The Curse of the Raven (Raven Son Book 2)

by Nicholas Kotar

  He puffed like a bellows after it was done, cradling the thing in his hand like a child. It was a flask, but it did not even look metal. It looked like a dark flower enfolded in leaves at midnight. It was the most beautiful thing Llun had ever seen. And he recognized that it was not he who had made it. He was but the instrument.

  “Mirodara,” he said. “Go. Take it. You are its only hope. It must never fall into the hands of the Raven. Find a way. Leave Vasyllia. Seek the true Vasylli out there, in the wild. If you find Voran the Healer, tell him to hurry. There may not be a Vasyllia left if we wait much longer.”

  The doors to the forge flew open. Aspidían stood there, his gaze expectant. It quickly turned to disappointment, then anger, then horror.

  “What…? What have you done, Llun? Where is Mirodara?”

  “I am ready,” said Llun. “I am ready to be a dog-man.”

  Aspidían gestured, and the guards behind him swarmed in and seized Llun, pulling him out of the smithy on his knees.

  “Turn him around,” said Aspidían. “Make him watch.”

  Ten dog-men with torches stood in a semicircle around Aspidían, their eyes red in the fire-light.

  “Burn it,” said Aspidían. “The whole block.”

  And it came to pass that the sacrifice was offered, and it was found acceptable by the Most High. And he deigned to bend down from the throne of his greatness to confirm the sacrifice, and to give a final gift. But his words were terrible. Thus saith the Lord, the Most High: “For the last time I grant the fallen a boon, until the fire-born braves the final baptism and stands before me in his transfigured flesh.”

  —From “The Prophecy of Llun” (The Sayings, Book XXIII, 4:1-4)

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Escape

  Mirodara dropped the flask into the first canvas pack she found lying in a heap of rubble in Llun’s smithy. It tied over her shoulder well enough. She hoped it wouldn’t look conspicuous in the first reach. She must do everything possible not to attract too much attention to herself on her way out of Vasyllia.

  She stopped at a food stand and bought three breads and some dried meat. Enough, she hoped, to get her into Nebesta, where she would try to find some gainful employment while she searched for Voran. She had nothing more concrete than that as far as plans go. Some very reasonable part of her, deep inside her mind, nagged at her that the lack of a plan was no plan at all, but she was too excited by her forthcoming adventure to listen.

  Only when she was halfway to her destination—a side gate in Vasyllia’s wall that was usually undermanned and filled with merchant wains entering and exiting—did it fully hit her. She would never see Llun again. She sped up her walking, if only to force the hard cobbles in the streets to rattle her out of her desire to sink to the ground and weep like a baby. It was no use, not any more. Yes, she was an orphan, but she had gotten over that (or so she kept telling herself). Now she had no one left. But the world was ending. What difference did it make if there was no one to share it with?

  Focusing on the ground before her feet, she almost didn’t notice that she was at the gates, even as she joined the line of people leaving. Her good fortune held strong. Several caravans of merchants were lining up to take the shorter, more difficult routes that skirted the mountains and led out to the lands that used to be taboo to the Vasylli. Magical lands with monstrous creatures with many eyes that spun silk out of their own saliva. If the stories were to be believed. Mirodara certainly believed them.

  She tried her best to blend into the gaggle of merchants, some even with their families, as they prepared to take a journey that could last them years. What sort of hopes animated them? How did they survive in the new Vasyllia? Were they not also affected by all the madness? Perhaps they did well to leave, hoping beyond hope that things would be different when they returned?

  A little boy of two or three saw Mirodara and started making faces at her. She did the same, and he laughed with pleased surprise.

  “What’s your name?” she asked him quietly.

  “Adarin,” he said, sheepishly.

  “I’m Mirodara,” she said. “Do you want to play a game?”

  He nodded, eyes sparkling.

  “I’m going to hide under your father’s wain, under here. But I have to get there without anyone noticing me. You can help me, right?”

  “I want to hide with you, too,” he said.

