by Aaron Pogue
And then, despite himself, he whispered the cold dread that gripped his heart. “She’s dead.”
At his side, Wade nodded. “She was a good woman. She will be missed.”
Corin blinked against a burning in his eyes and turned away. He didn’t try to answer but fell into step behind Aeondra. He had barely gone three paces before Wade caught up and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Perhaps it would be best if you waited here,” the druid said. “Weave yourself a glamour and keep an eye on Ephitel’s men. I’ll speak with the Council and bring you a report.”
Corin didn’t stop, and Wade was forced to trot along beside him. Corin showed the druid his unmasked grief. “I would prefer to say good-bye. I believe I’ve earned that much.”
Wade pressed his lips together, clearly uncomfortable. Corin only held his gaze, unblinking. At last the druid seemed to wilt. “Give over, Corin. You know the strictures say—”
“None of the sons or daughters may pass into the inner Circle. But I am no longer one of them. I have become something more.”
“Perhaps. But I don’t have the authority—”
“I do,” Corin said, his voice hard as steel. “Who would deny me this? Tell me. When I did everything you asked of me. When I paid such a price.”
Those words twisted like a knife in Corin’s belly, but they reached the other man as well. Wade winced and tore his gaze away.
Corin pressed the point. “I loved her. That is no secret. She loved me almost as much as she loved this place. Those loves cost Aemilia her life. I have to be there to say good-bye.”
Wade could only nod. He squeezed Corin’s shoulder once again, but this time it was a gesture of sympathy. Then he dropped his hand and fell into step at Corin’s side. They went together, pallbearers to the sleeping beauty.
Somewhere along the way, Drew and Stibbons joined them. They didn’t say a word; they simply took up places, one at the head of the procession and one at the tail, both watching the forest intently as they marched. As the sun set on a wicked world, the druids carried Aemilia deep into the woods toward their secret meeting place.
Corin knew the place as soon as he set eyes on it. It was a ring of standing stones perhaps a hundred paces across, each stone immense beyond belief. A quiet energy filled the air around the stones, like a mighty power long restrained. Tendrils of thin gray mist danced in wild currents outside the circle—the same mist that Corin had learned to associate with Oberon’s strange magic.
This was a druid circle. Corin had seen the like before in his travels. There was one along the border between the Godlands and heathen Jepta, and Old Grim had told a tale of another just like it deep within the Dehtzlan wood. They only appeared around the far edges of civilization, and most men knew nothing of their purpose.
Nor had Corin until now. He’d only ever seen them empty, apparently abandoned, and in three months working with the druids in this corner of the world, he had never seen this circle until now. The druids had always come to meet him at his cottage.
And now that they had come here, he could not guess why. For all the mystery in those huge gray stones, what purpose could they serve? The circle held an inner ring of smaller stones—and even those stones were each twice as large as a full-grown man—and at the very heart of the place was a huge stone table. Or perhaps it was an altar. Corin shivered at the thought. Was this to be her resting place?
The one thing that still gave him hope was the mist that roiled all around them. It seemed to grow more frantic as their procession drew closer. The first of the druids to approach the circle’s edge did so with his tablet held before him. It glowed with an otherworldly light, and arcane symbols danced across its surface. With deft touches on the surface, the druid manipulated them in rapid succession, and half a heartbeat before he reached the circle’s edge, a brilliant flash of the same blue-white light burst out of the roiling mists and splashed against the stones’ perimeter.
When that light faded, the circle’s interior had changed. There was still an inner circle, and beyond it a table of stone, but these seemed to stand at slightly different angles. They were weathered differently. The differences were minor, but Corin had an instinct for spotting such small things.
There were more obvious changes too. The circle held more than a dozen other druids now, half of them dressed in the outlandish garb they never wore around the sons and daughters.
