by C. L. Wilson
“The hearth witches have the situation well in hand, kem’falla,” Bel said. “This attack looks much worse than it really is. I suspect the whole effort is a diversion meant to hold our attention while the raiding party we intercepted snuck through our defenses.”
“So you’re saying the only one here to Truthspeak the Mage is me.”
Aggression slammed through Rain’s body. “That’s out of the question!” He lunged into the space between Ellysetta and her quintet, thrusting her behind him in a Fey male’s instinctive gesture of protection. “Nei, I forbid it,” he reiterated when it looked like Gaelen or Bel might object. “She bears Mage Marks. We have no idea what touching a Primage of Eld—let alone trying to Truthspeak him—would do to her, what doors it might open. Better we get nothing at all from this Mage than risk Ellysetta.”
Bel and Gaelen looked away. Even Teleos couldn’t hold his gaze. They’d really considered it. They’d really thought Ellysetta might—
“Rain, if there’s a chance we can find out what the Eld are planning, isn’t it worth the risk?” Ellysetta spoke in a low voice, pitched for his ears only. “Think of the lives we could save. Koderas is lit. You said yourself that means Celieria is in grave danger. If I can Truthspeak this Mage, I might discover something that will help us prepare our defenses.”
He spun to face her and gripped her arms. “I know you want to help, but this is not the way, Ellysetta. Be sensible. You’ve never Truthspoken anyone before in your life. A Primage is hardly an appropriate test subject.” He shook his head. “Nei. It’s far too dangerous in every possible way. Put the idea out of your mind, because it isn’t going to happen.”
“We could send word to the other side of the Mists.” Gillandaris vel Jendahr, Ellysetta’s Air master, made the suggestion. Gil’s black eyes sparkled with silvery lights like stars shining in a night sky, contrasting vividly with the alabaster paleness of his Fey skin and the even paler hair that he wore bound at his nape with a simple, unadorned tie and left to fall to his waist in a shower of snowy whiteness. His expression was serious—almost grim. He was a blade’s blade, hard edged and dangerous. The kind of warrior more likely to slit throats than laugh at jokes, though with his friends he did on occasion display a wit every bit as sharp as his blades.
“The shei’dalins who left Orest are still in the Mists,” Gil was saying, “but there are others camped just on the other side. They might be able to get here soon enough to Truthspeak this Mage before he fights off the sleep spell and suicides like the others.”
“Summon them,” Rain commanded.
“Already done,” Bel answered. The hazy lavender glow of his Spirit weave still lit his eyes. “Two shei’dalins and their quintets are on the way. They should arrive in a few bells.” Revan-Oreth, the Mist-shrouded pass guarded by Kiyera’s Veil, wasn’t particularly long in miles, but it was a steep, winding, treacherous mountain path. Even before the Mists were raised, Revan-Oreth had been a slow road to travel.
“Which shei’dalins are coming?”
“Narena and Faerah vol Oros.”
Rain took a breath. The women were two of the Fading Lands’ most powerful shei’dalins, and he knew exactly why they were coming. “Call fifty of our strongest warriors. I want those two guarded at all times.” The vol Oros line was one of the most powerful surviving families of the Fey. One of Faerah and Narena’s two brothers—both now dead—had been a Tairen Soul, and their eldest sister, Nicolene, had been captured by the Eld during the battle of Teleon. Rain would bet every blade he owned that Faerah and Narena’s offer to Truthspeak the captured Mage had more to do with their hope of discovering what had happened to their sister than any desire to find useful military intelligence.
Eld ~ Boura Fell
“You’re late, umagi.” A cuff from one meaty paw accompanied the Eld guard’s irritable growl.
The small, ragged, dark-haired girl who’d received both the greeting and the blow stifled a hiss of pain and skittered to one side to avoid the following kick. She was usually more adept at dodging Turog’s fists, but she’d been distracted by the battered woman strapped to the table in the center of the room.
