by Maggie Furey
Most incredible of all, Corisand could see the wind: all the eddies and currents of moving air that swooped and swirled above the surface of the lake and the glacier like glowing rivers. In a flash of revelation, she comprehended at last why the Windeye was so named. But the new understanding went much further than that. All at once, she realised that the winds were her weapons and her tools, a link from the heartspring of her magic to the outer world. In conjunction with her Othersight, she could shape miracles - she was sure of it. Now was the time to put that certainty to the test.
She snatched at the long strands of air as they swirled past, grabbing a handful and twisting them round her fingers. They were fluid to her touch, with a cool, silken feel. Concentrating hard, she poured her Othersight into them, igniting them into streams of blazing silver radiance. These she spun out to form a bridge, which she cast towards the glacier, creating a glowing arc through the air that reached from her feet to the intense blue entity of ice.
A grin spread across the Windeye’s face and a warm glow of pride ignited within her. Not bad for a first attempt, she told herself, although she knew that the true test of her magic was still to come. The graceful arch of her gleaming silver bridge was beautiful indeed, but could she trust it with her life? It was time to find out.
In her heart, Corisand was certain that confidence would count for everything in achieving her objective. Firmly closing her mind to any doubts, she lifted her chin and stepped firmly onto her first creation. The bridge remained firm and steady beneath her feet. The structure she had spun out of nothing more than empty air and a Windeye’s magic looked as fragile and ethereal as moonbeams, but was as firm beneath her feet as any ancient bridge of stone. She took another step forward, noticing as she did so that her feet almost adhered to the surface. This was her own magic, and it seemed that her creation was determined to keep her safe. As the gleaming span took her far out above the cold lake water, she was more than grateful for that.
As the Windeye drew gradually closer to the glacier, the mysterious noises within the ice became louder. Strange as it might seem, she was certain that they held a great deal more meaning than mere random bursts of sound, and as she continued to listen with all her concentration, they began to reverberate through her head and resolve themselves into words whose meaning she could almost grasp, and which became increasingly clear as she drew near to the far side of the lake. She was wondering what she should do when she reached it when the matter was taken out of her hands.
From the top of the glacier where the wall of ice met the lake, the head of a gigantic serpent reared slowly into the sky. Its colossal form, white as the glacier ice, towered high above the stunned Windeye, and it looked down at her through eyes of the same vibrant, translucent blue as the glacier’s heart. ‘I am Taku, Serpent of Ice, Spirit of the Glacier and Master of the Cold Magic.’
6
KINDNESS OF A STRANGER
Tiolani and Corisand were not the only ones who were finding that their circumstances had been radically altered on the night of the ambush. When the Phaerie cut him free of their net, Dael plummeted like a stone into the forest below. His life would have been over had he not fallen into the thick canopy of a huge old chestnut tree. He crashed through the slender upper branches and the sturdier boughs below, and eventually thudded to a halt in a fork between two of the tree’s great limbs, battered, bruised and breathless, in a shower of twigs and bark. Winded, he lay still as a number of prickly green seed cases that had been stubbornly clinging to the tree throughout the winter came bouncing down around him. Everything settled at last and he realised, with a great deal of astonishment, that he was still alive.
It was still a long way to the ground, however. Moving carefully on his precarious perch, he took stock of the damage. His clothes, already in tatters before he’d been captured, were in a worse state than ever, with the bitter wind finding its way through every hole and rent. Violent pain stabbed through his chest when he breathed in - he had at least one broken rib. Blood was running down his face from a deep cut that was perilously close to his eye, and seeping into his pants from a gash in his left thigh. The left sleeve of his shirt had been practically torn off to expose a badly abraded shoulder and an arm bent at an odd angle. When he tried to move it, he felt the grate of broken bone, and was so overwhelmed by pain that it made him nauseous and faint. There was a tender lump on the side of his aching head and, judging by all the other lesser aches and pains, his body must be a mass of bruises and smaller cuts.
He couldn’t believe he had survived.
From the way his captors had been reacting, he knew that the attack on the Forest Lord must have taken place, but what had happened then? And after it was all over, would the Phaerie come back with their terrifying hounds to look for him? Or would they simply assume that the fall had killed him? He had no way of knowing, and he supposed that there was no point in worrying about something he couldn’t affect. He would just have to hope for the best, and get on with the business of trying to survive. Right now, the Phaerie were the least of his problems.
First, then, the arm. Working clumsily, one-handed, he untied the frayed old piece of rope he used as a belt and bound the injured limb to his aching side. It was the best he could do to keep it immobilised. Using strips from his torn shirtsleeve, he bandaged the cut in his leg as tightly as he could manage. As for the rest of his hurts - well, they would just have to take care of themselves. Until he could find some water, there was little more he could do for them.
