She tore her face from his hand and struggled in his grip as the crowharrow knelt slowly, in male, muscular grace, his wings brushing the ground, his hand outstretched. The bulge between his thighs was ripe and full. He spoke to her in his ancient language, so beautiful and hypnotic that she wanted to float into his arms like a butterfly.
“Tansel,” said the warrior with the wolf eyes. He had appeared to the west. Something in his voice caused her to hesitate. “Your mother didn’t have the choice you do. He ran her down, tore out her throat and bowels and sang with joy at the taste of her blood. That is what he will do to you, if you cross that line.”
Caelfar turned and glared at him, as if angered by his insensitivity. But the warrior’s harsh words had the desired effect: at once, at the image of her mother lying in a gory heap on the forest floor, Tansel came to her senses. For a moment, the crowharrow appeared as what he was, a predator with no more regard for her than a towering plague.
She started like a hare into the safety of Caelfar’s arms. He drew her close and soothed her as the tears came. Where once survival depended on her not grieving, now it demanded that she did.
The warrior stood very still on the edge of the circle. The crowharrow had gone. His absence deepened Tansel’s grief, as if his departure and her mother’s death had become the same ugly thing.
Caelfar spoke several words that felt like a breeze. The warrior entered the circle and moved close. He touched Tansel’s chin with his finger of solid light and turned her face to look at him. His eyes were eerie, like something from another world. Despite her grief, she resented him for breaking her out of the crowharrow’s spell. It caused her tears to subside, coldly.
Mushroom appeared at the edge of the woods.
The warrior lowered his hand and turned to Caelfar. “I think you’ll be safe for a while. How far to Muin?”
“An hour.”
The warrior walked to the edge of the clearing and made a thin whistling sound. After a moment, Caelfar’s horse emerged from the forest, tossing its head about. The animal moved up to the apparition’s hand.
“Are you a wizard?” Tansel asked him.
He turned to her with a strange smile. “I am.”
“This is the Raven of Ostarin,” Caelfar told her. “He and another Raven are presently journeying to Muin. They’re going to help us.”
Tansel’s gaze settled on the crushed ferns where the crowharrow had just knelt in the most splendid display of need imaginable. “Help us with what?”
The men shared a glance. The warrior released a breath and said, “I’ll accompany you.”
“You should return to Eaglin,” Caelfar countered.
“He’s still in the dark. He’ll be there for a while after the blow he took. There’s little I can do for him until he awakes.”
The older wizard nodded. “Then we should go.”
The wolf-eyed apparition took the reins of the horse and held out a hand to Tansel in invitation. She caught him eyeing the sky as he helped her up.
*
Faint light shone on the endless sea.
Eaglin stirred to awareness. He might have stayed there for a while, held by the womb, if not for the sensation of cold. Like a shortage of time, its urgency bothered him. He spoke an Aenspeak command that caused his airy body to spin around and snap into place with an unnerving jolt, as if he had been yanked back by a chain. His focus didn’t change.
He opened his eyes to a towering canopy of shimmering leaves. It was not the forest where he had left Lorth and the horses.
He lay in a pile of bones.
Fear shot through him like an icy dart. Knowing better than to panic, he remained calm. The inner dimensions didn’t operate by the same rules as the physical; emotion and thought had an immediate effect and an untoward reaction could change everything, like stirring mud into a clear pool. Here, events tended to be symbolic, nonsensical, and failure to focus could leave him in a river of dreams impossible to decipher.
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, then brought his awareness to his identity, the one thing that didn’t change no matter what dimension he was in. He opened his eyes again.
Bones. He got up in a clatter, surrounded by the remains of humans, animals, things he couldn’t identify, in varying states of decay; some with flesh, fur, hair, feathers, nails or clothes still clinging to them, others on the verge of dust, having been here so long. Once he had extracted himself, he stood on a wooden path on one side of the pile, breathing heavily.
