The Defiant Heir

by Melissa Caruso

  “Well, we’ve been walking in the valley between these parallel mountain ridges,” I said. “One of them marks the border, and the other lies deeper in Vaskandar, but I have no idea which is which. Do you recognize anything?”

  Zaira shook her head. “Just trees and white stuff. It all looks the same to me.”

  “Not to add to the pressure,” I said, “but I’ve only got one day of elixir left. My life could depend on us choosing the right direction.”

  “Then choose it yourself,” Zaira snapped. “You might be annoying, but I don’t want your death on my hands.”

  I peered along the valley, first one way, then another. A crow called from a nearby tree.

  “Oh, fine, laugh at me,” I muttered.

  It cawed again, then fluttered down to land on a branch nearly within grabbing range. It cocked a beady black eye at me.

  Zaira let out a bark of a laugh. “See? It can tell you’re going to die. Lining up for a bite.”

  “Thanks,” I said dryly.

  The crow lunged at my arm, as if to peck at me; I barely pulled my sleeve back in time. It steadied itself, wings half-spread, and then did a strange hopping dance, leaving claw prints on the snowy branch. It looked at me from the left eye, then the right, then muttered to itself.

  A strange thought occurred to me. “Did Kathe send you?”

  The crow cawed triumphantly, then flew to another branch twenty feet away. It looked back at me and cawed again.

  Zaira gave me a half-lidded, level stare. “Tell me we’re not going to follow the crow.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “This is the rock-bottom most idiotic piece of demon-begotten foolishness you’ve suggested yet, and that’s saying something.” Zaira shook her head. “But sure. Why not? I always let random birds make life-and-death decisions for me. Let’s follow it.”

  The crow stayed ahead of us, fluttering from branch to branch. If we took too long to catch up, it cawed. When I slipped on the snow, it cawed. When Zaira cursed at it, it cawed. I couldn’t be impressed at its vocabulary.

  Within half an hour, it had led us to a road. Wagon tracks and hoofprints marred the snow, which had tapered off to occasional scant flurries. We made better time on the road’s level footing, until at last the crow fluttered to land at the white-capped tip of a standing stone, one of two six-foot-tall menhirs flanking the road. It preened its glossy feathers, satisfied.

  Boundary markers. A spark of excitement brightened my exhaustion.

  “Does this mean we’re heading back into the domain full of chimeras who want to kill you?” Zaira asked warily.

  I frowned. “These stones look different.”

  They were older and more weathered than the ones we’d seen at the border between Sevaeth and Kazerath, the carvings half worn away. Snow blurred the edges, but the lines of the designs looked softer, forming waves and curls.

  Something about those patterns seemed deeply familiar, compelling. I reached out to brush snow from the rough surface of one of the stones.

  A ripple ran through me when I laid my hand on it, as if I touched a great bell and the vibrations of its deep tone shook through my body.

  The boundary stone warmed under my touch.

  There was no mistaking the change. It started cold, as stone standing in the snow should be; but within two breaths of laying my hand on it, I had to snatch it back from the uncomfortable heat. Water trickled down from the snow crowning the stone.

  How very odd. I walked around to the other side of the standing stone, crossing the invisible line between domains, and laid my hand on it again, to feel its growing heat. What was it the Wolf Lord had said to Prince Ruven? When you’ve carved out a piece of land from the Empire and claimed it with your own blood …

  “This isn’t Sevaeth.” I was certain of it, somehow. “That would make this Atruin, on the far side of Kazerath. The domain of the Lady of Eagles.” My great-grandmother.

  The crow suddenly took off from the top of the stone, cawing, its wings beating a breeze into my face.

  Zaira froze. “I think someone knows we’re here.”

  I pulled my eyes away from the strangely mesmerizing lines graven into the rock to find half a dozen elk staring at us. They formed a neat arc around us on the Atruin side of the line—not clumped together in a herd but surrounding us like predators. All six bore great, branching antlers; they watched us with shining brown eyes. Their breath formed clouds of steam around their velvet muzzles.

