They went on their way up the hill, delivering their kill to the abbot’s kitchen, where it was met with thanks. Everyone would partake of this bounty. “Now,” Thomas said as they left the kitchen, “what is it you’ve kept to yourself, big brother?” He meant for the words to sting. Waldroup had lied to him—perhaps for their entire campaign across Europe.
They walked over to the small level space where they kept their things. Waldroup picked up his tool satchel and continued farther down the hill, well out of earshot of the others. As he went, he rooted around in the satchel, finally pulling out a pouch the size of a pilgrim’s scrip. He started to unlace it, but his fingers shook, and he dropped it. Thomas caught it as smoothly as if he’d anticipated the drop. He began to unlace it. As he did, a strange pressure grew within him—an almost palpable presence pushing inside his head. He’d encountered such pressure before in the probing, stabbing thoughts of the Queen of Ailfion. He flung the bag down as if stung and took a step back.
Unlaced, the bag spilled open in the dirt—and there lay three flickering ördstones, their blue jewels twinkling in a weirdly coordinated way. The stones looked something like small encrusted oysters. In his head they were almost singing, a tune so discordant that it set his teeth on edge.
He stared into Waldroup’s eyes. “Those dreams you described, they weren’t dreams at all, hey, Alpin?”
Waldroup tried to smile, to make light of it, but failed. He sat heavily on the hillside. “When I went back into the crypts to look for the arrow you’d lost, I couldn’t put it from my thoughts that the Yvag must all carry these, and maybe—and I don’t know why I thought it—but I thought maybe the stones might somehow communicate with any Yvag who came after. You know, tell them it was you and me. I know it makes no sense. How could these small things tell anyone who we were? We slew the two that would know us, and, I mean, you don’t know who’s going to wake—”
“And if they can share what they’ve seen,” Thomas interjected.
“So you thought about it, too, then.”
“A little,” he admitted. “Because in their heads, like a hive of bees they talked to each other, and talked to me that way, did the Queen.”
“Each needs to cut their way home if their host dies, and I thought what if they can pass knowledge around, memory, experience? I couldn’t let go of the idea.” He gestured with a trembling hand. “So after I found your arrow I snatched them all.”
“But why did you keep them, Alpin? Why not drown them? Throw ’em down a well?”
Even standing over them, Thomas could hear their skritching seductive susurrus enveloping his name. He understood now Waldroup’s increasing agitation as the demons of the stones kept up their assault. Waldroup likely didn’t even know he was hearing them, obeying them, twisted this way and that. Thomas found himself in an odd position, that of the wise counselor, schooling his mentor.
“How many times did you use them?” he asked.
“Twice. But they never took me to Ailfion. I kept opening other worlds. How can there be so many, Tom?”
What had he described? Blue sand deserts and a night sky filled with moons? Not here but not that awful forest of bones, either. “You went in?”
“Only as far as to see it wasn’t all red. I thought for certain if I crawled in all the way, it would seal up and trap me.”
“As it might.” He nudged the three stones with his boot. “These are evil magic.” He stared Waldroup in the eyes. “We have to be rid of them.”
“Now, Tom, hold on—”
“Alpin, stop and listen to yourself. They’ve already bored into your brain like a brace and bit. They’ll never let you be, nor me now. No one can be near these. We damned Gallorini, you and I. I won’t do that to anyone else.”
Waldroup’s gaze fell. “No. No, we cannot.”
“Then let me take them. I’ll lose them somewhere no one else will find them.”
“You’ll not destroy them?” Alpin asked. Clearly, the notion worried him.
“What, smash them and release the demons living within? I wouldn’t dare, and I wouldn’t know how. I’m not certain either of us can.”
“You think they are demons?”
“I don’t know what to call them. Maybe they’re the fae, same as that thing in the crypt, I don’t know. But they’re alive enough, they know we’re near.”
Waldroup only nodded.
