The crowharrow’s voice echoed in the hollows of her heart as she drifted to sleep.
The empty crag stood like an insatiable ache at the center of the universe. Birch trees surrounded it. The sun above and the moon below shone up and down in geometric symmetry, illuminating the forest, painting it with shadows.
A raven fluttered onto the crag, its midnight feathers soft and shining. It released a rough cry and flew away, into the void. In its wake, a man cloaked in black watched with eyes the color of moss. The sun and moon cast a long, winged shadow at his feet that stretched across the space and struck the yearning earth again and again and again—
Tansel awoke with a start.
Someone pounded on the door.
She sat up. Wind drove rain against the windows. The room was cold; the fire had faded to a glowing coal covered by ash. She had slept for hours.
The knocking repeated. Tansel cleared her throat and called out: “Come!” The door at the top of the stairwell creaked open and then slammed, causing her to jump. She pushed herself to the edge of the bed and rubbed her eyes as someone came down the stairs.
“Well look at you now!” Sky exclaimed in a grackle tone. She stood with her arms akimbo, her cheeks aflame. Her brown eyes swept over the mess around the bed like an old thorn broom. “I expected you’d be working at least, but instead I see...” As she came closer and nudged the bloody rag Tansel had tossed on the floor with her foot, her expression changed. “What have you been doing?”
Tansel grew still inside. Somewhere in her gut, a rose-colored beam touched the garden. “None of your business,” she returned.
Sky’s eyes widened as she opened her mouth and bobbed her head. “Oh, isn’t it now? You come into my kitchen and leave a mess all the day for me to clean up and now I find you in here—”
Tansel stood with a crisp lift to her chin that silenced the other woman like a slap. “I said it’s none of your business. I’ll clean up your kitchen. Now get out of my room.”
“The Master will hear of this.”
Tansel breathed a small laugh as anger burned in her blood. The focusing stones outside gathered light and channeled it into her body with the force of missing fathers and cats, wounded aunts and frustrated lust; it welled up around the lines and spaces, light and void, crags, wings, stars and white rose buds—
“Who do you think you are?” Sky demanded.
“I am the gardener.”
She released the beam. Red fire shot out from her belly, lit the room, and knocked Sky clear off her feet. She landed hard and continued to slide a pace across the floor on her rump. Once she gathered her wits she cried, “You’ll answer for this you little witch! When the Master hears you’re—”
“Get OUT!” Tansel screamed.
“—using power against the—”
Tansel picked a jar from a small table near the bed and threw it at the other woman as hard as she could. It missed and hit the far wall in a shattering explosion of nightshade-chamomile salve that splattered the corner by the stairwell and sent glass raining into the room.
Sky stumbled up and fled.
The red beam subsided, and then drew back into Tansel with a snap. She swayed on her feet as power flooded around her like something too heavy to hold. She dropped to her knees, grappled for the bed with a gasp and then collapsed into the fiery void of a silent moon.
*
Tansel awoke to the rhythmic sound of brushing on the floor. She lay crumpled by the bed; her back hurt and one leg had fallen asleep beneath her. The floor around the bed had been cleaned; a bucket sat nearby, full of rags, plates and broken glass. The air smelled of salve. She pushed herself up and cleared her throat.
Her aunt looked up from her sweeping. She wore one of Tansel’s shirts. She had wrapped her leg in a fresh dressing, and had cleaned and combed her hair; it cloaked her shoulders in a thick mass of mousy cobwebs.
“It’s in your blood,” she said.
“What?”
“That temper of yours, for one—and the ability to call light.”
“Master has been teaching me things.” She hesitated, and then added, “Sky is a magpie.”
Her aunt cracked a smile. “Did he teach you that?”
“Na, I figured that out on my own.” She shook her tingling, prickling leg to bring the feeling back. Then she noticed a covered tray on the table by the hearth; apparently, Sigen had brought her evening meal despite her scrap with Sky. Ravished, Tansel went and lifted the cover to find a pie. She picked it up and bit into it. It was stuffed with meat, parsnips and carrots. She sat down, and with her mouth full asked, “Where did you go, earlier?”
