Three Wells of the Sea- The Complete Trilogy

by Terry Madden

  Merryn moved in a circle touching each head one after the other in an act of supplication.

  “These were worshipped by the green gods,” Lyleth said, understanding.

  “Aye. The gods of the gods,” Merryn replied.

  Lyleth followed behind Merryn from one god’s head to the next until she stopped before one of the goddesses. The three female likenesses were linked by sculpted vines that bloomed with flowers, swelled with seed pods, and sprouted thorns like a winter rose. The maid, mother and crone.

  Moss grew in the eyes of the maid. Honey dripped over the sculpted hair from a hive hidden somewhere in the rocks above. Lyleth could hear the bees. It deepened the color of the maid’s hair and cheeks. The maid was not a child in this sculpture, but a young woman. The swelling bud, the untested promise. Sculpted from stone, her features could be that of a thousand girls, yet Lyleth knew her with a mother’s conviction. The sculpture’s wide-set eyes swept up scampishly, and the hint of a dimple on the right cheek suggested a smile Lyleth knew well. The lips were parted slightly as if she were about to speak.

  Angharad.

  Just as Lyleth expected to hear Angharad’s voice issue from the stone, the walls began to shake. The flagstones beneath her bucked and she held Merryn tightly, expecting the roof to fall. It didn’t fall, but did exactly the opposite. Stones that had lain in ruins lifted from the ground. Pieces of ruined masonry refitted themselves into the sculpted arches of the dome, polished and perfect as the day the mason had cut them.

  The walls were rebuilding themselves.

  Merryn’s smiling face shone with the light of hundreds of glow bugs. “She’s come.”

  Chapter 4

  Connor found the law office of Arundell and Perry squeezed into a narrow space between a teahouse (spelled thé) and a place overflowing with Cornish souvenirs. He drove by in Merryn’s old pickup, searching for a parking spot. Fore Street in Truro was known for its Poldark feel. Most of the buildings dated from the 18th century or earlier, enticing tourists with fair weather, picturesque Morris dancing and pseudo-pagan festivals that marked any sacred day either real or imagined.

  Lughnasa had passed. The equinox was just days away, called Mabon by the neo-druids of modern times. Mabon ap Modron was the mythological son of the great mother in Welsh, often wrongly equated with the Green Man. Connor knew he was the lord of darkness, of death. He’d worshipped at his feet for many centuries. The equinox was called Elbin Elfid in the tongue of the Old Blood. Autumn light.

  “…Celeste is a terrifying woman,” Elowen was saying. Connor rejoined the conversation only at the end of her tirade. She’d been ripping Celeste for the past few miles. “You are putting yourself in danger meeting with her.”

  “Just because she’s one of the Sunless?” he asked.

  She gave him a look of disbelief, her brows drawn together in horror as she realized she’d been talking to herself for the past half hour. “Aye! Of course! What is it I’ve been saying all this time?”

  “I’ll be fine,” he assured her. He’d given her hand a pat before he could stop himself. “We’re in a public place.”

  Connor parked Merryn’s truck in a limited time parking spot.

  “You’re going to wait here,” he told Elowen. Her forehead bunched up as she prepared to protest again. “Move the car after fifteen minutes.” He pointed to the clock tower down the street. “Remember how I showed you to read that thing.”

  As he moved to step from the truck, she took his arm in a fierce grip. “Ye shouldn’t go in there,” she said. “Ye don’t know what she can do.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “She won’t let you leave, ye know. She’ll take ye like she took my lord.”

  “No.” He took her hand from his arm, and held it between his palms. “Trust me in this. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “But she works a dark magic. Blood magic. She’ll feast upon your soul.”

  He had to laugh. If she knew the truth, Elowen would doubtless run as far from Connor as her feet could carry her. He gave her hand another pat. “You can always call Inspector Trewin if I don’t come back.”

  The world spun when he got out of the car, reminding him that his red blood cell count was still low, according to the doctors. He pulled the sleeve of his sweatshirt down to cover the bandage on his forearm. Multiple rounds of stitching and some kind of antibiotics had made it manageable, but it still throbbed steadily. Connor’s body was working hard to renew his reservoir of “dark magic.”

