Sword of Fire and Sea tck-1

by Erin Hoffman

  // I can't let you do that, Vidarian. // Thalnarra's voice was quiet smoke in his mind.

  He turned back.

  // We came to support you, // the gryphoness said, indicating the gryphons behind her. // But not in making catastrophic decisions. I did not aid you so that you could do this! //

  “But you aided me,” Vidarian said. “And for that I thank you.” As gently as he had ever moved in his life, he laid Ariadel in the blankets again. Her pulse fluttered under his hand, time escaping. He stood, swift, and drew his sword.

  The gryphons behind Thalnarra hissed in promised menace, but she flicked her beak, warning them back. // Do you know what you're doing? // she asked.

  Her simple question, untouched by emotion, nearly undid his resolve. As Ariadel had writhed under the weight of her priestesshood, so too did he falter under the specters of his father, his mother, his legacy. Regardless of its outcome, he knew his family's dynasty to have ended here, the thought of which threatened to still his hand. “What I have to,” he said only.

  // If you think that I'll hold back out of pity, you're wrong, // she warned.

  “I'd be insulted if you did.”

  She leapt at him, claws outstretched, lashing out with a whip of searing fire energy. Vidarian fell to one side, half canniness and half clumsiness, stunned by the sudden leap. He spun away from her claws, but yelled as the flames washed over him, searing his face. Had he been in the center of the fire lash, he'd no longer be standing.

  He pivoted hard on his right knee, darting in just behind the flames with a fast overhead slice of the sword, pairing it with a surge of water energy that leapt ahead of the blade and reached for the heart of her fire. But as his water sense extended away from him, the sapphires surged up, dizzying him, knocking him back. He aborted his attack and spun again, regrouping, while wrapping his mind around the sapphires.

  Thalnarra gave him no time. In she lunged again, black talons as thick as his wrist flashing out for his intestines. This time the pulse of her energy was round, a cylinder of force large enough to swallow him entirely. But preceding the deadly heat itself was an aura of electricity, a warning, defining its periphery. Vidarian dove away and felt the edge of the attack just clip him, hot enough to curl the ends of his hair and fill his nose with the smoke of its burning. He had dodged her twice, but knew he couldn't be so lucky again.

  Vidarian seized the sapphires with his mind and shook them, jolting them into furious action-and released their energy directly into Thalnarra's face. She roared in astonishment and fury, recoiling her own fire energy in a barrier against the stones’ onslaught.

  “I never asked for this,” he said. “Your people had to throw prophesy into it.”

  // Humans, // Thalnarra said, and the thought was rimed with insult beyond his comprehension. // Shut up and fight. // She leapt at him again, the powerful spring of her hind legs bringing her to him instantly, a thousand pounds of deadly creature with equally deadly mind oriented on his defeat. His heart and animal mind cried out in terror and urged escape, but he held them back, raising his sword before him like a talisman, a wreath of water energy wrapping the blade. The wave of elemental attack she directed at him this time was a sphere of fire energy that exploded into lethal spines as it neared him- in desperation he threw up the strongest wall of water energy he could summon, recklessly spending the fury of the sapphires into it as well.

  Their energies met, resisted each other-and Thalnarra fell back, her wings flaring.

  There in the moment, his mind and body tuned for survival, his spirit screaming out with the need for victory, he caught Thalnarra's gaze, and was stricken with the sensation of staring deep into her very being. Where he was attuned for the precision of his purpose, his every thought directed toward opening the gate to save the life of the woman he loved, Thalnarra was divided; distracted. She questioned. In that instant he knew the purpose of the gryphon battle ritual; it was much more than a barbaric grasp for dominance.

  Truth bloomed, and the world dropped away while he seized it like an iron brand.

  Something within him snapped, and both the storm's mad energy-a roar of water-and the fire's spiraling heat poured out of him, melting together, becoming one, becoming nothing. Before him, coiling around his blade, that nothingness opened up, a gulf that tore at reality. Here the Starhunter seized, boiling up from the opening. Thalnarra stared, transfixed as the Vkortha had been, and the goddess of chaos reached for her existence.

