She sank to her knees on the icy cobblestones and centered herself again. She pushed her senses beyond the murmur of minds the way one would listen for a single voice in a crowd.
... Father ... Where are you? ... Answer me ...
She searched for his presence, his essence, a life force singing all he was within the grace of the Aspects Above. His life, his power, sang in her veins, as he and her mother gave her life. And if she didn’t find him in time, only the echo of him that resided within her would be all that was left. She would never let that happen.
... Father ... Please ... Answer me ...
The jumble of innumerable minds and presences swirled around her as she searched for one and only one. So very impossible. She needed more focus, more power.
An amulet.
The thought bloomed in her mind, and she shrank from it. A bond with an amulet would be demanded of her when she saw eighteen summers, the duty expected of all those who possessed the gifts of the Aspects. The pure gemstone of an amulet would confer upon its bearer the ability to focus the Aspects so tightly, he or she could accomplish actions far beyond the limited control of innate power. As for her, she would accomplish amazing things. Terrible things.
Mirana let her Seeing Aspect spread through her. Fragments of visions, premonitions, prescience drifted as they would through her consciousness. She could only pray something of her father would rise above the tantalizing yet useless information her Seeing Aspect now showed her. Without an amulet, she was at the mercy of her powers, unable to control what—and who—she wanted to see. With an amulet, however, Kinderra would be at her mercy. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. Not that. Anything but that. Unless there was no other way to save his life, she would not even touch an amulet. She still had time, two summers, before she faced such a decision. Her father still had time. Just.
Would he be in the forests of Kana-Akün searching the Ken’nar, or on the plains of that province’s southern border, on his way home?
Her mother nor the other seers had made no mention of the information he and his strike force had discovered regarding Falantir, so he was not yet far enough away from the Ken’nar to safely contact them. He must still be in the forest.
Mirana’s powers might be trapped within her from any serious manifestation, but she didn’t have to “see” with just one power. The Aspects Above never bestowed more than one gift, never gave more than just the Defending, Seeing, or Healing Aspect alone to an individual. She gritted her teeth. Unless they gave all three.
Gifts. What gifts? Having all three powers of the Aspects made her a Trine, one of the few ever to be born. But gifts? No. Her powers were a curse, or at least they might be someday. She had seen what would happen when she took up an amulet, the horror of destruction at her hands etched permanently in her mind. So she never told a soul what those so-called “gifts” made her, except for Teague. Sometimes, she regretted telling him. She wished she didn’t know herself.
Images, hazy with uncertainty, flit past her mind’s eye. She pushed away Teague’s warm energies and the cold of the icy pellets of sleet hitting her skin, and awakened her Defending and Healing Aspects, letting them listen for her father with her Seeing Aspect.
The preternatural wariness of the Defending Aspect gave rise to an awareness of where life hummed. Tall, thick conifers rose from ground hardened by winter. Icy, wet snow fell in spattering taps on the ground and coated naked black branches. Mice scurried down holes under barren shrubs. A rabbit paused its browsing through the prickly pine needles of the forest floor. A deer, no, a buck picked its way through the darkening woods. It stood motionless except for its ears. They swiveled, listening.
Mirana did not see the stag as much as she fathomed its essence. Unable to draw more of its presence to her without an amulet, she forced herself to remain patient and let the animal’s being fill her. It was hungry, starving from the cruel northern winter. Her Healing Aspect told her of its want. A want desperate enough for two animals. Two exact animals.
Her hope swelled with the odd sensation. Perfection did not exist in nature. Two completely identical presences simply could not be. Every creation had flaws except for the Aspects Above themselves. She could attest to that.
Mirana’s heart hammered in her chest as she thrust the thought away. The life of the buck mirrored itself, as did some rabbits, mice, a weasel. Duplicates of animal essences, exact in every way except reality, shimmered within the Aspects. They were too far, too faint for her to detect any more than a mere whisper. But they were there. Only a person with the powers of the Aspects could manifest such a duplication, a duplication with one purpose—to hide one’s life energies—and none were better at performing the technique than those possessing the Defending Aspect. Defenders like her father.