  They were beautiful, with sleek fur, warm eyes, and graceful legs. But there was power in their broad chests, and they loomed above us. I doubted any one of them would find it a difficult matter to kick me to death, and their antlers spread sharp and proud above them.

  I waited, not daring to move. But the elk simply watched. After several long moments, I took a tentative step forward, and then another.

  The elk parted to let us through. Zaira drew in close by my side, and we advanced along the road together, carefully as if we walked on spilled nails. The elk fell in around us, three and three, like an honor guard, blocking out the cold.

  “Now, this is just strange,” Zaira complained. “Graces’ tits, all I want is to be back in Raverra, where I can walk down the street without an escort of demon-cursed oversized deer, the only trees are chopped up in the fireplace, and the only things trying to kill me are human beings who have the basic decency to do it with knives and poison.”

  “I can’t say I disagree,” I said. But every step I took sent an odd, mostly pleasant vibration up my leg. This was technically the wrong direction, taking us farther from Highpass; but it somehow felt right, as if I’d been here before and knew the way. I wasn’t normally a creature of instinct, but it made a certain amount of sense. At this point, the closest safe trail over the mountains was more likely to be ahead of us, in peaceful Atruin, than behind us in a Kazerath armed for war and roused against us.

  The great beasts paced by our sides, watching us, pausing occasionally to rip a mouthful of tender pine needles off a branch in passing. The crow didn’t follow us, though it cawed after us once, as if to say good-bye. I felt strangely uneasy leaving it behind.

  Shortly we stepped out of the trees into an open stretch of neat fields, spread out in snowy white glory over the rolling land. These, too, felt familiar to me, like coming back to a home that had never been mine. A group of people pulling sledges heaped with firewood stared as we passed, but with interest, not hostility or fear. Rather than the furs and leather of Kazerath, they wore bright wool hats and mittens, and sheepskin coats with heavily embroidered trim in contrasting colors; and where the folk of Kazerath had been craggy and pale, here I saw shining dark hair and slighter builds. We passed well-kept farmhouses, and a pasture full of sheep spread out to forage for grass beneath the snow as if they had nothing to fear from wolves.

  “Well, this is different.” Zaira suspiciously eyed a shepherd who’d dozed off leaning against a leafless tree with his arms tucked around him, wrapped in a vivid red woolen scarf. “They’re not flinching away from everything.”

  “I suppose not every domain in Vaskandar can be straight out of the Hell of Despair.” I turned the thought in my mind, like a new artifice device of cunning design. “A Witch Lord has the power to keep everyone in their domain safe, comfortable, and healthy, if they choose to use it that way.”

  “And it’s your own rotten luck if you’re born on the wrong side of the boundary stones.” Zaira shook her head.

  After the last farmhouse, the forest swallowed us up again, the scent of woodsmoke and sheep fading behind us. Soon we came to a place where a narrow footpath branched off the main road, half overgrown and barely distinguishable. As we drew next to it, an elk stepped in my path and lowered his head, barring the way with the great spread of his antlers.

  I stopped. “I think they want us to take the side path.”

  “Are we going to let ourselves be bullied by a bunch of poxy cows with branches
stuck to their heads?” Zaira demanded.

  Another elk nudged between my shoulder blades—a shove with its muzzle which it might have considered gentle, but sent me staggering a couple steps toward the side path.

  Nothing in this land was afraid. Not of wolves, not of us, not of all the horrors their neighboring domains could offer. Something protected this place, hidden and unanswerably powerful.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think we are.”

  “Fine,” Zaira grumbled. “Here I am, an army’s worst nightmare, slayer of Witch Lords, prisoner of leaf-munching forest creatures.”

  We turned onto the overgrown path and began a long, gradual climb up the forested mountainside. At least we were heading in the right direction, toward the Empire; this might be the very trail we’d been looking for. The elk spread out through the woods around us as we followed the indistinct track. If we slowed, they closed back in.

