That sparked him to motion—a single, fluid movement that turned him about and brought his legs over the lip of the rocky jut, then had him sliding, sliding, to the end of his balance and dropping fast to the stone, drawing his sword as he descended, and landing lightly right beside the sentry.
The talon gasped, then gasped again as Bryan’s sword plunged through its chest.
The young warrior spun about, slashing as he went, gashing hard and deep across the sloped forehead of the second as it tried to rise. He leaped to the side, stabbing hard and repeatedly on the third, until movement from the stubborn second forced his attention once more.
The talon, blood pouring over its face, was up in a crouch, bringing its spiked club to a ready, defensive position.
Bryan thrust high, thrust low, then launched his sword into a series of graceful, tantalizing sweeps, left to right, right to left, and back again, and again. Once or twice, the club got in the way to parry, but only a slight deflection that hardly disrupted the graceful dance of Bryan of Corning. He came ahead suddenly, breaking his momentum and altering the angle in midswing, stabbing wickedly, but the talon, no novice to battle, turned and blocked with the club. On came Bryan, and away backed the talon, matching him stride for stride.
“Yous will find no holes, human,” the wretch taunted, as an evil yellow smile, one of pointed, broken teeth, widened on its face. “Garink’s friends wake.”
Bryan leaped forward, then stopped, then came on again, sword jabbing hard. That talon, Garink, was too far from Bryan for the thrust to score a hit, but Bryan understood that well, and understood, too—though the talon apparently did not—that the backing creature had retreated just a bit too far. The talon countered the first thrust by skipping back, smile widening, even offering a taunting laugh.
“Garink’s friends wake,” it said again, laughing louder and then skipping back again, Bryan’s second thrust falling harmlessly short.
Or not. For the talon’s continuing laugh shifted suddenly to a scream of the sheerest horror as the creature slipped off the edge of the outcropping and plummeted and tumbled away into the darkness.
Bryan rushed back to the fire to meet the fourth of the group as it groggily staggered to its feet.
“Duh?” it asked when it wiped the sleep from its eyes and noted that this was no talon but a human standing before it.
Bryan grabbed the creature by its scraggly hair, yanked its head back, lifting the chin, presenting a target that his sword tip was fast to find. He retracted the blade quickly, its work complete, then quick-stepped across the flat stone, dying talon in tow, and with a powerful twist of his slender frame—a movement strengthened by the recollection of Rhiannon’s slumping shoulders—heaved it from the ledge.
That left only one, and Bryan shook his head as he regarded it, sleeping soundly, undisturbed though its four companions were all dead about it. He killed it with a single stroke, then rolled it, and the remaining two, from the ledge. Then he sat down at the fire to chase the nighttime chill from his bones. As he rocked quietly, basking in the heat, letting it sink into cold skin and chilled bones, the thought occurred to him that he shouldn’t have so quickly disposed of the bodies, that he should have taken something, their ears perhaps, to prove to Rhiannon that the task had been completed.
“Rhiannon,” the young man whispered into the dancing flames, picturing her asleep where he had left her, so soft and so beautiful.
He fell asleep with that not-unpleasant image in his mind.
“Bryan.”
The word came from far away, from the depths of his dream, he believed. The whisper of his lover—not a call to him, but rather, just the reciting of his name, the acknowledgment of him as the other half of a love that completed them both.
“Bryan,” Rhiannon said again, more insistently, giving the grinning half-elf a nudge.
Bryan opened a sleepy eye. His blurry vision gradually sharpened, focusing at first on the image of the blackened logs, patches of orange, smoldering glow evident here and there. His smile slowly faded as he came to realize where he was, the talon camp, and that the morning had found him there, and that Rhiannon, standing before him, had found him there, and that they had not spent the night in each other’s arms. That was just a dream, just a dream.
Just a dream.
“Bryan?”
“I am here,” he replied groggily, rolling to the side a bit to shift his weight, and stretching his sore back.
