Aoleyn wanted to answer that call, wanted to help, but she knew not how.
But another did. A witch of the Coven, who sang the song of Usgar with clarity and strength.
“Elara,” she said again, or tried to, for she couldn’t hear her words, nor could this young warrior. She knew that her guess was correct. Somehow, she knew.
The crystal tip of the warrior’s spear came alive with magic, enchanted from afar by the woman to whom he had bonded.
Aoleyn understood, and felt the magic streaming through Fionlagh’s limbs and into the crystal tip of that weapon, and knew that the giver of the enchantment, Elara of the Coven, Elara, who was her mother, was not far away.
She felt Fionlagh relax and heard his exhale, Aoleyn felt him leaning on a tree as tangibly as if it was her own body against the bark, and peered out at the night through his eyes. The full moon, shining red, seemed huge as it hung in the sky above, painting a surreal tint to the gray shadows of mountain jags and trees, limning the many ridges.
Knowing the significance made Aoleyn terribly afraid. What was this nightmare upon which she had intruded? This was the Blood Moon, the face of Iseabal, consort of the god Usgar. Iseabal, the goddess, ruled the moon. Usgar, the god, ruled the world. When Iseabal rode the full moon to Usgar’s realm, the barrier between the worlds thinned and Usgar raged. For Iseabal’s red face was a taunt to Usgar, a reminder that she had fled him and her wifely duties.
And so, when the moon was red, Usgar screamed.
And so, when the moon was red, the fossa heard.
And so, when the moon was red, the witches of Usgar danced wildly.
Aoleyn above all others understood Usgar’s demon creature that would answer his call. Only then did she realize the truth of this encounter, or one of the possible truths of what she was witnessing here, and she became terribly afraid.
No, it had to be a dream, a terrible nightmare.
She knew that she was sweating—that she was, and not just this warrior who stood awaiting the arrival of Usgar’s demon rage. He seemed calm to her. He trusted in Elara. But too calm!
He should not relax.
No, he must not.
She called to him, screamed at him, but he couldn’t hear, nor could she. Her screams were silent to all but her.
She tried to grab him, but her hands went through his corporeal form. She scrabbled and slapped and tried to yell again.
But she saw his face, and followed the pain there to his thoughts, and surrendered her impossible attempt. He was thinking of Elara, of the witches, and then of his own failure. The memory, too, came clear to Aoleyn.
This very same spiritual connection with Elara had brought Fionlagh to disgrace in the recent past, Aoleyn understood from their silent communication. For on the rainy day the Usgar had raided the village of Carrachan Shoal on the shore of the great lake at the eastern base of great Fireach Speuer, the warriors had been discussing the coming arrival of Iseabal.
The raid had been executed perfectly. At least for the Usgar, but Aoleyn recoiled at the memories of the warrior and his witch bride, for the raiders had silently moved like shadows through the perimeter of the village, felling the sentries in silence, then had slipped into the village proper without notice and slipped into the outer ways of the village without notice. Fionlagh and his fellow warriors had before them an easy win against the unwitting uamhas, for most of Carrachan Shoal’s strongest adults had been caught far out on the lake in their fishing boats.
The victory had never been in doubt. They would quickly and easily get the furs and food, perhaps even a few child slaves, and without enough resistance to seriously threaten any of the raiders.
What a glorious day it would be! Fionlagh and all the others flowed through Carrachan Shoal in pursuit of the fleeing villagers, all the way down to the lakeshore. There at water’s edge, the village stragglers, the old and the young mostly, desperately tried to launch their small boats out onto the safety of Loch Beag, where the Usgar would not go, and it seemed like all might make it, that the raid would garner supplies but none of the prized slaves.
