by Terry Madden
Nechtan fought for breath. “I sent him… to Pyrs.” He took her face between bloody, quaking palms. But his eyes were hiding something from her when he said, “You promised me...”
A whisper of arrowflight sounded from the walls. Lyleth’s archers had turned back with her, and had taken position on the stockade.
More ice-born were coming.
From the woods across the pasture, mounted thegns appeared.
“Ready your bow,” she told Dylan.
The boy nodded and pulled his bow from his shoulder, and Lyleth did the same. They took up position behind a low jumble of granite. Blinded by tears, she drew her bow and fired. When she glanced back at Nechtan, his eyes were on her.
I’m coming with you, her heart said to his.
He shook his head.
She read his reply on his lips, for she couldn’t hear him now. But it was as clear as if he’d whispered in her ear.
“Call the sea, Lyl.”
Chapter 39
Naked, Connor pulls himself from the river to stand on a bank littered with dead men. The wind is frigid; at least, it should be frigid because snow is falling, but he feels no cold. Looking back to the river, there’s no sign of Ned’s silvery coils. He’s certainly long gone, and without him, there’s no going back.
The bloody muck of this other earth oozes between Connor’s bare toes, but he feels nothing of the satisfying squish. He knows what it should feel like, has indulged in it beside so many lakes, but here, he senses nothing but a dull resistance to his presence.
He’s suddenly overcome by a longing to feel this mud, to taste the snowflakes, to grieve for the dead around him. This world is painted with unnamed colors and sings with music too perfect for his ears. But he is deaf. And he wants nothing more than to rend his flesh, to expose his heart to the light of this fairer sun.
But he’s come here for Dish.
Taking a deep breath, his alveoli swell with birdsong and the steam that rises from cooling horseflesh. He takes in the landscape.
From the edge of a river in a narrow valley, he looks across a field littered with the remains of a bloodbath. But snow is laying down a pure white blanket, covering the heaped bodies of men, horses and dogs.
An arm flails, a dying man sobs. The sight should sicken Connor, but his gut is stone. One of these men is Dish. But there are so many…
He draws another deep breath and smells the faintest fragrance of life, upstream. There, a bridge burns, groans and collapses into the river. The sound of a distant horn tells him the battle still rages there, and if Dish is alive, that’s where he’ll be.
He runs. His feet feel no impact of bone and muscle with earth, so he tries to fly and fails.
From a pile of broken flesh, a boy stirs and sits up. Not much older than Connor, he stands and looks down at the mutilated remains of his own body where crows pull at the flesh of his cheeks.
Connor takes hold of the boy’s arm, saying, “I’m looking for Hugh Cavendish.”
The boy speaks in a language that’s both music and laughter, his eyes dancing with anticipation. Joy.
Connor shakes his head. “I don’t understand.”
The boy points at the river, then back at Connor as if he considers trying again to communicate. Finally, he just gives Connor a weary smile, shows his open palms, and with one last look at his cast-off body, heads toward the river.
Connor watches others stand and after a long look at their bodies, they follow the boy to the river. Connor will follow them also when it’s time to go. When will he ever need to go? Is he dead? Or just trespassing? As they pass by, the dead mutter a greeting, or show their palms, or just meet his eyes with obvious expectation, as if the world they seek, Connor’s world, will be the heaven they hope for. He tries to tell them, “There’s death there, too.” But they just nod, and move on.
“I’m looking for a man,” he begs them, “a warrior, I think.”
When they reply, it’s always the same; they point to the river and say things Connor can’t understand.
Giving up, he turns around to see a boy on a galloping horse, headed upriver. He is a living boy, with helmet and armor flashing silver in the sun.
Connor leaps in front of the charging horse and waves his arms frantically. For a millisecond, this living boy must see Connor, or maybe the horse sees him, because the boy reins the horse hard. It rears and the boy tumbles to the ground. When he regains his feet, he has a sword in his hand and slashes at the air in a circle as if he’s under attack in a dark room.
He’s afraid of me.
