Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
She surfaced with a gasp to two hands reaching for her own as Laura and Duncan pulled her up and out of the water.
“Seren is alive!” The words burst from her mouth. “Seren is alive!”
She blinked the water from her eyes and saw Duncan fall back, his face pale as the moon, his eyes wide and dark.
Laura shouted, “What?”
The clip-clop of Angus’s cloven hooves sounded on the stones, and Carys turned to see him emerging from behind the waterfall. “I didn’t say that.”
“You did,” Carys sputtered. “You said—”
“I said she was in another realm, Carys Morgan.” Angus clip-clopped over to Duncan and stared down at him. “She needs a guide on this journey. I won’t be able to work at the forge for a while.”
Duncan was still sitting on the ground, his elbows braced on his knees and his eyes staring into the distance. “Do you really think I care about the forge right now?”
“Perhaps not, but it would be irresponsible to not give you notice.” Angus threw a twisted grey wrap over his shoulders. “Now what have you to offer me, Tegan’s daughter?”
Carys reached out her hand, and Laura helped her to her feet. “What do I… I already gave you the milk.”
Laura reached down, grabbed the bouquet she’d gathered earlier, and stuck out her hand. “And flowers.”
Angus walked over, bent down to sniff the bouquet. “Not a bad offering, but hardly enough to tempt me to be your guide.”
“What?” Carys’s head was still spinning from the revelations underneath the water. Cadell? She called her dragon in her mind. I need you.
She didn’t hear anything audible, but a rush in her chest told Carys that the flying beast had immediately turned and was heading toward her.
The panicked fluttering in her chest died down. “You told me the gods had chosen me to be the hero on this quest, and Wada’s daughter prophesied that you would be the one to guide me, but you want me to pay you?”
“Yes. I cannot work for free.”
Cannot. Not would not.
Interesting.
Okay, Carys, think.
What would a not-ùruisg—because it was very clear to Carys at this point that the mythological fae identity was only a guise—want from her?
“I don’t have anything to offer you,” Carys said. “I have a house in California.” It was her sole possession though, and not very portable. “I have tools. My father had a whole barn full of woodworking tools. Do you want—”
“I have no use for the belongings of a dead human from across the ocean.” Angus waved a gnarled hand.
Carys felt her cheeks warm again.
“Hey,” Laura snapped. “You may be a superpowerful creature who can speak any language, but maybe you should learn some manners.” She put her hands on her hips. “What do you want? She’s not a queen. She doesn’t have a treasury.”
“Then perhaps she should find another guide.”
“I have…” Carys almost said a dragon, but Cadell wasn’t a possession to be bargained with. “Do you want… passage to the Brightlands?”
“Really?” Laura’s shoulders slumped. “Carys, after the last time—”
“What? He’s supposed to go with us anyway!”
“Okay, fair point.” Laura turned toward Angus. “So?”
Angus crossed his arms over his chest. “I have no need for passage through my own handiwork, Carys Morgan. Try something else.”
“The forge,” Duncan said quietly.
Carys turned. “No.”
Duncan slowly stood up, brushed off his hands, and walked toward Angus. “Guide Carys on her journey, show her what she needs to do, and you may have the forge we’ve built as your own.”
Angus’s eyes gleamed. “So the forge and everything built there would be mine?”
“Everything built in the future,” Duncan said. “That which is already made remains mine.”
Angus was silent for a long time, then finally nodded. “This is an acceptable payment. I will guide you.”
“Duncan, you can’t pay for my guide,” Carys said. “Isn’t there some rule about that?”
“No.” Angus was already loping away from the pool and back into the woods. “We have a deal, Carys Morgan. The forge is mine, and I will guide you to the druids.”
“The druids?” Laura asked. “Wait, I thought we had to do this quest in the Brightlands because that’s where the Morrígan is.”
Angus turned. “Yes, of course. Do you think druids only reside on this side of the shadow?” He shook his head and kept walking. “I would expect a shadow-walker to be more educated than this.”
“Hey!” Laura frowned and started after him. “I am working in an entirely different mythological framework than I was raised in, so you can just—” She switched to Yurok and started telling Angus off in another language entirely.
Duncan walked over and tucked Carys’s hand under his arm. “Don’t think twice about it, lass. You don’t owe me a penny.” His dimple showed up. “In fact, you’re saving me two hundred gold sovereigns a year.”
By the time they arrived back at Angus’s forge, Cadell was already waiting.
He had remained in beast form.
