by Terry Madden
“I mean you no harm, Elowen. You saved me. Dylan and I are like…like brothers.”
She knotted her arms, hugging herself, clearly realizing the grave sin she’d committed in feeling anything for this pustule of humanity. She was backing away, off the porch and into the violet bed where the sunset splashed behind her.
“No longer, I’d expect,” she finally said. “I should have let you die.” She spat the words through quaking lips, tears streaking her cheeks.
He nodded and stared at his hands. “Yes. I’ll call Bronwyn. She can come and fetch you. I’ll be gone tomorrow. I swear it.”
The wish to die had lured him with every setting sun, and tonight’s was spectacular. But death would just send him back around. He’d just start over again. Feel his way blindly back to his own past. And now that Tiernmas was alive, he’d spare nothing to find Connor, for the scribe and his creature are bound by chains forged of blood. There was no way he could hope to explain this to Elowen.
Drenched in Scotch, Coventina was mewling. She followed Elowen onto the gravel drive, and threaded herself in and out of her legs.
“I’m going to call Bronwyn. She’ll fetch you.”
Elowen just wrapped her sweater tighter. With a hateful look, she strode down the long drive toward the road.
Connor found Bronwyn’s phone number written on the dirty white board in Merryn’s kitchen below Dish’s and Connor’s cell numbers.
“Elowen is headed down the road,” he told Bronwyn. “She’s, she’s beyond angry with me. If you could pick her up.”
He hung up before Bronwyn could respond.
He could have sent Elowen back the way he’d sent Merryn, told her nothing of who he was but let her bleed out, could have tasted her blood and bound her to him as he sent her through the roots. If he were some other man, some other blood scribe. No, she’d have to find her own way back across the Void. Dylan was waiting for her. She belonged with him.
Connor found his upturned teacup on the porch, refilled it with Scotch, and sat in Dish’s wheelchair. Elowen’s figure grew small as she made her way down the lane.
It was time to find Celeste.
Chapter 5
A cloud of gray dust blew from the rubble of the knights’ stones, shrouding the battlefield. As Fiach pummeled Cyr’s shield wall, the knights had formed their own battled unit and now attacked the rear. Fiach’s men broke rank in obvious confusion, giving up the offensive.
Cyr’s shield wall was already in disarray and under attack from both sides. The knight named Saeth killed three of the Old Blood without much effort, then sliced deeper into the line, her two swords a blur.
Dish had pushed himself to a sitting position in the mud.
Fiach reformed his horsemen and renewed the charge. He’d finally got the idea—these creatures were on his side.
Dish glanced at Iris. She’d made no move to fire the gun as he’d asked. She was still cowering behind the dead horse. Maybe it wouldn’t fire here.
It couldn’t end this way. Cyr wasn’t the enemy. They needed every fighter they could get to face the Crooked One.
Dish called to Fiach, but could not be heard over the din of the battlefield.
“Iris!” Dish crawled the short distance to her. He sat with his back to the dead horse. He could see the gun clutched in her quaking hands. “You know how to shoot that thing, remember? You did it once. I need you to do it now. Fire the gun, Iris. Please.”
After a deep breath, she wiped at her running mascara. “Yeah, okay, Dish. Okay.”
She staggered to her feet. Her tie-dye shirt made her the brightest object on the field, like a standard bearer. She clutched Connor’s gun in both hands and raised it straight over her head, her chin to her chest and her eyes squeezed shut.
A thunderous report echoed across the bog.
Horses reared and tossed their riders. The knights and the Old Blood ceased their fighting and all turned to Iris. She looked like a rock star—about to smash her guitar and set it on fire.
“Again?” she asked, with rapid panting breaths.
He was surprised the gun had fired at all. “No. No, I think you’ve got their attention.”
It was Saeth who stepped forward, her swords in a defensive cross before her.
“Your name is Saeth.” Dish proclaimed the name like a spell. “A name uttered with reverence around the winter fires of the Ildana. You served Black Brac, but he is long dead. Our enemies are not the Old Blood any longer, but the one who has awakened.”
