Three Wells of the Sea- The Complete Trilogy

by Terry Madden

  “Then, by your definition, Connor created a god. Do you…” he was beginning to put her logic together, “do you think Angharad is such a blood beast?”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore. I saw her astride the little horse, Brixia, and she was with Connor in the land of the dead.”

  “I’d rather she were with Connor than with Tiernmas.”

  There were tears in her eyes when he looked down at her. She nodded. Then her palms were on his cheeks, drawing him close to her until her lips softly tested his.

  He responded with all the need he’d saved up for six years, the fantasy he’d built about seeing her again, holding her again, loving her again. All the selfishness, the neediness, the weakness that had been Nechtan, and now was Hugh Cavendish.

  He drew away from her, frozen by the sum total of his inadequacies.

  “Lyl…I’m not…We’re nothing but a basket of memories, replaying our roles over and over—”

  The sound of her hand slapping his face was like a gunshot.

  “Then, that’s all you’ll ever be.” She scrambled back over the supplies, and out of the cart.

  Saeth returned, and took up the ponies’ reins. Dish was alone but for the sound of hooves, the creak of the wagon, and Saeth’s broad, armored back.

  The encampment of the ragtag army of Ys lit up the skeletal forest with a string of campfires and makeshift tents. Wind muttered through the leafless trees, mingling with the sound of whistles and song, and sending embers to dance with the stars. The night was perfumed with wood smoke and roasting game.

  Iris was spending more time with Dylan now that her proficiency at the language was growing. From his central position by the commander’s fire, Dish watched her laugh at a silly sleight of hand trick Dylan showed her. Dish supposed the human soul was supple enough to find happiness wherever it landed. Each of these small dalliances shaped the self in ways humans could never know.

  How long had Lyl been standing there with a bowl in her hand?

  “You do eat, don’t you, Hugh Cavendish?”

  “Thank you.” He took the offered bowl that smelled of fish and root vegetables.

  She hesitated, as if waiting for an invitation to sit, but Dish offered her none. How many lifetimes had they spent weakening each other with the endless need they felt? This would be the last.

  He watched her walk away, and swallowed his pain with a bite of fish stew. It would be better for both of them this way.

  The army of Ys halted their southerly march at the pass above the Plain of Slaughter. The plan was to meet Fiach’s army, which would be waiting at the base of the ridge north of Caer Emlyn. Fiach would be able to fall back to his fortress if an attack was made before Dish returned with reinforcements.

  The villages through which they passed were devoid of life. Not even chickens were left. Either the inhabitants had fled or been consumed by the sucking swarms of insects.

  From the pass above the bog, it was clear that the forests of the Felgarths, which had been green and alive when they passed just days before, were now gray and dead. It was as if the trees had been ravaged by fire, and yet were not charred. The Red Bog was a distant dark hub around which the destruction of the Sunless radiated like fallout from some otherworldly bomb. What had once been a pool of water around the central island, was now an enormous black hole. Even from leagues away, swarms of insects were visible, and continued to spiral from it like smoke.

  Around the fire that night, Lyleth explained to Glaw that the Sunless were gaining strength by sapping the greenflow from the forest and the villages.

  Lyl stayed only long enough to answer his questions, then vanished.

  As the soldiers settled down to sleep, Glaw, still wearing his swordbelt and helm, made his way among them. Dish could hear laughter and banter, but could not hear the words. Glaw was doing what he should do, making his face known to the men he would lead into battle. Making his voice recognizable, for in the din of steel-on-steel, many orders are shouted by many men. Maybe Dish had made the right choice after all.

  As night fell completely, Glaw returned to the commander’s fire, took a bowl of fish stew, and squatted beside Dish.

  “What if Tiernmas just sucks us all dry like those trees?” Glaw talked while he chewed, wiping at the corners of his big mouth with the back of his hand. “If Lyleth is right, he never needs to come forth and face us, he just sends bugs.”

  “Then you must take the fight to him,” Dish said evenly. “You must lead these men into the halls. Find the bastard.”

