by Terry Madden
“He doesn’t want anything, Iris. He doesn’t even know he’s here.”
Gently, she took the teddy bear from under Dish’s arm and held it like a little girl as she wandered to the shelf full of cards. She positioned the bear in a jaunty pose beside some wilted flowers, but her hand came down with the little whiskey bottle Merryn had left. She had the top off before Connor could stop her. She sniffed it.
“There’s water in here.”
He tried to grab it, but she was faster than he expected. “What do you know about this water, Connor?”
“I know it’s not yours. Put it back.”
“It’s probably holy water from church.” She watched Connor for a response.
He gave her none.
“If it’s holy water,” she said, “maybe it can help Dish, give him a little god mojo.”
Her eyes didn’t leave Connor while she poured a splash into her palm and let it trickle over Dish’s waxy white forehead. It rolled off and vanished in the pillow under his head.
Connor snatched the bottle and struggled to get the cork back from her, finally succeeding just as nurse Holly stepped in.
“Mr. Cavendish’s relatives are here. I’m going to have to cut this visit short.”
Connor slipped the little bottle into the pouch of his sweatshirt with the book. There was no way he was letting Iris pollute Merryn’s well water.
The double doors buzzed and parted and there stood Bronwyn and Merryn. It was now or never. Connor pulled the Ziplocked book from his pocket and fumbled for page 73.
“Here,” he said, thrusting it out to Bronwyn. “I’m not crazy. There’s the mark on Dish’s arm. Right there.” He stabbed his forefinger at the stone. “Dish was going to get this book when the accident happened.”
Merryn reached for the book with two quaking hands, saying, “He found it.”
“And look here.” Connor flipped to the picture of Lyla Bendbow. “I saw her, Merryn. Well, it wasn’t literally her, but it was her in another body.” He hadn’t meant to tell them about falling into the well and the million fish that carried him over to the other side. It just came out. “Remember when you told me you couldn’t just fall through to the other side, you had to be taken. Well, I was carried across by millions of tiny fish. And when I surfaced on the other side, there he was. And he was with her.”
“Fish, you say?” Merryn’s hand was on his arm.
“Tiny fish, all packed together.”
“The souls of the dead,” Merryn said. “There are tales of women who net fish from pools such as this one, and when they eat them, conceive the child who will bear the same soul. You were carried by the Sluagh, lad, the host of the dead.”
“Enough nonsense.” Bronwyn snatched the book from Merryn, slipped it back into the baggie and slapped it into Connor’s hands. She caught his wrist, her nails digging in, and whispered through clenched teeth, “You’ll not come near my aunt again with this insane talk, and if you do, I’ll bring it to the attention of the authorities and have you charged with harassment.”
He matched Bronwyn in a stare-down, not daring to glance at Merryn.
“Your brother is split in two,” he said with all the certainty he possessed. “Don’t you see?”
“I’ve heard enough.”
She took Merryn’s arm and guided her through the double doors. They swung closed slowly. Iris was speechless for once. But the last thing Connor saw was worry in Merryn’s bright blue eyes peeking over her shoulder as the doors closed.
That night, Connor sat at his desk and stared at his homework. The sound of Chinese hip hop seeped from Aaron’s headphones. Connor’s roommate was focused on cutting and pasting information from a website into a research paper on the nature of the muses in Greek literature. He noticed that Aaron hadn’t bothered to make the fonts the same, and Connor didn’t bother to point it out.
Connor turned Merryn’s little whiskey bottle over and over and the water inside glugged back and forth. What if the water had magically awakened Dish when Iris dripped it on him? What would become of the man Connor saw on the other side? He felt sure if Dish woke up here, it would mean death over there. And if Dish died here… would he be lost to the sea, just like the kite? Or would he be free?
He popped the cork and put his finger to the mouth of the bottle and let a single, fat drop bead there. Inside the globe of well water, he saw a perfect, upside down version of the poster above him. Ozzy Osbourne in inverted miniature.
