The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (37 page)

~ ~ ~

Shay saw Lavrans first, far below him on the forest floor. The mage moved with the silent speed of the
tylwyth teg
, his footsteps leaving no more trace nor making any more sound than the dawn wind soughing through the trees and billowing his cloak behind him like dark wings on a bird of prey.

The Quicken-tree youth marked Dain’s direction, then signaled Llynya where she sat on a bough below him, doing her best to entice a sunbeam into warming the small purple-and-white violet in the palm of her hand. She was very near success. Shay could see the tiny ray of light moving along the field maple bough, both advancing and retreating, but growing ever closer to Llynya’s outstretched fingers. The flower still had the freshness of morning dew on it. Night nectar, the Quicken-tree were apt to call the moisture, for ’twas the cooling of the night that lured the water out of the air, and morning light that made it disappear.

He would have let her continue, for there was nothing quite like sunbeam-warmed violets to break one’s fast, but Lavrans was slipping deeper into the shadows of Wroneu. Shay tried to signal her again with a gesture, and when that failed to attract her attention, he cupped his hand around his mouth and gave the clear
chir-r-up
rail of a lark.

Her immediate reaction was not to look up at him, but to peek down over the side of her bough and, like himself, mark Dain’s direction. The flower went in her mouth to be eaten cold.

“
Malashm
,” she said, lapsing into an Elfin tongue. “
Donn Thanieu esa lofar Deri
.”

“I agree. He’s going to take the Olden Track to the grove.”

“He’s never done it before.” She threw Shay a quizzical glance.

Shay shrugged. “Rhuddlan said he might. The way through the mountains will take him over the high pass of Wyche Elm. The thinner air will help clear his mind.”

“Of what?” Llynya’s look grew even more confused.

“The maid, sprite. The maid.”

“Ah,” she said with dawning understanding, then her brow furrowed. “Maybe we should head him off. I don’t think Rhuddlan wants his mind clear of the maid.”

“No,” Shay said. “We’ll follow him, nothing more. Deri calls him, but it’s up to Lavrans to find his own way.”

“As it is for us to find our own way back through the
pryf’
s maze?”

He grinned. “’Tis Beltaine, sprite. Mayhaps I’ll find my way with you instead.”

Her startled expression didn’t bode well for the possibility. Neither did the speed with which she lofted herself off the bough to the ground. “You would have to catch me first!” Her words came back to him from where she’d disappeared in the trees, fast on Lavrans’s trail.

From his place higher in the maple, Shay jumped with his arms spread wide, letting his cloak fill with air and slow his descent. One day soon Llynya would grow up.

~ ~ ~

Dain knelt by the river and slid his hand down into the cool running water. Dawn was rising, sending her golden tendrils of light skimming over the horizon and the land to shatter on the surface of the Llynfi. Just beyond his fingers, trout lay in wait for the morning hatch of insects, their tails swaying languidly between the eddies and the rocks.

Llynya was behind him, smelling of violets. Shay was off to his left, crouched in a low-lying limb of beech, both of them watching and waiting. To any other, they would have been invisible. On any other day, he would not have been aware of them himself.

On this day, though, nothing escaped his awareness. The earth was a living force reaching up through the soles of his feet and twining through the fibers of his body, making pathways for the rivers that were the waters of his body. He spread his fingers, letting the icy cold seep into the tender curves of his hand. After the cold came the liquid element, lapping at his skin and passing through him. He was the river.

The sun broke free of the earth and flooded his senses with light; after the light came the warmth, carried on a gentle breath of air to caress and enfold him. A single sphere burned bright and deep in his chest, shining with a clarity beyond fire, with a luminosity he could scarce conceive. Rhuddlan had called a demon of earth and fire, but would receive a being of water and light.

’Twas Ceri who had done this to him. She had offered herself in love and had not left enough darkness in his soul to conjure up a good demon. She was the
Petra Genitrix
, the Stone Mother, unshakable, unconquerable, she who yields only to time. What need had Rhuddlan of a demon? she’d asked. The need of all men for demons, he should have told her, to illuminate the path to God. It was the simplest possible truth.

