Thus trapped for the second time, Tansel sat amid the heavy scent of roses and the chirruping of crickets and frogs. Eaglin had offered to let her rest in his chambers, or to go and sit with Aradia. But sleeping in the Raven’s bed would only get the servants talking, and Aradia was in Caelfar’s quarters, the last place Tansel wanted to go. After the old wizard’s intrusion, not even her own room felt right anymore. But here, on the ground beneath the crowharrow’s crag, she felt herself.
She didn’t know what Eaglin and Lorth had done with Caelfar. Perhaps they had put him in the dungeon with her father. A disturbing thought.
Where would she go when the so-called dust settled? She could no longer stay in Muin. Her cottage was destroyed, and Aradia—her only kin besides the madmen in the dungeon—lay as good as dead. Before, Tansel could have left this gloomy hall and gone to live with her aunt in her weird little house with the cats and the goats. She could have learned how to shapeshift, to become water or air, a bird, a hare. But not anymore.
During their ride through the forest, Freil had talked about the wizards’ citadel of Eyrie. He described it as a splendid place where she could learn the mysteries of healing and plants, or anything her heart desired. She could enter the Order of Wren, an exciting idea even before she had lost her last connection to Loralin.
Maybe the wizards would take her with them.
Everything had been all right before the crowharrow, before her father and sadly, before her initiation into womanhood. Strength, knowledge and the loss of innocence came with a price. Caelfar had been so kind, so gentle with her. A sheltering oak tree, he had taught her things and promised never to leave her. But now? He had only loved her innocence. Not her strength.
No wonder Kalein had left him! And Aradia, for all that. Though unknown by a man, Aradia had long since lost her innocence to the scythe. She was bitter as old frost, as the stinking sediment at the bottom of a tarn with no spring to feed it. She had never surrendered, and the darkness had devoured her.
Tansel’s eyes filled with tears. Which was worse? She couldn’t rattle the grim words of Kalein’s ghost from her mind. The priest has abandoned you to loneliness, with his rites. Tansel gazed up at the crag as the fire of knowledge burned. If Eaglin were here, she would scratch him like a wildcat for taking her maidenhead and not telling her what it would mean.
She froze as something stirred against the sky.
The crowharrow sat on the crag with his legs propped up and his arms slung over them, his face shining in the moonlight. She had been looking right at him, as if he had been there all along, invisible to mortal eyes until he chose to appear.
For several moments, they watched each other. Tansel dared not move or make a sound. For a brief instant, she considered calling Eaglin, despite her confused feelings around him. But strangely, in her heart, she didn’t feel the need.
She got to her feet and stepped towards the wall. The winged hunter could have come over it, had he wished. She called up, “Aradia yet lives. Won’t you release her?” The wizards had told her the immortal spoke no language but that of the Old One, but Tansel knew he understood. “She meant only to protect me.”
The crowharrow didn’t stir, and she couldn’t make out his expression. His presence filled the forest and the garden like the light of a star, mysterious, beautiful and crushingly indifferent.
He vanished.
“So much for that,” Tansel muttered. She rubbed the chill from her arms. The scent of rosemary hung in the air, and her forehead tingled. Then a thought came to her, something Freil had said about the Sun Key: This year, the summer solstice happens to align with the Rose Moon. This will open a portal to the Old One.
A portal to the Old One. Maybe—her heart warmed with hope—maybe they could bring Aradia back that way.
She headed back to the hall to find Eaglin.
*
In a small library adjacent to Caelfar’s private chambers where Aradia lay dying under the sioros’ hand, Eaglin paced back and forth by a table holding a candelabrum in the shape of twining vines. His angry, flowing movement caused the candle flames to flicker each time he passed.
