by Terry Madden
When he got back from the shrink’s office, he was supposed to go to class, but he’d convinced himself the only reason he didn’t find the well was because it wasn’t dusk when he went last time. Threshold of night. Dish said there was something magical about that time of day.
His dorm room stank of shoes and dust burned on the radiator. Across the quad, he heard the bell ring and knew a flood of kids would stream from classrooms in a few minutes. He locked his dorm room and headed down the hall, hesitating in front of room 21, Dish’s room. He tried the door. Why did he think it would be unlocked?
Jogging across the quad, he tried to beat the navy-blue wave of inmates that streamed toward him.
“Hey, loser!” Iris called. “Wait up!”
The last thing he needed right now was a groping by the psycho bitch.
“Later, Iris,” he called without looking back.
The trail was slippery with mud from the rain. Connor fell a few times, sending spikes of pain through his broken collarbone. It took him longer than usual to reach the ridge where cactus grew over the trail.
Wet from the last night’s rain, the flagstones of the pool deck looked almost new except for the cracks where the weeds poked through. The storm had stripped leaves from a nearby tree and scattered them over the fishpond. They dimpled the water like yellow river rafts and Connor knelt down to drag his fingers through them. The water was warm, and tendrils of steam rose between the leaves. A hot tub.
“Didn’t I make it clear my pad is off limits, dude?” From the shadows of the veranda, Ned sloshed toward him in slippers and a dirty yellow bathrobe.
Connor bolted to his feet. “I just. I mean, I came by a few days ago and this thing was full of algae.”
“So? What’s it to you. Get the hell off my property before I call the cops.”
Connor turned to go, but couldn’t do it. Not without knowing why that fishpond was clean and hot. He turned on Ned.
“Basically, you’re a squatter.”
Ned stiffened and gave a theatrical look of shock. “Correction,” he said. “This squatter saved your sorry ass from drowning. Now shoo, asshole.”
“I should call the police.”
Ned gave a phlegm-riddled laugh. “The police? Jesus H. Christ. So what is it you want from me, you blackmailing bastard?”
Connor wanted the well to open up and swallow him, he wanted to find Dish, to make him understand.
“I fell through this pool,” he blurted to Ned, “and came up in a cave. I was taken across. By a well guardian.”
“A well what?”
“I need to cross over. To the other side.”
Ned’s face folded into an origami scowl. He stood there for a full minute, then reached into the pocket of his dirty robe, pulled out a joint and lit it. He flipped a switch buried in the shrubs and the tub frothed to life. Leaving his robe on the deck, he stepped in and sank to his neck, then took a drag.
“You’re a crazy fuck, I’ll give you that,” he said with the tiny voice people do when they’re holding in smoke. “But what do you want from me? You’re holding me hostage here.”
Connor paced around the hot tub, leaving a wet trail like a snail. What did he want from Ned?
“What did you mean when you said, ‘He’s a million miles away’?”
Ned looked up through a cloud of smoke. “What?”
“When I was here the other day, you said Dish was breathing and pissing, but his mind was a million miles away. What did you mean?”
Ned stared at him, his jaw slack. “Who the fuck is Dish?”
“My teacher, the one in a coma. The guy in the accident. You said you were there.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Shit. Calm down. You’re gonna pop a vein or something.” Ned pressed his palms down over the water, the joint brown between his fingers. “I just meant there has to be someone still inside these guys who are in comas. I mean, it’s like you’re asleep for months or something. Dreaming about what? Ya know?”
“You think they dream?”
“Shit, I dunno, kid. Do I look like a psychologist? I mean his consciousness has got to still be somewhere.”
“Yeah.” Connor kept pacing. “He is somewhere. I just can’t get there.”
Connor looked out over the ocean where the sun was just setting. Threshold of night. This was it.
“Can you just—just turn it off?” Connor said. “And go back in the house, and come out just like you did last time?”
“What is this, some kind of weird role-playing therapy or something?”
“I just want to see if I can swim through again, that’s all.”
“Swim through what?”
