Crown of Crystal Flame

by C. L. Wilson

  “You will want to spin a weave around your mate, Tairen Soul,” Sheyl said when Ellysetta’s blindfold was secure. “The cabin’s weave is shielding her now, but she will lose that protection when she crosses the threshold. Most of the warriors have gone to a different part of the village to spare your mate what pain they can,” Sheyl informed him, “but a goodly number remain. They do not trust you any more than you trust them.”

  I am wrong to allow this. Dahl’reisen should not stand within a mile of my shei’tani.

  Ellysetta put out a searching hand and felt her way down Rain’s arm to his wrist. He had not sent that thought in Spirit. It had escaped his mind of its own volition. «Las, shei’tan. We owe them our lives—and this is their home. They have far more right to be here than we.» She wove calm and peace upon him to accompany her words. «Weave the shield, and let’s go. Our friends in Orest need us.»

  Shamed by his lapse, Rain reinforced the barriers in his mind, then snapped the shield weave around Ellysetta with a burst of magic.

  When they stepped across the cabin threshold, the dahl’reisen’s presence struck Ellysetta, piercing through the powerful weave Rain had placed around her. Without the Azrahn, his shield was not half so effective as the dahl’reisen weave around the cabin had been, and he felt the pain hit her like a blow. He gathered her close and grasped her hand, feeding her his strength until she drew a deep breath and nodded.

  Sheyl approached, her silvery eyes intent. “There are a few sensitives among us. Mostly they live outside the village, where they cannot feel the dahl’reisen so strongly. If you will permit me, I can summon a villager to add Azrahn to your weave, Feyreisen. It will help her block the pain.”

  “Nei.” Rain refused before Ellysetta could speak. Gaelen he trusted to weave Azrahn in Ellysetta’s presence, but Gaelen was dahl’reisen no more. Then Rain glanced at her pale and trembling form, and shame filled him. “Sieks’ta, shei’tani. I should not refuse so hastily. Sheyl is right. You are in pain.”

  She gave a wan smile. “So long as you hold my hand, it is manageable.”

  “Tell me if it gets worse,” Sheyl instructed. “If you will both follow me. Farel grows impatient when he’s kept waiting.”

  Rain held Ellysetta’s hand and guided her after the healer. He wished she was not blindfolded. The sight of this dahl’reisen village in the early-morning light would have filled her with delight. The cabins nestled high in the trees, vine bridges connecting one tree to another. It reminded him of Navahele. Everywhere were signs of not just functionality but artistic beauty. From the intricate, decorative curling of the vines on every bridge and stair to the graceful lines of the buildings, with their exquisitely carved doors and shutters and leaf-covered roofs.

  The village seemed at most a part of the forest itself.

  “Did the dahl’reisen build all this themselves?” he asked.

  Sheyl nodded. “Many of them turn to gentler things to keep the darkness at bay. Some, like the dahl’reisen who fashioned these cabins, find peace working with Earth. Others prefer creating things without any magic at all.”

  A woven vine bridge linked the cabin to another larger cabin nestled in a nearby tree. Sheyl led the way across the gently swaying bridge, and Rain guided Ellysetta after her, sending commands in Spirit to guide her feet.

  “We are a village of outcasts,” Sheyl continued. “The mortals among us were either winded as children by the villages where we were born—or we are descendants of those who were.”

  “Winded?” Rain repeated. “That’s a term I’m not familiar with.”

  Ellysetta answered. “It’s a custom in many of the northern villages. When babies are born with deformities or dangerous magic, the villagers take them out to the woods and leave them for the winds to spirit away—which is just a pretty way of saying they abandon them to starve or be eaten by predators. Which is what Mama and Papa thought had happened to me when they found me abandoned in Great-wood as a child.”

  “Your mother was so afraid of magic. I’m surprised she would adopt a child she already suspected must have dangerous powers.”

  “Papa told me that when Mama was a little girl living in Dolan, her baby sister Bessinita was winded for having Fire magic. Bessie was only two when she was taken off to die. Papa said that was what made Mama take me in. When she looked at me, she saw her baby sister, and she couldn’t leave me to die.”

