“This won’t be nice,” Lorth said needlessly.
As they entered, the Raven of Muin turned, his lips set like a sealed temple and his eyes as dark as the storm gathering in the east. A female shape hovered around him, thin and misty, with tall wings of shifting light. It bore the mark of an apparition, an advanced thoughtform consciously created to do a wizard’s bidding. Oddly, Caelfar didn’t seem to be aware of it.
Eaglin dropped into Lorth’s mind. Tell me you see that.
I do indeed, came the intent reply.
Caelfar held out his hand. “Give it to me.” It could have been the sioros asking.
Lorth threw Eaglin an I-told-you-so glance as he reached into a pocket for the voidstone. “We meant to use it as leverage,” the hunter said, unfolding a rough cloth. “We didn’t know the effect it would have on us.”
The old wizard snatched the stone from his hand. To Eaglin, he snapped, “If you had told me you were taking it, I could’ve warned you.”
“There wasn’t time.” Eaglin stepped up to the iomor beaming in serene consciousness from the center of the pentacle on the floor. “Even if we had been here, we wouldn’t have been able to prevent Tansel from sneaking out of the hall.”
“I needed you to guard her!” the old Raven shouted. “I couldn’t be with her day and night. It takes energy, constant attention, to keep a Formation Pentacle of this size and power.”
“We aren’t the only ones here,” Lorth noted. “One of your staff could’ve watched over her. You saw the effect the sioros had on her in the forest that day. Did you trust the girl to stay in the circle of her own desire?”
“And why wouldn’t she?” said a voice from the doorway. They turned. A tall, thickset man in a blue-green cloak of the Order of Albatross leaned against the arch. He had gray eyes, dark brown, curly hair twisted into a knot, and a warrior’s braid on his breast bound at the end with a silver loerfalos. He stepped inside. “Why wouldn’t she stay where she is safe?”
Caelfar came forward and gestured briskly to the Ravens. “Gabran, this is the Raven of Eusiron, High Dark to the Priesthood of Maern”—he turned to Lorth—“and the Raven of Ostarin, First Raptor and Ninth Seat on the Aenlisarfon.” To them he said, “Masters, this is Gabran, Order of Albatross. He is first mate on the Winterscythe, at port in Caerroth, presently. He arrived earlier today.”
Eaglin’s interest turned abruptly keen. The Winterscythe was a Keepers’ war ship, and only a warrior of some skill, mettle and attitude could attain the position of first mate on that vessel. The captain and the first mate were in the Order of Albatross; the rest of the crew comprised cutthroats and warriors from all over the world. Eaglin had recently learned that the captain of the Winterscythe was on the wrong side of the Eye for attacking a ship he should not have.
“You are Tansel’s father?” Lorth presumed.
“Aye.” The sailor greeted them in the proper fashion—roughly—and then stood back, tense and visibly malcontent. Eaglin required none of his wizards’ skills to smell trouble. This man had been too long away at sea where his only masters were storms, blades, and bad orders.
“What are you doing here?” Eaglin asked pointedly.
“To see my daughter, of course. I didn’t expect to arrive and find her at the mercy of a crowharrow.” The sailor stepped forward like a warrior claiming the center of a sword yard. “I understand you were summoned to protect her.”
Eaglin couldn’t decide which stunned him more: the irony of the statement or Gabran’s impudence. “We were asked,” Eaglin replied, his patience dissolving into the chasm of his intentions.
Caelfar said, “You weren’t asked to take the voidstone from my keeping.”
“You were safe inside your Pentacle,” Eaglin returned. “We were not.”
“You fell to its charms within ten miles of this hall!” Caelfar shot back, his sunken cheeks reddening.
Lorth shifted on his feet. “We still wouldn’t have made it.”
The old wizard swung around. “Didn’t it occur to you the sioros knew what you were doing as he carried her off?”
“What were you doing?” Gabran inquired, looking between them.
“Hah!” Caelfar barked with an extravagant nod. “Aye, tell him that.”
“We were fucking like cats,” Lorth said matter-of-factly, lifting his chin with a calm wolf eye. Eaglin lowered his forehead to his fingers as the assassin’s cavalier admission fell into the air—a clear attempt to bait Gabran, if Eaglin knew the hunter at all.
