by T.A. Barron
Before I could renew the attack, however, Balor roared angrily at Rhia. He seized her by the arm, ripping her loose. Then, roaring again, he whipped her around and hurled her headlong at the cliff wall. Face first, she slammed into the rocks. She staggered backward, then slumped motionless on the ground.
My heart split in two at the sight. Just then Bumbelwy emerged from hiding and ran to her side, waving his arms wildly. Seething with rage, I charged straight at the ogre, swinging my sword while still averting my gaze. Yet Balor sidestepped me with ease. His fist smashed into my shoulder, sending me sprawling. The sword flew out of my hand and clattered on the rocks. I crawled madly after it.
A huge boot kicked me in the chest. I flew through the air and landed with a thud on my back. My ribs screamed with pain. The pinnacles of the cliffs seemed to wobble and whirl above me.
Before I could try to sit up, Balor’s immense hand closed around my throat. He squeezed until I gagged. Then, with a sharp jerk, he lifted me into the air. My head swam. I flailed my arms and legs, swaying helplessly. But he only squeezed tighter, throttling me. I pounded on his arm, trying desperately to breathe.
Slowly, he lowered me, until our faces almost touched. His grip tightened. His snarl tore at my ears. Then, pulled by a spell I no longer had the strength to resist, I looked into his dark eye. Like a pit of quicksand, it drew me in.
With all my remaining power, I fought to break free. But I couldn’t resist the eye. It pulled me deeper, deeper, sucking out my strength. Darkness shrouded my vision. I felt myself go limp. I should just give in. Just let go. I stopped trying to fight, stopped trying to breathe.
Suddenly, I heard Balor roar in agony. He released my throat. I fell onto the rocks, coughing and gasping. Air filled my lungs again. The darkness clung to me for another moment, then faded away.
Weakly, I raised myself up on one elbow, just in time to see Balor collapse on the rocks. He fell with the force of a toppled tree. From his back protruded a sword. My sword. And standing behind him was Rhia, half her face bloody. Her neck bent strangely, as if she couldn’t straighten it. Then her own legs gave out and she crumpled next to the fallen ogre.
“Rhia!” I called hoarsely, crawling to her side.
Bumbelwy appeared, looking grimmer than grim. He lifted me by the arm so that I could stand. As I stumbled over to Rhia, I heard him moan, “I told her she’d kill herself if she moved, but she wouldn’t listen.”
I knelt by her side. Gently lifting her head with my hands, I tried to straighten her neck. Above one ear I found a deep gash. It bled profusely, staining her suit of woven vines, as well as the rocks. Carefully, I sprinkled some of the herbs from my satchel on the wound.
“Rhia. I’ll help you.”
Her blue-gray eyes opened halfway. “Merlin,” she whispered. “This time . . . there’s nothing . . . you can do.”
“No.” I shook my head vigorously. “You’re going to be all right.”
With difficulty, she swallowed. “It’s my time . . . to die. I’m sure. When I looked . . . in the Lake of the Face . . . I saw you fighting Balor . . . and losing. But I . . . also saw . . . one of us dying. It wasn’t . . . you. It was . . . me.”
Holding her, I tried to pour strength into her head and neck. I tore off the bottom of my sleeve and pressed it against her skin, willing the gash to heal as I had willed her bone to knit itself together in Eagles’ Canyon. Yet I knew that these injuries were far more severe than a broken arm. Even the torn vines of her garb seemed to be fading a little with each passing second, their vibrant green showing hints of shadows.
“It doesn’t have to be that way, Rhia.”
“Oh yes . . . it does. I never told you . . . but I was told . . . a long time ago . . . that my life would be lost . . . to spare yours. That staying with you . . . would mean my own death. I wasn’t sure whether to believe it . . . until now.”
“What nonsense!” I concentrated harder on the wounds, but the blood continued to flow, soaking the cloth and seeping through my fingers. “What fool ever told you such a thing?”
“No fool. Arb . . . assa. That’s why . . . you were never welcome . . . inside the door.”
