“Éireamhóine.” Her teeth clenched so hard, Vitré was almost certain he could hear them rattle. “Who should have been dead these twenty years!”
Scioleann cleared his throat once, twice, as if preparing to speak—and then refrained. Again it fell to Vitré. “It is not absolutely certain that the man we are seeking is he. If Camhóinhann were here, I think the matter could be quickly settled.”
Her restless movements had taken her from one end of the gardens to the other. Now she whirled around and started back. “I do not need Camhóinhann. Now that the name has come to my attention, it will take very little time to learn the truth. And if it is Éireamhóine I will crush him!”
Struggling to keep up with her, Vitré spoke swiftly to make amends. “Naturally I never thought otherwise. I only meant that if the High Priest were here you would not be inconvenienced—”
“There will be no inconvenience. He has caused me so much annoyance already, I look forward with pleasure to the prospect. By tomorrow morning, he will be dead.”
“If that is your will,” said the priest, “there can be no doubt of it.”
But late that evening, when her little hunchbacked chancellor opened the door to the chamber where he kept all his records and interviewed his spies, he found her waiting for him there, white-faced and trembling with fury.
“He is not dead,” she said. “This upstart magician has defied all my spells. Those who thought they recognized him were mistaken. Am I to be served only by fools and incompetents?”
“But perhaps there was no mistake,” said Noz, fingering his white beard. “Perhaps—”
“No,” she replied fiercely. “Not on my own island—not if I had his true name—he could never turn my spells.”
“I was about to say, he may no longer be on Phaörax. He was last seen two days ago, and many ships have departed since then. If we send men to all the ports to ask questions, we may learn where he has gone.”
She glared at him with her cat-green eyes. “And in the meantime he may pass out of easy reach. No. I will sink every galley and sailing ship on the ocean within a two-day voyage. That way we can be certain.”
“But your own ships—” the hunchback protested.
“Must unfortunately be sacrificed,” she said briskly. “I will not be thwarted in this. The wizard will die, and these annoyances will end.”
Noz limped across the room on his crooked legs, a deep frown furrowing his brow. It had not, after all, been absolutely proven whether the transformation from mountebank to magician had precipitated any of these troubling occurrences—or was merely another result. Nor could he be easy with the notion of sinking so many Pharaxion ships.
Yet he had sense enough to recognize when it was impossible to reason with her. He had known her too long to be mistaken about that.
Her decision made, Ouriána wasted little time ascending to the isolated rooftop where she sometimes worked her spells. Elemental magic, most particularly on the scale that she planned, was best worked in the open air. The last time she had attempted such a spell-casting indoors, the results had very nearly been disastrous. But she had been younger then, and was wiser now.
She had delayed only so long as it took to send some of her most trusted servants on before her with the apparatus of magic. By the time she arrived, they had already arranged everything according to her instructions, then made a silent departure. Of all the nine towers, this was the only one with a flat roof, or stairs that offered access. An ancestor of hers with lesser gifts had commanded that it be built so. It offered an unobstructed view of the night sky.
Overhead, wheels, spirals, vortexes of stars spun in the black vault of night. Even the plodding ordinary stars in their fixed constellations seemed to shine with extraordinary brilliance. And while the moon was slender and still very young, she knew that its light would be sufficient. The omens could not be more favorable.
Why look to the sky for portents? said her other self. You drive the stars. By your least deeds they are influenced. Even after so many years, a delicious thrill passed through her at the thought.
And already she could tell that the deity within approved what she was about to do. There had been a time when temple sacrifices had mostly appeased its hunger; now it urged her more and more often toward death and destruction. Its appetite seemed to grow with what it fed on. Once that would have daunted her, but she was not so easily dismayed now.
A brazier filled with coals, as yet unlit, stood in the exact center of the roof. From her bosom she drew a silver phial set with precious stones. Breaking the wax seal and pulling out the stopper, she tipped the phial over the brazier and spilled out a few grains of red powder. They ignited at the first touch of moonlight and set the coals ablaze.
Stirring the fire with a wand tipped with crystal, she began to sing, to weave signs on the air. Calling forth mighty natural antagonisms, she set element warring against element. As she worked her spell, in the sweet intoxication of so much power, her breath came and went in an uneven rhythm. Around her, the very air quaked; it tasted of iron and ashes; it hissed and moaned. Under her feet, the stones of the tower writhed.
Then she sent the power on its way, with screaming winds and thunderclouds pulsing with the tumultuous forces building inside them. She stirred the seas to fury; she piled waves like mountains. Drawing frigid air down from the north, and hot air from the south, she brought them together with a mighty concussion.
In Apharos, doors were torn from their hinges; shutters went whirling off into the sky. A monstrous wave crashed on the western side of the island, with such force that the spray was felt a mile inland. It engulfed two fishing villages, and then sucked them out to sea when it retreated again.
Farther out to sea, lightning slashed open the sky. On ships as far away as Erios, winds ripped sails from their masts, cracked spars, dashed dozens of ships to atoms on rocky shores. A fleet of Ouriána’s own galleys, rowing hard against the pull of a great whirlpool, were swallowed one by one. The captain of the last to go died cursing the enemies of the Empress, little knowing that she herself had worked the ruin of so many good ships.