Instead, he had sucked the centaury smoke into his mouth and let it escape with his spoken words, using his voice to lure her into fear. Or so he had tried. Brave Ceri had done naught but retreat a single step. What strange matrix comprised her heart and soul, he wondered, that she had no fear? Must be the purest he’d ever beheld.

Caradoc was no match for her.

He brought his hand to his mouth and drank the water cupped in his palm. The day would be long with no food, the hours filled with the singing of many sacred chants. He drank again, replenishing the water he would soon lose as sweat in the cavern to the west of the gorge. The Quicken-tree would have already begun building a pyre next to the warm pool that bubbled up from the floor in the cavern, using for fuel the trees that had died in the past year: yew, oak, beech, hazel, elm, all but the dead rowans, for those would be burned in the Bel-tinne. Stones would be heated in a circle close to the flames and water from the pool poured on the stones. ’Twould be night before he emerged from the dark, steaming womb, purified as Ceraunnos.

The scent of sweet william wafted to him on the breeze. He turned his head and rose, drying his hand on the edge of his cloak. ’Twas time to lead the sprite and Shay into Deri. The Wyche Elm Pass started off to his right, little used and overgrown, with a scree slope on its southernmost flank. He himself had discovered the track only late the previous autumn and had not used it since. The seclusion and beauty of the water trail had always beckoned to him more, but the river-hollowed cave behind the waterfall did not appeal to him this morn. He would rather walk the mountains and fill himself with the smell of gorse and heather, with violets and sweet william and sunlight, and avoid all dark places that smelled too much of rich earth, until he was called by the Quicken-tree.

~ ~ ~

“Nuuuuma,” Ceridwen crooned, leaning forward from where she sat on the floor. “Look, Numa. Look what Ceri has for you.” She dangled the monkshood-laced meat in front of the albino’s nose. ’Twas a risk, to be sure, but all her other attempts to circumvent the dogs had come to naught. The meat trick was proving no better. Numa was ignoring her. Elixir had growled when she’d offered it to him, a low, deadly sound that had near scared the heart half out of her.

Damn dog. The black hound was Satan himself, aloof, needing no one. Not even Dain touched him, not so much as a scratch behind the ear.

But the bitch liked a good scratch.

“Numa.” She smiled, reaching toward the dog’s head. Numa’s lip curled, and a growl issued from deep in her throat. The sound was not friendly, but neither did it have the menace of Elixir’s warning.

Regardless, Ceridwen relented, bringing her hand down to her side. There was no sense in pushing the albino to violence. Dain had told her the dog would tear her limb from limb, and though she doubted that Numa would go so far, a bite was not out of the question. Her memory of Numa’s teeth sinking into old Erlend’s throat was quite dear.

She sighed and tossed the meat back into the bowl of physick. The day was nearly done, the sun setting far to the west, the forest sinking into night. She had seen no fires yet, but she knew they would be lit. ’Twas May Eve.

Elixir padded by her and stopped at the bowl to give it a sniff. The draught was of her own making. She’d been careful with the monkshood, wanting the dogs only asleep, not dead, though neither was likely unless they ate her concoction. The hunting hound finished his inspection, and his black eyes flicked up and impaled her with what she was sure was a curse.

“Fie,” she scolded him. She was already damned. The hound could not hurt her. “Fie,” she repeated for good measure, then immediately wished she had not, because he grew so instantly still, ’twas as if he had suddenly, upon her utterance, been turned into stone. Nary a hair nor lash moved on him, nary a whisker twitched. His eyes, no longer malevolent, had hardened into glassy, sightless ice. He was frozen, with only his ears cocked in a manner to imply life.

Had she conjured a spell with her “fie,” she wondered, accidentally using a word with powers far and beyond those of the insipid “sezhamey”?

No, she had felt nothing. She would know if magic was working within her, and if “fie” was a charmed word, people would be frozen like statues over half the demesne.

But if not magic, what?

She looked to Numa. The bitch was quiet too, but without Elixir’s unnatural control. There was a trembling in the white hound’s haunches and hocks. Ceridwen slid her gaze back to Elixir. Would whatever held them hold them long enough for her to grab her pack and break through the locked hatch? Not even breath appeared to move through the black levrier. They were waiting, the both of them, but waiting for what?