The blazing green eyes moved from Iris to Dish as if Saeth were an automaton, governed by the magic of Black Brac’s druada.
“Who is this who speaks my name?” Saeth’s voice was the rustle of wind through reeds. The other knights closed behind her.
Dish swallowed the lump in his throat. Iris crouched behind him as if he could protect her.
Fiach’s horsemen had reined up a spear’s throw from the knights, and the Old Blood were forming a shield wall behind Dish and Iris. Dish could only think of the saying, “Between the devil and the deep blue sea.” The Ildana once again faced the warriors of the Old Blood with Dish between them.
“He…is Nechtan!”
It was Iris who said it. She couldn’t possibly have understood the Ildana words Saeth had spoken, but she managed to put together a phrase in Old Welsh. It wasn’t the time or the place for this strange unveiling. But it would have to do. If it kept these people from killing each other.
Dylan took her cue and said, “Nechtan has returned. The king has come!”
Fiach rode closer, leaving his army behind. He dismounted and strode closer until he squinted down his chest at Dish. The past six years had eroded Fiach’s good looks. Silver threaded his amber warrior’s braid and beard, but he was as strong as ever, cat-like in his movements. Dish felt a surge of old jealousies flush his skin.
“This is not Nechtan,” Fiach spat.
“And you should know,” Dish said. “You who displayed my stinking corpse to your men. You kept it in your supply tent. You even tied Lyl to it. You left her there to die with me. Such kindness demands repayment.”
Fiach bent over and pushed his face into Dish’s. His eyes flashed to Iris who still held the gun over her head in quaking fists.
“Stand up, stranger,” Fiach demanded.
Dish grasped his pants and lifted one dead leg to let it drop. “I cannot.”
“Is this a jest?” Fiach asked with a forced laugh.
He drew his sword and pressed the tip to Dish’s chest.
Iris stumbled over the dead horse toward Fiach, saying, “Get away from him or I’m gonna blow your ass off.”
Dish looked over his shoulder to see her squared up with the gun pointed at Fiach.
“She says,” Dish translated, “that if you don’t step back, she’s going to drill a hole through your chest with that weapon of hers. It can kill from quite a distance. I would do what she asks.”
Dish guessed that the sight of the petite woman with a streak of electric green in her bleached hair, multiple rings in her lower lip, and tribal tattoos like a seasoned warrior from Cadurques probably put fuck-all fear into Fiach and his men.
Fiach’s gaze flashed from the gun, to Iris’s face, then back again. His mouth hung slack and he glanced back at his men, who had dared advance no further. Then he took four slow steps in retreat.
“Dish,” Iris said with a quavering voice. “Show him your arm.”
He’d spent six years trying to cover the thing up. He rolled up the right sleeve of his dirty dress shirt and extended the inside of his forearm to Fiach. As he did, he said, “The mark you once pointed out was missing on Nechtan, the resurrected king you denied. That’s because…I had it.”
Fiach set his jaw.
Dish said, “I’m no threat to you Fiach.” He indicated his lifeless legs again.
Fiach’s gaze went from Dish’s wrist, to his eyes, and then back to his wrist. He finally growled, “Then you’re of no u
se to me either.”
“Are you sure of that?”
After a lengthy hesitation, Fiach sheathed his sword, utter confusion on his face.
Dish saw his opportunity. “It’s not the Old Blood we must fight, it’s the Sunless, those who have pledged their souls to the one who claims to be king, the self-made god. The Crooked One, the Lord of Death, the King of Darkness, Lord of Caer Sidi. We have given him these titles as our fear has grown these thousand years. We have made him into a monster in the lore of the Ildana, and a monster he may well be. But these men,” Dish motioned to the Old Blood behind him, “they denounced Tiernmas a thousand years ago. They agreed to exile, and they handed their king over to Black Brac to be executed. They want only to live in peace beside the Ildana. The way it should always have been since our ships first anchored off these shores. We are the invaders, Fiach.”
