The Hidden Stars

by Madeline Howard

  “Unless Guirion should chance to be with them,” he finished under his breath. “For of all her servants, he knows that country the best.”

  5

  They made their way slowly through the rumpled foothills, by way of hidden paths and narrow, shadowed ravines, and a week later they began the arduous climb up the rugged wooded slopes of the Cadmin Aernan. Deep winter had gained an iron-grip on all the land, and the air had an edge as keen as a knife. The mule trudged along with her head down, and the horses’ breath rose in great silvery white clouds.

  As they left the dark fir-woods and ascended the bare windy flanks of the mountains, the wind blew increasingly colder, under a sky the color of burnished pewter. Luenil felt fear catch at her heart, not for herself, but for the little Guenloie.

  “What does it matter whether those creatures following us catch up to us or not, if she freezes to death first?” she asked Éireamhóine, her teeth rattling in her head. Frost glittered on her woolen cloak, silver against black, and there was frost in the wizard’s beard.

  “She will not freeze; I won’t let her.” Reaching out to touch the infant, Éireamhóine fed a little of the heat from his own body into hers. It was such a small, intimate spell, he did not think it would be detected.

  This is how you do it, he said, speaking mind to mind. This is how you stay alive. And he felt that tiny spark of power within her flare up in response. He knew the child was too young, her mind too unformed, to understand him; she still lived by instinct only, like a little animal. But he hoped that instinct would teach her to seek the warmth—to draw it out of him, Luenil, the horses, the earth and the sky, wherever she might find it—as instinct prompted her to turn toward food and comfort at her nurse’s breast.

  Climbing from the boulder-strewn middle slopes to the high passes, sheer precipices, and arid bony shoulders of the mountains, it became harder and harder to breathe, the air was so thin and bitterly cold. Éireamhóine’s ears turned red and tingling inside his hooded cloak; ice crystals formed on his eyelashes. Winds shrilled and moaned between the great steeples and chimneys of stone, and the track often rose so steep and dangerous it became necessary to dismount and lead the horses, wading through thick powdery snow or slipping and sliding where the rocks were bare and icy.

  There were glaciers, slow-moving leviathans of rock and snow, carving out gullies and valleys with their patient millennia-long advance. Éireamhóine heard Luenil catch her breath, saw her face grow strained with shock as she spied a vast shape caged in the ice: a magnificent golden griffon, suspended as it seemed in the midst of some terrifying action, with wings outstretched and beak wide-open, caught like a bubble in glass or a fly in amber. Farther on, they passed other tremendous figures prisoned in the glacier: a stone giant, a winged serpent, a manticore captured in midpounce.

  “You need not fear them,” said Éireamhóine. “Most of them are dead; the rest have been sleeping for a thousand years. As they didn’t wake when the mountains danced, they’re not likely to wake for our passing.”

  At night, he and Luenil slept as close to the fire as they dared, with the baby between them, in whatever cave or sheltered hollow they had set up camp. Even so, the wizard, his teeth chattering, spent many long hours shivering under his blankets, unwilling to draw more than his share of the heat. Whenever he woke, he could hear Luenil’s restless movements a few feet away, her sobbing breaths, and knew she was just as sleepless and miserable as he was.

  Fool, he said to himself, striding along in the weak daylight with the snow crunching beneath his feet. Idiot. I accused Réodan of suicidal folly, but have my own decisions been any better? The child might have been safe on Thäerie, at least until spring. He began to wonder: how many disastrous choices had he made along the way? There was no knowing, there was never a way to know. The best he could do was carry on and try to make the best of the decisions and the mistakes he had made so far. This much he did know: with the Furiádhin following somewhere behind, it would be folly to turn back.

  “Do what you can,” that is what his teachers used to tell him. “Do as conscience and experience dictate, and leave the outcome in the hands of the Fates.” A wizard—most of all a seer—could go mad, could drive himself unreasoning mad, asking himself too many questions. Or he could flounder forever, paralyzed and impotent, in a swamp of possibilities, of half-perceived outcomes and alternatives, and never accomplish anything at all.