When she’d entered the mating cell and caught sight of the masses of tangled black hair and the faint silvery glow of the woman on the table, the girl had frozen in her steps. For a few, dizzying instants, she’d thought it was Shia, the pretty, black-haired, blue-eyed woman who’d loved to brush the girl’s hair and sing her sweet songs. Shia, who’d given the worthless umagi girl the name she now called herself: Melliandra.
But Shia had been ripped apart in childbirth, her lifeless body thrown down the refuse chute to be eaten by the savage darrokken that lived in the den caves at the bottom of the pit. And when the woman on the table opened her eyes, Melliandra’s impossible hope faded. Black eyes, not blue. Dull and dazed from the effects of the drugs and Mage spells used to make her docile and receptive to mating. Just as well, Melliandra thought with an unexpected surge of pity. The stud set upon the woman had clearly been one of the wild ones…the kind who sank his teeth and nails into a woman as well as his mating organ.
“What the jaffing hells are you waiting for, skrant? Get to work.” Turog swung his massive paw again, but this time Melliandra was quick enough to duck.
She dragged her cart of cleaning supplies into the room and suppressed her unexpected surge of emotions with ruthless determination. Emotion was a sign of weakness in Boura Fell. Blank, unseeing eyes, ears deaf to the screams of the suffering, and a heart devoid of caring were the only ways to survive here.
Still, she couldn’t keep from watching out of the corner of her eye as the black-garbed umagi attendants released the heavy leather straps binding the woman’s wrists and ankles and helped her to her feet. The woman’s knees gave way, and she would have tumbled to the floor if one of the attendants hadn’t caught her beneath her arms and held her upright. The other umagi draped a blanket around her—which Melliandra knew was more to keep one of the High Mage’s precious female breeders from catching a chill than any attempt to preserve her modesty—and led her out the door.
Melliandra listened to the sound of their departing footsteps, counting the steps and calculating the distance before the slight muffling indicated a turn down another corridor. The new woman was being taken to the garden, the deceptively beautiful chamber that looked like a natural paradise but was, in fact, the prison where the High Mage kept his most valuable and magically gifted female breeders.
A prickle at the back of her neck warned her that Turog was watching, and she promptly snapped her attention back to her chores, dunking a clean cloth into the bucket of warm, soapy water and attacking the mating table with it. Though Turog behaved like every other lumbering, thick-necked bully who guarded the lower levels of Boura Fell, he was more observant than most. And meaner. The High Mage chose the men who guarded his breeders very carefully.
Despite the bruises and bite marks on the woman’s body, her mating hadn’t been one of the most violent ones Melliandra had been summoned to clean up after. There were only a few smears of blood on the table and almost none on the floor. Within ten chimes, the room was spotless and ready for the next unfortunate participant in the Mage’s breeding program.
Melliandra gathered her supplies, loaded them on the cart, and exited. As she passed the corridor leading to the garden prison, her veins hummed with the desire to make the turn. The woman who’d just been taken there was one of the new prisoners, someone whose skin shone with the same silvery luminescence as Lord Death and his mate.
Someone new enough and magical enough to perhaps still retain memory of her life outside Boura Fell, perhaps even information Melliandra could use to her advantage.
The desire to head down that corridor was so strong, she fought to keep her body from making the turn. It was as if something or someone in that room were compelling her with a power almost as strong as the one the High Mage of Eld used when he took command of her body and bent h
er to his will.
But she knew the compulsion didn’t come from someone else. It came from within. She wanted to go down that corridor. She wanted to visit the newcomer, interrogate her, discover everything she knew about the world above.
Melliandra’s muscles clenched in protest as will overrode want. She couldn’t go. Not now. Her earlier reaction when she’d entered the mating chamber had roused Turog’s suspicions, and she could feel his gaze boring into the back of her head.
She pushed the cart a little faster, forcing herself to walk past the corridor. The High Mage was gone for at least two days, and Turog would head back to the barracks hall when his shift ended in four bells. She would come back then and sneak into the garden room to visit not just the new breeder but all the women held there. She hadn’t seen them since Shia’s death.
Losing the first person ever to treat her with kindness had left an ache Melliandra had never known before and couldn’t seem to quell. She’d shed the first tears of her life over Shia, felt the first consuming burn of rage.
