Elanraigh

by S. A. Hunter

  In spite of her present mood, the Elanraigh risked the sending of a small air elemental, which skittered about her, bursting in its zealous duty.

  She absently noted the air elemental and remembered that legend told of the Elanraigh having an ability to influence the winds. She remembered that Teacher had said, however, that elementals of wind and air were flighty and temperamental, and when asked for a gentle breeze, were just as likely to produce a considerable storm.

  Thera moved out into the open, paused, and then continued on to the rocky ledge. There was no sign of the others. The small breeze attempted to buffet her back from the cliff edge. She moved back, but only because she intended to descend the cliff path.

  She soon found Jon and Innic. They lay piled one upon the other like broken jackstraws. Thera felt her body shaking. She clenched her teeth, swallowing hard against the grief that rose like bile in her throat, and sank to her knees beside them. They lay on the rocks where she had last seen them at the narrowing of the trail. Jon’s body was on the bottom, face down. The rocks and sand below him were stained dark with blood. Jon’s arm was out-flung with the sword still clenched in hand. Probably his plain weapon had not been of interest to the Memteth who slew him.

  Innic lay face up, the swordsman’s famous grimace intact. He had many wounds. He had probably weakened from loss of blood, Thera thought, and then taken his fatal blow. Innic’s sword was gone, as were his leathers. Some Memteth had carved a bloody rune on Innic’s forehead. Thera placed a shaking hand on his brow and murmured an ancient blessing. No curse of theirs could keep Innic’s soul from finding its rightful place.

  Innic’s skin was cold and waxy. The eyes stared.

  A cold sweat broke out on Thera’s forehead and her stomach heaved sickeningly. The Elanraigh’s small breeze caressed the sweat-dampened tendrils of hair off her forehead. Past the thunder of her own blood in her ears was the far off mewling of gulls.

  Scanning the area around them, Thera saw other dark patches staining rocks nearby. Her lips curled in a snarl. She observed the ground more closely and saw the swath of overturned rocks. This must be the way the Memteth had hauled their own dead or injured back to their ship.

  She turned her face back to the bodies of Innic and Jon. “We will raise you a cairn here, swordsmen, and at my father’s house your names will be entered in the Scroll of Honor.”

  Thera flashed a question toward the Elanraigh.

  She didn’t believe a soldier’s soul was as likely to yearn toward the Elanraigh, as would that of a woodwright, hunter, or Salvai. However, it was possible Innic and Jon had chosen so.

  In a strange, subdued voice, the Elanraigh replied, “Their spirits were welcome to come to us, but have chosen another place.”

  So. Thera stood again. There was the Lament to be sung, but that must wait. She looked down trail. She had yet another to find.

  At the foot of the trail, she stood where she was screened by tall yellow broom. Thera looked out upon the vast crescent of Shawl Bay. The Memteth ship was gone. Her hands clenched as she saw the remains of the fallen sitka—only its boughs, branches, and shavings —thrown into a heaping pile. Nearby were the remains of a fire. Her brow puckered. They had been ashore long enough to have a meal and some comfort, it seems.

  How long did I sleep in the tree cave, she wondered again.

  Thera walked onto the sand. The butchered remains of a horse lay some lengths ahead. Thera sighed shakily, it was not Mulberry, it was Jon’s mount. Sand fleas covered the decapitated head and the poor beast’s gelid eye gazed skyward. Large bones lay cracked in the remains of the fire.

  Past the pile of sitka branches Thera glimpsed a flicker of white blown by the wind. She began to walk toward it, stumbled, then ran. Her foot slipped on a sandy rock. Quickly outreaching her arm, she slid to the other side of the sitka’s branches.

  Nan’s garment. It’s Nan! Her white petticoats spread like the wings of a fallen gull. Thera fought for breath as the nausea and horror threatened to overwhelm her. She moaned deep in her throat.

  “Ahh. Nanny...” Sobbing a litany of old nursery endearments, Thera dropped to Nan’s side.

