Much like Eean was at one with the great wilds, so too could Elemech steer through the unseen. She could find a light in every shadow, a meaning in every casting of the bones, or feel the drop of a tear from spans away in the ripples of her pond.
“Here we are, sister,” said Elemech at last.
Not a sand too soon, thought Eean, hanging her head; her breathing was a rasp, and she was mostly being carried now. Eean opened her heavy lids to the brightness of their home, snapping bits of recollection here and there. She saw the crystal-studded walls, glimmering as a geode’s violet guts. A flash of the pool where Elemech would often dip her hand and sing of far away lands to them; of the places they would never see. The limestone table, rusty with blood, where they would eat and read entrails together. Their third sister’s cluttered workshop and the stone shelves filled with herbs, skins, jewels, fabric, bones, and knickknacks rummaged from the forest or the cave. Finally she felt the familiar relief of her fragrant pine-and-moss mattress caressing her flesh. In and out she drifted; her pulse and vision ragged. The sand of her death was nearly upon them. She heard small feet running up, and a tiny hand clutched her gnarled one.
“Oh, Eean,” cheeped the sweet young voice. “Do you have to go so soon? The season while you’re away is so gray. You know how somber Elemech can be. Staring in her pool, reciting all the sadnesses of the world. She is so glum without you.”
“My dearest Ealasyd. Let me look at you. At both of you before these eyes fail me,” grunted Eean, and forced herself to see.
Both her sisters were kneeling by her. With her honey-gold hair and innocent gaze, Ealasyd was as beautiful as sunshine. Ealasyd had the same green eyes as her sisters had, tawny skin, and the finest features of the three, yet only because she was the youngest. Come a point, when the cycle repeated itself and Eean was young again, Ealasyd and she would be fair-haired twins. She delighted in those years, when the two of them could play as siblings. Just as many, many seasons past that childhood, she would take on the wintry beauty of Elemech, with her mystery and darkness, and they could brood and sing as one. As the crone, her final lap of life was always the most tiresome, for she could not play with Ealasyd or contemplate as adeptly with her failing mind as Elemech could, so she was lonely despite all their intimacy.
So, in that season of her life, she would leave, not to be a burden, and would forage the Untamed, gathering gifts for her sisters to use in their craft. A task to which her hardy, dispensable body was better suited than those of her delicate sisters. And she had been lucky this time. She had one parting gift for them.
“Such lovely mothers and sisters you each have been,” praised Eean. “If one of you would reach to my pouch, you will find a few treasures of Alabion.”
Ealasyd clapped her hands and rummaged about in her sister’s garment. She came away with three things: an animal fang crusted in blood, as if ripped out during a hunt; a handful of crimson grass; and a polished black stone, like the scale of an ebony lizard.
“Oh! These…these are perfect, Eean!” Ealasyd clapped again, and scampered off at once, without allowing her scowling middle sister to have a look.
“Bring those here!” snapped Elemech.
“The gifts are for both of you,” reminded Eean, and her sister nodded and took the hand that Ealasyd had left, kissing it.
“She is right, you know. I am colder without you. As harsh as the Long Winter,” confessed Elemech with regret. “I hope that I am to bear you this time. A kick inside my ribs might force some kindness into me.”
“Perhaps. It is so hard on Ealasyd; she is so small, and my head and shoulders are so large,” Eean said, smiling.
The sisters shared a laugh.
In a wind of excitement, Ealasyd was upon them again. “Look!” she cried, shoving her arms over Eean and scattering her with items. First, Ealasyd picked up a rudimentary, four-legged clay figurine, which had the bloody tooth jammed into the bottom of its head. A wolf, thought Eean. Then Ealasyd claimed the second toy: a rag-doll woman made of pale mouse skins with a mane of red weeds. A maiden, decided Eean. The third creation lay on Eean’s stomach while Ealasyd had the wolf chase the maiden around it, and Eean debated how to classify the thing. What was this ball of nettles and the bird husks—a skylark and a crow—that shared a black stone between their beaks?
“What…is that?” wheezed Eean, curious.
