The sun showered the foliage with dappled light. Something that was not the sun—a strange golden mist-light—flickered through the trunks, as though the stag had left a trail of light behind it. The mist beckoned him deeper into the forest.
Voran plunged headlong into the deepwood. The strange light continued before him for a mile or so, then blinked out. Voran looked around and realized he had never been in this place before. He stood on the edge of a clearing awash in morning sun, so bright compared to the gloom of the woods that he could see nothing in it but white light. He stepped forward.
The light overwhelmed him, forcing him to crouch over and shield his eyes. Fuzzy at first, then resolving as Voran’s eyes grew accustomed to the light, the white stag towered in the middle of the clearing, almost man-high at the shoulder. Its antlers gleamed gold, so bright that they competed with the sun.
Voran froze in place and adopted the deep, silent breathing pattern that an old woodsman taught him in childhood. Inch by inch, he reached for his bow. His quiver hung at his side in the Karilan manner, so taking the arrow would be the work of half a second, but extricating the bow strapped to his back was another matter. A single bead of sweat dropped from his forehead and slid down the side of his nose, tickling him.
The deer turned its head to Voran, showing no inclination to flee. As though Voran were nothing more than a fly, it flicked both ears and continued to graze.
The howl repeated, just to Voran’s right. Out of the trees crept a black wolf the size of a bear, its fur glistening in the light of the antlers. It paid no heed to Voran, leading with bristling head toward the grazing deer. It lunged, blurring in Voran’s vision like a war-spear, but the stag leaped over it and merely moved farther off to continue grazing. The wolf howled again and lunged again. Back and forth they danced, but the stag knew the steps of this death-dance better than the wolf. His nonchalance seemed to infuriate the hunter.
The wolf charged so fast that Voran missed its attack. The deer flew higher than Voran thought possible, and its golden antlers slammed the wolf’s flank like a barbed mace. The wolf screamed. The sound ripped through Voran, an almost physical pain.
The stag trotted to the other end of the clearing. Looking back once more, it waited. Gooseflesh tickled Voran’s neck. The stag called to him, teasing him to continue the hunt. Voran ran, and the deer launched off its back legs and flew into the waiting embrace of the trees.
Voran stopped. His body strained forward, intent on the hunt, but his heart pulled back. The wolf. He could not leave a suffering creature to die, even if it was the size of a bear, even if it would probably try to kill him if he approached. With a groan for his lost quarry, Voran turned back.
The wolf dragged itself forward with its forepaws. Each black claw was the size of a dagger. As Voran approached, its ears went flat against its head, and it growled deep in its throat. Voran’s hands shook. Gritting his teeth, he balled his hands into fists and willed himself to look the wolf in the eye. Its ears went up like an inquisitive dog’s. It whined.
In the eyes of the wolf, Voran saw recognition. This was a reasoning creature, not a wild animal.
“I can help you,” he found himself saying to the wolf as to a human being. “If you let me.”
The wolf stared at him, then nodded twice.
Voran pulled a homemade salve—one of Lebía’s own making—from a pouch on his quiver. Tearing a strip from his linen shirt, he soaked it with the oils and cleaned the wound of tiny fragments of bone. The wolf tensed in pain, then exhaled and relaxed. Its eyes drooped as the pungent odor suffused the air, mingling with pine-scent. Soon the wolf was snoring.
As Voran watched the sleeping wolf, something stirred in his chest—a sense of familiarity and comfort he had only felt on rainy evenings by the hearth. For a brief moment, the wolf was a brother, closer even than any human. Perhaps it was better that he had given up the chance to hunt the stag. This stillness was enough.
A rustle of leaves distracted Voran. He turned around to see the white stag returning into the clearing with head bowed. Voran could not believe his good fortune. He would be the successful hunter. His family’s dishonored name would be raised up again on Vasyllia’s lips. Trembling, he reached for his bow.
The stag stopped for a moment, as if considering. More boldly, he walked to Voran. Voran’s heart raced at how easy this kill would be, but the excitement died when the stag didn’t stop. He stared right at Voran as he strode. Voran pulled out an arrow and nocked it. The stag walked closer.
