by Holly Lisle
Molly, in shock, stared at her hands as if they didn't belong to her. Green fire had come from her touch, and some alien monstrosity swore himself to her service. She wanted to hide. She wanted to scream, or to faint. Instead, she whispered to him, "Take me home."
"You are among friends," he told her. "You must trust us. You go now to your castle. You will be a goddess, Vodi. And if ever you need me, simply speak my name. Say 'Yaner, Yaner,' and will your wish, and I will come to you." He pulled his daughter close and dropped off the back of the wagon. And then he ran away.
Molly lay back in the straw, too numb to do anything but stare at nothing, too numb even to cover herself with the blanket again. She'd suspected the truth, but discovered that knowing this particular truth was far more distressing than merely considering it as a possibility. She wasn't in some third-world country, a political prisoner, a hostage for some terrorist's ideological crusade.
She had felt the green fire, but she had felt no pain.
Molly McColl stared at her hands and tried to understand what was happening to her. The tunnel of green light, the aliens.
Above the peculiar muffled hiss of snow falling, Molly suddenly heard a sound out of place. A baseball bat hitting a leather jacket, but slowly. And from overhead.
With no more warning than that, people grabbed her and began running through the woods with her, as silently as if they were ghosts. Behind her, she heard the eruption of hell, and screams of, "Rrôn, rrôn!"
The sudden leathery thunder of enormous wings, and roars that shook the snow from the trees and deafened her—the clash of metal, the screams of dead and dying, the stink of shit and blood.
Her rescuers dropped her on the ground, then squeezed in tightly on either side of her. "No sound," a voice whispered in her ear, but whoever offered this advice need not have spared breath or chanced even the risk of a whisper; she could hear the hell behind her, and she would no more voluntarily call that down upon herself than she would throw herself in front of live fire to see what might happen. She did what she could to help her own survival; she breathed through her mouth because that made less noise than breathing through her nose, and she forced all of her muscles to relax, and she tried to think of anything she might do to save her own life if she and her rescuers were discovered. She wouldn't be able to do much. With an M-16 and a thousand rounds, she bet she'd be able to make a positive contribution to the fight, but all she had to offer were two blanket-wrapped feet, two bare hands, and no weapons of any sort.
And whatever had landed on the caravan was big. Really big.
She could feel the creatures to either side of her trembling. The roars had words in them, though not words she could understand. Trees shattered with cannon booms and carts and cart beasts came sailing through the air to land in the forest all around the place where she and her kidnappers hid. Men shouted, and fought, and died, and Molly heard screams, and then fewer screams, and then no screams at all.
And then the thunder of leather wings filled the air again, and the roaring stopped.
Silence.
The hiss of snow falling on snow, the rattle of branches one against another in the frozen forest, and not so much as a moan, a whisper, the sob of someone begging salvation or release.
For a long time, she lay unmoving between the two who had taken her away from the wagon caravan. Then she felt them move, and she sat up, slowly, shook the blanket away from her face so that she could see, and looked from one to the other.
"Rrôn," the one to her left said in the softest of voices. "They felt the healing. They came."
The other one said, "You will have to walk now. No wagons will be left. Stay with us, though, for the rrôn may check the road—you do not want them to find you."
"What about helping the survivors?" she asked. "The injured?"
"The rrôn would not leave survivors. The injured are dead."
"Others like us, then?"
"If any hid instead of fighting to protect you, better they throw themselves on the mercy of the rrôn than ever return to Copper House."
One checked her feet and discovered her no longer barefoot and bound—then checked her wrists. She heard breath hiss out of him, and felt his steady gaze on her. After a moment, he said, "There are only two of us left. Will you come with us?"
Molly cleared her throat and said, "yeah." She was quiet for a moment.
"How many died?" she asked at last, as her two captors pointed her away from the road, deeper into the forest.
"More than a hundred. Others of our…unit…will come tomorrow to retrieve the bodies, before the yaresh haul them off to sell. Or eat."
Molly decided she would not try an escape tonight. Maybe not for a long while.
Cat Creek, North Carolina
Lauren Dane finished scraping the last of the black paint from the antique mirror's glass. She swore a final time at the unknown vandal who had painted it over, then sighed and stood. Her legs ached from crouching for so long—she stretched, hearing the creaking in her knees and feeling the cracking in her spine, and she reflected that thirty-five was a lot harder than twenty-five had been. She was pretty sure she was getting smarter, but she figured she was falling apart at about the same rate. By the time she was seventy, she ought to be both brilliant and too decrepit to make any use of her hard-won knowledge.
But at least now the mirror looked good. Reaching from floor to ceiling at the back of the foyer—ten feet high, framed by one of those ornate carved dark wood frames that collected dust in the crevices but looked so pretty when rubbed with oil—it seemed a little out of place, too grand to be at the back of the foyer in the old Southern farmhouse. But the mirror had always been there. Lauren remembered being terrified of it when she was little—of refusing to walk past it in the dark, and of staring into it in the daylight, certain that she could see ghosts moving within its silvered depths.
