Wulfgar didn’t move. He just sat there, arms draped over his knees, glowering from red-rimmed eyes. Lorth approached him with a hunter’s respect, regarding him deeply to assess his darkened disposition.
Nightshade loosed an alarm cry outside the cell.
Alinan filled the doorway. Before Lorth could send the Raptor away, Wulfgar jumped up with a roar and bounded for the door, colliding with Alinan and slamming him into the opposite wall of the passage. His torch flew to the floor. “Whoreson,” the prince growled. “I could’ve helped her!” Before the Raptor could respond, Wulfgar struck him with a head-butt.
As Lorth approached, the prince swung around, breathing heavily, fists clenched. Lorth held up his hand. “Easy, lad.” Alinan lay slumped on the floor. Lorth knelt and checked his pulse: out cold. The Raptor would be mad as a bull when he awoke.
Wulfgar picked up the torch and strode down the passage. Lorth looked around for Nightshade, not seeing her, and went after him. As they ascended a steep, narrow stairwell the prince said, “Where did they take Elspeth?”
“She lives with her mother not far from the Vine,” Lorth said quietly. “Probably there. Wulfgar. What happened?”
The prince did not respond.
A woman’s voice lashed out from a cell at the top of the stairs: “I know the laws of the Eye! You can’t keep me here without audience!” A pause. “Bastards!” Fana’s face pressed against a grated door.
“You had your audience,” Lorth said as they passed by. The power of the earth still weighed in his gut, stretched with the tension of a drawn longbow. “I am not satisfied.”
“You’re no wizard you son of a—”
Lorth stopped, silencing her. With all his tension to bear, he growled a nasty word that shook the earth at her feet, causing her to stumble and fall. As she rolled over he said, “I am the Raven of Ostarin, First Raptor and Ninth Seat on the Aenlisarfon. I could have you executed with a yawn. Best you get back to thinking about the details of your journey.”
Patience stripped to the bone, he left her there whimpering curses. When he reached the office, he narrowly averted another row between Wulfgar and Brawl, who had helped Alinan to drag the prince here from the Vine. Nightshade perched on the desk of the office and yelled like a middle-aged nag. After sending Rhinne’s scurrilous brother into the street, Lorth plied Brawl for information, left instructions, scrawled a note for Eaglin, and stomped out of the place. Nightshade shot through the door as he went through, nearly clipping him in the head.
Wulfgar stood near a tree on the other side of the street, huddled in the wind-driven rain. Lorth hadn’t expected him to wait. After sending Nightshade off with his message, he approached. The prince stirred from his brooding as Lorth held out his sheathed South Born blade and knife, which he had reclaimed from Brawl. Wulfgar took the weapons and put them on with a hard jaw.
Beneath the trouble in Lorth’s mind, the Hunter’s Rede began to rise, as it tended to do when he needed to pay attention. The sun casts shadows. The Shade of Illusion. One ray of sun in the darkness: “Rhinne is safe. Eaglin found her.”
Emotion cracked the stony resolve in Wulfgar’s face. He started walking. “Who was that woman in the cell?”
“A thief. Lifted the coin your sister obtained for her sword and left her on the docks. She kept the darker details from her confession to me. I think she might be an oborom spy.” After a respectful pause, he gently added, “I am deeply sorry about Elspeth. I didn’t see that, not there. I’ll hear about it, Wulf. I’d prefer the truth from you first.”
They walked through the streets in silence. It was cold, and the air was sharp with the smell of brine. Finally, the prince let down his guard and began to talk. Lorth listened intently, visualizing the scenario. The assassin had managed to slip out clean, leaving Wulfgar with a bad situation.
Lorth did admit surprise that Elspeth had given her love to Wulfgar. As far as he knew, the only man she had been with was the priest of Maern who had made her a woman by the Rites of Hawthorn. Wild and fey, Elspeth had eluded most men until now.
They reached a square that formed an intersection. Few moved about in the late hour. In one direction lay the docks and Lorth’s duty to war. In the other lay a dead girl, an unintended casualty of that war. No death is mine, said the Shade of Attachment. “We were expected back hours ago. Eaglin awaits us, with your sister.”