“Are ye hurt then?” the witch asked.
He spent a moment considering that possibility, replayed the events of the previous night—the actual events and not his fantasies—and shook his head. “No. Not hurt. I haven’t a scratch.”
Her reaction caught him off guard, for she moved beside him, crouched low, and punched him hard in the gut. “Ye fool,” she scolded, and her anger was not feigned. “How dare ye take me vision from me and put it to yer own stupid use?”
“I did … What do you mean?” Bryan stammered, balling up defensively as Rhiannon punched at him again.
“Who’s telling ye to go off alone then?” the fiery young witch went on. “Who said to ye that this was yer own fight? Yer own fight alone?”
“You were worried about me,” Bryan responded, that boyish smile flashing bright, its undeniable charm stealing some of Rhiannon’s ire.
“Of course I …” the witch began, but she stopped, caught by surprise as to where this conversation might be leading.
“Ha!” Bryan laughed into the morning light, clapping his hands together and leaping nimbly to his feet. “And so you care, daughter of Brielle,” he accused poking a finger at her. “You care, and there will be no denying it!”
“Ye’re me friend,” the witch replied seriously, calmly. “I’d not deny that.”
Bryan’s eyes focused on her intently. “Just a friend?” he asked with a snicker.
Rhiannon’s cold look stole the mirth from the young man, and told him without a doubt that he had pushed her too far too quickly.
“Ye’re me friend,” she said again. “And we been fighting together, a powerful team, and for ye to go off without a word o’ explaining, for ye to take such a chance without even giving me the option o’ telling ye ye’re right or ye’re wrong …” Her voice trailed off and she looked away, chewing her bottom lip, her blue eyes growing suddenly misty.
“I did not mean it like that,” Bryan began, rushing over and dropping to a crouch beside her. He draped an arm across her shoulders. “This fight was not for you,” he tried to explain.
“That choice is me own to make,” the witch said firmly, avoiding his gaze.
“No,” Bryan disagreed, and the bluntness of his tone did draw her gaze, a look of both curiosity and budding anger. “You have no choice. You would have joined me in this fight, however weak, however weary you might have been. You would have joined me because you see that as your duty. You would have aided me with your magic, despite the obvious price, because you feel you have to, though this fight was not so difficult a task for my sword alone.”
The young witch started to look away again, but Bryan caught her chin in hand and turned with her, forcing her to look at him.
“You would have sought to protect me, as I would protect you, but that exertion, that call to magic, would have wounded you more than these pitiful talons could ever wound me.” He let go and brushed his fingers gently across her cheek, and Rhiannon made no further move to turn away.
“Do you not understand, my Rhiannon,” he said quietly past the lump welling in his throat. “By preventing you from protecting me, I protected you.”
She stared at him hard.
“Would you not have done the same?” he asked gently.
“This is not about me, Bryan of Corning,” the witch said suddenly, fiercely. “And not about yerself. We fight because all the world needs us to fight. Suren it’s a bigger thing than me or yerself, or anything ye think we two might have between us.” She pulled away then and ros
e, stepping quickly out of arms’ reach.
“Then think of all the world,” Bryan snapped after her, and he too straightened. “Then think of how little good a bone-weary Rhiannon can do for the world compared to what rested Rhiannon did only a few short months ago. How many did you heal then, at the great battle? And how many talons did you slay with your magics? And all of that before you battled the Black Warlock! Before you, Rhiannon of Avalon, flattened the Black Warlock to the ground and sent him slithering back to his dark hole!”
“It was not me alone,” the witch answered softly, her anger subdued by the painful memories of that horrible battle. She looked away, out over the lip of the plateau, out to the wide world spreading before her.
“But how much could you do now?” Bryan pressed. “If a hundred wickedly wounded soldiers lay waiting for you, how many now would survive?”
Rhiannon looked back to him and said nothing; she had run out of answers.