The sailor turned scarlet. “What?”
Eaglin turned as the metallic scrape of a blade cut the air. With the fiery eyes of a wild boar, Gabran charged him headlong.
Lorth pulled his blade and covered the space to parry the sailor’s blow. In three blinding strokes, he sent Gabran’s sword clanging across the floor. Then he put him down with a cracking punch, dragged him up and slammed him against the wall, holding him as still as death and dreams with a cold edge at his throat. When the hunter spoke, his voice vibrated deep within the sinews of the Otherworld. “Control your temper, Albatross. I could strip your sword and cloak and have you hung from the South Quadrant tower like a thief.”
Jaw clenched, Gabran grudgingly lowered his eyes. As Lorth released him, he knelt. Eaglin sensed he had some reason for doing this besides fear and respect for one far his superior, but it was convincing enough, coming from him. Eaglin doubted this man had ever knelt to anyone.
Caelfar lowered himself into a chair, his misty specter floating and shifting around him. “Gabran,” he said irritably. “You’re out of line.” Apparently, the Raven had decided that Gabran’s lack of respect was more of a problem than Eaglin’s and Lorth’s indiscretion.
Gabran moved to get up, and then paused abruptly as Lorth leveled a chilling gaze on him. “I’ve not bid you rise, Albatross.” He padded back and forth before the warrior, his sword bare. “For a man who’s not been here to care for his only daughter these many years, you’re mighty righteous. And ignorant too, that you’d challenge a Raven who could kill you with a thought.” Lorth stopped pacing and leveled his sword at the sailor’s face. “If you ever raise your blade to a Master of the Eye again, I shall see to your execution personally.” He sheathed his blade and bade the warrior to rise with a flick of his finger.
Gabran stood, straightened his back and turned to Eaglin. “Forgive me, Master,” he said properly. “I felt protective.”
Eaglin nodded with the faintest acknowledgment.
“Touching,” Lorth said. “I didn’t hear tell that you accompanied Freil when he went after her.”
Gabran spit blood on the floor. “I didn’t know about that. I was a day behind him. He left Eyrie before I’d finished my business.”
Eaglin exchanged a glance with Lorth, and then released a breath and addressed Caelfar. “We didn’t come here to defend what you perceive as weakness or frivolity in the face of crisis.” The old wizard glanced up from his brooding. “We risked our lives to get here.”
“Your romp in the forest was quite risky,” Caelfar noted.
“Our personal affairs are none of your business,” Eaglin informed him. “We didn’t endanger Tansel. She’s still under the Old One’s protection.”
“You don’t know that,” Caelfar grumbled.
“Neither do you.” Eaglin started to pace. “We did discover something. Do you know what the voidstone is? Why the sioros wants it so badly?”
Caelfar dropped his hand. “I felt the same thing you did, though I sealed it away rather than explore the particulars.” His tone was dry enough to shrivel a ripe tomato. “It belonged to the sioros and Tansel should never have had it.”
“And yet she did have it. Have you not considered why the Old One demanded this?”
“That’s why I took the stone and brought Tansel here. I assumed my arrival into this situation was designed, and that I found the stone to protect Tansel once Aradia’s pact with the Old One was broken.”
“What makes you think it was broken?” Lorth asked.
“Because the sioros came after us! Aradia claimed it was because I took the stone. I’ve come to believe that. Why else would he have come, when for seven years he left her alone?”
“The stone was hidden only as long as Tansel had it,” Eaglin said. “My guess is, because she is pure, like the stone, the sioros couldn’t see it. Once removed, it drew his attention—only that’s not what he noticed. He discovered Tansel.”
“What is this ‘pact’ you speak of?” Gabran ventured.
“It began when the sioros killed Tansel’s mother.” If Eaglin had expected a reaction from the sailor to this, he would have been disappointed; he got none. “Aradia was there. She found the voidstone and escaped the sioros with it, believing she was marked. Shortly thereafter, she invoked the Old One to ask for Tansel’s safety. In return, the goddess asked for two things. One was to give the stone to Tansel. The other,” he took a deep breath and brushed a glance with Lorth as if to say, Get ready, “was for Tansel’s innocence.”
