Naming things was easy. Actions were a bit harder and feelings more difficult than that. Expressing desires and mood were beyond her at this time, as was worrying about being polite or rude in her speech. Sometimes she would say something, and it would send off giggles in the other women. They would correct her, and she would blush without knowing the why of it.
She learned that not all hearthmakers were women. A small minority were men. Some of those men were mated to the few women hunters, and Keira took hope in seeing that crossing between circles was possible. It took her a while to realize that the hearthmother and the huntmaster were not mates. The huntmaster made a hearth with one of the male hearthmakers. When she realized what this meant, she paused for a moment. Apparently such things were taken as matter-of-fact by the Glavlunders. They seemed to think nothing of it, as long as hearthmates were pairings between the Hunters Circle and the Hearthmakers Circle. Their roles were more important than what hung, or did not hang, between their legs.
She asked Esteri why hearthmakers were still mostly women. It took a few words repeated and chained in inventive ways, along with creative sign gestures, to get the gist of the question across. Finally, Esteri understood she was asking why each circle wasn’t an even mix of the sexes. She gave two answers using a mix of words known and unknown to Keira, punctuated with creative sign gestures. The wolven wasn’t quite sure, but she guessed that it had to do with personal inclinations and the fact that hearthmaking had something to do with seeing the unseen.
Keira observed the hearthmakers on several occasions studying the patterns of tossed bones and seashells. Each hearthmaker, it seemed, offered advice to their hunter, determining the best location for their hearths and when they should move.
Hearth, as she came to understand it, was a spiritual concept. As best as she could tell, it meant “family.” More than that, it meant the warmth of family. The physical location of the hearth was transitory. During the Hearthmoot months of summer, it was the tents they shared. During the winter, they made homes of packed snow and ice. Keira was skeptical of how living in a house of ice could warm them against the winter cold, but she trusted they knew what they were talking about.
After weeks of learning their language, her speaking was broken and disjointed, but they could communicate in halting words. She had been shown several ways of preparing food, from meat to fish, and working tanned leathers.
She liked Esteri. The older woman seemed to adopt her as a daughter, and there was warmth between them whenever she was able to spend time with her. Keira was taught by many of the women, and there was no time for leisure. They were making her ready for the approaching winter.
By the end of the third week, Esteri and the Hearthmakers Circle led Keira into the woods in the foothills of the Ice Mountains. The air was considerably colder, and even though the plains melted in the summer months, the mountains remained in perpetual winter. The lower foothills were not covered in ice and snow like the higher elevations, and pines grew thick on their gentle slopes.
They led her deep within the forest, miles away from the village along winding paths between walls of smooth, round hill rock. Red pine needles thickly carpeted the forest floor, and fingers of leftover snow ran through the shadowed crevices of the ground.
They came to a clearing surrounded by a circular pine wall. Among the pine needles, an inner circle of faintly glowing blue and burgundy mushrooms formed a second thick ring in the open space.
“This place… our secret,” Esteri told Keira. “Magic. Watch.”
Esteri stepped into the mushroom ring, taking care not to step on any of them. She raised her hands, and tiny flames danced over her fingers and then floated into the air. They formed a spiral of turning lights that slowly spun, widening to the perimeter of the clearing. Another hearthmaker, one of the men, joined Esteri. He also turned his palms up to the sky, whispering words of magic. Gossamer dust coalesced overhead and gently descended, forming a shell of glittering blue and pink light over the clearing.
Keira started. Things, little things, had begun to move in the shadows between the toadstools. They glowed and rose curiously through the air, lifted on gossamer dragonfly wings. She rubbed her eyes, unable to believe what she saw. They were people! Tiny people not larger than her fingers. Little naked men and women, each with wings, flew up to explore the falling lights. She heard a tingling chorus of laughter as the glittering dust fell on them. They tried to gather it and throw balls of light motes at each other. They zipped around the air in excitement, forming trails in the luminous aura.
