The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (40 page)

Ceraunnos’s crown was brought out by the white-haired ones and put upon his head. ’Twas a crudely wrought corona of gold set with a stag’s antlers, the metal chased and engraved with creatures that were half man, half beast. A necklace of claws was hung around his neck. The pelt of a wolf was put upon his back and tied to his arms. Feathers of kites, sakers, peregrines, and gyrfalcons were woven into his hair along with the feathers of owls and short-winged hawks, all birds of prey. Bracelets of iron and of long sharp teeth were wrapped in layers around his wrists and his ankles, their soft jangling meant to call the gods with every movement he made, and tonight, even he believed the gods would come.

There was power in the grove this e’en, as there had been power in the cavern. ’Twas more than Ceri changing him. The magic brought by spring out of the darkness of winter had sunk deep, reaching an unseen core both in the earth and in him. He who mocked all could not mock what he felt in Deri on this Beltaine.

When the last feather had been braided into his hair and the last bracelet had been wrapped around his wrist, the bodhran drums began a slow beat, and the Quicken-tree danced once more. Following a serpentine design, they slipped to one side of him or the other, gradually weaving him into the pattern, until he no longer stood alone. ’Twas then he changed their dance by beginning his own. His foot hit the ground in counterpoint to the beat of the drums, sending a wave of sound from iron and teeth through the dancers. To all in the grove, it announced that the Horned One was among them.

In a wave, the Quicken-tree widened their distance from him, flowing outward from the fire, but keeping to their pattern—except for the Liosalfar. The warriors welcomed him by staying close and following the new dance. Dain moved around the fire, forcing the music to a faster tempo by raising his arms higher into the sky, urging the drummers on and on and on, until they matched the ceaseless rhythm of the wind, and the sound of his bracelets was one with the drums, and the sound of the drums was one with his heartbeat. The air became charged with the frenzy of the dance, drawing the others back, closer and closer. A bolt of lightning rent the night, tearing through the darkness with its brilliance. Thunder followed in a rumbling chorus—and beneath his paint and feathers, Dain smiled. Thus it happened every year. Fortuitous coincidence, he’d always thought before, but this year he knew ’twas he who ripped the skies apart with
mellt a tharanau
, thunder and lightning.

Around him, the dancers lifted their voices in answer to the sky as they whirled and stomped the earth. The circle tightened again and again, with new dancers continually coming to the fore. When they were near enough to be touched, he lowered his hands and touched them, letting his fingers and the bear claws run through their garlands and gently scrape against their skin. It took a sorcerer’s grace. Beautiful people, ripe with the juice of the earth, he would not have them marked with blood.

~ ~ ~

Rhuddlan sipped the horn of mead, watching Dain make his magic with the dance. He’d seen the flash of the mage’s smile, and he’d smiled to himself. Dain knew what he was about, even if he did not yet understand the deeper significance of the ceremony.

Llynya had arrived with Conladrian, the two of them slipping into Deri under the cover of darkness. Behind them, the trees whispered of another’s coming, shooed on by a restless wind and by the trees themselves closing the path behind her—limbs bending toward one another, leaves touching to block out the moon and the stars. Rhuddlan tipped the horn and drained it dry. She would be there soon to sit upon Her throne.

C
eridwen ran through the woods as if her heart would burst. Lightning arced across the sky, throwing jagged light onto the trail winding through the trees. The wind pushed at her back and went beyond, picking up the leaves in her path and swirling them off to either side, clearing the way in a manner she distrusted—but not as much as she distrusted the darkness following her. When she veered from the path, it seemed to push her back, though she conceded that it could easily be her own fearful imagination.

Lightning flashed and thunder cracked again, bringing the scent of rain and the promise of another misery to add to the evening. A stitch in her side nearly forced her to stop; she could not run so hard forever, but a quick glance over her shoulder spurred her on to new speed.

Damn, damn, damn
. Strange happenings were afoot in Wroneu this eve. She would swear to any who asked that the very trees were closing in behind her, swallowing up the earth as she passed.

Numa loped at her heels, matching her labored strides with ease. The hound was not panicked, and Ceridwen found some reassurance in Numa’s steadiness. Elixir had deserted them along with Llynya. Damn dog.

A faint glow, more golden than silver, emanated from the forest up ahead. Soon she heard the sound of
crwth
and bodhran, and mixed in with the music, voices raised in song. Her steps faltered. She dared not halt, for between the darkness and the danger of men, ’twas the darkness that frightened her more; yet she barely dared to go on. Mayhaps she could circle round the group of revelers.

