Fury of the Falcon (The Falcons Saga 5)

by Ellyn, Court

  She tugged the reins to turn back. A light under the shade of the cottonwood caught her eye.

  “Here, child,” Saffron called.

  Uncle Thorn lay among the roots of the tree. The front of his clothes was stained dark, his face ghostly gray. With a wail, Carah launched herself from the saddle and ran to him. She called his name and shook his shoulders. She pressed fingers to his throat. His pulse raced, so faint that she barely traced it.

  His eyes opened. For a moment, there was no recognition on his face. Then he smiled. “You really here?”

  “I am. I’m going to heal you.” She took refuge in the inspection of the injuries. Small stab wounds, nearly a dozen of them, opened his belly, his thigh. Most were shallow, some were not. None bled profusely anymore. It was the arrow Carah worried about. The sight of the brutal spike rising from his ribs tore a cry from her. A touch of her hands showed her the extent of the damage. His abdomen was flooding. He was bleeding out, a drip at a time, soaking the ground beneath him.

  His palms were red and sticky. He had tried to staunch the worst of it and given up. “Did you see the dragon?” His voice was so soft that Carah had to lean closer to hear him over the wind. “He’s coming back for me.”

  “No, Uncle Thorn!” She closed her eyes and tried to decide what to mend first.

  “Lothiar is dead. Killed by his own chains. That’s a song, eh?”

  Ah, Goddess, she needed a surgeon. How could she close veins and stop the bleeding with the arrow shaft in the way? If she pulled it out would it worsen the flow?

  “Don’t fret over it, love. It doesn’t hurt like before. And the dragon is coming.”

  What did the damn dragon have to do with anything? He was delirious. “Stop talking. Let me work.”

  His fingers pried her hand away.

  “You must let me,” she cried. “Die, damn you, and I’ll follow you. I’ll follow you down into the dark.”

  The threat made him smile. “You won’t. Unquenchable fire. Too stubborn to die.”

  “So are you!”

  “There is only light now. No more darkness for me. D’you see it?”

  “No, I don’t, and neither do you!” She was shouting, she realized, and didn’t know why. She shook off his grip and laid her hands over his wounds again.

  “Build my pyre on the hill of stones. You know the one.”

  A chill seized her. “Slaenhyll?”

  “My father’s pyre was there. I shared little with him. But I can share that.”

  Tears rolled hot down her face. “Oh, please, Uncle Thorn. Don’t give up. Let me—”

  “Thorn is already dead.” The idea seemed to please him. “He died with Lothiar. You’ve never called me by my name.”

  She blinked through tears, bewildered. “Kieryn?” The name felt foreign in her mouth.

  He nodded, satisfied.

  The music of birds, water, and wind dampened around them. The seething afternoon sunlight filtered through a silver shadow. Uncle Kieryn’s lax body went rigid; he stared into the motionless canopy with ecstatic expectation. “There. Do you see her?”

  Carah saw nothing. She leaned across him, determined to shield him and keep him.

  Futile. A breath crossed the threshold of his lips. Light fled his eyes. Leaving a trace of joy on his face.

  Carah stared at him, unable to believe he had left her. In a frenzy, she searched with Veil Sight for a light speeding away, a strand, a thread to coax, to beg, to order to return. There was only her own azeth, and Saffron.

  “How am I to tell Da?”

  “You won’t have to.”

  The jagged sound of heartbreak drew Laniel into the shade under the tree. The sight that greeted him stole his breath. Carah lay curled beside her uncle, her arm stretched across his blood-soaked chest as if she fought to anchor him to this world. The sightless stare of those blue eyes told Laniel it was a fruitless battle.

  He eased down beside Carah and wrenched her away from the body. She clutched onto him fiercely, and he rocked her, and her sobs burst against his ear. “I couldn’t save him! He wouldn’t let me save him!”

  Damn stubborn bastard. Who was Laniel to bicker with now? Never before had he dared love a duínovë. Now he remembered why. Part of him had thought his oath-brother might live forever. He had lied to himself.