“Faeries!” she exclaimed in Roentian. “Sprites and pixies! I thought the Otherworld had broken!”
Esteri stared blankly at her. Keira flushed red and switched back to Glavlundic, trying to find the words. “Their home,” she said. “Home is dead?”
Esteri nodded. “Here home now. They here when home died. Stuck now.” Then she beckoned. “Come. They give magic.”
Keira stepped towards the circle, but as she drew close, the sprites flitted and darted away from her. Their giggling laughter turned to angry chattering. “Wolf!” Their tiny voices rose in unison. “Big bad wolf!” She heard them speak in Roentian. They hid back in their bed of mushrooms, unwilling to come forth once more.
Esteri’s face widened in surprise. She clearly had not expected this reaction. She looked at Keira quizzically.
Keira felt grateful the hearthmother was not angry. She loved the old woman and would have been torn up if she had displeased her.
“No magic,” the hearthmother said sadly.
Keira pointed at herself. “I… hunter.”
Esteri looked at her a moment with skeptical eyes.
Keira regarded her patiently. Then, she lifted a finger, gesturing to wait. Esteri watched as Keira puzzled out how to communicate with the woman.
She shifted into wolven form. Esteri’s eyes gave a brief twitch in surprise—Keira had yet to transform in front of the hearthmakers. The old woman waited, however, for Keira to continue.
Keira pointed at her furry body with her wolf claws. Her eyes gleamed. “Hunter,” she said again in her gravelly wolf voice.
Esteri nodded. “Wolfkeira. Hunter.”
Keira shifted back into human form.
Esteri chuckled. “Womankeira. Hearthmaker.”
Keira stared at her. She shook her head, confused. She understood the words, but not the implications.
Esteri smiled at her patiently. “Two (…) (…)” she said, pushing her arms against her chest. Keira thought she could make out that last word. Yes, she could. Esteri repeated: “Two (…) hearts.”
The middle word… she had heard that word too. When they spoke of the bones and shells, trying to see the unseen things of the world.
Two souls.
She understood. “Yes,” she echoed. “Two spirit hearts.”
* * *
While Keira spent the month learning from the Hearthmakers Circle, Tiberan added his strength to the Hunters Circle. The Glavlunders taught him a few things about the cold wastes, but for the most part he already knew enough to survive. Not only was he a better marksman and tracker than their best hunters, he had the knowledge passed to him from the dead Fae memories that formed his being. And he had the focus and instincts of the Green Dragon.
With Keira and him spending time in different circles, they hardly saw each other, and his troubled dreams returned without her presence. Every night he watched the torture of that piece of the Green Dragon that was not himself, and he awoke with a cold sweat, haunted by the Black Dragon’s spirit. He pitied that part of Graelyn that had been sent out into the world. What fate had brought her to choose torture at the Evil One’s pleasure?
After a particularly fitful night of sleep in the final days of September, he walked down to the shores of the White Sea to clear his mind. The sky was gray with the early clouds of winter, and a cold wind had risen from the sea. There was no such autumn to speak of in this land. He found Esteri
standing alone on the beach.
“Hearthmother,” he greeted her. He liked the old woman. She had a pure heart, and she always smelled honest and direct.
“Tiberan,” she returned the greeting. “Summer grows old, and I would speak with you before we depart.”
“You are always welcome, Hearthmother,” he replied.
She took his hand as they walked. It was not a romantic gesture, but one of simple friendship. “Summer ends,” she said. “Soon we will spread over the plains and hunt. It is our way. The first snowfall is the sign of Hearthmoot’s end.”
“Yes,” he replied. He knew this from the Hunters Circle.
“Then you know you should choose a hearthmaker as a mate.”
“I have no need of a mate,” he replied.
“Nevertheless, you should consider it,” she said. “The winters are long and cold, and having a companion increases your chances of survival. It is not our way to force a hearth, but give it some thought.”
