Three Wells of the Sea- The Complete Trilogy

by Terry Madden

  The fighters were forced to shield themselves against the sandstorm. With shields turned into the wind, they looked toward Dish and the ring of stones.

  When Dish looked up again, the last of the stone crumbled to the ground. Hair, powdered with dust, was knotted in intricate braids. It was a woman, clad in ancient armor of bossed leather stitched with horn plate.

  She must be Saeth of IsAeron. According to legend, she never used a shield. This creature drew two short swords from her heavy belt. She tapped them together as if to knock the stone from them, then glared down at Dish with eyes blazing with green flame.

  “Saeth!” Dish called, not knowing how that would help.

  Her head tipped quizzically at him. Bending over, she placed dusty fingers under his chin and probed his eyes with her flaming gaze.

  White with stone dust, she wore a leather helm plated with bone and embellished with a polished rim of steel. Her mail was threaded with narrow blue ribbons, now faded, that fluttered like a maid’s dress and her eyes burned green on either side of the long nose-guard.

  “You were captain of Black Brac’s house guard.” Dish hoped it was enough to convince her of his allegiance, though he was unsure of it himself.

  Her head swiveled slowly on a neck of softening stone; she turned her green spirit eyes from him toward the battlefield.

  The creature spread her two swords wide as if she offered the ritual gesture of respect to Dish, an ancient version of showing the palms. Then she stood, and started toward the battle. The eleven others followed her, shaking off the stone that had bound them.

  Black Brac’s orders had been given a thousand years before. They were the orders of a man who made no bargains and wanted all or nothing. The Knights had been charged with killing the Old Blood.

  With the approach of the Knights, Fiach’s men fell into disarray. Their horses reared and tried to bolt from the Knights.

  But Cyr charged forward and his men followed.

  Saeth launched herself at Cyr, her swords meeting his shield to splinter it.

  Dish pulled himself across the muddy turf on his elbows, knowing there was no way to reach them.

  How could he stop this?

  Wielding the remains of his shield, it was all Cyr could do to avoid Saeth’s second blade until another of the Old Blood came to his aid. But Saeth parried both of them with ease, catching the second man’s spear in the crux of her two swords and snapping the shaft.

  The Old Blood numbered in the hundreds and the knights were but twelve. Dish knew the makings of those twelve. They would not be put down easily, and the Old Blood would fall right where their ancestors had died.

  “Bloody hell!” Dish screamed. “Saeth!”

  At the sound of her name, the woman glanced toward Dish long enough to miss a parry. Cyr’s blade found her shoulder and glanced off her armor.

  “Iris!” Dish called.

  “I’m here.” Her voice was weak and distant. She’d followed his crawl toward the battle, and taken cover behind a dead horse.

  “Fire that bloody gun!”

  Chapter 3

  From the ledge high above the copper gates, Lyleth clutched Merryn’s hand tightly. She knew if she let go, Merryn would scramble down the rocky path to Tiernmas. By the look on the risen beast’s face, Tiernmas knew it just as surely. The wreath of dead blooms upon his head had begun to green already, and color flushed the deathly pallor from his skin.

  Merryn had returned to the land of the living just as she had sent Lyleth, through the sap of a blood-runed tree conjured by Connor. All of this—from Angharad’s birth to convincing Connor to bleed the old woman out—all of it had led to this moment.

  It had taken her a thousand years to put the pieces in place, but Merryn had succeeded. She’d opened the well and freed the exiles for one reason—so she could return to her lover and king.

  Brixia circled the two women like a sheepdog. She nudged Lyleth. Her message was clear. This place was not safe.

  Lyleth released the breath she’d been holding. From this vantage, it was clear that Angharad was not with Tiernmas. Relief and worry dueled in her. She’d expected to see the child’s hand in Tiernmas’s, as she’d once clung to Talan. Lyleth nurtured the hope that her daughter had escaped him, had found her way out of these endless tunnels.