Nothing had been the same since then. There was a hole in her, a yawning, painful emptiness she couldn’t seem to fill.
Every night, she dreamed. Not the dull, spiritless gray dreams of an umagi, but dreams filled with vibrant color and emotion. Dreams that made her wake each morning with her hands curled into determined fists and the ragged square of folded cloth beneath her head soaked with her own tears.
She dreamed of Shia singing softly as she brushed Melliandra’s hair…of Shia’s torn, lifeless body tumbling out of the refuse cart into the pit of slavering darrokken…of Shia’s child, the tiny, bright-eyed infant in whom a piece of Shia still lived.
Most of all, she dreamed of watching the High Mage die in torment…and of the day when she, Melliandra—with Shia’s son cradled in her arms and the Mage Marks that made her a slave completely erased from her soul—would step out of the cruel, sunless gloom of Boura Fell into the glorious freedom of the world above.
“Get out of my way, umagi.”
The curt snap of a masculine voice shattered her unintended reverie, and a swirl of blue silk filled her vision. Primage! Realization splashed over her like a bucket of icy water.
Horrified to be caught daydreaming—and by a Primage, no less—Melliandra gasped. “Forgive this worthless umagi, master.” She scuttled out of the way, dragging her cart with her. All the while her mind worked at a frantic pace to gather every fragment of dream and whisper of thought that belonged to Melliandra and shove them securely back into the tiny private space she’d somehow managed to create in her mind to hide the time she’d spent with Shia.
That tiny space had grown over the last few months and more thoughts had crowded into it. Hopes had blossomed, and her first timid wish for freedom had evolved into dreams so vivid she could not help pursuing them.
A nameless, worthless umagi had no thought, took no breath, envisioned no future that was not allowed by her Mage master…but Melliandra did.
Within the body of a slave, the dreams of a free soul had taken root. One day, she would make those dreams come true.
CHAPTER FOUR
Shadow Man
Magic Mages
Lift your hand
Weave your spells
Rising Darkness
Evil Rages
Throughout the land
Azrahn dwells
Shadow Magic, a Fey child’s poem of Eld
Celieria ~ Orest
“He doesn’t look anything like I imagined.”
Ellysetta stared at the blue-robed man lying unconscious on the floor in the center of a large, windowless room carved into the mountain. The Fey had brought their prisoner to Upper Orest to await the arrival of the shei’dalins, and they were taking no chances that he might escape. In addition to the chains that bound his hands and ankles, a ring of grim-eyed Fey surrounded the Mage, feeding power into the blazing twenty-five-fold weave that secured him, while another twenty-five Fey had spun a protection weave around the room.
Looking at the Mage, Ellysetta couldn’t help thinking that she had expected a Primage of Eld to look more sinister…more openly evil and depraved. The Fey warriors guarding him looked more dangerous than he. This Mage had the face of a handsome young man in his early twenties. “He looks so…innocent.”
“Don’t believe it for an instant,” Rain growled. “The boy born into that body might have been innocent, but the Mage that boy has become is anything but. Come away. It’s against my better judgment that you’re even close enough to look upon him.” Despite the twenty-five-fold weave around the Mage, the twenty-five grim-eyed Fey holding the weaves, and the added protection of her own bloodsworn quintet hovering nearby, Rain was clearly on edge at having Ellysetta in such close proximity to a Mage.
Flashing sparks of unsettled magic swirled around Rain like agitated fairy flies. He hadn’t wanted to bring her here—he’d even suggested she leave the city entirely—but she had insisted on coming. She’d wanted to put a face to the evil that had haunted her entire life.
Was it odd to feel so…disappointed? She’d prepared herself for horror, for a monstrous face from her worst nightmares. Not a handsome youth who would make girls sigh as he walked by. Maybe the twenty-five-fold shields were to blame, but she couldn’t sense the slightest hint of danger about him. Nothing. If she’d met him on the street, she would have smiled and offered him greeting. Upon better acquaintance, she might even have welcomed him into her home.