  “But then we’ll both get in trouble, won’t we? I’ll tell you what. If you help me hide now, I’ll let you come down with me for the rest of the trip. I just need to be under there when we pass the gates. Got it?”

  Adarin looked dubious, but he obviously wanted to play. He nodded seriously, then started to scream bloody murder. Every adult within earshot was completely absorbed by his screaming. Mirodara slipped under a wain and held on for dear life. As soon as she did, Adarin stopped, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to scream one second, then stop the next. Mirodara had to bite her lip to keep from laughing aloud.

  Just as they approached the gates, Mirodara heard the stomp of booted feet. Many booted feet.

  “Stop the wains, stop the wains!” Someone called from behind.

  “What’s the matter, sir?” asked someone Mirodara assumed to be the warden of the side gate.

  “Political prisoner. Escapee. Young girl, thirteen maybe. She has something of value needed by the Consistory.”

  “We’ll keep a watch out for her, sir.”

  Adarin. Please don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything.

  He didn’t. They passed without so much as a peep from the boy. To his credit, he waited until they were well beyond earshot before he crouched down to look for her.

  “Well? Can I come down now?”

  Mirodara laughed, dropped and rolled out from under the wain. She hopped up and ran away from the merchant caravan. A few surprised merchants reached out to catch her, but she had always been fast. She managed to squeeze past them. She ran down into the deepwood without stopping or looking back.

  This part of the Vasylli mountain woods she knew like the back of her hand. Even as a child, her—she almost thought “father,” then realized she had no father—“treacherous person who raised her” took her often into the woods for days at a time while he would find the best kind of wood for his carpentry. So, finding the backwoods paths that eventually joined the Dar’s Way to Nebesta was easy enough.

  She ran with inhuman speed all the way to the border of Nebesta. Three days and three nights of nearly constant running and walking, with only short naps for rest whenever she felt like she couldn’t go on any more. The rough mountain tracks she followed were well-worn, though strenuous. But she found unexpected reserves of strength inside herself. She ate less than she had expected, and she traveled farther, faster than she had thought possible.

  When she joined the Dar’s Way, she was sure some sort of alarm would blare the moment she stepped onto the pavement. Nothing happened. At least, nothing she could detect. But there did seem to be some kind of unseen energy that hummed on the level of emotion, just beyond sound. She was unsure if she had caused it, or if it was some devilry of the Raven. It left her stomach queasy. But she resumed her easy pace without any hindrance.

  She knew that just before the Way crossed over into Nebesta, it would rise up onto a ridge, then fall away steeply into a shallow valley walled by two tree-covered hills. If there was going to be an ambush anywhere, it would be there. So, she took her time cresting it, listening for the slightest sound of pursuit or ambush. But she heard nothing at all. Not even the sounds of animals. That frightened her, and as she crested the ridge, her breathing became shallow and spots danced before her eyes.

  On the downslope, a wall blocked the Dar’s Way. It was not very tall yet, clearly in the process of being built, though it was dark and imposing. Menacing, even.

  The moment she stopped to stare at the wall, she heard it. Horses behind her.

  She ran to the wall and tr
ied to find a handhold to launch herself over into Nebesta and safety, but her hand shot back in pain as though there were tiny barbs all along the wall. She looked at her palm, and it was bloody. Her arm pulsed with pain. Had she just poisoned herself?

  She turned around to face whatever it was that was coming after her. Three horsemen. Gumiren. They were bloodied and their eyes were wild and hungry. She would get no quarter from these. They looked like they had just escaped one of the latest pogroms.

  “Why you out here, Vasylli girl-child?” asked the central of the three, the youngest.

  She said nothing.

  He talked to his neighbor in their rat-a-tat tongue. They quickly came to a consensus.

  “Your hand.” He pointed. “It bloody.”

  “Yes?” she said. “The wall. It’s…”

  “Pricked…yes? Keep you in. Keep others out. We guard the wall. All who touch it are for to be executed. You not know this?”

  She gulped hard and shook her head. These Gumiren had death in their eyes. She supposed she should be grateful it was only death she saw in their eyes.

