Goldenmark

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  And on we go, Elyasin thought.

  Alranstone by Alranstone, they called their combined magic. Thad’s music became a song Elyasin danced to with her beloved by her side. Their flow became a dream, Elyasin’s mind broadening to view the proceedings from outside herself and above the plaza. Watching their body work; watching Ghrenna orchestrate their combined wyrric powers. At every Stone, it was the same. Their dance, Thad’s song, the sigils Ghrenna commanded with her power, to bind the shards of quartz back into one, and then a round of Luc’s healing to rejuvenate them all.

  But this time, Ghrenna did not allow them to feel their discomforts, only sent Luc where she judged he was needed, not releasing the flow of the dance. Euphoria filled Elyasin as they continued on, making her lose herself upon a tide of opiate-smooth bliss, over and over. Her body quivered after the fourth Plinth; she fell to her knees as it nearly gave out. The song jangled, a sensation like screeching animals ripping through Elyasin – but Luc rushed in, his seeping golden light sluicing through her flesh, removing all her concern.

  Removing all her reason – to resist the call of the Nightwind.

  On and on they worked. Elyasin’s body was a forge, her hands were smelted fire. Her dance was lava’s flow down the mountainside, meeting with the cool rush of the river that was Therel. The music filled her in haunting strains like wind though the darkness of time. Therel failed in the middle of the fifth Stone. With a cry, he collapsed to his knees just as Elyasin had earlier. The music jangled; the dance spasmed with a vicious chorea. Massive shards of crystal jittered in midair, lifted halfway into place but not yet set. Thad’s voice cracked as if he’d felt Therel’s pain, and a hard thrust of icewater ripped Elyasin’s veins – sharp as a dagger.

  She cried out, her limbs freezing from the cracking of Delman’s wyrria.

  But Luc was there fast, his hands upon Therel, pouring his gifts through his King as the rest of them held the dance steady from its near-collapse. But with her euphoria interrupted, Elyasin could see suddenly. How pale Luc was, sweat beading out upon his forehead from healing them all, over and over. How Therel’s muscles jerked and spasmed as he was healed, his breath a hard rasp in his throat, his skin dusky with cold, ice beading out around the edges of his searing blue eyes. Elyasin’s body poured sweat, soaked and searing with heat-blisters as a horrible thirst filled her, her tongue bloated and a headache screaming in her temples.

  “Luc! Quickly!” Ghrenna’s true voice was surprising in all that cacophony. Elyasin felt a push of ether whisk past her and slam into Luc – a command from the Nightwind. She could almost see sigils of white fire blaze in Luc’s wrists, seeping into his hands, forcing him to heal Therel faster. And then Therel was up, steady, breathing out a hard plume of chill mist and re-joining the dance.

  The harmony fused. The crystals lifted and ceased jittering – and they continued.

  But Elyasin knew the truth. Even as her euphoria resumed, a dark fear filled her as they turned to the sixth Alranstone. As Morvein’s Nightwind consumed her again, that dark pleasure coaxing Elyasin back into the dance, she knew it would devour them. This power consumed all that it commanded. It opened them wide, ate them up, taking their vitality – coercing a person to give their all for the Nightwind. And like a threllis or fennewith high, the user who’d been yoked into this bliss didn’t even know they were being devoured.

  Until it was too late.

  On the seventh and final Plinth, Elyasin felt her body give up at last. Unable to supply any more energy, her wyrric furnace ripped apart and a vast explosion rocked through her. One last surge of heat flared through the cavern, as the crimson inkings all over Elyasin’s body blazed. Ghrenna’s white sigil in her mind seized that power and focused it, sending it like a comet to the thousands of fragments in the final Plinth.

  Zooming upward, the crystal shards thrust into place upon that hard wave – not a gentle, controlled rise but a shocking burst of organization. A similar blast of power shot from Therel as he failed upon the backlash of Elyasin’s collapse, his own purple inkings flaring vivid, lighting up the Alranstones all around. He went down to his knees with a cry as the last of his blistering ice hammered the fragments with such power that it slammed them into their final places. Sigils blazed into being as Elyasin fell, hitting the gold of the dais on her side – burned-out.

  Used up.

