Three Wells of the Sea- The Complete Trilogy

by Terry Madden

  Tiernmas had reached the halls. It wouldn’t be long before he began searching the land of the dead for Connor. Neither of them alone was as strong as the two united.

  Chapter 2

  The axe haft felt right in Dish’s fist. Even though he’d lost his legs, his soul had not forgotten how to fight. He looked down at the man he’d killed, one of Celeste’s Sunless who’d crawled out of the well behind him. He regretted that she’d forced him to kill. But it didn’t matter what flesh he wore; he was the same man underneath, and the lives he’d taken stretched back to the beginning of time.

  He lay at the bottom of an immense pit, the walls of collapsed earth rising in jagged, crumbling chaos above him, raining dirt and stones from above. Water streamed in muddy races from all sides, and mingled with the bloody water of the well. Far above, a blue sky brightened like a vision through a keyhole.

  With one hand on the chiseled well coping, Dish’s lifeless legs were buoyed by the red water. It was stained with Connor’s blood, and that of the men Dish and the Old Blood had killed.

  “Iris?” he called.

  A weak voice came from behind a fallen boulder. “Yeah.”

  “Stay out of sight for now.”

  “Exactly my plan, Dish.”

  Dylan emerged from a tunnel with a half-dozen men. He was not the boy Dish had left six years earlier, but a man of fighting stature. All the men but Dylan were naked, just as they’d crossed over. Thankfully, they were no longer frogs. These warriors of the Old Blood carried an array of weapons—spears, axes, a few swords and pikes, and shields bearing the sigils of Emlyn and Ys.

  Dish called to Dylan from the well. “You know the way up.” When Dylan failed to respond, Dish added, “Help me out of here.”

  But Dylan narrowed his eyes as he approached Dish, leading with the point of his sword. “Are ye Old Blood? Or Sunless?”

  “Neither. I’m Nechtan,” Dish whispered. “At least, what’s inside is still Nechtan.” He thumped his chest.

  A distant recognition began to bloom in Dylan’s eyes as one of the naked warriors pressed the point of his spear to Dish’s throat. The warrior looked to Dylan for direction. Dylan had clearly taken command of these ancient fighters. Dish smiled.

  The spearhead pushed deeper and still Dylan said nothing.

  Dish offered something Dylan would recognize. “You and Lyl survived the calling of the sea. Without Brixia, you would not have been so lucky.”

  “You’re Ildana,” the naked man spat.

  “Right now, I’m British.” Dish replied haltingly in the warrior’s native tongue. When Nechtan had first taken the throne, Lyl had forced him to learn the basics of the dead language of the Old Blood. Now, he was glad she had. He said to the warrior, “You were a frog but minutes ago, looking for a way back here—a way I provided.” It wasn’t quite true, but it was true enough. Dish’s blood, after all, had played a critical part in the opening of the well.

  Dylan stepped between them, pushing the spear aside with his forearm. “My lord…it is you.”

  Dish shot him a look to silence him. It was best to keep his soul’s identity quiet for as long as possible. Dish reached out a hand, indicating he needed help to get out of the well. Dylan took it and dragged him from the water with surprising force.

  “Lord, I had no hope of your return—”

  “Dylan,” Dish said in Ildana, “now that you understand who I am, you’ll keep it quiet.”

  Dylan straightened.

  “The Sunless are right behind us,” Dish said as well as he could in the tongue of the Old Blood. “If we’re fighting among ourselves, we won’t be able to fight them.”

  “I don’t see how you’d fight anything,” one of the naked warriors said, indicating his legs. They lay at unnatural angles, and his wet trousers exposed the withered pointlessness of them.

  Dish brandished his ax. “I might surprise you.”

  All stood at the ready, eyes on the surface of the well. After some minutes, it appeared no more Sunless would come. Three of them? That was all that had made it across?

  “Something’s wrong,” Dish said. With bloody knuckles he dragged himself toward Iris’s hiding place. She’d pressed herself into the shadows. When he rounded the rock, he was met by the revolver pointed at his face. She’d brought Connor’s gun?

  “Put that bloody thing down!”

