by Nunn, PL
Even Victoria knew that the Unseelies could have protected their minions if they chose. They did not. There was no peep out of them, magically speaking. Nothing to suggest they did anything more than observe from the camp they had made outside the boundaries of the grove. They were brewing trouble. Victoria was certain Azeral had some sinister ulterior motive in his inactivity. Some blindingly shocking move that would put the game in checkmate before his adversaries had even the chance to counter the move.
Ashara knew tactics better, but she was not talking. Oh, she carried on telepathic communication with her other commanders. With Neira’sha at the keep, with her scouts, but she kept the fear to herself. Victoria could see her eyes cloud on occasion, when they took rest or rode to the next place of battle. As she stared sightlessly through the impenetrable forest cloak towards the place where the Unseelie court crouched.
~~~
Alkar let an arrow fly. He had already loosed a dozen. His quiver was half-empty. The attackers still came.
There were goblins with the ogres this time. Small, dark shapes that moved with more speed than the lumbering bulks of their larger companions. The goblins got through. The goblins slashed with jagged knives and steel-tipped claws and brought the battle to a more personal ground.
Alkar and his scouts were finding themselves outnumbered and in danger of being overrun, and without great enough power to turn the attack.
He shot a goblin through the throat.
Blood splattered too close to him. Another arrow was notched in a heartbeat. It was almost too late as a second goblin sprang, sharp dull claws spread wide. It came up hard against a shield. Alkar could not stop the arrow from flying. It shattered against the same shield, spraying him with pieces of wood. The bird man from the Alkeri’na, Keirom, had pulled up behind them ahorse. His birds were absent, either scouting on their own, or sent to safety by their master. Another rider followed, one that should not have been anywhere near the combat, by order of Lady Ashara.
Alkar was terribly glad to see him anyway.
“What are you doing here, Okar?” he demanded, wiping sweat from his brow.
“Saving your hide,” his brother commented, distractedly, attention on the writhing mass of enemies struggling to break through Keirom’s shield. The ogres were easy to control. The goblins were another matter. Their devious little minds were too dark and twisted for sidhe magic to get a proper grip on. The best that could be done was turn the ogres violence upon them. Alkar doubted Okar was up to major magic use, so soon after his run in with Azeral. Mentioning it would only serve as a distraction, so the younger sidhe silently lent his brother what support he could, offering his lesser developed pool of power for Okar’s use.
Concentration was solely on the manipulation of the enemy. Every eye, both magic and physical, was turned to that effort. When the blow came, no one was prepared for it, much less expecting it.
It hit no one sidhe or even the lot of them. They were merely witnesses who stood too close to the explosion. A hundred magic ears were momentarily stunned. A hundred senses reeling from the shock. It came with a crack of power not unlike the roll of violent thunder and its release in the form of electricity. It hit a dozen places within the grove with enough force to shake the ground for miles. It was sudden and unprecedented, it allowed no time for defense. Even the most insensitive felt the grove scream.
Every form stood stock still, sidhe, ogre and goblin alike. And for a heartbeat or two, they remained that way, until the goblins screamed bloody murder and resumed their charge and the slower ogres fumbled towards coherency brought on by the cessation of Okar’s attack. Keirom’s shield faltered. The closest goblin got through and an arrow pierced its forehead.
The shield came back up.
“What happened?” Alkar demanded, feeling the alteration in the air. Feeling a strangeness in the grove that he had never felt before. A weakness.
“The wards,” Okar cried, as though hit. “By the Four, they’ve destroyed the wards.”
It was not an adequate prologue for the desperation that was to follow.
~~~
Victoria felt it like a dull throbbing ache behind her ears. It reverberated inside her head for what seemed an endless time. It was not aimed at her – God, she could not have withstood ‘that’, but around her. It penetrated the earth and drove down deep, past soft dirt and twining roots into the first layers of bedrock. The fingers of it spread like disease and slammed back upwards, hitting the grove at a heretofore undefended angle. And something broke.
The sidhe cried out in varying degrees of shock and surprise. Ashara swayed in her saddle, eyes gone wide.
She gathered power, Victoria could feel her pull it in, but it was too late. The damage had been done. She dove into the closest, easiest mind, knowing it was mannerless and at the moment, not caring.
The whole of her world was crying out in protest and she had to find out why.
The wards. Neira’sha’s wards, which were as old as the grove, had been shattered. Overpowered by one overwhelming jab of combined magical power. There had been no one but Neira’sha to defend them. Every other able mind was set to the task of holding back the mundane ogre attacks.
Neira’sha. Sudden worry assaulted her. If she, who was attuned not at all to the grove was so effected by the blow, then how must Neira’sha fare? In a panic she sought the other’s mind. Found nothing. No conscious thought. No wandering dreams. With a cry she turned to Ashara, who was clutching to her mount’s mane as though she might fall. She was muttering to herself, almost in a daze.
Victoria leaned close, catching the last of a phrase.
“ – he’ll get through. The forest cannot help us anymore.” She straightened suddenly, tears beginning to streak her dirt smudged cheeks. “Fire. They’ve set fire to the grove.”
“God,” Victoria moaned. “How can we stop it?”
