by Terry Madden
The woman called Nesta stood and drew herself to her full height, saying, “Talan murdered Nechtan, who had been murdered less than a season before. Tell me, solás, what law is it we are to consult to understand such an act? Or the desperation required when you attempted to wield sorcery known only to the Old Blood?”
Lyleth had not attempted to wield the Old Blood’s magic, she had succeeded. But these judges saw it as a transgression to call Nechtan back from the dead. Apparently, it was forbidden to seek out the wisdom of those who were long gone from this land. She would offer no defense for something so clearly in the right, for their answer would be the same as Pyrs’. The Five Quarters prospered and were at peace. Nothing else mattered. To anyone.
“So, you're telling me that it doesn’t matter that Talan murdered his own solás not one month ago? His ‘peace’ gives him the right to execute those who are bound to him?”
Their silence was their answer.
Lyleth pushed the bowl of soup away. “I will seek justice elsewhere.”
“You must know something before you leave the nemeton,” Nesta said. “Come, we must talk.”
Lyleth said, “There’s nothing you can tell me that will change my mind.”
“Perhaps not. But hear me out.”
Lyleth followed Nesta out of the cave into the gathering dusk, considering what she would say when this druí demanded that she accept the brehons’ misguided conclusion.
Nesta squared with Lyleth and gripped her shoulders in strong hands. “Your hive was destroyed.”
The bluntness of the words was like a clubbing.
“We thought you dead with the rest,” Nesta stated. “Ice-born reavers put all those on the Isle of Glass to the sword.”
“How can that be?”
“Your hive on the Isle of Glass was pillaged and burnt. None survived.”
For a moment, Lyleth thought it was a ruse to bring her round to their twisted sense of justice. Then she felt the truth seep from Nesta’s hands and into her heart. They’d received a message. All the children, all the teachers, all the young lordlings in her care? Gwion and Breaca? Lyleth could no longer stay on her feet. She slumped to a stone and buried her face in her hands. It must have happened within a day or two of her leaving. If she had been there, she would be dead as well, and if Talan had not taken Angharad…
“Why didn’t you tell me when I arrived?”
“We wanted to hear your request, without this—”
“Ice-born? You’re certain it was ice-born?”
“Pyrs sent word,” Nesta said. “He said a fisherman put in at the isle and found the hive destroyed, none alive.”
“The lordlings in my care were worth far more in ransom than all the wealth we possessed. Ice-born would know that as well as you and I. So many children… Desmund’s son and Maddoc’s daughter. Their sires will seek vengeance—”
“Maybe they were not after wealth,” Nesta said.
“They most certainly weren’t.” They were after Lyleth. Hired reavers of Talan’s tasked with making certain Lyleth could not protest her child’s abduction, could not make it known to the world that Talan had murdered Maygan. That was why he was so confident in sharing such a memory with her. He was gloating to the person he planned to kill next.
Nesta placed a hand on her shoulder, and Lyleth shook it off. The woman was casting about with hidden magic, spewing soothing charms meant to quiet distrust. But Lyleth shut her out easily and completely. No judge would search her soul against her will. Ever.
“Did this fisherman see longships?” Lyleth demanded. The ships of the ice-born were easily identified.
“We were not told if he did or did not.”
“No longships. How does Pyrs know it was ice-born?”
“I don’t know any more than what I’ve told you, sister.”
“You turn blind eyes on Talan,” Lyleth said, willing her anger to staunch the tears. “He’s murdered his uncle and taken his own cousin, not yet seven years of age, as his solás. Never in the annals stored on the tongues of our bards has a king done such a thing, and yet the judges look the other way because this king has brought wealth. And to silence me, he slaughtered my hive.”
“We don’t know that—”
“I know that.”
“Then the green gods speak to us in different languages, solás,” Nesta said evenly. “You cannot speak mine, nor I yours. But we serve them still.”
“You serve them.” Lyleth found her satchel and bow, slung it over her shoulder and started up the dark path that had brought her here.
