Candlelight cast the place in magic. The heady scent of amnivaren in the censer mingled with the dark complexity of the powerful-smelling brew Amien had made, stretching my awareness wide. I tingled with a need I couldn’t name. When Telliyn climbed over Aballo’s walls, her light entered through the window to pool in the center of the floor: casting the rest of Amien’s workshop in even greater mystery. Red-headed Sanglin, Amien’s right hand, herded me into that crystalline space at the center of the room, handed me a cup of Amien’s brew, and drank with me. The brew made my head even more uncertain than amnivaren; something in me trembled on the verge of letting go, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if it did.
Sanglin held out his hand for my empty cup; I fell into the magic in his brown eyes, and without warning I found his mind tangled with mine. This happened occasionally, accidentally; typically I controlled it, pulled myself back into myself. Tonight I couldn’t remember how.
Sanglin’s affection suffused me. I didn’t question when the man pulled off my clothes and Oregen wrapped the ceremonial robe around me; I didn’t question when I realized Amien and dark-haired Dandem had taken up compass-point positions opposite Sanglin and Oregen. I turned to Amien; the familiar arcane signatures that always hung about him had become the crackle-and-hum of an imminent storm, and the controlled wildness of magic overlaid the fondness in his coal-black gaze.
Amien smiled. “Cast the circle, Ellion.”
Now, finally, I understood. This was to be my formal initiation into the Order. It was months ahead of schedule: Ildan, the fall equinox, was the expected time. For the moment the date seemed wholly irrelevant.
I knew what had to be done; I’d seen the process hundreds of times. I must invoke the gods and goddesses at the four compass quarters; I must visualize Them with such conviction those visualizations manifested. I must channel and direct the energy that would form the protective circle for tonight’s working, drawing it in brilliant arcs from point to compass point. Now, finally, the delicious energy that always flowed in a circle would run through me. The need coursing through me redoubled; this time I could put a name to it. It was magic I craved.
I raised my arms and invoked Ilesan, Lord of Gods; my visualization of Ilesan sprang into being behind Amien. The god’s long dark hair, piercing black eyes and chiseled ageless face looked exactly the same as when anyone cast a circle; something in my middle took flight. Par was as ready to my mind: browner skin than any human, curly black hair and wild golden eyes, the sinewy arms and shoulders of an archer.
When the circle began in the quadrant between Them, the energy rippled through my body like a lover’s touch. Laughter welled in my throat. The circle manifested exactly as I visualized: gold rather than the typical Aballo green. Sanglin stirred, but no one said anything; nobody ever used gold, but anything other than black or red would have been acceptable. Gold felt right in a way I couldn’t have explained.
When I invoked Tella, the goddess Who manifested looked real enough to touch, more present than either Ilesan or Par. Tonight She was even more beautiful than any visualization I had ever seen: Her white skin purer than the light of Her moon, Her long hair blacker than the spaces between the stars. The pleasure of channeled energy intensified again, blending with the first surprising tingle of readiness. I forgot to banish it. Ara’s cascading golden hair, exotic amber skin and voluptuous curves were pale in contrast to Tella’s beauty and wondrous presence; but She was there, and the circle closed just as it should.
I grinned, which was not exactly proper. Magic flowed intoxicating as wine throughout my being. I had felt the ability within me all along, but a wizard in his novitiate is never called upon to work magic. Until tonight, it had all been study. Now I felt ready to do anything; but I wasn’t sure what anything might be.
Amien met my eyes again, face just as pleased as my own must be. The wizard closed the distance between us, reached up and laid his hands on my head.
The second phase began: I hadn’t expected this, either. Under Amien’s coaching and commanding touch, for the first time I channeled Ilesan’s Element of Air, blown abruptly into awareness too wide to control. For a moment I couldn’t see; I lost track of my body, too far gone with the ecstasy coursing through me to locate the mundane world. When I found myself again, Oregen stood in front of me; together we drew down the power of Fire. It lit me like a chandelier; again I reeled with the wild delight of it. But this time I managed to control the madness. This time I knew who I was, when Sanglin took Oregen’s place.
