Aewyn heard before she saw that she was not alone. Her mother’s voice, when she heard it, was unmistakable, though the song was new and mournful:
Iarthundon fei iarasu
Ionai cruthandairova
Hani emai hallom
foriammaillas
Ap şiïl sae vectelim
odondi lentumvei
f’lurithal eştona
Ionlurind graivect.
The words Aewyn could make out were certainly Viluri—an old form of it, certainly, but undeniably familiar. Beneath the melody, there seemed no other song; but Aewyn felt more than heard a far older language beneath the words, a language of young rivers and patient stones. Where it came from and what it meant she could not know.
Her mother sang without ornament, but with a starkness and clarity tinged with sorrow. She might have gone on all day, all year, if Aewyn had not interrupted.
“Mother,” she said. The voice stopped abruptly, but the song of the forest continued; it echoed through the fog like something out of a dream.
“Homeward you come,” said her mother, “at a very late hour.”
She stepped from the fog, then, resplendent in a cloak of autumn. Where Aewyn’s hair had gone the ruddy orange of a pumpkin, her mother’s untamed curls were shot through with bursts of fiery red, harvest gold, the blazing yellow blondes of rapeseed and mustard. Her skin had the creamy softness and precise colour of a peeled birch tree; she was naked, as far as nakedness went, but there was something otherworldly about her that seemed to defy the very notion.
“There’s a Horror loose in the wood,” said Aewyn.
“There are more than one,” replied her mother coldly. Aewyn shuddered at the words.
“We’ve been tracking one,” she said. “It killed a deserter from the city.”
“Yes,” said the dryad.
“It was coming this way.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were in danger.”
“And so you came.”
Aewyn nodded. “Of course I came.”
The dryad turned away. “To do what?”
Aewyn shook her head for want of a reply. “You’re impossible,” she said at length, mostly to herself.
“And I grow more impossible every day,” said her mother. “That will be my end, Aewyn. Not these monsters. You would do better to protect the Iun you have left alone in the deep wood.”
“The Havenari can take care of themselves,” said Aewyn.
“And I cannot?” A cold breeze picked up, thinning the fog. The tremendous branches swayed curiously overhead as the first few drops of an autumn rain began to dapple the stones at their feet. Aewyn shivered in the wind and felt, more than ever, like a visitor in this place.
“There’s more,” Aewyn said, though she had not known it until this moment.
“I thought so,” said her mother. “Have you eaten?” The sweet scent of fruit and honeysuckle was carried on that fog too, wafting down from the slopes that surrounded the lake.
“I have been speaking with Celithrand,” she said, ignoring the question. “He came home to take me away—my destiny, he said, is at hand. He spoke of the Uliri Imidactuai the Mysteries of the Blind Watchers, and read the old verse to me. He called me a champion of mankind, a great warrior…or something.”
“Your destiny belongs to you alone,” her mother said. “What path you walk, what company you keep, even the very world you live in. All these things belong to you, now.”
“But the prophecy—”
The dryad silenced her with a raised hand. Her countenance was washed in a gentle sorrow.
“Celithrand has long been kind to you, Aewyn,” she said. “Old and wise he must seem to you. But he, like all his prophets before him, are children born under the Moons—young in this world. He did not rise from the sea, nor was he born into the old magic. That Age has been gone a long time, Aewyn. And men who are not born into magic will take it for themselves, or make their own, wherever they can find it.”
“You do not believe him?”
“Long have I tended my wood,” she said. “Long have I smelt the air and listened to the crashing of the distant waves. Before the Uliri Imidactuai, or any Uliri, before Luna herself cried down the aerils, my feet danced ripples in the edge of still and dreamless oceans, and I sang upon a green heath under untroubled skies. What the wise foretell may come to pass, as it has since the beginning. But that truth does not equal destiny. It does not weave a spell of their words. And the worded folk of the world would do well to remember that.”
