Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (21 page)

Madron was well versed in Druidic lore and
capable of manipulating natural things—a witch, he’d heard men call
her in an absurd underestimation of her skills—but she was no
warrior like Fand to be sent alone on a mission, not with war
brewing.

“None know the path as well as I,” she
countered, barely concealing her irritation with his veiled
command. That she tried at all, Rhuddlan considered a hopeful sign.
In truth, she was not his to bid. Anglesey was as much her home as
Merioneth, or the cottage she’d left in Wroneu Wood, and he’d long
since lost any rights he’d once had as her protector. She had
stayed with the Quicken-tree in Merioneth more for their daughter
Edmee’s sake than because of him, accepting that ’twas better for
the girl to be among her own than to lead the solitary life of her
mother.

For himself, he was glad to have Madron near,
whether she was his to bid or nay. The summer had provided many
opportunities for indulging in her company, a contrary pastime that
both appeased and intensified his longing for what they’d once
shared. Few were as quick as Madron, and she’d learned much in
their years apart. Much that had surprised even him.

“Nor do any make paths as well as you. Not
even your father could set such a blaze to the earth,” he said,
effectively telling her that he knew of her efforts to keep an
opening in his bramble with her spells. “Nemeton but marked a path.
You conjured a beacon with your bags of stuff.”

She had the grace to blush, for Madron was
ever graceful, even at her worst. That he could discomfit her at
all, he took as another hopeful sign. For too many years she’d been
as stone with him.

“Did you leave it be?” she dared to ask, her
blush notwithstanding.

“Aye. For you. For now. Anyone who uses your
path will find himself delayed, but not harmed.”

“Fair enough,” she conceded, relinquishing
the arrow. “You know, in truth, that we are not at
cross-purposes.”

“Nay, we are not,” he agreed, then turned and
called a Quicken-tree youth forward. “Tages, take this to Anglesey
and find the old men who live in the caves. Tell them the tale of
what the Quicken-tree found in the damson shafts, and then it’s to
Inishwrath with you. I would have tidings of the troll fields on
the island. No change is too small to report.”

Tages swore his oath upon the elf shot arrow
and went the way of Fand and Prydd. Rhuddlan continued around the
gathering, sending various men and women of both the Quicken-tree
and the Ebiurrane to warn clans in the far north and the west,
south, and east, and with each of them he sent word for Ailfinn to
come nigh. He needed the mage as well as an army.

Shortly before midnight, the last messenger
left the confines of Carn Merioneth, a fleet form sliding silently
through the postern in the wall and heading for Kings Wood across
the border in England. Being closest, the Kings Wood
tylwyth
teg
would be the first reinforcements to arrive in
Merioneth.

Madron took her leave, heading toward the
lower bailey. To check the boy, Rhuddlan was sure. Others in the
group spread out to find what rest they could before the march. For
him there would be no rest. He would leave before dawn with a
handpicked troop to recover Nia, and to reconnoiter the deep dark
and see what inroads the enemy had made.

“What else would you have me know, Trig?” he
asked, turning to the elf-man who waited by his side.

Aedyth had fashioned a patch of green leaves
for Trig’s left eye. The other stared at him with an emotion
Rhuddlan couldn’t name.

“Ye said the boy would test me,” Trig said,
“and by the gods, he did. ’Twas not me who left Bedwyr by the dark
sea.”

“Was blood let?” Rhuddlan asked with
misgiving. ’Twas no time for him to lose the old warrior as his
captain, and Trig would not have left Bedwyr without a fight.

“Nay.” Trig shook his head. “He flanked me
with his blade drawn before I could so much as find me knife.”

Rhuddlan shifted his gaze to the hearthfire
and back to Trig again, releasing a sigh. ’Twas also no time for
Trig to be losing his edge. “ ’Tis not like you to be caught with
your guard down.”

“Nay.”

“But without any blood being drawn...”

“Nay, Rhuddlan. ’Tis over. Your new captain
lies in the lower bailey. If he lives the night, no doubt he’ll
serve you well.”

“He had no wounds other than what Llynya
inflicted. Moira will heal those quick enough.”