No. He couldn’t do it. This beast was too noble, his eyes too knowing. Killing him would be like killing a man in cold blood.
The stag stopped close enough that Voran could touch him. To Voran’s shock, he bowed his two forelegs and dipped his antlered crown to the earth, a king of beasts making obeisance to a youth of a mere twenty-four summers. Gathering courage, Voran approached the stag. His hands shook as he reached out to touch the antlers.
Something shook the branches in the trees ahead. Voran looked up, shoulders tensed. Something, some sort of huge bird, much bigger than a mountain eagle, perched in the crown of an orange-leaved aspen. No, not a bird, something else. Then Voran understood, and terror and excitement fought inside him, leaving him open-mouthed and rooted to the ground. The creature had a woman’s face and torso, seamlessly blending with the wings and eagle body. Her head was adorned in golden-brown curls, and each feather shone like a living gem. A Sirin.
She opened her mouth and sang. It was his song, but he had never heard it like this.
Voran no longer felt his body. It soared above the clouds; it plumbed the depths of the sea; it hovered on the wings of a kestrel. The song pinioned him like a spear to the earth, but raised him on a spring breeze above the world’s confusion. He was once again in the arms of his mother as she nursed him, her breath a soft tickle. He was inside the sun, and its music weaved him into existence. The earth shuddered, and he knew that he could turn it inside out.
The song of the Sirin stopped, and life lost all meaning. It was all grey, ugly, useless without her song.
When he came back to himself, the stag, the wolf, the Sirin were all gone, though her song lingered on the air. It seemed he would never rest, never sleep until he found her again.
The prince, beguiled by the aspen grove, sat down to sleep. A sleep that lasted three hundred twenty-seven years…
-From “The Sleeping-Wood” (Old Tales: Book I)
CHAPTER TWO
The Pilgrim
It was a few hours after midday on the same day, as far as Voran could tell in the enormous dark of leaves. He walked in a direction he hoped would lead him back to known paths, but he still recognized few of the trees or hills. The undergrowth was so thick that Voran suspected he had stumbled on a true wildwood. He didn’t know there were any left in Vasyllia, for though there were few outlying villages outside the city proper, many Vasylli had been woodsmen in their time, and hardly an inch of copse, plain, or grove was undiscovered.
One thought niggled the back of his mind, where he tried in vain to keep it contained. It whispered that he was no longer in Vasyllia at all, that he had entered a different realm from the human. Though he had just encountered not one, but three legendary creatures, Voran was not yet ready to believe all the Old Tales to be true.
He stumbled out of the murk of oaks into the breathing space of an alder-grove. He was exhausted. Laying down his bow, quiver, and sword, he sat at the base of a young tree and leaned back.
He should be more worried about losing his way. His provisions were few, he had drunk all his water before midday, and poor Lebía would be frantic with worry. But he found he cared little for any of that. He was not even anxious to find Vasyllia. Nothing mattered so much as finding the Sirin, as hearing her song again.
A kind of echo of the music thrummed through him stronger than his own heartbeat. Whenever he stopped moving, everything around him moved with the rhythm of the Sirin’s song. The wind toss
ed the branches in her cadence; the birds chirped in unison. His own heart and breath began to move with it, until he thought he would go mad with its insistence.
It was not the music itself, he realized. It was the incompleteness of it. The Sirin had sung, but not to him. To the trees and the beasts, perhaps, to the summits and rivers, but not to his heart. The thought held a creeping dread. If her incomplete song had caused him to go half-mad, what would happen if she directed her song at him? Nevertheless, to contemplate the possibility of not hearing the song again terrified him, like a childhood dream of a parent’s death.
As for finding her, none of the Old Tales were particularly helpful. The Sirin were capricious, appearing in their own good time, in their own chosen place. You did not seek out the Sirin, they sought you out. But he had no intention of waiting patiently for the song to return. He needed to do something.
The stag. Somehow, the white stag and the Sirin were connected. He couldn’t exactly understand how, but it made sense on a level of intuition. The stag was of a different world, the world of the tales, the world that never encroached on everyday life. At least until today. If he found the stag again, perhaps it would lead him to the Sirin.
