Lorth knelt and held out his hand. “Fear not, Rhinne,” he said gently. “I am Lorth, Order of Raven, Master of the Eye. I’m here to help you.”
Her lips parted as she caught her breath. Beneath the turmoil of her outer appearance, Lorth perceived a maelstrom of anguish with no perceivable bottom. “They sent you,” she accused. “From the inn.”
“The men at the Shining Star were deceived. They meant you no harm. Are you hurt?”
She withdrew into her body with a protective grip. Lorth’s throat turned dry as he sensed the emotional energy of violation. Rape? He set his crystal down. “The one who attacked you is dead. He wasn’t just an assassin. He knew magic. Dark magic. I need to know what he did to you.”
She leveled her gray gaze on him as if to say, I know what he is. “He cut me,” she said, trembling like a bird. “Used my own sword.”
Lorth glanced behind him at the blade she had dropped. Strange. He turned back around. “Let me see. Please. I won’t harm you.”
She hesitated, then drew aside her cloak and turned around. Lorth took up his crystal and held it over her. Her dress had been cut and ripped away to expose the lower half of her spine. He reached up to part the fabric. As his hands touched her skin, she flinched. “Easy,” he soothed, holding aside the bloodstained cloth. Four long, thorn-like cuts arced over the small of her back in a symmetrical pattern with a gap in the center. Something virulent flowed out of it, as if the marks had created some kind of portal.
Lorth swore an oath to Maern under his breath. Eaglin is going to bring down Rothmar when he sees this. He drew her up and carefully wrapped her cloak around her. Then he retrieved the blade from the ground and returned to the light, holding it aloft to study it. It was very old, stunningly crafted and covered with intricate inscriptions. He loosened his wrist and swung it around to try its weight and balance. Flawless. He let his breath out slowly, moving his gaze to hers. “Where did you get this?”
She hung her head. “It’s mine.”
Lorth regarded her for a moment, sensing no deception. He returned to the body of the hunter. He removed the strap and scabbard, sheathed the blade and slung it over his shoulder. Then he opened his interior space and found the mind of Ecthor, a captain of the Order of Osprey who commanded a large company of Raptors that kept order in Caerroth. Ecthor, Lorth breathed into the familiar darkness.
Master Lorth, came the reply into his mind.
I found him. He projected an image of his surroundings. North side, near the old mill yard. Dispose of the body. Save all his clothes and personal effects. I’ll send someone for them later.
Aye, Master, the captain replied, and then withdrew.
Lorth cleared his mind and returned to his charge. She stood there, gazing at the moon setting through the trees. “Can you ride?” he asked her.
She nodded. “Where are we going?”
“We’ll care for your wound. Then you’re coming with me to Eyrie.”
She shook her head. “I—can’t. I have to get home.”
Lorth stepped close. “Would this be the same place your hunter came from?” When she didn’t respond, he assumed it for true. While he didn’t wish to frighten her further with what he had learned, he sensed a wild strength in her that would drive her to do something reckless if she didn’t have a good reason to stay under his protection. He said:
“Perhaps you aren’t aware to what lengths he went to flush you out and isolate you. He paid a messenger to go into the Shining Star and accuse them of harboring a traitor to the Gray Isles. After leaving Geeta dead in the kitchen under a spell that made her appear in your image, he killed Sirion to silence what he knew of your whereabouts and then sealed your door so no one could see you. He knew you well enough to presume you’d make a run for it. Believing you dead, our men had no reason to search the city for you. If I hadn’t arrived and broke the spell on Geeta they would have sailed her body back to Tromb.”
Rhinne gazed up at him, pale as wax, her lips parted and her heart beating rapidly at the base of her throat.
His point made, Lorth continued, “I suggest you lay low under our protection for a while.” Until I can figure out who you are, he added privately. He guided her in the direction of the street. “Perhaps you can tell me what that hunter wanted from you.”
“Nothing.”
Lorth glanced at her. “If he wanted nothing he would have killed you in the inn with none the wiser.”
She gazed ahead, silent as a wall.
