by Terry Madden
“Just a flower,” Ava said to the darkness.
Her voice came from some other where, not from her lips but from her fingertips maybe. Her voice lay on the floor with her body, drooling and convulsing. She slipped into the defiant skin of the red crow, its feathers singed and stinking of burnt flesh. She laughed at Finlys, and flew far away into the dawn and the vale of Elfael.
She would find them.
Chapter 17
Lyleth felt dull tugging at the skin below her collarbone. With effort, she opened her eyes. A sphere of candlelight warmed the room. Then everything started spinning, until Nechtan’s face appeared. Oh, yes… he was sewing her soul’s cloak back on. She remembered now. She remembered driving her dirk into the neck of a young man from Emlyn, remembered the despair in Nechtan’s eyes.
Elowen’s face appeared beside Nechtan’s.
“Pour the steeped herbs first.” Elowen handed Nechtan a pot over his shoulder. “Don’t stitch too deep, deadman.”
“I’ve sewn more men together than you’ve known in your life, lass. Now leave me be.”
Wearing a pout, Elowen’s face vanished.
Lyleth summoned all her strength and clutched Nechtan’s wrist. “There’s no time for this.” The words were thick on her tongue. “Go.”
He peeled her fingers away and went back to work. “Close your eyes and shut up.”
A strong aroma of poplar buds and juniper berries wafted from the concoction he poured over her wounds. This she felt, but only distantly. They must have given her sweet wine or maybe henbane. She spun back into numbness, tried to speak, but only her mind said the words, over and over. She could hear the thread pulling through skin, could see Nechtan’s hands working the needle.
“Not to be unmade,” she heard herself say.
He met her eyes for a long moment, the needle poised in bloody fingers.
“Not to be unmade,” he echoed.
Against her will, her eyes closed.
It wasn’t the words of their binding vow that convinced her, it was the voice that spoke them. She had refused to allow herself to believe it until now. With or without the king’s mark, this man could be no one else but Nechtan. And she had called him back from the dead to kill his own countrymen. Could anything be more heartless? Floating in this painless fog, she admitted, if only to herself, that she had brought Nechtan back to hurt him the way he had hurt her, and today was only the beginning. But he had no memory of those last days. It’s hard to punish a man who has no memory of his sin.
Through the narrow slivers of her eyes, she watched him, his brow furrowed in concentration as he pulled and knotted her back together.
This wasn’t the man who so wronged her. No, she had raised to life the man she knew long ago, the man who asked her to bind her life to his so they might lead a kingdom together, the man who once ruled the vast wasteland of her heart.
She couldn’t hold her eyes open any longer, and fell back down that well of body-less peace.
Was she dreaming? Or remembering? Nechtan took her hands and leaned close, his breath warm on her neck.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” he whispered. “Stay with me.”
When she forced her eyes open, the spinning of the room had slowed and a single candle began to gutter out on the bedside table. Thinking she was alone, she tried to sit up and saw him slumped beside her, his arm draped over her legs. Asleep. She let her fingers stroke his hair.
“Not to be unmade,” she whispered.
Dawn poked through cracks in the wattle and daub. Chickens hunted insects in the thatch overhead, sending faint drifts of dust through shafts of sunlight. She was in the inn by the river, Lyleth reminded herself. The crackling burn of her skin had gone, and a blessed cool filled her.
She sat up, the stitches pulling taut. Was it dawn? No, it was dusk, it must be. She had slept through the day and she was alone. She hoped Nechtan had fled for it wouldn’t be long before Fiach missed the men he’d sent here, and he would certainly send more. Many more.
She made her way to the staircase that led to the common room. Voices and the smell of fresh bread met her as, peering over the splintered handrail, she saw Elowen and the boy who had been playing at the smallpipes the night before. A game of hounds and hares sat between them, the boy deep in thought over his next move.
“You cheat,” he said.
“I do not cheat. I’m jus’ smarter ‘an you’s all. ‘Tis not hard.”
As if sensing her presence, Elowen looked up and gave Lyleth a toothy grin.
