The impatient rose would have grown back...
A tear broke loose and crept down her cheek. As she brushed it angrily away, Mushroom looked up with a golden-eyed, sleepy blink, then stretched and curled into another position.
Over her journey that day, Tansel imagined the old wizard coming after her. She saw him in every tree and shadow; every noise in the forest sounded like a booted step, a voice, a command speaking her name. But he hadn’t followed her. Why would he have acted so kind, rescued her from Maetor and then taken her away only to let her return here without a word?
The Raven of Muin has not left this hall in three days, Sigen had said. What did that mean? An illusion? Maetor had told her the Raven was not there, which had to have been a lie, if Sigen spoke the truth. So what had happened to Maetor? Had the whole thing been some clever ruse to deceive her? Maetor might be alive even now, weaving some sinister spell from within that horrid red tower that would bring death to everything she touched.
Then she remembered the fang stone.
She got up and went outside. Withered stalks crunched beneath her feet as she crept to the northern side of the garden. She reached the spot and knelt. Moonlight illuminated the flipped-up rock and the earth where she had dug up the stone.
Her aunt’s words came to her: You must keep this hidden until you are ready to know the darkness. But Tansel had given the stone away, to a wizard, no less. While she didn’t give much weight to her aunt’s eccentricities, she now wished she had taken this one more seriously.
She stood up in despair. Her mother was right. Wizards were bad and she should never, ever trust one, never believe one, never look to a wizard for care...
She returned to her cottage and slammed the door so hard it shook the windows and the jars in the pantry. She went to her pallet, lay down and curled into a fetal position. She wanted to cry, to let something go inside like a spring flood breaking a dam left by winter storms. But she had never been able to afford such luxuries.
Eventually, she fell to sleep.
*
In the darkness, deeper than the night, deeper than roots and rain, deeper than the earth hiding the green-black stone, an old woman whispered, “Until you are ready to know the darkness.”
He emerged from the wind, fleeting and strange, with raven wings and flesh as smooth and white as velvet doves. He turned and looked straight through her with eyes the color of ice on a granite cliff, pale blue and empty as an eon. She had never seen anything so fair and yet so chilling.
She knelt to him, a dusk-colored petal falling in slow, suspended time to the earth. She held out her hands as the ache in her loins swelled like an incoming tide, one she knew but had never felt so overwhelmingly pleasant.
The being stepped forward, the muscles in his thighs rippling like the neck of a stallion. His wings rose, spread and settled in a fragrant whisper of rosemary and oak. “Innocence...” he breathed with a chasm sigh, his parted lips revealing the snow-pearl glint of fangs. His step vibrated in the earth with the rhythm of lovers entwined.
*
Tansel’s eyes snapped open. She sat up, her heart pounding wildly. Hoof beats. Mushroom sat by the door, facing it.
Someone was here.
Tansel jumped up in a rush of sparkling terror. She went for her pack, which she had not yet emptied, and rummaged in the depths for her knife. When she felt the antler handle in her hand, she pulled it out and whirled around. Only then did she realize she had no idea what to do with a knife besides cut up plants.
The hoof beats stopped. After a moment, steps approached the door.
“Mushroom!” she hissed. “Get away from there!” At the tone of her voice, the cat darted away, and then stopped as if baffled by her behavior.
“Tansel,” said a voice at the door. A soft knock rattled the wood. “Tansel.”
She lowered her knife and opened her mouth to speak. No sound came out.
The door creaked open. A tall figure stood there, in a black cloak, the dying firelight shining in his eyes and around the lines on his face. Tansel’s knife slipped from her fingers and clinked to the floor.
Mushroom released a friendly meow and walked to the Raven of Muin with his tail high and curling at the tip.
As the wizard stepped into the room, Tansel backed into the wall behind her, terrified by emotion. He held out his arms; on instinct, she went to him. He hugged her closely, old yet strong as a mountain. He smelled of horses and tree bark. “Forgive me,” he breathed into her hair. “I didn’t realize you had gone.” He lifted her chin. “I was trying to give you time to adjust.”
