Shadow Dawn

by Chris Claremont

  She felt the backwash of Bastian’s wings scooping the air to brake his descent, followed by the touch of the towel across her back as the eagle let it fall.

  Her heartbeat slowed and she found once more the ability to take a full and unbroken breath. Likewise, her vision gradually sharpened to reveal a small man-form standing before her in woodland attire. Rool was beside himself with laughter, clutching hands to his sides as though the force of each guffaw would pop his rib cage, rolling on his back because he no longer had strength enough or desire to keep his feet.

  “Very”—she gasped, and had to take a few more breaths before she could finish the sentence—“…funny.”

  “Yes, it is, actually,” Rool agreed, even more uproariously. “Very!”

  “Pest.”

  She kept her lines short, she didn’t trust her voice to handle constructions of more complexity.

  “Elora Danan, I am so hurt! Say not so, I beg you!”

  “I’m going to be sick now.”

  She didn’t recall blinking, but in that brief segment of time Rool shifted position well back out of reach.

  “Don’t you dare!” he cried.

  “Fair warning.”

  “That isn’t funny!”

  “Neither is the way I feel!” And with that, she sprawled full-length on her belly.

  “Life is tough.”

  She cocked a baleful eye in the brownie’s general direction and stuck out her tongue at him for good measure.

  Rool stood barely half as high as her knee, a perfectly formed figure of a man whose weathered features were matched to a body as lithe and limber as any youth’s. For all the mirth of minutes past, his was a sober soul, as unassuming and practical as his outward appearance. He wore two swords, wickedly hooked blades carved from the fangs of a Death Dog he’d slain, and who in the process had very nearly slain him, leaving a cruel network of scars across his chest and a pale slash that ran from chin over right cheek to well beyond his hairline. His hair was chestnut, though the summer sun had given it more of a tawny cast, and he’d pulled it into a thick queue fastened at the nape of his neck with a forged silver knot. His eyes strangely were a match, flecked with gold in summer, a dark and mysterious brown when snow fell.

  When Elora first met him, he wore the head of a mouse as a hood and its skin as a cloak, the rest of him covered by a loincloth and an intricate crazy quilt of painted tattoos, but he’d roamed the greater part of the world since then—a journey no sane brownie would contemplate in his most horrific nightmares—and expanded his wardrobe along with his horizons. His preference remained for leather, a taste Elora had adopted for herself, finely tanned hides that fit him so well they might have been a second skin, as comfortable to wear as cloth yet far more hardy. His trousers were tucked into knee-high boots whose soles were firm enough for walking while allowing him the freedom of movement to climb. There was a shirt of finely woven cotton, and over it a high-collared jerkin of long-sleeved leather, most notable for big bellows pockets at either hip. Rool, and his companion Franjean, were thieves by profession as well as nature (since all brownies are, to some extent or other, packrats) and the pockets were useful places to stash both tools and loot. Topping his ensemble was an ankle-length coat of oiled canvas, also constructed with pockets aplenty, slit to the backside to allow easy riding on the back of an eagle. The air might be summer hot on the ground but at the altitudes Bastian soared and the speeds he favored such protection was a necessity.

  It had been far too long since she’d seen her friends. She wanted to hug the brownie until he begged for mercy, but he was too small. Instead she contented herself by padding her towel on one shoulder for Bastian to use as a perch. When the great eagle landed, balancing himself with such precision that his cruelly pointed claws didn’t even prick her skin, she worked her fingers beneath his thick coat of feathers to scratch his chest where he loved it best. In return, Bastian turned his head around to stroke her cheekbones with his beak, the same gesture of greeting and affection he used with his mate, Anele.

  “How’d you find me?” Elora asked as Bastian hopped from her shoulder to a nearby log and she began rummaging through her clothes for something to wear. When no answer was forthcoming, she cast about for Rool, spying him close by the bulrushes, his arm draped with strands of her hair. He was examining shore and shallows in as intent a search as she’d ever seen, making sure to gather every shorn lock.

  “Rool?” she called, donning her shift. “What’re you doing?”

  “What d’you think else, child, but savin’ you from your own folly. As always.”

  She rolled her eyes, in the mistaken assumption that he was making more fun, until a flash of his own gaze back toward her made her reconsider.

  “I don’t understand,” she said as she hunkered close by him to offer help.

  “A blinding revelation, if ever there was.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  He shook a handful of tufts at her.

  “This is a part of you,” he told her. “Find the right sorcerer, there are spells aplenty to give him influence over your body. P’rhaps even control. Claim the flesh, you maybe gain access to the soul. You want to wake up one morning, find yourself marching clump-clump quickstep back into the Deceiver’s arms?”

  “I thought I’m supposed to be immune to spells.”

  “Look in a mirror, starskin.”

  She didn’t have to. She knew full well what she looked like, the strain was in remembering what had been before. The words came easily to mind: hair like spun gold shot through with streaks of autumnal fire, skin as fair with the flush of ripe apples on her cheeks, eyes the rich blue of cornflowers. Plump baby, plump girl, easy to laugh in the cradle, easy to pout when she came of age to walk. Disturbingly, though, when she tried to match descriptions to the images of memory, nothing would fit. It was like gazing on a stranger.

