Celtic Fire(95)
He eased her down on the pallet. “They will bleed and die just as well, then.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Rhiannon floated as if in a dream. She wore a checkered tunic and a mantle of blue and gold fastened at her shoulder with a gold pin worked like a leaf, but she had no memory of dressing herself in such garments. A sea of bodies surrounded her, most half hidden behind the tall stones, but a few men—Madog and Owein among them—stood within. Madog’s high, thin voice chanted a numbing path through her mind. Owein’s low tone wove across and around his mentor’s call. Ancient syllables, pulsing, urging.
Compelling.
She gripped a taper lit by the strike of iron on stone. Its flame leaped against the night, straining to break free. Two cold pyres lay within the Druid circle, great mounds of oak and fir. They wanted but the touch of her hand to send the wood into flame, but some instinct told Rhiannon to hold back. Though she couldn’t remember the reason, she knew that lighting the summer fire would be a grave mistake.
But the Druid song rose, sapping her resistance until it was as faint as a childhood memory. She stepped between the pyres and touched the taper to the tinder at the base of each. The tiny flames flickered, faded, then burst anew, snaking through the sacred wood. They lapped higher, caressing one of the white shanks that mingled with the logs and branches. Rhiannon frowned at the pale shafts, her horror rising.
Bones. Roman bones.
She watched with revulsion as flames consumed the human kindling, dancing merrily, darting into black hollows and emerging with renewed strength. The spent taper dropped from her fingers.
She was dimly aware of a man at her side. Edmyg. He wore a fur-trimmed cloak and the gold torc that marked him a king. That, too, was wrong. He was no longer her consort. He’d abandoned that right when he spilled his seed in the womb of another woman.
The flames leapt, reaching into the night sky. The throng assembled beyond the stones shifted. The chieftains approached first, offering allegiance. As they passed between the fires, she heard her own voice, accepting their troth.
Their warriors followed, then the elders, and finally the clanswomen and the children. The flames galloped to the twin peaks of the pyres and reached for each other across the heart of the circle. A sound like whipping wind drove back the night cries of the forest. The shadows of the stones flickered. Wood smoke assaulted Rhiannon’s nostrils and stung her eyes.
The Druid chant quickened, Owein’s young voice blending with Madog’s quivering tones. The full moon, pregnant with promise, broke the edge of the hills and rode into the sky. Rhiannon felt the veil between the land of mortals and the shores of Annwyn grow gossamer-thin, as it did when death neared.
The last old woman hobbled between the fires, leaning heavily on the arm of a young lass. Madog paced behind, marking his steps with his staff. The skull perched upon it stared balefully at Rhiannon, drawing a flicker of recognition. Who had met such a gruesome fate? It was important that she remember, but she couldn’t seem to snatch the answer from the fog in her brain.
Madog halted at Rhiannon’s left. With Edmyg’s presence crowding her on the right and the dread skull hovering above, she found she could scarcely breathe.
Only Owein hadn’t yet passed between the flames. He approached now, still chanting, a low, mournful sound that seemed to be absorbed into the flames. He strode forward, halting barely more than an arm’s length away from Rhiannon, at the very center of the circle. Madog’s Druid sword hung in a scabbard at his side.
Owein stood as still as death for a heartbeat, then his head snapped back with such a force that Rhiannon was sure his neck had broken. He collapsed on the ground, keening, his hands tearing at his hair. A deep groan tore from his throat.
Rhiannon gave a cry and lurched toward him, only to be hauled back by Edmyg’s grip. She tore at his fingers as Owein writhed at her feet. “Let me go!”
“Be still,” he hissed. “He calls Kernunnos.”
Rhiannon stared dumbly at Madog. When the Druid nodded, her hands began to shake.
Owein’s back arched and his arms flung wide. Words long forgotten by all save those sworn to guard them poured from his lips. Their power caused Rhiannon’s soul to tremble.
The wind rose, howling like a wolf, and the ground beneath her feet shook. The Roman’s skull grinned as the flames consumed the bones that had once carried his flesh. The forest shrieked with a voice not of the earth.
Owein chanted louder, faster. Flames shot from the pyres to form an arch over Rhiannon’s head. The face of the skull rocked toward her. Its hollow eyes, washed by flames, seemed to mark her with their gaze.