They rode past a small pool with a trickling waterfall splashing into it. Freil said, “Need to rest? I have some food.”
Tansel nodded. “Aye, this saddle hurts.” She pulled the reins. When the beast stopped, Freil slid to the ground and helped her down. As he rifled around in his saddlebags, Tansel walked to the pool, knelt and scooped water into her mouth. It was fresh and cool. Her heart warmed to the idea of slipping into it for a bath. Though she didn’t think their circumstance would bear such a luxury, she pulled off her boots and dipped her feet into the water.
Just then, she spotted something growing on the far edge of the pool beside the falling water. It was partly in shadow, but some of the leaves glinted in the moonlight. Hiking up her dress, Tansel stepped into the water and moved to the bank on the far side. When she reached it, she touched a leaf. It was shiny and perfectly smooth. She sniffed her fingers and recognized the pungent odor, similar to bee balm.
“What is it?” Freil asked behind her.
“Falistrom,” she replied over her shoulder. “Very rare. It’s worth much in the village to the healers. I’ve only seen it two other times I can remember. I tried to grow it once, but it’s very picky.”
Freil sat on the far edge of the pool with his sack. “What is its nature?” he asked, chewing on something.
“Falistrom is said to heal a broken heart.”
The wizard reached into his sack. “Does it?”
She shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
He held out something. “Hungry?” Tansel moved back across the pool, dropping her dress into the water to trail behind her. As she took the food, Freil said, “The plant wouldn’t likely be so valuable if it didn’t work.”
Chewing on a thick strip of jerked venison, she replied, “I think it’s poisonous. I ate a leaf once and it made me sick.”
Freil smiled. “Maybe your heart is too strong for it.”
Well-meaning as the comment was, Tansel didn’t smile. She still remembered the day, not long after her mother had left her, when she had chewed the falistrom leaf and retched like a cat. It hadn’t made her heart feel any better at all.
Freil handed her some sort of dense cake made of nuts. It was dry and stale. He remarked, “If you ever want to scare Eaglin off, just toss him some of that. He hates it.”
“Better save some for when we get back.” They laughed.
Freil drew forth a small cup, leaned aside and dipped it into the falls. “Speaking of that, we should go.”
“I wish we could stay.” She moved a hand over the water. Ripples spread out across the liquid moonlight. She was filthy and exhausted, and the water sang to her. She returned to the other side of the bank and cupped her hand around the falistrom thriving in the silvery light. It was thick enough that she could take part of it and leave the rest to replenish itself, as her mother had taught her. She gently moved her fingers around the plant, grasped a separate shoot and pulled it free.
Freil leaned forward. “What are you doing?”
Tansel cradled the small sprig of falistrom in her hands. “Nothing. Turn around.”
After a startled pause, he looked over his shoulder. “What is it?”
She placed the falistrom on a stone at the edge of the pool. “I’m getting into this water. Won’t take long.”
“When we get back, you can take a proper bath,” Freil pointed out, but he moved farther into the shadows and settled his back against a tree, facing mostly the other way.
Tansel pulled her dress over her head and tossed it on the bank, then leaned down and removed the dressing from her thigh. She gasped as part of a scab came with it. After throwing the bandage near the dress, she lowered her body into the water with a ragged sigh. It caressed her as she moved around. She submerged, raked her fingers through her hair and came up in a bubbling splash.
Freil’s hair glinted in the moonlight as he turned his head. “You mentioned that Lorth made the crowharrow leave. I’m curious how he did that.”
Tansel smoothed her hair back and blinked the water from her eyes. “He spoke in that weird language. Like the crowharrow.” Cringing inwardly at the sketchiness of this explanation, she hoped to the moon Freil left it alone.
She dropped her chest into the water as he threw her a glance. “A crowharrow isn’t turned away that easily. They must have promised him something.”
Tansel gulped. She didn’t want to reveal her secret, but neither could she bear lying to this man who had been so kind to her. So she said nothing, but floated there until the water began to chill her. Finally, she said, “We should go.”
