by Terry Madden
“Come to weep for your daddy, have you?”
How long had she dreamt of this? She had believed a transcendent rage would take her, that she would sink her teeth into his flesh and rip it from his face. But the fury refused to come. No, she would hurt him far more than mere mutilation.
“The new boy-king of the Ildana sees fit to place me on your throne in Rotomagos.” She said it with the tone of a gossipmonger to an eager housewife. “And I will see to it that your stench is scrubbed from every stone in the land.” She savored the horror in his eyes.
“You are your mother’s daughter. She never told me a truthful word in her short life—”
“Because you’d have cut out her tongue if she did. Just like Ilsa.”
He chuckled and yanked at his chains, leaning closer, so she could smell his rotting teeth. “She was your ‘friend.’”
They were just girls. Ilsa was a low-born herder’s daughter, sold into service by her family to act as Ava’s chambermaid. The Bear decided to make an example of Ilsa, to teach Ava her place in life. After he raped Ilsa, he cut out her tongue. But within the week, Ilsa had hung herself, for she too was Skvalan.
Ava had learned her lesson, but not the one the Bear had intended.
“May your death be slower than the growing of a great tree.” The Ildana curse felt right on her ice-born tongue.
He was laughing still when she left him with a gob of her spittle hanging from his beard.
In the morning, when Talan gave the order to strip the Bear’s skin from his body, Ava smiled. And the Bear screamed at last.
The only thing that pained Ava was seeing Gwylym die. His eyes were on her through the fall of the axe and she felt a rush of desire to be taken away from this world too. She was tired of living.
Talan hung the Bear’s skin from the walls of Caer Cedewain in the same place he’d found the pale rag that was his mother. While Marchlew and Nechtan engaged Ava’s forces in the glen, the Bear had slaughtered everyone left behind in Caer Cedewain. When Talan arrived, he found his mother’s body hanging from the walls with the rest like butchered meat, flayed, covered with a rime of hoarfrost, her frozen skin hanging beside her like a cloak. The Bear’s skin looked no different now.
Talan kept Ava in a makeshift prison, a room of the fortress that hadn’t burned. It lacked a window, so Ava had lost track of the days and the guards would tell her nothing. She passed time watching ants ferry the remainder of her meals along the joints of the flagstones.
At last, Lyleth came to call.
“Let’s be done with this,” Ava said to the druí.
Without a word, Lyleth took a seat on a stool beside the small brazier. Had she come to chat over warm milk? Nechtan’s solás wore her veil of indifference poorly today. He must have died in her arms, for in those shrewd, piercing eyes Ava could see the hollowness he’d left in Lyleth’s soul. She envied it.
“You serve a boy,” Ava said. “Is it so different than serving a she-king?”
In spite of Lyleth’s trained composure, Ava saw a flash of doubt in those eyes. No, Lyleth distrusted this boy, as well she should.
“I serve the judges of the greenwood,” Lyleth said. “And I do the will of my king.”
“Noble, but tell me, when will you send me after my loving father? I have no patience for these games.”
“You told the Bear you would be king in his place, in Rotomagos.”
“Now you spy on me, too. Execute me for lies, then, if it please you. Just do it.” Ava had to smile at this. But Lyleth’s expression never changed, playing her part in the court of a king.
“You will rule the land that has come to you by virtue of your blood. You will work to build peace between our lands.”
By Lyleth’s tone, this proposal had cost the druí a large sum of pride, something these greenmen were forbidden.
“Do I hear you rightly? You want to send me back to Sandkaldr?”
“He used you, Ava.” Was that pity in Lyleth’s voice? “You are the only living heir of Saerlabrand, the Bear of Sandkaldr. As such, you inherit his throne by your own laws as well as the laws of the Ildana.”
Ava snorted a laugh. “You’re afraid. Afraid of who will win the Bear’s throne and sail back to your shores. You’ve not studied the ice-born, have you, druí?”