  With a growl, Vidarian held her back, threading the energies apart again with his mind, but he seized on Thalnarra's distraction. When his sword arm came up, one of the gryphons screamed, an eagle's defiance, nearly startling him into dropping his wrist the full length. Instead, he stopped the arc of the blade with the strength of his arm and the reach of his water energy, seizing it in place. The edge hovered less than half a handspan from Thalnarra's exposed throat. He looked up at the remaining gryphons.

  “Will you all stand against me?”

  “Would it stop you?” Ruby asked, and her smile, full of sharpness and grief, filled his eyes with sudden water. She walked to him, the confident sway of a ship captain in her step, and placed the rubies in his hand.

  “No,” he said, “it wouldn't.” And he willed the gate open.

  The gate was a gaping maw, a depthless ocean, an unmaking. Here at the threshold between worlds the gemstones in Vidarian's hands warred against each other, arcs of electricity crackling between them and the gate as their energies flared and flickered.

  Set me free, she whispered, and the sound vibrated from the gate, prickling every inch of his skin. Set us free, Vidarian. Her presence loomed just beyond the gate, her energies pressing it outward in an urgent bubble of near emergence.

  It was a mouth between worlds, a maw in the face of the universe, and before it all thoughts threatened to slip away from Vidarian. As he stared into the opening it was as if he looked into the night sky, doubled and tripled and quadrupled and onward into infinity, endless universes of which theirs was the tiniest speck.

  You see, the Starhunter said. There are plenty of stars to eat. I really don't understand the problem with taking a few. If I wasn't supposed to eat them, they wouldn't be so delicious. And there before him one of the stars very deliberately winked out.

  It was his own mortal terror that drew him back into the moment and gave him the consciousness to release what the gate had held, back into the world.

  A concussive force knocked him back, and he curled his body just enough to shield Ariadel with his chest and arms. The ground impacting his head sent a new kind of stars blasting across his vision, and all was black. By her yell of warning and the thud beside them, he knew Ruby had fallen near as well. Above them, the thundering of wings-thousands upon thousands of wings flooding outward from the gate, the wind of their passage rushing outward and pinning him to the ground.

  Storms opened up around them, tearing after individual pairs of wings and the creatures that bore them. The sky broke with lightning centered in halos around individual flying figures, while others were wreathed in circles of fire. Most destructive of all, but thankfully rarest, some of them tore at the earth with powerful magic that effortlessly ripped trenches into the ground deep enough to swallow them all alive.

  Then, just before the gate, the ground rose up, and Vidarian wrapped his arms around Ariadel, gathering himself to leap. He looked at Ruby, who knelt beside him, ready to take cover as well. But the clay and rock, still topped with the grass that had been below them a moment ago, swung up in a protective curve, sheltering them from the destruction.

  A creature that was almost human but significantly not so ducked under the arc of the protective mantle with them. She-somehow he knew it was a she-was covered with brown and black speckled feathers, a pair of massive wings folded at her back like a great cloak. As she crouched, he saw that her feet terminated in birdlike claws, and her hands also bore more delicate ones. Large golden eyes, twice again too
round to be human, looked out at the chaos atop a compact black-tipped beak. Her clothing was an ancient style he'd never seen before, a kind of wrap that accommodated her wings, and a gold pendant hung suspended in the middle of her forehead.

  When she was satisfied that the wall of earth would protect them, she turned to him. “Isri,” she said, and he wondered how they would understand the creatures’ language, but she said, “My name is Isri,” in clear, unaccented trade-tongue. “I am elder mindspeaker for the Treune seridi. You are gate-opener. We've been expecting you for some time!”

  “Pleased to meet you,” he shouted, and at the sound of his voice Ariadel stirred in his arms.

  Her eyes slowly opened, unfocused at first, then fixing on him. His heart leapt and his eyes stung. Then her soft expression of love as she saw him, so welcome and familiar, transformed with the arrival of conscious thought to horror, and betrayal. Her hand came up, shaking, to touch his face. “Vidarian,” she whispered, her voice rasping, “what have you done?”