  Rain noticed Sheyl frowning at Ellysetta. “Something is wrong? “

  Sheyl’s frown cleared and became a sheepish smile. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking of all the poor children lost to such an evil custom.” She bent her head and continued walking at a brisker pace. “Your mate’s explanation of winding is correct. The Mage Wars left many scars here in the north. The remnant magic still lives in the ground, seeps into our water, our food, our bodies. Most of us born in the north possess some sort of talent, but usually it’s something small and unnoticeable—sensitivity to the emotions of others, a gift for growing things. In some of us, the magic is stronger, more pronounced. Or, the gift is something fearful. My mother had a vision in which she saw the death of a neighbor. She made the mistake of telling someone. When the neighbor died, my mother was blamed. She was seven months pregnant, but the villagers bound her arms and legs and left her in the forest to die. She was half-dead when Farel rescued her. She died in childbirth that same day.”

  Ellysetta stopped walking. “You remember her death. You weren’t even born, but you remember it.”

  The color left Sheyl’s cheeks. “Your gift is strong, Feyreisa. I’m usually much better at shielding my thoughts. Yes, I remember. And I remember that the vision for which my mother was killed was mine. She saw it because I lived in her belly.”

  “Oh, Sheyl.” Ellysetta reached out blindly to clasp the other woman’s hands. “You believe you caused her death. How can you, a healer, still believe that? You were a baby, an innocent life.”

  Tears filled Sheyl’s eyes and spilled over. She smiled and tried to pull her hands away. “I was right. Your gift is strong, but as I said, you should conserve your strength.”

  “She does not realize she’s doing it,” Rain said quietly. “To her, she is merely sharing the love in her heart, as she has all her life.”

  “Doing what?” Ellysetta asked. “What am I doing?”

  “Healing, shei’tani. You are healing her. As instinctively as you read her thoughts a moment ago.”

  Ellysetta released the other woman. “I’m sorry. Again.”

  “I am not offended,” Sheyl answered. “You should not apologize for being what you are. Which is quite remarkable, you know. I’ve never met such a strongly gifted sensitive who could bear to walk within half a mile of this village, even with our shields.”

  “Is that so surprising? You don’t seem to have any trouble living here among the dahl’reisen, and you have strong magical talents.”

  “I’m not empathic. I sense disease and I see the flows of magic, but I cannot sense thoughts and emotions.” They had reached a hanging stair that led down towards the forest floor below. Sheyl paused. “Before we go down to Farel, there is someone I would like you both to meet.”

  Moving past the stair, she led them through the trees and across two more vine bridges to a larger building circling the broad trunk of a massive oak. Entering a small, wedge-shaped room on the south side of the building, Sheyl indicated a set of empty rocking chairs in a cozy sitting area. “Please, have a seat.” She went to the windows and pulled the curtains closed before walking to a small connecting door on the eastern wall. “Wait here. I’ll only be a moment. The Feyreisa may remove her blindfold.”

  Sheyl slipped through the door and returned a few chimes later with another woman clad in a serviceable green woolen dress with a tan apron tied around her waist. The other woman was older, clearly mortal. Her curling brown hair was streaked with silver and tied back in an untidy bun, and her bright, inquisitive brown eyes were crinkled at the corners with d
eep laugh lines.

  “Ellysetta Feyreisa… Rainier Feyreisen… this is the woman I wanted you to meet. She came to us forty years ago as a small child… winded near the village of Dolan for possessing the gift of Fire. We call her Bess… but the name her parents gave her was Bessinita.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Shadowed Path, soothing path,

  Choice from pain and sadness.

  Aching path, desperate path,

  Escape from lonely madness.

  Darkened path, forsaken path,

  Hide from fear and sorrow.

  Lonely path, empty path,

  Save me from the ‘morrow.

  Dahl’reisen’s Plea,

  a song of prayer, by Varian vel Chera

  Celieria ~ Dahl’reisen Village

  Ellysetta stared with burning eyes at the sister Mama had loved and believed long dead. “I… I don’t know what to say.”