“Oh, I have. Without ships, they are as crippled as an archer with no arrows. And more pliant.”
“You think burning their ships will stop them. They’ll still come. If they have to swim the Broken Sea, they’ll come.”
“I’ve burned all… but one. The ship that will bear you back. If you want a kingdom, take your own.”
A she-king of the north? Her kin would slit her throat in her sleep.
“The hearts of the ice-born are as frozen as the land,” Ava said.
“Not yours.”
Lyleth looked at her as if she could see something decent and deserving flickering in Ava’s frayed soul. Ava had to look away. Lyleth pulled the green soothblade from her belt and held the hilt to Ava. It belonged to the beewoman, not Ava, but Lyleth needn’t know that. Ava’s hand closed around it, feeling the weight of truth. She might plunge it into Lyleth’s eye and send her after Nechtan. Perhaps it’s what she wanted. But when Ava looked up, the door was closing behind Lyleth.
The Broken Sea had begun to freeze in the shallow bay of the Gannet’s Bath. Wide stretches of beach were white with snow, without a sign of the Bear’s longships that had been beached here. Talan had them burned and their charred skeletons had surely been taken by the tide. Pyrs’ fleet waited beyond the waves while Ava and her escort boarded the last longship and launched with the tide.
Men pushed through ice floes with harpoons and hooks and cleared a path for the ship through the shallow waters until they reached the open sea, where they could set their backs to the oars.
The flat keel pitched over hummocks of rolling sea, its dragon masthead diving and resurfacing with every swell. Ildana sailors made up the majority of the crew. This was no swan ship, and the Ildana fought the single sail’s shroud and tack until it bellied steadily and plowed the sea north and east.
Ava leaned over the bow rail and watched green water curl and return to the vast and bottomless sea. The spray washed over her, and the deep beckoned.
She inhaled the smell of salt spray and horse fat from the sail, and the smell filled her with the melancholy of a Skvalan winter, sunless and cold. Nechtan’s laugh came back to her for some reason. Perhaps she heard it in the splash of the sea.
She refused an evening meal offered by Lyleth’s servant, the boy, Dylan. He watched her tirelessly. But he had the will of a boy, and at last, he slept with the others between the thwarts. The ship had fallen into a still pocket of night air. The sail flapped, limp. A path of moonlight buttered the windless water, and blue icebergs drifted in the distance like cities.
Ava reached into the soft leather of her left boot. The bone handle was warm from her flesh. She drew out the soothblade and wondered how fair the Old Blood truly were. They lay hidden now, in stone and root, star and wind, but they were the only part of this land that had wanted Ava. They had given her the guardian. At least that was true.
She held the green blade to the moonlight. The fractures in the stone ignited with silver fire, but she was blind to the runes of the ancients. What truth would spill? Poison? Bile? The black tar that seeps from under the earth and burns with the stench of the underworld?
Was there any truth left in her at all?
The blade was sharp and she cut deeply. Holding her arm to the moonlight, she examined the truth spilling from her. It beaded and glistened, like the sticky juice from a brambleberry. She caught a drop on her fingertip as it fell to the stinking deck, and put it on her tongue. She smiled, and felt Nechtan’s warm fingers on her cheek, wiping away her tears.
While the moon watched, she laid down another cut beside the first. She had much truth to spill. And she did.
Chapter 41
Dylan had returned just days ago with the news of Ava’s death, and Talan seized the opportunity to remind Lyleth of her wasted effort. “The ice-born are too savage for your treaties of peace, they understand nothing but the sword,” he said.
Perhaps he was right. But Lyleth had spent most of this lifetime trying to make it otherwise. The ice-born would return to these shores under another banner; another Bear would rise.
On this day of his crowning, Lyleth rode behind Talan through the city gates. His solás rode to his left, a student of Dechtire’s as Lyleth had once been, yet this druí was as fair as Lyleth was dark and some years older than Talan. She carried the silver branch timidly, the boughs hung with holly and mistletoe, hazelnuts and acorns, and of course, silver bells.
