Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (22 page)

Never like this.

How could the dragons not be upon him when he
felt their flames scorching a path down his body? ’Twas the vision
all over again, with Ddrei Goch and Ddrei Glas raging across a
night sky, weaving trails of fire with their breath, and the
shadows of his enemy marching from behind, wave upon wave of
fear-begotten foes taking form out of the darkness. Sha-shakrieg
and skraelings.

Only he could hold them all at bay. Only
he—and the sword he’d been given did not fit his hand.

The muscles in his arms twitched and shivered
with the force of his grip on the red book and the charm. They
never yet had kept him from the inferno that burned inside him, but
he held on. He needed will and yet more will to keep him from his
feral doom, strength of will to hold on until the wild madness
passed. For as surely as it would come in the dark heart of the
flames, the wildness would pass.

All things passed in time.
In
time.

“Time.” He muttered the word as a curse,
forswearing his pleas for mercy. The wormholes had beckoned, and
he’d succumbed. Still they’d kept their great secrets from him. He
knew nothing of time, except that burning with an inner fire could
give a man a glimpse of eternity, an eternity of damnation—for what
was the fiery abyss that reached for him if not hell itself?

His breaths grew shallow and quick, like the
panting of an animal. His gut cramped, doubling him over with a
weak cry of protest. The next sound to breach his lips was a
keening moan... and so the wildness began.
Christe, Christe,
Christe, eleison
...

L
lynya made her way
through the willow huts in the lower bailey, eating a warm
honeycake she’d gotten from Moira at the hearthfire. Moonlight
shimmered on the curtain wall, beckoning with the promise of
solitude and an unencumbered view of all the stars in the night
sky. Mayhaps she should climb to the battlements. The meeting under
the yew would be finished soon, giving leave to more private
discussions she wanted no part of, especially if they included
Rhuddlan or Shay.

Rhuddlan would have naught but scolding on
his mind and punishments too onerous to bear. While Trig had made
an accounting of Mychael’s mishap, the Quicken-tree leader had
turned his brief but thoroughly chastening gaze on her. She had
thought herself full-grown, until Rhuddlan’s glance had proved her
otherwise. Despite all she’d been through, she was still the
sprite, and still in hot water up to her neck. In hindsight, she’d
been damned lucky no Sha-shakrieg had gotten his teeth into
her.

As for Shay, her longtime companion in
adventure and mayhem had become appallingly solicitous and
disgustingly overconcerned for her welfare since the battle with
the spider people. If ’twas up to Shay, she would not be allowed
beyond the wards. Her great worry was that he would convince
Rhuddlan of the same, yet she dared not argue for her continued
freedom. Better to lie low this night, assume the best, and stay
discreetly to the rear of the column on the morrow. She would camp
with the Ebiurrane in Lanbarrdein and with luck, Rhuddlan wouldn’t
even know she’d made the descent. And thanks to Trig, she now knew
how to open the seals on the tunnels leading to the wormhole.

“Bagworms,” she muttered. She’d been as well
into the thick of the battle with the Sha-shakrieg as any and been
the least harmed. Even Rhuddlan had noted that, though he’d not
given her much of the credit for her unscathed state.

Coming abreast of the stairs, she angled her
steps toward the wall, then changed her mind upon seeing the bent
form of Naas on the battlements. The old woman toiled night and day
to bring down the curtain, planting her seedlings in every rocky
chink. She wasn’t given much to talk, but this night, Llynya was
inclined toward none.

With the ramparts taken, only one place could
ensure her privacy, the apple grove in the farthest reaches of the
lower bailey. ’Twas the oldest part of the castle grounds and had
been the least changed by the Boar. The southwall tower where
Mychael had taken up residence was close by the orchard, but she
could avoid him easily enough.

Keeping to the darkness and the shadows cast
by flickering lanterns, she passed huts of different shapes and
sizes. Some were thatched and daubed for wintering over. Not
everyone had been going to the winter grounds this year, and now
mayhaps none would go. Hushed voices speaking of nighttime things
slipped through the woven willow wands as the wild folk bedded
down. In some of the huts, lullabies were sung to charm children
into dreams.

