by Hazel Hunter
Seeing the gleam of the wet red excited Murdina. “Let me have them.”
“’Twill take too long to kill them all.” Hendry lifted his hands, his power growing bright as it gathered and seethed over his palms. “In terror and silence be, away from mine and me.”
Murdina watched his power divide into dozens of glowing green orbs. They flew forward to burst over the mortals around the pit. As soon as the magic touched them, the mortals dropped their tools without a word and fled.
“Stand guard,” Hendry told the driver. To Murdina he said, “I sense the traces of Flen’s broken enchantment. The conclave had him use sunlight to power the imprisonment spells here and on Skye.” His upper lip curled. “How predictable.”
“Yet the sun still shines,” Murdina said, gazing at the sky. A strange resonance still lingered around them. “And the light trembles.”
“’Twas a sun storm,” her lover said. He grimaced as he shielded his eyes and followed her gaze. “In our time such couldnae affect such enchantments. The sky now is thinner, and the air tainted by smoke and more I dinnae ken.”
He led her to the edge of the pit, where the mortals had removed most of the shattered stone casings and burial soil. The wide oval of tall oak tree posts appeared intact, still joined together by an enormous ring of ash wood inlaid with polished cabochons of dark topaz. Fragments of long-dead mistletoe vines still wrapped around each of the fifty-six posts. Nothing grew in the earth around the henge. Bhaltair Flen had salted the burial soil so much it resembled blood-stained snow.
Murdina had expected the worst, but to see their caraidean’s prison brought back all the old pain. “Can you free them?”
“With your power joined to mine, aye.” He clasped her hands between his. “Open for me, best beloved mine, and give me all.”
An unexpected shame filled her. “I’m no’ as once I was for you.”
“Nor I.” He brought her hands to his mouth, kissing the center of each palm before pressing them against his chest. “I dinnae care. With you I am everything, my lady.”
The love in his eyes soothed Murdina as she lowered the wards that contained her own power. As Hendry’s magic drew on hers, she felt the changes their long exile had wrought in him. His anger had grown like hers: a constant, boiling fury, fed by his desires to see those responsible suffer. The clarity that had once guided his clever mind now lay behind a fortress of icy, ruthless ambition. Just when she thought they had both gone mad, his feelings for her engulfed her.
All fell away as she wrapped herself in those deep, eventide shadows. “My poor love,” she whispered.
He caressed her cheek. “’Twill be as I promised. Once the reckoning is finished, the world belongs to us and the caraidean.”
Hendry reached out over the pit, her hands still entwined with his, and closed his eyes. Murdina felt his lean body shake as he gathered and combined their powers to fuel the spell he murmured. Popping and splintering sounds rose from the pit. In the next instant the dark brown gems hurled upward from the warping ring of ash wood. As the last words of the incantation left her lover’s lips, the circle cracked and fell away from the oak posts. The massive wood columns groaned, the pitch spiraling upward, until loud cracks split the air. As the oak posts ruptured into halves, the immortal spirits within escaped.
A soft rumble spread out over the land, like the distant roar of an immense beast uncaged.
Murdina watched the caraidean emerge from the henge, her fear fading as awe swelled in her breast. Each of the fifty-six spirits rose from the pit as a phantom of what they had once been: massive totems carved of sacred oak. Now they hovered in the air, shimmering and bodiless. They stretched up as they had in life, more than seven ells tall, four times the size of a human. Their broadness invoked the mightiness of the massive trunks from which they had been hewn, and their limbs bulged just as thick and unyielding.
Nothing that had ever walked the earth could match their magnificence.
“We didnae forget,” Hendry called out to them.
Closing his eyes and murmuring under his breath, he cast a little known spell. From each post, a splinter rose up from the pit to hover above it. With a flick of his hand, he scattered the fragments over the grass beneath the phantom oaks, which slowly descended and enveloped them. The slivers of wood swelled and elongated, taking on the shape of the totems they had once been. Now Murdina added her own magic to their efforts, casting a wide swath of transmuting power over the giants, which shrank them down as they took on human form. When the intense light dwindled and vanished, fifty-six enormous warriors stood on the other side of the pit, each watching them.
