The last thing he perceived before blacking out was the hunter’s wolf-dark gaze settling on his heart like a murder of crows.
*
Eaglin shivered as the watery darkness rushed into his body, eclipsing the light of his mind. The scent of the sea surrounded him. His memories descended like ravens to a feed: failure, incompletion, lust, and grief swirled into a vortex that slammed through the grid like a fist.
He stood in the silence of an ancient gate sealed by a pattern of five.
The Raven of Muin stood outside the gate, facing the forest, waiting. Beyond him, the thin rose beams of the Waeltower sparkled in intricate patterns on the flowers, shrubs and trees.
Eaglin stepped up to the gate from the inside. “Caelfar.”
The old wizard whirled around in surprise. His dark eyes were wet and his face drawn. Once again, Eaglin noted a gray shadow around him, hovering, almost taking shape. The Raven was thin and tired. Alarmingly.
“Maern!” Caelfar gasped. “How did you get inside the Pentacle?”
“Never mind,” Eaglin said, stepping back as the other wizard opened the gate and closed it quickly behind him. “What is amiss?”
Caelfar looked him up and down with palpable suspicion as he moved into the corridor beyond the vestibule, but he was too distraught to ask questions. Eaglin followed him. As they reached a courtyard draped in ivy, the old wizard said, “I need your help.” He wrung his hands and began to pace. “Aradia is shapeshifted some place in here and I can’t find her.”
“She can’t leave the Pentacle changed.”
“I fear she changed only to elude me until she can get out in her body.” He looked up at the calm sky shining above the yard as if he expected to see the witch flying in the air. “There are many places in this hall she can get out. I can’t be in all of them at the same time. I set watchers, but she could easily elude them.”
He stopped pacing and rubbed a hand across his face. “I just caught her talking to Tansel. I lost my temper and we had a row. I don’t know what she said to that girl but I fear the worst”—he clasped his hands over his heart—“I think she promised the Old One Tansel’s life!”
“Unlikely,” Eaglin said quietly. For I promised the winged hunter the same. “Peace, Caelfar. I’ll find her.”
Eaglin lowered his head and stepped back, pulling his airy cloak around his body like a wing. He knelt and spoke a word in Aenspeak to invoke the spirit of a mountain cat. A swift, agile hunter, the cat knew the paths to the Otherworld. His mind flowed into the boundaries of the hall, held in Caelfar’s spell. A wild rush of impressions spread before him, a torrent of sadness, color and song, each person, creature, tree and plant alive and suspended in a sea of light. He studied the glimmering patterns until his mind settled on an anomaly, a pattern of one thing beneath another in an unnatural combination of energies.
He changed. His consciousness erupted into a fluid expanse of sight, scent and sound. In a single bound, he leapt to the top of the courtyard wall, padded on supple paws over the top to the far eastern side and dropped without a sound. Then he trotted towards the skittered pattern of Aradia’s altered form. A short time later, he slipped into an empty corridor outside of the antechamber of the Waeltower, his thick haunches flowing.
A rat scuttled along the edge of the passage. When it saw him, it stopped with a squeak—and disappeared.
Eaglin didn’t focus on Aradia’s form but on the pattern of something shapeshifted. He only needed to catch her once. He entered a circular courtyard open to the sky and ringed with elm trees. With a graceful thrust of feline power, he leapt into the air with a twist and caught a bluebird in his claws. It screeched and vanished. Eaglin landed on his feet as a man, cloaked and hooded. In cupped, closed hands, he held a hornet. He clenched his jaw as it stung him.
“Moridrun fore sarumn,” he said in Aenspeak, as if to wish the morning well, and then he threw open his hands and stepped back. Aradia tumbled to the floor. Before she had a chance to come to her senses, Eaglin wove a long, threaded strand of Aenspeak that surrounded, penetrated and caressed her mind with an injunction drawn from the Source.
Aradia got to her hands and knees and retched like a cat throwing up a hairball.
Eaglin knelt by her side. “Forgive me, Aradia, but this was long in coming.”
