“Oh, but he did speak to that.”
“What? When?”
“Before you asked him about Hel.” Infuriatingly, he adds nothing more.
Thomas wipes his hands across his face. “Well, what did he say, poet?”
Taliesin blinks. “Beeswax.”
Thomas stares, certain he’s hearing more nonsense from mad Taliesin.
The poet is leaning on his hand, palm against the floor. He stiffens upright abruptly. “Food’s coming,” he announces. “Get to your cell, lad.”
He has just entered the arch when the lights go out and a note sounds, and once again he finds himself tipping forward. This time the pallet catches him, but he bangs one knee on the floor.
Cursing, he gets up, hobbles back out to where the patens await, food steaming. As he bends down to pick them up, he looks at the honeycombs laid to the side and realizes what Onchu was talking about. They’ve been sucking the honey from these combs almost daily. The wax has been right in front of him. It’s the answer to a riddle he hasn’t asked yet.
This is how he will escape.
XXVII. Thomas Underground
As the time of the next meal approaches, Thomas tries to go over every detail of the escape plan with Taliesin. For Thomas to have any chance of escape at all, the old poet must maintain the appearance that he’s never left.
“You’ll have to eat double portions,” Thomas explains, “or else throw the leftovers in the garderobe hole.”
“Double rations sounds wonderful.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
After a pause, the poet asks, “Will ti come back after ti determine where we are?”
“I can’t. If I make it out of here without being caught, I don’t dare return. Besides, if you aren’t here to eat the food, they’ll quickly discover our absence and neither one of us will live long.”
“Yes, yes. Wise. I must divert them.”
“Convince them I’m still here. That’s all.”
“But how will ti get out?”
“I don’t know.” They have had this part of the conversation twice already. The poet forgets nearly everything. How he’s going to remember to eat both their portions . . . Well, Thomas can’t do anything about it other than hope.
The old poet strokes his hairy chin, nodding to himself. “I will have to compose a poem about True Thomas.”
Thomas bows his head, pats the old man on the shoulder. “If you share that with Nicnevin, they will toss you in Hel.”
Taliesin munches on his beard awhile. “Care I?” He seems to consider it. “The only pity is, I wouldn’t be here for me to speak to.”
Thomas folds some sticky saved honeycomb, pinches and rolls it into a ball, then divides it in two. He awaits the poet’s signal that the meal is coming. He knows he should wait and watch one time before taking the leap, but every day he doesn’t act might be a year passing by back home, another year without Janet, and who knows how many have gone already? Ten? Twenty? More? Is she even alive? Is his daughter grown by now? Who’s left?
Taliesin says suddenly, “Once you orient yourself, ti should head for that troll ruin again.”
“What? Why there?”
“The trolls might assist ti.”
“They might kill me, too; they tried to the last time. After all, I led Ađalbrandr straight to one of their own.”
The poet mulls that over before saying, “Yes, well . . . I’ve no other advice, except don’t let them catch ti.”
Thomas nods, says nothing. Regret is sinking in, wrapped in the realization that if this subterfuge works, they will never see each other again. Taliesin will die here in isolation, having thrust True Thomas like his own vengeance upon the Yvag. He may die considerably sooner because of his part in it, too. Either way, it’s not the fate Thomas would wish for the old poet, even if, as he reasons, in some sense Taliesin died centuries ago. Surely, the loss of Waldroup is stirred in with the melancholy of the approaching moment. He’s lost Waldroup twice now—first in life, then in death, the ghost who accompanied him silenced, it seems, by Nicnevin’s use of him.
“Tell Onchu I love him and I’ll—I’ll count the catkins in his honor. Tell him—”
Taliesin interrupts: “It’s coming,” he says, finger raised, and turns to get up. Thomas watches him climb unsteadily to his feet and thinks, You would never make it up even the first hill, old fellow. The realization is so obvious, yet it stabs him sharp as a needle. How has he failed to appreciate the infirmity of Taliesin before this?
Thomas scrambles up and steps back into his space while stuffing the warmed and formed beeswax into his ear canals. He listens to the roar of his own blood, the only thing he can hear now. The twinkling stars in the walls fade to blackness, and in the same moment the musical note sounds, only he doesn’t so much hear it as feel it in his bones, rising up through his feet, shins . . . rattling his jaw. He’s gritting his teeth.
Right before him a wall begins to descend. Before it can seal off his doorway completely, he dives beneath it. He plummets, bracing like a cat, having no sure idea how far the floor is below. The fall knocks the breath out of him, and he bangs his forehead hard. The darkness sparkles.
The floor glides silently to a stop. Recovering, he rolls over. Above him in the shadows hangs the great arched ceiling he has always observed. Yet, surely it can’t be there, must be an illusion.
Two arches lead obliquely away from the circle here—side-by-side tunnels receding as far as he can see. They are lit at seemingly random points and full of mist or steam. Directly behind him there’s a smaller, scooped-out niche, as if a section of the wall has caved in symmetrically.
The floor thrums with some deep vibration. He rolls up onto one knee just as a great shadow comes marching along the right-hand tunnel. Thomas throws himself into the niche. The space proves to be shallower than his cell. He presses as far back as he can, hoping that the shadows will mask him. The empty patens left from their last meal together sit in the middle of the area.
Somewhere above, Taliesin will right now be calling out his name, determining that he has gone. The thought stings with a further pang of loss. He’s bid the poet farewell and lost his brother again, this time forever.