  I didn’t dare stop even to take a sip of water. Zaira could have roasted them all easily enough, likely without losing control or consciousness, but I feared what would come after. The histories I’d read mentioned the Lady of Eagles among the titles of the first three Witch Lords, who founded Vaskandar over five hundred years ago.

  The trail passed between a pair of old stones carved with designs similar to the border markers, but smaller—perhaps chest height, rather than reaching over my head. And then it ended at a mossy, dark opening: a fern-fringed cave mouth, gaping in the mountainside. More stones flanked it. The air wafting out of it held a trace of ice and smelled like old, wet stone.

  Something in there set a thrumming deep in my bones, like a sound too low to hear.

  The elk closed in around us, hooves stirring the snow, horns tossing.

  “Oh, no,” Zaira protested. “Absolutely nothing good can come of going in there.”

  I took a step forward, my pulse racing. The answer to Kathe’s question lay in there. I was sure of it. “One good thing can. Knowledge.”

  Zaira shook her head. “You’re mad. Knowledge of what? The kind of creatures that live in caves in Vaskandar and eat curious Raverrans?”

  “The secret of the Witch Lords’ power.” I laid a hand on one of the stones beside the entrance. It grew hot to my touch, almost at once. One of the elk reared and snorted.

  Zaira swept a hand at it. “You think the Lady of Eagles sent her pointy-headed friends to show you her secrets? To murder you if you learn them, more like it!”

  What she said made sense. But something called to me from that cave, blood to blood. All things quick with life, one sharp bloody knife …

  The elk knew. They could feel the connection, too. That was why they’d brought me here.

  “To keep the Witch Lords out of this war, or to defeat them once it’s begun, we have to know them. To thwart their power, we must understand it.” Excitement stirred in my veins. Normally I hated dark, cramped places, but the ancient promise that exhaled from the cave’s mouth enticed me with the prospect of discovery. What would my professors at the University of Ardence think of me if I walked away now?

  “I’m going in.”

  I ducked under the hanging canopy of moss and stepped into the cold, rocky interior of the cave. Zaira swore and followed.

  I blinked in the dimness, chasing shadows and leftover specks of sunlight from my eyes. The gurgle and rush of water surrounded me. I had expected the cave to be cramped, but it opened up into a domed chamber larger than my bedroom at home. The walls were too smooth; humans had shaped this place.

  The back of the cave dropped off into a rushing underground stream, which flowed through the chamber and out the other side. At the center of the rough, uneven floor rose another stone, carved with the same flowing designs I’d seen elsewhere; this one had a shallow basin dug into the top. The air had the thick, hushed feeling of a temple.

  An invisible tide of more than curiosity pulled me toward the stone. A channel ran from the basin down the back side of it, emptying into the stream. I ran a finger around the basin’s rough edge. It warmed under my touch, pulsing slightly; a tingle ran up my arm, and a hum started in my bones.

  “Ten streams through it all,” I whispered. A dark stain marked the bottom of the channel. “Ten drops fall on stone, one lord on the throne.”

  Zaira hovered halfway between me and the cave mouth, her eyes wide. “All right, that’s creepy. What in the Nine Hells are you talking about?”

  “This is how Witch Lords claim their domains.” Excitement unfurled in my middle. It all made sense; it was like finding enough key letters in a nonstandard artifice rune set that I began to be able to read the symbols and understand the magic. “A vivomancer’s power is to control life, but normally they can’t do it on such a grand scale, or from afar. But all life arises from water. Water is the web that binds it all together, like the central wire braid in a complex artifice weave. And blood is life and water both.”

  Zaira peered dubiously at the basin. “You’re telling me they bleed into the streams and rivers?”

  “To make themselves part of the land, and the land part of them. And they mark their claim with stones. They’re not just boundary markers.” I’d wager they formed a pattern, like an artifice circle. “The stones are the bones of the earth, and the rivers its blood. And once they’ve completed the binding, every living thing nurtured by that earth and that water would be part of their magic. That’s why a Witch Lord’s power over their own domain is so absolute.”

