Queen of Song and Souls

by C. L. Wilson

  Ellysetta cast a troubled gaze over her shoulder. Rain stood a short distance away, shoulders hunched, pinching the bridge of his nose as he expended visible effort to calm himself. She’d frightened him badly, and his control hung in tatters. Untruemated Fey warriors absorbed the torment of every life they took—the pain, the darkness, the sorrow of lost dreams hanging like burning stones around their necks—and Rain bore the weight of millions on his soul. Mental and emotional discipline was the only thing standing between him and insanity, and her nearly fatal trip into the Well had stripped those protections threadbare. Shame washed over her.

  The tairen bent her head and nudged Ellysetta. «Go to your mate, kitling. He needs you. Now more than ever.»

  Ellysetta crossed the short distance to Rain’s side. Moss grew green and thick along the edges of the plaza’s mist-dampened bricks. Winter would be upon them soon, and the spray off the Veil would turn to flurries of ice crystals. The nights would grow longer, the Eld Mages more powerful. Despite the brave efforts of Lord Teleos’s soldiers, Celieria stood no chance of surviving the winter as a free land without the help of the Fey. The might of the tairen was the only power Mages truly feared.

  Until Ellysetta found her wings, Rain was the only living Tairen Soul capable of Changing to his tairen form and leading the pride into battle. As such, he would have to fight—again and again and again—and the torment of his soul would grow more unbearable with each engagement. Ellysetta hadn’t been thinking about that when she’d made her decision to save Aartys. She hadn’t been thinking about Rain at all.

  “I’m sorry, shei’tan,” she apologized sincerely. “I should have been more careful—for your sake if not my own.”

  “That’s what you always say,” he replied in a low voice, “but it never stops you from doing what you know you should not.”

  She rubbed her forehead, where a headache had begun to throb. “I never meant to go so deep into the Well, but he was a child, Rain. Not much older than Lillis and Lorelle. I couldn’t let him die. Can’t you understand that?”

  He sighed. “I do understand, shei’tani. Better than you think.” He turned to face her. “But saving that boy or even a thousand more like him won’t bring Lillis and Lorelle back.” He took her shoulders in a firm grip. “You’ve got to stop risking yourself this way, Ellysetta. You’re no good to your sisters, or your father, or anyone else for that matter, if you’re dead or lose your soul to the Mages.”

  “I know that. I do. It’s just that—” Her voice broke off. She could feel his fear, his love, his guilt for bringing her into the dangers of a Tairen Soul’s life, his terror that he might not be strong enough to hold himself in check the next time she came so close to death.

  “Oh, Rain.” She leaned against him, resting her forehead against the unforgiving golden steel of his tairen-forged war armor and laying the palm of one hand against the smooth warmth of his jaw. Though they could not read each other’s thoughts until their bond was complete, they could, when they touched skin-to-skin, feel each other’s emotions as clear as day.

  Because he was the strongest of the Fey, the most powerful Tairen Soul in living memory, it was so easy to forget how fragile he truly was, how narrow the band that kept him from plunging into madness.

  «Sieks’ta, shei’tan.» I’m sorry, beloved. She wove the apology into his mind on a thread of Spirit, not reading his thoughts, but offering him one of hers. With her hand against his face, her skin touching his, she knew he could sense her sincerity and the great love she bore him just as she sensed his agitation drain away, replaced by regret and weariness.

  He turned his lips into her palm and pressed a kiss there. “As am I,” he said. “I know my fear for you is a burden, and it shames me that you must bear it. You are a Tairen Soul, which means you are fierce, born to fight and to defend those in your care; but you are also my shei’tani. I thought I would be strong enough to let you embrace the warrior’s side of your nature. I know now I’m not. I cannot allow you to be harmed—not even by your own actions.”

  Ellysetta forced a small smile. “Perhaps when our bond is complete, things will be different.”

  “Perhaps,” he agreed without conviction.

  Steli’s wings flapped. The white tairen nudged them with her nose. «Time to fly, Rainier-Eras. The day grows late.»

  “Aiyah.”

  “Where are we going?” Ellysetta asked.

  “Crystal Lake,” he admitted.

