by Lisa Smedman
“… our other patrols?” one of the men below asked.
Most of Master Ferrick’s answer was pitched too low for Larajin to hear, but she thought she made out the words, “… wait for them at…” before the horses thudded on, and the riders were lost from sight again.
A rush of hope filled Larajin. They were going to wait for someone? Did that mean the company had merely split up—that Tal might still be alive?
Launching herself from the branch, she flew through the forest to a tree that lay in the general direction the men were traveling—north—then landed and strained her ears and eyes. So intent was she on watching for the men to reappear that she only realized something had landed beside her when she felt it brush against her. She turned, expecting Goldheart, but saw Leifander instead. She glanced up and saw the tressym circling anxiously overhead.
Though the soldiers were still too far away to hear him, Leifander’s croaking was low, the equivalent of a whisper. The goddesses’ blessing must still have been upon Larajin, for she heard what he said as plainly as if he’d spoken in Common—“Sembians?”—as well as the tightly controlled anger in his voice.
“It’s Tal’s company,” she answered.
Leifander cocked his head as the riders came into sight again, watching. This time, the men below kept silent. More than one was looking around, as if fearful of attack. One of them looked up, and both Leifander and Larajin instinctively froze.
Leifander waited until the riders had disappeared from sight before speaking again.
“Your half-brother is not with them.”
“No,” Larajin admitted, “but Goldheart said Tal was coming this way.”
“What of it?”
“If I can find Tal, I can warn him that the elves—”
“That the elves what?” Leifander cawed angrily. “Have windriders guarding the forest ahead? I think not!”
Frustrated, Larajin dug her claws into the branch. She had no idea what Leifander was talking about, but his accusatory tone galled her.
“We’re on the same side now, remember?” she cawed back. “We’re trying to stop this war.”
“By betraying the elves’ secrets?” Leifander asked hotly. “How human of you.”
“And what of when we reach the druids?” Larajin hissed back. “Will you betray the movements of the men below and get my brother killed?”
Her words had been plain enough, but Leifander was giving her a blank look, his head cocked and his glossy black eyes unblinking. Then Larajin realized why. For some reason, her last few words had come out in the form of a tressym’s angry yowl. Before she had time to wonder why this might be, Leifander launched himself into the air. Larajin, still angry, hurled herself after him, wings beating furiously.
They chased each other through the sky for several moments, he furiously cawing and she howling like a cat.
The trembling looseness that she’d felt earlier returned. Realizing that she had to land—and soon, before her spell wore off—Larajin searched the forest below. She briefly debated trying to find the Sembian riders again, then decided against it. Master Ferrick would recognize her, but his men might not—and Larajin didn’t relish the thought of dying at the edge of a “friendly” sword after startling them in the darkness.
Rauthauvyr’s Road was an equally unappealing place to land—it was too open, too exposed—but she had to make up her mind quickly. Each wing beat was an effort, and the treetops below loomed ever closer.
She tried to get Leifander’s attention, but he seemed unwilling to recognize her plight. Instead it was Goldheart who aided her. The tressym circled above what appeared to be a small opening in the forest. As Larajin drew nearer, she saw it was the circular rooftop of a slender stone tower. It looked long abandoned. The wrought-iron rail that surrounded the top of the tower was rusted and bent, and ivy grew thickly on its stonework, disappearing inside broken windows.
The tower itself, however, looked solid enough, its timbered roof still intact. Larajin felt her limbs lengthening and changing shape, and she realized it was her only option if she didn’t want to fall headlong from the sky.
She was just able to land on the mossy rooftop before her magic left her, returning her with a wrenching jolt to human form. Rising to her feet, Larajin searched the sky for Leifander and Goldheart.
Leifander was a rapidly disappearing dot in the distance, winging his way north. Goldheart however, had remained close by. Larajin waved to her, and as the tressym descended to where she stood, quickly repeated the prayer that would allow them to communicate.
“Goldheart, I need to pray—to regrow my wings,” she told the tressym. “While I do that, I need you to follow Leifander. See where he goes, then come back and find me. Tell me where he lands.”