He glanced up at the moon, riding high. “That, we should.”
“I’m surprised Lorth didn’t come after us again.”
“He’s probably resting. But we’re lucky Master Eaglin isn’t able. We don’t want him stalking us at night.” He got to his feet, took her cloak from the ground and held it out, looking the other way.
She climbed out of the pool, shivering as the night air touched her flesh. She took the cloak from Freil and dried off. The scratches on her leg throbbed with pain. She brushed off her bandage, refolded it and wrapped it around the wound.
Freil had grabbed his food sack and went into the forest for his horse. As he returned leading the moonlit steed, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, spun around and gazed into the shadows.
“What is it?” Tansel asked, scratching a bug bite on her hip. The wizard had gone deer-still, as wizards do when something is wrong.
“Put something on. Quickly.”
With a catch in her breath, she picked up her dress. It was mostly wet, and it stank. “Oi!” she groaned, letting it droop in her hand. “This is horrid.”
“Here.” He rustled around in his saddlebags for a moment. “Wear these.” He held something out.
Tansel took a garment from his hand. It was rough and heavy, with leather stitches. Breeches. He followed with a pale shirt. She dropped her cloak and donned the shirt first. It smelled like him. When she pulled on his breeches, she had to double the fabric at her waist. “If we sneak into the hall, I can go to my room and give these back before anyone sees us,” she panted, hopping around as she pulled on her boots.
He made a sound of doubt. “That won’t be easy. They’re waiting for us.”
She snatched up her cloak. “Maybe I should put the dress back on.” At the thought, she added, “Can you use magic to get us in?” His hard, silent stare caused her to giggle. “Guess not. We’ll tell them I fell off the horse into the mud because we were in such a frightful hurry.”
Freil snorted a laugh. “That may have worked three hours ago.”
Just then, Tansel remembered the falistrom. “Wait.” She returned to the pool and knelt by the falls. The sprig still lay on the rock where she had placed it.
As she returned, Freil held out his hand. “I’ll put it in my saddlebag.”
They approached the horse, readied themselves and were about to mount, when Freil froze again. Tansel heard his breath catch. “How long have you been standing there?” he said to the darkness.
Tansel moved behind the young wizard, her mind flashing images of her father, her great grandfather and Eaglin, terrible faces she felt entirely too fragile to confront. She relaxed slightly when the intruder spoke, a man with no torch and a smooth, familiar way.
“Lovely night, isn’t it?” Lorth said, his steps making no sound as he approached. Tansel leaned around Freil like a mouse looking from its hole to see where the cat was. She couldn’t make out the warrior-wizard’s expression in the dim light, but it was easy to imagine.
“We’re on our way,” Freil said. He reached around Tansel’s waist and started to help her up onto his horse, but Lorth stopped him.
“Na. Tansel, you’re with me.”
Freil released her. Lorth whistled; after a moment, his horse Freya emerged from the deeper murk of the forest. The sounds of hooves and creaking leather touched the still night air. Tansel hiked up her breeches and walked
to Lorth as he beckoned. They mounted, and without another word, set out.
Freil came up alongside, one shadow apart. “What of Aradia?”
“No change,” Lorth said.
They rode in silence after that. Lorth guided Freya as if he knew every star, leaf, stone and shadow. At last, Tansel spotted the lights of Muin flickering through the trees. Freil moved a short distance ahead, his white horse flashing in the moonlight as he passed through openings in the foliage above.
A sickening knot grew in Tansel’s stomach. Lorth didn’t seem angry, though with him it was hard to tell. She mustered her nerve and leaned up towards his shoulder. “Master Lorth?”
He turned his head. “Tansel.”
“Are you angry?”
He cleared his throat. “About what?”
“Because we’re late?”
“The sioros is abroad again. I came to make sure you and Freil were safe.” With a smile in voice he added, “It would appear that you are.”
