The Humans
Anya a’Cooper: Powerful mage, serves Ishavriel—sometimes
PROLOGUE
17 of Scaral, 416 AA
THE wind was a wild taste in her mouth, a thing that kicked at the tongue and the lips with its strangeness.
It carried the embers of a dead fire, wood ash long past the point of burning, in the lengthening shadows of the coming evening. The living fire burned around it, swirling like eddies of brightly colored water. Wrong, wrong. She lifted a hand, rubbing her mouth with the back of it as if the taste would somehow come off. As if she could clean it away.
“Anya,” Devlin said. He caught her hand before she could cut her lips against her teeth; she’d been rubbing too hard, without thinking.
Almost, she pulled his fingers back, but as she touched them, she realized that his skin felt the cool, crisp color of blue—and she knew it was happening again. The tears started, and as they ran down her face, they tingled, a jumble of red and exquisite yellow, burning brightly. She heard the wind, held its voice a moment before it slid into something that she did not understand—some thing that made her mouth water, a smell.
“Anya, Anya, Anya.” But she could still hear his voice, his precious voice.
The first time it had happened, she’d been terrified. She’d touched a metal plow in the old shed down by Devlin’s uncle’s farm, and instead of feeling cool, humped metal, she’d touched green. A year ago. A little more.
Then, in the wake of that confusion, pain.
It had passed with sleep and the dawn’s light, and she’d said nothing to anyone. Not then. And not a month later, when it happened again. Not five months after that, when it happened once or twice a week, always something unusual—a smell where a sound should have been, a color instead of a sensation, a noise, some pealing of bell or muted susurration when she looked at what should have been cornflower blue.
Not even when the sunlight began to shout in a voice she understood; when the shadows whispered or sang; when food felt like bark or steel shavings, the taste wrong.
No; she hadn’t spoken at all until the pain was too harsh to ignore—because when she couldn’t ignore it, no one else could either. Devlin noticed first. He always noticed things.
“Anya.”
But it was bad this time. When had it gotten so bad? Tears blurred the lines of his face, and she brushed them away—just as harshly—so she could see it clearly. She needed to see him clearly.
He knew what she was thinking, too. Always did. He was Devlin and she was Anya, and they belonged together.
“It’s the pain again.”
She bit her lip and nodded, and the tears blurred his face again—but it didn’t matter, because his arms formed a brace around her body, drawing her in, holding her close—and that close to his face, she couldn’t focus anyway.
“Anya, they’re coming too close together, these pains. I’m worried, I’m worried for you, little Ann—maybe we should go back.”
“No!” She pulled back a moment, and when he wouldn’t let her go, buried herself more deeply into his chest. “No, I won’t go back. You heard what they were going to do. They were going to send me away with that—with that man!”
“Aye, away. I know it.” He held her, rocking her against the pain. “But that man—he wasn’t an ordinary man. Maybe he was a—”
“He was a wizard,” she said, her voice a tight scrape of sound struggling free of clenched teeth. “And he’d done his poking and prodding.” She buried the words again, as the pain came. Bit his shirt, which helped. Heard his grunt, and knew that she’d bitten more than shirt—but Devlin never complained about anything. He was steady. “They were going to send me away. Without you.”
“Anya—”
“Dev—” she bit her lip until it bled, as she’d done many, many times these last few weeks. A wonder it hadn’t scarred. A wonder. “Don’t you love me?”
Her voice sounded small, even to her own ears, and he answered with words and without, speaking and rocking her, letting her know by motion and presence that he loved her more than anyone else possibly could.
Her parents had called for the wizard. Called him all the way from the city of the Twin Kings in the Eastern Empire. Never mind that they were free towners, and damn proud of it. One priestess’ mumbled words and they’d scattered like chickens when faced with a fox.
They were going to give her away.
Anya, love, smart chickens do scatter when faced with a fox.