  “And that is why no one tampers with my blooding stones and lives.” The new voice came from the cave mouth, sure and commanding, deep as the earth and fluid as the river.

  I turned, slowly, to face the Lady of Eagles.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Lady of Eagles’ mage mark showed black against eyes golden as the sun. Her midnight-black hair fell straight and loose past her hips. She wore a mantle scalloped to mimic scales or feathers, each leaf a different shade of bronze, amber, brown, or gold, and each minutely edged in the spiky curves of Vaskandran-style embroidery. It draped from her shoulders like wings.

  She was the mountain, ancient and still. She was the sky itself, bright and unreachable. She was the hunting cat who prowled the forest, lean and graceful, and the deer who bounded through it, fleet and free. And her eyes were an eagle’s eyes: wild and fierce, piercing as the rays of daylight, and utterly without fear.

  I bowed, holding it for a long time to give myself a moment to find my tongue. I half expected Zaira to leap into the silence, but she stood frozen, one hand reaching behind her as if searching for a wall to lean on.

  “My lady,” I said, when I found a way to shape words with my dry mouth, “I’m sorry if I’ve intruded. I didn’t intend to tamper.”

  Her raptor eyes flicked to Zaira, then to the claw necklace on my chest. “Your intentions are dust to me. You woke the stones. I tire of intruders meddling with my domain; do not think my blood in your veins will protect you.”

  “I try to make a habit of not presuming anything, my lady.” I swallowed. “If I may ask, when you say people have been meddling with your domain—Do you mean on Mount Whitecrown?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You know of it. And yet you claim innocence.”

  Graces preserve us all. Ruven had circles in place in Atruin. He would almost certainly have saved those for last, given the risk; his artifice pattern on the mountain might already be complete.

  I stepped forward, too agitated to feel the fear I should have. “Have you found artifice designs around the mountain? Prince Ruven is trying to trigger an eruption.”

  She advanced across the cave and stared directly into my eyes. From this close, the sense of her power blazed like the sun itself. I felt small, helpless, and exposed, like a rabbit cowering beneath the eagle’s shadow.

  “You understand what this foolish pup is attempting?” she demanded. “This stolen Raverran magic? I have seen artifice many times before, but nothing like this.”

  I swallowed to wet my t
hroat. “Yes, I think I understand it.”

  “Well enough to undo it?”

  I reviewed the diagram in my memory—both the one I’d glimpsed in the dark study and the original I’d seen in a book in Ardence. It was almost ludicrously complicated and blended artifice and vivomancy in ways most of my professors would have called impossible. But I didn’t need to understand the entire enchantment to sabotage one part of it. “I think so.”

  “Good enough.” She whirled, her mantle swinging behind her. “Come with me.”

  We followed the Lady of Eagles along a game trail up the flank of the mountain. The narrow track climbed steeply, and I soon found myself panting, but she moved with springy grace, as if the earth itself lifted her up. Given what I’d learned, perhaps it did. The brush and branches bowed aside as she passed, strewing her path with shed snow like white petals, clearing the way for the great lady.

  Soon, the Lady of Eagles stopped by a slab of bald rock—a place where the bones of the mountain showed through, with no earth, grass, or trees growing on the stretch of wind-scoured granite. She stopped and gestured with disgust to an elaborate artifice circle, perhaps ten feet across, carved into the stone. No snow had stuck to the circle or the area immediately around it. Her contempt rippled through the low bushes bordering the rock like a harsh wind.

  This was it. One of Ruven’s volcano circles. I stepped forward, a mix of eagerness and dread quickening my breath.

  “I am no scholar of artifice,” the Lady of Eagles said, “but this is not artifice alone. Another witch blooded this design, binding his power into it. My claim on my half of the mountain remains as strong as ever; however, this circle attempts to establish a competing one. It would be trivial to wipe it out, but this strange and complex magic is snarled around the mountain’s heart, and disturbing it might unleash disaster. Tell me what this is, and I may let you live.”

  I knelt by the circle, tracing its lines with a trembling finger, translating runes in my mind. “There should be more like this, encircling the mountain.”