The Bloody Cup by M. K. Hume Read Free Book Online

the shadows and the chaos between the worlds, and she had wept in her loneliness and her loss.
    ‘It’s only me, Nimue. I’m your old husband. Don’t you know me?’
    And then she knew that the dream still consumed her, for this creature was not Myrddion in withered age but in all the power of mature youth. How beautiful he was, and how his hair caught at hers in a net of darkness. She would have pulled away, but his eyes were the same as when she had first met him, lustrous, amused and full of pain.
    ‘But you’re dead, Myrddion! You must leave me to my sorrows, for your cooled ashes already lie in the burial urn. I would rather be crazed or lifeless than trapped in a hopeless search for you.’
    He had kissed her thread-scarred fingers.
    ‘You will live on, my beloved. You will live long, and when you call, I will come and we will talk and laugh as we did when I breathed in the fashion of men. You can send for me in your thoughts, and I will be here.’
    So Nimue had been forced to acknowledge what Odin, the least learned of her old friends, had always instinctively known, although they had never spoken of it: the soul goes on, and some fortunate few can send their spirits out upon the wind and find the souls of those who call to them, beyond grief, beyond sorrow and beyond the small indignities of death.
    ‘Mother?’ a voice called from the kitchen.
    Her reflection was broken.
    As she entered the room, a servant girl from the hill people was in the act of clouting Nimue’s youngest son with a crude ladle. He had stolen bread and was dipping the crusts into the mutton stew. Her eldest son, Taliesin, was attempting to wrestle the dripping morsel from his brother’s hand.
    Nimue simply raised her index finger. ‘Enough!’ The word fell like a single pebble into a still pond.
    ‘Forgive me, Mother,’ Taliesin apologized and dropped his brother’s arm. ‘I should know better than to disturb your peace.’
    ‘You owe me no apologies, but Gerda shouldn’t be made to look foolish by the behaviour of any of my sons.’
    Like all of her kin who eked out a precarious living in the mountains, Gerda was short and very dark. Both of Nimue’s sons towered over the irritated woman whose ancestry must have gone back to the little painted people who had lived peacefully in the isles for thousands of years. Nimue felt a flash of shame for her thoughtless children and pressed Gerda’s hand lightly in apology.
    Taliesin promised to present his second greatest song to Gerda if the servant would deign to forgive him. His eyes were so distressed that the maidservant put away her indignation.
    ‘Have done with your glooming, boy. I knew you and your brother when you were both still soiling your loincloths, so neither of you had better touch Gerda’s stew until I decide to give it to you.’ The kitchen maid, who was little older than a girl herself, brought the wooden ladle down sharply, but without hurt, across the crowns of two repentant heads.
    Nimue’s sons were the wonders of the hill country. The boys were alien creatures to the simple folk because they were so unlike each other that, had the people not known of the lovers’ devotion towards each other, they would have sworn cuckoos had been placed in the Stone House nest.
    Taliesin was a reincarnation of his father, a symphony of black and white, but with eyes that were almost too blue to be human. He had fashioned a harp during his youth and had found the gift of music in his fingers as he learned to play the instrument. The grandams in the village spied the mark of white hair at his temples and nodded in archaic understanding of his qualities.
    Glynn ap Myrddion was Nimue’s middle son. He was barely seventeen years of age, and was as fair as Taliesin was dark, but his eyes were wholly inherited from his father. Glynn’s black eyes were made doubly powerful by the fairness of his eyebrows and the golden hue of his skin. Taliesin’s passion for music, poetry and