Firesong turned slowly, saw him, and nodded. It felt like an invitation. Darkwind stepped across the Veil and into the snow to stand beside him.
After a moment, Firesong spoke.
"He goes home now—" the Adept said dully, "—his body does."
Darkwind saw that one of the shadows at the limit of vision was moving; was not a shadow at all, but a black-clad rider on a ghost-gray horse, with a large bundle carried across the saddlebow. Moving away; toward that path that led down to the Plains.
"And what of the spirit?" Darkwind asked, finally.
"I am not a shaman. I cannot say."
Darkwind rubbed his arms as the residual heat of the Vale wisped away from his body into the silent snowfall.
"I want you to know, you did the right thing. In protecting the Heartstone. It would have killed us all."
Firesong stiffened, and looked up; white crystal flakes settled on his forehead and brows, laced his eyelashes and crown of white hair. "Knowing it was the better of two ills changes little." His hair rippled like silk in a breeze. "It makes Tre'valen's death hurt no less."
Darkwind nodded.
Firesong shifted his loose robes and lifted a long bone pipe to his lips. Thin, breathy notes fell softly upon the ear, mingled with the silence. Darkwind knew the tune, a Shin'a'in lament.
A second voice joined the flute's, though Darkwind could not have told what it was until he saw the white firebird perched in the tree branches above the Adept, its head and neck stretched out, its graceful bill open and its throat vibrating.
The scene etched itself into Darkwind's memory. After so many years in the company of Adepts, he knew the outward signs of self-induced trance; after a while, he realized that the Adept was paying no attention to anything but his music.
Darkwind turned and walked back into the Vale, leaving Firesong and his bondbird pouring out mournful notes into the dark and silence.
As he walked away, he thought he caught sight of something wet glittering on Firesong's cheek, though the notes never faltered, and the face remained utterly remote and as lifeless as a marble statue's. Perhaps it was only a melting snowflake.
Perhaps it wasn't.
* * *
A scream rang out and was cut short.
Falconsbane slashed, all claws extended, and the hapless slave fell to the stone floor, choking on his own blood. Falconsbane watched him with anger raging unappeased through his veins, as the boy gurgled and clutched desperately at his throat. Blood poured between his fingers and splattered against the cold gray marble as the slave twitched and gasped and finally died, his eyes glazing, his body twitching, then relaxing into the limpness of death.
Not enough. Falconsbane looked for something else to destroy, cast his eyes about the study, and found nothing that he could spare or did not need. He had already shattered the few breakable ornaments; the upholstery of his couch was slashed to ribbons. The table beside the couch was overturned, and he would not touch the books; they held knowledge too precious to waste.
So he turned back to his final victim, and proceeded to reduce the body to its fundamental parts, using only his hands.
When he was done, he was still full of burning rage. He kicked the door of the study open, hoping to find someone lurking in the hall, but they knew his temper by now, and had cleared out of the corridors. Likely they were all cowering behind locked doors and praying to whatever debased gods they worshiped—besides him—that he would appease his anger with the slave they had sent him. Cowards. He was surrounded by worthless, gutless cowards.
He growled deep in his chest. Not as gutless as the slave is now.
He stormed out into the corridors of his fortress, and ran upward, toward the rooftops. The place stifled him with its heat and luxury. He wanted to destroy it all, but instead, he went seeking the darkness of the night and the quiet of the snow to cool his temper.
He found a spot where he would not be tempted to destroy anything more because there was nothing to destroy—the top of one of the four corner towers.
It was open to the wind and weather, and since the quiet and cold did nothing to cool his anger, Falconsbane found another outlet for his rage. He reached out to the storm about him and whipped it from a simple snowstorm to a blinding, howling blizzard, taking fierce comfort in the shrieking wind. Wishing that it was the shrieks of dying Hawkbrothers he heard instead.
