Chalice 2 - Dream Stone (33 page)

T
he wind had picked
up by the time Llynya awoke, rising out of a drowsy slumber to find
Mychael sitting across the fire from her, finishing the last of a
handful of raspberries and looking very elfin in his new clothes.
Firelight danced along the shimmering cloth, picking up the colors
of the flowers and the leaf blades, and giving them a faint
metallic sheen to match the copper stripe in his hair. The line of
his scars had been clearly visible earlier in the moonlight, but
had done naught to takeaway from his appeal. He was marked, but
with time, the magic elixir of life. It suited him well.

“Hullo,” he said, looking over when she
stirred and extending his hand with the berries.

“Nay, thanks.” She shook her head at his
offer and eased her shoulders with a stretch. Some protector she
was, she thought, sleeping away while he walked all about, drying
off and changing clothes, buckling and unbuckling his baldric and
belt and probably snapping all kinds of twigs and branches while
he’d picked his berries.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.

She thought she detected a teasing note in
his voice, and sure enough, when she glanced over, a grin was
curving the corner of his mouth.

Much to her irritation, she felt her cheeks
grow hot. Bothersome boy.

“ ’Tis rare work Moira did on your tunic and
chausses,” she told him, pushing herself up to a sitting position
and ignoring his gibe. “Not many
tylwyth teg
can weave whole
plants into their Quicken-tree cloth.”

“Not many of them break the branches of trees
they’re hiding in, either,” he said, and his grin broadened,
warming the cool gray depths of his eyes. “What’s the matter,
sprite? Losing your touch?”

“Touch. Posh.” She set about tucking a few
straying braids back into the tumble of her hair, as much to hide
her blush as to accomplish any tidying up.

“ ’Twas you I heard, then. Banging and
clattering through the woods behind me.”

“I’ve ne’er banged and clattered in my life,”
she declared in mock affront.

“Aye,” he agreed, opening a gourd of catkins’
dew he’d brought with him to the fire. “ ’Twas what I told myself,
that it couldn’t possibly be you, but mayhaps an old, lumbering
boar bear, or a staggering hart with his rack all tangled in the
bracken, or mayhaps a great questing beast the likes of which bay
at the moon. But there’s no beast here, only you.”

He was clearly enjoying himself, and so was
she for all her show of discontent. ’Twasn’t often that he smiled,
and even less often, if ever, that he teased, yet he was teasing
her.

“And there you are wrong,” she assured him.
“There’s a questing beast here, come to Bala Bredd to devour the
fruits of the forest. Mayhaps she’ll come for you next, when the
raspberries run out, so you’d best eat your fill and be gone.”

His grin flashed again, and he laughed. “I’ve
oft searched for questing beasts in the woods and never yet found
one, so I think I’ll wait and take my chances.”

The sound of his laughter so surprised her,
running through her like clear, cool water, that her pulse
quickened and her ears pricked up and twitched forward. She could
do naught but gaze at him, dumbstruck—gaze and yearn for his kiss.
For that was the trick, wasn’t it? And the real reason she’d come?
To steal a kiss from him, if she dared.

She could have quickety-splitted one off him,
but a quick kiss was not what she wanted. She wanted one of those
slow, wandering-all-over kisses he’d given her in the tower. And
now she wanted another kind of kiss, one with laughter in it. Sweet
mystery of desire, to want to kiss, and touch, and taste his
delight, to press her lips to the teasing curve of his smile and
sigh and laugh with him, sharing the same warm breath. Aye, the
truth of it was very clear when she sat this close to him. She’d
come for a kiss.

But how to go about getting one, that was the
vexing question. They’d been arguing in the tower just before he
kissed her, but she had no heart for arguing this night.

He’d nearly kissed her the time she’d cut him
in Crai Force, but she knew that had been “in spite of” and not
“because of” her dagger work. Nay, she did not want to hurt him,
not ever again.

What she wanted was to kiss him, once, twice,
thrice, and on and on, until the sun rose over Glyder Mawr and
silvered the scree. Given her reaction last time, though, she
doubted if he was still inclined to kiss her.

Sticks and rot, she thought, her mouth
tightening. There had to be a way besides Massalet’s flirting.
She’d never flirted with a man in her life. ’Twould make her feel a
perfect fool. ’Twas best, mayhaps, to try to win his friendship,
and then, as a friend, she could outright ask him for a kiss.