  He laid a hand across the smiling blue eyes, touched the bloodless forehead and the breathless chest and whispered the blessing of parting. “May the Light shine on your face. May Ana heal you and hold you, now and forever. May you rest at last, my brother.”

  ~~~~

  The last enemy commander on the battlefield raised his chin defiantly. The Elari’s eyes were a purple so dark they were almost black, his hair wind-tossed silver-blond curls. Miraji surrounded him, bows taut. Kelyn had come to accept his surrender. “Your name?”

  “Tréandyn. I want to see him. Until then, I’ll never believe it.”

  The dragon had flown southward, roaring the announcement over the hospital pavilions and the battle waging on the eastern edge of camp. The ogres there, too, had fled at the news, abandoning their lieutenant.

  Kelyn led him to a cart and tossed back a tarpaulin.

  Tréandyn stared in silence at Lothiar’s body. His face registered neither grief nor rage nor fear. His jaw hardened a little, that was all.

  “I’ll take your arms,” Kelyn said.

  “What good would that do, duínovë? You’ll kill me anyway.” He nodded at the Elarion who’d apprehended him. “Or they will.” Did the fool mean to draw his sword and force Kelyn’s hand?

  “On the contrary. I’d like to record your words. You know what Lothiar was thinking. You share his views.”

  Tréandyn sneered. “More than ever.”

  “Will you tell it to a scribe?”

  “As your prisoner?”

  “Heads on spikes don’t talk at all.”

  Tréandyn gulped, eyed the points of the arrows. “Under those circumstances, gladly.” He unbuckled his sword belt and dropped it at Kelyn’s feet.

  Kelyn nodded approval. “My brother thinks history ought to be recorded faithfully. You’ll do as Thorn wishes, in exchange for your life.” An inadequate gift for putting an end to Lothiar, but all Kelyn could offer his brother.

  The prisoner groaned. The idea of serving Kieryn Dathiel rankled him. The sight of his displeasure tugged a chuckle from Kelyn.

  He left Tréandyn in the care of his own kind and walked with Kethlyn and Eliad back to camp. The piercing pain in his side had eased somewhat. He could almost ignore it, though he still found himself pressing at it as he strode along the avenue between tents.

  Smiles. Smiles on nearly every face. Soldiers hailing his name as he passed. So much still to be done. A world altered. A veil torn away forever. He envisioned ogre hunts in putrid bogs, but put the thought aside. That was for another day.

  First order of business was to find Rhoslyn and hold her for hours.

  Already soldiers scoured the countryside for wagons and carts, sledges and sleighs, anything that might serve in transporting the massive number of casualties back to Tírandon. Others gathered wood and chopped trees from the birch forest beside the Blythewater for pyres. Too many pyres.

  Pain unfurled in Kelyn’s chest, dropping him to his hands and knees. Breath fled his lungs. Some deeper something tore loose and fluttered away. For an instant he could see nothing but light, endless light. Then the sunbaked soil between his hands.

  Someone grabbed his shoulders, set him upright, and his eyes fell on the crown of Slaenhyll, and he knew. Not Thorn, not Kieryn, not my brother, no.

  Voices shouted. “—heart attack? I don’t know.”

  “Get a surgeon!”

  “Just exhausted—”

  Certainty broke him. He drew in the wind and released it in a single, echoing roar. Demands for explanation, cries for help clashed around him, but he heard no words. It was as if his own lifelight had been cut away, and it searched desperate
ly, vainly for his twin in a gaping darkness.

  ~~~~

  40

  Lanterns lined the path to the summit of Slaenhyll. Stars and moons lit the way overhead. Kelyn ascended. A slow trudge. Dread in each step. He was webbed in a nightmare, and he could not cut himself loose. He was blind and deaf and his skin was numb to the caress of the balmy nightwind. Yet he saw the light shining from the lanterns planted on the hillside, heard the keening song of Elarion swirling about the standing stones, and he followed both upward.

  Rhoslyn climbed a couple steps behind him, sniffling softly into a kerchief. Kethlyn and a long line of mourners followed. Far below the slopes of Slaenhyll, broad swaths of flame smoldered. The common dead burned in great pits tonight. Brothers-in-arms, now brothers-in-ash. The dewing air was thick with the smell of burning meat, bubbling fat, and the tireless night-cries of ravens.

  Rumors abounded; they had reached Kelyn’s ears in passing. “He can’t be dead,” a soldier had said outside the pavilion. “Isn’t he immortal?”