  Her fingers gently touched Nan’s pale limbs all mottled with bruises. She straightened Nan’s splayed body and tidied the white dress about her. Nan’s face was grimy as if she had fallen in the dirt, though a cleaner tear track ran from the corner of each eye to her tangled hair.

  Thera pressed her face to Nan’s cold flesh, the tears she had thought to forbid until all was done, poured down her face. She wept, in gut-wrenching sobs as she had not done since she was a very little girl, and her fingers tightly clenched the folds of Nan’s dress.

  Finally she lay still, hiccupping and empty.

  “She is not here, Thera. She is with her soldier now,” sent the Elanraigh, its inhuman voice resonating with sorrow.

  “They could have had a life together!” Thera straightened and moistened a corner of her tunic on her tongue to wipe gently at the grime on Nan’s face.

  Thera sat back on her heels. The corners of her lips jerked downward as she gazed at Nan’s face.

  Her expression smoothed and hardened as she tilted her head to the sky. “How long did I sleep?” She demanded of the Elanraigh.

  Silence.

  “How long, if you please,” Thera repeated.

  “Two days.”

  With fluid swiftness Thera rose and strode to the fire pit. She bent to feel the rocks surrounding it and frowned. “The rocks are cold.”

  “How long have the Memteth been gone in their ship?” She demanded.

  A silence again, before the Elanraigh finally responded, “They sailed on the evening ebb tide yesterday.”

  “Thera, what do you think to do?” It was Teacher’s voice.

  “Teacher,” murmured Thera with a small curl of lips, unlike her usual smile. “You are here? Were you here, then?” Thera gestured to Nan’s still form.

  Teacher’s voice was mournful. “There was nothing we could do for her, Thera. Nothing you could have done, except share her pain. Her spirit was not there, at the end, my child. She had already left. You must continue on to Elankeep. We will see you there safely; we will not be caught by surprise again.”

  “I have a thing to do first,” stated Thera, and closed her mind to their dismayed murmurings. She remembered Chamakin had spoken of “calling.” Thera had no idea if the ability to call was part of her gift, but with mind-voice Thera projected a request for the sea hawk to come, to join with her again.

  “Thera! “Alarm rang in Teacher’s mind-voice, but Thera already heard her hawk’s response, and felt a sense of feral joy as the sea hawk recognized her, followed by a faint but eager query.

  Thera formed a picture of herself standing on the wide white crescent of Shawl Bay with the sun in morning position over her left shoulder. She detailed the image in her mind as clearly as she could.

  The sleek raptor sent recognition, and a sense of fervid acquiescence. Thera smiled. The young bird could not verbalize like Farnash, but the sensations and images she sent Thera could understand very well.

  Thera returned to Nan’s side, and ignoring the queries of Teacher and the Elanraigh, composed herself to sing the Lament.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was some time before Thera was roused from her watch at Nan’s side by the strident greeting of the sea hawk. Thera placed a last evergreen bough over Nan’s still form and rose to her feet. Gazing northward, she shaded her eyes. The young raptor was flying very high, though already beginning her characteristic spiral descent. Her ardent, piercing call to Thera scattered raucous gulls from her flight path.

  The wind elemental, to Thera’s surprise, was still by her, mindful of the duty the Elanraigh had laid upon it. It began to skitter and dance between Thera and the sea hawk. The wind el
emental greeted the sea hawk like kin.

  “Welcome,” Thera sent as the hawk settled on the topmost branch of the pile of sitka remains. She composed herself for the joining, and then paused to send, “Is my friend hungry or tired from her flight?”

  The young raptor ruffled, and with impatience, she flared her wings.

  Thera responded to the sea hawk’s eagerness with a grim smile. “Indeed, my friend, I feel the same,” she murmured.

  Teacher’s anxious voice inserted itself into the moment, “Thera, wait! You must safely conceal yourself…”

  Thera did not delay to heed it; she was aflame at last to do something. She reached for the joining, just as gently as the time in her mother’s garden, but with more sureness of touch. The joining was immediate with no disorientation.