Thwarted. Again! It could not have happened. He'd posted sentries to spy upon them. They had done nothing out of the ordinary. They made no efforts at all to use the twisted power of their Stone. Instead, they had sought to drain power from it, and it, of course, had resisted as it had been trained to do. Their mages were exhausted; they had no reserves, no Great Adepts.
The timing could not have been better. And yet he been thwarted.
First, his attempt to retake his pawn Starblade failed, of the channels he had so carefully established into the Bird-Fool's heart and mind were gone. Not blocked, but gone completely, healed by some strange application of magics with a taste he could not even begin to sort out. Strongly female and laced with an acid protectiveness that made him flinch away.
That was bad enough, having to abandon his best tool, but when he tried to turn his controlling of Starblade into an attack on the k'Sheyna Heartstone as planned, he could not springboard to the Stone. Infuriating!
Not once, but twice; blocked at the Stone itself, by shields he could not penetrate, and blocked again at the channel he had tied to Starblade's life-force! Where had those fools gotten the Adept that had shielded the Stone? There had been no one, not even the Outland girl, with so much as the potential for power like that! And what had they used to block his death-strike on Starblade? Not only did he not recognize it, but his mind still reeled beneath the blinding counter it had made to his strike. What had intercepted his fire-bolt? It had taken all his power and transformed it into a force he could not even remotely name.
Either of those alone would have been bad enough. Together they awoke a killing rage in him that demanded an outlet. He had stormed out of his working-place and into his study, intending mayhem.
He discovered there was more—much more.
His outriders had been waiting for him; they had come in to him, all bearing the same story. Black-clad riders on black horses, haunting the edges of his domain. Riders who did nothing; simply appeared, watching for a moment, as if making certain that they had been seen, and vanished again. Riders who left no mark in the snow; whose faces could not be seen behind their veilings of black cloth.
His mages had come to him with more news of the same ilk, hundreds of tiny changes that had occurred while he was dealing that aborted attack to k'Sheyna. Along and inside all of his borders, there were tiny pinprick-upsettings of his magic. Traps had been sprung, but had caught nothing, and there was not even a hint of what had sprung them. Ley-lines that had been diverted to his purposes had returned to their courses, but they went to nothing specific nor any new power-poles. Areas that he had fouled to use for breeding his creatures had been cleansed. Yet there was no pattern to it, no plan. Some lines had been left alone; traps side-by-side showed one sprung, the other still set. Areas near to the Vale had been left fouled, while others, farther away, had been cleansed.
He snarled into the howling wind. He hated random things! He hated fools who worked with no plans in mind, and changes that occurred with no warning! And most of all, he hated, despised, things that happened for no apparent reason!
Every one of those pinpricks had taken away his order, interfered with his careful plans—and left chaos behind. And all to no purpose he could see!
He shouted into the night, and let the wind carry his anger away, let the cold chill his rage until it came within the proper, controllable bounds again. How long he stood there, he was not certain, only that after a time he knew that he could descend into his stronghold again, and be in no danger of destroying anything necessary.
He dismissed the stormwinds;
without his will behind them, the winds faded and died away, leaving only the snow still falling from the darkened, cloud-covered night sky.
He opened the door into the warmth and light of the staircase and found one of his outriders waiting there for him.
He snarled and clenched his fists at his side; this was more of that news, he knew it, and he wanted so badly to maim the bearer of it that he shook with the effort to control himself.
The man's face was white as paper; he trembled with such fear that he was incapable of speech. He held out an intricately carved black box to his master, a box hardly bigger than the palm of his hand.
Falconsbane took it and waited for the man to force the words past his fear to tell his master where this trinket of carved wood had come from. But when the man failed utterly to get anything more than an incoherent hiss past his clenched teeth, Falconsbane ruthlessly seized control of his mind with yet another spell, and tore the story from him. It only took a moment to absorb, mind-to-mind, but what he learned quelled his anger far more effectively than the wind had.
