It wasn't until she had a half dozen usable heads lined up on the bench in front of her, and had smashed the rejects, that she felt as if her temper was any cooler. Cleaning them was a dull but exacting task, precisely what she wanted at the moment. She didn't want to see or talk to anyone until her foul mood was gone.
So when she felt the stirring of air behind her that meant the door had cracked open again, she was not at all amused.
I'm going to kill him.
She readied a mental bolt, designed to hit him as if she had shouted in his ear—when her preliminary Mindtouch told her something completely unexpected. This was not Skif—or Kerowyn, or anyone else she knew.
And she ducked instinctively as something shot past, overhead, and landed with a solid thunk point-first in the wall above the bench.
A hunting knife, ordinary and untraceable. It quivered as she stared up at it, momentarily stunned. Then her training took over before the other could react to the fact that he had missed.
She kicked the stool at him as she rolled under the bench and came up on the other side. He kicked it out of the way, slammed the door shut behind him, and dropped the bar; a few heartbeats later, the door shuddered as Gwena hit it with her hooves.
Now I wish this place wasn't quite so sturdy—
The stranger turned with another knife in his hands. Gwena shrieked and renewed her attack on the door. He ignored the pounding and came straight for Elspeth.
With her lesson so fresh in her mind, she flung the first thing that came to hand at him—the half-cleaned doll's head. It didn't do any damage, but it made a hollow popping sound which distracted him enough so that she could get clear of the bench, get to where he'd kicked the stool, and snatch it up. Using it as a combination of shield and lance, she rushed him, trying to pin him against the abused door with the legs.
But the battering the stool had taken had weakened the legs too much to hold; his single blow broke the legs from the seat and left her holding a useless piece of flat board. Or almost useless; she threw it at his head, forcing him to duck, and giving her a chance to grab something else as Gwena's hooves hit the door again.
That "something else" proved to be one of her better pots, a lovely, graceful, two-handled vase. But she sacrificed it without a second thought, snatching it off the shelf and smashing it against the wall of the shed, leaving her with a razor-sharp shard. A knife-edge, with a handle to control it.
She took the initiative, as he started at the crash of shattering crockery, and threw herself at him.
He wasn't expecting that either, and she caught him completely off guard. He tried to grapple with her, and she let him, sacrificing her own mobility for one chance to get in with that bit of pottery in her right hand.
He grabbed her, but it was too late to stop her. Before he realized what she meant to do with that bit of crockery, she slashed it across his throat, cutting it from ear to ear, as Gwena's hooves hit the door and it shattered inward.
"Are you going to be all right?" Kerowyn asked, as she wiped Elspeth's forehead with a cold, damp cloth. Elspeth finally finished retching and licked her lips, tasting salt and bile, before she nodded shakily.
"I think so," she replied, closing her eyes and leaning back against the outer wall of the shed. The others had arrived to find her on her hands and knees in the grass, covered in blood—not her own—with Gwena standing over her protectively as she emptied her stomach into the bushes.
Her stomach still felt queasy, as if she might have another bout at any moment. No matter that she had seen death before—had even killed her share of the enemy in the last war with Hardorn—she'd taken down Lord Orthallen with her own two hands and one of Skif's throwing knives.
That wasn't close, not this close. I was dropping arrows into people from a distance. I threw a knife from across the room. Not like this, where he bled all over me and looked up at me and—
Her stomach heaved again, and she quelled the thoughts. "Who was he?" she asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, trying to get her mind on something else. "How did he find out where I was? And how did he get past the guards?"
"I don't know the answers to your second and third questions," Kero replied, as Elspeth closed her eyes and concentrated on the coolness against her forehead. "But I can tell you the answer to the first. There's a spiderweb brand on his palm. He's one of the followers of the Cold God. They hire themselves out as assassins, and they're very expensive because they don't care if they get caught. He was either providing a legacy for a family, or doing penance for some terrible sin. If you hadn't killed him, he'd have killed himself." Kero dropped the cloth and sat back on her heels, and Elspeth opened her eyes and gaped at the older Herald, her nausea forgotten.
