by Janzen, Tara
“Ye should not ha’ let ‘em bind her hair,” the old woman said, limping back to the table. “’Twill do her no good to have Rhuddlan’s mark upon her, unless... unless... Auch.” She shook her head and dismissed the whole of it with a wave of her hand, sending the bracelets jangling.
“’Tis their way,” Lavrans said, taking the chair next to Ceridwen and dropping his saddlebag on the floor.
“Aye. They’d plait the trees, if I but let ‘em.”
“I think ‘tis pretty,” Ceridwen said, and the old woman slanted her a narrow look over her shoulder. For a servant of a supposed lady, she was remarkably unkempt, all ragged and loose, as if she would crumble into dust at the first good wind.
“So, the little one has a tongue?” she asked.
“Aye.” Lavrans laughed, and Ceridwen shot him an offended glance.
“And she likes Moira’s handiwork?”
“’Twas not Moira, but Llynya who braided my hair,” Ceridwen said, absurdly pleased to know at least one thing the hag did not.
A loud guffaw greeted her news, taking much of her satisfaction.
“Llynya? That wretched little sprite?” The old woman cackled. “Then Rhuddlan does not know your true worth. If he had, he would have dragged the white-haired ones out of their huts and made them work their fingers to the bone twisting and knotting your curls.”
“Rhuddlan said he found her lacking, though he did not say in what,” Lavrans confirmed, arranging himself with a knee over one chair arm and an elbow resting on the other, lounging with the air of one accustomed to both the company and the place. His ease helped assure Ceridwen of the safety of the cottage, though his words were yet another offense.
“Lacking?” The hag bridled, drawing herself up to a surprising height. “She is Ceridwen, a true-born daughter of Carn Merioneth. The only lack is in his wits.” She turned to the table and began pouring milk pottage out of a pitcher and into silver goblets, hunching back down and muttering all the while. “Lacking, auch, we’ll see who’s lacking soon enough.”
One by one, she took the goblets to the cauldron and dipped hot, sweet wine into each. The first she gave to Ceridwen, setting it on a small round table at the side of her chair.
“Here’s yer posset, dearie. Ye might let it cool a bit.”
As the old woman shuffled back and forth between the pitcher and the cauldron, Ceridwen sipped on her posset and examined the trinkets scattered across the table: two green-glass bottles, one stoppered and empty, the other half full; an iron saucer holding a pinch of salt; a family of little squirrels made of pewter. A scrap of tapestry woven in the same sinuous lines as the Quicken-tree rugs caught her eye, though it looked much older than the rugs. The color was dark and it was worn about the edges. Next to the tapestry was a candle burning bright in a brass holder marked with spiraling blue swirls. Beyond the candle, closer to Lavrans, was a plain pottery dish decorated with nothing more than zigzags, but in the dish were rocks, pretty, shiny rocks, and amongst the rocks was something she’d never dreamed of seeing.
“Elf shot,” she murmured, leaning closer and reaching for the stone arrowhead.
“Hmmm?” The hag gave Lavrans his drink and peered over to see what Ceridwen held in her hand. “Oh, that. Hmmm. Int’resting choice ye made, dear.”
“Is it really elf shot?”
“Oh, aye. Fashioned by the tylwyth teg and used in the Wars of Enchantment. Ye can ha’ it, if ye like.”
“What of your mistress? Is it not hers?” Ceridwen looked up, her hand closing around the precious piece of chipped stone even as she asked the question. Her mother had told her about elf shot, how the stone to make them was found only to the north of Carn Merioneth, mined by the tylwyth teg beneath the mountain dragon-back of Tryfan, and how the arrows would pierce only an untrue heart and nary leave a scratch on a true one.
“Ye can rest easy, little one,” the old woman said. “That bit is mine to give. Here. Ye can ha’ one o’ me bags to hold it in.” She untied a pouch from her belt and began emptying it onto the table. Two shillings and three pence shook out, clinking against the iron saucer. A fluttering of oriole feathers, soft and golden, followed the coins. The last item, she had to reach in after, her knobby fingers struggling to pull it through the leather opening. “Auch,” she swore, giving up with her fingers and turning the pouch upside down to give it a good shake. Nothing happened.