Ealasyd looked to the talisman and shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
Elemech’s face waned with shadow. “Give those to me,” she demanded, and snatched the playthings from Ealasyd and the talisman that lay on her sister, too. While Ealasyd protested, Elemech raced off to a still pool that glimmered with soft light. Although Eean could not turn her head to see, she heard the splash as her sister tossed the items into the water.
“It took me so long to make those! Hunting rats isn’t easy, and neither is scraping clay! Do you see, Eean? Do you see what I shall be left with?”
“Hush, my sister. You made your toys well. It is Elemech’s turn to play with them,” said Eean. A wave of pain suddenly ran through her, and then the cold hand of death gripped her spine. “I love you, sister…I shall see you soon.”
Ealasyd nodded her golden head and then placed it on her sister’s chest. She listened to the slowing heartbeat and wept. A few heartbeats later, Eean’s eyes fell shut, and that sorrow-sweet vision of Ealasyd was the last thing she saw in this life. However, even if muffled with cotton, she heard Elemech’s chanting, a rhythmic and fading echo, as she drifted down a swift river that her sisters could not follow. At the pool, the waters ran black, the discarded relics whirled deeper and deeper, and although her body remained upright, Elemech felt herself tip and flounder after them.
First comes the tearing of her immaterial flesh: pins and needles stabbed into every nerve, a thousand mouths nibbling at her tenderest bits, a thousand whispers that hiss every weakness and failure she has ever known. Such magnificent torture should not be, for she is a ghost in this vision, not bone and meat that can be harmed. This is the Hungry Dark, and it has swallowed her utterly. But even as a watcher she is strong, even against the greatest of evils.
“You shall not have me today, Black Queen,” she declares.
She steels her Will and cuts through the clinging darkness like a blade of sunshine. In an instant, the blackness splits, and she is free of the Hungry Dark. As a bird, or a wind, she now soars over a scorched and fiery wasteland toward a grand city. A city once golden and now as red with the presence of murder as the great moat of fire that encompasses it. Coiled about the city’s spires are black serpents of smoke. This is Zioch, the Golden City, and it has fallen to evil. She does not need to contemplate the fate of Zioch’s Immortal King, for she can hear his tormented howls echoing through the haze. Amid his madness, she senses his sadness and knows that he has done something terrible to his brother.
“Fair king…” she says with regret, and then her wind is borne upward, and she sees a white moon, bright and full, bathing the rich woods of Alabion. A pair of birds flies past the moon, one pale to the point of being silver and the other black. The black one is chasing the other; she knows that he wishes to kill it, just as she knows the men whom the birds represent. Suddenly, speedily, she is pulled downward through the netting of trees toward a campfire and an oddly laid scene. Beside the sparking fire is a weathered corpse; its grimace could be interpreted as a smile, and a magpie is pecking at its yellow teeth.
“A kiss,” she thinks. “How sweet.” For these shapes do not hide the true selves of these beings, and she knows them for who they truly are. It warms her that they will find each other.
A growl commands her attention elsewhere, to the shade outside the campfire’s reach. She sees him prowling the darkness there, a great man or beast—a bit of each, she thinks—and he is not hidden in allegory as with much of her vision. He is clear, this enormous, grumbling creature who walks on all fours and snaps his teeth to the night. The man’s bearing is defens
ive, protective. “Of what?” she wonders, until the glimmer of ivory and red courts her eye from the circle he paces. Again, there is no couched meaning to be found, and what he guards is as clear to her as her own name: a maiden. Elemech’s heart twists with emotions—excitement, fear, joy—and the vision twists with it and shatters.
“The one lost,” Elemech mumbled, paler than cream.
She was still gazing into the pool, which had returned to its clarity and had no more secrets to share with her. She had enough to deal with anyway. Instinctually, she called for her elder sister, whose wisdom would be needed for this matter.
“Eean,” she whispered.
“Eean is dead; come mourn with me,” pleaded Ealasyd.
Elemech went to join her small sister over the body of Eean, and they huddled together and cried. Elemech’s tears came from sorrow as much as from what the pool had shown her, which neither she nor Ealasyd had the power to face alone. If only Eean were with them now, she would know what to do. How to grease the wheels of possibility without breaking the machine.