Nêrys, you smell of the otherworld.
“How can you tell that?” She walked over and immediately threw her arms around his leathery green neck. Cadell, Seren is alive.
She felt the fire rise in him like a flame hit with a bellows.
What?
What is Ogwen Valley?
Who told you she was alive?
“Angus.” She stepped back and looked him in his great golden eye. “What is Ogwen Valley?”
There was a ripple along Cadell’s skin, and moments later, he faced her in human form. “Come with me.”
He led her to a round circle of tree stumps that had been cut and placed around a stone fire circle. He sat on one and Carys sat next to him.
“I heard Seren’s call for the first time when she was eleven years old,” Cadell said. “She was not my first nêr ddraig, but I had never…” The corner of his mouth turned up. “I had never been bonded to a human who fought me as Seren did.”
“She was stubborn.”
“So stubborn,” he said. “Even as a child. I was the elder. Obviously I was battle-tested, but no matter how we trained or what we did, she had to do it her way.”
“And you went along with that?”
“Not at first, and not always,” he said. “Remember, I am your dragon, but I am not your servant.”
“I remember.”
“Seren took her power over me seriously, and she respected that, but I would always try to lead her in the direction I thought was the smartest or the safest. But she is her father’s daughter.” His eyes lit up. “As you are, Carys.”
She blinked away tears when she thought about her father. Her steady, solid guiding light in the world. “But my father was a teacher, not a king.”
Cadell nodded once. “Indeed. Seren grew up with a very clear path, and that path led directly to the throne.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “And she would have made a remarkable queen.”
“Ogwen Valley.”
“It was a testing run,” he said. “It is the final trial of the training school. The teachers and their dragons set up a series of trials—they’re different every time—and hers was the most challenging I have ever seen.
Marksmanship, tracking, hunting, ambushes.
She was limping and had a spear through her leg by the time we reached Ogwen Valley.
She was half delirious from blood loss, and there were more obstacles ahead.
Spears thrown at my wings, sharpshooters in the hills. ”
“You couldn’t fly over them?”
“Not if she wanted to pass the trial.” Cadell folded his hands and looked at the ground.
“I knew what was coming, and I knew she was in pain. She wasn’t thinking clearly, so I had a complicated strategy planned to evade the sharpshooters and get us through the valley without her taking another hit. ”
“More dangerous for you, I’m betting.”
He shrugged. “I am a dragon, nêrys. I heal much faster than a human.”
“But Seren had another plan.”
“‘Fly as fast as you can, as straight as you can.’” He shook his head. “Low to the ground, well in range of the sharpshooters, leaving both of us exposed. Pure speed and nothing else. ‘Just go as fast as you can. They’re expecting strategy, let us give them power.’”
“You argued.”
“Of course, but in the end, she reminded me that it was her trial, not mine. And that she knew she was right, and I needed to go along with it.” He shrugged. “I did.”
“And it worked.”
“It worked. They knew she was injured, so they assumed we would be cautious. I took one spear to the wing, but it barely grazed me. Seren passed out as soon as we reached the castle, but her strategy—or her lack of one—succeeded. Her instructors unanimously agreed that she had passed her training.”
“And she always reminded you of it?” Carys smiled a little bit.
“Ogwen Valley was our code, and she wasn’t the only one who used it. It was a signal that one of us was sure—even if it didn’t make sense—and we were asking for the other’s trust.”
“So when I said Ogwen Valley on the battlefield over Saris Plain—”
“I knew then that Seren wasn’t entirely gone,” Cadell said. “It wasn’t my place to tell you that. I don’t know how she is speaking to you from Annwn, but—”
“Annwn.” The underworld of Welsh mythology was an alternate realm where the dead lived on, usually carousing with heroes of old and the gods. “But you said you felt her die.”
“The dead may live on in Annwn, but they never return to the Shadowlands. They are lost to us. So when Seren spoke to you, I was confused, but do not take my confusion—or whatever the old one said—to mean that Seren is alive. She is not alive. I felt her die.”
“But she’s not really dead either.”
Cadell looked up at the sky. “The prophets of your world write of a realm in the sky where human souls live in the presence of their god, do they not? How is it different? Don’t you believe that is where your father’s spirit resides? Does he not live on in some way?”
“I don’t know.” She’d thought about it after her parents passed, listened to the words of comfort from the pastor at the small Protestant church in the woods where her father had worshipped.
“I know what my father believed, but how does that square with my mother being a devotee to a Celtic horse goddess?”