  Tiernmas pressed his palms to the copper doors, and they opened to him. His eyes, pale moonstones too beautiful for any human to own, found Merryn. What passed between the two, Lyleth could only guess. But the dead wreath that crowned his amber hair, suddenly came into full flower. It was as if the sight of Merryn set the petals free and, one by one, his silky soft promises floated upward in the torchlight, blue and yellow petals buoyed by drafts rising unseen from the precipice below. They spiraled up toward Merryn.

  Lyleth could not let them reach her.

  “Come.” She took Merryn by the shoulders and turned her from the scene. “We must be gone.”

  Merryn’s shadowed eyes were filled with tears. It was not the face of an old woman as she would have been in the Otherworld, but the face she’d worn a thousand years ago. The face loved by Tiernmas and Lyleth. Though lined with soot in the way of the Old Blood, she was still doe-eyed and heavily lashed. Her lips were so full and expressive, the words they spoke always sounded like music. Her impish size and the light dusting of freckles over her long nose made her look like a perpetual child. Hers was a face Lyleth had loved and cursed with equal ardor.

  Lyleth wished it had been the old woman’s body Merryn had brought with her through the roots. A wise old woman who had waited a thousand years to be reborn, though Lyleth would never describe the woman she’d known a thousand years ago as wise. Clever, faithful and monstrously impulsive—Merryn had been all of those things. Trust was not something she could spend on Merryn, especially now.

  Brixia danced around them, dislodged stones, and then trotted back into the tunnel from which they’d come, clearly trying to warn them to leave this place.

  “Come.” Lyleth tugged at Merryn’s hand until they’d reentered the narrow corridor.

  “Perhaps he’s changed as we have,” Merryn whispered.

  “His soul’s been locked inside a stone for a thousand years. What kind of change could reach him there? Now come. He’s poison to you.”

  The doors had opened, and Tiernmas was crossing the threshold into the halls. Lyleth knew he was too weak to come after them now, but he would draw upon the greenflow of this place to rebuild himself and his army. Not even Fiach would be a match for him then. She wished she could taunt him to turn, to come after her, for she stood a chance against him now. But she couldn’t risk losing Merryn to him. Having her, his solás, would give him a strength no one could battle.

  “Come,” she repeated and led Merryn after the little horse.

  The darkness in the tunnel was even darker after the blaze of torchlight had flooded their eyes. Lyleth reached out for Brixia and took the horse’s long tail in her hand. A tangle of tree roots grabbed at them until they were forced to crouch low, almost crawling. The woody fingers caught in her hair and clothes. It reassured Lyleth that this was the way they’d come, for it was in this tangle that she’d found Merryn.

  Lyleth had always thought her own awakening in a cavern of tree roots was nothing more than a child’s nightmare. She understood now, in this place, that it was no dream. She’d awakened from death in much the same tangle of roots.

  It was Dechtire, the master of the great school on the Isle of Glass, who’d found Lyleth in a similar state. Dechtire had placed false memories in Lyleth’s. She’d shaped Lyleth’s past into that of a lonely greenwood babe. Now with her true memories restored by the soothblade, Lyleth knew that she’d never had a family in this world. She’d grown up in the hive on the Isle of Glass because she had no home. Root-born, the Old Blood would call it.

  Connor had probably sent them both. Unless—there were others who wielded his blood magic. Others like Irjan. Maybe even Celeste.<
br />
  Connor held the power to summon and to send and he was certainly well aware of his power now. In fact, Lyleth half-expected to find him among these roots.

  Connor was the least of Lyleth’s worries right now.

  “You sent Nechtan back for one reason only,” Lyleth said to Merryn, trying to temper the accusatory tone that had surfaced in her voice. “You sent him to create Angharad.”

  “You and I could never create a being like Angharad.” Merryn laughed. “The green gods seize those of us they wish and shake us like rag dolls until we spill out the goods they seek. Where is your child?”

  Lyleth felt a burning lump in her throat. “And yet, you sent me back, hoping—”

  “Hoping. We all hope, sister.”

  Lyleth had feared she would see Angharad’s hand clutched in Tiernmas’s. There was a strange relief not to find the child here, but another terror knowing she was lost in the caverns alone.

