“If I told you, you would not believe me. Just as you find everything I have said thus far unbelievable.”
“Try me.”
“The manitous took them, Jamie. North American cousins of those beings called elves that figure so prominently in European folk tales.”
“Jesus!”
Tom shrugged wearily. He met Jamie’s questioning gaze steadily.
“So,” Jamie said at length. “What are they supposed to do there?”
“They will meet with a shaman who knew Taliesin when he first arrived on these shores. His name is A’wa’rathe—He-Who-Walks-With-Bears. They had wandering folk in North America then as well, Jamie. They were solitary shaman/bards who were part of no tribe, but yet of all tribes. Like the European bards. Musicians, magic workers, healers. They were called rathe’wen’a—the Drummers-of-the-Bear—for their totem was the bear. The manitous that brought Kieran and Sara into the Otherworld will in turn bring A’wa’rathe to them.”
“To do what?”
“A’wa’rathe holds the key as to how Taliesin may be stopped.”
“So why aren’t you there? Why is Sara involved? Christ, why am I involved?”
“Sara was unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She seems to have certain . . . abilities of her own. Rather than let her come under Taliesin’s influence, for he is attracted to both magic users and those with the potential to become magic users, I had her taken with Kieran. She will be safe there.”
“And meanwhile? Where’s your druid?”
“Working—even as I am. We lead Taliesin astray. While he follows us, he won’t be following Kieran and Sara.”
“By us, do you mean me as well?”
Tom shook his head. “I need but one thing from you. The same thing that Taliesin has already sought here.”
“Taliesin’s been here already?”
“Not inside, no. But I have sensed an aftertrace of his presence about the House. Something kept him at bay—perhaps the House itself.”
“What’s the thing you want?”
“I left a few objects in Aled Evans’s keeping, Jamie. I need them now. The keybone of my Weirdin is one.”
“I don’t have it anymore,” Jamie said. “I took it to the museum, where the RCMP confiscated it. They’ve also got the rest of them.”
“Then that solves one problem,” Tom said. “It will take no great skill to retrieve them.”
“What do you use them for?”
“As guideposts along the Way. Normally, at least. They are also an oracle of sorts. For my present purposes, I will use them to discover the most auspicious time and place to deal with Taliesin.”
“Why did you enter them in Memoria?”
“I thought if I put them in your computer that you would discover them and use them. As I said, they are more than an oracle, Jamie. They are all that survives from the ancient druidic alphabet of the trees. Mine once belonged to Taliesin, but he left them with the rathe’wen’a and they came into my hands. I thought that with them, you would begin to follow the Way. The Craft of Silence.
“I tell you once again, Jamie. There is magic, though it is not, perhaps, what you think it to be. All the trappings of power are just that. Trappings. The Way itself is a strengthening of the spirit, a growing closer to the balance that governs the world. Progress is slow along the Way, but every step of the journey is like a note in the oldest tune of all. When you have the tune complete, you are complete yourself. Every potential becomes realized. Then you can move beyond this existence. No longer will you be reborn, for your time on this earth will be done.”
“Where do you go?”
“To the Summer Country, Jamie. But it’s like I could never describe to you. I have seen only glimpses of it myself, but what I have seen remains burned into my soul. I yearn for my time there. How I yearn.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me about these Weirdin and the Way?” Jamie asked. “Why did you have to hide them like you did?”
Tom sighed. “Secrecy itself is a source of power, Jamie. And also—in many ways you are different from those in the world around you, but in many ways you are the same. Most people will not accept a gift—most will not allow it its true worth if it is given freely.”
A therapist, Jamie decided, could make a life’s work of Thomas Hengwr. But that wasn’t what concerned him just now. His feelings were mixed. He wanted to believe. But unfortunately, Jamie was also pragmatic. No matter how much he studied the paranormal and wanted to believe in it, he also had to accept that there simply wasn’t any solid evidence.