  The woman named Bess clasped her hands before her waist. “Sheyl explained to me about your mother. Clearly, I must be that Bess your mother loved, but I don’t remember anything from that life before.”

  “Of course, you don’t. You were a baby… a precious baby who should never have been thrown away because of your gift.” She remembered the sadness in Papa’s eyes when he’d told her the story and told her how that one moment, that one loss, had changed Mama’s life forever.

  She gulped past the growing knot in her throat. “You should know that my mother found me in the forest of Great-wood,” she told Bess. “My birth parents had put a glamour on me to make me look mortal. So when she found me, she assumed I’d been winded like you, for some dreadful, dangerous magic. She knew I was magic—she feared it more than she feared anything else in the world—but she took me in anyway and loved me in spite of her fear. She did that because of you… because she couldn’t bear the thought of what had happened to you happening to another child.” Ellysetta blinked back tears. “You don’t remember her, but she never forgot you. She would want you to know that. She would want you to know she loved you very much.”

  “She must have been a very special woman,” Bess said “She was.” Tears welled in her eyes as the memory of her mother’s death and the horrible ache of her loss punched deep. The grief was still too fresh—never more than a memory away. “I loved her very much, and I miss her every day.”

  Bess’s eyes softened with compassion. “I’m sorry for your loss. All of us here in the village know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”

  “Thank you.” Ellysetta wiped away her tears, but more just took their place. “I know she’s just a stranger to you, but may I—may I… share her with you?” She held out her hands, palms up.

  Bessinita hesitated, then placed her hands in Ellysetta’s.

  Ellysetta’s mouth curved in a trembling smile. “Her name was Lauriana. She married a man named Sol Baristani—my papa—a woodcarver and a wonderful man whom she loved very much. They have two other daughters. Twins named Lillis and Lorelle…”

  Through the touch of their joined hands, she gave Bess the memories of her mother and their family and the deep love they had shared. Little scenes of their life that Ellysetta treasured. Mama laughing over some silly joke. Mama holding Ellie close… kneeling beside her bed to say evening devotions. Mama delivering a stern lecture when the twins got into some sort of mischief, and Papa teasing her out of a mood with kisses and a pot of tea by the fire. Mama could be stern and fierce, but, like the tairen defending her kits, that fierceness was her way of protecting her young—of protecting Ellie and the twins the way she hadn’t been able to protect her sister Bess.

  When she was done, Bess had tears in her eyes as well, and a melancholy smile on her face. “Beylah vo. Thank you for giving me this gift.”

  “Nei, it’s you who’ve given me the gift. Sometimes it’s hard to remember all the good in the world in the face of so much bad.” Ellysetta stepped back and reached for Rain’s hand, squeezing tight and letting the vast comfort of his love wash away her remnant sorrow. All this time, Mama’s sister had been alive… saved by the dahl’reisen… raised by them… loved by them. How could dahl’reisen walk the Shadowed Path yet still have wrought such obvious good?

  The white-haired hearth witch cleared her throat. “There’s something else I have to show you and a favor I must ask of you, before I take you to Farel. Would you both, please, come this way?” Sheyl walked to the door Bess had come through. “We are a private people. Our survival has depended on our discretion and our ability to keep our existence a secret, but the time for that has passed.” Sheyl lifted the latch and pulled open the door to reveal a long, curving room that wound around the giant tree trunk.

  The room was filled with children, at least sixty of them, ranging in age from tiny infants to five-year-olds. A dozen village women tended the tiniest of their charges, while the older children gathered in groups supervised by one or two adults. Noisy, childish chatter and the tiny cries of babies demanding maternal attention filled the air, muted from the outside world by a privacy weave tied to the room’s floor, ceiling, and walls.

  “These are our children. And this is our greatest secret.”

  “Oh, Rain…” Ellysetta reached for Rain’s hand. «So many children, shei’tan.»

