Tansel smiled and nodded. He held out his arm, and she tentatively slipped hers through it. He led her into the cherry grove. On the far side, against a rock ledge, was a stone table cloaked in moss. Two benches held up by crouching cats rested on either side of it.
The wizard sat down and began to remove things from his basket: a loaf of bread with raisins and nuts, dried apples, plums, cheese, and creamy pastries. Tansel laid her lilac bouquet on the table and sat across from him. Glossy green ivy grew over the rocks. Water trickled through the stones and fell into a pool that contained a small, half-submerged statue of some strange creature. It coiled out of the water in curved lengths like a swimming snake, its head lined with sharp scales and its open mouth full of thin teeth.
Tansel sat up and pointed. “What is that?”
The wizard shut his basket and leaned aside. The wrinkles around his eyes grew long as he smiled. “That is a loerfalos.”
“A what?”
“Loer-va-los.” He said it slowly, to help her pronounce it. “The word means, ‘serpent of green darkness.’ An immortal serpent that lives in the sea. Very dangerous. You wouldn’t want to meet one.”
“What would he do to me?”
“She would eat your whole ship, most likely.” Tansel smiled, and he raised his brow. “You think I’m kidding? A dreadful creature, the loerfalos.”
She cast a glance behind her. “Well, that one’s not so bad.” She plucked up one of the pastries. It was sweet and filled with cream; she had never eaten anything like it. She consumed it in three bites.
“Tasty?” he inquired.
She nodded, her mouth full. As she ate, the wizard watched her with a strange expression. It made her nervous, but it felt pleasant, all the same. After a time, she said, “Maybe a lo—rf—”
“Loerfalos.” He bit into a piece of bread, his eyes warm.
“Maybe one of them ate my father.”
The wizard lowered his bread as something wild fled over his face. “Why do you say this?”
She shrugged. “He was a sailor. My mother told me.” She flicked a crumb from the table.
He set his food aside as if it no longer interested him. “I wouldn’t be so quick to feed your absent father to a monster. The forces of balance don’t always consider the hearts of children. Sometimes, the Old One’s hand can be cruel indeed.”
Tansel absorbed this with all the introspection of a fog. His gentle tone, the sadness in his eyes and the grinning miniature sea monster in the pool behind her blurred together like a grating laugh. She slid from her seat and stepped away from the table.
He rose. “I’m sorry about your mother,” he said. “More than you know. Do you now feel you are alone?”
“I don’t know.”
He took her arm. “Tansel...” She stubbornly looked beyond him, into the forest. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
She pulled her arm from his grasp and started walking.
When the wizard didn’t follow her, she walked faster, into the center of the garden spiraling in like something swirling down a drain. Her vision blurred with tears and the roar in her mind didn’t quite drown the wizard’s voice carrying through the woods.
She reached the center pool, dark and still beneath the willow trees. She went to her knees on the edge. Fish darted away, frightened by the vibration. A tear slid over her chin and dropped into the water, rippling out; no cause for it, no source or sense. Algae stained the woman’s fish tail and moss clung to her thighs and hands. Her face, hidden in the folds of a hollow cowl, knew only darkness.
A short time passed. Tansel jumped as she heard a step behind her. Like a wary cat, she eyed the wizard as he approached and lowered himself onto a bench in the shade of a willow on the edge of the pool. He gazed up at the statue, his face haggard.
“Her name is Kalein,” he said softly. “She was a Keeper of the Eye. A wizard and a masterful shapeshifter.”
Tansel thought she recognized the name, but she was not sure. “Why is she part fish?”
“She didn’t heed the warnings. She spent too much time in other forms besides her own, which is dangerous. In the form of a fish, she forgot herself and a crowharrow took her.”
Tansel gulped. “The same one who came in the forest?” And took my mother.
He nodded. It was almost imperceptible. “Kalein was the love of my life.” After a pause in which Tansel’s heart began to thump, he leaned down and held out his hand. It looked like a gnarled branch. “Come here.”
She drew closer and sat at his feet.