“So rest, my Rhiannon,” Bryan implored her. “Rest and recover your strength, and be ready for that inevitable time when I truly need you, when all the world truly needs you. Do what divining tricks you might to point my sword in the right direction, but then let me take care of the rogue bands. In the end, they are little enough trouble.”
“The day’s to snow,” Rhiannon said quietly, and started away, but not before she offered a conciliatory nod to the young warrior. “It’d not do for us to get caught up so high.”
They made their way down the mountain, to a low and sheltered vale, and encountered no more talons that day, nor trouble of any kind. True to Rhiannon’s prediction, a snow did begin to fall, but it was gentle down in the valley, not wind-whipped and stinging, as up on the higher plateaus. Often Bryan tried to broach again the subject of the talons, of his and Rhiannon’s respective roles in their alliance. By Bryan’s estimation, Rhiannon had done more good than any could have imagined, and she should rest now, let her powers be in case they would be needed again in more desperate times. “Whenever your animal friends speak of enemies in the region, pass the word to me,” Bryan said with all confidence, “then take your rest and await my return.”
Rhiannon was too weary to argue with the eager warrior. She understood that Bryan’s words were as much boast—and a boast aimed at her, and how that set her back on her heels!—as reason. The young warrior wanted to puff himself up—as Rhiannon’s mother used to describe it—in Rhiannon’s eyes. Given the honesty of their relationship, where they saw each other so clearly and truly, she could hardly understand any need he might have to boast.
Still, given the efficient manner in which Bryan had disposed of the last talon band, and the fact that he had long survived without her help, without anyone’s help, striking at talon encampment after talon encampment, freeing refugees and ushering them to safety across the river, Rhiannon had to admit that there was more than a little basis for his bravado. So the young witch—who had been sheltered in her mother’s forest for so much of her life, but was at last beginning to sort out the wide ways of the wide world—took Bryan’s boasting, his need to protect her and to impress her, as a compliment, and lay down by their fire that night thinking that she might find her first truly restful sleep in a long while.
Since before this power had awakened within her.
It was Bryan, supposedly keeping watch, but surely exhausted from the long hike and his escapades of the night before, who first began to snore. Rhiannon lay awake, smiling outwardly at the sound, but her inner turmoil roiled. She had not been properly schooled in the ways and the sources of magic, but she, too, like the other wizards of Aielle, knew that something was terribly amiss. At first she had thought the sudden magical weakness to be her own, but now she was coming to understand that it was the source of power that had been weakened, that those energies to which she might reach out were no longer pure and strong.
That notion brought other disturbing questions to mind. Her home, beloved Avalon, was a creation of magic, and was sustained by magic. If the source had been weakened, had the colors of Avalon, so pure and so rich, begun to fade? “Me mum,” the young witch whispered affectionately into the wind, and indeed, at that moment, Rhiannon would have given anything to be wrapped in Brielle’s warm embrace. She glanced over at Bryan, her would-be hero, leaning against a rock wall, his eyes closed, his snores as loud as ever, and she thought that she should take him there, to Avalon, to meet Brielle. This young man, barely more than a boy, had known only grief and war for so long, for months on end. Perhaps she might show him the quieter and more beautiful side of life, for if Avalon could not heal the emotional scars of war, then no place in all the world ever could.
She would take him there, she decided, and remind him of the goodness of life, to remind him of the beautiful things, to remind him of his own inner beauty.
Rhiannon paused in her musing and just stared at Bryan, and did not doubt that inner beauty for an instant.
She let those thoughts go at that, thoughts she had not held for any man save Andovar. Not yet, she silently told herself, and she lay back down, remembering her fine ranger, his easy yet emotional way with stories, his fine silhouette as he sat tall upon his horse, the graceful way the muscles of his legs held his seat as the animal galloped across the fields, leaping fallen trees with ease.