There were artifacts as well: on pedestals and stands throughout the clearing, in open-fronted cabinets, and spread in great number on the broad stone table at the heart of the inner circle. Corin couldn’t guess at the uses of them all, but they had the same glass-and-silver look as the dartguns and the tablets he’d seen in druid hands before.
All eyes turned toward the procession when the first of them stepped into the circle, and a handful of men in stark white coats rushed to stand around the stone table. They were expecting the new arrivals, then. Waiting for Aemilia.
Wade tried again to stop Corin. His grip tightened on Corin’s shoulder, and he began to speak in a carefully measured voice. Corin ignored him. He tore free and dashed forward, diving through the gap between two standing stones and into the circle’s clearing.
A tall man wearing one of the white coats shouted, “Who’s this manling? Who brought him here? Someone restrain him, please!”
In answer, Corin drew a dagger in one hand and a sharp-edged knife in the other. He showed his teeth to the first of the druids who started toward him. “I’m Corin Hugh. Perhaps you’ve heard the name. The first of you who tries to lay a hand on me will lose it.”
He spun on his heel and flipped his knife around, ready to throw. “That goes double for anyone who tries to dart me. I know all about your little toys.”
It had been barely better than a hunch, but he found himself locking eyes with a white-haired man holding a dartgun half-raised. Corin raised his knife hand higher, threatening, and the druid lowered his gun.
They stood a moment frozen like that, and Corin spent the whole time wondering how many of these men he’d have to stab before they’d let him stay.
Then Endan Wade heaved a great sigh somewhere behind him. He approached cautiously and said, “Put down the knives, Corin. No one’s going to make you leave.”
“Let’s not make any hasty promises,” the tall man in the white coat said, finally approaching. He pulled himself up straight and stared down his nose at Corin. “Who gave leave to bring him here?”
Before Wade could answer, Corin pressed forward and met the taller man eye to eye. He tried to suppress his rage, but some hint of it leaked into his tone. “Your god gave me leave. I am the chosen heir of Oberon. And who are you?”
The druid raised his eyebrows in surprise. Then he looked right past Corin to Wade and spoke with deep disdain. “This is how you manage your assets, Wade?”
Corin’s patience snapped. He dropped his knife, knotted a fist in the druid’s lapels, and dragged him down as he brought the dagger flashing up. He lay its blade against the tall man’s throat and snarled in his face. “No one manages me, druid. Your people let Ephitel at the woman I love, and your people robbed me of the means to avenge her.”
The man’s eyes grew wide as Rikkeborh crowns. “Ephitel?” He seemed at last to understand what he had heard before. “You’re Corin Hugh? You’re speaking of the anomalous sword?”
Vindicated, Corin released his grip on the man’s coat. He knelt to retrieve his knife and sheathed both blades; then he smoothed his shirtfront while he took a measure of control. At last he nodded. “I am speaking of the sword Godslayer. It is mine by every right. Return it to me.”
“Surely . . . surely this is not the right time. We must focus on Aemilia—”
Corin shook his head. “Aemilia is dead, and her murderer still walks the world. I care nothing for your rituals, and I will not rest until Ephitel pays in blood for what he did to her.”
The tall man turned to Wade again, this time pleading. “You must r
eason with him!”
Wade spread his hands. “I have done everything within my power. No one manages Corin Hugh.”
Corin growled. “For three months I did everything your people asked of me. And this is my reward.”
He turned away from them to watch as Aemilia’s strange bed rolled to a stop beside the huge stone table. Half a dozen druids moved to surround her, with one of those in a white coat supporting her head. That man called out something in an unfamiliar tongue. It was a short, repetitive bark that had the sound of ritual, and on the fourth intonation all the druids moved in perfect synchrony, transferring Aemilia from her litter to the cold stone altar.
Light sprang up across its surface, and strange characters like the ones he’d seen on their handheld tablets. The whole huge slab of stone became an animated slate much like those tablets, and the druids who had brought her there bent over the strange symbols, poking and prodding, manipulating the images while Aemilia rested, still, in the middle of it all.
