Bloodfire Quest (28 page)

He turned and found an old man standing behind him, a white-bearded ancient cloaked in robes that were worn and ragged, his tall, lean body stooped with age and perhaps the weight of something much greater, something that was reflected in his eyes as he studied the boy with an intense but not unfriendly gaze.

“How do you know about Grianne Ohmsford?” Railing asked, finding that his voice was now returned to him.

The old man made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, I know quite a lot about most things. It is my business to know.”

Railing shook his head. “I have the strangest feeling I should know you.”

“Or at least know of me.”

“You have use of magic, don’t you? Are you a Faerie creature?”

“I am. I was well known to others in your family. I have helped them now and then over the years by offering respite from weariness and stress and advice about how to continue. Sometimes they took both and sometimes they took only one and sometimes they did not take either. Once or twice, I gave them talismans. Like this one.”

He held out his hand, his fingers closed about whatever lay within. Railing hesitated. “Take it,” the old man said. “Would you reject a gift from the King of the Silver River?”

Railing stared in surprise, then quickly extended his hand. The old man dropped a ring into it. The ring had a very odd look to it. The band was formed of a series of gold strands that had been interwoven in an intricate, delicate design. There were perhaps a dozen threads in all. At the apex a single gemstone, milky white and opaque, had been fastened in place. Railing had never seen anything like it. He tested the strength of the woven strands to see how much give there was to the metal and found to his surprise that there was scarcely any. The metal felt hard and fixed.

“Slip it on your finger,” the King of the Silver River suggested. “Go on, it will not harm you.”

Railing did as he was told. The ring fit perfectly, the metal suddenly soft and malleable, molding itself to his finger as if it were a living thing. The boy studied it a moment, admiring its look, and then tried pulling on it. It came off without difficulty and turned rigid and unyielding again.

The old man nodded. “It belongs to you now and will serve only you. Should another try it on, it will not respond.”

“What does it do?” Railing asked. He was still trying to get used to the idea that this was the legendary Faerie creature who had appeared to members of the Ohmsford family at various times over the centuries, always with a willingness to help when their lives seemed darkest and their need greatest.

“It does what you need it to do when you cannot find your way.” The King of the Silver River smiled. “That’s what I have come to talk to you about. Finding your way.”

“Can you help me find Grianne Ohmsford?” the boy asked excitedly. “Can you tell me where she is?”

The old man shook his head. “I am not here for that. The ring can show you the way once you know what you are looking for. I am here to talk to you about what you
should
be looking for. I know the quest you undertake, and I know the reasons for it. I have listened to your conversations on both sides of the Rainbow Lake and seen the writings you have uncovered. I know your heart. I can feel your passion. But you travel down a road that may lead to your ruin.”

Railing started to ask for an explanation, but the old man had already turned away. “Come sit with me while we talk. My bones are weary from tracking your efforts. I need to rest them.”

They sat together on the trunk of a fallen tree, looking back across the water at
Quickening
and the star-filled skies that silhouetted her. For a long moment, the King of the Silver River did not speak.

“This is going to be difficult for you to hear, Railing Ohmsford—and even more difficult for you to believe. Perhaps you won’t heed me. Perhaps you will dismiss me out of hand. But at least I will have spoken the words and you will have had a chance to assess their worth. And perhaps, if you allow yourself to do so, you will take them to heart and weigh them carefully. If not now, then at another time in the not-too-distant future, before it is too late.”

“What is it?” the boy asked him. “What would you tell me?”

“You search for Grianne Ohmsford, Ard Rhys of the Third Druid Order. You believe that by finding her, you will find, as well, a way in which to bring your brother back to you. But you should understand that what you seek is not necessarily what you will find.”

The old man folded his hands in his lap. “The Grianne Ohmsford you seek is lost to you. She has been gone for a hundred years, since she gave herself to the tanequil in exchange for the girl who became your grandmother. What’s been gone for so long cannot be brought back. Not as it once was. Not whole and complete again, perhaps not even alive. Understand, Railing. She is transformed. She became another creature entirely by choosing to live as an aeriad. She cannot take that back, and you cannot expect to find a way to make her.”