  Screaming her defiance, she stroked upward, swift and strong. As before, her hawk body felt buoyant and wondrously light. Wind fingered through her feathers with a slight hissing.

  Already high above the white crescent of Shawl Bay, she looked down upon the long, rolling curl of surf. Nan’s body lay under the criss-cross of branches and evergreen boughs that Thera had placed over her with the blessing of the Elanraigh.

  There was her own body lying crumpled beside the green mound. Her red wool tunic was a splash of vivid color on the beach.

  Oh.

  She keened softly in chagrin. That is what Teacher meant—to make sure her physical body was secure and safely hidden before the joining.

  The hawk circled twice, there were no ships on the horizon, and the sun was not yet high. She clashed her beak and screamed once again, then banked westward out to sea.

  The air elemental whispered to her that its name was Sussara, and then frisked in her wake like a hound pup just out of kennels.

  From this height she could see the first islands of the archipelago on the horizon. The dense chain stretched a four day sail north of Allenholme and eight days south. Thera was told by the mariners of Allenholme that it was a six day sail west, through often treacherous passages, before open ocean was reached again. This was one reason the large warship from Cythia had never been much use against the Memteth raiders, whose smaller ships could skim through the maze of islands, defying perilous shoals and rock-strewn passages.

  As she neared the islands, she saw a small herd of sea pups emerge from the water to clamber up a kelp-covered rock. A flock of orangebills landed nearby to feed on limpets. The sea hawk circled and then continued her search for a black sail. She swung between the vast cliffs of West Rednape and Carver Islands. While passing through the cool mist of a waterfall she shrilled, and her voice echoed off the steep rock face.

  She continued flying west using the snowy spire of Banner Mountain on Lastmer Island as her westerly lodestone. Then she saw a Memteth ship below her.

  Her neck feathers fanned, but Thera hushed the hawk’s defiant scream of challenge. “Hush! Not yet,” she soothed, “not yet.”

  That they were Memteth was beyond doubt. However, they might not be her Memteth. She circled down. She was either unnoticed or disregarded. The crew’s attention was on their ship as they prepared to negotiate a riptide passage between islands.

  A small exclamation escaped the sea hawk as she recognized the raw sitka spar lashed into place as main mast. She circled closer.

  “Sussara, can you get close enough to see how the sitka’s elemental does? I need to know if it yet clings with its tree, or if it has…left.”

  Sussara whirled downward to circle the Memteth mast, meanwhile playing havoc with the sail. The hawk keened a wicked laugh as the Memteth leader roared out commands to the scrambling crew. Thera counted only seven Memteth. Five body shapes lay under canvas near the stern.

  “Sleeping.” Came the reply from the air elemental to Thera. “Sitka sleeping.”

  Thera suspected the sitka elemental was either still in shock, or had deliberately gone dormant. She pondered as she wove the air streams above the ship. If it could be awakened, the tree elemental could perhaps be transported home to the Elanraigh with Sussara.

  The wind elemental circled and danced around her in its eagerness to be of service.

  “Sussara help the poor cousin—yes I will.”

  “Blessings.” Thera thanked the elemental with a mental smile, and bent her head once more to check on the activities of the ‘Teth.

  The depleted Memteth crew were encountering turbulence now where the tidal streams met around Dog Leg Island. Thera decided to risk alighting on the sitka mast. Her eye on the Memteth leader, the young hawk tightened her circling, until at last, furling her wings she gripped the sitka with her sharp talons. The sitka’s elemental, not so deeply submerged after all, must have sensed her as a friendly and familiar presence, for almost immediately Thera was aware of a poignant query from it.

  “This is Sussara, sent by the Elanraigh. It will carry you home, if you agree to release yourself and be joined with Sussara?”

  With a small trill of gratitude that tickled through Thera’s light avian bones, the sitka’s elemental agreed. Once again Thera felt the resonance of an Elanraigh life form vibrating under her touch, and then it was gone.

  She, too, lifted gratefully back into the air. The Memteth had paid no attention to her.

  “Safe? Together?” inquired Thera immediately of both elementals.