Tansel was glad the night hid the blush burning her cheeks. With renewed courage, she ventured, “When we get there, will you—” protect me? A ridiculous thing to say. “I don’t want to see anybody.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Nothing.” A breath escaped from her chest. “I don’t want them to know anything.”
“Such as your private affairs with two of Eyrie’s finest? Fear not. You don’t have to hide in your own home.”
“It doesn’t feel like my home,” she said honestly.
“Give it time.”
She ignored that. “Freil and I didn’t—” She clipped that short, hoping the idea got across. “I just wanted a bath.” She cringed at the way it came out.
“Your business is your own,” the wizard affirmed quietly. For some reason, his calm manner made her more nervous than his anger would have.
“I’m afraid for Freil. He said my father will send a hunter after him.”
“Not likely,” he assured her. “He’s in the dungeon.”
“Muin has a dungeon?” It was all she could think to say.
“Of a sort.”
Tansel let the tension in her abdomen flow out and away with relief so profound she didn’t even think to ask what her father had done. After all, he was not the reason she had chewed the leaf of a rare poisonous plant.
The Apparition
The sky breathed snowflakes into the air. Gulls cried in pale wheels over the choppy waves splashing against the shore in sprays of stars.
He held his black cloak against the north wind and watched as the great, slick maw of a loerfalos rose up from the gray-green sea and came down upon the Winterscythe. The ship sank, all but one fold of a sail in the shape of a wing.
A woman in a white dress ran over the slippery rocks, falling, stumbling and clambering up again, looking over her shoulder as the sioros raced over the water.
The wizard waited.
As the immortal hunter descended upon her, her scream blended with the howling wind and the singing gulls. The water heaved as hunter and hunted became one, draped across the rocks.
As the wizard approached, she pushed herself up and stood before him. Her green eyes were calm and her reddish hair moved on the wind. Her throat was pale as a shell. She held out her hands, cupped and holding a small plant.
“The power to heal is the power to destroy,” she said with the faintest smile.
*
Eaglin opened his eyes. Night cloaked the windows and the fire in the hearth had burned to coals. His heart thumped beneath the freshly dressed wound on his chest. Chilled by a premonition, he got up, grabbed his cloak and left the room.
He strode through the corridors. The damp air smelled of flowers. The Waeltower cast faint beams in a spiral force that illuminated the focusing crystals in the floors and walls. In another few hours, the Midsummer Portal would open.
The power to heal is the power to destroy. Tansel had held a plant. It had smooth, shiny, dark green leaves edged with purple, and tiny pink flowers. Though Eaglin was familiar with many different types of plants, he couldn’t recall one like that.
He entered a wide corridor draped with tapestries. At the end stood an arched door of black wood carved into patterns of flying birds. A watcher spell spanning several dimensions hovered over the door like a death-dealing beast. An absurd waste of energy. Sigen’s brother Inos stood there with a dutiful air, oblivious to the spell. As Eaglin approached, the dark-haired man nodded and stood aside.
Eaglin shifted his mind sidelong and spoke several words to take the bite off the watcher. It collapsed into a simpler pattern, parting like mist and then returning to shape as Eaglin passed through and closed the door silently behind him. Inside the chamber, stone walls held a forest of carved wooden trees with crystals set into the leaves. The ceiling was covered with beautiful patterns of ivies and vines. Animal hides covered the floor, and the air smelled of wood smoke and burning herbs. A river-stone hearth crackled with a blazing fire.
Caelfar slumped over in his chair by the bed, snoring. Aradia lay beneath thick covers, deeply in sleep. The airy, shifting specter of a woman stood over the old wizard. As Eaglin drew near, she raised her head, turned with eerie slowness and opened her eyes, pale as milk. Eaglin’s life force swirled in the pit of his stomach like something being sucked down a drain. The hair on the back of his neck rose.
“Name your essence,” he said in Aenspeak.
She became more substantial, like fog or snow solidifying into marble. A tall pair of wings the color of doves rose up behind her. “Olantir.” Her ghostly whisper left frost on his heart.