“Kalein was your grandmother’s mother,” he said. “I—”
Tansel put it together with a start. “You!”
“I am your great grandfather.”
She absorbed this with more aplomb than it deserved; somehow, in some oak-tree world, she had known. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He took her hand in his. “I am a wizard, but also a man and I’ve fallen as every man does. When I was young, in my ignorance, I made a terrible mistake.”
“Why didn’t you come before? I never knew.”
“I wasn’t aware of your existence until you called to me.”
“Why...” Mother, you told me nothing.
“When Kalein got with child, she left me. She didn’t want my help or care, and I couldn’t follow her, where she went. I tried anyway. She never forgave me for it.”
Nothing. Tansel fingered through her memory for anything her mother had told her about their family, but all she held was a threadbare blanket with a great many holes. “Why did Kalein leave you?”
He was silent for such a long time that she wondered if he would answer at all. Finally: “Kalein was wild. She wanted—the wilds. I couldn’t give her that.”
“Why wouldn’t she forgive you for following her? She was carrying your child! Didn’t she know you loved her?”
The old wizard withdrew from her, leaned forward and put his head in his hands. In a thin voice he said, “That is your innocence talking.”
Tansel had no response to that.
“Come,” he said at last. He rose stiffly and drew her up, away from the pool and onto the path, into the sun. He folded her arm into his, and patted her hand gently. “Forgive me for not telling you sooner.”
As they strode along the path, Tansel said, “My mother used to say wizards were like vine paths, thick and closed.”
He wheezed a laugh. “Well said. I shall have to improve that.”
They rounded the path to the cherry grove. On the far end, their breakfast remained where they had left it. The wizard began putting things in the basket; Tansel helped him. Confusion darted around her mind like a dragonfly as she tried to absorb what he had just told her.
The wizard picked up her lilacs, now drooped but still fragrant, and offered them to her. After blank consideration, she took them.
As they returned to the path, she said, “You don’t come here much, do you?”
“It’s been a long time. I shall come more now that you’re here.”
They passed by a bed of woodruff, and Tansel noticed one of the carved stones. It had three sides and stood upright, like a column. A crystal glittered on top. She stopped and knelt, pointing as she looked up at him. “What are these?”
Instead of answering, he said, “You aren’t alone, Tansel. I am with you. On my word.”
She lowered her hand and stood up. “Swear on your name.”
“Hmph. A wizard cannot swear on his own name, I’m afraid. How about,” he cast his face to the morning sky, “I swear on the statue of Kalein.”
Tansel sensed but didn’t quite grasp the import of the oath. “Fair enough.”
He drew her aside and pointed to the stone. “Now. That is what we call a tertiary focusing stone. It is one of twelve types of stones that gather energy and hold it in certain patterns, depending on the angle of the sun and moon...”
Tansel heard mostly every other word as she basked in the light of her great grand
father’s presence.
*
Aradia limped from the underbrush on slender paws, with matted fur and thoughts a fox should not have. She slowed and crouched, panting in the shadows of a snakeroot hedge in sight of the hall. She put her snout to the humid air, catching the crowharrow’s unearthly scent on her mind.
For nearly a week, she had prowled outside the tumbled walls and forested ramparts of Muin looking for a way in. Her grandfather had enchanted the walls to prevent the crowharrow from getting to Tansel; unfortunately, the spell blocked Aradia as well. Taking the forms of birds, beasts, insects, creeping things, flying things, and tunneling things, she had attempted to get past the walls and under the protection of the spell, with no success. The crafty old wizard had sifted her out, just as he had her sister, mother and grandmother, the lost wombs of his domain.
His poisoned love wouldn’t protect Tansel from the Destroyer. The winged hunter had many ways of seducing a maiden. With an immortal’s patience, he wove his spells to draw her out, singing words in his black tongue, words of love, power and desire, words no maiden should hear. He had tried to enter the hall from the ground and from the air. He moved in and out of the physical dimension, one moment solid and towering in the evening light; the next, a shadow or a feeling by the wall. He appeared in the trees, on the rocks, scratching in the dirt, or hanging from the side of a crag overlooking the grounds. Eventually, he would wear the girl down.