Clamping a hand over the aching cramp below her rib cage, she altered her direction the slightest degree, watching to make sure her feet stayed clear of the shadows. She got no farther than an unseen hawthorn. The shrub’s thorns pricked her skin and snagged her gown, forcing her back onto the path.

She swore again, using one of Dain’s vile words, and drew the Damascene. There was naught to do but face what came.

~ ~ ~

Rhuddlan shifted in his chair, turning his face into the wind and smelling the message-scent of the trees. Ceridwen was once again testing the boundaries he’d set, trying to forge her own path. The maid from Usk had a strong will, but not strong enough to negate his need of her, not yet. She would come to the grove, and in Deri she would learn of sex and magic. She would mate with the Horned One to seal a bond.

The sorcerer was ready for such. There was not a man or woman among the Quicken-tree who did not sense Dain’s arousal, each of them taking a part of it inside him and herself and nurturing it into a living flame. Like the burning rowans, the flames bespoke of lives past and of life yet to come. Slumbering seeds brought to fruition with warmth and lust, quickened into being on the forest floor.

Rhuddlan smiled and turned back to the dance, where men and women were already pairing off and disappearing into the trees. Another’s scent came to him on the wind, sneaking in from behind the throne to tease his nose.

Rhayne.

All was well.

With a lift of his hand, he signaled the Liosalfar to leave the grove. ’Twas time for Ceridwen to be brought home.

~ ~ ~

Dain saw the bitch first, a white streak of hound cutting across his line of sight, betraying him with her presence. His first instinct was to follow her and bring her to heel. Something stronger made him look instead to the bower from whence she’d come.

For an instant, no more, he felt the circles of life stop their ceaseless wheeling. For an instant, no more, everything around him faded away, ’til naught was left except Her.

The Goddess had been chosen.

She graced the flower throne with a beauty made stark by anger and fear. Her cheek was scratched, her gown torn and ragged at the hem. On either side of her, Liosalfar stood guard, their faces banded with the diagonal stripe of warriors, their bows drawn.

Rhuddlan’s betrayal made Numa’s look as nothing. Dain started forward and was stopped by the glint of a knife in Rhuddlan’s hands.

“She came armed, Lavrans,” the Quicken-tree leader said, smiling, “and nearly cut Trig.”

“Then I taught her well.” He kept his voice steady despite the confusion surging through him. He had been part of the dance, weaving a spell out of firelight and drumbeats, and though the spell had been shattered, neither his mind nor his body was free of it. He was still the Horned One.

Rhuddlan nodded, lifting the knife. “So ’twas you who gave her the dagger. Tell me, mage, did you also teach the blade what it knows of death?” He ran the pad of his thumb along the knife’s edge, incising a thin red line into his skin. “This steel has tasted more blood than most. See how it draws mine into its groove? It fair reeks of carnage.”

“You speak of the knife’s past.”

“And its future, I fear, my friend.” Rhuddlan gave him a knowing glance. A fresh wind dropped down from above and swirled through the fire, stirring up the flames and filling itself with rowan smoke before disappearing back into the sky. The eddies of its passing rippled through the grove in the wake of Rhuddlan’s prophesy—for the Quicken-tree’s words had been no less.

“If we are friends, you will choose another.” Dain made his terms clear.

“Because we are friends,” Rhuddlan replied, his smile growing cold, “I will let you fight with your own knife.”

“No!” Ceridwen lurched to her feet and was pulled back into the chair by one of the men who had caught her in the forest. She now recognized the darkness for what it had been, Rhuddlan’s magic. Wood demon, indeed. Dain was not the only sorcerer in the grove.

Rhuddlan gave her a long look, his eyes far too innocent to be those of a satyr, yet she knew why she’d been brought to Deri. Dain had warned her, and she had ignored his warning, trusting instead her own damned instincts and a sprite named Llynya.

She struggled against the strong hands holding her shoulders and gripping her pack, but the men about her were serious in their intent to keep her in the flower-draped chair.

“Hush, child.” Rhuddlan’s voice was low and oddly reassuring. “Do not squirm so. Nothing will happen here that you do not wish.”

“I do not wish to be held,” she said between gritted teeth, again trying to jerk free, and again failing.