Her aunt tossed her head towards the garden.
“Is the crowharrow after you too?” Tansel asked without thinking.
The crone didn’t respond except to peer at Tansel strangely for a moment. She scooped up the rest of the glass, limped to the bucket and dropped it in. Then she straightened her back and set the broom aside. “Do you know where the fang-stone is?”
Tansel took another bite of pie as she recalled her visit to her aunt, years ago. The woman must have known that the crowharrow had taken Tansel’s mother. Until you are ready to know the darkness.
“Master told me I wasn’t supposed to have that.”
Aradia snorted. “None of his business. Where is it?”
“How should I know? He took it.”
The crone looked annoyed, but she didn’t speak of it. “I must stay here with you for a while.” Her expression turned blank. “To heal. I’ll not trouble you. I’ll stay in the garden.”
Tansel glanced at the dark gray landscape outside. “Stay where?”
“My child, I have lived in the wilds all my life. Your little garden is nothing to me but a nice, safe, place.” She articulated the last word with weird stretched lips.
Tansel set her pie aside. “At least stay here in my room near the fire until your leg grows a bit stronger.”
“And risk one of your admirers coming in here for you?”
Tansel rolled her eyes. “I don’t think they’ll come now. And the Master will not come unless I call him. He’s good about that.”
Aradia barked a laugh. “Och! I should say he is. But never you mind. I’ll be fine.”
“Why are you hiding from him?”
“Because he hides from himself,” she replied crisply.
Before Tansel had a chance to ask her to clarify that, the crone moved away and said something strange. She appeared to blur, and then a small brown cat scurried across the floor, holding up one back leg and trotting on three. It slipped through the door, which Tansel had left ajar for the other cats, and ran into the night.
In the blood.
“Do find Mushroom while you’re out there,” Tansel muttered.
*
The moon waned, and Tansel with it.
She got up every morning, went out in her bedclothes to the white rose patch beneath the empty crag, stared at it, and then returned to her room in sadness, her hope destroyed like something fresh and beautiful that renewed itself each night only to die with the dawn.
She hadn’t called the wizard. She hadn’t returned to the kitchen to clean up her mess. Such things had drifted far away. She spent the days working in her garden: pulling weeds, trimming hedges, furrowing dirt, picking off dead leaves, setting stones in beds, watering seedlings, and arranging things for the birds. She didn’t do this because her heart moved her. She did it because it put her outside beneath the trees where the crowharrow prowled.
...Or used to prowl. It seemed he had lost interest in her.
She wore paths in the dirt between the bushes and beds to the northeastern corner of the garden where the white roses grew. She went there whenever she thought of him, to the point she no longer knew what she worked on or why. The continuity of gardening had been replaced by longing.
She rose in the middle of the night and fumbled through the inky darkness just to see if the crowharrow preferr
ed the wee hours. She told herself, as she peered up at the invisible crag, that he watched her from the shadows. But she felt nothing.
Her dreams grew deep and red. There, the crowharrow lurked just out of sight, his back turned or his face looking away, his wings hiding his body, or the trees covering him. She called out, but he didn’t answer.
One day, she finally mustered the nerve to go to the passage with the tapestries, hoping to see him watching her from the threads. Only the raven perched on the rock, inanimate.
On the eve of the new moon, Tansel sat by the roses, her loneliness and need complete. She sat on the cold ground until she couldn’t stand it anymore, and then tilted her face back and released an animal cry that rent the sky like a scythe. She had passed beyond hope; now, she begged. Still, the crowharrow didn’t come.
Another did.
“He’s hunting you,” a woman said.
Tansel whirled around, her gaze sweeping the garden and trees before coming to rest on her aunt, in human form. Tansel hadn’t seen the crone since the evening she left as a brown cat. No telling where the woman had gone or what she had been doing. No use asking, either.