He saw it just as she reached out. In a blur of hands and arms, he plucked the voidstone from the puddle of bile on the floor. He stood and wiped it on his cloak, then held it up between his forefinger and thumb. It shone in the nothingness beneath time and space.
“Give it to me,” the witch growled.
Eaglin slipped the stone into a pocket. “It was never yours. Is this why you came here?” The desperation in her eyes answered the question. “Did you plan to use it to bargain for your life?”
She snorted. “My life is worth nothing.”
“You would bargain for Tansel, then.”
“Isn’t that why you want it?”
Intuitive, Eaglin thought. But his dark purposes flowed far below the level of her observation. “Caelfar believes you’re sioros-marked. If that is true, the sioros won’t bargain; he’ll simply take his stone and kill you. Why are you so bent on reclaiming it—or were you planning to repeat history and flee shapeshifted?”
“It would draw him away from Tansel. Now you’ve taken my powers and condemned me—and her—to death.”
“Your powers are the reason this happened. Why did you take it from him?”
“This isn’t about that. Caelfar would’ve bound my powers to make a point. He sent you to do it because he didn’t have the courage to do it himself!”
“You know Caelfar doesn’t have the strength to capture you now. Even Kalein did not possess your skill. Perhaps, instead of blaming that old man for the troubles in your life, you can own your choices and leave him to his.”
“You dare chide me!” she spat, her eyes wild as thorns. “You know nothing of my choices!”
Eaglin opened and closed his hand a few times. The hornet bite had begun to swell. “I know you promised the Old One something in addition to giving your niece a sioros voidstone.” He lowered his hand with a gaze that would have stripped ice from a river. “The Old One doesn’t grant wishes for trifles. What else did you promise her?”
Aradia scrambled up to her knees with her arms over her belly, breathing heavily. “I’ll tell you naught, Keeper.”
He smiled faintly. “I don’t have to be nice about this.” As fear flickered over her face, Eaglin realized that he had better be careful before his own predicament with Tansel made him less kind than the Wizards’ Code required of him.
Aradia snapped, “Caelfar took the voidstone from her. He broke the spell. Not I.”
“For all you know, that’s the reason you were asked to give it to her in the first place,” Eaglin returned. “Had you not, she wouldn’t have been under Caelfar’s protection when the sioros returned.”
“If Caelfar hadn’t taken the stone, he wouldn’t have returned.”
“You don’t know that. What else did you promise the Old One?”
For some moments, Aradia wouldn’t yield. Then, as if buckling under a weight, her eyes filled with tears. “She demanded Tansel’s innocence.” Her weathered features shrank with pain. “I was to await a sign. But my only sign was the crowharrow and now he has claimed her by no action of mine!”
A chill crept up Eaglin’s spine from the depths of the sea. “It’s still her choice,” he said, his throat dry. “The Old One will honor it.”
Aradia pushed herself clumsily to her feet. In a voice as tired as a dying oak she said, “Tansel cares naught for that. She’s unknown to a man and she doesn’t understand what that means. The crowharrow does. He’s hunting her, seducing her—she pines day and night for him like a cat in heat. I tell you, it’s her life she’ll give to the Destroyer, now.”
Considering what he had promised the sioros, Eaglin wondered if Aradia were right. Clearly, by that
vow, the unholy deed of releasing Tansel to the Destroyer had been passed to him. Indeed, it appeared that Aradia had made the same decision he had in the sioros’ lair. “Why are you so willing to condemn Tansel to death?” he asked, needing to know the answer. “You love her. What do you fear that’s worse than watching her die?”
“Ignorant whoreson,” she choked. “I’ve watched every woman in my bloodline die. I can’t change the beast’s curse after three generations. Tansel’s life is forfeit.”
“Aradia...”
“Leave off!” she shrieked. “You don’t understand. She desires him and that’s all that matters, now. The cycle has begun. There’s no stopping it.”
“So it would seem.” All things fall to the Destroyer. “But I can’t believe Maern would promise to protect Tansel only to destroy her in the end. She asked for the girl’s innocence. That’s a different kind of death. Perhaps this is about initiation.”
“It’s about blood, Keeper. However you throw it.”
