by Terry Madden
Bronwyn announced, “Look who’s come, auntie.”
“Hugh,” Merryn said weakly and reached a hand to him.
Connor offered a forced, lopsided smile. He’d changed so much, Dish almost failed to recognize him. He looked like a Renaissance artist with lank, wavy hair and a sparse musketeer beard to match. He stood, offering his hand, his size confirming he’d become a man since the last time Dish had seen him. The restless questioning hadn’t left him, and Dish felt a surge of affection for the folly he saw burning in Connor’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Bronwyn said with barbs, “have we met?” She extended her hand to Connor.
“Connor Quinn.” He took her hand and held on, unsmiling.
“My you’ve changed,” Bronwyn said. “It’s been some time.”
“I should be going.”
“Nonsense,” Dish said. “You’ve traveled far. We’ve come for the same reason.”
Dish wheeled his chair beside the bed, but couldn’t reach Merryn to kiss her, so he pressed her withered hand to his lips and patted it to warm it. She had grown even smaller since the last time he’d seen her, her cheeks sunken and the color gone from her skin. Her eyes flitted from Dish to Connor and back.
“You two must talk,” she said, her old eyes twinkling. “I shall come back home, and then we will all have a good talk. Now tell me about your work, Hugh. About how you keep your chin up, or are you just pretending?”
Merryn always could see right through him.
“I’m taking every day as it comes.”
“And you’ve got a great longing in your soul, a burden that can’t be lifted by me, nor Connor.”
“I’m lifting his burden,” Bronwyn said. “I’ve brought him back home, haven’t I?”
“And now you’ll take me back home,” Merryn declared. “It’s where I must be.”
The nurse arrived to say visiting hours were over.
“Sleep well,” Dish told Merryn. “Tomorrow I’ll see to the papers to bring you home.”
Bronwyn shot him a look filled with barbs. When he turned, Connor had gone, and he pursued.
Dish caught Connor before he reached the elevator, eager to find out what was really going on. Dish said, “I thought you had work.”
“I had planned to be gone before you arrived.”
Dish didn’t know what to say to that. Connor had actively sought to avoid him, and by all indications, he had been in England when Dish called two days before. “I’m sorry to interrupt your plans,” Dish said, “but I’ve come to say farewell to a woman who is very important to me.”
“As she has become to me as well.”
“So I see.”
The elevator dinged, and by the sound of her heels on the hall tiles, Bronwyn was on the way back from the loo. Dish caught Connor’s arm as he stepped into the lift. “Where are you staying?”
Connor’s eyes flitted to the floor. “A hostel in Truro.” He was never much good at lying. Dish could see Merryn’s ragged needlepoint keychain hanging from his jeans pocket.
“You’re staying at Merryn’s.” Had Connor turned into one of those creepers who follow little old ladies to get a piece of their leavings? “I’m coming with you.”
“But Bronwyn—”
“She’ll be glad to be rid of me, and if she finds out you’re staying at Merryn’s she’ll have you arrested.”
Dish intercepted Bronwyn, saying, “Connor has offered to drive me back. He’s staying in Madron, and you know we have a bit to catch up on.”
Was that hurt he saw on Bronwyn’s face?
“He can drop me at your house, and we’ll have tea.”
“You’re not taking Merryn home,” she stated.
“We’ll discuss it over tea.”
Connor took over pushing the wheelchair as if it were an automatic response. Once they were in the parking lot, Dish dared say, “You’re driving Merryn’s car?”
“I’ve been driving Merryn’s car for the past month.”
“And Bronwyn knows nothing of it?”
“She never comes. It’s as if Merryn were already gone to her.”
Connor unlocked the door of a vehicle Dish recognized as Merryn’s old banger, a farm lorry that was almost as old as he was.
They were well on their way down the A390 before Dish finally said, “You’re either after Merryn’s old age pension fund or carrying on with finding the well.”
“You wouldn’t understand—”
“I wouldn’t understand the obsessive fixation on a well that has no intention of being found? Who do you think you’re talking to, lad?”