“So be it.” The Quicken-tree man gestured with his hand and the men retreated from around her.

She wasted no time in leaping up and away, running to the end of the arch-roofed bower before realizing she had no safe place to go. The forest was no haven, not with Rhuddlan about. He had charmed her into Deri, and she had no doubts that he could keep her there.

She looked to Dain—and blanched. There was no safety in his dark gaze, only a quiet, seething rage trying to break through an unsettling disorientation. He did not look himself. She took a step back, and he started toward her, dropping his crown into the grass, shedding the clawed gloves from his hands, letting the wolf’s cloak fall to the ground. She retreated farther, her gaze darting across the grove, searching for a refuge, yet never truly letting him out of her sight. He was frightening in his beauty, with raptor feathers braided through his hair, his bare torso gleaming in the firelight. His face was banded in woad. Lean, supple muscle corded his arms and legs. He looked fiercer than she remembered from the night of his bath, more feral, even a little mad about the eyes.

Mayhaps he was still the Demon.

Mayhaps the transformation to a god had not worked. Had she not doubted it from the beginning? Mayhaps Rhuddlan was the safer of the two after all.

She stumbled in indecision as Dain kept coming toward her. A cry lodged in her throat, cut short by Rhuddlan’s shout.

“Lavrans!” The Quicken-tree leader rose from his throne and strode down the alley of trees, his voice strong and sure across the grove. “The Goddess may in truth choose to be with Ceraunnos tonight and not this green man, but the choice is hers. So take your blade, friend”—he tossed the Damascene forward with an underhanded throw —“and parry to first blood with me for her favor.”

From where she righted herself on the ground, Ceridwen saw Dain pick the dagger out of the air in a move so full of grace, ’twas as if the haft floated into his palm. A muffled groan escaped her. She feared the contest was over before it had begun, and that the Demon would have her in the end.

Dain harbored no such illusions. Rhuddlan would not be easily dissuaded from his folly, but folly it was. The man had erred badly in his taking of Ceridwen ab Arawn. If the earth grew fecund only with the sacrifice of her virginity, then the Quicken-tree were in for a damned lean year. Dain had not saved her from himself to let another have her. He had locked her in the swivin’ tower, and he had expected her to stay there.

His jaw clenched, and his hand tightened around the knife. He was in no mood to parry for a virgin’s favors. His blood and his life were demanding what had been denied, overruling every shred of interfering intellect and shame. The heat of the fire burned at his back, its sizzle and crackle the only sounds in the grove, the silence of the drums a potent reminder of where all the dancers had gone.

He watched Rhuddlan walk steadily closer, the full, high moon throwing a dappled shadow upon the bower path. At the end of the alders, the Quicken-tree man drew a blade from the sheath on his belt. ’Twas a dazzling, gold-encrusted thing, catching the firelight with its crystal haft and throwing diamond-like sparks into the air.

With an ease he’d learned as a boy, Dain balanced the Damascene in his palm, the blade following the length of his forearm.

Rhuddlan circled slowly, looking for an opening, holding his knife lightly, too lightly. His fingers did not quite close around the clear bluish-white haft. The dagger was a truly fine piece, a rare glassen treasure, and suddenly Dain realized it was much more than it seemed. He wasn’t sure what gave him the crucial moment of insight, whether the openness and size of the grove lessened the dreamstone’s power, or if having succumbed once to the dancing lights, he had built up a resistance; but the warning was enough to save him from enchantment when Rhuddlan turned the hilt of his knife more fully toward the fire. Light gathered in the white heart of the crystal, coalescing to a pulsing brightness for no more than a blink’s worth of time before Dain lunged, forcing Rhuddlan to close his hand around the crystal and meet his attack.

Twice more they came together, the strike and block of every thrust, back and forth, like a deadly dance of sharp blades and lightning quick reflexes. Dain took the Quicken-tree’s measure even as his own was being weighed, and ’twas a fair match, he decided, fairer than he had expected. Rhuddlan was fast enough by a hairbreadth to block any strike he made. Or mayhaps the dreamstone was slowing his own movements, for even with Rhuddlan’s fingers on the haft, flashes of light escaped from the crystal and grew more brilliant with every parry —blindingly brilliant. Soon he would not be able to see Rhuddlan’s hand. He would have the rest of the Quicken-tree’s body to guide him, but where the man’s movements terminated, where the pain would come from, would be naught but a ball of light.