His hand clutched convulsively on the box as the tale unfolded, and he left the man collapsed upon the stairs in a trembling heap, ignoring whatever damage he had done to the outrider's mind. He took the stairs two at a time back to the safety and security of his newly-cleaned study; there was no sign of where the dead slave had been except a wide wet spot. And only there, with all his protections about him, did he use a tiny spell to open the tiny box from arm's length.
If this was a rational, ordered universe, it would contain something meant to cripple or kill him.
He held his shields about him, waiting.
Nothing happened.
The box contained, cradled in black, padded suede, a tiny figurine carved of shiny, black onyx.
The figure of a perfectly formed black horse, rearing, and no bigger than his thumbnail.
There was no scent of magic upon it—no trace of who or what had made or sent it. Although he knew what had delivered it, if not who it was from.
One of the black riders.
He retreated to his newly-covered couch and held the delicate little carving to the light, pondering what he had ripped from his servant's mind.
This particular outrider had seen these black-clad riders three times before this, but always they had vanished into the forest as soon as they knew they had been seen, leaving not even hoofprints behind. But this time had been different. This time he had seen the rider cleave a tree with a sword blow, and leave something atop the stump. The rider sheathed the sword and slipped into the shadows, like another shadow himself. When the outrider had reached the spot, he discovered this box.
And it weighted down one other thing. A slip of paper, that had burned to ash in his hand as soon as he had read it. A slip of paper bearing the name of his Master, Mornelithe Falconsbane, in the careful curved letters of Trade-speech.
As if there had been any doubt whatsoever who this was meant for—
He turned the figurine over and over, staring at it. There was nothing here to identify it or the box, with its stylized geometric carvings, as coming from any particular land or culture. Was it a warning, or a gift? If a gift, what did it mean? If a warning—who were these riders, who had sent them, and what did they want?
* * *
Skif and Nyara talked idly about the chase; this rabbit they were dressing out had been far more trouble than it was worth, but Nyara's capture of it was as worthy of admiration as any hawk's stoop. Wintermoon was gently cleaning a deep scratch one of the dyheli had suffered, several feet from the two of them.
Nyara had reentered their lives by simply coming into camp and waiting to be discovered. They'd found her between the two dyheli when they awoke, sitting with her knees tucked up to her chest and the sword Need at her feet. She looked different now—more human, and with sharply-defined muscles. She also moved with purpose rather than slinking like a cat; she had visibly undergone many changes, all of which served to fascinate Skif further.
There was no sign of any trouble, but suddenly Cymry's head shot up, and her eyes went wide and wild, with the whites showing all around them. Her body went from relaxed to tense; she stood with all four legs braced, and there was no doubt in Skif's mind what she sensed.
Danger. Terrible danger. Something was happening.
Skif stood and put one hand on her shoulder to steady her, as Nyara's face went completely blank. Nyara leapt to her feet and stared off in the same direction as Cymry, her own eyes mirroring a fear that Skif recognized only too well.
He felt nothing, but then, if it was magic that alerted them, he wouldn't. But he recognized what direction they were both staring in.
The Vale—where Elspeth was.
He tried to Mindtouch his Companion, but all of her attention was on the danger she had sensed. It was Need's mind-voice that growled in the back of his head, as he tried to break through Cymry's preoccupation.
:Leave her alone, boy. She's talking to Gwena. There's big trouble back with your bird-loving friends.:
He dared a tentative thought in Need's direction, waiting for an instant rebuff. He still had no idea what Need thought of him, beyond the few things she had condescended to say to him. :What kind of trouble? Something involving us?:
The sword hesitated a moment. :Hmm. I'd say so. Your kitten's sire just tried to flatten the whole Vale. And I think—yes. No doubt. There's been a death.:
Before Skif could panic, the sword continued. :Not Elspeth; not Darkwind. More, I can't tell you. There's some shamanic magic mixed in with the rest, and damned if I can read it. :
Wintermoon stared at all of them with the impatient air of a man ready to strangle someone if he didn't get an explanation soon. Skif didn't blame him, and he broke off communication with the blade to tell the Hawkbrother what little Need had been able to tell him. The name of Mornelithe Falconsbane got his immediate attention.
