by Terry Madden
She led him to the person bundled in a cloak and leaning against one of the standing stones, a cloud of midges like a halo around his head. Connor crumbled to the ground, feeling the world spin.
“Who are you?” A young man pushed his hood back and glared at Connor, his sickly pale face growing more so under alighting flies. He was older now, but Connor couldn’t forget watching this man who had been just a boy then, drawing his bow as a wave of ice-born closed on a little island in a sheep pen. He was so much like Connor’s brother, even their names were the same.
“You’re Dylan,” Connor managed to say. He searched for additional words. “I saw you once.” He could have added that it had been when Nechtan died but his Old Welsh was anything but fluent, and it was probably not wise to bring it up.
“Why is he… gray?” Dylan asked Lyleth.
“Gray?”
Connor looked at his hands, his wet jeans and shoes. It was true. He looked like he’d come from a mud wrestling pit.
“I should wash.” He tried to stand but fell back to the soft turf. As he did, he felt his cell phone under his butt cheek and fumbled to get it out of his pocket. “Shit.” He tried the button. Nothing. Of course. What was he expecting, 3G? He tossed it to the mossy ground.
“We need to eat,” Lyleth said, and tossed him a skin of water as she left. “I’ll be back.”
But water didn’t help. He rubbed at his skin with a cloth, and it was still gray. Unlike his first visit to this world, he had a body this time, and they could see him, but his skin was gray like a corpse.
Dylan asked him, “What did you do with my Elowen?”
“The girl in the water? Elowen?”
“You saw her!” Dylan gripped Connor’s forearm with what was probably all his strength. Connor read the threat in his eyes. “Tell me.”
“You’re not, uh, pretty enough…”
Oh, shit, his Welsh was worse than he thought. Dylan’s murderous scowl softened to a mocking grin. “Cul shean!” Then he spat.
It didn’t take much to imagine the translation.
Lyleth returned with a bag filled with grasshoppers. “Breakfast.”
“He saw Elowen,” Dylan told her.
“He’ll tell us what he can of Elowen, when he can. Leave him be. Now we best eat so we have the strength to get out of here.”
“A simple question requires a simple answer,” said Dylan. “He saw her. Where is she?”
Connor’s vocabulary wasn’t up to the explanation. “I saw her in the water,” he said. He touched his mouth. “She kissed me, and I am here.”
With a growl, Dylan erupted, his fingers closing on Connor’s throat. But Connor threw him off easily.
“Stop this instant!” Lyleth demanded. “You’ll reopen that wound, and I can’t stop it again.”
“I know nothing of your Elowen. I only know we traded.” He wanted to say he had nothing to do with it. But the translation came out, “My responsibility in this is invisible.”
“Here.” Lyleth handed the bag of grasshoppers to Connor. “Pull off the legs and wings and throw them in there.” She produced a small, round-bottomed pot from her sack. “We won’t get far if you spend your strength fighting over something you can’t change.”
“Where are we going?” Connor said. “You can send me back, surely.”
“I don’t know how you got here, so how can I send you back?”
“Dish… Nechtan—”
“Don’t speak of the dead,” Lyleth said. “His world is not mine, nor mine his any longer.” But the look on her face didn’t match her words. What was going on? There were so many things he wanted to ask her. Merryn, the trees, the Old Blood…
“You can’t die,” he managed to say.
“Oh, can’t I now?” she scoffed.
“You can’t come back if you die. Nechtan knows—”
In reply, Lyleth held a soothblade to his throat. “You’ll not speak of him, or I’ll send you back where you came from.”
Connor nodded. Lyleth and Lyla were one and the same. The blade in her hand must be Lyla’s. That would mean Lyleth had brought the blade across with her when Merryn planted her tree. That seemed impossible. Then he remembered that Merryn’s blade was stuffed in his own belt.
“I have something to show you.” His hand moved to the knife, but Lyleth took it from him.
She held Merryn’s soothblade up beside hers. They were nearly identical, and Merryn’s was just as green as it had been on the other side, even more so.