The scene in Fionlagh’s thoughts, and so in Aoleyn’s thoughts, became distinct. So young and swift, the promising young warrior had sprinted off to the side, to a hidden inlet, and there Fionlagh had caught a villager trying to shove a craft from the sand and onto the waters of a hidden cove. He came upon the man in fury, sweeping his spear down across the man’s arm as the terrified villager turned to meet the charge. The blow knocked the filleting knife from the villager’s hand, and he stumbled, nearly toppling into the craft. In that moment, Fionlagh brought his spear up and angled, stabbing for the man’s belly. Aoleyn gasped, she was sure, when the tip penetrated the soft flesh and this fierce warrior, her father, called upon the gray magic within the blessed weapon to bring forth a burst of lightning that jolted and flipped the poor villager over the side and into the rowboat.
There he lay, helpless and terrified, and Aoleyn wanted to scream out, but could not, when her father moved to murder the innocent.
Helpless and terrified and shaking his head in denial and despair, the poor victim tried to shield another in the boat.
His child. His daughter.
Fionlagh had a great prize before him, a young slave.
But he felt the spirit of Elara through his blessed spear, and with that sensation came a reminder that he could not dismiss.
Aoleyn’s father looked at the ugly villager, but did not see the obvious differences—the man’s weakness or misshapen head. Nay, he saw instead the man’s eyes, and there a thread of commonality, for in this man’s expression, in the sheer sadness, Fionlagh realized that he was seeing himself as he would appear were the roles reversed.
How that touched Aoleyn, who had seen the commonality between Usgar and uamhas in the slaves, in poor Innevah who lay dead down below, and in Bahdlahn, who had become so dear to her. She didn’t know what had sparked such a twang of conscience in that particular moment for her father, until she followed his thoughts from that spot, just a brief flash of a memory.
For Elara was not alone back up in the village awaiting Fionlagh’s return. Tucked at her side lay Fionlagh’s infant daughter, their first child.
Watching this … what was this? An event? A memory? A demonic trick?
It didn’t matter, for Aoleyn looked upon something that seemed real enough, and true enough, and that meant that Aoleyn now looked back on herself, a newborn.
Her father’s spinning thoughts came clear. From the moment he had seen his little girl, Fionlagh had come to know fear. For the first time in his life, the invincible Usgar warrior had come to understand that his spirit could be truly destroyed.
And so Fionlagh recognized the vulnerability painted on the face of this doomed lakeman, not for himself and his own impending death, but because this man knew that his young child was also surely doomed.
The spear’s tip hovered just before the prone man’s chest. A simple thrust would end it.
Aoleyn could not understand if that was happening, or if this had happened, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t watch a murder. She screamed, with everything she could manage. Physically, with her mind, with her spirit, with her magic, with anything and everything she could manage, she screamed.
Fionlagh hesitated.
And he withdrew the weapon and lowered his shoulder against the high prow of the small boat and pushed it out onto the water.
He hadn’t even thought about it. It was a ridiculous thing to do. It went against everything the Usgar had come down to the lakeshore to achieve, everything the Usgar believed, every tradition that had sustained the tribe through the generations.
Even as the boat caught the current and drifted away from him, Fionlagh could hardly register what he had done. He did not feel the blessing of mercy bestowed in that moment, or the relief that Aoleyn was feeling, or the jumbled emotions she sensed within Elara at that fateful moment.
Just confusion for Fion
lagh.
Confused, too, was the Usgar warrior who had come up beside him a moment later, head shaking, eyes wide with surprise. The boat slipped out into the cove, not far, but by all tradition and a reminder in the form of an edict of the Usgar-righinn, the Usgar warriors were strictly forbidden from entering the waters of Loch Beag, not even a step.
“Dead,” Fionlagh lied to the man.
But the other warrior snorted and shook his head and motioned with his chin, and when Fionlagh looked back to the boat, he saw, Elara saw, and Aoleyn saw, that the wounded villager was sitting up and trying to set an oar. And as Fionlagh began to weave a lie of excuse, the man’s young daughter had also appeared, staring back at the beach, at Fionlagh and the other Usgar.
Aoleyn lost herself in the swirl of Fionlagh’s thoughts as he tried to concoct a story, an excuse that he hadn’t seen the girl, that the child must have been covered by a dirty blanket.