Slowly, one by one, the men in their white coats turned away, and other men rushed up to take their places. Corin couldn’t quite understand the significance of that, but the tall man clearly did.
“Then it is true,” he said. “She’s lost to us. I cannot imagine Hurope without Aemilia in it.” He turned to Corin, and Corin was surprised to see genuine sympathy in the tall man’s eyes. “I understand your pain,” the druid said. “I do. But killing Ephitel will not ease it. Go say your good-byes and try to find some peace.”
“I . . . can’t.”
The druid nodded in understanding. “Then watch from here. You’ll have a clear enough view. And when it’s done, we’ll find you a nice comfortable bed for the night. Tomorrow we’ll decide what’s best for you.”
It was everything he’d learned to expect from the druids: shallow comforts and a promise to wrest away more control of his life. He bowed his head in what he hoped they’d take for gratitude, and both men moved away. They left him alone in the bustling outer circle while they went to speak quietly with the men who’d left the table earlier.
Corin couldn’t help himself. He drifted closer. He had no desire to see Aemilia, no hope at all to find any sort of peace with what had been done to her. He wanted to avenge her, not grieve his loss.
But she was about to be gone. He could not ignore the fact. She was about to be gone forever, and he had to see her one last time.
So, in spite of himself, he drifted closer to the inner circle even as the druids there were drifting out. They formed a ring, shoulder to shoulder outside the standing stones. Many stood with teary eyes. Some gripped comforting hands. One and all they stared into the inner circle where Aemilia waited on the table all alone.
She looked pretty. Corin couldn’t help thinking it. Someone had tied off her hair the way she liked it, out of her face. The strange tubes and mask were gone now, and one by one the glowing symbols on the table flashed and went out. Stillness and starlight settled over the inner circle.
She was lovely on the cold stone slab. He reached out a hand toward her, but he didn’t complete the gesture. His throat closed up again, harder this time, and he had to close his eyes and turn away before he could gasp a breath again.
All around him, the druids began to sing. He could not comprehend the words, but he recognized it as an aching dirge. He felt its sadness in his breast. He forced a painful breath, and then another, as the sounds of litany gave voice to his grief. He left the inner circle and pressed through the ring of druids, desperate for air. He broke free of their line and kept walking, faster and faster. He had to get away.
He almost left the outer circle at a sprint, and he wasn’t at all certain where he would have ended up. Was this the same circle he had entered in southwest Raentz, or would he find himself in Dehtzlan or Jepta or somewhere else altogether? And would he be able to return?
He didn’t have a chance to find out. No sooner had he started toward the standing stones than his eyes fell upon a glass-fronted cabinet filled with the druids’ strange artifacts. Though they were not of any design common to Hurope, he instantly recognized them as weapons, firearms from Yesterworld. And there was the sword Godslayer in an ill-fitting scabbard, tucked among the otherworldly weapons and looking oh so out of place.
He cast a glance around, but everyone seemed fixed on Aemilia’s last rites. He nodded to himself and dashed toward the cabinet, drawing out his lockpicks as he went. This was exactly what he’d come for, and he would grab it now while the druids were distracted, then leave this place and do what needed doing.
But when he reached the cabinet, he could find no lock to pick. The thing glowed here and there with the wicked, artificial light of druid artifacts, and one small panel near the middle of an edge shone in the runes of their language. None of that told Corin how to slip the lock, though.
He stood for a moment, staring in frustration, inches from the thing he wanted most in all the world and stymied by a lock that wasn’t there. He tried the door, hoping foolishly that the druids trusted each other insofar as not to lock it, but of course it wouldn’t budge. He cast a glance over his shoulder, just to make sure the others were still engrossed in their ceremony.
They were. All but one of them, anyway. A stranger in unaccustomed clothes stood barely three paces from Corin, watching him intently. When he saw Corin glance his way, he answered with a little nod toward the weapons case.
