Three Wells of the Sea- The Complete Trilogy

by Terry Madden

  “We forbade it for just this reason.” She indicated the labrys and everything around them.

  “And yet, we use it,” Dish argued, “or we plan to. Connor has made a beast. You seek to use the labrys. Do we not invite the same corruption into our souls as that which infects Tiernmas?”

  He caught Saeth’s look. Yes, she was a product of blood magic no less than the risen warriors that fought for Tiernmas—cocooned in stone until she emerged as a vengeful butterfly. Perhaps it made her feel powerful. Perhaps it made her feel tainted. Dish was not sure which. Perhaps she felt nothing at all.

  Lyl sat down on the bench beside him, gripping the labrys as if she would give it a swing. “I would forge it again,” she said evenly, “and so would you to save this land.”

  Dish nodded in agreement. Lyl had a way of banishing his guilt with a few well-chosen words.

  “We’ll need Connor’s magic to get near Tiernmas,” Lyl said.

  “He’s never seen Ragnhast,” Dish mused. “Perhaps he can take a message.” Dish indicated the axe.

  “I kill it before it speaks,” Ragnhast agreed.

  Lyl shook her head sadly.

  “You trust Ragnhast,” the ice-born said, thumping his battered breastplate. “Let Ragnhast use this, Lylet. I kill this king. I kill this monster.”

  Saeth’s eyes simply slid from Ragnhast to Lyl and back again, her hands resting on the hilts of her two swords. She had shown no emotion when Dish had told her the fate of her fellow knights, that they had all been slain on the field when the dragon had turned on them.

  Reverently, Lyl laid the weapon across Dish’s unfeeling knees. “There’s something Connor failed to tell you.” She swallowed hard, and met his eyes. “A king must strike the blow.”

  It was late in the afternoon when Connor strode into the room with Merryn’s sprite on his shoulder. A blinding swarm of hundreds of Sunless sprites came into the room with him. They were so thick Dish could barely see the others. Iris and Elowen looked tired and hungry, Fiach, bruised and bloodied from the battle, Dylan, whose eyes darted to Iris repeatedly. He took her arm and led her to the table where the meager spread of fruit and cheese awaited. Elowen followed, her arms threaded around herself as if she were cold.

  Outside, Dish could see the eight risen warriors Connor had conscripted. They formed a defensive wall outside.

  Ragnhast passed around a flagon of ale. Each drank from it in turn.

  Dish spoke in English to Connor. “Lyl tells me I must wield the axe, and strike off Tiernmas’s head.”

  Both Connor and Merryn turned to face him, her tiny insectoid head tilting repeatedly. Dish could read their thoughts. They had no idea how this event might come to pass. Dish’s hands closed more tightly around the haft of the axe still resting across his knees.

  “First things first,” Connor said.

  He took a deep breath, and turned his attention to Celeste, now leaning against the side of the bench where Dish sat. Connor knelt before her, and softly stroked her dirty cheek.

  “Shouldn’t we tie her?” Iris asked. “She can be a mean bitch.”

  “No,” Connor said. “We’ll leave her here.”

  Connor grasped Celeste’s head between his palms and placed his thumbs over her closed eyes. Muttering his spells, he then breathed upon her face. A distinct and sudden chill gripped the chamber. Dish could see his own breath.

  Then, from Celeste’s slightly parted lips a tongue flicked, tiny and black.

  Dish hadn’t seen Lyl move beside him until her hand rested on his shoulder, startling him. He placed his hand over hers, and when he looked back at Celeste, the head of a creature peeked from between her pale lips. Its golden eye so familiar, its glistening black skin marked with golden stars. It slipped free and fell into Connor’s waiting palm. A salamander.

  Dish’s thoughts turned to the seeds in Lyleth’s pouch. He glanced at her, and her look said she was thinking the same thing.

  Celeste opened her eyes and struggled against the ropes that bound her wrists. She glanced at all the faces, at the sprite that still hovered on Connor’s shoulder.

  “Where are we?” she demanded of Connor.

  “Where I promised you’d be. In the fortress of your lord. Caer Sidi.”

  But Dish watched Connor slip the tiny salamander into the pocket of his hoodie.