  As the seventh Plinth blazed into becoming, every Alranstone in the White Ring searing with blue-white light, complete at last, Elyasin gasped her final breaths upon the cool gold of the plaza. Her vision flickered; darkened, her hearing buzzing out to a thin whine. Someone’s fingertips found hers – twined in hers. Elyasin rolled her eyes to look as her breath fled, seeing Therel collapsed on his side next to her.

  His wolf-blue gaze flashed for her one last time, in love, before dimming out to frigid winter snows.

  CHAPTER 42 – ELOHL

  The Valenghian camp upon the Aphellian Way was in a ruckus as night settled over the arid plain. The final preparations for battle, which was coming for them like the hammer to the anvil, were well underway.

  Desperation surged from all sides as the heavy grey twilight deepened into a brisk darkness. As torches and braziers were lit against the lowering night, Elohl watched the tension in the air. Irate Praoughian long-riders whipped horses that had no need to be whipped, who reared and whinnied in distress. A group of Valenghian heavy infantry in full silver battle-armor rushed past a Cennetian cook, slamming into the man and spilling his pot of potatoes. The Cennetian stepped into the torchlight, spewing epithets in a florid rush and shaking his fist while making devil-cursing gestures at the Valenghians. Two Cennetian soldiers dressed in night-shade gear and bristling with knives came to the man’s aid, calling for the Valenghians to halt, then rushing after them with daggers half-drawn when the silver-haired men did not.

  Tension had intensified in the ranks. Just today, Elohl had broken up no less than twelve fights between men of different nationalities, and a few women warriors, too. With the threat of battle looming, each and every soldier now aware that Lhaurent’s forces outnumbered them two-to-one, the Vhinesse’s former army was cracking. Breaking, as if without her wyrric tyranny, they had no glue to force them together any longer.

  Sitting near the horse-pickets adjacent to the command-tent upon a rough wooden plank over two water-barrels, Elohl roiled with the tension simmering through the air and through himself. Since he and Fenton had been given the High General’s pins, to take over command of this fracturing army in Merkhenos’ absence, Elohl had led just as he’d done in the High Brigade, only on a larger scale. Issuing commands to Merkhenos’ Generals and Captains, working with Fenton to secure a moderately competent plan against the arrival of Lhaurent’s forces. They were dug-in, supply-lines were set, any last cracks and chinks in the towering fortress-wall that the Valenghians had built across the Way near the center league had been repaired. Sentries had been set to watch for the Menderian approach; signal-fires were ready, barrels of boiling oil atop the ramparts. Supplies of arrows and healing-resins, salves and bandages were fully stocked, and the countryside around the Way had been evacuated of farmers and villagers, excepting those who knew how to heal or fight.

  They were ready – as much as they could be.

  And now, Elohl was alone with his thoughts, whittling, the scent of spicy citrus coating his fingers with every curl he shaved from his creation. Elohl smoothed the hunk of yither-wood in his hands, lit in stark definition by the crackle of a nearby brazier. It was taking shape finally, inspired by the creatures of myth that writhed up every Monolith all along the Way. Elohl narrowed his eyes and blew a few shavings into the dust beyond his boots. He could almost hear the shavings screaming as the cracked earth sucked out what little moisture was left to them, even at night.

  “Centime for your thoughts.” Fenton clapped him upon the shoulder as he settled to the bench with a tired sigh, stretching his boots out before him in the shifting light of the
brazier. Unwinding a silken red wrap from his mouth and nose, Fenton rubbed the palms of both hands over his face as if fatigued. He probably was; they hadn’t gotten much sleep in the three days since Merkhenos had departed – and still, the Valenghian High General had not returned.

  “Why are we here, Fenton?” Elohl spoke, watching his carving take shape beneath his knife, thinking about Ghrenna and everything they had discussed three nights ago. “In the middle of all this chaos, trying to unite men who just want to break apart?”

  “Why do the night breezes blow?” Fenton was winsome tonight, as if their being hours from battle eased him. Leaning back onto his palms with a ready grin, he gave a soft chuckle. “Enjoy being alive tonight, Elohl. You might be dead tomorrow.”

  “Is that supposed to calm me?”

