by Terry Madden
She made him as comfortable as she could on the driest ground she could find. Her cloak would protect him from every kind of flying insect while she searched by moonlight for anything that might help to staunch the blood flow.
Sphagnum moss and bog willow grew in abundance. But better than moss was the down-like pollen of cattails. She was forced to beat clouds of insects away to collect it. Once gathered, she pared the fluff from the stalks. This she would use to pack the wound and stop the external bleeding.
As she worked, her mind wound back to Nesta. She’d been sent by the High Brehon because he suspected that Lyleth was the one who would try to free the Crooked One. What would Nesta report to him now? That his king, the king who’d brought peace through terror and wealth to all, his golden king had come to the Red Bog and murdered an innocent young woman, had offered his own body as a vessel of the Crooked One. Lyleth could only hope that the High Brehon would act on it. There was little chance that the woodsman Lyleth had hired would be carrying her message to Pyrs, not after Nesta had finished with him.
Whether the judges turned a blind eye on Talan’s depravity or not, Lyleth would see to it justice was done. Not only had Talan murdered members of her hive, now he’d murdered two hearts most dear to her. But Dylan would not die. Not if Lyleth kept his heart beating.
As the moon climbed across a clear black sky, she shivered in her wet clothes and listened to Dylan’s ragged breathing as she pressed close to him for warmth. She beat at clouds of grasshoppers and flicked snakes away with a stick. But she never took her eyes from the cromm cruach, watching with the Knights of the Stoney Ring that cast long moon shadows across the small island.
She reflected on Angharad’s placid acceptance of Elowen’s murder. How could it be? She couldn’t help but wonder whether Angharad’s birth had not been designed by the green gods as she had thought, but was instead a child of the Crooked One. Child of Death. Had Lyleth birthed and raised a priestess of the Sunless?
She rejected the idea as soon as it presented itself. The look in Angharad’s eyes when she looked directly at Lyleth… there was an explanation to be heard. Maybe Lyleth would live long enough to hear it.
Waiting for dawn, she marked the night with frequent tears and quieted them with singing.
**
First light brought little more than the warming of a misty sky. The sun tried to burn through the gray bog mist that blanketed the stone circle, and swarms of midges, biting flies and locusts clouded the air. Lyleth thought she could hear the swarms chewing the foliage. She would have to try to move Dylan, or they would both die in the Red Bog. She closed her eyes to face the sun, feeling the particles of light prick her skin with happy needles of warmth.
“Lyl,” Dylan whispered.
She offered him water, which he drank greedily and stared out at the pool of the cromm.
“There.” He pointed.
The Knights loomed, partially obscured by the bog mist that drifted past, creating the illusion that the stones moved. Something caught her eye behind one of the stones, something had truly moved.
Lyleth bolted upright, her hand on her bow.
There, on the far side of the pool, a pony materialized from the fog. It trotted to the water’s edge and began pacing the shoreline.
Lyleth got to her feet. As she approached, she confirmed what she suspected. It was Brixia. It had to be. In fact, a few red ribbons were still tangled in her thick mane from six years earlier. But how could it be? The little horse had been following Elowen when they’d met the vagabond child that day in the Felgarth mountains. But Brixia was no horse. That day on the battlefield, when Lyleth called the sea… Brixia was a water horse.
Brixia pawed at the mud at the edge of the pool and trotted around to repeat the action on the other side. She was trying to tell Lyleth something. But what?
Dylan coughed.
He reached a quaking hand out to point at Brixia and struggled to say, “Elowen’s pony.”
Lyleth approached the little horse slowly, cooing, “It’s all right. We’re friends. What troubles you, sister?”
When she reached the pony, she laid her hand on her silky neck and followed her gaze into the water. What was it she saw in the depths? Something pale glowed under the brackish water. It had the vague shape of a person. Was it Elowen? Did Brixia want her to bring the poor girl’s body up?