Goldheart nodded her head in agreement, then growled low in her throat as she sniffed the wind. Her tail fluffed to twice its size.
“Be watchful,” she hissed softly. “He comes.”
Larajin withdrew her hand in alarm. “Who? Is it Tal who…?”
Before she could complete her question, Goldheart launched herself into the air. She winged away through the night, following Leifander.
A chill breeze whispered through the treetops, making Larajin shiver. Above her, the cold orb of the moon beamed down, throwing a dark puddle of shadow at her feet. Feeling exposed, she wondered for a moment if she shouldn’t try to climb down inside the tower and find a more secluded place to pray. The tower was tall and thin, no more than a few paces wide. The decorative leaf pattern of its rusted railings hinted at elven construction, and Larajin wondered if the tower had been built back in the days when Gold elves ruled Cormanthor.
Remembering Goldheart’s warning to be watchful, she crossed to a darker patch of shadow that was an open trapdoor hanging from one rusted hinge. She kneeled beside it to peer down into the tower. As she’d expected, it was hollow, with a single metal staircase spiraling down the inner walls to ground level, more than a hundred paces below.
The inside of the tower was choked with spiderwebs that glinted silver-white in the moonlight. Larajin jerked back in alarm as a fist-sized spider scuttled across one of the strands of silk, a few paces below her. She forced herself to take another look, to make sure there weren’t larger spiders moving around down there. After a moment, she sighed with relief—there weren’t.
The staircase, she saw, was no longer whole. It ended at a distance of about five paces up from the floor. It was as if the bottom of it had been torn from its moorings by an invisible hand. Frayed bits of metal littered the stone floor.
There was no way Larajin could have descended that twisted mess, even if she’d wanted to brave the spiders. If it was indeed Tal whom Goldheart had said was coming to this lonely spot, she’d have to fly down to meet him.
Just as she was about to sit down and begin the prayer that would return her to tressym form, another movement in the tower below caught her eye. At first Larajin thought she was looking at a pair of spiders, but after a moment she realized they were dark hands, reaching out of a hole in the ground. With a growing sense of dread she watched as the hands grasped a piece of the broken staircase and pushed it aside, widening the hole.
Larajin watched, transfixed, as a woman with glossy black skin climbed from the hole. The woman’s slender build, pointed ears, and bone-white hair marked her as one of the dark elves—the drow. As she climbed from the hole, a spider dropped onto her shoulder from above. She reached up and stroked it like a pet.
As the drow glanced around, Larajin drew quickly back from the broken trapdoor. Heart pounding, she crouched against the rooftop of the tower, not daring to move. Listening, she could hear what sounded like more drow climbing out of the hole, then a flurry of conversation, spoken in a language that reminded her of the chittering of spiders.
How many drow were down there? Larajin didn’t want to risk a look. Two or twenty, it really didn’t matter. Larajin had no first-hand knowledge of the drow, but t
he books she’d read described the underworld elves as a cruel and cunning race, even deadlier than the poisonous spiders they worshiped. The drow were said to hate all races that walked in sunlight with equal vigor—humans and their elf cousins alike. Those they killed outright were the lucky ones. The rest were fed to the spiders. Bound tightly in their webs, these unfortunates faced a slow, gruesome death.
Touching the locket at her wrist, Larajin began the prayers that would allow her to skinwalk away from there. As the locket began to glow, she cupped it tightly in her hand, wary lest the glow give her away. As she prayed, she tried to make sense of why Goldheart had led her there. Was Tal indeed headed this way? Was Larajin expected to use her magic to protect him from the drow below?
The voices stopped abruptly, causing Larajin to halt her prayer in mid-whisper. Had she been heard? The answer came a moment later, when another voice—lower than the others, and male—sounded from below. He was speaking the chittering drow tongue, but between sentences there came a familiar wheeze.
Larajin didn’t dare look down into the tower. Not with the moon so bright overhead. Instead she channeled the energy Sune had just blessed her with into the spell that allowed her to comprehend other languages. Her ears tingled briefly, and the words below became as clear as Common.