“We are lost without her,” sniffled Elemech, unusually emotional. “What an inconvenient time to die.”
“She’ll be back soon,” said Ealasyd. She started undressing the corpse. “We should return her flesh to the forest, as she likes us to do. Come help, sister.”
The sisters stripped Eean’s body and neatly set her garments and staff aside on a shelf; these items wouldn’t be used again for many, many years. Using the water from Elemech’s pool, they washed her, and then anointed her skin with badger musk and animal fats so that she would be a sumptuous-smelling meal for the beasts of the woods. For Eean’s dignity, they placed a crown of dried ivy about her head. Carefully, with Elemech carrying the shoulders and Ealasyd lugging the feet, they dragged the thin carcass of their sister down the labyrinth of dark tunnels and out of the cave. At the edge of the meadow they stopped, taking a breath before finishing their task, as poor Ealasyd was spent from the haul. A handful of stars had joined the shy moon to watch Eean’s passing, and the night was crisp, windless, and calm.
“I don’t feel anything yet. In my belly,” noted Ealasyd.
Come to think of it, neither did Elemech; the candle of new life had not been lit in her womb. Eean was not returning to life. What is she waiting for? wondered Elemech.
“Do you think?” said the sisters together, and bent over to examine Eean.
As if on a spring, Eean’s mouth popped open and a gasp escaped. For such a tiny breath, it roared past the sisters’ faces like a monster of air and thunder. The sisters stared up at the sky for a while, trying to guess where Eean’s breath, this wind, had gone. Their souls and faces were bright, knowing that Eean had not forsaken them, that she had held on to her flesh for as long as she could. She had given them hope. Elemech was more mirthful still, for with that final breath the miracle of new life had stirred within her; she would bear Eean this time.
“Where do you think her breath went?” asked Ealasyd.
“Exactly where it was supposed to,” answered Elemech.
They tossed Eean’s body from the cliff.
PART I
I
WHERE THE WIND WENT
I
ARMSMAN, the sign read, in script so fine that it appeared penned on the swinging board, not wrought in twists of metal. Morigan squinted and could decipher that the original lettering of the sign had been erased. WONDERS OF THE ARCANE was there no more, which left her with few options to find a sprig of fireroot for her particular master. If she hadn’t been all over Eod today, she might have been less inclined to pop in and ask the proprietor of Armsman if he knew what had happened to the last merchant to set up shop here. But she had paced Eod’s hot white streets since first light, wandering from tent to stall to shanty in the Faire of Fates, and finally to the smaller workshops in less commercial districts. From counter to counter she’d gone, almost pleading with the proprietors for a maddeningly rare herb that they simply did not carry. She was footsore, sweating, aching in her bladder, and ironically, quite thirsty, too, and the reaching shadow that fell off the tall pale building was inviting, even if its bricked-up widows, smoking rooftop, and pitted facade leaned toward menacing. The iron-banded door was opened a tad as well, as if a wind had pushed it ajar, and she took this as fate’s final invitation.
As light as a dancer, Morigan was up a few steps and had slipped through the crack of the entrance.
“Hello,” she called boldly, for it was dark inside the hallway in which she stood.
Morigan was hardly a timid girl; she had watched her mother die, and the dark or any other anxieties since then were minor to her. So she called again and went farther into the dimness, following the sound of a hammer on metal.
What an odd shopkeeper, to have no lights inside. I can only imagine what sort of strangeness I’m getting myself into—all for a glass of water and a piss.
Quickly it brightened with the glow of a fire, and the hammering rang louder. The short hallway ended, and she was in a heat-congested space. When last she had been to this store, before its conversion to a forge, the room was set up from floor to ceiling with shelving and jammed with all manner of baubles, crystals, bundled spices, and animal heads. Now the room was stripped bare to its white foundation, with its casements filled in and its second floor torn out to create a lofty ceiling. A hole was carved in the roof for the smoke to escape. Whoever worked here also lived here, and she could tell he was a humble person, for in one corner lay a dingy straw pallet. Nearby was an undignified lavatory, lacking so much as a screen for privacy. Gleaming weaponry was heaped along the walls and scattered around a grated pit of fire dug right into the floor. Bellows, tongs, molds, and other smithing instruments were laid about in disarray.