The gale raged for a day and a night before it blew out. The silence that followed was like a mighty shout, so accustomed had the ears of the islanders become to the noise that had preceded it.
29
The hour being well after midnight, Sindérian lay down to rest while Prince Ruan kept watch. Although she was convinced that anxiety and exhaustion would keep her awake, she sank at once into the oblivion of utter fatigue and woke with the morning sun in her face.
There was no breakfast, because their food supplies had disappeared with the horses. She spent the rest of the morning purging what remained of the poison in Kivik’s blood, while Ruan went off to the east to recover some of the horses. Aell remained in the camp with an aching head and one arm in a sling, refusing further treatment, and Sindérian could not help but glad of it. Meanwhile Skerry slept through the morning. She knew that when he woke there was still much to be done on his behalf.
Ruan came back shortly after noon, riding one horse and leading another. They made a hurried meal from the supplies he had recovered, before he went off to bring in the other horses while Sindérian and her father tended her patients. Skerry, she soon discovered, was burning with fever. There were purple weals where the puncture wounds in his chest had been, and she feared that whatever sickness infected the manticore had passed into him. But in the cool of the evening his fever broke, proving her fears were groundless.
It was obvious by the next morning that none of her patients were strong enough to ride. They would require at least another day to rest. Ill fortune continues to follow us wherever we go, she said to Faolein. Our entire party might have been killed.
And yet, he answered, with his usual calm, nobody was killed. The outcome could have been very much worse.
Even so, the delay might well prove fatal to all their hopes. I almost believed, she said,
flinging herself down on the grass, that the winds of the world were beginning to blow in our favor.
Neither for us or against us, I think, he replied. I believe we have come to a period in time, however brief, when it will be possible to choose our own course. Let us choose wisely.
They rode out the following morning, setting a gentle pace for the sake of their wounded. As if in answer to their need, there were several days of mild, bright weather, almost springlike, during which Aell and the Skyrran princes rapidly recovered.
Then the weather turned again, and the wind blew colder. They spent one night in one of the ruined villages, in a building that was miraculously little damaged: three walls left standing, and most of the roof remaining. Another night, of savage winds and smothering darkness, they spent in the inadequate shelter of a knot of trees. The next two days were wholly occupied skirting a morass of black, oozing mud and wet green mosses.
“We are a little to the north of Ceir Eldig,” said Prince Ruan, after a week’s travel from the Whathig Wood. “Another day and a half should bring us there, if we don’t turn west and pass it by.”
“Let us wait until tomorrow to decide,” said Sindérian. There was something in the mention of that fallen city that set her heart racing, that sent an undercurrent of excitement racing along her nerves. As they topped a rise, a ray of sunlight struck through the clouds—and suddenly the Sight which had eluded her these many months returned to her, strong and true.
A great panorama of the earth spread out before her; distances were compressed; mountains proved no barrier. From the ground below to the vault of the atmosphere above, there was no impediment. She saw into the sumptuous chambers of palaces, and into the huts of peasants, into ships and cities, and into the nine underground kingdoms of the dwarves. Yet no mind could hold so much, and it passed so quickly that she could never hope to absorb or remember it.
Nevertheless, that brief vision left clarity behind it.
Be the lightning rod, Sindérian. So Faolein had said on the shores of the sea, and ever since then her resolve had been steadily growing stronger. Don’t be like the weathercock changing direction with every wind that blows. Be the lightning rod instead. She had known for many weeks what she must do. But now she knew the place and the hour.
When, at Sindérian’s suggestion, they stopped well before twilight, Prince Ruan saw no reason for concern. Everyone was weary of travelling, wounds were still aching, and they had reached a little grove of linden, birch, and hawthorn with a stream running through, where they could water the horses and set up a camp sheltered from the wind.
It was only after supper, when he realized that Sindérian had slipped away without him noticing it, that his suspicions were aroused. “Where has she gone—did anyone see her leave?” he asked the others.
No one had. Catching some of his uneasiness, they were all about to go out searching for her when she reappeared. Her dress was damp and her hair dripping wet; she had apparently found a spot, farther down the stream and screened by bushes, where she could bathe. Without a word to anyone, she sat down by the fire to dry her gown and comb out her hair.
The other men, sensing nothing amiss, returned to their seats on the ground and to the conversation that had occupied them before Ruan raised the alarm. But there was something about her—a strange, fey air—that continued to disturb him.
As the sun went down the western sky and the moon climbed above the trees, Ruan kept an anxious eye on her across the fire. She was humming a song he could not quite catch. And he knew, he knew, as he watched her throw herbs on the fire and plait her hair into a braid of seven strands, that there was something afoot that she was telling no one. Her eyes, ordinarily so candid, were full of hidden things, of wizardly mysteries.
Something she wore on her wrist caught the firelight, a glitter of silver and a glint of deep amber-gold. “I’ve not seen that bracelet before!”
Startled by his raised voice and abrupt question, the others swiveled their heads to look at him, and then, following his glance, at her.
