At the center of the House of Silvanus was a circular space open to the sky. A ring of menhirs stood around the periphery, and just inside it, three granite thrones stood side-by-side facing the altar stone in the middle.
Cindermoon felt a pang of resentment as she, Shinthala, and Ashenford all took their seats. Granted, the founders of the Emerald Enclave had intended that three should preside here as equals. But for all their wisdom, the druids of yore hadn’t foreseen the Blue Fire. The burned, broken land it had left behind needed a single decisive, clearheaded spiritual leader, one who could do what needed doing without having to take the opinions of lesser minds into account.
Perhaps one day, Cindermoon would be rid of them, but for now, she’d have to suffer through whatever charade they’d devised to trick her into abandoning her present course of action. She waved a copper-skinned hand that was dainty even for a female elf. “Get on with it.”
“Gladly.” Ashenford then raised his voice so it would carry to the other side of the open space. “Come forth!”
Three people stepped out into the yellow torchlight and the pattering rain. They were as Cindermoon had been led to expect. A blond outlander boy. A Red Wizard—more proof, had the elf needed it, that the other members of the Elder Circle were either idiots or willing to conspire with even the vilest blackguards to undermine her. And a strapping Turmishan warrior with a trace of gray in his hair and a blade hanging on either hip.
“Hello,” said the little boy.
“This is Stedd Whitehorn,” Ashenford said, “the Chosen of Lathander.”
Cindermoon shook her head. “I don’t see it.”
Shinthala frowned. “Because you haven’t tried.”
“Please,” Ashenford said, “look with the eyes of the spirit. That’s all it takes.”
Cindermoon was reluctant to do that because it required lowering her guard. But she also didn’t want to appear timid or unreasonable, and at least she didn’t lack for protectors. Loyal druids, rangers, and Drummer, a huge black bear that had been her companion since he was a cub, were all close at hand.
She took a long breath and emptied her mind of distractions, of anger, caution, and the clammy feel of the rainwater on the seat of her throne. Then, silently praying, she asked Silvanus to help her see.
At the same time, she sensed the boy—Stedd—revealing himself to the best of his ability. Their complementary efforts produced a sudden layering of her vision. She still saw the boy, but at the same time, she beheld a red and golden dawn, and with it came a surge of hope so keen and unexpected it made her laugh out loud.
When the revelation faded, she raised a trembling hand to her brow. “Treefather,” she breathed.
“Now do you see?” Shinthala demanded.
It was the human druidess’s eagerness to make Cindermoon commit, to manipulate and manage her, that jolted her back to her customary wariness. Yet she saw little choice but to concede the truth. To do otherwise might call her powers and thus her leadership into question.
“I do,” she said. “Welcome, Stedd Whitehorn. The Emerald Enclave rejoices at the god of the dawn’s rebirth.”
“Uh, thank you.” Stedd hesitated. “Did Ashenford and Shinthala tell you why Lathander sent me?”
“They claim to help end the famine.”
“Yes. If we all work together, all the Chosen and the other druids, too, there must be something we can do.”
“There is,” Cindermoon said, “and I’ve already set a plan in motion to do it. I’ll be grateful for any support you can give.”
Stedd frowned. “You mean, the plan to kill the scar pilgrims?”
“Ah. My peers told you about it.”
“Lathander wouldn’t want me to help with that. I don’t think … I mean, I know he wouldn’t want anybody to just go kill hundreds of people.”
Cindermoon’s fingers tightened on the arms of her throne. Plainly, this was why Ashenford and Shinthala were so happy another Chosen had turned up. To their minds, the boy was another voice of equivalent stature to speak against her and dilute her authority. But by deep roots and green leaves, it wasn’t going to matter.
“Then do the Morninglord’s bidding,” she said, “insofar as a child newly Chosen understands it. But please realize that although my folk revere your god, we worship Silvanus above all others. And he’s decreed the pilgrims have to die.”
Ashenford grimaced. “Shinthala and I are his Chosen, too, and we haven’t heard him say any such thing.”
