Light fled from the warlock’s eyes. Wulfgar knelt and touched the lids closed. For a brief moment, he thought he recognized the man. Feeling sick, he wiped his blade on the man’s cloak and thought, Gods, wizards, what a waste of power, you empty, pathetic sons of bitches—
He sheathed his blade and rolled the other man out of his cloak. He put it on and pulled the hood over his face. It smelled like the underground. He crept into the trees, irritated and alert. Guided by the faint light still touching the western sky, he headed towards the coast.
Before long, he heard his brother’s voice. Quietly, Wulfgar headed towards it until he spotted Bjorn, Brigid and Pike standing between the trees near an enormous boulder that formed a natural shelter. They turned with a start as Wulfgar approached. Bjorn drew his sword, spinning it around to loosen his wrist.
“It’s me,” Wulfgar said, drawing the black hood from his face. He stepped around a corpse. “Where’s Aelfric?”
His brother sheathed his blade. “We don’t know. Think he got hit. He didn’t answer my calls. I didn’t have time to search with the oborom on me.”
“We have to find him.”
Bjorn moved close with an older-brother expression that told Wulfgar he was about to be reasoned with. He recognized it even in the dimness. With a painful jolt he realized this must have been how Rhinne felt about him much of the time. “Wulf...”
An owl hooted nearby, causing them all to grow still and listen. Wulfgar knew the owl was real; Aelfric had taught him to tell the difference. “I will not leave him.”
“The queen was urgent about our reaching her by nightfall, milord,” Brigid said, glancing off into the distance. “’Tis not far.”
“Then it can wait.” He turned in the direction of the outcropping.
“Wulfgar,” his brother said with an edge to his voice. “She wants you there.”
The South Born stopped and swung around. “I don’t care what she wants. She gives me nary a fact to warrant it. It can’t be a quarter mile from here, where they attacked us. Go ahead. I’ll be along.” He continued into the trees.
Bjorn swore something behind him. Wulfgar kept walking as the others discussed the situation in low tones. After a time, they came up behind him. “We’ll help you,” Bjorn said.
Brigid drew a dead warlock’s cloak around her.
They spread out in an overlapping search pattern and beat the brush. No one attacked them. Wulfgar tried every animal call he had heard Aelfric use. He rasped his friend’s name a few times. But they found no sign of the red-haired warrior.
They searched until barely enough light remained to see. Aelfric, Wulfgar called silently, his heart as heavy as a soaked net. I do wish you’d stop doing this to me...
He froze as he heard something in the distance. Men and horses. Bjorn spoke his name and appeared between the trees. Pike and Brigid joined them as they moved in the direction of the noise. They trudged through the bushes until they reached a rise, which they climbed. They crouched down as they reached the top. Cold wind struck their faces.
“We’re too late,” Brigid said.
On the ragged, rock-strewn plain that edged the sea, mounted warriors hacked and trod with the fury of beasts over a company of black-cloaked men, slaughtering without mercy and sinking arrows into anyone who fled. None escaped.
“Bloody hell,” Pike muttered. “This thing they’re protecting. Some important, ay?”
Bjorn cast Brigid a quick glance. “I suggest losing the cloaks.”
Wulfgar unclasped the black cloak and let it slide to the ground as he rose to his feet. He released a piercing whistle into the sky. At once, several men in the company below turned their mounts and rode towards them as they moved down onto the plain.
“Milords!” Gareth rode up to them in a wild flush that fell quickly into a strange, unnatural calm that chilled Wulfgar’s heart like his mother’s amulet. The men who accompanied the commander kept their distance, sitting uneasily on their mounts and bowing their heads.
“Gareth,” Wulfgar greeted him. “What’s happened?”
The commander looked over his shoulder at the sea and then dismounted. In the gray light, Wulfgar saw the contours of a ship in the mists offshore. Gareth removed his gloves and stepped up to the princes with a pale yet resolute expression. “We came under attack in Lafnarin. Somehow, they found out we were there. The Eldest Sentinel was with them. Queen Lorelei bought us our escape.”