“Welcome back, my friends.” Hendry bowed so low his brow nearly touched his knees.
Murdina had no skirts to sweep back into a proper curtsey, but she did her best in the strange garments. “We came as soon as the sun storm freed us.”
One of the largest of the transformed hobbled to the front, rocking unsteadily on his new legs as he came around the pit. The ground beneath their feet trembled with each step he took.
“Gratitude,” he said in a creaky voice. As he came to a stop in front of them, he touched his own jaw and ran his hand over his neck, producing an eerie grating sound. “You remade us. Why, Hendry Greum of the Wood Dream?”
Hearing the name of their slaughtered people spoken after two thousand years, even in the giant’s grating, unnatural voice, made Murdina clutch her lover’s arm. If the immortal caraidean remembered them, then they had not changed.
“Aon,” Hendry said, “we must go back and punish the Dawn Fire tribe for what they did. Then we would begin the reckoning.” He knelt before the giant. “For this, we ask your help. If ’tis no’ your wish, I shall restore you to your true forms, and bid you farewell.”
The giant lifted and turned his hand to inspect it before he offered it to Hendry, tugging him to his feet. “We shall return with you for the punishing and the reckoning.”
Murdina glanced at the other giants, who were testing their new limbs by milling about in an uneven circle. They would be clumsy until they became accustomed to their new forms, and then they would be unstoppable. She would have to ask Hendry to save Bhaltair Flen for her, however. She had spent several centuries in the darkness planning what she would do once the old meddler’s soul was in her hands, and an easy death would not be his. Indeed, what she would see him suffer would make being trapped in the Storr seem like a benevolence.
“The druids used a portal to put us in the henge,” Aon said and stretched out a long, bulky arm toward the stream. “There.”
“The ancient cairns here remain intact,” Hendry said, “so too may the portal.” He slipped his arm around Murdina’s waist. “Shall we begin our new journey, druidess mine?”
As they made their way to the secluded oak grove, she wanted to skip beside the sparkling stream. But they slowed when they neared the sacred grove. Waist-high weeds choked the clearing in the center, and the trees surrounding it had grown into each other. Most of their twisted, interlaced branches had died, reminding Murdina of funeral pyre wood. She tugged on her lover’s arm until he halted just outside the grove.
“Bhaltair may have left a trap for the caraidean, should they escape the henge.”
“No snare magic here, druidess,” Aon said and gestured toward one of the other giants, who had a deep scar running down the center of his face. “Tri, open the portal.”
The big warrior trudged through the oaks and stopped on the edge of the clearing. He reached down to touch the ground—but nothing. Then he slammed his fist into it but still there was naught. After several other attempts that included his feet and head, he came out and stopped before Aon.
“They willnae permit,” Tri creaked in his surreal voice. He glared back at the overgrown oaks. “Silent to me.”
Aon sent more of the giants to test the portal, yet none could open it. At last the leader of the caraidean tried himself to gain entry, but the clearing remained clo
sed.
“This grove cannae remember us,” the giant finally said and surveyed the trees. “They came up after the old trees burned.”
“Mayhap they dinnae recognize you in your altered form,” Hendry said, and drew Murdina with him to enter the clearing. “Follow us once we open the portal,” he called back to Aon, but when they stepped into the center, the ground did not open.
More disturbing to Murdina was how the oaks remained still and quiet with two druid kind in their midst. “Surely they cannae refuse us.”
Hendry dropped down and pressed his hands to the soil for a long moment before he rose. “More of Flen’s scheme. None of us can use the portal.”
She realized what he meant. “The oaks cannae sense us as druid kind.” Panic shot through her as she stared at the ground. “We’ll be trapped here.”
“No,” Aon declared. His cold shadow stretched over them. “We begin the reckoning here. Now.” He lifted his huge arm and splayed his hand against the wind. A thick mist released into the air that then silvered. It showed an opaque image of a young woman among trees. “There, walking in the forest. A female of the Dawn Fire. She shall open the portal for us.”
