by Janzen, Tara
There was both threat and warning in his words, and the revelation of what he’d done with all his shouting and hitting of doors: He’d sealed the tower. Panic fluttered to life in her breast. She would not be trapped like the animal he had become, awaiting the return of Caradoc and damnation. The time for leaving was upon her.
“I gave my word that I would not try to escape,” she said, fighting to control her alarm and bringing all her guile to bear on the falsely spoken promise in hopes of making it appear genuine.
“And your word will be broken,” he said with utter conviction.
“I have not yet strayed,” she reminded him “And I have had the chance.”
Slowly, he lifted his head, staring through the darkness and the distance with eyes so bright, she trembled. He looked more beast than the Boar. “Your thoughts of love held you here, and I have taken them away. You will try your escape now, but I am warning you: Do not attempt to leave this tower before another full turn of the sun. The hills will be aflame tonight with the fires of Bel, and you will be consumed. I promise you this.”
Her face went from the paleness of fear to the red flush of anger. Love? How dare he speak to her of love.
“You have overvalued yourself.” She would not be made a fool of twice, no matter how badly he frightened her.
“No, kaereste,” he said, his gaze unwavering. “’Tis that I undervalued you. I thought I could not be touched. You have proven me wrong.”
If the words had been spoken in any tone other than that of desolation, she might have taken hope, but he had left her none. He sat alone at his table, his form unyielding, his bearing grim, leaving no room for another at his side.
In silence, he broke the seal on the clay pot, then dipped in the middlemost finger of his left hand and pulled it back out. ’Twas covered with a black unguent. Starting on the left side of his face, he put his finger beneath his eye and drew a thick line straight out across his temple to his hairline. With his right middle finger, he did the same to the other eye. The dark potion glittered in the light of fire and candle like a streak of the night sky across his tawny skin.
This was not the banding of the Quicken-tree, Ceridwen thought. It was something else, something much less fair, something baleful.
“What are you doing?” She pulled the curtains aside and slipped to the floor in her bare feet, curiosity overcoming caution. “What is this unguent you use?”
He did not answer, only dipped in his finger again and drew a second line from his right ear across his cheekbone and up and over the bridge of his nose.
She approached him carefully, not knowing how close she dared to get.
“Your courage is ill-placed in this,” he told her, and she wondered if she’d ever managed to hide anything from him, or if he’d been reading her mind from the first night.
“So what say you?” She kept her voice soft. “Am I in danger?” She was duly afraid, but strangely and suddenly, far more for him than herself. For herself, she was wary, and curious, so curious.
“Not if you stay in the tower with the hounds to guard you.” He finished the line by drawing it across his left cheekbone to his left ear.
“Will you be staying also?”
“No. I go to Rhuddlan’s camp.” A new line was started below the last, the three of them thick and rich.
She stopped at the table’s edge, well away front the broken glass and him. “And what will become of you in Deri?”
A short, harsh laugh answered her question. “The becoming has already begun, chérie,” he said, trailing the third line across the width of his face with unerring accuracy.
“And is this what you become? This striped, wild thing?” She made a small gesture of helplessness, not understanding what she saw in his face. Something stranger than the alchemical magic they practiced in the lower chamber was happening to him. The shadows, the low uneven light, and the pattern he was painting on his face were conspiring to disguise him. Verily, he seemed to be disappearing before her eyes.
“Wild?” With the reverence of ritual, he touched each of his fingers to the pot in turn, smearing their tips with unguent. “Aye, ’tis something wild I become, wild and fearsome.”
He looked down at his hands and slowly turned his palms toward the ceiling. The air stirred, setting the candle flame aflicker and causing the incense smoke to curl around and down upon itself, then rise up again in a winding trail. He lifted his arms, his fingers curved like unsheathed talons, his palms cupped, as if he were pulling something up from the air in front of him.
Ceridwen held herself close, her own hands clasped at her breasts, resisting the need to reach out to him and stop him. In her ignorance, she did nothing, and when his gaze flashed to hers—brightly crazed with an unholy light —she knew ’twas too late. He had gone beyond her.
