The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy)

by Janzen, Tara

  “Are you well?” Concern made her voice gentler than she liked. At least she told herself it was concern and not the slow ache she felt building inside.

  “Aye,” he answered, not sounding at all truthful. With the slightest of movements, he turned his mouth into her palm, flooding her senses with awareness. His lips were soft, his breath warm against her skin.

  Heat poured through her. She wanted to lean closer and take him in her arms, cradle his head next to her breast; to glide her fingers through his hair, dragging the long, dark strands away from his face, then bend low to kiss his brow. When he’d kissed her across the river from Deri, he had kissed her as a man as well as a sorcerer, and after her dream of him as the savior with a sword, she’d had no more fear of him. She had only the want of him, a need unlike any she’d felt before, undeniable. Thus compelled, she did lean closer, bringing her face ever so much nearer to his.

  His breath grew shallow, and slowly his eyes opened, the gradual lift of his lashes mesmerizing her with hope and promise. Her heart pounded. Surely he would kiss her again.

  Yet when their eyes met, it wasn’t longing she saw in his gaze, nor weariness, but a regard so cool, she felt the icy chill of it.

  She quickly pulled away, embarrassed beyond measure, and growing even more so when he lounged back in his chair. ’Twas what came from being raised in a nunnery, she thought with disgust, this inability of hers to understand or predict him, or to keep herself from her own awful foolishness.

  “Forget this dream you had,” he said. “It can do neither of us any good.”

  “Dreams cannot harm you, magician.” Damn him. He had felt nothing, and she could scarce see straight for still wanting him. He was more changeable than the weather. She should have more sense than to think of him the way she did. She should have more sense than to think of him at all.

  “Mayhaps,” he agreed. “But for some, the whole world is a dream, and who can deny that there is harm in the world?”

  “Do not speak in riddles to me.” She would not cry. She’d had enough of tears. He was the one who had kissed her, was he not? She had not gone out of her way to kiss him. But then it never stopped at kisses for a man. A sister at Usk who had been widowed twice before taking her vows had told her so. With Dain, the kisses she longed for would no doubt turn into something beastly that she dared not desire.

  “You do not want riddles?” He reached for his cup of wine. “Then hear the truth, Ceridwen. I also dreamed in Madron’s cottage.”

  She stopped her silent railing and glanced up at him. “A dream like mine?”

  “Enough so to make me wary.” He drank and set the cup back on the table.

  “Is this why you are no longer friends?”

  “Aye.”

  ’Twasn’t much as explanations went, but it was something. “The thing with Caradoc. What does it matter to Madron if we wed?” She asked her most pressing question, trying to take advantage of his willingness to speak, if not exactly discourse on the matter.

  “She was Nemeton’s daughter, and believes if Caradoc is wed, then she can be returned to Carn Merioneth.”

  “Nemeton’s daughter?” she said, taken aback by his answer. “I think not. Nemeton’s daughter was named Moriath.”

  “’Tis another name the witch has, Moriath, though only Rhuddlan calls her thus. They have known each other for many years—” He rubbed his head again, as if the pain had suddenly increased. “At least fifteen, for certes. But what do you know of Nemeton?”

  “He was the greatest bard in all of Wales and often came to Carn Merioneth,” she said, excitement spilling over into her voice. She’d been right. It was Moriath she’d seen in the cottage. “Everyone knew of him, and for a short time Moriath stayed with us. She was the one who brought Mychael and me south and put us in the religious houses.”

  “Aye, she was at Usk,” Dain said, and swore silently. He’d fallen into a hornet’s nest of intrigue with the maid at the center of it all.

  “Did you say anything to her about the red book? Did she know of it?” the chit asked, leaning close, her face alight. Then just as quickly she moved away, a pink stain upon her cheeks.

  “She wrote it,” he said. “At least the Latin parts.” Another unfortunate telling of truth he surmised from the startled widening of her eyes. “’Tis not what you think, Ceri. She but put her father’s stories to the page, which may have naught to do with you. I have heard stories of a Ceridwen as the mother of Taliesin, a mythical being who some say is also the Merlin of Arthur’s court. There is a Ceridwen as keeper of a magic cauldron and another as—”

  “They are the same,” she interrupted him. “Taliesin’s mother and the cauldron keeper are the same woman.”

