The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (4 page)

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From the shaft to fresh air and freedom was not overly far for one who knew the way through the maze of tunnels. Moriath had said no more in the caverns, only sometimes burst into a fit of sobbing and tears that she eventually controlled, until the next fit hit. Ceridwen thought the whole adventure one big, miserable disaster, and she didn’t understand why they couldn’t just go back to their bed, or at least the keep. She didn’t want to go to the mountains. She was tired and hungry, and she wanted to go home. She wanted her mother.

A bramble thicket covered the cave entrance when they reached it, one more unpleasantness to add to her day. They fought their way through the thicket, getting pricked and stabbed, except for Mychael. He was safe in Moriath’s arms, his cheek resting on her shoulder, his soft snores making Ceridwen’s exhaustion nearly unbearable.

“Damn,” she said under her breath. A bramble thorn caught in her gown, ripping the cloth, and she swore again. “Damn.”

“Child,” Moriath said, stopping on a small rise just past the thicket and reaching a hand back. For an instant Ceridwen thought she was going to be reprimanded for her language, maybe even boxed on the ears.

That was when she heard it, the distant clang of metal on metal and the popping and hissing of a great fire. She pushed forward and came to a sudden, horrified stop by the maid. Her heart started beating furiously. A flush of fear washed down her body.

Below them, Carn Merioneth was burning, its palisades, the keep, and all the life within being devoured by flames and war cries.

’Tis written thus in the annals of time—

naught tempers a blade like chalice wine.

Chapter 1

March 1198

Wydehaw Castle,

South Wales

“J
esu. Sweet Mary.” The groom, Noll, crossed himself as he cowered in the darkness at the bottom of the tower stairs. He’d gotten through the bailey under the power of fear alone, but his legs would take him no farther. Rain-slickened stone supported his back. Nothing would support his knees—not muscle, nor sinew, not bone, nor his faith in the Virgin, Holy Mother of God.

His lord had said to fetch the sorcerer, but his lord had asked for too much. Noll tilted his head back and stared up at the malevolent shadows of darkness that deepened with each curved step into the tower. Rain ran in rivulets down his hair to his face, obscuring his vision and adding to the torment of the godforsaken night.

There! Where the gray stone changed to black! Was it a trick of the light, that bare flicker of movement and scratch of life? Or was it the sorcerer, Dain Lavrans, conjuring up demons out of the mists of fog and sending them down the stairs to greet him?

Noll’s heart stopped in a moment of terror, then his blood ran cold and fast on a track of pure fear. He could take no more and turned to run, or to crawl on trembling knees, if need be, back to the great hall where only minutes before he’d had the pleasure of pinching a comely maid with sprigs of lavender tied in her hair.

He paused in mid-retreat, the light from his lantern looming and diminishing with each gust of wind that swirled through the open arch leading to the barbican.

The baron would have him beaten if he failed, and what of the comely maid then, when he lay bloody and bruised in a heap by the hearth, nothing but meat for the dogs? What man would press his face into her fragrant bosom then?

Hugh, no doubt, the cur, a stable boy with no idea of the refinements needed to lay a kitchen wench. The maid deserved better, and hadn’t she smiled at Noll? A mite toothlessly, to be sure, but a smile nonetheless, and what man needed teeth in a woman when her bosom was soft and ripe like peaches in late summer?

Noll glanced again at the tower stairs running up into darkness, his fear and trembling growing to courage under the impetus of lust. His lord had said fetch, and no serf who valued his life would disobey a baron of the March, one of the land-hungry Norman freebooters who had seized territory in Wales and held it “by the power of their swords and by fortune.”

With his back to the outside wall, Noll slunk up the spiraling stairs of the Hart Tower, using his feet, his knees, and the one hand not holding the lantern to guide himself. A fainter shade of gloom and wet gusts of air denoted each arrowloop he passed. Halfway up the first full turn, the chiseled steps turned from gray to black. Noll crossed himself again and thought of buxom pleasures, the scent of lavender, and the sweetness of peaches. A quarter turn farther, a step shone creamily white in the lamplight. The next was black, and the one after it white, full warning that he was entering the sorcerer’s domain.

“Sweet Mary.” The prayer hissed from between his chattering teeth as an oak door set into Druid stone and banded with iron came into view. A gargoyle of the most hideous countenance barred the way, leering at him from the centermost plank with a bronze knocker hanging from its fangs. Rock crystal eyes glowed in the flickering lantern light, first blue, then gold and green.

Gods! Was nothing what it seemed in this corner of the keep?

Noll lifted his hand to grasp the knocker, and as he did, the hair rose all along his body, each tiny strand standing up to tremble alone. He knew it was the sorcerer’s power, and the moment his flesh touched metal, a great crack of lightning rent the air with a blaze of white fire and a concussion of thunder.

Noll sucked in a paralyzing last breath, clutched the knocker with a spastic grip, and fainted dead away.

Inside the tower, the resulting clang of bronze striking bronze reverberated like a pale echo of the lightning strike. Dain Lavrans turned at the sound, his fingers curling around the large chunk of cinnabar he held in his hand, a fortune in vermilion for scriptorium monks, and a source of mercury for those who—like himself—dabbled in a different faith.

Behind him, sleet and rain beat on a glazed window. The lightning had struck close, probably the ramparts and, if what he felt was true, one of the metal-headed minions patrolling there, sealing his helmet to his skull. The baron would call for him, as if he could unfry brains roasted in such a manner.

