Not pleased at all.
Getting Tansel back to Muin was his immediate problem, and coming up with a way to shake off the sioros long enough to do that wouldn’t be easy. Something extreme would be called for, if both he and Tansel were to escape with the option of wresting Aradia from the sioros’ control.
How to make the immortal believe Tansel had died? Feigning grief and rage would be easy, especially as a sioros; all he had to do was settle into his old memory of losing his first hawthorn-clad maiden to the Wolf River. One of his wings had been twisted, and a wound burned in his side, on his waist. So much the better. He let himself drop beneath the canopy of the trees, and then released an anguished howl that stretched the forest like a gale.
The sioros materialized in the air above him.
Eaglin breathed a word and changed into the wind that shook the trees. Though he was now free to do things he couldn’t have done while carrying Tansel, he had to do more than simply elude his hunter. Furthermore, he couldn’t leave Tansel in the altered forest for long. Sooner or later, the sioros would notice her, and know he had been tricked. While he no longer had the scent of her innocence to guide him, he surely had other ways—the scent of sex, at the least. An unsettling thought.
Before long, Eaglin remembered one shortcoming of changing into elements. He had relaxed into scattered contentment; his thoughts fled before him more quickly than he could attend to them, until he was no longer sure how long he had been in this state. With a wrenching shift, he spoke a word and became a child of the wind. Hoping the sioros didn’t see the gyrfalcon appear and notice its wounded wing, Eaglin cast a diamond eye over the mountains and the carpet of the forest below. He wheeled around, his tired wings stroking the air, until he reached a cliff towering over the tops of gnarled, stunted birches. There, he landed, to gather himself.
The sioros appeared before him with a snarl.
Eaglin spoke a word. Shapeshifting into stone was by far the most dangerous kind of transformation, but he had no time to ponder it. Briefly, he realized the sioros must have recognized the gyrfalcon as one that didn’t frequent this domain—probably something he had learned from hunting Aradia.
Eaglin’s thoughts grew slow, burdened and lazy with primeval inertia. From a very great and uncaring distance, the sioros slammed an iron fist into the new mass of rock jutting from the side of the cliff.
Eaglin changed into something close to stone, but not.
The sioros’ breath froze the silvery moss. “You are not leaving this realm, Thief, to return heavy with grief to your hall. Why not?” His grating laughter vanished into silence.
Eaglin tore his consciousness from the moss and flew on the swift wings of a golden eagle to the place where he had left Tansel. He had stalled a moment too long: the sioros was onto him. Now, he no longer had the time to entice the sioros with his bloody linen even if he had wanted to abandon Aradia. This would have to be far more engaging than that.
He thought of the rhyme his mother had told him as a child; most particularly, the last line: Destroyer’s smile bids him depart.
Destroyer’s smile. As a High Dark, Eaglin knew the aspects of the Old One, and could become them as easily as he could wind or stone—though the danger was beyond what any Keeper of the Eye would utter. The Old One would not be fooled. Surrender had to be genuine.
He spoke a word and descended as a sioros into the blue-green gash of the woods. With a chill on his heart that sickened him, he invoked a summoning command that challenged the sioros to a death match. Nothing less than a call to fate, even the immortal’s hunt would pale before it.
As expected, the winged hunter appeared in the air before him, claws splayed, fangs bared and eyes as white as winter. He spoke a word that Eaglin didn’t understand and struck him across the heart. Eaglin had only enough time to speak a transformation command in the Dark Tongue before he spun from the sky like a bird shot down by an archer’s arrow.
He didn’t remember hitting the ground. From the Void, he stirred and stepped from his unmoving body, turning slowly, dispassionately, to look upon it. Light flowed into him from the darkness; pure, perfect light that knew itself as itself.
The darkness knew more.
He thought of Tansel. At once, he soared over the ferns and shining light of the mountain cat’s prints in an alternate Loralin. Cloaked and hooded in black, he appeared in the woods beyond the hollow tree. Just then, a swift, golden blur moved through the green.