  Celeste Arundell had wormed her way into Merryn’s family through a friendship with Bronwyn. She’d had a singular goal—opening that well. When she’d first met Dish and laid a hand on him, she would have known that he possessed the blood she needed. It wouldn’t have taken much to figure out what Merryn was hiding.

  Had she known who Connor was this whole time? No, he rejected the idea immediately. She would have tried to kill him if she’d known. Crafty bitch. But now, Celeste certainly knew full well that Connor was back, sucking up oxygen in this world. That would mean she’d already started running, or busied herself with setting a trap for him.

  A blood scribe of her talents would likely not run, however. It unsettled him. Connor had trained only four blood scribes in the years he served Tiernmas, a mistake he was clearly paying for still. He’d concluded that Celeste must be one of those four.

  Before he met her, he’d chosen one of the students as the most likely candidate. She was a woman of undeniable skill, mostly because of her disregard for her fellow humans, and even more, because of her obsession with Tiernmas.

  As Connor recalled, this student had failed to understand that Tiernmas had fallen in love long ago. With himself.

  Now, Celeste had failed to cross the well with Dish and the Old Blood. She couldn’t look too good in her followers’ eyes at this point. Her plan to reunite with the object of her desire, Tiernmas, had been foiled by Iris wielding Connor’s pistol.

  Connor wished he had the gun now, just in case.

  “I’m here to see Ms. Arundell,” Connor said to the receptionist, a middle-aged woman in a pastel peach suit.

  Connor pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head.

  Faux antiques and potted plants decorated the waiting room, but the smell of those obnoxious aromatherapy sticks reminded Connor of Dr. Adelman’s office. It was an obvious attempt to cover up the plastic and viscose smell of office carpet and paneling, but why couldn’t they find something better?

  The receptionist’s eyes summed him up quickly, doubtless judging his hoodie and jeans to be outside the usual fashion parameters for clients of the establishment.

  She asked at last, “I’m sorry, do you have an appointment?”

  “No. I’m…an old friend. In town for a few days, and thought we could catch up.”

  Her face morphed from harpy to the jolliest of hostesses. “Ah, lovely. But I’m afraid she’s in a meeting at the moment. Perhaps you might leave your information and she can get back to you directly.”

  “I’ll try her again later.” He started away, but an impulse took him. He turned back to say, “Tell her Caradoc called.”

  “Caradoc…?” The receptionist fished for a surname.

  “Just, Caradoc.”

  He regretted it as soon as he’d said it. Celeste would read it as direct threat, which he supposed it was, and if she fled—his plans would be toast.

  As he stepped out on the sidewalk and rounded the corner, he paused, watching Elowen from across the street for long seconds. She had moved to the driver’s seat of the beat-up truck, her hands on the wheel as if she were ready for a starting flag to drop in a race. Even from here, the radiance of her living flesh lit up the cab of the Toyota like the beacon of a lighthouse. She belonged with the living as much as Connor belonged with the dead.

  It was time to talk.

  Connor had found any excuse possible to avoid talking to Elowen about the truth. One of those excuses was the appointment with t
he shearer the next morning. He and Elowen began the task of corralling the sheep. The shearer would be there by eight, and one hundred sheep had to be easily available for the task. But these sheep had clearly been sheared before, and the small metal pen by the barn was a known spot where terrifying things always happened.

  Connor took one side of the pasture, and Elowen the other. She sang to them, and had far more luck getting them to move as a group.

  “Why doesn’t Merryn have a dog for this?” Elowen asked. “We have dogs in the Five Quarters.”

  “Merryn used to just stand up there by the pen and call them.” Connor had a distinct memory of it, and never thought it strange until now. “She’d sing a little song, and the sheep would file in like boarding school students.”

  Elowen tried a song, some kind of magical tune she’d learned on the Isle of Glass. The sheep just stared at her and bleated.

