Bloodraven (50 page)

The sword had barely reached the end of its arc before it left the maddened soldier’s hand and the man was screaming, now in a tone that had nothing to do with offended dignity, but with overwhelming pain. The soldier doubled over, clutching at his arm, his knees buckling as his body writhed. What flesh was visible seemed to erupt with the spidery fingers of purplish bruising, without any hand being laid to skin. He gave one last cry and toppled backwards, his face twisted in agony and eyes wide and staring, his skin a mottled mosaic of lesions and hematoma.

All within moments. Mere moments of his attack upon the lord of this dark keep. Men stood frozen, hands on half-drawn weapons. Alasdair staggered to a halt, staring at his fallen man, then up to Elvardo who stood with one hand on the stone beast of his banister, eyes narrow and angry, a thin line of red marring one pale cheek.

Yhalen stood frozen where he was, yards away and still too close to the echoes of the black power that had erupted out of Elvardo and taken that poor man. The essence of it left a foul taste at the back of his throat, as if he’d inhaled it. He could barely hear the sound of the shocked men in the hall, could barely think from the backlash of it—but the lady’s pale face drew his eye like a beacon from her place in the shadow. The sweat on her brow, the frown upon her lips that spoke more of a curious disappointment than shock, or despair over a needless death.

“Put down your weapons!” Alasdair’s roar reached through the noise in Yhalen’s head. The knight whirled upon his pale-faced, angry men. “Any man that draws a blade will answer to me. Do you hear?”

Hands carefully left the hilts of weapons. Men shuffled nervously. Bloodraven, who hadn’t moved since he’d turned to confront Alasdair, said something in a low growl in his own tongue, then turned and stalked to the door.

“God damn it!” Alasdair snarled, and stabbed a finger at one of his lieutenants. “Go with him.”

155

“Sir?” The man cast a worried look after the halfling, then back to his fallen comrade.

“Just...follow him. Don’t piss him off.” The knight ran a hand through his dark hair and looked back at Elvardo. “What did you do?”

Elvardo lifted a brow and slowly touched a fingertip to the bead of blood that had formed at the edge of the shallow slice on his face.

The knight took another breath, no doubt realizing the depth of the offense his man had perpetrated upon an uneasy host. If Elvardo had responded with honest steel, the men might not be as white-faced and frightened as they were. But there had been nothing honest in the dark lord’s method of retaliation, provocation or no.

“This was not....” Alasdair faltered, white knuckled. “You have my apologies. This man acted of his own accord and foolishly.”

Elvardo canted his head, interest perked at the knight’s faltering attempts at politic apology. Yhalen couldn’t stand there in the shadow of the dark magic that had felled a man a moment longer. He quietly moved back towards the rear of the hall and saw another figure making retreat as well. The lady, moving as silently as she could in long skirts, her face still deathly white, her lips pinched taut.

Alasdair had claimed his man acted of his own accord, but Yhalen had doubts suddenly of the validity of that claim. He’d been too distracted to feel any working on her part, but he felt in his gut that she’d had a hand in it. He hurried after her, catching her arm in the passage just beyond the main entrance hall.

“Unhand me,” she spat, turning a narrow glare upon him and attempting to wrench her arm free of him. He tightened his grip, shoving her a step backwards against the cool stone of the wall.

“You did this. You took that man’s will and made it your own.”

She laughed in his face. “You have no proof.”

“You did the same thing to Bloodraven.”

“Your word. Do you think our fine knight captain will believe the ravings of a forest-bred whore? He has more difficult problems to deal with.”

He ground his teeth and ignored her slurs. “Problems of your making. Why? What benefit to you?”

She leaned forward, digging the nails of her free hand into the back of Yhalen’s hand upon her arm.

“If I’d done such a thing...and I make no such admission...perhaps it was simply to see what he’d do.”

He took a breath, then another, and released her suddenly as if she were scalding. Curiosity.

Curiosity had killed a man.

“Don’t you wonder what he is?” she asked, low-voice and sibilant. “To wield such power? To maintain such
youth
, when he’s ancient?”

