by Janzen, Tara
“He’s king on this side of the mountain,” Llynya answered, taking another bite of cake.
Before Ceridwen could ask who was king on the other side of the mountain, or, indeed, which mountain she meant, or king of what, the sprite took off. In fact, all of the Quicken-tree had begun to move.
Being lower than the others, they were among the first to reach the floor, and looking back, Ceridwen beheld another amazing sight. A magical web of luminescence crisscrossed the cavern face along the Quicken-tree trails, each piece of quartz holding the glow of dreamstone light long after the blade had passed, reflecting both blue and purple against the velvety black background of solid stone.
’Twas a wonder all its own.
’Twas a perfect dragon’s lair, Dain thought. From a man who had believed in nothing, he’d been reduced to believing in everything, especially the impossible, it seemed. He looked from the web of light to the rest of the riches-filled cavern. Amethyst was abundant, some of it appearing to be of a quality fit for royalty. Rhuddlan’s throne and the one next to it were carved of black marble variegated in a lush dark green that showed nowhere else in the cavern, though a vein of white marble ran through the cave, and there were chunks of ruby in the white. A man with a hammer or a good knife might be tempted to chisel himself a bit of gemstone. Dain hoped Morgan’s men would have more sense.
“Once we’re through the Hall of Lanbarrdein,” Llynya said, “we can try for the surface by doubling back through some smaller tunnels that run up behind the walls.” She led her charges across the cavern floor, hoping to reassure them when she herself needed assurance. All well and good for Rhuddlan to send her to Wydehaw to get the quicksilver woman for the O Great One’s pleasure, but the end of that night had seen Ceridwen captured and near killed. Llynya had not forgiven herself yet for the damned curiosity and, aye, the yearning for a bit of adventure that had led her astray. She would not fail the maid again, but every time she’d tried to take one of the Canolbarth paths leading to the surface, she had been outflanked by Balormen. It had been only with great skill that she’d managed to avoid them all but once.
Despite what she’d just said, on the other side of the hall her options dwindled considerably, especially if the pryf were already present and clogging up the few tunnels that might yet get them into the mountains of Eryri. She had been given her orders, and she was willing to turn and fight if it came to that, but there was still a chance to see Ceridwen free of the battle.
A clear stream poured out of an opening high on the south wall of Lanbarrdein and wound a course east until it disappeared again beneath the rock. They stopped to refill their water gourds, as did others of the Quicken-tree. She searched the faces of those lined up until she found a Liosalfar from Deri. ’Twas Math.
The white-haired ones and the youngest of the Quicken-tree were finding places of refuge in the huge cavern, needing time to rest from the trek through the maze. Anyone of fighting age was either still in the Canolbarth or heading back there, except for the bowmen taking up positions on the high ledges of the hall. If Balormen escaped the trap in the maze, they would face yet one more deadly threat
“Math, malashm,” she hailed the Deri man as she made her way through the water runners that were coming and going in their efforts to resupply the men and women fighting.
“Llynya.” He lifted a hand in greeting. A bloody bandage was wrapped around his forearm.
“You need to see Aedyth,” she said when she reached him, gesturing to his wound.
“Aye, but not yet. Rhuddlan is bearing down on the Balormen from behind. If we can but hold this end, we’ll have them.”
“And if not?”
He finished a long draw off his water gourd before answering. “Then we’ll fight in the hall, and if needs be we’ll take Caradoc and all of Balor down into the deep dark and let the old worm crush them into dust.” ’Twas Math’s first battle, and the excitement of it showed in the bright green of his eyes. He was the youngest of the Liosalfar from Deri, barely older than Llynya herself.
“I would still try to get Ceridwen away to the mountains,” she said. “’Tis what Rhuddlan bade me do.”
“Aye,” he agreed. “The greater part of the battle is coming through the southern Canolbarth. If you take the passages behind the flow stone, you can stay out of the midst of it, but I would caution you to steer clear of the pryf nest. The prifarym have not been there in many years and no doubt that will be the first place they head.”