“Please. It’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Then you’ll leave.” Ned stared Connor down.
“Yeah.”
Ned sighed and hoisted himself out of the water, dripping and steaming. He flipped the bubble switch off, pulled on his robe and headed back toward the house, glancing over his shoulder a few times.
Connor took off his shoes and shirt, walked back to the fence and started running toward the pool. He didn’t look, just ran right in like he did the first time. His feet hit the bottom and his head never even went under.
“Shit!”
Ned reappeared, looking down his hairy chest at Connor, the joint twitching between his lips. “You’re a crazy fuck.”
A desperate emptiness coursed through Connor.
It must have shown on his face, because Ned sighed, flipped on the bubbles and stepped back into the tub.
“I saw him.” Connor found the concrete seat and let his legs be buoyed by the jets. “When I was in here, drowning or whatever. I saw him.”
“You saw your teacher?”
“Yeah.”
“People see all kinds of shit when they’re knocked out—”
“I didn’t hit my head. I wasn’t drowning.” It was the first time Connor had let himself admit it. It felt true.
“I beg to differ. But okay, let me hear your theory.”
He passed the joint to Connor. Weed wouldn’t help him sort out reality. “I see enough shit already. Thanks.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Before you pulled me out,” Connor said, “I was in a pool of water, in a cave. And my teacher was there with a woman. And I finally know what I was seeing.”
“And what was that exactly?”
Connor started to sweat, in the water. He reached over and took the joint from Ned and took a long drag that seared his lungs. He tried to hold it in, but coughed out plumes of the stuff. He had no idea it would hurt that bad.
Ned grinned. “Go on. You got me trembling with anticipation.”
It came tumbling out, Dish’s weird clothes, the pretty woman who was bleeding, Connor’s hand passing right through Dish like he was a ghost. Ned listened with his caveman brows all knotted up and his mouth hanging open.
“I think Dish was supposed to die in that accident,” Connor said. “And now a bunch of machines are keeping him alive.”
“So, you just wandered into this guy Dish’s dream? But if he died, he wouldn’t be dreaming—”
“It was no dream. It was another world. It was as clear as you and me sitting here. Dish was looking for a well, his sister told me so. And he found it on the beach. Then bam, he’s in a coma and the well on the beach is gone. Because it moved. Here. Right here.” He pointed at the water around them.
Ned gave him a long, measured look, like he was calculating what he should say to prevent a hysterical breakdown.
“So… where is this well now?”
“That well on the beach was bait.” Connor took another hit from Ned’s joint. “And Dish took the bait. And now his soul is over there, but his body is trapped here. Just like you said. Besides, the woman told me to ‘give him time.’ She needs him.”
A long silence was followed by Ned saying, “Okay. So who ‘baited’ this guy Dish? Tell me that.”
Connor sighed. “I don’t kn
ow.”
“This might be a little off the Narnia topic,” Ned said and exhaled a blue stream of smoke. “But where the fuck were you and teach going when you got whacked?”
“I have no idea.”
Startled, Ned looked up at the darkening sky. “Friend of yours?”
Connor followed Ned’s gaze to find Iris standing at the edge of the hot tub.
“Oh shit. No chance.”
Connor was out of the hot tub faster than he thought possible. The thought of Iris seeing the pimples on his skinny shoulders sobered him up fast. He tried to pull his shirt over his wet skin with no success.
Oh god, she was taking off her clothes. How long had she been standing there?
“I want to hear everything,” she said, and stepped into the hot tub with nothing on but her hot pink thong.
Chapter 16
Ava found Irjan in her chamber, a windowless room that had once been an armory. When she first arrived at Caer Ys, Irjan had chosen this room for its darkness. “The sunlight weakens my compounds,” she’d said.
The small room was crammed with shelves of unguents, distillates, and rare roots, wings of birds and insects, powdered stone from across the sea, parts taken from badgers and whales, stinging flies and beetles, reindeer and men. From ceiling beams, bunches of herbs and seedpods hung above ochre and cinnabar, ash, lead and silver powder ordered in crocks against the wall. Ava had yet to learn the use of such things, but certainly, in those jars and vials lay the makings of a poison that could kill a king.
