Mystic Warrior

by Patricia Rice

His arrogance in believing he had learned to control his tempestuous gifts was Murdoch’s undoing.

  Focusing all his joy on Luther’s promise, knowing Lis was watching nearby, Murdoch located the fireworks he’d placed behind the speaking platform and concentrated. He could channel his fire better if he had his sword in hand, but swords were weapons of war, and he must act in peace. Giddy delight probably wasn’t the best conduit for channeling energy, but it was less erratic than fury, and Lis adored the colorful jewels of light he brought back from his travels. He would gift her with fireworks nightly, if she would let him.

  Perhaps Luther would grant his public blessing to their courtship tonight, along with his formal acknowledgment of the success of the voyage. In expectation of defeating his competition for Lis’s hand, Murdoch stood with his bare legs apart, arms crossed, waiting for the right moment to express his elation.

  He hardly heard the greetings and congratulations for a safe journey. At Luther’s words “I would like to announce . . . ,” Murdoch’s spirits rose, and he concentrated on the celebratory Roman candles stored behind the platform.

  With his extra perceptions, he studied the winds and verified that the fireworks would be safe among the rocks, away from the crowd. Even if he accidentally shot off three at a time, he’d harm no one. He raised his hand to focus on his target.

  “. . . that I have accepted Trystan the Guardian’s desire to court my daughter. . . .”

  Red-hot anger burst behind Murdoch’s eyes. Even if Luther meant this as a test, Murdoch couldn’t dampen his shock, rage, and disappointment fast enough. The fiery lightning that was his greatest gift shot from his hand as surely as cannonballs ignited by gunpowder.

  The entire box of fireworks erupted in one brilliant blast of red and blue. Colored fire burst across the midnight sky, setting their world ablaze.

  Unholy wails and screams of terror almost drowned out the rapid percussion of exploding skyrockets. The platform on which Luther stood above the rocks tilted, cracked, then collapsed. Luther was already crumpling to the ground, a hand over his heart.

  Frozen, Murdoch could only watch the horrified expression bloom on Lissandra’s face as her father landed in a bundle of fine clothes on the sand. Unable to move, Murdoch continued to watch as Healers ran to the Council Leader’s aid.

  Even before Lis shoved through the crowd to kneel beside her father, Murdoch knew what she would find. Luther was dead. Appalled at the atrocity he’d unintentionally committed, Murdoch couldn’t even pray that Lis would understand.

  And when she looked up with condemnation darkening her eyes, he deserved the words she flung at him.

  “Damn you into eternity, Murdoch LeDroit,” she cried in heartbroken ferocity. “If you don’t leave my sight now, I will kill you myself!”

  One

  France, May 1793

  “Your documents, mes frères.” Three soldiers, muskets raised, blocked the road to the village.

  From the back of his stallion, Murdoch LeDroit regarded with disgust the rogues aiming sword and musket at him and signaled the driver of the wagon to rein in his mule. He had places to be, messages to deliver, a life of sorts to get on with. He didn’t have the time or patience for fools.

  Despite their pretense, the soldiers weren’t protecting the village from traitors by asking for documents proving the cart’s passengers were loyal citizens. They were intent on robbing Murdoch’s weary charges of purse and life.

  This was what France’s glorious Revolution had come to—highway robbery. For four long years Murdoch had ridden as an officer in support of the noble ideal of taking wealth from greedy aristocrats to feed the starving and downtrodden masses. Four long years of penance for his sins had deteriorated to a farce in the face of France’s monetary and moral bankruptcy. Without wealth, power always fell into the hands of the best-armed bullies.

  Two of the cart’s more elegantly garbed passengers, helpless despite their once-great riches and prestige, cursed the thieves and began hunting for the few gold coins sewn into the hems of their fashionable attire—their only fare for passage to a safer life.

  The youngest traveler, a small girl in a bonnet spilling golden curls, fell into the arms of her shoemaker father, who was driving the cart, and buried her face in terror. Wearing a moth-eaten frock coat, the driver hugged his child and stared defiantly through sunken eyes at the thieves. He had no money to bribe anyone, but the shoemaker had once given Murdoch a home and a helping hand when he’d needed them most. He would not desert the man.