This last was said with such longing that he saw the real cause of her rancor. Envy. She was a human woman who practiced witchery, and she had come across something so much more than she herself could ever hope to be.

It occurred to him in some unguarded corner of his mind, that it was not beyond him, and he shuddered, feeling a little stab of nausea at even thinking such a thing. He gave her a look of utter loathing and stalked away.

He walked blind for a while, mind filled with anger towards the lady and disgust at himself for a simple stray thought. He lost his way in the passages and wandered for a time after, chilled to the bone at the ominous feel that seeped from behind many of the heavy closed doors, that sometimes seemed to emanate from the dark stone of the walls themselves. He found his way eventually back to a hall where windows let in healthy sunlight and then to a passage that seemed familiar.

He knew his way then, and retraced his steps back to his and Bloodraven’s guest chambers. He slouched down in the chair before the embers of the fire and stared moodily into the smoke blackened alcove where only the bravest spots of glowing orange remained in the charred ashes of the night’s fire.

“Did I appall you?”

Yhalen started, heart thudding in his throat at the unexpected closeness of the voice. He pushed himself out of the chair, putting his back to the fire and glaring into the room. Elvardo stood at the end of the bed, having made no sound whatsoever of entry.

“What do you want?” Yhalen grated out, clenching his fingers into fists to hide a trembling that he couldn’t control. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the tiny slash of red on Elvardo’s smooth cheek.

“You flee from me as if I’m a monster,” the dark lord said, and idly laid his fingertips against the 156

carved foot of the bed, tracing the patterns along the rim. “Perhaps I am. But how will you know for sure, unless you understand the true nature of magic?”

“I don’t care. I don’t need to know anymore about it than it is abhorrent to use the Goddess’ gift to take a life she created.”

“Goddess!” Elvardo spat. “Spar me the religious babble. I grew weary of hearing it decades ago. It’s all the same rhetoric anyway, drilled into the minds of children by superstitious adults with no room for leeway or supposition. The Goddess did this. She made that. She wishes us to live our lives this way, observing this place as sacred, humbling ourselves on this day or that in reverence of her all powerful, but never seen self. Rubbish. You’d think if she were so overwhelming in her power she’d hold a place outside the Forest. That the men outside would have her face graven into the walls of their temples alongside their innumerable petty gods.”

“Shut up,” Yhalen cried, taking a step forward.

“Your grandfather and I theorized about just such things when we were green youths—younger than you even—and headstrong with the vigor of oncoming manhood. We dabbled in the ways of power that have always come to naturally to our people.”

“He did not! He’s a shaman of the people.”

“Now.” Elvardo smiled slyly. “Not always. What do you think it was that turned him so adamantly towards the path of the goddess?”

Yhalen didn’t want to hear it. He swept past Elvardo towards the door and the dubious freedom of this keep. The handle would not turn, seemingly welded in place. Had he Bloodraven’s strength, he could have wrenched it open regardless, defying hinges and lock. As it was he stood there, forehead to the smooth wood, Elvardo’s words insidious and inescapable.

“We rather preferred each other’s company over that of the young maidens, and would trek deep into the woods for many days—on the pretense of honing our tracking skills when all we were really doing was escaping the eyes of our elders to fuck each other’s brains out. Yhalor could suck cock with a skill that belied his years. I’ve yet to find an equal, but perhaps he only stands out so vibrantly because he was the first to do it with any finesse.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Yhalen whispered between clenched teeth. It almost made him nauseous to think of his venerable, wise grandfather, the most ancient of the elders of his village, on his knees before this eternally young creature. But then his grandfather had not always been an old man.

He shut his eyes and drove the images away.

Elvardo brought them back with a few words.

“For a summer we were lovers, until my father caught us rutting like pigs in a place we should have known better than to dally. They wanted to send me away, to a village on the far side of the great forest with a branch of the people that were stricter in their methods of teaching their young men. Of course they’d send me away and not him, for the sons of your family, as far back as records go, have always been chieftains and shamans. It seemed unfair to us, and it was...so we chose our own path and fled, knowing very well there was a wide world beyond the forest, even if we’d never seen it.