  “Now,” Connor declared with a solemn look at Dish. “We can begin.”

  Chapter 28

  Wrapped in hooded cloaks, the only ones among them who would draw no attention were the eight risen warriors Connor had summoned to guard him. Four walked before the little group and four walked behind. As they traversed a broad, arched gallery walk that linked two buildings, they had a clear view toward the north.

  Their encounters with other Sunless had gone unnoticed so far. It was the living Lyleth worried about. They would know immediately the identity of the man who was being carried between Saeth and Dylan.

  They halted at Nechtan’s command, his hands on the balustrade that opened to the north.

  Lyleth paused beside him.

  “The wall,” he said, pushing back the hood of his cloak. “It’s breached.”

  She followed his gaze across a jumble of rooftops and broad training grounds to see the dragon, looking no larger than the salamander in Connor’s pocket at this distance. It circled, spewing trails of green flame into the amassed troops beyond the wall, and then landed again on the spire above the gate. It seemed injured, reluctant to leave its perch. If not for the dragon, Pyrs would be ascending the stairs with them now.

  But there was indeed a breach near the gatehouse to the east and the tiny figures of men huddled beneath shields emerged from the rubble. The dragon spewed green flame onto their turtle of shields. When a few men dropped, the rest soon followed.

  As the sun dropped lower, the beam from the sunstone crept up the tower that marked the gate.

  “Look,” Lyleth said to Nechtan. “The spear of Lugh.”

  It was Connor who responded from beside her. “Shit.”

  There was that Anglish word he liked so much. Merryn hovered around Connor’s head like a jewel of light.

  “Shit what?” Nechtan asked.

  “Today’s the day,” Connor replied. “The remaking of Caer Sidi.”

  “’Tis already remade,” Lyleth argued.

  “It will be restored. Completely,” Connor said. “The finished product. Just as Arianrhod shaped it.”

  “’About its points are ocean’s streams,’” Elowen recited, “’and the abundant well above it—sweeter than white wine the water within.’”

  Lyleth turned to see Elowen standing on the other side of the gallery walk where pillared arches faced the broad inner garden. At its center rose a structure borne up by columns of living stone, vining skyward. The well, so recently buried beneath the bog in damp, dark caverns, now rose above them. An enormous bowl cut from green rock crystal was clasped by the four vines. Between each vine, a waterfall splashed from the edge of the bowl—water beads like jewels shone in the sunlight, falling to the garden where the streams trickled through beds that might have once nourished flowers and herbs.

  Why did no flowers sprout there now? They bloomed upon Tiernmas’s head, stolen from the gardens, Lyleth thought.

  “Come,” Connor said with a furrowed brow. “We have no time to spare.”

  No sooner had he said it than the air was on fire with an explosion of light. The earth bucked beneath them, casting them to the floor. Lyleth closed her eyes against it but still saw the after image of blinding brightness, a rainbow of color behind her eyelids.

  The air sizzled as if from lightning and smelled of a storm.

  Blinded, she wiped her watering eyes and tried to peer at what was happening. A blurred view of chiseled and polished stone emerged on the rough blocks all around them. Plaster, then frescoes appeared, painted by an unseen hand, on the walls at the end of the corridor. From the great columns that supported the archways o
f the gallery, blooms the size of Lyleth’s fist sprouted from the stone, red petals dancing in the breeze. The smell of storm-crisped air was replaced with the perfume of these blooms and thousands of others.

  “Oh!” Elowen cried. She held out her arms as the concussion of light rippled through all of them.

  A wave front of regenerative force created shadows around each one of them.

  The Sunless soldiers Connor had called from the dead no longer wore withered, rotting flesh, but the gleaming skin of rebirth. The vines that formed their armor now bloomed as if in answer to the fortress itself.

  Saeth was afire with a white-hot light, staring at her hands as if she’d never seen them before, and Dylan’s ghost could not take his eyes from Iris, draped with the image of a resolute warrior woman armored in the manner of the Old Blood.