“Then clean out your ears!” Cindermoon snapped. “Is the plan truly all that hard to comprehend? By purging Turmish of all who worship the Blue Fire, we’ll magically cleanse the land of the last of the taint itself. That in turn will restore the enclave’s strength. Then we’ll use that might to feed the hungry.”
Stedd shook his head. “You can’t take the power from something so bad and use it for something good.”
Cindermoon’s fingers tightened on the armrests until they ached and she pried them loose again. “Boy, you’re debating first principles with one who was already a druid and Chosen when your great-great-grandfather … never mind. I’ll answer as your station if not your experience deserves. You couldn’t turn death into life. But the Oakfather is the lord of all Nature, hunter and prey, dark and light. Druids can do things—difficult, ambiguous things—that dawnbringers and sunlords never could.”
“Still,” Ashenford said, “Lathander has returned in a time of turmoil. Surely, he has a thousand urgent matters to concern him. Yet he elected to send his first new Chosen here, to us. We’d be wise to consider what the boy has to say.”
Cindermoon glared at him. “You’d be wise to heed what I’m telling you. The scar pilgrims are going to die. The Assembly of Stars has given its blessing—”
“Because you approached them without our knowledge,” Shinthala growled.
“—and I’ve gathered warriors to carry out the campaign. You two can either help, and prove yourselves worthy of the rank you hold, or hold back and—”
Voices cried out. Drummer moaned and scrambled behind the row of thrones. Startled, Cindermoon jerked around on her seat and looked straight ahead.
While she’d been busy squabbling with her peers, a circle of wavering, somehow filthy-looking red light had appeared in the air. It was a window into a place where almost everything was on fire, including the damned souls shrieking and flailing in pits like mass graves and the giant soaring toward the breach between worlds.
Some trick of enhanced motion or warped time brought the balor to the window in an instant. When it did, Cindermoon could make out the pock-like scars on the demon’s hideous face where her conjured hailstones had battered it, and the horn Ashenford had broken with a blow from an enchanted quarterstaff. She’d believed she and her peers had destroyed the demon utterly, but some power even greater than itself must have seen fit to resurrect it.
A beat of its bat-like wings carried it into the gateway, which now took on the aspect of a tunnel, and as it flew onward, some form of distortion made its massive body seem to slither like a snake’s. Appearing suddenly, perhaps simply because the balor had willed them to, dozens of lesser fiends hurtled after it.
Cindermoon abruptly realized she’d lost a precious instant to consternation and had, at best, only one more left. She lifted her hand and drew breath to shout a word of forbiddance.
But before she could, Stedd Whitehorn shrilled, “Lathander!”
Red-gold light pulsed across the heart of the sanctuary, and the balor and the lesser demons tumbled backward like leaves in a gale.
Meanwhile, the mouth of the tunnel drew in upon itself like the contracting pupil of an eye. In a couple heartbeats, it closed completely.
The boy then pivoted to the Turmishan warrior who was supposedly his faithful bodyguard. Looking shocked at the sealing of the passage to the Abyss, the man stood with his cutlass in his hand. The short, curved blade still glimmered with a trace of the same dirty red light tha
t pervaded the balor’s domain. Evidently, it was the talisman that had opened the way. He must have surreptitiously eased it out of its scabbard when everyone else was looking elsewhere.
“Why?” cried Stedd. “Why would you do this?”
“Because a Marivaldi,” the swordsman growled, “finishes what he starts.”
With that, Cindermoon realized exactly which member of that once-respected family he must be, the only conspirator to escape after the near-destruction of Sapra and the Elder Circle. A ranger who likewise understood shouted to identify the dastard to one and all, “That’s Anton Marivaldi!”
For one more instant, the traitor glared across the innermost sanctum at the trio on the thrones as though contemplating a suicidal charge. Then he whirled and ran back into the temple.
“Kill him!” Cindermoon cried, whereupon rangers and druids pounded after the fleeing man like hounds on the track of a deer.