"Falconsbane! But I thought—"
"We all thought—or, we didn't think," Skif replied, trying to make his thoughts stop spinning in circles. "We just assumed. Not a good idea where magic is concerned." Of where Falconsbane is concerned. Next time I won't believe he's dead until I burn the body myself and sow the ashes with salt.
"If there is trouble, we must return, with all speed. And it must be with Nyara or without her, for we cannot delay to argue," Wintermoon said firmly. "I had rather it were 'with' but I shall not force her."
The mention of her name seemed to wake Nyara from her trance. "Of course we go, night-hunter," she replied. Her eyes still looked a little unfocused, but her voice was firm enough. "And I go with you. I know too much about my father to remain outside and watch your people struggle to match him again. I shall not hide while he tries to destroy your Clan, hoping he will miss me as he concentrates on you."
She shook her head, then, and hesitated, looking fully into Skif's eyes. "If I had a choice, I would tell you this when we are alone, ashke," she said softly. "But I think that Wintermoon must hear this so he can bear witness if need be."
Skif tensed, wondering what she was going to say to him. Things had seemed so promising a few moments ago.
"I care for you, Outlander," she said with quiet intensity. "More than I had ever realized when I saw your face this morn. I would like—many things—and most of all, to share my life with you. But you and I can do nothing until I come to terms with my father. There is much that I have not told you of him—and myself. It must be dealt with."
Skif had seen such looks as he saw in her eyes more than once, before he became a Herald—and after, among some of the refugees from Ancar's depredations. He saw it in the eyes of a woman who spoke of her father, and horrors between them.
He knew. He knew of many things that decent people would only think of as horrible nightmares, and deny that they truly happened. He knew the sordid tales that could be hidden behind those bleak eyes. She didn't even have to begin; he knew before she started. And he blamed her no mor
e for what had been done to her than he would have blamed a tree sundered by lightning.
She was all the more beautiful for her strength.
Maybe it was just that he was too busy wanting to hold her and tell her that nothing in her past could make him want her any less. Falconsbane was dismissed from any redemption in his mind; to him he rated no more thoughts, not even hate—as his friend Wintermoon had taught him, such emotions can cloud purpose. Maybe that purpose was too important for him to have any room left for anger, now. That might change if he ever actually saw Falconsbane again, but that was the way he felt at this moment.
All things could change. If he were the same person he was only a few years ago, he'd have already been sharpening knives, plotting revenge on Falconsbane; now, simply eliminating the Adept was more important. Revenge seemed foolish somehow, it would not help Nyara at all. How strange, that after a life like his, revenge seemed hollow compared to simple justice.
Nyara deserved far more consideration than her father.
He didn't even think about the sword's propensity to eavesdrop, until she spoke to him.
:Well, bless your heart, boy—I'm beginning to think there's hope for you yet.: Need's harsh mind-voice rattled in his head as she chuckled. :You are all right! Hellfires, I'd even be willing to nominate you as an honorary Sister!:
He felt his ears redden, as Nyara looked at him curiously. :Uh—thank you,: he said simply, not wanting to offend the blade by adding I think.
:Tell her, boy. Don't go into detail, keep it short and simple, but tell her. She needs to know.:
"Look, Nyara—" he said haltingly, wishing he could say half of what he wanted to. "I—I love you; I guess you've figured that out, but I thought I'd better say it. There. Nothing's going to change that. I'm not the picture of virtue—or innocence—I've seen more than you might think. I've spent time on Ancar's Border. I've seen girls—women—who've had pretty bad things happen to them. Who've been—I don't know. I guess you could say they've been betrayed by the parents who should have protected them. I know what you mean. You and I can't do anything about us until we get him out of our lives."
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