Lorth and Freil sat together at the far end of the table. Behind them, a large window overlooked the hall and the Waeltower above, glowing from within like an ember. The hunter was as silent and expressionless as an overcast sky. Freil leaned back in his chair and stared at the birch ceiling panels as if to incinerate them. Salve dotted the cuts on his face and throat. He had awoken with his energies half-aligned, scattered and pouring out of his solar plexus like milk from a broken jug. The first thing he had asked about was Tansel, prompting Eaglin to give him some perspective by relating the finer, more intimate details of this situation. It hadn’t improved the young wizard’s attitude.
Caelfar sat near the hearth holding a goblet of wine in one hand and his head in the other. Eaglin glowered at him as he paced. “You summoned us. You pleaded, in the name of innocence, for us to help you with something the Old One herself was involved in. You even acknowledged Tansel’s power. Did you even believe there was such a thing?”
“I did,” the old wizard said quietly.
“Do you still?” Freil asked the ceiling.
Caelfar didn’t answer him.
Eaglin stopped pacing. “Did you think it would be simple? Give the sioros his voidstone, watch him fly away and leave Tansel to pull weeds in your garden as if nothing had happened?”
Caelfar dropped his hand and looked up with a wintry stare. “It might have been, if not for your interference. Had I known you sought to heal a wound of your own, and would use my Tansel to do it, I would have called someone else.”
Lorth shifted positions in his chair. “And who would that have been?”
“Every wizard has wounds,” Eaglin said. “We’re dealing with an immortal. Such beings expose things; that is their nature. If anything, you should be thankful it was Lorth and I whom you called.”
“Thankful?” Caelfar scoffed. “I sent you to rescue her from a sioros, not take her innocence for yourself! You were in league with him all along—worse, you actually deceived him by opening her—and called it healing! Your accusation that I violated her is short of that, I think.”
Eaglin stepped up to him, his heart beating solidly in his chest. “The difference, Caelfar, is that Tansel chose to yield to me. And if you think to accuse me of coercing her or using my stature to trick her, you’ll want to freshen up on the rules that govern our kind. She didn’t choose for you to enter her womb with your mind just because it happened to be dark.”
“I told you, I am sorry for doing that. I lost myself. I don’t want her repeating the cycle.”
“What cycle?” Lorth said. “Warming up to a man? You were her first experience of that, Caelfar. She loved you. Trusted you. In return, you put her in a cage.”
“She was innocent,” Caelfar said. “She’d learned nothing but hatred for men from her mother and Aradia. I sent my people to ask around the village, you know. No one could get near Tansel. They think her fey, wild as a fox. Unsuitable.”
“She was able to refuse a sioros,” Eaglin pointed out. He gestured to the books lining the walls. “Have you ever studied the nature of an immortal seduction spell? History doesn’t know a thimbleful of maidens who’ve withstood that. Hatred is not the defining factor.”
“You told me Maetor’s treatment of her enabled her to withstand the spell,” Caelfar countered in a tight voice.
“Aye, but not for the reasons you assume. Hatred creates a blind spot through which the sioros would surely have had her. Tansel learned young to value her own strength. She refused him because she realized his desire didn’t care for her. She became conscious of her own worth and was able to stand by that even when it meant being abandoned by what to her was nothing less than a god. Don’t you find that just a bit impressive?”
Caelfar took a long drink from his goblet. As he lowered it, he wiped his mouth and cast a glance over his sh
oulder to where Lorth and Freil were sitting. The hunter gazed back with a wolf’s inscrutable stare. Freil had closed his eyes as if to doze, but he did nothing of the kind; most likely, he was thinking about Tansel, the moon, Maern knew what else. He didn’t want to be here.
“Survival is all those women know,” Caelfar said, returning his gaze to the fire. “That’s not so much strength as instinct. Tansel was simply the first one who had a choice.”
“A choice you denied her,” Eaglin reminded him. “I’m still interested to know how a sioros could honor Code where a Master of the Eye would not.”
Caelfar gazed into the fire and said nothing.
Lorth pushed himself from the table and padded to Eaglin’s side. He said, “Tansel is the only woman in your bloodline by Kalein who was not sioros-marked. I believe she too would have been, if Aradia hadn’t asked the Old One to protect her.”