  Wearing the coat of the Revolutionary army, Murdoch had been using his disguise to lead escaped prisoners to safety. His charges were idealistic political leaders and innocents who had been unjustly incarcerated by power-hungry officials little better than the lawless miscreants who were confronting them now. Murdoch worked to see justice prevail—if only because he knew what it was to be denied an impartial trial.

  Ever since the French king’s execution at the beginning of the year, Murdoch had been unable to reconcile the Tribunal’s penchant for blood and revenge with the principles of equality, fraternity, and liberty for which the original revolutionaries had fought. He’d envisioned Aelynn’s leaders crippled and brought low in the same manner as France had assaulted theirs, and he could no longer stomach the bloodshed.

  Saving refugees from the methodical madness of Madame Guillotine was his only means of holding the tattered remains of his soul together these days. That, and the message he meant to carry to his former friend Trystan, warning him of the latest outrage that would endanger his fellow Aelynners. He hoped Trystan wouldn’t hold the past against him and would listen to his warning.

  Aware of his own unpredictable gifts, debating his choices in this all-too-public venue, Murdoch held his temper and did nothing in haste. Still wearing his officer’s braid, he insolently slouched on his horse while considering his prey. The angry fire of his youth had been diluted by experience—the people outside his island home were no challenge except to his imagination. His caped greatcoat hid his weapons and disguised his tensing muscles. He’d learned to conceal his taut, angry jaw behind a week-old beard, just as he hid the burning flare of his Aelynn eyes in his hat’s shadow.

  “I carry their documents,” he informed the soldier with cool scorn that hid his fury. “What right have you to demand them from your superiors?”

  “We demand equality!” the heavyset rogue shouted. “They’re naught but a bunch of filthy aristos. Why should you or Paris share their wealth when we starve out here?”

  “Justice demands they be tried fairly,” Murdoch replied with insulting insouciance, slapping the reins of the stallion so that it pranced nervously.

  The younger soldier dropped back a step to avoid the huge beast’s hooves. “What care we?” he called in contempt. “They’re naught but fodder for Madame Guillotine.”

  “So you choose to terrorize them for fun and profit. How industrious of you.” Murdoch had spent these last months pretending he was one of these soldiers while he helped prisoners flee, but he lacked the patience for further charades. Making his choice, he departed his saddle in a leap so swift as to be invisible. His polished Hessian boots landed a full length in front of his horse, in the dry brush at the side of the road, beside the trio of lackwits. Sweeping back his greatcoat, he revealed the braid on the red and white officer’s uniform he wore.

  The thieves stumbled hastily backward, their gazes widening at the costly sword and rapier being brandished in their faces. Although the Revolutionary army was so poorly supported that they wore whatever uniform they could find, men saw what they wanted to see, and these men saw authority. To be fair, they lacked any knowledge of Murdoch’s homeland, so they could not grasp his gift for illusion or his powers—despite his swift, nearly invisible leap.

  Murdoch sensed four other scoundrels hiding behind the hedgerow, their murderous intent clear even to his less-than-perfect ability to read their puny minds. He casually tossed his weapons from
hand to hand, letting his fury build while assessing his foes.

  One of the renegades he faced had a few inches of height over him, but like many tall men, the soldier lacked muscle. The sergeant wasn’t tall, and packed more strength. The third was a mere stripling. The boy’s hot-tempered anger and fear were more dangerous than his aging musket. Disarming these three might terrify the hidden ones into running, if they were lucky. Boldly, Murdoch stepped forward, pushing the brigands backward with the points of his blades.

  The heavyset soldier with a sergeant’s stripes recovered sufficiently to scoff at Murdoch’s presumption. “Do you think a lazy officer can take on three armed soldiers, all trained and experienced in fighting?”

  “Experienced in theft, more like,” Murdoch replied. “Be gone with you before I carve out your livers and feed them to the ducks.”

  Insulted, the heavyset sergeant ordered, “Shoot him, Jean.”

  The stripling aimed his musket and fired. The cart’s passengers screamed.

