The Salamander's Smile (Three Wells of the Sea Book 2) Read online

  “I have work.”

  Dish wanted to explain his distance, why he had snuffed Connor’s every attempt to resurrect the search for the well. But instead, he said, “I see. Shall I give Merryn a message from you?”

  “Tell her I’ll see her again.”

  “Right. Cheers.”

  There were times in his life that Nechtan felt more real than Hugh Cavendish and other times when his life as king and fool felt like a dream that shook him to the marrow. Unless he again found something the green gods wanted, he could do nothing but wait for death to send him back. The idea of hurrying that process presented itself with increasing frequency.

  He would leave for England the next day.

  The roaring sound of a jet taking off reminded him he needed to check in for pre-boarding.

  Ten hours on a plane could only be accomplished with humiliating modifications to Dish’s travel plans including a catheter. He met a nurse at the airport in Bristol to remove the thing and replace it with a nappy before starting the long ride to Bronwyn’s house in the far west of Cornwall.

  Through the tinted windows of the airport shuttle an impossible summer green assaulted him. The sky embraced a landscape sculpted by the rise and fall of successive civilizations. Sheep tracks were etched into hillsides by millennia of flocks herded over the remains of ancient battlefields; forests long ago stripped of timber and cleared for livestock and grain fields. Cattle rested in the shade of stone circles and befouled holy wells. Dish had grown up here, and the sight of it brought a pungent rush of memories stirred together with those of the Five Quarters. England was so like that other land in many ways.

  Bronwyn had built a plywood ramp up the front steps and turned her office into a guest room. The loo was moderately accessible, though it required a five point turn to enter.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she told him at the dinner table.

  “You’ve colored your hair,” he replied. And that was the end of the critique and the beginning of the customary silence.

  She’d bought pasties at a local shop, removed the shop’s wrappers and put the meat pies in the oven as if she’d made them herself. Dish wondered if her two boys had grown up on takeaway, for he’d never known Bronwyn to be a cook. He wondered what else she misrepresented as her own these days.

  “You really shouldn’t live alone, Hugh.”

  “I don’t really live alone, if you count adolescents as people.” She returned his smile with a lift of her wine glass in salute.

  Underneath all that sanctimonious judging, he thought he saw a bit of pity written in the lines beside her green eyes. Pity was something he found intolerable. What had happened between them? As children, they were inseparable. He tried to remind himself of the love they had shared, but sometimes, that just wasn’t enough to heal new wounds. It was simple. Life had taken them in opposite directions, and neither valued the ideals the other had grown to embrace. For Bronwyn, status and money had supplanted adventure and wonder. And Dish would appear a callow pedant with his degree from Oxford.

  “Merryn hasn’t asked to go home?” He took a sip of wine and watched Bronwyn weigh her answer.

  “It’s not just the kidneys, you know. There’s the dementia. She needs round the clock care.”

  “But she’s not going to survive this,” Dish said. “Perhaps she’d like to make her end at home.”

  Charles, Bronwyn’s husband, looked up from his pasty. Soft and red-faced from high blood pressure, Dish could probably still beat him in a sprint. Charles had a hand in changing Bronwyn, and Dish would always blame him, even if it wasn’t altogether true.

  “She would need in-home care,” Charles said.

  “I have the summer,” Dish said.

  “You?” Charles had the ability to convey an entire diatribe with one word.

  “I would care for her myself,” Bronwyn said, leaning over her plate, “but I have work, and the boys’ football schedule ties me up daily.”

  “As I said, I have the summer off.” With his eyes on Charles, Dish added, “I’m not actually as useless as I look.” He pushed the remainder of the dry pasty around his plate. “Shall we be off, Bronwyn? Visiting hours are till nine.”

  **

  Bronwyn drove Dish to hospital, a fair distance away in Truro.

  “I’ll have a visiting nurse come,” Dish said. “I can take care of the rest.”

  “You’ll cook? Help her to the loo?” Bronwyn said. “Like bloody hell you will, you can barely care for yourself.”

  “My cooking involves more than getting take-away from a pasty shop,” he said.

  The remainder of the ride was spent in welcome, stagnant quiet.