  “How could the enemy get the better of him?” said another. “He fought off hundreds at once. No, it can’t be true.”

  In the hours of waiting, Kelyn had demanded answers to the same questions. No one knew. Near sunset, Azhien had galloped into camp upon Thorn’s horse. The young Elari’s face was ashen. He was relieved he did not need to tell the Sheannach the news, only fill in the details. An arrow. A single arrow had taken Thorn from behind. He hadn’t died alone.

  Reaching Slaenhyll’s summit, Kelyn kept his eyes on the shadows pooling around his feet and laid a hand on the carven surface of the nearest standing stone. His fingers detected the sun’s warmth lingering in the pillar, the lichen crusting its face.

  How could he feel, yet feel nothing at the same time?

  Two decades ago he had lit another pyre here. Slaenhyll had been steeped in fear and superstition. His father’s ashes had bestowed a different reputation, one of heroism and honor. Remembering that night beside his father’s pyre, the ice falling, the fever rising, the effort to swallow such a loss, Kelyn understood why Thorn had made this his last request.

  He had longed for acceptance from their father and never received it. This scholar of a son who had met his end in battle. Fitting, then, to burn him here.

  Kelyn steeled his nerve and rounded the great stone pillar. The dranithion stood in a ring, their backs to the stones. Each had conjured a small spinning ball of yellow light that hovered over their uplifted palms. They keened in haunting harmony, a song without words yet full of meaning.

  In the center of the circle, Etivva stood at the head of a waist-high bier built of tent poles and greenwood. Rumor said that as soon as she heard, the shaddra had stopped mid-prayer over a dying soldier. Shouting and tossing orders like a sergeant, unlike anything her meek spirit had ever permitted her to do, she sent Regulars and Miraji, men and dwarves to track down Thorn’s whereabouts.

  It was she who had bathed him and dressed him in his fine velvet robe. The silver embroidery glistened in the conjured fay-light. Its folds and Thorn’s perpetually untamed hair caught the nightwind. His face was unbearably pale. Bloodless, a stone carving. Not Thorn at all. No, not him. There’s been some mistake. All these people, they’re blind, crazy. It can’t be him.

  Yet the shattered place inside, the ache where a vital limb had been torn away, testified that Kelyn’s eyes did not lie.

  A tear-strained voice gasped, “Oh, Da!” Carah emerged from the dark between stones and threw her arms around him.

  For a moment, unfettered joy welled. “My girl, my girl,” he muttered and kissed the crown of her head as she sobbed into his shirt. Safe. Rhoslyn wrapped her arms about them both. A long while they took refuge in each other, while the rest of the mourners filed onto the summit and filled the circle between the ancient stones. Eliad and Kalla, Sha’hadyn and Drona, Tullyk limping slow, Maeret bruised head to foot, Laral who despaired beyond all hope…

  The inevitable awaited.

  Kelyn approached the bier. His glance clung to his brother’s hands. He could bear that much. They were folded upon his chest, gloved. “I’ll never forgive you for leaving me like this. What am I to do?”

  This isn’t right. It’s not supposed to be this way. It’s supposed to be me. Thorn was supposed to sail to far shores, sit aching at a writing desk as he filled page after page with words, smile in delight as he spread rainbows across the sky for laughing children. What business did he have being on a battlefield?

  Anger flared. Stupid egotistical son of a bitch, thinking you could fix it all. Should’ve stayed in your library. Should’ve … I should’ve …

  Don’t! No undoing it. This is the battle I must fight. It’s not going away. Shield up.

  He drew back his shoulders, dried his face, and noticed things he should’ve noticed immediately. There was no wood under the bier. No oil.

  He rounded on the dranithion, on Carah. “Forget something?”

  His daughter flinched. The day’s events had scored her raw, left her fragile. In a small voice she said, “I’m to do it, Da.”

  He hauled her close, held her tight, muttered apologies.

  He gave Etivva the nod.