I winced. “You can’t die now! Not because of some foolish prophecy!” I bent lower. “Listen to me, Rhia. These prophecies are worthless. Worthless! A prophecy said that only a child of human blood could kill Balor, right? Well, you saw what happened. Balor had me in his death grip. I was helpless—I, the child of human blood! It was you, not me, who killed him.”
“That’s because . . . I too . . . have human blood.”
“What? You’re a Fincayran! You’re—”
“Merlin.” Rhia’s eyelids quivered, as the wind wailed beneath the cliffs. “I am . . . your sister.”
I felt as if Balor’s boot had once again slammed into my ribs. “My what?”
“Your sister.” She drew a difficult breath. “Elen is . . . my mother, too. That’s another reason . . . I had to come.”
I pounded the black rocks with my fist. “It can’t be true.”
“It is true,” declared Bumbelwy. He bent his lanky frame to kneel beside me. “When Elen of the Sapphire Eyes gave birth to you in a wrecked ship somewhere on our shores, she also gave birth, a few minutes later, to a daughter. She named the boy Emrys, and the girl Rhiannon. The bards of Fincayra all know that story.”
His glum sigh melted into the wind. “And also the story of how that daughter was lost as an infant. Her parents were traveling through Druma Wood when they were attacked by a band of warrior goblins, the soldiers of Rhita Gawr. A fierce battle ensued. The goblins finally scattered. But in the turmoil one of Elen’s twins, the girl, was lost. Hundreds of people searched for weeks, without success, until at long last even Elen stopped looking. Heartbroken, all she could do was pray to Dagda that her daughter might someday be found.”
Rhia nodded weakly. “And she was. By . . . a treeling. Cwen. It was she . . . who brought me . . . to Arbassa,”
“My sister!” Tears welled in my sightless eyes. “You are my sister.”
“Yes . . . Merlin.”
If the towering cliffs had caved in and crushed me just then, I would have felt no greater pain. I had found my only sibling. And yet, as had happened so many times before, I was about to lose what I had only just found.
Tuatha, I remembered now, had warned me that the prophecy about a child of human blood could have an unexpected meaning. It may be true, and it may be false. Yet even if it is true, the truth often has more than one face. How could I possibly have known that it would be the face of Rhia?
“Why,” I asked in a quavering voice, “didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t want . . . you to change . . . your course to try . . . to protect me. What you do . . . with your life . . . is important.”
“Your life is just as important!”
I threw away the bloody rag and tore a new piece off my sleeve. Even as I tried to mop the gash, I recalled a night long ago in Cairpré’s room full of books. So this was why he had hesitated so strangely in telling me the story of my birth! I had suspected then, and knew now, that he was on the verge of telling me something more. That a sister had been born on that same night.
I cradled Rhia’s head in my lap, feeling her warm breath on my arm. Her eyelids had nearly closed. The shadows on her garb deepened. As a tear slid down my cheek, I said, “If only I could have seen.”
Her eyelids fluttered. “Seen? Are you talking about . . . your eyes?”
“No, no.” I watched the blood dripping from her brown curls. “This isn’t about my eyes. It’s about something else, something my heart has known all along. That you are, well, more than someone I just happened to meet that day in Druma Wood. My heart knew that from the very start.”
She made a slight movement with her lips that could have been a grin. “Even when I . . . hung you up . . . in that tree?”
“Even then! Rhia, my heart could see it, but my head just didn’t
understand. I should have paid more attention to my heart, I’m telling you! The heart can see things invisible to the eye.”
A blue flash erupted from the rocks where Rhia had left my staff. Without even looking, I knew that it bore a new marking, in the shape of an eye. For I had discovered, somehow, the soul of Seeing. Yet my gain paled in comparison to my loss.
In that same instant, the air began to shimmer near the outstretched arm of the fallen ogre. The invisible curtain parted, revealing a low circle of polished white stones. A well. Not a stairwell leading up, but a deep well leading down.
I could see it! And I also understood, for the first time, that the pathway to the Otherworld—to Heaven and also to Hell—meant going down, not up. Down into the very deepest places, not up to somewhere in the universe far removed from myself.
The bitter wind swept over us, howling. Rhia spoke so faintly that I could hardly hear her. “You will be . . . a wizard. Merlin. A . . . good . . . one.”
