“But it’s how it is.”
She took a deep breath. “And it is what we have to deal with. No good complaining about a lousy pour, Torquil said. One way or another, find a way to make it right.”
“Rare wisdom, for a Nelwyn.”
Rool’s small attempt at wit won him a ghost of a grin from Elora, that faded as she turned full circle to survey the carnage.
“I’ve never fought like this before, Rool,” she said. “I’ve never…”
“I know that, too, child.”
“I want to be sick.”
She stood in the center of the room, wishing the darkness could blind her as powerfully as any ordinary Daikini. The floor was awash with the ogre’s blood, she could smell its bitter scent on her own skin and clothes. She felt an aching hollowness deep inside, an awful sense of loss had been with her since she’d entered the first of the ruined homesteads. This combat hadn’t lessened it in the slightest. By one reckoning, the scales of this massacre had been somewhat balanced, the dead a little bit avenged. Yet to Elora, these deaths didn’t offset the others.
She picked her way with care around the bodies to gather Bastian gently into her arms, taking the greatest care to make sure his wings were properly folded against his body, grateful to see that they moved easily, without strain or break. She held out her left arm so he could use it as a resting post, and felt his claws close about her forearm while the rest of him sagged against her breast. For all the size and power of the great golden eagle, it was always a marvel to her how comparatively little he weighed, thanks to his hollow-boned skeleton.
On the way out she picked up Rool as well, before making her way down the final flight of steps to the ground floor and from there out into open air. Neither brownie nor eagle asked what her MageSight revealed to her in that close and fetid space, nor did she volunteer the information.
She found a resting place for them on a hump of rock upslope of the tower and the road that passed it by, then returned inside for the prisoner. A last trip was to collect her cloak and what could be found of the Daikini’s belongings.
“Do we carry him?” Rool asked, when she rejoined them.
“He won’t last an hour.”
“What then? Wait till it’s no longer an issue?”
“I can try to help.”
She began by making the man as comfortable as possible, scrounging bedding from the ruins to improvise a pallet on the bluff, with enough left over for Bastian and Rool as well. True to form, the brownie insisted that he was fine and needed no such special treatment. Elora pointedly ignored him and continued on about her business.
Once more her cloak did double duty as the covering of a lean-to, although this time there were proper poles to serve as the frame. Again she set out her stones and sang warmth back into them, tucking them close about the Daikini and Bastian to combat the growing evening chill.
“Summer’s fading fast,” she noted conversationally as she set out kindling for a fire. “Even in highlands, I wouldn’t have expected a chill like this for another month or so, at least.”
“Speaking from experience, are you?”
“You’re not the only one who watches the way the world works, I’ll have you know. And listens to what folks say. Traders and drovers have been complaining the whole of this season’s bazaar. Late spring, cool summer, less forage than they’re used to, less game as well. Everyone talked about the weather, almost as much as about the Maizan. Nobody wanted to travel either. A lot of those who came did so because they felt they had no choice. They couldn’t wait to be away, and didn’t expect ever to be back. Why are they so scared, Rool?”
“You ask a brownie about Daikini?”
“The only Daikini available doesn’t appear much in the mood for conversation.”
She made broth for herself and Rool and the Daikini, found meat in her pouch for Bastian. She didn’t feel terribly hungry, though, and sat cross-legged across the fire from the Daikini, staring intently at him.
“You’re going to do something foolish, aren’t you?”
She offered Rool a lopsided quirk of the mouth that made him shake his head in dismay.
“Elora, Elora,” he repeated.
“I can’t do spells.”
“Bless Cherlindrea for that godsend.”
“But I’ve learned from Thorn and Torquil to draw forth the inborn power of all natural things. If I can remind stones of what it was like to be warm, why not a body of when it was whole and healthy?”
“A rock is not a person. Its essence is simple, as is the task required of it.”
“I can’t think of any other way to help him, Rool.”
“Not everybody can be helped, Elora. Sometimes you have to let go.”
She nodded her head one way, then the other, agreeing with him yet at the same time objecting passionately. This time passion won out.
She sat close by the Daikini, letting an uncharacteristic calmness flow out from the center of her being to wrap herself in a blanket of serenity. The fire blazed high, sending a whirlwind cascade of sparks skyward, its behavior a stark contrast to her own, becoming increasingly wild as she grew more calm. Her skin gleamed in its light, as ideal a reflecting surface as the polished metal she resembled, painted in flickering shades of scarlet and rose. To Elora, there was no longer any sensation of being apart from the earth on which she sat. Her flesh and the world were growing one, the heat of blood rushing through her veins resonating in kind with the heat of the lava that raced beneath the planetary crust. Gradually, wondrously, the world’s strength became her own.
Without a physical move, she reached out to the Daikini, seeking to establish a similar rhythm with him. His heartbeat was significantly faster, yet the force of each pulsation was fading markedly. No wound was mortal in and of itself but the cumulative effect was deadly. Too many insults to the body, too many demands on resources already stretched thin.
So she offered him a measure of hers.
