King of Sword and Sky (21 page)

Even as he spoke, Sybharukai rose to her feet and padded across the black sands to where Cahlah's body lay. The other tairen followed close on her heels.

"It is time, Ellysetta." Rain lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss on her fingers. "Merdrahl agreed to wait for me, but he cannot stand to wait any longer. There are steps carved into the wall behind us. Climb to at least the fourth ledge, and do not come down until I tell you."

Worry gripped her. "Rain?"

"I will be safe, Ellysetta, as will you, but you must do as I say. Hurry, please."

The sense of urgency in his voice made her turn and run across the sands to the wide, flat steps hewn into the side of the cavern. Magic swelled as Rain summoned the Change, and when she glanced back over her shoulder, he was loping across the lair in tairen form to join the rest of the pride.

Ellysetta made her way to the second ledge high above the cavern floor. Below, several of the tairen took all but one of the eggs in their mouths and carried them to the other side of the lair. They deposited the eggs in a far corner and buried them in a heap of dark sand before returning to join the others, where they formed a ring around Merdrahl and the dead Cahlah.

All the tairen began to growl, the sound a single deep, throaty note that made the hairs on Ellie's arms stand up.

«Higher, shei'tani.»

Rain's silent urging sent her scrambling up another flight of steps. As she reached the third landing, the growling reached a higher pitch. The tairen circling Merdrahl and Cahlah rose to their hind legs, and their wings began to unfurl. Opalescent tairen eyes glowed bright with magic. Merdrahl released a haunting cry and laid his body over his dead mate's motionless form. The mountain itself began to tremble as the voices of the tairen filled the lair, reverberating in the massive cavern. Several of the tairen stretched back their heads and roared. Gouts of fire escaped from their throats, and then she knew.

She scrambled up yet a fourth flight of steps. The palms of her hands scraped against the rock, but she paid no heed to the pain. A sense of urgency had gripped her, spawned by a fierce, unshakable certainty.

Fire was coming, hot and glorious. Tairen's fire to cleanse and purify. Tairen's fire to slay and transform. Tairen's fire, deep and deadly magic.

How she knew it, she could not guess, but she was certain. Her skin felt hot and full and tight, as if the fire were already inside her, fighting for release. Perspiration dewed her skin, and her breath came in ragged gasps. She stopped on the fourth ledge, unable to force herself higher. What was coming alarmed her, but now it also drew her, calling to her like a beloved friend.

Below her, the ring of tairen were all standing on their hind legs. Their wings were fully extended, the furless undersides glistening as though paved with diamond dust. Tairen song played in her mind, pure, endless notes that grew stronger and deeper, building to a crescendo, flooding her with emotions. Aching sadness, vast love, an agony of loneliness, the promise of peace. Tears spilled from her eyes. Merdrahl had lost his mate, and his suffering was unendurable. The tairen, his family, would release him.

The visceral notes of gleaming gold and silver music flashed and trembled in the air, resonance so pure and intense it assumed visual form. The music filled Ellie's ears and mind and went deeper still to invade her blood, flesh, and bones, sinking into the very fabric of her being. Deep within, her own tairen shifted with unease. Feral, frightened, it hissed a warning even as desperate yearning filled her, an aching void, a soul-deep pain. It wanted…needed…
what?

When the song reached its apex, the tairen on the lair floor flung back their heads and roared. With wings flung wide, fully extended and trembling, their massive chests expanded on a single, communal inhalation. In the center of the ring, Merdrahl bared his deadly fangs and screamed a final, fierce, earthshaking roar of love and sorrow, pleading and command.

Fire exploded from the throats of the surrounding tairen, enormous, unstoppable jets of consuming flame. A fiery furnace raged where Merdrahl and Cahlah had been. Ellysetta raised a hand to shield her eyes from the blinding inferno, yet she could not look away. Tairen wings pumped like bellows. Great clouds of flame and smoke billowed outward, flooding the cavern floor. Heat blasted upwards, flinging Ellysetta off her feet.