With that, Lorth decided his best course lay in letting her be. But he had no intention of letting her out of his sight. Whatever the thorn-clad hunter had wanted from her, it was important enough to carve from her flesh with a sword.
He would not be the last.
Flight from Tromblast
Smoke wafted through the air as Wulfgar rode beneath the portcullis of Tromblast’s south gate. Aelfric, Harald, Gareth and a dozen warriors rode with him. Harald held his arm in a sling. He had taken the wound defending the sea caves beneath the West Tower from the oborom, but he had failed to stop them from setting sail after Rhinne.
“I still have men below,” Gareth said by his side. The commander’s brown eyes shone in the sun as he cast his gaze to the glittering sea.
“Galbraeth will find them,” Wulfgar assured him. He leaned down and adjusted the reins of his horse, a deep brown gelding named Dair. “Far as the oborom know, he’s still theirs.”
“I still wonder that Dore didn’t execute him for losing Rhinne,” Aelfric said, shifting in his saddle with a grimace. He had taken a fall down a flight of steps the day before.
“Apparently he’s a good liar.”
“Unless he’s doubling,” Harald put in.
Wulfgar said nothing. He had entertained the same thought. The oborom were extremely persuasive, and their spies were many. But his doubts weakened each time he recalled the expression on Galbraeth’s face as they had searched for Rhinne and found nothing—the expression of one who had lost his own to the same forces, however his imagination tried to convince him otherwise. No one was that good of a liar.
The portcullis yawned open behind them. Wulfgar called a halt and swung his steed around to make sure the remainder of his men emerged from the keep unhindered. Since he had killed the priest by the smithy, Wulfgar had put all his might and arms into keeping the oborom below while he evacuated the keep and saw its folk safely to Graylif Forest. They had learned quickly not to travel at night. The warlocks used every rat hole to the underground between here and the headwaters of the Draumar to harry them, killing warriors and stealing supplies.
The last men came through the gate. They were wounded, exhausted and most sat two to a mount. Tromb being small, it was not necessary for most to own horses; the beasts were generally reserved for nobles and military officers. Clad in oborom habits, a staunch few remained behind to gather reports and undermine the warlocks’ movements. But Wulfgar was not fooled by his seeming success in abandoning the keep to Ragnvald. The king just wanted them gone. For some reason.
Wulfgar led the war-torn company down through the marshes to the South Road. Gareth took up the rear. As he rode, Wulfgar cast one last glance at the grim walls of the South Tower absorbing the light. Though it rankled to leave Tromblast under the blade, he had grown weary of sneaking around. Preferring an honest straightforward fight, he never acquired Rhinne’s skill in keeping a low profile.
A quarter moon had passed since his sister set sail on the Ottersong at Harald’s bidding. Wulfgar’s initial joy that she hadn’t drowned in the Lower Draumar or been fished out by the oborom had faded quickly, however. Dore hadn’t bothered sending mere warlocks after her. He sent assassins. Thorns on one arm, Harald had said. Blood on the other.
Rhinne never arrived in Lifnmir, not that night, nor any night since. She hadn’t made it to any port on Tromb at all, to Wulfgar’s knowledge. For a short time, he held hope that she had made port on one of the other isles. But when Endwinter cam
e early with a fury even old men hadn’t seen in many a year, a fury so cold that many whispered of the Riven God, Wulfgar was forced to assume the sea had taken her.
Even then, he had kept hope, as Galbraeth had kept hope for his family despite the unlikelihood that the oborom’s promises were true. But Wulfgar’s hope had left him when Harald’s men found the prow of the Ottersong wedged into the rocks on the northwestern coast beneath the shadow of the keep. Wulfgar had spent too much time at sea—and at war—to imagine his way past so obvious a token.
Now he rode beneath the shadow of his ancestral home towards Lifngrove, where lived not only his army but also the queen. Scant hope she was, the last of an ancient line of women who guarded the mysteries of a knotted serpent long tangled in silence. When he told her that Rhinne hadn’t returned, she had ignored the obvious conclusion, even going so far as to disregard Endwinter. This hadn’t changed after he found the battered remains of the Ottersong; in fact, the queen didn’t let on that she believed her daughter was dead. No other thing had damaged Wulfgar’s faith in the woman’s stability as that had.
