The Great Tree of Avalon (25 page)

Nuic’s color darkened. “She did, did she?”

“Yes,” declared Llynia proudly. “It was perfectly clear.”

The old sprite merely grimaced.

Elli glanced at him uncertainly, but he only said, “Put me down, Elliryanna.”

With a worried look, she set him down. He walked over to the small pool in the fold of the knoll and put his feet in the water, grumbling to himself.

Llynia turned back to Tamwyn. “I’d tell you what I think of you, porter. But . . . as a holy woman, I can’t!” She rose, fists clenched, and strode off toward the other side of the knoll. Fairlyn, smelling like something that had roasted too long on the fire, followed after her.

Tamwyn watched them go. Then, careful not to disturb Batty Lad (who was sound asleep in his tunic pocket), he got up and went to join Nuic. As he sat next to the sprite, he shook his head glumly. “Some quest this is.”

The sprite’s liquid purple eyes studied him for a moment. “I’ve seen worse. Not for several centuries, mind you, but I have.”

The young man sighed. His mind was bursting with questions—about the Lady, the stars, and most of all, the mysterious hoofprints in the mud by the pool. Anxiously, he touched one of them with his toe, as if he could somehow feel the truth of how it had gotten there. But he felt nothing . . . except confusion.

Absently, he picked up a small branch that the dragon’s tail had broken off the beech tree. Taking the dagger from his belt, he started to whittle, slicing long shavings that curled and fell to his feet.

Nuic turned his round face toward him. “So then, to get to the eastern end of Woodroot, where the Lady lives, which portal would you use?”

Tamwyn sliced off a particularly twisted shaving. “Well, to tell the truth, I’m not sure we should use
any
portal.”

Elli, who had come over to join them and was now standing behind Nuic, tossed her curls doubtfully. “Not use one? What are you saying?”

Without looking up from his whittling, he replied, “Portals are unreliable. You said so yourself, days ago. But up here in northern Stoneroot, they’re also scarce. There are only three that I know about—and one is that portal in Dun Tara that’s now buried under rocks. The second is over on the coast, but I’ve been told that its only outlet in Woodroot is in the far northwest, where the elves make magical musical instruments. And if Woodroot’s as big as this realm, that would be several weeks’ walk—or more—from where you want to go.”

“What about the third one?” asked Nuic. “Nobody uses it anymore.”

“Why not?”

Tamwyn dug his blade into the wood to cut through a knot. “Because it’s down inside the lair of those dragons I tracked.”

Nuic swished his feet through the water of the pool. “Hmmmpff. Our friend Llynia would just love that idea.”

“Wait, now.” Elli got down on one knee beside them. “Are you sure there aren’t any more portals up here?”

Tamwyn rammed the dagger down the wood, slicing off a thick piece. “No. I’m not sure.”

“You must not go to other realms very often.”

He stopped whittling and looked straight at her. “I haven’t gone to other realms
at all
. Not since I came here seven years ago.”

“What? And you call yourself a guide?”

“If you must know, I’ve been looking for someone.”

“Right. Someone you were guiding, I’ll bet. And then led off a cliff.”

Tamwyn’s temples pounded, but he forced himself to stay calm. He sliced a few more curls of wood, then glanced at Nuic. “I thought we might try instead . . . the Rugged Path.”

The old sprite’s color turned as gray as many of the stones at the base of the knoll. “The Rugged Path? What do you know about it?”

“Just what I’ve heard from bards, really. It was first discovered back in the Age of Ripening, I think.”

“Hmmmpff. In the Year of Avalon 33, to be exact. Which you humans never seem to be, until it’s too late.” He shifted his weight, sinking his small legs deeper in the pool. “A boy named Fergus, a shepherd, found it. Saw a strange creature one day who led him to the Path. And when he entered, he went from Stoneroot to Woodroot, or the other way around. At least that’s the legend.”

Elli raised an eyebrow. “What kind of creature?”

“A deer.”

Nuic paused, glancing at Tamwyn, who had stiffened at the word. “A doe, pure white from head to hoof. Some bards say it was really Lorilanda, goddess of birth and flowering, on a visit from the spirit world. But if you ask me, it’s all just a load of gossip. And not very reliable gossip, either.”

“Why not?” asked Elli.

