In Siege of Daylight

by Gregory S Close

  Bloodhawk eyed the arrows about his person. That much, he had deduced already. “Peace, then,” he began again, in the trade tongue. “I seek parlay.”

  An aulden woman emerged from the dark recess between trees at the other side of the clearing, next to a small spring. She was tall, cloaked in brown and white over the hint of a mail shirt, a recurve bow in her hands with arrow half-drawn. Her face was shrouded by a large shadowed hood, one wisp of blue-black hair waving in the breeze before her face. Of that face, he could make out little save the gentle curve of her nose above a delicate chin and the thin line of her lips. She was beautiful, by mortal standards, as were all of the aulden. His own heritage immunized him from the disarming glamour that ensnared many human men with its false promises. From somewhere within her dark cowl he felt her watching him.

  Rising slowly, for he had no desire to test his weary reflexes against their arrows, Bloodhawk held out his hands with fingers splayed empty before him. He could still detect her companions in the trees, and knew that their bows were also drawn and nocked.

  “I am Bloodhawk Moonstone,” he said. “I have news of import for the Ceearmyltu.”

  “Any news of yours does not concern us, half-man.” Her tone was distilled contempt. “Begone.”

  Bloodhawk’s brow lifted in surprise. He was rarely referred to as half-man. To the humans he was half-aulden, or a faelle, or sometimes even a changeling. The few aulden counted among his acquaintance avoided reference to his mixed lineage unless they wished to do him injury. Then they would call him just that – half-man. To the aulden, this referenced the disgraceful, ignorant, barbaric side of his lineage. Emphasizing that part of him, in their minds, discounted their shared blood as if it were mere technicality.

  If she had intended that simple insult to dissuade him, she would be disappointed. He had thicker skin than that. “Malakuur has tapped an iiyir well. I know more, if you think my words now worthy of your ear.”

  There was a stillness to her then, a change in attitude more sensed than seen. Perhaps her lips tightened, or her cheek twitched, or maybe nothing. She was silent for only a short time, during which Bloodhawk got the distinct impression that she was relieved in some odd way by his news. An explanation found where none was sought or expected, perhaps? An answer to a question unasked? Or she could simply have been quiet. It mattered little when she spoke what her reason had been.

  “It’s not for me to judge your worth, half-man, or that of your words. I’ll bring you before the nyrul cayl. They’ll decide both.” Her tone had lost none of its ire. She turned back into the wood, a shadow returning to the dark.

  Bloodhawk stood with determined silence. His pain had diminished little with his short rest, and he still felt the lightheaded touch of infection in the cloudiness of his thoughts. But it wouldn’t do to show any weakness now. He followed after her and out of the forest three other aulden warriors appeared, bracketing him in their midst. The women were indistinguishable from each other, gliding through the forest with bows at the ready, an unspoken warning at the tips of their gleaming arrows.

  They offered no comment on their journey, nor did Bloodhawk. He felt clumsy in their presence. The woodland skills in which he so prided himself, that he had practiced since he could walk and still practiced to this day, were natural to the fair folk. Where he must decide on which leaf or twig to tread, however quickly and unconsciously, they knew immediately and instinctively how to move. Normally his footfalls were like the softest of woodland voices. Now, he felt like a shrill cry in a council of whispers.

  They traveled without rest as the suns made their own journey across the sky, and then continued as the great silver orb of Illuné began her own nightly ascent. Only when the smaller, darker orb of the Dead Moon emerged in the stillness between night and morning did they make camp.

  Bloodhawk knew he had pushed himself too hard. At his own pace, he had been able to stay within his limits and provide his body with adequate rest. At the grueling pace the aulden had set today, he was afforded no such luxury. He was resolute about hiding his injury and his fatigue, and curled into his cloak. He was now losing his struggle against the infection, and his skin was clammy with feverish sweat. On the far side of the clearing, the aulden also made ready for sleep. When he drifted from consciousness, it felt more like a dead faint than slumber.