Ceridwen leaned closer, an offer of help on the tip of her tongue, when the first loop of gold chain slipped out. Others followed, delicate and finely wrought.
The old woman gave a grunt of satisfaction and looped the chain through her fingers. Slowly, she began to pull.
Dain sipped on his hot drink and watched the byplay. The chit was entranced already, and Madron had barely begun. Whatever was at the end of the chain was bound to be interesting. Madron never disappointed, nor did she usually wear her guise of the crone except when traveling farther than the boundaries of Wroneu Wood. She must know something about the forest this e’en that he did not. She had never searched him out before when he’d been late or gone missing—unless ’twas the maid she had prepared to search for and not him.
More likely than not, he thought with a twinge of unease at one more sign of Ceridwen’s importance to someone for reasons he did not know. He’d brought the red book with him. Mayhaps was time to show it to the witch.
He swung his leg off the arm of the chair and was about to reach down, when the pouch released its prize, and the sight stopped him halfway to his saddlebag. The piece was interesting, aright, too damned interesting in the hands of one such as Madron. He did not doubt the witch’s skills, be they begot by magic or tricks. He settled back into the chair to see what his friend would do with the thing.
“Is it a serpent stone?” the maid asked in a voice hushed by awe.
Her reaction was not unwarranted, for the crystal ball was cut into a thousand faces, each of them glinting in the firelight and casting a rainbow into the cottage. The orb twirled on its chain where the gold links hung from Madron’s fingers. The colored lights danced about the room, swirling around and around in a dazzling, dizzying display.
“Serpent stone?” Madron asked, an eyebrow raised in his direction.
He shrugged.
“Aye,” Ceri said, her gaze fixed on the glass rock. “Born of the froth of the frenzied serpents beneath Domhringr and hardened by their fiery breath.”
The quote was good and, he admitted, somewhat gratifying. He hadn’t realized she’d been listening so intently or that he’d made such a lasting impression.
“Ah, one of those serpent stones,” Madron said, redirecting her attention to the maid. “No, little one, ’tis not from the Doom Rings of Judgment. This is a dreamstone.”
Dain’s unease increased. He had not heard of dreamstones, but there were stones enough and names enough for a good trickster to make of them what he or she wanted, and Madron was a very good trickster. Ceridwen had been quick to fall to his Brochan charm, but that night she had been pushed beyond her physical and emotional limits, and had no doubt been ready to faint dead away before he’d opened his mouth. She was strong this night with the Quicken-tree touch upon her, and she had proven to be a woman of uncommon will. Still, he could not take the chance. He had promised her protection, and he would not fail, even if it meant protecting her from her own overactive imagination rather than any physical threat.
Thus, with a lift and reach of his arm and a most fluid twist of his wrist, he passed his hand over and beneath Madron’s, palming the crystal. It disappeared in a twinkling, and with it, all the rainbow lights dancing wildly around the cottage.
If Madron was surprised, she did not show it.
“Your instincts are good, if misplaced,” she said, gracefully lowering her arm, all trace of the crone gone from her movement and speech. “Edmee told me you were protective of the maid, and yet, dear Dain, in this instance, you are too late. Remember that the next time Ceridwen ab Arawn
needs you.” The green eyes were leveled at him with the good humor of a victor and the warning of a friend.
He shot a glance at the maid and at first saw nothing amiss.
“Ceridwen?”
There was no answer, and as he watched, her lashes fluttered, then lowered over the pale ocean-blue of her eyes, and she fell into a deep sleep.
“A fair trick, indeed,” he said, careful to keep the anger he felt out of his voice. Anger had come to him all too easily this night, and had done him no good.
“’Tis called a Druid sleep. The knack has been in my family for generations beyond recall.”
“Nemeton,” he said, knowing well the family history. Madron had been the first to come to him, as the crone, when he’d won the prize from D’Arbois by opening Nemeton’s tower door. A great trick that had been, and the first time that he’d ever sincerely thanked Jalal for anything, including the saving of his life. He’d had so many reasons to hate his desert master, and not one to be grateful to him, until he’d been faced with the mechanical wonder that was the Druid Door. Not even Madron knew the secret of it, or if she did, she had not used it to secure the tower for herself.
