Crystal Rose (55 page)

“Calm yourself, Regent Feich,” she told him. “We are not the
Weavers of this inyx. Our Weaving is one you will celebrate.”

“You . . . ?” He slanted a swift glance back at the tent flap.

Bloody light crept along its inner edge, the din of death
lapped through it in sickening waves. “Who, then? Who could—?”

“Your pretty Golden Wicke,” said Lilias, wine-dark lips
curved in a knowing smile. “She and her acolytes Weave this. Do you like it?
Does it terrify you?”

He didn’t answer. “Doesn’t it terrify you?”

The women glanced at each other and laughed. “Come,” said Coinich
Mor, gesturing at their circle of calm golden light. “Come see what your sweet
Raven has divined for you.”

He sheathed his sword and moved to sit between them, facing
Aiffe. To his surprise, the two joined hands so as to frame the stone, and
gazed deep into its facets. Then, Lilias’s dark eyes seemed to roll back in
their sockets and Coinich Mor began to sing a duan.

In the halo of light above Bevol’s crystal images formed:
Four riders struggled through rocky fields of snow, leaning into a wind that Feich
could neither feel nor hear. Four walkers led their mounts along the
treacherous ledges of the Cauldron. Four travelers sheltered beneath the pines
of Baenn-an-ratha miles below where his chances of capturing Taminy were being
snuffed out.

“What am I seeing?”

“Look closely,” whispered Coinich Mor, her gaze going to
Lilias’s flickering eyelids.

The scene shifted to the aislinn travelers huddled around a
camp fire. Their faces revealed by the fire’s warming glow.

Feich gasped aloud.

“You know them?” asked Coinich Mor.

“Saefren Claeg, Iseabal-a-Nairncirke, that idiot Osraed,
Lealbhallain. The other girl I know only on sight.”

The Dearg smiled. “They bring you a gift, Regent. The Osmaer
Crystal is with them.”

He gaped at her through the aislinn scene. “How do you know
this?”

“Dear Lilias has a great gift for the Sight. I have merely
added to it my own senses and this, the Osmaer’s sister stone, cut from the
same matrix. They are perhaps two days below us, Taminy shields them from more
than observation. All this”—her gesture took in the turmoil without—”is her way
of clouding your vision, lord. Of frightening you into retreat. How fortunate,
you were, to have us here.”

“The Osmaer,” he breathed. “But what must I do? How can I
have it?”

“Attack Hrofceaster.”

The voice was Lilias Saba’s. Feich turned his gaze to her,
pulling it from the aislinn vision.

“Distract them as they attempt to distract you. You have the
forces at your command. Attack. When these children arrive, shielded though
they be to outward eyes, I will see them. You will have them, you will have the
Crystal, and I will have Iseabal-a-Nairncirke and revenge.”

Feich shook his head. “Don’t you realize what’s happening
out there? I have no more forces at my disposal. Those who have not fled in
panic are dead and dying. Taminy is destroying my men and yours.”

The women smiled secretly and rose and beckoned him back
outside where red tongues of light and black tongues of smoke licked at the
bodies of the fallen. He shuddered as Lilias Saba knelt by the body of a
Deasach corsair and turned him over to reveal his face. He was little more than
a boy and Feich was startled to recognize him as the young soldier his Deasach
paramour had chosen to display her displeasure at him only nights ago.

“Look,” she told him, holding a hand before the boy’s face.
“He has only swooned in fear. He will wake before long and wonder, or run and
hide.”

“He’s not dead?”

Feich bent closer and saw that Lilias was right. Steam rose
from the boy’s nostrils. He had only fainted. Head raised, Feich looked out
over the camp and realized that it was only the strange, squirming light that
made the scene so horrible.

“Yes, you see?” asked Coinich Mor. “They’ve not melted away.
It is all a trick of light and shadow. You are right about your Wicke. She is
constrained to be harmless.”

Feich felt laughter building in his throat. It bubbled out,
sweeping him away on a tide of relieved hilarity. He let it take him, tumble
him, steal his breath.

“Shall I—” he gasped. “Shall I rally my fallen troops? Oh,
but how shall they ride? How shall they fight?” He looked at the fallen bodies
now and saw them as comic.