“That was a thousand years ago,” Fiach stated. His eyes flashed to the men behind Dish. The women and children of the Old Blood had found their way from the caverns below, and now huddled far behind their men. A child began to cry. “We are no longer invaders,” Fiach said, “we are the rulers of this land. The Old Blood are here to take it, no less than the ice-born have done.”
Dish tried one last approach, drawing from everything Dylan had told him about the opening of the well and Tiernmas’s rebirth.
“Tiernmas is building an army of followers,” he began loudly so all those gathered could hear. “Those who served him in secret from among the Ildana will join him. Those who have made blood sacrifice to him, fed him with the greenflow, and kept him strong inside his stone coffin. But it’s not only these few Ildana who have served him these centuries—he has followers among the Old Blood. Many of those have set aside the green gods to serve him. They may be trapped still in the land of the dead, or they may have found their way to the Halls from the other side. When they reach him, his army will swell. And when he’s strong enough, he will emerge and retake this land from us. Unless…we join these Old Blood, these who still revere the green gods. We must join them and fight.”
Fiach’s grip on his sword hilt slackened somewhat. He surveyed the gathered army of Old Blood who were dressed in the armor of his own fallen men as well as those of Ys. “Who speaks for the Old Blood? Surely not this cripple.”
Dish addressed Cyr in his own tongue, and asked him to come forward.
“This is Cyr. He wants peace. Will you grant him that, Fiach?”
“I’m in no position to grant anything to anybody, and neither are you.”
“The king of the Ildana is dead, and I, well, you’ve seen what I am. A cripple, as you’ve pointed out so well,” Dish said. “You speak for the Ildana now.”
It was Saeth who stepped forward. The flames of her green eyes had faded to embers. She stood before Dish, her stone-powdered face tilted quizzically, the red of her hair nothing but a glow beneath the dust. Then she fell to one knee and arranged her two swords as a cross in the mud before Dish, hilts pointed toward him. It was the ancient act of capitulation, a ritual that had died out these past thousand years.
He thought he could see the green fire dancing in the blades just as it danced in her eyes. The smell of ground stone, like chalk, filled his nose. What was she? Her flesh had died a thousand years ago, fossilized by the greenflow, and yet she moved and breathed.
“My lord king,” she said in an unearthly rattle, like stones washed by breaking waves. “I serve you now as I once served you. Command me and my brothers once again.”
“Once again?” Fiach asked.
In that moment, Dish felt as though he’d been spun on a mill wheel, that existence was nothing more than the eternal “we are” built upon the finite “we were.”
The conscious mind is a dreamer afloat on the surface of a very deep lake.
“You are the king,” Saeth decreed, “and we accept no other.”
They wasted most of the day in argument. Dish finally convinced Fiach to accept a temporary truce, long enough to hear him out. They would never have a better chance to succeed in an attack of Caer Sidi than now. Tiernmas would never be weaker than he was now.
Fiach presented the reality of it. His own troops were decimated, and the men of Ys who had survived the battle had fled.
“How can we get inside Caer Sidi?” Fiach added. “You said yourself, the only way in is through a maze deep underground, even if we could get through the gates.”
“We have the Old Blood,” Dish said. “We send someone to Ys who can negotiate skillfully.”
Fiach snorted. “Ye?”
The person who came to mind was Lyl. She never left Dish’s mind. He said, “Without Talan, control of what remains of the army of Ys lies with the captain of the house guard who has likely returned to Caer Ys.”
“Right now, we send the dead on their way to the Otherworld,” Fiach said.
The day grew old, and the dead began to stink.
Fiach saw to the cremation of his own men, but left the rest.
As evening approached, tremors began to shake the bog. It felt as if the entire surface would follow the island into the slowly widening chasm. In the Otherworld, Dish had seen pictures of such things; whole city blocks had vanished into the earth in sinkholes. Maybe there were ancient sunken fortresses in that world, too.
The stream that had once fed the bog, originating in the dense forest that bordered the north end, had become a cataract, plunging several hundred feet into the chasm. Dish hoped it might drown the halls of Caer Sidi in the process.