The Winter King. It suited Talan, for he was as cold as the wind off the peaks of the Pendynas.
Lyleth had stood at Talan’s side when he reclaimed Caer Cedewain from the Bear. The ice-born couldn’t hold the walls for long against the numbers Talan now commanded, for Fiach’s and Lloyd’s forces tripled the numbers of the northern tribes.
Marchlew had died in battle and Lyleth thought it a blessing, for the sight that met them at the gates was not one a husband should see. Yet Talan seemed unmoved by the sight of his mother’s corpse, flayed and hanging from the gate tower. The boy simply said, “Cut her down.”
The ice-born had slaughtered all in Caer Cedewain, servant and soldier alike, children as well as women. But Lyleth had never found Dunla among the dead.
Lyleth watched Talan ride before her, shoulders growing broader by the day. His silver circlet had been Nechtan’s, for Talan wouldn’t allow a new one to be forged, saying it would give him counsel in a way he had not yet divined. Perhaps so, but he didn’t strike Lyleth as one who listened to the voices of the dead. No, he needed the allegiance of those who had loved Nechtan, and they were many. He would glean some glory as nephew and heir of the Deathslayer.
The streets of Caer Ys were choked with revelers and those come to glimpse their new king; troupes of Midwinter guisers with chiming ankle bells dressed as stags or riding hobby horses, their faces darkened with soot. Playing blackthorn whistles and goatskin drums, they beat out ancient songs to rouse the sun from his slumber. Lyleth knew the sun could never warm her heart again.
A tall man wore a hide cloak, the skull of a horse fitted over his head. He worked the jaw with cords to mime the words of a bawdy tune trilled by a chorus. But dancing behind him was a hobby horse with fins, a water horse, its scales made of layered oyster shells that rattled when it shook its mane of kelp.
The song he sang was a new one, recounting Lyleth’s calling of the sea and the “battle of the water horse.” It told of Pyrs’ men, how they arrived at the summoned lake to see the tail of the water horse sweep the ice-born under as they tried to claw their way back to solid ground. But the image that had burned into Lyleth’s mind was Brixia, scrambling out of the water and shaking like a dog. With a high whinny, the little horse trotted into the woods and disappeared.
“Nechtan’s lady, please!” An old woman pushed her way through the crowd to reach out to Lyleth’s foot. The woman clutched at her leg, threatening to unseat her, crying, “Exalter of star and stone, she who sings men to life, help me, I beg you!”
Talan’s guards had the woman in hand and started to drag her away, but Lyleth stopped them.
“My son,” the woman cried, “he’s dead not more than a day. Bring him back to me, I beg you, druí.”
“I’m sorry. I cannot.” Lyleth parceled these words out a dozen times in a day. The look of betrayal always followed, from every mother, husband, brother. She could raise a king; why not their dead, too?
As Talan’s retinue reached the outer ward of the fortress, snow began to fall. Lyleth found a warm fire burning in the bedchamber that had been hers when she served Nechtan. Staying here, so full of memories, was like wearing a gown made of stone. She would be gone soon, back to the Isle of Glass and the hive where she had learned to serve the green gods. Dechtire, her teacher, had fallen ill, and Lyleth would see her before the end.
But there was one last ritual she must see to. She sent Dylan to fetch the harp of the drowned maid, now in Talan’s treasury. The day they had left Caer Cedewain, Dylan found the harp half buried in snow where Lyleth and Nechtan had left it, lying under the starwood tree in Kyndra’s moon garden.
“The wind told me where it was,” Dylan said. “It plucked out an angry tune.”
“What did it say?” Lyleth asked him.
His reluctance finally gave way. “That Nechtan was to leave us.” A distant sadness clouded his eyes.
“Have you ever wondered if the land of the dead is not beyond the well at all, but here?” she asked him. “Perhaps we’re the dead, just waiting for another chance to live among the wonders of the real world.”
“Maybe there’s no death at all.”
“Aye, and no rest.”