Seagulls and ravens wheeled in the sky as Gareth lowered his gaze, his chest rising and falling with some effort.
“Commander?” Bjorn pressed.
Gareth looked up, his eyes moist. “Milords, the queen is dead.”
Wulfgar slowly dropped to one knee, driving his fist into the stone as his heart broke once more at the hands of the Riven God.
The Oborom’s Spell
The Seed Moon rose through the trees on the rising foothills of Rothmar, home of the citadel of Eyrie, the seat of the Keepers of the Eye. Now and then, the Amethyst Waeltower appeared through the steep landscape, piercing the sky like an icon of isolation, a beautiful light too lofty to shine into the hollows of a warlock’s spell.
Her heart turned to frost as the serpent recoiled, her emerald eyes shining with malice.
The spell that the assassin had carved into Rhinne’s flesh whispered like something alive. In the back of her thoughts she perceived a stream of images she didn’t understand, accompanied by rough emotions with no source. Lorth had carefully tended her wounds in the Shining Star. But the spell remained.
It was the second evening of Rhinne’s journey with the Raven of Ostarin. He rode beside her in his easy way, his wolf gaze moving over the villages on either side of the narrow road. Through the darkening woods, they passed pastures, cottages, barns, stables, woodsheds, a winery, and a forge. Now and then, Lorth’s attention swept over Rhinne, slowing and redirecting her cold river of visions as if he had the power to touch the waters.
She suspected he did. Rhinne had a basic knowledge of the hierarchy of the Eye, enough to know that Raven was the highest order. But the deference that the wizards and staff at the Shining Star had paid Lorth went more deeply than echelon. At the time she thought that unsurprising given how quickly he had dispatched the oborom assassin. But after two days she had begun to realize his strength cut deeper than the blade as well.
From the shades of the Otherworld, an entity whispered in an ancient tongue, a language known only to sorcerers.
Not deeply enough to silence the cold-river spell, however. On several tense occasions she considered telling him about it. But the spell itself forbade such interaction. It held her in the dark.
“Where is Nightshade?” she said, leaning forward to take the pressure from the wounds in her back. The raven’s company somehow held back the darkness as no human companionship could, even that of a Master of the Eye.
The wizard put his face to the twilit sky. “Off hunting, I suppose. She’ll be back.”
It was Marsin’s idea to send Nightshade along, his reasoning being that the bird liked Rhinne. But Sirion’s death had crushed him, and Rhinne suspected he didn’t care to have such a notable harbinger of death as a raven in his company, let alone the woman for whose sake his captain had died.
Lorth’s voice broke into her thoughts. “There’s an inn yonder. We’ll stop there for the night. Did you sleep earlier?”
Confusion clutched her thoughts and scattered them like birds.
Rhinne rubbed her eyes and shrugged. Sleep had become a yawning chasm that dropped into the cold river. But there was no trusting the water anymore. When she closed her eyes, it swept her away like the Lower Draumar but didn’t deposit her onto a shore; instead, she awaked with unfathomable terror. It hovered around her all the time now, bleeding from the carvings in her back, stealing her strength. She had had to stop several times that day and twice the day before, to lie down, shivering and weak, clutched by sickness.
Lorth had complied the
first day, watching, pacing over her, muttering under his breath in the wizard’s tongue. By the second day, he dispensed with patience and put her before him on his horse whenever she swayed in her saddle, too weak to ride.
At times, as they rode or sat before a fire, he told her stories. He told them as if they were the truth, but they had to be tales: a powerful wizard who had tricked an immortal predator into releasing him from a vow to the Old One, the goddess of life, death and transformation; and a beautiful Tarthian princess with the face of a wolf who had nearly brought down the realm of Ostarin for love of a man.
He told her of a young man named Hemlock, born from the union of a star and the sea, who transformed into an immortal sea serpent by the hand of an assassin. Lorth had claimed the tale happened in the Gray Isles, giving Rhinne many questions that she dared not ask without risking she would have to answer a few of her own. The tale had comforted her, even bringing warmth to the pit of her belly, a powerful sensation that dispelled the visions. She was still working up the nerve to ask Lorth about it again.
