“If you don’t bring me Brecia, I will kill you in a manner you won’t like. Then I will toss your tattered old bones to my wolfhounds.”
The prince, who was busy chewing on some singularly sweet bread, raised his head and said, “Dogs wouldn’t touch her bones. Her bones would stick in their throats and kill them dead. Throw them mine.”
Mawdoor looked from one to the other, then rose, and shouted, “Maida! Bring me yourself. I have plans for us.”
The young woman walked to him, her lovely hair floating over her shoulders and down her back, a wolfhound on either side of her. “My lord?”
“We will go hunting,” Mawdoor said.
“Where will we go, my lord?”
“To Spain, I think,” Mawdoor said, and in the next instant both of them were gone.
“Why would he want to go to Spain to hunt?” The prince said aloud, then swallowed more sweet bread. “There is nothing to hunt in Spain.”
Brecia could only laugh at him.
They didn’t have long to find the cask again. Neither of them doubted that it would be as easy to find this time.
“Mawdoor is gone,” the prince said. “He isn’t here to sense our magic.”
“I don’t know,” Brecia said slowly. “I just don’t know. As you said, why would he go hunting in Spain? And take a mortal with him? This doesn’t make much sense.”
“If it is a trap, we will have to deal with it. We have no choice but to find that damned cask, Brecia. We have no choice but to get rid of Mawdoor. Damned witch, if only he didn’t want you so badly.”
“I am not a damned witch.”
“Aye, you are. A trap, you think? You are probably right, but no matter. We will do what we must.”
Brecia said, “Do you think he carries the cask with him now?”
“I think he’s afraid of it,” the prince said. “Probably too afraid to keep it very close to him.”
All day they searched Mawdoor’s fortress. They even sent their sight into the cow byre and the chickens’ pen, even sifted their hands through the miller’s flour. Nothing.
When the fortress bells rang six o’clock, Brecia called to him, “I have found it.”
The prince, who’d been searching each crevice in the wooden ramparts, was beside her in an instant.
“Look,” Brecia said and pointed downward.
The prince came next to her and saw the cask at the bottom of the fortress well. Only a wizard or a witch would have seen it beneath a good twenty feet of water.
“An excellent hiding place,” Brecia said. “I dropped my cup in there and that’s when I saw it. I never sensed it. Mawdoor has protected it very well this time.”
The prince called up the cask.
The cask didn’t move. He sighed and disappeared, only to reappear at the bottom of the well, the cask in his hands. In the well water the cask wasn’t cold to the touch.
He waved up at her.
Suddenly, without warning, Mawdoor’s laughter filled the courtyard. Brecia had no time to do anything before she was thrown headfirst into the well.
Present
The brilliance of the light that burst out of the cask blinded them. They staggered back, covering their eyes. Then, slowly, still keeping their eyes shaded, Bishop and Merryn stared down into that impenetrable light.
“What is it?”