Beneath his feet, above his head and all around grew a mighty tree. Beyond its enormous boughs, wide and heavy enough to bear horses, lay distant lands. Every living surface formed part of a complex array of three-dimensional geometry. Carvings covered the bark, intricate patterns of spirals, lines and the shapes of nocturnal and predatory creatures including bats, snakes, wolves, wildcats and spiders. Small openings covered the branches and roots in place of an eye here, a claw there, the center of a spiral or the end of a knot.
A chill crept over Eaglin’s scalp as he discerned a deeper pattern in the work, another level of carvings inherent in it: the written form of the Dark Tongue. Unlike the spoken version of that language, however, in which sound bridged the chasm between formlessness and structure, the carved language was indecipherable. It changed meaning as he looked at it, depending on where he looked from point to point, what he thought or felt. It left his mouth dry and his knees weak.
The bone pile lay on a tight net of branches. Beyond it, the path went into a labyrinth of halls and passages. Below, layers and layers of boughs grew from a trunk the size of a castle tower. A short distance away, the tree opened up to a wide, arched opening woven into symmetrical patterns. It looked out high above the tree line onto snow-capped mountains.
Wind blew into the opening. A whistling sound began to vibrate in rich, complex notes caused by the wind moving through the holes in the tree carvings. The eerie, hypnotic sounds made him want to cover his ears or shake his head to clear a mist from his eyes. The wind subsided, returning the place to sublime, leafy silence. With his head ringing and his heart pounding, Eaglin suddenly realized where he was.
A sioros lair.
He dropped his forehead to his fingers and mouthed a curse. How could this be possible? From between his fingers, he eyed the bones and briefly wondered if Tansel’s mother Ana lay among them.
Just then, an enormous shadow swirled in the woven entrance. It flooded into the chamber, setting off the whistles into a sigh of recognition. Absurdly, Eaglin recalled something his mother had told him as a child, a nursery rhyme—a wizard’s nursery rhyme, she had joked. He hadn’t thought of it since, even when he had seen the sioros north of the Snow River as a young man.
Born of gods, a larger part;
Skies above the mountains.
Wings of crows, a darker kind; Wind between the worlds.
Maiden’s hand brings him,
Mother’s blood feeds him,
Destroyer’s smile bids him depart.
A nursery rhyme. As the sioros appeared before him, Eaglin reflected on the uselessness of everything he knew about his present situation, including that.
“Son of Ealiron,” the sioros rumbled in the Dark Tongue, his wings settling to the bones with a rattle. Eaglin remembered that his father’s name sounded the same in Dark Tongue as it did in every other language.
Eaglin moved away from the bones, stepping carefully on the bough to avoid slipping through a crack to the tangle below. “How am I here?”
The sioros bared his fangs. Not a promising response. The immortal rolled his head on his neck, stepped gracefully aside. When he spoke, his voice sounded like stones grating together in a rush of water.
“Your wisdom is lacking, Wizard.”
“Don’t toy with me. How am I here?”
The immortal predator’s gaze rested on him like the death of a world. “Through a cold place in the sea where you do not know Menscefaros.”
Menscefaros. The Dark Tongue word for the Old One; the oldest word; all things knew it, but few things, even wizards, could utter it. The sound caused the tree to stir. But Eaglin didn’t need to wonder what the sioros meant.
Evidently, the cold sea shadow on his heart had provided the sioros with a portal through which to capture him. “What do you want?”
The creature flexed his wings. Wind whistled through the lair in a song of deep longing. “You will free the maiden to me.”
Maiden’s hand brings him. That much of the silly rhyme was clear.
“Tansel is protected by Maern. You can’t have her.”
The sioros flashed a smile that looked like a silent scream, his fangs and icy eyes shining like a sword. “Fool. That agreement is broken. The maiden is mine.”
“If she were yours, she would be here,” Eaglin countered, throwing a glance at the bone pile. “You wouldn’t need me.”