Moonlight glimmered through the forest as they rode down a hill. At the bottom, they crossed a bridge over a stream still swollen with winter snows. It flowed down through a greensward lined with stone walls, and disappeared around the back of a two-story house surrounded by gardens illuminated by golden light spilling from the windows. Hanging beneath an ornate iron lamp, a sign with a gray wolf standing amid white birch trees read: The Shapeshifter.
She withdrew as the darkening sky, tumbling sea and rocks in the surf cried out in warning.
A strange name for an inn. A barn stood on the far side. Lorth rode up to the entrance and dismounted, and helped Rhinne from her horse. A stablehand emerged; Lorth handed the beasts to him with a low word. Rhinne pulled her cloak around her body and gazed at the moon.
Stars shine in the dark as the moon looks away.
Lorth returned and accompanied her inside. Skipping formalities, he brought her immediately to the most private room in the inn. Again, it was not lost on Rhinne how swiftly and with much ado the innkeeper complied with his requests. Lorth had food brought up to them, lit a fire in the hearth using a word that commanded flames from cold wood, and cracked a window on the far side of the room to accommodate Nightshade. It smelled of damp woods, lilac and woodsmoke. The stream murmured outside.
The wizard did what any honorable man would do to respect a woman’s privacy, but he didn’t leave Rhinne alone. He gave her the bed and settled himself in a chair by the fire. She sat with a pillow propped up behind her fiery aching back, spooning thick mushroom soup from a bowl in her lap. She dipped a hunk of brown bread into it between spoonfuls.
The wizard held a glass of golden wine in his hand, dangling over the arm of the chair. A stack of plates with the remains of his dinner sat on a nearby table, and his black cloak hung on a peg on the back of the door. He had removed his boots and set them near the fire. His weapons hung over the back of a chair at the table, all but a longknife strapped to his thigh. Rhinne looked between the man and the weapons and decided it wouldn’t take him long to reach them, knife notwithstanding.
A sword will cut the fair and call it love.
“In your story about Hemlock, the boy who became immortal,” Rhinne ventured, chewing on a bite of bread soaked in soup. “You said his mother was the Mistress of the Sea? The one in the legends?”
The wizard turned to her with the same steady, golden eyes as those of the wolf on the sign outside. “The same,” he said. He returned his gaze to the fire. “But she is no legend.”
Rhinne swallowed. “How do you know?”
“I’ve seen her.” He sipped his wine. “This is the second time you’ve lit up by her,” he noted. “What is your interest?”
The First One swam in and out of existence with sinuous grace; one moment slipping through the cold waters; the next, through dreams.
Without thinking, Rhinne blurted, “Because I saw her too. I think.”
The wizard set aside his wine, then leaned forward in his chair with such penetrating interest it put a chill over her flesh. “Do tell.”
She absently moved the spoon in her bowl. “I probably imagined it.”
“You’ve not so much as told me the village you hail from, let alone what you were doing in the open sea at that time of the year—which every sailor familiar with North Derinth knows is a bad idea. But you brought this up, so I’m assuming you saw something. What was it?”
Rhinne stared into her bowl as if to scry the bread-smeared cream and mushroom bits for some way to undo having asked this scary man anything. No answer came to her, only silence and the glitter in the wizard’s eyes as he awaited her response.
“Endwinter was coming,” she said quietly. “I’d just prepared my boat to weather it. I was sitting at the tiller and the sea changed.” She looked up; he still regarded her intently. “I saw coils, like a serpent, only bigger than I could imagine. It surrounded my boat and tossed it around, and I thought it would sink me. But then the beast submerged.”
“What color was it? Did it have fins?”
“Aye, sharp, ragged fins. It was dark green, almost black. Why?”
“What happened after that?”
“The storm rose up and a wave hit me. It was terrible.”
The wizard rose and came to her. He took her bowl and put it with the rest of the plates, then returned and sat on the edge of the bed by her side. He smelled like leaves and horses. “A wave?”