“You’re back,” the girl said.
The boy shot to his feet, and taking the stairs two at once, appeared at Lyleth’s side, offering his arm.
“Lady,” he said, “I’m Dylan, at your service.”
“Tell me, Dylan, where is Nechtan?”
“Seeing to the—”
“The dead. He should be gone from here.”
She took the boy’s arm, still feeling weak as a babe.
“He’s jus’ been waiting for you to waken. He tol’ me to tell ye that he’ll be back soon. I’m to see to your comforts.”
“Where’s the innkeep?”
“Gone to help me lord king. What might I bring ye, lady?”
“The bread smells grand. Have you apples?”
“Oh aye, sweet as light, our apples.”
They’d reached the bottom stair. “Milk, as well, if you have it.”
“I’ll fetch it fresh.”
“Thank you.”
Dylan disappeared into the kitchen and Lyleth took the bench across from Elowen. The game pieces were indeed positioned for Elowen’s red hounds to make the killing move.
“Nechtan should have fled at first light,” Lyleth said.
“The deadman won’t leave you, druí, ye must know that. He makes ready to go by night.”
It was true, darkness would allow them to cross the plain unseen. Perhaps it was best. And they’d have horses; Fiach’s men had no use for theirs now. But what must be done with this girl? Take her with them? Leave her here with the innkeeper and the boy?
“You’re a greenwood babe,” Lyleth said to Elowen, remembering their conversation by the well. The girl was born with more than ordinary instincts, like Lyleth, like all greenmen. “You should be schooling in a hive.”
“It suits me poorly.” Elowen snuffed as if she smelled something foul. “All that poesy and practice. Bending the knee to gods who care not for me, nor for no one else.”
“That’s why you live by the offerings left at the wells. You ran away.”
“You’d ‘ave run too if you weren’t so dutiful,” Elowen said, crossing her arms.
“And when you got back to your family, what did they do?” Lyleth knew the answer, but she wondered if Elowen had even tried to return home when she fled her school.
“Shut the door on me, they did. Said they knew me not.”
Lyleth searched the child’s face for the hurt, but she knew Elowen had scrubbed that hurt away as she must.
If Lyleth had left Dechtire’s hive and tried to make her way home, the same fate would have faced her. The get of May Eve revels belonged to the greenmen. Withholding a child would bring the curse of the green gods and no father or mother would call such as this down upon themselves. Instead, the chieftain paid them a yearly blood price in lambs or calves just as he would if he had slain their child with his own hands. Greenwood babes belonged to the land.
“I might have stayed,” Elowen said, “if I could study with the great Dechtire, like you’ve done. ‘Tis true, you studied with her?”
“Aye, so I did.”
“They say she makes stones speak.”
Lyleth smiled. “In a way, aye.”
“And she reads the future in the spinning of clouds.”
“Dechtire sees with the eye of leaf and stone,” Lyleth explained. “You can see much when you rid your heart of desire.”
“Become a tattered rag, blowin’ about in the wind? Nay, not
I.”
Lyleth smiled. “You captain your own ship. How envious I am.”
Elowen returned the smile.
There was no mothering on the Isle of Glass, only lessons. It wasn’t that Dechtire treated her students badly; in fact, Lyleth had been favored by her teacher. No, Dechtire scoured one’s soul that it might be filled with the will of the gods, as indifferent to the passions of men as star and stone. But Lyleth longed for her frailties.
“’Tis your loyalty that bleeds you dry, druí,” Elowen said, moving a red hound on the game board to take Dylan’s last hare. “Like a rabbit in a wolfhound’s mouth, ye are.”
Elowen snapped up the wooden piece and held it out.
Lyleth took it and turned it over in her hand. Stiffly carved, its ears whittled to long sharp points, its two eyes burnt out by a hot nail. As bloodless as the dead.
“Perhaps so,” Lyleth said.
Dylan appeared from the kitchen with a loaf of bread, a pitcher of warm milk and three small apples.
“My thanks,” Lyleth said. “Dylan, my lord might have need of another pair of hands. Will you see to it?”