  “Well, it sad for you. But law is law.”

  He nodded at the Gumir at his left. In a smooth motion, he pulled a knife from his belt and threw it at Mirodara. It struck her in the chest, the blade going in all the way to the hilt. She stared at it in fascination, before the spots began to dance in her eyes and her knees wobbled. The ground reached up and grabbed her. No, it was the Gumiren. They hoisted her above their heads, she thought. Then, the sensation of weightlessness, followed by the earth falling on her body. No, it was she who fell on the earth. Why was it so hard to concentrate? Everything hurt, especially her left leg. Strange. Why her left leg? She felt at the thing that tugged at her chest. It was knobby. That didn’t belong there. She wrenched it out, and a fountain of red poured up and out of her. It was mesmerizing.

  Then she realized it was her blood. She seemed to be drowning in it. But no. It wasn’t just blood. There was a great deal of water. And it smelled…like…roses.

  Voran and Aglaia—he still had trouble thinking of her as Aglaia when she was in her wolf form—had been traveling toward Vasyllia in a straight line for a week. It was the first time they had done that since the fall of Vasyllia, almost ten years before. At every step, Voran expected that the road would fade, that he would fall into a different realm, or that reality would shift around him, and he would find himself where he had started a week before.

  Returning to Vasyllia was impossible. He had tried it. Hundreds of times. But someone—whether Zmei and his brothers or the Raven, Voran didn’t know—had made the lands before Vasyllia a warren of hidden doorways and traps. Time and time again, Voran took a step toward Vasyllia, only to find himself in the Lows of Aer, or displaced hundreds of miles farther away from Vasyllia. Something was doing everything in its power to prevent anyone from approaching Vasyllia.

  It also didn’t help that he hardly had a day when he wasn’t running away from Zmei or his giant brothers. It didn’t take him long to realize that they had noses like hounds, and they were nearly always three steps ahead of him every time he made his way toward Vasyllia. A few times the encounters had been close to fatal. When his mother Aglaia had joined him in her wolf form, it had actually gotten worse. The giants had bound her to her wolf form in the first place, and somehow her presence made them seek him out ever more ferociously. But she had refused to leave him. She still bristled if he so much as mentioned it.

  There were other reasons Voran didn’t come back to Vasyllia earlier. One was that Voran had been healing everyone he could find. As Zmei had predicted, the power of the Living Water only lasted for some time. Voran learned to supplement its lack with a thorough study of herbs and medicines from every leech he could find, in whatever village he happened to be at the time. Those travels had taken him as far as Karila, even to the edge of the Steppelands border. He had become a competent enough healer with his hands alone. But sometimes, rarely and never according to his own desire, an echo of the old power came out of his hands, and people were healed by his touch. That alone had been enough to make his legend travel ahead of him. He hoped that it had reached Vasyllia by now.

  A year ago, something had happened that made him seek Vasyllia with renewed energy. Lyna stopped coming to him. He realized in the pit of his gut that she was upset with him for not managing to return to Vasyllia. For not accomplishing his calling, so to speak. He felt he had had little choice in the matter, but her lack was like a knife slowly cutting a hole in his chest. He needed her like he needed to breathe. So, he and Aglaia had braved the most obscure paths, some of them nothing more than pure deepwood, with little more than pressed-down grass from the passage of some wild animal.

  It took much longer than it normally would. Finding food was a problem, even for Aglaia. But they had done it without even a whiff of giant-stink anywhere near them. Somehow, either the traps had faded in power, or they had managed to evade them. Finally, they came to a sharp ridge of mountains. In them was a narrow pass, hardly noticeable to the naked eye, beyond which lay a hunter’s track that connected with the Dar’s Way near the border between Nebesta and Vasyllia.