Then she heard it, a far distant singing coming from beneath the floor. A single phrase floated in the air, silvery and clear, rising and falling with the melody of wind over water. The voice grew closer and the notes quickened, swirling around each other with an added phrase. No man sang the fantasia, but a woman, making her way up the tunnel leading to the alchemy chamber. ’Twas enchantment pure and simple transfixing the dogs, enchantment rich with memories and emotion. Rhiannon had made similar magic with music, long ago upon the cliffs overlooking the Irish Sea. Her daughter remembered it well. The sweet sound of harp strings came to her often in her sleep, suffusing her deepest dreams.

“O Rhayne anna bellammenaseri

Conladrian, Conladrian ges

Be strong! Be strong! Come to me!

Rhayne, Conladrian, come to Quicken-tree!”

The voice broke into a rhymed song, echoing off the tunnel walls, and the dogs began to whine. Ceridwen gave them a shrewd glance. Rhayne? Conladrian? Dain was not their master after all, but another, a woman of the Quicken-tree. She wondered if he knew.

“Abban euil a’ ritharmian

Nov galliot As besteri

Be strong! Be strong! Come to me!

Rhayne, Conladrian, come to Quicken-tree!”

Three more verses, each slightly different from the one before, but all having the same last two lines, brought the woman directly below her. The song trilled off into silence on the other side of the oak planks. Ceridwen scooted away from the hatch and waited. Quickly enough, she heard the bolt slide free.

Only a moment’s hesitation stayed her hand before she helped raise the hatch door, her trust being in the dogs to know the difference between friend and foe. To Dain’s command, she gave not a thought. He had trapped her inside the tower, and she was being set free.

A small hand showed first on the floor, then a dark head peeked up. Twigs and leaves were stuck this way and that in the woman’s ebony braids—or rather, almost-woman.

“Llynya!” Ceridwen cried, reaching for the sprite. The dogs danced around them, no longer whimpering, but yapping. Even Elixir—Conladrian?—had shed his aloofness to jump and prance with Numa.

The sprite’s presence brought cheer and hope into the gloom of the Hart. Ceridwen hugged the Quicken-tree girl close, wrapping her arms around the sprite’s strong, slender shoulders. Within her embrace, Llynya felt as promising as a sapling, both imps by another name, both bursting with the freshness of life.

“Sweet child, you have come to save me.”

“Oh, aye.” Llynya grinned and kissed her on one cheek, then the other. “Come to save you true. We’ll be off and away into the woods quickety-split, for the day is running short. Hurry now. Let’s gather your things.”

Ceridwen wasted no time. She had prepared a pack with the Quicken-tree cloth and tied it closed with the ribands from her plaits, filling it with only the barest necessities: the unguent, a gourd of
aqua ardens
, a pouch of
rihadin
, the red book with Mychael’s letters, the runic mirror, and Brochan’s Great Charm. She’d kept Madron’s pouch for her elf shot and wore it as an amulet.

“Can you show me the way to Strata Florida, once we are free of Wydehaw?” she asked Llynya, angling the pack across her back. The blanket roll was held in place by a rope of riband crossing her chest from her left shoulder to her right hip. They would be traveling in Wroneu at night, on May Eve, and she would not lose her precious supplies to either stray branches or quick fingers.

The sprite looked up from where she played with the dogs. “You would go to the hooded men in the mountains?” The hounds licked her face and nipped at her fingers, growling in tones far sweeter than Ceridwen could have imagined coming from either of them.

“To my brother.” She sheathed the Damascene in the belt at her waist.

“Brother?” Llynya’s eyes widened. Elixir barked, and she shushed him with a strange command, calling him by his Quicken-tree name. “
Behamey
, Conladrian.
Behamey
.”

“My twin, Mychael,” Ceridwen said. The dogs played about the sprite more like pups than the menace Dain had set to guard her. They tumbled and rolled, crushing strewing herbs and releasing the orange scent of hyssop into the air.

“Ah.” The girl’s voice softened. “So there is a brace of you. He must be very beautiful, your brother.”

“I last saw him as a child of five and mostly remember his troublesome goodness. He was always good, which made me appear always troublesome.” Ceridwen smiled at the memory, then set about adjusting the pack to a higher position on her back, working the cinch she’d contrived on the riband. “From his letters, he seems to have gotten only more thoughtful and in no ways less troublesomely good. He will probably be sainted.”