The room smelled like vitriol and dead things, but Ava still had the smell of Finlys’ burning flesh in her nose. The fire had finally burned out, and the winds off the sea had taken the last of the greenman’s smoke to the inland vales and peaks of Ys.
Irjan sat on a narrow cot, a small table before her cluttered with herbs and a mortar which she worked rhythmically.
“You must learn to guide him now,” Irjan said.
“Must I?”
“You’ve tethered a man’s soul to yours, my lady. This druí, Finlys, is bound to you far stronger than is your solás, and you must learn to command him before he commands you.”
But Ava hadn’t come for a lesson. Not this time. She’d come for truth.
Irjan stood and showed her palms, the bells on her hat singing a faint tune. She wore the garb of a shaman of the frozen wastes, a coat of reindeer pelt and a bright blue cap of the four winds. The spirits must recognize her as their taskmaster, servant as she was, of the Crooked One.
Irjan tapped the powder from her mortar into a horn vial and stirred it with a bone. “We have little time if we are to march north as you have commanded.”
“Finlys cursed me with the truth before he died,” Ava said. “I come to discover it. All of it. The old meadmonger, Dunla, said it was no festering wound that killed Nechtan. It was you.”
Ava closed the space between them.
Irjan stopped stirring, a vague smirk playing at her lips. Ava peered into those small black eyes. Perhaps she’d been wrong to place so much trust in one who’d wedded the dead.
“The daughter of the Bear questions her own destiny,” Irjan said.
Ava’s father had taught her to trust no one, least of all those closest to you. She could still see Nechtan lying on his deathbed, the wound on his neck a stinking mass of corruption, and Irjan…
“You never touched the salve you used to dress his wound,” Ava said. “You spread its poison over Nechtan’s skin with a wooden butter knife. Then you wrapped it, so careful not to touch it.”
“I did what I must to serve you—”
“Which one is it?” Ava ran her fingers over the racks of jars and horn vials.
“Your king had lost himself to drink and desire,” Irjan said. “How long would it have been before your father saw Nechtan’s weakness?”
“My father is not your concern. I am.”
“Your husband shamed you—”
“Then it should have been my hand that took his life.”
“Oh, dear one.” Irjan gathered Ava in a motherly embrace, but Ava shook her off.
“It is not your destiny to shape mine, slave.”
“Is it not?” Irjan said. “A king, even a she-king, who wears the stain of murder is not a king at all, but a tyrant. Would the gods have chosen a tyrant to lead these people? Would the guardian have given herself to your blade? No. I wear that stain. For you, my Iron Lamb.”
The woman’s brown lips quavered, her beetle-black eyes threatened to spill tears.
“Guards!” Ava called, and they appeared. “Take her.”
Irjan looked over her shoulder, saying, “I offer you wings.”
Ava didn’t sleep that night. The truth of Irjan’s words settled like a gentle snow. If Irjan had not intervened, Nechtan would have sunk deeper in the mire of shame he’d dug, and yes, the Bear would have come to deliver him of his weakness. Ava’s father would own this land now, and he would have married Ava to one of his thegns. No, Nechtan’s drunken spectacle at the Midwinter revel was a dagger he plunged into his own belly.
The Bear had sent Irjan to open Ava’s womb to Nechtan’s seed, but in this, she had failed. It was a judgment from the gods, for the offspring of such a man would grow into such a weakling as his sire. It was for the best that her babes were born dead.
The fertility spell had been cast in Irjan’s musty chamber. It was Ava’s first glimpse of the power Irjan offered. That night, Ava had told Nechtan she was meeting with the seamstress.
Once in Irjan’s chamber, she stripped and lay on the stone floor. A black hen pecked around her head while Irjan held the hen’s egg cradled in her outstretched palms. She chanted in a language unknown to Ava, until her eyes were as savage as a wolf’s. She danced with the egg, miming the act of copulation, led by some lecherous spirit. She tore at her shift, her tongue wagged and slaver ran from the corners of her mouth.