The words never passed his lips, though, for the returned expression screamed at Fionlagh that this other warrior knew the truth, knew his failure.
And so it was that Fionlagh had been disgraced, and that he would nevermore accompany the hunters or the war parties, and that he would not be allowed to claim paternity of his dear little girl.
He was shunned. After the raid and the return to the mountain, only Elara, beautiful Elara, would even speak with Fionlagh, and even then, only secretly.
Back in the forest under the Blood Moon, Aoleyn felt the warrior steady himself. His beloved and his new daughter deserved more than this, more than the shame of his failing. He had to regain his status in the tribe, had to become proper Usgar once more, for their sakes, for their very lives, most likely, because life on the mountain was difficult and the wind was already beginning to blow fast with winter’s coming bite. There were times, after all, when the tribe had to make sacrifices to Usgar, or had to decide who would eat and who would have to go without.
Fionlagh considered that his wife was a member of the Coven, one of the thirteen witches who blessed the weapons, but he couldn’t count on that to protect his family after his heresy, he knew.
And Elara knew, too, Aoleyn realized, for she was a part of this desperate plan. If Elara hadn’t thought Fionlagh’s fears valid, she would never have agreed to let him come out here to hunt the demon fossa. The folk of Usgar did not stray from their defensive crouch within the perimeter of their camp when the taunting face of Iseabal leered from the sky above.
Moving boldly, determinedly, the warrior left the cover of the trees. His steps were silent and light, for the magic of the speartip included the green stones—so clearly could Aoleyn hear that song.
Elara’s presence filled him, her spiritual joining to him strong and complete. She sent magic to expand his senses and add her own cues and clues to his. Aoleyn felt it all, keenly, and tried to be a part of it. Aoleyn knew the way of the fossa. She knew how to defeat the fossa!
“Give me time to stab the beast,” Fionlagh whispered with his voice and his thoughts.
He meant to strike first, to kill the beast.
To redeem himself.
* * *
Aoleyn awoke, shivering, hugging herself and trembling, with tears streaming down her cheeks. What had she just witnessed? She feared she had become unbound in time, a collection of disjointed realities and memories, or, more likely, that she was actually quite dead.
Of course, she was dead. She had been fed to Craos’a’diad. How could she not be?
“The child,” she whispered into the darkness. “Aoleyn.”
Her father had thought of her, lying beside her mother back at the camp, and that had stayed his hand at the lakeshore. She was glad of that, glad that he was possessed of mercy, but with her relief came, as well, no small amount of guilt.
In her father’s mind, she knew, he had failed, and that failure had driven him out in desperation to hunt the tribe’s most feared enemy, the demon fossa itself.
“No,” she said aloud, needing to hear the denial. “No.” She didn’t know anything. It was just a dream.
“No,” she said yet again, and more times after that, as she fell into her wedstones and brought forth the true power of Usgar. She washed herself with warm healing once more, more powerfully, more determinedly.
The dream kept tickling at the edges of her thoughts, but she fought it aside and kept her focus.
She felt a profound tingling in her legs, and drove on harder.
Then she slumped. She brought forth a cloak of flames again, and quickly, because her mind was fast flying away as she passed again into unconsciousness.
* * *
The hairs on the back of Aoleyn’s neck stood up. She could feel it, the predator, coming for her, coming to chew her flesh and crunch her bones, and worse, to devour her soul.
She could feel it, it was not far. She had to run.
But he resisted and would not run, and only then did Aoleyn realize that it wasn’t the hair on the back of her neck that was standing, but on his.
The predator was coming for him, this Usgar warrior, Fionlagh.
She felt Elara calling out to him in warning, directing him. Elara had sensed the demon with her magic and guided him now, that he could get that first strike.
Her energy flowed through him, into the spear, and the song was loud and strong and beautiful, and reminded Aoleyn so much of her own magic, and of a situation very much like this. For a moment, the young woman took heart in that, and pride in powerful Elara.