“Thanks.”
“Malashm.” He nodded. “Good luck.”
“Malashm.” She turned to leave and was surprised to find Morgan standing close behind her. A blush instantly colored her cheeks. Strange man, she thought, to have held her so. His mouth had been warm on hers, and sweet in a way she had not expected of a kiss.
“So we go on?” he asked.
“Aye.” She had scarce been able to look at him or keep her eyes off him since he’d kissed her, a disconcerting phenomenon, especially with him so close to her in the maze, but she hazarded a glance now.
He smiled at her, a quick curve of his mouth, and she wondered if he was the sort who could read minds. Her blush deepened as she looked away.
“I have heard you called both prince and thief this day,” she said, staring at her boots.
“Aye, and I am both.”
Good, she thought, for there was something she would know. She caught his eye for an instant, before retreating back to watching her boots.
“Rhys says you once stole an English earl from his tower bedchamber in the dead of night, though he had a hundred men-at-arms guarding his Cardiff keep, and that you spirited him away to the forest and held him there until he returned the land he’d taken from a Welsh chieftain.” She dared to look up.
“’Tis an old story, and I still collect a cash rent from two furlongs on the estate,” he admitted with a slight shrug. His black tunic was torn in places, as was the long-sleeved white shirt beneath. Mud caked his boots up to his knees. He was two days unshaven, yet he still had the look of sunshine in his eyes. Blue sunshine, as clear as a mountain stream.
“Rhys says you nipped half a year’s rents from a bailiff over by Hay-on-Wye and gave it all back to the tenants,” she continued.
“Not all,” he assured her, his tone implying he’d kept more than he’d given, though Rhys had told her different.
“Rhys says—”
“I didn’t realize you had spent so much time talking with Rhys today,” he interrupted her. “Mayhaps I need to give the boy more work.”
Undaunted, she took up where she’d left off, anxious to get the important thing said before she lost her nerve. “Rhys says you can lift the yellow off a buttercup and return it to the sky, and I... and I—” She faltered just a bit. “I would know the trick of it, if you would teach me.”
It was the most forward thing she’d ever done, deliberately asked a man to spend time with her—and then there was the trick itself. Sticks! If she could lift the yellow from a buttercup, she could learn to lift lavender from violets and green from grass. She could make rainbows at her whim, turn raindrops into colored gems. The possibilities were endless, utterly endless.
Morgan was both charmed and perplexed, thinking she couldn’t possibly have taken Rhys’s comment literally. The yellow off a buttercup? Why, who but God Himself could do such a thing? Yet he had only to look at the artless expectation shining in her eyes to know she thought it true. Wondrous creature, she was beyond any expectation he’d ever had. She believed in the impossible. And why not? She was the one who made light from the haft of her knife. She was the one who held boars at bay with a song.
“In truth, I have never tried,” he finally said, brushing the tips of his fingers across her soft, soft cheek. “Mayhaps when we reach the mountains, we can work the magic together.”
At her nod, he would have taken her in his arms and kissed her for the rest of his life, except someone called to her. She looked away, and
with a pass of his hand, he stole a leaf from her hair.
She never knew.
“I must see Math before we go,” she said, turning back to him. “I will only be gone a moment. Wait for me.”
Aye, he would wait, he thought, sliding the leaf inside his shirt, next to his skin. He wondered if Dain had been as easily seduced by magic. As to his friend’s damnation, he felt surely that it had been lifted by what he’d seen at the bubbling pool in the other great cave. Elves, Madron had said, and mayhaps that explained her feyness and that of her daughter, the mute and beautiful Edmee. In this place, anything seemed possible.
As she’d promised, Llynya was not long, and soon the four of them and the hounds were making their way up a winding trail cut into the face of the cavern’s east wall. Halfway up, the sprite chose a passage, and they all followed, one after the other, leaving the damson beauty of Lanbarrdein behind and stepping into darkness.