**
Darkness had fallen completely when Lyleth found her horse. She had lit her way with rushlights, and the horse’s eyes flashed red by its light as she approached. The mare was where she’d left her, grazing at the edge of the wood. She nickered as Lyleth drew near and the two of them slept the short span remaining until dawn.
The way out of the Wistwood had been easy; the wards cast on the nemeton protected it from those who wished to enter, not from those who wished to flee it. Lyleth had upbraided herself for seeking out the judges who had crowned Ava. They had failed to see the work of a soulstalker behind her rise to the throne, and now they refused to see that Talan had murdered far more than Nechtan.
What would Talan do when Lyleth walked into his court? His face would tell her all the truth she needed to know. She would leave with Angharad, or the chieftains, Maddoc and Desmund, would know who had killed their children on the Isle of Glass. She still had a silver ingot. Enough to buy a messenger.
The road to Caer Ys led her through the high pass that crossed the Felgarths. When she reached the village of Brittas, she found a man she could read like the open sky. A woodsman. An honest man who gave her shelter for the night in his saw shed without ever asking for coin. It smelled of fresh-cut pine, and she made her bed upon the boughs.
In the morning, she placed the last silver ingot in the woodsman’s hand and had him recite three times the message he was to deliver to Maddoc and Desmund.
“The king would do such a thing?” the woodsman asked.
“Aye. That and worse. Now you’ll tell no one of it but Desmund and Maddoc. Not even your wife. You will only leave here and travel north to their courts if I fail to come to you within the fortnight. You’ll speak of it to no one. Give me your word.”
“By stars and stones, I’ll speak of it to none but the two chieftains in the north.”
She gave his shoulder a friendly pat, then mounted her horse. “I’ll be back within the fortnight, and all will be forgotten.”
The road wound down from the mountains into the lush, narrow Long Vale. Dunla’s meadstead lay just off the road here. The beekeeper had given Lyleth refuge after Nechtan’s death. She missed the old meadmonger, and by the looks of the place, Ava’s men had burnt it down when they’d come searching for Lyleth six years earlier.
She stopped here, wandered through the blackened ruins as if Dunla might be here still. The old woman had escaped Ava’s torching somehow, and in Caer Cedewain, she’d escaped the Bear’s slaughter for her body was not found among the dead. Lyleth entertained a desperate hope that she might have returned here.
She remembered the undercroft where Dunla kept her mead barrels. The way in was partly buried by mud, but Lyleth was able to move enough of it to gain entry. Anything left inside had long ago been pilfered. It was foolish to hope to find Dunla here. But it made for a good place to sleep for the night.
**
Just after sunrise, Lyleth prepared to mount her horse and continue on the road toward Caer Ys. In the distance, she saw a fluttering standard, but she could not make out the sigil. A company of mounted men flowed over a distant hill.
After hiding her horse in the woods, Lyleth slipped back into the narrow hole of the undercroft. From there, she watched them approach. They flew the sigil of the water horse. Ten guards, Talan, Elowen, Dylan, and Angharad riding a white cob. They took the road east, toward the Wistwood. Coul
d Talan be seeking out the judges? Did he come to make a case for his actions?
Lyleth knew the road forked a few leagues away. One road led to the high pass into the Felgarths while the other crossed the hills into IsAeron, and beyond that, Emlyn. Could he be headed there?
Lyleth had started out of the undercroft to follow them, but just as she reached the narrow slip, a hand closed on her shoulder. She spun, drew a knife from her belt and had it pressed to her assailant’s throat.
“A soothblade,” Nesta said, indicating the knapped stone blade Lyleth held as if she were merely displaying it for her. She smiled. “I’ve never seen one before.”
Chapter 6
Dish was stronger than Connor expected. After he had rolled his wheelchair to Merryn’s bedside, he grabbed Connor by the throat and pulled them both to the floor. Dish’s chokehold was easy to evade. In the next instant, Connor was the one who pressed the chokehold.
“Just hear me out.”
He slowly released Dish, but as soon as he was free, he landed a fist to Connor’s jaw and repeatedly hammered Connor’s face. He would gladly let Dish beat him to a pulp, but he didn’t have time right now.