Unless Aradia’s plan worked. She just had to get in.
Caelfar’s spell didn’t block other creatures. Chickadees swept and chittered over the wall to settle in the cherry trees in the garden; a toad hopped beneath the gate; a hawk circled in the sky above the Waeltower. Servants, horses and hounds came and went. But no matter what Aradia changed into, she only succeeded in being thrown from the edge of the perimeter.
Eventually, she gave up trying; her bones ached from the icy jolt that struck her whenever she touched the spell. Heartbroken and desperate, she had even considered knocking on the gates to ask her grandfather for sanctuary—but pride kept her from stooping to that. Besides, she wanted something from him that she dared not take under the auspices of good will. Better to stay angry. That way, she didn’t have to deal with the remains of her conscience.
Dusk cloaked the forest. In the shadows of the eastern wall, the vixen trotted this way and that, drifting farther into the woods in search of a rosy beam touching the landscape. The rose light nourished her, somehow. Little else did. Her heart had become a wasteland of death, blood, sunsets, hunger, thirst and grief as she waited for Tansel’s innocence to fall like wheat to a farmer’s scythe.
The singing of tree frogs filled the air. Aradia considered the front gate again, despite her pride. She couldn’t get in any other way. Unfortunately, to call for entry, she had to take human form—which meant exposing herself to the crowharrow. In shifted shape, she was close enough to his realm to evade him.
The vixen shook her head, sat down and scraped at her ear with her back paw. Mites. It itched terribly where she couldn’t get at it. She sat up as something tawny and warm moved swiftly into the shadows at the base of the hill. The creature stayed low to the ground, and made no sound in the brush.
Nasturtium. Wondering why the cat would come into an area where the crowharrow prowled, Aradia followed her until she entered the woods above the garden wall. The ground grew thick with wild herbs and vegetables, as if the garden had escaped and made a run for it. A familiar yowl split the silence. Cat claws scraped loudly on bark. An answering catcall came from the wizard’s garden and a strange smell floated on the air.
Evidently, Nasturtium was in heat, drawn in by the big gray tomcat sitting on top of the wall. Tansel’s voice floated on the indigo air: “Mushroom! Come down from there.” She made an obvious attempt to keep her voice low.
Too late. Wind gusted from the north; the air parted.
Aradia yipped a word. On the tiny feet of a dormouse, she wriggled into the ferns. The earth shook as the crowharrow alit to the ground, folded his wings and stepped towards the wall with a deep-throated growl.
“Mushroom!” Tansel repeated.
Nasturtium streaked into the brush away from the hall.
Aradia trembled with terror as the winged hunter spoke in a voice as rough as nails and smooth as milk, beautiful, hypnotic, and seductive. She didn’t understand all of the words even within the ancient universe of her animal cells. But she didn’t need to. The sounds moved upon each other and climbed down into her, tangling her in dreamy impressions that made little sense to the mind, but devastated the heart. If Aradia had been in the shape of a woman, she would have wept at the sound of it. She darted about in random spurts of disorientation, her every cell burning with the desire to flee.
Tansel sobbed on the other side of the wall.
“Come to me,” the crowharrow soothed in the Mother’s tongue.
Tansel cried, “Go away and leave me alone!” It lacked conviction. The crowharrow thundered with laughter.
“Tear of Menscefaros. You are mine.”
Bastard. Wrenching herself from the raw, instinctual terror of prey, Aradia spoke a word and fluttered up into the cool evening air. The forest spread into a panorama of moving patterns. A half-moon hung in the trees, surrounded by a ring of golden mist. She landed high on a hemlock bough and released a velvety whooo-oo! In the distance, another owl responded in kind.
The crowharrow looked up slowly in her direction. As his gaze bit into her, Aradia changed into a crow, leaned forward with ruffled wings and let loose a cacophony of cawing, mocking laughter.
