Page 38 of The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire

creiriau

(RELICS)

The lights flicker back on, revealing black veins that pulse along every wall, every turn.

My leg is throbbing and bleeding with each step I take. I have to stop.

Wincing, I ease myself onto a forgotten crate and slowly lift my skirt to reveal stockings stained red.

Biting down hard on my lip, I wiggle off my boots and then the long socks, my leg burning at even the lightest brush of fabric.

Luckily, the dagger wound is not too deep, but to my horror I notice that the skin around it is tinged gray.

I’m running out of time. How long did it take for the soldier to succumb to Y Lle Tywyll?

How long will it take me? Maybe Ceridwen is already lost. I let out a strangled sob; I can’t let my mind go there.

I tie one stocking as tight as I can over the gash in my leg.

That’ll have to do to stem the bleeding.

I need to keep moving; I need to get to Ceridwen.

Bracing myself, I yank my boots back on and push myself up.

There’s a ventilation door up ahead, just big enough for me to pass through doubled over.

There are hoof marks on the ground, left by the ponies that drag the heaviest drams. Ponies are brought into the tunnels at four years old, and the next time the sun touches their bodies, they aren’t there to feel it.

I hope I won’t find any of them down here.

Relief washes over me as I pass the stables—empty—to find a ladder on the wall, leading down.

If I’m looking for the very core of the mine, down is the only way to go.

I ease myself onto the top rungs, wave the light and look down into thick darkness. A colorful metal sign hangs half off the wall, warning the reader to stay away.

I clamber down until I’m level with the next shaft and pause to shine my light into its mouth.

“Elin?” Ceridwen’s false name bounces off the walls.

Elin? Elin? Elin?

No reply. But no creatures rushing to eat me, either.

Down and down the ladder goes, level upon level, until finally I reach the last tunnel.

I hop off, my legs protesting when they hit the ground. I wince and brace against the wall, trying to take the weight off the worst of the damage.

“Elin?” I call.

I hope that’s not her real name.

I whip around to find the canary perched on the ladder.

“I thought you were dead,” I tell him.

The bird rustles long-lost feathers. What are you waiting for? What you’re looking for is just ahead.

My heart shakes, a caterpillar preparing to leave the cocoon. “My sister?”

The canary jerks his head to the left. Not sure. But it’s something that isn’t supposed to be here. Somewhere that I can’t go.

“Well, that’s needlessly cryptic—”

He takes flight, but I stand still for a long time. My legs are leaden. My head even heavier.

I wonder how Dad did this every day.

No matter the aches and pains, or the waste he felt his life had become, he rose before the sun each morning and did it all again.

I’ve grown used to ease. To Neirin summoning carriages, to doors that open by themselves, food that’s handed to me. I love the teg’s tricks and flights of fancy. I love their soft mattresses and sparkling gowns.

But none of it is mine.

I’m a child of man, born in the mechanized age of a dying country that has as little to offer me as I have to give. I’m my father’s daughter, and he gave me a piece of his strength one day when I was born. It doesn’t rust, doesn’t jam, doesn’t fade. It simply is, and always will be.

My tired limbs scream in protest as I follow the canary’s call.

It starts small at first.

The glow of my lantern lands upon a pair of shoes, set tidily against the wall. Sunday shoes, as if they’ve been taken off and left by the front door. Then another pair, for a little boy. There’s a rug a few feet away, covering the tracks, and a doll atop it, discarded face down.

I set her upright. I don’t know why. She could have been mine. Someone loved her very much once—was it you?

More dolls follow, toy soldiers, too—too many for me to look after them all.

There are birthday cards sticking out of cracks in the stones, baubles dangling from overhangs, and shelves of coal bearing small family portraits, sketches of flowers and birds, scrap albums so overflowing with memory that the pages can’t keep themselves together.

Beside the tracks, there’s a table set for Christmas. A candle shudders in the center, casting shadows of people who’ve long left the feast on the wall.

And then there are the wedding rings. They litter the floor, clinking beneath my feet.

Jutting out from a cave wall is a church window. I almost miss it, so plain it is without sunlight, until my lantern hits the colored panes and casts Saint Christopher on the ceiling.

Finally, I reach a mass of unpenetrated coal. The canary waits just before it, perched atop a grand white dollhouse. My brow knits and I drop to my knees before it, but the front door won’t open. Not for me.

Bit old for dolls, aren’t you?

“Not really,” I huff.

It looks just like the big house, and suddenly I understand.

It’s the mine owners who cut into the land with iron, who upset the balance between worlds, most of them rich Englishmen who take from us, and pay us pennies for the privilege of helping them.

The wealthy, titled and royal have cut a bloody path across the world, starting and honing their skill closer to home, against their Celtic neighbors.

But by the time the English got to the rest of the world, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish—we’d long been helping them, hadn’t we?

At home, English politicians call us stupid, ungovernable, their teachers hand out a Welsh Not, and beat our language from us at their command.

The clever among us leave for English universities, make their fortune in London and never come home.

We fight under their colors and bring their flag to lands far from our own. Sometimes, we even thank them for it.

We’re all being used by a big house somewhere.

Llanadwen is a drop in an ocean of misery, but that doesn’t make it any smaller.

I launch my boot through the front wall of the dollhouse again and again, and when it caves in on itself, I jump on the roof.

The canary flaps in front of my face. Satisfied?

“As much as I can be,” I reply. “Until I can torch the real one.” I look at the skeletal canary. “You aren’t coming with me, are you?”

I can’t.

“Is it really that bad?” I ask very quietly.

Not bad and not good. It is what it is.

A gap darker than the coal splits the wall just level with my head, a strange purple glow emanating from within. I’ll have to crawl on my hands and knees.

“Will you just lurk around the mines forever?” I ask the canary.

I’m already dead, kid, where else can I go?

I nod tersely and push my lantern into the tunnel.

“Good luck, then,” I say, and I clamber inside.

The canary chirps, and it’s almost like a laugh. I ran out of luck long ago. Then he’s gone.

I crawl forward, laboriously shoving the lantern ahead.

The roof scrapes against my back and the sensation of being touched at every angle makes me twitch.

It becomes even tighter. There’s blood on my palms. My knees and shins are the same.

I fight to keep my breathing steady. I crawl like an insect, flat to the rock.

My fingers dig into the coal and tear as I yank myself along, scuffing my boots for purchase.

Eventually, I can’t even lift my head.

But the light is there, and if it keeps on shining, then I’m not crawling toward a suffocating dead end. I will, however, become stuck if it gets any tighter. Frantic panic shoots through my body, and my struggling becomes even more desperate.

I shove the lantern one last time. It falls from a ledge and shatters, and I scramble out after it.

I take a gasping breath, free from the constricting rock. I sit in the broken glass, rubbing my bruised head.

A large cavern surrounds me, as tall as a church and domed twice as severely. The coal walls shine with moisture, water drips from the chamber ceiling like a small rainstorm, and, in the very center, as if it has been dropped there by a giant’s hand, sits my house.