The statue faces the far side of the pool, where a ramp emerges from it, extending up to scalloped doors that look as if they’ve been carved out of ice—believable in this frigid air. Beyond them it seems to be bright and sunlit, which must be an illusion. He knows this world now. There’s no such brightness here. His curiosity gets the better of him and he steals toward the scalloped doors.
He has hardly started around the pool when the doors start to swing open, as if in response to his approach. That surely cannot be the case. Still, he hesitates.
Gleaming light pours out from the opening and along the ramp—morning sunlight spreading across a field. It’s the light of home, of Ercildoun, the light of his house above the Teviot. He’s so close he can taste the air.
The doors slowly shape a circular space like an ördstone’s tunnel leading straight to a meadow that must be somewhere in his world, not theirs, not with that bright light. It’s populated with children, babies. The babies are mostly human, pink and fat. The children are Yvag, human, or something halfway between, all of them tended by different Yvag handlers dressed in red flowing garments as if they are of his world, too. As the circle opens wide, a cortège of these handlers, moving as one, emerges, all of them clothed in those red raiments. They’re like an order of novitiates from a diabolical church.
In a crouch, he retreats, circling back around the pyramid, certain that the gray-faced goblins will know him for a fraud the moment they get a close look at him. But coming around the far side now is a company of uniforms like his own, shiny black armor. They carry pikes and march in synchronized step. Are they looking for him? Did the vicious little hob sound the alarm? Do they know already that he’s escaped? He can’t take the risk, can’t afford the confrontation, but he’s caught now between two groups with nowhere to go in either direction. The company of knights will emerge from behind the pyramid in moments.
The only way left is into the pool. He dives into the growth of reeds, pulls himself deeper among them, then swims quickly beneath the turbulence of the falls, coming up below Nicnevin’s statue, gasping for air and grabbing onto her carved heel to draw himself around to the far side of the statue. His breath steams, a yellow-green mist; his eyes sting from the fluid in them. It runs in rivulets from his hair. He hangs off the statue’s foot and watches.
There’s no green fire, but the group coming down the ramp do seem to emerge from an ördstone tunnel. If he could only run past them and through that doorway, he would escape into some place that’s of his world. Even as he looks on helplessly, the doors close and the bright sunlight behind them fades. Now the icy doors stand dark and red like everything else here. There’s no point in grieving over it. It’s gone.
This pool is practically the size of a corrie loch. He could swim to the most distant side and probably escape unseen, but his vision is blurry with oily fluid, his mind confused as if the thunderous cataract has shaken it loose. He ignores how the water stings.
The Yvags in red meet up with the martial black entourage, which parts and turns aside, revealing in its center Nicnevin. She wears purple and gold, but the garment fits strangely. It makes her look as if she’s grown enormous wings beneath it. Her face seems much thinner, even haggard, and she walks with effort. Is she ill? He wipes at the sparkling fluid on his face, but it’s greasy. It smears. He blinks some more to clear his vision.
Nicnevin climbs up onto the ramp. Then the novitiates, as he thinks of them, bring forth an object they’re carrying; it’s a baby, a naked human baby. They hand it to Nicnevin. She holds it out, the way her statue above him is posed for the sparkling cascade. Two of those red novitiates draw off her cloak. She descends the ramp into the pool naked, and he can see why the robe fit her so oddly. It’s not wings. On her back is a long translucent pod, a crystalline cocoon. It’s attached, growing out of her strange ribbed torso, and there is something dark, something alive inside it, a chrysalis. He knows what it is. What he wouldn’t give to have his bow right now, and an arrow to pierce that cocoon, to repay her for the horror of being so used.
A little unsteady, she carries the human infant into the water, lower and lower, coming straight toward Thomas. Her coloring has changed—the rose along her abdomen has turned violet, and wraps now around her sides, up into the cocoon. The ramp seems to reach all the way to her statue. He pushes back, circling behind the pedestal to look on helplessly as she immerses the baby, holding it down so long that she’s surely drowned it, and still she strides forward.
He thinks of Baldie facedown in the river, of blue babies that never draw a first breath, of every imagined terror he endured while Janet birthed Morven—that Janet would die, or Morven would be stillborn or deformed—and the litany of prayers and promises he whispered, muttered, offered, to keep them both alive. The baby in Nicnevin’s hands remains submerged for an eternity.
He has swum backward to maintain his distance from the Queen. Suddenly, he’s grabbed and dragged under.