Lyleth stepped in. The water was icy. She glanced at the pony for direction and Brixia pawed at the water.
If Lyleth could swim down and reach her, perhaps she could bring Elowen back up. An impossible hope filled her heart. Could she still be alive somehow?
The icy water provided a relief from the biting bugs, and she convinced herself to get it over with swiftly. After filling her lungs with air, she dove under.
The water stung her eyes as she strained to see what the white image was. As she drew closer, the perfect sculpture of a man became clear, half-buried in the muck, his stone arm reaching up as if to the sky. When she touched the chiseled hand, the rough, cold stone became flesh and clutched hers. Her breath escaped with her scream in a cloud of bubbles.
She pried the fingers off and swam for the surface, gulping air. But the hand grabbed her bare foot and pulled her under again. Her fists beat against stone that softened under her blows. Flesh, not stone.
She struggled free and made for the edge of the pool. Vomiting water, she turned to see the pool seethe and churn. Whatever was under there was trying to swim up.
“What’s happening?” Dylan’s voice was weak and fearful.
“Someone’s there.”
“Elowen?”
No, not Elowen, she thought.
On her hands and knees, Lyleth looked back at the water, bubbles surfacing. It was drowning, whatever it was. She had decided to let it do just that, when a pale green moth surfaced, struggled against the water and took wing. A creature of the green gods. Brixia whinnied and began galloping back and forth along the shore.
Whoever it was, Brixia was clear about what Lyleth was to do.
She went back in the water and felt for the hand which had gone limp and still. She ran her hands over the sculpture, seeing a vague green glow brighten the water behind her touch. Clothing that had been sculpted of stone suddenly floated in the water. She took the arms and dragged against the dead weight of what was, indeed, a man.
Hauling him onto the shore, she saw he was the same color as the mud. With him on his side, she forced water from him in a slow dribble, pounded his back so it came in gouts, until his eyes opened at last.
Brixia nickered to him and nuzzled his hair.
His odd clothing was the same gray as his skin, and he began shivering in the cold breeze. He was a young man, tall and long-limbed. His hair and thin beard were a darker shade, though still gray. But his eyes… they were the color of newly forged copper. And she’d seen them before.
He groaned and managed to say, “Lyleth.”
Chapter 11
The persistent buzz of insect wings resounded inside his head. A room filled his view, indistinctly. What room? Talan rolled over and vomited. He wanted to see the little man swimming in the bucket, drowning in his bile. He reached in, felt for his tiny twig-like bones, but there was nothing but liquid, foul smelling and mortal.
“Where is he?”
“Gone, gone where there is no dawn. Gone, gone where the Sunless spawn.” The galling drone of the little man’s voice hammered behind his teeth.
“No! You promised! I did everything you asked!”
“Everything and none! Everything and less!”
Talan scrambled from bed. What bed? Where was he? In a room of simple furnishings. He unlatched a shuttered window that opened onto a painfully bright day, overlooking a village and grasslands… of Emlyn, surely. He had been in Emlyn. At the Red Bog.
He found a mirror beside a wash basin.
“Speak to me, bastard. Tell me why he denied me!”
He thrust out his tongue but
saw nothing but eyes peering from the anus of his throat.
A voice rasped from his gullet. “He hungers like a beast, while the green gods feast. Your gift slipped away to the lands of clay.”
“I did as you asked!”
“She poisons you!” the little man shouted. “She poisons me!”
“Who?”
“’Tis the taste of your bile, of the salamander’s smile.”
“Salamander? What are talking about?”
With that, the little man planted barbs like fish hooks into Talan’s tongue and rolled it back, stuffing it down his throat.
Talan tried to grasp his tongue, pull it out, but fell to the floor, battling a coiled snake, its scales, cool armor that sheathed rigid muscles. It clenched and filled his throat, its fangs buried in the roof of his mouth.
He cried without sound. And the room went black once again.