Let others sleep this night, Llynya thought,
continuing on. She would look to the stars and gaze at the moon,
celestial orb rich in elfin lore and magic for a woman’s taking.
She needed magic, more magic than she held, earth magic she could
take into the deep dark.

Mychael ab Arawn had proven an unlikely ally.
Crazed man. His mood had grown dangerous on the march up to Carn
Merioneth, leading him into mutiny on the shores of Mor Sarff. By
anyone’s figuring, wounded or not, Trig was the captain, and he’d
been against the decision to leave Bedwyr at the Serpent Sea, but
he’d been no match for Mychael. Neither was she. On the sands
leading to the gates of time, the archer had shown himself to be
exactly what she’d seen in Riverwood.
Sín.
A rising storm of
fury.

Neither she nor Shay had jumped into Trig and
Mychael’s short-lived battle, and not because of a sense of divided
loyalties. They’d both been too wide-eyed and dumbstruck to move
before it had all been over. If she was to stay in Rhuddlan’s good
graces, ’twas probably best to distance herself from the archer.
Yet he’d read the walls with his hand. In all her life, she’d seen
only Nemeton do such a thing.

He hadn’t spoken to Trig of her
scent-blindness, another point in his favor. Below Mor Sarff, they
had all been too intent on reaching the surface, and after Mor
Sarff, Mychael and the captain had not spoken a word to each other.
Bad blood had been spilled there, for certes. Rhuddlan would want
to speak to Mychael, but Rhuddlan was headed back to the deep dark
before dawn. Moira had taken Mychael up almost immediately when
they’d finally surfaced, and Llynya hadn’t seen him since, neither
at the meeting nor the hearthfire. If he slept, he was sleeping
through his last chance to expose her. She could only hope it
so.

Strange man, to turn so suddenly fierce.
She’d thought him a sapling in Crai Force cavern, but no sapling
could have daunted Trig, and no sapling could have made the run
from the deep dark to Merioneth in two and a half days with two
wounded and one dead. They might have lost Math without that speed.
Aye, Mychael could make a powerful ally, but there were definite
dangers to weigh.

Upon reaching the apple grove, she swung
herself up into the nearest tree. Immediately, a familiar and
comforting lightness suffused her limbs. She was home. The leaves
in her hair fluttered ever so slightly, and a smile came to her
mouth. Her ears twitched. These trees remembered her from the
spring. They had been a haven for her then, awash in blossoms and
open to her tears, cradling her in boughs laden with fresh green
leaves. Before Aedyth had taken her to Deri, she’d spent her days
sheltered in their shadow-dappled branches.

Her tears were gone now, and the blossoms had
yielded fruit, moonlight limned apples, their golden roundness
edged with crescents of lunar silver. She picked one and took a
bite, her teeth sinking into sweet, crisp flesh. Moira had told her
the trees had been planted down through the ages by the Anglesey
priestesses. They had refined the juice of the apples to a love
potion of unsurpassed potency and used it to bind men to them in
times of danger. At least a garrison’s worth of men, so one story
went, had been lured to the coast by songs of enchantment set loose
upon the wind. After filling the mortals with magic drink, the
women had marched off with them to do battle with a monstrous
creature. Few of the men had survived the slaying of the beast,
according to Moira, but those valorous few had lived the rest of
their lives in peace and plenty, blessed by the favor of the
priestesses.

No such potions worked on
tylwyth teg
,
nor did any such poisons, priestess brewed or nay. If it grew upon
the earth, it flowed through elfin blood. ’Twas only the damnable
desert brew that laid them low. Llynya took another bite of apple
and began making her way deeper into the grove, alighting from one
bough to the next, heading for the middle of the fruitful copse. In
the tallest tree’s topmost branches, she made her bed and settled
in to watch the sky and let the moon’s light soak into her
pores.

The first keening moan was no more than the
barest whisper on the breeze, an underlying dissonance more than an
actual sound. She might have missed it except for a tingling in the
tips of her ears.

She rolled over and brushed aside a veil of
leaves, looking to the southern end of the bailey from whence it
had come. Or so she thought. When next she heard it, ’twas from
over the great wall, clearer, louder, yet faint with distance.
Pushing to her feet, she balanced herself between one branch and
the next and looked out to the sea. Long breakers were rolling in
toward the cliffs, their white froth shining in the moonlight.
Farther out, on the edge of the horizon, almost past where the
curve of the earth cut its scythe across the sky, a thin streak of
green fire edged in red flickered in the night. Then all was gone,
both the keening cry and the colored lights, and naught remained to
delineate where the blackness of the heavens sank into the last
reaches of the ocean.