But Aoleyn remembered that similar encounter, remembered Brayth.
Her mind filled with the image of Brayth flopping about, broken, as the fossa dragged him away.
She could feel the magic building from the tingling in the fingers of the man whose body she now inhabited. The energy arced and crackled, ready to explode with the power of a lightning bolt when Fionlagh drove the weapon home.
He crouched low as he came over one angled rock, working to keep the line of the horizon as clear and close as possible in the uneven terrain, so that he might glimpse the silhouette of the beast.
Every sense screamed at him, at Elara, at Aoleyn. The demon fossa was close. Fionlagh didn’t know how he knew it, but his instincts screamed the truth of it. The Usgar tribesmen, raised on the mountain, traveling the mountain trails on the darkest of nights, had been trained by bitter experience to trust in those instincts. They would hear, they would see, they would smell, the hints of danger before any clear confirmation.
Fionlagh eased himself down the side of the angled rock, to an almost-flat stretch of ground where some chokeberry bushes had taken root. These were only about mid-calf to the man and Aoleyn could feel them scratching at his legs, stealing his silence. He accepted that as he moved to the center of the large spread.
The bushes would slow the demon fossa. The bushes would shake with its passage, revealing the charge, and Fionlagh would strike first.
By the time he had centered himself in the chokeberry patch, the Usgar warrior crinkled his nose, and Aoleyn, too, shared his disgust at the foul smell, like a combination of rotted flesh and burned hair.
“Do you know?” the man whispered.
Before Aoleyn could answer, for she could not, she felt Elara’s spirit confirming. As the fossa could sense the magic, so Elara could sense the foul demon.
Aoleyn remembered, too keenly, and she felt herself recoil at the violent recollections.
Fionlagh heard a growl and spun about in a crouch, spear at the ready.
He saw the dark night and nothing more.
And the night had grown silent.
The smell nearly overwhelmed.
A slight breeze blew past and the stench grew stronger, and Fionlagh spun again, facing the breeze, certain that it carried the smell of the approaching demon.
The chokeberries shivered and the man danced, straining, seeking. It was near. He knew it was near.
A low growl came from the brush before him. But how could the demon be beneath the
bushes? They were too short!
He moved to prod.
Behind you! Elara’s thoughts screamed in Fionlagh’s mind, and in Aoleyn’s mind.
Fionlagh whirled, but too late, as the demon creature exploded into a leap from under the brush behind him.
The spear tip crackled with lightning power.
The demon fossa landed before him—to look upon it again nearly sent Aoleyn cowering—but shied fast, cutting sharply across to stay ahead of the spear.
Fionlagh almost had it. And now he followed it with his spin, trying to catch up, knowing that when the fossa turned back or slowed, he would have it.
But the tail swept across and Fionlagh felt it slam against the side of his ankle, pitching him into the air to land hard in the bushes.
He rushed to bring his spear to bear, but did not despair, for the demon was out of reach and he had time to recover his defenses.
“An Usgar does not fear,” he recited, rolling as if to stand—and he would have tried to do exactly that if not for the shock he sensed within his spirit, the silent wail of Elara.
Fionlagh didn’t understand. His arms and face were scratched, yes, but he had the demon fossa in sight, and he didn’t plan to let it get away.
Oh, my love!
And through Elara, Aoleyn, too, understood, and heard her own wail, Oh my father! Fionlagh got to his knees and brought one leg forward, and only then did he understand his beloved Elara’s dismay, only then did he realize the truth of the fossa’s strike.
Only then did he realize that both of his feet had been severed by the sweep of that awful tail.
He saw them, one of them at least, atop a chokeberry bush just to the side, and he started to reach for it, to reach for his own foot, before he realized that it would do him no good.
He growled through the fear, he didn’t feel the pain, to Aoleyn’s amazement. Her respect for Usgar warriors multiplied in that horrible moment, for Fionlagh did not despair. He set himself firmly and resolutely on his knees, took up his spear in both hands.
Reckoning of Fallen Gods Page 23