“My father did not need a stone,” she said. “His voice alone was enough to lure people into sleep and dreams.”
“And what does Ceri dream?” he asked, feigning a calm he did not feel. Too much emotion was loose in the woods this night, that much was for damn sure, and he felt like a magnet for all of it. The maid was doing him no good. He would be better off rid of her, better off to take his marks and not look back when Caradoc came to fetch her.
“Ceri?” Madron repeated, giving him a heedful look. “Her brother called her such.”
“Mychael.”
“She told you?” Madron began unlacing her gown. There was nothing provocative about the action, and Dain did not react as if there was. He had seen the transformation before.
“As much as she knows,” he answered. “Mychael is a monk at Strata Florida and he has not written for some time. She has a book she keeps his letters in. A red book,” he added.
“Ah,” Madron said, sounding well pleased. The mud-colored rags dropped to a pile on the floor, revealing a fine, shimmering lavender gown stitched and gathered with silver thread. Matching kid boots showed beneath the hem, stitched with the same silver thread. The coif came off next, and with it the gray wig. Madron shook out her own auburn hair and ran her fingers along her scalp.
“I brought it for you to look at.” He reached for the saddlebag and pulled out the book. ’Twas the reason he’d come, to find whatever truth there was, as much for his own benefit as the maid’s.
“That won’t be necessary,” Madron said, twisting her hair up into a tidy knot. “I have seen the book before, and in truth, the Latin passages are mine.”
He didn’t think so, not the book in his hand. “’Tis one she brought with her out of Usk,” he explained, which meant to him that it must be a very different red book than any Madron might have written in. Good friend that she was, no nunnery would have had her.
“Aye, that’s the one. The one from Usk.” The already much younger-looking woman walked over to the cupboard and poured scented water out of an ewer onto a piece of white linen. To that she added a few drops of oil from a vial. “I put my father’s prophesies to page while I was exiled in the abbey. He gave me the book, thinking a Catholic scriptoria was the safest place to keep older truths from being forgotten, and a convent the best place to keep his daughter from being condemned for his own misdeeds.” The cloth prepared, she wiped the age and lines from her brow. “Little did he understand the pious ladies of Usk.”
“A convent, Madron?” Dain couldn’t keep the doubt from his voice. If Madron was the kind of woman coming out of Usk, no wonder Ceridwen was unlike any novice he had known.
“Only until no amount of my father’s gold could induce the nuns to keep me.” She laughed softly, folding the cloth into clean quarters to wash her cheeks and chin.
No one could have that much gold, he thought, and she laughed again, casting a glance in his direction. The witch was disconcerting.
He turned his gaze back to Ceridwen. She was slumped in her chair, her chin tilted up, her mouth partway open like a child’s.
“Is she virgin?” Madron asked.
Damned disconcerting.
“Aye,” he said, not wanting to wonder what made Madron think he knew. Ceridwen was not the first maid he’d checked, but she was the first he’d checked strictly for his own knowledge.
“You would do well to keep her that way. ’Twill only go hard with her if Caradoc finds her virtue breached.”
Ceridwen stirred, nestling her cheek deeper into the ermine. The scar down the side of her face showed silver in the candlelight, her lashes gold, her mouth soft pink.
“Mayhaps she won’t go to Caradoc,” he said, watching the chit and debating once more whether to keep her. Caradoc could find another bride.
“Nay, Dain,” Madron said quietly, turning to face him. “She is not for you. She will go north, and she will marry Caradoc.”
“Why? I see no reason for it. The Boar can find a different bride.” He didn’t attempt to hide the belligerent edge creeping into his voice. He was getting damned tired of people telling him what to do with the maid. He was the one who had saved her from Ragnor, wasn’t he? Without him, she would have been long since dead, and the rest of them could have traveled to hell and back without finding a trace of her.