A darkness engulfed her, fell over her mental vision through the curtain of night; at first she thought it to be the emotions of the loss, the death of Andovar replayed in her imagination. But then Rhiannon recognized it as something tangible, not remembered or imagined, as some true darkness, and not so far away. The witch was up quickly, pacing about the encampment, wondering if she should try divining with a reflecting pool, or if she might simply concentrate and sense the presence more clearly. She reflected on it long and hard, and came to believe that whatever it was—and she feared it might be Morgan Thalasi—it was moving east to west, some distance north of her present position, out of the Baerendils and across the Calvan plain.
Indeed it was a darkness, a perversion, a hideous insult to Nature. That recognition angered the young witch, for indeed she was more like her mother than she could ever know, and her instincts to protect the natural world had her gathering together her things before she even realized the action. If she had sensed the darkness, then it would likewise recognize her, she suspected. Better that she go out and meet it on the open fields; better to be the huntress than the hunted.
But what of her companion? she wondered, glancing over at the sleeping young warrior. Should she wake Bryan and tell him her designs? Should she allow him to accompany her, as surely he would demand?
“No,” the witch whispered. Not this time. This was not a battle of swords, if a battle it would be at all. This was a matter for magic, and in that, Bryan of Corning could play no role. This perversion was an evil that the young half-elf simply could not know. Still, Rhiannon hated to leave him behind, and so she resolved to go out with all speed, better scrutinize the source of darkness, and then return to Bryan’s side, hopefully before the end of the next day.
She left Bryan with a gentle kiss on the cheek and floated out easily across the broken ground of the mountain trail, her black gossamer gown, the dress of her heritage, trailing behind her, shrouding her form in mystery.
Chapter 5
His Place and Hers
THE MORNING DAWNED soft and gentle, a growing hint of spring in the air, though the snow lay thick about Avalon. The warmer air brought up a wispy fog from that snow, veiling the dark trees, dulling the cold starkness from their leafless branches, and giving all the forest a surreal and dreamy quality.
Belexus stood perfectly still for a long, long while, collecting his thoughts one at a time, translating them into some tangible image—a block of stone—and then dismissing each of them into emptiness, throwing them away, falling deep into a meditative trance. Then slowly he began to reach for the morning sky, like the great oak, higher and higher, spreading wide the great limbs of his arms, st
iffening them, grasping a firm hold on nothingness, the cords of his bulging muscles stretching taut. Then gradually he softened, became fluid, like the willow, that most deceptive of trees, the tree that successfully battled the greatest of winds through apparent submission. Side to side he went, always to his limits, always reaching. The ranger had seen fifty winters, but with the graceful stretching routines Brielle had shown to his father Bellerian, and that Bellerian had in turn taught to Belexus and to all the rangers of Avalon, his body remained supple and flexible, more the frame of a twenty-year-old.
It went on for many minutes, and then Belexus pressed his palms together and pushed with all his strength, working muscle against muscle, his forearms and biceps balling from the exertion. He came out of the isometric press with a violent leap, catching the lowest branch of a nearby tree and quickly inverting himself, wrapping his legs about the limb and hooking his ankles. Then he let go with his hands, hanging flat out, stretching toward the ground, again lengthening his back. Slowly he lowered himself, leg muscles tight so that his feet held strong as he gradually loosened his wrap on the branch. Then he let go with his legs altogether, dropping, outstretched arms first, to the ground, where he caught himself, holding the perfectly steady handstand for a calm and slow ten-count.
With a deep, relaxing breath, Belexus bent his arms, ever so slowly, until his face was low enough to kiss the sacred ground, and then he pushed back up to the handstand. He repeated the motion fifty times, until he felt the warmth of coursing blood flushing his huge shoulders.
The ranger sprang to his feet gracefully out of that last push-up. He repeated the beginning of the routine, giving a few final stretches, then gathered up his huge sword and belted it about his waist. Before he had gone five steps, he drew out the sword, held it across his open palms, and paused long to consider that trusted weapon, studying its workmanship, remembering the many battles it had served him, the talons slain, the whip-dragons skewered.
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