"I've never heard of anything like that!" she exclaimed.
Kero nodded. "Not too many people have; the Cold One's advocates come from farther south than anyone I know has been except Geyr. He's the one who told me about them, after the last try at your mother, and told me what to look for. Said that if Ancar really got desperate and knew how to contact them, he might try hiring one of the Cold Blades." She frowned. "I didn't take the threat seriously, and I should have—and believe me, it won't happen again. Frankly, you were lucky—they usually aren't that careless. And there is nothing, nothing, more dangerous than a suicidal fanatic."
"But—how did he get in here, in the gardens?" she asked, bewildered. "How could he? We have guards everywhere!"
Kero frowned even harder. "If Geyr's to be believed, by m-m-m-m-magic," she said, forcing the word out around the compulsion that seemed to overtake all Heralds when discussing anything but the mental Gifts and the Truth-Spell. "There're m-mages among the Cold Ones that give them a kind of invisibility. My grandmother could do it—make people think that when they looked at her, they were actually seeing someone they knew and trusted and expected to be there. Works with the mind, like Mindspeech, but it's set up with a spell. Dangerous stuff—and now the guards are going to have to double-check everyone they think they know. There're going to be some unhappy folks, unless I miss my guess...."
He either underestimated me, or he was inexperienced, she thought soberly, as Kero left her to talk quietly with some of the Guard who were dealing with the body. And—I don't think we're ever going to find out how Ancar found him because I have the funny feeling that he used magic.
She shivered and stood up, her knees shaking. Her Whites were ruined—not that she'd ever want to wear this set again. Magic again. Whatever had protected Valdemar in the past, it was not proof against Ancar anymore.
Chapter Two
DARKWIND
Darkwind k'Sheyna balanced his bondbird Vree on his shoulder, and peered out across the sea of grass below him with a touch of—regret? Envy? A little of both, perhaps. From where he stood, the earth dropped in a steep cliff more than a hundred man-lengths to the floor of the Dhorisha Plains—a formidable barrier to those who meant the Shin'a'in and their land any ill. It took knowledge and skill to find the paths down into the Plains, and from there, intruders were visible above the waist-high grass for furlongs.
His bondbird lifted narrow, pointed wings a little in the warm, grass-scented updraft that followed the cliff. :Prey,: Vree's thought answered his own, framed in the simple terms of the bondbird's understanding. Not so much a thought as a flood of images; tree-hares, mice, quail, rabbits, all of them from the viewpoint of the forestgyre as they would appear just before the talons struck.
Prey, indeed. Any would-be hunter attempting to penetrate the Plains without magic aid would find himself quickly turned hunted. The land itself would fight him; he would be visible to even a child, he would never guess the locations of seeps and springs, and without landmarks that he would understand, that intruder would become disoriented in the expanse of grass and gently rolling hills. The guardians of the Plains, and the scouts that patrolled the border, had half their work done for them by the Plains themselves.
Darkwind si
ghed and turned away, back to his own cool, silent forest. No such help for him—other than the fact that the eastern edge of k'Sheyna territory bordered the Plains. But to the south and west lay forest, league upon league of it, and all of it dangerous.
:Sick,: complained Vree. Darkwind agreed with him. Magic contaminated those lands, a place Outlanders called the "Pelagir Hills" with no notion of just how much territory fell under that description. Magic flowed wild and twisted through the earth, a magic that warped and shaped everything that grew there—sometimes for the better, but more often for the worse.
Darkwind took Vree onto his wrist, the finger-long talons biting into the leather of his gauntlet as Vree steadied himself, and launched him into the trees to scout ahead. The forestgyre took to the air gladly; unlike his bond-mate, Vree enjoyed the scouting forays. Hunting was no challenge to a bondbird, and there was only so much for Vree to do within the confines of k'Sheyna Vale's safe territory. Scouting and guarding were what Vree had been bred for, and he was never happier than when flying ahead of Darkwind on patrol.
