Curls of steam wafted from Ponu’s palm. The winged elf lifted the little packet, tipping a dried yellow powder into what he held before stirring it with his thumb. “The cure,” Ponu explained, grinning down. “There. That should be enough, I think. Now, drink this.”
“Medicine?” Gaelin queried. He wriggled his shoulders, struggling to prop himself higher. “But I thought—”
Ponu shrugged. “Not everything can be remedied with a flick of a wrist. Sometimes magic needs help. Your drained body craves fluids, young human. This power of yours is not magic, though the elves and giants call it that. It is energy. The fuel of stars. Human flesh cannot . . .”
The elf hesitated. “I wonder how your Terrek Florne found strength enough to confound my magic to move and free the ghost. I am called Ponu,” he added. “Pardon my lack of courtesy, but when you live as long as I have, names become irrelevant. I am me. I had a longer name once, but I don’t recall what it was. Now drink.” He held his cupped hand under Gaelin’s lips and tipped the steamy liquid toward him.
Gaelin took a sip, swallowing quickly, then gulping when the mage forced more fluid into his mouth. He stared at the falling snow, a taste like berries on his tongue. “You saved Tierdon,” he murmured.
Ponu grunted and retied the string around the diminutive parcel. “I saved nothing,” he replied, returning the packet to his pouch. “A city reborn does not replace the lives lost. And now I sense you resisting Holram’s control. Our one hope is finally rousing, and you refuse him.” Ponu scowled. “Do you realize the damage you cause yourself? You force Holram to ravage your entire body when all he needs is a window in your mind. Now that he wakes, you must surrender, Gaelin. I know the Seeker elves warned you of this. Did you not listen? No wonder you are dying.”
“No one asks me what I want,” Gaelin said. “I was a captive my whole life. I will not . . .” He clenched his teeth. “When I lose control, I kill people. I become as bad as my stepfather was.” Gaelin yawned, and Ponu lowered him until he lay supine again. Memories rose, rushing to consume him. He shut his eyes against the return of his vertigo.
“Tell me,” Ponu urged. “Why are you so reluctant to tear down this fortress you hide behind? You can talk to me. There is nothing I have not encountered in my life, Gaelin Othelion. I will not think ill of you no matter what you say.”
“Lavahl,” Gaelin corrected. “My name is—”
“The Seeker elves may have tolerated that nonsense, but I am not so gentle,” Ponu said. “You harm yourself by clinging to that false identity, and you will refrain from doing so in my presence. Do you understand me, young human?”
“I’m . . . not supposed to talk about it,” Gaelin said as the elf laid a staff of twisted crystal across his chest.
“So think whatever it is, and my magic will show me,” said Ponu. “Meanwhile, let me tend to this.” Gaelin yelped when the winged elf lifted his reddened hands to examine them. “Don’t you have gloves?”
“I don’t know where they are!” Gaelin cried.
“That sensation you feel is a good thing,” Ponu said. “It means you can keep your fingers. Fear not, for the discomfort will pass. Now look to my staff and visualize what you’re forbidden to say.”
Gaelin focused on the lumpy crystal, following the twist of its clear matrix within, the hints of fiery bubbles underneath its glossy exterior. He tensed as the sculpted quartz clouded, an image of trees taking shape around the likeness of a cabin he knew. He moaned when familiar hands dragged at him. Then he thrashed, the strength of his stepbrother Delbert pressing him onto the seat of a wobbly chair.
Gaelin saw the memory he had tried to block—Seth Lavahl standing red-faced and intoxicated across the kitchen floor, stains of oil and liquor spattered on his journeyman’s vest. The big man had bound Gaelin’s mother naked to the table; now once more Gaelin spotted Sareh Lavahl lying with her limbs outstretched, her wrists and ankles tied. “No!” Gaelin writhed, striking with his fists at the hands that squeezed his throat. In helpless rage, he watched Sareh’s efforts to move, her head rolling on her bruised neck, blood streaming from her shattered cheekbone and jaw.
He froze, spying the long dagger in his stepfather’s fist as Seth Lavahl mashed his fat belly against the table. Grinning mirthlessly, the drunk leaned his weight upon his knife’s antler haft—to drive the blade deep under his victim’s breastbone. Gaelin sobbed at the sight, grieving for the parent who had sung to him in the tumbledown barn, who had comforted him at night when he had cried.