Connor pinned Dish’s arms to the floor, saying, “It’s not what it looks like, I swear to you.” Dish was still struggling to free his arms.
“You killed my aunt!”
Connor said, “I just did what she asked me to! Just listen.”
“Listen my ass!”
With surprising strength, Dish tossed Connor aside as if he were a child and started crawling for Merryn. He couldn’t let Dish break the spell now. Connor got to his feet and dragged Dish away from the baking pan that collected a steady ribbon of Merryn’s blood. He hoped she had already left her body behind and entered the seed that lay in the center of the pan.
Connor dragged the wheelchair out of Dish’s reach as he crawled toward it.
“Sodding bastard!”
“It’s what she wanted, Dish.”
“You murdered my aunt!”
“I did exactly what she asked me to do!” Connor had planned to deal with Dish later. He wasn’t supposed to wake up. Connor touched the blood that streamed from his nose, saying, “I’ll explain when I’m finished.”
“Oh, you are finished!” Dish struck out at Connor’s legs and missed, then began pulling the dead weight of his body across the floor in a commando crawl. He was going for the soothblade. Knocked out of Connor’s hand in the struggle, it lay under Merryn’s bed. Connor got to it first and tucked it in his belt.
“Where did you get that?” Dish demanded.
Connor didn’t want to hit him, but dawn was coming, and Dish might call the police. He drew back his fist, saying, “It will all make sense, I swear it.” But he couldn’t do it.
“How about you explain it now, you sodding killer! Where’d you get a soothblade?”
The electrical cord from a lamp was the only thing handy to tie his wrists together. Connor didn't tie him to anything, just gagged him with some gauze the nurse had forgotten and left him on the floor.
The candle had burned low, casting flickering warmth over the uneven stone walls. The room smelled of old woman and ashes from fires long burned out, and the decorative gas heater warmed the room to an unbearable temperature. Dish lay in the fetal position at the foot of Merryn’s hospital bed, bound and gagged and sweating. He’d stopped struggling, his eyes brimming with tears and hatred.
Connor gave Merryn a kiss on the forehead.
As she had instructed, he collected the baking tin that sat on the floor below the bed. It was half full of blood. Inside the pan sat an open oyster shell, looking like the ragged wings of some bloody bird. Inside the shell, Merryn’s once-black lock of hair was now a sticky red pool upon which rested a single acorn, now covered in blood. “Not just any acorn,” she’d told him. But it looked like any acorn to him.
Dish should be the one with her blood on his hands, his heart torn to pieces with the task Merryn had assigned.
Connor wiped at his tears, then headed out the door with the pan of Merryn’s blood.
Using his cellphone to light his path, he made his way to the toolshed to fetch the shovel he’d left there.
The flock awakened and bleated as he crossed the broad sloping pasture that bordered the brook. Here, Merryn’s forest grew. A great hazel tree watched over all, its catkins hanging like ornaments in the pre-dawn gray. Lyla’s tree. Merryn had been clear on the exact place he was to plant the acorn. There was a clearing of soft ground between Lyla’s tree and the brook. Not too close to the water, or the seed may be washed away when it flooded. He finally found a spot with few stones and dug the hole as she had instructed. Repeating the words she had taught him, he placed the acorn and its oyster shell into the earth, poured her blood over it, and covered it with soil.
Dawn broke scarlet.
And Connor watered the newly turned earth with his tears.
**
“Just listen to me.” Connor held out his dirty palms.
He thought about removing Dish’s gag and decided it would be better to wait.
Connor glanced at Merryn’s corpse as if for instruction. But her face wore a tired gratefulness to be gone from this world.
“She’s in the womb of the earth now,” Connor said. “It’s her way across.” Every explanation he had rehearsed sounded ridiculous. “Merryn was never just your aunt. She was Old Blood. She and Lyla Bendbow, the woman in the picture of the well stone that Clyde Pritchard took—the two of them found a way to get back across without the well. She knew if she couldn’t find a way to open the well, she’d find another way across.”