  A hand pressed against Bloodhawk’s mouth, and he awoke with a start. His eyes flickered open, and he immediately relaxed. An aulden woman’s face, smooth and pale, bent down over his own, long silky strands of hair the color of wheat and berries touching his skin. Her almond eyes of pale silver begged his silence. She removed her hand from his mouth and began lifting up his shirt and jerkin, her eyes darting furtively to her sleeping companions.

  She pulled his wounded arm from its sleeve and removed his makeshift bandage. She took one look at the hastily stitched gash down his arm, raised and swollen and flaming red, then back into Bloodhawk’s eyes as if to scold him. She removed the old dressing and cleaned the wound with a damp cloth. Bloodhawk clenched his jaws and swallowed a scream. The inflamed skin was white and frothy now from her ministration. Still without a word, she re-wrapped the wound with leaf-lined cloth and fastened it with a silver brooch from her cloak. Bloodhawk’s trembling arm reached out to touch hers in thanks.

  “Ieylulki,” she whispered into his ear. “You must eat this. For strength.”

  She produced a fruit that was the size of an apple but with the irregular whiskered skin of an oversized, purple strawberry. She cut small mouthfuls of the fruit with a slender dagger and fed them to him one by one. At every bite, Bloodhawk felt the crisp, sweet fruit dissolve into relief in his mouth. It was jujoehbe fruit. Prized for its healing qualities, this was a rare and precious gift. Already he felt its effect, along with a welcome, peaceful, drowsiness.

  “Your name?” he whispered.

  “Jylkir,” she said. “Now sleep.”

  Then she was gone, and Bloodhawk slept.

  Just before daybreak, as the birds of the wood began their sweet song to woo the dawn, a soft-soled boot nudged Bloodhawk in the ribs. To his surprise, there was little pain.

  “Get up, half-man.” The voice of the aulden captain was familiar and cold. “You’ve slowed us down enough.”

  Bloodhawk got to his feet and made a wordless response by readying his pack as she stalked away. The fever had broken, and he felt rested and whole, as he hadn’t since parting company with Two-Moons. He tried to determine which of his escort was Jylkir, but found it impossible to tell with their hoods pulled forward to hide their faces. Without even the pretext of a morning meal, they were off again.

  The pace quickened, whether because the aulden were in a hurry or because they realized he had strength enough to keep up, he did not know. Their long strides put league upon league behind them. The day grew long and their shadows grew longer, the half-tame outskirts of human settlement were left further behind for the thicker growth of the ancient wood. Few but the aulden tread here in peace.

  Though the vegetation was different from the southern coastlands of the Elyrmirea, the signs of Faerie grew more and more abundant. Winter, though not abated, was mollified. Trees flowered and bloomed out of season, and foliage danced from limb to limb to form a sheltering canopy of emerald overhead. The aulden ways did not work against nature, but with it, denying no season its time, softening the harsh edges into smoother, gentler lines. Death, like winter, was not denied, but even when Her cold hand came to enforce Ghaest’s will, an aulden grove remained a place of life above all else.

  Just after suns-set, when finally the intertwined branches of towering bloodroots laced before them like webs of a giant wood-spinning spider, Bloodhawk knew they had reached the gateway to the Sacred Grove of the Ceearmyltu. He noted the deeper bronze coloring of the thorny bark and the golden petal starbursts that hung from the leaves, marking them apart from the trees of their like in Edgewood and even Oam. As he considered it, he remembe
red Symmlrey describing the bloodroot of her own tribe, the Vanneahym, and they too were different. He wondered absently if there were seven types of bloodroot for the seven tribes of aulden.

  “Wait here, half-man,” said the aulden captain, breaking her day-long silence. “I will send for you when the time for council is nigh.”

  As the aulden passed through the wall of tangled bloodroot, the figure that had been the rear guard caught her captain’s sleeve. There was a quick whispered exchange, and then she turned back toward Bloodhawk as the others continued on. She sat with her back against a birch, in a hollow almost clear of snow, and motioned Bloodhawk to join her.

  “It may be awhile, and though I doubt that you need a guard, I thought perhaps you might desire some company.”

  Bloodhawk smiled when she pulled back her hood. As he’d suspected, it was Jylkir, who had shown him such kindness the night before.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I am in your debt.”