  “And neither one of them is you,” he said, making his point. He saw no reason to frighten her with Madron’s unconvincing reassurance that if Ceridwen married Caradoc, her blood would remain her own.

  Christ, but he hated the whole of it.

  “You must take me to Moriath,” she said. “I have to talk with her.”

  “No.” He dared not take her back into Wroneu. In truth, he didn’t know what to do with her. “There were dangers beyond the ocean in my dream, Ceri, and I know not why Madron showed them to me, or what they mean, or if ’twas really a dream.”

  “If not a dream, then what?”

  “Mayhaps a threat. Or it could have been a vision. I have a small gift of sight.”

  “Small?” Obviously, Ceridwen didn’t like the sound of that. “Erlend told me you were a great diviner, feared throughout the March of Wales; famed throughout the borderlands and the shires beyond.”

  His lips twitched with the beginnings of a grin he barely held in check.

  “I would not put too much store by what Erlend says,” he opined drolly. “Or spend too much of my time listening to his prattle.”

  “His prattle is better company than your silence. As for visions, I have no gift at all, so how do you explain what I saw?”

  “Madron.”

  “She has magic then?”

  Dain grimaced. “All with you is magic.”

  “It would be, if you would uphold your end of our bargain.”

  He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Magic is mostly damned hard work and nothing to be bargained with.”

  “Magic was your half of the bargain, sorcerer, not mine. You promised the lightning dance.”

  Their eyes held across the chessboard for no more than a moment before he relented. ’Twas Ceridwen’s easiest victory yet over him.

  He pushed himself out of his chair and stood. “Aye, then, before we jump into the thick of it, why don’t we begin with something no less volatile, but much less likely to immolate you.”

  “Immolate?”

  “Burn to a cinder,” he elaborated, gesturing toward the trapdoor with a broad sweep of his hand.

  ’Twas about time, she thought.

  ~ ~ ~

  What was Madron’s game, Dain wondered, to have warned him off, and then to have given him and the maid the same dream? It had all come back to him as Ceri had spoken of his sword, come back far too clearly for his peace of mind: the smell of the dark place, the danger of it, the way the walls had moved, the utter surety of his own death. With the clarity of the dream, he’d also remembered the moment in Deri when he’d felt and seen the same dark place.

  Too much darkness, he thought, filling another lamp with oil. When he lit the crystal globe, the lamp cast a shattered glow of fractured beams around the walls of the lower chamber. They danced over Ceridwen’s body and wove themselves through her hair where she stood across from him at the table. He’d started her off with the making of rihadin, one of Jalal’s most closely guarded concoctions, compact packages of mineral powders, fire oil, and resin used to change and deepen the colors of flames. Bits of charcoal, sulfur, or wax were sometimes used, depending on the desired effect. Saltpeter could be added, though he’d been strongly advised against it, and his own e
xperiments had proven the admonition to be based on sound reasoning and in favor of self-preservation, unless one was intent on a certain amount of destruction.

  A number of candles were already flaming, adding their meager light to the work at hand. He hung the lamp from a chain above them and set about filling his alchemy still with wine. ’Twould be aqua ardens he made for her.

  He had never doubted Jalal’s magic, or Madron’s, only his own, and yet he’d underestimated the witch. Her dream had awakened something in him. He’d felt it hovering on the edge of his consciousness these past few days, a mystery, mayhaps magic, but a magic more dangerous than any he had imagined. Not so for Rhuddlan. More than the Quicken-tree leader’s intuition had been at work in the grove that night. Rhuddlan had known the contents of Dain’s fleeting moment of sight. Dain’s own intuition, jogged into awareness by Ceri’s dream, told him it was so.

  Madron. Rhuddlan. Ceridwen. And Madron as Moriath, the one who had taken Ceridwen to Usk. The three were part of some whole, their lives knotted together for some purpose beyond a simple marriage. But what? And where was the dark place that bespoke of his death?