  Become a vessel for the Light and allow it to work through you, that was another thing his teachers had taught him, what he told his own apprentices and journeymen. Give yourself wholly up to the Light, without reservation, without trying to make bargains with the Incomprehensible. But also: the Fates help those who help themselves, they have little patience and less charity with cowards and weaklings. It was important to do something, to struggle on, no matter how hopeless things might appear.

  One day, as he toiled up an ice-slicked trail, Éireamhóine again felt that prickle of warning. He glanced back and saw a flash of red on the snowy slope below.

  The Furiádhin were ascending rapidly, striding along and leading their horses. Scarlet robes and crimson cloaks fluttered, white hair whipped in the wind. Éireamhóine recognized Guirion moving a little ahead of the others: Guirion, who knew these mountains almost as intimately as he did.

  Perhaps Ouriána’s servants had never been far behind, perhaps they had only waited to show themselves, choosing the time and the place carefully: there on a trail so slippery and treacherous it was impossible to mount up and flee. And the way that the path switched back and forth across the face of the mountain, there was no use running, anyway. However great the distance between the two parties on foot or ahorse, the distance as the spell flies would continue to narrow.

  “We will stop here and make a stand,” said Éireamhóine to Luenil. “We have no choice. I must try and fight them.”

  “Fight them?” said the girl, turning to face him, wild-eyed and incredulous, forcing the words out between cracked lips. The wind caught up her protest and tore it to shreds, forcing her to raise her voice almost to a shriek. “What chance have you against six of Ouriána’s warrior-priests? Are they not powerful? Are they not terrible?”

  “Nevertheless,” he answered grimly, “against six I have some small chance of prevailing, however desperate. Against one—and that one Camhóinhann—our case might be hopeless, but by chance or good fortune he’s not here.” As he spoke, Éireamhóine loosened the straps that held the infant in place. Removing her from the basket, he thrust her into Luenil’s arms. “Stay just behind me, whatever happens. I’ll do all I can to protect you.”

  The wizard forced himself to stand still and silent, his thoughts and senses turning inward. Now that the time for action had come, the time for second-guessing himself had passed, he felt a surge of confidence. This was how it was to be a wizard: not the endless weighing and measuring, but a way of experiencing the world and acting within it. He searched his mind for ancient names; for runes and charms; for spells of power and might; for patterns, symbols, riddles, and strictures; for all the knowledge of the eight great elemental forces he had been acquiring from his first lessons as a youth through all the long years of his maturity.

  Then he began to gather those forces to him. Drawing energies up out of the soil, the rocks, the hidden veins of metal and the secret springs and rivers under the snow-covered mountains, he reached deeper and deeper still, groping in the dark, dredging up every vestige of power that he could. He knew that the battle before him would be a terrible one.

  Meanwhile, the six Furiádhin proceeded inexorably up the icy trail. They were not so much hideous as grotesque, unnatural, these Priests of the Incarnated Devouring Moon; the dark magics they practiced, the debased rites they performed in Ouriána’s name, had withered them and changed them, until they were no longer human.

  Their faces were stern, bloodless, framed by fine, flowing hair the color of moonlight. Their eyes glinted silver,
gold, or bronze, without white or pupil, giving to their faces the flat, expressionless gaze of beasts or statues.

  One gripped the reins with a hand covered in silvery fish scales. Another had a pair of ragged and leathery wings sprouting from his shoulders and trailing behind him, pale and leprous. A third had a face of singular beauty but for the mouth: a thin, lipless slit that opened on sharp, fanged teeth as deadly as knives. So each of Ouriána’s priests, as well as the strangeness he shared with the others, had his own particular and unique deformity, and so they had come by the name by which they were known: the Furiádhin, the furies, the Mutated Ones.

