The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods)

by Barbara Friend Ish

  “Maybe upstairs?” Easca said quietly.

  The clan leader grimaced. “There’ll be little dignity in that trip.”

  Easca nodded ruefully.

  “Well, bring them in; we’ll sort it all inside,” the clan leader said.

  “I— Thank you, Lady,” Letitia said, plainly unhappy.

  The clan leader nodded. “We’ll settle your dead, and I’ll send my son to fetch Arian’s—herdsman, and then you can settle your horses. It’s a bad night all around, but we’ll sort it.”

  “Thank you, Lady,” Letitia said again.

  Manannan, Greine, and Fiacha followed Letitia and the clan leader inside, carrying the bodies of the fallen knights. Seconds later a young Tan bolted out the door and down the walkway, stopped just long enough for a swift embrace with Easca, and raced out into the village: Alba’s son Erc, I guessed. The rest of us stood silent in the gathering dark, waiting for the knights to return. A zephyr skittered down the street, carrying wild, unfamiliar energies that raised gooseflesh on my exposed skin. My heart ramped up its pace again; renewed desire for things I knew better than to touch swept through me, and I bit down hard on my lower lip.

  Finally they came back down the walkway; we mounted and followed Easca through the village to a wattle-and-daub barn. The doors were already flung wide, and lamps burned within; we dismounted, led the horses inside, and did what we could for them in the small space not occupied by cows. My own horse rolled his eyes at the close quarters and constant jostling; but at least by now he was acquainted with his fellows, and they could share warmth as their coats dried. I hoped he would find some peace tonight, once all the people cleared out.

  The clan leader’s house proved just as cramped as I had surmised: surely the smallest, meanest dwelling in which a noblewoman of royal ancestry had ever resided. The first floor was all one room, lit by rush lamps and a pungent dung fire. The three fallen knights had been carefully laid out in the center. The second floor lacked stairs: only a stout ladder led through an opening in the first floor ceiling.

  We stacked our soggy packs in the corner near the door, piled damp mail and weapons in the farthest reaches of the room. There was no remedy for our sodden clothes but to stand near the smoky little fire; I chose the clammy embrace of wet silk over smelling like a dung fire for gods-only-knew-how-long, and took up a spot against the opposite wall instead. Alba’s daughter Ailbhe brought bowls of water subtly scented with heather, so the Tanaan might prepare the dead according to their custom; Tru, Bruane, Easca and even Alba and Ailbhe fell to the task immediately. Amien walked quiet circles around them: banishing the dark energies wafting towards the corners of the room, murmuring prayers for safe crossing to the heroes’ reward. None of it seemed to have much effect on the depletion spell; I could barely see the knights’ bodies through the traces of magic that hung on them: a shimmer of shadow in colors that mundane eyes never see. But if Amien saw it, he said nothing.

  “Lady,” Letitia said. Now that she’d removed her armor, I saw: she no longer wore the enchanted diamond. The well-worked Mora’s Torc looked oddly plain without it. I wished I had finagled some opportunity to examine it more closely before she realized what it was; I wondered whether it had been lost with her horse.

  Alba looked up, chagrined. “Your pardon! I have taken your—”

  Letitia shook her head, face set in a way that made it perfectly clear she considered the task outside the mora’s purview, and shifted the book she’d been carrying since Irisa from hand to hand.

  “I need to meditate. We’ll be sailing to Ilunmore tomorrow. Where—”

  “Ilunmore?” Alba echoed. “How?” She cast a glance around the group.

  “I… have an idea, Lady,” Easca said quietly, not looking up.

  “Really,” Alba said, but Easca just kept bathing Luachran’s wounds. The clean scent of the heathered water permeated my head, warring strangely with the shimmer of the depletion spell.

  “Is there someplace I can have quiet?” Letitia pursued.

  “I—” The clan leader shrugged. “Upstairs.” She cast a glance towards the ladder.

  Letitia followed her gaze, then nodded stiffly to the clan leader and stepped towards the ladder. “Nuad,” she said peremptorily, and climbed through the opening in the ceiling.