Slowly, he swept his extended finger around the walls of his room. Everything was transformed by the bulging surface tension of the drop until it reached his window and the blazing eye of the moon. He looked deeper into the droplet and saw something move. It wasn’t the moon at all. It looked like a bird, but the drop was just too small to tell.
He picked up the bottle of water and held it up to the moon, but the label hid the water from the light.
Flinging open the bottom drawer of his desk, he dug around, throwing stuff out on the floor.
“What are you doing?” Aaron dropped his headphones around his neck.
“Looking for something.”
Connor found the little glass container, shaped like a Christmas ornament that came with jellybeans from his mom. After dumping the last of the stale candy onto his desk, he opened the bottle and poured the well water into it.
He shut off the room lights and held the water up to the moon.
“Hey! I’m working here, douche!” Aaron said.
“Just give me a minute.”
The moonlight fractured and bounced through the water until it revealed a fire snapping inside the glass ball. And across that fire sat the man who must be Dish. The scene wasn’t inverted like everything else, but right side up. Dish sharpened an axe and talked to the water in the ball like it was a person, but Connor couldn’t hear anything. Dish smiled and looked into the fire. Then his eyes locked on Connor’s. In those eyes stewed a lifetime of struggle and Connor knew the axe in his hand waited for battle. Dish had a score to settle. That’s why he had to go back.
He felt the words move from Dish’s mind to his own, the same words the woman had said to him.
Give me time.
How could Connor give Dish time? He didn’t hold the kite string.
The lights went on.
“I have a paper to write, asshole.”
Just like that, the man inside the water was gone and only the moon and fluorescent light remained.
Chapter 24
Lyleth awoke, her face buried in the crook of her arm to stifle the stench of death. It was day again. The tent was crowded with sacks of flour and barrels of salted meats. Outside, the camp clamored with the ring of an anvil, the passing of horses and boots, and as daylight drifted with motes of dust through the oilcloth, she struggled to focus.
Beside Nechtan’s body rose the center-post of the tent, swaying and creaking with a passing breeze.
Had Fiach ordered she be left without food or water? Or perhaps it was Ava, for the news Lyleth had overheard from passing soldiers said the she-king had arrived.
Lyleth had spent the previous day looking for something, anything that might offer a way out, but now that Ava had arrived, her desperation to free herself consumed her. She attempted to drag the body, but the rope cut deeper into her wrists until she lost feeling in her hands. She considered kicking down the tent pole, thinking it would bring enough men she might snatch a dagger in the confusion. But even if she could get her hands on one, cutting herself free would take time. No, her captors would have to put the weapon in her hand and help her cut the rope. Once free, she would be faced with a quandary—run, or stay long enough to slit Ava’s throat.
She heaved against the rope.
The body was stiff as a tree and just as heavy. She struggled to her feet and straddled the corpse so she could use her legs for leverage in an attempt to drag it. She had to clutch Nechtan’s hair to relieve the strain on her wrists, but it was still no good. Frantic, s
he flung herself against the rope again and again like a tethered beast until she fell, exhausted, on top of his body. The wracking sobs wouldn’t stop, so she stuffed the hem of Nechtan’s cloak in her mouth and screamed until she was empty.
How long she lay there listening to flies, she didn’t know. The hum of their wings filled her belly; the gentle sway of the tent pole lulled her until she imagined Nechtan’s chest rose and fell as if he slept.
A beguiling calm came over her.
She measured her breath and with each inhalation, she became more certain. Fiach was right. She’d loved Nechtan long before her soul came to roost in this flesh, and she would love him in other lands, warmed by other suns, where her mind failed to remember who he was. She’d lived every waking day of this life like a tree in winter, storing love in her roots, letting the wind strip the leaves from her branches.
Come spring, sap pulses from root to leaf, marrow to fingertips.
Lyleth had forgotten how to summon sap to green shoot, to call forth leaves and blooms from her heart.
She thirsted for spring. She thirsted.
