by Janzen, Tara
She sighed and tossed the meat back into the bowl of physick. The day was nearly done, the sun setting far to the west, the forest sinking into night. She had seen no fires yet, but she knew they would be lit. ’Twas May Eve.
Elixir padded by her and stopped at the bowl to give it a sniff. The draught was of her own making. She’d been careful with the monkshood, wanting the dogs only asleep, not dead, though neither was likely unless they ate her concoction. The hunting hound finished his inspection, and his black eyes flicked up and impaled her with what she was sure was a curse.
“Fie,” she scolded him. She was already damned. The hound could not hurt her. “Fie,” she repeated for good measure, then immediately wished she had not, because he grew so instantly still, ’twas as if he had suddenly, upon her utterance, been turned into stone. Nary a hair nor lash moved on him, nary a whisker twitched. His eyes, no longer malevolent, had hardened into glassy, sightless ice. He was frozen, with only his ears cocked in a manner to imply life.
Had she conjured a spell with her “fie,” she wondered, accidentally using a word with powers far and beyond those of the insipid “sezhamey”?
No, she had felt nothing. She would know if magic was working within her, and if “fie” was a charmed word, people would be frozen like statues over half the demesne.
But if not magic, what?
She looked to Numa. The bitch was quiet too, but without Elixir’s unnatural control. There was a trembling in the white hound’s haunches and hocks. Ceridwen slid her gaze back to Elixir. Would whatever held them hold them long enough for her to grab her pack and break through the locked hatch? Not even breath appeared to move through the black levrier. They were waiting, the both of them, but waiting for what?
Then she heard it, a far distant singing coming from beneath the floor. A single phrase floated in the air, silvery and clear, rising and falling with the melody of wind over water. The voice grew closer and the notes quickened, swirling around each other with an added phrase. No man sang the fantasia, but a woman, making her way up the tunnel leading to the alchemy chamber. ’Twas enchantment pure and simple transfixing the dogs, enchantment rich with memories and emotion. Rhiannon had made similar magic with music, long ago upon the cliffs overlooking the Irish Sea. Her daughter remembered it well. The sweet sound of harp strings came to her often in her sleep, suffusing her deepest dreams.
“O Rhayne anna bellammenaseri
Conladrian, Conladrian ges
Be strong! Be strong! Come to me!
Rhayne, Conladrian, come to Quicken-tree!”
The voice broke into a rhymed song, echoing off the tunnel walls, and the dogs began to whine. Ceridwen gave them a shrewd glance. Rhayne? Conladrian? Dain was not their master after all, but another, a woman of the Quicken-tree. She wondered if he knew.
“Abban euil a’ ritharmian
Nov galliot As besteri
Be strong! Be strong! Come to me!
Rhayne, Conladrian, come to Quicken-tree!”
Three more verses, each slightly different from the one before, but all having the same last two lines, brought the woman directly below her. The song trilled off into silence on the other side of the oak planks. Ceridwen scooted away from the hatch and waited. Quickly enough, she heard the bolt slide free.
Only a moment’s hesitation stayed her hand before she helped raise the hatch door, her trust being in the dogs to know the difference between friend and foe. To Dain’s command, she gave not a thought. He had trapped her inside the tower, and she was being set free.
A small hand showed first on the floor, then a dark head peeked up. Twigs and leaves were stuck this way and that in the woman’s ebony braids—or rather, almost-woman.
“Llynya!” Ceridwen cried, reaching for the sprite. The dogs danced around them, no longer whimpering, but yapping. Even Elixir—Conladrian?—had shed his aloofness to jump and prance with Numa.
The sprite’s presence brought cheer and hope into the gloom of the Hart. Ceridwen hugged the Quicken-tree girl close, wrapping her arms around the sprite’s strong, slender shoulders. Within her embrace, Llynya felt as promising as a sapling, both imps by another name, both bursting with the freshness of life.
“Sweet child, you have come to save me.”
“Oh, aye.” Llynya grinned and kissed her on one cheek, then the other. “Come to save you true. We’ll be off and away into the woods quickety-split, for the day is running short. Hurry now. Let’s gather your things.”