“Does your cheek pain you a’tall?” she asked,
her concern real even if her motives for asking were highly
suspect.

“Not much,” he said around a yawn. Putting
his hands together, he stretched his arms out in front of him.
Lean, supple muscles flexed and contracted beneath his tunic. At
the apex of his stretch, he groaned, a soft, intimate sound, an
animal sound full of animal pleasure. The vibrations of it echoed
through her, and she near melted on the spot.

“Moira put something on it,” he continued,
relaxing from the stretch and taking up the catkins. “Something
besides
rasca
to take the pain away. ’Tis mostly her
stitches I can feel anymore, not the dagger cut.”

They sat for a while in companionable
silence, so companionable—what with the fire crackling and the wind
soughing through the trees all cozylike—that Llynya nearly
convinced herself they’d already reached a stage of friendship.
Then she did a quick review of their encounters over the last
sennight and decided that although there was some sort of
relationship between them, it could not yet be classified as
friendship.

“I’ve seen some of the Quicken-tree move in
that special fast way you did in Crai Force with your blade,” he
said, looking up from the fire, his eyebrows drawn together in
thoughtful confusion. “But none of them are as fast as you. Not
even close. I remember ’twas like a lightning strike when you cut
me.”

“ ’Tis called ‘quickety-split,’ or ‘
tlas
buen
’ in the elvish tongues,” she said, struggling with a
twinge of guilt. Rhuddlan might still have her wrung and hung for
cutting one of their own. “The Yr Is-ddwfn aethelings have always
been the fastest of all the
tylwyth teg
. The Quicken-tree
have lived too long in the world of Men, for eons and eons I
s’pect, and there’s been marriages and such between the two, sort
of like the one between your father and mother, who though she was
not exactly elfin was the closest I’ve ever seen a priestess be.
Near faerielike, she was, a rare
faerie blodau
, not one of
the little woodland beasts. The mingling up has made the
Quicken-tree and the other clans stronger in some ways and weakened
them in others, but they can still run circles around men.”

“You knew my mother?” he asked, leaning
forward, his sudden, eager interest reminding her of his long-ago
loss. She nearly reached out and touched his cheek, but held
herself back. Under no circumstances could her feelings for him be
misconstrued as maternal.

“Aye, and I loved her too,” she said, glad
they shared such a bond, though she’d not seen Rhiannon or gone to
Merioneth for years before he’d been born. Ailfinn and she had
wandered far and wide after leaving Yr Is-ddwfn, returning to
Merioneth only to find it had been lost to Gwrnach. “She told the
most wondrous stories and played the sweetest harp. You could hear
the stars singing in Rhiannon’s harp. She had soft hands, and a
soft, soothing voice, and her hair was like a beautiful golden
cloud. I ne’er saw hair like that again until Ceridwen came to
Deri. I gave her a thousand braids that night to keep her safe.”
She paused, stirring the fire with a long stick and giving him a
sidelong look. “You know, you could use a braid yourself, a
fif
braid. ’Tis one of those fair, subtle things that bind
you to the trees.”

“Binding, knotting, braiding, and brambling,”
he said, smiling again. “The Quicken-tree are ever weaving the
world together. To what end do I dare bind myself to the
trees?”

“Well, you’ll walk through them a little
easier, if they know you’re there,” she explained. “Most times they
don’t bother with a man. Men’s lives move too fast for trees to
care much about, but if you’re
fif
braided, kind of like how
all of them are wound up together on this patch of earth or
another, they’ll notice you more, and sometimes they’ll talk to you
a bit.”

“Talk?”

“Aye.”

“About what?” he asked, his voice rising on a
note of incredulity.

“This and that,” she said with a lift of her
shoulders. He stared at her for a long time before the doubt faded
from his expression. “They talk to you, don’t they?”

“Aye, and Rhuddlan, and Madron, and most any
of the
tylwyth teg
who take the time to listen.”

A sigh escaped him as he looked up at the
trees. The dark crowns of pines, and oaks, and a few straying
beeches carved out their silhouettes against the night sky, curving
around the pond in an uneven horizon.

“A
fif
braid will tie me to the
Quicken-tree as much as the forest, won’t it?”