Darkwind didn't mind the scouting so much, even if the k'Sheyna scouts were spread frighteningly thin—after all, he was a vayshe'druvon. Guard, scout, protector, he was all of those.
It's the magic, he told himself—not for the first time. If it wasn't for the magic—
Every time he encountered some threat to k'Sheyna that used magic or was born of it, and had to find some way other than magic to counter that threat, it scorched him to the soul. And worse was his father's attitude when he returned—scorn for the mage who would abandon his power, and a stubborn refusal to understand why Darkwind had done so....
If I could go back in time and kill those fools that set this loose in the world, I would do so, and murder them all with my bare hands, he thought savagely. His anger at those long-dead ancestors remained, as he chose a tree to climb, looking for one he had not used before.
A massive goldenoak was his choice this time; he slipped hand-spikes out of his belt without conscious thought, and pulled the fingerless, backless leather gloves on over his palms. The tiny spikes set into the leather wouldn't penetrate the bark of the tree enough to leave places for fungus or insects to lodge, but it would give him a little more traction on the trunk. As would the shakras-hide soles of his thin leather boots.
In moments he was up in the branches. The game-trail along the edge of the territory lay below him. When two-legged intruders penetrated k'Sheyna, most of the time they sought trails like this one.
When scouts patrolled, it was often up here, where the trails could be seen, but where the scouts themselves were invisible.
He shaded his eyes and chose a route through the next three forest giants by means of intersecting limbs, stowing his climbing-spikes and removing his double-ended climbing tool from the sheath on his back. Then he picked his way through the foliage, walking as surefootedly on the broad, swaying branch as if he were on the ground, pulling another branch closer with the hook end of his tool and hopping from his goldenoak to the limb of a massive candle-pine just as the branch began to bow beneath his weight. He followed the new branch in to the trunk, then back out again to another conifer, this time stowing the tool long enough to leap for the branch above him and swing himself up onto it.
As he chose his next route, his thoughts turned back to that wild magic, as they always did. What it has done to the land, to us, is unforgivable. What it could do is worse.
Never mind that the Tayledras tamed that magic, cleansed the places it had turned awry, made them safe for people and animals alike to live there. Not that there weren't both there now—but they often found their offspring changed into something they did not recognize.
But that isn't our real task. Our real task is more dangerous. And my father has forgotten it ever existed, in his obsessions with power and Power.
Darkwind looked back at the treeless sky where the Plains began. The Shin'a'in had no such problems. But then, the Shin'a'in had little to do with magic. Odd to think we were one, once.
Very odd, for all that there was no mistaking the fact that Tayledras features and Shin'a'in were mirrors of each other. The Kaled'a'in, they had been the most trusted allies of a mage whose name had been lost over the ages. The Tayledras remembered him only as "The Mage of Silence," and if the Shin'a'in had recorded his true name in their knotted tapestries, they had never bothered to tell anyone in the Tayledras Clans.
Father forgets that the real duty of the Hawkbrothers is to heal the land of the scars caused by that war of magics, even as the Goddess has healed the Plains.
He often felt more kinship with his Shin'a'in "cousins" these days than he did with his real kin. The Lady gave them the more dangerous task, truth to tell, he admitted grudgingly. He looked back again, but this time he shuddered. The Hawkbrothers cleansed—but the Shin'a'in guarded. And what they guarded—
Somewhere out there, buried beneath grass and soil, are the weapons that caused all this. And not all of them require an Adept to use them.
Only the Shin'a'in stood guardian between those hidden weapons and the rest of the world.
I don't envy them that duty.
:Men,: Vree sounded the alert, and followed it with a vocal alarm-call. Darkwind froze against the tree trunk for a moment, and touched Vree's mind long enough to see through the bondbird's eyes.