  Nuad’s face didn’t change, but the set of his shoulders spoke of resignation. He followed Letitia up to the second floor.

  “Ilunmore?” Alba said to Easca. The idea flitted through my head that there was significance to the juxtaposition of heather, which is sacred to Lady Tella, with the residue of the depletion spell. But there wasn’t time for me to examine the thought before it faded into the smoke from the pungent fire.

  Easca’s shoulders sagged, too; she didn’t look up from her work. “Mama, we’re escorting the mora to the Beallan lands; she also plans to make the pilgrimage at Ilunmore along the way—” Something in the clan leader’s face or posture made her stop.

  “The pilgrimage,” Alba said, no gentleness in her tone. “Has she been invested, or not?”

  Easca sagged further.

  “And yet she’s mora.”

  “Mama, do you want to talk Irisa politics tonight? We’re leaving in the morning.”

  Mother and daughter exchanged stares. Several of the Tanaan sitting around the little table and leaning against the walls shifted uncomfortably.

  “How do you plan to get to Ilunmore?” Alba said.

  Easca sighed, sat back on her heels, and wrung out the cloth she was using. “I’m going to talk to Indech,” she said, and rose.

  Nuad climbed down the ladder. “Easca, you’re first watch.”

  “Ra?” Easca said, incredulous. Her fair face flushed. “With respect, Ra, I’ve only one night—”

  Nuad’s hand sliced through the air. “The mora asked for you specifically.”

  Alba frowned. An anger that suggested far more history than this one injustice gathered in Easca’s face.

  “Who better than the one who knows the territory, she said.”

  “Ra, you know—”

  “Easca, get on it.”

  She cast Nuad another aggrieved, incredulous look; crossed the room to gather her mailshirt and weapon; spun on her heel; and stalked outside. The door closed behind her with sufficient impact to shake the frame.

  “Nuad,” Iminor said quietly, and went to stand among the armor in the farthest corner of the room. Mattiaci and Tuiri moved closer to the fire, expressions bland. A strange little ripple of upside-down power, reminiscent of the energy I’d tasted at the spring in Letitia’s garden at Irisa, washed past me; a tremor skipped up my back. I had to find something else on which to focus.

  “She needs you to stand up to her when she’s wrong.” Of all things, why Iminor’s barely-more-than-whispered words were what came through to me at that moment was beyond my capacity to understand. “She gets emotional; she needs you to—”

  Upside-down power rippled up from the floor, swirled around me like a whirlpool, pulled my consciousness towards places I couldn’t allow it to go. Heather and some exotic aroma I couldn’t identify infiltrated me. This time I realized what had snared me: the energy of Letitia’s meditation. Was it so much stronger than it had been on previous nights?

  Arcane consciousness sank velvet talons into my brain. In another thirty seconds I would no longer have a choice. I pushed away from the wall and strode to the door.

  “Lord?” Bruane said, looking up from the floor with concern in her gaze. Her red-gold hair reminded me of someone, of some argument I’d left unfinished.

  “Ellion,” Amien said, in a tone that would have irrestistibly fixed my attention, were I still a member of his workshop. But the mayhem gathering in my brain made it impossible to focus on him.

  “Excuse me,” I said, opened the door, and stepped outside.

  Will-o-the-wisps hung over the rice fields, for all the world like stars fallen to earth and so numerous that the entire village had
taken on a faint blue-green glow. The air sparkled and danced against my skin, whispering of energies that awaited the grasp of someone who knew what to do with them. Out in the narrow excuse for a road, Easca spun towards me, unearthly light casting her in strange glamour and tracing the fine edge of her swiftly-drawn sword.

  “Lord!” she breathed.

  I nodded and strode down the walkway. “I’m just going to get some air.” Maybe things would be less eldritch beyond the rice fields.

  Easca shook her head. “Lord, this is no place for an evening stroll.”

  A hollow laugh escaped me. “Nevertheless, I’ll be back,” I said, and walked down the road to the river.

