The parchment populated itself with pale grey mounds for hills and mountains, and little green spikes for trees. When that was done, it made two dots, one red, one black, for her and Dominik. She saw that they were about halfway there, and put it safely back inside her vest.
About ten miles; another ten to go. A bit more than half an hour. It seemed that they had been riding for an age, and that they would never get there in time. Her insides knotted up. If they weren’t in time. . . .
She glanced over at Dominik, who paced her stride for stride, grim-faced. He looked over and caught her eye.
It was hard to communicate when pounding across the hills, and neither of them, she suspected, wanted to shout. But he managed to get his face into an expression of inquiry that was pretty easy to read. Do you have any idea what we are facing? Any plans?
She shrugged. He nodded.
They both turned their attention to getting as much out of their mounts as they could without exhausting them.
Finally they found their path taking them into deep woods, among hills almost tall enough to qualify as mountains. They followed streambeds and game trails, whenever they found something going more or less in the direction they needed. It was easier to follow the streambeds than the game trails, but it was rough going either way. They had to slow now, but the map was no longer nearly as much help, since they were practically on top of the sand-dot.
And that was when she had a brainstorm, and reined her horse in at a slightly clearer spot in the woods. Dominik immediately did the same. His horse blew out its breath in a snort, impatiently.
“What—?” Dominik asked, in a harsh whisper. She held up her hand, then pulled off her right glove with her teeth, and gently detached the sand-dot from the map. Leaning forward, she carefully transferred it to the center of her horse’s browband and made it fuse there with a little magic. Keeping her fingers on it, she concentrated, willing power and intention not only into the bit of Markos-infused sand but into the horse’s mind as well. Follow, my four-legged friend. Follow where that leads. She tickled the part of her magic that allowed her to get inside the horse’s mind, and commune with him without words. She sensed he understood, and withdrew a little.
Around her the forest was—itself. There seemed to be nothing whatsoever sinister lurking within it. If she had not known better, she would never have guessed this was a place where Markos could be in danger.
Maybe whatever it is is very, very good at hiding.
She patted the horse’s neck, trying to communicate her anxiety for a herd-mate without frightening him. Then she slacked the reins, and gently nudged the horse with her heels.
He threw up his head, a little startled for a moment, then, tentatively began to move through the trees, forsaking the game trail altogether. Dominik followed right at her horse’s tail. She figured he knew enough about magic to have understood what she was doing when he saw it, and didn’t want to break the silence with voices. Human voices had a nasty tendency to carry quite far in the forest.
One great advantage of being Elemental Masters in a situation like this was that wildlife tended not to call the alarm on their approach. An Elemental Master—especially an Earth Master—could move through a forest and attract less attention from wild things than a large predator, like a bear. And since their horses were not much bigger than deer, the soft sound of their hooves on the ground was not likely to give them away. Unless this peril had a nose keener than anything else in the forest, or was using birds to stand guard, it was unlikely they would give themselves away.
She linked herself to the little dot of sand as well, allowing herself to feel the “tug” as it tried to reach Markos. If the horse needed a little extra guidance, she would be able to give it. She kept the reins slack, and her hands light on them, for this fellow had shown himself to have a sensitive mouth.
But this horse was as clever and willing as their cart horse had been dull and recalcitrant. Now that he “understood” what was wanted, he was completely attentive to the signals to his mind, and stepped carefully among the undergrowth to find the easiest path to get where the sand was taking him.
She kept her eyes half-closed, trying to be as sensitive to the forest around her as she could, looking and “feeling” for trouble—was there any chance, any chance at all, that whatever Markos had encountered would have been careless enough to leave traces of itself?
Oh, may it be so, she prayed fervently.
And then, as if her prayer had been answered, she saw it.
Unmistakable, and just joining their path ahead, barely visible through the trees. She would have seen it, regardless, once they had gone a little farther, but since she was looking hard for it, the signs screamed at her with their wrongness. She reined the horse in on pure reaction, her heart in her mouth.
Energy trails, like dried blood. The visible traces of vârcolac, shifters, users of blood magic. Not one. Not three or four. This was . . . a lot. Weaving in and out around each other, all going in the same direction. A dozen, maybe more.
Dominik pulled up beside her, and when she glanced at him, she saw his eyes were wide with shock. He looked over at her.
“We need to rethink this,” she whispered. She had not anticipated there might be this much opposition. She had never heard of that many shifters working together, like a real wolf pack.
Not ever.
This was unprecedented.
“Whatever we were thinking of doing,” she continued, her mouth dry, “Is clearly out of the question. We need some really original plans.”
Wordlessly, he nodded.
Rosa and Dominik lay side by side above a crack in the hillside. They were belly-down on sparse grass over a scant layer of soil, which in turn topped granite. Sun shining down on them seemed to give no heat, at least not to Rosa. She suppressed shivers at the sheer level of dark magic she could sense beneath them. A thin stream of somewhat noisome smoke barely wafted out of the crack in the rock. That crack served as the “chimney” to a cave somewhere far below. And in that cave was Markos.