  Rhuddlan had gone north, not to return until Beltaine, Dain remembered, and Caradoc had come from the north.

  He glanced up from his still to where Ceridwen worked on the other side of the table. The maid had brought strange forces to bear on his life. She mocked him with her need for the powers of salvation he could not give himself, yet he’d be parting with her against his will.

  Nimble fingers, nimble mind, she’d grasped the concept of rihadin immediately. She had smirked and called him “charlatan” when he’d shown her the how of it, yet she still believed his tricks were magic and asked him how he conjured his exotic powders. She had enough faith in him and the God she prayed to for the both of them, and mayhaps that was why he was loath to let her go. In Arabic, she was alkemelych, “small magical one.”

  Mayhaps he would go north with the wedding party.

  “Christ’s blood,” he muttered, surprising himself with the idiocy of his thoughts. The maid had turned his mind to lust and his powers of reasoning to pottage. He had long since stopped yearning for death, and there was no reason to court it now, especially for a woman he could not have, let alone keep.

  He forced his attention back to his work, luting the stillhead with a paste made of flour and water. His hand shook, and paste dropped into the cold brazier beneath the still. He swore beneath his breath, but let it lie. He should not have kissed her palm. He’d known that even as he’d pressed his lips against her skin, drawn by her scent and her closeness. She made him weak. A woman less easily dissuaded would have had him on his knees in minutes, but a woman less easily dissuaded would not have been Ceridwen ab Arawn.

  She was visceral, slipping into his veins to wreak her havoc and bring him damn little peace.

  May Eve would be upon them soon, before the week was out, and she would be gone shortly thereafter. He felt the heavy ripeness of the earth building with each passing day, and he wondered if Rhuddlan also trembled with the coming of Beltaine. Each year his own awareness heightened ever more intensely, entwining him deeper with mysteries that always lurked just beyond his ken. Yet this year they were drawing close. More of Madron’s doing, and Rhuddlan’s, and the maid’s, and the Druid force brought to bear on the coming of spring.

  Nemeton’s grove and Nemeton’s tower held the same secret, albeit in different forms. Dain had realized that much the first time Rhuddlan had taken him to Deri for Beltaine. He’d behaved the perfect dissembler on the occasion, calling the Quicken-tree’s goddesses and gods for them with much pomp and legerdemain, employing every trick he knew, turning the flames of their fires into rainbow hues—aye, and they’d liked that well enough to request it year after year—roiling up great clouds of smoke and using his voice to make the trees talk, which the whole of Quicken-tree had found exceedingly humorous, much to his irritation. ’Twas only later he’d realized that to them, the trees had their own voices and his had been sorely out of tune.

  Yet for all that he’d made a mummery of their ceremony, he had not left the grove unchanged. The bodhran drums had done it to him. Their pounding, driving beat had slipped beyond his defenses and found an answering rhythm in what had been left of his soul. He couldn’t remember now what had surprised him more: that he’d responded to the Quicken-tree’s pagan rites, or that Jalal had left a part of him intact.

  Pagan. The word barely sufficed to describe what happened in the grove. Edmee would not be there on Beltaine. Madron never allowed it. Mayhaps he would turn to Llynya. That one’s sweet wildness had tempted him once. Or Moira. The Earth-Mother would take him in and give him comfort, bring him peace. There were others who would be willing, aye, even eager to lay down on the forest floor with the Horned One he would become—and none would be Ceridwen.

  He would continue to teach her how to use her new knife, and he would show her how to distill wine into water that burned. If he dared, he could tell her somewhat of the things between a man and a woman. Though Caradoc had brought the ransom and shown concern for her well-being, he did not think the Boar of Balor would bother to ease his way into a maid’s affections before easing his way into her bed, and Dain did not want her hurt, no matter the trouble she had brought to his life.

  He looked up again, watching as she worked the resin with her fingers. Her brows were drawn together in concentration, but her mouth was soft, free from worry. She was convent-bred and unused to the ways of men. After shocking her the night of his bath, he felt a certain responsibility to atone. Fear did not make a good bedmate, and it could make it especially hard for a woman. He could teach her somewhat, he supposed, teach her what he dared, but not nearly all she would allow.