“You see before you the Demon.” The words rolled off his tongue encased in smoke, terrifying her with their proclamation: Evil was here. Smoke flowed from between his teeth and out of his nostrils, circling up in fumed whorls to shield his face and curl through tendrils of his hair. He closed his eyes on a breath of uncanny length and power, a deep inhalation of the fragrant grayish-blue haze that filled his chest and pulled a stillness down around them both.
She dared not touch him now. Indeed, she took a step back. He had shown her nothing like this before. ’Twas wondrous, monstrous, dizzily frightening stuff. The heaviest of magic, she was sure, good for the most deadly spell-casting and conjuring.
“What need has Rhuddlan of a demon?” she asked, compelled to the rash question by her own needs. Mayhaps, when the time came, if she had the courage, she could transform herself into one. Heresy in its most despicable form, but what choice did she have? Nothing less than what she saw before her would dissuade the Boar from his wedding bed or frighten him from his damnable course, but that it would do so she had no doubt. Here was a feral being unheedful of the laws of man or God, a demon true, bound only by his own evil intent.
Jesu. Was this how all sinners came into being, forced by circumstance into dealings with a dark manifestation? Falling from grace while clinging to that most divine state?
The barest smile curved the Demon Dain’s mouth. Wisps of vapor curled at the corners of his lips and veiled the red-rimmed eyes staring at her from deep in their sockets. “You are fearless, Ceri.”
She could have called him liar, despite his gift of sight, for her heart was racing. Yet her only concession to fear was another judicious step back.
“Retreat?” he asked with a mocking lift of one brow.
“Caution only,” she replied, though her voice was breathless with fright.
“Then listen, little cautious one.” He smiled, and his lashes lowered over his fiery gaze. “Rhuddlan calls up the Sacred Demon of the unknown for his own use, the Demon of despair, for Rhuddlan is as fearless as you.” He spoke the words as liturgy, lifting his hands and laying the tips of his fingers upon his cheeks. “Rhuddlan of the Quicken-tree welcomes the true Demon of suffering and sorrow, the one who steals the first sweet breaths of children, the one who cripples and maims youth and the old with no regard to justice, the one who steals souls.” With the solemnity of a priest, he dragged his fingers across his face, making four lines on either side to add to the three.
“Rhuddlan beseeches the bane of mankind and all beings, the hand of God in destruction. The Demon enters the forest at dawn, the bringer of all divine disasters: the earth cracking open, rivers swelling over their banks and washing the land clean, fires spewing forth from the mountaintops, giant winds swirling down from the sky. The Demon beckons, and the four elements do the Demon’s bidding. Earth. Water. Fire. Air. I am the Demon,” he said, and his voice echoed upon itself in eldritch tones both eerie and profane.
Aye, she thought, taking in every word and committing it to memory. Here was power to be used, dark power to be feared by all.
“And when the destruction has been wrought, Rhuddlan and all of Quicken-tree w
ill take the Demon and transform him into the Underworld god they need, the god he was before Rome turned him into the Devil.” His voice wove a continuing spell of enchantment with its undulating charm, revealing the mystery of what he had become. “Ceraunnos, the Horned One, Lord of the Animals, will come to them on Beltaine as he has for time beyond memory, and there amidst the fires, he will meet Beli, father of the gods and god of the Sun, and Don, Mother Goddess of the Earth and the gods, and of all heroes.”
Ceridwen knew the god Ceraunnos, as well as she knew Beli and Don. She’d come across them many times in the manuscripts kept in the library at Usk. Their names ran through the old stories told by her mother. They were worshiped by the Druids, and they consorted with the Light-elves from across the water. Aye, she knew Ceraunnos, for he was spoken of in the red book and she’d seen him once, somewhere, etched into stone with his torc in one hand and a horned serpent in the other, with other serpents by his side, a deity of fertility crowned with a stag’s antlers—or so the pagan manuscripts said.
Now she faced the mix of god and demon in its flesh, and she understood the being no better than she had before. God was God. Devil was Devil. One was to be loved, the other abhorred. The lines were clear, the two could not meet, and certainly not within the form of one mere mortal.