She rolled over on her hands and knees and started to rise, but a familiar cold tingling, like the bite of an ice spider, washed over her, sapping her legs of strength. The sensation grew stronger, shooting up her spine, making her every muscle tremble. Fear clutched at her throat.

«Rain
…»

Her hesitant call went unanswered. She crawled to the edge of her perch. The cavern floor was completely submerged beneath a deep, raging ocean of fire that buffeted the ledge just below hers. No part of the tairen was visible, yet she knew they were there, at the center of the inferno, unharmed and feeding the flames. She could hear them singing, a single, sustained note resonating in her mind.

She crouched on the ledge, shivering despite the heat. Her flesh trembled as though it would dissolve off her very bones. Beneath the pure, endless aria of the tairen, she could now hear whispers. Insidious, frightening. Voices beckoning, hissing, pleading. Wordless commands that pulled at her and shot terror through her heart.

And then she heard the sound of her name, spoken as if from some nameless monster of the dark.
Ellysssettttttaaaaaa.

Gasping, she flung herself back from the edge, scrambling for something, anything to hold on to. As if what called her name could reach out and grab her. She found a small boulder and clutched it with frantic strength, squeezing her eyes shut.

"Rain!"
She screamed his name aloud, shrieking it into the fiery wind. Then again, in Spirit and along their bondthreads, like a talisman against the summoning darkness. «
Rain!»

Across the room, the tairens' single, sustained note ended, and a gentler melody ensued, tender and sad, but with a light, hopeful chord running through it. As quickly as they had come, the whispering voices were gone, and with them the disturbing chill that had crawled across her skin like ice spiders. The tairen's roar quieted, and through her tightly shut eyelids she could see the brightness of their flames dimming until the lair was once again shrouded in shadow.

Rain found her clinging to a small boulder. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and even in the dim light he could see the pulse pounding in her throat and hear her shallow, gasping breaths.

"Ellysetta?"

The first touch of his hand made her flinch, and he frowned in concern. Her flesh felt chill to the touch. She was shivering—and clearly terrified. "It is over,
shei'tani.
There is no need to fear." Tenderly he brushed her hair back from her face and cupped her cheeks, letting the warmth from his flesh seep into hers. All he could think was that the tairen rite of passage had terrified her. She'd probably believed she would be burned to death in the flames.
"Sieks'ta.
I am sorry. I should have warned you about the Fire Song. I know how frightening the rite can seem, but I swear to you,
shei'tani,
you were never in danger."

Sariel had always feared the tairen. They had welcomed her as Rain's mate, but she had never been comfortable around them. She had rarely accompanied him to their lair. Ellysetta was a Tairen Soul, so he'd thought she would understand better, would feel at home here, as he did, but clearly he'd expected too much, too soon.

He stifled his disappointment and pressed his lips to the smooth skin of her forehead. «
Sieks'ta, beloved. Forgive me. I should have prepared you, given you time to adjust before thrusting you into the pride and expecting you to understand our ways.»
He had not pushed Sariel to accept the tairen half of his soul, nor would he press Ellysetta to accept more than she could. When she was ready, the pride would be waiting.

"I'm not afraid of the tairen." Ellysetta's voice was a hoarse whisper. "I wasn't afraid of the fire either, though perhaps I should have been."

Rain pulled back to look at her. Her eyes were open, her face pale. Her fear was just beginning to subside. "Then what was it that frightened you so badly?

"It was the darkness, the cold." Her voice shook, and she began to shiver again. "The voices, calling to me."

His brows drew together. "Ellysetta, there was no darkness or cold, only fire. There were no voices, except the tairen singing Cahlah and Merdrahl and their lost kit into the next life. We did not call to you."

"It wasn't you or the tairen. It wasn't the Shadow Man either. It was something else. Something horrible. Something evil." Her fingers clenched, digging into his shoulders. "Rain, it knew my name."

