Tempest

by Mercedes Lackey

  Cloud Brother’s eyes opened, and Sparrow stifled a gasp. His eyes had been sealed by blindness many years ago. This Cloud Brother was an imposter. And had he visited her in her sleep, Sparrow would have been easily fooled, taking his words as dream truth.

  But she was awake, and this invader threatened the mama wolf in her lair at his peril. She wasn’t afraid, but incandescently angry at this counterfeit being’s violation of her baby’s sanctum.

  His false eyes were black and shiny, crow’s eyes. “You are my woman,” he said, his voice rough now. “You do not question me.”

  The artifice had crumbled away just like that. Cloud Brother never spoke of her with possession or casual brutality. He and she walked together in beauty, heartmated for life. Possession had nothing to do with the love that they shared.

  Alone, alone. The little mother faced this imposter all alone . . .

  The word echoed in her mind painfully, mockingly.

  Alone.

  What could she do now? She had no Mage gift, no Companion to strengthen or Choose her.

  Sparrow swallowed hard and forced herself to relax. Tis needed her to stay sharp. Anger kept her fear at bay, but anger by itself was not enough to repel her attacker.

  But the crows had spoken true. This was war.

  For such a nasty creature to invade the Vale, some basic facts had to be in play. The Heartstone . . .

  Rork’s words, and her beloved’s, echoed painfully in her mind. The wards gathered around the Vale had failed somehow. Cloud Brother and Abilard had to be so embroiled in Herald business that they could not come to stand with her. Sparrow knew in the marrow of her bones that all of these elements were tied together with her solitary state.

  She remembered the Change Adept Emptiness, who had invaded the Vale in a similar manner three years before, when Sparrow had first come to k’Valdemar. This false sending reminded her of him, of Emptiness, but in some ways, this was worse.

  Because the sending now had impersonated her beloved Cloud Brother so effectively that the sight had fooled Sparrow at first. Long ago, the physical being of Emptiness had walked among them here in the Vale as a man, with a physical man’s limitations.

  A sending this vivid, in a place so fundamentally hostile to it? Whatever had manifested this sending had enormous, malevolent power. More than the errant Adept Emptiness had ever been able to summon.

  Perhaps the coming of Emptiness had created a gap in the Vale’s protection, some weakness for an invader to exploit. The northern reaches were always hungry for easier, more temperate territories to the south. And the Vale was a tropical sanctuary in the midst of a vast, almost impregnable forest.

  The Vale was a jewel of inestimable price. And a thief had just appeared, through Sparrow’s heart, her yearning, to strike at the home that she loved.

  Her heart . . .

  The Heartstone. The foundation of all the Vale. Sparrow remembered Cloud Brother’s warning, and feared this creature’s power was stoked by drawing off energy from the Heartstone itself.

  If she was right, then the entire Vale, and all of Valdemar, was in mortal danger. Strange mutations of magic still emanated from the wilder regions of Velgarth, and of course she had been taught as a child of the evil Adepts of old, they who had preserved their spirits and lain in wait, seeking to possess a Mage willing to become their tool.

  But Sparrow was the opposite of a great Fire Mage, a terrible vessel of destruction. She was a mama, a human hertasi among the northern folk. Sparrow enjoyed the quiet, enormous task of setting the world around her to rights, strengthening the life force of the people she loved.

  Maybe this was the locus of her power? And this sending sought to possess the least, not the greatest, in the Vale? Perhaps the least of the Vale denizens would prove the easiest for an evil spirit to master.

  Goosebumps pebbled up the length of her forearms. Sparrow took a deep breath. Time to test her theories and see if this ghost was as hungry as she feared.

  “Begone. Go back to where you came from,” she suggested, a little lamely. If only this situation could be solved that easily!

  The sending laughed, a hard, ugly sound.

  She steeled herself to press her point. “Really, it will end better for all of us if you just go back home.”

  “Home? I have no home! I am alone!”

