“Ilkur?” he asked. “What of our friend outside the walls?”
“He hasn’t returned, Commander. Hopefully we left him a painful reminder of his visit.”
Altan smiled briefly at that as he sat at the head of the table. Soldiers from the kitchen hurried in to place wine, flagons, bread, and cheese on the table, then left. “Good. I suspect you’re all as tired of this miserable place as I am. Musa, did the messengers return from the Great-Voice?”
“Yes, Commander. We have all the soldiers here that the Great-Voice is willing to spare. A full hand of cohorts has arrived, and another hand is expected in the next few days, assuming good winds.”
Altan nodded. “That should be sufficient. Cumhur, your engineers have been working?”
Cumhur was a burly knot of a man, his head nearly bald except for the length of a braid at the back. His arms and hands were massive and showed the wear from decades of work. “We have, sir, using trees from the bluffs and from across the strait. We’ve engines for a siege if need be or for our own bombardments. The men are eager, sir, and ready.”
“As we all are. Here …” Altan unrolled a map on the table. “This is Onglse as we know it. We’re here.” He placed his finger on the southeastern edge of the island. “The island is ringed with hill-forts; I want us to take the forts directly to our east and west so that we widen the breach we’ve already made. Then we can hold the breach and move through with less worry about being attacked from the rear and surrounded. But …” He stabbed his forefinger at the center of the island. “Bàn Cill is there, a hard march of three days, and that’s where we ultimately must go. Once Bàn Cill falls, the entire island falls, and with the draoi’s stronghold gone, all of Albann Bràghad will be suddenly vulnerable.”
“What about the draoi?” Ilkur asked.
The vision of Lucian arose before Altan again, and he closed his eyes to banish it, taking a breath. “They’ve done nothing but bother us with this accursed rain since we won the fort. That will end once we advance; they’ll come at us again with their damned shrieking spells, and we’ll lose soldiers to them. But we know they’ll tire; we’ll wear them down. And we know from our experience here that when they do retreat, they’ll leave behind trap-spells for us to set off, so we won’t be so easily fooled this time. But—and this is the important fact—the draoi are a finite resource. We’ll make the Cateni use them until they’re exhausted, and that’s when we’ll begin our push on Bàn Cill.”
“They’ll make us pay for every stride,” Volkan said, and Altan looked up. Everything about Volkan was dark—his hair, his skin, his glowering eyes, his expression—but there was an eagerness to the set of his mouth, as if the man relished the thought of the coming battles. “There’s another ring of hill-forts to penetrate past this one. The land is wrinkled and treacherous, and we don’t know the best paths.”
“None of us ever expected this to be easy,” Altan answered. “But the Great-Voice has given us most of what I’ve asked for, and now he expects payment in the form of Onglse’s fall. So let’s put our heads together now and determine the best way to accomplish that.”
It was late that night, candles guttering to waxen mounds on the table, before they finished.
15
Thrust into Battle
THERE WERE DAYS WHEN Voada thought she might not survive Greum’s attention.
For the first few hands of days, she at least had Ceiteag’s sympathetic ear to complain to when Greum’s insistent and blunt attentions frustrated and angered her. But Ceiteag and the other draoi Voada had come with, as well as most of the remaining draoi in Bàn Cill, were sent out by Greum when the Mundoan forces suddenly left the fort in which they’d been huddling and renewed their attack.
She’d thought—no, she’d hoped—that Greum would go with Ceiteag and the others, but that wasn’t to be. She was left largely alone with the man and his harsh lessons.
She couldn’t decide whether she admired him or hated him. Perhaps both at once. After all, that was one of his constant reminders. “You have to be able to hold two contradictory emotions in your head at once: your own feelings and those of the personality in your anamacha that you’re using.”
Voada wondered whether he entirely trusted her, since the mocking term “friend of Savas” had continued to come up in their discussions. She wondered why he was paying so much attention to her, barely a draoi at all, given the invasion of the island. At the same time, she could see how the situation on Onglse wore at the man. He seemed to be in daily consultation with runners from the forts and with other draoi, and Voada had seen Ceannàrd Maol Iosa in Bàn Cill at least three times. Still, Greum found time to spend a few stripes of the candle with her every day, sometimes more. He gave her exercises and spell incantations to memorize, and he accompanied her into Magh da Chèo when she called her anamacha to her. She had to admit that she’d learned more from him in a hand of days than she had during her entire time with Ceiteag.
Under Greum’s tutelage, Voada now understood how to separate the massed voices of the anamacha, how to keep her equilibrium when she entered into the anamacha, and to harness the power of a few of the draoi who composed her anamacha, though he would not let her reach out to find Leagsaidh Moonshadow, hidden deep in the shadowed interior. “The Moonshadow would rip apart your own mind and leave you mad or worse,” Greum insisted. “You wouldn’t be able to hold her. You’d die and become just another minor voice inside, forgotten forever like too many other new draoi who tried to bond with this anamacha.”
