Crystal Rose

by Bohnhoff, Maya Kaathryn

  “Your pretty Golden Wicke,” said Lilias, wine-dark lips curved in a knowing smile. “She and her acolytes Weave this. Do you like it? Does it terrify you?”

  He didn’t answer. “Doesn’t it terrify you?”

  The women glanced at each other and laughed. “Come,” said Coinich Mor, gesturing at their circle of calm golden light. “Come see what your sweet Raven has divined for you.”

  He sheathed his sword and moved to sit between them, facing Aiffe. To his surprise, the two joined hands so as to frame the stone, and gazed deep into its facets. Then, Lilias’s dark eyes seemed to roll back in their sockets and Coinich Mor began to sing a duan.

  In the halo of light above Bevol’s crystal images formed: Four riders struggled through rocky fields of snow, leaning into a wind that Feich could neither feel nor hear. Four walkers led their mounts along the treacherous ledges of the Cauldron. Four travelers sheltered beneath the pines of Baenn-an-ratha miles below where his chances of capturing Taminy were being snuffed out.

  “What am I seeing?”

  “Look closely,” whispered Coinich Mor, her gaze going to Lilias’s flickering eyelids.

  The scene shifted to the aislinn travelers huddled around a camp fire. Their faces revealed by the fire’s warming glow.

  Feich gasped aloud.

  “You know them?” asked Coinich Mor.

  “Saefren Claeg, Iseabal-a-Nairncirke, that idiot Osraed, Lealbhallain. The other girl I know only on sight.”

  The Dearg smiled. “They bring you a gift, Regent. The Osmaer Crystal is with them.”

  He gaped at her through the aislinn scene. “How do you know this?”

  “Dear Lilias has a great gift for the Sight. I have merely added to it my own senses and this, the Osmaer’s sister stone, cut from the same matrix. They are perhaps two days below us, Taminy shields them from more than observation. All this”—her gesture took in the turmoil without—”is her way of clouding your vision, lord. Of frightening you into retreat. How fortunate, you were, to have us here.”

  “The Osmaer,” he breathed. “But what must I do? How can I have it?”

  “Attack Hrofceaster.”

  The voice was Lilias Saba’s. Feich turned his gaze to her, pulling it from the aislinn vision.

  “Distract them as they attempt to distract you. You have the forces at your command. Attack. When these children arrive, shielded though they be to outward eyes, I will see them. You will have them, you will have the Crystal, and I will have Iseabal-a-Nairncirke and revenge.”

  Feich shook his head. “Don’t you realize what’s happening out there? I have no more forces at my disposal. Those who have not fled in panic are dead and dying. Taminy is destroying my men and yours.”

  The women smiled secretly and rose and beckoned him back outside where red tongues of light and black tongues of smoke licked at the bodies of the fallen. He shuddered as Lilias Saba knelt by the body of a Deasach corsair and turned him over to reveal his face. He was little more than a boy and Feich was startled to recognize him as the young soldier his Deasach paramour had chosen to display her displeasure at him only nights ago.

  “Look,” she told him, holding a hand before the boy’s face. “He has only swooned in fear. He will wake before long and wonder, or run and hide.”

  “He’s not dead?”

  Feich bent closer and saw that Lilias was right. Steam rose from the boy’s nostrils. He had only fainted. Head raised, Feich looked out over the camp and realized that it was only the strange, squirming light that made the scene so horrible.

  “Yes, you see?” asked Coinich Mor. “They’ve not melted away. It is all a trick of light and shadow. You are right about your Wicke. She is constrained to be harmless.”

  Feich felt laughter building in his throat. It bubbled out, sweeping him away on a tide of relieved hilarity. He let it take him, tumble him, steal his breath.

  “Shall I—” he gasped. “Shall I rally my fallen troops? Oh, but how shall they ride? How shall they fight?” He looked at the fallen bodies now and saw them as comic.

  “Later,” Coinich Mor told him, and together with her Deasach ally she led him back to his tent.

  oOo

  Deardru lived with a strange, tight, exhilarating dread clogging her throat. Around her, Taminy’s followers scurried at their Mistress’s beck and call, knowing that Airleas was missing or had been taken, but not knowing how or by whom. Reaching out through the catamount totem told her why they remained in the dark. Airleas slept, deeply and completely, dreamlessly, at Coinich Mor’s Weaving.

