by Cindy Dees
Eben said, “We would be grateful for any information you might be able to share with us about Kerryl.”
The widow’s gray mouth opened to reveal more long, curved fangs that made Will’s skin crawl. “Well, now. What I know about Kerryl could take some time to tell.”
Eben leaned forward expectantly.
“My beloved husband, rest his spirit in peace, was a Venerer in service to a child of Zinn, the Great Spider. Kerryl is—was—the Keeper of the Great Wolf.”
Will frowned. “Who are these great creatures?”
“Bah. The old ways are broken and old knowings forgotten in you younglings,” the widow grumbled. “First, there was the land. And it came to life, bursting with green and growing things. And the Great Circle of Tree Lords had dominion over it all. Then came the animals of land and sea and sky, and over them ruled the Great Beasts of Haelos. And last, there came life and death to the plants and animals, and over their spirits ruled the Great Totems. These three, the treants, beasts, and totems, worked together to protect us all until a terrible war came and broke their circle.”
“What war?” Raina interjected.
Will knew she had studied history and read many books, but she asked the question as if she had no idea what war the widow spoke of.
“A forgotten war!” the widow snapped, sounding annoyed at the interruption. “And now that the circle of life is broken, a sickness has come upon the land. It is slowly dying because its balance is destroyed.”
Something fierce surged in Will’s chest. The widow’s words were resonating strongly with Bloodroot.
“My husband should not have died, but Zinn was weakened and could not protect her children. Now she has no keeper to speak for her and spread her teachings. I do what I can, but I was never meant to be her speaker.”
Was that how the widow had turned into a spider changeling?
“And Kerryl…” The widow’s voice trailed off for a long moment. “And Kerryl lost his way. His wife and child were killed in the Forgotten War, his mind shattered. He sees dire threats where there are none and ignores the laws of nature.” She shook her head and fell silent.
What Forgotten War? Aurelius had been trying to fill in Will’s sketchy knowledge of Haelan history and had never mentioned anything about a war that broke the Great Circle.
“Kerryl ignored the law of nature forbidding turning humans who do not want it into were-creatures,” Eben said bitterly.
“You fool!” the widow lashed out, her fangs abruptly extending several inches out of her mouth. “That is not his crime! He had to kill a scion of the Boar to change your friend! That is the crime! Do you have any idea how rare and precious such a creature is? The power to protect nature that was lost by killing that scion?”
“What about the power to do good that was lost by changing our friend?” Eben shot back.
The widow leaned back in her chair, her fangs retreating into her mouth. “Just so, boy. Just so.”
Raina said thoughtfully, “So Kerryl had to kill a rat scion or two to make Pierre and Phillipe into were-rats, and an alligator scion to make our friend Tarryn into a were-alligator?”
“So many?” the Black Widow breathed. “What has he done?”
Will would take that as an affirmative answer to Raina’s question. He would also take the widow’s horror to mean that scions of Great Beasts were not plentiful. What was Kerryl thinking to kill so many of them? The man was a nature guardian after all and had to know what he was costing the Great Beasts. Sha’Li and Kendrick both insisted the man was not mad, but Will had to wonder.
He frowned. “Wouldn’t this Great Wolf you spoke of do something to fix Kerryl if Kerryl is his speaker?”
“The Great Beasts expend all their energy trying to heal the land. Most of them are barely alive right now, let alone awake.”
“And the tree lords?” Will asked. “What of them?”
She shrugged. “They do what they can for the land, but with the circle broken and Bloodroot destroyed, their balance, and their ability to restore balance, is gone.”
“What if Bloodroot is not dead?” Will asked her cautiously.
The widow snorted. “I think we would all know if a greater bloodthorn tree had sprung up somewhere. They’re gigantic. Impossible to miss.”
Amusement bubbled up in his gut. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. “Tell us more of Kerryl,” Will said aloud.