She found it easy to follow that advice, since it was difficult enough to handle the lesser personalities in her anamacha. Voada felt herself not at all tempted to try to pluck the Moonshadow from her refuge. Today, Greum had told her that she would be entering Magh da Chèo entirely on her own. “Ceiteag told me you could barely set dry wood on fire. Prove her wrong.”
He gestured around them. They were in the ring of oak woods outside the circle of standing stones. Above them, a breeze played with the canopy of green and brown like a parent tousling the hair of her child. The air was filled with the smell of rich loam and vegetation. The forest made Voada touch the oak leaf pendant under her torc. Greum noticed her gesture; he shook his head. “There’s nothing magical or sacred about these trees. What’s sacred is what we teach the draoi here. Show me what you’ve learned, Voada. Show me that I haven’t been wasting my time with you, friend of Savas.”
The comment scraped at her irritation, making her release the pendant on its leather string. She could see her anamacha standing a few steps away, its form half lost in the play of sun and shadow. “Come to me,” she called, opening her arms as if inviting them to embrace her. The anamacha responded, gliding toward her and slipping into her without hesitation. There was cold, and then there was the sense of being ripped from this reality into another. Ceiteag had never let her enter fully into the anamacha; Greum insisted on it, but before he had always been with her as a guide, using his own anamacha. Now she did so on her own.
As Greum had taught her, she fought to retain her own vision so that the nightmare world of Magh da Chèo was overlaid on the landscape around her. Without Greum’s help, the feat was far more difficult to manage; what she saw through her own eyes kept slipping away, tossing her into the anamacha’s dark and chaotic land even as she fought to push it aside like a curtain. She could feel her fingernails pressing into the palms of her hands as she battled to retain control.
It was Iomhar who came to her first, as it usually was—whether it was because he had been the last draoi to become part of the anamacha or because there was some affinity between them, Voada wasn’t certain. But he was the easiest of the personalities inside the anamacha to separate out and was one of the more powerful, at least according to Greum.
appily destroy her, because it would give them pleasure to see someone else succumb as easily as they had, or perhaps they felt it a mistake that the anamacha had come to her.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she answered them. “Of any of you. I call Iomhar to come to me now.”
< … Not afraid … not afraid … not afraid … > the voices echoed—some mocking, some not—but their voices and the feel of multiple presences were already fading as Voada concentrated on bringing Iomhar forward. The world lightened around her, her own sight becoming dominant. A single shade now stood with her, and Voada could feel it pulsing with the energy that the anamacha had gathered from the world it inhabited, so near that of the gods.
The ghost that was Iomhar glowed as if a sun burned inside him.
“I know the shape. I know the words,” she told him. With that, Voada began to move her hands in the spell pattern, weaving an imagined knot before her, the shape more complex than the simple patterns Ceiteag had taught her. Invisible in the living world, she could see it through the anamacha’s vision. As her hands passed through the crossing of the knot, she shouted the words that would bind the net, spoken in a language that resembled Cateni, but was—Greum had told her—much older. Already Iomhar was releasing the energy he had gathered for her, placing it in the knot work that pulsed between Voada’s hands. Make fire, Greum had told her, and she spoke the word: Teine!
She’d chosen a medium-sized oak set a bit apart from the others. The spell she released flew true, striking the target at head height with a furious clap of thunder. The tree shuddered at the impact, the trunk shattering into splinters as flame rolled like liquid further up the tree, crackling and fuming. The upper boughs fell, engulfed in flame as they struck the ground. Sparks spiraled away into the sky.
In the sudden silence, Voada and Gruem could both hear the fire consuming the tree and spreading to the nearby brush. Tendrils of white smoke coiled away on the breeze, the smell of ash and fire overpowering. The anamacha slid away as Voada staggered, exhausted from the effort of creating the spell and casting it. She could feel her body trembling. “Adequate,” she heard Greum say. “Now get rid of what you’ve made. We can’t have a fire here in our wood.”
“Ceanndraoi, I can’t,” she said. “I’m so tired …”
“Quit complaining,” he barked. “Just do it. Do you think your friend Savas would stop attacking you because you’re tired? Do it.”
“He’s not my friend.”
“You’re angry with me. Good. Use that. Put out your fire.”
Voada scowled at Greum. She forced herself to stand taller and opened her arms again to her anamacha. “Come to me,” she commanded it.
This time, the anamacha was much more difficult to control and to keep apart from herself. The massed voices called to her, a din that made it difficult to find the voice she wanted: Iomhar’s. When at last she did manage to isolate him, he seemed recalcitrant and slow to gather the energy required, and she could feel her control slipping away even as she created a new knot work web and allowed him to release the energy into it. She hurried, speaking the necessary words and shaping the container as quickly as she could, using her irritation at Greum to push away the fatigue. “Uisge,” she commanded this time: water. She could barely hold it, barely manage to pull herself from the anamacha’s world.