  She did so, stuffing it into the back of her pants like some kind of delinquent.

  “Did Bronwyn make the call?” he asked her. Dish had been too intent on clearing the crawlspace into the barrow to see what had been happening around him. Having forgotten Iris didn’t speak Ildana, he repeated it to her in English.

  She nodded and whispered, “The cops were driving up when we entered the barrow.”

  “Elowen?” It was Dylan. “Where’s my Elowen? She was here! I saw her!”

  Even Iris understood that. She answered before Dish could. “She fuckin’ jumped in after Connor.”

  Dish phrased it a bit kindlier in Ildana.

  Dylan’s face fell. All three of them stared into the bottomless water before them. In the next moment, Dylan was in. He dove under, trying to swim deeper, but the well refused him, buoyed him up like a bobber on a fishing line. It made Dish wonder how Connor and Elowen had crossed back.

  Dylan finally gave up, and hauled himself out of the water.

  “We’re here now,” Dish told Iris. “You’ll be needing that axe more than the gun.”

  Iris gazed up at the distant sky and the eroding walls. “How long before we’re buried alive down here?”

  “Dylan knows the way out.” Dish indicated the dripping man who stood beside him. Iris hadn’t taken her eyes from Dylan since she’d first seen him. “Let’s get to it.”

  Dish knew Lyleth had vanished into the maze of tunnels, but what of Angharad? Where had she gone?

  Dish had been granted no more than a brief glimpse of the child he’d longed to hold in his arms. He hoped she had not followed Lyleth and Brixia into the labyrinth.

  Iris stepped from behind the boulder and seemed to see the naked warriors for the first time. She took in the view with obvious delight. “I’m going to like it here, I can tell.”

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Dish warned. To Dylan, he said, “On our way to the top, you can tell me what happened up there.”

  The man who had initially held the spear to Dish’s throat did so again. He spoke as if he’d understood Dish’s Ildana. “There are none but the dead above.” He was middle-aged, his dark hair pulled back into intricate braids bound with hide strips and tied with shells. His black eyes were hooded by heavy brows, his face long and narrow like the head of a hatchet. He had the scarred build of the Old Blood who believed a warrior’s body was the only weapon he needed, a creature from legend come alive.

  “Then we’ll take their horses and make for Emlyn,” Dish said.

  “And what gives you the right to decide our path?” the dark warrior said. “You, a cripple.”

  “Do you fear me so?” Dish said, indicating the spearpoint at his throat. When the warrior failed to back off, Dish continued, “I seek nothing more than a peaceful return of the Old Blood to their lands.” Dish paused to search for the words in the man’s tongue. He extended his palms in surrender. If this warrior of the Old Blood were to uncover who Dish really was, see the soul that nestled in this imperfect body, he would kill him and dismember him, scatter his soul among the stars. It would be a matter of honor for a warrior of the Old Blood to kill a king of the Ildana.

  Dish said evenly, “I want peace between you and the Ildana. Nothing more.”

  “Peace?” the man scoffed. “We come to kill the Ildana. To take back the land that was stolen from us.”

  Dylan pushed the spear away from Dish’s throat. His Old Blood was worse than Dish’s. “Old Blood and Ildana, fighting with, to save the Five Quarters.”

  The dark man was confused by Dylan’s lack of the language.


  Dylan said plainly, “The Crooked One is free.”

  The look on the dark man’s face surely was as stricken as Dish felt. Tiernmas had been freed.

  “How?” Dish asked in disbelief. “He was guarded by the Knights of Stone and—”

  Dylan gave him a clear nod. “’Tis truth.”

  “Are there any of the Ildana left to fight?”

  “I don’t know,” Dylan said. “They may have retreated in fear.”

  Dish knew if Fiach or any other chieftain had assembled an army on the ground above them, they would attack the Old Blood without asking any questions. Dish wasn’t ready to die just yet. Not until he’d found Lyleth and Angharad. Not until he was certain an army was prepared to meet Tiernmas in battle.