“No man can be both god and demon,” she told him.
Dain’s eyes slowly opened, and a subtly demonic smile lifted a corner of his mouth. “Au contraire, chérie. No man can help but be both. Until the ceremony, and even after, you will not be safe in Wroneu. Any man who catches you in the forest on May Eve will take what I have not.”
He pushed himself out of his chair, rising with a horrible swiftness, and she stumbled back in unabashed retreat. His eyebrow arched, but he took no more heed, passing by her without comment on his way to the hearth.
With all his sorcerer’s grace, he swung his cloak around his shoulders and lifted the cowl over his head. She saw nothing more of his face. If not truly demon and god, he had become what he’d been the first time she’d seen him: a shadow lost in darkness.
“Remember what I have said, and beware the dogs,” he warned, striding toward the floor hatch. “They will not let you pass where I have told them you may not go.”
Ceridwen watched him descend the alchemy chamber stairs, pulling the hatch closed behind him. Within moments the bolt slid home on the underside of the planks, and she knew her fate had been sealed as surely as the tower.
Yet there was the faintest glimmer of hope, for he had left the black unguent. ’Twould not be a pale, trembling virgin Caradoc found when next he breached the walls of Wydehaw.
~ ~ ~
Shay saw Lavrans first, far below him on the forest floor. The mage moved with the silent speed of the tylwyth teg, his footsteps leaving no more trace nor making any more sound than the dawn wind soughing through the trees and billowing his cloak behind him like dark wings on a bird of prey.
The Quicken-tree youth marked Dain’s direction, then signaled Llynya where she sat on a bough below him, doing her best to entice a sunbeam into warming the small purple-and-white violet in the palm of her hand. She was very near success. Shay could see the tiny ray of light moving along the field maple bough, both advancing and retreating, but growing ever closer to Llynya’s outstretched fingers. The flower still had the freshness of morning dew on it. Night nectar, the Quicken-tree were apt to call the moisture, for ’twas the cooling of the night that lured the water out of the air, and morning light that made it disappear.
He would have let her continue, for there was nothing quite like sunbeam-warmed violets to break one’s fast, but Lavrans was slipping deeper into the shadows of Wroneu. Shay tried to signal her again with a gesture, and when that failed to attract her attention, he cupped his hand around his mouth and gave the clear chir-r-up rail of a lark.
Her immediate reaction was not to look up at him, but to peek down over the side of her bough and, like himself, mark Dain’s direction. The flower went in her mouth to be eaten cold.
“Malashm,” she said, lapsing into an Elfin tongue. “Donn Thanieu esa lofar Deri.”
“I agree. He’s going to take the Olden Track to the grove.”
“He’s never done it before.” She threw Shay a quizzical glance.
Shay shrugged. “Rhuddlan said he might. The way through the mountains will take him over the high pass of Wyche Elm. The thinner air will help clear his mind.”
“Of what?” Llynya’s look grew even more confused.
“The maid, sprite. The maid.”
“Ah,” she said with dawning understanding, then her brow furrowed. “Maybe we should head him off. I don’t think Rhuddlan wants his mind clear of the maid.”
“No,” Shay said. “We’ll follow him, nothing more. Deri calls him, but it’s up to Lavrans to find his own way.”
“As it is for us to find our own way back through the pryf’s maze?”
He grinned. “’Tis Beltaine, sprite. Mayhaps I’ll find my way with you instead.”
Her startled expression didn’t bode well for the possibility. Neither did the speed with which she lofted herself off the bough to the ground. “You would have to catch me first!” Her words came back to him from where she’d disappeared in the trees, fast on Lavrans’s trail.
From his place higher in the maple, Shay jumped with his arms spread wide, letting his cloak fill with air and slow his descent. One day soon Llynya would grow up.
~ ~ ~
Dain knelt by the river and slid his hand down into the cool running water. Dawn was rising, sending her golden tendrils of light skimming over the horizon and the land to shatter on the surface of the Llynfi. Just beyond his fingers, trout lay in wait for the morning hatch of insects, their tails swaying languidly between the eddies and the rocks.