“Are you real? Sigen said—”
“I am real. Yesterday, too, only not in physical form. Do you understand?”
She shook her head.
“I came to you as an apparition.” He brushed a tear from her cheek with an anguished expression, as if it burned his fingers. “Now I’m here in flesh. Can you see the difference?”
Tansel recalled the strange things she had noticed about him the day before: his faint presence, the way he changed under her perception, the manner of his silence, his coldness and the way he moved. Now, he seemed more human. As her heartbeat began to return to normal, she withdrew from his embrace like a cat that suddenly didn’t want to be held anymore.
He closed the door. “Why did you leave?”
“I don’t belong there.”
The wizard moved to the corner on the other side of the hearth and lowered himself stiffly to the floor. He drew forth a leather flagon and tilted it to his lips for a long drink. He seemed suddenly frail, but when he looked up, his eyes held more than age; they held the fires that gave him power. “I’m not accustomed to visitors or people in the hall who need me,” he apologized.
“I don’t need—” She bit off the word you.
“You are strong, Tansy,” he said gently. “But—”
“Don’t call me that.” She walked to the pallet and sat with her arms wrapped around her knees. For some reason, she recalled the wizard’s words from the day before: Tansy will obey you...if you know the words.
“Very well,” he soothed. “Tansel. Though you are strong, you are young. There is much about the world you don’t understand.”
“I can manage.”
“I know you can. But that’s partly because you’re innocent of what’s out there.”
Her dream surfaced like a shape on the wind. Innocence... She leaned over, grabbed a piece of wood and tossed it onto the flames. Sparks crackled up into the darkness.
The wizard’s presence filled the corner of the room like a bottomless lake. “I’m not going to abandon you.”
Without thinking, she said, “You haven’t been with me. How can you abandon me?”
He fell silent for a long time, his head bowed as if under a great weight. She felt a stab of remorse. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Master—would you like tea?”
He looked up, his expression as wild as a garden left to grow for generations with no loving hand but that of the passing seasons. Finally, he said, “I ask you, humbly—as an old man and not a wizard—that you come and live with me in Muin. I’ll not leave you there alone again unless you wish it. On my word.”
“Your garden scares me,” she confessed.
He smiled faintly. “When we return, we’ll go into the garden together. I can teach you things that will make it less scary.”
Her heart lifted. “Very well.”
“Sleep now. I’ll rest here with you.”
“Do you need a blanket?”
“I am fine.”
Yawning, Tansel lay down and pulled her only blanket over her body. The Raven of Muin pulled his hood over his face, leaned back and grew as still as a dungeon shadow.
In the silence, Tansel began to drift. As an old man and not a wizard. Her breathing deepened. Wizards, like tansy, were all she knew of men; all men were wizards to her. They did not stay well. But an old man? That felt more like an oak tree with a strong trunk an
d branches spreading out in all directions. The oak tree sheltered the earth, shaded the garden path and gave homes to small creatures.
The oak tree stayed.
*
In a warm burrow sheltered by blackberries and grass lay a snowshoe hare. She had returned with the dawn, her belly full of fiddleheads and clover, and slept.
She awoke with a start, warm, alert, her heart thumping like a birch leaf shimmering in the breeze. Darkness moved in the forest. It flew by like the wind, unseen but felt. She twitched. Positioned in her resting place for escape in the event that a predator came upon her, she sprang out and came to rest in a soft bed of ferns.
The runways around her burrow were well worn from her tracks as well as those of woodchucks, red squirrels, dormice and an occasional skunk. She moved again, a hop, a pause, huddling under brush and fallen trees until she came upon the stone hut by the dead garden. Silence cloaked the clearing.
The sun fled behind a passing cloud. A shadow darker than the hollows beneath hemlock roots moved in the space between.
She spoke a word and changed. She pressed her sleek body to the ground and flattened her ears, her feline gaze unwavering as it discerned the unseen.
