Across the battlefield, Nogcwren screamed frustrated fury. Thunder rolled off in the distance as a punctuation to the maniacal displeasure of the Raven Queen. “The Mal'akhim!” She spat in disgust. “How dare he send the Oweles!” Her yellow eyes burned like molten sulfur as she gathered herself and then spoke in a calm voice. “Captain Durai.”
The commander of the advancing Nocturnal forces stood tall and unwavering, ready to receive his orders. “Has General Aius sent word from our army in the east?”
“No, Raveness,” the commander said cautiously, not wanting to cause further displeasure to the volatile Sorceress. “Our scouts have reported no word as of yet, and we have seen no evidence of his movement.”
“Evidence of his movement?” she turned on him. “Evidence, commander? It is an army nearly ten thousand strong! You will feel the very trees uproot themselves to get out of his way, the ground will shake at the sound of the boots of my forces coming down from the north!
“My Queen,” Durai said apologetically.
“He is not slinking around, hiding behind the cover of the forests like some bumbling peasant, commander! He is a bloody army! My banners unfurled, my horns shaking the resolve of every ear who hears them! And no bird or beast, no hiding ram is safe from the guile of the hunter, commander!” she seethed in anger. “You need not search for evidence of his coming. Either he is here … or he is not.” As she finished, the ink markings on her pale flesh were writhing like a nest of angry vipers.
“I will have my scouts send word as soon as we see him,” Durai offered.
She looked at the commander with hatred in her eyes, then turned her gaze towards the tall, dark-haired hero of Haven. “Fools,” she said as she looked him over from head to toe. “Do you want to see how to win a war, General?”
Seig’s eyes had begun to turn green, and they glowed in their Nocturnal lust at the beckoning of this lethal beauty. “Of course, my Queen.”
“Well then,” she cooed. Her voice, not moments ago rough and biting, was now luxuriously velvet, like dark wine on a drunken tongue. “Follow me.” She turned and strode off towards the field of battle.
Seig smiled like a man being led to a new and foreign bedchamber, licking his lips in anticipation of her appointment. “Men, gather your arms,” he ordered the once-pious guardsmen of Haven. “We will be escorting the queen to her victory.”
“Captain Durai?” she said, not looking over her shoulder as Seig and his men gathered about her in a shield-like formation.
“Yes, Raveness?” he answered compliantly.
“Kill the damned birds, will you?” She ordered. “The Mal'akhim. Shoot them all.”
“Yes, Raveness,” he said with a bow.
Chapter Forty
“Cal!” Astyræ shouted, wincing in pain as her bruised and battered ribs screamed in protest. “Cal, are you alright?” She gingerly crawled to her feet, searching for her friends who had been thrown violently into the mountain when Uriel was struck by the dragon.
“Deryn? Cal?” she shouted into the night, the heart-wrenching sounds of war echoing up from the battleground below. The wind caught her golden hair, and she labored to keep it out of her eyes so that she could search for her friends.
She took a deep breath, wincing again as she did so. “Argh,” she groaned to herself as her hand went instinctively to her side. “Cal! Deryn! Where are you?”
“Astyræ!” she heard Cal’s weak voice below. “Astyræ, are you alright?”
She cautiously walked to the edge of the rocky ledge. Steadying herself against the stone beside her, she peered out over the edge to see if she could spot him. “Cal?” she called again. “Are you alright? Hang on!”
Cal had been thrown from the back of Uriel, but he did not land upon the relative safety of the ledge. Rather he had crashed and tumbled further down the face until, by some grace, he was caught in the gnarled branches of a scrub tree that was growing in the cracks of the Itxaro.
“Aye!” He shouted up to her. “I’m pretty banged up … but I’m alright.”
“Can you climb up here?” she shouted back.
“I should be able to,” he said as he found a bit of rock to place his boot upon and a secure handhold to begin the climb up thirty or forty hands to where she was perched. “Have you seen Deryn, or Uriel? The dragon, I didn’t even…”
“No! Not yet,” she told him as she looked hard into the darkness, scanning the face of the rock for any sign of their friends. She searched as Cal labored his way up the side of the mountain, and just when weariness was about to give way to despair, her eye caught a glimpse of an azure light just above and to the right of her.