Realizing he’s the target, Connor dances out of reach of the hissing sword. Then it catches him, soundlessly slicing through his belly and out the other side, spilling nothing but powdered light.
Unhurt, Connor grabs at the boy’s flailing arms, but just like that time in the cave, Connor’s hand passes through, sensing every corpuscle, every atom, every proton of this boy’s flesh. And something else—the inky stain of fear? Or is it madness?
The boy glances about wildly, blindly, finally sheathing his sword. He walks right through Connor, knocking the breath from him. Molecule passes through molecule, two holograms on different frequencies, never touching, without gravity or friction.
But the boy’s flesh leaves a faint trace of Dish’s blood on Connor, and he looks in the direction from which the boy came. Another fire burns in the distance, a house, and a tower on the ridge above it.
Connor turns to watch the boy step into his stirrup just as an arrow buries in his back. The boy falls. Riders approach, dismount and with a grin, one man swings an axe. He kicks the boy’s head away from his twitching body, then empties the helm of its head. Laughing, he removes his own plain helm and slips on the shiny silver one. It flashes with rough stones.
As quickly as they’d come, the horsemen are gone.
Connor stands beside the body of the boy, waiting for his spirit to rise and head for the river as the others had done. The boy does indeed stand, but not his spirit. His violated body stands, streamers of blood-red powder drift from his severed neck and blow through Connor. As Connor watches, the boy finds his head in the dirty snow and fits it to the stump of his neck. He turns to look at Connor one last time with eyes like embers, then he mounts his horse and rides away.
Over the snowy landscape, Connor’s bare feet fly. He should feel terror, but the dull indifference of this dreamworld makes him a distant observer. His body passes through a fence and into a pen of sheep and there’s Dish, lying among scattered dead. He’s not alone. There’s Lyla, and a blonde-haired girl, and… Dylan. At least he looks like Dylan. But it can’t be.
As Connor starts across the pasture, mounted warriors break from the woods and charge toward them.
The woman he takes to be Lyla and Dylan fire arrows at the riders, but there are so many.
As Connor draws closer, he sees that the woman is crying. She looks over her shoulder at Dish. He says something to her, then she’s holding him, her face buried in his neck, rocking him.
Connor reaches Dylan’s side. The boy’s jaw is clenched. He’s intently drawing the bowstring to his cheek, his dark eyes damp with tears as he sights down the shaft. Dylan’s arrow drops a man, leaving a riderless horse to charge freely through the sheep.
Dylan looks over his shoulder at Dish and Lyla, and mirrored in Dylan’s face Connor sees everything he feels for Dish, and he wishes more than anything he could feel it now. He wishes this boy really was his brother, that he could make Dylan understand how much he misses him and loves him. But this Dylan is a man here. And Dish is his teacher no less than he is Connor’s.
Feeling a surge of desperation, he reaches out to touch Dylan’s hand and hesitates. Connor came here for Dish. The reminder blinks in his mind like the remnant of a dream.
He turns to see the blonde-haired girl hand the woman a flask. It’s made of light and tears, and the woman begins circling Dish, pouring a stream of luminous water from the flask and chanting words that Connor’
s soul understands but not his ears.
“She calls the sea,” he hears himself say.
She pours the last of the flask over Dish. As if in answer, blood flows from his open belly, a rivulet that seeks low ground, making its way back toward the river that brought Connor here. Blood soon becomes water, spilling from Dish until a torrent bursts from nearby rocks. Not blood now, but water.
The sheep are swept up like leaves in the flood.
Connor is swept up with them. The water flows in a circle, carrying Connor, the sheep and dead men in a whirlpool that begins to form a lake, leaving an island in the middle where Lyla and Dylan are taking up their bows again.
A mail-clad man thrashes beside Connor, but the weight of his armor drags him under. Connor watches Dylan turn, draw, and fire with a fierceness in his eye of one who is fully alive.
Riderless horses swim for the far shore where a timber wall burns and spits hot pitch. Chunks of burning wood fall into the growing lake, steaming. Warriors fight for a foothold on the muddy shore and men with spears race along the water’s edge.