  Her first reaction to that realization had been relief; she’d fully expected to return to Hrofceaster to be locked away for her part in the boy’s disappearance. Now she spent every day in nervous anticipation that the boy would awake and point an aislinn finger at her. Alternately, she prayed that Feich would take his hostage and run or that he would stay and fight and win.

  When the waljan and their Mistress launched their aislinn attack on the enemy camp, she was terrified.

  Corsairs and soldiers swooned away in terror or panicked and tried to run, though there was no where to go with any speed.

  Unable to do anything against the strength of that combined Weaving, she had reached out to Coinich Mor and been gratified to know that the Dearg Wicke already suspected what she knew as fact—Taminy was loathe to kill even her worst enemies. The attack was intended to induce fear, not bring about death.

  Yet, there was death. Fleeing down the steep, dangerous track on foot and on horseback, a number of terror-stricken souls perished. She could see them, through the eyes of the Deasach Banarigh, tossed like rag-dolls down the toothed flanks of a pass known only as the Cut—Dearg red, Feich yellow, even Deasach black.

  She knew that Feich would attack once he’d regathered his scattered and trembling troops. Still she held her breath, awaiting that event, fearing that Airleas might awaken first and reveal her as his betrayer, and went about her duties at Hrofceaster—cooking, caring for the children. All the while she watched the bond between Catahn and Taminy strengthen and grow. Like a living thing, it seemed, eating away at her, growing fat on her anguish.

  Yet so, her hatred of Taminy grew fat and flourished.

  Chapter 23

  Those who know God know none but God; those who fear God fear none but God, though the entire world be against them.

  —from the Testament of Osraed Bevol

  Between the three forces, they had lost less than twenty men to the canyon; another thirty or so had made their escape good and hid or fled back the way they had come toward El-Deasach. Most of the dead and missing were Dearg. Daimhin Feich did not waste time with grief or anger.

  He left no one time to mourn the deaths—which were, after all, the result of cowardice—but had the men gathered before dawn, fed and ready to assault the Hillwild fortress. Here, he stepped aside, Ruadh would call the battle plan in consultation with Coinich Mor’s slow but fierce husband and Lilias Saba. It amused Feich to think that the Deasach Banarigh actually commanded her own battle forces. He’d expected her to relinquish their control to a lieutenant, but she did not.

  He might have teased her for such a conceit if there had been time and opportunity . . . and if he had not such an appreciation of her pride.

  They attacked Hrofceaster with the first faint reddening of the eastern sky—Ruadh with his troops, Daimhin with his aidan. Now, Taminy would taste of her own tactics.

  oOo

  Sunrise.

  The peaks to the east lit as if painted with fire. The mists of Baenn-iolair bled down her flanks and hung over Baenn-an-ratha in gaudy tatters. Still. It was too still on the mountainside, as if all things held their breath.

  On the battlements Catahn Hageswode watched as a strange mist rose from down-slope and crept toward them—mist that didn’t behave like mist. It billowed in the breezeless air, curled and fanned and obscured whatever might lie beyond it. Cover, Catahn realized. Cover for an attack. He summ
oned his lieutenants silently to preparation. A scent reached him, spicy, woody.

  Smoke, yes, but unnatural. Vaguely, he could feel the force behind it—a tickling on his skin, a prickling at the back of his neck.

  Ready, ready, he thought to his men. Be ready.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the face of the fortress rising from the court, at the window of the Great Hall high in the facade. Taminy was there. He could see her only as a shadow against the thick glass. He could sense her as a flame, warm at his back. Reason enough to fight. Reason enough to die.

  He turned back to the creeping smoke. It was below them now, had obscured the gate of Airdnasheen, rendered her empty houses and streets invisible. It rolled across the sloping access to Hrofceaster, spread east and west, blotting out the grove of Catahn’s Crask-an-duine, the spring-fed mountain stream, the lonely stands of trees around and between. Concealing the ground, the sky . . . the enemy. It surrounded them and began to climb the walls. As the false mist flowed over Hrofceaster’s battlements and into her forecourt, Catahn fought the tightness in his throat and took up his bow.