“So, druid kind persist,” Hendry said and spat on the ground. “But this era is full of flimsy creatures, so we shall need more than one. How many other druid kind females do you sense near us?”
Aon raised both hands and turned in a slow circle. The air around grew dense with a haze of particles emanating from his form, and took on a woody, sharp scent. At last he regarded Hendry. “Four others may be taken.”
The particles Aon had released turned silvery as the first one had, and showed images of the females he had located.
Hendry studied all of them and smiled at one in particular. “Lady mine, do you see what I do?”
“By the gods,” Murdina whispered as she gripped his hand tightly. “How can it be?”
“By the gods,” her lover echoed, and kissed her brow. To Aon he said, “They’ll serve our purpose. Only remember, we need them alive.”
“As you will, so we do.”
Aon rejoined the other giants, choosing four among them to walk out of the grove.
Murdina and Hendry followed, and she leaned against her lover as the five caraidean sank into the ground. Once they had submerged completely, raised ridges of earth began to streak out in different directions, toppling trees and smashing through fences.
“So, it begins,” Hendry said, sounding very satisfied as he glanced around them. “’Twill be a very different world when we’re finished.”
She nodded. “Once we kill all the humans, ’twill be ours to remake.”
Chapter Three
SHATTERING LIGHT POURED over Chieftain Brennus Skaraven, scrolling over his skin and dragging him from the darkness. He opened his eyes to find himself standing knee-deep in snow atop the high, flat plateau of the Am Monadh Ruadh. Winter had come to the red hills to freeze the wellsprings into mirrored coins. Ice veiled the granite tors, making the ancient rock pillars glitter with the false promise of silver ore.
He could not remember coming here.
Yesterday he had led his men against the famhairean, the giants even more terrifying than the Skaraven Clan. The battle had been brutal, savage, and had ended in darkness, but not in this place. They’d fought in summer, not winter. And while the bitter climes of the highlands had rarely troubled Brennus, thanks to his towering, muscled-padded form, here he felt no chill at all. The snow clinging to his powerful legs might have just as well been sand.
The dead dinnae grow cold.
As Brennus looked up he saw five ravens circling through the sun’s tremulous beams. The ink on his chest should have responded to the birds with surging power. But there was only the faintest crackle of his raven battle spirit, as if it were far away. When he knelt to offer proper reverence, the black birds hurtled down, only to dissolve like so many phantoms. His lips drew into a hard line.
Tree-knower tricks.
He rose from the drift and drew his sword, his bicep bunching under his dark cloak as he held the heavy, razor-sharp blade ready.
“Show yourselves.”
His deep voice rumbled around him in muffled echoes, but no one appeared.
Brennus’s big hand knotted around his blade hilt until his knuckles whitened. He recalled everything that had befallen him: the hard life, endless battle, the brief taste of freedom, and then the final sacrifice. He could not be in the highlands. He’d died yesterday, as had his entire clan. The man who had been Brennus Skaraven lay rotting somewhere with them. The unanswered wrongs that seethed in his heart boiled out of him in a furious bellow to the gods.
“What do you facking want of me?”
Without warning the snow beneath his boots dropped away, and Brennus fell again. He smashed his fists against the sides of the dark, whirling tunnel, but he could find no handhold or even slow his plunge. Beneath him he saw an ocean of white stars laced with golden magic, but when he landed he found himself crouching in a bed of thick ferns.
“Oh, wonderful,” a young, elated female voice said. “You’re going to do great things for us.”
Across from him not a hand reach away knelt a slender, flame-haired lass. As Brennus stared at her, the oddness of her faded trews and heavy plaid coat perplexed him. She wore some kind of satchel against her back. But it was being so close to her and not hampered by chains, that made him hardly dare to breathe. She paid no heed to him as she plucked the feathery greens and stowed them in odd sacks made of thin glass that moved as fabric would.
What new trick was this?