Yet now she was no more than meat to the one who had forced her into servitude, just a deer for her captor to gut. The smith, panting with bloodlust, rubbed the sweat from his palms. Clasping the knife’s hilt two-handed, he jerked the embedded blade down through his victim’s navel to her hips. Gaelin whimpered when his mother’s scream cut off, replaced by a rattling cough as his stepfather cast the knife skittering across the floor. Laughing then, Lavahl sank his fingers into his victim’s gaping wound and ripped Gaelin’s world apart.
“Bring it here!” the smith shouted.
Gaelin’s stepbrothers leapt to obey, and now as an observer, Gaelin recognized their fear of the brutal man. They dragged him up kicking and screaming, Gaelin howling his terror as the smith snatched him from the older boys’ grasp. “Hold her open!” Lavahl gestured to the wound, and then Gaelin was fighting for his life, gasping for breath when the drunkard smashed him atop his mother, shoving him into a wet and salty warmth until the top of his head felt the thrum of her heart.
“Take it back!” Lavahl roared. “Take it back, you bitch! Take your stinking runt back!”
“No!” Frantic, Gaelin struggled to escape. The grip he battled was impossibly strong, holding him still though he fought with all his might. “She died. She died because of me!”
“Hush now,” Ponu soothed. “It is a memory, Gaelin, one no child could ever deserve. I understand how you view Holram as another bully seeking to erase you. Yet what you just showed me is what Holram must endure every day, Staff-Wielder. Erebos kills in the same cruel way. Only he does so repeatedly, while all the warders are forced to bear witness through the power that joins them. Do you comprehend now why his evil must be stopped?”
Gaelin barely heard the elf over his mother’s echoing screams in his head, her look of agony and revulsion he would never forget.
“You are wise to keep silent,” Ponu murmured abruptly. “This is what Gaelin needs. Did you see what was in my staff?”
“I saw,” Terrek replied from somewhere near. “What have you done to him, elf?”
“I hope something akin to what I did to Tierdon,” said Ponu. “His life needs restoring, but his fears hold him back.”
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Gaelin called from the mist around him, the dizzy whirling where the cabin had been. “I hear what you’re—” He stopped at another memory, the odor of rot as his mother’s corpse lay moldering on the woodpile. Trembling, he saw again her staring skull as every day he had been forced to fetch the wood. “I was eight,” he whispered.
Ponu’s eyes glittered above him. “I never knew. Through my crystal, which is much like your Skystone, Gaelin, I checked on you,” he said. “I was waiting for you to discover Holram. I could tell your life was difficult. But I never realized . . .” His expression uneasy, he flicked back his silvery hair. “I caught flashes. I knew you slept in the relic of an old barn. Or you would stay in a gloomy place below a . . .”
“That was the cellar,” Gaelin provided. “He locked me there when he took his sons to town.”
“I will find him,” said Ponu. “You needn’t worry about that, Terrek Florne. He and his offspring shall be brought to justice, I assure you. Humans are a part of this world now. On Talenkai, such things are not tolerated.
“As for you, child of Othelion,” Ponu advised Gaelin, “you must reject your stepfather’s name, for titles held too tightly can become wounds that never heal. Spurn the label as I have; Lava
hl is a cruel drunkard. Othelion is your proper surname. Garrick Othelion was the name of your father. Othelion: of the lion—or one who is noble. It is a giantkin word for a creature from your Earth.”
He flicked his white wings, staring over Gaelin’s head at the distant trees. “Your people lacked both names and memories when they first arrived. Most of you were dead. Sephrym was intent on saving his star, and you were in his way, so he threw you down. The few of you who survived it were the foundlings, the children the elves cared for at Heartwood. The Seekers researched your world in books like the one you examined in the castle. Adhering to your traditions, they gave you two names, and some of them were taken from those books.
“You owe them everything.” Ponu grimaced. “Yet you humans resent them and reject their language. They give you the simplest rules, the laws of the Seekers, to protect the magic. And you chafe under that. Always you must be superior. On the Earth, you considered yourselves entitled,” said Ponu with disgust, “much to the detriment of your world, and now some of you intend to repeat those behaviors here.”