  Glaw stopped chewing.

  “Lyleth says she doesn’t know the way, that it’s a maze inside—halls, doors, stairs, and below it all—”

  “Below it all is where he will hide. But before you can kill him,” Dish said, “you’ll have to figure out how.”

  “’Tis what you’re here for, is it not?”

  “I know no more about the underground of Caer Sidi than you. Lyleth has been inside. She’s the best we’ve got.” He didn’t bother to share what Lyleth had said about Connor—that without him, they stood no chance. After all, she could be wrong. She’d proven that more times than Nechtan could count. At the very least, Merryn could have led them through most of the fortress, but now they’d lost her as well.

  Let Glaw believe that strength was the only thing that mattered, for belief can often keep men alive when their swords fail them.

  As the small army moved into the lowlands surrounding the bog, it became clear that a cavernous void was not all that was left where the island had once been. From a league away, Dish could see a scintillating dance of light coming from something large and reflective that protruded from the pit.

  Dish recalled the quakes they had felt when encamped nearby. Lyl had described an uplifting, like a creature rising from beneath a pile of rubble.

  “The sunspire of Caer Sidi,” she said, a look of wonder on her face. She and Glaw rode close to Dish’s cart so they could talk. Feeling blind in the back with the supplies, Dish had had Saeth remove the tenting over the cart. His skin was burning, but he had a clear view across the bog as they detoured several leagues in order to avoid it.

  As they drew closer, he saw that the reflective object was a shard of amber crystal. It emerged from the pit like jagged finger, its base clasped in a knot of vines that looked both like wood and stone. The vines held the crystal at the apex of whatever would rise beneath it.

  Lyl said, “The old tales say it is a lens of sunstone. It gathers light and sends its rays down the great spire. It was a wonder…” Her voice trailed off, but Dish couldn’t read whether it was truly wonder or horror he heard in the quavering of her voice.

  “Not only is the fortress rising,” Saeth said, breaking a long silence, “but so are the Sunless.”

  Chapter 14

  The army of Ys snaked behind Lyleth and Glaw. They descended a ridgeline north of the bog, to a raised wooden causeway that provided a road through the soggy land. As they drew closer to the gaping pit, Raghhast rode alongside Lyleth, his eyes on the glinting spike of yellow-green sunstone protruding from the bog. From a distance, she’d guessed the gemstone to be the size of a barrel, but from here, it was clearly the size of an entire room. When they’d left for Caer Ys, there had been no visible trace of the fortress above the ground. Now the sunstone spire was the height of a tall fir tree.

  “All-father be with us,” Raghnhast said. His wife and child had gone north with the other servants of Caer Ys. Rather than go after them, he had agreed to fight for Lyleth. His mouth hung open as he squinted up at the shard. “There bes something inside the stone,” he said. “Lylet can see it?”

  He spoke loudly to be heard over the clatter of horses and men on the plank causeway. Lyleth glanced at the brilliance of sunlight refracting through the stone. It was impossible to look directly at it. “I can’t tell.”

  “I think I see it.” Glaw was shading his eyes with the hem of his cloak. “It’s a figure of some kind—like a
darker part of the stone inside it.”

  Lyleth tried her cloak, but saw only sharp rays of light dancing upon the surface of something the must be the stone. She saw nothing inside.

  They rode closer, and the smell of rot grew stronger, until the causeway turned west, away from Caer Sidi. Lyleth wondered how long it would take for the entire structure to rise. She sensed that once the fortress was restored, Tiernmas would be as well, and their chance to kill him would be past.

  In comparing their separate experiences inside the caverns, Ragnhast had not noticed the masonry reassembling with every quake. To him, it had felt as if the castle was sinking. But Lyleth thought it like the swelling of a seed in the moist warmth of rich garden soil. As the tender shoot uncoils, so its shell bursts open and the plant carries itself sunward.

  “Caer Sidi is a living thing.” Lyleth spoke to no one in particular.

  Ragnhast replied, “Evil, living thing.”