  The moon had been at its zenith the night of her Ascension, and as its radiance leached all color from the scene, casting every aspect of the ceremony of her Ascension in shades of absolute light and shadow, so did the Deceiver steal away the same from her. The gold was stripped from Elora’s hair, the warmth from her skin, leaving a figure that might have been cast of purest silver. Over the years since, more than one person she met had to touch her to believe she was composed of flesh and blood rather than some form of animate metal. Only her eyes flashed color, and even they had paled to the blue of forged steel.

  She’d heard the events of that awful night retold so many times in stories, around Highlander cookfires and Nelwyn tables and bazaar ale houses, of how the gods had reached out that fateful night and laid their mark on the Sacred Princess Elora Danan. What no one seemed sure of was whether this was a sign of good fortune or ill, though she wasn’t apparently alone in coming to suspect more and more the latter.

  She was immune to magic, that had been proven time and again. No spell appeared to have a lasting effect on her.

  Save this one. Where the Deceiver was concerned, she had no special defenses. The only consolation was that in return she seemed able to hurt her foe where others could not.

  Unfortunately the shape he’d settled on, when she finally slipped through his grasp, was that of the Castellan Mohdri, leader of the Maizan Thunder Riders. It was hard to do your enemy damage when he rode in command of the most formidable fighting force the Daikini world had ever seen.

  “Point taken,” Elora conceded grudgingly.

  “At long last,” was Rool’s riposte.

  “Spare me.”

  “Earn it.”

  Like Thorn, she’d learned the hard way when to engage the brownies in verbal combat and when the wiser course was to concede the field. In this instance, she backed off to where she’d left her clothes.

  She decided to leave her legs bare, the bette
r to cope with the heat of the day. If more cover was required, against brush or bugs, she’d sling on her leggings. Above the waist, she chose a cotton shirt beneath her buckskin tunic. Her boots ended at the bottom of her thighs, tied above and below the knee to keep them from slipping, with the joint itself well padded in case she either fell or had to do some crawling. She kept one weapon visible, her short-sword, which she tucked into her belt behind her. A much smaller dirk was hidden deep within the folds of her cloak. Lastly, she slipped a dagger into its boot sheath.

  “Where’s my hair?” she asked Rool when the brownie returned to her side.

  “You have your places to hide things, I have mine.”

  “Just don’t use it for anything mean.”

  To her amazement, he looked genuinely shocked.

  “Elora Danan,” he protested. “I would never—!”

  His distress was so genuine and so intense that she couldn’t help tumbling down beside him in the soft grass, to gaze at him with a hand outheld in comfort.

  “I know you wouldn’t, Rool. I’m sorry. But what brought you here?” she asked, gambling on changing the mood by changing the subject. “How did you find me?”

  “The one is so obvious it doesn’t merit an answer. The other—?” He paused for thought. “Brownies know when strangers enter their burrows.”

  “All brownies? All burrows? Even the ones that have been abandoned?”

  “Well…” He temporized. “You let out a pretty wild cry when you dropped into that lava stream. Shot Drumheller from his sleep like a shaft from a longbow.”

  “How is he?”

  “Cranky, all things considered. He doesn’t get much sleep lately.”

  “Why aren’t you looking after him?”

  “We do our best. He’s stubborn.” The flash of his eyes, the way his mouth twisted at the memories, told her their best represented a considerable effort, and the brownies weren’t at all pleased with their ongoing lack of success. “Mostly, he’s well.” A last, grudging concession. As evident was Rool’s belief that condition wouldn’t last.

  “He sent you.”

  “As fast as Bastian could fly. Figured if he could hear your cry, so could the Deceiver.”

  “Has he been in contact with Torquil?” she demanded urgently, happiness at this reunion quickly giving way to concern for her foster home. “Does he have any news of the Rock Nelwyns?”

  “Scared the demon out of everyone, you did. Made Franjean jealous. It was the sort of thing he’d have liked to do himself. Proper little frightener, he is.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “As am I, in my way.”

  “One of their own was trying to open a World Gate.”

  “I believe they know that, lass. From the telling, shaman to shaman, them to Drumheller, they had themselves a wild night of things. But they survived. Their mountain’s whole. They’ll be glad to have you back safe as well.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re to escort you home, Elora Danan. Back to Torquil.”

  “Bollocks!”

  “What’s that chy’ say?”

  “Bollocks!”

  “I know the word, where’d you learn it?”

  “It’s common enough among drovers.”

  “You’re not a drover, you’re the Sacred Princess!”

  “BOLLOCKS!”

  “Will you stop saying that!” Rool sounded well and truly scandalized, which Elora hadn’t thought was possible.

  “I’m not going back.”

