Chalice 2 - Dream Stone

by Tara Janzen

  “Aye,” she said, though the wavering of her voice belied the word. “ ’Tis just a bit of the scare left in me. I’m not usually so skittish, but the spider people eat elf children, and it being a while since they might have seen one, I was afraid they would make a mistake and accidentally chew off my arm, or take a bite out of me before they realized I was full grown.”

  Christe. His jaw tightened, yet he felt some relief. Compared to spider people, he must indeed seem a savior. “You should have killed me, if you thought that.”

  “I was trying, going for your throat. I don’t know what’s worse, that I missed, which could have been the death of me, or that I didn’t miss a little more, seeing that ’twas you. Here, eat this.” She came up with another piece of wet seedcake and gave it to him. He took the cake and found it sweet, still redolent of clover honey. The taste heartened him. Next out of her pouches was a small bundle of wrapped leaves tied with petioles, the rasca. He knew about the salve. Moira used it on everything from scrapes to breaks, and its soothing touch would be welcome.

  “Come and sit, so I can tend you.” She dropped to the floor to sit cross-legged in front of him, artlessly arranging herself in a tangle of arms and legs.

  Obeying for reason’s sake and not because she had told him to—for it seemed she had done naught but order him around since she’d regained her voice—he sat down and gave himself over to her ministrations. Mayhaps ’twas just her way of dispelling her fears, which he was all for, and the rewards of being this close to her were well worth the small annoyances. For certes the scent of the lavender she’d eaten was like the very breath of spring flowing into the cold, dark corner where they hid, and the view was unsurpassed. Her eyebrows were drawn close in concentration, two perfect black wings sweeping over long lashes and aquamarine eyes. For a moment, he’d thought she was going to cry again, but the crisis seemed to have passed, and without doubt she’d realized ’twas he who had rescued her. That knowledge heartened him even more than the seedcake.

  She leaned in close, using the wet hem of her tunic to clean his face, and a length of her hair slipped over her shoulder. He watched it slide down and find a resting place across his thigh, where it dampened the leg beneath and made his mouth go dry. Aye, she stirred him, aright. Near ebony her hair was, a startling contrast to the fairness of her skin. He’d felt silk once, on a bishop’s robes, and was sure her hair would have the same soft fluidity should he dare lift it with his fingers.

  He did not, but he was sorely tempted to steal one of her leaves. She had arboreal badges to spare, not only in the live cockades of oak, hazel, and rowan in her hair, but in the sinuous tattoos twining ’round her wrist and up her arm. He could see long, curved willow leaves and pairs of lance-shaped ash leaflets winding through the elfin runes marking her skin. A delicately lobed oak leaf, glistening with river water and no bigger than the center of his palm, dangled precariously above one of her pointed ears—magical things, those, intriguingly pretty when seen up close, and faintly erotic.

  He shifted uncomfortably on the floor. Could any Welsh maid entice him so?

  With her fingers pressing the last of the rasca into Mychael’s wound, Llynya stilled, startled into a moment of immobility by what she sensed. Her nose twitched. Not daring to move anything else, she kept her gaze on the herbal and the curve of his cheek, wondering at this unexpected turn and how it was possible that a man with a four-inch gash across his face who had been dunked in an ice-cold river from the waist down could be aroused—and the even greater improbability that it was she kindling his response.

  Yet there was no one else about.

  Mayhaps she’d changed even more than she’d thought. More likely, she was mistaken. Would be a rare wonder indeed if anything got through her nose in one fragrant piece.

  Double-checking, she closed her eyes and gave herself over to her next inhalation. Warmth flowed into her slow and easy, a sweet-edged heat wrapping around her senses and tracing a path that led to a memory she had forgotten... a cool spring night in the Mid-Crevasse glade, moonlight shimmering on the entwined bodies of a man and a woman.