“Later,” Coinich Mor told him, and together with her Deasach
ally she led him back to his tent.

oOo

Deardru lived with a strange, tight, exhilarating dread
clogging her throat. Around her, Taminy’s followers scurried at their
Mistress’s beck and call, knowing that Airleas was missing or had been taken,
but not knowing how or by whom. Reaching out through the catamount totem told
her why they remained in the dark. Airleas slept, deeply and completely,
dreamlessly, at Coinich Mor’s Weaving.

Her first reaction to that realization had been relief;
she’d fully expected to return to Hrofceaster to be locked away for her part in
the boy’s disappearance. Now she spent every day in nervous anticipation that
the boy would awake and point an aislinn finger at her. Alternately, she prayed
that Feich would take his hostage and run or that he would stay and fight and
win.

When the waljan and their Mistress launched their aislinn
attack on the enemy camp, she was terrified.

Corsairs and soldiers swooned away in terror or panicked and
tried to run, though there was no where to go with any speed.

Unable to do anything against the strength of that combined
Weaving, she had reached out to Coinich Mor and been gratified to know that the
Dearg Wicke already suspected what she knew as fact—Taminy was loathe to kill
even her worst enemies. The attack was intended to induce fear, not bring about
death.

Yet, there was death. Fleeing down the steep, dangerous
track on foot and on horseback, a number of terror-stricken souls perished. She
could see them, through the eyes of the Deasach Banarigh, tossed like rag-dolls
down the toothed flanks of a pass known only as the Cut—Dearg red, Feich
yellow, even Deasach black.

She knew that Feich would attack once he’d regathered his
scattered and trembling troops. Still she held her breath, awaiting that event,
fearing that Airleas might awaken first and reveal her as his betrayer, and
went about her duties at Hrofceaster—cooking, caring for the children. All the
while she watched the bond between Catahn and Taminy strengthen and grow. Like
a living thing, it seemed, eating away at her, growing fat on her anguish.

Yet so, her hatred of Taminy grew fat and flourished.

Those who know God know
none but God; those who fear God fear none but God, though the entire world be
against them.

—from the Testament of Osraed Bevol

Between the three forces, they had lost less than twenty
men to the canyon; another thirty or so had made their escape good and hid or
fled back the way they had come toward El-Deasach. Most of the dead and missing
were Dearg. Daimhin Feich did not waste time with grief or anger.

He left no one time to mourn the deaths—which were, after
all, the result of cowardice—but had the men gathered before dawn, fed and
ready to assault the Hillwild fortress. Here, he stepped aside, Ruadh would
call the battle plan in consultation with Coinich Mor’s slow but fierce husband
and Lilias Saba. It amused Feich to think that the Deasach Banarigh actually
commanded her own battle forces. He’d expected her to relinquish their control
to a lieutenant, but she did not.

He might have teased her for such a conceit if there had
been time and opportunity . . . and if he had not such an appreciation of her
pride.

They attacked Hrofceaster with the first faint reddening of
the eastern sky—Ruadh with his troops, Daimhin with his aidan. Now, Taminy
would taste of her own tactics.

oOo

Sunrise.

The peaks to the east lit as if painted with fire. The mists
of Baenn-iolair bled down her flanks and hung over Baenn-an-ratha in gaudy
tatters. Still. It was too still on the mountainside, as if all things held
their breath.

On the battlements Catahn Hageswode watched as a strange
mist rose from down-slope and crept toward them—mist that didn’t behave like
mist. It billowed in the breezeless air, curled and fanned and obscured
whatever might lie beyond it. Cover, Catahn realized. Cover for an attack. He
summoned his lieutenants silently to preparation. A scent reached him, spicy,
woody.

Smoke, yes, but unnatural. Vaguely, he could feel the force
behind it—a tickling on his skin, a prickling at the back of his neck.

Ready, ready
, he
thought to his men.
Be ready
.

He glanced over his shoulder at the face of the fortress
rising from the court, at the window of the Great Hall high in the facade.
Taminy was there. He could see her only as a shadow against the thick glass. He
could sense her as a flame, warm at his back. Reason enough to fight. Reason
enough to die.