Connor pulled the gauze from Dish’s mouth, and an angry cry drained from him. Several minutes passed before he could speak.
“What are you saying, Connor? Old Blood? Why did she never tell me this?”
“She thought you’d try to stop her. You’d have tried to stop me.”
Connor untied the electrical cord from Dish’s wrists and half expected a fist to crash into his face again. But Dish allowed Connor to help him into his wheelchair.
“Of course I’d try to stop you. But—”
“But if you stopped me, then Merryn would continue to be trapped in this world with the rest of the Old Blood. She was exiled with all of them when Black Brac sealed the well. They were to live in the land of the dead forever.”
“I know the story. But if Merryn is Old Blood, how does she think this will get her across to the other side?” Dish pointed to the dark stain of blood on the rug.
Dish dragged the back of his quaking hand across his mouth, pushed his chair to Merryn’s bedside, and took her hand.
“It was a spell, some kind of magic of the Old Blood,” Connor said. “You should have been the one. She meant for you to do it, but since the accident—”
“Since the accident, I’ve not even visited her. I’ve locked myself away. I know.”
“She needed someone. Someone who had seen the other side.”
“You. Of course.”
“She sent Lyla first. Back in 1955. The two of them figured out how to cross over. ‘A tree grows both up and down,’ she told me. The roots sprout into a tree, a mirror image, on the other side.” He thought he should tell Dish the whole truth about Lyla Bendbow, but decided to save that for another time. There was only so much Dish could take in right now.
“So Merryn will be a tree on the other side?”
“I’m not sure what happens after that. That’s all she told me. It’s like some kind of bending of the rules, going in through a secret door or something.” Merryn had never told Dish any of this, it appeared. “Haven’t you ever wondered what happened to the Old Blood after they were banished from the Five Quarters? Haven’t you wondered if a random stranger on the street might be one of the Old Blood?”
“I never really thought about it,” Dish said. “I reckoned they forgot their past as we all do.”
“Most of them, yes. But their d
ruada were charged with remembering, with finding a way back for all of them. Their king brought this on them with his truce—”
“’For so distraught was King Tiernmas by the coming of the Ildana and the spilling of his peoples’ blood,’” Dish recited, “’that he chose the land of night, and left the day behind.’ Yes, we know this in the Five Quarters.”
“She never told me all of it,” Connor said. “She never told me why the Ildana banished a whole people forever.”
“It was not King Tiernmas’s choice to live in exile, as the epics say,” Dish said. His face took on a stony look that Connor had never seen before. The look reminded him of Nechtan, the king he’d watched die on a battlefield in the other world. “The Old Blood had turned to an old magic, one that used blood as its currency. Sacrifice.” His eyes went to Merryn’s cooling body. “All that lives will die. All that dies will live again. Unless the life force is stolen and reshaped into something else. I’ve seen it myself. Ava’s soulstalker shaped a red crow from the blood of a druí named Finlys who was tortured and killed. A beast that did her bidding; it watched us with Ava’s eyes.”
The realization made Connor weak. He collapsed to the sofa, saying, “What I just did was some kind of blood magic?”
“Clearly, and to think otherwise is daft. All I’m saying is that the Old Blood struck fear into the Ildana with it. If Merryn was Old Blood, and druada as you say, she would know how to use it.”
Connor took the stone blade from his belt and handed it to Dish. “Merryn said all her memories were in this blade. She just had to find it from one lifetime to the next.”
“Then she’ll be missing it when she gets to the other side, won’t she now?” Dish inspected it, holding it up to the morning light that assaulted the east window. “A soothblade, Lyl called it. She said the Old Blood once used it to cut the truth from people.”
“Or it recorded their truth,” Connor said.
Dish handed it back to Connor as if holding it unnerved him. “I’d best call for help. And you’d best be prepared to explain.”
**
The constable, a middle-aged local man named Alfred Trewin, found the note on the table beside Merryn’s hospital bed just as planned. He also found the sharp paring knife Connor had placed on the floor in a pool of blood. Connor explained that he had taken a room at the hostel in the village, so he wasn’t here when it happened.