  “The Source in the mountains? But that’s bells away—” She broke off and her brows drew together in concern. Every great city in the Fading Lands had a Source at its center, and the Fey drank the water of those Sources to bolster their strength and replenish flagging magical energies. The only Source that existed outside the Fading Lands was Crystal Lake, and its magic-infused waters fed one of the tributaries that flowed into Kiyera’s Veil and the Heras River.

  If the diluted Source waters of the Veil were no longer powerful enough to replenish Rain’s magic or rejuvenate his strength…

  “It’s more precaution than need,” Rain reassured her, reading her expression. Fey didn’t lie, which meant he was telling the truth—or at least a version of it. “Besides, how long has it been since we’ve managed to do more than snatch a few bells’ sleep together? I thought you might like some time away from the battlefield and the healing tents.”

  “I would.” The other shei’dalins slipped back through the Mists every few days to restore themselves in the peace of the Fading Lands. Banished and Mage Marked as she was, Ellysetta didn’t have that luxury. “I suppose we could both use a visit to the Source,” she said, stepping back to give Rain room for the Change.

  He waited for her to get clear before closing his eyes and summoning his magic. Flows of power gathered and swirled around him, darkening to a gray mist that sparkled with rainbow lights. The crackling energy of his magic poured over Ellysetta in hot, electric waves. She gasped and closed her eyes on a shudder of shared plea sure as Rain’s Fey body was unmade—his flesh and consciousness flung out into the mist of the Change—then reformed in a staggering rush into the great, sleek body of his tairen self.

  When the magic of the Change cleared, Rain Tairen Soul crouched where Rain the Fey had stood: a magnificent, kingly creature, like one of the sleek black jungle cats Ellysetta had seen in illustrated books of faraway lands, except that his tairen body stood easily half as high as a fully grown fireoak, and great, batlike wings sprouted from his back. Even by tairen standards, Rain was an impressive male, with fur a glossy, unrelieved midnight black, a vast wingspan, and radiant, pupil-less eyes that glowed like lavender suns.

  He lowered his head to pin Ellysetta with that bright, whirling gaze and rumbled a throaty purr. Her body clenched like a fist, every nerve abruptly sizzling with a rush of pure, primitive heat. She might not yet have found her wings, but the tairen in her soul recognized its mate—and yearned for him with staggering force.

  She wet her lips and tried to compose herself while Rain purred deep in his throat and nosed her with unmistakable interest. “Stop that.” She laughed, giving him a shove. She summoned an Earth weave that transformed her gown into steel-studded scarlet leathers, with Fey’cha belts crossed over her chest and her quintet’s daggers sheathed in the belt slung around her hips. A subsequent weave summoned a burst of powerful silvery Air magic that lifted her body up and deposited her into the cradle of the leather saddle that Rain wove for her on his back. She anchored herself in place with the saddle’s leather straps. “I’m ready.”

  «Then spin the weave, shei’tani. Around Steli as well as us.»

  Ellysetta nodded and reached once more into the well of power that lay within her. Lavender Spirit, the mystic magic of consciousness, thought, and illusion, surged up in a rush and she wove the dense threads of energy in a pattern Gaelen vel Serranis had taught the Fey only a few months ago. She flung the weave out like a net, first around Steli—who promptly winked out of sight—then aro
und herself and Rain, rendering them invisible to both mortal and magic eyes.

  The other tairen had left the waters of Veil Lake and padded over to the plaza. They leapt into the air seconds before Rain crouched down on his haunches and sprang skyward, and their presence provided cover for the rush of wind that might have betrayed Rain and Steli’s otherwise invisible launch.

  Ringed by the pride and sheathed by invisibility, Rain, Ellysetta, and Steli soared high over the Rhakis mountaintops into the thin, crisp chill of the autumn sky. A dusting of snow capped the high, jagged peaks to the north. Below, just across the Heras River, the southwest corner of Eld still smoldered from the fiery aftermath of the recent battle. What had two weeks ago been a fortified village was now a scorched plain, razed to the ground, every living and dead thing in a twenty-mile radius reduced to ash. Yet still, the Eld came to battle the legions of Orest with relentless determination, wearing them down bit by bit, then retreating back into the dense forests of Eld, where, thanks to the batteries of bowcannon trained on the skies, not even the tairen could follow.