That was what the sand-dot told them; the energy traces of the shifters told them that there were . . . a lot of them. It was like a murky, polluted cesspit down there.
There were so many of the shifters that, near the entrance of the cave, their trails all got muddled into one solid wash of horrid, sickening power, and all that Rosa knew for certain was that there were far more than a dozen.
Another problem was that there was no way to tease out individual trails without actually having something belonging to the shifter. So there was no way of picking them out individually to count them, either.
And there was the problem of traffic in and out of the cave. Energy trails faded after about a day, but who knew how many times the shifters had entered and left the cave during that time? All she could tell for certain was that there were far more of them than she and Dominik could handle with a straightforward attack.
By the smell coming up from that chimney-crack . . . this was their home den, the place from which they staged all their attacks. And they had been living there for a very long time. The stink of unwashed bodies, human and lupine, was enough to gag a goat. It was flavored with the smoke, hints of old blood and a touch of rotting meat. She wondered how they could stand it. Wolves had incredibly sensitive noses.
But maybe, since it was their stink, they liked it.
This was definitely where Markos was being held, and they knew, now, that he must be being held as a prisoner. There was no way a pack of shifters like this would have allowed him to join them, no matter how cleverly he tried. In fact, that might be how they had taken Markos prisoner in the first place.
She and Dominik couldn’t tell exactly where Markos was in there, and all they knew for certain was that he wasn’t dead yet. She felt her gut clenching, and forced back tears. To be so close to him, and not be able
to think of a way to rescue him! This would need a full Hunt, and he would be dead long, long before she could bring a full Hunt here. Never had she felt more helpless—
Well . . . not quite never. The last time she had felt this helpless, she had been trapped in the pantry, with a shifter clawing through the door. . . .
. . . shifter, clawing through the door. All alone. Desperate. And reaching out, fueled purely by that desperation . . .
Wait . . .
It wasn’t so much an idea as a . . . feeling.
Could I? Should I, that’s more to the point.
What choice do we have?
“Let’s get back to the horses,” she whispered. She wiggled backward from the crack until she was well away, then got carefully to her feet and stole quietly through the forest. Years and years of practice, plus her soft-soled boots, made her so quiet that she didn’t even snap a twig. Dominik was a little more clumsy; despite his best effort, he kept stepping on branches, and rustling leaves—but he was smart enough to make his movements slow and deliberate, so that they sounded rather like a bear shoving his way through the brush, and not like a human at all.
Once they were well away from the—well, she could only think of it as a “den”—she broke into a trot. There was no point in being quiet now, and she wanted to get back to a safe point before she spoke aloud. Dominik did the same and followed right behind her, trying to put his feet in her footsteps to confuse their path, until they got to the little cleft where they had left the horses.
It was not unlike the cleft in the rock back at the first shifter cave, except that it was shallower and there was no cave at the back of it. They had left the horses tied up to a young tree about the girth of a bracelet, right beside a trickle of water, and there was enough grass beneath it to keep the horses satisfied for now.
When we have to leave them . . . I must tie them loosely, scatter the oats around them, and give them orders to pull free and run by sunrise. She hoped this cleft was far enough from the shifter den that the shifters wouldn’t scent the horses. She hoped no bears or real wolves would get them overnight.
Then again, she doubted that bears or wolves would come this close to the shifter den. Likely the only animals around here were things the shifters wouldn’t trouble to kill.
“I need to do a magic working. This isn’t going to be like anything you have ever seen before, Dominik,” she said, as they paused and took some deep breaths, leaning a little against the horses’ rumps. “It—it isn’t even exactly a ritual, or a spell, or anything of the sort. I’ll tell you the truth; when it comes to all the magic that I actually know, I’m completely at my wit’s end for remembering anything that will do us any good at all.”
He nodded. “Nothing I could think of would, either,” he admitted, grim-faced. “We need a Hunt, but—blessed Virgin, how could we ever be so cruel as to try and make one up out of Petrescu and his villagers? And nothing we summoned, not even from my family or Markos’, would get here in time.”
She nodded, lips compressed into a thin, hard line. “But I finally remembered that I did something by accident, once upon a time when I was a child and as desperate as we are now, that worked beyond anything I should have been able to do. I’m going to try something of the same thing, this time on purpose. And we’ll see what we get.” She took a deep breath, and dropped her hands to her sides, shaking them out. “This probably isn’t even going to look much like magic. So . . . well, all I can do is try.”
She dropped all of her shielding. After all, she hadn’t even known what shields were back then, much less been able to raise them. She needed to be the opposite of what she usually was; she needed to return to that pure, innocent state of childhood, when she had no idea that—some things weren’t possible.
Maybe . . . maybe in that state of purity and innocence, anything was possible.