Caelfar released a breath of derision. “You call it protection, to give her innocence to the Destroyer?”
“It is exactly that,” Eaglin said. “Tansel is not a child. She is a woman who was isolated by circumstance and then awakened by an immortal. You yourself told us how much power she has. Why do you think Maern asked for her innocence? Power must be integrated. It cannot stand in the darkness where it’s indistinguishable. What I did is protective.”
Lorth folded his arms over his chest. “You asked us for protection and sight into the paths of Maern. How can you be so offended when we’ve given you just that?”
“You knew the Old One was protecting her!” Caelfar said in a shaking voice, slamming a hand on the chair arm. “The girl didn’t need your help refusing the sioros; she’d have done that on her own. You bled her to serve your own ends—and she’d not so much as bathed your scent from her loins before this young, dishonest Osprey moved on her again. Forgive me but that was not what I had in mind when I called to you for help.”
“I respected Tansel’s honor in every way,” Freil declared.
“Aye,” the old wizard growled back. “After finding out your Master had claimed her, I’ll wager you did!”
Freil’s cheeks reddened. “I didn’t know about that. I’ll wager you wish you had.”
Caelfar gripped the arms of his chair and started to rise.
“Sit down!” Eaglin barked. “You aren’t in the position to defend your sacred spiral of pain anymore, Caelfar. The Aenmos will blackring you for this. Even Gabran is in less trouble at the moment.”
“He could use some company down there,” Lorth put in.
Caelfar returned to his seat and put his face back in his hand. Blackring was not a word any wizard of the Order of Raven took lightly. A powerful binding spell cast by the Aenmos himself, it rendered a Raven’s powers latent by removing the focusing paths to certain patterns and frequencies beyond the mortal spectrum.
Eaglin stepped up to Caelfar as if he didn’t notice the winged specter hovering behind him. “You are deliberately focusing on an issue that does not concern you. My deed with Tansel is outside your dominion. I would be marked by the Destroyer herself for such duplicity as you accuse me of.
“Now. As Lorth said, it’s more than notable that your women were all sioros-marked—including Tansel, had the Old One not stepped in. There are no coincidences like that in the mountains; no sioros takes an arbitrary liking to an entire bloodline. Perhaps you can tell us why.”
“It’s not your place to question me,” the old Raven grated.
In a calm voice hovering on the Otherworld, Eaglin said, “You attempted to enter the Old One’s domain using the Dark Tongue. Tansel not only gave her love to me, but also allowed me to protect her by the power of High Dark. Do you honestly believe yourself immune from the same fate you dished out to Maetor—for less? This goes beyond a blackring. Answer my question.”
“You can’t take what’s already hers.” The old wizard waved his hand around his head as if to touch the apparition there. “You see her, do you not? Your threats mean nothing. It’s only a matter of time, now.”
It was the first time the Raven had acknowledged the specter’s presence. Eaglin said, “If you truly have nothing to lose, then telling us about this won’t damage it further.”
The old wizard’s lined face flooded with anguish. He was silent for some time. Finally: “Kalein left me for the wilds, as I told you. What I didn’t say is that she fell in love with the sioros. I think she only saw him once, but it was enough. She loved an ideal, a dream. And I lost her to it.
“One day, after she left me, I followed her. I caught her with him, pregnant, in tears. I don’t know why he appeared to her, but she spoke to him in the Dark Tongue and asked him to take her. She would rather have died than give life to our child and I couldn’t bear it. I tried to intervene.”
“What, exactly, did she say to him?” Eaglin said.
Caelfar repeated it, as if in trance, a twining vine of water and shadows.
Eaglin rubbed his face. “Are you sure that’s what she said?”
“If I could forget it, I would.”
“She wasn’t asking him to kill her,” Eaglin informed him. “In that phrase, the word ‘take’ is sexual.”
Caelfar paled. “That, too, would have killed her.”
“She may not have known that,” Lorth said. “You said you intervened. What happened?”