“I’m no lad anymore, Hugh.” Connor was clearly testing that name. It probably felt as strange to him as it sounded to Dish. Connor went on, “None of it matters now. Merryn is on her way soon.”
“That she is. And I can’t say I’ve been a nephew to her these past years. Nor have I been much of a human being.”
A long silence said Connor agreed. “I understand,” he said at last. “You don’t have to explain anything to me, Dish. I’ve been there, remember?”
Connor flipped on the wipers. The yellow beams of the dim headlights stabbed into overgrown hedgerows and skimmed the slick black of wet pavement. A memory flashed in Dish’s mind of a different evening on a wet road.
“I do need to explain,” Dish said at last. “I’ve been a sodding recluse, feeling sorry for myself, and doing nothing but waiting.”
Connor glanced over at him. “Waiting? For what?”
“For death. Or birth, whichever way you choose to view it. I seem to be rather experienced at death. It’s time to shed this wreckage I’m dragging around with me.”
He could see in the flash of Connor’s eyes, unmistakable guilt. That was the sea that lay between them. Not Merryn, not Dish’s abandonment of the search for the well. Connor’s guilt.
“I left a child there.” Dish let the words settle between them.
“How do you know that?” Connor seemed to force his eyes to stay on the road, his face lit by oncoming headlamps.
How to explain the certainty without sounding mental? “I’ve seen her,” Dish said at last. “Connor, finding the well has never been possible for you and me.” He recited the translation they both knew so well, the runes that ran around the well stone, “Cleave star and stone, Child of Death, and call the Old Blood home.”
“The child of death? Yours? But you weren’t dead.”
“Lyleth brought me back. From the dead. From here.” Dish indicated the rainy twilight outside the lorry. “Here is where the dead reside, Connor. You and I, we’re dead.”
“Or, you could say, there is no such thing as death. Just life in another world.”
Always the half-full chap. That was Connor. “If you define life as a biological function, perhaps.”
In the intermittent sweep of headlamps, Dish could see Connor was doing his best to refrain from saying something.
“What is it?” Dish prodded.
“If she’s this Child of Death, then how will she call the Old Blood home?”
“The same way they left. Through the well.”
Dish looked past the rain-flecked window at a flock of sheep flowing down a hillside, foamy shadows in the twilight. “The child was what the green gods wanted from Lyl and me all along.”
“Then it’s coming,” Connor mused, excitement in his voice.
The realization struck Dish full force. He was right. If his child fulfilled the prophecy revealed on the well stone, then she would open the third well, and the Old Blood would find their way home. Then what? The Ildana wouldn’t exactly welcome them with open arms. After all, the Old Blood had been exiled for a reason.
The moon was rising when they turned into the long drive that led to Merryn’s cottage. The little stone house was unchanged since Dish’s childhood. The whitewashed stones glowed in the moonlight. He was overcome with so many sweet memories of his time here with Merryn. And now it was coming. The well Merryn had been s
earching for her whole life would open. Perhaps tonight, perhaps twenty years from now. But unless he knew where, Dish couldn’t hope to find his way through it, or to take Merryn across with him.
Chapter 2
The Isle of Glass rose from the sea like a shard of green ice. The ragged cliffs, crowned by a ring of standing stones, fell away to sparsely tillable land. The druada of Dechtire’s hive composted kelp and manure with fish guts, then mixed this with ground bone, deepening and enriching the soil that had been made by those who came before. They grew turnips and onions, beetroot and mustard. In summer, it was long beans and fennel and berries that grow only where the daylight of midwinter is but as long as a good ballad. Stunted pine and oak grew where the soil was a forearm deep, their roots cleaving great greenstone boulders in their search for soil and that which lies beneath it.
In their shade, Lyleth and Angharad searched for mushrooms. The child was old enough to tell a wood bluet from a fool’s cap, though Lyleth always examined what her daughter put in the basket. Fool’s cap had uses of its own, but none she would share with Angharad till she was older.
“What of these?” Angharad pointed at a buff cluster of feathery fungus attached to a tree stump.
