by Janny Wurts
Probably stress and anxiety had caused his mind to play tricks.
But when he jabbed the car keys into the ignition, the fresh blood was back again. Damning, slippery fingerprints smeared on everything he touched. Choking back sobs of frustration, he saw another mangled owl's feather float down and settle on the dashboard.
At that moment Rafe fully understood: he was not going to handle his meeting; he was in fact going to lose his job. The money and prestige and quick thinking upon which he had secured his success were not going to save him. An owl shot down for a moment's stung pride had marked him, and the crime was going to blight his life forever ...
* * *
Kirelle sat back on her heels, saddened by what she had learned. The two reavers she had dreamspelled were just thoughtless, prideful braggarts, ignorant rather than evil. A stag and an owl had died to no purpose, and for that, she must see two mortals driven from the wood with incentive not to return. The last of the three, by default, must have been the one to cut the Eld Tree. He must be left bound in sleep to even the balance when the fey arrived to demand blood-price.
Bent with the stone cupped in her hands, Kirelle composed herself to discharge that last unpleasant duty. Beside her, the blond man with the costly bracelet moaned in the deep throes of nightmare, and the third reaver snapped out of sleep.
Silent, he was, and blinding quick. His explosive surge threw off blankets to bare the moon-caught gleam of hard steel. Breathing fast, his grip on his weapon bone-white, he swung to take out the intruder.
The near proximity of cold metal had already stung Kirelle to inadvertent recoil. Her braid tumbled down across her shoulder, a slash of dark against the fey-woven shimmer of her cloak.
The reaver sucked in a breath half-strangled with surprise and managed, just barely, to curb his reflex to kill. 'A girl!' He shifted onto one elbow, stiff with unfriendly suspicion. His weapon continued to threaten as he snapped off an emphatic question.
His accent was unmusical and clipped, the words too rushed for understanding. Kirelle shook her head, while his attentiveness dissected every inch of her. She saw his moment of reassessment: that she was a woman, if small and otherworldly, and not some briar-scraped child dressed in tatterdemalion rags. His eyes stayed mad nonetheless, empty as smoke over water. If Kirelle had expected him to be ugly, he was not. Reaver he might be, and patently vicious, but he was neatly made. In body and feature he had as deadly a grace as one of the fair folk themselves.
Kirelle stared at him, undone by fear and unsure what to do next. Beside her the blond companion ensnared in spelled dreams started hoarsely and raggedly to sob.
The man yanked back in a flinch at the sound, and Kirelle snatched the chance to try retreat.
His left hand shot out and caught hers, and painful strength caged the half-enspelled stone between their shared grip.
Kirelle cried out, aware of the danger, but utterly unable to tear free; and so it passed that the dreamsnare unfurled and meshed with two minds and two hearts.
For a second, all senses upended. The mortal man beheld himself through borderland eyes in a spinning rush that made him gasp. The slaughter of a deer and an owl became re-rendered as pittance before his own most thoughtless axe-blow, so innocently motivated, a plain measure of safeguard to stow edged steel so that nobody should blunder into an unsheathed tool after dark. Torn headlong from mortal heedlessness, Alan saw blood well from heartwood. He felt its pain shake the silence of winter night to disharmony, then knew the deep, subliminal thunder of an Eldforest's awakening to rage. Full knowledge of his deed wrung from him tears of abject despair.
At the same moment, Kirelle, helplessly torn from her roots, felt herself seared by the murderous war that had plundered the joy from a lifetime, horrors that had tortured and killed, an unconscionable destruction of land and life that had left this survivor half-unstrung in time of peace. The ways of mortal earth had nigh broken Alan's spirit, Kirelle saw. Least-likely reaver of the three, it was he whose blood would be called to right the balance to placate the wrath of the fey. The irony cut, as her healer's perception further revealed that the hurt in him cried out for reprieve: that after years of misery, his heart had raised its answer: the desperate strength of his need had unbound the arcane defenses. The Eld Tree of itself had shed secrecy, to invite this man across the veil.
'You,' she gasped, as the firestorm of images thinned and finally released her. it was you who invoked the great mystery.'
