Three Wells of the Sea- The Complete Trilogy by Terry Madden

Author:Terry Madden [Madden, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989414163
Publisher: Digital Fantasy Fiction, an imprint of Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.
Published: 2019-06-28T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

A distant sun hung in a brackish, fluid sky. Connor’s heart didn’t pump anything, and his lungs were full of stone. The only sensation he felt was the flutter of wings against the cavern of his mouth. But his eyes saw. Brown flotsam drifted by and a frog shot across his stationary view, its ripples breaking the murky water that surrounded what could only be his white, outstretched arm of stone.

An eternity passed. He could still taste the woman’s lips on his.

The brown sun traveled across the brown sky and was gone.

In the darkness, he should have been afraid. But stones don’t fear. Surely he didn’t lie at the bottom of the brook below Merryn’s farm, for the water there was clear and flowed happily.

The sun rose on the opposite side of his view, and the blackness became brown again. The water sat stagnant, dimpled now and then by a water bug, or a snake, no, many snakes. They streamed over his head like kites.

When two dark figures appeared, casting shadows over the dirty water, Connor knew he should feel fear. But he felt nothing, just as he had when Ned took him across and left him to wash up on the shore of that other world, lifeless as driftwood.

One of the figures bent low over the edge of the pool and then stepped in. Through the murk, a woman swam toward him. Connor was sure she was looking for him, but wasn’t sure he wanted to be found.

Detritus kicked up by her movement swirled into a cloud, and though he couldn’t see her, he felt her touch. On his hand, first. Her touch burned like fire and Connor wished she would stop because he was trying to breathe now. He sucked in water. The woman tried to swim away, but he grabbed her foot and held her, unable to move anything but his arm. He fell back rigidly to the muck, his insides thawing and drowning all at once. His mouth opened. The moth beat free of his lips and spiraled up toward the sky.

**

“Lyleth,” he croaked, and vomited water into the mud.

He would laugh if he could. The woman who had pulled Connor out of the water was Lyleth? Or maybe it was just someone who looked like her.

She rolled him to his side, and Connor’s eyes saw everything at once, every paisley, interlocking bit of this world. He certainly knew where he was, even if he didn’t know how he got here. It was Dish’s Five Quarters. And yet, this place was different. He looked off at the horizon where the sun was rising over a vast bog that swarmed with insects. A circle of standing stones ringed the shore like a clock face with one dark stone rising from the pool where she’d found him.

And a pony nuzzled his wet hair.

He croaked again, “Where am I?”

Everything was alive here. Stones, clouds, wind. It all fit together into a seamless entity. The sky, the mud, even

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