by Carol Berg
“Lord Stearc,” I said, coaxing my balky horse up beside the thane as the road wound downward onto the flatter approaches to the bridge. “Call a halt as soon as we’re across. I’ll lead from there.”
He jerked his head in assent. Before very long, Stearc passed over the bridge and between the broken pillars. He raised his hand.
“Saints and spirits,” I mumbled, as I reined in beside him, gulping great lungfuls of Ardran winter. Blessed Ardra. The clouds seemed thinner this side of the bridge, the air clearer…cleaner. Only my own anxieties thrummed my veins, not the muted violence and suffering that had tainted my every breath in Evanore. I felt as if a mountain had rolled off my back.
“Are you ill, Magnus? It’s been only a few hours since you renewed the damping spell.” Saverian slipped from her saddle, squinting at me as if I were a two-headed cow. She’d not spoken three words to me all day. Only diseases piqued her interest.
“On the contrary,” I said, wishing she weren’t watching as I lifted my mangled bum from the saddle and dropped to the ground. I winced, but managed not to groan aloud. “Both health and spirits seem much improved now we’re this side of the river.”
“Except for the posterior.” Her slanted brows mocked a frown and her small mouth quirked, as she cupped her hand beside her mouth and whispered, “However will you ride naked?”
Gods… A number of entirely crude retorts came to mind, but they would likely only encourage the creature. I vowed to ignore her and her odd humor.
Leaving the horses with Voushanti and the soldiers, we joined Osriel and Stearc beside Caedmon’s pillars. Thane and prince were arguing quietly. “…But you have too few men to protect you, lord.”
“Have the past three days taught you nothing?” snapped the prince. “You need to be out of sight. You carry the lighthouse ward. Remain at Gillarine until I give you leave to do elsewise.”
The thane stalked away, threw himself into the saddle, and barked a command. He and his five men mounted up and soon vanished into the valley of the Kay.
“Are you ready to proceed, my lord, or do you wish to wait for morning?” I said, removing my mask now Stearc’s men were gone. Voushanti, Philo, and Melkire had dismounted and were sharing a skin of ale with Saverian. The prince sat on a stained block of marble fallen from the shattered columns.
“We go now. I’d rather not push our luck with the weather.”
“All I know to do is try to find the Sentinel Oak and seek a way to take us past it. I gather we’ve brought no nivat?” Though my voice remained determinedly neutral, conscience and resolution battled the guilty hope that he would contradict me. Would he dare tell me if they had it?
“No nivat.” The prince rubbed his neck as if to ease the stiffness. “What need to lure the Danae into our lands, when your talents can take us into theirs? I trust we’ll have no inflated illusions today.”
Relieved, yes, truly relieved, I told myself, I sought some trace of good humor in this reference to my artful past. But none of Gram’s wry humor or controlled excitement leaked from under Osriel’s thick cloak and hood. He manifested only this passionless determination I’d seen throughout this journey.
Voushanti commanded Philo, Melkire, and Saverian to remain with the horses, while he, Gram, and I ventured onward. A few hundred querae from the bridge, I halted. Time to keep my promise to Elene.
“My lord, perhaps we should discuss how we’re to approach the Danae. If I could but understand the terms of your discussion, what exactly we are seeking from them, what’s to happen on the solstice…”
“That is not your concern. The time for discussion has passed.” And that was that.
I could have refused to take him farther, but I had no means to weigh the world’s need against Elene’s fears. If I postponed my leaving, stayed close if and when this meeting took place, then perhaps I could glean Osriel’s purpose.
“It is my concern, lord, as your contracted adviser and as a fellow member of the lighthouse cabal. Eventually we must and will discuss it. For now, for the Danae’s safety and our need for understanding, I’ll fulfill our bargain.”
I knelt and touched my hands to earth. At first I sensed nothing beyond the scrape of snow crystals on my wrists and cold grit under my palms. A momentary panic struck me that Saverian’s medallion had left my bent useless. But she had insisted that it should not, and as distasteful as her arrogance might be, she had convinced me of her competence.