Llynya was behind him, smelling of violets. Shay was off to his left, crouched in a low-lying limb of beech, both of them watching and waiting. To any other, they would have been invisible. On any other day, he would not have been aware of them himself.
On this day, though, nothing escaped his awareness. The earth was a living force reaching up through the soles of his feet and twining through the fibers of his body, making pathways for the rivers that were the waters of his body. He spread his fingers, letting the icy cold seep into the tender curves of his hand. After the cold came the liquid element, lapping at his skin and passing through him. He was the river.
The sun broke free of the earth and flooded his senses with light; after the light came the warmth, carried on a gentle breath of air to caress and enfold him. A single sphere burned bright and deep in his chest, shining with a clarity beyond fire, with a luminosity he could scarce conceive. Rhuddlan had called a demon of earth and fire, but would receive a being of water and light.
’Twas Ceri who had done this to him. She had offered herself in love and had not left enough darkness in his soul to conjure up a good demon. She was the Petra Genitrix, the Stone Mother, unshakable, unconquerable, she who yields only to time. What need had Rhuddlan of a demon? she’d asked. The need of all men for demons, he should have told her, to illuminate the path to God. It was the simplest possible truth.
Instead, he had sucked the centaury smoke into his mouth and let it escape with his spoken words, using his voice to lure her into fear. Or so he had tried. Brave Ceri had done naught but retreat a single step. What strange matrix comprised her heart and soul, he wondered, that she had no fear? Must be the purest he’d ever beheld.
Caradoc was no match for her.
He brought his hand to his mouth and drank the water cupped in his palm. The day would be long with no food, the hours filled with the singing of many sacred chants. He drank again, replenishing the water he would soon lose as sweat in the cavern to the west of the gorge. The Quicken-tree would have already begun building a pyre next to the warm pool that bubbled up from the floor in the cavern, using for fuel the trees that had died in the past year: yew, oak, beech, ha
zel, elm, all but the dead rowans, for those would be burned in the Bel-tinne. Stones would be heated in a circle close to the flames and water from the pool poured on the stones. ’Twould be night before he emerged from the dark, steaming womb, purified as Ceraunnos.
The scent of sweet william wafted to him on the breeze. He turned his head and rose, drying his hand on the edge of his cloak. ’Twas time to lead the sprite and Shay into Deri. The Wyche Elm Pass started off to his right, little used and overgrown, with a scree slope on its southernmost flank. He himself had discovered the track only late the previous autumn and had not used it since. The seclusion and beauty of the water trail had always beckoned to him more, but the river-hollowed cave behind the waterfall did not appeal to him this morn. He would rather walk the mountains and fill himself with the smell of gorse and heather, with violets and sweet william and sunlight, and avoid all dark places that smelled too much of rich earth, until he was called by the Quicken-tree.
~ ~ ~
“Nuuuuma,” Ceridwen crooned, leaning forward from where she sat on the floor. “Look, Numa. Look what Ceri has for you.” She dangled the monkshood-laced meat in front of the albino’s nose. ’Twas a risk, to be sure, but all her other attempts to circumvent the dogs had come to naught. The meat trick was proving no better. Numa was ignoring her. Elixir had growled when she’d offered it to him, a low, deadly sound that had near scared the heart half out of her.
Damn dog. The black hound was Satan himself, aloof, needing no one. Not even Dain touched him, not so much as a scratch behind the ear.
But the bitch liked a good scratch.
“Numa.” She smiled, reaching toward the dog’s head. Numa’s lip curled, and a growl issued from deep in her throat. The sound was not friendly, but neither did it have the menace of Elixir’s warning.
Regardless, Ceridwen relented, bringing her hand down to her side. There was no sense in pushing the albino to violence. Dain had told her the dog would tear her limb from limb, and though she doubted that Numa would go so far, a bite was not out of the question. Her memory of Numa’s teeth sinking into old Erlend’s throat was quite dear.
