The Riven God

by F. T. McKinstry

  The lies she had been privately rehearsing returned to her. But the wizard’s dark, penetrating air gave her pause. She lifted her chin, her throat dry as dust. “I am North Born of Ragnvald, King of Tromb.” She pointed to her sword hanging with the wizard’s weapons on the chair. “That’s the ancestral blade of the Sentinel of the—”

  “You’re a princess?” he cut in.

  —North, she finished silently. “Aye.” To a few.

  He lowered his forehead onto his hand, his lips moving silently.

  “I left the isle to escape that assassin,” she continued quickly. Or one of them, she added to herself. “I had planned to circle to the southeast and make port in Lifnmir. I was followed. I sailed west hoping to shake him. But I got off course and then I did get caught in the Drift. The storm found me before I could get back.”

  The wizard looked up. “Why are you marked by an assassin?”

  “I killed a—one of theirs and was accused of treason.”

  “Was it?” he asked simply.

  Rhinne released a breath of derision. “Depends on who you ask.”

  He leaned his head back and appeared to study her. She had omitted quite a bit of information, and he knew it. Fearing he might think she was attempting to cover up something that would make her a traitor in truth, and not simply by the twisted laws of her father’s regime, she said, “There were rumors that the Keepers on Tromb were in league with them.”

  He lifted his brow. “That, we are not. Your assassin was in violation of the Wizard’s Code.” He folded his hands together with a deep breath. “Get some rest, now. Tomorrow we’ll get you to Eyrie, where they have healers who can tend to that wound better than I.”

  As Rhinne settled down under the covers, the cold river rose up around her.

  The First One stirred in the north and opened her eyes.

  The warmth in her belly fled as she drifted to sleep.

  *

  The forest hung in silence, dark and damp as the interior of a womb. Rhinne slipped from her body and stood on the edge of the burbling stream outside the window of the inn. Mistress, she called, sinking to her knees on the black, wet earth. Help me. Ivory lilies hung over the water and a single thistle grew in the moonlight, its fuchsia crown rising over a warlord’s castle of wicked deep green leaves, pointed and armed with silvery fur and thorns. Mist hung over the stream and cloaked the depths of the forest like cobwebs.

  From the water a figure came, slick and green as brine; then taller, swaying with a woman’s step, cloaked in black and wearing the face of a wolf. The Old One. Her heart pounding wildly in the distance, Rhinne knew her, yet not.

  The goddess approached and held out her hand. “Come with me.”

  Without question, Rhinne rose and went to her.

  Darkness consumed her, stripping away all perception except awareness. Beneath her outer sense of personality, time and place, an identity reflected her selves in all lives, an intricately carved crystal glittering with the light of her Source.

  Her name was Eifin, Twenty-Second High Priestess of Ascarion, Guardian of the Circle and votary to the First One who ruled the seas. Her realm was balanced and fair, and named after the god Ascarion, whom she loved with all her heart. She had never seen her god. But she knew his presence and light, which sustained and gave her power. The old women of the Circle prophesied that the Twenty-Second High Priestess would take into her womb the seed of the god and bear him a mortal child.

  Silvery clouds covered the sun, driven by a brisk autumn breeze. Beneath the shining arc of the sea a dark moon slept, awaiting the night. Eifin stepped up the last stair to her private chambers, pausing to gaze down at the rocky strand churning with the rising tide. Far beyond the foamy breakers, green and gray merged with the depths where the First One swam in and out of existence with sinuous grace; one moment slipping through the cold waters; the next, through dreams. The priestess knew her in both.

  She turned and passed through a short corridor and down to her chambers. Sunlight sparkled through windows with small panes of many colors, chips of glass and crystal carved into the leaves, bark and limbs of trees, raging surf, turquoise serpents and wheeling gulls. The patterns whirled slowly around the room.

  Eifin unfastened and tossed her cloak over a wooden rail. She reached back to pull the long crystal pins which held the braids of her hair. The silken ebony lengths tumbled down, unraveling. Smoothing the ivory folds of her shift, she went to a long divan by a clear window that faced north. Storm clouds gathered into frosty breaths on the cerulean sky. Eifin leaned her chin on her arms on the wide stone sill, seized by sudden, familiar melancholy.