Anton slowed for an instant to thrust his cutlass back into its scabbard. Despite tapers and watch lights, the interior of the House of Silvanus was dark enough that otherwise, the ruddy glow that Umara had conjured into the steel might have served as a beacon for his pursuers.
From the sound of it, he had plenty of them, and that was the idea, to lure all of Cindermoon’s protectors away. He was glad that, in the aftermath of the catastrophe in Sapra, on the day preceding his realization that he was in imminent danger of arrest, curiosity had prompted him to go look at the body of the fallen balor. His description of its wounds had enabled Umara to produce a convincing illusion of the exact same creature. He’d judged that that, combined with the revelation of his own identity, would jolt the elf and her defenders into precipitous action if anything would.
Now he’d see if he could survive the consequences of his success.
Had it been possible to move in a straight line, he could have sprinted from the courtyard in the center of the sanctuary to its outer edge quickly. But it wasn’t. The seemingly random placement of pillars and stone slabs supporting the roof and the lack of anything approximating a genuine corridor obliged him to veer repeatedly, until he wasn’t sure he was even heading in his original direction anymore.
He was all but certain his pursuers were spreading out. It was what he would have done in their place to catch a stranger who was likely blundering back and forth in confusion.
He rounded a corner, and a wolf lunged out of the shadows. He wrenched himself aside and banged his shoulder into granite, but the beast’s jaws snapped shut on empty air.
The wolf started to spin for another try, and he booted it in the ribs. That knocked it stumbling away and gave him time to draw his saber. As the animal gathered itself for another lunge, he decided on a cut to the neck. The curved blade was already in motion when he remembered druids were shapeshifters.
He spun the saber lower and slashed a foreleg instead. The wolf fell. He dodged past it and ran on.
He’d only taken three strides when a voice rasped words of power behind him. Instinct told him when to dodge. Spines like porcupine quills hurtled past him to stab into a wooden screen.
That’s what I get for showing mercy, Anton thought. It would have served him right if the former wolf’s barrage had hit.
Yet he showed mercy again when a ranger rushed out of the dark. Even though it took longer to sweep the other warrior’s broadsword out of line, step in, and drive the curved guard of the saber into his face with stunning force than it would have to simply kill him.
Calling to one another, the voices of Anton’s pursuers echoed. They sounded like they were all around him, and he could only hope it wasn’t really so.
Three more turns, and then he burst in on a skinny adolescent girl in druidic robes who yelped and recoiled. Hostage! he thought, but no. If he took a captive, someone would hurry back to the Elder Circle to report the situation when his entire objective was to keep all their underlings away from them. He simply had to keep running.
When he raced on by without pausing, the young initiate found her courage and started an incantation. Fortunately, she recited the words slowly, like she had yet to fully master the spell, and he left her behind while she was still declaiming it.
An arrow flew past his head. Seeking only cover, he ducked into the narrow, unpromising-looking gap where two stone “walls” nearly met at an angle. That was the turn that finally revealed the pool, now black as the starless sky it mirrored.
Anton dashed out into the open, looked about, and saw that he’d apparently exited the temple ahead of any of his pursuers. And while people stirred among the lean-tos and campfires on the far shore—some sharp-eared soul must have heard the yelling inside the sanctuary despite the hiss of the waterfalls and the patter of the rain—they weren’t yet doing so in an organized or purposeful way.
Anton judged that if he kept moving smartly, across the pool, past the camp, and on down Hierophant’s Trail, he might actually get away. More likely not, but at least it was a chance.
He found the nearest string of steppingstones and started striding from one to the next. He reached the eighth one, and then an all but shapeless form surged up to tower over him. It seemed less a creature that had been lurking in the pool than a portion of the water that had formed into rippling approximations of arms, a head, and a torso; the liquid bulk at the center of it contained and concealed the next steppingstone in line.
Anton laughed. “You’re confused. You’re supposed to kill evildoers going into the sanctuary. But just sink back down, and I won’t tell.”
The water spirit raised its arm.