  Bronwyn’s bluntness had gained no charm in the past six years, still as bitter as ever. She had played a part in several of the multitude of powerful dreams that had plagued Dish. She was a squid in one, and her translucent tentacles had squeezed the life from his legs as Lyleth hacked at it with her dagger. His time in Cornwall would be well spent if he could repair the bond with his sister.

  They arrived at hospital with a half hour of visiting time to spare. They found Merryn in a dormitory with two other women. The room smelled of iodine hand scrub, black pudding, and commodes in need of emptying. A braided corn dolly hung above Merryn’s bed, and several bouquets of sweet peas and asters did their best to mask the other smells. A visitor had pulled a chair beside Merryn’s bed, and from the back, Dish assumed it was one of Bronwyn’s boys. No wonder he hadn’t seen them at supper.

  The visitor held Merryn’s hand, and her face was alight as she gazed into his.

  Bronwyn wheeled Dish to the foot of the bed and Merryn looked at him with a broad smile. So did Connor. Dish felt his lip begin to tremble.

  Bronwyn announced, “Look who’s come, auntie.”

  “Hugh,” Merryn said weakly and reached a hand to him.

  Connor offered a forced, lopsided smile. He’d changed so much, Dish almost failed to recognize him. He looked like a Renaissance artist with lank, wavy hair and a sparse musketeer beard to match. He stood, offering his hand, his size confirming he’d become a man since the last time Dish had seen him. The restless questioning hadn’t left him, and Dish felt a surge of affection for the folly he saw burning in Connor’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Bronwyn said with barbs, “have we met?” She extended her hand to Connor.

  “Connor Quinn.” He took her hand and held on, unsmiling.

  “My you’ve changed,” Bronwyn said. “It’s been some time.”

  “I should be going.”

  “Nonsense,” Dish said. “You’ve traveled far. We’ve come for the same reason.”

  Dish wheeled his chair beside the bed, but couldn’t reach Merryn to kiss her, so he pressed her withered hand to his lips and patted it to warm it. She had grown even smaller since the last time he’d seen her, her cheeks sunken and the color gone from her skin. Her eyes flitted from Dish to Connor and back.

  “You two must talk,” she said, her old eyes twinkling. “I shall come back home, and then we will all have a good talk. Now tell me about your work, Hugh. About how you keep your chin up, or are you just pretending?”

  Merryn always could see right through him.

  “I’m taking every day as it comes.”

  “And you’ve got a great longing in your soul, a burden that can’t be lifted by me, nor Connor.”

  “I’m lifting his burden,” Bronwyn said. “I’ve brought him back home, haven’t I?”

  “And now you’ll take me back home,” Merryn declared. “It’s where I must be.”

  The nurse arrived to say visiting hours were over.

  “Sleep well,” Dish told Merryn. “Tomorrow I’ll see to the papers to bring you home.”

  Bronwyn shot him a look filled with barbs. When he turned, Connor had gone, and he pursued.

  Dish caught Connor before he reached the elevator, eager to find out what was really going on. Dish said, “I thought you had work.” />
  “I had planned to be gone before you arrived.”

  Dish didn’t know what to say to that. Connor had actively sought to avoid him, and by all indications, he had been in England when Dish called two days before. “I’m sorry to interrupt your plans,” Dish said, “but I’ve come to say farewell to a woman who is very important to me.”

  “As she has become to me as well.”

  “So I see.”

  The elevator dinged, and by the sound of her heels on the hall tiles, Bronwyn was on the way back from the loo. Dish caught Connor’s arm as he stepped into the lift. “Where are you staying?”

  Connor’s eyes flitted to the floor. “A hostel in Truro.” He was never much good at lying. Dish could see Merryn’s ragged needlepoint keychain hanging from his jeans pocket.

  “You’re staying at Merryn’s.” Had Connor turned into one of those creepers who follow little old ladies to get a piece of their leavings? “I’m coming with you.”

  “But Bronwyn—”

  “She’ll be glad to be rid of me, and if she finds out you’re staying at Merryn’s she’ll have you arrested.”