“Hmmmpff. For a start, the legend says the Rugged Path runs only one direction—but no one is sure which direction that is. It could go to Woodroot or from Woodroot, but not both. And if that’s not enough uncertainty for you, nobody knows for sure whether the Path even exists! In all my centuries in the mountains, I heard only a few claims of finding it, none of them reliable.”

“Great.” Elli looked at Tamwyn with renewed scorn. “So that’s the best you can do? A path that doesn’t exist?”

He paused in the middle of a slice. “Oh, it exists, all right. I’ve seen it myself.”

Nuic’s color brightened slightly, with ribbons of yellow moving through the gray. “You’re sure?”

Tamwyn drew a long, slow breath. “Well, no, not exactly.”

Elli snorted skeptically.

He continued to the sprite, “But I’m almost sure. It’s a sort of cave, you see. Way up in the high peaks, even higher than Dun Tara. I heard it called Fergus’s Path by an old hedge faery I met up there—you know, the kind that’s all covered with prickly fur.”

“The kind that’s famous for telling tall tales and stealing food from other faeries’ gardens, you mean.” Nuic’s colors had darkened again. “And you believed what he said?”

Though he was starting to feel a bit foolish, Tamwyn nodded. “He said he was going to leave Stoneroot and start a new life.”

Elli scowled. “So you speak to faeries as well as dragons?”

Tamwyn ignored her, which made her even angrier. “Then I watched him fly into the cave—and not come back.”

“Hmmmpff. Probably just running away from whoever was chasing him for thievery.”

“Maybe.” Tamwyn carved an especially curly slice. “Look, I admit that I don’t know much about these things. But I do have a theory about the Rugged Path. And it fits with what I learned from that faery.”

“And your theory is?”

“Well, we know that Avalon is a tree, right? And that each realm is one of its roots. And we also know that Krystallus, after years of portalseeking, concluded that Woodroot is on the side of the Tree nearest to Waterroot and Stoneroot. So . . . what if those three realms are connected up at the top? The way tree roots connect to their trunk! Don’t you see? That means the highest mountains at the very top of Stoneroot might actually be a kind of barrier—a border—between the realms. So if there really is a path up there, you could go from one realm to another.”

“But that still doesn’t explain why the path supposedly runs just one way,” objected Elli. “Or which way that could be.”

“Say,” he replied in a mocking tone, “you’re a genius. You have a better theory?”

“I think you’re a fraud!” she shouted, waving her arms. “I think you’re all those things you said to Llynia, and ten thousand more!”

A bony little wing poked out of Tamwyn’s robe, followed by a pair of glowing green eyes. “Hushy shush!” squeaked Batty Lad. “Me me needsa day nap, you know. Yessa ya ya ya. Gotsa rest to go hunting all nighty.”

Tamwyn tugged one of his round ears. “You’re in luck, then. It’s nighttime now. See? Look up.”

The batlike creature gazed up at the darkened sky, his eyes aglow. “Goody good! Me hungry fora some tasty flies.” He clambered fully out of the pocket, stretched his crumpled wings, and flapped off into the night.

Tamwyn was about to turn back to Elli, a new batch of insults on his tongue, when he caught sight of the Wizard’s Staff. The constellation seemed to sit on the rim of the knoll, just above the dark outline of the cooking pot. It still had five stars, but one of them, at the upper end, flickered weakly. Soon it, too, would go out.

Elli had seen it, as well. She was gazing up at the constellation, her expression now one of worry. “Nuic,” she asked, “what does it mean?”

“Nothing good.” The pinnacle sprite looked down at the small pool of water. “I should have stayed in the mountains.”

So should I
, thought Tamwyn.

Elli nodded grimly. “A week has gone by already and we haven’t accomplished anything.”

“Not true, Elliryanna. You’ve given our new guide here a ripe pair of black eyes.”

“Yes, well, he deserved them.”

Right now she wished she could sit under the beech tree and play her harp, forgetting about everything else, feeling at peace. But now the memory of her harp just made her angry again.

She faced Tamwyn. “Looks like we have no choice now but to follow you into that fool’s cave! There isn’t time to find another way. In case you’re too stupid to figure it out, we have to get to the Lady—and, most likely, beyond—before the last of those stars goes out.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard for a great genius like you,” he said with a smirk.

Elli slapped at the pool, drenching him with water.

Tamwyn grabbed a couple of wood shavings. Quickly, he tied them together, then turned them in his hand. When the little knot caught a glint of starlight, he focused on that speck of light, imagining it was really a spark. Then a burning coal. Then a candle wick on fire. The wood shavings seemed to spurt into flames.

