When the Wind Speaks (Starstone Prophecies Book 1)

by Corinne Kilgore

  “Athan!” Dnara spun to catch him as he fell, his weight taking them both down to the dirt.

  “To Demroth with you!” Jenny howled and sprung from her earthy bed, sword in hand.

  “How-?” Melakatezra barely had time to ask before the blackrope was on her, blue lightning blazing hot and crackling between their struggle.

  Melakatezra growled, primal and low, and syllables formed on her lips. Jenny cried out in pain but did not relent. A tree branch nearby snapped and Rupert charged, the branch flinging from his reins as he plowed into the raven feathered mage.

  “Go!” yelled Jenny as Rupert reared back and slammed his hooves near Melakatezra’s head. “Get on that damn mule-headed boy and go!”

  “Betrayer!” Melakatezra screamed, and lightning ignited from her fingertips. “After all I gave to you!”

  “You took everything away!” Jenny screamed back and thrust her sword into shadow.

  Dnara watched in rapt horror as the two fought, mage’s magic to the blackrope’s anti-magic, sparks of blue and black and white illuminating the ashen trees and the ravens above. Faithful Rupert added his own body to the throng, until the ravens descended to swarm around him with pecking beaks and scratching claws. The horse whinnied in distress but did not run, and Jenny stabbed again and again but only hit shadows where flesh should be. The world had gone to madness, and Dnara could not look away from it.

  “Go,” Athan wheezed, his face having gone as ashen white as the dead trees surrounding them. “Take Treven. Please!”

  “No,” Dnara said and tried to pull him up with her, but his dead weight was too much.

  “Please, Dnara,” he begged, hand raising to her cheek as the fighting raged on behind them. “Leave me to my choice.”

  Dnara stared down at him as tears fell from her eyes. Choice? What choice had there been in any of this? He had no more choice in his fate than she in her imprisonment. Trickery and half-truths and magic; all of it blightmad and rotten!

  “No,” she said again, this time more sure of that one single word than anything of her life before. No. She would no longer be pushed and pulled in directions not of her making. She would draw the line here; she would accept all she had lost but she would lose nothing further!

  “Get up,” she commanded and tugged harder on Athan’s arm. Athan let out a pained groan but tried to push himself from the ground. They fell back down to the earth as he slipped, but she stood back up and pulled harder. Again he stumbled and fell, the life draining from him through a wound that did not bleed, and again she cursed the blight and struggled to help him stand.

  “This is not how it ends!” she cried, tears both of sadness and frustration as Athan once more fell to the ground, unable to catch his breath. “This is not how it ends,” she whispered with her face pressing to his unshaven cheek, her strength waning on the cusp of renewed despair as her defiance dwindled in the face of her weakness.

  Fickle creature. Melakatezra’s words taunted her as behind them the battle continued.

  Melakatezra both laughed and cursed as her shadow shifted away from Jenny’s skillful sword swings. The ravens danced around Rupert’s head and his feet stamped the earth. Jenny flung her blade in a beautiful, deadly arc only to catch shadow where Melakatezra had stood a mere second before. In Jenny’s eyes, the madness and the magic masked over the warmth and kindness of the woman Dnara had come to call a friend.

  “This is not how it ends,” Dnara said again as she looked into shadow, Athan sagging in her arms.

  The clang of steel against tree echoed through the forest, joining the ravens’ noisy chorus. Melakatezra’s cackling filled the grove, amused by Jenny’s vain attempts to rend shadow with blade. Rupert whinnied in anguish, trying to shake the ravens loose from his head, and Treven tugged at Dnara’s hair in an urgency to do as his brother asked and run.

  But she didn’t want to run. She wanted to stand. The weight of growing despair drew her downward, and all seemed lost before it had begun.

  The beginning. One should always start at the beginning. How strange for her to long to hear her keeper’s voice as all hope crumbled around her.

  ‘Pay attention, girl! You can’t just start in the middle. Concentrate. Find the beginning in that head of yours. The first page, not the last. Now, tell me, what do you see?’

  “Keeper Ishkar,” she muttered, eyelids heavy. “I see...”

