Chapter 41 #2
Meilyr rubbed his arms, nerves ragged. It was incredibly risky to be here, but he could not shake the feeling that it would be worse to leave Celyn.
‘He will be all right,’ Osian told him as they made their way towards the far corridors. Their boots thrummed with the rain. ‘The knights I positioned here will allow us entry. Aldreda’s should be conveniently distracted, and there should be… Meilyr?’
Meilyr had slowed, then stopped. Stiffened.
‘What is it?’ Osian asked.
A tug, as though his blood had heard something his body could not.
‘There is something… wrong.’ There was no other way to put it. It did not feel like Celyn, did not feel like it came from the dungeons.
It was as though Osian felt it too as he followed Meilyr’s gaze and tensed.
Something was moving in the shadows of one of the other corridors. Meilyr’s senses strained like a bowstring: There.
The wrongness, familiar and acerbic, seeped in like carrion on the air.
Osian stepped in front of him.
The thing that stumbled into the cloister had once been a person. Someone once finely kept, resplendent in fine robes of grey and gold, almost like a priest.
Shocks of iron-grey hair, once elegantly coifed, fell across their face.
‘Lord Gelens,’ Osian said, not quite in greeting. Nothing eased with the recognition.
It could still have been Lord Gelens were it not for the thumping in Meilyr’s veins. The dizzying beat of wrong wrong wrong.
‘Osian…’
As Meilyr gripped his arm, Lord Gelens tipped forward and began to wheeze. Horrid, pained breaths like a hare with an arrow through its lung. Frothing blood slipped over their lips, and they looked with a lolling head directly at them.
‘Osian—’
The shape of what had been Lord Gelens buckled and reformed; blood-black tree roots spilled from their mouth, from their shoulder blades as they bent forward. Limbs snapped at impossible, inhuman angles.
Osian drew his sword, the sing of metal clear through the horror. ‘Run.’
‘I’m not leaving you—’
‘Run!’
The thing that had been Lord Gelens fell to all fours and screamed.
Something threw Meilyr back and he stumbled, spine and still-tender skull smacking into a pillar.
Osian moved like lightning, like a tidal wave that cracks open rock.
He was not fast enough. The creature reared, slamming his blade aside as though it were made of wood.
Osian swept in again, but even his gwaed-steel rang cold, slicing through only a handful of the amassing, writhing roots forming the beast’s head.
It shrieked and bore down on him, slamming him into the ground with a thud and the scrabbling of branch against stone.
Osian held it back with his sword braced across him, but roots wrapped around the blade as if to absorb it. The creature’s bulging, clawed feet inched closer to his shoulders, his face. His heart.
The creature that had been Lord Gelens would plunge and puncture Osian in a thousand places, with branch and tree-sinew and root. It would rip him to pieces. Osian would die slowly, agonizingly, as Meilyr watched. Once again unable to save someone he—
No.
He pushed off the pillar and reached for the roaring of his blood.
It engulfed him like the dark waters of the lake. It was not stiff or unsteady or uncertain, as it had been in the barn loft – he was not afraid, or out of practice. The roar rolled through his bones, through his flesh and everything he was, as though it had been waiting for him. Perhaps it had.
He reached with his hand, with the blood on his re-opened fingertips and his re-opened lip, and pulled.
Osian was the easiest thing to grasp in the world. Meilyr hauled him out from under the creature like a rug, and it stumbled and howled as the prince slid across the stones, all the way to Meilyr’s feet. He stepped around Osian without breaking focus, let him go and reached—
He had no connection whatsoever with Lord Gelens’ blood, but that did not matter.
Yew. Lord Gelens’ body had been woven with yew – specifically the old yew, south-west of the fountain. The roar within Meilyr recognised it by scent, by taste.
He sucked more blood from his lip, arced his fingers and gripped.
The creature lurched towards him, Osian’s sword still strung through its jaw – and lumbered to a halt. The largest majority of the bark and greenery stiffened. Held.
Sweat slipped down Meilyr’s temple as his heart thrashed, the roar having taken his breath. The edges of the corridor blurred. How long could he hold on? How could he stop it?
Like a weed—
His mother’s voice, prying a pesky shoot from the edge of their herb patch.
Sometimes, that’s all there is for it. Out, like a weed—
His bones straining as though they might burst through his flesh, Meilyr spread his hands and gathered. Pried. Ripped.
Yew jerked. Groaned. Bowed.
Slowly. Too slowly.
His blood blared, barely indistinguishable as individual beats, so hard and fast he had to have only moments left of consciousness. Moments left to tear the life out of the soil – the body. Moments left to save Osian.
Osian.
Osian, who lunged past him and dived his hands into the mess of pried-apart yew and root, grasped the hilt of his sword and drew it as if from a rusted scabbard – a stone on a hill.
Meilyr heaved the other way, and the sword came free with a clear, bright ring of metal. As his vision bled, his mouth exploding with iron, Osian plunged his sword down with a cry through the gap in the parted yew.
Flesh-sound. Blood. Roots.
Osian severed the last of the life within the thing that had once been the king’s adviser, with a strike that cleaved through the rain in the courtyard beside him.
The creature shuddered. Began to wither. Some of the smaller roots snapped at the air like rattled serpents, but the life was leaving, the wrongness with it.
Osian stepped back, breathing hard – alive. Alive.
The roar left Meilyr’s body as quickly as it had come. He fell to his knees, hard on the stone, and slumped sideways.
‘Meilyr!’
Scuffing of boots. The clatter of steel. Rain.
Osian pulled him into his arms. ‘Meilyr! Meilyr, breathe!’
Meilyr sucked in air like a man drowning, heart jolting back into rhythm. Abysmally fierce, as though it might split his skull. As though he had run a hundred miles.
Osian touched his arms, his face, his shoulders, leaving behind little brushes of blood.
Osian. Alive, woven from gold even in the rain. Stirring memory.
‘Meilyr…’
In the wake of the devastation, cold realisation seeped in.
The familiar sound of the rain, the familiar feeling of his emptied body.
Meilyr, what have you done?
He wrenched out of Osian’s arms and to his feet, falling against the wall.
Osian’s knowing, shocked eyes. He had seen. He knew. He knew what Meilyr was.
‘Meilyr—’
Meilyr shoved himself from the wall and ran.