“Aye. Chick-o’-the-woods,” Lyleth told her. “Tastes of chicken.”
The child laughed and pulled her stubby dagger to begin prying the layers of fungus from the stump.
Lyleth ran her fingers through the girl’s ember-colored hair. Nechtan’s hair was as dark as oak bark. Where had these fiery tresses come from? Lyleth had let the rumors run; in fact she had stoked them, whispering to select people that her babe was Fiach’s child. After all, Angharad’s hair was Fiach’s color. But it was the child’s eyes that bore her father’s mark, and the way she carried herself. She had barely lost her two front teeth, yet could recite The Battle of Finvarril in its entirety and see the life of a dog from pup to old age by running her fingers over its skull.
“Get of death,” Lyleth had overheard one of her initiates say. Some had failed to accept the rumor of Angharad’s fathering, seeing in Lyleth the void left by her loss of Nechtan, knowing the love she bore him. She knew the green gods waited to collect their prize, the product of their scheming. So when she heard the high-pitched whistle from the edge of the wood, she knew that day had come.
She dropped the mushroom basket and looked toward the sound. It was Elowen. She broke through a rhododendron hedge at a run, her skirt bunched in her hands as she struggled for words and breath at the same time. “Three ships set anchor in the bay.”
“From Arvon?” Lyleth had received messengers from Pyrs, the quarter’s chieftain, every season change.
“War galleys,” Elowen said. In the past six years, Elowen had gone from the feral child who once attacked Nechtan and Lyleth with a sling, to a beautiful young woman. Her cheeks were flushed from the run, and her hair had escaped from a braid into a cloud of unruly gold. “Three dories make for shore now. They fly the water horse.”
“The king? Where’s Dylan?”
“He’s led archers to the cliffs above the beach.” She followed Elowen’s gaze to Angharad who stood clutching Lyleth’s hand, her brow knotted in confusion. Elowen knew as well as Lyleth the threat Angharad presented to Talan. She was the daughter of a king. A twice murdered king. Lyleth had done everything Nechtan had asked of her, had seen Talan to the throne against her own best judgment. What could he want from her now?
“The king pays us a visit,” Lyleth stated. “Yet it might be best if I meet him alone.” She knelt before the child, looked firmly into her daughter’s eyes saying, “You remember the giant’s hurley field?”
The little girl nodded and pointed north toward a jumble of toppled standing stones.
“You and Elowen are going to play a game of hide-and-seek.”
Angharad eyed her with suspicion. At six years of age, Lyleth found it hard to keep anything from her. She knelt and held her daughter in a tight embrace. “There’s nothing to fear.”
“I know,” Angharad answered. “But that’s not what your eyes say, Mama.”
**
The few druada who had completed weapons training had taken up position on either side of the track leading up from the bay. Lyleth was careful to instruct that they not take a defensive stance, but merely as a show of respect, their bows shouldered, their swords sheathed. The druada of Dechtire’s hive had always relied upon the grace of the green gods to hide their little refuge from reavers and pirates. Well, their grace and the treacherously steep cliffs that made defense much easier.
Lyleth met Dylan on the headland. Since the day Nechtan died, Dylan had spent his life protecting her, and the task had aged him quickly. She depended on both Dylan and Elowen more than she should. They had grown into such strong adults. Lyleth knew he was casting about for Elowen. He still pretended there was nothing between them, but such feelings as they shared were hard to hide.
“She’s with Angharad.”
“Stars and stones…” he said. “The king himself’s come, Lyl.”
“Aye, and as I recall he bore you little friendship.” She gave him a smile, knowing he remembered as well as she the scuffles that had occurred between the two boys when last they met. But neither were boys any longer.
Three dories were beaching far below. One bore the standard of the clan of Black Brac, a red water horse on white, the sigil Talan had inherited from Nechtan and their forefathers.
“Return to the hive,” Lyleth told Dylan, “and see that the hall is prepared to receive him.” When Dylan hesitated, she added, “What can he do to me here on sacred ground?”
“It’s not you I fear for.”
She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “He has to get past me to find Angharad. Take the archers with you and send Gwion and Breaca back to me.”
