Victory of the Hawk

by Angela Highland

  She could see her hearth in her mind’s eye. Her mind’s hand was stretched forth into its golden fire, giving it a path to travel up and out to Kirinil. But she could see the meadow too, ringed in conifers, with sunlight smiling down on the wildflowers.

  With all her mind’s strength, she called out toward that meadow.

  Kestar!

  * * *

  Kestar and Celoren had been born too late to fight in the war with Tantiulo, as had most of the other Hawks in active service. But that had never stopped the Order from training its cadets in the skills of soldiers, for their teachers had fought in the war—and they always swore that any Hawk worthy of the name should be prepared to fight in defense of the Anreulag, the Church and the Crown. Some part of Kestar had always wondered if he’d ever be called on to use that training in more than just occasional hand-to-hand combat.

  Yet he’d never thought he’d be lifting his sword against his own Order.

  Not surprisingly, the elves of Dolmerrath didn’t want the humans on the front line of their defense, for that would put them far too close to the Wards. Neither did the elves leave the humans alone. The scouts rode out in the first wave, led by Jannyn and Tembriel, but many more elves stayed nearer to Dolmerrath to prepare a second line with the humans, once word spread that the boats had escaped out into the open waters of the ocean. Gerren himself took charge of those who remained behind, organizing them by who could fight with what weapons—bows, muskets and blades—and then sending small groups scattering in different directions through the caverns. To Kestar’s relief, Celoren and the others who’d come with him from Shalridan stuck close to him, and no one saw fit to separate them.

  But to his surprise, Gerren elected to join them where they’d gathered in the stable cavern. With him came two other elves, the oldest Kestar had ever seen in his life. One was male, with liberal streaks of gray in his hair and the beginnings of weathering in his otherwise ageless visage. The other was female, with hair gone completely white, and a face that bore plentiful wrinkles despite her visibly pointed ears.

  “Talnor and Gyllerah are my guards, and they’re not about to let me out of their sight,” Gerren announced without preamble. “And as I’m not about to let any of you out of mine, I’ll have to trust we can all work together. Follow me now, if you would.”

  He gestured toward one of the ways out of the cavern Kestar hadn’t yet explored, but before any of them could do as he asked, Julian spoke up. “You’re a fine one to speak of trust if you can’t see fit to take your eyes off us.” His voice wasn’t cold, but there was challenge in his stare, and expectation in those of Rab and Semai and Ganniwer.

  Gerren didn’t flinch. “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of communication. I’ve sent Faanshi to work with Alarrah and Kirinil to strengthen the Wards. I expected that all of you would wish to stay together, and that you’d wish to know immediately if anything happened to her, and likewise, that she’d wish to know any news of you.” His gaze tracked from face to face, not lingering long on any, save Julian himself. “Am I mistaken?”

  Kestar eyed the Rook as well, cognizant of how the other man had been looking at Faanshi, and how the healer had been looking at him in return. Julian shot him an answering glance, but before either of them could speak, Ganniwer stepped forward. She bore a quiver of arrows along with her borrowed bow, and she’d never looked more of a baroness, especially when she replied, “Of course not, and we appreciate your concern for us and for Faanshi. If you and your guards will guide us to where you wish us to be, our weapons are yours.”

  “Djashtet’s will for us all remains clear,” Semai agreed. “I will fight in Her name, but all of us will fight in yours.”

  Behind Kestar, Celoren put in blandly, “I can’t speak for the cloud-head, but I for one am rather piqued that the Order’s seen fit to chase us all the way here. They’re interrupting our holiday.”

  “I certainly see no other option than to go out and express our displeasure at such barefaced effrontery,” Rab said, equally deadpan. To Celoren, he added, “I trust you won’t look askance if I chastise a few of these intruders on your behalf?”

  “Not at all. Just try to remember to point your knives at them, won’t you?”

  Julian smirked at both of the younger men, enough of a glimmer of better humor that Kestar thought he might just be able to find something to like about the assassin after all; for Faanshi’s sake, at least, it seemed as if he should. And when Julian gave him the slightest of nods, Kestar said at last to Gerren, “My mother speaks for all of us, steward. Take us to where we need to be.”

  “Then come.”

  Dolmerrath’s steward led them up a staircase winding through the very rock, and for the first time Kestar saw what the last free holding of the elves in Adalonia looked like on the side that faced southward to the woods. They emerged into a long, narrow bunker of stone, with nothing in it save locked wooden chests. One of these proved, when Gerren produced a key and opened it, to contain powder and shot for muskets, and arrows wrapped in oilcloth. There were muskets in the second, and a crossbow and quarrels in the third. The others quickly divided the weaponry between them.

  His attention went out through the narrow windows set all along the bunker’s south wall, slits through which rounds or arrows could be fired. In the distance he could see the northern edge of the woods that led up to the cliffs. Between the line of trees and their vantage point was open terrain dotted with rocky outcroppings and short, wiry shrubs shaped by ocean winds. The ground didn’t run even—their bunker was set into a short rise, one of the last before the ridge sloped downward to the sea.