His upper lip curled in sullen humor. They expected too much, these Norman Marchers, from their Danish sorcerer.

He put the cinnabar on a high shelf, then crossed the chamber to answer the first summons of the evening, lifting the cowl of his cloak over his head to conceal his face with shadows. The clasp he adjusted to bring the cloak over his worn leather gambeson was his by right of plunder, a garnet-encrusted Celtic scroll with a cabochon of amber on either side. Deer-hide boots covered his feet and were laced to his knees with strips of leather.

Tonight he did not look like his Norman lord with silk hose, samite tunic, and ermine-trimmed mantle. Tonight Dain was a hunter—and he was not pleased to have his hunt delayed by some fool’s folly.

He pulled on the door, and when it did not open, bared his teeth and pulled again. The night was proving to be full of more than the normal discord and dissent of Wydehaw Castle.

Slowly, the banded door swung open, dragging the wretched summoner in its wake. The man’s bony fist was frozen around the knocker, while his body hung like a wet rag to the floor. His other hand still held a lantern, which threatened to spill flame into the rushes.

Cursing, Dain picked up the lantern and stomped on the cinders and the smoldering edge of the groom’s tunic, an act designed more to save his chambers than the man’s life. The Baron of Wydehaw valued not his servants. This man would not be missed, though it was apparent nothing short of Lord Soren D’Arbois’s own command would have brought this weak-boweled knave to the sorcerer’s door.

Dain ground the last ember into dust. He wouldn’t be thanked, and in truth, he’d done the man no favor, for he was leaving the clod where he hung on the door, a bold warning to any others who might think to disturb Wydehaw’s mage. By midnight every castle cretin would know the story of how Dain Lavrans had frozen Noll the groom to the gargoyle’s fangs, and how the magician’s powers had flowed through Noll’s body and singed his clothes. By morn, the whole village would know. The knowledge would seep into the forest, slide through the trees, into grottoes and glens, alerting every outlaw and saint of the black heart that lived within the keep’s tower.

The thought brought a smile to Dain’s mouth. His reputation was hard-won and most decidedly well deserved, though he would be the first to admit his debt to his predecessor in the tower. The magical deeds of Nemeton, a Brittany bard, were still whispered with awe and fear in the demesne. The most tangible proof of the man’s high standing in his time was the existence of the tower itself, with its parti-colored stairs, three tiers of rooms, and the near magical workings of what the castle populace called the “Druid Door.”

For many years, Dain had given no more credence to one religion than another and little enough to any, especially the dead and ancient ones like Druidry. Still, he’d found much of interest behind the Druid Door and in the surrounding forest of Wroneu, enough to keep him at Wydehaw when it should have been no more than a night’s stay on a journey much farther north.

“Erlend,” he called to the servant hiding somewhere in the chaos of the workroom.

“Aye.” A wizened old man stuck his head out from behind a heavy damask curtain drawn across a crescent of the chamber. Smoke followed him in a halo around his sparsely haired head.

Service to the sorcerer was considered a sentence akin to death by most, but old Erlend seemed to have sinned apurpose to land himself in the comforts of the Hart Tower. He’d once told Dain that at three score and two he had nothing left to fear from God, the Devil, or anyone in between.

Dain had only smiled.

“Watch the brazier and don’t drink from the marked cask.” Dain issued the orders in the tone of someone accustomed to being obeyed.

“Aye,” Erlend answered in the manner of someone growing unaccustomed to obeying.

Dain arched a dark eyebrow, a warning better understood than ignored.

Erlend squinted through the gloom. “Poison, is it?”

Dain held the man’s gaze a second longer, then turned and stepped over Noll’s limp body. A hand gesture brought two sleek hounds loping out of the shadows of the chamber to join him. The old man would make of the evening what he would.

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The great hall of Wydehaw Castle was filled to bursting with the feigned shrieks of maids and the roars and laughter of men-at-arms well into their cups. Chaos ruled the servants below the salt, scattering them this way and that, their hands gripping leather jacks and trenchers, their feet nimbly dodging disaster and the dogs.

Most of the assemblage had forgotten about the prisoner chained to the wall to the left of the dais, but not the red-haired knight. From beneath the veil of her lashes, Ceridwen ab Arawn watched his gaze rake her body, the intensity of his attention like that of a feral cat stalking prey, waiting for the right moment to reach out with an unsheathed claw and snag a morsel for its mouth.

She shivered, the sensation racking her from her head to her toes and awakening her pains. Never had she felt such an icy chill so deeply in her bones, yet if she could die from the cold this night, she would count herself blessed.

The knight shifted on the bench, a veritable mountain of iron-studded leather and concealed blades. A fresh infusion of panic quickened her already ragged breathing. Panting, her chest hurting, she fixed her gaze on the floor, seeing naught beyond the clay tiles flanking the hearth. Red-hot embers snapped and popped out of the fire, rolling onto the chased floor, and slowly it dawned on her that the designs etched into the squares of fired clay were of animals copulating.

Revulsion and nausea churned to life in her belly. One corpulent boar, beady-eyed and barrel-chested, leered at her in a perfect parody of the knight; and, even worse, in a frighteningly accurate depiction of the vile bridegroom she had desperately tried to escape. The abbess at Usk had oft warned her she would come to no good, but the lady could not have foreseen such a despicable end.