“She is safe with him. I’m going to see Elspeth.”
“Your hunter will be waiting for you.”
“Good.”
Lorth stopped walking. “War doesn’t care about our hearts, Wulfgar. It takes. That assassin went after her to weaken you.”
Wulfgar swung around and stepped towards him. “If I’d been thinking with my heart it wouldn’t have happened. She sensed him and I didn’t believe her. She couldn’t have known he was coming. She was so cagey, she wouldn’t tell me anything. I thought she’d sold me out and then changed her mind.”
“Elspeth was a seer, fragile and reluctant in the art. She didn’t talk about it.”
“You think I don’t get that now? Asa—” He clenched his jaw and looked off into the street, his eyes shining.
Annoyingly, the Hunter’s Rede continued to whisper. The Void loves nothing. Lorth lifted his chin and said, “You have to let her go, Wulf. This will avail us nothing and it could get you killed. You won’t be lucky a third time.”
Wulfgar tilted his face to the rain. It was not a gesture of coming to his senses. He said, “You don’t believe in luck. You brought a realm to its knees for the sake of those you loved.” He lowered his face and settled his gaze on Lorth with the force of a sword. “You let nothing go.”
“I paid a high price for that,” Lorth reminded him. “I gained my skill by the detachment of the Hunter’s Rede and when I used that skill against it, the people I loved bled, broke and died. Balance is not kept by those who are attached. The Destroyer is alone.”
“As am I,” Wulfgar rasped. “Don’t speak to me about the price of love. I pay it every day.”
Lorth stepped forward and lowered his gaze respectfully. “If I didn’t care about that, Wulfgar, I would suggest we use this situation to track that assassin. For your sake and Elspeth’s I’m letting that go—against orders. If you would have me do that, then don’t tempt the Destroyer by walking into a trap. I don’t want to lose you too.”
“Elspeth had a garden. I will go there and feel her presence once more ere I leave these shores. Do what you will.” He spun on his heel and lumbered into the street.
“You don’t know where it is.” And her mother will gut you like a toad when she finds out who you are.
The prince kept walking.
With a long breath, Lorth cast his mind out in a swath to search for impressions of the oborom. A needless habit: Wulfgar’s amulet never failed to detect them. Uneasy nonetheless, the hunter blurred the night around them as he started after his friend.
Blood of an Immortal
The South Born of Tromb stood like a fugitive at the end of a sodden path, gazing at the dark cottage wavering through the windblown trees. Light touched a window, so faintly he might have imagined it.
“Did you fall in love with her?” Lorth asked quietly by his side.
Wulfgar’s heart started to pound. He didn’t answer.
“Elspeth’s mother is a priestess of Maern,” Lorth said. “Her name is Willowfae. Address her as Maern—and do tread carefully.”
Wulfgar accompanied the wizard down the path. He had thought of many things to say to Elspeth’s mother. Meaningless horseshit. He couldn’t imagine any grieving mother accepting him in this circumstance, at this hour. But he couldn’t leave this undone.
They approached the door. Maern, please allow me to lay eyes upon your daughter once more.
Lorth drew his soaking hood from his face and knocked an odd pattern on the wood.
I need to see her garden.
Several moments passed. Lorth muttered one of his
words and raised his hand again.
Please?
The door opened. Both men stepped back as a woman appeared, dressed in gray and brown woolens. Her white hair twined liked snakes around her face and eyes, red-rimmed and wild as the northern seas.
“Maern,” Lorth said. He lowered himself to one knee; Wulfgar followed. “Silin en Maern tali. We come to honor Elspeth.”
“Siomothct!” she spat. “Begone! She doesn’t need your kind.”
Lorth looked up. Wulfgar jumped to his feet, his heart skittering over itself like an animal on the ice. “She’s alive?”
Lorth rose, gasping his arm to calm him. Then he spoke in the Dark Tongue, which Wulfgar only recognized because it resembled sounds in nature. The priestess responded in the same, her eyes filling with tears. Lorth turned to Wulfgar. “What is it called again, the poison?”
“Graestrip,” Wulfgar said to Willowfae. “It’s taken from a shellfish of that name. Pinkish with a gray stripe on it.”
The woman vanished into the house before he finished.