  A wry smile curved his mouth. She wanted too much from him. He saw it in her eyes, felt it in her touch, and she didn’t know the safe limits of such things. If naught else, though, he would open her mouth and give her a kiss. Much could be learned from a kiss, and the maid was quicker than most.

  She would need to be, if she found herself often matching wits with Helebore. Before she left, he would give her the trick of using stone snake tongue to detect poison in food and wine. He had an extra mermaid’s purse or two he could part with, though he’d never actually figured out what to do with them besides intone grim-sounding chants while waving them about.

  He could teach her how to do that. Truly, the chanting was his most effective “magic,” that and divining the future from chicken guts. If there were many like Erlend in Balor, the chicken trick could make her reputation, and God knew there was safety in having a reputation as a mage. His had served him well for many years, until the maid had come into his life and begun tearing it asunder from the inside out.

  Chapter 16

  Rhuddlan and Trig knelt by the steaming, bubbling pool deep in the heart of the caves beneath Balor. The Liosalfar touched his fingers to the stone rim, the Quicken-tree leader reached for the water itself, and what Trig smelled on his fingers when he lifted them to his nose, Rhuddlan felt in the pool.

  “Desecration,” the Liosalfar said, looking up.

  Green eyes met green, and Rhuddlan nodded. “Whoever rouses the pryf dabbles in mysteries beyond his ken. Find the paths he uses and close them off.” The foul being whose presence they sensed could not be left to run free.

  Men from above had ventured into the caves many times since the fall of Carn Merioneth, some by accident, some apurpose to explore, and some to meet unexpected death. The caverns of the Quicken-tree did not readily reveal their secrets, and for that reason Rhuddlan had never bothered to challenge the presence of those whose thoughts did not go beyond tangible riches. ’Twas better for them to find nothing and return to tell the tale.

  This one, though—the Quicken-tree leader skimmed his fingers across the scrying pool once more—this one did not think of gold and gemstones, but of a treasure beyond price, and he must be checked. The searcher would know
someone had locked him out the next time he tried to descend into the caves, and mayhaps he had enough wits about him to devise a new way in, but that would take time and Beltaine was nearly upon them. After that good night, Rhuddlan would return with those he needed to break the seal on the weir gate, and once again he would be the ruler of the kingdom beneath the mountains, a dragon keeper.

  Then let this foul being come below, and Rhuddlan would feed him to the mother ocean.

  ~ ~ ~

  Travelers from the far north, from beyond even Denmark, arrived near Wydehaw midweek. The messenger who had sighted the peddler band in the forest and brought the news to the Hart had been scarce more than a boy. He had disappeared back into the night with his four pence clutched in his fist, leaving less trace of his passing than a shadow. For such an outrageous sum, Ceridwen had told Dain, she would be happy to run free in the woods all day and report back to him everything she saw. His reply had been that she had not done so well by herself running free in the woods, and that mayhaps she should just stay put. She did, while he left at the next dawn to go in search of the barbarian traders.

  Glad she was to be alone. The tower was too small to hold a caged animal of Dain’s size, and he acted the part no less than any wild thing she’d seen caught in a trap. He no longer spoke, he growled and snapped. He no longer slept, but prowled the whole night long. Every sound brought his head up, alert and wary. Every shift in the wind had become cause for another hour spent staring out the window upon the forested hills. He had not eaten yesterday, nor broken his fast this morn.

  Worst of all, his restless pacing had infected her with the same agitated excitement, the same sense of anticipation, though she knew not what to anticipate other than the escape she must contrive before Caradoc’s return. She had put it off long enough. Less than a sennight remained.

  Her plan was still to make for Strata Florida, but she was sorely tempted to go back into Wroneu and find Moriath before heading north. Despite what Dain had said about the witch, Ceridwen had felt no harm coming from her, and whether she was called Moriath or Madron, she was a touchstone to the past. Mayhaps she would have tidings of Mychael.