She opened her mind further. If her father had cloaked his presence, she would never be able to call specifically to his mind. She could call to anyone in the vicinity of the false animals, but any Aspected mind would hear her telepathic communication.
She froze. What if the false presences weren’t her father and his patrol group? What if they were Ken’nar cloaking themselves? And if she called out? Their enemies—the latest generation to engage the Fal’kin in three thousand summers of bloodshed—would know he was near.
The Healing Aspect within her sought to bolster her failing strength. Sweat turned to cloying ice on her skin in the bitter air of the courtyard. She opened herself deeper to the strange sensations of life in the distant forest. Hunger and wariness. And pain. Exhaustion. These people had fought, had been injured. So had the Ken’nar in sacking Falantir, but they now had a garrison, a place to rest, to eat, to heal. No, these Aspected who masked themselves had not paused to recover. That meant urgency. An urgency born of necessity. They had to flee Kana-Akün to warn Kin-Deren province, her home, the Ken’nar were on the doorstep.
A sudden, bloodthirsty counterpoint slashed the soft harmony of animal presences within the Healing Aspect.
Grynwen.
Some said grynwen hunted with some primitive form of the Aspects. Even if the rumor were true, if her father and his strike force had cloaked themselves, the predators would sense mice, not people. They couldn’t divine the duplications of essences much less search for them, could they?
Before her mind’s eye, the grynwen pack loped on long legs with primal confidence toward her father and his men and women, the drumming of their paws echoing through her Defending Aspect. Why? Their bellies were full. They had no young to defend, no blooded prey to bring down. These were not normal beasts. They hunted, she sensed, but not for food.
They wanted to kill. Because they liked it.
If the beasts hadn’t tracked her father with ordinary senses, hadn’t hunted him for food, they couldn’t possibly know his location. Unless they were sent. Unless they had been given her father’s position and sent to kill him.
To warn her father, she’d have to call wide as if she were shouting across a crowded room. Any Aspected mind—Fal’kin or Ken’nar—in the local area would hear. The risk was worth her paithe’s life.
The Seeing Aspect now joined with her Healing Aspect and Defending Aspect, merging of its own accord within her. It spoke of no future skein of time, no distant, uncertain knowing. It demanded her attention, present, real. Now.
... Father! ... Grynwen! ... Ride! ...
She poured as much of herself as she could into her mind’s voice, into those words. The Defending Aspect burned within her chest at the resounding need trapped within the prison of her body.
The illusion of the second stag shattered. Shock and disbelief exploded in her mind. A presence surrounded her consciousness, full of awe, of love. A moment later, the presence disappeared as if it had never existed, replaced once more by a buck.
But it was enough.
The raw need to send a warning slipped away. Her chest tightened, her lungs could not draw air. The presences, even the Aspects faded. Something hard, rough, and cold pressed against
her cheek and temple.
“Mirana!” a voice cried.
Hands, strong yet gentle, lifted her and placed her right palm flat against a surface, solid and warm. A thud, pulsing with life. A heartbeat. Teague’s heartbeat. His life sang out to her Healing Aspect, reviving her.
“Mirana, wake up!” His confident fingers pressed her neck, her heartbeat throbbing against his touch. She looked up at him as she lay in his arms on the courtyard’s frozen cobblestones, her breath now wreathing his face in the cold air.
He blew out loud exhale. “Thank the Aspects Above.” He stroked her cheek and blinked back the sleet. “Miri, you dropped like a stone. You didn’t move. I couldn’t wake you. What happened?”
The clatter of small boots on cobblestones interrupted his reply.
“What’s wrong? What happened? I heard you both!” Taddie said as he approached.
Teague frowned. “I didn’t even yell.”
The stable boy shook his head. “No. Your minds.”
Teague’s frown deepened.
