The Winged Hunter

by F. T. McKinstry

  *

  Aradia crept from a hole in the foundation of her cottage, one of two cats that lived there, the other being an orange tabby named Nasturtium. She padded through the goat pen and slipped through the remains of a rotted fence fallen into disrepair. One of her goats had died of age; the other had fed hungry wolves two winters ago. Goldenrod, yarrow, fleabane, and peppermint had claimed the trodden earth, and wild roses entwined with morning glory vines formed a wall up the side of the cottage. To an outside observer, the roses would appear to cling to nothing but a dead maple riddled with woodpecker holes.

  Something powerful moved through the forest. A wizard’s mind. Aradia stopped on the weedy path and waited.

  Seven years had passed since the crowharrow had killed her sister Ana and come after her. Seven years of hiding in the nonhuman shapes of animals, birds, plants, trees and water had made Aradia akin to the Otherworld. She took human form only long enough to remain human, a commitment to which she only adhered to honor her grandmother’s death. Despite repeated warnings to a granddaughter who loved the forest, its creatures, and its infinite subtleties to great distraction, the powerful wizard had herself fallen to the perils of her art.

  Aradia knew the dangers, even as she continued to drift from humanity. Seven years had faded her grandmother’s admonitions like a scrap of old linen. Most people knew never to ignore a wizard’s warnings; however, few people faced a crowharrow and lived to tell of it—including her grandmother—so Aradia took her chances. She rarely stayed in one place or shape for very long, but haunted the woods within lumbering, trotting, creeping or flying distance of Tansel’s home so she could look after her.

  The forest knew things, and as the forest, Aradia knew things. Before Tansel had come to her, Aradia knew that a wizard named Maetor courted her niece using an absurd tactic, like a fool trying to force a cat to do something it didn’t want to do. Aradia had felt the eerie wail of frost in the soul of the wood. And she had known, despite her antipathy, that the Raven of Muin would balance the wrong.

  For herself, Aradia had eaten a strange tasting grasshopper. From a frog’s eyes, she had watched the Raven find the voidstone and whisk Tansel away.

  He didn’t know what Aradia knew.

  So she waited until the old wizard materialized by the willow tree on the edge of her empty goat pen. An apparition. Evidently, he didn’t bother to travel in person anymore. Ironic.

  “Aradia!” he barked.

  She hesitated, unable to recall the word that made her human. This happened more and more, of late. She licked her paw.

  “Moridrun fore sarumn,” the Raven commanded imperiously, in Aenspeak, the wizard’s tongue.

  Aradia crouched in the weeds on the cottage path with her hand held to her mouth. She dropped it and stood stiffly, swaying on her feet as a dizzy spell rippled through her head. Her hair clung in mats to her skull like moss on a tree, her muscles ached, and her skin stretched tightly across the scars on her back.

  “Grandfather,” she said in a voice gravelly and full of whispers. She only ever used her voice to change into something that didn’t.

  The wizard lifted his chin at the greeting. His bearing, like that of most wizards, revealed little despite his having uttered her name like a crushing curse. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” He stepped forward. “Where did you get it?”

  When she didn’t answer, he clenched his fist and turned it in the air between them. Exceedingly unpleasant pressure built around her solar plexus. “I found it,” she grated.

  He lowered his hand. “Don’t lie to me. One does not ‘find’ a sioros voidstone.”

  Voidstone. The Old One had used that term. But she didn’t know the other word. “A what?”

  “That stone you gave to Tansel. Do you have any idea what it is?”

  “I found it,” she repeated. “In the ground.”

  “You are hiding something, Aradia,” he said tiredly, as if he had been tired of her secrets all his life.

  “It’s none of your concern,” she snapped. She would not show her grief to him, not when he had abandoned them all to the whims of a crowharrow’s immortal hunger.

  “I am the Keeper of the Muin Waeltower,” he said. “The balance of this realm is my charge and therefore my concern. I am within my authority as a Keeper of the Eye to bind you until you answer me.”

  She resisted the urge to spit. The Eye! Nothing but hypocrisy and sorrow. Typical. This wizard dared to threaten her, right beneath the shadow of the Old One herself. “You have no power over me,” she growled.