“The other nature guardians despise him. The Tribe of the Moon’s Hunter in Green hates him for destroying Quinton, who was Kerryl’s brother and her lover.”
Sha’Li leaned forward, listening intently, as if she’d heard of this Hunter in Green before.
The widow continued, “As the war was lost, the Great Wolf was dying. Kerryl needed to bond its spirit to someone fast. Kerryl himself, as the Wolf Speaker, was the best candidate. But only Kerryl knew how to cast the magic, and he could not cast it on himself, so he snagged his brother, Quinton, and joined him with the Wolf instead.”
“Why did that anger the Hunter in Green?” Sha’Li asked. “Quinton could still have been with her, couldn’t he?”
“The joining was hasty and badly done. Both the Wolf and Quinton would have gone mad if Kerryl hadn’t dived in to erase both of their memories. Afterward, Quinton had no memory of the Hunter in Green.”
Will made a face. If someone took away Rosana’s memory of ever having cared for him, he would be out for blood, too.
“At any rate,” the widow continued, “the Hunter in Green despises Kerryl. She swears that if he’d given her time to try it, she could have taught the Wolf and Quinton to coexist in the same body.”
Everyone in the party glanced at Will. To varying degrees, they all looked relieved and impressed that he had survived the joining with Bloodroot. It was a little late for that. He’d fought through the encroaching madness and loss of self mostly on his own. Raina and Rosana had helped him overcome the deathly poison to his body of hosting Lord Bloodroot, but he’d done the rest himself. Pride in his accomplishment surged through him.
“Why does Kerryl create these were-creatures?” Raina asked.
The Black Widow pulled her filmy cloak more closely around herself. “He creates an army.”
“To fight what?” Raina followed up.
“You would have to ask him.”
Will snorted. The next time they caught up with Kerryl Moonrunner, it would be to slit his throat, not to have tea and chat with him.
The Black Widow pinned Sha’Li with a piercing stare. “You’re Tribe of the Moon. What say you about Kerryl?”
The lizardman answered carefully, “I do not speak for all of the tribe, but I believe Kerryl’s heart to be in the right place, even if his mind is not. We are”—she paused as if searching for the right word—“concerned about his recent activities.”
Will’s eyebrows lifted. That was news to him. Sha’Li had been Kerryl’s staunchest defender all along. But now she was expressing doubts? He might accuse her of being diplomatic for the sake of not angering the Widow, but Sha’Li didn’t have a diplomatic bone in her body and always spoke the truth. Interesting. Eben looked thunderstruck at the change in position from Sha’Li.
Good. Maybe those two would quit giving each other the silent treatment. They made everyone in the party uncomfortable with their long, glowering glares directed at each other.
“Do you have any idea how we can find Kerryl?” Will asked.
“Of course,” the widow replied.
When she didn’t say any more, he prompted, “Can you share it with us?”
She grinned, a pointed, poisonous grimace that made him shudder. “Stay here a while, and he will come to thee.”
* * *
Rynn was even less pleased than Cicero when the Black Widow proposed that their party spend the night with her. That giant web of hers worried him. A lot. Dream magics poured off of it, and he was having to fight for all he was worth not to be lured into its sleeping embrace, even now
, while fully conscious and able to fend it off. Once they all fell asleep and their mental defenses were down, that thing would ensnare them all.
He cut off Raina as she opened her mouth to accept the invitation and said politely, “We must be on our way, I’m afraid. Thank you for your generosity and knowledge, Lady of the Wold.”
The widow insisted on giving them dried rations for the trail, and it was nearly full dark before they finally stood in the door. Raina took the widow’s clawlike hands and kissed that leathery cheek before they took their leave of the strange home and its equally strange occupant.
Behind him, ponderous squeaks announced that pole holding up the web was being lowered. A great sense of being summoned to the dreaming overcame Rynn. That dream web was giving off vibrations he could barely withstand. It took all his mental powers to hold off the dream.
