Eaglin’s expression darkened. “What sort of summons?”
“A boy, nine or ten summers, came to me from the air. He spoke my name, told me the Mistress of Eusiron wanted me back in Ostarin, and then vanished. He had pale yellow hair and dark eyes.”
“What?” The Mistress jumped up and came to the side of the bed like a blast of wind as astonishment rippled through the room.
“We had nothing to do with that,” Eaglin said crisply.
Morfaen rubbed his eyes and muttered something about war.
Lorth glanced between them. “What do you mean?”
“If I wanted to summon you,” the Mistress said, “I would have appeared myself!”
In a controlled voice, Eaglin said, “The boy is a Keeper, training here in Eusiron. His name is Freil.”
Lorth settled into himself as this dawned on him. “You didn’t summon me?”
“No,” the Mistress said, her gray eyes unwavering. “Why Freil did, I don’t know.”
“Yet,” Morfaen put in.
Lorth stared at the floor as his mind repeated in rapid motion the events that had brought him here from Tarth. He had had a good reason to leave. Somehow, it had justified everything, that the Mistress had summoned him. Things that had already been there, just hunting for an excuse—but now, he didn’t have one anymore. All he had now was the real reason he had left, and that reason was dead. Grief laughed and stormed in his heart, shoving him into graves, shoveling dirt, freezing in the snow.
I am the Destroyer. By the whim of a child named Freil.
The Mistress turned to Morfaen. “Leave us.”
“Find Freil and bring him to my quarters,” Eaglin added.
The commander nodded and left the room with a mean set to his jaw.
The Mistress sat on the edge of the bed. “Lorth,” she said quietly. “You have one foot in the Old One’s domain. That puts you on a different battlefield, with different rules. Mine.” Her faint, perilous smile caused the pit of Lorth’s gut to spin out from beneath him. “Whether you’re involved in Icaros’s death or not, I do know he raised you, and that you sought refuge with him, ere he died. But that’s all I see. The rest is in Void and when I look, I see only you.” She leaned back and looped her hands over her knee. “I suggest you start talking.”
As he sat there, bleeding from yet another sword thrust in the hide of his shaky intentions, Lorth decided he had better come out of the darkness before this woman devoured him with it. “I didn’t kill him,” he repeated. “He was a father to me.”
“Do you understand what happened to you by my pool yesterday?” the priestess asked.
Lorth leaned his head against the headboard and closed his eyes. “Does it matter?”
In answer to that, Eaglin said, “How did you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You uttered a phrase in Aenspeak, Lea Maern silin moth. Where did you learn that?”
Lorth opened his eyes. “It was the last thing Icaros said to me. In a vision.”
For a moment, they just stared at him. Then the Mistress said, “The phrase means, ‘Mother is whole.’ It has many shades of meaning that have to do with the unity of the Old One’s aspects as they are in truth, as opposed to how we perceive them. You can also interpret it as, ‘Mother is one,’ or ‘Mother is all.’ In Aenspeak, that all means the same thing.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Eaglin let out his breath and rubbed his forehead. He glanced at his mother. To Lorth he said, “When Icaros moved to that house, he swore to Ealiron, by the Wizard’s Code, not to use his powers. He gave up his cloak and turned away from the Eye. Are you aware of this?”
“As I told you,” Lorth answered evenly; “I didn’t know he was a Raven. He never told me that, nor did he explain what the Orders of the Eye were, exactly. Only fragments. I came to believe his talk to be offhand facts about wizards he had no traffic with.”
A small laugh escaped Eaglin’s lips. “Did you believe he had no powers?”
Lorth shrugged. “He knew things. But they seemed simple enough, to me. He could grow things, calm animals, heal a broken bone or a fever, and keep the wolves from raiding the yards. He was wise, and I knew he was a wizard. But after seeing the things you can do—” He hesitated. “I never saw him do anything like that.”
“He could have. He once did. Icaros was one of the most powerful wizards ever to wear a Raven’s mantle.”
The Mistress regarded Lorth with truth in her eyes, calm as the force of an age. He couldn’t believe he had missed all this.
