Prince of Time
Page 38
“Well, if we could get the weir to work...” His voice trailed off.
“Mychael and Madron think the worms are already back in sync, moving through the continuum.”
“And we’d need chrystaalt. I’m never going back through without chrystaalt.” The difference between his first passage and his second had been amazing.
“Aye, we’d need chrystaalt,” she agreed.
“And a way of figuring out how to get where we wanted to go, if we wanted to go anyplace other than Claerwen,” he continued.
“Didn’t you ever talk to Ferrar?” Avallyn asked. “From what you’ve told me, she and Jons went pretty much at will.”
“Aye, they did, but for all those years in the future, saving mayhaps my last two days, the weir was my least favorite topic of conversation.” In fact, at the time, wild horses couldn’t have dragged him into a wormhole, not for all the gold in the Middle Kingdom.
“I wonder where they are now. Probably not in Claerwen.”
Morgan tended to agree. He couldn’t imagine Ferrar spending too much time with the High Priestess without grabbing Jons and leaping into time.
“They’re probably having the greatest adventure,” Avallyn said, and Morgan thought he detected a switch in her voice from ambivalence to longing. Her next words proved it. “If we went, mayhaps to the slave boy colony on Orion, we could have an adventure too.”
That got his attention.
He rolled over on his side to better see her face and the little grin teasing her mouth.
“You’ve got all the slave boy you need, wench,” he growled, leaning down to gently gnaw on her neck.
She giggled, and he relented. Pregnancy had made her delightfully ticklish. He kissed her mouth and pulled her back into his arms, settling deeper with her into the blankets to watch the night sky.
Saturn and Jupiter were in Aries, shining bright. Mars had already set, and Venus would not be seen again until next month. Above them, a shooting star arced across the vault of the heavens, a meteor trailing a glittering cloud of celestial dust. They watched until it disappeared against the ink black darkness of deep space.
“I made a wish for us,” Avallyn whispered into the silence.
Morgan turned and pressed a kiss to her mouth.
“So did I,” he said, and then he kissed her again.
Epilogue
“No offense, Ferrar, but that’s the crikiest crap I ever tasted.” Aja screwed his face up in disgust and handed her back the cup.
“Hush, Aja,” Ferrar admonished him. “If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be out here, freezing our fannies off and praying for worms.”
Aja had to agree about the fanny part. It was friggin’ cold on Claerwen’s weir platform, but it wasn’t all his fault that they’d gotten locked out of the temple. Ferrar had been at loggerheads with the High Priestess since she’d arrived at the great pile of bones. What had happened with Sachi in the cloisters had been next to naught. Aja had hardly kissed her and had certainly not had time to do anything else. He was quick, but he wasn’t that quick. Nor did he want to be where kissing was concerned, a fact he’d tried to explain to the High Priestess, but the more he’d talked, the less she’d liked, until she’d practically exploded on him.
He’d been pretty fast at that point and ended up on the weir platform, exactly where he’d wanted to be, with Jons and Ferrar right behind him.
The temple complex was still pretty much intact, but there were rumors out in the Waste that some of the priestesses were more than a little upset by the damage the Warmonger had done to the north and east walls. They especially missed their bell tower, and the word in the dunes was that they were out for more bones to rebuild—anybody’s bones.
After meeting the High Priestess, Aja didn’t doubt it for a minute. Morgan had been lucky to get out of the place alive, and he had gotten out alive. Ferrar and Jons had seen the worms take him.
Of course, with Vishab dead and the Warmonger gone, bones were going to be at a premium. If Aja had been going to stay, which he wasn’t, he’d be going into the bone business.
“Ferrar,” Jons said, directing her attention to the sky. Aja glanced up with her and saw clouds rolling in, lots of clouds.
“Here,” she said, handing Jons the refilled cup.
He drank the stuff down like it was water, and it most definitely was not water. Ferrar had put chrystaalt in it to prepare them for the time worms.
As a concept, getting swallowed by a time worm left Aja feeling a little queasy. As a means to an end, though, he was willing to put up with queasiness.
He noticed Ferrar drank her share with the same ease as Jons. Mayhaps it just took some getting used to. Next, Ferrar broke a juice-jacked carbo-bar—cherries and shampberries, Aja’s favorite—into three pieces. He chewed up the portion she offered and watched the sky. The clouds had gotten darker, and he thought he saw lightning in the distance.
He took another bite, keeping his gaze to the east. Definitely lightning, he thought, seeing a big bolt of it light the clouds. The wind was picking up, chilling him a bit, and he wondered if it was going to be warm in thirteenth-century Wales.
Ferrar watched the boy, smiling. He was a handful, and a rare talent, but for all his talent he hadn’t noticed the subtle shift in time that made the world they were in now different from the world they had been in just a moment past. Tufts of vegetation grew in the crevices of the cliff wall, sea campion and vetch. Above them, she could just make out the tops of the trees in Claerwen’s apple orchard. ’Twas a place of orchards, the temples of bones shaded by their leafy crowns. Below them, a river ran through the canyon, washing toward the sea.
Jons had noticed the shift in time. He’d been with her too long not to notice.
It wasn’t that the Waste was no longer a desert, or that an ocean now beat upon its eastern shore where before there had been none. For the people of Earth in the 6,247th year of the Trelawney Rebellion, the ocean had never disappeared, the desert had never existed. The wars had still happened, for war was a human endeavor. But the scourge of Dharkkum had been defeated in an age now long past, and the damage it had inflicted on Earth had never happened.
But Ferrar knew the difference. Every Prydion Psilord of Time would have felt the shift in the time-space continuum caused by Morgan ab Kynan’s victory in the past.
Somewhere in space and time, Nemeton would have felt it too. “Sanctuary” he’d been called since the dawn of the Dark Age, and a sanctuary he had proven to be for all the children of the forested planet called Earth.
The Chalice Trilogy:
The Chalice and the Blade – Book One
“Magnificent storytelling, complex flesh-and-blood characters... so compelling, I read it in one sitting.” Iris Johansen, NYT Bestselling Author
Dream Stone – Book Two
“Holds us spellbound... [an] extraordinary reading experience.” RT Book Reviews
Prince of Time – Book Three
“Guaranteed to wow... The pace is breathtaking, and the swashbuckling and general portentousness are interspersed with some dazzlingly sensual scenes.” Kirkus Reviews
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