He turned back to the creeping smoke. It was below them now,
had obscured the gate of Airdnasheen, rendered her empty houses and streets
invisible. It rolled across the sloping access to Hrofceaster, spread east and
west, blotting out the grove of Catahn’s Crask-an-duine, the spring-fed
mountain stream, the lonely stands of trees around and between. Concealing the
ground, the sky . . . the enemy. It surrounded them and began to climb the walls.
As the false mist flowed over Hrofceaster’s battlements and into her forecourt,
Catahn fought the tightness in his throat and took up his bow.

The assault came with lightning speed on the tips of flaming
arrows and crossbow bolts. Pinned below the lip of her battlements, Hrofceaster’s
defenders could only await a cessation in the rain of weaponry.

There was none. Wave after wave of artillery rolled over
them, preventing all but the most limited response. Catahn knelt in a narrow
niche and brought his bow up, arrow notched. There was yet nothing to fire at,
and now he heard someone cry out from the forecourt that a fire had sprung up
there.

Chill clutched at his heart. If the arrows continued to
fall, extinguishing the fires they caused could be impossible.

oOo

Above and behind him from within Hrofceaster’s Great Hall,
Taminy saw Feich’s shield of smoke as the aislinn-molded thing it was.

“Feel it?” she asked. “Feel the aidan behind it—within it?”

Arrayed around her, eyes on the lead-crystal windows of the
big room, the waljan did indeed feel the presence behind the heavy billows that
pressed against the panes.

“How?” Wyth Arundel asked, shaking his head. “How can a man
like Feich have such a powerful Gift? I never sensed this in him before Cyne
Colfre’s death. Did you?”

Taminy shook her head. “I felt . . . something from him, but
nothing like this.”

“Yet he Weaves as one fully versed in the Art. He Weaves
with the power of someone like Osraed Bevol.”

Skeet, flanking him at the window, murmured, “He has Aiffe
and he has allies.”

Wyth shook his head. “A crystal is merely a focus. If he had
no aidan . . .”

“He could do nothing,” finished Taminy, her eyes never
leaving the window.

“Then how has been able to train such a strong Gift in such
a short time?”

Taminy shook her head. “I wish I knew.”

“The Deasach Cwen has the Sight,” observed Desary. “Father
says while you were talking with Feich, he felt her watching us. Watching you.
But with Feich, he can sense nothing. It’s as if—”

A muffled shriek pulled them from their murmured
conversation. Eyslk had pulled back from the windows, one hand covering her
mouth, the other pointing into the teeming mist.

“Demons!” she cried, voice breaking. “They send demons in
the mist!”

Taminy brought her eyes back to the glass. Black phantoms
with flaming eyes assailed them. Spreading wings the color of midnight,
carrying swords of flame, they hurled themselves against the windows of the
Great Hall, rattling the iron frames.

“Oh, Mistress, they can fly!” whimpered Eyslk.

“No. They can’t. They can only make us believe they can.
There are only arrows set afire. Help me, all of you. Help me disperse the
smoke. Catahn’s men can’t see what they’re firing at.”

The room fell silent as they Wove a wind—a cold, relentless
wind that rolled down from the crown of Hrofceaster and blew Daimhin Feich’s
wind back into his face. The hail of arrows did not stop, and now they could
see that there were fires in the courtyard. But the enemy no longer had a place
to hide. Caught on the shelf of rocky ground beyond Hrofceaster’s gates, they
were forced to flee or die as the Hillwild and their Claeg reserves at last
found targets. The arrow-storm lessened as the enemy was forced to fire from
concealment. Less than an hour later, the fires in the court were out, but not
without a loss of livestock and fodder.

The battle continued on and off for the rest of the day. By
late afternoon, Taminy knew there were casualties on both sides. The knowledge
made her weep. Her only comfort was the promise that birth must be accompanied
by pain even in the Eibhilin realms. So, she wielded the waljan and their
talents like a shield and wondered what darkness would bring.

oOo

“They come.” Lilias Saba’s huge, luminous eyes opened,
light dancing across them—phantoms of fire and crystal.

Feich nodded, his own eyes on hers. “Yes, I see them.”

He
could
see them,
slipping through the darkness below Airdnasheen, imagining that they were
concealed from him—he smiled—imagining that their Mistress would be the one to
greet them.

“They’ll try to hide themselves from us in some way, but we
will be more clever. We will make hiding impossible.”