  “By keeping that voidstone, you’ve unleashed a sioros on my realm. Power has nothing to do with this, now.”

  Sioros. That word again, and she didn’t know it.

  The Raven lowered his gaze upon her like an owl and said, “Sioros is the Aenspeak word for crowharrow. That stone belongs to him.”

  Her body quailed under the recurring sensation of the crowharrow’s claws tearing into her flesh. “How do you know that?”

  “A voidstone is not of the earth. It’s a portal to the Old One’s domain and only she can bestow it. The voidstones she gives to the winged hunters are fang-shaped. There is no more precious a thing to a sioros. It will eat at his heart like an infection until he finds it.”

  “He killed Ana.”

  “Ana.” He paused. “Tansel’s mother?” Aradia nodded. “And you never told Tansel this? She thinks her mother abandoned her.”

  Aradia laughed like a cackling crow. “And that troubles you, does it? Och! That I would ever see the day.” She could tell that this hurt him, but she had stopped wishing for that a long time ago. “I didn’t abandon her.” Her throat hurt from talking. “The crowharrow was hunting me. I didn’t want Tansel to live in terror of him and I couldn’t risk leading him to her.”

  “So you condemned her to ignorance? It’s one thing to take a sioros voidstone; another to give it to a child! How long did you think it would remain hidden under a rock?”

  “Aye but it has, hasn’t it? It’s been seven years. Tansel is safe.”

  The old wizard’s eyes narrowed. “The sioros only kills those whom the Old One marks. He didn’t come after you because he wanted another kill. He came because you took his voidstone.”

  Aradia knew better. “He would have killed me for it,” she said offhandedly.

  “How did you hide it from him? You must have done something, because he would have ripped this forest apart.” He came forward again, so close she could see the threads in the cowl of his cloak. He smelled of mugwort and balessan. “There’s only one thing powerful enough to control a sioros. You invoked Maern, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t know what the stone was,” she said, evading the question. “But if the Old One put it into the crowharrow’s hands, then she also put it into mine.”

  “A shrewd observation,” the wizard noted. “But an unfortunate one. I believe you are now marked—and because of your foolishness, so is Tansel. What did you promise Maern in return for your lives? She does not grant such requests without a price.”

  Aradia could have laughed at his ignorance, such as it was. “Nothing for mine,” she said. “But for Tansel’s safety, she bade me give the voidstone to the girl.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “How should I know? The Old One does not explain her requests.”

  The wizard eyed her with penetrating suspicion. But the other thing the Old One had asked for, Tansel’s innocence, that information, Aradia would keep. This wizard didn’t respect such things.

  She stepped away from him. “I answered your questions. Now leave me be.”

  “You haven’t answered all of my questions.”

  As she started to speak a word, he interrupted her. She spoke it anyway. Her vision blurred beneath four hoofed feet as her grandfather’s terrible, booming voice raked over the forest like a crowharrow’s claw.

  “You may be able to elude me, Aradia, but you cannot elude the Raven of Eusiro
n! I shall call upon him to bind you!”

  The Raven of Eusiron. A master shapeshifter and the mortal son of the Aenmos himself—a worthy threat. But Aradia kept running. If she could hide from a crowharrow, she could hide from anything.

  The Raven of Eusiron

  The Waeltower of Eyrie shone in the morning sun like an amethyst jewel. For days, low clouds had obscured the top of the spire like a shroud. Today, the air flowed clear, fresh and cool, and smelled of green. Sunlight glittered on the stones, roofs, and fresh growth of trees and gardens. Men and women in the brightly colored cloaks of the Eye moved about on their way to morning studies.

  Eaglin, the Raven of Eusiron, strode briskly towards the tower. Those he passed cleared a wide path around him. As he neared the center of the citadel, his forehead tingled and his heart fluttered in response to the iomor, an energy well deep inside Mount Rothmar. Called the Source, it connected, fed and sustained the world’s iomors in a vast net of conscious energy. Though Eaglin had learned to channel the Source, he still buckled under the full force of it. As it intensified, he perceived a brilliant, incomprehensibly complex equation that gave form to the mind of Ealiron, the Aenmos and his immortal father.