The first difficulty lay in actually getting down from the tree in one piece. He knew he’d do better to wait until the sky grew lighter, but he was afraid that if he tried to stay up there for the rest of the night he would drift off to sleep and fall to the ground. It felt like an awfully long way to climb down, especially with only one arm and an injured leg. He was only able to take shallow breaths, due to the pain that knifed through his ribs with every inhalation. Shaking all over, partly with fear and partly from the reaction to his fall, he began to descend, selecting his route with care. He got stuck a couple of times, in places where there was nothing he could do but scramble and slither and eventually let himself drop, trying to protect his broken arm as best he could and praying that the boughs below would be strong enough to catch him. Somehow, his luck held. He finally made it down. As his feet touched the ground he felt his knees give way, and he slumped, exhausted, against the tree’s massive bole.
When Dael awakened he was aching, chilled to the bone and furious with himself for falling asleep in the open. What if a wild animal had come along? Or worse still, one of the accursed Phaerie? Might-have-beens, however, were the last of his worries. So far, he had been fortunate indeed, but he had a suspicion that his luck had finally run out. His injuries alone were probably enough to condemn him to a lingering, painful death, especially if the cuts and lacerations should fester. Alone in the forest in winter, he was hopelessly ill-equipped to survive. He had no means of making a fire, he didn’t have a cloak or blanket, and his clothing was hopelessly inadequate for the freezing weather. His only way of keeping warm at night would be to heap dead leaves around him. With no tools or weapons apart from his useless knife, he couldn’t hunt animals for food, and there was nothing growing in the forest to eat at this time of year: it was a long way from the nesting season for birds, and there were no mushrooms, nuts or berries.
Dael rubbed his hand across his face. He had tried to keep going, but the odds had been stacked so high against him it was hardly surprising that nothing ever went right. He closed his eyes, sunk in dark despair, too weary and desolate even to weep. What was the point? There was no chance of him living through this mess. Why put himself through any more misery and pain? He had his knife. He might not be able to kill an animal with it, but he could easily open one of his own veins.
The handle of the knife, usually so familiar in shape and texture that he never gave it a moment’s thought, felt different today. The smooth, carv
ed bone seemed alien and heavy in his trembling hand, and the blade gleamed with cold menace in the grey morning light. He tried to find the right place on the wrist of the broken arm - awkwardly, since it was still bound to his side - once again feeling that shock of agony as bone scraped against bone. Pressing the keen edge of the knife against his flesh, he braced himself to slash deeply. How long did it take to bleed to death? Hopefully, it would be over quickly, and then . . .
And then what? Some slaves believed that they would go to some kind of ease-filled paradise - well, Dael would believe that when he saw it. Some were sure that they would be reborn into a better life. But how could such a thing be possible? They would still be humans, wouldn’t they? Still be slaves. Dael had always suspected that such notions could be nothing more than wishful thinking - and that being the case, did he really want to throw away the only life he had? Though it was unlikely that he would find another group of ferals or escapees to help him this close to the Phaerie city, it wasn’t absolutely impossible, was it? His life was all he had. The only thing they had not been able to take from him. How could he throw it away as if it were worthless? The Mages and the Phaerie might think mortals were little more than animals, counting for nothing, but Dael would never let himself sink so low as to believe that. When the Phaerie had cast him so carelessly from the skies, they had believed he would die. Why go out of his way to prove them right? If he ended his life now, they would have won. And he had been through so much already and survived. Why not wait a little longer? After all, he thought bleakly, what was the hurry? He could kill himself any time.
Survival in the forest proved to be even more of an ordeal than Dael had expected: an unending struggle against pain, cold and hunger. Try as he might, dragging himself over the uneven ground with the aid of a staff he had made, he could find nothing to eat. Even animals were few and far between in this cold weather - not that he’d have been able to kill them, even if he had managed to find them. After a fruitless day’s searching, he curled up in the hollow core of a dead tree, taking his roughly made staff, a stout fallen branch, with him as his only means of defence, and shivered through the hours of darkness.
On the second miserable day he was lucky enough to come across a squirrel’s winter cache of nuts, which he smashed open with a rock, devouring the fragments greedily. On the third day, however, he found nothing but the rigid body of a crow lying beneath a tree. It had been dead for so long that even a single mouthful of the raw and stinking flesh made him too sick even to attempt any more.
That was the day it started to snow. When he’d awakened that morning, he had felt colder than ever, and there had been a thin sprinkling of white over his leaf-pile. Later, as the day drew on towards evening, the snow began to fall in earnest, filling the air with fat, swirling white flakes as he staggered onward, growing colder and weaker with every hour that passed.
As dusk was deepening the shadows, he stumbled across the settlement. He emerged into a clearing to see a cluster of rough shelters: vague shapes in the swirling snow, much like the one from which he had been banished. Dael’s heart leapt. Another colony of humans. These folk didn’t know he had been cast out. Surely they would help him. With a cry of joy he lurched forward across the rough, hummocky ground of the clearing. As if in answer to his cry, lights appeared as people bearing torches emerged from the doorways of the dwellings, and a group of men, women and children stepped out to greet him.