“They pursued us—for our own good, of course. And ended up chasing us far up into the eastern mountains. To this day, I don’t recall what actually started the fight. They caught up with us, and one of them—my own father, perhaps—might have hit me. I was tired and scared and desperate, and I reacted in a way that shamans throughout the generations feared. I struck back with the magic that came naturally to me as breath. Fire sprang up like a wall, protecting us, and without thought or the knowledge of how to control it once conjured, we ran. I honestly don’t know if my father and the other men survived it, but the forest, dry from a long summer, burned for days. Yhalor left me that night. I suppose he was horrified at the magnitude of what we—what
I
—had wrought. I don’t think he was ever as serious about his conjecture of the existence of the Goddess as he was about fucking me. He couldn’t take the guilt. So he fled back to the people, to take his punishment and no doubt condemn me as penance. Little wonder he devoted himself to the ways of the shaman, after having had a hand in burning down half the great forest.”

“I don’t want to hear this...I don’t care. Just go away.”

“But if I go away without telling you the things you need to know, how will you survive when he takes you deep into the heart of the northern mountains, among the true-blooded viciousness of his people?”

Yhalen swung around to stare at Elvardo, wide-eyed and shuddering.

157

“What will you do when he’s not there to protect you—if he even can against the strength of a full-blooded ogre? You’ve tasted their maliciousness before, haven’t you? Endured their hatred and their fascination with human flesh?”

“Stop it. Shut up!”

“If it wasn’t for magic that your grandfather would be so appalled at the usage of—you’d be dead now, wouldn’t you?”

“Better dead than exiled,” Yhalen cried and Elvardo laughed.

“Oh, no. Not in the least, believe me. You don’t believe it either.”

“Leave me alone!”

Elvardo tilted his head and said thoughtfully. “On one condition.”

Yhalen stared, warily waiting.

“Use that portion of your magic that the most pious of your people would not object to. Heal this small cut and I’ll leave you in peace to do as you will.”

“Why?” Yhalen asked suspiciously. “Why not do it yourself?”

Elvardo shrugged. “Perhaps the most benign of our arts are beyond me. Perhaps I want to see if you can. Perhaps I simply wish to exert my will over yours, descendent of Yhalor.”

Yhalen lifted his chin stubbornly and Elvardo chuckled.

“If you can do it, I’ll do you one better. I’ll see the halfling takes this trip without you. See that you’re free of him once and for all, to go and do what you will. Return home if you like.”

Yhalen took an uncertain breath, tempted beyond all reason by that offer. “I don’t know if I can,” he said, but that was a lie to buy time. He had done more than what Elvardo asked, much more, when he’d healed Bloodraven’s wounds. He remembered how.

It was worth the effort. He took a step forward, then another, steeling his will and reaching out with fingers that only trembled a little to touch Elvardo’s cheek. Skin that was cool and smooth, except around the edges of the cut. Yhalen felt the heat of life’s blood escaping, of flesh with a mission to reknit itself. It would repair itself eventually, after days and days of tireless effort, if left to its own devices. It was simply a matter of lending his own strength, his own life energy to hurry the process along. A melding of his magic with Elvardo’s flesh...like he had done with Bloodraven weeks past.

And like with Bloodraven he let a little of his own life energy seep into Elvardo. Unlike with Bloodraven, that tenuous bond was snatched and yanked and Yhalen found himself tumbling headfirst into an enveloping wash of darkness. He was lost in it, floundering, pulled in past the mundane physicality of flesh and into something more...sinister. It rushed at him from all sides, darkness cloaking other things. Flares of energy. Of impulse. Of magic.

He struggled to find his way back as something bored past his defenses with ease. A high-pitched pain that wasn’t exactly pain, that filled his ethereal body to the point of bursting and then he did burst, tumbling with a soundless scream as bits and pieces of him fluttered off, melting into the darkness.