  His words, a mockery of her deepest, most secret fears, burned Sparrow’s heart like a terrible acid. The Vale was beautiful and lush, the most easy and lovely place she had ever known. But it was not the northern village of Longfall, where she had been born, where her parents had raised her. Her beloved father, Hari, her home village as she had remembered it, both were now out of reach forever. She could never return to her first home again.

  However, her sympathies didn’t cancel out her determination to protect the Vale, her new, adopted home.

  She nestled deeper into the lumpy couch, and the feather tickled her behind her left ear, where she had tucked it away. “Now, now,” Sparrow chided him, the way she used to fuss at her older brother before he joined the army and disappeared from her daily life. “Just because you feel alone doesn’t mean you are, in fact, homeless.”

  She spoke both to the dislocated being and to herself.

  “You come from somewhere. Everybody does, okay? When a body’s in pain, the first impulse is to draw away from a helping hand and try to bite it. I understand. Anybody who ever tended a sick critter knows the same. But you can choose your home, your belonging. And I say that if you choose your home, you will never be alone.”

  The sending smiled at her, a horrible sight superimposed over the face of her beloved Cloud Brother. “I choose this place, I choose you for mine.”

  Sparrow’s heart fluttered in fear. The implications of accepting this being’s choice filled her with a deep dread. Could accepting this hostile being prove a pathway to disarming him?

  After a moment Sparrow pushed the thought away. She didn’t believe so, not when possession, not communion, was the entity’s true goal.

  Sparrow cradled Tis to her chest, and her rage melted away. She was never that great at righteous anger anyway.

  After a moment, she made up her mind. “I am going to do a dangerous thing, visitor.”

  The sending did not respond, only crossed his arms and blinked his eyes in a way so unlike Cloud Brother, so impatient and hungry, that it made Sparrow laugh in the midst of her alarm. The illusion was so powerful, and yet it fell apart when Sparrow knew to question it.

  She took another deep breath, sighed it out. Her strength lay in her authenticity, not in great shows of magical power. Sparrow was going to wield the power she had.

  “This is my little baby, Tis. He has no power, none. See? He has the potential to become a great Herald or Mage, given his family and his home. But right now, he is an acorn. His job is to grow.”

  “His name is Thistle!”

  The entity’s words filled Sparrow with a terrible panic. She hadn’t shared his full name with anyone, ever. For this sending to know her deepest secrets . . .

  Sparrow feared now that the sending had already infiltrated her thoughts and soul. How else could it recreate Cloud Brother so perfectly? Know her deep fears of abandonment? Know the true name of her defenseless little son?

  This sending was the shadow of Sparrow herself. The malevolent being had already possessed her!

  A low wind rose in the ekele, as if the air grew thick with ghosts. The currents shook the crow feather loose from behind Sparrow’s ear, and it danced in the air between her and the false sending of Cloud Brother.

  She focused on the feather, not the invader. Patience would see her through. Sparrow had tended her mother through her last illness, and an echo of that helplessness and despair now passed through her and away.

  It was patience and acceptance of terrible circumstances t
hat had gotten Sparrow through that time. Nothing had been as hard to bear since then.

  But this was getting close. Her baby, her little acorn, was depending on her to protect him from this energy, this primal threat to everything that Sparrow loved.

  The wind drew up higher, and Sparrow took refuge in it. With a shock of recognition she saw the faces of the Cloud Walker clan, her clan, twinkling like stars in the wind.

  She was not alone. In fact, she had never been alone. Her clan, the little ekele, her love for Cloud Brother, all of this had surrounded her and protected her in a mantle of love.

  She was working hard and guarding an outpost by herself. But at all times, she was enfolded in a tapestry of love, connecting clan, family, and home.

  This strange entity, trying to possess and claim this tapestry for its own, did not want to transform into a mere thread connecting to the others. It wanted to take the tapestry for itself, add it to a hoard of other tapestries it had already claimed.