She had taken over the constable’s house in Lifngrove and turned it into a witch’s haunt. In the two large rooms on the ground floor, she lived amid stacks of pillows and books, plants and roots hanging from the rafters and an unmade bed with clothes draped over the posts. A lone table was cluttered with dirty plates, tall crystal flasks half full of wine, a beryllium sphere, a long, wicked knife with a jeweled handle in the shape of a serpent, and phials of dark colored liquid. Wulfgar envisioned her face aglow in the firelight, her auburn hair tangled around her shoulders and her green eyes bright with tears. The king has replaced our gods with one, she had said, stabbing at the fire in the hearth with an iron rod. An entity as cruel as he is fair, he promises his followers unending bounty, power over the Keepers of the Eye, and a North Born male.
A North Born male. Scoffing at the claim, Wulfgar had blithely asked her how the god would fulfill such a promise. In response, she had moved to a copper bucket and pulled forth a scrap of fabric stained with blood. After a blinking, seasick moment, he realized that his mother was still fertile enough to bleed. She wouldn’t willingly agree to bed the king again, of course. She wouldn’t be given a choice.
If that hadn’t rattled Wulfgar enough, she had also told him that his brother Bjorn would soon arrive to the Gray Isles. She had sent a snow goose after him over a moon ago, she said, though how she had known his whereabouts when he hadn’t sent word to the isle in two years Wulfgar couldn’t guess; nor had he dared to believe it would come to pass in any good time, if at all.
Then something happened that caused him to question his skepticism about everything.
Three days ago, he had received word, under Gareth’s personal seal, that Bjorn had in fact arrived to Lifnmir. The Sentinel of the East had moored the Eastfetch off the southern coast of Waleis and loaded a merchant ship with supplies, including horses. He came with his men: sailors, warriors and cutthroats, and let them loose in the forests and towns as watchers, scouts, and hunters, making it easier for the people of Tromblast to get to Lifngrove without being harried.
Wulfgar still shifted back and forth between dreams and reality over the news. It had caused him to wonder if the queen’s seeming denial around losing Rhinne had some better explanation than the madness of a woman’s grief and the fear of her husband’s lust.
The company rode hard, keeping to the outskirts of Forlsc which, like most of the villages on Tromb, had been taken over by the oborom. The company left the South Road and rode northeast to the Black River, which they followed a short time before splashing across a ford into the shadows of Graylif. Someone uttered a blessing.
Of all the Gray Isles, Tromb offered the most bounty in the way of fresh, flowing water. An interesting feature, as the oborom had a marked aversion to it. Crossing a river or a stream, or plunging into the surf rendered one safe from their influence, saving the shot of a bow. For this reason, perhaps, the black-cloaked warlocks were accomplished archers. They also carved the hulls of their boats with patterns that were said to insulate them from the forces of the sea.
Light cast patterns of gold and shadow into the mossy hollows of the wood as the company rode through. Birdsong filled the trees. Though the sun rode high and Gareth’s sappers had found and sealed many openings to the tunnels that threaded everywhere beneath the western tip of the isle, the riders’ nerves were taught. No one dared assume the entrances had all been found.
To make an ambush more difficult, the men spread out between the trunks, keeping close enough to see each other. Wulfgar rode in front, on a path he had known since boyhood. He could find it on a moonless night if he had to. No one spoke. They rode as quickly as the terrain allowed, hoofbeats muffled in the ferns.
Aelfric rode up next to him. “Did you get another amulet?”
“Aye, on my last visit.” He cast his friend a glance. “But I wouldn’t put too much trust in frost. Gareth thinks the oborom have discovered that using their magic alerts anyone wearing a serpent.”
Aelfric nodded. “Won’t stop an arrow, as I always said.”
They rode on for a time, surrounded by the sounds of thumping hooves, rustling leaves, whispering evergreens and creaking leather. A breeze stirred the trees.
A strange sound hit the air, followed by a shout. “Oborom!” someone cried. The company drew their arms and erupted into disarray.