The crowharrow bared his fangs, hissed like a snake—and vanished.
Aradia fled. She soared from the hall with the crowharrow all around her, slipping from one dimension to the next. She dared not consider him, but changed again and again, a fluid river of forms, a stream of words in the language of creation: birds, moths, wind, boughs, an egg in a nest, a beetle under a loose piece of bark; she became moss, stones and finally water as she plunged with a siskin scream into the Saille River northwest of the hall. The crowharrow slammed into the shallows on the river’s edge and raked his claws on the water with a livid roar.
She flowed away.
As water, Aradia realized the flaws in her plan. Evading a crowharrow was one thing, but attempting to thwart his lust for Tansel was patently absurd. This game would only hold off the Destroyer’s glance for a short time. Aradia had no choice but to put the next step of her plan in motion—but to do that, she had to call for entrance into the hall.
She flowed until she reached the deep wall of stone edging the Saille on Muin’s western side. The roots of willow trees drank deep within the earth. She pulled herself from a shallow pool on the river’s edge as a salamander, crept through the mud and into the shelter of a skunk cabbage. She could have stayed there until autumn stilled her flesh with a cold song. But she had to keep moving.
As a muskrat, she waddled through a tangle of wood ferns. Beneath muskrat concerns, she kept alert for the crowharrow. The night wouldn’t shield her from him; he could see in the dark with senses no mortal had, animal or not, and he could feel anything he didn’t see. He wouldn’t show himself until the last moment, from some dimension only gods and wizards knew.
As a weasel, she slunk around the western side of the hall through outcroppings, walls and cairns, blueberry bushes, holly, wild roses, and ferns. At last, she reached the main gate. A black portcullis towered beneath the mossy heights of the front wall. Faint light shone beyond the bars. The pennons of Muin hung on either side of the quiet entrance.
Aradia scanned the trees. This would have to happen fast. The moment she regained her human form, the crowharrow would be on her. She decided to find out where he was before she tried this.
Bats flittered and swooped overhead. Aradia changed, shot up and joined them. She was careful not to follow the other bats over the edge of the invisible wall only she knew was there. Once she felt safe, sh
e became a moth. She fluttered around the perimeter, carefully eyeing the forest below until she spotted the crowharrow pacing like a hungry wolf by the wall where he had last heard Tansel.
Lust could be a useful thing. In this case, it made the hunter somewhat predictable.
A short time later, Aradia alit to the ground before the gate. She stood there on six tiny legs, trembling for a time, before she spoke the word. As a woman, she stood. But in this form, so strange, lonely, deaf and dumb, her legs were weak and unaccustomed to holding her weight. She collapsed and fell forward, flailing blindly towards the gate. As she slammed her head against the bars, darkness descended.
Her consciousness returned with a shudder. Everything hurt; her head, her limbs, her heart and the scars pulling across her back, it all hurt. She lay before the main gate of Muin, in the dark. As she tried to move, she discovered one thing: her hand and forearm lay between the bars, inside the wizard’s enchanted wall. She inhaled sharply and pulled away...then tentatively put her hand back into the iron gap.
She could get in.
As a human, she could get in.
She sat up with a broken smile. Evidently, the same skill that enabled her to shift and evade the crowharrow also blocked her from entering the hall, just as it did him.
She changed into Nasturtium. This was not a respectful thing to do, but it was her best recourse. Low to the ground, she moved swiftly and silently into the woods towards the garden wall. A gnarled hawthorn tree grew there, its boughs reaching over the other side. It was the only place she knew where she could reach the top of the wall without touching it, and then get over as a human. The garden would protect her, then.
As she drew nearer, she sensed the crowharrow’s presence. He no longer sang, as Tansel had fled when Aradia baited and distracted him from his terrible spell. Warily, she studied the landscape of shadow and gray, looking for movement. Unseen even to a cat’s eyes, the immortal hunter brooded in the darkness, sitting perfectly still, his black wings folded and his icy gaze moving over everything in this world and the other. No living thing would elude his vigil.
The Winged Hunter Page 10