“ ’Tis not his wounds that threaten him,”
Trig said. “He’s what Naas told ye—quickened in his mother’s womb
by priestess blood, and dragon spawned. A nestling no more, he’s
cooking in his own fire this night.”

Rhuddlan glanced toward the lower bailey in
time to see Madron slip through the open arch in the wall. His
instinct was to follow her, but his common sense bade him stay and
hear Trig out. She knew the boy better than most. Indeed, when he’d
told her what Naas had seen, she’d shown no surprise and said
naught but that there was a little of the dragon in all of
them.

’Twas Rhuddlan’s fear, the dragon in the boy,
for ’twas more than a little. Many nights this summer past he had
watched Mychael pace the ramparts, oblivious to storms that had
sent the Quicken-tree into their huts. He’d seen the moments of
frenzy in the boy’s eyes, and he’d seen the scars that marked the
boy’s body from his repeated attempts on the wormholes—and his
fears had grown.

Rhuddlan had been a dragon keeper until he’d
sealed the Weir Gate to protect the
pryf
, thereby sending
the dragons far out to sea. They’d not come near him or Merioneth
since, but they called to the boy, and ’twas to the boy they would
come if they ever came again. When that happened, Rhuddlan knew his
time would be at an end, the old king passing to make way for the
new.

Mayhaps he was ready. Mayhaps. But the boy
was not. The boy was wild and growing wilder. Now Trig had seen the
roiling up of power in Mychael, the dragonfire, but whether it
would work for the Quicken-tree or against them, not even Naas
could tell.

“Nay, Trig, your work as captain is not yet
done,” he assured the older man, keeping his fears to himself. If
the darkness was rising, the
tylwyth teg
needed Ddrei Goch
and Ddrei Glas more than they needed Rhuddlan of the Light-elves.
The question was if they could survive Mychael ab Arawn. “In the
morn, we’ll set the boy to a task to put him back in his
place.”

“And what place would that be?” Trig asked
with a skeptical lift of his eyebrow.

“For now, ’tis behind you in battle and bent
to my will.”

“The boy don’t bend too well.”

“No,” Rhuddlan agreed. “He doesn’t.”

Clapping his captain on the back, he sent
Trig on his way, then crossed over to the portcullis to choose his
weapons for the morrow.

He knew the Earth. He and the
tylwyth
teg
spent their lives in the flow of her most subtle rhythms,
shifting effortlessly from one season into the next with the trees,
one eon into the next with the living rock, revolving with her
around the Sun and basking with her in the celestial light of the
Moon, forgetting nothing. Nemeton had prized them for what he’d
called their bit of knowledge, which Rhuddlan had in the beginning
thought to be an absurd conceit.
Earth is all
, he’d said.
To know her in all her wonders is to know the heart of the
Mother
. And so Rhuddlan had believed, until Nemeton had
directed his gaze toward the heavens and told him that before Earth
there had been Chaos, and it had come from afar.

Rhuddlan knew the story of the
Starlight-born. ’Twas written on the first page of each of the
Seven Books of Lore, lest any forget. The surprise had been that
Nemeton also knew the ancient tale and had brought it to bear on an
age long removed from the terror.

The Douvan kings of the Twelfth Dynasty had
lived in a second age of chaos long before the Thousand Years War.
In their time of direst need a child had come to them out of the
deep dark to wield the Magia Blade—Stept Agah, the last Dragonlord.
That story, too, was old, even in the reckoning of elfin time, a
telling of battles and plagues and a shadow across the land, of
armies of wolves and
uffern
trolls, of sweeping sickness
scouring the ranks of men and elves, and of the black, reeking
vapor—portent of Dharkkum—that had hung like a pall between heaven
and earth, until Stept Agah had called the dragons and overrun the
plaguing armies. The beasts had devoured the darkness, and the
Prydion Magi had once again forced the remaining smoke and
effluence into the chasms that lay deep below the surface, sealing
them with damson crystal wrought with words of power.

But beasts of war are ever hungry
...
and once roused to battle, the dragons were wont to ravage the land
unless ruled by the Magia Blade. In all his long life, Rhuddlan had
never seen them fight. They came to the nest on Mor Sarff to breed
and spawn and die. They were born in the nest, a secret place
beneath the
pryf’s
labyrinth accessible only through an
underwater tunnel, and they died in the same.