His heart accelerated. Why had he not considered it before? The Dar would have already gathered the hunting party to search for the stag. All of Vasyllia—rich third-reacher and poor first-reacher alike—would be lounging in pavilions and on wool blankets before the city, feasting and awaiting the return of the hunters. Perhaps they had caught the trail already? He must stop them at all costs.
He tried to jump up, but found that his limbs were not responding to the commands of his mind. His eyelids were heavy, his head drooped, hungry for sleep. What had come over him? He had hardly been out for half a day!
Then the realization speared him. He was stuck in a sleeping-wood. By the Heights, surely that old story wasn’t true as well?
Out of the corner of his vision, a hairy creature waddled toward him. He couldn’t move his head to see it clearly. He heard a porcine snuffle, though it was far too large to be a tree-pig. It stood up on two hind legs, growing in the process, all matted hair and dirt and encrusted leaves. It growled.
Something changed in the music of the grove. At first, Voran couldn’t place it, then he realized it was the birds. They no longer sang in rhythm to the Sirin’s song, but to another music, more somber and ancient. Every branch in his vision hopped with purple, red, golden, brown songbirds. There was even a firebird trilling on one of the larger branches. The hairy creature snuffled back into the oaks.
“You shouldn’t amble through these woods, young man. The Lows of Aer are not to be lightly entered. All manner of strange things are possible here.”
Voran strained to move his jaw, and realized that nothing held him in place any more. He jumped up so suddenly that the speaker took two alarmed steps back and raised a walking stick in warning.
“I’m sorry, master,” said Voran, eager to make amends. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No harm done, young man.” The voice was as harsh as rock grating on rock, though it had an uncanny melody. It oddly harmonized with the birdsong. “Tell me, what brings you to the Lows?”
The man’s face was wrapped in some coarse grey fabric, though a beard poked out of it here and there. He was a huge man, out-gaining Voran by at least a head, and Voran was of the warrior caste. Something about him suggested incredible age, but he moved confidently, like a young man. Voran urgently wanted to make friends with this strange man.
“I am lost. My name is Voran, son of Otchigen of Vasyllia.”
The man’s grey eyes flashed like the sun reflecting off new snow. “The son of Otchigen? You are far from home, young man. How long have you traveled, then?”
Something in the pit of Voran’s stomach twisted. “Only this day. I hunted the white stag.”
Voran expected the man to laugh, but instead he unwrapped his face, revealing a smile of recognition. Like the beard, the man’s entire face resembled carved stone.
“Ah, a fellow seeker. What good fortune. I am a Pilgrim, young Voran.”
Voran could not believe his luck. Pilgrims were unnamed wanderers who traveled all lands searching for the beautiful and the terrible. They were whispered to have a special grace of Adonais. Meeting a Pilgrim in the wild was more valued than catching a questing beast; hosting a pilgrim brought one’s family years of prosperity. Many a well-bred housewife would brave open war with her neighbors for the sake of a Pilgrim’s visit.
“Good fortune indeed, master! Where do your feet take you this day?” Voran hoped he remembered the correct traditional address to a Pilgrim from his seminary days.
“My feet go where they will, young Voran.” The Pilgrim bowed his head, acknowledging the formality gratefully. Voran’s shoulders relaxed. “But meeting you perhaps has indicated a surer path. You wish to return to Vasyllia? It will take a week, at least, if you take the usual paths.”
Voran’s mouth must have dropped open in shock, because the Pilgrim laughed—if harsh rock can be imagined to laugh—and tapped his chin with his stick.
“You meddled with the Powers, young man. No telling what sort of trouble you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“Pilgrim, what do you know of the Sirin?”
The Pilgrim stiffened in suspicion. “Why do you ask? Have you not been chastened enough for your curiosity?”
“Forgive me. It is just…I have seen a Sirin. I have heard her song.”
The Pilgrim’s eyebrows rose a fraction and his eyes widened a jot, but his body remained still. Voran imagined it took great effort to appear so little moved.