Stedd doubted that Lathander’s blessings helped him lie any more convincingly. If anything, the touch of so much goodness ought to tangle his tongue if he tried.
Yet apparently, he’d played his part in Anton’s trick convincingly enough. Because Cindermoon had ordered her guards to chase the pirate, and except for a couple woodsmen in brown and green, they’d all obeyed.
And in the aftermath, it seemed like the reemergence of a deadly threat from the past had distracted the little black-haired elf from current grudges. When her green eyes looked at the other members of the Elder Circle, Umara, or Stedd, it was without the clenched mistrust he’d sensed before.
Maybe we could persuade her now, the boy thought, but really, he knew that hope was too faint for even a Chosen of Lathander to depend on. He and his companions needed to stick to the plan.
Umara plainly agreed. Seemingly peering in the direction where Anton and his pursuers had disappeared, she had her back to the three thrones and their occupants. That enabled her to whisper an incantation and crook and cross her fingers into mystic signs without Cindermoon spotting it. The spell plunged the two rangers into slumber; their legs buckled beneath them and dumped them on the ground.
At the same moment, Ashenford and Shinthala scrambled off their stone chairs, pivoted to face Cindermoon, and started chanting. The half-elf held out his hand, a sickle appeared in it, and he spun it over his head. Like a ghost plant growing in midair, the suggestion of holly, with toothy leaves and little red berries, formed around the white-haired druidess. Stedd could even smell it.
Because Stedd didn’t know how to subdue people without hurting them, he had to leave it to his two new druid friends to overcome Cindermoon. They should be able to. They had her outnumbered, and they’d caught her by surprise.
But then, with a roar, Cindermoon’s bear rounded the line of thrones. The illusory demons had scared the animal off, but apparently not far and not for long, and the sight of mere human beings working magic wasn’t frightening enough to keep it from trying to protect its mistress.
A swipe of its claws jerked Shinthala’s leg out from under her and dropped her on her back. The phantom holly vanished, scent and all. The bear reared over her.
Stedd threw out his hand and cast brightness into the beast’s beady eyes. The light was harmless, but, startled, the bear flinched from it.
That gave Shinthala time to cast mor
e magic. She spoke, and her voice came out as a high, inhuman throbbing. Her manner reminded Stedd of someone ordering a naughty dog off a bed.
The bear shuddered as though struggling to resist the druidess’s power to command it. Then it wheeled and lumbered back the way it had come.
Stedd spun back around. Without support from Shinthala, Ashenford had failed to render Cindermoon helpless; instead, he himself strained against vines that had burst from the ground to wrap around him. Now on her feet like her peers, her delicate face with its slanted eyes and pointed chin furious, the elf turned toward Shinthala and swept out a hand that was suddenly covered with insects. As her arm snapped out straight, the conjured hornets took flight.
A fan-shaped blast of yellow flame engulfed the wasps halfway to their intended victim. When the blaze guttered out a heartbeat later, there was nothing left of them. Her fingers smoking, Umara shifted to face Cindermoon dead on.
Cindermoon twirled an upraised hand. Visible chiefly by virtue of the raindrops it caught and spun, a cyclone twice as tall as a man howled up from the ground. It charged Umara like a bull, snatched her up into the air, and flung her into one of the menhirs. Something cracked, and the Red Wizard collapsed like a rag doll at the base of the stone.
Stedd stared for a heartbeat, then remembered that here was something he did know how to do. He scurried in Umara’s direction.
As he bent over her, he glanced back at the fight. Kneeling, the blood from her clawed leg pooling around her, Shinthala conjured a huge boar halfway into being.
Then Cindermoon shouted, “No!” and shook her fist. The blurry, misty semblance of a hog vanished.
Stedd reached out to Lathander and drew down his light. Setting his glowing hands on Umara’s shoulders, he poured the power into her.
Ashenford flailed his arms, and his bonds, now dry and brittle, started to break apart from the top down. That freed his hands to start a different spell, but his legs were still immobilized when the whirlwind roared at him and engulfed him. His chanting ended in a cry of pain.
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