  And Connor…young as he was, he had worn his pain on his flesh. It had aged him in subtle ways. The wounds that marked his arms from letting blood, all gone. His gleaming shadow was that of Caradoc. As he appeared all those years ago, when Lyleth had escorted Merryn to Caer Sidi. The blood scribe looked back at her now. And in his eyes, she could see the honest yearning for balance he had been seeking all along. She saw his soul, chained to decisions that made sense to her in that moment.

  “Lyl…” The voice who spoke her name was written in her heart.

  She glanced across the mosaic floor of the gallery to see Nechtan. Perhaps he was Black Brac, for the many lives had become one in the cleansing beam of the sunstone. Like a diaphanous ghost, he sat as close as a shadow beside Hugh Cavendish. With his back to a pillar, his warrior braid tied with a silver bell just as he always did. His beard, a shadow in need of a razor. His eyes the green of the greenstone all about them. The same color as Angharad’s eyes. He was smiling at her.

  He drew up his knees, helping them with his hands before he realized he no longer needed to. Then he stood. He met the eyes of Hugh Cavendish who gazed up at him—reached up to him as if the ghost might lift him to his feet, draw him into his embrace and give him back his legs.

  As quickly as it had blasted forth from the gem crowning the gate spire, the sunlight passed out of the great prism, the spear of focused sunlight rising above it. The remaining fog of incandescence, the shimmering images of their shadows, fell with powdered light and swirling flower petals until nothing but the sunset colored the air.

  Hugh Cavendish struggled to stand, and failed. He dragged himself across the flagstones until Saeth and Dylan took him by the arms and lifted him between them.

  He would not meet Lyleth’s eyes.

  She placed her hands on his face, forced him to return her gaze. Before her lips met his, she whispered, “My lord, your shadow is with you always. As am I.”

  “Come,” Connor said. “Pyrs stands no chance now. The walls are remade. The dragon is healed. We have little time.”

  He led the way across the gallery and they entered a maze of corridors. When they finally stood at the base of a staircase, he halted. His risen guards, now clothed in living armor, took up position on either side. Two landings of stairs welcomed them to rise upward in an intertwined double spiral.

  “It’s like the two worlds,” Lyleth said. “Moving forever around one another yet never meeting.”

  Connor smiled at her. “Who said you don’t hear the whispers of the gods?”

  Twisting around themselves, the two staircases formed a spiral helix to the Chamber of the Sun, many floors above them.

  Lyleth stood beside Nechtan and his two helpers and looked up the hollow center. Like the empty stem of a reed that terminated high above them in a crystalline ceiling.

  “It’s unguarded,” Connor said. “He’s lacking men, so he’s taken his guards to fight Pyrs.”

  Fiach stepped upon one of the treads, but Connor’s hand stopped him from moving further. “Only one spiral will take us where we want to go. And it changes.”

  “How can we know which?” Fiach asked.

  Connor didn’t answer, but glanced at Merryn. The sprite immediately flew to the left-hand staircase and hovered there as if urging them on.

  “This way,” Connor told them.

  He left two of his risen guards at the bottom with orders to stop anyone who tried to come after them. Lyleth told Ragnhast to stay with them. She didn’t entirely trust Connor’s Sunless followers.

  “What will happen if we choose wrong?” Dylan took the steps of the left-hand staircase, keeping pace with Connor who was ahead.

  “We’ll find ourselves back in the labyrinth.”

  Lyleth followed. Her eyes never left Nechtan. His arms were draped over Dylan and Saeth. Lyleth saw the curl of his hair at the nape of his neck as if she’d never seen it before. The shadow of Nechtan still clung like vapor to him. She could only hope that ghost would help him swing the labrys she carried, and free them all from this nightmare.

  Her thoughts were jarred by the sound of steel on steel echoing from below. Someone had encountered Connor’s guards at the bottom of the stairs.

  Lyleth glanced over the railing, down the long hollow center of the stairwell, to see flashes of the fight below. Arms, the flash of steel. One of the creatures stood at the center of the spiral, and his vacant eyes met hers.

  Ragnhast.

  No longer the friendly face she’d come to trust. His face was empty of all humanity, a mechanical thing from which his soul had fled. He wore the wounds that marked his death at the hands of Tiernmas’s soldiers. With him was a cloud of sprites. Their glow lit up the hollow center and they spiraled upward, answering the call of the one far above them.