“You could try to break the glass,” he said, “but it won’t work. You’re going to need the combination.”
Corin’s mouth was suddenly completely dry. He swallowed hard, trying to work moisture into it, then stammered, “W-would you . . . give it to me?”
The other pretended to consider that a moment, then shrugged. “Sure. But only if you promise me you’ll kill off Ephitel for good.”
Something in that shrug, in the other man’s expression and his voice, tugged at Corin’s memory. He considered the druid for a long moment and then his jaw dropped.
“Jeff?”
The druid’s eyebrows raised, but the corner of his mouth turned down as he nodded in reluctant admission. “In the flesh. You know me?”
“Better than you might believe,” Corin said. “Have you not heard my story?”
“I’ve heard some drivel about time travel, but that’s not what interests me. The main thing I keep hearing is that you’re anxious to run off and deal with Ephitel instead of waiting for the Council’s carefully considered approval.”
Corin flashed his teeth. “You’ve caught me in the act.”
“Then get on with it,” Jeff said. He leaned past Corin and punched four of the clustered symbols on the glowing panel. Each press elicited a tiny, tortured beep, and on the fourth, the door fell softly open.
The druid’s eyebrows rose again when Corin reached past the outlandish weapons and grabbed the longsword’s scabbard. Drawing it out, he clipped it on the belt around his waist. Then he jerked his head toward a distant spot along the circle’s outer edge, where a pair of standing chalkboards made a little nook that might offer them a bit of privacy.
As they walked, Jeff asked him, “How’d you know?”
“Know what?”
“That the sword was hidden in the rifle case?”
Corin frowned, uncomprehending for a moment, then he glanced down at the sword hanging from his belt. The thin, almost imperceptible mists of a druid’s glamour hung close around it. Corin chuckled to himself and waved a hand, dismissing the disguise with a thought. Jeff choked on his surprise.
“I see through the dream,” Corin said. “A gift from Oberon.”
“You aren’t one of us, then.” It was almost a question, if a ludicrous one.
“I am a manling, born in Aepoli. But I did travel into a dream within a dream. I saw the fall of Gesoelig through Oberon’s eyes. I met you there. I was in the plaza when you and Delaen rescued Aemilia from Ephitel’s prison coach.”
Corin watched the doubt in Jeff’s eyes die away
with every word. By the end of Corin’s explanation, he was nodding along.
“Then it’s all true?” he asked.
Corin grinned. “Every word of it. I’m a force of nature.”
“That would explain how Ephitel found Aemilia.”
Corin’s grin dissolved. Something sharp and hungry burrowed into his belly. He took a slow breath to fight away the feeling and asked quietly, “What do you mean?”
“It’s the puzzle that dragged me here. I’m supposed to be dead, you know.”
“Aemilia had hinted at it, but she never said as much outright.”
“She never liked to lie. Not where you could catch her at it, anyway. She was a good woman. Is it true you two were an item?”
Corin sighed. “Would they have let me come here otherwise?”
Jeff shrugged. “I haven’t understood them for more than a century. But I suppose I see your point. They wouldn’t let you do what needs doing, but they would break a dozen strictures for the sake of a forbidden love. That sounds like their style.”
Corin blinked at the bitterness in Jeff’s tone. He looked the druid up and down, considering his options. A man with such animosity toward the Council might prove useful.
While Corin was still thinking, Jeff picked up the trail of his earlier comments. “I’ve . . . I guess I’ve been in hiding for a while. But I keep an eye on things. When I saw the news about Aemilia, I had to check it out. And one question kept nagging at me: How’d he find her? After all this time, what brought Ephitel to one of ours now?”
Jeff might as well have punched him in the gut. Corin grunted and dropped his head. “I did. I killed a Vestossi—”
“That’s not enough. He didn’t need a motive, man. He needed a means. Ephitel’s been gunning for our people ever since he murdered Oberon. We have the resources to evade him.”