Ashara turned to her, bemused. “This keep houses no court. This is a family. No great hunt has ridden from these woods in longer than you’d care to know. My folk do not know how to fight this kind of battle anymore. It’s been too long. There is no way to stop him.”
The mental cries of anguish rose in crescendo. The grove was no more than earth and wood and leafy growth now. It fell easy victim to heavy blades and thrashing bodies. There were no select points where the enemy was able to break through and focus their attack. They could crash through the barricade anywhere.
Goblins swarmed out at them even as they retreated, yellow eyes gleaming with dull perversity. Victoria screamed, horse shying frantically to the side. The sidhe were silent as stone, surprise hidden behind instantaneous reaction. Archers got the first of them, but the ambush was too close for second shots. Silver blades came into play, parrying goblin claws and daggers. The sound of the ogres lumbering through the wood behind the swifter goblin assault was a terrifying preamble.
Like air raid sirens waking one from the peacefulness of deep sleep. It took precious seconds for Victoria to shake away the veneer of paralyzing shock.
Ashara was already in action. A goblin burst into sudden searing flame, flared and crumbled to ash within the span of four heartbeats. Another followed suit. Ashara slashed her arm violently and the incendiary remains scattered to the winds.
The first ogre form broke through the shadow of the wood. Wide-eyed, Victoria wished it away, too panicked to rationally come up with a proper invoking. It ignored her mental demand and charged the hard-pressed defenders. What could have been a dozen of its companions crowded behind it. A sidhe went down, swung at from behind by an ogre ax. There was no helping what was left of the body, cleaved pieces falling feet away from each other. Victoria screamed again in utter horror, and forced her mind to clarify an action. She poured every bit of power she could find into the command and unleashed it.
The ground trembled, not unlike when the Unseelie court had struck at the wards.
The horses struggled for balance, then gave up the fight in favor
of backing frantically away as the ground erupted.
Roots and stone shot up like talon-tipped fingers. There were a thousand of them, every solid substance that lay under the veneer of earth dissatisfied, broke to the surface and mercilessly pierced the living bodies that trod on their resting place.
Feet and legs were punctured by the shorter spears of wood and stone, the longer fingers rupturing torsos and arms.
Ogre and goblin screams rent the air. The avenging spears miraculously spared sidhe bodies. Very few attackers were so lucky. More still were only injured, with gnarled root or spike of stone through a limb or non-vital spot. They beat at the invading spears with ax and dagger, clawed at them with bleeding fingers.
Victoria drew a hissing breath between her teeth and closed her twisted hands into fists. Like a expanded rubber band snapping back to its former shape and size, the roots and their brethren were sucked back down into the earth. They dragged whatever flesh they had snared with them, creating great burrows and trenches in the earth. It was a violent withdrawal. Openings where slim root or rock had erupted stretched wide to accommodate larger fleshy forms. The screams ended abruptly at the dirt swallowed its prey. There were lumps under the ground that had not been there before. Those few that had not been taken by the minions of the forest root cellar were quickly fallen upon by the sidhe hunters. Their blood fed the sated earth.
Ashara looked at her once, nodded without saying anything and urged her mount forward. No other bands of intruders bisected their path, but each and every one of them felt the timbre of battle from a hundred different places within the grove. And there were a hundred more places, where the enemy ravaged the forest and no sidhe stood in his way.
Their band met with another. One of Ashara’s elders, a broad shouldered, red-maned male that looked no more than a boy, yet was so very much more, clutched the stirrup of Ashara’s saddle. He was sweating and bloody as were most of his small group of hunter scouts. There was tightly leashed panic in his eyes.
“I know, Ehram,” she said before he could broach the subject. “No more wards. We’ve only the keep itself to protect us.”
“Lady, there are too many. And that count includes not the Unseelie court itself!”
A shiver ran through the Lady of the Keep. Her long ears twitched in nervous reaction. “We retreat to the keep. No use striking at the beast in the grove.”
“But, Lady – the grove is afire. It burns from the north.”
Her lips tightened. “We retreat to the keep,” she repeated stubbornly. “With haste.”
The engorged group continued on.
The path no longer opened for them. The forest had been sapped of its will. The going was slow and the scouts often had to hack a clear path for the horses. Aloe walked beside Victoria’s horse, having lost her own in the melee. Her bow was strung and loaded at her side. She had a long gash running the length of her narrow jaw. Victoria leaned down from her perch, and quietly asked, “How many have we lost?”
Aloe blinked up at her, eyes silver slits. “Too many.”
“When the wards went – something happened to Neira’sha. I can’t find her.”
The sidhe girl looked away, jaw set.
“She put her soul into this grove,” was her final comment and she would say no more.
Victoria straightened up fearfully. Aloe turned, and she thought she had decided to continue the conversation, but the girl brought her bow up instead, aiming over Victoria’s mount’s head. An arrow was loosed. It passed another in flight.