  “It wasn’t always evil,” Lyleth said. “The sunstone carries the sunlight deep into the halls below. Legend says the walls inside once blazed with focused and refracted light. The central sunstone feeds light to smaller stones set in the roofs of the buildings below. It must have been like jewels hung from every ceiling.”

  “Magics,” Ragnhast said. “Dark magics.”

  “It was not dark then,” she said with reverence. “It will be bright again. You’ll see. After—”

  “After we kill that creature,” Glaw said, “the Crooked One.”

  It had taken a promise of loot from the Halls of the Sunless to get Ragnhast to agree to fight. He had made it known that he was acting as guard to the solás, Lyleth, none else. He would take orders from no one but her. Lyleth had agreed. Anything to increase the number of trained fighting men. But now that Ragnhast had seen the rising castle, would he follow Lyleth to battle?

  “Livink stone, livink vílgi?” He used the ice-born word for fortress. “Not possibility.”

  “You see it there with your own eyes, do you not?” They had to turn in their saddles to see it now. Just as it had grown larger at their approach, now it fell behind them. The causeway had deposited them on a road that wound toward the western foothills. There, Fiach awaited them with the army of Emlyn and the Old Blood.

  “Tell Ragnhast songs of this place,” Ragnhast requested. “Who makes such thing? We has no such vílgi in Sandkaldr.”

  “Long before the Old Blood invaded these shores, it was the home of the green gods,” Lyleth said. “It was ruled by a queen then, by a woman who was both druí and warrior. You might say she practiced the seidr.” It was one of the few words Lyleth had retained from her short lessons in the tongue of the ice-born. It meant sorceress, or seer.

  “She is a Norn, this queen?” Ragnhast’s jaw hung open as he concentrated on understanding the Ildana words. He turned his horse to get one more look at the distant spire of the sunstone.

  “Something like that, I suppose. The Old Blood called them ‘green gods’ because of their skills at magic, which included building. But these people called themselves the ‘Tuatha’ which merely means ‘tribe’ in their tongue.”

  “And these green gods make woman kink?”

  “New kings were chosen from among the old king’s sisters’ sons, and if there was no son, then a daughter became queen,” Lyleth explained, but her thoughts ran toward Angharad and the sculpted face of the maiden in the cistern of Caer Sidi. She had to admit to herself that Angharad was more than her child, and she would be safe inside Caer Sidi because it was her home. Everyone was reborn to new flesh—why not a god?

  “So this Norn build the vílgi? Under the ground?”

  “Her name was Arianrhod. She built it on a plain where winter never fell, but crops were grown all year. This wasn’t always a bog. It was the most fertile plain in all of the Five Quarters in those days. Enough food was harvested by the green gods that their stores never ran low. Anyway, it was said that Arianrhod used the greenflow of five thousand invading Nemedian warriors to build Caer Sidi, to grow it from the plain as a forest grows. Their greenflow sculpted the stones.”

  “She grew it from mens?”

  Lyleth shrugged and pointed over her shoulder. “Ja, grew. Just as we see it growing now, from the earth itself. With blood magic.”

  “What mens blood makes her grow now?”

  Lyleth had been wondering that herself. It could only be the Sunless, the souls of the sacrificed.

  Ragnhast traced the sign against evil, and looked back at the spire. It had diminished to a faint green glow from this distance.

  “You and I,” Lyleth said, “We’re the only ones who’ve been inside. When we reach Fiach, we’ll have to draw a map. Of everything. Every corridor, every hall we passed through. Everything we remember.”

  “Darkness, I remembers. And the little mens like buzzies flied about. I follow.”

  “You have to remember more than that.” She gave him a scowl.

  He returned it with a rakish grin that made the bright blue beads of his eyes grow small. He wasn’t young, and he wasn’t that old either. But he’d seen a hard life. An old scar at one temple bunched up when he smiled, causing that eyelid to half-close. It looked like he was winking when he smiled.

  This was a man she understood. One who followed his instincts, and lived to find the ones he loved. It was this quality she’d so loved in Nechtan. Hugh Cavendish was not Nechtan. She’d accepted that, the way she’d accepted she was not the druí who locked the Knights of the Stony Ring in their circle. And yet, she was that same druí.