  “Ascarion,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “Forgive my pleas. You, for whom I take no mortal man...” She hesitated as a tear sprang into her eye. “Will you not reveal yourself to me, so that my eyes can see what my heart knows?” She lifted her face to the sky.

  On the last dark moon she had confided in the Eldest Priestess of the Circle, her grandmother. She had fallen to her knees, expecting to be chastised for her lack of faith. But the crone had said: You are fertile. It is your womb that longs, not your eyes.

  One cycle later, fertile again. Her grandmother’s words were as tasteless as unsalted fish soup. Perhaps her womb made her feel this way and nothing more. She grew sleepy. From the shades of the Otherworld, the storm in the north whispered in an ancient tongue, a language known only to sorcerers.

  Stars shine in the dark as the moon looks away.

  Away, disinterested.

  A sword will cut the fair

  And call it love.

  Love, forsaken.

  Come to my hand as a shell washed upon the sand.

  “Awake.”

  The First One stirred in the north and opened her eyes.

  So did Eifin. An immortal voice rang through her body, deep, rich, resonant, and complex. She lay on the divan, her back and neck cramped from sleeping with her head on the sill. As she pushed herself up, her breath collided on a gasp.

  An entity stood before her, gazing with eyes the color of shadows on snow. His flaxen hair hung in two thick braids bound by thorny onyx branches; his clothing, fine mail and leggings the color of blood, clung to every line of him. Eifin had never laid eyes on anything so beautiful. Beneath the perfection of his ivory skin and the line of his jaw, his silent study of her was so magnificent that she slid from the couch to her knees and lowered her face to the flagstone floor.

  “My Lord,” she breathed. Her heart hammered like the drums and flutes of a wedding song. Ascarion had come at last, in answer to her pleas. She looked up. “You have come.”

  The smallest hint of a smile moved on the corner of his mouth. Eifin was so beside herself with joy she didn’t heed the subtle shade of darkness there.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” the god said. He didn’t bid her rise; he let her kneel there, staring up at him in awe. “You are the most beautiful one of all.”

  “Am I not yours?” she asked breathlessly.

  That flick of a smile, again, a tiny fragment of ice disappearing into a cold running river. “You are mine.”

  He stepped forward, moving a finger to bid her rise. Eifin did as she was told, again feeling a shadow on her heart that didn’t smile. Her heart turned to frost as the serpent recoiled, her emerald eyes shining with malice. The god touched her face, ran his finger along her cheek, took a handful of her hair and caressed it. His nostrils flared like an animal’s and his pale eyes deepened with lust. The words he had spoken in her dream droned in her mind like a spell entangling her in thorns.

  Come to my hand.

  “Ascarion?” The darkening sky, tumbling sea, and rocks in the surf cried out in warning. When he didn’t answer her, she stepped back. “Leave me. Now.” She lifted her chin in challenge. No Otherworld being could defy such a command from a priestess grounded in the mortal realm. There were rules.

  He took her into his arms, perfectly strong, every sinew renewed by the
fires of immortality. His lips came down on hers, rough and utterly unbidden.

  “Release me!” she shrieked.

  “You would refuse the desire of your god?” he said huskily, moving his hands down over her hips. Confusion clutched her thoughts and scattered them like birds.

  “You are not my god! Ascarion!”

  “Ascarion is dead.”

  He forced her onto the divan where she had prayed only moments before and covered her like the winds of the northern storm breaking upon the shore.

  The Shade of Low

  Lorth dozed.

  Physical impressions, memories, and thought flowed in layers beneath the threshold of his awareness; sky above sea, earth beneath. The fire crackled. Outside, the moon had withdrawn and rain tapped on the windows and roofs of the inn, and into the chimney flue. People moved in the halls, talking in low tones. In a makeshift nest of straps and scabbards, Nightshade slept with her head beneath a wing.

  In the bed nearby, sleeping more fitfully, lay a red-haired, gray-eyed princess from the Gray Isles who had come alive in a high priestess’ scrying pool, seen a loerfalos, and been marked by the sort of assassin the Aenlisarfon commissioned men like Lorth to hunt.