Connor swims to the island and drags himself out onto the muddy shore.
A horse no bigger than a large dog, adorned with ribbons and red berries, runs in frantic circles at the shore of the island. It stops where Connor lies in the muck and sniffs at his hair. This, he can feel. He revels in the warm, damp breath of the horse, the velvet softness of its tiny muzzle. He strokes its sleek coat, rests his forehead against its cheek.
Dish, the little horse reminds him. You’re here for Dish.
The horse trots away and suddenly leaps into the water and disappears under the surface.
Connor can’t take his eyes from the spot where the little horse went under, for a whorl grows of a million tiny silver fish. They move as one, like a flight of birds, turning and twisting and condensing so tightly that it becomes one beast. He knows this beast. The water horse.
It breaks the surface and jumps like a great fish, taking a horse and rider down with it.
Connor makes his way to Dish, and falls to his knees beside him.
Dish looks into Connor’s eyes and takes his hand. It doesn’t pass through this time, flesh and bone meet, and Connor can feel the trembling man inside. At that moment, from the wound in Dish’s belly, downy feathers sprout. The wind catches them and they mix with snow and embers. And just like that night in the hospital, a flash of green fire passes from Connor’s wrist to Dish’s.
“You have to wake up now,” Connor says.
“I’m coming,” Dish replies.
Lyla gathers Dish in her arms and weeps. As Connor steps back, Dish’s clenched fist opens again to reveal a pearl the size of a small bird egg. A fog surrounds it in the colors of a stormy sky.
The pearl rolls from Dish’s hand into the water.
Connor understands and dives after it into the muddy current. His fingers sift silt and pebbles as the rush of water tries to carry him away. He can see only dimly in the churned muck, but the glow of Dish’s soul guides him. As he seizes the pearl, the water horse wraps him in its shimmering coils and takes him under.
The hiss of sea foam dragging over sand forced Connor to open his eyes. Silver fish convulsed in the sand around him; they gasped for air just as Connor did until the next wave forced him farther ashore and took the fish back to sea.
He coughed up seawater and looked back at the waves that had brought him.
The water horse was gone. And this was Malibu Beach.
A knock-kneed kid with a plastic bucket stood over Connor. His blonde hair was on fire in the sunlight.
“Where’s your swim trunks?” the little boy asked. His voice moved through water, shrill and distorted, and the words finally meant something to Connor’s mind.
He got to his hands and knees and willed himself to stand. His head hammered with the pulse of the sun’s rays, piercing his skin with a million needles. Then he opened his frozen fingers to find the pearl nestled there with a fistful of sand.
The kid’s mom was running full tilt toward him, and with a look that said she feared for her kid’s life, she scooped up the boy and kept running.
Connor followed as fast as his leaden feet would go.
The mom was grabbing a cooler and a second kid was crying, but Connor managed to snatch a beach towel from the little girl before they left him to wade through this honey-thick reality.
He drew a deep lungful of this stagnant world, wrapped the Little Mermaid towel around his waist, and headed for Pacific Coast Highway.
The guy who picked him up was chatty, but a long stare from Connor brought silence. He wondered if this guy could even see him. After all, Connor was just a ghost.
He told the security guard at the hospital his brother was dying and was escorted to I.C.U.
Connor hit the intercom button and was thankful when Holly’s voice came on.
“I’m not too late. Please,” he said into the wall.
He looked at the pearl once more. It was smaller now, and felt like dry ice in his palm.
The door buzzed open. Connor walked into the cold light of sterile death. The vision of Dish lying on the little island superimposed on top of this one and out of the corner of his eye, Connor saw the little horse flying out over the water with ribbons fluttering.
Lyla held Dish and wept. But no one held him here.
Holly met him at the door of the alcove, saying, “His heart rate’s grown erratic. They’ve decided to do it now.” She draped a blanket over Connor’s shoulders.