For a moment, no one moved. Then Caelfar rose slowly, gripping the arms of his chair.
Gabran glanced at the old wizard quickly. “How was she to deliver that? By abandoning Tansel to the crowharrow?”
“That wasn’t her intention,” Lorth said.
Caelfar stepped towards Eaglin with a livid expression and wheezed, “Her innocence? You were here and you didn’t tell me this?”
“Would you have listened after she fled at the sight of me?”
Gabran cleared his throat. “You said you discovered something about the voidstone.”
Lorth said, “It’s a portal to Maern through which she materializes to him.”
“She makes love to him through it,” Eaglin added. “His need for that drew him to Tansel. He wants the Old One, and as she is in all women, especially at the threshold of change, he seeks to complete his desire however he can.”
“Give him back the stone,” Gabran said. “Then he won’t need Tansel.”
Eaglin shook his head. “Once he noticed Tansel, he wanted nothing else.” He addressed Caelfar. “After I took the stone, I invoked the sioros and offered it to him in return for his vow to leave her alone. He refused.”
“It isn’t about the stone anymore,” Lorth added.
Caelfar said, “That wouldn’t have happened if that daft granddaughter of mine hadn’t tried to bargain with the Old One.”
Since his scuffle with Aradia, Eaglin had become less convinced of her madness and more conscious of a bigger landscape. As he tried to imagine what had happened in the clearing between Aradia and the sioros, he could only guess that she had stood up to him, perhaps as a diversion. She would have to have baited him good to get bitten instead of killed. Rare, for a sioros to do that.
After a time in which no one said anything, Gabran said, “So you think Tansel is alive. The goddess is protecting her.”
“Insofar as Tansel chooses it so,” Eaglin said.
The sailor blinked as if he had just heard something in the Dark Tongue. “Do you have a plan for rescuing her?”
Caelfar looked every day as old as he was, at that moment. “We don’t have the power to wrest her from a sioros. She is lost.”
“I can find her,” Eaglin decided aloud.
In the wake of their questioning stares, Lorth got his meaning first. He shook his head once, slowly.
“What are you saying?” Caelfar demanded.
“I can shapeshift into his kind.” As he said it, Eaglin shuddered at the simplicity of the Old One’s cyclic plans; how artfully this played out despite his heart’s every cry to the contrary.
“You’ve done that?” Gabran said.
Once, Eaglin thought, seeing himself in his dead maiden’s eyes.
“Not even a master shapeshifter can do that,” Caelfar scoffed. “It’s impossible. The sioros is immortal. You are not.”
“I don’t have to be. As a sioros, I’ll have enough senses to track and keep up with him. I have to assume he’ll take her to his lair. As long as he has her, he’ll be bound to this dimension, so he’ll have to fly there. Nothing else but a sioros could follow him.”
“A bird could,” said Gabran.
“A bird couldn’t carry Tansel,” Eaglin returned.
Surprise shot across the warrior’s face. “You’re going to fly with her?”
“There’s no other way to get her out. His lair is inaccessible.”
Caelfar put his head in his hands and made a sound of dismay. “Even if you do get her out, you won’t be able to pass between dimensions as he can. You’ll never escape him.”
“I can use interdimensional portals,” Eaglin said.
Lorth tilted his head in doubt. “He’ll see you above the grid.”
“Aye,” Eaglin agreed. “But it’ll take him longer to find me in it. Aradia eluded him; so can I.”
“What are you talking about?” Gabran said.
“An immortal can focus his body anywhere in time and space,” Eaglin explained. “I can only do that projected. In a physical body—any kind of physical body—I am bound to this dimension. But I can use the Dark Tongue to alter the structure of perceivable reality as it emerges from formlessness. I may be able to lose him long enough to get back here with Tansel.”
Eaglin cringed inwardly at the boldness of his plan. It sounded plausible when spoken aloud; it may even have been possible under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, his oath to deliver Tansel to the sioros would make taking her from his clutches an unlikely feat, indeed.
“You’re still assuming she’s alive,” Caelfar grumbled. “I’m not convinced of that.”
“I believe she is still under the Old One’s protection. He can’t harm her unless she chooses to yield to him.”