  “I need to get above ground, to the chieftains of the Ildana,” Dish said with all honesty. “I offer whatever skills I have at negotiation because I know up above,” he pointed at the distant sky, “there’s likely an army waiting for you and if you attack, they will reply in kind. I give you my word that I want no bloodshed, I want the Old Blood and the Ildana to talk. That’s all.”

  The dark man glanced at the naked assembly of his kin, no doubt considering their chances against a prepared army.

  When none of them moved, it was Iris who came to Dish’s side. She cast her axe aside, and pulled Dish’s arm over her shoulder.

  “I have no idea what you three are babbling about, but we’re getting out of this fucking hole before we’re buried alive.”

  The dark warrior stepped aside and motioned for his men to head for what seemed to be the way out.

  Iris tried to drag Dish in the same direction but it became clear she could no more move Dish than she could a dead horse. Dylan took his other arm and the two dragged his dead legs behind him. Before they’d reached the spiral steps at the base of the cavernous hole, the dark warrior took Iris’s place. The man hefted Dish onto his back like a sack of grain, the way Connor had carried him to the stream.

  With his head hanging over the warrior’s shoulder, so close that Dish could smell the pond the man must have been spawned in, he whispered, “I’m Nech—” The name came to his tongue unbidden. He corrected it quickly. “I’m Dish,” he said as the man took the first step on the stairs.

  “I’m Cyr,” the man replied.

  Cyr said nothing more as he ascended the crude staircase. Chiseled from stone, the narrow steps spiraled upward at least ten stories. Dish locked his arms around the man’s waist. Vertigo took him, forcing him to close his eyes. By the time they reached the top, the view into the hole had a kaleidoscopic quality.

  The well at the bottom was nothing more than a bright silver disk. From the top, the view across the ground attested to a great battle, already fought and lost, for the turf was churned and dark with blood. Fallen horses still thrashed and screamed. It hadn’t been over for long.

  Not a single green leaf remained on willow or cattail, for something had stripped it all clean. The place smelled of shit and bog water.

  Winded, Cyr unloaded Dish into a pile of dead men which softened the fall, and returned to his men. A cloud of flies erupted from the corpses.

  Dish pulled his hand away from a cooling face and rolled into the mud. He dragged himself away and into the shade of a gray standing stone. It was one of a dozen just like it that circled the sinkhole. As he watched, the edges of the hole gave way in places, the edge creeping ever closer to the ring of stones.

  “They once stood around the crom cruach…”

  Dish lay his hand against the pillar of granite and looked up the expanse of stone. It had the vaguest shape of a man, shoulders thrust back and shaded with lichen and moss. These were the knights. Of the Stoney Ring. The tales of their imprisonment were told around every winter hearth; they’d been hammered in Dish’s mind like every other Ildana. Black Brac, king of the Ildana, had condemned them to guard the Crooked One. Now Dish saw each face in his mind’s eye with blistering clarity. Were they faces he imagined as a child? Or something else?

  Black Brac had stood by as each knight had accepted their watch, ready to wake when the Old Blood returned, ready to fight to the death rather than let the Old Blood reclaim this land.

  As if in response to his memories, a wind came up from the north, carrying the flies away, and scouring the Knights until Dish thought he saw a faint powder twist from the stone at his back.

  “Jesus…” Iris was beside him. She clung to his arm with a vice-like grip, her face a grimace as she looked across the battlefield. Of course, she’d never seen anything like this in the Otherworld.

  Across the field, the bodies of the dead were veiled in swarms of flies that competed with the crows. Beyond that, what once might have been a lake glistened in the morning sun. Now it was a draining swamp of decaying peat and mud. Insects perched on the bones of long-dead things that protruded from the muck. Crows roosted among the blackened racks of ancient great deer, the rusted wheels of chariots and the spines of horses.

  The draining of the bog had begun to reveal the history of the place. Here, battle upon battle had been fought. A cursed place.

  “The Plain of Slaughter,” Dish said.

  “The what?” He could feel Iris shaking, and he doubted it was just from her wet clothes.

  “This is where the Ildana won the Five Quarters from the Old Blood. It’s where Tiernmas was executed, and the exile began.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “This hole,” Dish pointed at the great maw ringed with standing stones, “was an island. The head of the Crooked One was encased in stone and set upon the island.”

