clasped at her breasts, resisting the need to reach out to him and stop him. In her ignorance, she did nothing, and when his gaze flashed to hers—brightly crazed with an unholy light —she knew ’twas too late. He had gone beyond her.

“
You see before you the Demon
.” The words rolled off his tongue encased in smoke, terrifying her with their proclamation: Evil was here. Smoke flowed from between his teeth and out of his nostrils, circling up in fumed whorls to shield his face and curl through tendrils of his hair. He closed his eyes on a breath of uncanny length and power, a deep inhalation of the fragrant grayish-blue haze that filled his chest and pulled a stillness down around them both.

She dared not touch him now. Indeed, she took a step back. He had shown her nothing like this before. ’Twas wondrous, monstrous, dizzily frightening stuff. The heaviest of magic, she was sure, good for the most deadly spell-casting and conjuring.

“What need has Rhuddlan of a demon?” she asked, compelled to the rash question by her own needs. Mayhaps, when the time came, if she had the courage, she could transform herself into one. Heresy in its most despicable form, but what choice did she have? Nothing less than what she saw before her would dissuade the Boar from his wedding bed or frighten him from his damnable course, but that it would do so she had no doubt. Here was a feral being unheedful of the laws of man or God, a demon true, bound only by his own evil intent.

Jesu. Was this how all sinners came into being, forced by circumstance into dealings with a dark manifestation? Falling from grace while clinging to that most divine state?

The barest smile curved the Demon Dain’s mouth. Wisps of vapor curled at the corners of his lips and veiled the red-rimmed eyes staring at her from deep in their sockets. “You are fearless, Ceri.”

She could have called him liar, despite his gift of sight, for her heart was racing. Yet her only concession to fear was another judicious step back.

“Retreat?” he asked with a mocking lift of one brow.

“Caution only,” she replied, though her voice was breathless with fright.

“Then listen, little cautious one.” He smiled, and his lashes lowered over his fiery gaze. “Rhuddlan calls up the Sacred Demon of the unknown for his own use, the Demon of despair, for Rhuddlan is as fearless as you.” He spoke the words as liturgy, lifting his hands and laying the tips of his fingers upon his cheeks. “Rhuddlan of the Quicken-tree welcomes the true Demon of suffering and sorrow, the one who steals the first sweet breaths of children, the one who cripples and maims youth and the old with no regard to justice, the one who steals souls.” With the solemnity of a priest, he dragged his fingers across his face, making four lines on either side to add to the three.

“Rhuddlan beseeches the bane of mankind and all beings, the hand of God in destruction. The Demon enters the forest at dawn, the bringer of all divine disasters: the earth cracking open, rivers swelling over their banks and washing the land clean, fires spewing forth from the mountaintops, giant winds swirling down from the sky. The Demon beckons, and the four elements do the Demon’s bidding. Earth. Water. Fire. Air.
I am the Demon
,” he said, and his voice echoed upon itself in eldritch tones both eerie and profane.

Aye, she thought, taking in every word and committing it to memory. Here was power to be used, dark power to be feared by all.

“And when the destruction has been wrought, Rhuddlan and all of Quicken-tree will take the Demon and transform him into the Underworld god they need, the god he was before Rome turned him into the Devil.” His voice wove a continuing spell of enchantment with its undulating charm, revealing the mystery of what he had become. “Ceraunnos, the Horned One, Lord of the Animals, will come to them on Beltaine as he has for time beyond memory, and there amidst the fires, he will meet Beli, father of the gods and god of the Sun, and Don, Mother Goddess of the Earth and the gods, and of all heroes.”

Ceridwen knew the god Ceraunnos, as well as she knew Beli and Don. She’d come across them many times in the manuscripts kept in the library at Usk. Their names ran through the old stories told by her mother. They were worshiped by the Druids, and they consorted with the Light-elves from across the water. Aye, she knew Ceraunnos, for he was spoken of in the red book and she’d seen him once, somewhere, etched into stone with his torc in one hand and a horned serpent in the other, with other serpents by his side, a deity of fertility crowned with a stag’s antlers—or so the pagan manuscripts said.

Now she faced the mix of god and demon in its flesh, and she understood the being no better than she had before. God was God. Devil was Devil. One was to be loved, the other abhorred. The lines were clear, the two could not meet, and certainly not within the form of one mere mortal.

“No man can be both god and demon,” she told him.

Dain’s eyes slowly opened, and a subtly demonic smile lifted a corner of his mouth. “
Au contraire, chérie
. No man can help but be both. Until the ceremony, and even after, you will not be safe in Wroneu. Any man who catches you in the forest on May Eve will take what I have not.”

He pushed himself out of his chair, rising with a horrible swiftness, and she stumbled back in unabashed retreat. His eyebrow arched, but he took no more heed, passing by her without comment on his way to the hearth.

With all his sorcerer’s grace, he swung his cloak around his shoulders and lifted the cowl over his head. She saw nothing more of his face. If not truly demon and god, he had become what he’d been the first time she’d seen him: a shadow lost in darkness.

“Remember what I have said, and beware the dogs,” he warned, striding toward the floor hatch. “They will not let you pass where I have told them you may not go.”

Ceridwen watched him descend the alchemy chamber stairs, pulling the hatch closed behind him. Within moments the bolt slid home on the underside of the planks, and she knew her fate had been sealed as surely as the tower.

Yet there was the faintest glimmer of hope, for he had left the black unguent. ’Twould not be a pale, trembling virgin Caradoc found when next he breached the walls of Wydehaw.