They raced away from the clearing for perhaps a half hour, until Rosana finally huffed, “Can we stop for a moment and catch our breath?”
Rynn stopped apologetically.
“Why did we have to get out of there like that?” Raina asked him.
“The web. She was planning to capture our dreams.”
“And you know this how?” Raina followed up.
“I could barely hold off the pull of the dream web, and I was wide awake. Asleep, we would have been defenseless. She could have taken all our dreams from our minds.”
“But she had more information for us about Kerryl—”
He interrupted Raina, “Do you want her to see you dream of Gawaine? To let her know where exactly to find him?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Or the rest of you?” Rynn demanded. “Do you want the widow to see all your dreams? To know your most private wishes and aspirations and lay them bare?”
The other members of the party squirmed a little. As well they should. He tried hard to respect their privacy, but sometimes he caught glimpses of their dreams by accident. He knew that Raina visited Gawaine’s grove in her dreams almost every night. That Rosana dreamed of Will, and Will dreamed of glory in battle. Sha’Li dreamed of returning home a hero, and Eben—
Ah, Eben. He so desperately wanted to prove himself that he would throw in his lot with a creature like Vesper and risk destroying himself. Rynn made a mental note to keep an eye on Eben. If Vesper could possess unwilling subjects, she could certainly possess a willing one.
Raina shuddered, her expression grim.
Cicero said urgently to her, “Look what the mages drove her to. What they’ve driven you to do already. This is what the Mages of Alchizzadon do to the women of your family. Why do you seek peace with them? You should be seeking their destruction.”
Raina sighed. “They’re not evil. They’ve merely lost their way. I can tell them what their original purpose was and help them find their way again.”
Rynn had never met these mages, but he was compelled to ask, “Why would they believe you? In their eyes, you’re but a silly, rebellious girl who’s given them a lot of trouble.”
“Thank you,” Cicero said to him emphatically.
Raina shrugged. “I have to try. I owe it to my daughters and my daughters’ daughters to try to make the mages understand where they have strayed from their intended path.”
Rynn snorted. He wished her good luck with that.
Cicero said, “It is full dark, and this place is not safe at night.”
Now there was a massive understatement.
“How do you suggest we proceed?” Rynn asked the kindari whose home this was.
“Let us find a tall tree and climb it. We’re safer up there than down here where the monsters roam.”
It took a while to get everyone high into the branches of a massive pine tree, and then to use an axe to chop off the lowest branches so no one else could easily climb up after them. But eventually, they were all settled on branches of their own, leaning against the trunk, and tied into place so they wouldn’t fall out of the tree in their sleep. The night was cold and damp, but blessedly, there was no rain.
Rynn huddled deeply within his cloak and awkwardly draped bedroll, and at long last, he succumbed to sleep. He tentatively opened his mind to dreaming and was not surprised when the Black Widow’s image crept into his mind with that weird, scrabbling gait of hers.
Wariness of her power and ruthlessness washed over him. He did not sense evil in her, exactly, but she was a predator—and extremely dangerous. If only he could sense her agenda more clearly. Like most paxan, when he was near people he could pick up emotional cues and bits of thoughts that gave him insight to people’s true purposes, but the only emotions he got from the widow were grief and rage. Cold, implacable rage that would never diminish and never relent.
If he and his companions could focus her rage, channel it in a direction that suited their purposes, she could be a powerful ally in their quest to wake the Sleeping King, but in the absence of any clues to her real feelings and opinions, he had no idea how to go about shaping her rage constructively.
He would have to speak to Raina about that in the morning.
Except when morning dawned, she was gone.
CHAPTER
15
“Where am I?” Raina blurted, shocked by the abrupt change in her surroundings. One moment she was blinking awake in the dark of the Sorrow Wold with a hand over her mouth and Justin’s shadowed face leaning over her, and the next she was standing here in this cavernous chamber, decorated with massive furniture carved from age-darkened wood, its walls hung with huge, faded tapestries. Iron torches guttered in brackets on the walls, casting hellish shadows over dozens of men looming ominously around her.