  Dish intercepted Bronwyn, saying, “Connor has offered to drive me back. He’s staying in Madron, and you know we have a bit to catch up on.”

  Was that hurt he saw on Bronwyn’s face?

  “He can drop me at your house, and we’ll have tea.”

  “You’re not taking Merryn home,” she stated.

  “We’ll discuss it over tea.”

  Connor took over pushing the wheelchair as if it were an automatic response. Once they were in the parking lot, Dish dared say, “You’re driving Merryn’s car?”

  “I’ve been driving Merryn’s car for the past month.”

  “And Bronwyn knows nothing of it?”

  “She never comes. It’s as if Merryn were already gone to her.”

  Connor unlocked the door of a vehicle Dish recognized as Merryn’s old banger, a farm lorry that was almost as old as he was.

  They were well on their way down the A390 before Dish finally said, “You’re either after Merryn’s old age pension fund or carrying on with finding the well.”

  “You wouldn’t understand—”

  “I wouldn’t understand the obsessive fixation on a well that has no intention of being found? Who do you think you’re talking to, lad?”

  “I’m no lad anymore, Hugh.” Connor was clearly testing that name. It probably felt as strange to him as it sounded to Dish. Connor went on, “None of it matters now. Merryn is on her way soon.”

  “That she is. And I can’t say I’ve been a nephew to her these past years. Nor have I been much of a human being.”

  A long silence said Connor agreed. “I understand,” he said at last. “You don’t have to explain anything to me, Dish. I’ve been there, remember?”

  Connor flipped on the wipers. The yellow beams of the dim headlights stabbed into overgrown hedgerows and skimmed the slick black of wet pavement. A memory flashed in Dish’s mind of a different evening on a wet road.

  “I do need to explain,” Dish said at last. “I’ve been a sodding recluse, feeling sorry for myself, and doing nothing but waiting.”

  Connor glanced over at him. “Waiting? For what?”

  “For death. Or birth, whichever way you choose to view it. I seem to be rather experienced at death. It’s time to shed this wreckage I’m dragging around with me.”

  He could see in the flash of Connor’s eyes, unmistakable guilt. That was the sea that lay between them. Not Merryn, not Dish’s abandonment of the search for the well. Connor’s guilt.

  “I left a child there.” Dish let the words settle between them.

  “How do you know that?” Connor seemed to force his eyes to stay on the road, his face lit by oncoming headlamps.

  How to explain the certainty without sounding mental? “I’ve seen her,” Dish said at last. “Connor, finding the well has never been possible for you and me.” He recited the translation they both knew so well, the runes that ran around the well stone, “Cleave star and stone, Child of Death, and call the Old Blood home.”

  “The child of death? Yours? But you weren’t dead.”

  “Lyleth brought me back. From the dead. From here.” Dish indicated the rainy twilight outside the lorry. “Here is where the dead reside, Connor. You and I, we’re dead.”

  “Or, you could say, there is no such thing as death. Just life in another world.”

  Always the half-full chap. That was Connor. “If you define life as a biological function, perhaps.”

  In the intermittent sweep of headlamps, Dish could see Connor was doing his best to refrain from saying something.

  “What is it?” Dish prodded.

  “If she’s this Child of Death, then how will she call the Old Blood home?”

  “The same way they left. Through the well.”

  Dish looked past the rain-flecked window at a flock of sheep flowing down a hillside, foamy shadows in the twilight. “The child was what the green gods wanted from Lyl and me all along.”

  “Then it’s coming,” Connor mused, excitement in his voice.

  The realization struck Dish full force. He was right. If his child fulfilled the prophecy revealed on the well stone, then she would open the third well, and the Old Blood would find their way home. Then what? The Ildana wouldn’t exactly welcome them with open arms. After all, the Old Blood had been exiled for a reason.

  The moon was rising when they turned into the long drive that led to Merryn’s cottage. The little stone house was unchanged since Dish’s childhood. The whitewashed stones glowed in the moonlight. He was overcome with so many sweet memories of his time here with Merryn. And now it was coming. The well Merryn had been searching for her whole life would open. Perhaps tonight, perhaps twenty years from now. But unless he knew where, Dish couldn’t hope to find his way through it, or to take Merryn across with him.