Alan freed her hand, head bent and shaking. 'I didn't know.'
'That's not entirely true.' Kirelle sighed. 'Your heart led you better than you realized.'
Reminded that moment of the gun still clenched in his handj Alan snapped on the safety and cast it aside in distaste. His gaze, light as smoke, flicked across her. Then he got up. Still terrible in grace, he strode away from his sleeping companions to draw the offending axe his blow had left wedged in Eld oak. He ran light hands over scarred wood until his longing burst out into words. 'Show me the way to cross the veil. Your borderlands are more beautiful than dreams, and what life I lead here has no meaning.'
'You can't know what you're asking!' Kirelle said, moved to desolation by his plight. 'Your steel has harmed the last Eld Tree on earth. Across the veil, the blood of your deed will draw the forest's wrath and mark you out for fey vengeance.'.
He stood, resolute in the calm of his conviction. 'Then let me answer there for my ignorance.'
His words fell with an uncomfortable, sharpened clarity upon a night that abruptly seemed changed. The deep shadows went suddenly, painfully harsh-edged, and the moonlight seemed alive with vibration.
'Veil magic,' Kirelle gasped, her dread overridden by a piercingly musical voice. 'Debt must be answered for, here and now!'
Overhead, the Wizard's white owl raised wings and exploded into flight as Kirelle whirled, the mortal man along with her.
Around the trunk of the Eld Tree stepped a rangy, graceful figure magnificently clad in green and gold. A black lacquer bow adorned with river pearl crossed his shoulder. Beneath hair the glossy dark of a raven's wing, his eyes shone a lucent silver gray. No crackle of sound betrayed his step as he crossed the carpet of dead leaves. The sightly beauty of him made the earthly air seem to burn and shimmer with his presence.
The mortal man by Kirelle's side gasped aloud, his deadly fast reflexes turned stupid and still by the uncanny arrival of the fey.
Kirelle had never owned courage; old Meara often had chided that unsettled nerves made her tart. Before the fey could raise voice to claim blood-price, she found herself crying useless protest. 'Your kind had abandoned these woods. Who is to blame if spells of guard set so long in the past have thinned to the point where one man's need could wake the mysteries? Alan's act was without malice. His desire was only to protect.'
The fey regarded Kirelle in all of his bright, cold arrogance. 'Price must be paid, nonetheless. Steel has cut an Eld Tree, and blood must atone for blood. It is true enough the guardspells have weakened; thus I am sent here, to unmake the last link in the veil.'
'Why claim the one man whose heart could touch an Eld Tree?' Kirelle begged, piercingly torn for a failure that could not save the Wizard's borderlands, nor spare one innocent life. Her gesture encompassed the two men asleep on the ground. 'There are other mortal reavers whose interests are the more callous.'
'Two lives for one?' The fey raised his brows, perhaps prepared to strike a bargain, until Alan reached out and caught Kirelle's wrist, his fingers coldly unsteady.
'Wait. I forbid this.'
Years and reason and counseling had never satisfied his guilt, that chance had granted him survival when others more worthy had died. Blundering through life without faith or clear purpose, this time he could not walk away. To the fey, he insisted, if it's true and I've offended, I will give what is asked.'
'No,' Kirelle whispered. 'You will yield up nothing. Your death will not win reprieve, nor will it save the last link. The myst
eries will be cut away from your earth, and our borderlands will perish along with them.'
The fey regarded her, narrow-eyed. 'What does any of that matter? Earthly folk care nothing for Eld ways. The mysteries, to them, are just tales, and true magic a beauty forgotten.'
Which was, perhaps, the real reason why the veil's guardspells had slackened, Kirelle thought. The mysteries themselves might have reached out to a mortal to thwart further shrinking of their boundaries. She knew now, beyond doubt, why she had been the one chosen to receive the Eld Tree's dream. 'Your complaints could be changed,' she said quickly. 'These woods are not dead, nor unfeeling, but only numbly asleep.'
'You would stay, then, and waken them?' The fey laughed, his mirth a sword-sting of mockery.