Drifting at the bottom of a little hide coracle, she rocked heedlessly on an endless sea. Nechtan was fishing with his drop line, his beardless boy’s face painted against the brightest blue sky. Or was it the sea beyond him?
Sky became sea and sea became sky.
He was laughing and his laughter sounded like a gull’s cry, or was it a crow?
She awoke with a start.
The croak of a crow came from somewhere near the tent opening. She forced her eyes to focus, but couldn’t see past a barrel of salted cod. If she could move it, she might at least have a view out the tent flap. She summoned enough strength to sit up and brace her feet against the barrel, her lower back to Nechtan’s hip. She straightened her legs and pushed. The corpse moved a hand’s width, and the barrel tumbled and rolled away to reveal a view of the sun-dappled ground outside.
Fresh air kissed her face. Boots moved by. The sound of a dice game drifted in and a crow hopped into the tent.
It ruffled its feathers, hopped across the damp ground and perched on Nechtan’s foot.
“Go on. Be gone.” She kicked at it, but it hopped just out of reach.
A shaft of sunlight gave its feathers a queer ruby sheen. A red crow. Could it be the same bird she and Nechtan had seen on the heath? That bird had unsettled Lyleth, for it watched with a far keener eye than it should. Who wore these feathers?
The bird cocked its head, its beak agape. Then it hopped across the grain stubble, to perch again on the corpse’s booted foot.
Lyleth kicked at it again, but it jumped and avoided the blow, and hopped the length of the corpse until it stood on Nechtan’s mailed chest, its eye fixed on Lyleth.
It croaked.
“Are you so afraid to speak to me? Come, coward, let me see you.”
The crow hopped just out of reach. Lyleth lay still and it wasn’t long before it crept back, making its way to Nechtan’s face where it set to work on his eyes.
With her limited reach, Lyleth grabbed for the bird’s legs, but it took wing, alighted on her shoulder for a heartbeat, and flew out into the brightening day.
But for the bird, no one had come into the tent since she was left there, and her thirst was growing fierce. Lyleth’s sense of smell had long since shut down in self-defense and her consciousness ebbed and flowed with the hum of the flies.
Nechtan would be nearing Cedewain. And what then? Every man and woman in the Five Quarters would know there was one living Nechtan and one bloated, rotting corpse of the same man.
By afternoon, her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth and she could no longer produce spit. But her ears still worked. She listened to snatches of conversation, blacksmiths and armorers. Ava had indeed reached the camp and they would march north at dawn.
It was late in the day when a figure darkened the entrance to the tent. A druí looked down his grey robe at Lyleth, and it seemed he waited for her to speak. Was it him who had been watching her with the eyes of the red crow?
He put a cloth to his nose, no doubt soaked in flower oils to dull the stench, and with that motion, he bared his wrist. A tattoo of an eel crawled there. Ava’s solás.
Lyleth’s voice sounded much like the crow’s. “You’ve come without your lady’s permission.” Ava would never have sent her solás to Lyleth, for nothing but truth could pass between two who served the green gods.
“I am Jeven,” he said. “And I cannot let a sister suffer. I must see to your needs.”
She worked hard for the words. “What else could I possibly need?” She nodded to her anchor.
Kneeling beside her, he uncorked a waterskin and held it to her lips. The trickle streamed past her throat and into her belly and she swallowed faster than she should.
“What must I trade for this short extension of my life, Jeven?”
“You spoke the Words of Waking Stone,” he said with obvious admiration. “And those words bear a price—”
“Because we fear the wisdom of the Old Blood? We think of ourselves as children playing with fire. Children grow up. But the chosen of the green gods, the exiled ones… no, they are changeless, they grow neither older nor wiser, Jeven. They seek only the way home.”
“Of one thing, I am certain,” he said. “No price Ava can exact from you could equal the price the green gods will demand.”
“Ah. You’re here to deliver their bill?” She forced a weak smile.
He returned it, saying, “I’m here to see that you live. Nothing more.” He gave her another drink.