“I can try,” Railing interrupted, upset by now with how the conversation was going. “Grianne switched places with Cinnaminson. Why can’t it happen that someone switches places with her?”

The King of the Silver River nodded. “It would seem that such a thing would be possible. But the switch between Grianne and your grandmother happened only weeks after your grandmother gave herself to the tanequil. Only weeks, Railing. Not more than a hundred years. You can expect things to stay pretty much the same in weeks, but not after a century has passed.”

“What are you saying, then? That I should just give up and go home and forget my brother? That there is nothing I can do for him?” Railing was so incensed by the idea that he was shouting. He caught himself, glancing out at the dark shape of
Quickening,
but there was no sign that anyone aboard had heard. He looked back at the old man. “I won’t do it. I won’t abandon Redden.”

“Nor am I asking you to. Nor would I expect it of you.” The aged eyes seemed to look right into him. “But finding Grianne Ohmsford may not be the answer. It may end badly for everyone involved. It may not yield the result you hope to achieve.”

“You can’t know that. You can’t know how it will end!”

“I am a Faerie creature, and I have the use of magic and the gift of premonition. While I cannot know the answers to all things, I can sense if they will be good or bad for those involved. It is so here. My sense of it is very strong.”

Railing took a deep breath to steady himself, not wanting to blurt out what he was thinking. “What are you telling me to do?”

“Only this. Make your choice wisely. Do not become wedded to the idea that there is only one way.”

“I already know that.”

The King of the Silver River shook his head. “You only think you know. In the end you may discover you are a child playing with matches and in danger of burning everything around you to the ground. Think carefully. Do you really wish to continue on after what I have just said, or will you turn back and go into the Forbidding alone?”

There was a long silence as the boy and the old man faced each other. In the distance, something splashed in the waters of the cove, and the dark shape of a bird of prey winged skyward with food for her young.

“I cannot give this up,” Railing said.

“You can give anything up just as you can take anything up. But once the choice is made, there are consequences. And you cannot change those consequences. You can only live with them.”

The insistence in the old man’s words was daunting. Clearly, he believed what he was saying. Railing hesitated. Neither of them knew exactly what would happen if Railing persisted in his search for Grianne Ohmsford, but the King of the Silver River seemed certain that it would not be anything good. Yet even creatures of magic could be mistaken. Even they could be wrong. The history of the Ohmsford family had demonstrated that often enough.

Railing was no fool; he knew he should consider carefully what he was being told. He had until at least sunrise to do so. And he had all the days of his journey after that, as well, didn’t he? He would not dismiss the old man’s warning out of hand. He would think on it for as long as there was reason to do so.

“Will the ring guide me to wherever I choose to go?” he asked the other.

The King of the Silver River shrugged. “Or out of wherever you’ve been, should that become necessary. But know this. Unlike some magic, it has a finite life. It will show the way each time you ask for it, but each time one strand of its woven threads will disappear until all are gone. Save the stone for when the threads are gone and your life is at such risk there is no other magic you can call upon. That time may come sooner than you think.”

Railing took a deep breath. “I thank you for the ring and the advice. I will consider carefully everything you have told me.”

“Will you?”

The boy nodded uneasily. The old man seemed to see right through him. “How do I get back to the ship from here?”

The King of the Silver River smiled. “Who is to say you ever left?”

Then he disappeared, and the shoreline and the trees and any view of the airship anchored in the cove disappeared as well, and Railing woke from what might have been only a dream still wrapped in his blanket and lying on wooden planking, and he was aboard
Quickening
once more, and all that remained was the silence and his memory of the Faerie creature’s words.

It might have been a dream if not for the ring that nestled deep inside his pant pocket.

Railing was awake for much of the rest of the night, mulling over what the King of the Silver River had told him. He was conflicted in every conceivable way, even as to whether what had happened was real.