The air moved by the door of the cottage. From between the realms, the crowharrow materialized. He spread his shining black wings into an eclipse that obscured the entire hut, and then folded the feathery mantle behind his body. His hair hung in twisted, shining strands around his face and shoulders. Moss clung to his waist and thighs.
He stood before the door, his lips working words even a cat’s ears couldn’t hear. He lifted his face to the sky, fangs bared and glinting, and softly cried, “Innocence.” He spoke in the tongue of no making, the first tongue. As the word came clear, the cat’s fur rippled into a ridge down her back to the end of her tail.
The crowharrow raised a bare, muscled arm and slammed his fist upon the door, shattering it. The cat hissed and bolted into the forest. In the distance, the crowharrow stormed inside the hut, tearing it apart in a cyclone of breaking glass, splintering wood and cracking stones.
She spoke another word and fluttered into the sunlit air. She circled around in an arc, swiftly maneuvered through the tangled wood and alit in the top of an ash tree near the stream behind the cottage. There, she watched through the tiny black eyes of a chickadee.
No sound came from the cottage. After a moment, her senses caught movement: a rustle, a cry. Another moment passed. The crowharrow appeared at the door and leaned out, holding the frame on either side. He breathed heavily, his hair hung in his face and tears glistened in his eyes. “Innocence,” he rasped. He folded his tall wings down and squeezed through the opening like a moth emerging from a cocoon. Then he took to the sky in a bound and vanished into the Otherworld.
The chickadee hopped from the tree, swooped down before the cottage door and spoke a word.
Aradia stood up shakily. She fought off a wave of nausea, and drew several deep breaths to calm her heart as she took in the broken door, shattered windows, trampled dirt, containers, and broken furniture inside. This was impossible. The Old One had promised to protect Tansel. For seven years, the crowharrow hadn’t crossed into the physical dimension.
Aradia breathed heavily as the Old One’s words returned to her. You must give me her innocence. The crowharrow had come looking for innocence. He wanted it as badly as he had wanted his lost voidstone.
Aradia stepped over the threshold and peered inside. The immortal had demolished the interior as if to extract Tansel’s soul from the structures of her things. Chilled to her source, Aradia wondered if he had finally come looking for the stone. But why now? And why would he...
Her questions gave way to blood-draining comprehension as she noticed the pallet in the corner of the room.
She crept through the wreckage to Tansel’s simple bed. The morning sun streamed through the broken window and illuminated the indentation of her body. A silvery, cooling mess of male seed glistened there.
Aradia backed away, tripping on a broken chair that sent her tumbling in a clamor to the floor. She jumped up and fled like a frightened animal. When she reached the path, she fell to her knees, tore her skirt and hair with her fingers and wept. “You tricked me!” she screamed at the ground, the water, the sun and sky. She loosed a harrowing cry that flushed a charm of finches from the trees.
Relinquish all expectation. For the first time, Aradia understood her grandmother’s warning. It was said, among the wise, exchanging favors with the Old One was a tricky business best left to priests and priestesses who, in their studies, had fallen, drowned and been transformed by the fires of darkness. But love and grief had made Aradia unwise. She had made a promise to Maern that the crowharrow would now fulfill by taking not only Tansel’s innocence, but also her life—and Aradia’s sacrifice, in return for seven short years of safety, was to accept it.
When the time comes, you will know.
The time had come. But Aradia couldn’t bear knowing this. Her mind gave way like an intricate old clock blown apart under the force of a swift kick, never to be put back to rights. She got up, spun around and laughed wildly. She struck herself in the face. Then she spoke a word and as a she-wolf ran, howling and crazed, from the clearing and into the cool forest shadows.
*
Eaglin and Lorth rode in the growing light of the rising sun, their horses’ hooves striking the earth in pounding rhythm. They had stopped in the wee hours long enough to rest, and then continued as dawn breathed upon the eastern skies.