She made her pulsebeat his, had her own heart bear the load of pumping his blood. At the same time she tempered his breathing so that each came more slowly and deeply. With his basic condition stabilized, she turned to each of his wounds in turn, reminding the torn flesh of what it was like to be whole. What the man’s body would have done in days, given the chance, she charmed it into accomplishing over the passage of this single night. The energy to sustain the effort came from her, as the strength she required was drawn from the earth itself.
The healing was easier for her than for Thorn, because his essence was linked to the earth, while hers was to the primal fire at its core. The forces she could manifest were more intense and volatile, they responded more quickly than their more settled counterparts. By the same token, though, they took a fiercer toll.
Especially of one not so practiced as her mentor in shielding herself from those negative effects.
She heard her name called but couldn’t find the wherewithal to respond.
“Good thing we’re in a valley,” noted Bastian. “Put her on a mountaintop, she’d be mistaken for a star.”
“Whuzzat?” she wondered, her attempt to speak coherently forestalled by a yawn so huge it threatened to crack her jawbone loose. The Daikini matched her from his pallet, move for move.
“You’re glowing,” Rool said simply.
She wished she could see herself through their eyes but lacked the strength to cast forth her InSight. It took all her focus to laboriously make her way along all the connections she’d established between herself and the Daikini and pull them loose, a task that proved as exhaustive as saving him had been. No less necessary, though, if she was to keep herself safe.
“Elora,” Rool called to her again, the wonder in his voice giving way to thin-edged urgency, “by the living host, what have you done here?”
A mist had grown off the river while s
he worked to coat the slopes and hollows of the town, shrouding the brutal remnants of the massacre and giving the scene a false seeming of peace and tranquillity. Cruel realities were blurred and softened, the boundaries erased between what was and should have been.
“Something moves in that fog,” Rool reported.
“I see it. Put up your bow, Rool, they mean us no harm.”
“You’ll wager your soul on that?”
“It’s what I’m here for.”
She rose to her feet with a sleek grace that was totally at odds with a body that moments before felt as though it had been cast from lead. There were lights visible through the mist, a scattering across the hillsides that corresponded with the locations of all the houses. The structures themselves took on a more coherent form, trampled gardens resumed a vestige of their former beauty.
Figures appeared. Ghosts at first, for that was what they were, discernible by the way they stirred the mist with their movements. They were spots of darker gray against the lighter background that gradually assumed a tangible form.
At the sight of them, Rool groaned. For all their bad behavior and the grief they gave races other than themselves, brownies always considered themselves creatures of honor and decency. To torment their fellows was a joy and a delight. Murder was an abomination.
Here was murder.
The figures that wandered before them all bore the signature marks of the wounds that took their lives. Great slashes across the body, torn limbs, crushed bones, burned flesh, they formed a presentation of outright horror. Nor was this barbarity confined to the Daikini inhabitants of the village. Among the gathering, Elora made out denizens of Lesser Faery who’d also made this place their home. They had been slaughtered with no less savagery than the Daikini.
“They’re coming closer, Elora,” Rool said. “They should not be here, we shouldn’t be here.”
“Bastian,” she called softly to the eagle, “can you fly?”
“Far enough.”
“Take Rool, get out of here.”
“Forgive me, Elora Danan, but I cannot carry you away.”
“I’m not asking for me. Just take Rool.”
“The devil you say, girl,” the brownie protested. “I’m goin’ nowhere without you.”
“Nor I,” echoed the eagle.
“They keep looking at me,” she said. “Why do they keep looking at me?”
“You’re the beacon,” Bastian told her.
“They’re lost,” Rool echoed. “Cut loose from their earthly lives, unable to claim the peace of whatever lies beyond.”
“There must be a way to release them.”
“Don’t turn to me, girl. Dead is dead, a fate to be devoutly avoided for as long as possible, that’s the brownie way. We have no truck with necromancers, not those who speak to the dead, nor those who wield power over ’em.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, my friend,” she said, “because I think I’m about to try both.”
“What?” Rool squawked incredulously.
She didn’t mean that quite the way it sounded. She knew nothing of the spells required to perform either feat, and had no interest in learning. It was their wounds that sparked an inspiration in her. The ghosts were in pain, that much was clear. As she had found a way to heal the Daikini’s wounds, she had the hope now of trying the same with them.
“Once, Rool, this was a place of peace and joy,” she told him as she stepped beyond the firelight, haunted eyes and bodies turning to follow as she did. “There should be dancing.”
Voices curled at her from the mist, a litany of resentment building to outright hatred: a Daikini, The cursed naiads tore our fish traps; the naiad, The cursed Daikini befouled our water. Another Daikini, The dryads spelled our orchards so the fruit rotted on the stem; a dryad, They clear-cut whole groves!
Good neighbors they had been, the Daikini who tilled the soil and shaped this rich land to their liking, and those of Lesser Faery who had resided here for as long as there was memory. There were resources in abundance and all the various races had long ago learned to share the wealth of this valley to the benefit of all.