He wanted it to have been a dream—in spite of the ring’s presence—mostly because he didn’t want to believe that what he had been told had any value. Even accepting that there was a possibility things wouldn’t work out as he wished, that Grianne Ohmsford was indeed beyond their reach and would never return, he did not want to abandon his search. Because if he did, if he gave up on trying to find Grianne, he would be forced to do what the old man had told him he ultimately must. He would be forced to go after Redden himself, into the Forbidding, a place much, much worse than the one he had barely escaped before, and with no idea of how to go about finding, let alone rescuing, his brother.

Just thinking of it terrified him. Once he had been so sure of himself, so certain that he could just hop a flit, charge back into the Forbidding, and save his brother. No more. He was ashamed of his fear, but he could not dispel it. He might be brave enough flying a Sprint into the wilderness of the Shredder, but that was child’s play compared with what he would face inside the Forbidding. He’d had time to think about it, to understand better what it meant, and his fear was so overwhelming that he could not come to terms with it.

As a result, he could not give up the idea of finding Grianne and persuading her to stand with him against the creatures of the Forbidding.

It could happen. It must.

He agonized until sunrise and then rose with the others, moving about the
Quickening
as if half dead, consumed by fears and doubts and confusion. He knew he should tell someone about what had happened to him during the night. He knew he should reveal what he had been told. But if he did so, the search was over. Skint, for certain, would turn back and try to persuade the others to do the same. Austrum and the other Rovers would give up, as well. Maybe even Mirai would abandon him, in spite of having said she wouldn’t.

“Ready to set out?” Farshaun Req asked him as they sat around on the foredeck eating breakfast.

All eyes turned toward him. He fingered the woven strands of the ring that he had kept concealed in his pocket.

He was surprised at how quickly he responded. “Ready,” he said, and felt the world drop away inside.

Amid a pungent haze of smoke and ash and mist, cloaked in gloom and wrapped in pain, Aphenglow Elessedil opened her eyes. Somehow she was still in one piece. The last thing she remembered was clinging to the railing of
Wend-A-Way
’s pilot box as the airship, shattered and burning, plunged earthward, completely out of control and seemingly doomed. She had been thrown backward off the railing with the last explosive attack of the fire launchers mounted on the Federation warship, and stayed conscious for only a moment or two afterward—just long enough to feel
Wend-A-Way
begin to fall. Then everything had gone dark.

What she knew for certain was that she shouldn’t be alive. She should be dead.

She looked around, still sufficiently dazed that she couldn’t seem to get her bearings. Where was she? She wasn’t aboard the airship any longer. She was lying on the ground; she could feel cool dampness of the earth and grasses beneath her. She shifted her position slightly and caught the red glow of dying embers through the haze. The remains of the airship, she thought.

Then she remembered Arlingfant and Cymrian and the Elven Hunters who had been aboard the airship with her, and she forced herself into a sitting position. A wave of dizziness swept through her, and she seemed to hurt everywhere at once. But when she tested her arms and legs, one by one, she could tell that nothing was broken. Her ribs were another matter. At least several were cracked and perhaps worse. She took a moment to use her magic to layer her midsection with a healing wrap that gave her some relief from the pain.

Then, ignoring what pain still lingered, she forced herself to her feet and took a few steps toward the glow of the embers. She could tell the airship had come down in a forest; the trees closest to her were scarred and ripped by the force of the crash. Pieces of the vessel lay everywhere, scattered about like the bones of a dead thing. She found one of the Elven Hunters only a few feet away, what was left of him barely recognizable. Shivering at the implications of what this might mean about her sister and Cymrian, she stumbled ahead more quickly, looking everywhere at once.

She found the larger part of
Wend-A-Way
some distance farther on, her hull holed in a dozen places by enemy fire and her decking collapsed. The glow she had seen earlier was emanating from sections of wood planking that were still smoldering. The masts were shattered, and lengths of them lay all around the wreck. One was even caught up in the branches of one of the trees. The parse tubes and light sheaths had been thrown all across the space where the airship had come down. Yards of radian draws hung from the trees like spiderwebs.

