The Chalice and the Blade (The Chalice Trilogy) (2 page)

I
n the year 1190, Richard the Lionheart set forth from Europe on a divine mission to wrest the Holy Land from the infidels. A vast host of Christian soldiers took the cross and followed, and failed. Some survived, many died, and a few—either by their own wishes or forced through the will of others—disappeared in the deserts then under the dominion of the great Saladin.

Of those that were lost, three found their way out of the wasteland and home. One, scarred beyond redemption, made his way north into the mountain fastness of his father to wreak his vengeance on strong and weak alike. Another bound himself to God, family, and country as a balm to his wounded body and heart. The last took all that he had learned of pain and mystery and bliss, of magic and medicine, of desires and acceptance and power, and set himself up as a sorcerer... the
Blade
.

Seven years before the Lionheart’s crusade, England’s battles had been fought closer to home, in sweet grass meadows and shallow fens, through dense stands of the king’s forests and deep in the mountains of Wales. The Welsh people, Cymry in their own language and warriors in any language, took up arms against the invading English and one another with equal vigor. Palisades were burned, villages ransacked, and new lords proclaimed where others had reigned.

Only three, a woman and two children, survived the battle for Carn Merioneth, a prize on the coast of the Irish Sea. The woman, wise beyond her years in ancient ways—a fey creature—made her way south, hiding the children from the destructive force unleashed on their home. For the first, she found sanctuary in a monastery, and over the years he lost himself in a life of quiet contemplation. For the second child, the woman chose the abbey of her own youth, knowing well the secrets hidden there and trusting the girl to find them. The child did not fail, and in time she became the catalyst of her own destruction and the key to her own salvation... the
Chalice
.

October 1183

Carn Merioneth

Merioneth, Wales

F
or the third night in a row the harp played upon the cliffs overlooking the Irish Sea, the strings caressed to life by delicate, ring-bedecked fingers that wove secret melodies and set them free to float like feathers upon the wind. In the northern sky, a single star fell toward the water in a glittering arc of celestial dust, enchanted unto death by the sweet music.

Rhiannon, daughter of Teleri, daughter of Mair, created the enchantment. She nurtured it and cherished it, listening to her heart, and the song, and the waves crashing into the rocks hundreds of feet below, for every moment of enchantment was one less of fear in the endless night of Calan Gaef.

An errant breeze caught on the headland and curved around the natural bowl where she played, tangling through her hair and bringing the ocean mists up to the land. Flames from a fire of yew, oak, and ash lit the cavern walls behind her and flickered over the dark, sinuous lines etched into the stone by a people long lost to memory. As a child she’d traced those paintings, standing on tiptoe, touching the strange, ancient creatures and feeling their power and beauty echo through time and her fingertips.

Dragons, her mother had called them, sea dragons, guardians of the gates of time who lived in the deep beyond, rolling their mighty bodies to churn the tides and keep the moon coming back to the sun. Her mother had seen them and had promised Rhiannon she would see them too.
In time, in time
.

And so, in time, she had.

The wind gusted, and Rhiannon’s fingertips swept across the harp strings, plucking each in turn with blinding speed, matching her song to the rhythms of the storm brewing far out to sea.

~ ~ ~

Inside the keep at the top of the cliff, Ceridwen awoke with a start. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep at all this night, but her mother’s music had lured her into dreams without so much as the tiniest struggle on her part.

“Damn,” she whispered. ’Twas her new word, “damn,” a daring choice for a child of five years.

The harp played no more outside. Its melodic tones had been replaced with the driving rhythms of a hundred bodhran drums. The ceremony in the caves had already started, and they were going to miss it, if they didn’t hurry.

“Mychael, wake up.” Ceridwen rolled over in the bed and shook her twin. “Wake up.”

’Twas fair dark where they slept at the end of the great hall, still well before sunrise, though Ceridwen felt the difference in the air that told her the night was rising toward day. The low flames of the hearth fire helped to cut the gloom, but she still wished the maid Moriath had left them a candle. They were going to need light to get where she wanted to go, or risk a few stubbed toes.