She smiled at her childishness and liked the look of the smile on her reflected image. She couldn't resist a little primping—this particular mirror had always been fairly kind with the images it reflected, unlike the closet mirror in her old apartment, which had put twenty pounds on her and made her skin look green no matter the lighting or the time of day. She thought she still looked decent for her age. No gray in her hair yet, no real lines on her face—though she could see where she'd have crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes in a few more years—and when she stood sideways, her stomach was flat enough and her butt still looked good in her jeans. The last year had been rough on the inside, but it hadn't done much to the outside.
She looked into her reflected eyes, and saw the faintest flash of green light shining back at her. Her heart skipped a beat, and she smiled nervously, and turned and looked down the hall to see where the light had come from. But the beveled-glass sidelights to either side of the front door showed nothing unusual outside. A North Carolina afternoon in mid-November, the scrub oaks still clinging to their brown leaves, the river birches bare, the leathery leaves of the magnolias so deep a green they were almost black. The bright, pale sky wore a few mares' tails high up, and to the west she saw the fish-scaled clouds her father had called mackerel sky. Nothing moved except a bluejay; he sat on top of the cedar bird feeder she'd hung out the day she moved in and glared at her as if she questioned his right to the corn and sunflower seeds inside.
The street lay empty; the house across the street was still; and no kids full of after-school rambunctiousness dotted the neighborhood yards yet.
No green light. She felt the slight stirring of hairs at the back of her neck, and shivered. She turned around again, but averted her eyes from the mirror as she had when she was a little girl…and she caught herself doing it, and she shook her head and forced herself to look in her reflection's eyes again.
The green flash. Just a spark, a sparkle, but it seemed to come from within the mirror.
And she thought, of course, the coatings on these old mirrors tarnish and flake off, and one of the flakes is
catching the light oddly. If I move…here, I won't get that little—
A single tendril of green fire flickered from behind her reflection's head off to the left, looking like a slow flash of lightning. Her heart raced and her mouth went dry and she took a step back. That hadn't been caused by a bit of tarnished silvering.
The mirror seemed to tug at her; she stepped nearer, even though she was as suddenly and completely frightened as she had ever been as a child, and she stared deep into her own eyes, and within their reflections she saw green fire play. Light licked out from her reflection, hypnotic and beautiful and somehow welcoming. She reached one hand forward, and beneath her splayed fingertips she felt the cool glass hum and vibrate and grow warm.
Memories flowed around her—a memory of fire that embraced but did not burn, of images that danced within the soft green glow shimmering through the gentle flames: a meadow that spread to the end of sight in all directions, with flowers chin high that rolled away like a sea of crimson and white; a woman, young and brown-haired, her dress white and full-skirted and covered with huge red poppies, her high heels white with sharply pointed toes; high-pitched laughing voices calling her to come play come play come play; and on the back of her neck, Brian's lips pressing a kiss, and Brian's soft deep voice in her ear, promising her he'd be home soon.
Out in the living room, Jake woke screaming.
Lauren jerked away from the mirror, the spell broken. Tears ran down her cheeks and burned in the back of her throat; the woman who stared back at her from the other side of the mirror looked lost and dazed and bereft, as if she'd been stolen away from heaven within sight of its gates.
Lauren turned and fled—raced into the living room to gather Jake into her arms; she held him and patted his back and crooned at him that everything was okay, okay, okay, okay until her own racing heart quieted and her own trembling hands steadied and she could breathe again.
She carried Jake up to his new room to change his diaper, but she went the long way—through the dining room and the kitchen and the side hall and up the back steps, past stacks and stacks of boxes waiting to be unpacked, so that she did not walk by the mirror with him in her arms.
Silly superstitions, she told herself as she carried the two-year-old up the steep, narrow stairs. Childish behavior. She had no reason not to carry Jake up the front stairs. None. Exhaustion from a long move, from big changes finally made, from uncertain chances finally taken as challenges instead of obstacles—all of those had left her fragile and vulnerable and weary. Suggestible. She'd remembered the mirror, had remembered her childhood fear of it, and in her tired state her mind had played a trick on her. The next time she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she would see nothing out of the ordinary. A thirty-five-year-old mother with her father's black hair and her mother's green eyes; the foyer of her childhood home; light reflected from out of doors.
In the back of her mind, thunder rumbled and green lightning flickered across a land like no place on Earth, and high-pitched voices called to her called to her called to her to come and play.
And Brian waited. Somewhere.
* * *
"Mama. Please—biteys?" Jake, grown tired of pounding on pots with wooden spoons, now stood behind her with a hopeful expression on his round face. "Please—broccoli?" Which came out with each syllable carefully enunciated, and all three stressed the same. Bra Cole Lee. "Please—cookie-biteys?"