“And yet I hold you.”
Eaglin let out his breath very slowly under the immortal’s triumphant gaze. He had a good point. If Eaglin were not in some way personally connected to this, the sioros wouldn’t have been able to capture him. He just had to figure out how and why.
The sioros said, “You will release her from Formation geometry.” The term in Dark Tongue caused a pentacle-shaped force to blow over Eaglin’s chest. “Swear to it, and I will release you.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” Eaglin replied pithily.
The sioros took a step in his direction. “You will.”
“I’m not marked. You can’t harm me.”
“I can keep you here until your body dies without you in it.”
“That would still mean my death at your hands.”
“Ah,” the sioros breathed. “But that will be something you chose. By Menscefaros, that allows me.”
Crafty. “I see. So either I die, or Tansel dies—after you rape her—all in the name of Free Will. Do you honestly believe I would let that happen, even to save my own life?”
“There are worse things than death, Wizard,” the sioros said softly. He peered sidelong through the black, twining tangles of his hair, the fingers of his hands splayed, long nails arcing. “If you choose this death, you will die to me in every existence you know, in every time line.” His fangs gleamed as he flashed a wide cat grin.
Eaglin stared. “I’m not choosing death to you. I’m choosing to protect Tansel. My death beyond the context of this is none of your concern. Only the Old One can mark me like that. It’s her domain.”
“The shadow on the sea gives me that power, Wizard.”
For the first time since the beginning of this conversation, Eaglin felt genuine alarm. Could this be true? The same blind spot on his heart that had enabled the sioros to capture him would also mark him in every existence he would ever know? He didn’t think so. A sioros would tell any sort of lie whatsoever to suit his purpose.
“You will not have Tansel by my hand,” he declared.
If the sioros felt surprise or anger by this decision, he didn’t show it. He lifted his chin with rapacious confidence and purred, “So be it.”
He turned, lifted his wings and vanished, leaving Eaglin in the ancient silence of the lair with the whistles and the bones.
Eaglin’s Shadow
Eaglin opened his eyes to the sioros’ lair.
He had dreamed of water. Briefly, he wished that this was a dream, though his training as a wizard told him otherwise.
He lay in a fetal position on a heavy bough that supported the woven gate near the bone pile. Shortly after the sioros had left him, Eaglin had explored the layout of the tree and discovered that the tangled paths inside the canopy grew into the shape of a pentacle roughly a quarter mile in diameter. Initially, he had assumed the lair was in another dimension, as he didn’t recognize the pattern of the wood, its leaves or the essence of its nature; nor had he ever imagined a tree so large growing in such a place. But as he had found each point on the star and looked out upon the lands around, he recognized them. He had seen these mountains and valleys while training in the arts of shapeshifting. As birds, he knew them from above. He had never seen this tree, however. While very high, it was sheltered by the peaks of the Sioros Mountains. It must have come from the stars, like the Om tree in Eusiron.
He pushed himself up with a shiver. A gibbous moon enshrouded by mist hung over the mountains. A storm gathered; the air smelled of the sea. As he had done several times already, he leaned out over the edge of the opening. A leafy, branchy cliff fell off some distance below and vanished into the top of a stunted forest that grew amid veins of roots. He withdrew, sat with his knees up and his arms draped over them, and hung his head. How long had he been here? He couldn’t be sure, but it hadn’t been too long. When his physical body in the forest began to thirst and starve, he would feel a pull followed by a sensation of distance and apathy. That hadn’t happened yet.
Sooner or later, Lorth would attempt to call him back. The hunter might even try to project here himself. But he would not succeed. Eaglin had chosen this, and no one could interfere.
Well, almost no one. He looked up as a familiar presence surrounded him.
The Aenmos stood before him, vast as an eon, fair as a star. “What are you doing?” the god inquired. His voice resonated in the tree, setting off the chimes with a faint song of love and question.