“I see them!” she shouted down to him, but was startled when one hand and then another took hold of the ledge by her feet. “Cal!” she gasped, then winced at her own startled breath. “I think I see them there,” she said, pointing in the direction of the glow.
Cal pulled himself up and onto the ledge, his face a smattering of blood and dirt. His tunic was ripped, and his feathered armor was dented, but he was alright. He grunted as he stood to his feet, his scraped and bloodied hands pushing the hair out of his face. “Where? Where did you see them?”
“There,” she said, pointing with one arm, still holding her wounded side with the other.
“That’s him, alright,” he told her as his clouded gaze returned to her pained grimace. “What about you, my lady?” he said, taking her own bruised and bedraggled face in his hands. “Are you hurt badly?”
“My rib, it might very well be broken,” she told him.
His eyes were locked on her own violet gaze; compassion, relief, and worry swirled about them. Just then, the sickening sound of the horns of the Raven army broke them out of their wounded reverie. Cal looked down and saw the horrors of war still raging like a violent storm; his friends were doing their best to weather the tempest, all the while knowing that the waves of darkness would soon crash their finality upon them all.
“Can you climb?” he asked her, taking her hand.
“I think so,” she said, steeling herself for the pain that was sure to follow.
“Come on then, Astyræ, we have got to find them. And then, we have got to find the marking of the Stag.”
The two of them clung to whatever their hands could grip. They shimmied and climbed, pulling their weary bodies and wounded spirits up the face of the mountain. It wasn’t much more than twenty hands up and to the right from the ledge where they started that they came upon a cleft hewn out of the rocky face.
“Deryn!” Cal shouted. “Deryn, where are you?”
Cal pulled himself up and over, onto the rock. He quickly spun around and reached out his long arm, offering his hand to Astyræ below. “Take my hand, quickly now!” he told her.
She reached up and out for his hand with her own slender fingers, but her arm was not nearly long enough to meet his grasp. “I can’t reach you!”
“You have to!” Cal shouted back down to her. He looked frantically, his eyes surveying the face of the rock below. “There! Just put your foot right there, and when you step, reach out and take my hand.”
She held on tightly to the relative safety of where she was, and with a steadying breath she placed her foot upon the very place that Cal had showed her. “Alright!” she said as stones and pebbles skittered out from under her feet.
“Take my hand, Astyræ!” he said, his voice willing her to trust him.
She swallowed hard against her fear, then nodded her understanding to him. “Alright, Cal.” She reached up, her fingertips grasping at the air between his hand and her own, her face wrinkled in pain at the fire that tore through her side.
“Come on! A little further now!” he said as he too strained against the rock ledge, willing his body to meet her own. “Further up!”
She let out an exhale as she shifted her weight from the safety of the ground and onto her other foot. In one motion, she leapt towards Cal’s hand. Skin found skin, and Cal gr
asped her wrist as the rocks from where she propelled herself upward went skittering down the face of the mountain and into the battle below.
“I’ve got you!” he told her through gritted teeth. “I’ve got you, my lady!”
She turned her head to look at the battle below and swallowed her fear back down into her bile-churning stomach. Her eyes found his again, and she nodded her understanding. It wasn’t but two more calculated steps and a generous tug of her arms until she and Cal both lay in a heap upon the mountain ledge above.
Her chest was heaving and her breath came raggedly, a cold sweat clinging to her face.
“You did it, my lady,” he told her as he rose first to his knees and then to his feet. “You are alright now.”
She stared into the black sky above her, the noises of war drowned out by the sound of rushing blood in her ears. “Thank you, groomsman.”
Cal smiled, nearly forgetting why it was that they had labored so to reach this place. It was the sounds of wounded breath and agony, mingled with the soft silver song of the Sprite, that woke him from the glow of this small victory.