“I’m fine,” Mirana said as Teague helped her to sit. “I just slipped on some ice, that’s all.” She caught her herbsman’s eye. Calling to him would do no good. He couldn’t hear her, and Taddie most certainly would. He made a slight movement with his head. Few would notice the simple gesture, but such responses had become a language all their own. She hated making Teague a party to her lie, but she couldn’t very well have Taddie run to the hall seers who would, in turn, run to her mother with the truth of what she had just done. Far too many questions would need to be answered if that happened. “Now, get back inside before you catch a cold,” Teague replied. “You don’t want me to use the nasal pot on you again to clear your stuffy nose, do you?”
Taddie’s eyes grew as round as trenchers at the suggestion of such a horror. “Aspects, no!” He turned and pelted back inside the stable.
Once the boy was gone, Teague asked again, “What happened?”
Mirana looked up into his forest-colored eyes. “I found him.”
The watchtower of Jasal’s Keep loomed behind her beloved, dark and foreboding, its crenulated pinnacle crown lost to the icy precipitation and the gathering night.
Her father was safe. But for how long?
CHAPTER 2
“A warning often comes, not with the clang of swords, but with the softest of whispers.”
—The Book of Kinderra
Kaarl Pinal tightened his grip around the blood-red garnet amulet hanging at his chest. At his touch, the Defending Aspect rose sharply within him. He opened himself to the union his soul made with the amulet, a connected sense of rightness he would find with no other crystal.
He focused deep within himself, reaching for the power that lay there, a twinning of the harmonics of his life with that of the gemstone. His Aspect and his amulet became one—separate yet insoluble—as he willed his power out through the pure red crystal. A tongue of vermilion lightning engulfed the last of the ferocious grynwen as it moved toward him for the kill. The deadly light reduced four hundred pounds of muscle and sinew to a pile of blackened bones and ash, leaving the cold rain to hiss on the burning remains.
“How could they have found us? We were hidden,” Seer Binthe Lima shouted to him from farther in the forest clearing, her breath rising like smoke in the frigid forest. “Unless my Aspect is as frozen as I am, I never saw them.” She grimaced with disgust as she yanked her long knife free from the throat of one of the carnivores.
He shook his head. Cold air stabbed his lungs as he breathed deep from the exertion of the vicious but brief scuffle. “The Ken’nar. It seems they’re training mongrels to do their dirty work now.” He had no proof, of course, just an intuition honed from summers of warfare.
“Then they did see us from Falantir’s ramparts,” Morgan Jord said, clawing the ice from the beard outlining his face with one hand, the other still gripping his amulet.
Visions from seers in Kin-Deren province suspected the Ken’nar had sacked the city. Kaarl and his troops had proved their suspicions were correct.
Binthe’s shoulders fell. “I made sure we left no trail.” She clutched the emerald amulet that hung about her neck. “The vision of the forest battle I saw was the Ken’nar assault on Falantir. I did not see the grynwen. I should have.”
The defender second stepped closer to the seer woman, his blue eyes hard with guilt. “Binthe, I know this wasn’t your fault. I would never blame you.”
Kaarl held up his hand, silencing his lieutenant. They had more pressing problems, and he wasn’t about to waste the advantage the warning call had given them.
“These beasts had nothing to do with you, Binthe.”
No one should have been able to find him to call a warning, for his presence was hidden. No one. He had wanted to reply, desperately, but he dared not. He could not risk the discovery of his men and women. Nor the one who called him.
He turned to the rest of his unit. “Everyone, back to your horses.”
He scanned the forest as he perched a boot in the stirrup of his warhorse. A mount remained without a rider.
“Gannah!”
He ran over to a fallen defender woman slumped against a fire-blackened conifer and knelt next to her. Clumps of singed fur, bone, and ash smoldered at her feet. She clutched a deep wound in her side.
“Commander, tell Jord to move his arse next time when I tell him to get down.” She tried to laugh, but her labored breathing turned it into a wheeze.
Kaarl pressed his hand over hers. Fresh, hot blood oozed over her ebony skin, saturating his glove and steaming in the cold air. Her armor and chain mail had been torn away from her flank. He clenched his jaw. More grynwen and Aspects Above only knew what else would be drawn by the scent of blood. “Damned beast thought he could nip you, did he?”