  Closing her eyes, Dnara tried to block it all out, the clashes of fighting and sounds of suffering. Athan sank further, and she too with him, the earth offering a damp and cold place to lay down her struggles. The black sea lapped first at her thighs then rose as high as her chest, the temptation to leave everything behind rising with it. Her eyes clenched shut, and she took in a long breath, then she let the sea swallow her. Downward she drifted, the world becoming nothing more than distorted sounds and flashes of light folded within the inky void. There, she was alone; there she felt safe.

  But this, she thought in the moment right before the air left her lungs, was not how the story should end.

  In the darkness she felt safe, but she didn’t want to be alone. She wanted to live freely, and for those she’d come to call friends to live freely with her. They who had sacrificed, they who fought for her, they who had chosen to give her the gift of freedom; she could never abandon them. A barren shore full of unwanted memories may await her, but on that shore she could stand up for those who had been lost, and she could reach out to those waiting for her return.

  With powerful strokes, she swam to the surface, shaking loose the strands of shadow that tried holding her down. Breaking through, she gulped in a deep breath and basked in the moonlight that greeted her. A breeze caressed her cheek and smiled with her, and she remembered another gift she had forgotten.

  A gift. Not a curse, and it had become undeniably part of her. Like the secrets waiting for her in the grove, she had to stop running from the magic within her and embrace it; no longer letting it carry her along but accepting her part in its formation.

  “I see it,” she smiled. “And this is not how the story ends.”

  Her eyes snapped open and a gust blew through the leafless trees. Melakatezra stopped laughing and looked to her flock, dread entering her eyes for the first time in a thousand years. Feathers went flying as the wind knocked the birds away from Rupert and broke their bodies against the tree trunks. The sickening thumps of a hundred birds hitting wood then ground filled the clearing, and Melakatezra let loose a wicked, monstrous screech. The wind gathered around the mage in a blustering squall and begun plucking away her black feathers. Melakatezra swatted at the wind in growing frustration, all the while cursing Ishkar’s name.

  Jenny stood fast, leapt forward with cat’s grace and drove her magicked blazing blue blade into Melakatezra’s gut. Instead of striking shadow, the sword found flesh and the mage staggered. Shocked by the hit, Jenny let go of the hilt and took a step back. The sword remained where it had sheathed itself within the mage’s body, its sharp point cutting through the back of her dress.

  With wide black eyes, Melakatezra looked to Dnara and muttered in disbelief, “This is not how it is meant to end.”

  Dnara stood, and with the wind’s help, Athan stood with her. “No,” Dnara replied. “This is how it is meant to begin.”

  Melakatezra drew in a ragged breath and sadness sagged her expression. “You are certain?”

  “I am,” Dnara said, her back braced by the wind. “I choose to learn my own truths of this world.”

  To this, Melakatezra nodded solemnly and closed her eyes. “So be it, child. So be it.” Her eyes reopened, and in them swirled unfathomable melancholy surrounded by a deep black sea. “But do not say, when what comes to pass breaks this world apart, that I did not offer you a different path.”

  With her foreboding prophecy spoken, Melakatezra raised her arms to the night sky. Darkness gathered and all the fallen birds took wing around her. One last crescendo of ravens’ song filled the knoll
, then all went silent and Melakatezra vanished into shadow. Jenny’s sword fell to the ground, its blade streaked with an unnaturally thick, inky crimson. Overhead, the clouds dissipated, and a full moon floated in a sea of stars on the first night of spring.

  Jenny picked up her sword and circled the clearing with battle ready steps. “Is it over?”

  “She’ll be back,” Athan said on a pained voice. “She doesn’t like to lose.”

  “Then we best be going,” Jenny said then took in the agony present in Athan’s expression and the way he leaned heavily on Dnara and Treven. “What did she do to you?”

  “Don’t know,” he said before coughing and spitting to the side. A patch of blood appeared at his feet. “But it hurts.”

  Dnara tugged open his shirt and splayed her fingers over his chest. “There is no wound, but... But there is something there. I can...” She closed her eyes and let the magic seep in. “I can feel it.”

  “Stop,” Athan gasped then cried out in pain.

  Dnara snatched her hand away. “I’m sorry!”