  A gurgling cough behind them turned both their heads. When Vidarian looked up from Ariadel and saw Ruby's ashen face, and how she fought to remain standing, his heart shouted astonished denial.

  All things, the Starhunter whispered, returning to his mind with ease and solidity, and their antithesis.

  The wound at her side was darkening with blood, suddenly overcome as if it had been ripped open anew. Out of some instinctive reach for power, Ruby extended her elemental sense-a massive arm of it that lit her face with shock. Vidarian automatically raised his own in a shield-and was crushed to the ground under the weight of the energy that poured out of him. He stemmed it back, and even in restraint it was as if the sea energy poured from him in a torrent, wild and near uncontrollable.

  “It's…” Ruby gasped. “The healing magic…it's all wrong…. ” And at once Vidarian realized that the infused poultice would now have its energies thrown out of balance by the same shift that had many-times multiplied their own elemental energy. And it was killing her.

  Ariadel, by contrast, was rising under her own strength, leaning toward Ruby, her eyes streaked with tears. Vidarian turned to Ruby, and the breath stopped in his throat.

  “No sentiment, please,” Ruby said, her neck straining. “But I did tell you…I wanted to die on my ship,” she said, and fell to the ground. Vidarian dove after her, his head swimming, looping his arm under her neck. Her muscles were slack, her eyes shut, her head lolling. And there, as Vidarian clasped her nerveless fingers, the Queen of the West Sea departed the world, the rush of her powerful elemental presence winking out before him.

  “She's gone,” he said.

  They returned to the clearing and the gryphon camp. Ariadel had lapsed into a silence from which she could not be moved. The gryphons-including Thalnarra, to Vidarian's surprise-had quietly rallied around him. // Your truth was stronger than mine, // Thalnarra had said only, and would speak no more of their duel. They'd bound Ruby's body in bandages. Her last words weren't precisely a request to be returned to her crew, but Vidarian knew it was what she would have wanted.

  The camp's activity had now doubled with the arrival of the seridi, and only the fast organization of their leaders kept it from tripling or more. Like the gryphons, the seridi seemed to be organized by element and led by elders; these, wearing pendants like Isri's, clustered around the gryphons from Thalnarra's pride, conferring. Catching up, Vidarian thought, on two thousand years of gossip. Meanwhile, thousands more of the creatures were spreading out in all directions, hurrying to create or find shelter and sustenance for over a million refugees. Small mixed teams of gryphons and seridi were dispatched to the gryphon prides and the priestesshoods.

  Except for Isri, the seridi uniformly deferred to him to the point of stopping whatever they were doing, and so Vidarian eventually distanced himself from the camp. His pursuit of solitude eventually returned him to the gate and the little flight craft that still sat beside it, nearly forgotten. By some silent agreement the gryphons had sent Altair and Isri to follow him, and he couldn't bring himself to stop them.

  Vidarian went to the craft and rested his hands on the bow. Just below its curved surface, encircling the entire craft, was a row of stones he'd never noticed before; he'd assumed they were large nails. But now each of them glowed softly with an internal energy, a pale blue light. As he knelt to examine them more closely, Isri joined him at the craft's side.

  // It was a skyship, long ago, // Altair said.

  “That's right,” Isri replied, her hands passing gently over the ship's hull as if swallowed by a memory. She seemed to delight in every physical sensation-the wind, the warmth of the late afternoon sun, the scent of the trees. Now she hopped adroitly into the craft and knelt, inspecting wooden cases set into the shallow deck. Vidarian had thought that they contained ballast or some kind of stabilizer. But when Isri flipped a series of catches and opened them, she reached in and pulled up a slender mainmast made of a light, flexible metal Vidarian had never seen. Still rigged to it was a sail made of light translucent silk, and when she straightened the mast, it snapped loudly-and firmly-into place. Intrigued, Vidarian climbed into the ship after her to get a closer look.

  As if this weren't enough, while he inspected the main, Isri proceeded to open two more cases hidden in front of the benches to the fore of the craft, unpacking two more sails and even slimmer masts. These folded out over the sides, unmistakably mimicking birds’ wings.