  They replied with satisfaction, “Safe!”

  “Blessings be!” The young hawk sensed Thera’s joy and screamed its challenge.

  The black-sailed ship was fast approaching the narrow bend in the passage, yet something in the hawk’s cry caused the Memteth leader to glance upward.

  Thera studied him, as he briefly directed his attention to her. The Memteth was tall and lean. He stood spraddled-legged on the heaving deck, his posture practiced and sure.

  She saw long, hooded eyes, amber colored with ovoid pupils. Human-like, yet something reptilian about him, with glinting amethyst scales forming a widow’s peak below his helm.

  Prominent bony plates of forehead and cheekbones shone smoothly taut. The thin, sharp nose ended in flaring nostrils. There was a honed symmetry to his features, and a presence both shrewd and dangerous.

  From her high spiral the hawk saw him look away, dismissing her. When he shifted position, placing his hand on his hip, her raptor’s vision clearly saw the leather pouch suspended from the ‘Teth’s leather belt. Innic’s tobacco pouch!

  Rage consuming her, she closed her nostrils against the drive of wind into her lungs, folded her wings and dove, straight for the Memteth’s face.

  Warned by a shout from an alert crewman, the startled Memteth leader threw himself backward, falling onto the canvas covered bodies of his dead. He flung one mail-covered arm up over his face and with the other reached for dagger or sword.

  The hawk screamed. Her wings cracked the air as she slashed at him with talons and hooked predator’s beak, opening his face to the bone.

  Livid flesh gaped, pouring dark-hued blood.

  The Memteth made no outcry. His yellow eyes glared into hers, then his sword was free and he stabbed upward at her, meanwhile levering himself to his feet.

  Frenzied by the smell of his blood, Thera beat her wings for height, intent on renewing her attack.

  A hoarse shout, and intense pain followed. An arrow struck her left pinion.

  She tumbled over the end of the boat. The young hawk recovered awkwardly, able only to skim the rough waves. In panic, she labored to uplift.

  It was Sussara and the sitka’s elemental who inserted themselves between the drenched sea hawk and the clashing, pike-high waves. Carrying her, they spun themselves into a small thermal and she rose awkwardly.

  It was a long, laboring flight to a bleached bone of a snag on Dog Leg Island. Even though exhausted, her talons gripped the branch wi
th instinctive strength. Her injured wing she held aloft a moment, then gently folded it. The crossbow bolt had torn flesh, but the damage would heal.

  Yet she trembled. She mantled her feathers, and mantled again. Her beak opened and she panted slightly. The pain was nothing compared to Thera’s remorse. She, Thera, in her anger and lust for revenge, had driven the young sea hawk almost to its death. What would the Ttamarini Maiya have to say to her for such abuse of this trust?

  She received the young hawk’s vigorous assertion of life. Thera sensed also, that the hawk had thoroughly absorbed her human friend’s hatred of the Memteth. Strangely, this grieved Thera.

  The Memteth ship was holding course through the white water of the passage. They would soon be clear of the rip. Thera shifted nervously. She had an idea.

  Chapter Sixteen

  She must leave the sea hawk. The young raptor would need to feed, rest, and heal. Thera would not risk her again, yet she was uncertain how to go about what she planned. The last time Thera had left the joining, she had almost lost herself upon the wind. Of course, then the rupture had been sudden and unexpected, and this time Thera would prepare.

  Thera took time to compose herself, and then projected herself outward. Quick as thought, she was borne far above the wind-bitten trees of the island, loose upon the wind.

  The hawk on her branch keened after her, and Thera sent warm reassurance and thanks.

  Thera could sense that the elementals were intrigued and excited about her change of form. She too, was fascinated with this disembodied state. There was danger, however, as already she could feel the urge to dissolve as a warm lethargy washing over her. She must hold to her purpose or she would be lost.

  She moved out over the water, faster and faster through the air, as if she were an air elemental herself. With hissing speed she passed the Memteth ship, the elementals so close they were almost joined with her. She marveled at the speed of her flight in this state.