Kirelle swallowed. One word, one act, and she would be trapped for a lifetime. She glanced at the mortal beside her, felt once again the unquiet pain that tormented him, the creative potential this world's works had taken and twisted and ruined. 'Let this one go,' she begged, knowing the borderlands could ease him. At last, her own will was certain. 'I will stay. This wood will have me as guardian, and the old mysteries will be quickened anew to nurture and guard the Eld Tree.'
'A life for a life,' the fey agreed, unsmiling in acknowledgment of the pact. 'Your mortal shall have his reprieve. He may cross back with me to the borderlands if you remain here in his place.'
* * *
Dawn threw gray fog over the campsite when Bill awakened from his dream. Gasping and sweating as if he'd been running for his life, he glanced up, saw branches half blurred in dawn mist, then loosed a sharp, breathless laugh. Nightmares, he thought, overwhelmed by a wash of relief; only nightmares. For a second, on waking, he'd actually believed he'd shot down and gutted his own daughter.
The vision remained acidly vivid. Bill pushed onto one elbow to reaffirm that the trophy he'd dressed was a buck.
The shock hit like a slug in the gut: for there was no deer, only Sallie, hanging by one ankle from a bloodstained length of rope. Behind her, clad in a cloak that looked cut from no earthly sort of cloth, a tiny woman stood with the wind blowing through her dark hair.
Reproach in her eyes as biting as frost, she spoke before grief could unhinge him. 'Go. Take your trophy, and upon your heart's blood, may you never kill again for your vanity.'
Weeping with fear, shaking and weak at the knees, Bill scrambled out of his sleeping bag. 'I can't do this,' he gasped. But the woman's eyes gave him no quarter. More frightened of her than of losing his last hold on sanity, he rummaged underneath his jacket, found the knife he'd stripped off the night before. Half blind with tears of remorse, he reached up and cut his daughter down. Sobbing deep in his throat, he wrapped her slack body in his sleeping bag, then clumsily smoothed her blonde hair.
His hand brushed fur, cold gray fur, then the unyielding tines of an antler. In his arms, cradled against his bare chest, lay the blood-rank carcass of a buck.
Bill looked up, too shocked to be angry, but the woman who had threatened him was gone. Unsettled by feelings that every move he made was being watched, he spilled the wretched carcass upon the ground, packed up his gear, and fled without a backward thought for his forsaken companions.
* * *
Left alone at the campsite, Rafe roused to a spill of winter sunlight and the rustle of foraging birds. No apartment, no office, no report due, he understood in a flood of rising spirits. He thrust his arms from his sleeping bag to stretch ... and froze, half crippled by chills.
His hands were running with red blood. He started up in panic, then all but retched as he blundered across the stiff, feathered corpse of an owl that someone had left dumped on his chest.
His scream tore apart the forest silence.
The small woman who watched him went unnoticed until he ran out of breath. She stood over him, uncanny and bitterly accusing. 'You will go,' she said clearly. 'Kill no more for your ego, and the death of the owl will be forgiven.'
'Who are you?' gasped Rafe. But he didn't want an answer, not really. He just needed out of here, as fast as he could throw on clothes and jacket.
Afraid for his sanity and survival, he abandoned his expensive gear and fancy rifle where they lay. Without pause to look for Bill or Alan, he raced headlong to his car. Sweaty, panting, and shaky, he waited until he had the engine running before he dared to check whether the blood was gone from his hands.
* * *
Under the Eld Tree, in a morning wood emptied of reavers, Kirelle regarded rank after rank of sunlit, sleeping trees. Amid a litter of meaningless camping gear, she sensed the soil beneath her feet and listened to winds that had long ago forgotten speech. She found no regret in her heart, but a strange, eager joy for the task that lay ahead of her.
Rapt as she was, intent upon the needs of the forest she had adopted for her own, she did not hear the silent beat of wings. The owls that flew widdershins around the Eld Tree went unnoticed as they flocked and finally settled to roost in the branches over her head.
The first she knew of the Wizard's presence was the merry chime of brass bells. She spun, surprised, as he reined his gray horse to a stop and regarded the oddments of gear the reavers had abandoned when they fled.