All at once, Dael knew that something was very wrong. Surely he should be able to smell the smoke from the settlement’s fires? And why were these people approaching in such eerie silence? Surely they should be calling to him, asking him who he was, speaking to one another, making some sound?
Just as the moon rose above the trees, a swirl of snowflakes blew across the clearing and obliterated the figures. Dael’s feet caught on one of the hummocks and he went down hard, screaming with agony as he jarred his broken arm. Measuring his length in the snow, he came face to face with a little girl. She lay sprawled on the frozen ground with her skewed limbs half-buried, her ice-encrusted skin the same colour as the drifting snow. She seemed to be looking up into the sky - save that one eye had been picked out by the crows, and the other was obliterated completely, for the entire left side of her face had been sheared away by what looked like one enormous bite.
The bite of a fellhound.
The Hunt had been there before him.
He hurled himself backwards, gagging and retching, his empty stomach trying to empty itself still further. His out-thrust hand landed on a hard, icy form with familiar contours . . . Looking around, he saw another face, that of a man this time, whose head had been shorn away from his body. With a shriek, Dael leapt to his feet. All those hummocks scattered across the clearing must be corpses! The snow had obliterated the blood and stench, but here and there he could see that what he had taken, in the shadowy dusk, to be a branch with a cluster of twigs at the end was actually an arm. A thicker bough could only be a leg, though it was not attached to a body. Now that he understood what he was seeing, some of the shadows on the ground resolved themselves into faces that were mauled like that of the child, or twisted with fear and torment.
Snatching up his fallen staff, Dael scrambled to his feet, heart hammering. He looked across at the shelters, but found nothing there but blackened, burned-out wreckage. For an instant he thought he could still see the tenebrous forms of the ghosts - then they too had vanished into the snow and the night.
Before he had time to assimilate what had just happened, Dael heard the sound of snarling behind him. Now that night had fallen, the forest’s predators were coming to feast upon the bodies of the dead. Wolves loped through the trees, running low to the ground, and he caught the moon-like reflection from the jewelled eyes of a lynx. All around him, animals were holding their grisly feast, gnawing, and ravening as they quarrelled over the lumps of frozen meat that they tore loose from the scattered bodies. So far, with so much easy food available, they had ignored the human interloper in their midst - but how long would that last? What if a bear should come? It was doubtful that he’d be able to defend himself against a smaller creature like a wolf or a lynx, but against one of the gigantic forest bears, he would certainly stand no chance. Impelled by terror, Dael scrambled out of the clearing and fled the dreadful scene of carnage as fast as his weak and weary body would take him.
On he went, staggering blindly through the dark woods and the snow. Only his stubborn will kept him going: a flat refusal to surrender his life. He had survived his father’s brutality, his compatriots hadn’t succeeded in killing him when they’d exiled him, and the Phaerie hadn’t accomplished his death, even though they had dropped him out of the skies from their net. He had even survived his own sense of hopelessness. After coming through all that, he was damned if he was just going to lie down and die because he was cold and hungry and snow was falling on him. Somehow, come what may, he would get through this, if only to spite his former captors.
At last the ground began to slope upwards, becoming increasingly steep, and he hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was worth the effort it would cost him to keep going in this direction. Yet maybe, if he could climb above the general level of the forest, he might be able to spot another settlement of feral humans like the one he had already found. At the very least, he might be able to see somewhere to shelter.
Dael did his best to keep moving throughout that night, knowing that if he lay down he would have neither the strength nor the will to get up again. Dawn would soon be breaking, he kept telling himself. With the daylight would come fresh hope. Scarcely aware of his surroundings, he wandered aimlessly beneath the trees in a darkening dream - until abruptly he was shocked back into awareness as his stumbling foot encountered nothing but empty space. He lost his balance and fell forward, rolling and tumbling down a steep, stony slope, bounding and sliding and turning head over heels, faster and faster - until a large boulder came looming out of the night. Helpless to a
void it, he collided with the huge stone, crashing into it and hitting it hard. There was a bright flash of pain, then Dael’s world went dark.
The Cailleach was sitting by the fireside, enjoying the random flickering of the golden flames, the comfort of the warmth washing over her skin, the spicy tang of mulled wine. It was strange to be back in the world again. Strange, but very good. Too good, if truth were told. Sometimes, she wondered if she had been wise to come here. But her vision had shown her the risks of destruction for so many of the wonders she had helped to create, and somehow she just couldn’t sit back as a dispassionate spectator and watch all her hard work pulled down. Such direct intervention was against the Laws of the Cosmos, and if the other Guardians ever found out, the retribution would be grave indeed: she would certainly be banished from this world she loved so much, and her brethren might even take her powers from her. Even so, having located the pivotal time when events might be steered in one direction or another, she had come anyway. Not to interfere, she kept assuring herself. Certainly not. Just to be on hand in case she should be needed. However, though she had been willing to risk the penalties for defying Cosmic Law, she had never for one moment considered the other, more insidious dangers to an Immortal who had long dwelt on a higher, more ethereal plane.