  When the smoke cleared, Murdoch remained unharmed, leaning against the donkey’s neck, some distance from his last position. He tipped his tricorne from his face with the edge of his rapier, knowing he revealed the controlled fires of his fury as he regarded the stunned soldiers. “Do you have any more ammunition to waste?”

  The trio darted frightened gazes from the spot where Murdoch had been standing to where he stood now—twice the distance of a donkey’s length. Again, they hadn’t seen him move. “How did you do that?” the boy asked.

  “Just kill the blackguards and be done with it,” one of Murdoch’s passengers shouted.

  The child continued to sob into her father’s coat. The shoemaker and his daughter were guilty of nothing except trying to make an honest living in a cesspool of mob mentality. Wasting diseases ran rampant in the filthy prisons, and the innocent died without trial or verdict. Murdoch refused to let these two die, as they surely would at the hands of these murdering thieves.

  He rotated the point of his rapier in a tight, furious circle. If he focused on the weapon, he might be able to control his anger and prevent himself from inadvertently killing everyone in the vicinity, including the cowards still lurking in the hedgerow. Keeping his temper was imperative.

  Before the stripling could jump out of range, Murdoch cut off the buttons at the boy’s waistband and split the string of his drawers. Both garments fell into the dust at his feet.

  While the youth cursed and bent to gather his clothes and his wounded dignity, Murdoch swung sword and rapier in tandem, a feat few others could imitate. In a whirl and slash of silver blades, stripes disappeared from uniforms, buttons flew, and more drawstrings were severed. The soldiers were suddenly too busy covering their indecency to aim their muskets. With an assist from his boot applied to a fat derriere, Murdoch tumbled the sergeant headfirst into the parched weeds.

  “Gentlemen, I suggest you stand back so we may be on our way,” Murdoch thundered, his greatcoat flaring around his boots as he swung up in the stallion’s saddle without need of stirrup. Disarming his foes hadn’t eased his ire. Violence too easily became a way of life when one faced it daily, and he’d been facing it for four years now. Four years in which he’d learned violence wouldn’t win him what he wanted. Rather than risk venting his volatile temper, he would let the scoundrels live another day—provided the ones in the shrubbery didn’t interfere.

  Standing in the stirrups, he held his saber in one hand and urged his mount on with the other. Beside him, the wagon lurched forward. The defeated soldiers rolled and scattered from their path. The cape of Murdoch’s coat fluttered in the dry wind.

  Still standing so he could better flourish his weapon, Murdoch urged the wagon’s animal into a close approximation of a gallop, aiming for the safety of the nearby village. The passengers gasped and grabbed the cart’s sides. Dust flew in a cloud, separating them from the humiliated thieves.

  As his stallion raced down the dirt road, Murdoch flashed a wicked grin of triumph through the stubble of his beard. “Praise Aelynn and may the road rise up to greet us!” he shouted to the heavens.

  The heavens responded by releasing a ball of blue flame.

  It arced toward Murdoch in a shower of sparks, igniting a host of memories—of legends he’d heard of the blue spirits of the gods wreaking their revenge or issuing their blessings. Legends of gods he no longer believed in. Only, instead of striking him down, the light bathed him in warmth before coalescing in the black pearl of his Aelynn ring, a ring that had been part of him since birth. Dazed and bewildered, he dropped back to his saddle.

  A gunshot exploded, blasting him from his high perch and knocking him to the ground.

  In a rage of agony and disbelief, Murdoch rolled across the grass, flipped over onto his uninjured shoulder, and with a power he could no longer control, conjured up lightning from the clouds that had been gathering since the encounter had begun. Thunder boomed as the first bolt struck. The wind hit the treetops in gusty gales.

  The rotten wood of a hollowed-out tree trunk erupted in flames. Sparks spread to drought-stricken weeds. In seconds, fire raced with the wind of the rising storm—not in the direction of the villains, but directly toward the nearby village and its unsuspecting inhabitants.

  Once again, Murdoch’s good intentions had ended in disaster.

  Two

  Standing over her mother’s deathbed, swallowing a lump of grief, Lissandra Olympus looked out over what had once been Aelynn’s lush jungle. Now brown palm fronds drooped onto wilting gardenias, baked by a relentless sun. Since the disappearance of the Chalice of Plenty four years ago, the volcano had rumbled and spilled ash as it never had before, and the island’s temperate climate had become increasingly unpredictable.