When she released the spell, a small storm cloud coalesced above them, dark and foreboding. A stroke of lightning pierced the air, followed by thunder, and then the rain poured down, cold and fierce, soaking not only the tree but herself and Greum. The fire before them hissed and complained, then went out completely, leaving only a blackened and fallen tree trunk as the storm she’d created became caught in the winds above the canopy and went scudding off to the east, still pouring rain.
Voada fought to stay upright under Greum’s regard, refusing to collapse as she wanted. She looked at him. Water dripped from the ends of his beard, hair, and torc, plastering his robe to his body. “Adequate?” she asked, mocking his tone.
She thought he nearly smiled. “It will do,” he answered. “Neither spell was as precise as it could have been.” As if to demonstrate, he shook drops of water from his fingers.
“Are you never satisfied, Ceanndraoi?”
“Never,” he answered. “Not even with myself. In fact, generally less so with myself.”
His somber tone and his gloomy demeanor made her laugh despite her irritation and weariness. “Why does that amuse you?” Greum asked.
“I don’t know,” she told him. “Perhaps because you’re so much the opposite of Meir, my husband. He always told me that the best way to have someone work hard for you was to praise their good efforts and remain silent otherwise. He said people required the same care that a good potter gives her clay, so that it works for her and remains solid and whole. That approach seemed to do well for Meir—and for me. Your way …” Voada shrugged. “It seems that you risk shattering and cracking your pots by handling them roughly.”
“If my pot shatters, then perhaps it was flawed from the very beginning. Better that it breaks here than when it’s desperately needed elsewhere. We don’t have the luxury of time.” He sniffed and looked past her to the blackened ruins of the tree. “We should go back to the temple and rest. It’s time we were both placed in the potter’s kiln.”
“It’s time for me to return to the battle,” Greum said as they walked back toward the temple. “And time for you to relieve those who have been there too long. Be ready to leave at sunrise.”
Voada didn’t protest; Greum had made his attitude toward shattered and broken apprentices clear enough. She was prepared for this task, or she was not—she knew it wouldn’t matter to Greum either way. Horses and packs were made ready for them by Daibhidh and the temple staff, and when the sun rose the next morning and the menach of the temple had performed the morning prayers, Greum, along with Voada and a half dozen other draoi, set out.
It would be a three-day journey over rugged terrain. Voada found herself physically sore and tired from the constant jostling and balancing and mentally exhausted from the lessons that Greum insisted on inflicting on her when they stopped for the evening. She would drop into sleep as soon as she could afterward, and her dreams were haunted by images of Orla and Hakan. Her children called to her for help, and in the dreams she could not reach them, though she struggled and fought through the hands that held her back: Voice Kadir’s hands, Voice-wife Dilara’s hands, Altan Savas’ hands. Mundoan hands.
She woke without feeling rested.
On the evening of the third day, they finally came within sight of the island’s outer defenses, a stone wall running along the ridgeline of tall, rounded hills studded at intervals with fortifications. To the south and east of where they were, storm clouds pouring gray sheets of rain blanketed the hills, masking them, and under them she could see columns of black smoke rising to blend into the gloom.
Battle. Silent and still hidden, but near.
The acolytes set up open-sided linen canopies in a circle as warriors scouted the nearby area. They found nothing, but guards still patrolled just outside the range of the light from the central fire. As Voada approached Greum’s tent for her nightly instruction, she heard Greum’s low voice talking to Daibhidh. She stopped in tree-shadow. She could see the two of them only a few strides away, silhouetted against the camp’s fire and the fading afterglow of the sunset, their heads close together as they talked.
“… you might tell her that she’s impressed you.” That was Daibhidh,
his voice thinner and reedier than Greum’s low rumble.
“There’s no need for that. It’s the anamacha who has claimed her that lends her power, not the woman herself.” Greum’s voice, quieter and lower, made her lean forward.
“Yet she can hold that power, and Ceiteag says that when the woman speaks, she has the gift of making others listen. She says Voada could be a menach as well, or a clan àrd.”
“Might be. Could be,” Greum answered. “I only care about what she is. In this moment.” His head lifted, looking in her direction. Voada shuffled back deeper into shadow. “And she is here now,” Greum said.
Voada stepped forward into the light. “Ceanndraoi, Daibhidh,” she said, inclining her head toward the men.
“You heard us?” Greum asked.
“I thought I heard my name. Nothing more.”
Greum sniffed at that. He waved his red-splotched hand to Daibhidh, and the younger draoi stood, bowed to Greum, then Voada, and walked away. Greum gestured to the blanket where Daibhidh had been sitting, and Voada ducked under the canopy and sat facing Greum. “You lie easily,” he said to her.
“Apparently as easily as you do, Ceanndraoi,” she responded.
In the growing darkness, it was difficult to read the expression on his face. She could see his anamacha near him, and her own as well, both glowing softly in her vision. “I don’t care whether you like me or not, Voada.”
A Fading Sun Page 15