The two druada had studied with Lyleth under Dechtire. Gwion was a fine weapons master, drawing students from as far away as Tartessos. Breaca taught bardic verse. They were the only ones Lyleth had told about Nechtan’s fatal wounding, knowing that if something happened to her, the truth about Talan’s murderous rise to power would still burn brightly.
Gwion brought Lyleth her staff, a simple twisted branch, cut from the distant forest of the Old Blood. It was supposed to impart some kind of gravity to her position as the head of the hive. She found it ridiculous.
“Perhaps he simply seeks shelter,” Gwion said.
“That I doubt.”
The required cups of water and mead were prepared just as the first warriors crested the headland. Talan followed, his personal guard forming a phalanx through which he strode. He was pale, his broad cheekbones sunken and his blue eyes bloodshot, his brows lowered as if the sun hurt them.
Behind Talan came Pyrs, chieftain of Arvon, laughing in response to an unheard jest of Talan’s. A stab of betrayal slipped between Lyleth’s ribs. Pyrs had been Nechtan’s closest ally, and now he raided the ice-born without provocation, taking their children as slaves. This was not the man she once knew.
“My lord king,” Lyleth said. She opened her palms in respect and watched the sea pinks dance at Talan’s feet. “Your visit honors our simple hive.”
The water horse tattoo on her left wrist was uncovered, and when she looked up, she saw his eyes flit to it.
“I know better,” he said, slightly winded from the climb. He grinned. “There’s nothing simple about the skills of the druada trained here.”
Pyrs took Lyleth in the embrace of an old friend, and she willed herself not to stiffen, but by the look in his eyes, she failed. Perhaps it was time Pyrs knew whom he served.
Talan had become a man since she’d last seen him. He still wore Nechtan’s circlet of Finian silver, but his features had lost their childish fullness, his nose and cheekbones sharp and hawkish. He looked more like Nechtan than Angharad did, certainly. It was a startling resemblance, the lines of his face, the way his arms fell from his shoulders. His eyes were his mother’s, though, blue as a w
ild bird egg, alight with the same spark of impulsiveness. He was strangely pale for having come from battle, and he repeatedly cast glances over his shoulder as if someone whispered to him. Beneath the smell of the sea and unwashed warrior, Lyleth detected the faint odor of rot about him.
“Do you come from an early raid on Sandkaldr?” she asked.
His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Ah, your senses are finely tuned, sister. Pyrs joined me on a short foray into ice-born lands. Even Nechtan believed that it was battle alone that keeps a king’s sword sharp.”
Talan motioned for one of his men to bring forth a chest. He opened it, revealing ingots of silver and a crude statue of the one-eyed all-father of the ice-born. “A gift for the hive,” he said.
Lyleth just said, “Come, rest yourselves.”
She turned to lead them back to the hive, but Talan took her arm and grasped her hands. His were cold and damp from the exertion of climbing the cliff, and his skin was neither soft nor calloused, but somewhat like the skin of a shark, or the crust of decomposing stone.
She tried to quiet the images that flooded her—his solás Maygan falling at his feet, her head bloodied, Talan’s palm gripping the shaft of a spear and taking aim as Nechtan turned. Lyleth tried to pull her hands away, but he held them firmly, forcing her to see into his memories as clearly as if she’d been there. What she saw was the look on Nechtan’s face as he turned from the body of a dead ice-born warrior to look at Talan. Nechtan had known what Talan intended before he’d cocked the spear back. He had accepted it. For in death he could let the reins of this headstrong horse, this land that owned him, fall from his hands to Talan’s.
Lyleth knew he had killed Nechtan, but Maygan? His own solás? She glanced again at the statue of the one-eyed god and found Talan’s wild squint turned on her. He knew she could see it all with a touch. He was showing her. But why?
“You are… unwell, my lord.”
His face contorted and he began to sweat. His mouth worked around as if he chewed tough meat, then he finally said, “And she could do nothing to heal me.”
But there was something else, a shadow that peered at her from behind Talan’s soul.