  They’d be fighting in the dark tonight, unlucky and chaotic no matter how one did it. At least it wouldn’t be the scorch of the day, but it would be Halsos’ Burn of its own variety. Elohl had fought many a highmountain skirmish in the dark, and they never went well. Too many wounds, too many wild sword-swings even in the hands of allies. Lhaurent’s forces had marched at dawn, but the two camps were at the opposite ends of the Way, and the field of approach was long between them. Fenton and Elohl had left explicit instructions to hold their position behind the Valenghian guard-wall – their army would not waste energy and resources crossing the leagues, and would let Lhaurent come to them.

  But Lhaurent’s army hadn’t stopped their march as the sun eased past midday. He’d not paused them leagues out, to water and rest and prepare. He was coming – and he was coming tonight. No one would see any sleep from the spears of tension that surged now through the camp. Midnight would come and go in a wash of fitful dreams and watchfulness, and they’d clash sometime in the early hours before dawn. Elohl turned his whittling over, examining what was turning into a coiled serpent with strong forelimbs and claws – the dragon-stone in the field near the Heathren Bog.

  “I don’t think it’s a matter of being calm,” Fenton murmured, watching brazier-fires spring to life all over the camp like lightning bugs in the night. “Just knowing one’s own mortality.”

  Chill stars had popped out through the velvet darkness. But even as Elohl glanced up, he saw the stars to the west blotting out to a suffering crimson above the fortress-wall. A wind blew, thick with heat and change. There would be a storm tonight, and it rolled in from the western Way as if pushed ahead of the annihilation that came for them.

  “No, I mean,” Elohl spoke again, watching the molten sky to the west, “what point is there to all this?”

  “Saving the world?” Fenton chuckled, leaning back on his hands again.

  Elohl gave him a look.

  “Alright! Alright.” Fenton held up his hands, then settled back with them laced behind his head. Gazing out over the nighttime bustle, his lips curled into a small smile as the brazier’s flames cast his face in a red glow. “Do you see them, Elohl?”

  “Who?” Elohl squinted out in the lowering dark. A mirage of changing temperatures moved across the dusk, obscuring the far row of Monoliths beyond the enormous, sprawling encampment.

  “These people,” Fenton continued, nodding at the soldiers moving through the chilling night. “They know nothing of dire times and deep magic. They only know what is before them tonight. To fight; to kill or be killed. To love and hopefully get loved before you die. It’s something I cherished about being among the Elsthemi. Merra, Therel, and the Highlanders didn’t live for tomorrow or yesterday. There was only today. And today is what you make of it, for good or for ill.”

  “Wise words.” Elohl brushed dust from the coil of the serpent’s tail, examining its long line.

  “Some might say so. Sometimes I think I’m foolish, Elohl, but there’s one thing I’ve learned through all my thousand terrifying years.”

  Elohl glanced over. Fenton wore a strange expression in the brazier’s light, deeper than pondering and more expressive than judgemental. It was more real than his usual face, this pensive wonder; and as Elohl watched, he gave a slightly etheric smile.

  “I almost never thought I’d meet you,” Fenton spoke at last. “The Rennkavi. Part of me disbelieved that any creation of my grandfather’s could possibly be as wondrous as my mother’s Prophecy described. But when I met you, when I saw those marks flare on your skin – I felt their honesty. Your honesty. You may hate being a slave to fate, Elohl, but you have a gift no one else could master, simply because you hate being a slave. And that gift gives us hope. All of us. It has the power to bring us together into one enormous, slightly less dysfunctional family. Maybe, anyway. How could you not wish to gamble on such a thing? It’s a beautiful wyrria... no matter how it began.”

  “You really believe your grandfather was evil? That he created the Rennkavi to enslave the world?” Elohl couldn’t meet Fenton’s eyes as he smoothed his carving.

  “I do.” Fenton’s voice was calm, and something about it made Elohl look up. Fenton’s eyes curled with a slow fire, the gold in them bright in the evening’s starkness. “But my grandfather died. Whatever ensnaring purpose those Marks were originally meant for, it can’t happen now. You’re free, to use the Marks how and when you will. You showed that in the Vhinesse’s throne hall. You have a choice – to bind with those Marks and enslave or to elevate people’s hearts, uniting them not as slaves to your will, but simply because love is powerful. Think about it. And then decide whether you want to continue stewing.”