And leave their young behind ’em? No—not even chickens do that. We’ll go to the—to the Western Kingdoms. We can make a life together there. Find a farm, a place we can make our own. She hadn’t told her parents, and he hadn’t told his; they’d packed in bits and pieces over a hurried day and a night. And then, before Anya could be packed up and sent off to the East, they’d slid out of the confines of their parents’ houses and headed out into the world to decide their own fate.
Oh, the pain, the pain was terrible. She felt her stomach shudder, and knew that her knees had collapsed, although the ground didn’t rush up to meet her. The priestess had said the pain wouldn’t stop until she spoke with the mage-born. The priestess had said—
Not even the healer-born can help with this pain, Anya, if you could afford their touch. And all the while, her eyes were round and dark with pity, as if Anya were a lame horse.
She bit her lip, or thought she must have; blood welled up in her mouth as if it were the only drink she was to be allowed. She choked on it, on something thick and chewy, and then she felt something hard between her teeth. Something her teeth could cling to.
She had never been so afraid of fire in her life; she knew it was burning her, burning her to ash.
Devlin!
I’m here; I’m here, Annie. I’m not going anywhere without you. I’m here.
And it helped, to hear his words, even if they sounded as if he’d spoken them underwater.
There wasn’t anyone she loved so much in the world as she loved Devlin. He was tall, and handsome, and his hair was like copper, brushed and straight; his eyes were a deep blue that sometimes edged into gray when she least expected it, like the shadowed secrets of a free town dusk. He wasn’t the miller’s son, with his wandering hands and his sour breath; he wasn’t the weaver’s son, who wanted to leave his mark on all the young women of the village, taking what he could without giving anything much in return.
Every girl in the fields had had an eye for Devlin a’Smith, and he—he had had eyes for Anya a’Cooper. Oh, not all at once, and even when he knew that she wanted him, he’d kept his distance because he thought she was just a child. But she was more than a child, and she’d proved it in time. Just this past year. After she’d seen her fifteenth birthday, although by the priestess’ reckoning, she’d been a woman since she was just shy of fourteen.
Devlin was nineteen. Almost twenty. Broad shouldered, and learning a real trade. And he was the best man in the village, even her mother said so—excepting, of course, her father, although Anya privately thought that between Devlin and her father there wasn’t much comparison.
She’d been so happy, even when the pain had started. Even when it had come more and more often, until it seemed to always be there, she could ignore it because Devlin loved her. It was when it got sharp and hot that she’d finally gone to a priestess. And the priestess had spoken with her at length, and then risen with a worried look, a creased sort of face with thin lips.
She’d given Anya herbs, in a bitter brew, that helped with the pain for a short while—but only a short while, and in truth, not very much.
The priestess had spoken with her mother and father, and they had come home tired and gray, her mother fussing in that sharp-tongued way that mothers fuss when they’re worried and everyone else is going to worry just as much, or else, and her father going silent to his work, casting a troubled glance over his shoulder a time or two, hushing the rest of his children while watching them with that same
terrible worry that he now watched Anya. As if she was a hailstorm and they were the rest of the crop.
And then, weeks later, he came, like the doom out of an old story, walking into her town while the sun was high and the sky was clear. He cast a long shadow, but Devlin sensibly pointed out that it was because he was tall—and he was tall, the tallest man she’d ever seen. His hair was white as snow in winter, and longer than any sensible free towner’s, and his eyes were gray and cool and hard, very much like metal. His hands were unblemished, and his skin fair, and his clothing—well, his clothing, her mother said, was probably worth more than a cow.
He’d told them he’d walked, but Anya didn’t believe it; the dust of the road had a way of marking a man, and no man—noble-born or common as clay—escaped it. But this one had.
I’ve come from the Order of Knowledge, at the behest of the church of the Mother. He was polite and distant when he spoke to anyone, even Anya, but she knew when she saw him that he was the end of her life.