“What do you mean?” She did ask that.
“He cast a spell on you. Then he withdrew to make you want him even more. When he calls you, you’ll not hesitate. This is what men do.”
“He’s not a man.”
Her aunt coughed up a laugh. “Foolish child. He is all things men are and worse.”
Tansel heard only one thing in her aunt’s bitter words: the crowharrow still wanted her. For the first time in a fortnight, her heart warmed with hope. She set her gaze on the crag painted by the setting sun. “Why?”
“It’s the way of Maern. One of two things will happen: either you resist him and lose your heart, or you go to him and lose your life. Either way, your innocence is his.”
Until you are ready to know the darkness.
Tansel turned to her. “How did you ever get to be so miserable? What happened that you’d condemn me to this—wasn’t it enough to lose my mother? Is this also in our blood? To fall to him?”
The crone said nothing for some time. As Tansel huddled there, she didn’t care if the old woman ever said anything to her again.
“You must understand,” her aunt said finally, with uncharacteristic gentleness. “That stone I gave you belongs to the crowharrow. He came for me to find it; now he’s after you.”
“I don’t have it anymore.”
“He’s not after the stone, now.”
Tansel didn’t bother feigning innocence; she knew what the crowharrow wanted. “I would rather die at his hands than feel like this another day,” she said honestly.
“Hmph. That would change, if he caught you.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“There’s nothing you can do.” The older woman drew near and put her hand on Tansel’s face. “Tansel, there’s something you need to know. Every woman in our bloodline is marked. Should you resist his lust, you may live for some time, long enough to bear another daughter, anyway, as my mother did. But eventually, he will claim you.”
“You escaped him,” Tansel pointed out.
“Only temporarily.”
“He wants me because I’m marked?”
Her aunt shook her head, as if exasperated. “If your life were all he wanted, he would have killed you already—he had a thousand chances, being what he is. He wants your innocence, now.”
Tansel looked at the empty crag. Why did her aunt’s words have no effect on her? The garden, the hall and her body had become a prison from which she thought only of escape. “He’s so beautiful. He wouldn’t hurt me. He wants to—”
“Aye, Tansel, he does, but—”
They both turned as something stirred behind them, enveloped in a crackling wind. Tansel jumped to her feet as the Raven of Muin came forward, his eyes dark as indigo storms and his face set into the most terrible expression of wrath she had seen since the day he had turned Maetor into an insect.
“Aradia,” he said quietly, in a voice that caused the very garden to withdraw and hide its head.
*
Tansel had always felt a kind of suspicion towards wizards, and though she sensed that her aunt, like her mother, possessed even less regard for the breed, she hadn’t understood how deeply this went until Aradia stood up like an angry bear spoiling for a fight.
Tansel stepped back. She didn’t know what to do. To her mind, it was never a good idea to anger a wizard, regardless of how one felt about him.
“How long have you been standing there?” Aradia demanded as the Raven towered over her.
“What are you doing here?” he returned. “You think to lure her away from me? Not enough for you and the rest to hate me for three generations? Where does it end, Aradia?”
“Och! It won’t end until you’re laid in the ground, Caelfar! You defy the Old One by keeping Tansel here.”
The wizard boomed, “Who was it gave her a sioros voidstone? You marked her to him, now he wants her and you dare hide behind the Old One to me? Isn’t that—”
“It’s my—”
“—just what you’ve done all these years? As if I felt nothing, knew nothing of love.”
She spat. “Love? Is that what you call it? Abandoning us to this?”
He did not abandon me, Tansel thought lamely.
“I never abandoned you! Kalein didn’t want me. She wanted him—an immortal. He would have killed her! What was I supposed to do?”
“I know what you did, Caelfar,” she said in a low, dangerous voice, as if in pain. Tears streaked her face. The Raven’s face, in contrast, was as cold as the empty crag beyond the garden wall. An old row, this. It was embedded in their hearts like a fang-shaped thorn. Tansel wondered how long it had been bleeding there.