Nearly every smith in Eod used the cold flames of magik for his forge. Not this one, she cursed as she daubed herself. Indeed, most of Eod was so cultured and proper. From its pearly streets to its sandstone bricks that were shaped into orderly, elegant towers, gabled courts, and even quaint byres for the poor, everything was crafted with symmetry and meaningful precision. The Everfair King would have no less than perfection in his city. In contrast, this forge, with its raggedy roof and its proprietor who lived as meagerly as an escaped slave from Menos, was surely the messiest place Morigan had seen. She knew messiness. She spent her days tidying up after a sloppy and forgetful sorcerer, running his errands, and arranging his life. A bit irately, she called out to the hammering man—it had to be a man to make this sort of chaos—for a third time. A shape was veiled behind the thick smoke of the pit; she thought it was a standing suit of armor and gasped when it moved.
The Wolf had heard the woman enter his shop—not a dropped pin or the nightly bickering of his drunken neighbors escaped his notice—and her light tread, as if a deer was stepping upon grass, was no exception. He held his breath when he heard the noise, for it caused a queer feeling in him: a quickening of his heart that for once was not the thrill of chasing, hunting, and tearing. He continued to hammer, working the kinks out of an already flawless shield. He continued to ignore the other signs of the stranger’s entry. Signs like the sweet onion and honey scent of her sweat, a smell that made his mouth water. Or the sweep of her perfumed hair, silkily swishing in his ears and surely as soft to touch as it sounded. He knew that her locks were the deepest shade of red, for she smelled of autumn. The Wolf wasn’t afraid of this stranger, for he feared nothing but a cage in which he could be kept. Yet this confusion of emotion persisted nonetheless, and waffle he would not. He was a creature of absolutes, not one for questioning his nature. Finally, he stood and strode through the smoke to meet her.
Morigan gasped a bit more as the man emerged, immediately disarmed by his size and the surety of self that allowed him to walk in his brass-fitted boots through lightly flickering flames without a care. She had never known a man so large, and he carried his immensity as naturally and weightlessly as she bore her slenderness. Likewi
se, they were in many ways contrary to each other. She was pale as milk, while he was tanned to darkness and shimmered like the coppery metals that his enormous hands might squeeze. She was as delicate and smooth as any woman would desire to be, and he was as knotted and veined as an oak, with thick-black hair on his chest, upon his naked arms, and over his stony chin and chops. Their faces were each beautiful—if again polarities of soft and hard—with her supple angles and pink pout of a mouth and his hewn cheeks and wide red lips. If her hair was a mane of fire, then his was an unkempt flame of darkness, almost as long as hers was, but somehow suiting the man.
With all their opposing aspects, their stares bore an eerie similarity. Morigan’s eyes held a flash of silver, the legacy of a bastard father she had never met. Whereas the Wolf’s eyes gleamed with the cold gray indifference of an animal peering out in the darkness.
He is like a man sculpted from the earth. Am I dreaming? Have I hit my head? Passed out in the street from the heat of walking all day? Get your wits together, girl! What in the king’s name am I doing in this ratty forge with a man who watches me as a beast would its supper and from whom I cannot look away? Morigan cautioned herself.
Sands fled, and they stared and stared, unable to remove their gazes from each other. Morigan had forgotten why she was here, yet she was unafraid, if uncertain of the hungry way in which the large man watched her: his nostrils flaring bullishly, as if he could smell something that she could not. Uncomfortable, she pulled her summery shift tighter about herself despite the stifling heat, and the Wolf noted the teardrop outline of a breast against her damp garment. Her clothing was almost transparent to his cutting eyes, as if she were wrapped in mist, and his heart raced harder. In his head danced thoughts of chasing her through a field, of drinking in her laughter or cries as he nipped at her flesh.
Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) Page 2