“Where did you get this?” As soon as she asked, Lyleth clamped her fingers over Connor’s mouth. “Don’t answer. Come, we must eat and leave this place.”
Silently, she handed back Merryn’s soothblade and pointed at the grasshoppers.
While Connor sat plucking appendages from insects, Lyleth built a fire and tended to Dylan, exposing what looked like a knife wound to his back which she re-dressed with something that looked like cotton.
“Can I ask what happened here?”
Lyleth gave him a steely glance. “You cannot.”
Connor tossed the grasshoppers into the pot, glad he’d had bangers and mash for breakfast. Squeamishness was never one of his problems, but he was thankful that it would be a while before he was hungry enough to eat these. And then again, the old folktales said that people taken to the Otherworld should not partake of the food and drink there, for if they did, they wouldn’t return. He wondered if grasshoppers counted.
Watching his own colorless hands at work made him feel as though he watched a puppet. His gray skin against the green of the grasshoppers. It was like looking at himself in the moonlight while the rest of the world was lit by a brilliant sun. Maybe that was it. He was muted by the vibrancy of this world, evident even in the faceted eyes and ornately patterned exoskeletons of these grasshoppers. He could really see them, the infinite fractals of their form, the way they were woven into the fabric of this place in a way he was not.
“I don’t think I’m real,” he said flatly. “If so, what am I?”
Lyleth took the pot of squirming insects from him and set it in the coals, saying, “Not every question has an answer, Connor.”
**
Lyleth looked like she’d been knifed herself, almost as pale as Dylan with dark shadows around her volatile blue eyes. The long rope of her dark hair was tangled with twigs and moss she’d probably gotten from diving into the bog after Connor. But beneath it all, he saw that she’d aged as much as Dish had in these six years.
Connor had eaten a few of the crunchy grasshoppers to satisfy Lyleth. They would be better with salt and chili powder.
With Dylan on his back, he waded into the bog behind Lyleth, the pony named Brixia at his side. Except for the water snakes and the half-submerged antlers and various dead things, crossing the bog was easy.
“Deer die in this place often?” he asked.
“They got trapped in the bog ages ago,” Lyleth said, wading beside him. “Sank into soft ground and here they stay, waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Connor’s feet found mushy purchase on the far bank and Lyleth took his arm, heaving him and Dylan into a bed of cattails.
Her look said that question would have to wait with the others.
Eventually, they climbed onto an elevated causeway made of miles of rough-sawn planks. Lyleth surveyed the ground around them as if looking for something or someone.
“The green witch. She took my horse.”
“Who?”
But Lyleth’s look was answer enough. She set to changing Dylan’s soaked dressing one more time. “It’s several leagues to Caer Emlyn. Can you carry him that far?”
“Through water is one thing.” Connor figured Dylan was near his own weight. It was too bad Brixia wasn’t bigger. “I can carry him for a while. But it would be easier to drag him.”
Within an hour, Connor had cut and lashed together two sturdy willow branches to form a makeshift travois. The hard part was finding a way to suspend Dy
lan between them. With Lyleth’s help, he lashed a series of green, pliable withies between the two poles with his shoelaces and sweatshirt strings. He laid Lyleth’s cloak over them, and they eased Dylan onto his new bed.
Soon, Connor was heaving against the poles and slogging over the causeway in unlaced shoes while Dylan bounced along, certainly in pain, but uttering not a word. He was either very stoic, or he’d passed out. The sound of the poles over the planks was like someone strumming a washboard. And still, Brixia stayed right at Connor’s side. Every time he glanced at her, she returned the look.
All plants in every direction had been stripped to the ground which writhed with worms of all kinds, and grasshoppers like the ones they’d eaten. The beauty of the place was rapidly being devoured, and Connor sensed this was a new development.
There were bugs of every kind, many he’d never seen before, crosses between dragonflies and beetles, aphids and spiders, scorpions and centipedes. Big, small and everything in between, crunching under his feet, catching in his hair. He had to keep his mouth closed, or they would be in there too.