  “Where is that stone now?” Iris asked.

  A deep fear gripped Dish. Yes, where was it?

  “This battle looks to be done,” Cyr proclaimed, striding toward Dish. He had stripped clothes from a fallen man and pulled on a leather kirtle over them. He cinched a sword belt around his waist. He squinted down at Dish. “Where are these Ildana you said would greet us?”

  “You’d best ask him.” Dish pointed at Dylan who approached with quick strides.

  “They can’t be far,” Dylan said, “Talan’s men, were attacked by Fiach’s. They were trying to stop it.”

  “The opening of the well?” Dish asked.

  Dylan looked from Dish to Cyr. “The freeing of the Crooked One…which is one and the same. Tiernmas had to be freed to open the well. The cromm cruach…it was the wellstone. Talan set him free. With Angharad’s help.”

  “Stars and stones,” Dish moaned. Talan’s reign had brought no more peace to the Five Quarters than Nechtan’s had. Talan’s fate was clear. Dish had seen his head, washed up among the rocks at the edge of the well.

  “And where is the Crooked One?” Dish pressed him.

  Dylan licked his lips. “Vanished under the ground. Like a snake. He…he took Talan’s body for his own and now he lives again. I’ve never seen nothing like it, my lord. The head of the demon came to life, eyes opened, when it was placed upon Talan’s body.”

  “And Lyl went after him,” Dish said, the realization like a physical blow. That was why she’d gone into the caverns.

  But Cyr was pointing across the pewter gray mud at a distant wall of horsemen. The armies had not retreated far and from the look of them, they’d seen the Old Blood taking the field. Their colors looked like Emlyn’s. The men of Ys had either fled or been killed.

  “Another battle’s soon to begin,” Cyr replied. He shouted to his men who were busy plundering the dead. Within minutes, they were armed and bore shields of either Emlyn or Ys.

  The wall of horsemen had begun to close the distance between them.

  Cyr shouted orders that resulted in a rag-tag shield wall. There couldn’t have been two hundred of them against fifty or more horsemen.

  “Shit. What do we do?” Iris crouched behind Dish, her hands on his shoulders.

  “I don’t know.”

  Dish looked up the expanse of stone above him. What had been an imagined fl
ow of powder was now clearly a stream of dust. The standing stone was eroding before Dish’s eyes.

  “The Knights return,” Dish said.

  “What knights?” Iris demanded. Then she followed his gaze to the pillar stone.

  Across the broad plain, Fiach’s horsemen splashed through the shallow water of the bog, spears set. The Old Blood would be defeated again before a peace could be struck. Dish couldn’t let that happen.

  He closed his eyes. In his head, he replayed a scene he’d never witnessed. It was as if he remembered the making of the Knights, remembered the pain they’d suffered as the druada spilled their blood and wrapped them in the horse hides. Black Brac’s twelve best warriors.

  Their duty called them now.

  He took his hand from the stone and with it came the crumbling stuff that had held them for a thousand years.

  Iris screamed.

  “It’s all right,” Dish told her. But it wasn’t all right. Dish could no more protect the Old Blood from the Knights of the Stoney Ring as he could from Fiach.

  The stone warmed beneath Dish’s hand. Iris stood and backed away.

  The sound of steel meeting shield erupted from the field behind them as the horsemen met the shield wall.

  The stone teetered on its roots. Dish was showered in a fall of rubble. He shielded his head with his arms, but could not look away. Above his head, gray fingers splayed from a dusty hand.

  Iris was trying to drag him away by the shirt. It tore and she fell backward.

  “No, leave me!” he told her.

  “You’ll be buried in this stuff!”

  “No. Watch!”

  She did. Across the field, Fiach’s horsemen pummeled Cyr’s shield wall, but the Old Blood held fast.

  Above Dish, an arm followed the fingers, peeling free of the stone and finally reaching for the hilt of a sword that was revealed at its waist. The wind increased. Streamers of stone dust twisted across the battlefield, like a dust storm in the desert.