He came, and although her parents were allowed to listen to him—more, she thought, for their comfort than her own—he did not acknowledge their presence. Hers, he did; he treated her with—with careful respect. He spoke at length. To her, in his quiet voice.
And that night, that night she made her desperate plans to flee. Went to Devlin, to whom she would have been married by the end of her seventeenth year, and told him that she must leave with him, on the following eve, or she would never see him again. It was, after all, the truth.
Ah, the pain, the fire.
What she hadn’t told Devlin, and what she was afraid he was beginning to guess, was what the mage had said: she was mage-born, and coming into her power far too quickly, and if she didn’t come with him, she stood not only to lose that power—which she didn’t much care about anyway—but quite probably her life as well. That was exactly how he’d worded it. Quite probably.
If she hadn’t been so afraid of losing Devlin, she might have gone with the mage. But the mage had made it plain: there was only room for the mage-born where she was going, which meant no Devlin. And if she’d told Devlin, if she’d told him what that white-haired stranger had said, that she might die—he’d have betrayed her; he’d’ve sent her with the mage. For her own good.
Devlin was the only thing she wanted. Had been the only thing she had ever wanted.
They’d put up their little tents; the sun’s red gleam was cut by those tents into precise shapes as it lowered itself down the horizon behind their small encampment. The light would fade quickly, and when the last of its color had bled into blues so deep they were almost black, the demons would be allowed to feed.
They were feeding now, at an uncomfortable distance, the muffled intensity of the young girl’s pain a hint of the sustenance that they had been forced, by dint of the Summoning, to forgo. The Hells, they feared, were lost to them—and if they had ever known another realm, it was buried in the memory of a flesh much different than the flesh the world had surrendered to their return.
Thus it was with the kin: They tended the gardens and the monuments of the Hells with a keen and loving hand. But in a time beyond the memory of all but the most powerful, they had been born to the earth, to the old earth, and the world remembered their names and their spirits. A cunning mage could stumble across those names, and if he was willing to make a bargain of blood and time with the old world, he could force the demon to return to the land of human life and vice; the world itself closed round the kin in a shape, a physical form at once natural and foreign to the Summoned creature.
They wore such shapes now: things of ebony and silver, bodies long and dark with slender claws, long fingers.
Two weeks; two weeks and more, they had watched this girl and this boy. Lord Ishavriel himself came frequently, to take their reports, to cast his spells, and to listen. But today, finally, the watching stopped.
“Kill the girl as you please,” he told his two servitors, “but do not harm the boy.”
Ishavriel-kevar smiled thinly, but Algratz did not; he studied his lord’s expression. “What would you have us do with the boy?”
“Frighten him,” their lord replied, but carefully. Algratz thought him ill-pleased by the tenor of the question. Or perhaps by the interruption. “Before you take the girl, you must force him to desert her. Break his spirit; offer him a choice between his life and hers. It must be clear, to him, and to the girl, what his choice was.” He paused a moment, to give his words weight, and then he looked back at the tents framed by sinking sunlight.
Ishavriel-kevar laughed and nodded, straining eagerly as the sun’s light ceased its dance upon the windswept waters of the lake.
But Algratz asked. “Why?”
“Because,” Ishavriel replied, “I so order.” His voice lost all trace of warmth, and there had been little enough of it, and that all carnal. “Or do you challenge me, here?”
“No, Lord Ishavriel.”
“Good.” His gaze, wrapped in a face that appeared almost human, was the color of the setting sun. “The boy is mine,” he said, relenting slightly. “After he has fled, I will hunt him.”
Ishavriel-kevar nodded, impatient to be gone. They would share the girl and leave the boy to him. It made sense.
Still, Algratz began his approach through the tall grass and the low shrubbery more cautiously than his companion. “Think, Kevar,” he said, granting the demon the use of free name. “The Lord has forbidden all hunting of humans until the gathering and the Summoning is complete.”
“And our lord has given us permission.”