Gaelin scowled as he struggled to find his bearings; he failed to comprehend the elf’s anger or his words. “But I’m used to Lavahl,” he said finally. “That’s the only name I know!”
“Not all humans are the same,” Terrek put in. “We have classes at our university. We instruct our young people to learn your rules as you wish us to.”
“Not wish,” Ponu said. “It is what the elves demand. And you are correct when you say ‘not all.’ Gaelin has been respectful. I saw him as a child, a feral little animal in the woods. He possessed no pride or lofty ambitions. He slept with wolves, and one even helped him when no human would. But you, Terrek Florne. You hesitated when the time came to dispose of the louse-ridden hair you cut from his head, even though the elves were clear about the importance of burying or burning. I heard you through my staff.”
Terrek shifted, troubled. “Feel any better?” he asked Gaelin quietly.
“I’m hungry,” Gaelin complained.
Terrek nodded. “We had already frightened and humiliated him . . .”
As Terrek explained his actions to the winged mage, Gaelin shuddered, recalling the two men holding him down his first night in camp—to cut away his matted hair and splash alcohol on his scalp. “I thought burying the clippings might add to that,” Terrek continued. “But still I covered them, didn’t I? I have assumed my whole life there’s some logic behind these laws the elves give us, and so I do try to follow them.”
Ponu snorted. “You strengthen the world when you give back. The more of yourselves you bury in the soil or burn clean for the air to breathe, the sooner this planet will recognize you. Do you wish to stop being an outsider and have magic of your own? Then respect the rules,” said Ponu with a grin.
“Now . . .” Gesturing to Terrek, Ponu reached down, then together the man and the elf helped Gaelin to his feet. “I think our young Master Othelion requires food!”
Chapter 27
GAELIN GLARED AT Ponu across the cooking fire. “I did not sleep with wolves! There was just a wolf, and she kept me warm in the woods one night after she . . . freed me from my mother. I had released the wolf’s pup from a snare once, so sometimes Beauty would visit and bring me small animals. I’d eat them raw because I couldn’t cook and I was hungry!”
“Freed you?” Vyergin asked. The captain crouched before two large pots of stew, the ladle in his grasp dripping broth. “From your mother? Why would anyone need to be—” Vyergin grunted when Terrek shook his head.
“You saw in his staff, you said,” Gaelin muttered to Terrek. “You know what my stepfather made me do.”
“You didn’t ‘do’ anything,” Ponu told him. The elf sniffed curiously at the bowl Vyergin proffered him, the scent of leaves, roots, and rabbit wafting through tendrils of steam. “Seth Lavahl did that to you. You were a child; he was a man grown.”
“He stitched her up,” Gaelin remembered. “He made Delbert hold me while my head was inside. He wanted her to take me back, but I was too big. So he left me like that to suffocate; that’s what he said. But Beauty came. I was screaming and knocking wood off the pile he dumped us on when Beauty heard me and got to me with her teeth. He had me strapped to my mother, and my legs were bound, too, so I couldn’t get free.” Gaelin shuddered. “Somehow the wolf knew where to bite and . . . next thing I knew she was licking my cheek.”
“Well, that’s no surprise!” Oburne said. “She was drawn to the blood. You’re lucky she didn’t gobble up your mother!”
“Come now, gentlemen!” Vyergin lifted his hand to get their attention. “Eat now while it’s hot. That storm blasted away whatever dead branches we could have used. We have the wood we brought from the ruined sled and that’s all.” He paused to gesture at a passing swordsman. “Abithane Tayert!” Vyergin waited until the man stopped beside him to sniff at the stew, then slid his fire stick under the nearest cauldron’s bail to heft it above the flames. “This one’s ready. Be a good lad and carry it over to the others, would you? Be careful,” he cautioned the black-haired warrior. “It’s hot!”
Ponu smiled while Abithane crab-walked the swaying vessel toward the huddle of men by a second blaze among the trees. Then, sighing, the elf flicked his wings and sipped carefully at Vyergin’s concoction.