“I’ll be fine. I just need a moment.” Her eyelids fluttered.
Binthe and Morgan crouched down. The seer placed her arm around the defender woman, supporting her. “Gannah? Siba?” Her sea-green eyes held his, intense with concern when the woman didn’t reply.
Morgan’s gaze darted around the thick woods. “Do we have time to cauterize the wound?”
The woman was hardly more than a girl but was already one of the best defenders her far-flung southern province of Jad-Anüna had ever sent to his strike team. She had her whole life ahead of her. Kaarl nodded. “Ai.”
“No,” Gannah breathed. Her hand fell away, revealing torn flesh and ribs, shockingly white in the twilight gloom. “Go. I’ll cover your backs. You have to get word to Deren that Falantir has fallen.”
“Gannah—”
Binthe sucked in a breath and closed her eyes. Her hand flew to her amulet, verdant light spilling from between her fingers. ... Riders ... The seer called an image to his mind’s eye.
He fought a gasp of his own. “There must be several dozen.”
... Fifty ... she called again, her lids remaining shut. He knew better than to ask her to speak when his battle seer was working a vision.
“Can you tell who they are?” Morgan asked. “Maybe some of the Fal’kin survived.”
The seer shook her head. ... They have black armor ...
Kaarl nodded, tensing his shoulders to hide the rising dread. Black armor. Ken’nar. The incessant war against their enemies had long ago erased panic but never the sinking dismay that came before a bloody fight. Panic would do nothing to protect Mirana and Desde, nor the Unaspected, those without powers whom he was sworn to guard.
“I thought I heard something earlier, just before the grynwen attacked. Do you think one of the Ken’nar scouts found us?” his lieutenant asked.
“No,” Binthe replied. She took a deep breath and pushed a lock of mist-darkened auburn hair away from her face. “I heard it, too. It seemed desperate.”
Kaarl stripped off his cloak and bunched it against Gannah’s side. “It was Mirana.”
Morgan’s eyes widened. “Your daughter? But how—?”
; The injured woman lay slack in Binthe’s arms, her breathing jagged. Kaarl tugged his sword belt free and lashed it around her, holding the makeshift compress in place. “Her warning will be for naught if these riders find us.”
The Ken’nar were the ones who had laid the grynwen ambush, he was certain of it. The attack was never meant to wipe them out, only slow them so their sentries could finish them off.
The enemies of the Fal’kin for thousands of summers, the Ken’nar consumed everything in their path. They and their ruthless leader, the Dark Trine, sought to subjugate Kinderra with the Power from Without, a manipulation of their innate powers to steal life to fuel their Aspects through an amulet. Fal’kin, like himself, devoted themselves to protecting all of Kinderra through the Light from Within, directing only the powers the divine Aspects Above granted them at birth in communion with a crystal amulet.
His daughter had known about the ambush. She must have seen it. She found his mind when it should have been impossible to do so and called to warn him.
Kaarl cinched his belt tight around the dying defender, swallowing against rising bile in his throat from the fresh rush of blood over his hand. He and his fighters were only a handful of leagues from Falantir. Could those black-hearted bastards have heard something of his daughter’s warning call as Binthe and Morgan had? Could the Dark Trine?
He clamped down on the thought with the same strength the grynwen had on Gannah. Right now, he needed to get the nineteen men and women around him—and the information they carried—home.
... Binthe, take your unit and move left into the brush ... he called to the seer. ... Morgan, take your group and my horse, Ashtar, and go right ... If the Ken’nar think a pack of mangy curs can finish us, they’re about to learn differently ... Let’s see how they like to be ambushed ... The rest of you ... Hide yourselves and your presences ... Do not fire your amulets until I give the call ...
Kaarl scooped up Gannah in his arms and hurried into a copse of thick brambles. He looked down at the unconscious woman in his arms. She exhaled a wet, slow leak of breath.
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