“It was King Yri’s gift,” she answered quietly, sliding the silver band further up her arm until it disappeared inside the dark sleeve of her gown.
“Isn’t that…” Skerry began.
“What?” said Ruan, rounding on him. It seemed for a moment as if revelation hovered on the air. “What were you about to say?”
“Something Prince Tyr said about the jewelry the dwarves make.” Skerry shook his head. “I thought I recalled, but it escapes me after all.”
Disappointed, Ruan looked to Kivik. “As it seems that I was not there at the time, do you remember what he said?”
But Kivik remembered nothing. “It was so many weeks ago, and so much has happened since.”
Turning back to Sindérian, the Prince narrowed his eyes. “What reason had King Yri to give you such a gift?”
For a moment there was an answering spark, a swift rush of color into her cheeks. “You must ask him the next time you see him,” she said with something of her old defiant manner. “He said nothing about it to me. But it was there in my saddlebag when we left Reichünterwelt, and as it is beautiful, I choose to wear it.”
And hide it under your sleeve, so that the rest of us might not see it, thought Ruan. Yet for all that his suspicions were so thoroughly aroused, he could find no obvious threat in King Yri’s gift of a silver bracelet.
The first watch of the night being appointed to Aell, the others arranged their bedrolls around the fire and settled down to sleep. Ruan had insisted on the early morning vigil, with some idea in his mind that Sindérian might attempt to strike out on her own at dawn. Lying on his back, concentrating on the dark behind his eyelids, he willed himself to sleep. He thought that he succeeded, for it seemed a long time later that he rolled over on his side, opened his eyes, and saw that Sindérian had risen from her bed.
She sat alone at the edge of the camp, cradling something in the palm of her hand: a little black, fluttering thing, like a moth or the shadow of a moth. Watching that mothlike fluttering made him feel drowsy and curiously languid. So drowsy, indeed, that he could scarcely keep his eyes open. So drowsy that a dark wave of sleep swept over him, and…
He came awake again when someone shook his shoulder and spoke in his ear. It was not like him to wake confused and disoriented, yet this time it was an effort to drive the mists from his mind, to focus his eyes on Kivik’s face. “Is it my watch already?”
“No, it’s mine,” said Kivik. “I hardly know how to tell you, I am so ashamed. I nodded off. One moment I was sitting on the ground staring up at the stars, the next I found myself lying flat on the ground.”
Ruan levered himself up into a sitting position. A swift glance around the camp told him that Aell and Skerry were already up. He knew with a cold sensation at the pit of his stomach that something was seriously amiss.
Reading his face, Skerry nodded. “The lady is gone—not just wandered off, but truly gone. She has taken her horse with her.”
Ruan sprang to his feet. “Where is Faolein?” No one had thought to look, and it was Ruan himself who finally spotted the white owl asleep on a branch. “Take comfort,” he said to Kivik, as he strode across the camp to rouse Sindérian’s father. “You did not ‘nod off.’ She put a spell on us all.”
Ruan scooped up his sword belt and buckled it on. His mind was reeling with conjectures, with memories; things he had never connected before were falling into place—too late. He spat out a string of oaths. “Fool that I was, why did it never occur to me that she would do something like this? She has gone to do battle with the Furiádhin, leaving the rest of us behind.”
“But we are nowhere close to them,” said a bewildered Kivik. “She will not even know where to find them.”
“Will she not?” There was a flash of white and a beating of wings overhead as Faolein took off from the branch and disappeared into the night. “Do you know what passes between her and her father when they speak mind t
o mind?”
“But why?” said Skerry. By this time Ruan was saddling his horse, and the others hastened to do the same. “What possible reason could she have for going alone?”
Leaving his bedroll and all else behind, Ruan vaulted into the saddle, took up the reins. “Because she knows that we—that I—would prevent her from doing the thing she intends to do.”
He rode south, following the tracks left by Sindérian’s mare, which he could just make out by moonlight. Before long, he could hear the hoofbeats of Aell’s horse directly behind him. But it was only when the moon went behind a cloud, and he was forced to dismount and search the ground for hoofprints, that the Skyrran princes finally caught up with him, bringing with them all the things he had left behind. Swinging back up into the saddle, Ruan was confident now that Sindérian was heading for Ceir Eldig.
“Tell us what you think she means to do,” said Kivik as they all rode south together. “And why she would even imagine we would try to hinder her.”
“She knows that I would do everything in my power to stop her,” Ruan said grimly. “As she also knows that I, having been tutored by a wizard, could not watch her do what she means to do without understanding it.
“Before ever I left Thäerie to begin this journey,” he continued, “Elidûc said to me, ‘When you meet Sindérian Faellanëos, observe her well, for then you will be privileged to see the most gifted young wizard of her generation. She was born with such talents that if she had even the most distant left-handed connection with the royal house of Phaôrax, the wizards on Leal would have reared her from childhood to challenge Ouriána in fulfillment of the prophecy. As it was, they allowed her to pursue her own inclinations and devote herself to the healing arts. They let her go off at an early age to break her heart on the battlefields of Rheithûn, leaving all her other talents lying fallow.
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