Runes on faces. Blue cloaks. Alchizzadon. The word exploded into her consciousness along with a burst of panic that brought magic surging defensively into her hands.
Justin answered from right beside her in a soothing voice, “Easy, Raina. We mean you no harm.”
From her left, Cicero groaned, “Not again.”
She whipped around to face him. “What have you done? Why are you here?”
“I saw him”—he pointed at Justin—“that kid from Tyrel you were friends with, sneaking up on you in your sleep. I waited to see what he would do. Didn’t expect him to open a blasted portal.” Cicero scowled past her at Justin.
“Let me guess. You were worried about me, so you jumped through after me. Again.”
“Well, yes.”
“Cicero, Cicero. You have to stop throwing yourself into harm’s way on my behalf.”
His glare turned on her. “You think I want to be here? I know who these guys are.”
“How do you know that?” one of the mages demanded.
Cicero replied in disdain, “I’ve been to Tyrel many times. I see you mages come through, messing with the daughters of the house. No good ever comes of it. Shiftless bunch, you are.”
Amusement coursed through her. She would lay odds it was the first time they’d ever been called shiftless. The shock of her abrupt relocation over, she powered down her magic. She asked Justin, “How did you find me?”
He continued, “I picked up your trail in the Sorrow Wold yesterday morning. After that, it was a simple matter of following you and your friends to the lair of that spider woman. When you left, I followed you and waited until you went to sleep for the night. It was not a simple matter to get up that tree to you, however. Clever trick chopping off the lower limbs. Took me nearly an hour to work my way up to you without waking your companions.” He looked over in chagrin at Cicero. “Or at least most of them.”
“How did I get here, and more to the point, where is here?”
He shrugged modestly. “I climbed the tree, cast a sleep spell on you to keep you asleep, then used a rune to open a gate and transport you and me—and unknowingly, yon elf—back here.”
Yon elf looked rather smug that he’d managed to hitch a ride through the gate without being detected.
“And none of my companions woke up during this operat
ion?” she asked.
Justin grinned. “Don’t you remember how sneaky I can be?”
She did, indeed, remember how silently he could creep around her parents’ keep, stealing cakes from the kitchen or spying on adult conversations not meant for their young ears. He’d been an excellent hunter, as well, as at home in the forest as in the keep.
A wash of fondness for him made her smile a little at him, and he smiled back. They’d shared a more idyllic childhood than either of them had known at the time, but they knew that now, and it formed a connection between them that would never break.
She had to find a way to get him out of here and free of the clutches of these mages. For surely, they’d only used him as a tool to get at her. When they finally realized she would never, ever do their bidding, he would be of no more use to them.
But how? She had no idea where she was or where this place was. Surreptitiously, she examined the chamber into which they’d gated. It was large, crowded with at least fifty mages, but notably, the room had no windows. Only huge chandeliers crammed with candles lit the cavernous space.
The darkness crowding down from the ceiling and the heaviness of the stone walls closed in on her until she could hardly lift her chest to breathe beneath the combined weight of the place and of the stares boring into her from all sides.
That was when she became aware of a burning sensation on her left forearm. She looked down and was appalled to see one of the mages’ infamous runes inscribed upon her wrist. Its navy whorls and lines were obscene against her fair skin.
“Take your mark off of me,” she demanded to the group at large.
One of them, a weaselly looking fellow who was regarding her like a starving wolf at a Christmas feast, replied, “But if we remove it, we will not be able to return you to your companions.”
“I’ll walk!” she snapped.
A large man with iron-colored hair trying to go gray stepped forward. Kadir. This was the man who’d forced her to run away from home in the first place. Her mother’s lover, and her father. Well, her parent by birth, not the man who’d raised her.