The sioros turned, and his eyes narrowed as he fell into a predatory crouch to face his attacker. Five times his size, the cat leapt at him with a growl that shook the ground. But the sioros bore the swiftness of an immortal; he vanished and reappeared on the cat’s neck, where with one swipe, he opened a gash that caused the beast to scream with the harrowing ripple of a death cry.
Tansel’s scream vanished into it. Unable to see or hear Eaglin in the form of a shade, she fled into the deeper shadows of the wood.
Eaglin spoke a command that caused the sioros to look up from atop the dead cat and whirl around. He alit to the ground. Spectral, lonely and cold, Eaglin said, in the Dark Tongue:
“Our oath is undone. The Destroyer has taken me. Begone.”
For a moment, the sioros stared as if he had never seen the wizard before. Then he knelt in the ferns, folded his wings and bowed his head.
Soundlessly, he vanished.
*
Tansel stumbled and fell as the forest around her changed. Stunned, she pushed her face from the rooty, rocky ground, gasping as pain shot out from the gashes in her leg. It appeared she had returned to Loralin; at least, she was no longer in the strange forest with the golden cat, now dead at the hands of the crowharrow because of her.
That she had returned here boded ill indeed. Eaglin’s spell must have passed with his life. She looked up and around, searching the trees, tears streaming down her face. The wizard had changed her so deeply she didn’t think she would ever know the extent of it, and to face his death—one more man gone—was the cruelest curse.
Secondary to this, she didn’t know where she was. She had no food, no provisions. She got shakily to her feet, glanced at the sun and began moving through the brush in what she could only guess was the general direction of Muin.
Perhaps Lorth or Caelfar would know that Eaglin had gone, or been gone too long. Maybe they even knew he was dead. They might come looking for her.
Images of Eaglin in the cave tormented her as she moved through the forest. Her tears wouldn’t stop and the pain in her heart was so great she had nearly forgotten about the crowharrow, though by habit she continued to search the trees and the sky.
She hadn’t gone far before something odd stopped her. A beam of light filtered through the trees and illuminated the forest floor. It didn’t come from above. The moment she focused on it, it vanished. She kept moving.
Then she saw it again, to her left. It beamed down at an angle not related to the sun, and seemed to turn, as if wind had blown it astray. It came alive in her heart like a caress. She hesitated, not trusting it, and then continued on.
When it appeared again, Tansel had a marked thought that the light was guiding her. Maybe this was Caelfar, leading her home. At once, she followed it. She limped along with new optimism, this way and that, changing her direction each time a beam appeared, and then faded out.
Then she saw something that destroyed her hopes with a single blow.
It lay still and unnatural in a thicket of blueberry bushes, a familiar shirt, a flash of black. Tansel slowed as her blood ran cold. Then she ran to the body with a cry. Eaglin. She jumped into the thicket and put her arms around him, quailing at the wound on his chest, struck through his shirt and drenched in blood. She put her hand over it, but it was no use. She tried to lift him up, bring his face to her chest. He was heavy, still and very pale.
Shattered and confused as to why the beams would have led her here, Tansel held his cold body to hers. “Why did you go?” she cried.
“I held on, didn’t I? You knew he would kill you! You—”
She froze. In an old beech tree not fifteen paces away, the crowharrow sat draped on a low branch, his expression as calm and cold as always, though perhaps more so, if that were possible.
Tansel erupted into fiery anguish. “You fiend!” she shrieked. “You utter evil bane of the world! How many more will you take from me?” She let Eaglin’s dead body down and stood up. His blood covered her hands and chest. “End it now.” She pounded her chest and held out her arms. “Go ahead! Take me too, you wretched murderer!”
The crowharrow didn’t move; his expression didn’t change. Only his head turned slightly, as if to consider her. Tansel jumped from the blueberry thicket, picked up a heavy stick and threw it at the winged hunter with all her strength. He caught it instantaneously, and then dropped it with no more exertion than if he were brushing away a gnat. Then he lifted his wings, dropped from the tree and flew into the nothingness of another time.