Victoria stared at it, stunned, more concerned with where it had come from than where it was going. She caught a brief flash of a goblin in the branches of a tree, saw it hit by the white feathered shaft of Aloe’s missile, then a great pain exploded in her chest. She rocked to the side, caught her balance and stared down in shock at the stubby brown bolt that protruded from her breast. The hurt began to coalesce about that area, spreading with the blood that soaked her tunic. Specks that were not sprites began to dance before her eyes, growing in numbers until her vision was a great flash of bright white. No darkness. Just dazzling white, and a great yawning indifference to the entirety of the world about her. There was nothing but the pain, and then she ceased to even know of that.
~~~
Phoebe screeched in surprise as Dusk sprang to his feet. The gulun was rudely deposited on her backside. The assassin stared sightlessly through the stone wall.
A sharp jab of distress faded within not so much his head as his heart. It had come on unexpectedly. Pain that was not pain. Fear that was not fear. And the knowledge that something, somewhere was most earnestly wrong.
~~~
The first thing Okar saw was the bright, flag-like beacon of Ashara’s hair.
He had known she was safe, but actually seeing her whole and healthy made his heart beat with a little less vigor. He pushed through the bustle of returning sidhe and caught the bridle of her horse, looking up into her hollow, worried eyes.
There was no need to speak between them. They both knew the situation. They both knew the desperation. She dismounted, stiffly, tiredly, and laid a dirt smeared hand on his arm. Brief comfort that she set aside for him before she flung herself towards the keep.
He dropped the reins, almost aghast at the blank expression. He expected anger… fear… something. But not the dead look he found. She was hurting. And he feared she would hurt more.
Behind him there was a conglomeration of movement, and a grunt of effort. A scout received a limp figure from horseback. Aloe hovered at his side.
A fall of shining red hair fell over the scouts arm, a limp white arm trailed.
“Mother earth,” he breathed, wondering what more they might lose to lessen what slight advantage they had.
“Goblin arrow,” Aloe said, out of breath, when he joined her. “Maybe poison.”
The arrow was still in the girl’s breast. The bleeding was minimal with its bulk blocking the wound. He put a hand on her head while she was being carried and felt the weakness. She required healing they had little time to do. But she was a power they could hardly afford to spare.
“I’ll have a healer sent to her,” he promised Aloe. “Stay with her if you wish.”
She nodded, hardly paying him heed.
He could spare no more time for them, had no choice but to turn his attention to his Heartmate and what she intended. Finding her was simplicity. She had fled to her most trusted council. He knew where that council was. And what Ashara would find.
Two healers were in the garden. They had very carefully laid Neira’sha out under the great old willow that was her favorite. The lady was pale and breathless. One would almost think her soul fled to that other, darker realm. But there was a spark. It merely huddled off in the back of her mind, dormant and bruised.
Ashara had stopped some dozen feet away and stared stricken. He came up behind her, not touching.
“The backlash from the wards,” he said softly. “She was overwhelmed.”
“I should have known,” she whispered. “Where else would he hit?”
“You are the lady of this keep. Not its sole protector or its only functioning mind. No one else managed to foresee his actions either.”
She tore her gaze from Neira’sha and looked up to him. Her eyes were dead calm. Her face impassive, emotionless.
He was reminded just how old she was, just how many courts she had been a part of before she had become the lady of her own.
“He will take this keep. Be assured of that. This is in no wise a battle court. It was never meant to be and it cannot stand against his, that is. We will do what we can to stop him, but I will not have the children or the innocents endangered by this.”
“What choice?” he asked, afraid of the answer.
“Send them away, this very day. Under cover of illusion and diversion. We can use his own tactics for that.”
“Where?”
“East. Across the lakes and into the Eastern forests.”<
br />
He stared at her blankly, mentally reviewing all the possible escape routes, all the hiding places that the east offered, and coming up with only one desperate, unattainable choice.
“Oh, Ashara. Not the Vale?”
“We will discuss it in council,” she said stoically, preparing to depart. He doggedly kept at her.
“You’ve already decided. We’ve no way past those wards. Even he couldn’t break those wards with a spell a hundred times as powerful as the one used on ours.”
“The perfect haven,” she said shortly. “The perfect death trap when we’re caught between it and him.”
“Neira’sha knows its secrets.”
“Neira’sha is barely alive.”
“So…” She turned a level stare back at him. “You are not the only one allowed to risk the impossible. Let it rest. We discuss it in council.”
~~~
Victoria floated in a place of darkness and pain. Concentric waves of agony wracked her physical form, driving the spark of her awareness deeper and deeper inward. She reached a place where the pain was only a distant irritation and drifted.
Visions spun before her mind’s eye.
A gray-paved street, sporadically lined with sleek, strange vehicles. Tall, old brownstones loomed over head like the walls of a narrow canyon. A pair of small, spotted dogs chased each other across the street silently. The whole world was silent. There was a child playing down the street on the sidewalk, drawing with colored chalk on clean, white pavement.
Lovely child, no more than ten, with golden hair that tumbled about her shoulders and a round, pink little face. She wore a blue dress with a big white bow at the back and matching little blue shoes.
Her knees were dirty with chalk dust.
Victoria stared at her in curiosity, and the child looked up, as if startled. Her green eyes were mirrors of Victoria’s own. But her nose and mouth, the wealth of sunlight hair, belonged to Alex.