  He reached the rosewood door of the vestibule beneath the tower and spoke a word into the quartz crystal in the center of the portal. Light flashed across his eyes as it opened. He brushed aside a hanging tendril of ivy as he passed through. Once inside, he approached the ancient stairs to the tower and headed up.

  Recently, his father, in one of his cryptic appearances, had recommended more frequent contemplation of the Source. Eaglin hadn’t been up here in over a fortnight; his heart wandered elsewhere. But today he had something to contemplate: a request for audience from Muin Hall, in the north.

  As he ascended the stairs, his knees weak and his heart thumping under the force of the energy rift between his body and the realms of gods, he slipped into trance.

  The high priestess stood by the gate, tall and dressed in black. Slowly, he dropped to his knees and stared through a shroud of tears at her hands holding a damp scrap of finery, pale as a maiden and stitched with flower-laden hawthorn boughs. We found her in the river, she said softly.

  But I did not—

  You did not understand that you cast the shadow of a god.

  Eaglin came to himself with a start, stumbling on the steps. He leaned heavily against the wall. The dark memory submerged, leaving a cold shadow on his heart. He continued up the stairs, feeling queasy.

  He reached the landing, spoke a word and pushed open the door. His boots echoed from the crystal walls of the eight-sided chamber. Called the Oculus, Eyrie’s Waeltower had the only spire with an accessible interior; the other Waeltower spires were solid. A crystal pentagram spanned the floor. The Source spiraled up from the center of the star like a column of liquid gold flowing into the heights above.

  Ealiron stood on the far side of the chamber, facing east. As tall and fair as a new birch tree and as old as the stars, his shoulders moved with a breath, causing the long black lengths of his hair to glint in the lavender light. “Eaglin,” he said in a resonant voice that emanated from everywhere. He turned around and fixed his gray-green gaze on his son, eyes the color of his own, shining with vastness, seeing beyond.

  “Father,” Eaglin returned, feeling his usual intense mixture of love and perpetual distance. “I didn’t expect you.”

  The entity walked across the floor with the silent, powerful grace of a panther. As he passed Eaglin, he touched his face, causing light to vibrate across his cheek and raise the hairs on his head. “You will want to bring the Web when you go,” he said quietly.

  “Go where?” Eaglin asked, turning his head.

  The Aenmos vanished, leaving Eaglin with the mortal sensation that he had imagined the entire exchange. Being above the time-space matrix and not bound by the linear rules of mortals, the god had a light step. This happened every time Eaglin saw him—and it always seemed that it had never happened before.

  Web. So the priests and priestesses of the Old One called a mortal chosen by the goddess to see the shadowy patterns of her domain. That could only mean Lorth, the Raven of Ostarin and Ninth Seat of the Aenlisarfon, the Council of Ravens who kept balance in the world.

  The door to the tower opened. As if summoned, a tall warrior stepped over the threshold. He wore the black habit of their order, his sword, and his graying hair in a long tangled braid. Eaglin wondered if his father had just altered the grid to place the wizard on the stair.

  “Lorth,” Eaglin greeted him.

  The other wizard tilted his head forward. “Eaglin. Council sent me a page. He told me to meet you here.”

  “Have you been skipping out on them again?” Wild as a fox, Lorth had never been one to abide protocol.

  Lorth walked casually around the edge of the pentacle. He stopped and folded his arms over his chest. “When they need me, they find me. I left a sword competition for this. What’s happening?” He gazed inquiringly from the green-gold eyes of a wolf, an apt feature for the most accomplished assassin in the northwestern realms. In his homeland of Ostarin they called him hunter, in Eyrie, they called him siomothct, an assassin in service to the Eye. But few knew that about him. Most knew him as a Raptor, a blademaster who trained wizards in the arts of war. The blood-red trim on the edges of his cloak marked him as such. Eaglin doubted any of Lorth’s apprentices would be surprised to learn of his darker occupation.

  “I received a request for audience from Caelfar, the Raven who focuses the Waeltower of Muin,” Eaglin said. “I came up here to answer it, and my father was waiting for me. He hinted at a journey and bade me to bring you along. He referred to you as the Web.”

  A smile touched the hunter’s mouth. “That can’t be good.”