Brennus could not utter a word. All Skaraven had been forbidden to speak to females. But to look at her filled him with wonder. Surely, she belonged to a king, for she had the delicate, unmarked skin of high nobility. Her uncovered hair had been tied back from the lovely oval of her face, and flashed with all the colors of candlelit copper. As she worked, she pursed her lips, as soft and curvy as flame flower petals, to kiss the air. Her downcast eyes remained hidden, but the sweep of her sable brows and gold-tipped eyelashes promised something rare and treasured. She wore a heart-shaped crystal on a fine silver necklace, both of a like he had never before seen.
The beauty that filled his eyes also made his gut knot. Gods, who had been mad enough to let such a splendid creature roam the highlands alone?
She frowned as she pressed aside some fronds to examine the ground beneath them, and pressed her palm atop the soil. “Can’t be. Jamie said it wasn’t an earthquake.”
Her strange accent and manner of speaking finally registered. She sounded neither Caledonian nor Pritani to Brennus. He knew nothing of the peoples across the sea, so she might be Francian or a Gaul. The soft timber of her voice made heat bloom in his chest, just beneath his skinwork, which startled him anew. His battle spirit had never once responded to the presence of a female.
All of his confusion scattered as the ground shook beneath him. A mound of earth rapidly piled up at her back. Without thinking he abandoned the old forbiddance and shouted, “Behind you, the famhair.”
The lass didn’t react to his warning. Two huge wooden hands shot out of the soil and seized her by the arms. Her head snapped up and her eyes, the clear blue of sky topaz, went wide as she screamed.
“No,” Brennus shouted.
But when he lunged for the female his hands passed through her flesh. He roared his fury as the giant dragged her into the earth. He hurled himself after her into the mound, and became engulfed. The soil piled higher and higher, collapsing on top of him and burying him deep. Brennus fought to free himself, dragging his arms through the shifting earth and ramming his fists above him. Dirt exploded over and around him as he punched his way out of the loose, cold soil, and hoisted himself to his feet.
His raven buckler, now as badly cracked and silvered as bog-wood, tore from its rotted leather straps and fell away from his wide chest. A damp, icy breeze rushed over his bare body and shed the sharp-swe
et scent of mistletoe flowers, prodding his temper. He saw nearly a hundred druids standing in a wide oval and watching as the ground shook and heaved. Earth fountained up in violent sprays as dozens of other tall, powerful men clawed their way out of the ground, each warrior as naked as their chieftain. The only thing each wore was a wooden ring carved from sacred oaks. Though blackened by time, each still held the likeness of a raven.
Brennus didn’t have to look at their faces to know who they were. Since boyhood he could feel the other men of the Skaraven Clan. He held up his right fist, brandishing his clan ring.
“Bràithrean an fhithich,” he shouted in the old tongue. Brethren of the raven.
As his brothers echoed their chieftain’s call to arms, they quickly fell into their ranks on either side of him.
This was not where they had died, either, Brennus thought. Nor were the tree-knowers that now encircled it the same who had sent them into battle. Their unfamiliar, dark blue robes concealed their faces with hoods.
Aye, but he’d been right in guessing this their work.
“War Master,” Brennus said, keeping his gaze locked on their watchers. “Counsel.”
The command brought Cadeyrn, Brennus’s second, to his left side. Soil still pelted the Skaraven War Master’s broad shoulders and powerful chest, and his sun-streaked umber mane hung down to his waist. He looked, as ever, ready to kill something.
“One hundred strong,” Cadeyrn murmured for his ears alone as he kept his fierce bronze eyes fixed on the dru-wids. “No wounds or garb. Seventy-seven tree-knowers enclose the field. The famhairean have vanished.”
Brennus knew the giants would not have willing left the battle, and as he scanned the land for their tracks he saw more disturbing signs. He recognized the river bordering the land to the west was the Enrick, but its course had subtly altered. The oaks at the forest’s edge he recalled as saplings had somehow grown into colossal trees. Beyond the river the rocky slopes of the mountains had rounded and spread, as if melting back into the earth. Knots of heather patches and thick grasses now entirely covered the floodplain’s bare black soil. As he turned his head, Brennus felt his own night-dark hair brush the small of his back, and recalled how he and the clan had shaved their heads bare before engaging the giants.