Sanglin met my eyes, smiling. Rapport suffused me. Sanglin was the only member of Amien’s workshop with whom arguments never turned bitter; the only one able to look past the shock of the questions I asked, who didn’t seem to care that I was royal. Together we invoked Water: Lady Tella’s bailiwick. Without speaking, the goddess Who stood silent behind Sanglin stepped out of Her position at West, walking through the sudden silence to stand within arm’s reach.
Without thinking I dropped to my knees, hearing Amien and the others fall to the floor around us. Tella’s gaze fixed on me, Her beautiful moon-white face full of pleasure and pride. She seemed lit from within; taller than I’d expected. I marveled at the delicacy of the bones of Her face, at Her small perfect mouth. Her long black hair hung like a curtain around my face as She leaned towards me, too perfect to touch. She didn’t speak aloud, but reached out to touch my cheek, delicate hand warm against my skin and heady scent enveloping me. Rapture blasted through me, erasing everything but my Lady and the sparkling pleasure of magic.
*What a gem you are, Ellion Tellan. How fitting that you have come this night to stand before Me.*
I reeled: this was Bealtan Eve. Lady Tella was comparing me to Cúchulainn: the one who took his initiation on Bealtan Eve at the hands of his own goddess, the one who spent all his mortal days as Her favorite. As a member of the Tellan royal family, I had felt my dedication to Her inevitable; but if I’d all but taken Her favor for granted, never had I imagined myself as Cúchulainn.
*Truly I am pleased,* She continued, amber eyes inescapable.
“Lady—” I said. But I had no idea what else to say. I stared up at Her, an almost painful joy washing over me.
She smiled again. *Be true in your practice, Dear One. Doubt not that we will meet again.*
She straightened up, turned and vanished into an incandescence that dazzled my eyes; I wavered reeling on my knees, the world spinning beneath me as the heady smoke of amnivaren crowded around. I was still in Amien’s workshop, and Sanglin was staring at me.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Silence encompassed the room, but the rest of them were climbing to their feet. It wasn’t done, the ceremony they had brought me here to complete. There was no need to discuss whether or not it was appropriate to finish. Dandem stepped into the center of the circle before me; but his brown eyes were haunted, and he stood just slightly to the right of the place in which Lady Tella had. When he touched me, the trembling of his cold hands raised gooseflesh on my skin.
Amien called the Bealtan fires afterwards; the rest of us passed through the flames in the ritual of purification. But tonight it felt less like purification than completion. The flames were a caress so distracting that I forgot myself until Sanglin yanked me and my smoldering hair out of the fire.
“Would it kill you to do things the normal way once?” Sanglin barked.
I laughed, but no one else did. Amien offered me a bittersweet smile that did little to conceal the worry in his gaze.
Had he somehow known, even then, how I would wreck things? My insides clenched at the thought—but the conclusion didn’t fit the facts. He would never have kept me on at Aballo if he did. I pushed aside the dark imaginings crowding around my edges, seeking awareness of the here-and-now and finding myself in the midst of a half-wild garden painted gold and burgundy by the setting sun. A Tana I hadn’t yet met walked the path towards me: gait schooled to the sort of casualness that never quite conceals the plan
behind a seemingly-chance meeting, pale green eyes meeting mine with a smile. Sunset cast her red hair in a dozen shades of fire.
“Ouirr,” she said, closing the distance between us and extending a hand in the manner of a woman who expects a kiss on the wrist. I took it, obliging the unspoken request, and discovered well-developed calluses on her fingertips.
“Lady,” I said, meeting her gaze with a questioning look.
She grinned. “Good eve, ouirr. I am Macha Ciena a Nemain, Ériu House’s bard.”
I surprised myself with my lack of surprise at meeting a female bard. After Letitia’s female herald and female seneschal, a female bard seemed almost commonplace.
The mundane world wrapped comforting arms around me; I grinned without planning it. “You and I have much to discuss.”
“Indeed we do, ouirr. May I show you my studio?”
“Only if you show me via a route that leads past my room. I would never live down the shame if I left Fíana without playing with you!”