  The energy that had appeared in the form of Cloud Brother was lost and disjointed, a parasite seeking a host not a home. Sparrow would have welcomed it in to join the tapestry, become part of the family. But it held itself apart, afraid to subsume itself into something bigger and more enduring.

  :Hold steady, Sparrow! The Crows and the Walkers are both here! Don’t be afraid.:

  Sparrow’s heart leaped at the words spoken in her mind, loud and perfectly enunciated. Ah, Rork, wonderful Rork. He had not forgotten her, of course he hadn’t. He’d sensed the trouble brewing in her little nest, probably before Sparrow herself had, and had rushed to get help from both her own clan, the Cloudwalkers, and the Crow clan, who had honored her the last time the crows had come to her aid.

  No Companion could be more steadfast and brave than that bossy, loving hertasi. Rork, her champion.

  The wind rose into a storm in the room, rendering Sparrow breathless. The sending opened its mouth to scream, but no sound emerged.

  “You are welcome to join us,” Sparrow said, her farewell to the invader. “But you can’t be coming here just to claim and to destroy us. We won’t let that happen.”

  Without Cloud Brother here, Sparrow could not rise into the wind to fight alongside their Cloudwalker Clan brothers, scouts and adepts swept into the inner storm. Cloud Brother’s Gift granted her the ability to fly into the higher energy planes, but only when she was by his side.

  Here and now, tethered to the earth, she did her part without him and his Herald’s Gift, holding her baby close and protecting him with her own offering. The gift of love and his mother’s arms.

  A humble gift, but one profound and powerful as well, a gift that walked in ways a great Change Mage could never understand.

  The gift of home.

  The wind rose to a shriek, violently shaking the walls, and Sparrow bent her head over Tis’s body to shield him from the battle. Awake, he wailed, adding his cries to the mayhem rising up against the invader.

  The sending of Cloud Brother melted into a ball of white light, no features or sign of humanity remaining. And as Sparrow watched in growing fear, the ball vibrated, rose—

  And hurled itself straight at her face.

  The pain of the direct assault burned like fire. Sparrow gratefully released the pain and her consciousness as everything went black.

  • • •

  Had she died, gone to join her father?

  Was she blinded now, like her beloved?

  These panicky thoughts were the first signs that Sparrow still lived, and once she realized she was thinking again, deep down she knew that whatever had happened, matters would set themselves right again somehow.

  With a great effort, she forced her eyelids open. Once she realized Tis was no longer in her arms, she jolted fully awake and struggled to sit up.

  “One minute, hold on!” Liros Cloudwalker said, loud enough to burn through the fog in her mind. “Give yourself a chance to return, Sparrow. Your son is fine. All is well.”

  Sparrow’s head pounded, as if the ball of evil energy had drilled a hole through her forehead. “But . . . what happened?” she forced out. She felt queasy and dizzy, amazed she was still alive after the pummeling she had just endured.

  “You protected your home,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Sparrow blinked hard and focused. The swirl of light and sound coalesced into the main room of her little ekele, now crowded full of scouts and Mages from the Cloudwalker clan. Cloud Brother’s friend Liros cradled Sparrow’s head, and Rork ran back and forth from the storeroom in the back of the ekele, bringing blankets, and cool fruit nectar, and hats, frantically trying to restore order to his domain.

  All of it was wonderful, all of it meant home. But that voice, quiet as it was, commanded her full attention.

  Cloud Brother. Returned from Haven, after so long and so much.

  “The council at Haven found the source of the trouble. The Mage here . . .” Cloud Brother paused, his voice husky.

  Sparrow didn’t care any more about the Mage, the threat. Together they had repelled the threat, at least for the time being. And Cloud Brother had come home. She could contend with just about anything, knowing he had returned.

  He took a half-dozen steps forward, easily sensing his brother Adepts in the room and sliding around them to reach Sparrow’s side. In his arms he held his son, baby-blue eyes wide open and calm in his father’s arms, where he belonged.

  “His name is Thistle? That was what Rork told me.”