  The shaddra spread her hands and looked to the stars. “Mother and Father of all, peer down on us this night. Pity us. We are broken with sorrow. We have lost, each of us, dear ones in exchange for the victory we ought tonight to be celebrating. Yet here we are, mourning. Our pain dampens our joy.” She gazed upon that still ivory face. “Dear boy. As much a son to me as ever I knew. That the Mother called me, of all insignificant people, to teach you, to rear you, that strange little boy with gawking blue eyes and endless questions. The legacy you leave behind is greater by far than the one given to you. You brought peoples together when others would sunder them. You sought truth, when others believed shadows. You brought light to all who knew you.” Her fingers traced a triangle upon Thorn’s brow, the Points of Flesh and Magic over each eye, the Point of Divine touching the widow’s peak. She linked the Triangle to his lips and his heart with a pair of light touches. Then she raised both hands in a series of fluid gestures, invoking the Four Winds to carry his ashes far and wide. “Blessed of Ana, blessed of Forah, return to your Mother, return to your Father, in peace.”

  While she intoned her blessing, a shimmer of silver danced in the corner of Kelyn’s eye. He turned, expecting the dragon but finding a lady. A coronet inlaid with moonstone and carnelian to show the phases of the moons graced her brow. A silver gown rippled about her feet. Golden curls fell past her waist. She looked on none but the dead man.

  Laniel spied her as well and rushed to her side. “I didn’t think you were coming,” he whispered.

  “I realized I was afraid. The Lady must look on the truth.” She searched the gathering until she found Kelyn. She knew him at once. How could she not? She came to him, pressed a gentle hand to his face and smiled despite the tears glistening on her cheeks. The intimacy of the touch should’ve startled him, even offended him, but it caused a warmth to spring up in him, as if he had been wrapped in the shielding embrace of a goddess.

  The ache, the search in her eyes, however, was altogether worldly. She wanted to see Thorn in Kelyn’s face. Because she had loved him. This was she to whom he had run to all those years ago when Kelyn had failed him.

  “I cannot reach him.” Kelyn didn’t know what prompted him to say it.

  “The Light is always close, and he dwells within it. It is there you will find him.”

  How many years from now? Was there a prophesy concerning Kelyn’s death as well? He’d rather not know.

  “Will you permit us to bless him?”

  That she felt the need to ask… Kelyn damn near pleaded her pardon.

  “You’re his family, too.”

  The Lady took Laniel’s hand and together they approached the pyre. The scent of gardens caught the wind and swirled about the stones. Kelyn saw that the Lady had opened a crystal vial of p
erfumed oil. While she poured it over the body, Laniel raised his hands to the heavens as if to cradle the Mother-Father’s face. “Gentle thief!” he cried. “You have taken from us our brother, our friend, our warrior, our shield. No more does his light illumine the darkness. He burned fiercely among us. Now he burns within you. We would have him back, Mother. You gave him to us for so short a time. How long the years seem, stretching ahead into shadow. But we are content to wait, for wait we must. Hold him fast. Let him shine still as a beacon on a rocky shore, to guide us home.”

  The dranithion sent their little orbs of light hurtling skyward. They fled like embers, danced like fireflies speeding for the stars. Then they were gone, swallowed, as if some great unseen mouth had opened and engulfed them. Kelyn imagined them messages, promises, cast into the beyond.

  The hilltop was plunged into darkness. The moons provided scant, blushing light.

  Silence lay as deep. The nightwind battered the standing stones.

  Laniel cast half a glance toward Carah. She didn’t move.

  “Are you sure, dearheart?” Kelyn asked her.

  She gulped down tears and stepped to the pyre. Etivva unfurled a sheet and laid it over the body. The mourners edged back. They knew well the unpredictability of avedra fire. And Carah wasn’t exactly calm.

  Her eyes closed, her fists knotted, her jaw tightened. She said not a word, but slowly opened one hand. It trembled as it stretched toward the bier. The perfume heated, the scent intensifying. The sheet smoldered, ignited in a sudden burst, but by then there was little left beneath it. Carah had burned him from the inside out. Masterful control.

  The tent poles and greenwood collapsed in a cascade of sparks. The dranithion raked the embers into place and the fire fed itself.

  What would the bards sing of Slaenhyll now, Kelyn wondered, and of Kieryn Dathiel’s ash poured out upon it? Would the songs tell of his shadow cast upon the stones by the red setting sun? Would ballads pair his name with dragons, forging new legends of the kind that once filled a young Kieryn with delight? Might the tales even incite, perhaps, a blush?