~ ~ ~
“Find your grave. Find your grave,” Helebore muttered well under his breath. He’d show Caradoc a grave, aright, and it wouldn’t be the leech’s.
All of Balor was being massacred in the tunnels. Sharp arrows came out of the dark and impaled guardsmen. Sharp knives did the same, then disappeared, leaving naught but blood and death behind. They’d tried retreating and had been cut off time and again.
He and Caradoc were hurrying through yet another narrow, muddy shaft. Blue lights flashed here and there about them—danger in every one, they’d learned—while their own torches did naught but cast weak glows and fill the damnable passages with smoke. They’d lost four men of their original eight, but had taken on six more who in their stupidity thought they would be safer with their lord. Fools all. They were lost, lost, lost. The blind leading the blind.
He did not tell the Boar that. Oh, no. As far as Caradoc knew, he was hot on the maid’s trail, running her down, closing in. Another man might have laughed to have so deceived his master, but Helebore knew better, just as he knew exactly where his own grave lay—beneath his feet the instant he stopped, if he didn’t have the woman in hand.
Yet he did stop, quite suddenly, his head jerking around, his senses alert. There! He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose. A ragged smile of suppressed glee broke across his face. Yes. Yes. Yes. For all his transgressions, God had not forsaken him, though God might regret His benevolence once Helebore was at His side with the reins of time in his hand.
He inhaled again and found the scent true. ’Twas Ceridwen. Unlike before, there was not much between them now, and without all those other bodies messing up the air, he would know her smell anywhere, a sickly womanish thing, but with a disturbing edge of purity about it for all her fornicating with Lavrans.
He opened his eyes, trying to find from whence the scent came. There was naught but solid rock on either side of them. He scuttled backward in the tunnel and lost the scent. He inched forward, through it once more, and lost it four steps away. Curious.
“Give me your torch,” he ordered the Boar, and felt a moment’s triumph when the light was put into his outstretched hand.
He dragged the flame this way and that over the walls, sniffing first one and then the other. The scent was stronger on the wall to his left where a fine crack parted the stone. He ran his fingers along it and, lo and behold, discovered that the crack was an illusion. Two walls shared a common footing, but were set farther and farther apart the higher one went. Though it was no more than a handspan wide at his head, by lifting the torch he could see the opening grew large enough to hold a man—and ’twas on the air from the hole that he smelled Ceridwen ab Arawn.
“You, there.” He pointed to one of the foot soldiers. “Give me a leg up.”
Disgusting turn of events, to have to be touched. Yet he endured and was soon following the scent that would give him immortality.
~ ~ ~
Beyond Lanbarrdein, the tunnels were riddled with cave-ins where the earth had fallen and roundabouts that did naught but circle in upon themselves. Ceridwen was beginning to fear they would wander in the darkness until none could take another step, and they’d never again see the light of day
“Behamey!” Llynya abruptly commanded. Elixir and Numa froze. The order elicited the same response in Dain, Morgan, and herself. Without knowing the word, they all understood to be silent, they all understood the unease they heard in Llynya’s voice. The sprite closed her eyes for a moment, turning her face toward a narrow shaft on their left, then slid a grim look to Dain. “Helebore,” she said. “The man has a good nose. He’s in these tunnels and following us.”
“How many are with him?” Dain asked.
“More than one or two others,” she answered. “Beyond that I cannot tell.”
“Caradoc?” Ceridwen asked.
The sprite shook her head. “The Boar smells like any other man. ’Tis only the evil one who stands out with his profane vice.”
“I would have this burr off my back, Lavrans,” Morgan said. “Let us stand and fight.”
Dain considered it, for he, too, was weary of retreat, but they were three swords only, and the better choice was still escape to the mountains.
“Not while we yet have a chance.” He turned to Llynya.
“Aye,” she agreed.
Thus they continued on with Llynya taking greater care in the shafts she chose to follow, checking each one for sign or scent of Helebore, all the while trying to weave them a path to the surface.
“Sticks,” she grumbled some time later as she halted. Once again, the shaft they were in had dead-ended.