Tansel dropped to her knees. Eaglin was right: the beast couldn’t take her. Only everyone around her. Some protection!
She whirled around as she heard something. A voice? She jumped up and clambered to Eaglin’s body, her heart pounding wildly. She took his face in her hands and searched for life, leaned down and put her cheek to his lips, his nose, hoping for breath. Had she imagined that sound?
His hands closed over her head, and then her shoulders, his fingers gently twining in her hair. “Tansel.” His eyes opened; beautiful green as moss in the sun. Crying a laugh, she tore off part of her dress at the hem with her teeth, folded it sloppily and pressed it over the ghastly gash in his chest. Tears burned her eyes.
“This is very bad, Eaglin.”
“Not as bad as it looks,” he whispered. “I tempered the blow.” He closed his hand over hers. “Clever wizard, you saw my signals.”
“The light beams? You did that?”
He nodded. “I was out of my body. You couldn’t see me, so I had to lead you here.” Clutching the bloody fabric over his heart, he tried to sit up. Tansel helped to disentangle him from the bushes. His clothes were torn, his face and arms were covered with scratches, and he moved stiffly, burdened by pain. “We must hurry. The crowharrow has withdrawn, but it won’t last. We must get to Muin.”
She stared. “Truly? After all that, he’ll return?”
He leaned over with a cough. “There’s a stream not far from here. I need to clean this wound and treat it.”
Nodding, Tansel helped him to his feet and put her arm around his waist to support him. They started hobbling slowly to the west. “How far to Muin?” she asked.
“Two days. I sent for help. Lorth will be here by nightfall with horses.”
“You can ride?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to try.”
“Can you shapeshift?”
He gasped as he missed a step. “I’m too weak, and it would be too risky. If we get into trouble, I can wrap up in a cloak and strap myself to a horse as a corpse.” He rasped a laugh.
Tansel did not. “I thought you were dead.”
“The crowharrow had to believe the Old One took me for breaking the vow I made to him in her name. That was the only way he would have left us alone. I led you to my body before I returned to it, so you’d find me and think I was gone. I knew he would come back to make sure.”
“You wanted him to see me?”
He nodded. “I knew he wouldn’t take you”—he threw her a hard, sidelong glance—“but I didn’t expect you to attack him. That was foolish.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you.” She stopped and pulled up a yarrow plant growing in a patch of sun. It was small and scraggly, but it would do. “I’m ever so weary of him.”
“The daughters of Kalein,” the Raven said with a dry smile. “Scrappy lot, you are.”
“Is my aunt still in Muin?” she asked hopefully, as they started down a ferny rise to a burbling stream. A short distance away, more yarrow grew on a knoll scattered with young birch trees. Leaving the wizard leaning against a tree, she ran to fetch some and then returned, rolling the leafy stalks together in a bunch.
He stood there, his head bowed, hair hanging down. His mood had changed. She walked by him to a bed of mossy stones and pulled up several clumps of violets. As the wizard lifted his head, his expression crushed her.
“Eaglin?”
“Help me tend to this. Then we’ll talk. I have much to tell you.”
Mother’s Blood
Aradia opened her eyes to darkness.
She hung from her wrists on a cold, damp surface. Chains bit into her flesh like teeth. Blood seeped from the bite on her neck, now partly numb, and the scratches in her leg throbbed with infection. Her breath was short. The dank air smelled of dirt and roots, and was so densely black that she wondered if she had lost her sight. She would have feared deafness, too, if not for the echoes of her anguished movements in the space around.
She didn’t know if she yet lived, or where she had come to, but only the crowharrow could have brought her here. That made it a very bad place to be, dead or alive.
Her voice emerged as a whisper as she spoke a word. But the Raven of Eusiron had taken her power away. Hatred oozed from her wounds, moved like stagnant, late-summer wind through her nose and mouth; it grew from her head and sat in her gut, empty and hard as ancient stones. She hated him and she hated Caelfar for bringing him. She hated them all, every one, for existing in the world and not giving her what she needed, no more than would the immortal hunter himself, the curse of her old age.