  But all the time his enemies were approaching, the wizard prepared for battle. Out of a small hidden pocket inside the breast of his tunic, Éireamhóine drew something he had carried with him, secretly, all the way from Thäerie: Nimenoë’s ring. He had intended to pass it on to the little princess, an inheritance from her mother, when she had wisdom and strength enough to use it: for there was no one, now, on Thäerie or Leal, capable of commanding its full powers.

  The history of Nimenoë’s ring was clouded, there were many different tales of its origin and how it had become an heirloom of the Pendawer house. It was made of a substance much like ivory, polished to a milky sheen—the knucklebone of a giant, according to most accounts, an elemental creature with power over earth, wind, and storm; a Shapechanger who often took the form of a great wingless and fireless dragon, a horrific and hungry cold-wyrm—an ancient and evil thing that ring, until the Fates took it and blessed it, in years long past when they still walked among men, setting five runes into the band as a sign of their hallowing.

  First came the runes duenin and güwelan, protection and healing. Then came theroghal and désedh, transformation and making. The last rune was the dark rune whose name the wizards never spoke aloud, though they carried the knowledge of its name always in their hearts. For to use any smallest part of that power, even at greatest need, might be presumption, while to misuse it was anathema, abomination.

  In the days when Nimenoë wore the ring, she had employed it most often for warding and healing. Éireamhóine was no healer, but he had performed many marvels in his time, and he hoped to accomplish even more through the power of the ring. But on the fifth rune, the dark rune, he was determined not to call.

  As he slipped the wide band onto his smallest finger, the world seemed to change around him. He could see the energies he had summoned, glowing in jewel-bright colors: a pure, bright, living green; a deep and thunderous purple; a hungry red that consumed and devoured; a rich blue, constantly mutating, like the changing colors of the sea.

  With the power of duenin he drew a fiery circle of protection around Luenil and Guenloie; while Éireamhóine lived, no evil thing would cross that boundary, no spell would touch them.

  Then, calling on theroghal and désedh, he took the shimmering rainbow energies and began to mold them, crafting them into weapons: spears and arrows tipped with fire; swords of light and daggers of pure living flame; maces and hammers with the weight of stones and the crushing power of mountains; bolts of raw energy that sizzled like lightning and roared like thunder.

  One after another, he made them, and cast them at his enemies. But the Furiádhin were powerful, too. They threw up invisible barriers, exploded his weapons in the air, and not one missile hit its mark.

  Then Éireamhóine took the swift-rushing force of a river in full flood, and he made it into a wall of sound and fury to batter his enemies. He drew geysers of boiling water up out of the depths of the earth. Snow melted and steam rose in thick clouds, obscuring the sun. He wove illusions which he animated with his own life and substance: a cloud of stinging insects to torment his foes; a flock of great raptors to dive at them and tear them with beaks and talons; a vast army of rats and mice and creeping vermin that swept down the mountain like a flood.

  So the battle continued for hours. The sun dipped toward the western horizon, and night gathered on the eastern slopes of the mountains. Éireamhóine inflicted great pain on the Furiádhin, he blinded them, confused them, lashed them to fury—but he could not break them, he could not destroy them.

  And he realized that he was growing weary, that his powers waned. Even were it otherwise, he knew he must eventually pay a price for this profligate use of forces and energies; the violence, the turmoil, had created stresses, oppositions, antipathies. He knew, too, that his enemies had all this time held something in reserve; they had only defended themselves, they had yet to attack him. They waited for his powers to fail, then they would strike, strike hard, without mercy or ruth. For a moment, he considered the power of the fifth rune, but his heart quailed at the thought of using it.

  So he made a final effort, and called up the winds, out of the north, east, south, and west. It is no small thing to summon the winds, for they are willful, capricious, and impatient of control, particularly for a wizard who feels the strength draining out of him like blood from a wound. But the image of the dark rune was still in his thoughts, and that hardened his resolve.