“Father.” As Eaglin stood up, he half expected to see the shadowy silhouette of the sioros flying in from the distance.
“He is not near,” the entity informed him quietly.
“He trapped me here,” Eaglin said.
“I know what he did. Why have you chosen to die? It is not your time.”
“Is it Tansel’s?”
The Aenmos stepped forward, his every move gracefully placed, his expression serene as new fallen snow. Eaglin felt his usual disorientation as he gazed into his father’s gray-green eyes, though in this state, his perception should have been clearer, easier to understand.
“Death is not as simple as you would make it,” the god said. “There are many ways to die, many ways to know the transition from one state of consciousness to another. Death is in all things. You do not fear it in its most obvious manifestation, but you do fear it in more subtle form. That is why you are here.”
“I don’t understand,” Eaglin replied, meaning it.
“This is not something I can explain. You must experience it.”
Eaglin shifted on his feet. The drop over the edge of the lair yawned behind him. “I’m doing just that. On the day I came to the Eyrie Waeltower, I saw a shadow in my heart. It felt like cold water in some vastness or depth. I’m here because of it. Is this not, then, my experience?”
“You are here to make a choice. You are choosing to die so that you can avoid another kind of death. That is not my choice for you.”
Eaglin lifted his chin. “My choices are just as valid as yours.”
“Of course. But you are making this one in pain and ignorance.” The god slowly folded his hands before him, and tilted his head in a beautiful gesture of thought. “You believe the sioros lied when he said dying here would mean giving yourself to him in all of your focused lives. Why?”
“The Old One decides how an aspect dies in each material life. It’s intertwined with the lives and choices of all things. The sioros doesn’t know all those connections.”
Ealiron gazed into his son’s eyes with crushing intensity. “He does not need to, Eaglin.”
“Do you mean to tell me he can do that?”
“He can.” His voice was soft, implacable.
“Sioros-marked in every existence?”
A slow, deliberate nod.
Eaglin turned and stomped from the shining aura of his father’s presence. “How is that possible? I am parallel focused—an entity incipient.”
“That is precisely why the shadow on your heart is no trifle. In the powerful, such awareness is paramount. Menscefaros would not reveal that to you out
of hand. You need to pay attention.”
“I am paying attention!” Eaglin protested. “You taught me that if one life isn’t important, then none are. That the balance exists by the integrity and choice of everything alive. The sioros will not let me leave this place unless I agree to give him Tansel. I can’t do that.”
“Is your life less important than hers?” the god asked.
“What choice do I have?”
“Answer my question. Do you think your life is less important than Tansel’s?”
Eaglin considered leaping off the bough just to see what would happen. “It’s certainly not more important. Tansel is innocent—I am not.”
“Now we come to it,” the god said behind him. “Innocence is not a static force, Eaglin. It cannot be separated from life and death; it is in cyclic motion with them, and one must pass through it. All things fall to the Destroyer.”
Eaglin turned around. “Are you asking me to hand over a maiden to a sioros?”
“It is not for you to decide.”
Eaglin threw his arm out to gesture to the lair. “Isn’t that why I’m here? That’s the choice I was given.”
“Perhaps. But it is not the choice you must make.” As the Aenmos vanished, his voice blew in on the wind. See to your shadow, Eaglin.
The night closed in as Eaglin sat on the edge of the sioros’ lair with his usual sensation that his father had never been there. But he had; for one thing, Eaglin knew fear. He hadn’t felt fear previously, even in the face of death.
He had sworn to Caelfar to protect Tansel. He had sworn it to himself. But he couldn’t die here, he knew that now. To be sioros-marked as a soul would deny him the purpose of his existence. His creator refused that—of course he did! Questioning his will was pointless. Ealiron saw the landscape from above like an eagle flying over it. He encompassed it.
How much worse would it be to die in every life at the hands of a sioros than to spend the rest of this life responsible for having given Tansel to him? If another choice existed, Eaglin didn’t know it.
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