I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with the cold air, imagining its pungent clarity sweeping aside all worries of Elene and Osriel, of lost souls and abducted children, of familial lies, gravid warnings, and looming birthdays. My fingers prickled and warmed, and I swept my mind across the frozen ground.
Beneath the wind-crusted snow lay a mat of yellowed grass and dormant roots, clotted with damp soil and stones. Sheep had grazed here along with deer, elk, and horned goats come down from the mountains. The beasts left a threadwork of trails down to the willow brakes and fens of the Kay. Human hunters, trappers, and other travelers had beaten two paths across the meadow—one leading down the valley toward villages, abbeys, and cities, the other up the bald rocky prominence to the thick-walled castle men named Fortress Groult. At the conjunction of these paths lingered the faint warm residue of sorcery.
Not much magical structure remained of my illusion—a knotty stump magically inflated from an astelas vine, meant to convince Gram and Stearc that I could read my grandfather’s book of maps. Yet two months ago that cheat’s ploy had spanned the barrier between true life and myth, between the realm of men and Aeginea. On a meadow with naught growing taller than my knee, I had glimpsed an oak tree with a trunk the breadth of my armspan and a canopy that could shelter a small village, and my companions and I had encountered a Dané female with moth wings on her breasts. I had yet to understand how I’d managed such a feat, but I hoped to repeat it.
My magic enveloped the spot of warmth. Recalling the great tree’s particular shape and the wonder I had felt upon seeing it, I sought some trace of a Danae presence upon the land, some evidence of the juncture of two planes that existed here.
The frozen world, the whickering horses, my companions, and my fears receded, and my mind filled with an abundance of the familiar and mundane—the paths of ancient sledges drawn up the hill to build the fortress, the remnants of siege engines and destroying raids, the blood and pain humans left everywhere they walked. Sounds, smells, tastes echoed the richness of the land and its history. Trees had once populated these terraced meadows: maples and oaks, spruce and fir, white-trunked birch. I concentrated, stretched, delved deeper…
…and came near drowning in music. A legion of musicians must have walked here, leaving behind songs in varied voices…a pipe, a harp, a vielle, some instruments unknown to me…everywhere random snips of melody that on another day would fascinate and delight. But on this day the pervasive music distracted me, and I pushed past it…deeper yet…until I felt the weight of the land, the slow-moving rivers of the deeps, the impenetrable roots of the mountains.
Puzzled and anxious, I reminded myself to breathe amid such ponderous life. Yet I sensed more in the deeps: heat…circling movement…stone dissolved in eternal fire…
I backed away quickly. No beings left traces so deep as this. No presence I’d a mind to encounter. I retreated to the veils of music, each melody as rich and holy as plainsong, of marvelous variety, yet not intruding one upon the other, as if designed—
Understanding blossomed like an unfolding lily. Brother Sebastian had taught me that plainsong was a medium of prayer—bearing the petitions we would submit to the gods—and also a mode of prayer—a state of mind that exalted the soul and opened our thoughts to heaven. I focused my inner eyes and ears upon the music as if squinting to see differently or angling my head to pick up fainter sounds, and I began to see and hear and feel what I had previously gleaned in random glimpses and snippets. As blue sigils upon smooth flesh, traces more numerous than
the paths of deer had been drawn on the land’s music, circling, dividing, rejoining. The earth’s music served as the favored medium of the earth’s guardians—their paint and canvas, their clay—opening the mind and senses to the deepest truths of the world. Danae shaped paths of music, imposing harmony…patterns…where they walked. No single thread laid across the landscape, but many silver threads that joined and divided and crossed one another. And now the path lay before me, I, Janus de Cartamandua’s son, could surely walk it.
I jumped to my feet. “Follow me.”
Mesmerized, I strode across the snow-clad meadow toward a spreading oak that had not yet shed its russet leaves. When at last I touched its bark, I marveled that the great bole’s rugged solidity did not waver or vanish. Laughing as would a man freed from the gallows, I pressed my back to the trunk and peered at the hazy blue sky beyond the spreading canopy—no longer winter evening, but autumn afternoon. The chill that nipped my skin tasted of fruit and wine. Then was my attention captured by the prospect beyond the shaded circle.
