by Terry Madden
Fiach glanced over his shoulder, his blue eyes burning with scorn at Connor. Lyleth had told him what she knew of his Sunless soul, his life as blood scribe to Tiernmas. “Do you think bringing him near this place is a good idea?”
“No. But I will have my daughter back, and then we’ll put an arrow through him.”
“And then the battle will begin,” Fiach agreed. But he knew as well as Lyleth that his numbers fell far short of Talan’s. He could try to surround them, but his losses were bound to be high.
They rode through most of the day, stopping to rest and eat. Connor was fading in and out of consciousness, and the wound was still bleeding.
“Tie one of those ropes above the wound,” Lyleth instructed Dylan.
“What?”
“Cut off the blood flow to the wound. He needs to stay with us for a while longer.”
“You’re a fool.” Connor called to Lyleth weakly as Dylan wrapped a rope around his arm. “Nechtan said you know how to bring peace. But this? Your daughter is more important than the land?”
“You would have me sacrifice my own daughter?”
“What makes you think Talan intends to kill her?”
“She will open the well—”
“By dying? You don’t know that.”
“I can’t risk that.”
“She told you herself,” Connor croaked. “She’s here to open the well. Let her.”
They rode into the night.
The stars known as the seven sisters would be rising soon, and the night was lit by a moon just past full.
When they reached the summit of a small swell of land, they halted to take in the view below. The stone that imprisoned the Crooked One sat upon a mound of earth that formed an island at the center of another island. The larger island sat within the shallow, but vast, Red Bog. The islands were a microcosm of the Five Quarters, surrounded by a sea that reached to the lands of the west and those of the east. A cup within a cup, a land within a land. A fitting place to hide a passage to another world.
Surrounding the pool of the cromm cruach, the Knights of the Stoney Ring rose like gray mourners in the moonlight. The remnants of trenches could be seen stretching across the flat, grassy island, evidence that someone had tried to drain it, to remove the watery chains that had held the Crooked One for a thousand years. But Lyleth knew the bog would not allow it. The water would have seeped back to fill what was removed, for the blood of the Knights would not be so easily diverted.
Much of Talan’s army was arrayed in defensive battalions at the shoreline of the large island. The rest formed a shield wall on this side of the bog. They waited where the causeway ended at the water's edge, the blockade.
Lyleth rode beside Fiach toward the line, leaving his soldiers some distance back. She towed Connor’s horse behind hers and showed empty palms to the line of men brandishing spears. When she drew close enough, she called, “I demand to talk to my king. Tell him I have his blood scribe, the man who made the Crooked One.”
Chapter 25
Dish began talking before Celeste stepped into the cottage. “I’ve had so much on my mind, I lost track of time. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Understandable. Apology accepted.”
“Excuse the mess.” He led her to the drawing room and indicated the sofa. The coffee table displayed five partially empty glasses of whisky. There was no hiding that now.
Iris took over talking while Dish made himself presentable. He heard another glass of whisky poured as Iris talked about the collection of items boxed up and carted to the thrift store. She mentioned Connor several times, quoting from the faked text messages about his grief.
Dish stripped off his tee shirt and pulled on a dress shirt. All the while, Elowen hid in the bedroom with the salamander. Bronwyn was passed out on the bed beside her.
“While I’m out,” Dish whispered to Elowen while wrapping a tie around his neck, “you’ll search this photo for the location of the well stone. It’s on this farm somewhere. I suspect near the brook where you appeared.” He handed her the book, opened to the photo of Lyla Bendbow and the stone. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Celeste decided on a gastropub in Falmouth. During the drive, she gave Dish her full resume—years at university, years as an advocate for physicians, and now in practice for herself as a contract attorney. All less than interesting.
As she sipped her ale and prodded her Nicoise salad, she expounded on the common points of contention between family members and how to unify them in their grief, something like that.
“Bronwyn hurts as deeply as you do. You need to validate her emotions, share with her how Merryn’s death has affected you.”
If Celeste only knew what Dish had recently shared with his sister…
Dish was trying to find a way to eat a sandwich and surreptitiously glance at the Starry Night app on his phone beside him. It showed the constellations at any given time from the viewer’s latitude. He had started it running in fast forward, and as he nodded and made intermittent eye contact with Celeste, stars wheeled across the phone screen.
He had been successfully nodding in agreement at what seemed like the appropriate times when Celeste asked, “Don’t you think?” She cupped her chin with a manicured hand and gazed at him.
“Think? Why, yes. Yes,” he agreed again to something unknown.
“Lúnasa is Saturday,” she said.
“Lúnasa?” How is it she even knew about the ancient Celtic festival?
“Your Aunt Merryn was quite the eclectic. She’s the one who turned me on to it years ago.”
“Turned you on? to what?”
Celeste proceeded to describe an open-air festival that sounded rather ghastly: three days of music, food and drink, medieval recreationists, cheesy arts and crafts, all just adjacent to Merryn’s farm in a pasture that bordered Trevaylor Wood.
“They have a permit for such a gathering?” Dish asked.
“The landowner has granted us access,” Celeste said. “It will be a New Age Woodstock.”