But Lyl was still down there.
With the tremors came landslides. Bodies of men, horses and dogs vanished into the growing pit. The living retreated to the edge of the forest. Men feared sleep, believing they’d awaken at the bottom.
Iris had gone with Dylan to see to the distribution of food, leaving Dish beneath beetle-ravaged trees among injured men who had been recovered from the battlefield. Dish found himself assisting a woman of the Old Blood who appeared to be a healer, possibly even a druí. He did as she instructed, packed wounds with moss and spiderweb, held mouths open for a trickle of water or the strong drink that was so similar to whisky in the Otherworld. The woman, Ffion, had strong fingers, a broad, rounded back as if from lifting, and merry, gentle eyes. She wore a dark red kirtle and trousers, taken from the dead.
“Ye, too, fought this battle?” She motioned to Dish’s useless legs.
“Not this one.”
How many battles had he fought as Nechtan? In the end it had been a box of steel and fire, a delivery van, that had finally taken his fighting strength from him. He didn’t even try to explain it to her.
Without warning, she lay her hands on his legs, felt about as if she could do something for him. He drove that fantasy from his mind. Even in this world, those who lost the use of their legs rarely regained them.
When she finally looked up at him, it was pity he saw in her eyes, not the hope she gave the others who lay beside him. Magic wasn’t meant for him.
Most of the injured slept. All except a boy of possibly sixteen years. He seemed to be in no pain at all. His face was empty of everything. He neither spoke nor moved. Ffion had given him gentle pats to the cheeks and failed to rouse him from his catatonic stare. She’d given him ale, nothing else. But he hadn’t touched his drinking horn.
“This will be behind you one day.” A lie was as good as the truth now. Better.
“Tell me about your home. Emlyn is large. What village is home?”
Nothing.
“I crossed the well. I came from the Otherworld.” Maybe some idle chatter could draw him out.
Without looking at Dish, the boy said bitterly, “Am I to fear ye, then?”
“You survived this battle. You have nothing to fear.”
The boy snorted a laugh. “Ye come from the land of the dead, and yet ye got no legs in the deal.” The words came slowly. The boy turned bloodshot eyes to Dish. “What good is magic then?”
“I’ve
been long enough without legs, I’ve forgotten what it was like to have them.”
The boy turned back to the wide plain that stretched out from to the south. His voice lacked all emotion. “I pressed my pike to a man’s throat and pushed it home. A man of Ys. A man older and wiser than the likes of me. Why didn’t he kill me?”
“The green gods have need of you.”
The boy spat. “Bugger your green gods.”
Dish had to smile. Yes, the gods never give us what we want, just what we need. Wasn’t there an old Rolling Stones song about that?
It wasn’t until the boy had to piss that Dish realized what he should have known all along. The boy had lost the use of his legs, too. A horse had fallen on him.
When the boy finally slept with the others. Dish watched the widening pit in the distance. The dead of Ys slid into it with the ground. With them went the peat-blackened bones of those who had fought and fallen a thousand years ago, and likely a thousand years before that. Perhaps they were the bones of those who had been sacrificed to the Crooked One. Reminders of their grisly death protruded from the muck in jumbles of blackened bone and rusted iron. Horses, dogs, and men surfaced alongside racks of great deer from ages earlier. Their bones surfaced, then fell, sliding over the edge into the ever-widening crater. Maybe if he fell in with them…maybe he’d find her down there.
He couldn’t hope that Lyl still lived. If she did, she might wish for the alternative. Dish was faced with living, not among the dead, but in the land of the living—without her.
Amid the stench of bog and death, swarms of insects sucked at Dish’s blood and the moisture at the corners of his eyes. He pulled his wretched sport jacket over his head to protect against the bugs. He was still wearing the smart-casual slacks and button-down shirt that Iris had dressed him in for his ill-fated date with Celeste.
As night fell, pyres continued to burn. Dish was thankful for the stench of burning flesh, for it was the only thing that kept the insects away.