  The assault came with lightning speed on the tips of flaming arrows and crossbow bolts. Pinned below the lip of her battlements, Hrofceaster’s defenders could only await a cessation in the rain of weaponry.

  There was none. Wave after wave of artillery rolled over them, preventing all but the most limited response. Catahn knelt in a narrow niche and brought his bow up, arrow notched. There was yet nothing to fire at, and now he heard someone cry out from the forecourt that a fire had sprung up there.

  Chill clutched at his heart. If the arrows continued to fall, extinguishing the fires they caused could be impossible.

  oOo

  Above and behind him from within Hrofceaster’s Great Hall, Taminy saw Feich’s shield of smoke as the aislinn-molded thing it was.

  “Feel it?” she asked. “Feel the aidan behind it—within it?”

  Arrayed around her, eyes on the lead-crystal windows of the big room, the waljan did indeed feel the presence behind the heavy billows that pressed against the panes.

  “How?” Wyth Arundel asked, shaking his head. “How can a man like Feich have such a powerful Gift? I never sensed this in him before Cyne Colfre’s death. Did you?”

  Taminy shook her head. “I felt . . . something from him, but nothing like this.”

  “Yet he Weaves as one fully versed in the Art. He Weaves with the power of someone like Osraed Bevol.”

  Skeet, flanking him at the window, murmured, “He has Aiffe and he has allies.”

  Wyth shook his head. “A crystal is merely a focus. If he had no aidan . . .”

  “He could do nothing,” finished Taminy, her eyes never leaving the window.

  “Then how has been able to train such a strong Gift in such a short time?”

  Taminy shook her head. “I wish I knew.”

  “The Deasach Cwen has the Sight,” observed Desary. “Father says while you were talking with Feich, he felt her watching us. Watching you. But with Feich, he can sense nothing. It’s as if—”

  A muffled shriek pulled them from their murmured conversation. Eyslk had pulled back from the windows, one hand covering her mouth, the other pointing into the teeming mist.

  “Demons!” she cried, voice breaking. “They send demons in the mist!”

  Taminy brought her eyes back to the glass. Black phantoms with flaming eyes assailed them. Spreading wings the color of midnight, carrying swords of flame, they hurled themselves against the windows of the Great Hall, rattling the iron frames.

  “Oh, Mistress, they can fly!” whimpered Eyslk.

  “No. They can’t. They can only make us believe they can. There are only arrows set afire. Help me, all of you. Help me disperse the smoke. Catahn’s men can’t see what they’re firing at.”

  The room fell silent as they Wove a wind—a cold, relentless wind that rolled down from the crown of Hrofceaster and blew Daimhin Feich’s wind back into his face. The hail of arrows did not stop, and now they could see that there were fires in the courtyard. But the enemy no longer had a place to hide. Caught on the shelf of rocky ground beyond Hrofceaster’s gates, they were forced to flee or die as the Hillwild and their Claeg reserves at last found targets. The arrow-storm lessened as the enemy was forced to fire from concealment. Less than an hour later, the fires in the court were out, but not without a loss of livestock and fodder.

  The battle continued on and off for the rest of the day. By late afternoon, Taminy knew there were casualties on both sides. The knowledge made her weep. Her only comfort was the promise that birth must be accompanied by pain even in the Eibhilin realms. So, she wielded the waljan and their talents like a shield and wondered what darkness would bring.

  oOo

  “They come.” Lilias Saba’s huge, luminous eyes opened, light dancing across them—phantoms of fire and crystal.

  Feich nodded, his own eyes on hers. “Yes, I see them.”

  He could see them, slipping through the darkness below Airdnasheen, imagining that they were concealed from him—he smiled—imagining that their Mistress would be the one to greet them.

  “They’ll try to hide themselves from us in some way, but we will be more clever. We will make hiding impossible.”

  He rose, left his tent and the two women who Wove there, and summoned a group of black-clad men to him to issue them their orders. They moved swiftly away toward the empty village.

  oOo

  In a narrow canyon mere miles below Airdasheen, the four travelers were forced to abandon their horses and continue on foot. The night was dark and still and already they could see the telltale glint of enemy fires above them and to the north.