“Oh bloody hell,” he said. “Are you a member of that, that neo-druid group?”
“So was your aunt. The Order of the Green.”
He scoffed, “Merryn? The Order of the Green? I don’t think so.”
“It will be fun, you’ll see. The ancient Britons used to hold tribal gatherings on that day, you know,” she said. “So we’re trying to resurrect the old tradition of holding a fair on the first of August. It starts tomorrow. Runs through the weekend.”
“You’ll dance round standing stones and summon the Fae Folk. Right.”
The first of August was just about to roll by on his Starry Night app. He slowed the star chart’s wheeling as the date approached, and as it did, he watched the front hooves and head of the constellation known as Pegasus peek from the northeastern horizon. Above it, and hence rising just before Pegasus, was the lesser known constellation, Equuleus, the little horse. He flipped to the photo he’d taken of the salamander to see that the pattern made by the two constellations echoed the design on its back. These stars would rise at sunset on the eve of Lúnasa. Tomorrow night.
What was that Peavey, or Ned, had said? It’s not so much a place as a time. Didn’t an event need both?
As his app ran in fast forward, it appeared the two horses emerged from the animated lake on his mobile phone screen and into the sky. Depending upon the location, these horses would appear to rise from water. Water horses.
His gaze wandered to his wrist and the symbol left there by the green gods.
“Stars and stones,” he muttered.
“What you got there?” Celeste asked. She seemed to notice the tattoo for the first time, or pretended to.
“Folly of my youth.” He tried to laugh.
“Do tell. Were you once a member of the Order?” She took his hand from across the table and examined the tattoo, her fingers running softly over the blue ink and over his open palm in a sensuous manner.
“No.” He attempted to draw his hand away casually, but she held tightly.
“You are an interesting man,” she said. “Quite deep, I should think.”
He took a long swallow of his stout with his free hand. All he could think about was preparing for the rising of these stars, though he had no idea how.
Celeste was talking, continuing to caress his open palm and the tattoo on his wrist. “I personally think life is a road to self-discovery and unless we take risks, try on personas and ideals, we stagnate and fail to grow. What about you, Hugh?”
Thankfully, his phone lit up with a text message from Iris. People in the woods by brook. Come home.
**
The sky was still bright with long summer twilight when they started home from the pub. Celeste insisted she introduce Dish to the festival preppers who were undoubtedly the people Iris had seen in the woods. Dish agreed. It was time he confronted them. They’d been snooping around the brook and the cairn for long enough. The idea that these people had something to do with the Sunless seemed ridiculous. Peavey must have been mistaken.
The Order of the Green was a local group of self-proclaimed druids who borrowed rituals from witches, Native Americans, and anyone else who worshiped the forces of nature. Dish had a hard time believing Merryn would have anything to do with such quacks.
Celeste parked in the layby just where the brook crossed the country lane. Cars lined the road, stacked along the hedgerow, but there were no people to be seen.
“All in there,” she said, pointing through a stile in a rock wall toward a great pasture that led to the forest. “The Order has designated Trevaylor Wood as a sacred grove. The owner of the land is a member, so it works perfectly.”
“You might inform them that the land across the brook is not part of this farmer’s property. It’s my aunt’s. They’ve been wandering about over there recently.”
“Something to discuss with them.”
She got out of the car and pulled the wheelchair from the boot.
Dish leaned from the window. “I don’t do much hiking these days. Perhaps their, er, leader, could come here.”
“That’s not the idea, love.”
She reached through the window and placed a warm palm on his cheek as if they’d known each for longer than three days. Then she leaned in and gave him a long kiss. A surge of warm longing filled him; he felt his loneliness burst from behind a wall he’d been building these six years. Why had she brought him here? His confusion knotted with a forgotten desire. How could this be happening?
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
“Right back?” he said to himself. And then what? What was it she wanted from him? He couldn’t allow himself to hope it was him she wanted. Not with everything else happening now.
While she was gone, Dish texted Iris, told her where he was and that he would soon meet the strangers who had been roaming the woods and the brook at the end of the pasture. But before he could hit send, the car door opened and a large man reached in and took the phone.
“Sorry,” he said, and was joined by another large man, and the two proceeded to hoist Dish from the vehicle.
“What’s going on here?”
“We’re to help you to your wheelchair.”
“You don’t need my phone for that.”
They failed to reply, but roughly loaded Dish into the wheelchair, held by yet a third man.
“This chair doesn’t go off-roading.”
“We’ll manage.”
They started over the bumpy ground, squeezing through the stone stile and across a pasture crowded with tents and campfires and people with whistles and drums, streamers of green leaves and antlers lashed to tall staves. They stopped what they were doing and stared at him. A holistic bunch, they were in cotton and leather and tie-dye; a few wore necklaces of feathers and shells and bones, and one woman in particular held a knife with a stone blade. A soothblade.
“Stars and stones,” she muttered as he passed. Dish thought he heard the words in Ildana, or maybe the tongue of the Old Blood.
His heart began to race.
The men pushed him toward an arbor of green withies that formed a portal into the trees. From here, he caught a glimpse of the sun setting over the pasture on the far side of the brook, Merryn’s farm. This place was directly across the brook and through the woods from the cairn and Lyla’s tree.