The dryad reached out—Aewyn had not realized she was close enough—and touched the girl’s cheek gently. Her voice softened. “Celithrand has believed your whole life that there was something special in you,” she said. “In that, child, we are in agreement. But there is vanity in prophecy—his, and yours. He has sacrificed much for you, and more than a little of it, I think, needlessly. He has moved the earth for you in ways you do not yet understand. It is by the strength of his belief that all these deeds have come to pass. So I dare not deign to say that prophecy is without power. Through him, prophecy has brought you such things as I could never give you. It has brought you a home, first and foremost, among those who are most like you.”
Aewyn flinched at the words. “You considered me a child of the forest, once. Your own child.”
“You will always be my child,” said the dryad. “And those of my kind do not have children. That you were born to me, in the fashion of a daughter to a woman, is a miracle unto itself, prophecy or no. You are my miracle, Aewyn—my own reminder of the lasting grace of a love that the First Children should not feel.”
A cool breeze stirred the waters of the lake, and a passing cloud, for only a moment, spun a fleeting shadow over Aelissraia’s sad face.
“You are loved,” said the dryad. “I have made you, and birthed you, and I see myself in your eyes with pride. But what do I know of a woman’s affection? The newest mother or the smallest babe among the Iun knows more of a mother’s love than I.”
“I don’t understand,” said Aewyn. “Your words are riddles to me.” There were tears in her eyes, but true to her words, she could not fully comprehend why.
“That is inevitable,” sighed her mother. “You will understand less and less as this world takes you from me. My words were simple to you, once. I wonder what you will make of them when you are gone, if you remember them at all.”
Aewyn was silent a long time, nodding solemnly as the rain picked up. There had been something else, after all, though she had not at first known it.
“I’ve come to say goodbye,” she said, discovering the thought only as it left her mouth.
“Yes,” said her mother. An unquiet rolling thunder boomed distantly in the sky.
“Poe is gone. Celithrand is gone. And you tell me you, too, are fading.”
“I wish I had something to give you, child,” said the dryad. “I will leave you nothing, when you go to them—only a memory, and the fading ghost of memory at that. It is a meagre dowry for one so loved.”
“Mother,” said Aewyn, and it was all she could say. She gripped her mother in her arms and pinned her tightly to her breast. The dryad flinched, then relaxed. This was what men and women of the village often did to each other when parting for a long time.
“Hush, child,” said the dryad. “We have time, now, to talk as we once did, though I fear you will not remember it. Let me hold you and sing to you, and quell the shadow within you while I can. Let me make you whole again, as once the old magic could have, before it was taken from the world.” She touched Aewyn’s leg—her hand was full of icy, chilling water—and as the numbing chill of it passed over her thigh, deadening the pain, she washed away the grisly scarring from the horse’s hoof as washing away a stubborn stain. A scar in the shape of a thin red crescent, where the raw iron of the horseshoe had struck deep, was the only scar that remained.
“The others are in danger,” she said sleepily.
“Hush,” said her mother. “Even now, death is already come and gone with its prey. There will be no more of it if you tarry. Not even if you linger till the whole wood is gilded with dusk.”
TWELVE
BENEATH TWO FULL MOONS, eight long years past, with the guarded pity of a stern and half-loveless father, Toren had mixed the last drops of an inky, fetid ichor with the heartblood of a living stag and a sacramental wine from the vineyards of Veritenh. The stink of a few drops of that rancid fluid had turned Robyn’s stomach; she was a lean-faced and bony girl of twenty-one, and she had retched twice before forcing a few drops of the hideous concoction down. Bram, who by then would drink anything with wine in it, heaved once and was done with it, though it disagreed with him for days after. There was none left for the Blooding of Tsúla, when he came, nor for Fletch, when they conscripted him at Haukmere and saved him from the mines. Robyn might not have thought of it, for she had buried the memory deep and had no desire to recall it. But the overpowering stench that came from the shadows as the trees parted brought it all back to her; and when she swooned and fell senseless to her knees, the foul taste rose again in her mouth and pulled her from the edge of a nightmarish vertigo that shook her to the bone.