  As they followed Brixia through the forest of roots, Lyleth told Merryn about Angharad—how she’d never been a normal child, but one well beyond her years; how she’d found a salamander in a jar and how she’d used it to free Tiernmas, which had in turn opened the well.

  “The salamander guardians have been hidden these long years,” Merryn said. “I was hiding the other one myself.”

  “Am I supposed to be surprised?”

  “Returning the exiles to the land of the living is what we set out to do, if you recall,” Merryn argued. “The well could not be opened without the release of the Crooked One.”

  “Convenient for you.”

  Merryn cursed under her breath, then said, “I want what you want, Lyleth. I want my people to return freely between the worlds, and—” here, she took a deep breath, “—I hope that Tiernmas has changed.”

  It was Lyleth’s turn to laugh. “So, to accomplish this great plan, you’ve been hiding the well from the Old Blood, keeping it for yourself.”

  “Keeping it from the Sunless,” Merryn corrected.

  “Waiting for the right moment, until the stars rose properly?”

  “I know you distrust me, Lyleth. You have good reason. But believe me, I want peace between the Old Blood and the Ildana as much as you do.”

  “And the Sunless? Tiernmas’s legion of followers? What of them?”

  Merryn was silent for some time, then finally said, “I sent you back, did the will of the green gods who would have birthed Angharad one way or the other. For they wanted the well opened.”

  “Or they wanted Tiernmas released,” Lyleth corrected.

  “Or they wanted both.”

  “Knowing the well would open soon, you made Connor send you back, so you’d be sure to be here when Tiernmas awakened.”

  “The question we must ask now,” Merryn said, ignoring the accusation, “is which result was Angharad after? Freeing Tiernmas, or opening the well? She couldn’t have one without the other.”

  Lyleth bristled in defense of her daughter. “Or could it be both?”

  Lyleth accepted the unspoken fact. It was clear from the evidence that Angharad was not just her little girl, but someone, something, vast and powerful. Lyleth only hoped her goal was the same as her own, to rid the world of the Crooked One. She had to believe it.

  “Then we need to consider why,” Merryn was saying.

  She was right. Whatever Angharad’s reasons for freeing Tiernmas and opening the well, they had to be driven by the desires of the green gods. For it was they who’d fashioned her, they who’d whispered in her ear. Lyleth had been nothing more than her surrogate mother. What was that Angharad had said? In this world, you are my mother. In all others, I am yours.

  But that didn’t change anything for Lyleth. Angharad was her child in this world, and the stony fear in her soul knowing that Angharad was lost in these caverns could not be eased by Merryn’s conjectures.

  “They call her the Child of Death,” Lyleth confessed, hoping Merryn could tell her more. “I can find nothing recorded in the annals of the Ildana that speak of such a one.”

  “Because she’s not born of the Ildana. She’s shaped from life and death. She sits upon the fulcrum,” Merryn said. “She moves between worlds on her silver wheel. She maintains the balance between them, and Tiernmas…” Her voice trailed off.

  Lyleth spoke the truth Merryn hesitated to admit. “Tiernmas seeks to sunder both worlds, to build his own from their ashes.”

  Merryn laughed. “You’re as full of that muddy nonsense as you’ve ever been.”

  “There’s nothing muddy about what he’s after,” Lyleth stately harshly. “A land of the undying. A land of the never-living. Once, you thought it a noble cause.” She regretted it as soon as she said it.

  “Once, you were a druí of the Old Blood,” Merryn replied with venom. “You turned your back on them, and slipped into the bed of an Ildana king. Not once, but twice.”

  “Not long ago you were the doddering old aunt to that very king, though he wore the flesh of a teacher.”

  Merryn stopped walking, catching Lyleth’s arm. In the near-darkness, her eyes flashed weakly. “How would you know such things?”

  “Connor,” Lyleth admitted bluntly. She wielded his name like a cudgel. Merryn could not have known Connor followed her across the Void, nor that he’d been turned to stone by Angharad’s magic.

  Merryn stopped walking. “Connor?”