And she closed her eyes, made herself entirely still, and . . . opened herself to the forest, to the hills and mountains, to the earth beneath her. Opened herself to all the life around her—which was the thing she had done instinctively and in a panic as a child.
This time she had no fear that the vârcolac would sense her. She knew now what she had not known then—that the shifters were entirely unnatural. That they were not in tune with the Earth, because their magic, like the magic of all of those who used blood-engendered power, was the opposite of Earth Magic. That they divorced themselves from the Earth, in a sense—attuning themselves only to the opposite powers of corruption, evil, and decay. What she did . . . well, they wouldn’t even know she was doing it. The only reason that shifter back in Grossmutter’s cottage had known what she was doing was because, untutored child that she was, she had called for help to anything that could hear her. This time, she was going to call for . . . only good things, wholesome things, anything natural, and tied to the Earth, that might be inclined to help her.
But it would leave her completely open and at the mercy of whatever answered her. Back in Germany, she knew what she would get. But this was Romania. And what answered her might not be friendly to her. The Saxons—Rhenish in her case, but spirits and Elementals wouldn’t know the difference—might not be regarded kindly by the native Romanian spirits and Elementals. She hadn’t sensed any animosity, but the truth was, she just didn’t know. The Saxons had brought their own creatures with them when they arrived centuries ago. Had they displaced the natives? Did the natives resent that? Never mind how long ago it had been, Elementals remembered favors and grudges for millennia. . . .
She was counting on Dominik’s presence—and the fact that they were trying to rescue Markos from something utterly foul—to temper that. But there were no guarantees. And if whatever came decided she needed punishment as an interloper rather than aid as an ally, well . . .
Well, then I will beg for help for Markos and submit to any punishment it might deem my due, she thought, reconciling herself to it. There was, after all, no choice. This was their best chance to save him. Probably their only chance. He had believed in her, and stood up for her, and taken her side. She could not do less for him.
She gathered all the power that was within her, as she had as a child. She tried to put herself in the attitude of supplication—not groveling, but as one who has exhausted all other options, and will accept with an open, grateful heart whatever might come to her aid. And she waited, until the moment felt right, as the tension built, as the metaphysical arrow waited, and the bowstring was drawn back, until the mystical quarry was in her sights, and the arrow was ready to leap from the bow, and the moment was just right—
And the moment came, single, whole and perfect.
Please! she called out, making her whole body ring with their need. HELP US!!
Just as it had that moment, so long ago, the entire forest seemed to ring like a bell. It was as if a shudder, an earthquake—no, a power quake—went through everything, and a moment after that . . . came an enormous silence. Nothing made a sound, not a bird, not a leaf, not the horses next to them. Not even the wind. For that moment, everything in the forest was completely, utterly still, and everything that had breath, held its breath—
Dominik looked as if she had struck him between the eyes with a hammer. Even his handsome moustache had lost its life, and drooped as if stunned.
She, too, held her breath, staring at the opening to the cleft in the hill where they had taken shelter, wondering what, if anything, was going to answer her.
Then, she had her answer.
There was light, golden light, building out there in the forest. It was a clear, pure light, of a sort she had never seen before. For a moment, it looked as if the most perfect sunbeam ever created had pierced the canopy and was illuminating a spot right where the cleft opened up into the woods. But then the light got stronger . . . and stronger . . . and began moving toward them.
Rosa clutched the saddle, knees going weak. She
hadn’t exactly hoped for this . . . she hadn’t allowed herself to hope for anything.
But whatever had answered her, it was powerful. More powerful, maybe, than that avatar of the Great Hunter that had appeared to help her with the first Romanian shifter, the one that had worn the first copper medal. But there was more than just one being answering her call this time.
The light formed into shapes, and then into solid creatures. Human-formed, but definitely not human. The power played around them like a halo.
It was a procession of maidens, pacing two-by-two toward them.
But oh! Such maidens as these she had never seen in her life, and reckoned she never would again.
The first lot were the most impressive, and most beautiful of them all. There were two of them, with long hair flowing down to the ground, hair the actual color of gold, golden gowns, and eyes the color of the sky. Their faces were impossibly beautiful, and still—like statues come to life. “Zâne,” whispered Dominik, eyes bulging, moustache bristling, as they neared and then divided, facing and standing one to either side of them. “They are like—guardian angels.”
Before she could respond, more paced forward out of the light. The second lot, six of them, walking toward them in a line of three pairs, were also beautiful, but dressed in mail coats over white gowns, and their hair was more the color of white gold. Their faces were anything but still. They smiled, lazily, and even though they were wearing armor, they swayed as if they were dancing, seductively. “Iele,” Dominik said, and shivered, as they cast voluptuous glances at him. He looked as if he was torn between fear and longing for them; being a woman, Rosa was immune to their seductive power, but she could sense how hard Dominik was fighting to resist. They seemed to find that amusing. She sensed that if they had wanted to, they could have brought Dominik crawling to them on his hands and knees. But they were here for another purpose, and were not inclined to toy with him. This time, anyway.
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