“Deryn,” he whispered. “It’s Deryn. Come on, we have got to find them.”
The faint, azure glow of his winged companion illuminated the dark rocks ahead of them. “Deryn! Deryn, I am here! Are you hurt?” He heard his own words grow quiet as his clouded eyes took in the sight before him.
There, laying in a heap of blood and bowels, was the mangled body of the lord of horses, his brilliant white coat now stained a violet-crimson. “Uriel!” Cal blurted out, his voice breaking under the weight of the emotion.
The Anahiera wheezed and labored as the torn flaps of his flesh bubbled and bled with each excruciating breath. Cal ran towards him and fell to his knees, taking his fabled friend’s head in his own stained hands.
“Uriel,” he pleaded. “No! Not you, too!” His eyes filled with tears as he looked at his Sprite friend, who also had two silver tears streaming down his face. “I am so sorry!” he lamented.
“Oh no,” Astyræ said, walking up to the carnage.
Cal’s hands traced the angry, gaping wounds on the white flank of his friend. “It was the dragon,” he said, choking back the anger and sadness. “Uriel took the brunt of his talons. He saved our lives, by giving up his own.”
The sounds of the horse’s painful breathing were nearly too much to bear, so Cal did the best thing he knew to do to bring peace to the equine friends he had known all his life; he began to sing. He reached out his hand to trace the ancient lines of Uriel’s mighty face as his shaky voice managed to bring music into the moment.
Astyræ gratefully listened to him sing for a few minutes before she placed her slender hand upon Cal’s shoulder. “He is suffering,” she said. “It is not right for the lord of the horses to lay here like this.”
He nodded slowly. “You are right, my lady.” Cal reached for his sword, but did not find it in its scabbard. “Gwarwyn?” he said as he looked in vain for the sword that lay buried in the smoldering flesh of the fallen serpent. “Only … only I have lost my blade.” He looked at her helplessly as a tear ran down his dirt-stained face.
“It is only right that I bear the burden of his final wound,” Deryn said as he reached for his tiny, azure blade. “For we are kin of a sort, given both wings and feet from our Great Father. I would rather him depart from the pains of this world by the hand of a friend.”
Cal placed his hand on the throbbing neck of the dying beast. His heart was broken at the sight of such injustice for the kingly steed. “I am sorry, Uriel, I am so sorry,” he whispered.
He heard the sound of Uriel’s shaky, gasping voice in the recesses of his thoughts. Seek the light, Calarmindon Bright Fame.
The winged horse snorted a weary, exhausted pardon, and then he nodded his permission to end the suffering.
Deryn walked to the neck of the dying horse, barely able to see over its girth. He held his blade in front of him, the point of the sword hovering just above the throat. He bowed his head and prayed in words unknown to Cal and Astyræ, but with a meaning that needed no interpretation.
“Clota sneachta Uriel tigherna an Tarrthála, le do dhoimhneacht agus íobairt; ní mór fianaise mhór ár n-athair a fháil riamh.
(Hail Uriel, lord of the Tarrthála, may the great light of our Father be found by your doom and sacrifice.)
“May it be so,” Cal said in agreement as Deryn plunged his blade deep into the throat of the lord of the horses, ending the life that had been given to spare their own.
Astyræ put her arm around Cal’s shoulder as the violet-crimson blood leaked out upon the stony floor of this cleft in the Itxaro. They stood there for a moment and waited for the last movement of air to pass from the magical beast before them. Finally, Cal wiped his cloudy eyes on the sleeve of his sodden tunic, noticing the whirlwind of war still raging on the battlefield below them.
“Now what?” he said as he turned about to survey his surroundings. “We are trapped up here!” he said angrily. “Is this the end? I chose to help my friends for a few brief moments instead of finding the light, and now we’ve lost everything? I have failed. Again.”
“All is not yet lost,” Deryn said as he wiped his blade clean upon the hem of his own tunic. “Three times you have failed, as was foretold. And three times, you will choose … even now … to persevere, Bright Fame.”