I lifted her head to my chest. “Don’t die, Rhia. Don’t die.”
She shuddered. Her eyes closed at last.
I held her tight, sobbing quietly.
Then, as if the dawn were breaking within my very arms, I sensed the presence of something that I had not noticed before. Something within Rhia’s body, yet apart from it as well. Passing through my fingers like a breeze of light. Her spirit. Leaving her body on its way to the realm beyond. In a flash, an idea seized me.
I called to her spirit. Please, Rhia. Don’t leave me. Not yet. I pulled her head close to my heart. Come with me. Stay with me. Just for a while.
I glanced toward the circle of white stones, the entry to the Otherworld. The pathway to Dagda. Even if it were too late for him to save Elen, maybe—just maybe—he could still save Rhia. And, if not, at least we might be together for a little while longer.
Come with me. Please.
I inhaled deeply, drawing far more than air. And with that breath, a powerful new feeling flooded into me. It was vibrant. It was robust. It was Rhia.
I turned to Bumbelwy, whose drooping cheeks showed the streaks of his own tears. “Help me up, will you?”
Solemnly, he eyed me. “She is dead.”
“Dead.” I felt the new life force within me. “But not gone, my good jester.”
With difficulty, Bumbelwy helped me to my feet. In my arms I bore, the empty body of Rhia, her head dangling. “Now bring me my sword. And my staff.”
Shaking his head, the dour jester pulled the sword out of Balor. He used his boots to wipe the blade clean. Then he gathered up my staff from the rocks. Returning to me, he slid my sword into its scabbard and the staff into my blood-soaked belt.
He studied me somberly. “Where are you going with her?”
“To the Otherworld.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Then I will wait here for you. Even though you won’t ever return.”
I started toward the ring of white stones, then stopped and faced him again. “Bumbelwy, in case I don’t return, I want you to know something.”
He gave me a many-layered frown. “What is that?”
“You are a terrible jester. But a loyal friend.”
With that I turned toward the Well. I strode across the rocks, my arms as heavy as my heart.
31: INTO THE MIST
A gust of warm air struck my face as I looked into the Otherworld Well. A spiraling stairway, made from the same polished white stones as the entrance, dropped down from the center of the circle. I couldn’t tell how far down the stairs went, though I suspected it was far indeed.
Holding Rhia’s limp body in my arms, I stepped carefully onto the first step. With a deep breath, perhaps my last, of Fincayran air, I started down the spiral. Downward I plunged, taking care not to stumble. As much as my ribs, throat, and shoulders ached from my battle with Balor, my heart ached still more to be bearing the body of my friend. My sister.
After descending more than a hundred steps, I noticed two surprising things. First, the Well never grew any darker. Unlike it would in a drinking well or tunnel hollowed out of the ground, the light did not diminish at deeper levels. In fact, it seemed to grow stronger somehow. Soon the white stones of the stairs glowed with the luster of pearls.
Second, the spiraling pathway did not need any walls. Only mist, curling and shifting, surrounded the stairs. The deeper I went, the more intricate and tangled the fingers of mist became. Sometimes they would twirl around my legs, or the curls of Rhia’s hair. Other times they would condense and twist themselves into strange shapes I could not identify.
The mist of this Well reminded me of the mist surrounding Fincayra’s shores. Not so much a boundary, or a barrier, as a living substance possessing its own mysterious rhythms and patterns. Elen had often spoken about in between places like Mount Olympus, Y Wyddfa, or Fincayra. Places not quite our world and not quite the Otherworld, but truly in between. In the same way that this mist was not really air and not really water, but something of both.
And I thought of the day when, on the dirt floor of our hut in Gwynedd, she had described Fincayra to me for the first time. A place of many wonders, she had called it. Neither wholly of Earth nor wholly of Heaven, but a bridge connecting both.
As I dropped deeper into the mists, drawing nearer to the Otherworld with every step, I wondered what kind of world it might be. If Fincayra were indeed the bridge, where then did the bridge lead? Spirits lived there, I knew that much. Powerful ones, like Dagda and Rhita Gawr. But what of the simpler, quieter spirits, like my brave friend Trouble? Did they share the same terrain, or did they live elsewhere?