  Telliyn waxed towards her first quarter, nearly at her zenith. Her light bathed the swift current and barren shore in a pale glow, made the bracken clinging to the banks into the feathers of some underworld bird. Across the river, the lonely sculptures on the Twin Hills of Arian gleamed. I turned north, away from the places where Básghilae corpses lay, following the river until the rice fields and will-o-the-wisps faded into darkness behind me.

  Moonlit basalt stretched away from the river into limitless distance, meeting the pinpricked darkness that arched above. Telliyn stood on the near side of the bright smear of the Way of the Gods, Arliyn across that divide. The sky was starkly cloudless tonight; stars twinkled in myriad subtle hues. The wind still carried hints of sulfur and iron—and energies whose names I didn’t know but longed to learn, harbingers of powers far stronger than the things Aballo wizards are trained to tap. Those energies infiltrated me, creeping through chinks in the wall I tried to throw around myself, raising illicit thrills up the length of my spine. It reminded me of something, this sensation of standing on the verge of knowledge that could blow Aballo’s understanding of magic wide open. No more than two heartbeats passed before I realized what it reminded me of, and the memory swept over me before I could forestall it.

  In my mind I was in Tellan again, astride a new and glorious stallion I hadn’t yet named, halting him almost mid-stride in a little, fir-infused glade on the southern edge of the Tellan family lands. Everything felt renewed this month, delighting my senses and my spirit; even this place through which I’d ridden a hundred times held an eldritch glamour I’d never noticed before. There was something here, a sense of presence like and yet unlike the closeness of the goddess I so often felt in a ceremonial circle: something half-familiar I sensed but couldn’t see; and I sent every sense, arcane and mundane, questing after knowledge of it. I gathered the reins in my left hand, turning the horse all the way around, peering into shadows. Something shimmered in my peripheral vision, but when I turned my head towards it I couldn’t see anything there.

  There are times when a wizard knows better than to trust his eyes. On a whim, I shut mine.

  There was definitely something here. It had been waiting for me, as patient as if time had ceased to exist.

  Hello? I thought, not projecting it. I heard no answer, unless the near-laughter of wind in the treetops was a reply.

  Earlier this twelvenight, on my return from Aballo, I had made the sacred marriage on Tellan’s own soil; my bond with the goddess, like my bond with this nation I would one day inherit, felt utterly complete. But surely other gods had walked these lands before the arrival of the true ones; how surprising would it be for older forces to call my notice now? At Aballo, more timid voices would have been calling for me to draw back, to be wary of straying from the path, as usual; I missed them not at all.

  A rider approached from the south: I opened my eyes and turned the horse again, until the the shimmering enigma hovered behind my shoulder and the place in which the path left the glade lay straight ahead. And on that path, entering the clearing, Deaclan: had he ridden all the way from Aballo seeking me? Half a twelvenight’s journey through lands I knew he had never seen. For a second I was almost happy; until this moment I hadn’t realized that, against all reason, I missed the constant tug of awareness of his awareness. But his luminous eyes, silver in a circle, were storm-dark today; his sensuous mouth twisted into something that wasn’t a smile. Now I understood what had brought him here: two years of competition and his escalating hatred; the itch for a dance that our superiors at Aballo would have stopped before it really began. The welcome I had almost offered twisted inside me; anger and multilayered arcane lust rose up in its wake. I drew the defensive habit of irony around me and smiled.

  “Ah, but you’ve missed the party,” I drawled.

  Deaclan gave an elaborate shrug. “You were the only one there who didn’t know it was dull.”

  I made some tart retort, but neither of us was listening; the ground on which my new horse stood erupted in flames. The young stallion reared, panicked; I vaulted backwards, rolling into the landing and casting at the Tan as his shield shimmered to red-purple life. I drew the golden sparkle of a shield around me and scrambled to my feet. How many months had I been waiting for this moment? We should have done this long ago.

  Look at this. It wasn’t a telepathic sending, and it wasn’t my thought, but it was inside my head anyway; and suddenly I was aware of the energy in the clouds scudding down from the north. This evening, those clouds would be a storm on the palace compound. Right now, that power was a tingle of delight along my spine.