Case in point: Thomas Hengwr. He couldn’t think of anyone more unreliable. But that judgment didn’t bring him any closer to his main concern, which was finding out what Tom had done with Sara. Jamie believed that wherever Sara was—and it wasn’t in some airy-fairy Otherworld—Tom had something to do with it. Until he found out, he meant to keep his curious guest talking.
“Who did the painting?” he asked.
“I did.”
“You? I never knew you could paint.”
Tom smiled. “There is a great deal you don’t know about me, Jamie. But I did not physically craft the painting. I created it with magics as a gift for Aled. The concept of a meeting between an European bard and one of the rathe’wen’a fascinated him.”
“The red-haired man is Taliesin?”
Tom nodded. “And the other is A’wa’rathe. They were both handsome men—Taliesin especially. But every rose hides a thorn.”
“Do you want the painting?” Jamie asked. “Or was it just the . . . ah, what did you call it? The keybone?”
“Not the painting,” Jamie said, “but there is one other thing. A small golden ring like this.”
He lifted his hand and Jamie saw there on his finger a ring similar to the one Sara had found in the storeroom of The Merry Dancers.
“It is called a gifting ring,” Tom explained, “and it is an object of power. The one I seek—the one Aled had—once belonged to Taliesin. A normal gifting ring serves to mark someone under the protection of a Wayfarer—one who follows the Way. They are given in friendship and have some small magic about them. Enough so that those who receive them often take to the Way themselves.
“But the ring I seek, Taliesin’s ring, is more than that. He received it from his tutor Myrddin who in return received it from the Lady of the Lake. It was forged by Gwyn ap Nudd, the King of the Faeries in the Summer Country, and has this additional property: it enhances one’s magical potentials. It was because of the ring that Taliesin was able to turn Maelgwn’s druid to stone. It was the ring that let him survive the long voyage from Gwynedd to North America in nothing but a coracle.”
“You’d think,” Jamie said, “if the ring is that powerful, that he would have used it to stop his banishment.”
“Not necessarily. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that Taliesin knew that he was no longer welcome in his homeland and so, in his own heart, chose exile. Either that, or the gods withdrew their protection from him for that moment. All that I know is that he no longer has it, but seeks it, and if he were to regain it. . . .”
“That ring sat in the storeroom of The Merry Dancers for three years or better,” Jamie said. “And before that, Aled had it for God knows how many years.”
“Twenty-two,” Tom said.
“All right. Twenty-two. What’s taken Taliesin so long to come looking for it? How did you get it in the first place? And you’ve known where it was for all that time. If you needed it, why didn’t you get it sooner?”
“I had no need for it. As to where I got it—that was at the same time that I acquired Taliesin’s Weirdin. The tale went around that Taliesin had died. A’wa’rathe had his effects and gave them to me when I asked for them. All he kept was a six-holed bone whistle.”
“What about his harp?” Jamie asked.
Tom shrugged. “It vanished. A’wa’rathe thought it was claimed
by Dylan Eil Ton and returned to the Summer Country.”
Jamie took up his pipe and tapped the ashes from its bowl into an ashtray. He began to fill it with fresh tobacco. “So he was just pretending to be dead?” he asked.
“Truly I do not understand what he meant to accomplish with that tale. All I know is that for years there was peace, and then an evil was abroad once more—an evil that Maelgwn’s druid recognized as the spirit of Taliesin, but changed. From bard to horror. The manitous named it Mal’ek’a—the Dread-That-Walks-Nameless. But Maelgwn’s druid can give it a name: Taliesin.”
“And the ring . . . ?”
“Is important as much as a defense against Taliesin as is keeping it out of his hands.”
Jamie nodded. “I see,” he said. “Only I don’t have it.”
“You don’t—” Tom’s face blanched. “Then where . . . ?”
“Sara has it.”
“Then she is in terrible danger. The ring will draw Taliesin to her—or her to him—like a bee to a flower. We may be already too late.”