“Come on, now,” she said to Mychael. “Here’s our chance, sweeting.”

A muffled grumbling was all the got for her effort, and the sight of a tousled blond head burrowing deeper under the covers.

“You sleep more than a suckling babe,” she said in disgust, giving up her crooning tone and flouncing back on the bed.

“Do not.”

The reply was near useless without accompanying movement, but she took heart. At least he was awake. How he continued to play slug-a-bed when the very heart of the earth was pounding beneath them was a mystery to her. Most everything Mychael did was a mystery to her. He was quiet, she was not. He was thoughtful, she was not. He behaved, she most definitely did not. She had no intention of staying put all night while everyone else in the keep ate and drank and danced in the caves.

She bent her head close to the covers. “Like a suckling babe,” she said.

Nothing happened, and she sighed.

The caves were the most wondrous part of Carn Merioneth—the labyrinthine tunnels, the still-water pools, the pillars of stone. These things lingered in her imagination long after each brief expedition into the caverns. She and Mychael were never allowed to go alone, and ofttimes —as on this night—they were not included when others went. Occasionally, their mother took them down into the caves open to the cliffs, to the Dragon’s Mouth of the Light Caves, or to the Canolbarth, the midland caves, but occasionally wasn’t enough for Ceridwen, and neither were the upper caves. She wanted to see the deeper caverns, the ones beyond the Canolbarth, the ones she was sure were filled with treasures and mayhaps dragon bones. Her mother told wonderful stories about dragons and the
tylwyth teg
, Welsh faeries who lived in the mountains and no doubt in the caves too, though her mother had not exactly said as much.

Ceridwen would dearly love to see a dragon or a faerie. She could spend days exploring the tunnels, and she would, if Mychael would just show more interest in the grand adventures she devised. Instead, he preferred to sit and dream. Going without him was unthinkable. She never went anywhere without him.

“Babe,” she said, loud enough for him to hear even under all the coverlets, and at last, she got her reaction. The covers whipped up, revealing an angry face remarkably like her own.

“I am not a babe.” He scowled at her.

His eyes were blue like their father’s, a pale, silvery ocean blue that all the women cooed over. So were Ceridwen’s, but no one cooed over her except their mother.

“Can you hear it?” she asked, too relieved that he had finally roused himself to be piqued over his scowl. “Listen!”

From deep below them, the primal rhythms of the bodhrans rose and fell. The sound in the hall was faint, barely discernible. Ceridwen hardly heard the rhythms herself, but she felt them strongly, pulsing against her skin and slipping inside to course along her veins. The rough-hewn timbers of the keep resonated with the richness of the drums; the bed trembled.

“They’re finished with the dancing,” Mychael said after a moment of thoughtful silence. “I’m sure of it.”

“There’ll still be food. Let’s go see.” She scrambled off the bed, pulling him with her. They wouldn’t get as good an opportunity as this again for months, maybe years, with Mother and Father and everybody busy down in the caves, and no Moriath watching them like a hawk.

“Ceri, stop.” Mychael balked before she could get him completely off the bed. “It’ll be cold.”

“I’ll let you wear my cloak.” She gave him another pull, but he didn’t budge. “The one with the white fur and the little black spots on it.” She coaxed again, still to no avail.

“I don’t think we’re s’posed to be in the caves tonight,” he said, his face scrunched up with doubt.

“We’re never s’posed to be in the caves,” she said, thoroughly exasperated with his lack of vision. “I’ll get you a honey-pie from the kitchen. I saw where cook hid them.” The bribe was her last resort, and she had hoped not to need it so soon in their adventure.

In the end, it took two honey-pies, her ermine cloak, and her new deer-hide boots, and a close call with a roaming guard before they made it to the south side of the bailey and the entrance into the caverns. Inside the opening were two paths. One led to the Light Caves and the sea cliffs, the other snaked deep into the bowels of the earth. Ceridwen didn’t hesitate. She followed the steeper tunnel, encouraged by the torches blazing in the iron sockets bolted to the rock walls and lured by the pulsing sound of the bodhran drums.