  Eaglin stepped up to the light emanating from the center of the star. “Let’s see what Caelfar wants.” He cleared his mind and drew a deep breath that cleared his mind to a dark sky. Then he spoke an intricate pattern of words in Aenspeak that invoked the ten-faceted pattern of the Muin Waeltower, deep and burning in the earth like the taproot of a mighty tree. In the flow of the Source in his brow, a rift appeared, aligning the iomor with the one at the base of Muin. A vivid image of the Muin tower chamber appeared over the solid features of the Oculus.

  Eaglin stepped back as a figure shimmered in the light. The rift vanished as the Raven of Muin stepped through in a stunningly crafted reflection of his physical form. Clad in black, he moved as if he had just awaked from restless, unsatisfying sleep.

  Eaglin held out his arms. “Caelfar. Breasin felos oth.” The old wizard came forward with warm eyes of violet gray. As Eaglin embraced him, his heart tripped a beat. As thin as a leaf when it should have felt like a bear hide, Caelfar’s airy body had all the signs of one who spent too much time as an apparition and not enough time focused in the physical. The old wizard smelled of herbs used to aid in manifestations—something he had probably not needed to use for two or three generations.

  Caelfar withdrew with a troubled smile. “Well now. You’ve grown proficient in the arts of the Source, I daresay. Clear as the sun!”

  Eaglin smiled and turned to his companion. “This is Lorth, Raven of Ostarin, First Raptor and Ninth Seat on the Aenlisarfon.”

  “Master,” Lorth said softly, bowing his head. “Well met.”

  “Well met indeed!” Caelfar stepped up to the hunter with a wide, wondering expression of appraisal. He glanced at Eaglin. “I ask for you, and you bring me a siomothct.” At Lorth’s inquiring expression, the older wizard added, “Oh your reputation precedes you. You were taught by Icaros, were you not?”

  “Aye, Master. You knew him?”

  “Knew him, and loved him well. One of my best. I see his power in you.”

  Eaglin said, “Lorth is a Web. Bringing him was my father’s idea.”

  Caelfar lifted his chin with a sound of recognition. “Ah. That is good, very good. And the Aenmos didn’t tell you w
hy, I take it.”

  “Of course not.”

  Strangely, Caelfar seemed relieved. In the chamber superimposed over the Oculus, he moved to a chair on the edge of the northern point of the pentacle, which aligned with the same on the Oculus floor. “Thank you for receiving me,” he said, sitting down. The light in his eyes grew dim. “I need your assistance.”

  Eaglin went to him as his earlier concern resurfaced. “You are thin, Caelfar. What has happened?”

  The old wizard let loose a breathy laugh. “I would that my affinity was for women instead of apparitions, that’s what.”

  “No such thing,” Lorth said. And well he knew it. Years ago, Eaglin’s mother, the Mistress of Eusiron and a high priestess of Maern, had taken Lorth as her lover, a tender fact that still rattled Eaglin’s nerves. Though the priestess had had many lovers in her life, not one of them would claim to understand her intricacies, Lorth—and the Aenmos—included.

  Eaglin lowered himself to the floor and draped his arms over his knees. “I’d been thinking that for you to call on me, your trouble must be great. But women? I’m not exactly—”

  “You are High Dark to the Priesthood of Maern,” the old wizard cut in, eyeing Eaglin from beneath a knotty brow. “And your power extends beyond mine, for all my years. This concerns my great granddaughter, Tansel. What began as a violation of the Wizard’s Code has become a very dangerous situation that I am unable to resolve, as it concerns Maern, some bad history on my part, and a sioros.”

  After a moment of startled silence, the wizards reacted. Eaglin rose to his feet; Lorth moved closer, his eyes darkening.

  Sioros. Eaglin had seen a winged hunter once, shortly after he had reached manhood, on a journey he had taken to the far north beyond the Snow River. The creature had appeared, tall and beautiful as a god clad in shades of woolen greens, with towering wings the color of night. He had stood on the edge of a ravine with a pale, quiet gaze that froze Eaglin’s blood in his veins and caused him to drop to his knees with an oath to Maern. The sioros had turned then, ever so gracefully, his confidence complete, and taken to the air in a mighty bound, where he vanished into the grid like an owl into fog.