  Chapter 2

  The Isle of Glass rose from the sea like a shard of green ice. The ragged cliffs, crowned by a ring of standing stones, fell away to sparsely tillable land. The druada of Dechtire’s hive composted kelp and manure with fish guts, then mixed this with ground bone, deepening and enriching the soil that had been made by those who came before. They grew turnips and onions, beetroot and mustard. In summer, it was long beans and fennel and berries that grow only where the daylight of midwinter is but as long as a good ballad. Stunted pine and oak grew where the soil was a forearm deep, their roots cleaving great greenstone boulders in their search for soil and that which lies beneath it.

  In their shade, Lyleth and Angharad searched for mushrooms. The child was old enough to tell a wood bluet from a fool’s cap, though Lyleth always examined what her daughter put in the basket. Fool’s cap had uses of its own, but none she would share with Angharad till she was older.

  “What of these?” Angharad pointed at a buff cluster of feathery fungus attached to a tree stump.

  “Aye. Chick-o’-the-woods,” Lyleth told her. “Tastes of chicken.”

  The child laughed and pulled her stubby dagger to begin prying the layers of fungus from the stump.

  Lyleth ran her fingers through the girl’s ember-colored hair. Nechtan’s hair was as dark as oak bark. Where had these fiery tresses come from? Lyleth had let the rumors run; in fact she had stoked them, whispering to select people that her babe was Fiach’s child. After all, Angharad’s hair was Fiach’s color. But it was the child’s eyes that bore her father’s mark, and the way she carried herself. She had barely lost her two front teeth, yet could recite The Battle of Finvarril in its entirety and see the life of a dog from pup to old age by running her fingers over its skull.

  “Get of death,” Lyleth had overheard one of her initiates say. Some had failed to accept the rumor of Angharad’s fathering, seeing in Lyleth the void left by her loss of Nechtan, knowing the love she bore him. She knew the green gods waited to collect their prize, the product of their scheming. So when she heard th
e high-pitched whistle from the edge of the wood, she knew that day had come.

  She dropped the mushroom basket and looked toward the sound. It was Elowen. She broke through a rhododendron hedge at a run, her skirt bunched in her hands as she struggled for words and breath at the same time. “Three ships set anchor in the bay.”

  “From Arvon?” Lyleth had received messengers from Pyrs, the quarter’s chieftain, every season change.

  “War galleys,” Elowen said. In the past six years, Elowen had gone from the feral child who once attacked Nechtan and Lyleth with a sling, to a beautiful young woman. Her cheeks were flushed from the run, and her hair had escaped from a braid into a cloud of unruly gold. “Three dories make for shore now. They fly the water horse.”

  “The king? Where’s Dylan?”

  “He’s led archers to the cliffs above the beach.” She followed Elowen’s gaze to Angharad who stood clutching Lyleth’s hand, her brow knotted in confusion. Elowen knew as well as Lyleth the threat Angharad presented to Talan. She was the daughter of a king. A twice murdered king. Lyleth had done everything Nechtan had asked of her, had seen Talan to the throne against her own best judgment. What could he want from her now?

  “The king pays us a visit,” Lyleth stated. “Yet it might be best if I meet him alone.” She knelt before the child, looked firmly into her daughter’s eyes saying, “You remember the giant’s hurley field?”

  The little girl nodded and pointed north toward a jumble of toppled standing stones.

  “You and Elowen are going to play a game of hide-and-seek.”

  Angharad eyed her with suspicion. At six years of age, Lyleth found it hard to keep anything from her. She knelt and held her daughter in a tight embrace. “There’s nothing to fear.”

  “I know,” Angharad answered. “But that’s not what your eyes say, Mama.”

  **

  The few druada who had completed weapons training had taken up position on either side of the track leading up from the bay. Lyleth was careful to instruct that they not take a defensive stance, but merely as a show of respect, their bows shouldered, their swords sheathed. The druada of Dechtire’s hive had always relied upon the grace of the green gods to hide their little refuge from reavers and pirates. Well, their grace and the treacherously steep cliffs that made defense much easier.