  To the west, the billowing wall of mist that marked the borders of the Fading Lands rose up from the mountaintops. Rain flew close enough that Ellysetta could feel the tingle of magic from the Mists, and her fingers tightened on the pommel.

  From the valley floor, the Mists looked like a line of thunder-clouds hugging the crests of the Rhakis mountains. From the sky, however, they looked more beautiful than foreboding, like a radiant veil of shifting rainbows that stretched upward as far as the eye could see.

  Ominous thunderheads or shimmering veil, Ellysetta recognized the Faering Mists for what they truly were: a deadly magical barrier meant to keep the enemies of the Fey from entering the Fading Lands.

  Fey-made, the Mists would never intentionally harm an innocent, and so Celierian lore was filled with tales of those who had wandered by accident into the Mists, only to emerge again, de cades later, unharmed, not aged a day, carrying tales of being feted by the Fair Folk in misty forest palaces. To the not-so-innocent, the Mists were far less kind. Entire armies had been swallowed up, never to be seen again.

  Ellysetta’s body tensed with remembered pain. She knew, firsthand, the torments that lay within those shifting clouds. Thanks to the four Mage Marks she bore, the Mists were now more dangerous to her than the Well of Souls, and the last time she’d entered, she’d very nearly not made it back out again alive.

  If it were otherwise, she would not be here in Orest, weaving her magic to save lives. She would be in the Mists, searching every gods-cursed fingerspan of the magical barrier, tearing it apart thread by scorching thread if she had to.

  Because somewhere in that veil of shifting mist, the last members of her family had been trapped; and she could not reach them…or even tell if they were still alive.

  The Faering Mists

  “Lorelle! Papa! Can you hear me? Where are you?” Lillis Baristani’s voice was hoarse from shouting, and the ocean of tears she’d shed had left her eyes swollen and burning.

  She turned in circles and squinted in a vain effort to pierce the suffocating veil of shifting whiteness around her. She’d been in the Mists a long time—bells, certainly, maybe even a day or more, though it was hard to tell time when the vapor was eternally lit by its own magical glow. In any event, she’d not seen or heard another living being since the moment the mountain had shuddered like a wild, angry beast and she’d lost her footing and fallen back into the Faering Mists.

  Never in all her life had she been so alone. Always, someone had been with her: Lorelle or Mama or Papa or Ellie.

  Alone was frightening. Almost more frightening than the terrible, monstrous darrokken or the evil Eld soldiers that had attacked Teleon. Almost more frightening than the sight of Kieran screaming as he disappeared beneath an avalanche of dirt, rock, and toppling trees.

  “Kieran?” she cried. “Kiel? Anybody?”

  There was still no answer.

  Lillis blinked back tears and clutched her small kitten to her chest. “They’re not coming, Snowfoot. I don’t think anyone’s coming.” In the sling tied around her neck, her black-and-white kitten mewed and squirmed and sank its tiny sharp claws into the wool jacket covering Lillis’s pinafore.

  Papa had always told Lillis, “If ever you get lost, kitling, stay right where you are. Your mama and I will come to find you.” But Mama was dead—killed by the same evil people who had attacked Teleon—and Lillis had waited long enough in the white blindness of the Mists to know that either no one was still alive to find her or they were looking in the wrong place.

  Either way, she couldn’t stay here.

  She stroked Snowfoot’s soft fur and hummed a little song Ellie had always sung to Lillis and Lorelle when they were frightened or upset. The tune didn’t soothe Lillis like it did when Ellie sang it, but Snowfoot stopped his anxious mewing.

  “I’ll bet you’re getting hungry and thirsty, aren’t you?” Lillis murmured to the kitten. “I know I am.” She wrapped her thin arms around the tiny feline, cuddling it closer and pressing her face to the soft fur at the top of its head. “Come on, Snowfoot,” she said. “Let’s go find Papa and Lorelle.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rhakis Mountains

  «When I find my wings, Rain, I doubt you’ll ever get me down from the sky.»

