A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) (11 page)

It was a small room, large enough for the fire, a sitting table, and a couple of chairs. The carpet reflected the theme of the room, twisting patterns of green and red in a festive way.

“No,” Sara told Annbell. “I’m not sure what is happening to me. When I went to the Mirror of the Moon, I was fine, working wyrd as always. Today it took almost all of my strength to conjure the fire here. I almost had to do it like any other person.”

“Hmm,” Annbell said, toying with the handle of the delicate mug in front of her. The pungent scent of coffee came to her nose. She preferred drinking it black, while Sara liked it nearly as sweet as syrup. “Maybe you should lay off working your wyrd for a while until we can figure out what’s going on.”

“And what
is
going on?” Sara asked. “I haven’t been able to get any feeling from the realm, only an image of Wyrders’ Bane, but the realm is adamant the illness has nothing to do with the chaos dwarves.”

Annbell splayed her hands wide, indicating that she didn’t know. “Maeven goes on his spirit quest tomorrow. With any luck he will find something.”

“How on earth will he find something when the Realm Guardians can’t?” Sara asked testily.

“I don’t know, Sara,” Annbell said in a clipped tone.

“Sorry, my patience runs thin. I want nothing more than to sleep, and I feel cold and achy all over.”

“Maybe you have a virus?” Annbell offered.

“That affects my wyrd?” Sara asked.

“I hope that Maeven will be able to think better, find something we can’t. He may not be a Realm Guardian, but he
is
a druid, and we are tied closely to the land.” Annbell took a drink of her coffee. “Maybe we are too close to the situation to know what is going on.”

“I hope,” Sara said, and then sighed. She watched the snow drifting lazily through the air and was endlessly amazed at how uncaring the order of the world was. The snow had one purpose, and it didn’t care what happened in the lives of the two huddled beyond the window pane.

“What are we looking at for races to ally ourselves with?” Annbell asked. She painfully avoided the word war. She hoped, as did Sara, that it wouldn’t come to that. But the truth was that the chaos dwarves were massing around Wyrders’ Bane, and they had no love for the Guardians.

“So far I know that the giants back us, the alicorns and dryads will follow the gnomes, and I’m pretty sure they back us, though they’re still waiting to see what might transpire. They’re supposed to be talking with the chaos dwarves and the trolls that have joined with the dwarves. The ga’los and brownies want to help, but I’m not sure how much assistance they can offer.”

“Don’t underestimate them because they are small crafters and cleaners; the races of the realm have a power we will never understand,” Annbell said.

Sara gazed into her coffee, and Annbell wasn’t sure she’d heard her.

“Those are better odds than I had expected,” Annbell said. “Maybe the dwarves will back off, knowing that so many of the realm stand in opposition.”

“Have you contacted the garrisons yet?” Sara asked.

“The military is preparing, and the branches are headed this way.”

“We will want to make sure the barracks are cleaned out to support them,” Sara said.

“I’m already on that; they should be perfectly ready to accept them when the garrisons arrive.” Annbell thought it was about to get a lot more cramped around the keep. While the barracks weren’t exactly in the keep, they were scattered at the base of the mountains just outside of the courtyard. Soon the sky would fill with more than snow as the barracks came to life. Annbell tried to picture the smoke from the fires, and couldn’t. The barracks hadn’t been used for almost a hundred years, when the military was moved to separate garrisons after a time of peace.

“Let’s hope Maeven finds something. If he doesn’t, we might be down one Realm Guardian,” Sara said. She tried to make it sound like a joke, but Annbell feared it wasn’t.

Joya couldn’t explain what was coming over her. Despite acting like none of it fazed her, she couldn’t quell the fear she felt. Angelica and Jovian had so many questions, and she didn’t have any answers for them. She couldn’t explain what she had been feeling since before she entered the realm, when she stood outside the fogbank and felt like the realm was calling her, welcoming her. Furthermore, the change in her stigmata startled her, and she just wanted to cry. Was she sick? Was this something to do with her heritage? Was it something to do with the Well of Wyrding? Had she drawn too much wyrd when it was toxic?

She shook her head and felt the rest of her team watching her. They had been studying her like she was about to sprout a second head since they entered the Haunted Graveyard. The strange looks she was getting from her family were the most aggravating part of it all.

More than anything she longed for Amber. She was close to Angelica and Jovian, but not as close to them as she was to Amber. Amber would know just what to say to ease Joya’s worried mind and make her laugh. But who knew where Amber was right now?
Is she even still alive?
But Joya couldn’t think like that.

Then there was another feeling inside of her body, a presence that assured her that she would never be alone again — for as long as she lived, this presence would be there. It wasn’t a fearful presence, not like the corrupting Voice of Wisdom had been, or a commanding presence as the Voice of Wyrd had been. Instead, it was like a companion, a best friend, something to support her, to comfort her when she needed it.

The problem was that she trusted too much; she had trusted the grigori that called himself the Voice of Wisdom, and it had nearly killed her. She couldn’t bring herself to let go, to give in to this other presence, no matter how benign it seemed. After all, the Voice of Wisdom had made her feel good things as well, only to serve its purpose.