Earth’s Holy Mistress… Bathed in the steep-angled sunlight, the land fell away in the familiar giant’s steps to the river valley far below. But here, the grass was not crushed with early snow. Rather it rippled in golden, ankle-high luxuriance. The great forests of the Kay, thicker, taller, stretched well beyond the boundaries I knew, so that swaths of red-leaved maples, of deep green spruce and fir and russet oak lapped even these upland slopes and spilled onto these grassy meads. A kite screeched and dived from the deepening sky, only to soar upward in an arc of such exultant grace as to bring a lump to my chest.
No evidence of the human travelers’ road scarred the autumn landscape. No warriors’ refuge had been hacked from the rocky pinnacle where Fortress Groult had loomed only moments before. I spun in my tracks. No human work existed anywhere within my sight, nor did any prince, warrior, physician, or beast.
“Lord Prince!” I called, hurriedly retracing my path toward the gorge, out from under the tree…back from golden afternoon to indigo evening and snow. When Osriel and Voushanti came back into view, standing not twenty paces from the barren crossroads, I grinned and beckoned, shouting as the wind billowed my cloak. “You’d best stay close!”
Osriel’s eyes gleamed as hard as garnet. The deep twilight left Saverian, the soldiers, and the horses as anonymous smudges by the broken pillars of the bridge approach. “You’ve found your way, then? We lost sight of you.”
“Ah, lord, it is a wonder…” Osriel’s somber visage stilled my desire to babble of music and sunlight. As did Elene, I feared his soul already lay beyond the rock gate without hope of heaven.
Reversing course toward the oak, I walked more slowly this time, relishing the passage, feeling the land and light shift all around me. I sensed a strip of woodland to my left before I could see it, smelled the intoxicating air of Aeginea while human paths yet lay beneath my feet. Voushanti’s mumbling told me he saw the tree well after it had come into my view.
When we reached the tree, Osriel touched the craggy bark, and his gaze explored the spreading canopy. It grieved me that I could read no wonder in him.
“I would venture the opinion that we stand in Danae lands, Lord Prince,” I said softly, as the dry leaves rustled in the breeze, a few drifting from the branches above us, “and that the meeting you have sought is at hand.” For indeed another marvel awaited us.
Striding upslope from the valley were five Danae, their elongated shadows gliding across the rippling grass as if they flew. A big, well-muscled male led the party, his ageless face reflecting unbounded hauteur. A wreath of autumn leaves rested on a cascade of rust-colored hair that fell below his slender waist. A female walked alongside him. Though taller than most human women, she appeared but a wisp beside his imposing height and sculpted sinews. The skin beneath her blue sigils glowed the softest hue of sunrise, and a cap of scarlet curls framed her delicately pointed face. Her lean body spoke of naught but strength.
Slightly behind these two, almost as tall as the male, walked the disdainful female we had met here two months ago—she whose angular face was scribed with a coiled lizard, her flat breasts with intricately drawn moth wings. The Sentinel, Gram had named her. Woodrush and willow, mold and damp—did I truly catch her scent at such a distance or was it but memory?
These creatures value human life less than that of grass or sticks, I reminded myself, summoning disdain and repugnance, lest the empty yearning of that magical night overwhelm me again.
Two other males trailed behind. They seemed younger, less…developed…than their leader. Or perhaps that was only my assumption as they had no sigils marked on their unsmiling faces. They carried bundles in their arms.
“Let us walk out, Valen. Best let them see us.” The prince’s command startled me, and my feet obeyed without consulting my head for a reason not. Osriel and I stepped beyond the oak canopy together, Voushanti so close behind I could feel his breath on my neck.
The five Danae halted ten paces away, wholly unsurprised, as if they had come here purposefully to meet us. The hair on my arms prickled, as my true father’s warning crept into my memory: Go not into their lands ’til thou art free…not until eight-and-twenty. My belief that Danae other than Kol did not know me dulled with the fast-failing sunlight, for it could not be mere imagining that five pairs of aspen-gold eyes had fixed on me.
“Envisia seru, ongai…engai.” Prince Osriel inclined his head to the two in front.