Ceridwen wasted no time. She had prepared a pack with the Quicken-tree cloth and tied it closed with the ribands from her plaits, filling it with only the barest necessities: the unguent, a gourd of aqua ardens, a pouch of rihadin, the red book with Mychael’s letters, the runic mirror, and Brochan’s Great Charm. She’d kept Madron’s pouch for her elf shot and wore it as an amulet.
“Can you show me the way to Strata Florida, once we are free of Wydehaw?” she asked Llynya, angling the pack across her back. The blanket roll was held in place by a rope of riband crossing her chest from her left shoulder to her right hip. They would be traveling in Wroneu at night, on May Eve, and she would not lose her precious supplies to either stray branches or quick fingers.
The sprite looked up from where she played with the dogs. “You would go to the hooded men in the mountains?” The hounds licked her face and nipped at her fingers, growling in tones far sweeter than Ceridwen could have imagined coming from either of them.
“To my brother.” She sheathed the Damascene in the belt at her waist.
“Brother?” Llynya’s eyes widened. Elixir barked, and she shushed him with a strange command, calling him by his Quicken-tree name. “Behamey, Conladrian. Behamey.”
“My twin, Mychael,” Ceridwen said. The dogs played about the sprite more like pups than the menace Dain had set to guard her. They tumbled and rolled, crushing strewing herbs and releasing the orange scent of hyssop into the air.
“Ah.” The girl’s voice softened. “So there is a brace of you. He must be very beautiful, your brother.”
“I last saw him as a child of five and mostly remember his troublesome goodness. He was always good, which made me appear always troublesome.” Ceridwen smiled at the memory, then set about adjusting the pack to a higher position on her back, working the cinch she’d contrived on the riband. “From his letters, he seems to have gotten only more thoughtful and in no ways less troublesomely good. He will probably be sainted.”
“And this makes you sad?”
Her gaze lifted at Llynya’s question. She hadn’t meant to reveal her feelings about Mychael—in truth, she was surprised the girl had discerned them—for mixed in with her sadness was a shame she would rather keep hidden.
But the truth would out with the green-eyed maid. “’Tis not his goodness that makes me sad,” she confessed, “but that I must use it to save myself. I am in desperate need of a saint.”
“Dain would not suffice?” the sprite asked with naught but the utmost innocence.
“Dain?” Ceridwen’s eyebrows arched, and her hands stilled. Did Llynya not know that even now Dain Lavrans stalked her woods as the Demon? He was no saint in any way, shape, form, thought, or deed.
“Aye. Do you not find his goodness also troublesome?” The girl brushed aside a twig that had slipped partway free from her hair to dangle over her eyes. The success of the action was short-lived, with the tiny stick falling back into her face.
“Goodness? What goodness?” Ceridwen exclaimed.
“Why, the goodness that keeps him chaste.”
Ceridwen colored. Had she no secrets left anywhere in the whole of Wales?
Llynya worked the twig free and stuck it back in her hair higher up.
“Why not drop it into the rushes and be done with it?” Ceridwen asked, grateful to change the subject.
“’Tis rowan from the Deri grove. Wearing it helps the other trees recognize me.”
Of course. Fanciful child.
Sure that Llyny
a would have another fanciful answer, Ceridwen didn’t bother to ask what blessings the rest of the twigs in her hair granted, or the leaves, arboreal badges that none of the other Quicken-tree seemed to require. Instead, she hurried to provision herself with a cloth sack of bread and cheese.
“What do you think, Ceri?” the sprite asked, rising to her feet. “Are the dogs prepared to leave with me?”
Prepared? “I don’t think they like being trapped here any more than I.” She gave her honest opinion, while wondering what possible preparations a couple of dogs would need to make.
“So you think they’re ready?” Llynya still sounded in need of reassurance. She was petting the dogs and scratching their ears and ingratiating herself with cooing noises. How could the hounds not want to leave with her?
“Are they not yours?” Ceridwen asked, becoming a little perplexed.