  The little skiff was hardly the Quest, but suddenly it was a piece of something like home.

  “May I?” Vidarian managed.

  In answer, Altair raised a foreclaw, and the blue cabochons set into the hull pulsed into life one by one as his magic touched them. With a soft groan, the craft lifted just off the ground beneath Vidarian's feet, and he scrambled to take hold. There was no wheel, but a slim capstan just before the galley had yet another clever catch system that, when opened, revealed a control mechanism shaped to fit a human hand.

  The ship was rising, and he only had a few seconds to decipher the controls. One was clearly a barometer, and another delicate device set beside it he suspected was an altimeter, this one built into the ship. Now the ship was higher off the ground, its bow even with Altair's head. Vidarian touched a cylindrical switch at the bottom of the panel and heard a clunk below and aft. A long rudder-more a fourth sail, composed of a springy metal spar and another sail-had unfurled below them, steadying the ship. Vidarian thought about the Sky Knights and how they had dominated the air, giving the Alorean Empire unprecedented advantage over the surrounding territories. “This changes everything,” he breathed.

  // You changed everything, // Altair said, then dipped his beak in a small salute. // Good flying, brother. // The title lifted Vidarian with a surprising flush of pride and affection.

  When they reached the tops of the trees, Isri shocked him by leaping over the starboard rail. He kept his hand on the rudder control to steady the craft, then ran to the side while it floated. Below, the seridi had snapped open her barred wings and was soaring gently over the forest canopy. While he watched, she gave a few powerful flaps of her wings and glided ahead, then up, riding the wind.

  They were still rising, and Vidarian returned to the controls, finding one that seemed to increase the power of the air-stones, propelling them forward, and another that lessened it. There were none at the capstan for turning the craft or changing its altitude, and it took him a few moments to realize these were controlled by the three sails and traditional shiplike rigging. Managing the ropes and sail, drawing them back and checking knots, the scents of rope and wood and wind, dropped him in gentle, old memories.

  Long ago, his family had owned a skiff not unlike this one, a small training vessel on which his father had taught Vidarian and his brothers how to sail. If he looked out over the bow, out instead of down, he could imagine he was on the sea, not in the sky.

  Shortly he had the craft leveled out and floating. The side-sails were new to
him, but after a few alterations in the rigging he found that a slight backward curve and a low propulsion setting allowed the ship to float gently where it was, teased by the breeze but not moved. Below, the world unfolded; forest melted into grassland, grassland rose into hill, hill spread into jagged coastline. And the sea-which had so shaped his existence, he'd thought-crashed there, distant and strange.

  A pulse of wings on air drew his attention back to the here and now. Beside him, out in the air, Isri hovered. Her feathers were lifted in what he'd learned meant excitement in a gryphon, and her breathing was fast but steady. Watching the glisten in her eyes, Vidarian found a sudden jealousy for her and the gryphons’ direct experience of the exhilaration of flight.

  “May I?” she called, her wings beating twice every few seconds to hold her in the hover.

  “Please,” Vidarian answered, doing his best to hold the craft steady in the high wind.

  He thought the mechanics of landing on a ship that floated in the air would be complex, but she must have done this before, and he stopped himself from the dizzying contemplation of when that might have been. With an ease she hadn't shown on takeoff, she dove and then looped in a quick arc, bringing herself directly on top of the Destiny. Then she folded her wings and dropped, one foot outstretched and the other ready to brace for impact, into a neat landing on the bench beside Vidarian. She gave one quick flap to steady herself, mantling like a hawk, and then her wings flipped back and closed with a whisper of soft, sleek feathers. With a lightness that spoke of birdlike bones, she hopped into the bench seat next to Vidarian. Her feathers smelled of sun-warmth and spice.

  Vidarian was looking at the sun, staring into the sun where it now sunk into the sea in a pool of searing, liquid light, and for a long time Isri followed his gaze silently. But as the spots it burned into his eyes turned deeper and darker, he realized he was trying rather pathetically to punish himself and looked away, tracing his returning vision up the coast.