The egg was as hot as a coal when Irjan’s calloused hand pushed it between Ava’s legs.
She lay frozen as Irjan took the hen by the neck and, in one motion, struck off its head. The body ran, flopping, around the room, falling over Ava, scratching her with its talons. When the thing finally fell dead beside her, Irjan picked up the body and sprinkled the blood on Ava’s breasts and belly. Still chanting, she drew symbols on her flesh with the bird’s blood, and instructed Ava to sit up. She cracked the egg into Ava’s cupped palms and bid her eat it.
She did.
Irjan instructed Ava to rouse Nechtan from sleep and mount him. That night, she would command his desires.
She did.
She felt a new power coursing through her. She demanded and Nechtan’s body obeyed. It was the first time she’d felt sweet release spread through her, spilling as he did into her belly. Throughout that night, she’d only wanted more of him and he didn’t deny her. Whatever magic Irjan had worked, Ava greedily reaped the rewards.
Nechtan planted a child in her that night that grew for longer than the others before Ava expelled it into a bloody bed. It was a boy. Nechtan’s child was too small to live in this world, yet his fingers were formed, his body perfect, like one of the Asrai.
Nechtan was away when she lost that child, settling a dispute between cattle lords in Emlyn. She kept the babe in an empty butter crock where it dried. Upon his return, she dropped the thing in his lap at supper.
“Your son,” she told him.
She could forgive him for not loving her, for love is not a wife’s right, but Nechtan brought her shame and disgrace that Midwinter night.
Within one turn of the moon, Nechtan was as dead as his babes.
Ava pulled open the shutters of her bedchamber and watched the sky brighten over the eastern mountains. What if the Bear knew of Ava’s crowning? Of Cedewain’s rebellion? Would her father risk a late autumn crossing of the Broken Sea to lay claim to the spoils of Ava’s efforts?
She accepted the truth. She had traded Nechtan’s life for his throne. Now she had
to find a way to hold it.
She called her guards. “Bring Irjan to her chamber, where I shall await her.”
Irjan was smiling when they brought her in, as if she’d been smiling all night. Ava dismissed the guards and closed the chamber door, throwing the latch.
“Teach me,” Ava demanded.
Irjan showed her palms and moved to pull the cot away from the corner. Ava helped. Behind a stack of crockery, Irjan revealed a hole in the stone wall, large enough for a wolfhound to pass through.
“What’s this?”
“In ancient days,” Irjan explained, “the outer wards were yet unbuilt, the keep more vulnerable. This armory door could be barred from inside, and the weapons could be taken out through here.” She pointed at the hole in the wall.
“What we do, we do in secret?”
“When you fly,” Irjan said, “the body you leave behind is as fragile as a babe. You must be protected. I must always watch over you.”
Irjan had taught Ava to use herbs that loosen the shackles of the flesh and allow the soul to roam free. But without a strong command of the self, one could be lost in the wasteland between worlds. It frightened Ava at first, but now she only wanted to see more.
Irjan lit a rushlight, got on her knees and crawled through the hole in the wall. Ava followed.
Inside, a narrow chamber opened onto a dark passageway that vanished between the walls of the inner keep. Irjan had placed a straw mattress on the dusty floor. Ava spread her cloak, stepped out of her gown, and lay down on her side. Irjan bound her wrists behind her with a sinew cord, then wrapped the other end around Ava’s neck.
“This noose will keep your soul bound to your body,” Irjan said, “for if the cord is broken, your soul will have no need to return, it will cross the water and leave this body behind.”
Irjan uncorked a vial and dipped a hollow bird bone into the tincture. This she dripped into Ava’s eyes, all the while intoning the summoning of that which was bound, the soul of the greenman, Finlys.
Ages ago, the seed of the self was stripped from some forgotten flower; the husk of petals and pollen carried by a north wind to meet the sea. How long could Ava ride the currents of this cold deep? How long could she imagine herself into life? Waiting until the slow drifts of sleep washed her up on a beach of fertile soil only to become a flower once again.