"Shh." Rain smoothed a hand over Ellysetta's wild curls and sent a concerned look to Sybharukai. Neither he nor the tairen had sensed any danger, and yet he could not doubt Ellysetta. What she believed, she believed absolutely.

What if Ellysetta, who could bring a
dahl'reisen
back into the light, could sense what even Sybharukai, wise one of the tairen, could not? Worse, what if the evil that had drained the life's essence from Cahlah and her kits had made Ellysetta its next target? A low growl rumbled in his throat. The entity that had slain Cahlah and her kits was a mysterious, invisible, untrackable foe that had triumphed over Fey and tairen alike for centuries.

Ellysetta continued to shiver in his arms, and her teeth began to chatter as fear gave way to shock. Rain gathered her in his arms, dropped smoothly to the lair floor on a slide of Air, and headed for one of the large tunnels leading away from the nesting lair.

"Where are we going?"

"You are chilled. There is an underground lake in Fey'Bahren, warmed by the mountain's volcanic heart."

"I'm all right," she protested. "I don't need a hot bath. And there's no need for you to carry me."

"You will take the bath to ease my mind. And it is my pleasure to carry you." If the formless evil attacked her again, he wanted to be close enough to hold her and sense what she sensed.

"What of Merdrahl? He's gone, isn't he?"

"Aiyah.
He is gone. That was the purpose of our Fire Song: to free him, Cahlah, and their dead kit from this life so they could enter the next."

She glanced across the sands to the place Merdrahl had been. Rain knew the moment she recognized what remained of the two tairen and their lost kit. Despite her shivering, her spine stiffened, and amazement flooded every point of contact between them.

"Rain, put me down." She squirmed free. "Is that… ?" She took three steps before he caught her hand to halt her.

"
Nei
, do not touch it. It is still quite hot." He glanced at the tumble of dark, glossy crystal, radiance glimmering in its multifaceted depths. Kingdoms had been conquered for the minutest portion of what lay there in the black sands.
"Aiyah,
it is what you think." Tairen's Eye crystal, two great boulders and one smaller, darker globe of it: all that remained in this world of Merdrahl, Cahlah, and their kit.

"How is that possible? You once told me that Tairen's Eye crystal could not be made or unmade."

"I said that the Fey could not make or unmake it. Only the tairen can do so, and only by performing the rite of passage that you just witnessed. The rite requires at least twelve adult tairen to sing the Fire Song."

She touched the two crystals that hung around her neck. "These are the…bodies of a dead tairen?"

"They once were, but the Fire Song transforms what was and leaves in its place something quite different." He laid the back of his hand against her cheek. "And that, Ellysetta," he warned gently, "is a secret you must never tell another soul. Even the Fey do not know how Tairen's Eye crystal comes into being. It is a treasure guarded by the tairen and the Feyreisen who walk among them as brothers."

She nodded. "I will not speak of it."

They passed through the tunnel entrance, to the broad, timeworn pathway that led down deeper into the heart of Fey'Bahren. Small pebbles clattered behind them, and Ellysetta turned her head towards the source of the noise.

"The tairen are following us." She sounded surprised.

"They are curious. It has been a very long time since anyone but me has come to Fey'Bahren."

She stopped. "I am not bathing with an audience. Even if they are tairen."

Celierian modesty. Part of him hoped she would never lose it. He loved the way her cheeks turned pink when she blushed. "I will weave a screen for you,
shei'tani."

The tunnel opened up into another large cavern. Rain called Fire to light the sconces around the perimeter and illuminate the clear, still waters of the lake. Though not as wide as the nesting lair nor as tall, the cavern was still impressive. Scores of adult tairen could comfortably bask on the rocks surrounding the vast, glassy lake, and above, the domed ceiling arched high enough to allow even the largest tairen to fully extend his wings for drying. The walls were smooth and polished from millennia of young tairen testing their flame beneath the pride's watchful eyes. Rain himself had joined his tairen cradle friends in spewing gouts of flame into rock, learning how to control the flame and its heat, and how to breathe fire without singeing his muzzle.