**
“Come, cousin,” a small voice said. “Fiach has prepared a feast in your honor.”
It was the child. Her green eyes burned holes in her face.
“Come.” She helped him to sit up. He was back in the small bed, the bucket of vomit gone, his body clean and in a new linen tunic.
“Can you speak?” she asked him.
No trace of fear peeked from the child’s eyes. The little man had strangled her servant, cast her into a bog pool to drown while the child watched. As cold-blooded as her mother, maybe more so.
He tested his tongue without opening his mouth, making a humming sound. He let his lips part, let the words issue forth like a stream of piss.
“You said you would rid me of this—creature. You failed me, cousin.”
“The leech-soul’s hold on you is stronger than I thought.”
“Where are we?”
“Caer Emlyn. You need rest.”
Caer Emlyn. Fiach then, had seen him like this. A mad dog. Perhaps Lyleth was right. The child was too young to make the decisions of a solás. Perhaps the little man was right, she was trying to poison him. Did she know that her mother was dead? That Talan had killed her? Certainly, Fiach knew by now that Lyleth was dead at the hands of ice-born raiders. It was ice-born raiders, not Talan. Not Talan, but the little man who arranged it.
“What did you tell Fiach?” he asked the child.
“That you took ill on the road.” She stroked the beard stubble on his cheek with her tiny hand. Talan had no memory beyond that of letting the beautiful girl slip beneath the brown water, the pang of regret he felt that the little man swiftly strangled out of him.
“Even kings grow ill, cousin,” Angharad was saying. “But you’re better now. Color returns to your skin.” She pinched at his cheeks to bring a blush.
“No, no.” Talan pressed her tiny hands between his. “I failed. The gift was not received, the god is enraged, and I am his prey. Don’t you see? He will not set me free.”
“Let the gods battle their own,” the child said. “You are but a man. And I will set you free.”
**
Mock joy was the only way to describe the look on Fiach’s face when Talan stepped into his expansive revel hall. Unadorned but crafted of fleshy pink stone in the shape of a six-pointed star, the timbered joists of the ceiling culminated in the single adornment, the carved heads of six horses joined like vines. They gazed upon the tables far below. Simple. Elegant. In a way like Fiach.
It required every fiber of control Talan still possessed to appear healthy and strong before this chieftain of Emlyn. Fiach could not know that Talan’s head rang with a ceaseless roar, that every voice was muffled as if he were locked in a box and rested at the bottom of a lake.
“Rude of me,” Talan said, trying to modulate his voice so he did not speak too loudly, “to arrive unannounced with a dozen mouths to feed.”
“Your presence is…” Fiach’s voice was distant, his warrior braid dressed up with tiny silver bells that sounded all the way to the soles of Talan’s feet. He could hear nothing else, just those bells, though Fiach was speaking, asking him something, waiting for a reply, his eyes expectant, lined at the corners as from many years of laughter. When were those years of laughter? With Lyleth? How Talan longed to know such laughter that could etch lines in his soul.
Perhaps Fiach had said something about ‘a gift’ or some nicety. He bowed and sustained the showing of his palms, then said something else Talan could not hear above the ringing. He looked to Angharad for assistance.
“We thank you for your hospitality, my lord,” Angharad said with a bow.
“You have met my solás, I should think.”
“She has looked after your needs better than most grown women,” Fiach said. Was that an admiring smile he cast at Angharad? Of course it was, she was flesh of Lyleth’s flesh, and everyone knew Fiach had never lost his desire for Nechtan’s solás. Angharad was surely an extension of her mother to Fiach, even though a reminder that her love never had been his.
“She is young,” Talan said. “But she is the trumpet of the gods, most surely, just as her mother was.” Perhaps now was not the time to bring up old wounds, but it shifted the focus from Talan’s troubled mind to Fiach’s lustful past. No one was perfect. Talan’s tongue wagged on, though he didn’t want to, “She is rumored to have been fathered by you, yet we all know better.” It was easier to talk than to listen, and it made Talan appear well and of clear mind. How long could he wrest control of his tongue from the little man? But was that Fiach’s wife there behind him? “Forgive my rudeness, lady…”
“Seryn.” Fiach ushered the demure little thing forward. “This is my wife, my lord.”