Bronwyn turned at the sound of Holly’s voice, her face streaked with tears. She met Connor’s eyes and there was so much sorrow there, he had to look away.
It was Merryn who held Dish’s hand in this world.
I’m coming, Dish had said.
Merryn sat beside him, Dish’s hand sandwiched between hers. She was talking to him, but when she saw Connor, she stopped and looked up at him. “You’ve come at last, lad.”
“Yes, Aunt Merryn.”
“Hugh will be pleased.”
He extended his closed fist over the wrecked flesh that was Dish. Connor opened his hand. There was nothing there but a tingling chill and damp sand. “Where is it?”
Merryn took his open hand and patted it. He felt the bones like twigs beneath her fragile skin. Molecule met molecule, and the gravity of this world governed them.
“Where did the pearl go?”
“What pearl, lad?”
Dish was fading into the white of his sheets. The bruises and cuts had healed, but his cheekbones were sharp and his collarbones stuck out from under the hospital gown. He was as wrecked in this world as he was in the other.
The nurse powered down one machine after another, finally flipping the switch on the ventilator and the artificial rise and fall of Dish’s chest stopped.
“Come on, Dish.” Connor’s vision blurred with tears. The rhythmic beating of Dish’s heart continued in green sine waves on the heart monitor. Slowly, the line began to flatten out, the rhythm erratic and fast.
Bronwyn sat on the edge of the bed and took Dish’s other hand.
I’m coming, a voice whispered in Connor’s head and he saw a dragon kite fluttering in the rain, envisioned himself drawing in the kite string. He could feel the tension, the string cutting into his fingers, the buffet of a determined wind.
The green line flattened out and droned a monotone. Alarms chimed and the nurses switched them off.
At the end of the kite string, a pearl the color of a stormy sky pulsed in a void.
“Come on, Dish.”
Connor saw Dish’s fingers twitch in Merryn’s hand. I’m coming.
Standing over Dish, he looked down at this man who had already fled his body on the other side.
“You can’t just let him go,” Connor pleaded, “fight for him!”
The nurses were unhooking the cables to everything. “Wake up.” Desperation took hold of him. “Wake up!”
I’m coming.
He took hold of Dish’s shoulders and shook him, his face inches from Dish. “You have to wake up!”
Holly’s arm was around Connor’s shoulders. “He’s gone.”
“He’s coming.”
It was Merryn’s touch that drew him away. She took his hand and patted it. “It’s all right, lad. He’s all right.”
“No. He’s not.”
He collapsed in a chair beside her. It was over. And Dish was swept away in the current between the worlds, waiting for another universe to be born. Connor measured the air moving in and out of his own lungs. He was a machine controlled by something that could never die and he wanted more than anything for someone like Lyla to hold him like she held Dish. And it suddenly became more important than forgiveness to know that she would hold Dish again, and that someone waited to hold Connor in just the same way. Maybe then, he could let go.
Dish gasped.
His arms swung wildly, tearing at the wires that sprouted from his chest and the I.V.’s in his arms, the tube that still went through a hole in his throat.
An alarm chimed outside and the room was suddenly thick with nurses and doctors. The green line jumped on the heart monitor, then went flat as Dish pulled the wires free. He cried out, a deep throaty wail, and the nurses tried to hold him down while Merryn and Bronwyn struggled to get out of their way.
But Connor was frozen in his chair.
When Dish’s eyes found Connor’s, he stopped fighting, the dislodged ventilator tube clutched in his quaking fist. He looked right into Connor’s eyes and said, “Dylan.”
Chapter 40
The new boy-king, Talan, had commanded Ava to watch her father’s execution as if it would pain her in some way. The spectacle had been set for morning. Lyleth, and three guards, escorted Ava to her father’s cell far below the smoldering walls of Caer Cedewain to speak her farewells. These Ildana liked to pretend at civility.
Lyleth left her alone with him, probably hoping Ava would choke him with his shackles.
The Bear was chained to the wall by his ankles and wrists. Stripped of his bearskin and armor, he was nothing more than an old man wearing a surly smirk.