  Sparrow could hardly speak past the lump in her throat. “You weren’t here, my love, and I had to name him something! I call him Tis, but Thistle it is, and I don’t mind to tell all the brothers in the clan, either. His name is safe with you all.

  “After three days, his name came to me . . . a thistle will cling to you, pierce you, and you can find them everywhere, growing like weeds, right? But a thistle is beautiful, too, a golden tuft that you find everywhere. And any healer knows a thistle is a plant of great virtue, a healer of body and mind, and not rare or expensive, but open to all, growing in every open field.”

  Cloud Brother gently kissed the baby’s jet-black hair. “He’s a gift, for sure. And so are you.”

  “But what I don’t understand, my love, is why the Mage was coming after me? And why did the Adept come three years ago? What do I have to do with anything? I am nothing special, no great Herald, no Queen. I hope that I am not some kind of magnet for bad or a weakness in the Vale!”

  :Quite the opposite, dear child . . . :

  It was not Rork, or even Cloud Brother who spoke now into her mind, but Abilard, Cloud Brother’s Companion, speaking from afar, and as always, his words sent waves of warmth and peace through her body, along with their meaning.

  :It is because you are no Mage that you attract the powerful. Often the powerful crave a safe place, a haven. Thank the Powers for your Gift, Sparrow! Without it, without home, where would any of us be?

  :Your Gift is home.:

  Harmless As Serpents

  Rosemary Edghill & Rebecca Fox

  From the moment his hooves first touched the grass in the Companions’ paddock, Kenisant knew he was special. He was perfectly formed and beautiful, even more so than most Companions, and gifted (as he knew without a single flicker of doubt) with the sort of insight and sensitivity not vouchsafed to the common run of Companions. Clearly he was meant for great things.

  So it was really no surprise at all that he had quickly grown bored with his young playmates in the herd. They were lesser creatures, and—goaded by what was almost certainly jealousy and envy—they never tired of tossing taunts at him: Vain. Stuck up. Arrogant. Selfish. He knew their words meant nothing, and really, such behavior was unbecoming to Companions.

  It was just as well they left him to his solitary meditations; gods knew he preferred his own company to theirs. They were
silly and boring and ill-mannered, and their rambunctious games were nothing more than a waste of time.

  After a few weeks of wandering alone through the tall grass, gazing up at the sky and thinking, Kenisant came to understand something that had puzzled him for a long time. How could he, the most splendid and amazing Companion to have been foaled in generations, truly have been foaled at all?

  And that was when he realized the truth that had been so cleverly hidden from him. He must be Grove-Born. It was the only explanation that made sense. His mother had only pretended to be his mother in order to conceal that fact from the others, lest their spite and envy be too much for his sensitive and generous spirit to bear up under.

  Clearly that explained everything.

  He decided not to embarrass his mother by letting her know he had seen through her well-intentioned charade. Someday, when he was grown and had found his perfect Chosen, he could gently let her know that her subterfuge had been both useless and unnecessary. He could even (now) pity his year-mates, who sensed the truth without knowing what they sensed. How ashamed and humble they would be once his true glory was revealed! He vowed to himself that when that day came, he would be generous and forgiving of their youthful blindness.

  But when he magnanimously rejoined the ranks of his year-mates, willing to graciously overlook all their deficiencies, they drove him off with nips and taunts.

  Go find your Chosen, Kenisant! That’s probably the only one who will put up with you!

  Of course, everyone knew you couldn’t go on Search until you were all grown up. But now that Kenisant had so much time to think, he simply couldn’t help wondering and dreaming about his Chosen. Surely that person would be the most perfect human to be found in all of Velgarth! Perhaps of royal blood—or maybe a great general who commanded armies!

  He could see the future so clearly.

  He would be on Search, of course (the youngest Companion ever to leave Haven; that much went without saying!), and he would meet his Chosen purely by accident, as he, Kenisant the Beautiful, selflessly and nobly saved a passing stranger from mortal peril. Perhaps he’d even battle a demon from Karse . . .