Fletch, who stood closest and had never been Blooded, let out a sound like a lost sheep as the darkness closed around him. The whole forest wall disappeared in an instant behind a great mass of shadow and sinew as it came, and so light was its step that not a tree branch or the snap of a twig betrayed its coming. Only the crackling of leaves as they withered and died gave warning of its desperate lunge, and in the moment it came, Fletch fell to the Aldwode and was already lost beyond reckoning when its jaws swung open like the doors of death themselves.
There was no hope. There was no time for words, for a last stand, for the kind of deed that would be sung about. The Havenari would remember for years after with solemn pride that he died with his hand on his sword, as if the Travalaithi deserter’s weapon had been eager to avenge its master. But the immense presence of the shadow-wreathed moadon was too much, and his sword-hand went slack, in the end. Those who stood like statues in thrall to its unholy bearing, who could not reach for their own weapons in the long seconds to follow, would remember that too.
It rolled through the bush, through the sapling trees, through the boy, like a wave of locusts howling through tall grass. The force of its impact might have killed Fletch on the spot, so furious was its charge, but he went up in its mandibles and was so rent from himself that none could say whether his end was here nor there. They stood nearly to a man transfixed—even Venser, who was a seasoned and Blooded veteran, and boastful beyond belief when his blood was up. As tatters and drops of the boy’s body spattered his hollow, gaping face, something old and strong woke in him, and he was the first to give answer.
The slashing head of his long spear was the weapon of choice for it, but so tight were the trees and so fast and slick its slithering movement that he could not find its flesh in the roiling shadow. The blade bounced awkwardly where it struck, swinging into its leathery hide so hard that the impact numbed both his hands. A long, rusted crack split the head of Venser’s spear and he fell back, roaring in pain and alarm.
“To arms!” he called, though his deep voice quivered.
“To arms!” someone answered, though no one came.
The others stood shaking a moment longer. Robyn drew her sword almost absently but her jaw was fixed; she could mouth no order, and none of the Havenari seemed ready to comply.
Venser’s courage held long enough to swing a second time, then a third, with his ruined pole; but its attention turned to him, and it fixed him with its many bottomless eyes, and when it jerked its head toward him he was nearly motionless with awe. Its whole head tore sideways, showering him with the blood and bone of its first prey as its jaws struck his arms hard, bouncing the weapon from his grasp and nearly taking him from his feet. It was only when he tried to lunge for the weapon that he realized his arm was mangled beyond use, shattered into a sack of bones. He reached for the sword at his belt with his good arm, but the thing swung back around, knocking him to the ground and blasting the sense from him, though the razor edge of its jaws did not land square enough to tear through his mail.
Too frightened to close with it, the Havenari fell back and nocked arrows with mixed results; most of the arrows skipped off its hide as if fired against a castle wall. Robyn caught it straight in the eye, so true was her aim, but its head was such a mass of eyes that it seemed hardly the worse for it. It turned its terrible gaze on her as she shot again, into another eye, and lunged on at her, impossibly fast, as she tried to nock a third with shaking hands.
“I need her!” she cried, a moment before its gnashing jaws blasted the air from her chest and sprawled her onto her back. She tried to rise, tried to take in enough air to cry out again, but the plate was caved in flat against her ribs and she could draw no breath.
Steel rang out as its chittering jaws plunged downward. The point of a sword—Bram’s sword—plunged hard into the thick centre joint of her breastplate and fixed itself firmly in the polished steel as the creature struck. An inch above or below the brace point, the tip of the blade might have pierced her to the breast; but lodged in the strongest square inch of her armour, the blade caught the full brunt of the Horror’s lunge on its gleaming edge and spread the force of the blow across the whole breastplate, sparing it from crushing her any further. Bram jerked upwards as the gnashing teeth came in and cut deep into the flesh of the monster’s gums.