  Fenton kicked Elohl’s boot teasingly, then jostled Elohl’s shoulder with a chuckle. Elohl drew a deep breath. He didn’t share Fenton’s lighthearted mood tonight. The simmering tension within him had been eating at him ever since they’d left Velkennish, since he had been torn away from Dherran, and it was only stronger now. But Elohl’s ethereal meeting with Ghrenna at the dragon-stone had been astounding, and it bolstered him, thinking perhaps she was right. That he needed this surging tension inside him; that it was part of his power, through the Wolf and Dragon lineage. That every moment of friction, every hour he simmered in conflict, battling his emotions that would no longer be suppressed under any kind of glacial calm, was another moment his wyrria strengthened.

  Another moment that he strengthened – becoming ready for when he would have to face his destiny at last.

  Elohl’s head lifted and he inhaled a steadying breath. Something hot swirled inside him as the air stirred, dry as the dust and with the iron tang of blood. Clanging drew his attention nearby. A Valenghian blacksmith one tent over plunged a hot-forged sword into a sizzling vat of cold water.

  “Elohl?”

  Roused from his trance, Elohl turned. “What if love isn’t enough, Fenton? What if this force inside me only grows out of conflict, only grows because of these writhing emotions I feel? Like the sword being honed in the forge, what if strength rises in the world only because we battle, like the Wolf and Dragon – rather than through peacemaking?”

  Fenton gave a subtle chuckle in the red night. He leaned back, stretching into his laced hands at his head. “I feel it, the tension in the air. It sears my limbs, Elohl, makes me feel like I’m on fire, through and through. When I have those sensations, when conflict and that simmering feeling roar through me like you’re describing – I feel how it makes me strong. But conflict isn’t the reason we fight. Too much conflict causes ruin: in the flesh, in the bones, in the mind. In our people. A world based on conflict is only anarchy, from which nothing can grow. No, we fight because we want a better tomorrow. We ache for it, would kill for it, desire it. Love is the reason we battle, Elohl. Love is what’s beneath the Wolf and Dragon. Because if you never cared about anything, what would you fight for? Nothing. Think about the people you love, Elohl – that’s why we have conflict. So really, it’s your love that gives you strength. You might ask Ghrenna what she feels beneath the roiling storm you hold inside you, when you and she meet at night.” Fenton’s smile was knowing.

  Elohl set his
whittling down. He gazed at Fenton, level. “How do you know about that?”

  “Come on,” Fenton’s lips quirked. “You steal off at night when you think I’m asleep. I can’t let you wander alone right now, Elohl, you’re too important.”

  “You’ve followed me when I went to the dragon-stone?” Elohl paused, unsure if he should feel betrayed or thankful that Fenton hounded his sojourns these past few nights. Though he and Ghrenna had really only spoken the first night, Elohl had returned both nights since – reveling in her, feeling her body and his entwine in the deepest darkness, coiled in the protection of the dragon-stone as they shivered and gasped in lovemaking.

  “Everyone here shuns that spot,” Fenton spoke, his gold-brown eyes knowing, “except those who feel its pull. Conflict wyrria is a hard curse, Elohl; the line of Khehem’s Kings is no easy blood to share in. Someone, eons ago, bound so much conflict wyrria into that damn dragon-stone that sometimes I think that’s why this Way attracts wars. These thirteen leagues are some of the most bloody on our entire continent. And yet. This place is also one of the most powerful on our continent. Whatever my grandfather Leith did to snuff out wyrria a thousand years ago, he couldn’t quite do it here. Power lives here. Fuck, it breathes. And that dragon-stone breathes more than most – allowing other powers to strengthen around it.”

  “So you’ve heard me speaking to Ghrenna.”

  “Speaking isn’t the word for it, but yeah.” Fenton held a slight smile, though it was kind.

  Elohl flushed, but Fenton spoke again before he could. “Elohl. You have a powerful connection to Ghrenna. It’s only grown since that coup in the White Palace. Use it. The love you bear each other is only more powerful for the distance that separates you and the conflict that creates. I’ve seen how the Goldenmarks light when you two are in contact at midnight. Your love feeds them. Instead of running from that, try using it. Indulge in your love, Elohl – and see how strong it can make you.”