  Her eyes opened, but this time the deep-scent vision did not all dissipate. The warmth stayed with her, settling into her veins and kindling her own response—a pleasant if undeserved respite from her guilt. Guilt that she’d cut him like that, when he’d saved her yet again. She was shamed by the deed. ’Twas the damned lavender making her scent-blind. Aboveground, she would have known immediately that ’twas him, but she could hardly admit to it. Neither was she likely to admit to the warmth she felt. ’Twas disturbing, and she prayed Mychael had not her nose for scents. As to the vision, she remembered the rest of it well enough, how Ceridwen and Lavrans had mated in the foresty glade, the salt-tinged musk scent that had drifted up into the trees, as if they’d made union with the earth herself. Aye, and she was a child indeed not to have foreseen such a possibility for herself.

  Unbidden, her gaze drifted a few degrees lower, to Mychael’s lips—soft skin caressed by his breath, a gentle indentation in the upper curve, the small nick of a scar near the rightside corner. He wanted to kiss her. In truth, he wanted more than a kiss.

  And would she set her mouth to his? She knew kisses. Morgan had kissed her in the boar pit beneath Carn Merioneth, pressed his lips to hers in a sweet touch.

  Aye, she was tempted to try kissing again, mayhaps overly so. The fascinating changes she sensed taking place in the small space between her and Mychael was a lure near impossible to resist. Beckoned by the breath warming their shared air, she moved a hairbreadth closer and sniffed ever so quietly, more a trembling of her nostrils. The scents were soft and rich with a restlessness not his alone. With a kiss she could taste the mystery of those scents, let them dissolve on her tongue and flood her senses. She had not felt the desire for such before, not with Morgan, and not from Shay’s brief kiss. Was this, then, an enchantment of Rhiannon’s son? Some Druid charm?

  A warning sounded in her mind, making her pull back a bare degree. Sticks! He was far more dangerous than Aedyth thought, for she feared she could be caught in this spell. Was her heart nor already racing in anticipation?

  Proof enough of the folly of the deed, she told herself, that she could be so easily swayed from her course. She knew what came from kissing—at the least, ever more kissing. Ceridwen and Lavrans had done little else after the night at the glade. Always kissing, they’d been, and it took no great gift of sight to realize a man was less likely to drop a lover down a wormhole than a Liosalfar. At the other end, a kiss was no light thing. In truth, she oft wondered if ’twas Morgan’s kiss that had set her on her present course, for that kiss had bound them in a way they should not have been. Better to be forewarned of Mychael ab Arawn’s surprising charms and leave him alone.

  She moved back to where she’d been and took his chin in her hand to scrub at a recalcitrant spot. The rasca had stopped the bleeding and would keep the wound from putrefying. “I could teach you how to block the strike I used,” she said, feigning ignorance of his state and applying common sense to her own.

  “I did block you.” He showed her the proof, the bleeding cut on his wrist.

  She released his chin and turned his wrist into the light. Not only had she sliced his face open, but his knife hand too. She’d probably ruined any chance she’d had of getting him to help her. He’d saved her and she’d done naught but hack into him.

  “ ’Tis no great wound,” he said, pulling away.

  She shook her head, denying him. “No, I sliced you open well enough. The arm’s not so bad, but your face is a mess.” She returned her attention to his cheek. “The cut’s a deep one, an even swipe from stem to stern. Most would have let up on the high end, but Trig taught me to wield a blade when I was scarce old enough to... well, scarce old enough to hold one, but he’s going to have my hide for this bit of work.”

  Mychael’s pride, which had gone amissing while he’d been mooning over Llynya’s leaves and hair an
d eyes, rankled back to life under her bold summation. Sliced him open well enough, had she? Wasn’t he the one who had saved her? And what had that long look at his mouth been all about? When she’d moved in closer, he’d nearly kissed her. Now he wished he had and saved himself her thoughts on how well she’d cut him up.

  Aye, he knew the way of a kiss, but he did not know the way of her. He was beginning to think the fragile loveliness that so enchanted him was more illusion than fact. Mayhaps the warrior he’d discovered in Crai Force spoke more truly of her nature. Warning enough for him to take heed where she was concerned.

  “The captain could stitch you closed,” she went on, “but if ’twas me, I’d wait for Moira.” She paused for a moment, and her voice grew less sure. “Truth is, archer, neither of us comes out good in this.”

  Especially him it seemed. Cut by a maid with a bloodthirsty blade and a sweet mouth.