Turning endlessly on itself, the spiral stairway led me downward. It struck me that there might be no difference between day and night in this world. Without the sunrise or sunset, or the moon sailing overhead, it would be difficult to tell time. There might not even be any time, or what I would call time. I vaguely remembered Elen saying something about two kinds of time: historical time, which runs in a line, where mortal beings march out their lives, and sacred time, which flows in a circle. Could the Otherworld be a place of sacred time? And if so, did that mean that time there turned in on itself, turning in circles like this spiraling stairway?
I stopped, tapping my boot on one of the steps. If there was a different kind of time in this world, I could return to the surface—if I ever did return—too late to save Elen! I might easily spend my two remaining days, and months besides, without even knowing it. I arched my back, lifting Rhia higher on my arms. Her weight, like the weight of my quest, felt heavier than ever.
All I could do was try to find Dagda as soon as possible. Let nothing delay me or throw me off course. I started again down the stairs.
As I followed the Well deeper, something about the mist began to change. Instead of hovering close to the stairs, as it had near the entrance, the mist pulled farther away, opening into pockets of ever changing shapes. Before long the pockets expanded into chambers, and the chambers widened into hollows. With each step downward the misty vistas broadened, until I found myself in the middle of an immensely varied, constantly shifting landscape.
A landscape of mist.
In wispy traces and billowing hills, wide expanses and sharp pinnacles, the mist swirled about me. At some points I encountered canyons, cutting into the cloudlike terrain, running farther and deeper than I could guess. At other points I glimpsed mountains, towering in the distance, moving higher or lower or both ways at once. I found misty valleys, slopes, cliffs, and caverns. Scattered throughout, though I couldn’t be sure, moved shapes, or half shapes, crawling or striding or floating. And through it all, the mist curled and billowed, always changing, always the same.
In time I discovered that the stairs themselves had changed. No longer stiff and solid like stone, they rippled and flowed with everything around me. Although they remained firm enough to stand on, they were made from the same elusive fiber as the landscape.
An uneasy feeling swelled in me. That what surrounded
me was not really mist at all. That it was not even something physical, made from air or water, but something . . . else. Made from light, or ideas, or feelings. This mist revealed more than it obscured. It would take many lifetimes to comprehend even a little of its true nature.
So this was what the Otherworld was like! Layers upon layers of shifting, wandering worlds. I could plunge endlessly deeper on the stairs, move endlessly outward among the billows, or travel endlessly inward in the mist itself. Timeless. Limitless. Endless.
Then, out of the flowing landscape, a shape appeared.
32: A GOLDEN BOUGH
Small and gray, the shape rose aloft from a burgeoning hill. As I watched, it spread two misty wings. It sailed toward me, floating on a current, then suddenly changed direction, climbing so steeply that I almost lost sight of it. Abruptly, it veered and plunged straight downward, until it spun into a series of loops and turns that seemed to have no other purpose than the sheer joy of flight.
Trouble!
My heart leaped to watch the hawk fly again. Although my arms were wrapped around Rhia, I could still feel the leather satchel against my hip. Within it, along with my mother’s herbs, rested a banded brown feather from one of Trouble’s wings. Nothing more had remained of him after his battle with Rhita Gawr. Nothing, that is, save his spirit.
Out of the billowing mists he came soaring to me. I heard his screech, as full of spunk and vigor as ever. I watched his final flying swoop as he approached. Then, with a rush of warm air, I felt his talons grab hold of my left shoulder. He folded his wings upon his back, prancing up and down my shoulder. Though his misty feathers had changed from brown to silver gray, streaked with white, a touch of yellow still rimmed his eyes. He cocked his head toward me and gave a satisfied chirp.
“Yes, Trouble! I’m happy to see you, too.” Then my moment of gladness vanished as I hefted the limp, bloodstained body in my arms. “If only Rhia could, as well.”
The hawk fluttered down to the leaf-draped girl’s knee. He studied her for a moment, then piped a low, somber whistle. With a shake of his head, he leaped back up to my shoulder.