The drow speaking was female, and Larajin’s spell revealed her words in mid-sentence. “… thank you for that, Drakkar.”
Larajin let out a strangled gasp of alarm. Drakkar! She’d gone through so much to flee the man, and now here he was, in the great forest! In her panic, she missed Drakkar’s reply.
The drow who had spoken a moment before continued, “How much longer, then?” she asked.
“The war builds momentum, even as we speak,” Drakkar answered. “My master has gained the elves’ confidence and will make a show of fighting beside them for a tenday or two—just long enough to drive the humans back. Then, when victory seems assured, there will be a falling out over an incident that will appear to be a deliberate act of betrayal by the elves. His forces will withdraw then. Left to their own devices, the elves will lose the war, and the Sembians, their desire for revenge sated, will return home. The few elves that survive can easily be slain, and the great forest will be ours.”
As a chorus of voices chattered below—some asking why it would take so long, others congratulating Drakkar for his cunning—Larajin seized on that last word. Not ‘yours’ but ‘ours.’ She realized the wizard’s dirty little secret. He might look as human as Larajin did, but despite the absence of pointed ears and glowing red eyes, drow blood flowed in his veins. Now that she thought about it, Drakkar’s ink-black hair seemed too dark for a man of his age. It should have at least been streaked with gray. Its natural shade was probably pure white—something he would be careful to disguise with dye, so none would suspect his true heritage.
She understood why Goldheart had led her to the tower with the cryptic message, “He comes.” It had been Hanali Celanil, speaking through her favored creature, who had wanted Larajin to overhear this exchange and realize what the ultimate end of the war would be: not just death for her dear brother Tal, but the destruction of the elves of the great wood, and the invasion of the forest by drow.
There was only one piece of the puzzle missing. Who was this ‘master’ Drakkar had just spoken of? Larajin listened intently to the voices below, but heard nothing that would answer that question. The drow spoke greedily of how they would turn the forest into a dark haven for their kind, once the other elves—whom they snarlingly referred to as “sun-spit”—were slain. And woe betide any human who dared venture within the tree-shaded wood.
With growing horror, Larajin realized the drow were describing the vision she’d had, back in the Tangled Trees. Dark hands reaching out of the earth, tearing open the flesh of human and elf alike, soaking the ground with blood.
All this would come to pass, if she and Leifander didn’t do something to prevent it, but once again, Leifander had gone off on his own—all over a stupid misunderstanding. Larajin had only wanted to warn Tal to turn back, before an elf archer killed him, but Leifander’s simmering hatred of humans—only partially suppressed and now reopened like a broken scab—had caused him to suspect the worst of her.
With a sinking heart, Larajin recalled Somnilthra’s warning: “Unharness hate, and you will lose everything. Even your very lives.”
She had to find Leifander, and fast—before he did something stupid and got himself killed.
Grasping her locket still tighter, she began to pray in a near-silent whisper.
“Sune and Hanali Celanil, grant me the power to skinwalk just once more. I must find my brother. I must fly.”
The familiar scent of Hanali’s Heart filled the air, and the red glow erupted through her clenched fingers. Larajin drew herself into position, kneeling on the mossy boards with hands clenched into fists to ease their transition into paws. She felt her body contort and contract, felt fur flow down her skin, wings grow from her shoulders, and her spine elongate into a lashing tail. Her whiskers quivered as she caught the buglike smell of the drow below, and she heard their shouts of confusion and alarm. They’d caught the floral scent that accompanied her spellcasting and were shouting questions at each other, asking what it might mean.
It didn’t matter. The stairs leading up to her perch were broken. The drow had no way to reach her. Almost laughing, Larajin launched herself into the air, wings beating as she soared from the tower.
In her elation at skinwalking, she’d forgotten about Drakkar. She realized her mistake when the wizard rose through the opening in the roof of the tower, trailing strands of web behind him like a torn veil. Spotting her at once in the bright moonlight, his eyes widened in recognition. He pointed his thorn-studded staff and shouted a word that was unintelligible, evento Larajin’sgoddess-blessed ears.