  “Where neither of us comes out good is in this rockbound trap,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.” He made to rise, but she stopped him with her hand on his leg. It was enough to freeze every muscle in his body. Had the girl no sense at all?

  “Nay, you don’t. Stay put while I finish. ’Tis safe here. Sha-shakrieg prefer the open caverns, where they can throw their wicked threads to make webs.”

  Webs. That’s what he’d heard, the slinging of webs across the cavern ceiling, not dragons.

  “And the other?” he asked, relaxing when she removed her hand to bind his wrist with a bit of gauze pulled from another pouch. It, too, smelled of rasca. “The thing on the far side of the river that scrabbled up out of the dark? What does it prefer?” They weren’t safe. He was sure of it.

  She shook her head, dislodging another shower of water droplets. Jesu. Every move she made was designed to enchant, and he was a fool for noticing.

  “I know not what that was,” she said. “Tua?”

  “No tua ever smelled like that.”

  “Mayhaps not,” she agreed. “But the walls were written on along the stairs, marking this place as a sanctuary of old, when the track was well used.”

  Sanctuary? This? He looked around the barren walls, his spirits sinking. ’Twould be better to die of wildness than to spend the last of his days in such a place. He reached out and pressed his palm to the rock behind him, checking, and thankfully felt nothing. The Dragon’s Mouth called to him more strongly than this lost hole.

  “Whatever safety this place held, is long past,” he told her.

  Her gaze lifted from his hand to his eyes, and one of her eyebrows arched a fraction higher than the other. “You can read the walls without marks?”

  He shrugged, dismissing the skill. Madron knew he could follow her father’s path. She was the one who had explained the traces of magic to him. Until then he’d thought ’twas something in the air that made one place feel different from all the rest, or mayhaps something in him. Now he knew it was Nemeton’s doing.

  “Is that how you get into the wormholes?” Her voice had become a whisper filled with equal parts awe and hope, neither of which he found auspicious. He preferred to keep the wormholes, and his knowledge thereof, to himself—a preference Rhuddlan cared not one whit to honor.

  “No,” he said with no intention of elaborating. Madron and Rhuddlan offered naught but warnings when it came to wormholes, but Mychael knew when the holes were safe to enter, feeling it in a way far more graphic than he felt Nemeton’s magic. The bard’s marks were subtle, there for an instant and then not again. The power coming out of a wormhole was not so coy. The holes said enter, or they said beware, and since the freeing of the pryf, the Weir Gate always and only said beware.

  “No?” She sounded vaguely disappointed, then even more curious. “There is a way of it, though, isn’t there? One you could teach?”

  “Teach?” He cast her a narrowed glance. Mayhaps he had not seen the truth of her even yet. Not an enchanted forest faerie or a Liosalfar warrior, for if she sought those swirling depths she was simply crazed. They would eat her alive more surely than any spider people. She had to know that. No Quicken-tree was allowed below who didn’t know the dangers of wormholes.

  “We could make a trade,” she went on.

  “For what?” he asked incredulously. She had naught that he wanted except a kiss, but a bargained for kiss was worth nothing. Cloistered as he’d been, even he knew that much.

  She quickly reached for her pouches and began emptying them. “I have treasures.”

  Twigs, acorns, and bits of grass spilled onto the tunnel floor, followed by wet wads of feathers and thistledown. A few crystal shards rolled free.

  He looked at the piles of matted fluff and miscellanea, and his patience ended. She’d cut him and enticed him and mocked him with her offer to teach him how to block her strike. Wasn’t he the one who had disarmed her, taken her knife away from her? Who would have been cutting whom then, if that had been his purpose?

  And now she’d proven herself no different from the others. Everyone wanted his knowledge of the wormholes.

  “I have no need of your simples, girl, and we’ve lingered here overlong.”

  “Girl?” She glanced up at that, and there was no mistaking her ire at his rude dismissal. “Have you heard of the Dangoes, boy? Or the Pillars of Manannan? Do you really know all that is in the deep dark, and can you find what you want without knowing?”