“However,” Eaglin continued; “it would seem he bent the rules a bit, with you.”
“He meant well,” the Mistress added. “He loved you, and perhaps he did it to protect you. When he was younger, he learned the ways of the Old One. He would have seen what you’re capable of, and recognized it.”
“I don’t know what you mean. The things he taught me were just small, tricks, useful skills in the world of war.”
Eaglin leaned forward intently. “I’ve watched you, Lorth. You are tuned to energy. You can affect time and space in rather direct ways, see watch-webs and feel things that most cannot. What else can you do?”
Lorth huddled in his bed, unsure how to answer the question. He never had been able to separate the things Icaros taught him from the things he knew as a hunter. He didn’t want to talk about this. Unfortunately, these people could make use of the things he didn’t say as well as the things he did.
“Let’s see,” Eaglin began. “Can you mindspeak?”
Lorth nodded hesitantly. “Not easily.”
“Can you cast a watch-web?”
“Aye.”
“Shapeshifting?”
“No, but—” He paused, and Eaglin lifted his brow in question. “I can hide myself. Blur my form to others. Appear as something I’m not.”
Eaglin moved his fingers into the air, one, two, three, as if to make a list. “Shapeshifting. Are you aware in dreams?”
“I can’t affect them. Usually.”
“Lucid dreaming. Aenspeak?”
Lorth made a face.
“Enough to be dangerous,” Eaglin decided. “Apparitions?”
Again, a term out of context. “I can create forms, like animals or spirits that do my bidding. Fog. Fire.”
The Mistress blurted a girlish laugh. “I should say! In your quest to have a fire in your cell, you nearly burned this place down. Every fire in Eusiron reared up like a hungry beast.”
Eaglin unclenched his jaw and lifted the first finger on his other hand. “Elemental summoning.” He lowered his hands. “You see where I’m going with this? Lorth, you’re walking around with the rough skills of a high wizard.”
“And you have the eyes of the Old One,” the Mistress added. “Last night, you invoked Maern in wholeness. That command Icaros told you is not just a saying of the wise. You actually used it to bridge the rift between the Old One’s aspects. Had I not intervened, you’d have dismantled this place. Turned us all to Void.”
Lorth cleared a laugh from his throat. “You’re mad.” He leaned back as unearthly fatigue clutched him, just as it had after he invoked the Destroyer.
“It would be more correct to say Icaros was mad,” Eaglin said with no amusement in his voice, “for taking a boy and teaching him the things he taught you outside of the authority of Eyrie. The Keepers of the Eye exist for a reason.” The Raven got up and strode to the end of the bed, pulling his black cloak around him. “You must have a great deal of natural ability, however, because Icaros appears to have trained you as a wizard—to protect you, give you a place for your energies to flow—whatever it was. What baffles me is how you knew to do what you just did. It isn’t enough to know the words.”
“Are Keepers taught how to—turn things to Void?”
“The term is to ‘dismantle’,” the Mistress said. “Only the high priests and priestesses of Maern know how to do that.”
“You must underst
and,” Eaglin said. “We don’t use that power lightly. Most of us don’t use it at all. We learn it only so we can undo it, if it is ever done.”
Lorth looked at the Mistress. “That’s what you just had to do?”
She nodded.
“Why would anyone use it consciously, then?”
“It can be used to balance evil,” Eaglin said. “As a last resort. Only by the hand of the Old One can it be invoked, and one never knows just how much will change or what will come of it, when it is.” He eyed Lorth with an expression of unease. “It isn’t so much a question of how you did it, Lorth. The real question is why.”
“I didn’t remember the dream, or the words. It came from nowhere. I couldn’t bear what was happening. It was wrong.”
The Mistress leaned forward and placed her hand on his leg. “You are a Web. Do you know what that is?”
“As in—a spider’s web?”
“Just so. The Old One spins structure from formlessness. She creates all that we know, all that the gods know, from that which is unknown. A Web is someone whom she has chosen to provide paths or portals in the time-space matrix through which she can be perceived. Webs catch things unaware. In your heart, you knew the balance, because your powers are part of it. They belong here.”