Unease clouded Eaglin’s heart. During what sleep he had wrested from the night, he had dreamed of a tall winged shadow haunting the forests of Loralin. A fleeting shade, a soft sound only a cat would hear and a driven need that felt like sex, blood and death—the hallmarks of a sioros’ soul—the dream rattled him so deeply that he couldn’t doubt its authenticity. The shadow that had fallen on his heart in the Waeltower had begun to feel less like a shadow and more like an oncoming night.
One of the first things apprentices learned under the Eye concerned the interconnectedness of all things. And while even the most seemingly unrelated, deranged experience had a connection to a pattern somewhere, mystery reigned: some fragments, dreams, or feelings never made sense. Eaglin had once defined mystery as a measure of how far into the Void a wizard’s mind could reach. But the heart defied that. Where consciousness met the Old One, there lay the darkest mysteries, where boundaries blurred and connections slept beneath a fog.
As if to remind him of this, his darkest memory continued to haunt him. In the silence of a pause, an absence of thought, he fell before his mother’s hand.
We found her in the river.
Eaglin considered the hunter by his side. Lorth had mastered the darker mysteries; he understood the implacable nature of death, cycles, and balance. How could he ever have known innocence, to do the things he did? And yet, no creature, even an assassin, could avoid the Old One’s glance for long. The hunter’s presence had to be a piece in the puzzle, but Eaglin couldn’t fathom how, aside from his discomfort with Lorth’s wolfish ways and general disregard for the finer details of the Eye in the practice of his arts. Lorth introduced mystery into everything around him.
Someone was about to die, ache or bleed. Maybe all of them would, in one way or another. His mother had once told him, in her eerie, offhand way, that whenever an immortal such as a sioros came into view of mortals, they would be deeply changed in some way. It involved the wide, sweeping shift of an encompassing event, like a solstice, a destructive storm, a plague; a cycle that included many smaller cycles, like a mechanism gated by the widest turn of a larger wheel.
The afternoon sun cast long shadows in the forest when Eaglin’s nervousness finally broke the surface. “Do you feel this?”
Lorth turned without surprise or indication that he had been asked an odd question. “I can’t recall the last time I saw you so cagey and spooked. What’s wrong?”
“I feel somethi
ng that I can’t see the nature of.”
The hunter breathed a laugh. “I assume most things are like that, for you.”
Eaglin glanced at him. “Not like this. Feels like the Destroyer.”
“So?”
So? Eaglin echoed sourly. “When was the last time you had to protect a girl?”
Some moments passed before Lorth spoke. “I failed at that, once. It was a bad enough experience that I haven’t repeated it.”
“Were you protecting her from the Destroyer?”
“From men. But a sioros is not a man.”
“He’s worse. A sioros is the embodiment of male force, its darkest aspects, the Destroyer as a male being. He is the gods’ expression of those things within us that we think little of until a woman comes along and makes us aware of them: aggression, predatory instinct, lust. It is said the sioros is the Old One’s lover, the most sacred creation in her black domain. Having seen one, I’ll tell you I’ve never beheld anything that struck me with such awe or that made me so afraid of myself.”
“Consider what a woman would feel to look upon him.”
You did not understand that you cast the shadow of a god.
Eaglin reined in Sefae and rode down into a thick stand of hemlocks on the western side of the road.
“Where are you going?” Lorth said. He sat on his mount wearing a casual expression of inquiry.
“Something’s wrong,” Eaglin called up. “I need to see what it is before I go mad. Help me find some water.”
After a pause, Lorth entered the forest in a thumping rustle of hooves and shifting brush. They rode through the trees for a short distance until they reached a small stream dancing over a mossy ledge with beech roots winding over it. The water burbled into a pool at the base of the rocks. Eaglin dismounted and let Sefae drink from the pool; Lorth did the same with Freya. As the hunter led the horses away to graze, Eaglin knelt before the water.
“What are you going to do?” Lorth asked as he returned.
The Winged Hunter Page 6