Then came a change. A growing uneasiness that dated from the Cataclysm, open hostility following the debacle of Elora’s Ascension. The culmination was an incident at midsummer. Children went missing and suddenly all the old stories about kidnapped babies and changelings didn’t seem so fanciful anymore. By the time the youngsters had been found and the truth made known—that they’d run off because of a beating and stayed hidden for fear of a worse one—the damage had been done. A family of trolls had been discovered and locked in a crow cage, together with any of the other races that could be found. The village had its vengeance on all it thought had done it harm.
Not so long after, the slain got their own back. As they were murdered they cried out to their own kindred beyond the Veil, the High Elves of Greater Faery, who retaliated in kind.
The blood of too many innocents had been spilled, each drop tainting the ground on which it fell, poisoning the earth as thoroughly and lastingly as these souls had been.
For what seemed the longest while, Elora stood with shoulders hunched, back curved, head bowed, as if she’d suddenly been burdened with an impossible weight. Her hands hung straight at her side, half curled toward a fist. To Rool and Bastian, watching from the campsite, it appeared as though her inner radiance had dimmed to the point where she was no more noticeable than any of the ghosts. As wisps of fog curled and flowed about her, she too often reached the brink of vanishing. Far from healing these crippled souls, Elora looked more in danger of being consumed by them.
Then, as if in answer to some cue that only she could hear, the young woman’s head came up, her body straightening to its full height. In absolute stature, there were many among the gathering who stood taller than she, yet her presence had become so forceful, her manner so commanding, that she seemed a match and more for them all.
She stepped back into a graceful pirouette, one arm and leg languidly extending with a sweeping elegance that bespoke endless hours of practice in flowing, floor-length formal gowns. It was the engagement used to open every grand cotillion in Angwyn and it ended with her standing before a wizened elder of the town, whose leather apron marked him as the publican of the tavern and sutler’s store that had in happier times occupied the ground floor of the tower.
She led, he followed. Her invitation was too gracious, her smile too irresistibly winning, to be refused.
They weren’t together for long before their dance segued smoothly into the more elemental and rustic steps favored out along the frontier. The publican began to prance and kick and whirl with an abandon he probably hadn’t seen in himself in a fair while, and the smile that gradually swept out across his face was a wonder to behold. With a whoop that caught Elora by surprise, he spun her around in a fast pirouette that flung her to the full extension of both their arms. Before she had even a moment to collect wits or breath, he snapped her back against his body. He held one arm upraised and lifted her off her feet with the other, embarking on a succession of snap turns that ended with a dip and finally a release that placed each of them just out of reach of the other. They both looked ready and eager to start the whole joyous sequence all over again.
Instead, with an ease that suggested the entire dance was choreographed, Elora swirled into the arms of a lad half her size and age. The beat in this instance was sharper and more peremptory, in keeping with the boy’s character. From one soul to the next she passed among the crowd, offering as much of herself as was needed, freely and without reservation, trusting to her own inner resources to sustain her. The only constant was that she led, her partner—regardless of age or gender or race or inclination—followed.
“D’you see, Rool,” Bastian called softly, as though a normal tone of voice might shatter the crystalline delicacy of the moment,
“what’s happening?”
“Better to ask, do I credit it?”
“Your soul no more plays you false, runt, than does hers.”
“What is she doing, Bastian?”
“No more, no less, than your eyes reveal. She’s healing them, one and all.”
Suddenly both bird and brownie were startled by the sound of fingertips on drumhead. Rool was still edgy from the battle in the tower, he had arrow nocked to bow in a twinkling as he spun around to behold the Daikini they’d rescued sitting up in the lean-to with a bodhran drum in his lap, fingers and dumbbell-shaped clapper tapping out a fast and fluid tempo.
Elora didn’t acknowledge the unexpected insertion of music to her dance as the Daikini set aside his drums for a set of bellows pipes, to fill the air with sound as infectiously wild as the dance itself. Faster he played and faster she danced from partner to partner, as though each was trying to outdo the other, raising the stakes, consequences be damned, until finally and simultaneously, they reached a crescendo.
There were two figures left with her at the last, a little girl who Elora knew was the owner of the doll she’d found. And a naiad, a mother who’d reached in futile, heartsick desperation from her crow cage to her mate’s as the sun broiled them both.
There was silence on the ridge, a hush and stillness that transcended the concept of sound. The three watching who could still breathe did so sparingly, so as not to mar the delicate purity of the moment. Elora swayed, moving between the two figures, alike in form and stature though they stood at opposite ends of a generation. Mother and child, both wrongly done to death, their afterlife tainted by a fear neither comprehended.
Elora set a gentle rhythm, the child matched it, so charmed by this argent vision that a smile broke her features for a moment. Elora did the same for the naiad, turning back and forth, from one to the other, bringing them ever closer until they were face-to-face.
They stopped. They stared. The little girl blinked her eyes rapidly, casting about for somewhere to run and hide. Elora’s lips tightened at the blossoming of a dark stain on the girl’s breast, the reanimation of the wound that Elora had thought was healed.
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