She gave me a smile and took my arm. The smolder in her glance would have meant she intended to do far more than play with me, if she were human. For all the tales of wanton insatiable Tana one hears in the human lands, however, I was still trying to sort out which were deliberate signals and what was allure as impersonal as the enticement of flowers to a bee.
Inside the house, lamplight cast the chambers and courtyards of Ériu House in a completely different kind of glamour than had greeted me this afternoon: high ceilings receded into purple shadows; strange flameless lamps spilled golden pools of light over pale marble and richly woven rugs. My room was dark, but my harp lay exactly where I’d left it: I scooped up the case by the strap and strode back into the lamplight. Macha cast a speculative glance over my harp case and took my arm again.
“Dear gods, what a relief it is to finally find a colleague here!” I said as we walked across a courtyard. “I needed background on your politics a twelvenight ago!”
Macha laughed. “Wheels within wheels, it is. Choose a place to start.”
“Thank you. The mora will be invested at Bealtan.”
“Yes.”
“Then who’s in charge now?”
Macha grinned. “A perspicacious question, and one for which there’s no easy answer. This situation has not occurred within anyone’s memory or knowledge; everyone is making up the song as they play. The lady passed the age of responsibility several years ago; she’s been leader of Clan Ériu since.”
“But not mora,” I said.
“How could she be mora before estrus?” Macha said, as if it were perfectly obvious.
“So the moraship is heritable by the Ériu clan?”
“Theoretically no, practically yes. In theory any clan leader could assemble a coalition and take it herself. In practice, since warfare ended…”
For half a second I lost focus on what she was saying. Since warfare ended? How was such a thing possible? Even could a ruler get everyone else to stand down, how would the ban be enforced without arms?
“…it’s become impossible for anyone else to take the Gáe Assail.”
“The what?”
“The Great Spear of Fíana?”
I’d thought that weapon a myth. The Great Spear had originally belonged to Lugh Lámfhada Himself. It had been the most feared of all Tanaan weapons, too powerful to be managed by any but its owner.
“It exists, then,” I said, unable to keep the astonishment from my voice. The Tanaan did not practice war, but they were in possession of the greatest weapon ever forged.
“Of course!” Macha released my arm and swept through an open door. The last shreds of daylight and the sound of her heels on marble hinted at her motion across a darkened room. She paused, turned up an oil lamp, and gestured me inside.
“Glass of wine?” she said as I entered. Her hand was already on the decanter.
“Thank you.” I set my harp case on a table and looked around. The room was of a size that would have indicated a well-favored royal appointment in the human lands, rich but not ostentatious with rugs on the floor and hangings on the walls. A door on the right-hand wall led to an inner chamber: a bedroom, I guessed.
“How does a mora choose a consort?” I asked, crossing the room to take the glass Macha offered. She gave me a little salute with her glass and another promissory smile; I returned both.
“There aren’t set rules,” Macha said, leading me to a settee. She sat down beside me. “Historically, most choices have been about cementing alliances between royal houses; that’s how Mora Carina came to choose Mor Rishan.”
Macha smiled. “Actually, she didn’t choose him. Her mother, Mora Berecyntia, did. Mora Carina actually had her eye on a bard…”
I laughed. “But Mora Berecyntia had access to the usual methods of forcing royal children into the appropriate marriages.”
“Just so.” Macha laughed too.
“So was Lord Iminor… Mora Letitia’s choice?”
Macha shrugged. “They’ve grown up with the expectation. Royal blood is scarce these days. She’s clearly not in love with him, though she does love him.”
“And he’s totally devoted to her.”
“Totally. In this day, it’s enough.”
“It’s about as good as it gets for royals, in any day,” I observed. “Were they married when she reached the age of majority?”
“Lord of Light, no! Ouirr, among Dana’s People, no one marries before estrus. And morae rarely take consorts before their investitures.”
“Keeping the lines of inheritance clean.”
“Just so.”
“Then their marriage is scheduled for this summer?”
Macha nodded. “Bealtan Day.”
“It’s going to be a busy Bealtan.”