She didn’t weep; her tears had dried like water shrinking from a drought-stricken land. She envisioned the young wizard Freil riding from the forest on his snow white horse, his strong hand reaching down. When his innocence was gone, he would become like the rest, a lofty crag that cared nothing of softness or the soothing caress of deep pools. Where was Freil’s power now? He hadn’t stopped the crowharrow from bringing her here for his amusement.
She hung for a time in listless misery, until she felt him.
He lurked in the dark with ubiquitous presence; she couldn’t tell where he was. Aradia closed her eyes, hoping he would go away.
He blew out from nowhere and opened a gash in her heart between her withered breasts. She screamed like an animal.
“Saerostrom fi alostic eaf,” breathed the immortal’s velvety voice from the darkness.
“Black rogue,” Aradia gasped as fresh, crimson pain consumed her. “Mother drown your wicked heart!”
He struck her again, this time on her abdomen, over a womb that had never known a man or a child. Aradia screamed again, but cut it short. She wanted to curl up over the wound. A shiver tore her flesh from head to toe as the immortal spoke again from a bed of thorns.
“Meators.”
He slithered from the chamber, a serpent of water and fire.
Aradia wished she could faint, die, sleep, anything to end the pain. Her body hurt; her heart hurt; her soul hurt worse. She hung there, blank with confusion. Beneath the stone, tears rose up like a spring tide.
In the forest, while looking for Tansel, she had released a plea to the Old One. Had she not, in that moment, forgiven her true mother for abandoning her? The young wizard had come. He had lifted Aradia onto his horse and taken her away from the hollow. Or had he delivered her into the hands of the crowharrow?
Why else had the Old One brought him?
Time passed: hours, days, months, years. Primordial night filled the chamber, growing, deepening into a warm, watery swell of something strange. Now alert, Aradia steeled herself for the sound of the crowharrow’s voice, the violation of his claws on her flesh. Nothing happened. The darkness grew stranger, and when a voice finally emerged, Aradia knew it.
You must forgive him, whispered the Void. The sound raised a chill on Aradia’s flesh that spooked her to the roots. The Old One spoke in the crowharrow’s same unearthly tongue, but Aradia understood
her, just as she had by the fire that day so long ago when she had asked for Tansel’s protection.
“Forgive whom?” Aradia whispered to the darkness.
Tears tapped on the stone like rain.
You know that. And then she was gone, vanished into nothing, into everything.
*
A gibbous moon rose like a maiden’s breast through the tops of the trees. Wind whispered in the leaves and tugged at the flames of the small fire by which Eaglin sat, leaning back or changing positions to ease the throbbing brand of pain in his chest. The poultice Tansel had tenderly placed on the wound eased him somewhat. But he couldn’t relax, as his body stiffened with aches and pains from his battle with the sioros. Beneath that, the wound felt like a tear in his soul; it had weakened his powers to such an extent he couldn’t even start a fire using the wizards’ tongue.
Lorth had found them around dusk. Eaglin briefly told the hunter what had happened, but for Tansel’s sake, had spared him the tender details. The hunter sat nearby, his arms draped over his knees and his hood drawn. He might have been dozing, if not for the animal shine of his eyes. On the other side of the fire, Tansel had finally fallen asleep. She was wrapped in a thick wool blanket Lorth had brought along with much-needed food and supplies.
Shortly before he had arrived, Lorth had found, not far from where Eaglin had hidden Tansel, the body of the catamount whose cave they had shared, its neck torn out by a sioros’ claws. The creature had lived in both dimensions, one as a cat, the other as a being of light. Eaglin did not have the heart to tell Tansel the cat had died in both places.
Lorth had taken a rabbit with his bow, and cooked it while Tansel tended to Eaglin’s wounds. Though Eaglin was an accomplished healer, he appreciated her care. Her touch was soft and she handled growing things with a deft, unaffected skill that would have made his mother, a mistress of herbal lore, proud.
“She would make a good Wren,” he said, gazing over the flames at Tansel’s sleeping form.
The Winged Hunter Page 19