Time hung still as Eaglin finally perceived the shape of this. It flooded up from the shadow on his heart like a starless, swirling ocean of male instinct he had never expressed for fear of it.
You did not understand that you cast the shadow of a god.
Initiation.
He had said it himself, in the sioros’ lair: How long do you think it’ll be before he gives Tansel to a mortal man? Not long! A fleeting thing, a woman’s innocence.
The Rites of Hawthorn.
As the Raven of Eusiron rose and backed away, he knew beyond his cold, watery doubts that Aradia was not the only one from whom the Old One was asking an impracticable sacrifice.
*
Tansel sat by the pool with Kalein’s statue long enough that something should have happened, anything. Nothing did, though grief continued to press her, slowly, bleeding, soft, and patient. Trembling in every nerve, her gaze crept to the finned tail beneath the surface of the water. In the form of a fish, she forgot herself and a crowharrow took her.
“Tansel,” spoke a voice. She didn’t respond as her great grandfather approached and lowered himself stiffly onto the bench behind her. “I am so sorry.” He could have been talking to the statue, Tansel, or both. “I didn’t mean for you to witness that.”
Tansel turned her head, brushing the noise of the fight beneath a cloak of silence.
“Forgive me,” the wizard said.
Tansel nodded weakly. What had her aunt ever done for her besides give her some tansy deterrent and that awful stone? A weak attitude: a wizard held no better quarter. Emptiness clawed at her like too many oak branches, too many secrets. “Will you turn her out again?” she asked. “Leave her to his mercy?”
“Certainly not. I spoke in anger. But she has escaped me and I fear she may make that decision on her own.” He rubbed his forehead. “Remember when I told you the Ravens of Ostarin and Eusiron were coming here to help us?”
“With the crowharrow.” Under the force of the immortal’s spell, she had almost forgotten about the wizards.
“Aye. One of them is here now, as an apparition. I called on him to find her. I must go to them now.”
“May I come?”
He stood and held out his hand. Tansel took it and rose. As they walked away from the pool and onto the path he asked, “How did Aradia get into the hall? Do you know?”
Tansel shook her head. “I found her in the garden. She was hurt, so I took care of her.”
“Ah,” he said, clearing his throat. “This is why you asked me not to come to you.”
Tansel winced inwardly. Her aunt had provided her with a workable excuse, as telling the wizard she had wanted privacy to hear the crowharrow’s song would not have gone well. As they moved through the garden, she said, “My aunt said I am marked. Is that true?”
He patted her arm, folded in his. “The crowharrow can’t harm you as long as you choose to resist him.”
“I can’t stay inside this hall forever.”
He turned with an expression so strange it caused her to shiver. “That’s why the Ravens are coming here. They are very powerful.”
They walked through the honeysuckle gate with unspoken words and questions between them. Once, Tansel had believed that nothing could thwart a wizard as powerful as the Raven of Muin, let alone three of his kind, but she doubted this now. They passed into the corridor with the tapestries. As they reached the end, Tansel glanced quickly at the raven on the rock.
“Mushroom is missing,” she blurted.
“I just saw him today, in the kitchen.” He guided her across a courtyard and into an archway carved with leafy boughs. “That’s where the mice are.”
Mice, magpies and messes, Tansel thought miserably. What was Caelfar doing in the kitchen?
He gazed down at her. “If you’re worried about your little scrap with Sky, rest your mind. I informed her that you’re to be given every consideration she would give to me.”
Tansel’s relief mixed with unease. “I’m sorry I blasted her.”
“Are you?”
“Well...” No. “I shouldn’t have done it.”
“I had already asked them to treat you as a guest, so your response was not entirely without justification. However, once all of this blows over, my dear, you and I are going to talk. You have too much power to be left on your own without guidance.”
She looked up at him quickly. “You said I didn’t have to become a wizard.”
“That was before you drew Waeltower light from the garden and focused it onto one of my staff.” His tone softened. “Wizards aren’t so bad, you know. Once you learn some manners, you may come to enjoy the craft. It is your birthright.”