Torn free of the statue, he’s sucked down into the pool, straight toward a dark hole at the bottom—it’s the mouth of the cylinder, the tun with downward-rushing water. His hands swipe and slide against the statue’s base, close on some of the reeds growing there. He tugs himself up. One of the reeds tears loose and immediately goes shooting down past him. He grabs another and pulls, and then another, until his hands are against the cold stone base again. The reeds part, and his fingers touch a rung. Desperately, he grips it and pulls hard. There are more rungs. No doubt some other Þagalwood creature uses them for something. Madly, he tries to climb up, to kick to the surface, his lungs screaming. But the suction catches him for a moment, long enough that his lungs simply give out. He sucks in the oily fluid, knowing he’s about to die. To his amazement, he finds it breathable. He ought to be choking, losing consciousness, as dead as Baldie. Instead, inhaling it again, he pulls himself, rung by rung, around the base of the statue. He comes up against its rear side, the fluid burbling out of him as he coughs and vomits and sucks in air.
Whatever this fluid is, he’s alive because of it. And it’s cleared the last of the beeswax out of his ears.
He spits the last of the vomit from his throat. It floats away like a small half-digested island. His breathing returning to normal, he glances across the pool. Nicnevin is still holding the child immersed. Surely it’s been a full five minutes. Then, quite suddenly, she lifts the baby aloft again and hands it to the novitiate in red who had given it to her, and who has followed her into the pond.
He squints to see. The babe is contentedly kicking and gesturing as if nothing strange has happened, but appears already transformed—its skin no longer pink, but iron gray. Sure and its wriggling fingers are longer than they were, too.
Queen Nicnevin’s breathing holes flex and blow out more golden fluid. As she emerges from the water, one of the knights drapes the Queen’s cloak over her grotesque form. The Yvag buzzing in response is so intense that Thomas winces where he is. With his eyes closed, he’s seeing the sparkles in the liquid, the same as he saw in the cylinders beneath the pool. With them open, it’s like trying to see through hard rain.
A shiver ripples through him. The air is still freezing cold. He needs to get out of this pond and away from here, but the ceremony isn’t done, the novitiates surround Nicnevin and hail her. The loud buzzing coalesces into murmurs and then, abruptly, into actual comprehensible words.
“Fountainhead of our world now gone,
Mother of all children here,
Fill us, make us
Eternity’s spawn.”
Humpbacked Nicnevin opens her arms to them all, and they sigh as if an angel has touched them. Not a sentiment he shares any longer.
Then all of them, red novitiates and black knights, turn as one and go back through the scalloped doors, entering to a darkling plain, not the meadow. That escape route, if it was a portal back home, has closed.
That only adds urgency to his need for an ördstone. The trouble is, taking one from any Yvag knight will alert them all to his presence, not to mention probably require him to kill the creature. That will not get him out of here. At best, he’ll be back with Taliesin and in chains this time.
When finally the creatures all leave, he crawls out of the pool directly behind the waterfall. The great space is empty.
He lies awhile, disinclined to get up, exhausted. He’s not sure if he dozes. The spangling fluid seems to have muddled his brain as though he’s been swimming in a vat of mead, crawled out as drunk as the warriors in Y Gododdin that Taliesin recited randomly all the time. He misses the old poet already. It’s absurd, he thinks: If he does manage to escape back home, Taliesin will likely outlive him here.
When at last he does get to his feet, he is momentarily dizzy, drops to one knee and has to lean against the stepped structure awhile. Stares into the waterfall. Its roar combined with the way it glitters draws him hypnotically, and he has to fight off its pull. It’s as if it wants him back in the pool.
Muddled, he stumbles out through the reeds at the edge, seeking an exit. He’s surely making too much noise, but there’s nobody to hear. The entire reverberating space lies empty save for him and the statue of Nicnevin before a cocoon grew upon her back. More than anything he needs to get out of this city, away from these insectile monsters.
He needs to go home.
XXIX. Escape
The exit is like a narrow narthex, edged with a kind of railing. Outside, it’s warm, the way he remembers it. His shivering diminishes. He recognizes where he is: behind the Queen’s massive summer house. Strangely, what was perpetually dim previously seems brighter now, as if their red sun has swelled while he was imprisoned. But one look at the tessellated sky—its mosaic structure clearer than ever—and he knows otherwise. This is some residual effect of being in that pond.
Around the far side of the Queen’s house lies a broad field of purple grasses through which he was dragged time and again before and after his baths, and beyond it the plaza where the Sluagh gathered for their hunt. It’s empty now, and in any case, not the plaza he needs in order to orient himself. He must find Hel. That points the way, or will once he finds it.
A phalanx of Yvag knights comes marching across the plaza, and he crouches in the grass to watch, studying their gait closely. He must imitate that stride as he pushes on, but he’s still feeling mildly feverish, disoriented. It’s an effort to stand and continue.
Down to the plaza then, past where he used to have the skin scrubbed off him. As he passes by other elves, they nod to him, but he barely acknowledges, hoping that Yvag knights are generally as standoffish as Ađalbrandr, which seems to be the case—at least, none of the others reacts oddly. Their tilted sloe-eyed glances appraise him, and their buzzing fills his head; as with the baptismal ritual he’s just witnessed, the noise coalesces into words now.
“He’s rather grand.”
“A captain, isn’t he?”
“Yes, like all such, no time for anybody else.”
