“To do what?” Aoleyn pressed. “Where would he go?”
Aghmor shrugged. “He tells me he’ll be back. He comes back.”
Aoleyn spun on her heel, shaking her head as she made her way back outside. The sky above was indeed clear, a million stars shining, and though without a blanket of clouds, the night was growing colder, it was hardly intolerable or dangerous. Still Aoleyn did not like the idea of Bahdlahn wandering the icy passes of Fireach Speuer in the low light, where one misstep could send him tumbling into a deep ravine.
He likely hadn’t gone far, she reasoned, particularly if he had a special place that he had visited on much less hospitable winter nights.
Aoleyn called upon the moonstone in her belly ring and leaped away, flying up above the small trees and rock jags of the area, circling wider and wider. With the jag of rocks of the secret cave still in sight, she spotted Bahdlahn, the silhouette of a man, at least, on a high rock spur over to the east. She flew in carefully, moving lower to the ground, then setting down on leopard hind legs, padding her way powerfully and softly toward the spur.
She breathed easier when she confirmed that it was Bahdlahn, and saw that he was resting easily, leaning back against a flat wall, staring out to the southeast around the mountain.
She crept up and reverted her legs to those of a human, then whispered his name.
He jumped in startlement, but settled fast, and shifted and smiled when he saw Aoleyn moving to the spur beside him.
Aoleyn thought to ask him what this was about, but as soon as she made the spur, she found that she understood, for the view up here was truly spectacular, looking down from the mountain, over Fasail Dubh’clach and far, far away. Looking back to the north, Loch Beag lay still and clear, reflecting the stars, but Bahdlahn’s gaze, she had noted, had been to the south and southeast. And it was again now, as she settled in beside him.
She didn’t ask, said nothing at all, sensing that he was focused elsewhere.
“Sometimes, just as the sun dips below the horizon in the west, I like to look to the south,” Bahdlahn said at length.
“Southeast, across the desert.”
“No, more to the south,” he corrected, pointing to the right of the wide desert plain, where the mountains continued and shortened the horizon.
“Why south?” Aoleyn asked. “I’ve looked south, and all I’ve ever seen are the mountainsides, and they’re not as grand as those around the other side of Fireach Speuer. It’s just the end of the world.” She had always found that notion curious, and more so now that she had said it aloud. According to Usgar lore, the mountains running north and south to the west of Fireach Speuer marked the edge of existence, and there was nothing beyond them—nothing, at least, in this world. It was just one of those stories Aoleyn had heard a hundred times and more in her childhood days, and she had never really considered the implications of it. “The end of the world”? What did that actually mean?
Bahdlahn shook his head and didn’t look back at her. “Not at the ground.” He lifted his arm and pointed up past the most distant visible peaks. “At the sky. It’s not always there. It’s like a flash, a little flash of green or red or blue. Look.” He pointed suddenly, more imperatively, and Aoleyn gave a little gasp and a wide smile.
“It’s not just a flash,” she explained, for yes, she had viewed this band of color before. “It’s a whole realm. You can see it better from higher up the mountain, or when you’re flying inside the thoughts of an owl.”
That brought Bahdlahn’s head around, as he stared at Aoleyn curiously, caught by that last remark. “You’ve seen it?” he asked. “The third realm?”
“Third?” Aoleyn asked.
“My mother told me that the flash of color is when two of the three worlds meet. The first realm, and the third.”
“Three?” Aoleyn had never heard such a thing. “The Usgar know only two. This world and Daonnan, Eternity, with the tents of Corsaleug itself, and the horrors of Ifrinn, where the dead dwell. My mother is there now, at least, with my father.”
“This world, where we live, is the first, my mother said. And the world we go to when we die, that’s the third.” He paused and swallowed hard. “They meet, but just for a short hug, at twilight, and you can cross between them.”
“Are you thinking of trying to cross between those worlds?” she asked, her voice quiet. “To find your mother?”