Eaglin drew an audible breath. “Even so. Your powers are rough and undisciplined. You may have the eyes of the Old One, but that does not release you from responsibility in the use of power. That’s why wizards train under the guidance of the Eye.”
Lorth bristled. “How was I supposed to know? I was a child. Icaros took me in when I had no place to go—what would you have me do? Go pound on his grave and blame him for leaving me with this?”
The Mistress stood up. “Certainly not.” She cast a cool glance at her son. “Enough. Your passion could be put to better use. Go find out what Freil is about before Morfaen roasts him on a spit.”
The Raven hesitated, and then strode across the room. As he reached the door, he turned. “Being a Web will not protect you from the hand of Eyrie,” he said to Lorth. “Your sense for the balance puts you at greater risk for breaking it. You send out a ripple and you’ll get a rogue wave.”
Lorth flinched as the door slammed. He closed his eyes and settled into his bed, utterly exhausted. If there was one thing he didn’t need a lecture on, it was the consequences of dipping his fingers into the pool of Maern.
He opened his eyes as the Mistress breathed a laugh. “Tired? Perhaps you’re not aware of this, but when the Old One is invoked in some way, it tends to weaken the structure of one’s focus in time-space. You are full of holes—and I am not referring to sword wounds.” She walked to the hearth and added wood to the fire. “Channeling Maern is no trifle. You, my mysterious outlaw, are going to be here for a while.”
Chapter 8
Shade of Age: I am not innocent.
Three days passed as the hunter recovered from his fall in the bowels of Eusiron. The Mistress tended him every day and allowed no one to enter his room without her permission—an injunction which, he was quick to notice, no one disobeyed. Warmth and care flowed like milk under her hands, but to cross the dark line of her maternal protectiveness meant seeing the worst the Destroyer had to offer. No one tried.
Lorth might have felt more grateful for this sanctuary—and for having escaped an interrogation for the time being—but his uncanny exhaustion only exposed a bleak situation. He had no place to go, or reason to go there. He had a price on his head beyond the borders of this palace. And while Eaglin might not care that he had killed a Faerin company, violated the Hunter’s Sanctuary or left Tarth without leave, he would certainly care that Lorth had eluded an Eagle at the city gates and then wounded an Osprey by invoking the Destroyer. Like a consummate assassin, the Old One had set Lorth up for a fall which he could no more avoid than he could stop an ocean tide.
For the first time, the Rede offered him no comfort. Not that long ago, his situation wouldn’t have been so disturbing. Now, he had only two comforts: a driving resolve to avenge Icaros; and the powers he had managed to keep, such as they were. But unless he found a way out of this place, they wouldn’t be much use to him.
Restlessness gnawed at him constantly. Each day, he attempted to rise from his bed, walk around, tend the fire, and find some scrap of strength—anything. But each time, a devastating wave of dizziness collapsed his legs beneath him. The last time he fell, he struck his head on a windowsill. The Mistress had brought him around and scolded him for being so stubborn.
He slept often, sometimes entire days and into night. The Mistress gave him concoctions that tasted like everything from raspberry honey to pine tar, and his sleep had wondrous restorative properties. He awoke feeling a bit stronger each day, with a clearer sense of mind. His sword wounds had healed to faint, thin lines.
He watched the priestess as she moved about the room, sometimes early in the morning when the sun cast gold beams upon the thick woolen rugs and the ivy leaves, other times in the silvery light of the moon; fully awake or through half-lidded eyes, even in dreams, he watched her. A woman could be a fascinating thing to a man in a sickbed, but Lorth doubted his own cynicism. The Mistress of Eusiron had a baffling way about her; the turn of her cheek, the way she smiled or creased her brow, the glitter in her eye, the shape of her hand or the curve of her hip as she knelt before the fire. Sometimes she wore the air of a maiden; other times, she could have been his mother or the old woman who had brought him out of the swamp in Tarth dying from a rastric bite; and from either of these aspects she could shift into the Destroyer, drifting from a shadow in the corner or pulling his bones through the mud, a being who could cast him over the edge of the Void with the faintest smile.