  “There are those who possess a magic as great or greater than his own,” Lyleth said. “While you grew among the roots, Connor came here, and not by his own choice. He’s told me much about you—and himself. About the days when he was Caradoc. He’s told me enough.” Lyleth hoped Merryn would fear what Connor might have said about their past. Truth has a way of breaking down pretense.

  “Tiernmas will search for him,” Merryn said at last, moving forward in the dark like a blind woman.

  Lyleth knew she was right about that, if not much else.

  They both fell silent. Nothing but the sound of Brixia’s hooves scrambling for purchase broke the quiet. A faint, almost imagined, glow of gray indicated she had led them to a way out. Lyleth expected to see the well again and the bright sky far above, but that was not what she saw when Brixia pushed through a veil of roots into the open.

  Breathing hard, the little horse came to a halt inside a circular chamber lit by a swarm of flying turquoise lights. More insects. They seemed to be fireflies of some kind. A hole high in the domed ceiling let in a distant pale light. Not the sky, but something else. The glow of reflected torchlight perhaps. Moss grew on one side of the dome, furring the crumbling rib vaults with malachite green as if the structure had been decaying for many centuries. Moss needed sunlight to grow, or maybe it fed upon the light of these flying things.

  Upon closer inspection, Lyleth saw that the moss, like the insects, glowed with their own light and covered the walls of the chamber. When she drew close to the insects, she could see that their bodies were not shaped so much like insects, but tiny white things. The one roosting on Merryn’s head had the vague shape of a human with the wings like a dragonfly. The creature turned to look at Lyleth with bulging, faceted eyes, then flew off.

  The chamber in which they found themselves was shaped of sculpted stone. Time had dulled what had once been intricately carved dramatic scenes of battles and revels. Mounted spearmen led chariots as the sun and moon cast rays upon them like blessings.

  Six pillars topped with six carved human heads marked points around the chamber. Three of them were female, and three were male. It was far larger than any burial chamber Lyleth had been inside. And yet it had the feeling of a tomb.

  Directly below the central hole in the dome was a large basin of milky white stone. Water dripped slowly from the hole above into the basin.

  “The well,” Merryn said with wonder in her voice. “We’re inside Caer Sidi.”

  “This isn’t the well. I just came from the well. The island collapsed into an immense cavern, and—” Lyleth had watched ten
men surface in a pool that had opened beneath the ground. “It was not this place. It didn’t look like this at all.”

  “What was it like, then?” By the light of the flying things, Lyleth saw the mischief in Merryn’s face. She knew a secret. When Lyleth didn’t answer, Merryn said, “Come. Look.”

  Lyleth stood beside her, and the two peered into the water. There, in the reflection, Lyleth saw the cavern behind her just as it had been when the Old Blood had come through. The rough stone walls, the jumbles of rock, and the streams of water draining from the bog above. She could even see a glimpse of the blue sky far above.

  The reflection of the glowing insects were not the images of insects at all. They had clearly human forms. She could hear them—the faint cries of men in the tongue of the Old Blood.

  She was struck suddenly by the memory of the “little man.” The creature had taken Talan’s body and will from him, had made him an instrument of the Crooked One. Could these things enter her and take her in the same way?

  She snapped her head to look around at them. The insects looked as they had before, winged pale things that had never seen the sun.

  She took a step toward the sculpted heads, but her foot struck something in the shadows.

  Beside the basin lay the gray, staring face of Nechtan’s nephew, Talan. It had fallen with the rest of them when the island had sunk into the bog.

  “Stars and stones,” Lyleth moaned. “This is the well. Where did the cavern go?”

  The jagged walls of the cavern had been replaced by dressed stones. The walls and pillars grew like vines as if they were alive, twisting and branching into the vaulting high above. It was a seamless whole, with a grace that mirrored the natural world. Despite the white crust of minerals that had leached into the walls with seeping water, it was clear that Merryn was right. They had found their way into the buried depths of Caer Sidi, and the third well.

  Merryn was pointing at long basins that ran around the edge of the room. “The rain water comes from conduits in the walls, and travels down here. At one time, it poured from the mouths of the six sacred ones to fill the well.” Merryn had lived in Caer Sidi, after all. Lyleth wondered if it was a legend or if Merryn had seen it herself.