  Thankfully, the shearer brought a sheepdog. Within minutes, he had the stragglers rounded up and began the noisy process of shearing the summer wool. It made the winter coat come in thicker, he said, to shear twice a year.

  He was done by noon, and handed Connor a fistful of cash. “Welsh blacks are favorites of the natural fiber lot,” he said. “Worth their weight.”

  After the bundles of fleece were tarped and tied down to his little truck, he was off.

  Tuffs of stray black wool blew from the pen as the terrified sheep spilled back into their pasture.

  Connor smelled like them—the musky scent of lanolin and mud. It brought a memory of the Otherworld, of the richness of a place manifested from greenflow. Not that there was no greenflow in this world, but it was nothing but the shadow-energy cast by the living. He could conjure with it, but only weakly, and the currency here was always blood. Sap, pollen, seed and flower were often enough in the land of the living, at least for simple conjurings. There was nothing simple about sending Elowen back through the Void.

  He glanced at the cottage. She had gone to start lunch. He couldn’t avoid this any longer.

  He wished Peavey, or Ned, had not left in such a hurry. He could have taken Elowen across. Connor could only guess Ned had been freed from a binding oath he’d made to Merryn. He’d done his job, and was off to another world, another well. After all, they spilled one into another, infinite fractals of the headwaters of an indifferent universe.

  The sun was westering over Penzance, casting long afternoon shadows as he walked back to the cottage.

  He moved Merryn’s gray cat, Coventina, from an old wicker chair to his lap, and stroked the silky fur until she purred. Coventina narrowed her eyes and pierced Connor with her incidental gaze. Cats see the soul first and the flesh second, the Old Blood would say. He was puzzled by why she was tolerating him at all.

  Elowen’s voice drifted through the open door. “My lord king is a fine man, but how will he protect himself in the Otherworld?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about Dish. He can take care of himself.”

  “He’s been robbed of his legs.” Elowen appeared in the doorway with a tea tray. Connor wasn’t about to tell her who was responsible for that. She said, “In the Five Quarters, they’ll not see him as king.”

  “Ah yes,” he agreed. “The old ways. The king must be perfect in body and mind as the consort to the land. Dish never wanted the throne anyway.”

  “What do you mean by that?” she scoffed. “Who else but he could lead? With Talan dead and none to take the throne.”

  “Dish is smart enough to want more than that, and he’s able enough to get it.”

  A cold wind blew from the sea, raising flurries of fallen leaves that had gathered under Dish’s wheelchair which was parked on the porch.

  Elowen set the tea tray on a rickety folding table. She took the other wicker chair, sitting gingerly due to its broken back leg. The gray cat immediately moved from Connor’s lap to Elowen’s.

  “Lyl is there,” Connor said confidently. “The Ildana will follow her. And she, with Nechtan, will lead them against Tiernmas.”

  As Connor brought the rosebud teacup to his lips, he smelled it. Not tea at all. Scotch. Again. He took a big swallow. He needed it if he was going to come clean.

  “Elowen…I need to explain some things.” He set the cup aside.

  “Explain?”

  Was there a right way to say that he was a murderous wielder of blood magic?

  He thought about taking Elowen’s hands in his, but decided it would give her the wrong impression.

  “Elowen…”

  The way he said her name brought her attention fully to him. He took a deep breath.

  “Listen to me. Dish’s blood opened the well. Without it, the Crooked One would not be free, but the Old Blood would not have crossed over either. Celeste used blood magic,” he explained. “You’ve studied with Lyleth long enough to know that such practices were set aside when the Ildana drove the Old Blood from the land.”

  “Of course ‘twas set aside. ‘Tis savage.” Elowen sipped from her teacup with both hands wrapped around the bowl, ignoring the handle.

  “Swords are savage too. The blade cuts both ways,” he said. He threaded his fingers together, and forced his eyes to find hers. “But would you agree that rivers run at will through a land? Ungoverned by any force other than…heaviness.” There was no word for gravity in Ildana. He wasn’t sure this analogy would work, but he’d try.