She expressed everything the Old One could be as a woman, and yet no one aspect excluded the rest. She was integrated and now and then, as he watched her, Lorth felt the words Icaros had last spoken to him, in a dream: Lea Maern silin moth. Mother is whole. This woman personified it.
She had told him her name: Leda. She had asked him to call her Leda but he couldn’t utter the word, so in awe of her he had become. It would be like calling the Old One by a name. She didn’t have a name.
~ * ~
On the eighth day, Lorth awoke with the dawn from a deep, dreamless sleep. He lay there, blinking at the light shining in the eastern window. Today, he had been told, he would leave his bed and stand before the Lords of Eusiron.
He reached down and stroked Icaros’s cat. Early on, the Mistress had brought the creature to him. Lorth’s only company, the cat stayed with him almost all the time, sleeping by his side, under the covers, or on the hearth by the fire.
The door opened. He gathered himself for what he assumed would be the wizard and his commander, come to finish their interrogation. But instead, the Mistress peeked in. “Awake, are you?” she said, entering the room. She had braided her hair loosely on the sides, and wore a long, dove-gray dress with interlacing patterns of stars and spirals on the hem. She held a tray in one hand and a pile of clothes in the other.
As he often did, Lorth wondered why a woman like this would waste time waiting on a condemned assassin. Surely, she had better things to do.
He pushed aside the covers and slowly swung his feet to the floor. The Mistress placed the clothes next to him. “I got these for you, until we get you fitted up proper.” She took the tray to the other side of the room and set it on a table. Lorth touched the clothes, which had belonged to Icaros: a familiar gray shirt with dark blue threads in the seams, soft leggings of deep brown with black leather buckles and straps, and a silvery green cloak. They were clean and soft. She had also brought him a thick black tunic and boots of fine, soft leather lined with wool.
He looked up. “How did you get these clothes?”
She moved to the hearth and knelt to tend the fire. “My guards brought them from Icaros’s house,” she said over her shoulder. She rose and walked to the door. “Your clothes were not exactly in the best c
ondition.”
“They weren’t mine,” Lorth returned without thinking.
He glanced up and caught her watching him with a strange expression. “Clean up, get dressed and eat,” she said. “I’ll return shortly.”
Lorth leaned over and pressed a fist into his forehead. Idgit! Why did you say that?
So much about this he didn’t understand. He took care of his needs, and then drew the gray shirt over his head. It smelled of wood smoke, cedar, and faintly of the man himself, plunging Lorth quickly in and out of a deep, icy cold river of grief. He rose, donned his leggings and buckled them up, then sat again and picked up the boots. As he pulled them on, he discovered an empty dagger sheath on the right.
He strode to the table and sat down to venison marinated in something gooey, fresh bread stuffed with nuts and berries, oatmeal and sliced apples. He had cleared most of his plate when the Mistress returned. Lorth looked up with his mouth full as she tossed his scabbard and silver girl knife onto the bed. Then she came to the table and settled into a chair like a cat.
He swallowed and said, “You’re giving me back my weapons?”
She leveled her snaky gaze on him. “You’re just as dangerous without them. I have no desire to rob you of your dignity.” She glanced at the bed. “Besides, a sword such as that does not fall into the wrong hands.”
Lorth picked up a leather flagon and took a long pull, feeling the cool, fragrant liquid course down his throat with a sparkling sensation that felt like a burbling stream in the sun. Mison wine. They made it here in Eusiron of mison flowers, which grew in the mountains in spring, tough, fuzzy yellowish-green blooms that had a faintly sweet and pungent smell. As a boy, he had often eaten them, though they left a strange film in the mouth.
He lowered the flagon with a breath. “Years ago, I trained here under a blademaster named Efar. He gave me that sword, and told me the runes bound my heart to the god who created me.”
She leaned forward onto her arms. “Aren’t you full of surprises. I didn’t know Efar had identity marked a blade for anyone.”
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