She found parts of another of the crewmen nearby, able to tell that it wasn’t Cymrian from the markings on the one remaining forearm. She pushed on through the haze, coughing as the acrid smoke and ash entered her lungs, peering about for signs of her sister and their protector. But she couldn’t find either. She was widening her search to the areas outside the immediate crash site when she remembered the Elfstones. She had chosen not to use them when they had been attacked, relying instead on her Druid magic. But where had she put them? She began searching through her pockets without success. If they had fallen out somewhere during the crash, she would never find them. They had to be on her somewhere.

And they were, tucked in an outside pocket of her pants, down along her thigh. She felt their distinctive shape through the fabric and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Aphen.”

She turned to find Cymrian coming toward her from out of the haze, his clothes soaked, wild and streaked with mud. Blood from a deep cut on his forehead ran down his face. She felt a sudden rush of emotion that surprised her—a sense of relief coupled with something much stronger.

“I can’t find Arling,” she told him at once. “Have you seen her?”

He shook his head. “I just now found my way to you. I was thrown off the ship when she came down. Right into a bog. Arling? I don’t know. She might be anywhere.”

“Let me see that cut,” she said, moving over to examine his head.

She cleaned the wound as best she could with the sleeve of her tunic and then used a small bit of magic to close the gash and initiate the healing. He stood quietly while she did so, his lean feature intense, his eyes turned away. “Are you all right?”

“Better than you, I think. Mostly, I’m just sore. We have to find her, Cymrian.”

He nodded as she finished and stepped away. “We will. Can you walk?”

“As far as you need me to.”

“Then let’s conduct a sweep of the area. Spread out from here. We’ll find her quick enough.”

They began a slow outward circling from the ruins of
Wend-A-Way,
searching the brush and trees as they went, careful not to neglect the possibility that Arling was caught up in the branches of one of the trees. Around them, mist and smoke swirled through the night, thick and pungent. They were barely able to find their way, but they pushed steadily onward until at last they were far enough from the airship’s remains that the haze had dissipated and they could see clearly again.

“This is close to where I landed,” he said at last, stopping. “Maybe we’re guessing wrong. Maybe she didn’t even get off the ship. She could still be inside, trapped belowdecks. It looked as if the ship collapsed in on herself, so …”

He trailed off. “We’d better go back and have a look.”

Aphenglow didn’t need to be told what he was thinking. If Arling was in the airship wreckage, she had probably been crushed to death on impact.

They took a direct line back to
Wend-A-Way,
leaving Aphen outside to wait as Cymrian began searching through the inside of the hull. He was gone a long time before reappearing. “Nothing,” he said.

They stood together once more, looking everywhere but at each other. “I’ll have to use the Elfstones,” Aphenglow said finally. “It’s risky, but I can’t afford to worry about that. Arling could be dying out there.”

To his credit, Cymrian didn’t argue. He simply nodded.

She pulled out the Stones and dumped them from the pouch into her hand. Closing her fingers about them, she stretched out her arm and formed a picture of her sister’s face, holding it firmly in her mind as she summoned the magic.

The blue light blazed to life and then spun away to their left. She wheeled quickly to square herself up to its beam, fixing the direction as it traveled only a short distance to a jumble of branches that had been torn away in the crash. Beyond was a tangle of grasses in which a body lay prone, nearly invisible against the muddied earth. The light held fast for a moment to mark the spot, then flared and was gone.

Cymrian was already moving. She hurried after him, jamming the Elfstones back in her pocket. It took them only minutes to make their way back through the trees and the brush. Arling lay just a short distance from where they had turned back from their earlier search. Aphen gritted her teeth in fury. They had been only steps away.

She rushed over to her sister and knelt. Arling was covered in mud and bleeding from her nose and mouth. She was breathing, but just barely, and her pulse was weak and unsteady. Quickly, Aphen checked for other injuries without finding any. But since Arling was unconscious it was difficult to be certain.

“She’s in a bad way,” she told Cymrian. “I’m afraid to move her.”

“Can you tell if anything is broken?”

“Doesn’t seem to be.” She felt up and down her sister’s arms and legs without finding any sign of broken bones. She explored Arling’s body, as well. Nothing. “Can you lift her? By her shoulders, but don’t let her head move when you do.”