Jamie stared at Tom’s shocked features and a feeling of dread crept up his spine. He hadn’t been willing to accept much of Tom’s wild story, but now the reality at least of Sara’s peril struck him like a physical blow. “Well, don’t just sit there!” he cried. “Get her back here!”
Tom stood up and the air crackled around him, like static jumping from a shirt when it is pulled from the dryer. Jamie regarded him numbly, not knowing what to expect. Would Sara suddenly appear here—pop in out of nowhere like a special effect in a movie? A long minute slipped by and nothing happened.
“What are you waiting for?” Jamie demanded.
Tom’s shoulders slumped. “I have been too clever for my own good,” he replied slowly. “I asked the manitous to take her—both Kieran and her—deep and far away, to a place even I don’t know, in case I should be trapped by Taliesin and the knowledge taken from me. There are a hundred hundred pockets of the Otherworld—each layered one against the other like the layers of an onion. They could be in any one of them.”
Totally forgotten now was the impossibility of the situation. All Jamie cared about was Sara and getting her back. He didn’t even stop to think that if none of this was real, then she wasn’t in any danger. “Sara,” he said softly. His gaze remained on Tom. “What have you done to her?”
“I only meant to protect her. Please, believe me.”
Jamie nodded without much enthusiasm. Then a thought came to him. “The ring! You can find her through the ring.”
Tom shook his head. “Taliesin can—because he has a bond with it. A bond I do not share. It was his ring. Not mine.”
“Do something!” Jamie cried.
A hard look came into Tom’s eyes. “I will try,” he said, and then he was gone in a whuft of displaced air.
Jamie half rose from his chair, staring at the place Tom had occupied moments earlier, then slowly sank back into the cushions. Oh, God, he thought. It was all true. There were powers beyond the here and now and somehow he and Sara were caught up in the middle of them.
His pulse pounded. I’m too old for this, he thought. What if my heart goes on me?
He tried breathing, slow and deep. In, out . . . in, out. Calm down. He wanted to get up and go running through the House in the forlorn hope that Sara had somehow gotten back on her own and even now was fast asleep in her bed. Safe and sound. He had only to get up and go look for himself to see that everything was all right. There was no weird Tom Hengwr appearing and disappearing, no threat of some long-dead bard come haunting, no magic ring.
But he knew that the hope was no more than a futile wish. Sara wasn’t in her bed, nor in a kitchen, an attic, the cellar, nor anywhere. She was no longer on this world, if Thomas Hengwr could be believed. And with what he’d just seen—one minute standing in front of him as solid as the desk or a chair, in the next second gone—how could he not believe?
When he stopped trembling, Jamie told himself, he’d get up from this chair and go find Blue. He had to talk to someone, someone normal. It was that or quietly turn to jelly here in the Postman’s Room. But whatever courage he could normally claim seemed to have vanished and it was all he could do to just sit where he was with his knees knocking together and his jaws clamped shut to keep his teeth from rattling against each other.
He sat there for a long while and slowly the thunder of his heartbeat quieted. Something in the House, that steadfast presence of a building that had stood so many years, a patient presence that came as much from the actual timber and stone that made it up as it did from the House itself, settled over him. He waited until he could unclench his hands from his knees and light his pipe without spilling tobacco all over himself, then stood up, feeling like an invalid just out of sickbed, and went looking for Blue.
In the Firecat’s Room, the House seemed to whisper to Jamie. That’s where you will find him.
He set off in that direction, wondering how he was even going to begin to tell Blue what was going on. What would he say? Look out for a dead Welsh bard named Taliesin? Sara’s gone to faeryland, but that’s okay. A wizard went off to get her back.
He shook his head. Smoke streamed from his pipe and trailed along behind him as he stalked off down the hallway. Moving, Jamie felt better, though it didn’t do much for straightening out this weird mess they’d managed to get themselves into. He wondered why Aled had never told him the importance of what he’d left Jamie as an inheritance, then remembered something Tom had said earlier: “Secrecy itself is a source of power. . . .”