“He struck my apparition into formlessness. It wounded me; I couldn’t project for some five years, afterwards. I tried to find Kalein, but couldn’t. I didn’t know until many years later that she was alive and had given birth to a daughter. And I didn’t discover until only recently, when I had words with Aradia, that the sioros had cursed them by marking every woman in my line from Kalein down.”
“I believe he cursed you, through the women,” Eaglin said. “The sioros is pure male force. He appeared to Kalein and you intruded into his territory.” He moved away from the fire and sat down. “However, a sioros can’t do that unless he has an opening.”
Caelfar hunched over in his chair, breathing heavily.
Lorth said, “Your heart has taken its power and flown. Your apparition can kill you or she can transform you. You choose.”
Caelfar looked up. A tear crept down his face. “It’s too late. I am old and tired. She will take me regardless.”
“Wouldn’t you rather die healed?”
“You don’t understand. Death is the only healing for what I did. Kalein loved the sioros. I knew she could never complete that love with an immortal. I tried to explain that to her but she wouldn’t listen to me. So”—he faltered—“I impregnated her. A child was something I could give her that he couldn’t, something that would change her, ground her, bring her back—or so I thought.”
Eaglin’s gut tingled with discomfort. “You ‘impregnated’ her? Against her will?”
“No!” he snapped. “I didn’t rape her, if that’s what you mean. She drank tea to stay barren. I replaced it with something else. She never knew until she conceived, and then she realized what I had done. That’s the reason she left and forbade me ever to contact her again.”
Lorth leaned heavily on the mantel as Eaglin lowered himself into a chair. Caelfar’s confession explained why his heart had taken form around him like a vengeful goddess; but it didn’t explain what she was waiting for. Why hadn’t she taken him?
Eaglin looked up as Lorth spoke a name, just as something moved in the shadow of the door.
Tansel stood there like a waif, her face pale and streaked with tears.
Destroyer’s Smile
The older a wizard grows, the more silent he becomes, like a woody vine growing over time to choke a garden path, deep and full of moss and snakes, running everywhere, impenetrable.
As Caelfar’s confession fell like a dead thing on the floor at Tansel’s feet, she decided it was time to weed. Before the wizards could react, she turned and walked away from her great grandfather’s private library, down the passage, around the corner and out into the hall. She didn�
�t run; this felt more like saying No. She had had enough secrets, accusations and troubles. Enough of the overgrown vine patch, the loss of innocence and words of the wise. Enough of the shouts filling the passages behind her.
As she stomped with grim purpose through a courtyard draped in ivy, Freil caught up to her. He knocked her back a step as he threw his arms around her in some male attempt to protect her from the ugliness of what she had just heard. Despite everything, she was glad to see him up and well. She kissed him on the cheek—and then kept walking.
“Where are you going?” he panted, striding beside her.
“I’m going to try to get Aradia back through the Midsummer Portal.”
The young wizard absorbed this. “We should get Eaglin or Lorth. They’ll know how.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“I’m coming with you. Aradia stood against the sioros for me, and I’ll help her now if I can. Besides, I know where the portal is.”
Tansel nodded, and they quickened their pace towards the rear gate of the hall.
A short time later, she found herself in the forest at last, with Freil by her side. The wizard knew just where to step; he saw into every shadow as if the sun were casting it. Here and there, the faint red Waeltower beams stretched over a tree, a stone or a fern.
Tansel couldn’t shake her great grandfather’s words no matter how cold she tried to be. She hadn’t heard much of the wizards’ talk; only enough. Death is the only healing for what I did. Kalein loved the sioros. I knew she could never complete that love with an immortal. Tansel closed her arms over her belly. She drank tea, to stay barren. I replaced it with something else. She wondered what had passed between the old wizard and the Ravens after she left. Nothing good. But it was not worth pondering.
Herself, her mother, her aunt, their mother, all unwanted, all marked. She did ponder that.
The Winged Hunter Page 25