A movement on the wall drew her gaze, and she
looked to find Naas staring out to sea, her aged fingers making
some unknown sign. ’Twas no warding like Llynya had ever seen. On
each hand the woman’s third finger was bent into the palm, while
her little finger came forward to make a circle with her thumb.
Naas was extending her hands out as if in offering—but an offering
of what? And to whom?

~ ~ ~

Caradoc and the skraelings had marched for
two days, through tunnels and caves that grew ever higher and
wider, but no better smelling, despite the stacks of oak planks
filling some of the caverns. An odd cache, he’d thought, until
farther caverns had revealed their even odder purpose. The
skraelings were building ships.

Other skraelpacks had joined them from out of
connecting passageways, some carrying bags of rivets and spikes, or
thick skeins of withies for lashing. They’d made their first camp
in a cave filled with the skeletal beginnings of half a dozen
halvskips, and the troop had grown to a hundred strong.

And still they came. That morn, a single
portal had disgorged enough of the beastly creatures to double
their ranks, and they had doubled again at the next cavern.
Somewhere along the trail, wolves had joined the horde. Caradoc
could see them sliding like shadows through the pack of marching
feet, dark wisps of terror with far less beastly-looking men at
their sides. He thought he recognized one or two men from Balor,
but the crush of the crowd made it impossible for him to get more
than a fleeting glimpse of any one face.

There were more than enough soldiers to
squash the Quicken-tree. Yet even more came, pouring out of every
hole in the dark, until he began to think there were too many.

The growing corps bristled with halberds,
pikes, and lances. Greenlings favored bows and short swords. Knives
and daggers there were aplenty, and staves, iron-spiked caltrops,
war flails, axes, and hammers. The clash of metal and thumping of
feet created a raucous din, and soon the jostling in the narrower
passages turned into shoving matches. One such test of wills ended
in a grunt and the collapse of a white-faced skraeling to Caradoc’s
right. Without a pause, the man was trampled beneath the hobnailed
boots of the marching soldiers, but not before Caradoc saw the
foot-long gash in his side and Igorot wiping his bloody blade
across the front of his hauberk.

A quick signal passed between the greenlings,
and Lacknose Dock, still in the lead, shouted above the burgeoning
roar,
“Grazch! Kle, drak, dhon, vange!”

The count was taken up and down the
lines
—“Grazch! Kle, drak, dhon, vange! Kle, drak, dhon,
vange!”
—and order was restored, with feet marching in rhythm
and the strident noise of skraeling voices grating on Caradoc’s
ears.

Piles of fresh bones and hollows afloat with
rancid offal in Rastaban’s outlying tunnels warned him of even more
skraelings to come. His gut churned into an angry knot. He’d been
played false. He’d asked for a scant hundred skraelings, a garrison
to replace the one he’d lost, and they’d brought a whole friggin`
army down on his head.

The wind picked up as they neared the triple
arch entrance to Rastaban, carrying the sound of hundreds—nay,
thousands—more voices raised in the skraeling war chant.
“Kle,
drak, dhon, vange! Har maukte! Har!”

He tried to slow his pace, every instinct he
had telling him to retreat, but Lacknose Dock grabbed him with a
viselike grip and hauled him forward into the shadows of the
archway’s pillars. Fear overtook him then, and he tried to break
free. Lacknose did but tighten his hold, aided by Igorot’s mighty
hands. ’Twas thus he entered the Eye of the Dragon, bound on one
side by a metal-nosed greenling, and on the other by a burnt and
branded grayling.

The wretched scent of burning flesh assaulted
him in the cavern, a redolent wave of carnage so strong it near put
him to his knees. Thousands of skraelings filled the vastness of
Rastaban, all of them stomping in rhythm to the chant. The ground
trembled beneath Caradoc’s feet. The sound crashed into the walls.
The air itself shook with the force of the cries—and at the far end
of it all, ten times the girth of any skraeling in the cavern, sat
Slott.