“Do you think Mages ever regret what they are?”
Rain turned to her in surprise—and no little concern. “Nei,” he said flatly, his tone certain and unyielding. “Regret requires a conscience, and Mages have none.”
“But—”
“Nei. But nothing.” His eyes narrowed. “I know what you’re thinking. You look at this Mage and you see a young boy, and you want to save him. Put that thought out of your head this instant. This Mage is no boy. He’s probably older than I am. In fact, he’s probably destroyed more lives than I have—yet given none of them a second thought.”
“Why would anyone ever choose to live such an evil life?”
Rain put a hand on her back, guiding her away from the Mage. “Who knows, Ellysetta? Lust for power. Something broken in the soul. Or perhaps all it takes is being born into a culture that celebrates death and the enslavement of the soul over life and freedom.” Shadows darkened his eyes, turning lavender to moody violet. “Does it matter? The Eld have always served the Dark, and we have always been their enemy.”
“But…don’t you think if we killed the Mages, the Eld from non-Mage families would want to be free?” She thought of her best childhood friend, Selianne, and Selianne’s mother, who had been born in Eld and soul-claimed by the Mages. They’d both been loving, caring people. And they’d both died at Mage hands.
“If that was their desire, they had their chance to take it after the Mage Wars. They chose not to.”
The sound of many booted feet coming down the adjoining corridor made Ellysetta swallow her next remark and turn towards the door. A score of warriors—lu’tans who had bloodsworn themselves to protecting her—entered the room. Behind them, garbed from head to toe in brilliant scarlet and surrounded by ten unfamiliar warriors, two Fey shei’dalins followed, while another score of lu’tans brought up the rear. The large room seemed suddenly much smaller with close to ninety Fey crowded around its perimeter.
The shei’dalins walked towards the Mage without fear or hesitation, throwing back the veils covering their faces.
Narena and Faerah vol Oros were stunning even by Fey standards, with clouds of thick, curling black hair framing alabaster faces dominated by full red lips and large, thickly lashed black eyes.
But it was the look in those eyes—a pitiless, unyielding purpose—that made Ellysetta catch her breath and move instinctively closer to Rain. The vol Oros sisters were not gentle empaths suffused with the customary warmth of shei’dalin kindness and compassion. The e
xpression in those searing eyes made it clear they were powerful, confident immortals come to rip truth from an enemy’s mind.
Ellysetta’s hand crept into Rain’s and squeezed tight. The vol Oros sisters reminded her all too vividly of her first passage through the Faering Mists, when a band of ghostly, Mist-spawned shei’dalins had trapped and forcibly Truthspoken her, diving into her mind, ripping at the protective barriers that had shielded her all her life, nearly unleashing the wild, violent thing that lived inside her.
«Las, shei’tani.» Rain whispered on the private path they had forged between themselves. «Narena and Faerah mean you no harm.»
His voice rang with certainty, but Ellysetta still flinched as the shei’dalins drew close and gathered their considerable power. No matter how warmly the shei’dalins would have welcomed any other mate of their king, Ellysetta bore four Mage Marks. That changed everything.
But the vol Oros sisters barely even flicked a glance in her direction. Their attention was entirely focused on the Mage.
“We need to know what the Eld are planning and where they will strike next,” Rain told the shei’dalins. “And get the size of their forces, too, if he knows it.”
One of the two nodded curtly, and without a word, they walked around the Mage and knelt on the ground near his head, their eyes never leaving his face. The two quintets who had accompanied them from the Fading Lands knelt around the Mage’s body. Each of the warriors pulled razor-sharp red Fey’cha from their sheaths and held them over the Mage’s body. Twenty blades were poised over vital arteries and organs: neck, heart, belly, thighs, arms. If the Mage so much as lifted a finger against the shei’dalins, he would be dead in an instant. Ellysetta shivered at the thought.
“Let’s go, shei’tani,” Rain whispered. “There’s no need for you to be here.”
“There’s every need,” she said. “I’ve never seen anyone Truthspeak a Mage. It’s a talent that could come in handy, don’t you think?”