  They could see the distant trees, and they were close enough to the edge of the woods that all three elves scowled off into the distance. Kestar’s eyes weren’t as good as theirs, but nonetheless he could see flashes of motion among the trees, swiftly moving shapes that could be nothing but mounted riders weaving through the edges of the forest. Occasional bright bursts of light marked the position of the one Dolmerrath scout who was unmistakable even from a distance—Tembriel, unleashing her fire magic along with her arrows. But there were other lights too, lights Kestar recognized immediately as blazing amulets worn by Knights of the Hawk, each and every one of them reacting to the presence of elven blood and elven power.

  “They’re fighting,” Gyllerah barked, before she cast a sharp glance at the humans around her. She looked almost envious, and primed to bolt out to join her comrades at the slightest provocation. “Can you hear them?”

  What the others might have answered, Kestar never knew. Neither did he notice if he offered an answer of his own, for all at once the world vanished from before his eyes.

  A massive bolt of lightning lanced down from the heavens, searing everything in its path. Trees burst into flames. The charred husks of birds, wings burned to ash, fell from the sky to litter the ground below. Right on the heels of the lightning came the thunder, a great rattling crack of it that shook bones within flesh and made the very earth rumble in ominous reply.

  The premonition struck and vanished again with such speed that it left him gasping. Someone grabbed his shoulder and called his name in alarm, and Kestar reacted without thought, whirling to tackle his mother and throw her to the stone floor beneath their feet.

  “Everyone get down!”

  There was no time to see if the others complied before lightning struck the cliff in truth, momentarily flooding the daylight with blue-white brilliance. The shock of impact shook the entire ridge, and granules of stone and earth rained down from the ceiling. One particularly large chunk of stone smacked into his shoulder blade, but Kestar ignored the sting of pain along with Ganniwer’s yells of protest—at least until he heard Gerren and his two guards all crying out in frantic bursts of their own tongue. Only then did he scramble up from the floor and throw himself toward one of the narrow windows
, to see what had just manifested before them all.

  He’d seen Her before, in Arlitham Abbey, when a renegade priest had used the Rite of the Calling—a spell that no one but the High Priest of the Church of the Four Gods should have known—to bring Her into their midst. Now, as then, She appeared as an apparition of silver and white. But this time She stood in the midst of a raging surge of power so potent that Kestar could see it even from many yards away. It surrounded Her in shades of eldritch fire, and the force of it rolled northward into the bunker and sent Ganniwer crumpling into Celoren’s hasty embrace. Semai snapped his head aside, muttering what sounded like a desperate prayer to his threefold goddess. Julian and Rab both thrashed as if they’d been physically punched. All the color drained from Julian’s face, while his partner choked back what sounded suspiciously like a sob.

  “It’s the Wards,” Gerren shouted. “Kirinil’s pouring power into the Wards.”

  Not just the Wards, Kestar wanted to answer him. But he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the sight on the open ground between them and the woods, and he couldn’t seem to find the strength to speak.

  Then something else rang across his mind, like the peal of a golden bell.

  Kestar!

  Faanshi. He latched onto her mental call in desperation, for her contact drove off some of the fear threatening to choke off everything else in his awareness. And only then was he able to hear his mother shouting in a ragged voice, “What in the name of the gods is happening?”

  “She’s found us, Mother,” Kestar said. “The Anreulag is here.”

  Chapter Ten

  Dolmerrath, Kilmerry Province, Jeuchar 10, AC 1876

  She appeared on the crest of a ridge beside the ocean, a blessedly open space filled with light and air and the salt smell of the sea far below. There were trees not far away, tall and towering and undisturbed by the intrusion of human axes, and she might almost have taken pleasure in their presence if she hadn’t sensed the tumult of fighting among the greenery. Somewhere nearby, too, was the one with green eyes—for her magic told her what her senses could not, whispering that she’d come to the right place.

  Yet magic not her own rose up to meet her as soon as her bare feet touched the earth, a power far younger than her own, and not without its strength. It engulfed her in flame that fought to hold her fast, blocking her way both to the north and to the south, and her fury rose up in reply.

  Magic meant one of her own kind, but that didn’t matter. No infant mage was going to hinder her path. No one was ever going to hinder her path again.

  Giving full shrieking voice to her anger, she reached deep into the cliff with her magic. The living earth replied, filling her blood and her bones with a new wave of power. Her every nerve sang with it. Her fingers and palms burned with it. And in exultation, she lifted her hands high to send fire of her own roaring out into the shielding magic that dared to try to block her way.

  * * *

  Jekke Yerredes had never before ridden in battle, and she’d ridden into this one in panic, afraid that she’d disgrace the gods and the Anreulag, as well as her captain and all her fellow Hawks. But when her compatriots’ voices rose up with her to sing in honor of Saint Merrodrie, for the first time since she’d been ordained into the Order, Jekke felt as though she belonged.