  “No,” she returned with a dismissive tone. “I simply don’t share the opinion of Du’uwneyyl and the others.”

  “About half-men in general, or me in particular?” prompted Bloodhawk.

  “Both,” she replied, but elaborated no further.

  Bloodhawk brushed the snow from a shelf of rock that protruded from the turf between two towering trees and sat. The diffuse orange-red light of the suns was now retreating somewhere beneath the invisible horizon, and the glimmer of the brighter stars could be seen infiltrating the purple twilight. Always in the vanguard like its namesake Irdik came the North Star, bright and true; then the Three Sisters, a triangle of diamonds only slightly less bright, low to the tops of the swaying trees. Then, as the darkness coalesced around them, the other stars and constellations peeked out from the night.

  Some, like the Dragon Meet, or the Great Tree, were known by peoples all across the continent of Rahn. But others, through the eyes of disparate peoples and experience, were seen differently or not at all. The Archer, to his people, was Nighthawk – first of the wilhorwhyr. In the East the same bowman was known as Buoain, for a Macc hero. The Lovers and the Chariot, both favorite constellations east of the Inner Sea, were not known to the West, nor was the bright sword Juut, with Irdik in its pommel, known to the East. But the stars, whatever their name, were good and faithful guides, and Bloodhawk was steeped in the science of their dances across the sky.

  It was Jylkir who broke the silence. “I haven’t the skill, but I’m told the stars are a script for those versed in their language, and that they chronicle time, but backwards, so that our future is written clearly in their passages.”

  Bloodhawk pulled his thick cloak tight. This night, so clear and beautiful, was thus unforgiving in its cold recompense. “I put little stock in such talk. I don’t believe the future is written anywhere but in the present, and each day unfolds as a fresh page, blank until we write upon it with our actions. But, I am no philosopher or mage. I suppose it’s possible that the gods know what will be before it is, and they have hidden the truth for those clever enough to find it.

  “But I am not so clever as all that,” he confessed, his lip turning up slightly into what passed for a smile on his stern face, “so I’ll use them to steer by, and I’ll gaze on their silent peace and thank Father Oa for their comfort. That is enough for me.”

  Jylkir nodded, an expression of understanding, if not necessarily agreement, on her face. “I hope what you say is true. Those who claim to know such things read only doom in the stars.”

  Bloodhawk stared in silence, watching the moonlight on the snow at his feet. With all he had seen the past twelve-moon, he knew doom was an imminent possibility. Malakuur was strong; the East was divided and weak. The wasting sickness reached its rotting fingers into fragile human flesh, and the Pale Man once again walked openly in the Realms. Dire tidings, these – perhaps reflected in the stars if not predicted by them.

  “What is the state of the Ceearmyltu?” he asked without looking up. “Are you ready for war, if need be?”

  “We are stronger than in recent years,” she said, a faint tremor of doubt in her words. “Yet there are few with the heart to fight for causes or people not our own. Word reaches us that the Qeyniir fight alongside humans in the north, and the Milfuiltea in Symbus as well, against the Old Foe. But there is no such common enemy here. Some might even suffer the presence of the Old Foe rather than the humans on our borders.”

  Bloodhawk looked up, eyes narrow. “That is foolishness,” he said in acid tone.

  “I would agree. But my belief is not a popular one. We have endured much at the hands of the human nations.”

  “Malakuur would make a harsher neighbor still,” breathed Bloodhawk. He found anger welling up but choked it down like bitter bile. “Such would be the price for inaction.”

  Jylkir stood and paused, looking into the branches of the trees that surrounded them for curious eyes and ears, then crossed the distance to Bloodhawk in a few quick strides. She brought her lips close to his ear. “Inaction is not the worst of councils I have heard. Be on your guard.”