With a flick of his wrist, he tossed the knot of burning shavings at Elli. It landed on her thigh, crackling like a ball of fire.

“What?
Aaaaah!
” She leaped into the air, swatting at the flames.

But there were no flames. The knot of shavings rolled on the ground, completely harmless. Elli glared at Tamwyn, her own eyes about to burst into fire. Shaking with rage, she kicked the knot at him and strode off to the beech tree.

“Well there,” said Nuic gruffly, “aren’t you full of surprises?”

Tamwyn, grinning with satisfaction, watched Elli sit down hard in the roots of the beech. “Just a trick, really. But it does come in handy sometimes.”

“Hmmmpff. Something else you picked up, I suppose. At least call it by its real name.”

“What’s that?”

“How many times do you need to be told? It’s not a trick, but an illusion! You projected the image of fire onto that wood, just like you projected the sound of that dragon into the air.”

“Trick, illusion, whatever.” Tamwyn’s toe nudged the hoofprint in the mud again. “It’s not real, that’s the point. Only people with real magic in their blood can change things for real.”

Nuic studied him closely. “Like the ancient deer people, perhaps?”

Tamwyn’s mouth went dry, for once not because of the drought. He turned to look at the hoofprints for a moment, then asked, “Nuic . . . was Hallia really the last survivor of the deer people?”

“The last in Avalon, yes.”

Somewhere down inside, Tamwyn felt a sudden emptiness. But he tried to keep his face from showing anything.

“Don’t you know your lore, young man?” Nuic went on grumpily. “Any child could tell you the story: How Merlin asked Hallia to come with him when Lost Fincayra became part of the Otherworld. How she couldn’t bear to leave behind her people and her heritage, and so parted from him. And how, in the end, she realized that she loved the young wizard—yes, yes, he really was young once!—too much to live without him.”

A lavender hue crept over the sprite’s round body. “And so, with help from Dagda himself, who became a stag and led her out of the spirit world, she and Merlin were reunited at last. They were married, in the Year of Avalon 27, atop the highest mountain in the Seven Realms. Now, that was an event, I’ll tell you, attended by all sorts of mortal and immortal beings. Even that bumbling giant, Shim, was there— holding a huge hat full of children—and a ballymag whose name, I think, was Mooshlovely.”

Tamwyn nudged the old sprite. “You make it sound like you were actually there.”

“Hmmmpff. Of
course
I was there, you bung-brained dolt! The wedding took place near one of my favorite bathing brooks. I had the best seat of anyone.” His colors shifted to a tranquil shade of blue. “Anyway, Hallia’s love for Merlin was so great that she stayed with him the rest of her days. She even joined him on a few trips to mortal Earth, the greatest sacrifice I could imagine, just so they wouldn’t be apart.”

The sprite made a rough sound in his throat, almost a chortle. “But of course, she had a son, Krystallus. A regular scamp of a boy, full of mischief! I should know, since I encouraged that right from the start.”

“You actually knew him?”

Nuic merely grinned.

“But Krystallus couldn’t change into a deer, could he?”

Nuic shook himself. “No, and he always regretted that. Made up for it by running all over Avalon, mind you! Even founded the College of Mapmakers—mainly, I suspect, to keep track of his travels. But he could never run like his mother, with the speed and grace of a deer.”

Tamwyn cleared his throat. “I’ve heard bards saying that if Krystallus fathered a child, that child could have some of Hallia’s magic. It could skip generations, the way it does with wizards—or did, at least, in the old days when we
had
wizards. But then, I’ve never heard anything about a child of Krystallus.”

Nuic’s liquid purple eyes turned to the star-studded Avalon sky. “When you live as long as I have, you get to see many things. Some of them happen only once, like the birth of our world from a single seed. And some of them happen . . . more than once.”

He faced Tamwyn. “Krystallus
did
have a child.” Seeing Tamwyn listening with rapt attention, he said casually, “It happened far away from here. In Fireroot.”

Tamwyn’s heart leaped.

“When Krystallus traveled there, he was the first person with human blood to face the flamelons since the war of the Age of Storms. Which is to say he was either very brave, or very stupid. And probably, since he was part human, it was the latter. He was captured, and sentenced to be burned to death. But on the eve of his execution, he was rescued.”