Muscle against muscle, Bram could not hold its weight off of her, but he turned his sword hard, wedging it against its anchor point, and wrested the monster’s head aside with a desperate yell. It wheeled on him in time to taste the sword’s edge twice more as Bram crossed the centre line of his sister’s body and sliced with quick, even strokes where the meat of its face was softest.
“Back!” he urged. “Get back! It’s too big! We can’t hold it!” He snapped the tip of his sword out again and it came back bloody.
The string of the cuts and the sound of his voice seemed to drive some new fury into the Horror, and it advanced again with the deadly caution of one predator against another. Bram backpedalled steadily, turning it from Robyn’s body as its mandibles and then its skittering forelimbs thrashed, thrust, cut at him, jamming the blade against its rapid strikes. The jaws struck his sword so hard that they shook apart the rusty cross-guard, which began to crumble away in flakes as it spun and danced in his hand. But the blade beneath did not bend; it began, at last, to remember.
“Spears and swords!” Robyn commanded at last, almost uselessly. Those who could draw their weapons knew already it was time to do so. Those who were stunned in the creature’s wake could not be helped. The moadon reared, and the shadows around it seemed to deepen as it lashed out with a chittering tangle of forelegs; Bram caught them against the edge of his blade, though the force of them sent him down and drove him to a knee.
“Over me!” Bram called out. Rising to his feet, sucking in a great gasp of foul air, Venser struggled to free his sword with his good arm. He jerked it from its scabbard and let it fall into his hand as Bram’s sword licked a twitching claw away from one of the forelegs.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Venser, as he staggered to his own weapon.
Tsúla, who had never been Blooded, was on his back screaming blindly, though he had not been struck; Roald, one of the old veterans, had taken up his spear and thrust hard against its chitinous side. Where the spear could not penetrate, still it could hold the creature straight on in the direction it was facing, lest it twist round unexpectedly and take them by surprise. It jerked sideways as Roald struck it, sensing the fight had been joined. In that moment, the bony plates of its neck opened and Bram’s sword lunged home. Blood or something like it spilled out, black and steaming. As it turned back to him, Bram snapped off the crumbling edge of his rusted crossguard with a hard pull an
d wedged it hard into the wound. It nearly took his hand off for the effort, but as it snapped its head around to Roald, then back to Venser, the gap in its neck plates did not fully close. It must have felt the cold winter air against the open wound, and known its weakness, for it turned from Venser and threw its whole weight forward against Bram again, who dove backwards as it barrelled in and came up just outside its jaws.
“South!” cried Robyn.
Bram ducked his head, threw himself back down, as an arrow whistled just over his head and into the thing’s vulnerable face. He recovered his stance too late to catch a jab that sliced open his cheek—but in time, barely, to keep it from taking the rest of his jaw with it.
“West!” Robyn cried, and he ducked left.
There was some unseelie cunning to the creature—it seemed to wear its wicked intelligence like a long shadow—but in the frenzy of battle it could focus on nothing but killing. Bram held its attention and its jaws, and flicked his sword-point into soft flesh when he could.
One by one, the Havenari found their wits and brandished whatever weapons they had to hand: it was determination, more than skill, that wore it down, and as the Havenari began to remember their training they fell into tight formation, walling it in with their spears and holding it at bay as well as they could. One or two of the men carried maces as well as swords, and tried them where the hide was thickest, or took swings at its clawed and scrabbling feet.
Tsúla could move no closer to it under his own power, but he had taken up another spear and could thrust it, at least, into the predictable path of the beast as Bram lured it forward again and again onto his spear-point. At first the wounds served only to make it more furious, and Bram was hard pressed to do more than preserve his own skin. But as the wounds multiplied, the thing began to slow, and Bram began to retaliate—first with desperate, harmless flicks of the sword-edge, then with hasty jabs, then with swings of steadily diminishing finesse and more raw power as the creature began to slow and the meat of its face slowly fell away in pieces.
The Season of the Plough Page 28