Lorth drew him inside and closed the door behind them. “Wait here.” The cottage was warm, and smelled of herbs, flowers and dirt. The wizard melted into the shadows of a stairwell into the earth; leaving Wulfgar by the door working over every prayer to every deity he could think of, though he served none. His heart raced and his hands shook. Alive? She had to be so close to death she could see the light of worlds.
Willowfae appeared at the bottom of the steps, her hair framed in a pale nimbus. “Get down here!” she snapped.
Wulfgar took the steps three at a time. The wooden stairs sagged and creaked under his weight. At the bottom he entered a dark room thick with the scent of candles and things of the earth, and scattered floor-to-ceiling with the trappings of women’s magic. After losing Asa and his mother, such things brought his heart alive with feelings he had tucked away for the matters at hand.
Elspeth lay on a tiny bed illuminated by candles. Lorth stood at her feet wearing one of his unreadable expressions. Wulfgar threaded carefully through the clutter of the priestess’ art. When he reached the bed, despair seized his heart. Elspeth’s flesh was as sunken and pale as a corpse, her spirit driven away. A small white stone lay on her chest; another on her belly. Wulfgar knelt by her side and took her hand. It was ice cold. Breathing heavily, he looked at her mother, who was grinding something to bits in a mortar. Was the woman thinking to bring her daughter back from the dead? He placed one hand on his lover’s forehead and with the other brought her hand to his chest, gently pressing a finger against her wrist. Her pulse whispered faintly in the shadows. She was dying.
“What manner of magic did this?” the crone said over her shoulder.
Wulfgar lifted his gaze in a whirlwind of blood and thorns. He didn’t know how to answer the question in terms she needed.
Lorth turned his head, his jaw flexing. “It’s an ancient form of sorcery that distorts physically focused consciousness with alternate probabilities. It sickens humans in this dimension because they can’t bridge the rift.”
“Och!” Willowfae growled, slamming the pestle into the mortar as she put it down. “Bloody wizard. Tell me the Mistress of Eusiron taught you a remedy for such things.”
“Immortals,” Wulfgar said suddenly. “The blood of an immortal.” He looked up to find the wizard and the crone staring at him. “My mother made charms and potions that counteracted the spells of the oborom. She had a jar of some black liquid; it was unmarked and guarded by a powerful spell. I tried to touch it once and was thrown across the room by something invisible. She laughed and told me immortal blood suffered no hand but that of the Circle.”
A smile touched Lorth’s wolfish eyes. “The blood of an immortal bridges the time-space grid at the physical level.”
“And where might ye get some of that?” Willowfae said, her eyes resting on her daughter with a grieving shine. “We’re out of time.”
“I have a favor I can call due. Wulfgar, make sure Elspeth stays with us. Talk to her. Willowfae, get a clean phial and come with me outside.”
Talk to her, Wulfgar echoed inwardly. For I told her nothing.
After Lorth and Willowfae left, Wulfgar gently removed the stones on Elspeth’s body and set them aside. He lifted her, sat on the bed and gathered her close against his heart, taking care not to disturb the dressings on the wound in her side. He touched his lips to her forehead. Then he opened his heart and told her about himself as she had asked him to do in the warmth of their desire.
*
Lorth stepped out into the storm. He hadn’t ceased to sweep the surrounding area for the prickly impression of oborom thorns, and he strengthened it now. He had expected trouble by coming here. But the hunters were quiet.
Willowfae trailed along behind him muttering curses on his kind. She carried a tangle of branches soaked in wax and bound on one end to serve as a torch. Though she knew him well, she was afraid. “What sort of favor,” she said. “And from what?”
She knew him too well, that was the trouble. Aside from his dark reputation, Lorth had learned much in Leda’s gardens in Eusiron. He stopped by a rowan tree swaying in the wind. He pulled the knife from his boot, uttered a word and cut off a low branch at the base. “I was involved in the birth of an eamoire,” he said. “He owes me a debt of gratitude.”
The priestess stared at him from the shadow of her hood. Asking for a drop of the eamoire’s blood would be a different matter, and they both knew it. Lorth said, “Where is your cat?”
“Died a fortnight past,” she said with a sniff.