  Athan looked worse than before but tried giving her a reassuring smile. “None of this is your fault.”

  Before she could argue, Jenny added her strength to leverage Athan up into Treven’s saddle. “We’ll figure it out later,” she said. “For now, we run. You two head for the Thorngrove, fast as...” Jenny paused to look into Treven’s eyes then softly rubbed his nose. “Fast as sweet Treven can carry you.”

  “And you?” Dnara asked as Jenny helped her up into the saddle behind Athan, handing her the reins.

  “I have her blood on my blade,” Jenny replied and mounted Rupert. The black stallion’s face had been cut by raven claws, but he seemed still ready for a fight, as did Jenny. “I can track her now. I want to see if she follows you, and possibly cut her wings off if she does.”

  Dnara tightened her hold on Athan as he slumped forward in the saddle. “You’ll hurry back to us?”

  “Aye,” Jenny promised. “And I’ll see if I can find some medicine, perhaps, though I know not what ails him.”

  “There might be something useful left at the tower.” Dnara held onto that hope. “Keeper Ishkar had books on magical injuries.” And Dnara wished she’d spent more time reading them instead of the herbal remedy books with pretty illustrations of plants.

  “Ishkar?” Jenny balked, then shook her head. “Explain it to me later. To the grove with you!”

  And with that, Jenny slapped a passing hand to Treven’s rear before nudging Rupert into a run in the opposite direction. Dnara held onto reins and forester as Treven jolted into an uneven canter before finding his balance down the knoll’s westward slope.

  “Hold on,” she said to Athan, but he gave only a squeeze of her hand in reply. “It mustn’t end like this,” she spoke more quietly in a prayer to gods she no longer believed in, and pressed her cheek to his back.

  The wind howled past her shoulder, urging a faster run. Treven heeded the wind, breaking into a thundering gallop through a moonlit field. The everbright lantern illuminated the path before them as into the first night of spring they journeyed together.

  29

  Well into the night, Treven ran as fast as the wind with Dnara and Athan upon his back. Not until the tall cedars of the Thorngrove came into view did Treven slow his pace. Breathing heavily through flaring nostrils, Treven reached the northern edge where trees met untamed fields. At this arcing line drawn across the land, so strangely distinct when one paused to gaze at it, Treven stopped and stared into the waiting darkness. He turned his long face to look up at Dnara with one questioning black eye.

  Tired in the saddle, Dnara too stared into the trees with weary eyes. Athan remained silent, but he gave her forearm a weak squeeze. Pressing her ear to his back, she listened to the uneven rhythm of his heart, once more feeling the unnatural presence of whatever malicious weapon Melakatezra had wielded. The object resonated with a vibration that made the hairs on her arms stand upward. Athan let out a quiet grunt and Dnara retreated from the object. Whatever it was, she could not simply drive it out as she had the blight.

  “I don’t know the way back to the tower from here,” she said, to which the wind responded with a tug on her hair to the east. “But it seems the wind does. Can you follow it, Treven?”

  Treven nodded with a bob of his large head then faced the forest again. His first step was a tentative hoof scraping the mossy earth just over the line of deep green and shadow that abnormally separated the forest from the field’s freely moving long grass. The wind blew through the grass, shifting the moonlight with it, then it headed into the forest, shaking the evergreen branches in a visible path. With head kept low, Treven followed the wind’s direction and left the open field behind.

  Dnara held onto Athan and reached past him to give Treven an encouraging pat. His withers twitched in response as he carefully chose where to step. The groundcover thickened into leafy brush. Nettles and thorns caught on Dnara’s dress, and she spread her cloak over all she could in the hopes of offering some protection to Treven’s exposed flank. Treven snorted and shook his head free when twining thorns caught his mane, only to be met with sharper briars.

  “Perhaps I should go alone?” Dnara asked, but Treven shook his head, let out a determined neigh and plowed onward.

  Just as the thorns seemed unpassable, Dnara ducked low with Athan under a tree branch then lifted her head to find Treven standing in a clearing next to a meandering brook. “I know this place,” she said, and an odd sense of home came over her, along with an unexpected excitement. “Follow the brook northwest. It leads straight to the tower.”