Dain swore. If it wasn’t some cave-in blocking their way, it was the smell of the medicus. He turned to retrace their steps, wondering how in the hell they were ever going to get out of there, when Ceridwen gasped behind him. “Jesu!”
He whirled, drawing Scyld, expecting that Helebore was upon them, but such was not the case. The ring of the blade echoed up and down the shaft while all else in the tunnel remained still—Ceri and the hounds motionless at his side, Morgan and Llynya standing one next to the other, their backs stiff with tension. He looked over Llynya’s head to the space in front of her and saw nothing beyond the blocked tunnel, until a black sheen of movement, reflecting blue in the light of the dreamstone blades, rippled across the whole end of the passage.
“Christe.” Ceridwen took a step back.
Walls did not move, Dain told himself.
As if to belie him, a second gleaming ripple coursed its way across the shaft like silk rippling in the wind, and a hushed sound filled the air.
Walls did not make any sound.
A keening cry, mournful and melodious, followed the ripple, and Dain knew. Pryf. The thing moved once more, picking up speed, and the smooth hush grew louder.
Llynya swore, a tangle of words having to do with leading them right into the middle of the prifarym nesting ground. Upon hearing her, Dain’s curse put the sprite’s to shame. There was no scrying pool this time, no mists in which to escape. He watched her exchange a glance with Morgan, and the two of them began backing away, taking no more than three steps before turning to run. Dain grabbed Ceridwen and did the same.
Now they were in it up to their necks, trapped in the deep earth between the leech and the worms.
~ ~ ~
Worms. The swivin’ leech had given him worms.
Caradoc stood in front of the blocked passage, his fists clenched at his sides, his breath coming hard, and watched the ribbed skin of the greenish-black creature roll by. It filled the whole opening of the shaft, more like a moving wall than a beast.
Giant worms. Huge beyond belief, yet the maid had promised him dragons.
“I see no riches, Helebore,” he bellowed above the eerie sound of pryf skin rubbing along rock and earth. His voice was too loud for the enclosed space, causing his cowering men to cower even more, but he did not care. Let them wet themselves in fear of him. He needed a release for the pain festering in his leg, for the rage and frustrati
on threatening to burst his heart. He shifted his gaze to yell again at the failed monk and found Helebore crouched in the shadows by the worm’s belly. The leech bowed his head to bring his mouth closer to the beast’s wet body—and with a flick of his tongue, tasted it.
One of the guardsmen retched somewhere in the dark.
Caradoc was sorely tempted to kill the medicus one quick cut to the back of the neck, one neat severing of skin, bone, and gullet—for a little blood was a sure and certain balm for pain and rage, but he needed the deranged bastard. His mesnie had been massacred. Each one in the prime of his life, each one sworn to him, and they were all gone. Balor was being overrun by those fleet-footed whore-sons they’d found waiting for them in the caves. Rhuddlan, their leader had been called. Caradoc would not forget that. Where Dain had gotten the wild ones, all dressed in shifting green with strong arms and quicker bows, he did not know, but he would see them in hell before he cried surrender.
Hell.
His own strangled cry near choked him. He had lost everything. Everything! He had murdered and maimed and butchered to make his way in the world, carving out a place that was his and his alone, and it had all been taken away by one sniveling bitch. He drew a shuddering breath, lifting his chin to let the air flow down his throat. He needed the maid, and he needed the leech to find her. Through Ceridwen, he would regain it all and be more powerful than ever before. He swore it on Christ’s blood, and had he not fought and near died for his Savior?
“A cup ye ssssaid,” Helebore hissed, his dark eyes rolling back.
Completely deranged, Caradoc thought through the haze of his anger, taking in the drool and worm slime running from the corner of the leech’s mouth.
“A ssssmall cup of her blood.” Helebore cackled, and the whites of his eyes showed briefly. “And if I’d got it, I could even now turn the pryf to my will. Come.” He rose to his feet, licking his lips. “She was here, and not long ago.”