  Ellysetta closed her eyes in bliss as her truemate’s sleek tairen form soared into a cloudbank. The wet chill of cloud-mist streamed across her cheeks and dampened her long, spiraling coils of flame-hued hair. She’d dropped the invisibility weave less than a bell’s flight north of Orest, and now Rain and Steli soared and swooped side by side through the sky.

  Clinging to the saddle on Rain’s back, Ellysetta enjoyed the vicarious thrill of tairen flight. She loved flying. She loved the weightless joy of it. She loved the grandeur and the solitude of the heavens. Most of all, she loved the silence—broken only by the whoosh of magnificent wings scooping air from the sky and the rush of the wind passing by.

  She hadn’t realized how drained she’d become after these last weeks of war—the endless days and nights filled with battle cries and clashing swords and the shrieks of sundered men pleading for her to grant them either healing or a quick end to their suffering. But here, enveloped in the sublime peace of tairen flight, she felt as if a great weight had lifted from her shoulders. She could breathe again.

  «How much farther?» she asked. The other tairen who’d launched to mask their departure had departed long ago, and Rain and Steli had been flying northward through the icy reaches of snowcapped mountains for several bells now, using the dense, low-hanging clouds that wreathed the peaks for cover.

  «We are here,» Steli answered. Up ahead, the white tairen’s form was nearly invisible against the cloud-covered peak of a snowy mountain. She put on a burst of speed, flying straight for the mountain. Bare instants before crashing into it, her wings angled and she shot suddenly skyward. Up she streaked, arrowing through the clouds and disappearing from view.

  «Hold on,» Rain warned. A split second later, he mimicked Steli’s daring ascent.

  Ellysetta gasped as the sudden vertical flight left her stomach several tairen lengths behind. They broke through the clouds and burst into the clear blue sky above, where the tallest peaks rose from a sea of white cloud-mist. Black wings spread wide, gleaming in the late-morning sunlight as Rain glided after the graceful white form of Steli. They soared, weightless, at the apex of their ascent, then folded their wings and plummeted, diving back into the clouds. Ellysetta clung to the saddle and laughed in delight.

  The tairen broke through the clouds into a deep, narrow gorge and raced north, following the rushing river at the bottom of the ravine. They zigzagged through the river’s bends and curves, then flew up over a series of breathtaking white waterfalls and emerged in a broad basin at the center of five enormous peaks. Crystal Lake dominated the basin, its waters a clear gemstone blue that reflected the five soaring, snowcapped mountain
s ringing it like a crown.

  An abandoned city hewn from the gold-veined gray rock of the mountains rose up on the southwestern shore, seeming to sprout from the mountainside. Clearly Fey but falling to ruin. Beautiful and melancholy in its gilded gray solitude, it stood like a monument to a once great race.

  «Dunelan,» Rain said. «The first lost city of the Fey. Abandoned near the end of the Second Age except as a military outpost. Not because its Source died, like in Lissilin, but because our people were too few to remain. I suppose we should have known then our race was in decline.»

  Rain’s and Steli’s wings angled to slow their speed and they alit on the rocky shores of the lake just north of the ancient city. Steli padded to the water’s edge and stuck her nose near the surface, purring as she inhaled the heady aroma of magic that perfumed the air above the lake. «Strong Source. Very powerful. Good for Rainier-Eras and Ellysetta-kitling.»

  She stuck a paw in, then gave a squawk of outrage. «Cold!» Images of a white tairen encased in icicles accompanied the exclamation.

  Ellysetta laughed as she slid off Rain’s back. “It’s a mountain lake, Steli. What did you expect?”

  Steli tossed her head and sniffed. She didn’t like being laughed at. A moment later, a calculating gleam entered her bright eyes. She drew a deep breath and breathed tairen fire on the water’s surface, holding the flame until the water steamed to near boiling. She padded into the hot water, head held high, tail swishing with feline superiority, and plunked down just off the shore. “Mmmmrrrr,” she purred.

  A cooked fish, boiled by the sudden heating of the water, bobbed to the surface. Steli’s whiskers twitched. She sniffed the floating fish experimentally, then lapped it up with a large pink tongue. Clearly, she liked what she tasted, because she boiled a wider circle of water and paddled around, slurping up the tasty fish treats as they bobbed to the surface.