  The energy around her was impenetrable.

  He imagined Leda, his love, sitting in the dirt in her garden, leaning forward with a blush on her cheek, her breasts pressing against the trim of a low neckline. The loerfalos is a First One, she had once explained. An immortal aspect created by a union between Maern and a god named Om. Always female. She rules the seas. She’s a creature of the Otherworld; she moves above the time-space matrix, so it’s not easy to define her. Like the Old One herself, it’s her nature to defy understanding.

  That conversation had ended nicely, with the priestess parting her scented thighs to him. He breathed deeply as lust swept through his loins, jarring his focus like a sword rattling in its sheath.

  Sedarius, the Raven of Wychmouth and the so-called Guardian of the Gray Isles, was not so accommodating. Lorth had half a mind, once he delivered Rhinne safely to Eyrie, to pay Sedarius a visit in projected form and request some information about Tromb and the goings-on there. Unlike their first encounter, however, in which Lorth had borne a bad reputation and not enough stature to avoid ugliness, this time he had the Aenlisarfon behind him.

  Or so he would claim. Lorth never knew if the Council was aware that he had slipped unseen beneath their steely edicts to accomplish his ends on their behalf. Sedarius knew. But he had discredited his accusations by unleashing a tide of histrionics that went badly with Lorth’s having prevented the annihilation of his realm. Unfortunately, Sedarius’ diatribe had accomplished one thing: if Lorth told the Council of his plan, they would send someone else, not wanting to muddy the waters with bad history. But someone else wouldn’t be able to ply Sedarius the way Lorth could. Sedarius knew Lorth wouldn’t hesitate to play mean, and would assume that the Council would stand behind Lorth just as they had the first time.

  Sodding politics.

  As wind drove the rain outside, Nightshade stirred, rustling.

  “Osc ti’art lif,” Rhinne said.

  Lorth opened his eyes and stared. He did not know the language.

  She screamed. The harrowing sound ripped up his spine like a saw, nearly stopping his heart as he leapt from his chair. Nightshade exploded from her nest with a squawk and flew to the window, now closed, her wings slamming into the panes. Voices rose up in the hall outside.

  As Lorth reached Rhinne’s side, she screamed again. Then she came out of the bed like a wildcat, her hair a ragged flame around her face and her eyes the wrong color, emerald as a jewel and slitted like a snake’s. Her voice changed as she cried out words in the same alien tongue. A force surrounded her, something he knew.

  Loerfalos.

  His wits scattered, Lorth held out his hand and tried to calm her in the Dark Tongue. He didn’t think to react as, oblivious to the wounds on her back; Rhinne spun around and kicked him the face so hard it sent him sprawling into the bedpost, twisting him around before dumping him onto the floor.

  Someone pounded on the door with a shout. His jaw pounding with pain, Lorth got up and growled a nasty spell that sealed the door. Rhinne had crossed the room and began throwing chairs, hearth implements and weapons around, weeping in great, heaving sobs. Nightshade wheeled around the chamber, cawing wildly, eluding projectiles.

  Lorth spoke Dark Tongue again, this time invoking the Destroyer, the most terrible aspect of the Old One. Rhinne grabbed a fire iron and slammed it across a burning candle, sending it flying and splattering wax across the room. Lorth ducked as the heavy iron holder sailed past his face.

  On the other side of the door, a wizard attempted to undo his sealing spell. Lorth called out, in the wizard’s tongue, “Leave the door alone! I’ll be there shortly!” This was merely a matter of courtesy: no one save perhaps Eaglin would be able to break the spell he put on it.

  Before Lorth realized he had unthinkingly left his longknife on the table, Rhinne picked it up and plunged it into her abdomen.

  Lorth dove. He knocked her down, sending the knife skittering over the floor. Rhinne screamed again and clawed at his face, then slammed her knee into his groin. He choked and doubled over. “Maern!” he gagged, clutching his crotch as he staggered up.

  Rhinne collapsed, her hands covered in blood.

  His heart racing, Lorth ducked as Nightshade flew over his head, claws outstretched. The bird landed on Rhinne. For the briefest moment, before Lorth could command the creature off of her, a man appeared in the raven’s place. He had shining golden hair, dark eyes, and was clad in fine mail and weapons of an ancient kind.