  Ragnhast seemed to sense her sadness. He pushed his horse closer so he could look her in the eye, saying, “The mens says the crippled man, he was once kink of this lands.” He tipped his chin toward the supply wagon bearing Hugh Cavendish, not far behind them.

  “Not that man,” she said, trying to convince herself. “He claims he is not the same man.”

  “But he comes through the well, ja?”

  “Ja.”

  “Then he is still the king, I says.”

  “I say so, too. But he’s not the man I once knew.” She rubbed at the cool breeze that chilled the back of her neck.

  “We are different persons every time we—” Ragnhast drew in a sharp lungful of air, “every breathe we steal from vorld. So is your man. He be different on tomorrow. He sees himself with eyes of yours, then…he knows.”

  She stared at him for a long time, watched his bright blond braid swinging with the gait of his big horse.

  “I hope you’re right, Ragnhast.”

  Fiach’s army occupied a broad, low ridge that provided views north across the plain, and west to Caer Emlyn. The men of IsAeron had camped with Fiach’s. But as the men of Ys approached, everyone grew silent. The threat was palpable. The men of Ys had been the enemy of Emlyn and IsAeron just a week before. Now, Lyleth was asking them to pretend it had never happened.

  She spoke to the captains, and made it clear that what they faced now required them to keep their hatreds to themselves. Many men were still recovering from battle wounds inflicted by men who camped near them. And Lyleth would ask them to fight again—beside the men who had recently tried to kill them.

  The army of the Old Blood, perhaps three hundred strong, remained entirely separate from the rest, with guards surrounding them. The women and children had climbed from the pit on the stairs the rest had found, and were reunited with their men in the camp.

  Saeth and her knights watched the Old Blood like hunting dogs forbidden to take down prey.

  Glaw gave the order for the men of Ys to strike camp where they like. Lyleth had to stop some of them from settling down in the heart of Emlyn’s men.

  Eventually, a delicate peace fell over the camps that night.

  Lyleth ordered Ys’s captain of the guard, Lewys, to tell the men of Ys to be vigilant. “The blood between you is still fresh. We understand this.”

  “Yes, solás.” The boy offered his palms, dirty with the dust from th
e road, and gave a low bow.

  Lacking a king, the responsibility for all of them fell to her as solás. She’d forgotten how it felt to lead. A familiar knot was forming in her belly, and she knew it would be with her until the end of this.

  Glaw needed constant reminders that it was Lyleth who commanded all armies, not him.

  “I’ll send the women and children to Emlyn in the morning,” Fiach explained. He’d set up a central tent as neutral territory where the leaders could meet.

  “Good,” she said. “I need to wash before we meet.”

  On her way to an empty tent, she called Dylan to her. “Bring Hugh Cavendish to the chieftain’s tent.”

  “What if he won’t come?” Dylan asked.

  “Carry him.”

  The girl, Iris, was not six strides away. Always close to Dylan, it seemed. Maybe she could talk some sense into Hugh Cavendish.

  Dylan nodded and did as she asked.

  Once she’d washed, Lyleth found her way to Fiach’s tent. She needed to talk to him alone before they met together. She found playing his blackthorn whistle and drinking ale.

  “Lyl,” he set his whistle aside and jumped to his feet. He acted like a nervous boy, an aspect of Fiach Lyleth had never seen before.

  “Caer Sidi is rising,” she said flatly. “We have only until it reassembles itself to move against Tiernmas.”

  “What?”

  As her eyes adjusted to the rushlights inside the tent, she was struck by the memory of the way Fiach arranged his war tent. His armor hung neatly from a wooden rack, the surcoat draped over it as if over the shoulders of an invisible man. His helm was not only dented, but one cheek guard was gone completely, and his sword belt dangled from one arm of the wooden soldier.

  “Nechtan has refused leadership of Ys,” Lyleth told Fiach. “He’s handed it to Glaw.”