  Elves on horseback came galloping into the edge of the woods to meet them, and her world constricted to the narrow, focused needs of the moment. Everything became a blur of dodge and shoot and turn and parry. The fear stalked around the edges of her mind, threatening to rise up again the instant her concentration slipped. Thus Jekke kept singing, every verse of “Merrodrie’s Lament,” over and over again until her voice began to give out from exertion and she had to gasp for breath between every line. Only when she sang could she beat back the fear and mark her fellow Hawks by the radiance of their amulets. More than one fell to the arrows of their opponents. Others fell to musket rounds, for some of the elves had guns, and it shook Jekke badly to see that the Good Folk of the North had learned the use of human weaponry all too well.

  Without warning, the brightest light of all flared up somewhere north of the trees, and both Jekke and the elf she was fighting froze in mid-swing of their swords. A rumble louder and deeper than thunder shook the air and the earth alike, while every amulet in Jekke’s line of sight flared into blinding incandescence—then went suddenly dark.

  The fear gnawing at her thoughts abruptly vanished, fast enough to leave her dizzy, and she had to cling to her horse’s neck to keep from reeling out of the saddle. Yet her horse was now far more agitated than she, and as she fought to keep her seat, she caught sight of an apparition beyond the trees, a vaguely human shape limned in flame.

  But those closer to the edge of the trees could see better, and Captain Amarsaed roared, “The Anreulag has come! Ani a bhota Anreulag, arach shae!”

  Hope surged through Jekke. If the Voice of the Gods had come, maybe the captain’s prediction had been a true one—maybe She would bless their battle after all, and maybe they could restore the realm to Her favor. In jubilation, she took up Captain Amarsaed’s call, along with the rest of her compatriots.

  “Arach shae! Arach shae! Arach shae!”

  Tembriel and her brother Jannyn loved nothing better than to fight humans. There was precious little opportunity to do so, as careful as they always had to be to protect Dolmerrath—and it had galled them that they’d had to resort to hiring human assassins to kill the Duke of Shalridan, rather than meeting him on a field of battle themselves. But now that Gerren had sent most of their people in the boats to escape, hopefully all the way to Vreyland or any other land where their kind wouldn’t be met with fire and swords, they were free to commit themselves with abandon to the fight.

  Jannyn had no fire magic, but what he lacked in magical gifts he made up for in speed and grace. It made Tembriel proud to fight at his side, and the two of them cut a swath through the regiment of Hawks who’d dared invade their woods. The accursed round-ears were singing a hymn in honor of one of the first Hawks, a song she’d heard far too often when she and her brother had been forced to fight in Tantiulo. It offended Tembriel to hear that song sung so close to Dolmerrath, and she took grim pleasure in shooting flaming arrows into the throats of any human who dared utter its words near her—until something roared across her senses, a flare of power far stronger than her fire magic. In horror she whirled her horse around to look to the north.

  “No,” she heard Jannyn breathe, even over the noises his own frantic mount was making in reaction to the outpouring of power beyond the edge of the trees. “No, no, no—”

  Around them the Hawks began to shout, familiar, hated words in a language that humans for the most part had stopped speaking, save when calling down the power of their Church on elven heads. Yet Tembriel could spare no anger for their human enemies, not when all her attention was seized by a far greater threat.

  She remembered the last time the Anreulag had appeared before her people, and how the survivors had fled to found Dolmerrath. She remembered the raising of the Wards—and she could feel the straining of the power that fueled them, striving to drive back the vengeful wraith who now filled the air with an outpouring of fire.

  As she drove her horse forward to seek a clear shot with her bow, she felt the Wards begin to fall, and she could do nothing but shoot arrow after arrow toward the figure of the Anreulag and pray that she could strike. Her power was meant to burn, not to shield. She could only pray to the Mother of Stars that it would be enough of a distraction for the Wards—and for the one who’d raised them—to hold.

  “Kirinil!”

  * * *

  Faanshi wanted to sob with relief when she brushed Kestar’s mind, but the power Kirinil had raised was so overwhelming that she could barely think of anything else. Her own magic was beginning to react to the strain in her
teacher’s body, making her increasingly, urgently aware of how his heart thundered far too swiftly in his chest, how every inch of his skin had become soaked with sweat, and how blinding pain bloomed within the confines of his skull. She could feel Alarrah striving to keep the pain at bay, but her strength was not quite up to the task. Her sister could only dampen Kirinil’s pain, not soothe it completely.

  Her magic would sustain him—was sustaining him. But Faanshi had never done three things with her power at once, and trying it now—reaching out to Kestar, loaning shielding strength to Kirinil, and chasing the agony from his muscles—was kindling pain of her own. There was fear too, for Kirinil was the very heart of the Wards on Dolmerrath, and she was the closest source of human blood in the path of the spell he was working to reinforce. Fear rolled through her, sharpened by her direct contact with him, and for a few agonizing moments it howled across her thoughts.

  You know nothing of how to use your magic. Your impure blood shames you in the eyes of Djashtet. The Wards will fall and the Hawks will come and you will not be able to hold back death!

  All at once, fear born outside of her rather than within sliced across the screaming of the Wards. In that moment Faanshi was certain she heard Kestar bellowing, but to whom, she had no idea. His voice echoed across her mind, an alarm she could not ignore.