Jamie sighed.
“If you’ve got any pull up there, Aled,” he said, lifting his gaze to the ceiling, “have someone give us a hand, okay?”
Which was a strange thing for a man who didn’t believe in God or Heaven to say. But right now Jamie was willing to call on anyone, so long as they were willing to help.
The stars of the Otherworld spilled a winter-sharp light into the glade where Thomas Hengwr stood. He watched them silently and gave the constellations their bardic names: the Wren, who was the mage’s guide to the Otherworld. Left of it, the constellation of the Queen of Otters and her consort the Bearded King. Under them swam the Salmon, who hid or revealed knowledge, depending on its whims. And lifting from the eastern horizon, hidden for the time being by the tall spruce and pine that encircled the glade, was the Weaver at her Loom who held all their fates.
They were each a part of a bardic mage’s symbolic measure of the world through which he or she moved. And whether named in the stars or in a druid’s alphabet of the trees, hidden in the turns of ritual music or carved on Weirdin bones, they were always the same: one hundred and twenty-two images, sixty-one dualities that likened the motions of one’s soul to the riddling steps of the world’s balance that a mage took on his or her journey to the Summer Country. Tom sighed and brought his thoughts back to the matter at hand.
As the deep silence of his taw filled him, he slowly knelt in the grass. The stillness that came from inside him seemed to seep out of his body, pore by pore, until what wind there was in the glade died away and even the stars above paused in their solemn dance. When the silence was so profound that it hung from every blade of grass, poised like an inheld breath, he brought out the pouch of Weirdin that he had retrieved from the museum.
That at least had been as simple to accomplish as he’d told Jamie it would be. But the ring and Jamie’s niece were another matter entirely. There were a hundred hundred layers of the Otherworld and she could be in any one of them. Close at hand in the realms nearest the herenow, or deep in those worlds where the boundaries between space and time were so thin as to be transparent. A hundred hundred worlds. Where in them would the manitous have taken her? Where would A’wa’rathe be meeting Kieran? His only hope was that the bones could guide him, for even his bond with Kieran was severed by the distance of the Otherworld between them.
He took a cloth from the bag and la
id it on the grass in front of him, then withdrew twelve of the Weirdin at random and held them above the cloth in cupped hands.
“Speak to me,” he whispered to the night and breathed across the bones.
Then he let them fall.
Avidly, he bent down to read their placement. The reading cloth had a triskellion shape in the center of a Celtic cross. Each arm of the triskell, the cross, and the outsides of the cross’s circle had a meaning, dependent on the fall of the bones and their placement to each other. The bone symbolizing the Maiden fell on the east arm of the cross. Beside it was the Hazel Staff and the Lake. He took the Maiden to be Sara. The Staff could mean either wisdom or journeying; the Lake, receptive wisdom.
Tom stared at them for a long time, shaking his head as he tried to make sense out of the reading. Was Kieran teaching Sara magics? He was still an apprentice himself so that seemed unlikely. Surely Kieran knew better. Tom turned to the fall of the remaining nine bones to see what light they could shed on this new riddle.
So intent was he on the reading, that he failed to sense a deepening of the shadows in the surrounding woods. The dark between the trees grew darker still.
The symbol of the Wren was in the top right-hand corner of the cloth, in the area that designated present allies or adversaries. That was plain enough. The Wren was also called the Harper, so that was Taliesin. But did the bone’s placement mean that Taliesin had already contacted Sara? Perhaps he’d even acquired the ring?
The shadows coalesced and eased out of the wood, sliding across the glade with a sly, almost imperceptible motion. It was as subtle as the shadow of a tree moving with the passage of the sun across the sky.
Tom looked at the bottom right corner of the cloth where the course of action, if one was to be recommended, would be. There were two Weirdin there. The Drum and the Lizard, or Salamander. Revelation and silence. Opposites. And yet the same—if the Lizard’s silence were taken as one’s taw.