She vanished.
Eaglin release his breath. Olantir was the name of Caelfar’s creator, his greater identity. Somehow, the wizard had manifested an apparition, a reflection of his heart, of which he was unaware. Eaglin went to him, knelt by the chair and took his hand, feeling for a pulse.
“Eaglin,” he wheezed, stirring. “I am, in fact, alive.”
“Forgive me,” he said, spooked and relieved. “You were so still.”
Caelfar sat up and rubbed his eyes. He smelled of juniper. “I could do with tea.”
“So could I.” Eaglin walked to the door and put his head into the hall. To Inos he said, “I would like tea, one with chamomile...” He stepped through the door and into the hall, and lowered his voice. “In the other, put a tincture of goat weed and celandine. Add rowan berry, sage, or woodruff,” he frowned, “and do put honey in it.” At the man’s blank, hazel stare he asked, “Are you familiar with these plants?”
“Not so much, Master. But the women are.”
Eaglin nodded. “Bring some food, too. Any word from the Raven of Ostarin?”
“No, Master.”
“Freil? Tansel?”
Again, a worried, “No.”
Clenching his jaw, Eaglin nodded and withdrew. When he returned, he retrieved a chair from the corner and sat next to Caelfar. His foreboding of something building, like a brewing storm, continued to bother him.
“Where is Tansel?” Caelfar said. “I need to see her.”
“She’s resting,” Eaglin lied. It had sat heavy enough on Caelfar to hear what Tansel had endured at the hands of the crowharrow, even with the sensitive details omitted. The last thing Eaglin wanted to tell him was that his beloved great granddaughter and yet another rash young wizard had been dallying in Loralin in an attempt to avoid family politics. Besides, once she did return, she would indeed need rest.
He also decided not to mention what Gwion had revealed about Gabran. Lorth would take care of that. The hunter had escorted the sailor at sword point to the lower reaches of Muin, to question him. Eaglin suspected those chambers hadn’t been used in Caelfar’s lifetime, anyway.
“I never knew her,” the old wizard said quietly, gazing at Aradia with a maudlin sag in his cheeks. “I never tried. When I spoke to her, it was only to accuse. Now, I’ve put all my power to bear on finding her and I can’t get through. The Old One
blocks me at every turn, no matter how I plead with her and offer my remorse. I am not forgiven.”
Eaglin rubbed his forehead as his own experience spread out into a complex landscape of suffering, knowledge and expansion. Maern cared little for remorse. But he could not, under the circumstances, explain to Caelfar just how intimately he knew that and why—not when it involved Tansel. As if to drive the point into a permanent place, he flashed a vivid image of her expression as he had descended upon her unclaimed body in the form of a sioros.
He leaned forward intently. “Until you forgive yourself, Caelfar, even Maern cannot forgive you. Remorse is not the issue; choice is. She answers only one’s understanding and acceptance of one’s own nature.”
“Acceptance?” Caelfar snapped. “This is my fault. Three generations, for a mistake I made. How can I accept that?”
“You aren’t the only one making choices. Everyone involved, Kalein, Alera, Aradia—Tansel—they chose too.”
“Their choices were uninformed.”
Eaglin lifted his brow. “The power of choice is no less sacred in one person than it is in another. While knowledge can be useful in making choices, it can also be a hindrance. Don’t use your stature to assume responsibility for the choices of those women. That approaches arrogance.”
For a time, Caelfar said nothing. Then, he stirred. “You are High Dark,” he pressed. “Can you not enter the sioros’ realm and find Aradia?”
“I can’t enter the Old One’s domain any more than you can.”
“Lorth told me that you entered her domain to save Tansel from the sioros.”
“Only because she let me.” By surrendering to me through the Rites of Hawthorn, he couldn’t add. “Aradia is in her own sphere of choices now. This is why you can’t use the voidstone, or anything else, to bargain for her. Lorth and I tried that. She must return on her own.”
The Winged Hunter Page 23