She pushed up from the half-unpacked box of glassware and brushed the hair from her forehead with the back of a dusty hand. She glanced from habit to the spot above the sink where her mother's clock used to hang, but of course it was gone, along with everything else that had been in the house ten years ago. Still, a look out the window told her what she needed to know—it was already dark outside, and the time when she should have had supper done for the two of them had come and gone long ago.
"Okay. Biteys it is, monkey-boy. Want to help me?"
He grinned at her. "No." He started backing away, ready to run should she decide to push the issue.
Ah, two. The age when everything was a test, and the only person who could fail was Mom. Lauren had heard other mothers telling horror stories about their two-year-old children and had assumed that such misbehavior merely reflected the poor parenting skills of the teller.
God got even with people who entertained thoughts of that sort—he gave them kids like Jake, and said, "Go to it, bright girl."
She smiled down at Jake and said, "Good boy. Go get me the broccoli from the refrigerator," as if he'd said "yes," and turned her back on him. After an instant she heard the refrigerator open and a moment later he was holding up two stalks of broccoli for her.
"Thank you," she said. "Now I need for you to sweep the floor for me. Go get the broom and the dustpan." She needed the floor swept by Jake about as much as she needed the house repainted by him—he'd do equally as good a job at either. But he liked to sweep, and would happily push dirt around the floor all day if she also let him try to use the dustpan. If he knocked over a few things in the process—well, that was why she didn't store anything breakable less than six feet from the floor.
He yelled, "S'eep!" and took off to find the broom.
She heard his sneakered feet thudding on old linoleum. Then the change when he hit wood. More wood. The baby gate would keep him from going up the front steps, she could see the back steps, and she hadn't unpacked anything in any of the rooms yet that he shouldn't touch. So she let him run. She got out the steamer and put the broccoli in it with a cup of water in the bottom, covered the pan, put it on the back burner.
Different range than had been in the house when her parents lived there, she thought; one of those fancy white-on-white models that matched fridge and microwave and dishwasher and the new bleached-wood glass-fronted cabinets that had replaced her mother's homey pine ones. Granted it wasn't avocado, which the old one had been, and that was a good thing, but it wasn't familiar either. Even though she would have had to live with ancient avocado appliances, she wished the people who had owned the house last hadn't remodeled the kitchen. She was so glad they'd had to move before they could change anything else.
Jake was being awfully quiet.
"Jake—broom!" she yelled, but she didn't hear any footsteps.
Which meant that he'd found something to get into. Probably had decided to climb into another of the empty boxes she had stacked by the front door. Unlike her, Jake so far seemed to adore moving.
Then she remembered she'd left both broom and dustpan beside the mirror in the foyer. She'd been sweeping up the paint flakes as she scraped them from the glass so that they wouldn't become embedded in the old wood floor. Something cold and terrifying crawled down her spine, and she yelled, "Jake, come here!"
And she heard him laugh, and say, "Hi!"
She jumped boxes, skidded over the slick wooden floor in her stocking feet, and careened around the corner to find him staring into that darkened mirror, smiling, reaching toward something that he saw within with one chubby starfish hand.
She shrieked, "NO, Jake!" and lunged for him, and he turned toward her, scared not by the mirror but by her sudden insane eruption from the kitchen, and his face crumpled and he began to wail.
"Baby," he sobbed, pointing to the mirror. "Baby."
She looked in the mirror. No green lightning. No monsters. No fields of red and white flowers, no pretty woman in a Jackie Kennedy dress and summer shoes, no Brian. Just an idiot in jeans and a gray sweatshirt holding a baby.
Jake liked the baby in the mirror. He always liked to talk to the baby in the mirror.
She swung him around so that he was riding on her hip, and picked up the broom and the dustpan and with shaking hands and her heart thudding in her throat, she carried baby and cleaning supplies into the kitchen. On impulse, she hit the light switch with her elbow on the way around the corner into the kitchen, and behind her the foyer flooded with light.
To keep Jake from falling in the dark and getti
ng hurt, she told herself.
Right.
CHAPTER 2
Ballahara
THE DEAD LAY SCATTERED along the road like mangled toys flung by a ruthless child. On the white snow, in the darkness barely tinged by dawn, the blood still crusted black. Shattered wagons; slaughtered beasts; weapons broken and twisted from unimaginably violent forces. Molly had never been in battle; she had seen the dead, but never the dead who lay as they had fallen, corpses still steaming in the cold. This face of death stunned her, pressed the breath from her chest, and sent the sweat trickling down her spine in spite of the bitter cold.
"Why did this happen?" she whispered. "Who did this, and why?"
The guard to her left, taller than Molly by two feet, wrapped in robes that swirled as he moved along the line of devastation looking for she knew not what, did not turn his face toward her as he said, "The rrôn feel magic, and they hunt down and destroy its sources."
Magic. Her healing of the child?