“No,” Madron said, the conviction in her voice irritating him further. “The true keepers of Balor must be returned. Ceridwen was born there.”
The maid had been born in Balor?
“What is this land to you?” he asked. Madron had some stake in the maid’s future, and he would know what it was.
“’Tis a sacred place, rightfully known as Carn Merioneth, the place where my father died,” she answered, and he thought the stew was getting thick indeed. Carn Merioneth and Balor were one and the same. All Caradoc—and Madron and mayhaps Rhuddlan too—wanted was for Balor’s chicken to come home to roost. “He held a position of great power there once,” Madron continued, “and I would have it back.”
“Why not Wydehaw? The tower was Nemeton’s.” And was now his. If she wanted to bargain with the maid for her father’s legacy, let her bargain with him.
“Wydehaw is the map, Dain,” she said. “Merioneth marks the treasure itself. There are not enough of us left to win a man’s war of axe and bow. That much was proven fifteen years ago. Marriage is our best recourse now and the maid is the key.”
“No one wins at war,” he said, ill-tempered. “And damn few win at marriage, especially political marriage. In both, ’tis merely a matter of who loses less.”
“This time, it shall be us.” Madron moved back toward the fire and the chairs, using the cloth on her hands. Her fingers were long and slender. The bracelets were gone. She wore no rings. “With Ceridwen ab Arawn residing in the mountain of stone called Balor Keep, we can once again take up the reins of duty that have been left slack too long.”
“We? Madron?” He dared to mock her with a smile and an arch of one eyebrow. “No one comes to your door. No one waits outside. In truth, I have never seen anyone other than the good Sheriff of Hay-on-Wye try to ally himself with you, and the alliance he wants would not take much of your time and little more than a lift of your skirts. No doubt he is the reason ’tis not safe for you in the woods at night.”
“He hunts me, true,” she admitted, drawing a footstool near and sitting close to Ceridwen. She took the maid’s hand in hers, turning it over and tracing the lines crisscrossing the younger woman’s palm. “But the sheriff is easy enough to elude. I speak of the Quicken-tree.”
“Rhuddlan wanted to keep her, lack or no lack,” he told her, as if her choice of allies might need reconsideration.
“Rhuddlan and I often disagree on the best way to proceed, but never doubt that we have the same goal in our hear
ts.” Finished with Ceridwen’s right hand, she took up the maid’s left and performed the same gentle investigation.
“Often disagree?” Dain begged to differ. “I have yet to see the two of you agree on anything.”
“There is Edmee,” Madron said, her gaze intent on the maid’s palm.
Of course.
Dain swore silently, lowering his chin toward his chest. He began rubbing his temples with an absent, massaging gesture, a poor attempt to combat the sudden pain he felt. Edmee was Rhuddlan’s daughter. Good God.
The maid had been in Deri that evening, which was not unusual. He should have guessed her parentage long ago.
“If Ceridwen is so important, where were you when Ragnor abducted her?” A change of subject was the best he could manage.
“The maid is like quicksilver to hold,” Madron said. “Twice she escaped her cousin, and I managed to shoo her back. ’Twas my preferred plan, for Morgan to take her north under the protection of the Gwynedd prince, for my own involvement to be imperceptible until she was safely wed. Then she escaped once more, and the beast got hold of her before I could intervene. Fortunately, she was quickly given to you and there is no safer place in all the world for Rhiannon’s daughter than Nemeton’s tower.”
“My tower,” he corrected her, looking up from beneath his hand. Damnable aching head. Madron must have some valerian for an infusion.
“Only for as long as Rhuddlan and I allow.” She inclined her own head to see him clearly.
“You never opened the door, and neither did Rhuddlan. ’Twas I who managed to pierce its secrets and free its lock.” Coup, he thought, and the end of it. “Do you have any valerian, Madron?”
“Aye,” she said, looking at him more closely. “Poor thing. What is it? Your head?”
“Aye.”
“Drink your posset, ’twill help. There is more water than wine in it, and milk always soothes. I’ll fix you an infusion shortly.” She went back to searching Ceridwen’s palm, her fingers light upon the maid’s pale skin.
