"Collun?"
Yes, it must be Nessa's ghost. Her voice was as hollow and thin as her white face.
Brie suddenly loomed up beside Nessa's ghost face.
"Collun? Can you hear me?"
He wanted to brush the sweat from his eyes. Maybe if he could see more clearly ... But when he tried to move his arm, his vision went black, and he gasped for breath. He must have screamed again, for there was a high-pitched noise echoing in his ears. He thought to himself it wasn't fair that he still had to feel pain even after he was dead.
"He needs water."
"There is a spring. Freshwater."
Collun could hear the voices, but they sounded miles away. He could not see anything.
"Can you help me carry him?"
"I'll try."
There were hands at his armpits and feet, gentle and careful, but the fire on his skin was unbearable. He wanted to tell them to stop. He could not move his mouth.
When he woke again he was lying in something cool Water, he thought. The burning was less with the cool water against his skin. For the first time it occurred to him that he might not be dead after all. A light flickered somewhere near. He tried to fix his wavering vision.
"Brie?" he croaked.
Her face appeared.
"Oh, Collun!" The ghost face of his sister came up beside Brie. Its eyes were brimming with tears.
It was Nessa. She was not a ghost after all. Nessa was alive. His heart beat faster with joy.
"Collun." It was Brie again. "Naid is dead. You killed it. You have been sorely injured, but you are alive. And Nessa is here, safe."
"Where...?"
"We are in the cave. Where Nessa has been kept prisoner. There is a spring here. The water is helping you. But Collun"—her voice was urgent—"did you not tell me of a remedy for burns, an herb from the hag's garden? Please, try to think."
Collun tried to focus on Brie's words. His wallet of herbs. It had been almost empty, but he had filled it again at Mordu's garden. There was an herb he had found there.... Then he remembered the crone who sold him a cure for burns and insect bites. Was a Wurme an insect? he wondered, his thoughts becoming loose and unconnected. He willed himself to concentrate.
He had plucked the herb from Mordu's garden. Mallow. That was it. And Mordu had told him the recipe. But it would probably not work.
"Collun? Tell us."
"Mallow," he rasped out painfully. "Leaves are round with points, bright red flowers, dried. Boil them ... with leek juice ... gentian ... goat's thorn leaves. Two parts mallow ... one of the others ... Make a paste. Mordu said..." He trailed off.
Brie disappeared.
Nessa stayed beside him. He looked up at his sister's face in wonder. Her skin was pale as curds, and the bones of her face stuck out sharply. There were purple-black shadows under her eyes, and her lips looked bloodless and thin.
"Nessa," he whispered.
"Collun." He could barely hear her voice.
"You are alive."
She nodded and covered his left hand with hers. Then he slept.
When he woke he was no longer in the water. Nessa and Brie were gently trying to peel away the layers of his clothing. In some places flesh and cloth stuck together, and during the agony of undressing, Collun lost consciousness several more times. Finally he lay shivering, both hot and cold, in a thin layer of sweat-soaked underclothing. He saw his sister holding something in her hands. He didn't recognize it at first, but then realized the sodden lump was the book she'd given him.
"Your ... book," he quavered.
"I'll make you another," she whispered.
The mallow paste was ready, and Brie slowly began to rub it into a patch of fire that burned at Collun's wrist. He let out a high-pitched animal sound. From then on, they told him later, he was delirious. Nessa said it was Brie, her face pale and set, who rubbed the mallow salve into Collun's raw, mangled flesh, reapplying it several times.
When he finally came out of the delirium, Brie bathed Collun's flaming face in freshwater. She told him she thought the salve was already beginning to heal the oozing weals on his body.
They got him to drink an herbal broth that Brie had improvised, sweetened with bits of Mealladh's apple. Collun felt weak and wrung out, but his heartbeat was steady and the gray streaks only occasionally darkened his vision.
His jaw throbbed. It hurt to move it. In the wavering light of a candle nearby, Collun could see his arm. It had been burned in a spiral pattern where the Wurme's tongue had wrapped around it. Undamaged skin alternated with festering ribbons of red. His shoulder was a mass of blistered flesh, and his hand was swollen and seeped with red-and-yellow pus. He remembered what the Wurme's tongue had done to the thick branch on the shore and wondered why he had any arm left at all. Perhaps, he thought, the Cailceadon Lir had protected him.
The soles of his feet had been badly burned. He wondered how he was going to walk again. And yet he was alive, and the mallow salve was healing his body more quickly than he would have thought possible.
As Brie sat by him, bathing his face, Collun noticed that her hands were covered with blisters. She told him she had gotten them while pulling him away from the dead Firewurme and onto the Ellyl horse.
"Fiain," Collun said, suddenly afraid. "Where is he?"
"He is fine," answered Brie. "The cave is too cramped for him, I think. He prefers to wait outside. He gallops around the causeway at low tide."
Nessa joined them then with a new batch of herbal broth. Collun looked again at his sister's emaciated face, and his heart twisted in his chest.
"What did they do to you, Nessa?" Collun asked.
Nessa looked at her brother. For a moment her eyes were unfocused and strange, as if she did not know where she was or even who she was. Collun anxiously reached over and touched her hand. "Nessa?"
The girl's eyes suddenly refocused, and they filled with tears.
"Crann said you must have held out for a long time, because Urlacan set out late to find me," Collun said painfully.
Nessa nodded, covering her eyes with her hands. "For as long as I could. But in the end..." She dropped her hands, her mouth twisted in anguish.
Collun held her hand tightly. "It was Bricriu, wasn't it?"
"Yes. The night before my coming-of-age ceremony, there was a feast at his dun. Halfway through the evening, Lord Bricriu asked to speak to me privately in his library. I entered the room, and then everything went blank. I woke in the darkness in a dungeon below Bricriu's dun."
"The labyrinth," said Collun.
"Was it? I knew it only as darkness. Each day Lord Bricriu came, carrying a candle. He said I would be given nothing to eat or drink until I told him where the chalcedony was. I told him I didn't know what he was talking about, but he only laughed. Days went by, and I grew weaker and weaker. Every day Bricriu came. 'Where is the chalcedony?' he'd shout. 'Where is it?' Soon I became too weak to answer.
"I think he believed, finally, that I knew nothing of the stone. The next time he came he brought a piece of bread, some cheese, and a flagon of cold water. He said I could have them if I would tell him about my brother and my mother. I sensed that to speak might bring harm to you and Mother, though I did not know why. So I kept silent. Bricriu was very angry. After that he used needlelike pieces of metal, which he heated in a torch's flame." Nessa shuddered and bowed her head. After a while she spoke. "I don't remember much beyond that. Except that somehow I did not tell him what he wanted to know.
"There was a journey on horseback then. I was given a little to eat and drink, but it made me sick. Finally we came to a rocky land with air that hurt to breathe. By then I was able to eat again. It was night and we were camped by a large river. There were many Scathians around the fire, as well as a number of hooded creatures with yellow eyes that frightened me."