Frost made a motion that caught my eye. “Meredith, are you well?” His hand hovered just over my shoulder, as if he wanted to touch me but was afraid to.
I dragged my gaze from Hawthorne, and I was suddenly dizzy. “Is it the chalice?”
“Hawthorne,” Frost said, and the one word was enough.
“I did not try to bespell her, I merely thought about how much I desire to have what Mistral had in the hallway. Not just the taste I had.”
“I cannot blame you,” Frost said, with a sigh. “But the fact that your desire turned into magic so easily means you gained more from the hallway than just a taste of pleasure.”
“As much as I desire an end to my celibacy,” Aisling said, “the chalice sits before us. How can you talk of anything else?”
“Your needs must be paler things than mine,” Hawthorne said.
Amatheon finally spoke as if to himself. “The chalice returned to Meredith’s hand. How can this be?”
I looked up at him, watched the struggle in his flower-petal eyes. “You mean that the chalice would never return to the hand of some mongrel half-breed like me.”
He swallowed so hard it looked as if he were choking on years of prejudice. “Yes,” he said in a voice that was a harsh whisper. He fell to his knees as if some great force had knocked him down, or he had lost the strength in his legs.
He gazed up at me, and the many colors of his eyes glittered in the light, not with magic, but with tears. “Forgive me,” he said in that same harsh whisper, as if the words were being torn from his throat, “forgive me.” I didn’t think it was me he was begging forgiveness of.
The chalice moved toward him, my hands held it, but it was not my will that moved it.
He buried his face in his hands. “I cannot.” His broad shoulders began to shake, and I knew he was crying. I let go of the chalice with one hand, so I could touch his shoulder. He sobbed, and threw his arms around my waist, clutching me so hard and sudden that I half collapsed against him. The chalice touched the back of his hair, and that was all it took.
I stood in the middle of a huge, barren plain. Amatheon was still pressed to my waist, his head buried against my body. I wasn’t certain that he knew anything had changed.
I smelled apple blossoms again, and I turned toward the scent. The hill that I had seen over and over again in vision stood in the distance. I could see the tree on top of it. The tree that Mistral and I had stood beside while lightning struck the ground. I had seen the plain, but never stood upon it.
Amatheon raised his head from my body so that he could look up at me. The movement of his head brushed the lip of the cup along his bound hair. When he felt the hard metal of it, he pressed himself against it, the way you would lean into the caress of a hand. Only then did he seem to see the plain.
He was very careful not to move from between my body and the touch of the chalice, but he reached down with one hand to touch the earth. His hand came up with grey dirt so dry that it trickled from between his fingers like sand.
He looked up at me again, eyes glittering with the tears he either refused to shed, or could not shed. “It was not like this once.” He pressed his head back against the metal of the chalice, as if seeking solace from the touch. “Nothing will grow in this.” He opened his hand wide and let the wind take the dirt. “There is no life here.”
He raised the hand that was coated in the dry, dead earth up to me like a child that has a boo-boo, as if I could fix it.
I opened my lips to say something soothing, but what came out wasn’t my voice and wasn’t soothing at all. “Amatheon, you kept your name, though you have forgotten who you are, what you are,” the voice said, deeper than my normal voice, rounder vowels.
“The land has died,” he said, and the tears finally flowed.
“Do I look dead?”
He frowned, then shook his head. Again the chalice rubbed against his hair, but this time I felt the silken caress of his hair across my skin, down my body. It made me shiver.
“Goddess?”
I touched his cheek. “Has it been so long, Amatheon, that you do not know me?”
He nodded, and the first tear fell from the edge of his jaw. That single drop of moisture fell onto the grey earth, leaving a tiny black print. But it was as if the earth underneath us sighed.
“We need you, Amatheon,” and I agreed with the Goddess. The land needed him, I needed him, we needed him.
“I am yours,” he whispered. He drew the sword at his belt, and held it up in his hands like an offering. Then he put his head back, so that his throat stretched tight. His eyes were closed, as if for a kiss, but it wasn’t a kiss he was waiting for. I understood then that if one tear felt so good to the land, then other body fluids would feel even better.
I understood then what he was offering, and with the Goddess riding me, I knew that his blood would return life to the land. He was Amatheon, a god of agriculture, but he was more than that. He was the spark, the quickening, that let the seed grow in the earth. He was that magic bridge between dormant seed, dark earth, and life. His “death” would bring that back to the land.
I shook my head. “I just saved his life, I will not take it now.”
Her voice came from my lips again. “He will not die as men die, but as the corn dies. To rise again, and feed his people.”
“I do not doubt that,” I said, “and if that is your will, so be it, but not by my hand. I work too hard to keep my people alive to start slaughtering them.”
“But this is not real death. This is vision and dream. It is not real flesh and blood that Amatheon offers you.”
Amatheon had opened his eyes and lowered his head and his sword. “The Goddess is right, Princess. This is not a real place, nor are we truly here. My death here would not be true death.”
“You have not seen the visions that I have seen, Amatheon. I dreamt of the chalice and woke with it solid and very real in my bed. I would not slay you here, and find your bleeding corpse in the hallway.”
“Will you leave the land barren?” the voice said, out of my mouth. Having both sides of the conversation coming out of my mouth was a little too psychotic for comfort. And this energy, this Goddess, felt heavier, not just a comforting presence.
“Why are you not happy with me?”
“I am very happy with you, Meredith, happier than I have been with anyone in a very long time.”
“I hear your words, but I feel your… impatience. You are impatient with me, and not about this.”
She thought her response, but I was mortal, and female, and I had to say it out loud. “You think I waste your gifts by trying to solve the murders.”
“You have your human police. Even now Cromm Cruach has them using their science for you.”
It took me a second to realize she was referring to Rhys, his original name.
“Not his real name,” she said with my mouth, “but the last true name he owned.”
“Rhys had a name older even than Cromm Cruach?”
“Once, though few remember.”
I started to ask the name, but I could feel her smile, and she said, “You are distracted by trivialities, Meredith.”
“Forgive me,” I said.
“I do not mean Cromm Cruach’s true name, I mean these deaths. They will be reborn, Child. Why do you mourn them so? Even true death is not an ending. Others can find your murderers and clues, but there are duties that only you can perform, Meredith, only you..”
“And what exactly would those duties be?”