“Rhayne? Mine? Oh, no.” Llynya laughed. “And Conladrian? They say he belongs to no one, but answers to Rhuddlan out of respect. ’Tis Rhuddlan who calls them home now. I am merely the messenger.”
“Then I say they adore the messenger and would follow you to the ends of the earth,” Ceridwen said, settling the matter. The quicker they left Wydehaw, the better.
“’Tis not so far that they must go.” Llynya grinned. “Only into the woods, then north in the morning. Come then, let us be off and see if what you say is true.”
North. Mychael and Strata Florida lay to the north.
“O Rhayne, Conladrian ges,” the sprite began to sing, swinging into an easy march down the stairs. Sure enough, the dogs followed behind. “Anna bellammenaseri-i-i-i...”
Ceridwen looked once around the Hart, checking to see that she had forgotten nothing, and giving one last glance to where Dain had sat at the table and turned himself from sorcerer to demon. Even as the demon-beast, a part of her had wanted him. His pull on her was beyond venial sin, tempting her into damnation with lures so sweet she knew even now she would abandon her faith for one more kiss.
“Christ save me,” she murmured. For the sake of her soul, her escape was coming not a moment too soon.
Chapter 18
In the heart of Wroneu, a half league north of Deri on the southern flank of Wyche Elm Pass, a fern-covered opening on the side of a hill led into the cavern of the Quicken-tree. Deep inside the dark, airy space, where limestone walls gave way to feldspar and quartz, was a grotto, and ’twas from there that Dain felt darkness complete its hold on the land above. The quietness of birds roosting and animals bedding down for the night permeated the rock and spoke to him of the rising moon; the subtle scent of a cooling forest clarified the air. It had been such with him all through the day, with hour after hour of messages from the natural world stealing upon him with the softest of treads. The earth was heavy with spring, and naught could hold back all she had to say and give.
He sat with the men of the Quicken-tree in a circle around a dying pyre, chanting in an ancient tongue, entranced as much by exhaustion and hunger as by the low steadiness of voices filling the air around him. Trig and Wei, two of the Liosalfar, were on either side of him. All the men were drinking from a shared bowl, passing it from one to the other. If ’twas consecrated wine or magic elixir, Dain had never been able to tell. The scent of grape was in it, but so were many other things he could not identify. An unusual sludge of leaves and whatnot had settled into the bottom of the mazer, and the faraway looks in the men’s eyes proved the libation to be more potent than in years past. For himself, he abstained. He knew too well the destination arrived at by ingesting sacred potions. Jalal had introduced him to a number of such simples, though without the accompanying spiritual rites, and few were as benign as Catholic wafers and wine.
There were plants and herbs that could give a man visions of the future and help him recall the past, even the far distant past. There were concoctions that could take a man to an unimagined heaven and concoctions that could take him to his most horribly imagined hell. Ofttimes they were one and the same, with a little bit of the ecstasy of heaven granted for an eternity in hell.
The wooden bowl came around again, smelling of bitter fruit and oddments, and Dain passed it to Trig. The Liosalfar bowman was older than the other men in the grotto, younger only than Rhuddlan. His face was hard set among the fair people, his body marked with woad tattoos and the scars of battle. He lifted the mazer to his mouth and drank, and for an instant Dain saw the bowman’s eyes mist over and turn a milky green. Though naught else visibly happened to Trig, Dain classified the occurrence as a warning. None of Jalal’s potions had ever had the power to change the color of a man’s eyes.
His gaze fell to his own hands as the ancient words of the Quicken-tree chant filled him, their rhythm pulsing beneath his skin like a heartbeat. ’Twas a long night he faced, balanced between one world and the other.
The chant changed with the leaving of daylight, and with the change came a new awareness. In the grove south of the cavern, the women of the tribe were performing their own ceremony. Their voices reached Dain through the avenues of the earth, the melody of their song much fairer than the darkly ponderous one echoing through the grotto; a song so fair, ’twas sure to bring them the blessings of the deities they invoked. The men, for certain, would come to them in the grove, and in the coming together, the nightfire of Beltaine would be lit and the rites of spring begun.