Wulfgar swore. Apparently, his men’s doubts were wiser than their faith in his brother’s mercenaries. “Fly!” he called out. At once, the men turned for the east and made a run for it. To elude the sights of archers, they wove through the trees, bows in hand.
The warlocks withdrew. Either they had been left behind, or didn’t bother to waste arrows on moving targets. Wulfgar didn’t let himself be comforted by the thought—and well he didn’t, as icy cold bit into his heart. “Sorcery!” he warned. From the corner of his eye, something flew from the trees, silvery, flashing and baring claws. It made an unnatural howling sound that put the hairs up on his neck.
The oborom couldn’t affect the wearers of amulets with magic, but a horse was another matter. Wulfgar’s horse spooked and reared back. The singing, shivering raptors filled the woods and drove the beasts mad. Riders cried out as their steeds fled in all directions, heedless of their commands. Many men fell from their saddles; others managed to dismount, stumbling back as their horses screamed and pawed the air. Some riders were carried off into the woods. One man was struck in the head by a hoof, killing him.
Wulfgar managed to keep Dair under him, but the gelding was oblivious to his hand. He entered a small clearing and shouted a command for his men to rally around him. No doubt the oborom had planned this, but he would rather make a stand together than get picked off in the forest one by one. He had lost too many men to that tactic already.
The spectral raptors vanished as quickly as they had come, leaving the forest in silence. The horses calmed a little, breathing heavily and foaming at their bits. Wulfgar dismounted and moved into his panting, bruised, and scattered company. One man dead. Two missing. Six wounded. Wulfgar checked on them, going finally to Harald. The captain had been hit in the thigh by the first oborom arrow. Aelfric had removed the shaft and stanched the blood, but Harald’s face was pale as wax and the edges of the wound bore the characteristic pale-green cast of graestrip, a poison the oborom distilled from a shellfish of that name.
Wulfgar knelt by his side. “Poisoned?”
“Feels like it,” Harald replied roughly, his blue eyes dull.
“We’ve run out of the queen’s antidote,” Gareth informed him.
“Lifngrove is only a mile off,” Wulfgar said. He placed his hand on Harald’s forehead. It was hot. “We’ll get you there.”
Just then, several men called out in unison: “Milord!”
Wulfgar rose. The forest darkened as a heavy cloud covered the sun. Black-cloaked men materialized from all sides, arrows nock
ed and drawn. Another group stepped forward baring swords. As Wulfgar’s men lifted their swords and shields in defense, a voice rang out from the trees like a sighing wind: “Relinquish your weapons.”
“Do it,” Wulfgar commanded.
The warlocks disarmed the company. Wulfgar gritted his teeth as they stripped him of his sword, bow, and amulet. Finally, the warlocks took the horses, leaving the company standing in the small clearing beneath a dark glitter of arrowheads.
“I will speak to the Prince,” the earlier voice said. Motioning Gareth to accompany him, Wulfgar moved to the front of the group. A priest emerged from the half-light, his hood down over his face. One move of his hand and the last of Tromblast’s defenders would be slaughtered like deer to a pack of winter-starved wolves.
“Sentinel of the South,” the priest addressed him. “Accompany us and your men shall be spared.”
“Ballocks,” Gareth snorted under his breath.
Aye, Wulfgar agreed silently. The warlocks would kill them either way. But in this position, they could also kill Wulfgar’s men and leave him unscathed. So why the posturing? Rare, for them to try something like this in broad daylight. And why capture him now, when by all his actions he should have met an assassin’s knife in his sleep?
Gareth leaned close. “Milord. You aren’t considering this, surely. To a man, we would die for you.”
“We should all be dead already,” Wulfgar returned. “They want something.”
“They tried to kill you once,” the captain reminded him. “Why would you now be important enough that they would spare us?”
Wulfgar gazed ahead into the darkness obscuring the priest’s face. Why, indeed. He lifted his chin and called out, “I refuse your offer, Priest. Be done with it.”
His men stirred around him.
The priest drew his hood from his face, his features ghostly pale from living underground. “You have my word they will not be harmed.”
The Riven God Page 11