~ ~ ~

She could not.

Rhiannon held the sacred cup of dragon wine to her lips, but she could not drink. All around her, the wild folk of the mountains and meadows and caves mixed with the people from Carn Merioneth. “Quicken-tree,” the wild ones called themselves, lone descendants of an ancient race. She oft thought of them as
tylwyth teg
and knew she wasn’t far from the mark, though they made no such claim themselves. They gathered in groups along the ledges of stone that circled the floor where the scrying pool bubbled and steamed at her feet. Their leader, Rhuddlan, stood next to her as guide of the threefold union she and he and the Druid would make. Across from her, glimpsed through the slowly swirling mist, stood Nemeton, the grove priest himself, He waited, his hands raised in supplication, his auburn hair streaked with one stripe of gray flowing down onto his shoulders, his sky-blue robes shrouding him to the floor, and still she could not drink.

Nemeton was an imposing man, tall and gaunt, with eyes of a rich, verdant hue, a famous bard from Brittany brought by his lord to the March of Wales because of his healing powers and the high art of his divinations. Rhiannon’s mother had recognized him as even more, just as he had recognized Carn Merioneth as being more than it seemed.

’Twas said he’d seduced and murdered his baron’s wife and thus had been exiled to the north with a price on his head, and was still sought by Welsh princes and mountain chieftains. Up until then, he’d lived as well as his lord, in great comfort behind castle walls, a stark contrast to the cave he was said to inhabit on the island of Anglesey, or the rough summer huts of willow and thatch kept for him in the mountains by the Quicken-tree.

Four times each year Nemeton came to Carn Merioneth, welcomed by Rhiannon’s mother in her time and now by Rhiannon. One of those times was always Calan Gaef, cursed night of faith when Rhiannon had no faith left to sustain her.

There had been feasting and dancing and music: harps, flutes, the bowed lyre
crwth
, and voices raised in songs sung in many parts. The bodhrans had been picked up one by one to start a new song, and slowly, the bodhran song had overcome all the others, until nothing but the sound of hands thrumming on skins remained.

It was Rhiannon’s moment to drink the dragon wine, when the drums reached their crescendo and held, but she could not. The gold rim of the jewel-encrusted chalice was warm against her lips, the smell of the wine filled her nostrils and made her near swoon, but fear stayed her hand.

She slanted her gaze to Nemeton, wondering what he thought of her delay, but she detected no impatience in the Druid. He was, seemingly, more inclined to see what was than to see what he could make of things.

Had he really murdered the long-ago baron’s wife? Or, as was so wont to happen, had his physick merely gone awry? ’Twas said crocus seeds had killed the noble woman. A more deadly plant could hardly be found. Even with all her own skill, Rhiannon never dealt with crocus. Did it have a taste at a deadly dose? she wondered. Did it have a color? A scent?

The wine eddied as her hand trembled, lapping at her lips, but still she did not drink. For each of the past five years, since her mother’s death, she had taken her share of the dragon wine and looked into the scrying pool to mark the eternal cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Never before had she doubted the safety of Nemeton’s potion. But never before had she been betrayed by one she loved as life itself.

Her gaze fell upon her husband, Arawn.

You have eyes as green as rowan leaves in high summer
, she’d overheard Arawn tell Nemeton’s daughter in a voice made harsh by the passion of the kisses they had shared. When had it been? Just three days past?

It seemed another lifetime. She closed her eyes against a wave of pain. Moriath was the grove priest’s daughter, an impious novice expelled from the abbey at Usk. Rhiannon had welcomed the girl, given her the charge of the children, who had grown too rambunctious for their old nurse to handle alone. She had seen no impiety in the maid, only a shade of feyness that she could well understand would arouse suspicion and misgivings in the Christian ladies of Usk. Did not Rhiannon’s own presence do the same when visiting clergy came to Merioneth? For though she was Christian, her Christianity was grounded more in the Celtic church than in the Catholic, and through her mother her religion reached back farther still, back to the heritage of a Magus Druid priestess from Anglesey.