“White stag,” the Pilgrim murmured, more to himself than to Voran, “Sirin-song…Is it that time already?” He seemed to make up his mind about something, and now his gaze was firm. “Come, Voran, I will take you to Vasyllia a different way.”
Everywhere the Pilgrim went, holloways seemed to carve themselves through the trees. Where Voran saw nothing but trees, the Pilgrim picked out alleys between birches, passages through beeches, and doors through sage-brush. It was like the land belonged to him. As though seeing with new eyes, Voran was inundated with details of the forest he had never before bothered to notice, and he wanted to stop to breathe in the warm birch-smell, to pick out the male sparrow’s call from the female’s, to run his fingers through rain-soaked juniper for the joy of the sticky drops. But he had to run to keep up with the long strides of the Pilgrim.
“Pilgrim, what was that thing in the sleeping-wood? How did you scare it off?”
The Pilgrim stopped walking, turning to Voran. “That? Oh, nothing but a harbinger.” He smiled at something. “Things stir in the deepwoods. Things you Vasylli have not seen, or even heard of, for a very long time.”
He continued forward with even more determined tread.
“Voran, tell me something. While traveling, I have heard tales about your father. Are any of them true?”
The anger rose in Voran with the suddenness of nausea.
“Which tales, Pilgrim?” he asked, unable to hide the quiver of anger in his voice. “That he massacred innocent people? Or that he beat my mother, forcing her to run away from Vasyllia in a half-mad state?”
The Pilgrim stopped, abashed.
“Surely that is not what is said of Aglaia?”
Voran stopped in mid-stride. The Pilgrim had knowledge of his mother. The possibility made his heart run circles in his chest.
“Pilgrim, do you know what happened to my mother?”
The Pilgrim smiled, but did not answer the question.
“Voran, am I wrong to believe that you have never spoken of these things to anyone? Will you consider it brazen of a Pilgrim to ask your confidence?”
Voran’s mouth began speaking even before he gave it permission.
“There is no one I can confess to, Pilgrim. Lebía—my little sister—is still haunted by nightmares. She was only eight years old when we lost both our
parents. The Dar is eternally sympathetic, but I don’t feel comfortable burdening him with personal worries. His daughter Sabíana, my…intended…” The heat rose in Voran’s cheeks. “Well, she is very protective of Lebía, and has a flinty nature. I find it better not to speak of it in her presence.”
The Pilgrim smiled knowingly. He pointed forward with his staff, offering Voran to continue speaking while they walked. Voran nodded, and they both walked forward as the carpet of fallen leaves rustled comfortably underfoot.
“Pilgrim, have you heard of the Time of Ordeal?”
“Who has not? Vasyllia’s warrior seminary is famed for it. Though I believe my knowledge of it to be several hundred years out of date.” He laughed, with a faraway look, as if remembering. Surely he was not that old. “Tell me, how many houses are still extant of the original seven?”
“Three remain. All three are segregated, as you know, coming together only for the training and vigils of the Ordeals. The gates of the seminary close, and no one is allowed in or out, not even with messages from family members. The Dar himself has no right to open the gates, except in times of war. The vigils, physical training, and period of intense contemplation are every bit as grueling as the tales have it.
“Eight years ago, I volunteered for the Ordeal of Silence four years before my allotted time. It’s a vow that few take, and hardly ever in their sixteenth year, but I sought out the opportunity with pleasure.”
“Voran, did you know that some of the oldest legends claim that the successful Ordeal of Silence fulfilled before its time is rewarded with a Sirin’s song?”
It explained a great deal. “No, Pilgrim. I did not.”
The Pilgrim’s smile was knowing. Chills ran down his spine. It was strangely pleasant.
“A week into the ordeal, my mother fell ill. None of the physicians understood it. There were lesions and bruises, and she just withered away. Then she disappeared. No note, no sign of departure, nothing. She just vanished. When I successfully finished the ordeal, the Otchigen I found was half the man he used to be. He had recently returned from a week of searching the wilds, but had found no sign of her. His state grew steadily worse, until I was forced to beg release from my studies, something I hated to do.
The Song of the Sirin (Raven Son Book 1) Page 2