  “If you’re trying to make me think Celeste was doing good with her magic—”

  “Let me go on. Please.” He held his palms up in supplication. “To make that river useful to the people who live upon its banks, channels are dug. It might be used to turn a millwheel, maybe to flood an orchard.” So now he was trying to make himself out to be a farmer. Shit.

  He took a deep breath and pressed on. “Listen…blood magic has its place. The shaping of the stuff of reality by diverting or channeling the stuff of the dark, the deep places. Blood.” He was making excuses for blood magic—but there were excuses to be made. The only comparison he could think of was nuclear physics and its use for good or evil, but Elowen had no memories of the technological world.

  “Blood magic has its place?” Elowen rocked back in her chair, her outburst sending Coventina running. “Ava used blood magic to make the red crow that carried her eyes over the land. She murdered a druí—”

  “Here.” He had a flash of inspiration. He took his cup of whisky, which was abundantly full, and set it before her. Then he plucked a leaf from the black briony vine that climbed the porch wall and placed the heart-shaped leaf gently on the surface of the whisky. It floated there like a fairy boat.

  Elowen tucked her hair behind her ear; the quizzical quirk of her eyebrow meant she suspected she wouldn’t like what was coming next. She was probably right.

  “The leaf is light. It floats. It’s balanced between the world above, of air, and the world below, of water—or whisky in this case. We could use it by placing something in the bowl of the leaf and pushing it down our river of whisky. And we’ve not disrupted the balance. We’ve used it to move the boat.” He found a bit of loose gray cat hair and placed it on the leaf.

  “How is blood magic like a boat?” she demanded without a smile. “And how is it ye know so much about it?”

  “I’m, I’m getting to that.” He took a teaspoon and dipped it into the whisky, then slowly started filling the leaf with it. “It can carry only a certain amount, I can use the water to carry it along, but if I try to carry too much—” The whisky beaded and finally scuttled the leaf-boat. “Then, it’s no longer useful, no longer balanced between sky and water. In fact, it’s been changed entirely, from a leaf in this world above the water, to a leaf sunk down below, now occupying another world, another…dimension. It’s crossed over the barrier.”

  “So blood magic is like building boats.” It wasn’t a question; it was a dismissal. Her eyes said she thought it was ridiculous.

  “If our creations fall out of balance, consume the greenflow s
o that it damages life around it—it sinks through the Void. It sinks, rots and poisons everything around it. That’s what the Crooked One is. And I…”

  He was about to drive away the one person in this world who felt something for him, something warm. His lame attempt to soften the truth was asinine.

  She leaned close to him, knees to knees. Her hands found his, and she met his eyes with fierce conviction. In them, was affection for him so deep it made him ache. He’d have to purge her of that right now.

  He swallowed hard and looked away. He let go of her hands and knotted them together in his lap. “I’m…I’m—”

  Her warm hands settled softly on his cheeks. Then her lips found his. He refused to let his body respond. This wasn’t passion; she was testing him. She was feeling around his insides with the touch of a druí. If Lyleth had taught her anything, Elowen would feel his past. She’d feel who he really was and he would allow it. He opened his soul to her completely.

  “Who are you, Connor Quinn, that you’d wake me from my stony sleep and take my place in the bog?” Her voice was silky. He wanted more than anything to take what she offered as he’d taken her kindness all along.

  He took her hands and placed them on his chest. Let her feel him. Let her see him. He opened his dark soul to her. Let her see Caradoc.

  She snatched her hands away.

  “In a distant life,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I was blood scribe to Tiernmas, last king of the Old Blood. I shaped him, from the flesh of a brilliant young man with a twisted spine and a withered arm. I made him. The Everliving, the Crooked One. I was called Caradoc.”

  Elowen stumbled to her feet, upsetting the tea tray. The smell of Scotch fumed around them.

  He was on his feet as well. When he tried to take her hands, she slapped at his arms, and then shoved him backward till he fell back into the chair. The horror in her eyes was enough to make him feel the way he’d felt when he’d opened his memories in the soothblade. His yearning for death was as real as it had ever been.