  “If it exists, I can find it. Which is more than I would suppose of you. Does Trig know you can’t find your way in the dark?” He was not looking for a companion on his search, and if he had been, she would be the last he’d choose. She muddled his brain more surely than wine. And how did she know he was looking for anything? Rhuddlan and Madron were the only ones he’d talked with—or rather, been forced to confide in. The Quicken-tree man was not one to let a stranger or a secret linger in his domain; and dangerous as she was, Madron was his only likely ally.

  Whatever argument Llynya had been ready to offer next died on her lips.

  Aye, he thought. They had come to the crux of the matter, which for all his fascination with her was not about a kiss.

  “Does he?” he asked again, though he knew the answer.

  “I can find my way,” she said, and changed the subject by dipping two of her fingers into the remaining salve and smearing it on his face wound. “Now hold still.”

  He wasn’t dissuaded. “You’re scent-blind. You can’t smell friend from foe, or north from south, or danger when it’s upon you.” He winced at the roughness of her healing touch. Moira did not hurt a person so. What a fractious elf the girl was. For certes he had to have been mooning not to have noticed her faults before.

  “ ’Tis a passing thing.” She made her admission brief and scooped up another dab of rasca.

  He caught her hand when she raised it to his cheek. “Then until it passes, you should not be allowed beyond Lanbarrdein. Bedwyr lies dead in the dark, and I would not have the same happen to you. Nor would Trig.”

  “Trig doesn’t know.” She pulled her arm free with a quick jerk even as he released her.

  “He will soon enough.”

  “Not if you keep your silence. A simple promise could—”

  “Promises made in the dark are easily broken in the light of day,” he told her, then immediately wished he hadn’t. The words had naught to do with what she’d asked; they were oft-quoted advice for the lovelorn, which of course she was not. Nor was he, he added in silent disgust. The trouble he suffered from, while not all lust, was most decidedly not love.

  “Mayhaps,” she answered, “but I would have yours.”

  Sweet innocent. She nearly swayed him with the hesitancy of her request, as if she knew his promise might come with a price, but his course was clear—and did not include her.

  “No.”

  Her mouth tightened, and after wiping the last of the rasca back onto its bed of leaves, she began retying the petioles. “Some say you ought not to run free with the Liosalfar in the caves.”

>   He knew that to be true. Bedwyr had been one of them, but if she would bluster at him, she’d have to find a heftier threat to wield.

  “And soon they will say the same of you.”

  She had no immediate reply to that, and for a moment he thought he and common sense had prevailed, but she gathered her wits and proved him wrong yet again.

  “I would stand with you, Mychael ab Arawn.”

  Not so much as a flicker of emotion inflected her words, but ’twas the first time she’d spoken his name, and he was not unaffected. Just as quickly, he renamed himself a fool. ’Twas idle banter at best. Rhuddlan would not listen to a lavender-addled maid should the tide of opinion turn against him.

  “I stand alone.” He always had, since he’d been five years old and ripped from family and hearth, and he saw no end in sight until Ddrei Goch and Ddrei Glas were at his side.

  “So will I, if needs be,” she said, pinning him with her gaze. Emotion aplenty inflected that statement, and it was all coolly convincing. She was the warrior again.

  Stubborn wench, he thought, stifling an aggravated sigh. No Quicken-tree alive would choose to travel alone past Mor Sarff. Except for this one, it seemed, the one least likely to survive the journey.

  “Why?” he asked. “What calls you so strongly into the dark?” She’d already gotten herself lost and half-frozen and frightened, and was scent-blind into the bargain. The spider people were still skulking about, and she knew she was their preferred first course. So what compelled her?

  No answer was forthcoming. Silently, she repacked her acorns and fluff into the pouches, her movements stiff with unconcealed frustration. There was a truth to be found in her, and ’twas obviously not what he’d been thinking these last five days, nor was it what he’d thought in the last hour.

  His gaze skimmed the contours of her face, and for once he did not allow himself to be misled by her delicate beauty. Rather, he noted the furrowing of her brow and her eyes, grown old before their time, and the resolute line of her mouth as she bent to her task. The years did not lie as tenderly upon her as he’d thought. The sadness he’d first seen months past in the oak grove above Carn Merioneth, and again in Riverwood, was still with her, a sadness that had begun when Morgan ab Kynan had been defeated by another’s blade.