“Elves don’t eat meat,” Roth protested behind him. “Do they?”
Shifting on the rock he had chosen for his seat, Ponu grinned. “I suppose that depends on the elf. This one does.”
Ponu turned to Vyergin. “I can help your fire to hold,” he said. “Here, Captain.” Extracting a small vial from a pocket of his tunic, Ponu handed it over. “Be mindful when using this. Just a few drops when the flames are low. If you look again you will find many felled trees in the forest now. The saplings are no match for the downstrokes of an Azkhar queen trying to rise.
“This you may have also,” Ponu added, passing to Vyergin several flat crusts of what resembled moldy bread. “It is bark from the fungi tree, Orthayli, that grows in the southlands of Tholuna. Just a smidgen can thicken up your broth. It will keep your hunger at bay as well.”
Fungi? Gaelin grimaced in disgust as he surveyed his own plate of stew. He picked up his spoon and filled his mouth with tender rabbit and bits of potato. Washing it down with a sip of the ice water in his mug, he frowned at the bitter aftertaste. “I already had medicine,” he grumbled.
“It is not the same kind,” Ponu said. “This is tagwort; it will help you rest. I gave the remainder of the yellow powder you had before to Captain Vyergin here. He has promised to keep it for when you use your staff needlessly again. Which you will. You are human, so you have no idea—”
“You’re an apothecary, I take it,” Terrek interjected. “This medicine you gave to the captain for Gaelin. Is it a cure?”
“No,” Ponu said. “What Gaelin has is no illness. A fire burns within him. It is my hope the Seeker elves may reverse some of the harm to his body, assuming he survives.” The elf-mage reached between his knees. Raising up his crystal staff, he tilted it toward the fire, the quartz casting prisms of gold upon the sunlit tents. “I am curious, Leader Florne.” Ponu stared at Terrek. “Where did you find the strength to break my hold on you out on the field? How did you free the ghost to alert me of Avalar’s plight?”
“Free the . . . ?” Terrek’s brow knitted. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t break any hold. Thanks to you, I couldn’t even move. I don’t know—”
“He means the scabbard,” Roth said. “It dropped from the sword when we were trying to find the giant. One of the brambles you cut through tore it right off. I didn’t see any ghost come out of the blade, though.” Hugging his chest, Roth kicked at the ground. “I hate ghosts!”
“Ah.” Terrek nodded.
“You will see the ghost only if he lets you,” Ponu said.
Terrek wiped at his mouth. “So that’s it. Well, good for Argus. Now he’s free an
d I don’t have to carry that rusty weapon of his around. I hope he behaves himself out there.”
“But you do have his sword,” Roth said. “It was caught beneath the straps of your pack. I wrapped it in a blanket for you.”
“Which means you also have the ghost,” Ponu told Terrek. He rounded on Roth, feathers flaring. “You’re the one, aren’t you? You took something of mine, and I want it back.”
Roth blanched. “I did?”
“The painting, Lieutenant,” Terrek said with a grin. “The one with my brother and Avalar. You still have it, I hope.”
“Oh, that! Of course I do. B-but it’s wrinkled now,” Roth said sadly.
“That’s easy enough to fix,” Ponu assured him. “Bring it here to me, won’t you?”
Roth edged reluctantly to one of the tents and crawled in.
“He’s lying,” Terrek informed the elf in an undertone. “It’s not damaged. Roth has been fretting over that thing for the last day and a half.”
“I am teasing him,” Ponu whispered back. “He’s laori, isn’t he? They’re always fun to meddle with. I don’t envy you, though, managing him and Avalar both. Stop me if you think I’m being cruel, or if he starts to be—”
“Laori?” Gaelin echoed. “What’s that?”
“It means great-hearted,” Ponu said. “A passionate or empathic spirit. Laori giants are more apt to friend-bond. In fact, I—” The elf broke off. “Grevelin! I forgot about him! He must be frantic with worry for me! I need to contact him and let him know I am well.” Ponu closed his eyes.
“I think the boy can cope with whatever you—” Terrek stopped when Roth reappeared from the tent. “Shh!” Terrek hissed at him and then motioned to Ponu. “Just bring it here. Let the elf see it.”
Song Of Mornius Page 21