  The marriage of Lissandra’s brother, Ian, to Chantal two years ago had pleased the gods enough to make them return the summer rains that fed the river and wells, but now the water was drying up in the excessive heat. Last spring a late frost had blackened fruit blossoms, and before that, winter storms had begun to wash away the sandy beaches that protected their shoreline. The people’s anger and fear stirred unrest throughout the island. With their chosen Oracle incapacitated by a stroke, the island’s solidarity had cracked. People fought over who would best lead them from disaster.

  “Praise Aelynn,” the dying Oracle whispered from her bed on the sacred altar. An instant later, Dylys’s life-affirming grip on Lissandra’s hand fell loose.

  Tears rolling down her cheeks, cries of protest choking her breath, Lissandra repeated the Oracle’s final words, “Praise Aelynn.”

  The temple swelled with glorious sound from a hymn written for the occasion, sung by the choir led by Chantal.

  Lissandra’s tears dampened her folded hands. She prayed for a cloak of authority to fall upon her, to give her the strength her mother had possessed to lead the island back to health and happiness. But Lissandra felt nothing except soul-deep grief.

  Ian hugged her, but Lissandra fastened her gaze on the still figure of their mother, unable to grasp that the holy woman who had been central in her life was gone. Never again would she hear her mother’s praise or ad monishments, see her bathe a newborn or lead a crowd in worship. Never again would her mother speak words of wisdom to remind her of her duties.

  She didn’t need any reminders of her duty now. She simply didn’t wish to do it—to close her mother’s eyes for the final time.

  Lissandra blinked, disbelieving, as a shimmer of blue flame rose from the Oracle’s lifeless figure. The crowd gasped, and the choir faded into silence as the illusion flickered and coalesced into a solid core over the late Oracle’s heart.

  Finally grasping the miracle, Lissandra gulped and stepped away from Ian. She straightened, standing ready. Perhaps this was the moment when she would be granted the confirmation from the gods that she needed to carry on. Neither she nor Ian had ever been present at the death of an Oracle, but they had been forewarned by the legends telling of the blue s
pirit flame.

  The gods were about to choose the next Oracle.

  Beside her, Ian tensed. Lissandra knew he didn’t want the task. He’d rejected it by marrying Chantal and moving off the island. Yet, if the flame chose him, he could not deny the gods. He would have to return and take up their mother’s role.

  Selfishly, Lissandra almost prayed that would happen.

  The blue flame gathered and formed a ball. Silence grew as the crowd focused on the translucent radiance, praying a true leader would be appointed to guide them to prosperity again.

  The blue spirit flame rose steadily from the altar, then hovered, before shooting forward to circle Ian’s head.

  Lissandra gasped as the flame darted upward in rejection, and Ian’s shoulders slumped in relief. She stood alone and accepting as the flame grazed her hair. She could actually feel a beneficent wave of energy as it descended. Even so, she felt resignation rather than anticipation as the mist of Seeing spilled across her sight, revealing other places, other times—

  A flash of silvered swords. A roar of smoking cannon. Soldiers—so many colors, red, and blue, and green. White splattered with blood. A battle-hardened Murdoch, there, raising a terrified stallion on its hind legs, leading the charge . . . his saber slashed downward, disarming a ragged peasant who charged at him with a wooden pike. Using his muscled thighs to bring the horse under control, he leaned forward with fury to drive his rapier into the throat of a man raising a musket.

  The battle re-formed and became a wooded forest, the vision blurred at the edges. In the thunderclouds hovering above the woods, her spirit guide pointed urgently at a cart progressing toward a village in the distance. There, on the same white stallion, rode Murdoch.

  The bucolic scene burst with an explosion of thunder, gunfire, and flames.

  Abruptly, the illusion dissipated. Above her hair, the ball hovered. Lissandra felt it grow cold, leaving an emptiness inside her. She almost touched the top of her head, but the ball shot forward, dashing in front of her eyes before arcing upward and disappearing into the unre lentingly blue sky—toward Murdoch.