“I saw her under his spell,” Lorth reminded him. “Yielding to him was the only thing on her mind, even after I snapped her out of it.”
“We have to try,” Eaglin said. “I’ll not abandon her on an assumption. She may be strong enough to resist him, at least for a time.”
Gabran asked, “Could someone tell me of this spell you keep talking about?”
Something dark rippled through Eaglin’s solar plexus as he considered how best to explain this to a man who knew so little about a daughter he had abandoned and now wanted to protect. He could be gentle and elusive—or he could plumb the depths of Gabran’s questionable paternal resolve with the ugly truth.
He decided on the latter.
“It means,” he said evenly, “that he is getting into her mind, heart and loins with the Dark Tongue and heating her up to the point where she’ll choose being raped to death rather than not complete the need.”
Under the silence that filled the chamber, Eaglin turned and strode out, his cloak moving around his feet like a flock of blackbirds. He didn’t look back, he didn’t care what talk he left behind and he was glad for the dimness of the hall—it hid the aching effect his own words had on him.
Tea by the River
Though young, her roots still shallow, she ran through the dirt with laughter and the desperation of the prolific, crowding around old plants, deep plants. She rose up in a patch of sun with jagged leaves, a tough stalk, and a presence that would not stand aside.
She basked beneath the wizard’s spell...until someone, a deep, motherly, angry someone, stomped across the fertile earth, grasped her by the crown and pulled. Up into the air she flew, away from the earth, away from the water.
Most unsettling.
Tansel opened her eyes with a sharp breath. Cold wind blew over her limbs. The crowharrow held her chest and belly against his, one arm around her back and the other over and beneath her rump as together they pulsed up and down in sweeping rhythm. His voice vibrated in his chest, a deep note she didn’t understand. She twisted her head and looked down. Far below, beneath a filmy veil of clouds, lay a vast, undulating tapestry of hills, forests, peaks, and rivers. To the east, a fortress
of billowing clouds threatened a storm. The air smelled salty and strange; her mother had once told her this was the scent of the sea. A storm from the east. Eastcold, they called it, and it meant high winds, heavy rain and a drop in temperature brought on by a north turning wind.
Animal instinct told her to scream, to struggle, but the empty air beneath kept her still. The crowharrow held her as close as a lover, strong as the mountains below and cold as the wind tearing over her body through the thin fabric of her dress. Her thoughts bloomed wildly, a moist, midsummer garden of elation and need kept at bay only by fear of height and the memory of the crowharrow’s spectral mien as he had appeared from nowhere in the forest green.
They entered the clouds. Cold began to crowd her thoughts, even given the immortal’s warmth and the startlingly intimate way he carried her. Shivering, she peered up past the muscles of his arm and chest, where the long, wind-tangled strands of his black hair draped around his throat. She said, “Please take me down, I’m freezing.” She drew her arms against his chest and let a shiver pulse through.
Gray-black mountains with snowy peaks came into view as the crowharrow dropped beneath the clouds. He circled lower, towards a craggy range bared like teeth around a darker pass. As they descended, Tansel didn’t see any place to land. Wind spiraled around her as the crowharrow flexed his wings for a final descent, heading for a ring of tall, carved stones cradled in a pass with no access but that which could be attained by flight.
He landed, and put her down on a circle of smooth marble ringed by statues. A five-pointed star spanned the diameter of the enclosure. Tansel scrambled back against the base of one of the stone figures and rubbed her arms, gathering warmth from the center of her chest.
The statues were beautiful. An assembly of flawless male beings, they had long flowing hair, chiseled faces, and muscled limbs. They wore robes, tapestried tunics, leggings wrapped in leaves and jewels, and the heavy trappings of warriors. One held a branch; another, a bow and quiver; others a crow, a cup, a sword. In the center stood a robed god holding an amethyst orb.
Of the same ilk, the crowharrow perched like a vulture on a broken rock shelf hanging above a warrior holding a crow. The immortal’s wings settled into a tower of night behind him, his arms were draped over one knee, and the shining black twists of his hair moved in the breeze. His expression was unfathomable. Tansel’s heart thumped in the hollow maw of her belly. She had no idea what to do.
The Winged Hunter Page 16