“Tall as the cliffs by the Howling Estuary. It struck and turned me over and over.” She gulped. “Truly, I don’t know how I survived it.”
“There are no coincidences.” The bed creaked as he rose. He returned to the hearth, knelt and put wood on the fire. “I can’t guess why the Mistress appeared to you. Generations of hard seasoned sailors—including wizards—have lived in the Gray Isles and not seen her.”
“You did.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “I only saw her because I dared to hunt for Hemlock beneath her protection. I quite nearly gave my life for that—and one of my crew did.”
“Are you saying that story was true?”
He returned to his chair and poured himself another glass of wine. “True as light. I’m surprised you’ve not heard the tale, even as a legend. I should think every soul in the Isles would know of it by now.”
She shrugged. She had heard something like it once to explain a wave that had damaged the ports and flooded the lower reaches of the keep. She had brushed off the more fanciful explanations to sailors’ tales. “Why would I see the Mistress of the Sea?” she ventured. “Is that bad?”
He paused with his glass to his lips. “If it were, she’d have taken you then and there.”
“Maybe she caused the wave.”
“Possible, but not likely.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs before him. “In the wizard’s tongue, the creature is called a loerfalos, which means ‘serpent of green darkness.’ She is a being of the Otherworld. The Mistress, as she’s known in the Gray Isles, is only a legend to most because she resides beyond the time-space matrix. When she does appear, she leaves you wondering if you imagined it.”
Rhinne placed her hands over belly, feeling warmth there, just as she had when the wizard first told her the story about the Mistress and her once-mortal son Hemlock. Now, as then, it provided odd comfort from the whispers below.
“What were you doing in the open sea west of Tromb?” Lorth asked.
Breaking my promise to Harald, Rhinne thought. She shifted positions to ease the pain in her back. A handy collection of lies came to her mind, but she decided that omitting some of the facts might be more convincing. She said, “I was sailing around to the other side of the isle. I was caught in fog and carried out to the Western Drift.”
As the wizard appeared to ponder that, something clattered at the window, causing Rhinne to jump. A black wing flashed through the opening as Nightshade hopped through.
“Here you are!” Rhinne piped. The bird released a quork! and fluttered to her arm, gripping onto her sleeve. She stroked the raven’s soft feathers with the backs of her fingers, grateful for the diversion.
Lorth rose from his chair and closed the window. When he returned to the fire, he fetched a stone from his saddlebag, drew the knife from his thigh, and began to sharpen it. He did this with methodical patience, as if to calm his nerves with a repetitive task. Nightshade lifted up and flew to the back of his chair, where she began to preen.
“Who are you?” the wizard asked, as if talking to the bird. But he wasn’t.
Rhinne stared into her lap and said nothing. An inevitable question, given the hunter’s patience up until now. True to their name, the Keepers of the Eye saw everywhere. If the Keepers on Tromb had known what Ragnvald was about, then so would the Lords of Eyrie. Lorth might know of it and not say anything, not knowing who she was. But if he learned that, his patience might end.
“A loerfalos does not appear at random,” the wizard continued thoughtfully. “An assassin such as the one who found you isn’t deployed to just anyone, either.” He waved the tip of his knife at the weapons on the chair. “And a sword like that, if it is indeed yours, does not come to the hand of many.” He set his stone and knife aside on the table and picked up his wine, finished it in one gulp. He lowered his glass and turned to her with a chilling expression of knowing. “Your friend Nightshade here disappeared from the Eostar for two days, you know. On her return, she harried the crew until they changed course and followed her to you.”
The raven climbed onto Lorth’s shoulder and put her beak into his hair.
“Is she trained to do that?” Rhinne asked.
“Na. We’ve no idea how she knew you were out there. Marsin said she’s never done that before.” He reached up and stroked the raven. “It is not my wish to expose you, Rhinne, or pry into your personal affairs. However, you seem to be connected to the deeper powers of the world, and that enters my domain. What is your history?”
The Riven God Page 13