Macha’s sidelong glance, delivered with all the sensual languor of decades of practice, promised hours of Bealtan busyness. “Very, very busy.”
“I can’t wait,” I said. For a moment we were both silent, just slightly too far apart for a kiss.
“So,” Macha said, a new huskiness in her voice. “If you had to choose one song to cross the mountains this month, which would it be?”
There was no need to consider the issue. “Fare and Fir.”
“It’s yours?” The perfume in her hair enveloped me, permeating my brain.
I shook my head. “It’s older than our written records.”
Macha laughed. The motion of her breasts very nearly made me lose track of the topic.
“So much for your one chance at immortality.”
I shrugged. “I am ard-harpist first, a composer second.”
“You shame me.” A wicked grin spread across Macha’s face. “Now I’ve no choice but to play you Carin and Allanin rather than one of my own compositions.”
“Carin and Allanin?”
Macha rose and crossed the room to retrieve her harp. “Written by Allanin, the bard I mentioned earlier. It’s not a bardic work per se: there’s no lyric or recitative. But it’s arguably the ultimate achievement of our harp tradition.”
She sat beside me again and began checking the tuning of her harp. It was reasonably close to the true: she must have tuned it earlier in the day.
“Allanin a Fea was the first person then-Lady Carina brought onto her staff,” Macha said, adjusting a string. “She was several years past the age of responsibility, but Mora Berecyntia was little more than three hundred years old: Carina had no expectation of ascending to the clan leadership, much less the moraship, for at least a century. She had a house built on Kykia and took up residence there. Allanin had a magnificent studio—it would make you drool, ouirr—but apparently he gave no sign of actually sleeping in that bed. Rumors floated through reception rooms and feasting halls: Carina would marry her bard. He was not merely of the Fea clan, but a son of the House of Fea itself, and it hadn’t been so very many centuries since the leader of Clan Fea was a mora… You get the idea.”
I smiled. “Some things ne
ver change, on either side of the mountains.”
“Mora Berecyntia had other ideas, of course. There were still a lot of raw feelings after the war with Fáill the century before, so she wanted to strengthen ties with Muir. And the mora of Muir had a son who was reasonably close to Carina in age…”
“Rishan.”
Macha nodded. “Oh, there was drama and slamming of doors. Carina swore she would marry her bard; Mama threatened exile. Evidently she did cut off Carina’s allowance…”
I laughed.
“And Carina rode to Muir to begin the nuptial negotiations, but not before she’d sworn her undying love for Allanin. He wrote this song for her, as a sort of send-off I guess—or perhaps he wrote it later. We’re not completely sure. At any rate, the story that goes with this song is that their devotion to one another was unwavering, their passion—” Macha met my eyes, a mischievous one-sided smile on her lips.
“Unequaled before or since. The bit about the passion may be true, but as for the devotion… The truth on that front seems to be that she was completely besotted with him until she fell for a Beallan wizard during your war against the renegade sorcerer.”
Amien: I knew it immediately. The old man had been obsessed with Carina and her mysterious power. He wouldn’t admit it, but there was no question they had been lovers.
“The Prince of the Aballo Order,” I said.
“Is that who he was?” Macha said. “He very nearly wrecked Fíana’s succession.”
She set the harp key aside and adjusted the harp against her shoulder, raised her hands to the strings, and met my eyes. The invitation in her gaze was unmistakable. I gave her a smile that promised all she could handle and more.
Carin and Allanin was pure seduction. If I hadn’t been curious about the mystery of Tana, if she hadn’t already made it perfectly obvious her allure was personal and meant for me, the song would still have made plans for unlacing her dress begin arranging themselves in my mind. It became nearly impossible to focus on committing the song to memory. She glanced at the strings occasionally, when large-scale jumps in the melody made navigation necessary, but mostly she played to me. The pale green depths of her eyes and the soft shadows on her long neck drew me inevitably closer, until the only gentlemanly thing to do was to nuzzle against her hair as she played. She leaned into the contact; I pushed her hair aside so I could explore the back of her neck with my lips.
The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods) Page 9