“She wouldn’t be there,” Bahdlahn said sadly. “She’s in the second world, where the deamhan come from, and where we go if the deamhan kill us. There’s no other way to get there, my mother said, and I shouldn’t want to go there even if there were.”
“Deamhain,” Aoleyn repeated. “You mean the Usgar.”
“There are other deamhan, but aye,” Bahdlahn admitted. “There’s also the lake monster, and the fossa. I think those are both deamhan, too.”
Aoleyn wasn’t about to argue at that time—how could she tell Bahdlahn that her people weren’t demons after what they had done to his mother, to Aoleyn, to Bahdlahn for all of his life! She turned her thoughts to a calmer place, remembering that long-ago day when she had first glimpsed this ribbon of strange colored lights wafting in the southern sky. She was barely a woman, then, perhaps sixteen years old.
The view was not all that common, she had been told by Seonagh, and was almost always fleeting, and so it was this night, when the colors faded and the southern stars came clear.
“See,” Bahdlahn cried out. “I wonder if anyone crossed … my ma.”
“Someday, I’ll take you up higher on the mountain, so you can see the colors better,” Aoleyn promised.
“Not up this mountain,” he replied. “I’m not climbing this mountain ever again.”
She laughed, and pointed to another mountain, to the south. It was not quite as high as Fireach Speuer, but still towered. “That mountain,” she said.
He looked at her, and he smiled, and she smiled back at him. He was quite striking even in the darkness, this young man who was her only friend.
She rested her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped his arm around her. The night wind was chilly, but Aoleyn felt as warm as she had ever been.
* * *
She stared into the fire in the little cave, but she was not seeing the flames. Her mind was full of images and memories and feelings too conflicted for her to make sense of them.
She felt Bahdlahn’s strong arm against her, about her shoulders.
She felt Brayth’s hands grasping her hips, his dirty fingers digging into her flesh, as he slammed against her from behind.
She remembered Bahdlahn’s gasp of elation when they had floated down the mountain.
She heard Brayth’s cry of ecstasy—no, of victory, it had seemed, for it was a growl of conquest and personal triumph, not of shared joy.
She was glad that Brayth was dead. She wished that she had killed him. So why was he still there, in her mind? Why was that awful moment still so clear, so nagging, bringing her into its grasp, echoing in her mind? Would it be there evermore, especially in those moments when it should not?
Aoleyn called upon her serpentine shield and poked her fingers into the fire, playing with the flaming sticks and angrily glowing embers, toying with that anger, denying it with her magical shield.
It would not burn her.
Her eyes reflected the flames, her crooked smile taunted them, as her fingers toyed with those embers that should hurt her, but could not.
She would not be a victim.
Not of the flames.
Not of Brayth.
“I am alive,” she whispered, her voice hidden by the hiss of the fire, as if it was protecting her play. “And you are dead.”
* * *
“Shh,” Aoleyn whispered, her finger over pursed lips. Her magical diamond light glowed softly from her belly ring, casting upward across her face as she leaned over the furs of Bahdlahn’s bed. She held her hand out to the young man.
Confused, Bahdlahn took the hand a
nd rose, following her quietly out of the cave, in cadence with Aghmor’s snores.
It was still quite dark, with dawn a long way off.
“What?” Bahdlahn asked, but Aoleyn just looked back at him with that crooked smile of hers, and put her finger over her lips once more.
She led him along a narrow trail around the side of the mountain, then to a steep shelf of stone and melting ice. She called upon her magic and grabbed Bahdlahn closer, and the young man held his breath as he felt his weight leave him, as he and the witch began floating up the steep and icy incline. Beyond that rise, Aoleyn picked up her pace and trotted along another trail, bringing them to a spot overlooking a place, a prow of stone, Bahdlahn knew well.
She had taken a different route to a ledge above his secret spur, the place from where he often viewed the mystical lights of the joining realms.
“What?” he said again, not sure of why she had brought him back to this place this same night, and noting that she had placed furs upon that stone spur. She turned back and smiled and winked, assuring him that it was all right.