“Hearths don’t stay isolated in winter,” Tiberan pointed out. “Some hearths travel and hunt together.”
“Yes,” she acknowledged. “But hearthmates are committed to each other first. Someone to have your back. Were you born here, you would travel with your parents, under their hearth, until such a time you found a mate. Yours is an unusual case for us, for you have no parents. Think on it… You are honorable and skilled, and your face is pleasing. There are several hearthmakers ready to leave their parents who would welcome making a hearth with you.”
Tiberan considered her words. He had survived the jungles on his own, for the most part. Well, perhaps that wasn’t entirely true. Ghost had saved his life, feeding him and nursing him back to health after a raptor had nearly killed him. He had Ghost and Cloudpaw with him here, and he had every confidence he could master the winter on his own terms. His name meant He Who Masters in Old Draconic, and that name was not given to him by a mother or a father. It was stamped into his very soul, bound into his being when Graelyn’s spark attracted faerie of similar quality to form the new being that emerged as Tiberan.
But Esteri wasn’t talking to him about himself.
“Keira,” he stated.
“Keira needs a hunter,” Esteri said. “Or a hearthmaker. It would be good for Keira to have a companion through the winter months, and I don’t think any of the others will take her, whether as hunter or hearthmaker.”
“Why?” Tiberan asked. “She is pretty enough.”
“It’s not that,” Esteri answered. “Those who give us hearth magic fear her wolf spirit, and she also wants to joint the Hunters Circle as Wolfkeira. She has accepted that Womankeira is a hearthmaker. Most hunters would only be confused by this, but you would not reject the two souls within her. What goes on—or does not go on—between hearthmaker and hunter in the privacy of the igloo hearth is of no one else’s concern. Ask her to make a hearth with you, if only to survive the winter.”
“That would be… delicate,” Tiberan said.
“I’m asking you to be practical,” Esteri replied. “You have not been through a winter here yet. You will need each other, even when you travel beside other hearths. When the food is scarce, hearths separate. Remember, Tiberan, the winters are cold here, and long.”
“I will speak with her,” he conceded.
12 - The Spark
Eszhira did not for a moment trust the sidhe. She remembered enough of them through her own Fae memories to know they considered themselves above the other races in all things. Strange that her own people, the seelie, could be so different when both elven races came from the Otherworld.
It must be the presence of the Dragon within us, she thought. She knew that was right. The Fae were creations of the Otherworld, made from the reflected images of Ahmbren’s people. The high elves were their pure descendants. She, on the other hand, was a light elf. Her people also had the essence of the Green Dragon; and dragons, as they had learned from Kaldor, were natural to Ahmbren. That was probably why the seelie were a bit more down to earth than their arrogant cousins.
She had watched the meeting from the sidelines, cloaked in her faerie invisibility. Tindron had made it a point to state he had been Valkrage’s student, and she had lived through what the mad Archmage had done to this city. When the meeting dispersed, she quickly hurried off towards the sidhe encampment, walking fast, but not so fast she lost her invisibility.
When she reached the edge of their camp, she saw floating crystals at the perimeter. She recognized these from the years spent in Cloudmoore—the gnomes were accomplished wizards, and she had seen her fair share of magic—and knew they posed no danger to her. They were sentries, and their light would reveal anyone who tried to approach with spells or trinkets of arcane invisibility, like the enchanted ring Kristafrost often used. Eszhira’s invisibility, however, was not due to the magical bending of light around her body. Hers was based on a faerie ability to move slightly out of phase with the world so that light simply passed through her. The sentries couldn’t detect her.
She hoped.
Assuming they worked the same way as the gnomish wizards’ sentries, she chanced it and snuck into the camp. In the center of the ring of tents, Tindron was arguing with a group of sidhe.
“I am not comfortable with this at all,” Tallindra was saying. “There are people in those towers!”