  To emphasize the point, she rolled to her feet in a single smooth motion, gathering up the last remaining piece of her kit, her cloak, and slinging it across her body. The suddenness of her action startled Bastian aloft and he beat the air with his great wings to establish both altitude and control. Elora immediately set forth in the longest strides she could manage and put a fair distance between herself and the others before they recovered enough to come after her.

  Bastian swept low overhead. She ignored him, leaving it to the eagle to avoid any collision, which he did quite artfully. As he passed by, Rool leaped from his perch on Bastian’s shoulders to Elora’s, quickly anchoring himself amidst the folds of her cloak.

  “This is foolishness, girl,” the brownie said in her ear.

  She said nothing and maintained a steady stride around the pond to the stream that flowed out from it. There were no obvious trails but the bank was mainly clear of brush and obstructions, so she chose to follow it.

  “Stop being so willful!” Rool told her.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ll get yourself into trouble!”

  “I mean, why must I go back?”

  “You’re safe there, Elora.”

  “I’m not, you know. But that isn’t the point.”

  “You have a point?”

  “If it hadn’t been for this, I’d have left anyway, with the Cascani Factor if he’d’ve had me, or one of the other merchants.”

  “That’s daft, girl.”

  “So you say. My whole life in Angwyn, Rool, I was a puppet in a dollhouse, a bright and shining object to be trotted out for state occasions and otherwise put out on display. I was their holy talisman, they would do whatever was necessary to keep me safe and secure in their possession, and if that meant making me a prisoner in a gilded cage, so be it. God forbid I should be allowed to take an interest in the affairs of that state, to grab hold of the reins of my own life and take it in what directions I might choose.

  “Who knows, if I’d been properly taught, Angwyn might have escaped its doom.”

  “What’s done is done, Elora. You can’t blame yourself!”

  “Can’t I? Tir Asleen, destroyed because of me. Angwyn, cursed because of me. And how many more cities conquered since, how many people slain?”

  “That’s the Deceiver’s doing, child.”

  “It’s me he wants, Rool.”

  “Why else d’you think Drumheller wants you where you’re safe?”

  “Trust me, there’s no such place. Even if there was, it’d be wrong. Don’t you see, it’s the same as in Angwyn, only the set dressings have been changed. Thorn’s making the same mistake. Before, I was a pampered pet; now I’m an apprentice at Torquil’s forge.

  “Five years ago my every whim was catered to and my security guaranteed by a corps of Vizards culled from the finest families in Angwyn. Today I help Torquil’s wife mind the house and baby-sit the kids. I was fat, I got muscles. But I’m never without supervision, and I’m never allowed out. Wherein is there any substantial difference, Rool?

  “When comes the moment I take a hand in my own destiny?”

  “You don’t know the dangers.”

  “I think I do. More, I know the price this war’s exacting. Harmony is the Nelwyn way, yet I saw a Nelwyn openly betray everything his people believe in to bring forth some power so ancient Carig didn’t even have a name for it. He was working against his own community, Rool. They were to be the blood sacrifice that sealed the bargain with this creature.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I was part of the Summoning spell, I had a taste of its dimensions. Don’t tell me what’s not possible. So are brownies abandoning their burrow. And dryads their glade.”

  “There’s no sustenance for them.” Rool was temporizing, but there was neither heart nor heat to his arguments. “Food aplenty for the body, aye, but for their spirit, naught but starvation. The magic has left the land. Franjean and I, we might survive here but we’d not prosper. This isn’t good land any longer for the likes of us.”

  “Exactly. And what happens, my friend, when you can say that about the whole entire world?”

  She stopped and turned her head around to face him, unaware that her body had settled into a spread-legged fighting stance that left her totally
balanced.

  “I’m not a talisman, Rool. Nor some standard fit only to be waved as an inspiration to battle. I’m alive. I’m a person. If this fight’s because of me, if I am to be anything like what the legends and prophecies foretell, I can’t stand passively by and watch others shed their blood on my behalf. I’m sorry, Rool, I’m not worthy to die for. Not yet.”

  “Where will you go then, Highness?”

  “To Thorn.”

  “Make my fortune sure selling tickets to that scrap.”

  “Feel free, my friend, and to bet on the outcome if you’ve a mind.”

  “You don’t know where he is.”

  “I’ll find him. Though it would be easier, were some kind soul to show the way. Less likelihood of accidentally walking into a Maizan camp, that’s sure.”

  “You bargain like a Cascani.”

  “I’ve been taking lessons. Who knows, maybe I can learn to be a sneak thief like you?”

  That pronouncement won her a disparaging snort, which she answered with a grin that promised their conversation was far from finished.

  Though she never raised her pace beyond a steady walk, Elora made fair progress along the stream as it wound its way through the hollows at the base of this gathering of hills and baby mountains. Before half the afternoon had passed, trees and meadow gave way to bracken and heather and the ground grew perilously uneven, scarred at random intervals by channels created from rain running off the slopes above. That same water left the ground largely saturated, not quite solid underfoot, not quite marshland either. Elora had to pick her way with care or run the risk of a sprain or, worse, a broken bone. She could handle either but she’d rather not have to.