Having used her cloak as a stretcher, Lyleth now batted insects away from Dylan as they walked, maintaining a slow pace in an effort to keep Dylan as comfortable as possible.
“You’re sure he’s still alive?” Connor asked.
“The pain has carried him away,” Lyleth said. “He still lives.”
“Tell me.” She finally spoke when they were miles from the bog and darkness was closing in.
“Tell you what?”
“Nechtan. He’s well?”
“I thought I wasn’t to talk about the dead.”
“We’re away now. The stones can’t hear us.” Her look softened as if she was remembering something sweet. “Tell me,” she said again.
The causeway finally ended and met up with a muddy road.
They walked until they couldn’t see the road any longer. Connor had blisters on his hands, and his shoulders and back burned. In that time, he had explained Dish’s—Nechtan’s—life on the other side. How he was a teacher, how he’d shut everyone out including Connor, how he’d never walk again.
“I left him sitting under your tree. That’s when I found Elowen.”
“What tree?” she asked.
She didn’t know about the trees?
“You and Nechtan, you knew each other before. Maybe many times. But in the Otherworld, you were Lyla Bendbow, and he was Clyde Pritchard.”
She turned a puzzled face to him.
“You don’t remember the Otherworld?”
“No one does.”
“Well, um…” How to tell her everything she needed to know? Merryn should have realized that sending her across wouldn’t guarantee she’d remember her past. He glanced at the soothblade at her belt, realizing she didn’t know how to retrieve the memories from it. She remembered nothing of how she got here or why she’d come, and Connor wasn’t even sure how to begin this conversation in his limited Old Welsh. He’d have to think about it.
Lyleth stopped walking. She stood there in the middle of the road for many minutes, staring into the gathering darkness, and Connor realized they had left the bugs far behind. Nothing but crickets here.
“We’ll stop for the night,” Lyleth said. “And you’ll tell me about Merryn. About the trees and why she needed such magic.”
With Brixia at his side, Connor collected dry wood and stacked it the way he’d learned to do in the Boy Scouts. As he turned to ask Lyleth how she would light it, she appeared beside him with a rushlight and struck it on a stone. The flame consumed the leaves he’d gathered until bright warmth penetrated him.
He asked her, “You don’t remember anything at all of the Otherworld?”
“As it should be. See what it’s done to your ‘Dish’? Memories are a curse.” She went back to tending to Dylan. She dribbled fresh water mixed with honey into his mouth and placed a damp cloth on his forehead. In the shadows cast by the firelight, Connor could see a vague resemblance to that old photo of Lyla Bendbow. Something in her eyes.
“But you’re Old Blood,” he blurted.
Lyleth froze, the dripping cloth in her hand.
“You and Merryn,” he said. “You are druada of the Old Blood. Exiled with the rest. You stored your memories in the soothblade and found it every time you were reborn. You and Merryn have a plan—”
“It’s not possible,” she said.
He pulled the soothblade from his belt. “This one is Merryn’s. And that one—”
“Cannot be mine. It was Ava’s. Dylan found it beside her body after she cut herself.”
“Maybe it just took the long road to get back to you.” He ate a few grasshoppers as he talked. “You and Merryn plan to open the well and bring the Old Blood back, restore them to their land. You’ve already started things. You have a daughter—”
“What would you know of my daughter?” There was venom in her eyes.
“Dish, Nechtan, knows he has a daughter. He’s seen her. He sees you in his dreams, he says. And he knows about the prophecy.”
“What prophecy?”
She really had no memory at all. It had to be stored in her deep subconscious somewhere. It was like she’d been operating on autopilot all these years.
“After the Old Blood crossed to the Otherworld,” he told her, “the well was sealed. In the Otherworld, the seal was a well stone, like a capstone. It had the mark of the water horse on it.” He glanced at Brixia, her eyes glittering in the firelight. “On the stone were runes that read, ‘Cleave star from stone, Child of Death, and call the Old Blood home.’”
“Child of Death,” Lyleth muttered, her eyes on the dance of the fire.