She pulled him to the edge, then grabbed Bahdlahn about the waist. Again, he felt his weight diminish, and so he understood, but still he gasped with surprise when she stepped from the ledge, pulling him with her. Embracing, they floated down together from on high, through the chill night air.
Bahdlahn gasped again when they at last landed, and catching his breath, he began to laugh with excitement. He shook his head and looked back up the cliff, hardly believing that they had flown down. It was one thing to feel such magic going up an angled hill, but quite another to be high in the empty air and floating, where an end to the magic would mean an end to Bahdlahn!
When he looked back to his surprising companion, Aoleyn was already sitting on the spread furs. She patted the spot beside her, inviting him to join her.
He could hardly move, and no longer from fear. Nay, stepping out onto the outcropping had changed everything around him, it seemed. He felt the cool breeze more keenly, its soft whispers tickling and exciting his skin. He looked down to the left, to the wide lake far below, and in the glass of those waters he saw the reflection of the sky, though it seemed not a reflection. He looked far to the right, to the south, and there saw the wave of green and purple, the touching of the realms. Bahdlahn felt as if he was in the midst of the sky then, and not below it, as if the stars were below and about him, and not just above.
He eased down onto the fur, its softness only adding to the illusion that he was not upon firmament here, that he was floating somehow, joined with the vast eternity of the cloudless and moonless night.
He could hardly catch his breath; he felt somehow as if the wind was part of his own exhalations, as if he, and not just his perceptions, had been transformed, as if he had slipped free of his corporeal coil and into something more, something vast, something eternal and great and beautiful.
He noted a slight movement to his side, and out of the corner of his eye caught the flow of fabric on the wind, and when he turned he saw that Aoleyn had shed herself of her clothes. She reclined on her elbows, open to him, naked to him, and unashamed. The gemstones set upon her belly shined like the stars above. The curves and contours of her graceful form drew his eye all about her, basking in the beauty, the completeness of form—so overwhelmed was he that he couldn’t seem to take it all in.
Then he saw her eyes, those wonderful eyes, and she looked up at him, those black eyes holding his gaze, holding his soul, and she lay back on the soft fur.
Bahdlahn didn’t know what to do! He wanted to fall over her and leap off the mountainside all at the same time, as desire and terror both erupted within him, panic and wanting, desperate wanting.
But then, her eyes, those eyes and that impish crooked smile calmed him, telling him that it was all right, easing the fear and coaxing him. Hardly aware of his movements, Bahdlahn pulled off his smock and let it fall aside, his gaze never leaving Aoleyn.
Unsure, but unable to resist, he reached for her with one hand, lightly running his fingers down her face, across her lips, his middle finger just barely touching her chin.
So lightly. So teasingly, to both of them.
He ran his hand down her delicate neck, feeling the smooth curves and flow of her body, continuing down, lightly, so lightly, at times not even touching, as if catching the cool breeze between them. But even in those moments, he could feel her, surely, as if her body was reaching back to him. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth in a quiet moan.
Down he slid his hand, between her breasts, one finger brushing over her tumescent nipple, and Aoleyn inhaled deeply and arched her back to reach up to him.
But Bahdlahn instinctively kept his hand just beyond her, just lightly touching her, teasing her, teasing them both, as he slid it lower, across her belly, across her abdomen, and lower still, to the front of her hips and toward her most private place.
But then Aoleyn moved, suddenly, quickly, gracefully, and as she turned, she broke the support of Bahdlahn’s planted left arm and so twisted him down to his back. He felt the fur beneath him, tickling him, and it seemed more the wind than anything solid.
And she climbed upon him, straddling him, guiding him into her, and there she sat upright, looking down at him, hardly moving. She began to sway more insistently, back and forth, side to side, and Aoleyn let her head lay back and began to moan once more with pleasure.