Now the crystal seals were breaking. He
needed Ailfinn to tell him why, and if the worst proved true, he
would need the dragons to fight—the dragons and Mychael ab
Arawn.

~ ~ ~

Descent
...
descent
...
descensus—
He was falling, falling like an angel from the grace
of God
. Kyrie, eleison
. Lord have mercy, Lord have
mercy
...

Mychael lay spread-eagled across the rugs
Moira had laid for him in his solar. His tunic and shirt were off,
his braies loose. One of his chausses was missing, leaving his left
leg bare, and still the heat burned him.

The Quicken-tree woman had long since
stitched him and left him alone for his night’s sleep, but there
would be no escape into sleep for him this night. The first
incandescent flash had finally broken through his will and flamed
to life even as Moira was smoothing the last of her
rasca
down the scar running the length of his left arm, torso, and leg.
If she’d felt it, she didn’t say. He’d noticed no difference in the
healing touch of her fingers when the heat began. Thankfully, she’d
left before the changes in him had become too visible. He’d never
told her of his fearful malaise. She knew about the scars. ’Twas
enough.

Madron knew. She’d seen the scars, and she’d
offered him potions. Potions to cool the flames. Potions to ease
his pain. Potions to soothe his soul. Potions, no doubt, to make
him hers.

Ceri had not trusted her, but he trusted in
Ceridwen. In his hands he held his sister’s gifts, a green stone
she’d called “Brochan’s Great Charm,” and the
Fata Ranc
Le
.

He should not have let his sister go so
quickly to the north. She was the touchstone to his past, blood of
his blood, but she suffered no dragonfire. Mayhaps she could heal
him. For certes the Quicken-tree’s old healer, Aedyth, would have
naught to do with him. Moira’s
rasca
helped, but only to a
point far short of relief.

There was one other spoken of by the
Quicken-tree, a mage summoned by Rhuddlan who had not yet answered
the call, whose touch it was said could raise the dead, whose
simples were as the elixir of life itself, whose enchantments put
Madron’s to shame. Ailfinn Mapp was her name. A Prydion Mage, they
said, someone who knew the secrets of the ancients.

Naught could be more ancient than dragonfire,
and if the mage kept the secret of his bane, he would know it. But
she did not come, no matter how many messengers Rhuddlan sent at
the turning of every moon.

Nay, he thought again, he should not have let
Ceridwen leave him so quickly on his own. Yet with disaster
looming, ’twas best she was well out of it and away. Away to the
cool north.
Thule
. Land of the frozen wastes. Farther north
than any man had ever gone. Did Dain Lavrans also burn with inner
fire to long so for the farthest reaches of coldest winter?

Ceri had spoken of a palace to be carved from
ice, and of a boy-child to be born there. Mychael wondered what
manner of man would come from out of the arctic landscape, home of
the fierce north wind. And would he ever meet his twin’s son? Or
would he die an ignominious death bathed in sweat and burning in
madness before the child was even brought into the world?

Another wave of heat washed through him, and
he gritted his teeth, clenching the red book to his chest to keep
from being swept away by the force of it. Only God knew how much of
himself he would lose if he let go. He feared it would be more than
he could bear.

A rock-crystal lamp lit the interior of the
tower room, the colors of its flames dancing over bare stone walls
and a roughly made table. Above him, a half-thatched roof of woven
willow wands became an arborescent cathedral bathed in flickering
light and shifting shadows. Stars and the moon shone through the
loose weave.

“... mercy,” he whispered for the thousandth
time, struggling against the endless tide of fire. But God in His
wisdom denied him.

His mouth was parched. A flask of water lay
not an arm’s length from him, and another of catkins, but he dared
not let go of his talismans to reach for either. His very existence
was balanced on a knife edge, suspended over a fiery abyss.

An abyss
. A fathomless canyon carved
into his heart by the dragons, grown deeper each time he’d lowered
himself into a wormhole. When had he first heard their cry?

In Strata Florida on a winter night when
he’d walked the cool cloisters alone and been beset by a
vision.

When had the wildness first come upon
him?

So very long ago—but not like this.