“Angharad,” Connor said. “She’s a child of the Old Blood and the Ildana.”
“A child of the living, and the dead.” Lyleth sat beside the fire, hugging her knees to her chest and gazing into the flames as if she could read the future there. He saw tears glistening in her eyes, and she wiped them away and buried her face in her arms. He knew what she was thinking. That calling Nechtan back from the dead was all just a plan hatched by her and Merryn. She wasn’t acting for the good of the land or even to appease her green gods. It was all leading to this… Angharad would open the well and set her people free.
“That’s why she’s with him.” Her words were barely audible, as if it took all her will to speak them.
“Who?” Connor asked.
“That’s why Angharad was at the stone of the Crooked One. The well lies beneath it. It’s the well stone in this world, sealed by the blood of the Crooked One, Tiernmas, last king of the Old Blood.”
She drew the soothblade and held it up to the fire. Fractures and dark mineral deposits traced spidery lines through the clear green stone. “I have to find a way to get the memories out of this blade, no matter who it belongs to.”
“You smell abundant luck,” Connor said. He meant to say ‘it’s your lucky day,’ but it came out all wrong. “Merryn told me how.”
Chapter 13
Dish had given Elowen a crash course in driving. Merryn’s old lorry was an automatic, thankfully, and Elowen was a quick learner. Within a few hours, she was able to drive them to the end of the lane and back. The roads in Madron village were anything but busy and Dish could only hope no one had seen the beaming smile permanently fixed to her face as she drove up to the funeral.
Elowen had put the truck in gear just as Dish had taught her, and they’d eased down the country lane at a slow pace. She halted at the crossroads, checked for traffic, and prepared to edge forward again.
“You’re rather good at this,” Dish said.
“Wagons are all the same,” Elowen replied with a smile. She stepped on the accelerator, nearly riding the car into the hedgerow.
“Well, maybe not that good.”
Merryn’s funeral was attended by the few friends who had not preceded her in death. They joined Dish’s cousins whom he hadn’t seen since his father’s funeral
ten years earlier, and Bronwyn’s friends, all of whom stayed on for tea and nibbles in the church hall. It was a modern box of a building set apart from the medieval church of St. Madron.
At the entrance of the hall, cornflowers and butterbur had been arranged in the hollow head of an ancient gargoyle, long ago fallen from the walls of the church. The fanged beast guarded the guestbook, and Dish noted that many of the elderly touched their lips then touched the gargoyle as they passed. An old superstition of the villagers. The creature offered the blessing of Saint Madron herself, really a Brythonic goddess dressed up in Christian clothes.
Dish sat in his wheelchair just inside the door, looking up the nostrils of every person who stopped to offer him condolences. But all he could think of was Connor. The moth Angharad had placed in Elowen’s mouth which enabled her to cheat death ended up in Connor’s mouth, or so Elowen had explained. Might it mean that he lay underwater in the pool of the Crooked One? And if Angharad found him, Connor would be with Talan now, and he would likely be deemed one of the Sunless. If Talan was as crazy as Elowen said, what would he do to Connor?
These past two days, Dish had sent Elowen to the stream at dawn and dusk to search for him. She’d seen nothing and no one, and no sign of the people Mr. Peavey had glimpsed in the woods. Peavey had asked no more questions about Dish’s excursion in the muck cart, or Elowen’s sudden appearance.
When Peavey walked into the hall and took Dish’s hand in a long, rough shake, Dish said, “You had something urgent to tell me the other day. I’m sorry I haven’t had time to talk.”
“It’ll wait, sir. You’ve other things to tend to now.” Peavey nodded across the hall to where Alfred Trewin talked with the vicar. “Best take care wi’ that one, sir.”
The inspector’s protuberant eyes flitted to Dish each time he sipped his tea. He finally came toward him, his hand extended to Dish.
“I expected to see your Yank friend here. Has he gone back to America?” Trewin asked.
“Off to do some research up in the north,” Dish replied. “Takes him off for days at a time. He had an appointment he dared not neglect.”