Long before night, while the sun had still been high in the sky, Rhuddlan had called Dain forth as the Demon, and he had done his part, feeding the flames with rihadin and roiling up the brightly hued smoke into a swirling tower that had reached farther than it ever had before, past the light of the pyre and into the darkest, highest recesses of the cavern. The Liosalfar had poured water from the grotto’s warm pool onto the stones of the fire ring, and the resulting steam had saturated all of them to their skin. Stripped naked, they had then taken up the chant.
Only after the water from their bodies had cleansed them and the songs had been sung into the air, had Dain been prepared by a white-haired woman for his descent to the river running deep in the earth. Old hands curled with age, but soft with their touch, had marked him with woad, beginning with circles in the centers of his palms and drawing serpentine swirls up the underside of his arms to his chest, where the lines curved over each other thrice before separating for the long course down his legs to the soles of his feet. The same trembling fingers had painted his face, banding him like the Quicken-tree with one broad blue stripe across his eyes. A loincloth of the softest deer hide had been hung about his waist.
The crone’s last act had been to have him kneel at her feet for the braiding of his hair. Five widths of chestnut strands from above his left ear she’d used to weave the plait, finishing it with tightly bound thread of Quicken-tree cloth.
Now, while he and the others chanted, she did much the same to Rhuddlan, painting him as Belenos, the Sun-God, down the front of his body, but she did not stop there. From the soles of his feet, her aged fingers slid up the backs of his legs and across his buttocks. Singing softly, she continued up and over his hipbones and circled his groin with bold blue strokes. She drew an arrow coming out of the circle up to his left rib cage and painted the sign of the sun above his genitals, marking him as the mate of the Goddess. No leather touched Rhuddlan’s body. A cloth of leaves, oak, and the mountain ash, rowan, was brought forth to garb him.
“Malashm,” Dain heard her murmur as she knotted the leafstalks around the blond man’s waist. She spoke a few more words in the ancient language, the melody of them clear to him above the monotone of the chant, and Rhuddlan smiled.
With the surety of his instincts, Dain knew the woman had once been the Goddess for the Quicken-tree leader. Given her age, mayhaps she had been Rhuddlan’s first.
Off to his right, Dain sensed a parting of the dark and another person entering the grotto. Elen, a young woman of Moira’s family, walked into the circle of men, bearing a golden chalice encrusted with jewels. Chrysolite and jaci
nth, amber and sapphire gems sparkled along the rim, and below them, a row of amethyst. Dragons were chased into the metal, some with emerald eyes, others with ruby. Topaz and diamond fire rolled out of their sharp-toothed mouths. Their bellies were softly lustrous with pearls.
The woman came directly toward him, and Dain rose to his feet. Elen smiled shyly, and as she gave him the cup, their fingers touched. Dain returned her smile, for she was lovely, far lovelier than he remembered from a fortnight past. Silky brown curls escaped from her crown of braids and caressed cheeks as soft and as prettily blushed as peaches. Her lips were alluring with the red stain of berry juice upon them. Her body was lush beneath her shimmering gray-green dress. Here was a being to grant a man oblivion.
Unbidden by conscious reasoning, he let his hands linger on hers, holding them around the golden cup, making a promise he had not made before. There were no restrictions against his taking a Quicken-tree woman, and the time had come. Tonight he would mate in the forest with the others. Like the earth, his body was heavy with spring, and he had much he wanted to give: the touch of mouth upon mouth, the outer warmth of two bodies pressed close together, the inner warmth of hearts meeting in a place beyond the boundaries of the skin that held them. Tonight he would share these things with the Quicken-tree woman; he would learn of her secrets and give her secrets of his own—for she was here, a part of the grove, and Ceri would always be beyond his reach.
Always.
Elen stepped away from him and melted into the shadows of the grotto, taking her shy smile and her secrets with her. He lifted his hand to stop her from leaving, then let it fall back to his side with a soft curse. He did not normally indulge in futile, sentimental acts. The ceremony was a set piece; he would not see Elen again until they met in the grove—if they met in the grove. He’d left Ceri locked in the tower while the taste of her kiss had still been on his tongue. Centaury smoke had not banished it, neither had the river water.