And then there had been the tomb of the Guardians. How could she tell her brother and sister that she had felt the personality of the fallen Guardian coursing through her, conversing with her, opening up its knowledge of the Realm of Shadow to her, and dumping the vast stores of information into her head as if it were shaking the words out of a book and into her brain?

There were things she just
knew,
and she didn’t know where the information was coming from or who was putting it there. She
did
know that the information she gleaned from the deceased Guardian wasn’t the same as the presence she felt underlying it all.

She looked down at the gray stigmata on her hands — was it just her imagination, or were they darkening?

Her gaze drifted from her palms to the black cobbled road cutting its way like a ribbon from the cave entrance to the Spire of Night, sitting alone and menacing in the center of the smoldering field.

Why does it smoke?
she wondered, and suddenly the information was in her head: the ground had always smoked. The ground was heavy with peat moss. The Frement Uprising had been fought with a lot of firepower, which had ignited the land.

Joya wanted to shut the voice out, get rid of the knowledge, but the truth was it was endlessly comforting to know all the answers to all of her questions without the need to ask. The presence of the fallen Guardian, Beatrice Forester, made the mysterious Shadow Realm less frightening.

There even seemed to be an option to revisit that point in time. All she had to do was shift her perception, and she could watch the entire Frement Uprising as if she had been there.

Joya decided that might not be the best thing to do at the present time, not with such an audience as she had, and the hecklin and what they were calling to their aid so close at hand.

She shivered and stepped out onto the black cobblestone road, raising her swathe of sunflowers above her head, lighting the way through the smoking field.

Behind them, barely audible over the downpour of rain, came the telltale howl of the hecklin on the hunt.

“They know where we are!” Angelica said. She was right. The hecklin had figured what had happened, and they were giving chase, which meant they were intelligent.

“Hurry,” Joya told them.

“We have the graveyard dirt,” Jovian said, but Joya didn’t pay him any mind.

“Should I remind you that we are going in the direct
opposite
direction than we need to be?” Uthia asked.

Again Joya ignored them, and started running, her tattered skirts whipping fitfully about her ankles. She knew the hecklin were on their trail, and she wasn’t sure they would make it to the spire before the beasts were on them.

“Joya, we have the dirt!” Angelica said, as if to ask why they were running if they had some kind of protection already.

“It’s not the hecklin I fear, but their riders,” Joya asked.

“What do you mean?” Jovian asked, but he didn’t need to.

The first hecklin crested the knoll the cave entrance was set into, and leaped into the dark air. A black-cloaked rider loosed an arrow at them, narrowly missing Joya as they ran.

Joya started channeling her wyrd down the swathe of sunflowers she carried. She lashed the weed behind her, and from the light of the flowers pink orbs of light shot straight at the rider, surrounding it like angry bees until the figure slumped from the back of the hecklin, screaming. She had a brief moment to look back, and saw the figure clutching at its throat, skin glowing pink; then the light faded and took with it the life of the person.

“What are they?” Angelica asked.

Joya lashed out with the sunflower bundle a few more times; each time the pink orbs grew in brightness and determination. She heard several more of the riders scream in pain and hit the ground with a thud, but they were never going to make it. From the corners of her eyes she saw the hecklin outpacing them, shadowy figures firmly planted on the back of each beast.

More arrows were loosed. They were coming right for her. Time seemed to slow for Joya a moment, giving her enough time to react. She lashed the sunflowers above her head, whirling them in a circle that called the arrows in, and drew them away from the humans. The arrows spun above her head for several seconds like they were caught in a vortex before violently ricocheting back at their shooters.

She heard them hit their marks.

But it was too late — they were surrounded. Joya pulled to a stop, chest thumping loudly as her heart beat double-time, and her lungs burning with air.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The hecklin wouldn’t come close enough to them for Joya to see who the riders were. One figure, taller than the rest and with a cloak much more ornately embroidered with shifting runes that glowed blue, slid off the back of his hecklin and crossed the expanse toward her.

He stopped several feet from the group and pulled his hood back. Brown hair tumbled loose in silken waves down his back, pointed ears protruding from the sides of the long locks. Black eyes stared at her from blue skin, blooming here and there with blushes of green.

“Ooslebed,” Joya whispered.
A real, live dark elf.

The figure smiled and drew his rapier. At his action, arrows nocked in bows and drew on the targets of Joya’s team.

“What are you doing trespassing on our lands, Holy Realm scum?” The dark elf spat on the ground at Joya’s feet. He had a strange accent — though his words were the same they would use, and not a different language as they would have expected by the script in the tomb, his accent seemed more educated, more proper.

A sharp pain tore through Joya’s palms like someone had stabbed her. She screamed out, startling the hecklin backward and knocking some of the dark elves from their perches in a clatter of bows, arrows, and rapiers.

Angelica made to go to Joya’s side, but stopped short when an arrow found its mark at her feet.

“We passed the protection at the border,” Jovian argued.

“Don’t you think
our
kind pass the protection on your borders also? Only to be hunted down like dogs and hung up for dalua to take?” the elf asked.

Joya couldn’t stop the burning in her palms. She turned her hands over, and moaned at what she saw. Her palms were smoking, as though a fire burned under the surface of her skin.

She felt another intense wave of pain, and she fell to her knees, another cry tearing from her throat.