Thomas folded up the pouch and tied off its neck, then picked it up. “Someplace we can always find them again if there’s need.” He turned and walked up the hill to the abbey. Waldroup took two shuffling steps, but stopped, tucked his hands in his armpits, and made himself stay put.
All the way up the hill, harsh whispering voices promised Thomas riches, rewards, whatever he wanted, much the way the alderman had slid into his mind in the crypt; maybe on account of that experience he could resist their enticements, even ignore them now. He wondered if the stones buried with the elven might be different in some way from the one Stroud had used, the one he wore around his neck right now. Could it be the stones that woke the Yvag in their tombs? Sly demons guarding the helpless sleepers, connected to their conveyances? Maybe they were indeed the fae.
The stones seemed to sense his purpose as he spoke to the artisan Gilleaux, who was even now sculpting the base of the abbey’s baptismal font, circling it with figures of small demons and dragons, figures squashed beneath the weight of the purity and goodness of God in the form of that font. Its placement was already decided; the octagonal hole dug and full of rough gravel, surrounded by set floor stones. Thomas knelt and with both hands plunged into the gravel and dirt to make a deeper pocket into which he dropped the pouch. Ignoring the wailing of those demons, which faded as he pushed the little rocks back over the pouch, smoothing it so that no sign remained. Before day’s end, the base would be set securely in the hole, and the cross-shaped font itself—large enough for him to lie within—placed upon it. Thomas was one of those laying the floor, and would be assisting Gilleaux in setting the font in place—after which the stones would never be heard from again. One way or another the purity of God would silence them. No dweller in Ailfion would ever hear their cry or learn what, if anything, they knew.
He stood stiffly, tired, and listened to the silence.
Waldroup had got it right: Those evil stones might have been able to identify them both. He didn’t know how, but he didn’t know they couldn’t, either. So, although he’d nearly been driven mad for his trouble, Waldroup had been smart not to leave them behind.
Thomas walked back down the hill. The rest of the day afterward, it was clearly all Waldroup could do not to ask where and how he had disposed of them. Thomas tried to impress upon his friend how wise he had been—that far more men than Gallorini would have perished if the Yvag had tracked the two of them here. Maybe everyone at work on this abbey would have been slaughtered. Who knew what revenge the elven might take?
Thomas lay now upon a hillock overlooking the ruins of Old Melrose. Beyond, the Tweed sparkled with moonlight; but daybreak wasn’t far off. Soon the sky would be lightening as it had done over that forest in Italia. They had stuck to their story of not knowing the whereabouts of Gallorini, a lie that tormented him to this day. But there was nothing for it; they couldn’t have rescued the poor little man even had they returned like fools to the very same spot in the Þagalwood to hunt for Waldroup’s lost stone. Had they strayed one inch off that path, they would have joined him.
So many questions remained: What sort of world was Ailfion beyond that wood, or was it all like that, a darkly haunted realm? If Gallorini transformed into so small a skeletal sapling, what race of creatures had been turned into the enormous tree things that vaulted the path, and whispered and sighed? Perhaps over time Gallorini would grow to their size. If that was so, then was the haunted wood what became of people the elves stole away as teind? He couldn’t stop brooding on the possibility that Onchu had been there somewhere—one of the nine hundred eighty-seven bald bone tree-things edging the path.
He could not find out, didn’t dare go back into the Þagalwood in search of answers. He doubted any answers at all awaited him.
He got up from the ground stiffly, stretched to hear his joints crack, then picked up his un-nocked bow and used it as a staff as he began to climb the Eildon hills back around St. Boisil and home.
“Another night, I’m sure,” Waldroup whispered in his ear.
“I fear you’re right, Alpin. Wherever they are, it’s not here anymore. The crypts are all empty. I’m wasting my time.”
“For a lad who pulled me out of that ensorcellment, you’re giving up awfully easily now that it’s just you on your own.”
“Weren’t you the one earlier calling this a fool’s errand?”
“Me? I’m not even ’ere, am I?”