“You know nothing,” he said. “You made a deal with the Old One that marked my very last girl—you never told her anything, never took any part in her life but that—and now you slink into my realm and encourage her to go to him?”
“I wasn’t doing that, you old fool!”
“Pah!” he scoffed. “I saw you respond to the hope in her voice. Her first thought is always to run, to escape protection and you’d have preyed on that like a wolf! I will protect her now, Aradia. You’re not welcome here.”
The old woman wagged a finger at him. “You’ve no power over Maern! You’re blind. And you’ve no power over the crowharrow either, for all your spells. She is marked.”
Tansel stumbled back into the roses, not caring as the thorns tore into her thighs.
“A fate to which you cast her, for your selfish ends!” the wizard said. “Now I see what you promised the Old One. You promised her Tansel’s life, didn’t you? Would you give her to him just to punish me, as your grandmother and mother did?”
What? Tansel shook her head, hating everything about this.
“You violated her with child!” the crone shouted. “The Old One knows.”
“Violated?” he roared. “You dare say such a thing to me! I loved her! She forbade my involvement!”
Tansel ran.
“You drove her right to him!” her aunt cried. “And for your meddling, he cursed us all!”
“That’s a lie.”
“You son of a—”
In a blur, Tansel fled from the last of her family, their angry voices, fiery eyes, pointing fingers and the scream of bad magic between them. She ran through the scary garden until once again, she reached the center pool with the beautiful fishes.
Tansel sank to her knees beneath the specter of her great grandmother gazing from beneath a stony cowl. Rose light from the Raven’s tower shone upon the surface of the pool. But no light touched the shapeshifter’s shadow staining the green-black water like a rippling tear.
Caelfar’s Daughters
Eaglin’s horse felt the call before he did. The stallion spooked and danced about on the rocky slope overlooking the Erusin River roughly a hundred m
iles southeast of Loralin Forest. Rocks loosened and thundered into the trees below. Eaglin used Aenspeak to calm the beast, but this only managed to keep the animal from skidding down the slope.
Lorth reined in behind him. “What did your mother do to that horse?”
Eaglin breathed heavily against the pain in his side. “She made a right rogue of him, that’s what.” He clicked Sefae ahead, guiding the horse into the shelter of the trees. Lorth followed.
A cool breeze whispered in the boughs of aspens, drawing them into a shimmering wave. Eaglin dismounted and rubbed his forehead, which tingled with high-vibration light. He walked stiffly away from the horse and faced northwest.
Lorth rode up and slid from his mount. “What’s happening?”
Eaglin held out his hand as a powerful force swept over his chest. A river of images touched his mind: beautifully focused patterns of garnet red, heavily laden vines woven into a pentacle and a shining ray of light with a familiar essence. His airy body began to separate from its heavier physical counterpart. He lowered his hand, fingers splayed, to hold it in place.
“I’m being summoned.”
Eaglin! Lines of light swirled around his head and throat. Tension gathered in his solar plexus.
“Is it Caelfar?” Lorth said.
“Aye.” He glanced about, and then moved to a flat, sheltered place between the trees. He lowered himself to the ground. “He probably means to ask where we are.”
“Many days away still.” When Eaglin didn’t respond Lorth added, “Avoid the sioros this time, ay?”
“I’m going to focus inside the Formation Pentacle.”
A moment passed as the hunter stared. “You can do that?”
Eaglin hesitated as the fabric of time-space bent around his head. Why had he just revealed that? A Formation Pentacle blocked anything consciously focused above the grid, such as immortals and apparitions. Eaglin was no exception—but his secret gave him a door, the same shadowy opening that had enabled the sioros to hold him in his lair.
“Eaglin?” Lorth pressed, his brow lifted in question.
“I can do it. See to the horses. I shouldn’t be long.”
The Winged Hunter Page 12