  She moved back to her original place of rest, staring away into the forest beyond the bloodroot. Bloodhawk felt his heart still clutching at the back of his constricted throat at her words. The unimaginable possibility that any of the Seven Tribes would ally with the evil beyond the mountains was something even cynical Raefnir would not have considered before her untimely death. Their intolerance of humans he could in part understand, but to ignore their most ancient enmities and align themselves with the forces of the Priest Kings was assuming a hatred he had never guessed at. Perhaps in the centuries since winning their freedom, the aulden had forgotten the fifteen hundred years they suffered under the yoke of Anduoun? Or the despair that fell on Rahn like a dark rain when the ancestors of the Priest Kings last tried their hand at usurpation?

  Bloodhawk sank into deeper contemplation as the stars continued to trace their inexorable patterns above him. Ingryst help me, he thought, trying to calm the swirling whirlpool of fears in his gut. Fear of his own death, a minor thing; fear of war and pestilence, something greater; fear of the ultimate wasteland Malakuur would make of beautiful creation, like a raging torrent. And another fear, small but insistent, that it was all written in the sky above his head, and that there was nothing in the whole of the world he could do to change what would be.

  It was handspans later that Du’uwneyyl’s scalding tone melted through the chill silence. “It is your time to speak, half-man, if you still wish. But be quick about it.”

  Bloodhawk looked up to see the aulden captain, her cloak discarded completely, standing in a mail shirt and helm of shining silver-green, each scale like a shifting wave on a rippling ocean. Her arms were crossed over her chest, the gloved fingers of her left hand dangling close to the hilt of her slim long sword. The errant strand of hair that had once fluttered from underneath her cowl now spilled from her helmet across her high cheekbones like a rivulet of jet-black water on alabaster banks. Her eyes were unusually dark for an aulden, shining black orbs with flecks of deep purple and lavender near the pupil.

  He rose and shouldered his pack. Du’uwneyyl led him through the imposing bloodroot barrier and past the night-shrouded dwellings of her people. Bloodhawk could see in the posture of her walk that she was a deadly warrior. Balanced and poised, she looked to him like a predatory bird or a great cat of the plains, all sharp eye and honed muscle and deadly instinct, so fluid in her lethal movements that it was mesmerizing, even as she circled for the kill.

  His attention was then drawn to a large, blazing fire about which hundreds of Ceearmyltu were gathered. Most present were female, as they attended to most matters of government and war, but the occasional male sat among them, just as fae and beautiful. Sitting on a wooden throne, under a pavilion of branches adorned with a rainbow of wreaths, leaves and flowers, was the Ceearmyltu lyaeyni. A queen by human reckoning, she held ultimate authority over her tribe. Three chairs flanked her o
n the right and left, and in somewhat less beautiful adornments, sat the other six members of the nyrul cayl, her closest councilors. They were all fair-haired and lighteyed, but their lips were turned downward into frowns that had almost fully matured into scowls. The flickering firelight played across their angular features, and for a moment Bloodhawk thought he was looking on an assortment of wicked lifeless statues, but the light shining back from their eyes belied their origins of flesh – if not quite dispelling their baneful aura.

  Du’uwneyyl took him to the center of the ringed aulden, within a few feet of the seated rulers of the tribe, and pitched her voice for all those assembled to hear. “This is the half-man wilhorwhyr I came across in the thinwood. He calls himself Bloodhawk Moonstone.”

  With no further words of introduction, she stepped to the side, still watching him with stolid resolution. Bloodhawk stood patiently. He knew better than to speak before the lyaeyni addressed him. He was once again thankful for his experience with the Elyrmirea.

  When it was clear he would not be baited, the lyaeyni spoke, her voice soft but strong like steel wrapped in silk. “Speak, Bloodhawk Moonstone.”

  And so he did.

  He related the tale of the iiyir well and the vast horde that awaited release by the Priest Kings. He made certain to describe the andu’ai that lurked in the ranks of the army, and the purposes that the Priest Kings ultimately served. If there were any who sympathized with the destruction of the Eastern Realms, he hoped to remind them that the price, once paid, would be unbearable. When he had finished, there was disquiet in the attending crowd and a lingering silence on the lips of the nyrul cayl.

  “Go to your rest, half-man,” said the lyaeyni, “and we shall ponder what you have said. Do not attempt departing without our leave. High Blade Du’uwneyyl will show you your way.”