Cymrian did as she asked, and she felt underneath her sister’s back. She had almost finished her exam when her fingers found metal splinters. Her breath caught in her throat. That last barrage from the Federation fire launchers must have done this. There were at least two, and perhaps more, of those splinters embedded in Arling’s back. It was impossible to tell how deeply they had penetrated, but it seemed likely they were the source of the problem. The splinters, and the impact of Arling’s fall from the ship, would explain a lot.

She took off her cloak and spread it on the ground beside her sister. “Can you roll her over on her stomach?” she asked Cymrian, indicating the cloak.

The Elven Hunter did so—carefully, tenderly, keeping everything as protected as he could manage. Aphen helped by turning Arling at her hips and legs as Cymrian turned her at her shoulders. It took only a moment to lay the injured girl on her stomach. Now both her sister and their protector could see the splinters and the blood that seeped from the wounds they had made. The splinters protruded from halfway up her back, close to where her heart was.

“I’ll have to take them out,” she said, looking at him. “But I don’t know what that will do to her.”

“If you don’t take them out, you know for certain what it will do,” he answered.

She called up her magic and layered her sister with a deadening spell that would numb her body against the pain and help to seal off the wounds as soon as the splinters were removed. She cut away Arling’s tunic to expose her back and was horrified to find that in addition to the larger, more obvious wounds, there were dozens of smaller ones, as well. Arling must have been caught in a hailstorm of metal shards in that last attack. A wave of fear swept through her. If she made a mistake now or if she failed to do enough, she was going to lose her sister.

Before any further thoughts of that sort could take hold, she began the process of extracting the splinters. One by one, she removed them with steady, practiced movements, ripping off the sleeves of her tunic to wipe away blood and debris, pouring small amounts of liquid from her aleskin onto the wounds to help with the cleaning. She worked as quickly as she could, refusing to be distracted by her fears. Cymrian knelt beside her, watching silently. It seemed to her that it took an inordinate amount of time. The larger splinters came out easily enough; they were deeply embedded, but didn’t appear to have penetrated or damaged any bones or the spinal column. The smaller shards were a different matter. Some of them were long and thin and not easily located. She reached inside her sister’s body with her magic, extracting the splinters one by one.

When she had the last of them she cleaned the wounds and sat back, staring down at her sister’s still body. Her breathing hadn’t changed. Her pulse was still irregular. Something wasn’t right. Taking out the splinters hadn’t been enough to solve the problem.

She shook her head, knowing she had to do more, that she had missed something.

Across from her, Cymrian suddenly turned and looked off into the trees. “Someone’s coming.”

She hadn’t heard anything. But she had learned by now that his ears were sharper than hers, in spite of her instincts and her magic. He would not be mistaken about something like this. She stared at him in confusion, saw the look on his face, and quickly said, “Don’t go.”

“You’ll be fine,” he said, already on his feet.

“It’s not me I’m worried about. If you go, you’ll be all alone.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t let whatever’s coming reach you and Arling. I have to stop it.”

“Wait a few more minutes. I’ll come with you.”

He shook his head. “We don’t have those minutes.” He moved over and knelt beside her. “Take as long as you need with her. Whatever’s out there, I will find a way to stop it.”

She glanced down at her sister, knowing she was losing her, knowing at the same time that she was about to lose him, as well. “Cymrian, no.”

He gave her a momentary smile. “It’s my job to protect you, Aphen.”

She made a small sound in her throat and reached for him, pulling him to her and kissing him hard on the mouth. She held the kiss for a long time, desperate to keep him close, realizing for the first time how terrible it would be to lose him. How many times had he saved her? How many times had he been there for all of them? She hadn’t realized it before—hadn’t let herself accept it, perhaps—not in the way she understood as she kissed him now. But there it was, full-blown and alive in her heart.

She cared for him every bit as much as he cared for her, in spite of all her efforts at distancing herself from his long-held affection for her.

When she released him, she said, “Be strong. I will come for you.”

Her eyes held him fixed in place for a second more. Then he turned away and was gone.