Something streaked from the end of the staff in a trail of red sparks, buzzing toward Larajin like an angry hornet. She tucked in her wings and plunged into a steep dive, crashing down through tree branches in an effort to escape. A sharp sting in her right hind paw, however, told her the maneuver had been in vain. Distracted by the painful sting, she tumbled in mid-air, only managing to find her wings again at the last moment before striking the ground. She flew on, weaving between tree trunks in a frantic bid to escape.
Behind and above her, she heard Drakkar shouting at the drow as they poured noisily from the tower. Could the wizard see her? Despite the screening of branches overhead, it would certainly seem so. Whichever direction Larajin flew, she heard the sound of running footsteps in the forest close behind her. A knife flashed through the air and buried itself in the trunk of an oak she’d just swerved to avoid, and to her right she could hear branches breaking as the drow circled around, trying to flank her. Always from above, came the shouts of the wizard, directing the drow to her.
Flying hard, Larajin twisted her hind foot up and under her belly, straining for a look at it. What she saw in that brief glimpse frightened her still further. A thorn was wedged between the pads of her paw. Even as she glanced at it, the thorn disappeared into her flesh like blood into desert sand.
She dropped her paw and continued flying, unable to do anything about it but worry. Was the thorn tainted with some foul poison? Would her wing beats soon slow, as the venom clutched at her heart?
But no, the sting of the thorn was gone, leaving behind no residue of ache, no creeping pain that worried its way up her limb. It felt as though the thorn had completely disappeared, and yet still the drow were pursuing her.
Drakkar must have used his staff to cast some sort of detection spell upon her, Larajin decided—one that made him cognizant of her every move. She might escape the drow, might even be able to fly fast enough to leave Drakkar himself behind, but guided by his thorn, how long would it be until he caught up to her again?
A second, less pressing question also puzzled her. Drakkar must have recognized her. Why hadn’t he simply kil
led her when he had the chance?
There could be only one answer. He must have mistaken Larajin, in her tressym form, for Goldheart. He either wanted Goldheart for his own evil purposes, or he hoped the tressym would lead him to Larajin.
Either way, Larajin was in trouble. As the voices of the drow and Drakkar’s shouts gradually diminished behind her, she headed in the only direction that made any sense: north, to Essembra.
Yet she couldn’t help but wonder, now that Leifander’s hatred had been unleashed, if Somnilthra’s dire prophecy would be fulfilled. Was Larajin only bringing death, in the form of Drakkar and his evil magic, more swiftly to her brother and ultimately, to herself?
CHAPTER 14
As soon as he reached Essembra, Leifander could see that something was amiss. Essembra was a human settlement—the only one ever permitted to take hold inside Cormanthor—but there were far too many humans down there, especially when travel should have been cut off by the war.
The stables beside the inn were choked with horses, and a number of carriages were lined up in front of the inn itself. Moving figures crisscrossed Rauthauvyr’s Road or stood in groups in the moonlight, talking. A number of tents had been erected on the north side of town. They looked military in nature, made from stiff, off-white fabric, and rectangular in shape. The way the people moved about between the tents, in regular, orderly groups, suggested soldiers.
But whose soldiers? Even if Lord Ilmeth had summoned every knight from the abbey, there still shouldn’t have been this many soldiers about. And why were they camped on the north side of town?
Leifander swooped down over the tents for a closer look. When he saw the red plumes on the helmets of the knights below, he nearly tumbled from the sky in surprise.
By the gods! he thought. Not soldiers of Hillsfar!
But it was true. They were unmistakably Lord Maalthiir’s soldiers, wearing full splint mail and carrying long swords. It was unthinkable that they should be camped on the outskirts of Essembra. The only explanation could be that they had taken advantage of the war and invaded from the north while Lord Ilmeth’s back was turned. Yet if that was so, how had they made it this far south through the great wood without being cut to pieces by the elves? Why had they stopped at the very gates of the town, leaving the folk of Essembra unmolested? So bloodthirsty were the Red Plumes that Leifander would have expected to see Essembra’s dirt streets soaked with blood and its buildings burning.