  Lorth said, “Moridrun fore sarumn,” to reveal the apparition’s nature.

  The warrior vanished.

  Nightshade hopped on Rhinne’s shoulder with a kruk.

  *

  Rain blew through the forest in cold sheets as Lorth rode in a fury on the North Road to Eyrie with Rhinne wrapped in his arms on the saddle before him. The wound she had inflicted on her body with his knife hadn’t gone deep enough to kill her, but she had lost blood.

  The wound in her soul was a deeper one. Based on the few things he knew, Lorth shuddered to speculate why she would awake with the eyes of a loerfalos and try to end her life with a knife in the womb.

  He relied on Freya’s sight and that of the Old One as he rode. He pleaded to the goddess like a foolish child to keep the princess in sleep and not awaken her in some state of arcane identity he couldn’t fight or quell. Rhinne lay alarmingly limp in his arms; either his pleas to the Destroyer were not necessary or she had taken pity on him after all.

  He had left the Shapeshifter in a hue and cry of disarray as if he had set the place on fire. His balls aching from Rhinne’s knee and his arms tired from holding the selfsame woman against his chest, he got well underway until he reached a desolate section of heavy woods void of dwellings. The rain had lessened. The air smelled of woodsmoke. A dog barked somewhere in the distance.

  Suddenly, Freya stopped, nearly sending Lorth with his charge over the pommel. The mare exhaled with a snort, a cloud of breath swirling around her. A chasm, primordial, lightless and aware, spread out as a sea without end, a familiar essence layered in the mists of the Otherworld.

  A figure in black shimmered on the road.

  “Easy,” Lorth soothed as Freya stepped back, her hooves biting into the stones. He looked up in annoyance as the apparition advanced.

  Eaglin cleared his throat. “What are you doing?”

  “Calming my horse after you just scared the tripe out of her. What are you doing?”

  The Raven threw his head aside as if exasperated. “Bloody hell Lorth, you’ve sent us no word except something about a treecloak on Tromb—your channels are closed—and I just had somebody pound on my door and inform me that you mauled some woman in the Shapeshifter, put their hounds to whimpers and rode out threatening anyone who followed you.” He le
veled a pointed stare at Rhinne. “Who is she?” He moved close and drew the hood away from Rhinne’s face with an airy hand.

  Then his expression changed.

  Lorth held her close. “Who do you think? It’s all true Eaglin, your vision in the pool, Cimar’s drawing of the loerfalos, a connection to the Gray Isles—we’ve come into something dreadful here and your princess is the key.”

  “It’s her, then.”

  Lorth nodded. “Her name is Rhinne. She’s on the run from Tromb, and someone right dark is after her. They want something. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. But they want it badly enough to’ve sent a hunter to these shores. He carved some kind of black spell into her flesh and I’m reasonably certain it just created a bleedthrough from the Otherworld.”

  “What?”

  As Lorth briefly described what had happened at the inn, his friend turned even paler than his projected body already was. He placed a hand on Rhinne’s forehead and stilled as he swept through her body for patterns. When he lifted his hand, Lorth continued, “I’m still two hours out. I need you to go to the Hall of Wren, ready a room, and gather the best healers we have. Get Heimnor, too. I need to speak to him.”

  Eaglin’s gaze settled on Rhinne. “Heimnor. Very well. We’ll be ready. And Lorth, do be careful.”

  The hunter raised his brow, thinking the warning odd. “Of what?”

  “The entity who is watching through that portal on her spine. I think it’s the same one cloaking Tromb.”

  The Raven faded into the shadows, leaving Lorth sitting in the dripping trees, chilled to the bone.

  *

  Three days passed. The sun rose beneath a heavy shroud of gloom hanging over Rothmar as Lorth swept beneath the northern gate of Eyrie, ignoring the watch-web as it raised the hairs on his neck. Soft rain fell, as it had since his return with Rhinne to the citadel. Trees enveloped him in muffled silence as he strode down the damp path draped in mist, sodden leaves and spider webs. A red squirrel released a volley of raspy chittering.