  I grasped the power and turned it on Deaclan. It crashed against his shield. For a moment I was alight with energy broader than anything I’d ever found in myself, stronger than any sacred source. The flash faded, leaving afterimages in my eyes and a broad ring of scorched and smoking earth around the Tan. He met my eyes as the echoes rolled through the forest around us, gaze full of unspeakable words that made my throat knot up.

  The flash came again; this time I wasn’t the one who had channeled it. It crashed against my shield, making my ears ring and my head momentarily uncertain. But when I reached inside for energy to cast at Deaclan, I found something just as delicious and wild as the lightning I’d channeled a moment before, and the part of me that wasn’t always human made me forget about everything else.

  Look at this. It was not my thought, again. This time I couldn’t have cared less whose it was.

  Show me, I thought. And whoever/whatever it was, it did. I stretched; the ground and trees and mountains and clouds receded below me, and the world curved away from my eyes. Everything was dark, except for the world far below and the brilliant glow of the sun hanging in the distance behind my left shoulder. A half-visible river of cold dark fire streamed above me, sparkling close enough to touch.

  I grasped it. I found myself again, reached back to the place where I stood inside a wisp of golden energy; and I let the cold darkness blast through me. Deaclan’s shield flashed and vanished; his gaze was a reflection of the terrible beauty in which I’d tangled, of all the joyous anger and awful lust we’d been taught never to satisfy. My own ungovernable laughter echoed in my ears. More riders approached: two horses moving at a brisk easy gait, following the trail I’d ridden only moments ago. I should stop. What Deaclan and I were doing was inadmissible.

  But I didn’t care if we were discovered; I didn’t care who saw. Deaclan had brought this battle into my preserve; I would owe no apology. And I burned with the need to find out what would happen: not just this dance, but the things that would come next. I cast even wilder power at Deaclan; without warning my shield boiled away; I deflected the force Deaclan flung at me, brain ringing with the impact. Wood snapped with a lightning crack as a tree broader than my outstretched arms toppled across the space at my left hand.

  Take a look at this. Incomprehensible brilliance flooded my mind; power blasted into me, too fierce to contain. I laughed again, full to bursting with raw anger and delight. The Tan I might or might not reduce to ashes began to shimmer, his motions oddly slow as he cast again. There wasn’t time to work another shield; I would deflect the charge, sacrificing another tree or two and then turning the brilliance boiling in my brain into the final onslaught of the engagement. />
  The casting came at me; simultaneously I realized who was riding into the glade. My parents, attired for riding and relaxed for the first time since the days of feasting and preparations for my sister’s wedding began, had stolen a little time for themselves. They weren’t ready to understand what was happening here; they still radiated unease when someone mentioned my time at Aballo. This was more than they could bear to know. Deaclan’s casting hit me; my awareness of them tangled up with the way I deflected his power.

  It was wrong. I knew it even before the motion was complete. I tried to pull it back, to absorb into myself the destruction I’d shunted aside. I didn’t know how I’d survive it, but I knew my chances were better than theirs. Brilliance flared again, the flash outside me and the mayhem within echoing so I lost track of where each began. For a fraction of a second my father met my eyes. I dimly sensed more hoofbeats approaching: at a canter this time. Then half the clearing exploded.

  The shock of the explosion washed through the glade, blowing dirt into my eyes and mouth. A bit of burning lace flashed past me and was gone. A howl ripped up from my core, igniting my throat; Deaclan stared at me, his white-hot anger melting into fear. Fintan’s horse clattered to a stop between us.

  I had never bothered to work it out: how many years before Deaclan and I began our initiates at Aballo had Fintan completed his. He’d been House Healer to Tellan since I could remember. Usually he seemed impossibly narrow-minded, ineffectual; today he leapt into action. He worked a binding that separated Deaclan from the rest of the glade and immediately turned a forbidding stare on me. I barely saw any of it; all I could focus on was the blasted place in which two horses and two riders had disappeared. A horse’s severed head dangled in the branches of a tree. A woman’s riding boot—I knew whose it was, but couldn’t allow myself to form the thought—balanced precariously upside-down, as if its owner had decided to dive into the earth. Nausea vied with the intolerable pain in my chest. There was nothing to do but stand and stare.