Clearly with child, Fiach’s first probably, at least lawfully. She bowed deeply and showed small white palms, saying, “Come, join us at the table, my lord.”
Talan knew Fiach had married but had yet to look upon the chosen woman. For a man of Fiach’s prowess, he certainly had the choice of every nobleman’s daughter in the land. Yet he married the daughter of a lord from the Summer Country, no doubt to stabilize the border he shared with them. Certainly wise.
The meal was very land-locked. Grains, mutton, apples, greens. Talan forced himself to eat, feeling the revolt of the little man at the taste of earthly fare, knowing he would see it again in the bucket in his room.
When Seryn had stepped away to see to the next course, Fiach leaned close and whispered, “I am beyond saddened by Lyleth’s savage death, and ready to seek revenge upon the ice-born at your word, my lord. Does the child know?”
“I have not spoken of it to her,” Talan said, “I thought it best.”
Angharad sat across the table, picking the nuts out of her bread.
But Talan felt his gorge rising. He held his napkin to his mouth.
“My lord?” Fiach was saying. “Are you feeling ill again?”
“I’m fit. Take on the ice-born? Is that what you said?”
“I have done some investigating,” Fiach said, “and sent word to Pyrs. He says the raiders came from the isle of Rhunay, from what he has gathered. He seeks to mount a purge of that island. They’ve been allowed to establish fishing villages there during our peace, with Pyrs turning a blind eye to it all.”
“And now they destroy the most sacred school of our people.” Talan worked up a mask of ersatz horror. But the little man had taken over his tongue. “They have murdered the children of chieftains and set to blaze the training ground of the green gods. And… they successfully killed the woman you tried to kill yourself not so long ago.”
Fiach rolled back in his seat, his jaw hanging slack. “That I did, my lord. You are correct to remind me of it, yet I assure you, I remind myself of it daily.” His eyes flashed to Angharad, now licking honey from her fingers after dipping apples. She hadn’t heard, it appeared. Just as well, she’d find out her mother was dead soon enough.
“But I agree in principle,” Talan added. “Retribution must be swift and thorough. Desmund and Maddoc will have it no other way for their children were among the dead.”<
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“My men are at your service, my lord. And anxious.”
After Talan had pretended to eat enough, he stood, his hands on the table for support, and the long bench of courtiers followed.
“I shall see myself to my room,” he told Fiach, yet had no idea where his room was. He whispered, “I shall leave you to inform Angharad of her mother’s passing. The blow might be softened coming from such a… close friend as yourself.”
Losing his way through a series of halls, Talan found himself in a courtyard where he glimpsed a green sister, led through a colonnade by the seneschal. She wore the gray cloak of the druada and a string of claws around her neck. She walked as one who does not touch the ground.
"Good day, sister," Talan said with a sneer.
She turned to gaze at him, one eye protruding from her face. The eye stretched farther and farther outward until it snapped free of the ligaments that held it to her skull, moving toward him, lidless. Silver-blue as a dragonfly’s abdomen.
—Seeing everything.
**
He awoke in a garden.
Looking up through the bobbing heads of pink gillyflowers.
Into the mismatched eyes of the druí. The things around her neck were talons, from different birds of prey. She removed the necklace, and with one of the talons, pierced the skin on his throat. He felt the blood gather in the hollow above his collarbone. She caught some on her finger and tasted it.
He awoke again. A dream within a dream. He doubted anything was real anymore. But he was still here in the garden. Or perhaps he dreamed again.
In the next moment, guards were lifting him from the flowers and carrying him away, back to the small room. He ordered them to shutter the window, and the room turned gray.