  Upward they moved, and southeast toward Airdasheen. Saefren figured on several hours of slow, tedious travel—perhaps a bit less if they were able to slip into the village rather than having to skirt it. He assumed, as did Aine, that Catahn would have brought the villagers into his stronghold for safety’s sake, leaving the place empty. The question was, had Feich taken advantage of that and stationed troops within the village itself?

  In a little less than two hours the scarp upon which Airdnasheen sat rose above them, close enough to blot out a good part of the sky. Only by the enemy campfires could they see the lowering mist; Airdnasheen itself was dark and still.

  “I’ll go up and take a closer look,” Saefren told his companions. “Wait here; I’ll signal.”

  “I’ll go with you.” That was Aine, of course. “Then you won’t have to signal.”

  “Aine, there could be troops up there, hiding.”

  “You think you’d have some advantage over them, alone? How well can you Weave a Cloaking inyx, Saefren?” she asked, when his mouth opened to reply.

  He grimaced. “Not very well at all. Fine. I’ll be glad of your company, then, since you’ve offered to make yourself useful.” He turned to Leal and Iseabal. “Wait here until we see if it’s clear.”

  They climbed, pushing through knee-high snow, using rocks and brush for steps and handholds, up the flank of the escarpment until they hunkered among a clump of scrubby pines that grew at the northwest verge of the village. Darkness met them, a darkness so complete they could see nothing of the village buildings save the most ghostly wash of moonlight on the roofs of those closest to them. For some minutes they sat, side by side, listening, watching, waiting. Aine, Saefren was certain, was scanning the place with more than eyes and ears.

  He turned to her, leaning his mouth close to her ear. “Well?”

  “It’s empty. That is, the Hillwild aren’t here, but . . . Something’s not right. Someone’s here.”

  “Feich?”

  “No, not Feich. No one with aidan.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “Fear.” She turned to look at him, her face gleaming like a dim moon. “I feel fear.”

  “Someone hiding out from Feich?”

  “I don’t know, but here. In Airdnasheen.” She ma
de a gesture upslope to where the southern reaches of the village huddled beneath the crags. “Up there.”

  “Do we dare travel through the village, then?”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  “We can move along the face of the scarp, but we’d be exposed, hampered by the snow and the slope, and too damn close to Feich’s camps.”

  “Well, then,” Aine said and glanced back over her shoulder, though she could surely see nothing.

  Saefren assumed she had just summoned the others. “My feet and hands are like ice,” he told her. “Have you no Weaves for warmth?”

  She chuckled. “Oh, aye,” she said and took his gloved hands between her own gloveless ones.

  In a moment, he felt warmth flood his fingertips, flow up his arms, invade his body, rush down his legs to his feet. It was an eerie sensation, for it felt like no fire he had ever sat before, no hot bath he had ever taken. This warmth moved from the inside out, from the red-haired girl to him. It was as if his bones had suddenly learned to conduct heat.

  He wished, for a moment, that he was not wearing gloves and could know if her hands were as hot as it seemed they must be.

  That thought led to one of a slightly more intimate nature. One Saefren dashed away with a charge of purely personal heat, only barely avoiding the guilty gesture of pulling his hands away. It was little more than a flash of feeling, not even a full-fledged thought, but it shamed him and he feared she may have caught it. Only when she didn’t pull her own hands away, did he relax.

  He was thoroughly warmed by the time the others reached them. They paused only long enough for Leal and Iseabal to taste of Airdnasheen’s strange quiet, then they slipped silently down from the rocks and into the empty village. Within moments, Aine and Iseabal had oriented themselves and led the others toward the eastern perimeter and the trail to Hrofceaster.

  In the river of mist, shops and houses loomed like shrouded islands. They kept to the shadows, eyes open for any other presence than their own. They were skirting the town circle when sudden light exploded across the snow-carpeted way, resolving into a billow of flame that exposed them utterly. In seconds, the roofs of three houses opposite them were afire. The flames leapt up in sheets, illuminating the rocky mountainside, washing across the circle along with a blast of heat. In a matter of seconds, they were spreading, racing to cut off the narrow lane that ran up to Hrofceaster.