  Rain stood frozen in the doorway and let the noise wash over him. He’d known there were children. He’d seen a number of them yesterday when he’d entered the village. But he hadn’t realized the true enormity of what he’d seen. He forced himself to breathe as he scanned the room, seeing the bright glow of Fey magic shining from child after child. More than half of the children were Fey. Even before the Mage Wars had left the women of the Fading Lands barren, it was rare for thirty children to be born in a village this size in twenty years, let alone four or five.

  A chill, too-sweet odor made his hands reach instinctively for his missing blades and he spun in the half crouch of a warrior, his eyes scanning the room for the person spinning the forbidden magic. A woman at the far end of the room held a spiral of Azrahn in her palm. At her feet, a semicircle of children held their own, less organized spirals of the black magic.

  Horror sapped all moisture from his mouth. “You teach them to weave the forbidden magic?”

  Sheyl glanced back at the children in question, then returned her wary gaze to him. “Azrahn is not forbidden here. I know the Fey believe otherwise. You banish your strongest warriors if they dare to weave it.” The corner of her mouth curled up. “Your customs aren’t so different from the villagers who cast out their children and abandon them to die. You just wind your children at an older age.”

  Rain’s head snapped back as if she’d slapped him. “The customs are nothing alike. Azrahn is the evil tool of the Mages.” But even as said it, he remembered Ellysetta saving the tairen with Azrahn, himself saving her, the warriors and civilians who would have died without Gaelen’s weaving Azrahn so Ellysetta could hold dying souls to life, the countless lives Gaelen had saved by detecting the Mage claimed hiding among the allies.

  “Azrahn is just magic, a mystic like Spirit. Is Fire or Spirit evil? Nei, though, the manner of their use can be. It is no different with Azrahn. Which is why we teach our children from a very early age how to weave their magic—more importantly, how to control it. The ones with Mage Marks do not spin it, of course, but the rest of us do.”

  “Some of these children are Mage-claimed?” Rain asked “Marked, not claimed. And, yes, some are. The dahl’reisen save the ones they can and bring them here, where we can protect them and give them some semblance of a free life, safe from the Eld.

  “It is Azrahn that lets us offer them that haven,” she added. “We spin it in our shield weaves to hide our presence from the Mages. We use it to detect Mage Marks and know who is a real danger to us, and who is not. Most of us here in the village possess at least some ability to spin the soul magic, and we are not evil.” She gestured to the room at large. “These children are not evil.”

 
; “Why would Gaelen not tell us about you?” Ellysetta asked, her stunned gaze roving over all the little faces.

  “All of us have sworn a blood-oath never to reveal information about our village and our children. The Eld would slaughter us. The Celierians would burn us out. The Fey would never accept dahl’reisen back within their borders, and none who live in this village would ever settle in a place where our men are not welcome. We are outcast, and keeping our secrets ensures our safety.”

  “Then why show us now?” Ellysetta asked.

  Before Sheyl could answer, a childish laugh rang out, and a tiny voice cried, “Again! Again!” Ellysetta gasped and clutched Rain’s hand in a tight grip. She stared in disbelief at the face of a child she’d loved dearly and never thought to see again. “Rain, that’s Bannon!”

  The son of her best friend, Selianne Pyerson, was dressed like a village child and playing with the other toddlers. She sent a frantic gaze towards the other end of the room, where the infants were, searching for another sweet face dominated by the big blue eyes so like Selianne’s. “And Cerlissa!” Cerlissa, Selianne’s baby, had grown so much in the last four months, but the chubby-cheeked infant, sitting on a rug, playing with blocks, was most definitely Selianne’s daughter.

  “You know Bannon and Cerlissa?” Sheyl asked.

  “Their mother was my best friend. She died trying to protect me from the Mages.” After Selianne’s death, when the Fey found her husband murdered and her Elden mother hanging from a knotted cord, Gaelen had promised he would take Selianne’s children to a safe place where they would be welcomed despite the Mage Mark set upon them by the Mages who’d killed their mother. “Gaelen said he would take them to a safe place, but he wouldn’t tell us where.”

  “They were taken in by a couple who lost their own child to a lyrant last year.”

  Ellysetta bit her lip. The children were obviously happy and well tended, but—“Please, may I see them?”