“You’ve heard rumors about me.” She hadn’t meant it to sound like an accusation, but it did. “You wonder if it could possibly be true that a man might be raised from the dead clothed in his own likeness, and you wait eagerly to see me meet my fate, saying to yourself, ‘Shall I study such a waking?’”
She lunged against her tether and he nearly fell backward. “You know as well as I,” she said, “that the man who rides to Cedewain is most certainly Nechtan, and this travesty, parading his body before his men means nothing. Not to you, not to me.”
He met her gaze evenly, and she saw his answer there. “You’re wondering why I would risk so much to call a murdered king back from the dead. You must know the answer by now, Jeven. You must know the Bear comes, riding the wake of Ava’s battlecry.”
His grey eyes flitted nervously to hers. She knew he could offer nothing but silence and remain loyal to the she-king. He shouldn’t even be here.
“I am bound to my king,” he said at last.
“As am I.” Lyleth tugged at the ropes at her wrists. “My king was murdered by his wife and her healer. Irjan had but one task and one task only—to murder Nechtan and see Ava to the throne. To make way for the Bear. And the judges of the wildwood crowned her. Out of fear, Jeven. The same reason you serve her now.”
He put the waterskin to her lips again, then took a loaf of bread from his satchel and wedged it between her palms. With one last questioning look, he started away.
“Our lives are not our own, you and I,” she called after him. “Our lives are bound to this land. But your soul belongs to you alone, solás. Remember that.”
A hand’s breadth at a time, Lyleth managed to push Nechtan’s body to the edge of the tent. Here, she could lay her head on the ground and take in fresh air. With one eye, she could see under the oilcloth to the camp outside. The sun was setting and men lined up at cook fires for supper.
That afternoon, they’d stripped Lyleth’s tent of supplies and loaded a wagon with flour sacks and barrels of salt pork and cod. It appeared they would indeed march at dawn.
Ava wouldn’t execute Lyleth. To do so would risk tipping the unsteady scales of her support. No, Ava would simply leave Lyleth out in this open field tied to her king. Wolves and thirst would do the rest.
Nechtan’s corpse wore his ceremonial dress, silver gilt mail that had tarnished, a surcoat of polished linen embroidere
d with a crimson water horse. They had taken his sword belt, of course. But with luck, they’d forgotten he always kept a knife in his left boot. But had they buried him with one?
Lyleth’s hands were far from his boot, and trying to double the body over was impossible, for rigor had set like stone. She tried to slip her hands out of the rope, slick with blood from struggling, but it was useless. Nechtan’s flesh held her fast.
With the supplies gone, nothing remained but Lyleth, the corpse and a box with one hooked nail head protruding from a slat. After frustrating failures, she finally hooked her boot on the nail and worked the laces loose. Her leg cramped with the effort, but at last, she kicked off the boot with her other foot.
Sliding her leg over Nechtan to straddle him, she felt for his left boot with her bare foot. She caught the laces between her toes and pulled slowly. They came free at last without knotting; now she just needed to loosen them. She pushed out the tongue of the buckskin boot with her toes, and when it was loose enough, it was time to pull it off.
Clamping her hands on either side of the corpse’s neck, she rolled quickly to her back, forcing the body to come with her. Holding her breath, her face pressed into the ripples of his mail, she felt for his booted ankle with both feet and, locking her feet around his ankle, she straightened her knees.
The boot barely budged. His feet were as swollen as his guts.
She rolled the corpse back off her and went back to the laces and, very slowly, pulled them out of the grommets. After four tries, the boot slid off his heel.
She pushed the body off her and took another look under the tent. Dirt clung to the sweat on her face and her breath kicked up a small cloud of dust that stung her eyes. Darkness was falling.
With the boot between her feet, she drew her knees up. She tried twice and lost the boot each time, but the third time, it came with her feet and she dropped it on her lap. Peering in, she could just see the hilt of a meat knife.
It was well past dark when she finally worked the boot to her hands. Her body was failing her. Her fingers fumbled the blade in the darkness. She lay there too long, her head on Nechtan’s shoulder.