“My lord,” I said softly. “What is—?”
“So a human knows of manners…and how to keep a bargain,” interrupted the small female as if I did not exist. The breeze wafted the sweetness of white pond lilies. “Awe embraces me. But I cannot return thy offered greeting. The sight of thee doth not delight my eye, Betrayer-son.”
“As ever, the long-lived honor their word,” said the prince, nodding coldly to the Sentinel. “Thus I presume it is Tuari Archon”—he acknowledged the male—“and his consort, Nysse”—and the female—“who honor me with their hearing. I regret that my presence offends. My sire reverenced the long-lived and their ways, and rued the division that grew between him and thee. As do I. As thine eyes attest, and the call of thy blood will surely affirm, I have brought thee that which was stolen.” His slender hand pointed at me.
No heat, no fire, no explosion of astonishment ignited my soul. Rather a deadly cold crept upward from my toes as floodwaters swamp a drowning man. This quiet betrayal should no more surprise me than should the sharp bite of Voushanti’s dagger now threatening to pierce my spine. Would I never learn? Ignorant, gullible, damnable simpleton. My family…my true parents…Luviar…Elene…Gildas…Osriel…they were all the same. Only a sentimental fool could have imagined that Osriel the Bastard, master of secrets, might possess some trace of honor and friendship and set me free as he had promised. A prince who had used an innocent boy to gain my oath of submission would not flinch at using me to gain—what?
“What is my blood-price, Lord Osriel?” I snapped before they could complete their inspection of me. “Now you’ve had your use of me, you might as well explain. At the least may it be some magic to avert the world’s end, for of a sudden I’ve lost all confidence that you are capable of illuminating your lighthouse for any Scholar. And I’d surely not wish my life to feed the evil that lies beyond Renna’s rock gate.”
He did not flinch. Neither did he offer me further assurances that my life was not at risk. “You will not be alone in your sacrifice,” he said.
The two younger Danae had glided to either side of us, cutting off what escape paths did not lie through the Danae or Voushanti’s knife. They laid aside what they carried—loops of braided rope tangled with some thick articles of wood—and stood alert. Watching me. Yet for that moment, as I met my master’s hard gaze, bitterness outflanked fear. “Perhaps those who have no sorry history as liars and renegades will be given a choice as to their sacrifice—along with the grace of their lord’s trust. Despite your dar
k mysteries…I would have served you willing, Prince, had you but asked.”
At that, a tinge of color did touch his cheeks. But he did not waver. “Life is pain,” he said. “Only movement—purpose—can make it bearable. As your life’s path has now brought you here, I’d recommend you summon what resources you possess to meet your fate. You are not helpless.”
He turned his back on me, opening his palms to the Danae in invitation. “Shall we proceed with our exchange? The day wanes. The world wanes. Our people suffer—both yours and mine. Our alliance promises hope for all of them.”
Tuari opened his palm in acceptance. “Let us walk, Betrayer-son. You bargained news of the Scourge.”
“There is a woman named Sila Diaglou,” said Osriel, moving to Tuari’s side. “She and her followers wish to return humankind to a primitive chaos…”
Heads together, the archon, his consort, and Osriel strolled into the evening meadow. Voushanti and the Sentinel trailed after them at a respectful distance. An owl soared through the air and settled on Moth’s shoulder—an owl just like the one that had tricked me and my companions into the bogs.
The two young Danae stepped toward me. At once Janus’s warnings took on a firm and terrifying reality. I’d come to Aeginea before turning eight-and-twenty, Osriel had mentioned sacrifice, and these two had muscles that looked like braided iron. No one was going to help me.
I bolted. I’d covered more than half the distance to the Sentinel Oak before one of them brought me down. Spitting grass and dirt, I slammed my elbow into the naked, wiry body on my back. He grunted, but did not let go. Writhing, twisting, I reached back in hopes of capturing the arm that was locked around my neck like an iron collar. I lifted my hip and bent my leg in unfortunate directions in an attempt to trap his feet. But my foot got tangled in my cloak, the Dané clung like a leech, and he caught my flailing arm with his free hand and pinned it to my side. His legs felt like steel ropes about my hips.