He clutched the trunk, fingernails digging into the bark. Direct contact with the forestgyre's mind was always disorienting. His perspective was skewed—first at seeing the strangers from above, as they peered up through the branches in automatic response to Vree's scream, the faces curiously flat and alien. Then came the dizzying spiral of Vree's flight that made the faces below seem to spin. As always, the strangeness was what kept him aware that it was the forestgyre's eyes he was using and not his own—the heightened sharpness of everything red, and the colors Vree saw that human eyes could not.
He was a passive traveler in Vree's mind, not an active controller. It was a measure of the bond and Vree's trust that the forestgyre would let him take control on occasion, but Darkwind took care never to abuse that trust. In general it was better just to observe—as he found yet again. Vree spotted one of the strangers raising what was probably a weapon, and kited up into the thick branches before Darkwind had registered more than the bare movement of an arm.
Darkwind released his link with Vree, and his hold on the trunk at the same time, running along the flat branch and using his tool as a balance-aid, and leaping to the next tree limb a heartbeat later. In his first days with Vree it had taken him a long time to recover from a link—
—and some never did, especially the first time. Caught up in the intoxication of the flight and the kill, they never detached themselves. And unless someone else discovered them, they could be lost forever that way—their bodies lying in a kind of coma, while their minds slowly merged with that of the bird, diminishing as they merged, until there was nothing left of what they were.
That had never happened in Darkwind's lifetime by accident, although there had been one scout, when he was a child, who had a lightning-struck tree crush him beneath its trunk. He had been far from a Healer, and had deliberately merged himself with his bird, never to return to the crippled and dying wreck of his body. He remained with k'Sheyna within his bird's mind, slowly fading, until at last the bird vanished one day, never to return.
Slower death, but death all the same. Darkwind thought pragmatically, climbing a pine trunk by hooking the stub of a broken branch above him to ascend to a crossover branch. He preferred to avoid such a nonchoice altogether.
He slowed as he neared the strangers, and dropped to all fours, stalking like a slim tree-cat along the branch and taking care not to rustle the leaves. Not that it would have mattered to the intruders, who called to each other and laughed as if they had no idea that they were being observed, or that they were in forbidden territory.
His jaw tightened. They are about to find out differently. And
they're damned lucky that it's me who found them. There are plenty of others—including Father—who would feather them with arrows or make ashes of them without waiting to find out if they're ignorant, stupid, or true hostiles. Not that they'll ever know enough to appreciate the difference, since I'm going to throw them out.
There were seven of them, however, and only one of him, and he had not survived this long as a scout by being incautious. First he called to Vree, for his Mindspeech was not strong enough to reach to the two nearest scouts.
:Call alert,: he said shortly. Vree knew what that meant. He'd contact the birds of the two scouts nearest, and they, in turn, would summon their bondmates. If Darkwind didn't need their help, he would let them know through Vree, and they would turn back. But if he did need them, they were already on the way.
He followed the intruders for several furlongs as they blundered along the game trail, their clumsiness frightening all the creatures within a league of them into frozen silence, leaving behind them a visible trail in the scuffed vegetation, and an invisible one in the resinous tang of crushed pine needles and their own human scent. Two of the men bore no visible weapons; the rest were armed and armored.
Vree's scorn, as sour and acidic as an unripe berry, tempted him to laughter. :Cubs,: the bird sent, unprompted, images of bumbling young bears and tangle-footed wolf pups.
Well, this was getting him nowhere. Nothing that the intruders had said or done, gave him any idea of their intent. With a sigh, he decided that there was no choice in the matter. He was going to have to confront them.
Decision made, he worked his way up ahead of them, climbed down out of the branches, restored his climbing-tool to his back, limbered his bow, and waited for them to catch up to him.
They practically blundered into him; the one in the lead saw him first; an ordinary enough fellow, his brown leather armor marking him as a fighter rather than a forester. He shouted in surprise and quite literally jumped, even though Darkwind had not moved. Of course, Darkwind's own intricately dyed scouting gear and hair dyed a mottled brown made a near-perfect camouflage, but he wasn't that invisible.
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