  The trek over the pass was difficult—it was late spring, and the cold and ice were omnipresent—but they made it over with only scrapes and bruises, not broken bones. Voran was continually astounded by the unseen grace that protected him in the wild. Sometimes it was just a whisper of a thought that kept him from falling into a crevasse in the night. Sometimes, it was more obvious, like the gust of wind that had actually lifted and carried him and Aglaia over a gap in the mountains that a mountain goat couldn’t have jumped. Voran was sure it was no wind, but possibly even a Majestva, one of the higher Powers of Adonais. But he kept his thoughts to himself, and Aglaia had not commented.

  Finally, they were within visual range of the border.

  A wall towered between Nebesta and Vasyllia, uncommonly high. Higher than the red-barks in Vasyllia, without a doubt. Voran didn’t think human beings could build such things. Perhaps it was the giants?

  As usual, it was as though his mother had read his thoughts: “No, that doesn’t smell of giants, Voran. Very clearly Raven-made.”

  “Not Gumiren?”

  She sniffed the air for a long time, her head bobbing up and down hypnotically. She did this for more than a minute. Then she huffed and sneezed.

  “Some Gumiren. But I think it’s an old smell. Very little human smell at all, actually.”

  They approached it carefully. Voran unsheathed his sword, and Aglaia’s hackles rose in concert. Her low growl made the ground shake. It gave Voran the needed push of courage.

  Nothing stopped them as they approached, their eyes fixed on the wall. Voran could see no way in or out. He could see precious little at all, as though this were not a wall, but a single, strangely-shaped piece of stone that snaked along the border. It stank of dark magic, even to him. Aglaia’s nose wrinkled more and more with distaste the closer they came.

  Then, sudden as a sunrise in the middle of winter, the smell. Tube-rose and lavender. Even a hint of orange.

  “Is that…?” Aglaia ventured, her tail out straight behind her.

  “Yes, it has to be,” said Voran. “Only Living Water smells like that.”

  The road bent leftward, just before rising toward the first ridge of the Vasylli mountains. As they turned the corner, Voran saw the strangest thing he had ever seen. And he had seen some very strange things.

  It was a dome-topped square building, similar to the kind of chapel to Adonais that rich merchants liked to build on crossroads in the wild. But it was built entirely of thick vines with vaguely heart-shaped leaves. Tiny purple-blue flowers exploded from the vines at regular intervals. The dome was an interweaving of some fibrous, root-like material that from a distance looked like an oversized onion. It was tipped with a single white blossom with eight petals, larger than any flower he had ever seen.

  “What in the
Heights…?” Voran said.

  “The smell…” said Aglaia, “it’s not coming from that edifice. It’s from inside it.”

  Voran’s hands shook. But it wasn’t fear. It was the overawing sense of presence that he used to feel in the Temple in Vasyllia in the old days. A sense he had not had in the wild for many years. It almost physically pushed him down. He felt the need to approach it on his knees.

  The vines moved with the slight breeze, revealing a chamber within the strange edifice.

  “There’s something inside,” said Voran, a little lamely.

  Aglaia chuckled. “You always become so painfully obvious when you’re in the presence of the grace of the Heights.”

  Voran smiled.

  He pushed aside the vines, and a light shone from within—warm and yellow, like a firelight. He climbed in.

  A girl lay on a bed of moss and leaves. Her hair—wavy and strawberry blond—reached to her ankles. Her hands were crossed on her chest, where they barely covered a wound from a very wide knife-thrust.

  “She’s alive! Look at her nails,” said Aglaia.

  She was right. Her nails were long and curled, as though they had been growing for years.

  “But how? That wound would kill a warrior, much less a girl like that.”

  “I think she’s been here for years,” said Aglaia, ignoring him. “This place smells strange. Fresh and old at the same time. Only one other place has ever smelled like this. The barrier between the worlds.”

  Voran reached for the girl’s clothes, and realized they were wet through. Her hair remained strangely dry. What sort of place was this?

  A compulsion came upon him. He recognized it. It was the same as the push he had felt the night he first heard the Sirin in the forest. He turned the girl over to reach at her back.

  She wore a pack made of old canvas, from which the ivy that made the walls grew. This was the source of everything. He opened it gently, and the smell of tuberose inundated him. His hand touched something metal. He pulled it out and gasped.