A smile carved his face. 'Did you think to bring back the mysteries to mortal earth on your own?'
Kirelle laughed. 'I didn't think at all, but only chose as I must.'
She moved to the Wizard's side, pleased that they would waken the wood together, and knowing that borderlands magic would one day come to bridge the veil and restore the lost link between worlds.
'Alan is with Meara, and safe,' said the Wizard. 'Anyone lacking a healer's compassion could have left him unjustly condemned as a reaver.' The secretive smile behind his silver beard turned ruefully reminiscent. 'You may not have known, but my guardianship began with an inadvertent slight to an Eld Tree. When our labor is complete, and the wild hunt returns to ride these earthly fields, I much doubt your exile will be permanent.'
Song's End
The wolfs jaws snapped shut with a sound like the crack of new ice. Deadly teeth slashed nothing but empty air, and the beast's frustration could be felt, hot as the spurt of fresh blood. On damp earth barely one stride distant, Huntress Skyfire rolled and evaded the edge of the stone knife which stabbed down to kill her. Breathless, sweating, bleeding from three previous challenges, she scrambled into a crouch and leapt while her opponent recoiled from his lunge.
On the sidelines the wolf whined. Its lips lifted into a snarl, and its haunches bunched, quivering. But this combat was a thing between elves. The pack was forbidden to intervene.
Skyfire struck her attacker solidly in the chest. He overbalanced, and both of them rolled with the throw. The knife grated against dirt. Skyfire took a knee in the ribs; air left her lungs with a grunt. The scent of her opponent filled her nostrils as she gasped a fresh breath. His odor carried a tang of fear. This, because she had bested two stronger challengers before him; those defeated had not lingered to watch her fight again. Both had retreated to the wolf lairs to lick wounds and nurse resentment.
Skyfire caught the new challenger's knife-hand and bore him down in swift and merciless attack. Fright made him dangerous, even desperate. The chieftess clung grimly as the Wolfrider thrashed beneath her. Anger lent her tenacity to match his fear. She barely felt the blows as he kicked and punched to win free. She twisted the wrist in her grip, felt the sinews tighten. Bone grated beneath the pressure of her hand. While pain distracted her opponent, she kicked away the knife, and sought his throat.
Abruptly the Wolfrider went limp under her hands, chin lifted in submission. Skyfire released his wrist and neck. Wearily she gathered herself to rise, to turn, to face the next of the challenges that had inevitably followed her return with the Dreamsinger to the holt.
Only that morning, she had shouted to the first dissenters who crowded round. 'He is an elf, and a Wolfrider, and by the Way, I say that he stays in this tribe by right!' Now, in he
r exhaustion, the words seemed still to ring in her ears.
At some point during the second fight the Dreamsinger had faded into the forest. With him had gone the scent of dreamberry blossoms, and soft south winds of spring. His leaving changed nothing. Wolfsong gripped the tribe like lust, and the open outbreak of rivalries had upset order within the pack. Skyfire barely noticed Rellah's hostile glare. These fights made distasteful work, since the challenges themselves were an indulgence of wolfish instincts. That Skyfire did battle to temper those same instincts mattered little. Bites and wrenched joints and knife wounds demanded exhaustive concentration and energy drain, and Rellah had none of Willowgreen's natural gift. Still, with the healer gone away with Two-Spear's exiles, only Rellah remained to fill that responsibility. She carried on with a learned knowledge of herbs and bandaging, and an uncompromising sense of duty, ancient as she was.
**Dreamsinger,** Rellah sent, **is spell-blind, mad. Not worth this bloodshed, desist.**
Skyfire refused the reprimand. Scuffed, stinging, sticky with the blood of conflict, she shook back tangled hair and snarled.
Rellah failed to flinch; and that lack of reaction by its very incongruity raised Skyfire's hackles. Prompted by distrust, she spun, her snarl changed to a growl of rage. The sudden movement spared her. She took the knife thrown by treachery from behind in the shoulder instead of the heart, where it was intended.
'Murder!' screamed Rellah. 'A curse upon Timmain for mingling the seed of the beast in our children.'