“I’ll have my phone back, now, if you please.”
But the men ignored him.
When the way became rougher, they carried his chair like a litter until they reached a small pocket meadow of bracken and mossy saplings. In the center of the clearing stood the stump of a dead tree, carved into what Lyl would have called ‘the Cernos,’ one of the frightful forest incarnations of the green gods. Its gaping mouth opened into the interior of the hollow stump. Polished black stones were set for its eyes, and ram horns fixed to its brow. No wonder early Christians classified the druids as demonic.
“I understand you’ve been visiting this part of the wood for some weeks now,” Dish began, directing his gaze at a man who wore a circlet of ivy, a designation of a high druid, or one of some rank. At least they had that part of the charade right.
“We seek the well,” the man stated. He was about forty with streaks of gray woven in his long hair and beard. He was working at the Merlin look, Dish surmised.
“There are wells aplenty in this area,” Dish said. “Madron is in the village—”
“You know the well I mean. And you know what’s needed to open it.”
He realized Celeste was standing behind him, her hands on his shoulders. She said, “He means the salamander, love.”
How could she know about the salamander? Were they Merryn’s kin, Old Blood? Even if they were Old Blood, they should have no conscious memory. Unless someone told them about what was to come. Someone like Merryn… or Peavey.
“Who are you and why should I answer any of your questions?”
Celeste moved one hand from his shoulder and returned it with a soothblade, which she pressed to his throat.
“Celeste,” he whispered. “Why? What is it you want from me?” What a fool he was. An utter, hopeless, crippled fool. And now he was at her mercy. Entirely.
She leaned close, her lips on his earlobe, whispering, “The blood of a king would be a welcome gift to the Cernos.”
Then he understood. They weren’t Old Blood. They were Sunless. And by the looks of it, their memories were fully intact.
“You think threatening to kill me will get what you want?” He laughed. “If you know anything, you know that opening the well is out of your hands, and mine.”
“Oh, but you’re wrong. We all play a part in its opening. Even you, Lord Nechtan.”
She took hold of his right hand, but he pulled it away. He shoved her to the ground and grabbed the rims of the wheelchair and tried to move it.
One of the men held fast to the handles of his chair. Dish punched a fist upward into his jaw and got the chair moving.
Celeste came at him with the blade, slashing wildly. He caught her arm and twisted it until the soothblade fell into his lap.
Before he could get his hands on it, something struck him on the side of the head. He and the chair tumbled over into a bed of bracken. He tried to crawl away, to get his hands on something, anything that could act as a weapon, but the thugs were on him, dragging him back to the righted chair and Celeste.
The men held his arms down as Celeste drew the blade over his wrist, cutting across the tattoo.
Dish growled with rage and pain, willing his dead legs to move, to carry him into the fight. But he sat, held fast to his chair by two men as his blood spurted over Celeste’s white blouse. He looked down at his wrist. Blood welled across the neck of the water horse tattooed there.
The ivy-wreathed priest caught his blood in a stone bowl. Flashes of Connor catching Merryn’s blood forced its way into his mind. Was Connor one of them? He refused to believe it. And now he
would bleed out, his blood some magical draught for the Sunless.
“Blood of a king,” Celeste proclaimed, lifting the bowl to the high druid. “King of the Ildana, the usurping bastards.”
She handed the bowl to the druid and then straddled Dish in the wheelchair. She slid her bloody hands to his cheeks, and kissed him. Her tongue was a serpent. She tasted his soul, tasted his past, his failures and deepest desires. She was lying there beside him under the starwood tree while he made love to Lyleth, her hand was on the spear beside Talan’s as he drove it into Nechtan’s belly. And she stood beside him when he found Connor collecting Merryn’s blood in a baking pan.
As she released him, she said with undisguised mockery, “You never wanted the throne. What kind of king are you?”
She stood, and took the bowl of blood from the priest and, muttering words in the tongue of the Old Blood, she poured some into the gaping mouth of the Cernos.
Then she turned to him and said, “The rest is for the salamander.”
The blow came from behind him. Then there was silence.
Chapter 26
A stone’s throw from the shield wall at the edge of the bog, Lyleth, Dylan and Connor waited in the moonlight. Talan’s reply to Lyleth’s request to meet would come soon, and that reply might just as easily mean death for all three of them.
Lyleth slid from her horse and untied Connor. He was weak but conscious, and fell from the horse into her arms. She wrapped his arm around her neck, saying, “It will be over quickly. Dylan will see to it.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered.
Dylan took Connor’s other arm and together, they supported the dying man’s weight. Brixia nuzzled his face. They had tried haltering the pony and leaving her behind, but she had gone into a frenzy. Whatever would happen on that island would happen with Brixia at Connor’s side.
Fiach’s horsemen waited some distance behind them with orders to charge the shield wall when they saw the archers launch the first volley of arrows from the northern shore. But Lyleth knew it would take some time for Fiach’s archers to make their way in darkness around the bog to the woods without being seen. There would be no moon in the woods. How fast they could move and take up position was questionable. Lyleth figured the ritual would be over before they could take their first shot.