The boy brightened, tripping over his feet on the way to the door. “As you command, lady.” And he was gone.
Butter fat floated in yellow spheres on the warm milk. Lyleth poured a cup for herself and Elowen, who broke off a chunk of bread and soaked up the milk with it. The apple was indeed sweet.
“What will you do,” Elowen asked, “when Marchlew finds the king has no mark?”
Lyleth stopped chewing. “I don’t know.”
Elowen popped the sops in her mouth and mumbled on, “You thought you raised a king from the dead, but instead, ye raised just a man.”
The melody of truth is hard to ignore.
“Aye,” she said at last, “so I did.”
“Which one owns your devotions, druí? The man or the king?”
The door burst open and Dylan reappeared, his arms heaped with mail. He dropped it beside the table, and announced, “My lord comes.”
Nechtan came through the door, followed by the innkeeper. “We’ll need four days’ food and clean linen for bandages,” he was saying.
“Aye, my lord.”
When Nechtan saw Lyleth, his face bloomed with relief.
“But before you do,” Nechtan told the innkeeper, “bring a pitcher of ale and sit with me and my solás.”
“Sit with you, my lord?”
“I’m no ghost. Drink with me.”
Nechtan took the bench beside Elowen and dropped a pair of cracked sharkskin bracers on the table. His eyes never left Lyleth’s.
“If you please, Lyl.” He held out his arm and she fitted the rough sharkskin around his wrist and began to lace it.
“See to the horses, lass,” Nechtan said to Elowen. “We need blankets as well as food, enough for you if you think to come with us. You eat as much as the plow horse.”
Elowen scowled, and stomped toward the door.
“You’ll take her with us?”
“She knows.” He tapped his right wrist. “She’ll find a place in Cedewain. Marchlew will see to that.”
“If we reach Cedewain,” Lyleth said.
Nechtan had replaced the rags Lyleth had brought for him with the redbeard’s clothes. The gambeson was stained with the man’s blood, but fit Nechtan well enough if a bit tight.
“We must be gone,” she said, and finished the lacing.
“With darkness.” His eyes were a storm of confusion. She couldn’t blame him if the trust he once placed in her had worn thin.
The innkeeper arrived with ale and three drinking horns.
“Sit,” Nechtan told him.
The man crept to the bench beside Lyleth and sat like he might take flight any moment.
“Your son?” Nechtan motioned to the lad who worked at mopping up the remains of last night’s soup and the blood mixed with it.
“Oh, nay. He’s ‘prenticed here, seeing I have none of me own.” The innkeeper swallowed and worked his empty hands into a knot.
“Where’s he from?” Nechtan asked.
“The lad? Oh…” The innkeeper lowered his voice, “from the Silver Marches. His own kin slaughtered by the ice-born, and he, no more than a cricket then. Hid in a grain bin, he did. Or he’d be slave to ‘em now.”
Nechtan poured a horn of ale and set it before the man.
“I don’t expect you to keep silent about what happened here,” he said. “I expect you to speak truth.”
“Truth, aye, ‘tis all I’m able, me lord.” His eyes were two blue coins, fixed on Nechtan.
Lyleth knew as well as Nechtan that when you want to know something, ask an innkeeper. No better information could be bought for gold feathers.
“Ava has called up the men of Elfael and Ys?” Nechtan asked.
“That she does, my lord, at least four hundred men of Elfael march to meet her forces, and with those of Fiach and Lloyd, oh, thrice that or more.”
“She marches north?”
“So they say.”
“Have any of the chieftains of Elfael refused her?”
“Refuse? Ho, I think not, my lord. They’ve pledged their blood to her.” The innkeeper took a deep swallow of the ale, licked foam from his thick lips, and leaned close over the table as if there might be spies in the empty room. “Marchlew offered his son in marriage to Ava in trade for his loyalty,” the innkeep whispered. “To spare bloodshed, is what Marchlew was after, they say. I says aye, to spare his own bloodshed.”