  He called out a lledrion, an elemental spell, to the winds:

  And powerful and wild and lawless as they were, they came at his command. Winds out of the desert, dry and burning; winds from the sea, laden with salt; rough inclement winds, filled with rain, snow, and sleet; turbulent winds; winds that came roaring and rioting—monsoons, cyclones, and hurricanes.

  He took them and fashioned them into a weapon greater and more terrible than any he had shaped before, and he sent them, raging and railing and shrieking, straight at the Furiádhin.

  But Guirion raised his hand, and cried out in his turn:

  There was a mighty clash of wills; intention met resistance, and resistance met a relentless opposition. The destinies of all hung in the balance.

  And in that moment, nature herself, thrown out of equilibrium by the tumults of the battle, responded with a convulsion, a violent upheaval of her own. Thunder crashed, the mountains reverberated, and a mighty avalanche came roaring down from the heights.

  Horses screamed, the priests turned to flee; Éireamhóine had only enough time to wrest the infant from her nurse’s arms, to shout an unintelligible word in Luenil’s ear, before the great wave of snow and ice and earth and stones came sweeping down. It caught them all, it crushed them, tumbled them, stifled them, buried them in chaos. Bones broke; eyes and ears and mouths filled with snow; spirits went shrieking off into the night.

  Then there was only a long white silence.

  * * *

  BOOK TWO

  (NINETEEN YEARS LATER)

  * * *

  1

  The air reeked of blood and smoke and heated iron. Sindérian made her way slowly but deliberately across the courtyard, through the confusion of men and warhorses, wading ankle deep in the dirt, snow, straw, and horse urine they had churned into mud. As tall as any of the men, she moved easily and fearlessly among them. This turmoil was nothing new.

  In a long, low hut built of stacked flint, she could hear the smiths at work: beating dents out of plate armor, mending helms and shields, repairing broken links of mail, as they always did after a battle. Sometimes, the incessant clang, clang, clang of hammer against metal, of metal against anvil, was almost too much to bear.

  Meanwhile, more men kept pouring in through the gate: some riding, some walking, some carried in by their comrades—slung across a saddle, or on an improvised litter. They were returning from a skirmish to the east. Everyone said that Cailltin and his men had been victorious, and Sindérian supposed that it was true, though by the number of the dead and wounded she knew they could not afford many such victories.

  Wherever she went, faces turned her way. Recognizing her for a healer by the grey woolen tabard she wore over her long, homespun gown, many cried out, begging her assistance, for themselves, for their friends. Wherever she could, Sindérian stopped to help: setting a bone or weaving a charm to stop the flow of blood. Traveling from battlefield to battlef
ield these last five years, she rarely had a chance to work a real healing.

  On Leal, she would have had the entire pharmacopoeia at her command: wormwood and spermaceti for bruises; boneset for fractures; basilicon and mithridate to draw poisons out of a wound; verjuice and mustard seed for children with scurvy; purges of clavendar and stag’s-foot for anyone sinking into a melancholy humor. But just as with so many other things needed in this war-ravaged land, there were no medicines; Sindérian and the other healers were forced to rely on their own native talents, and on a smattering of spells and charms they held in common. It was wasteful and stupid to do things that way, drawing on power that ought to be tapped only in an emergency, kept in reserve for the more desperate cases—but it was all they could do, else hundreds, perhaps thousands would have died who might otherwise have lived.

  And sometimes, it was the wizard-physician who died instead. There were always so many in need that a healer might drain herself to the point of exhaustion, to the point of death, and still there would be those who required her attention. So now Sindérian gave as much as she could—all that prudence dictated and perhaps a bit more—enough to keep a man on the verge of death alive, in the hope that she might return to him later, enough, where the damage was less serious, to start the healing process and leave the rest to nature.

  She was kneeling in the muck, removing an arrow from a young warrior’s shoulder, when Lord Duillig found her.