Lorth cast his eyes around the garden in various stages of spring growth. “I need something friendly to the Otherworld.”
The priestess hiked up her skirt and stomped past the tree. Lorth followed her. A short distance away, she knelt and moved her hands over the ground. “Here. Wormwood. Still sleepy, though.”
Lorth drew close and knelt, moved his fingers over the tiny silvery-green spikes soaking on the ground. “It’s fine. Now I need some garlic, have you planted it yet?”
“Na. But there might be a bulb still in the ground from last year.” She went in another direction and began pawing around in the dirt.
Lorth plucked a sprig of wormwood, pulling up part of the root. He put it with his branch and returned to the rowan tree. He took a deep breath. He hadn’t decided exactly how he would do this. On the road, he had defied the treecloak by invoking the earth and been sent tumbling by Eusiron. But it was worth the risk. The earth still served the Old One, and she played by no rules but her own.
Willowfae approached clutching the rotten stems of a bulb. “We have to hurry, Master,” she said, her voice trembling. “You say that man loves my Elspeth, but...”
“I am ready,” Lorth said gently. “Give me the phial.” She handed him the last things and then snuffed her torch by grinding it into the dirt.
Love. Leda had once taught him a word in the Dark Tongue that would bring him through cloaks and shields if used with the power of his heart. By his love for her, he had been able to visit her in projected form despite a treecloak over the Gray Isles. This time, he would have to tap into something at least as powerful. He tilted his face to the night as the sea rained down on him.
Grief. He had lost Cimri to a loerfalos. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the memory had found him that day in the Oculus when Eaglin passed around a rubbing made by Cimri’s son. He lowered himself by the tree. “Stay close,” he said. “Do not fear.”
Willowfae wrapped her cloak around her body and stood like an apparition of the Destroyer.
As he closed his eyes, Lorth envisioned Wulfgar bent over the priestess’ daughter, his shoulders sagging with pain. Elspeth was rare; she stood apart from other women. But one night in a tavern with a pretty girl couldn’t have been new to the Prince of Tromb, a seasoned blade who had sailed a quarter of the world’s seas before the age of thirty. For all of their sakes, Lorth hoped this was different. Hemlock
wouldn’t give his blood for anything less than love—if he gave it at all.
The weather helped Lorth to recall the night Cimri had fallen, as a storm had come upon them at sea. The sailor had sensed it many days before. Lorth saw the man’s smile, his red hair blowing in the wind. Heard him sing a song about a seer. Felt the undulating sea turn their boat in too strange of a way. Lightning illuminated the empty foredeck where the sailor had stood only a moment before. Samolan reefed the sails with a warrior’s cold silence.
They never actually saw the immortal serpent take Cimri. In the darkness, they could only assume.
Lorth spoke the word.
*
Stars glittered on the icy void. Lorth studied them, his mind blank. This was not Ealiron, in any season. He stood on a barren plain of stunted growth and outcroppings. Patches of snow glowed in the light of a huge moon looming on the horizon. The air smelled of woodsmoke. In the distance, dull orange light bled on the edges of hills. Lorth started walking.
Something told him he wouldn’t find Hemlock here.
He reached the nimbus in a moment, though it seemed he had walked miles over the wind-stripped wastes. A ring of massive stones stood on the plain like pillars holding up the sky. Carved with symbols and patterns, they emanated unnerving intelligence.
Warriors stood around a fire burning high in the center of the circle. After a quick glance, Lorth slipped into the shadow of the nearest stone. Immortals. They were dressed in beautiful clothes and glimmered with the light of the higher dimensions. Their presence encompassed him, the planet, the stars. With senses he wouldn’t have had in his physical body, he knew them as Formation, the Pentacle of Ealiron.
On a few rare and inaccessible places on Ealiron, statues of these entities stood in a circle on the points of a crystal pentacle. Called an ofsinae, the sacred circle was used to summon them: Ealiron, the Source, stood in the center holding an amethyst orb; Bancor, a branch; Math, a sword; Aorin, a crow; Farus, a bow and quiver; and Maelin, a cup. Senses aside, Lorth wasn’t entirely sure if these were their living embodiments. He didn’t see Ealiron among them.
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