“But how?” Cal asked them. “Our friends are dying, and the Sorceress would murder the whole world before she would see a single soul left standing in defiance of her rule. We don’t have a way down from these heights, and I don’t have a sword to wield, even if we could find our way down.” Cal sat down hard in a seat of his own self-pity, staring out over the fields below. “What kind of victory can we even hope for now? We are useless up here!”
Deryn looked directly at his charge. “What if the only victory we could have ever truly hoped for was to see our way clearly through this war?” Deryn asked him. “To escape the battle long enough that we might yet seek the light with the clarity of sight along the path that our Great Father intended?”
“My heart is breaking with so much death, Deryn, so much destruction and evil. Can’t we do something about it?” he argued. “What good is seeking the light anymore if everyone who might see by it is already dead?”
Astyræ looked about the cleft of the rock as they talked. The small ledge curved inward towards the heart of the mountain, but then came to an abrupt halt, not ten paces past the bleeding body of the last of the Anahiera. She noticed that the blood that spilled from Uriel’s body ran down, rather quickly, towards the wall of stone at the innermost part of the cleft. Something about this odd flow of blood caught her attention.
“So much blood from so great a beast, and yet…” she whispered to herself, paying no attention to the conversation of her companions.
“We have done much about it, my friend,” Deryn said with great confidence. “We have rescued prisoners, we have defended our friends, new and old. We have fought bravely, albeit recklessly, against the serpents of the enemy; yet still one thing remains.”
Cal nodded his head, and with a surrendering sigh, he understood. “It is much simpler, you know, to swing a blade and fell a foe, than it is to seek a power beyond all reaching, whose true might … was never meant for keeping.” He shook his head and smiled a sad smile, looking to the Sprite for approval of his rhyme.
“My warrior poet friend,” Deryn said with a tired smile. “That clarity … might yet still be our victory.”
“Cal! Deryn!” Astyræ called out. “Come quickly!”
Cal stood to his feet and made his way through the passage of rock towards the sound of her voice. He saw Astyræ standing at the end of a stream of violet-crimson blood, her face alight with the most peculiar expression.
“I have found something,” she said excitedly. “Look! Right there, do you see it?” She pointed to the stream of flowing blood.
“It is Uriel’s bloo
d, my lady,” Cal replied, clearly not seeing what it was that excited her so.
“That is what I thought too … at first, I mean,” she told them. “But why is it not pooling, then? Uriel is a mighty beast, and with so much bleeding, this rock should be covered.”
A wave of understanding washed over Cal’s face as he connected her excited thoughts.
“Look there, at the end of the stream. It is flowing beneath all of that rubble and that bush of brambles right there! It is draining into the heart of the mountain, Cal!”
Cal looked at Deryn and then back again at the mess of stones and sand, branches and scrub brush, and hope entered into his heart all over again.
“If it is flowing… then perhaps—"
“There might be a way inside for us too!” Cal finished her thought. “Come on, then. Let’s see what passage we might find.”
The three of them went about the messy work of removing debris and rolling away the stones. Cal took hold of the base of the bramble bush, whose roots had spidered out all along the face of the rock, just above where the blood had been flowing. He put his boot firmly upon the rock, and with all of his might, he pulled. Finally, the vine relented its grip to the persistent tug of the groomsman’s body, giving way with a rumble and the clatter of splitting stone.
With one final heave, the bush’s roots released, and he yanked it free from the mountain face. As he did, the rocks, which had been held securely in place by the roots, began to crumble in a heap upon the stony floor. Cal fell back upon himself, landing in the stream of Uriel’s blood. When the dust had settled and the sounds of falling, skittering stones finally ceased, Cal saw with his clouded eyes the glowing marks of the White Stag there upon the inside wall of the newly formed cavity.
“What in the damnable dark?” he said in wonder.
Chapter Forty-One
CRACK! The sound of the flame-ravaged rafters buckled and broke under the storm of fire.
The Coming Dawn: Epic of Haven Trilogy Book 3 Page 32