They passed into an antechamber ringed with elm trees. Aradia cowered there like a worn-out heap, looking up at a man standing over her. He wore a black cloak and his face was hidden by the hood. For a brief moment, Tansel thought it was the warrior wizard with the wolf eyes...until he turned around and pushed his hood back.
Tansel froze with a small sound of alarm that caused Caelfar to turn to her. “Tansel? This is the Raven of Eusiron.”
Aradia rattled loose a woodpecker laugh that caused both wizards to look at her, then at each other. Tansel backed away in horror. Flesh of a god, gray-green eyes and hair the color of a crowharrow wing—this was the man in her nightmares, the one by the raging river, and sitting on the granite crag.
The man with a crowharrow shadow.
She turned and fled like a rabbit into the safety of her great grandfather’s hall.
The Voidstone
Eaglin shifted into the layers of the inner space like a spirit returning to a moldy grave, Aradia’s mad laughter still clattering in his mind. What had frightened Tansel? It was as if she knew what he planned to do. In the wake of her flight, Caelfar had gathered himself up from his gray shadows wearing the same expression he had undoubtedly given Maetor right before destroying him. You better have a very good explanation for this, he had said.
Eaglin had nothing but very bad explanations.
Still projected, he stepped with spectral grace into a wooded landscape. Old oaks twisted up into a tangled canopy of fresh leaves, and the forest floor was thick with mossy stones, fiddleheads, and columbine. Eaglin drew forth the voidstone, held it straight up to the sky in his fist and grated a command used to locate the keeper of an object.
Wind swelled through the trees, carrying the scent of rain. Every bough and hollow looked like a big black wing. After a moment, Eaglin’s mind came into focus on an odd tree growing from the shadow of a granite boulder. The sioros lounged there like a cat, his feet upon the rock. He turned a hand before his face and studied his claws. Only his ice-blue eyes moved into a steady, penetrating stare that turned Eaglin’s blood cold.
“Give it to me,” the immortal hunter said quietly.
Eaglin returned the stone to his pocket. It throbbed against his body like a pulsing hole. “I’ve given you enough, I think.”
“It is mine
by Menscefaros.”
Interesting. “Let Tansel go.”
“No.”
Eaglin tilted his head with an expression of challenge. “I’ll put the stone beyond your reach forever unless you relinquish your claim on her.”
The sioros bared his fangs with a hiss. “Fool. You do not have that power.”
Eaglin lifted his chin, his gaze steady and calm. “I agreed to your bargain; you can’t harm me. You can’t take the voidstone from me, either. I shall hide it in my father’s realm and you’ll never see it again.”
The winged hunter’s expression didn’t change; he didn’t stir a feather or flick a nail as he said, “Keep it. The maiden is mine.”
With a turn in his eye, he sent Eaglin spiraling into darkness with a parting word: I’ll be waiting for you, Wizard.
*
It started as a pulse, a low, steady heartbeat just below the surface of awareness. Like a bleeding wound, it pressed into the air through a high mountain spring, an ache, a tide as sweet as honey, cream, and brine.
For several days, Eaglin and Lorth rode on, stopping only briefly to rest, usually around dusk or dawn. Eaglin could no longer separate the pulsing from his heart or body. It aligned with the thunder of Sefae’s hooves striking the earth. It moved in the stars, the waxing moon, and the wind. His thoughts became a warm sea of visions, elusive and blurred, nothing direct, nothing he could identify: the bare curve of a woman’s hip, a cheek, the scent of rosemary, soft feathers, body heat on a pillow, a lover’s cry. Though not his own, the visions were as profoundly intimate as the sex that creates a cosmos. His heartbeat became the rhythm, and his loins grew hungry as wolves.
He had returned from his visit with the sioros in his usual cloud of disorientation, voidstone in his keeping. With renewed urgency, he had explained to Lorth what passed in Muin—some of it—and little else. Fortunately, their haste didn’t leave much room for talk. But Eaglin didn’t have to be a wizard to perceive the questions in the hunter’s bearing, a brooding state of acquiescence that reminded him of something his mother had once said: A Web sees the spaces between the lines. This is not conscious knowing, but a sense, an inclination that serves the Old One’s purpose.
The Winged Hunter Page 13