Incredulous, Nechtan said, “Ava wed my nephew? And what did she say to that?”
The innkeeper grew stony. “She gave him her answer, aye. She pulled Marchlew’s greenman apart, she did, legs and arms, then tossed him on the fire, his soul taking flight as a bird, they say.”
“She executed Marchlew’s druí?” Lyleth said.
“Worse than execute. ‘Tis the way of the ice-born to make death a gift. That she did.”
“Ava wants this fight,” Lyleth said. The realization frightened her. “She’s baiting Marchlew.”
“Then we must reach him before she does,” Nechtan said.
“Before the Bear beaches his longboats to join her,” Lyleth said.
“Might I ask you one thing, me lord,” the innkeep said with a timid dance of his eyebrows.
“Of course.”
The innkeep licked his lips, twice. “How is it you were dead, me lord, and now alive?”
It was Nechtan’s turn to lean conspiratorially across the table. “The green gods saw fit to call me back from the land of the dead. For one reason alone. The Bear comes for the throne of the Five Quarters. I’m here to stop him.”
Chapter 18
It would soon be dark. Nechtan figured it would take two nights to reach the mountains that bordered the plain of Elfael, longer if Lyleth tired easily. Now that she was stitched up, he could only hope the plaster she had used so many times on him would be effective—pine sap, wine and silver powder. Finding silver powder proved a challenge, and he resorted to having the local smith grind down two silver salmons from Lyl’s money pouch.
Regardless of Lyl’s condition, they must be gone.
Darkness would have to protect them across the open fields of Elfael, for Ava would have marched north by now, and she and Fiach would snap at Nechtan’s heels all the way to Cedewain.
“My lord. I cleaned the armor like you tol’ me. ‘Tis there.” Dylan nodded at a pile of mail and weapons on the floor by the hearth. “I dunno how to put an edge on a blade, I fear.”
“Then it’s time you learn. Bring a whetstone and some wool grease. We haven’t much time.”
“Aye, my lord.”
Something about this lad haunted Nechtan. He resembled the boy in his dreams. Close in age, sandy-haired and coltish, but mostly, it was the timbre of their voices. Could Nechtan’s dreams be not of the Otherworld, but of this boy? The thought nagged him.
Dylan returned with a whetstone and grease and Ne
chtan took a stool by the fire. The horsemen’s axes were well made, and balanced as are axes for mounted combat. With deep horns and long curved hafts, they offered weight and a long reach. Sharpened, they would make a better choice for battle than the shortsword. He would put an edge on that, too.
“The angle is the most important thing,” he told Dylan.
“Aye, my lord.” The boy licked his lips, his eyes never leaving the stone and blade. “What’s the grease for?”
“You don’t want your blades to rust, now, do you? When it’s sharp as winter, then you rub some grease in. Here, you try.”
The boy took the axe and stone and roughed up a ragged burr. Nechtan showed him how to smooth it. But the boy’s eyes found Nechtan’s.
“You need a squire, my lord. I can keep your blades sharp, your mail clean—jus’ let me come with ye.”
“I ride to war, lad.”
“I’m old enough. I can fight.”
Would the dreams stop if he took the lad with him? Could Dylan possibly survive the days to come? Was he meant to?
“Besides, the lass rides with ye, she tol’ me so. If she can go—”
“Why do you want to come with me? Tell me the truth.” Nechtan studied the boy’s coppery eyes.
Dylan licked his lips and worked at finding words. “I dreamt you would come, and here you are.” He seemed to be measuring Nechtan’s response, clearly waiting for laughter.
“Go on.”
“I dreamt it over and over. In some dreams you’d be nary but a corpse what’s lost half its skin, but fight on ye did. Slayin’ scores before ye. Then, in other dreams… well, you’d be you. Just like ye are now. Sittin’ here in this very room. But last night, t’was different.”
The lad’s eyes flitted away.
“Different, how?”
“You slept, like one of the dreaming kings of old. But instead of being laid out in your barrow, ye were in a gleaming room of frosty light. Pale as the linens, ye were. Sleepin’.”