  The wind playfully swept through her hair then splashed up the river. The narrow, briar-free path along the river made for an easier journey. Overhead, the familiar song of ashbirds welcomed her back to their roosting trees while the moonlight peeked in and out between the dense canopy. Dnara held out the everbright lantern with one hand while holding onto Athan with the other. Aside from his holding her arm in return, he remained unresponsive and hadn’t said a word since leaving the deadwood knoll.

  As they crested a small hill, Treven let out a soft bray and drew Dnara’s attention to a large shadow looming ahead in the distance. She knew its shape immediately, though something about it seemed different. Tilted, almost. Not quite as it should be.

  “That’s the tower,” she assured Treven. “But...” A chill ran up her arms and the lantern’s light dimmed. “Something isn’t right.”

  Treven looked back at her, waiting. They’d come so far; too far to stop now. She took in a deep breath, calmed her nerves and held the lamp more steadily.

  “Well, it had been on fire the last time I saw it,” she said, trying to lighten things with a touch of humor even if the butterflies in her stomach were far from laughing. “I don’t know what we’ll find; what might be left,” of the people and animals, she added silently and swallowed against a uncomfortable knot in her throat. “But I have to see it. I have to know.”

  Treven turned his head back to the shadow and walked forward, leaving the brook behind as it turned sharply northward. The trees and thicket thinned and the songs of the ashbirds dwindled until not a sound broke the night. There were no signs of ravens sitting in the darkness, but also no owls nor insects, and even the moonlight appeared to shine less brightly so close to the tower. The air clung to her cloak and skin, not damp but heavy and oddly stale, like the air within the sealed vault where Keeper Ishkar had kept the most ancient of his books.

  She’d only been allowed near the vault a few times, to help Keeper Ishkar carry the gigantic tomes up to his room, but she could never forget how the vault had felt different than everything else. Not oppressive nor frightening, but almost out of place and heavy in secrets. Separate from the outside world. Apart from time.

  They came first to a stone wall no taller than Treven. Long stretches of it had tumbled down to the ground, over which had grown thick vegetation and thorny rose vines. S
he stared down at the mounds of stone as Treven passed. When last she’d seen the wall, it had been whole and unbroken. Those fallen pieces looked as if they’d been there for countless ages, weathered by rain and sunken deep into the mud.

  Treven followed the road, which too had been covered in overgrowth, its cobbled stones no longer visible along most of its length and the patchy grass being the only true indication it was ever a road at all. When they reached a break in the wall where an archway only partially reached out to meet the other side, Dnara could only guess at where the entry gate had gone.

  “There used to be a gate,” she said and Treven stopped to glance up at her. He must have thought her mad, as it didn’t appear there ‘used’ to be much of anything there. It looked as if the gate and its walls had been left to rot for much, much longer than a fire and a few weeks of abandonment could explain. The tower from her memory began to unravel, and with it her confidence. “And this wall... This isn’t right. Maybe we should wait for Jenny?”

  Athan’s hand gave her forearm a small squeeze where it held around his waist. “Keep going,” he said on a voice trapped within pain. “There’s more you must see.”

  Her heart leapt to her throat at the sudden sound of his voice. “You... You knew it was in ruins like this?”

  “Yes,” he rasped. “When I found you, I...” His words faltered into a hard-fought breath. “Go and see.”

  With those words and a small nod from Dnara, Treven walked them under the broken archway and into the courtyard. Where once there had been a vegetable garden, there now grew untamed vines, a large mulberry bush and the rotting trunk of an oak tree that had been at least a hundred years old when it fell. Across from the garden had been a barn full with pigs, chickens, and a milking cow named Honey. The animals had long departed, and only a few courses of cobbled stones remained to show where the barn walls had been. Still, it was in better shape than the squat kitchen. Only the stone floor and half of the main chimney gave any indication there had been a kitchen at all. Gone too was the bunkhouse, where the apprentices had slept. Not even a floor remained of the wooden shacks that had housed the other kept and collared slaves. A rusted anvil set atop an ancient hardwood stump surrounded by thorny bushes marked where the workshop once stood.