“If our lord angers the Lord, who do you think our lord will offer as compensation for the crime?”
But Ishavriel-kevar was beyond caring, and as the shadow circle their feet traced brought them closer and closer to the small, rough tent, Algratz well understood why: she was there. Her pain was lessening, which was unfortunate. But the pain that she felt now would be nothing compared to what the kin might inflict. To what he might, were she trembling in his hands.
It had been such a long time.
Such a long time, to be forbidden the hunting and the reaving. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Lord Ishavriel waited, impassive, where they had left him; he intended to witness the event. To intervene, Algratz thought, if his servants failed him.
As he stepped forward, the crickets fell silent; the night animals—and there were not a few—froze or fled. A careful human, in lands as dense with the old earth’s life as the forested stretch between the small mortal demesnes, could trace the path of his approach by the silence it engendered—for such silences as these were loud and unnatural.
But the girl’s pain was guttering, and the boy was involved with it, almost as much as they were; there would be no detection.
No escape.
He was wary, but as he approached, as the sound of the girl’s breath grew as loud to his ear as her ebbing pain, he saw Ishavriel-kevar dart forward, off the path, black hands outstretched, claws ready to cut a swath through the tent’s side.
He knew that Lord Ishavriel planned something; knew further that the risk he took—the breaking of the Lord’s law—was a risk only if there were witnesses, coconspirators, and that witnesses were often disposed of when the work was done. He could not think of a single reason why Ishavriel needed either Algratz or Ishavriel-kevar; a simple girl and a simple boy could have easily been disposed of by one of the Kialli with no one the wiser.
Nature intervened: Algratz, of the two, was the more powerful demon, and he could not let Ishavriel-kevar take first what was his by right of power.
Faster, sleeker, and more complete in his arc, he landed a foot ahead of the slightly slower demon—and when he cut through the rough, oiled cloth of the tent, the fabric provided so little resistance the tent barely shivered when half its side fell away.
“Welcome,” he said, in a voice made guttural by anticipation and desire, “to Hell.”
There was a moment of terrified
silence; he savored it, stretching it out for as long as he could. She broke it, and her scream was gratifying, an echo of the Abyss. He would have savored the scream just as deeply as the silence, but Ishavriel-kevar intervened, stepping into the breached wall and grabbing the boy.
The boy kicked and twisted in his grasp—just as a soul might writhe, with just as much success. “Devlin a’Smith,” Ishavriel-kevar said, and the boy slumped in a sick shock that even souls did not display. With his free hand, Ishavriel-kevar tore the tent from its moorings, uprooting and scattering its pegs in a single motion.
She disappeared a moment in its folds—but only a moment; Algratz spoke a word and the tent unfurled, exposing her. She was white, white as starlight and the face of the dark moon.
He caught her in his hands at once; marveled at the feel of her flesh, at the fact of it, that something this weak and thin and yielding had managed to survive so long.
Almost casually, he rid her of her clothing, slicing it clear from throat-hem to skirt’s edge, as if it were alive in its own right, and he an executioner. He heard her lovely whimper; she had lost her voice in fear, but her fear itself carried everything that he needed to hear.
At his side, he heard the unmistakable sound of flesh being split, a small tear, a slow one. It had a cadence and rhythm of its own, and when the boy screamed in terror, and in agony, and in anticipation, the two sounds blended, melody and harmony.
She did not hear it, he thought; she was concerned with her own fate, her own plight. When she opened her bruised lips, a single word escaped them. “DEVLIN!” All the sweet fear in the name was her own, it was of her, for her. He could almost taste it; could taste it. It had been so long.
She kicked at him, abrading her heels against his skin; he bore her down into the tall grass, all the while the boy’s name filling his ears and her lungs. And then he laughed, louder than she screamed, a deep, rich sound that hinted at the eternity of the Abyss for a mortal whose soul was, pitiably, far from making the Choice. Ah, well. He did not have an eternity.
The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 Page 2