“Aye,” she confessed.

He lowered his gaze from the trees back to
her. “Some of them would not be so glad to see me walking into Carn
Merioneth with my hair braided.”

“Naas gave you a dreamstone, and Moira made
you a suit of clothes with a whole wild iris woven down the
sleeve,” she asserted, stirring up another batch of sparks. “No
matter if Rhuddlan himself wanted you gone, he could not go against
those two.”

Another smile curved his mouth, but ’twas
wry, lacking any semblance of delight. “ ’Tis not Rhuddlan who
would have me gone. I think he would as soon I was reborn a
Quicken-tree so he could be my uncontested liege lord with full
power over me.”

A turn of events he was not inclined to
allow, she’d realized days past.

“He’s fair enough as a liege lord, but the
braid will make you no more his than you are now,” she assured him.
“ ’Tis a protection for you, is all, and it only ties you closer to
the Quicken-tree because they are all tied close to the woodlands
and meadows, to the fens and grykes, mosses and moors. I heard tell
once of an Ebiurrane who went so far north there were no trees, no
green living thing. One night, she became lost in a blizzard of
fierce snow and ice. At dawn, when she was nearly frozen stiff with
the cold, she heard the trees of home calling her. She heeded their
voices and was guided to safety. If you ever needed sanctuary in
the forest or out of it, the braid will make it easier for the
trees to guide you.”

“A
fif
braid will help the trees mark
me a path into sanctuary?” he asked, looking up from the flames,
his eyes dark with the keenness of his gaze.

“Aye. They know the way from every which
place to every other and e’en the places in between, like Yr
Is-ddwfn.”

“Yr Is-ddwfn? The place where you’re from, is
it a sanctuary, then?” His curiosity was fully alight now, and of a
sudden she realized a misunderstanding had taken place. She could
have kicked herself for not being more careful.

“Aye, I suppose it’s a sanctuary of sorts,”
she told him, backing off a bit from her tinker’s pitch for the
braid. Aedyth thought him a darkling beast, but Naas had told her a
different story that afternoon while they’d sat on the wall and
watched Mychael and the others unload Tabor’s ponies, a story of
priestesses and dragon’s blood, and Mychael’s searching of the
Dragon’s Mouth for a map of Nemeton’s.

Neither treebound refuge nor Yr Is-ddwfn
could protect him from himself, and the dragonfire that burned
through him was implicitly his, a bloodspell from Ddrei Goch and
Ddrei Glas conjured in an ancient time and running through his
veins.

“It’s a sanctuary of learning and some might
say of enchantments,” she went on, avoiding an outright blighting
of his hopes. “The Prydion Magi found it near the end of the Dark
Age, though they believed it to have been there even in Deep Time.
’Twas the dragon spawn, the
pryf
, who opened the path to Yr
Is-ddwfn through the wormhole.”

“I’ve been in the wormhole,” he reminded her,
“and I never saw a path.”

“You wouldn’t have, unless you’d been taught,
even if ’twas right in front of you. Ailfinn Mapp, the great
Prydion Mage, tried to teach Nemeton how to find the path, but for
all that he learned, he was ne’er able to learn the way to Yr
Is-ddwfn.”

“So Yr Is-ddwfn isn’t Nemeton’s sanctuary?”
he asked with a furrowing of his brow, coming around to the truth
quick enough on his own.

“Nay. But mayhaps I could teach you the way
there,” she said on a hopeful note, thinking she really should kiss
him. She knew she could cheer him with a kiss. “Most anywhere, a
thing is either there to see or it isn’t, but the path to Yr
Is-ddwfn has a trick to it. There’s a place not very far inside the
rim of the Weir Gate that looks to be either here or there, and if
you squint just so”—she demonstrated with a crinkling up of her
eyes—“and soften your gaze so you’re not staring too hard”—and she
did just that, peering at him while actually trying not to see him
so much as to see through him—“you’ll notice there’s a wee bend to
the rock, and if you can find your way ’round that bend, which I’ll
be the first to admit can be a bit troublesome on account of its
not being too solid as rock goes and with the worms swirling all
around, well, if you can do that, you’re practically there, and
once there, you’ll be surprised to find it’s not very far from
here. Not very far at all.”