She was to him little more than a silhouette, then, but Bahdlahn saw her more clearly than ever before. Her back arched, her breasts swayed with her movement, and every shift beckoned him deeper, pulled from him. The heavenly stars framed her, their soft glow touching the edges of her small form. To Bahdlahn, they weren’t on the mountain then, weren’t even on the ground at all. No, they were among those stars, lifting toward something greater and eternal, a place of pure sensation. Aoleyn was taking him there, beckoning him to a place, a promise, he had never known and never imagined, but now so desperately needed.
Aoleyn shuddered and cried out, and Bahdlahn could contain himself no more, and he felt his life force being pulled right out of him, given to her, in a burst of pleasure he had never imagined possible, and he, and they, lifted up into night sky, seemed to be floating on the cool breeze.
Bahdlahn didn’t know how long it lasted, all sense of time seemed to be lost to him, then, but gradually he opened his eyes again, to see Aoleyn’s impish smile, and her starlit eyes soaking him in.
“I … don’t…” he breathlessly tried to say, but she brought her finger upon his lips to silence him.
Still sitting upright atop him, she looked back over her shoulder up at the night sky, then lifted her arm and pointed.
“That light,” she said. “That star.”
That star? Bahdlahn saw millions of stars, and the great sky chasm of diffused heavenly light that hinted of millions more.
“Do you see it?” Aoleyn pressed, and she pointed more insistently. “The blue one, twinkling.”
It was impossible, of course. There were too many for such a vague description and a pointing finger to distinguish …
But somehow, Bahdlahn did see it, did understand which speck of light Aoleyn was pointing at.
“That is the light of this moment,” the woman said to him. “For it was not just a moment, nay, but now a memory for us both, a point of light, eternal in the sky. And it will be there for you whenever you need it, a light through the darkness, a light through the pain, a beacon through the fear.”
And Bahdlahn understood, and realized fully then this great gift they had shared, out here, out from the mountain, out among the heavens.
Aoleyn lay down atop him then, and nuzzled her head against his shoulder, and he fell asleep inside of her and woke up in her arms, to a sunrise more glorious and full of promise than anything Bahdlahn had ever dared hope.
20
JILTED
In his mind’s eye, he could still see Aoleyn’s silhouette, swaying with pleasure unde
r the starlight as she straddled the man. In fact, Aghmor could not purge that image from his thoughts, and it haunted him, every step.
How could she have done such a thing? How could this magnificent Usgar woman have so debased herself to swive with an uamhas, a nothing, an animal?
Aghmor stumbled along the snowy, muddy trails between the rocky spur and the secret cave, trying to make sense of what he had seen and heard, and of his own life. His leg supported him now, but it ached badly, particularly when his foot slipped a bit on the uneven and slippery trail.
“Should have known,” he muttered under his breath, for indeed, he had suspected that there was more between Aoleyn and that slave. Deep in his mind, he had even suspected this, although he had not been able to bring the thought forward, so disgusting did he find the mere hint of it.
Sleeping with a slave! An Usgar woman giving her treasure to an animal. It was different for the Usgar men, he knew. The men needed the release, and so the uamhas women served, but for an Usgar woman?
Aghmor could only shake his head and spit in disgust.
Soon he was back in sight of the cave. He could see the slightest glow coming from within, from the embers of the fire.
He had thought to go right in, but he stopped now, and found that he could not. What might he say to her? Could he even look her in the eye again? And if he erupted in anger at her, if, in a fit of rage, he told her what he had seen, what then?
Aghmor had felt the power of Aoleyn keenly when she had healed his leg. Her magic had coursed through him, as powerful as anything he had ever known. If he angered her …
But how could he not? How could he look her in the eye, knowing what he knew, having seen what he had seen? At the very least, he wanted to kill Bahdlahn.
Before he even consciously considered the movement, Aghmor was past the secret cave, moving along the same trail where he had fallen and broken his leg. He sorted the details of his story, his alibi, in his mind, fearing that Tay Aillig would surely punish him, perhaps even murder him, for his desertion.
Reckoning of Fallen Gods Page 33