  “Lylet…” the creature’s voice boomed from below.

  “No,” Lyleth whispered. “Ragnhast…”

  “Lyleth, we must go,” cried Saeth. “Hold them!” With Dylan, she hefted the king and the four of them stumbled forward up the stairs leaving Lyleth and the others to hold the Sunless midway up the stairs.

  Encased in a cloud of sprites that buzzed in their ears and caught at their hair, the Sunless moved swiftly until they met a wall of steel. Among their number, Lyleth saw the woman Connor had used as his flesh-cloak to fetch the labrys. She was still wearing the over-sized archer’s tunic. Fiach, Lyleth, Iris and Elowen blocked their path with the help of Connor’s risen guards. Fiach launched a kick at one’s chest and sent him back down the stairs, taking many with him. The once-glowing eyes were now more human after the renewal. But they were still empty, like Ragnhast’s.

  The stairwell was too narrow to swing a sword, so the combatants jabbed at each other. Lyleth and her comrades had the advantage of being on the upward side, so kicks and thrusts resulted in loss of footing for those below. But as men fell, the ones behind them took their place.

  Lyleth had resorted to her soothblade, slicing at their eyes. A deep thrust of a sword would only slow them. She kicked out, sending the one before her backward down the stairs, and taking a few other with it.

  As the next creature came at her she took hold of his mail and pulled him into the point of her blade, driving it home into his throat. Dylan was able to slow them with his arrows. Fiach followed their attacks by hacking at their necks with his battle axe.

  Until…the man who faced her was Ragnhast.

  He held his sword poised in the manner of the ice-born, elbow cocked and point guided by his offhand forearm. Lyleth gazed down the length of his sword into his ice-blue eyes, searching for the man she knew.

  “Ragnhast!” she pleaded. “You know me. You know us. Hold your weapon.”

  Several sprites had landed on his mane of tawny hair. They lifted locks and pulled as if they were trying to stop him, as if Connor’s plea to those he’d captured had earned some allies among them.

  But the blade came.

  Lyleth parried as best she could, slapping the point aside with the flat of her hand, and drawing back blood.

  “Ragnhast! Friend! Don’t do this!”

  She drew her own sword and caught his next th
rust with the hilt and deflected it.

  As she moved to deliver her own thrust, her eyes met his and he opened his arms wide as if welcoming the point of her blade. She faltered. The stairs were slick with blood and she’d hesitated too long. She fell, stopped only by the gathering pile of bodies. When she glanced up again, Fiach’s blade did what hers could not. Ragnhast fell, and Fiach added his head to the others that had rolled to the bottom of the staircase.

  Lyleth found her feet.

  A commotion issued from the stairwell above and she knew Connor had met more guards above. A throaty trumpet, like the belling of a stag or the howl of a bullroarer sounded from above them. Saeth’s battlecry.

  They charged up after the sound to find Nechtan alone.

  “Help him,” he demanded, pointing up the stairs.

  Fiach bounded past them, a bloody axe in one hand and a dagger in the other. The rest followed.

  “Where is the labrys?” Nechtan asked.

  “It’s worthless in any hands but yours, my lord.” Lyleth patted the metal bulk under her cloak. Flitting before her eyes, a sprite hovered, then landed on Nechtan’s shoulder. Merryn.

  Lyleth hooked both arms under Nechtan’s and set to dragging him up the stairs after the others.

  Chapter 29

  Raising the eight guards had left Connor nearly as weak as had shaping the dragon. But the spear of light had pierced him, and now he was humming with the sound of creation, of eternal light. He was renewed to the point of overflowing. The wounds from his bloodletting had healed. A tingling pulse rippled through the flesh he wore, and his hand went unconsciously to the pocket of his hoodie to be sure the salamander was still with him. Its skin was cool and damp. He stroked the small thing, and it coiled around his finger.

  His little party entered the great hall. The staircase to the spire was not far. Connor felt Arianrhod draw near—knew she could do nothing now but watch her plans unfold into a new reality.

  He found himself at the top of the spiral staircase with no clear memory of how he’d gotten there. He remembered some fighting below, but not much else. He was thinking of Celeste, hoping she would be safe locked in his chambers as she was.