Dylan built up the peat fire to a rosy glow, and Lyleth took up the harp. It was Talan’s harp now, and following the tradition of a thousand years, she would cut the strings of Nechtan’s rule. She had seen his nephew to the throne, as Nechtan required of her. Now, her thoughts turned only to following him to that other land and the days or years that lay between.
She sat on a stool, took the harp in her lap and thrummed the full range of notes, hearing Nechtan’s laughter in the strands of his hair, chestnut, ash and wet oak bark.
She plucked out an aimless tune, and when she looked up, Dylan was closing the door on his way out. She set her fingers to the strings and played a tune that reminded her of the feel of Nechtan in her arms, flowing with the will of water shaping stone. This flesh is frail, he had whispered under the starwood tree, but it’s all we have.
“Not all,” she said to the stone walls.
When her fingers left the strings, the harp played on. The dissonance of the Otherworld blended with a melody of this world. In a voice like birdsong, it sang in the tongue of the Old Blood, like wind dandling a barley field. A mere whisper. A name, repeated.
Talan… Talan stole what is only given.
The final notes left the strings and surged through the aching skin that held her bound to this world, through the chamber, through the courses of old stone, out to meet the light of the stars.
For no word is uttered that goes unheard, and no light burns without casting a shadow.
Talan’s spear had taken Nechtan from her.
She reached into her boot and found Ava’s soothblade. A shard of pure green olivine, shot through with dark veins that spoke in runes, the blade that had bled Ava into the hull of a longship.
“Not to be unmade,” she said to Nechtan.
No one else would know the truth it had to tell. Not yet.
In one slow cut, she severed the strings of Nechtan’s harp, and they sang like silver threads under a bow of spider silk.
The king was dead.
Chapter 42
When Connor and Iris went back to Ned’s, the house was boarded up and the fish pond/hot tub was drained. Nothing but a collection of beer bottles and Chinese take-out boxes were left to say Ned had been there at all. He opened the well on the beach to bait Dish, but bait him to do what? Unless Dish remembered his stay on the other side, Connor would never know.
Father Owens gave Connor a stay of execution, probably because he had showed up in the I.C.U. wearing nothing but a beach towel to witness Dish’s awakening, or maybe Owens and Dish had a chat again. Anyway, Connor could stay at school w
ith a list of conditions.
He visited Dish twice a week while he was in rehab. But Connor knew there was no therapy for what Dish had been through. Dish spent a month there, learning how to live without the use of his legs because the doctors said his paralysis was permanent.
As Dish’s traveling librarian, Connor brought him specific books from his collection, things with ragged spines and hundreds of notes stuck in them. Their talk was all surface stuff, like how Connor’s term paper was going, how many miles he had run that week, or what he thought of Don Zeigler’s new movie, that kind of thing. Dish never even hinted that he remembered anything about the Otherworld, and Connor began to wonder if his memory had been wiped clean by somebody like Ned. The bastard.
Half the time Iris came with Connor on his visits, because there was no way to stop her. At least with her along, there were no awkward silences because she talked enough for all three of them. At first, her parents decided to send her to a different school, saying she had made some unsavory friends, meaning Connor, but Iris made some promises, and they let her stay at St. Thom’s. Connor was glad. He even admitted it to her.
Brother Mike was driving them back from visiting Dish. Connor and Iris sat in the back seat, even though no one else was in the van. On the beach, people were playing volleyball. A kite fluttered past, a fairy kite. It looked sort of like Tinkerbell.
“You still haven’t told me what you saw over there.” Iris jolted him from his thoughts, as if she knew he was wandering back to that other place.
“It’s like…” How could he find the words? It wasn’t possible. “Here, we live in a world ruled by the left side of our brain. Over there, the right side rules…”
“You mean like conscious and subconscious?”
“Maybe. I can’t explain.” The best Connor could do was draw pictures. The images in his sketchpad felt like a shadow of that other place. After all, drawing is a right brain activity.