“We can’t afford for any of them to seize control of divine space-time!” he argued. “It’s bad enough our own people forgot the truth of the Kairantheum; otherwise, we could have prevented this. But here we are. Our creation runs the world, and we should be the ones to put it right.”
“But if you destroy Artalon, no one can put it right,” she stated flatly. “And the gods stay as they are.”
“The gods now know what they are,” Tindron replied. “They will at least keep the watch against the Void, so long as the other races continue to worship them. And they will. They can’t help themselves.”
“What of the troglodytes?” Tallindra asked. “Tiberan warned us that Klrain’s people have made incursions onto the surface.”
“The Black Dragon is dead,” Tindron stated flatly. “Nevertheless, would you have Artalon fall into their hands?”
They don’t know about Athaym, Eszhira thought.
Tallindra crossed her arms over her chest. “You can’t pull it off,” she challenged. “You’re nowhere near Valkrage’s ability. None of us are. You can’t possibly perform that spell.”
Tindron’s eyes narrowed. “Not by myself, no. But with a circle of twelve wizards at my side, I can raise the power. I know the technique, as long as I can coordinate our combined strength.”
Tallindra shot him an icy stare. “I can’t stop you, but I won’t help you either.”
“Sister,” Tindron replied, “would you turn your back on us? We will need your wand alongside ours.”
She shook her head. “You despise them,” she stated. “You lived above them here, apart from them, while you administered the Empire. I live with them in Glaeghindee. You forget, Brother, that Ahmbren belongs to these people more than it ever did to us. Our ancestors’ creation of the Kairantheum… how are we better than the meddling Dragons or gods?” Her lips pursed together for a moment before she added, “And we ourselves are nothing more than the fruits of—the Otherworld was—Dragon meddling. You can do this without me.”
“Sister—”
Before he could finish, she raised her wand and vanished.
Tindron stared at the empty space she left. “Damn you,” he muttered coldly.
The boom of cannon fire sounded from across the city. The sultan’s fleet had made the first, inevitable move.
“It begins,” Tindron told the others. “We must act now.” He brought the other sidhe around him. Eszhira guessed they were the twelve principle wizards of the camp.
“Are you sure you can do this?” one of the men said, a sidhe with corn-silk hair cut short at his ears. “We’re trusting you. None of us unders
tands the whole of the spell.”
Tindron nodded. “Once is all we need. I’ve already performed most of the rite. Only the final declarations are required… and your energy. My power alone is not enough.”
They moved in a circle, all twelve of them raising their wands and pointing them up to a central space above Tindron’s head. He took his wand and began chanting, tracing glowing sigils in the air.
Eszhira wasn’t quite sure what to do. She knew this couldn’t be good, but she also knew enough about magic to know that interrupting a spell could be worse. If she cut him off at the wrong time, the entire camp, and her within it, could be reduced to ash. Normally spell interruptions weren’t quite that disastrous, but the fact that he had gathered twelve other wizards to lend him their power made her think twice about just rushing in. She held her breath.
Tindron continued his chanting, gathering all the power they projected over him. Their energy formed a glowing ball of purple light that condensed into a singular point. He drew it down into his wand, then, with a commanding shout in that mercurial language, he thrust his arm into the air. The light flew into the sky, and all was silent.
The other wizards looked at him expectantly and waited. The corn-silk-haired man sneered. “And that was supposed to accomplish what?”
Tindron blinked. “I don’t understand,” he said, perplexed. “It was supposed to work. I studied the forms—”
BOOM!THwaaaaat!
An earsplitting sound that Eszhira knew all too well boomed through the city, a trumpet call with a horridly ribbed edge. Its sound reverberated through the ground and air. She covered her eyes and knelt before the blinding flash. A pure, thick beam of violet light shot from the heavens, slicing through Cloudmoore and piercing one of the towers in Artalon. A shockwave flashed over them, and those that had been standing fell to the ground. The tower shattered, all its glass exploding away from the zorium metal frame. Anyone who had been in that tower could not have survived.
When Dragons Die- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 97