King of Sword and Sky (6 page)

Bel gave the former
dahl'reisen
a baleful cobalt glare while Marissya only laughed, hugged him again, and declared,
"Meirvelei, kem'jeto.
Welcome back, my brother. I've missed you."

"I'm glad you have returned to us, Gaelen." Ellysetta reached out to take Gaelen's hands in greeting. "How are Selianne's children?" He had left Celieria City with her best friend's orphaned babies in his care, promising to take them someplace where they would be safe from the Mage Mark placed upon them.

"Safe and well and with those who will love them as you requested,
kem'falla,"
he answered with a bow. When he straightened, he frowned. "But I am not pleased to find you still here, outside the protection of the Fading Lands. Your mate is unwise."

"We leave in three bells, as soon as he and Lord Teleos have finished their discussions."

"You should not even be here. If Rain had flown you as swiftly as he could, you would already be five days past the Faering Mists."

"Setah."
She held up a hand. "Do not scold." She reached out to pull her twin sisters close and drop kisses on their mink brown curls. "Run fetch Papa, girls. Let's show him Mama's garden." When they were gone, she told Gaelen, "The delay was on my account, because Rain knew I could not bear to be parted from my family so soon after Mama's death."

"The reason doesn't matter. You should be behind the Mists. Safe. And so should Marissya." He ran frustrated hands through sheaves of straight black hair. "I thought vel'En Daris had more sense than to keep you here in Celieria."

"I'm fine, Gaelen," she insisted. "Nothing has—"

The seizure came without warning.

One moment she was about to chide Gaelen for his pessimism; the next she was writhing on the flagstones, shrieking in agony.

The pain was instant and all-encompassing and hideously familiar. Her spine arched, spasming in red-hot pain as her hands clawed at the rock beneath her. The tendons in her body stood out like ropes of steel, and her muscles clenched so tightly they became torturous, burning bricks beneath her skin.

«Rain! Dax! Ti'Feyreisa! Fey! Ti'Feyreisa!»
Dimly, she heard Marissya send the frantic cry for help racing across the common Fey path.

Ellysetta saw her reach out, her
shei'dalin
hands already glowing bright with healing weaves of gold-tinted Earth and Spirit. She heard Gaelen shout a warning, but it was too late.

The moment Marissya laid hands upon Ellysetta, agony enveloped her. It didn't rush out of Ellysetta. It simply expanded to sink its venomous fangs into Marissya, filling the
shei'dalin's
empathic senses with savage, brutal, shattering pain, as if every bone in her body were splintering, every muscle shredding, and her soul were burning in the fires of the Seven Hells. Marissya screamed and fell back, yanking her hands off Ellysetta's body in instinctive self-preservation.

"Marissya!" Gaelen grabbed her by the arms and all but flung her across the walk into the middle of the adjacent lawn, well out of reach of whatever held Ellysetta in its grip.

"Light save me." Marissya wept, her voice shaking as helplessly as her limbs. She raised horrified eyes to her brother. "Dear gods, Gaelen, I've never felt anything like that. Never." She had served on the bloodiest battlefields of the Mage Wars, Truthspoken the souls of mortals who had perpetrated acts so vile they'd made her ill to touch them, yet never felt the kind of soul-deep agony now racking Ellysetta's slender form.

"Bel, take Marissya to safety," Gaelen commanded. "I will tend the Feyreisa."

"Nei,
I am her
lu'
tan.
I will not leave her any more than you." Bel dropped to his knees beside Ellysetta's rigid body, careful not to touch her as he sent a questing filament of Spirit into her mind. He backed out again just as quickly when the wild, enraged power of her tairen sensed his intrusion and responded with a scream of fury and a flare of searing magic. Whatever was attacking her, he couldn't get close enough to examine it. «
Rain? Where are you?»

"I am here." Rain shot over the edge of the terrace and slid down a column of Air just as Ellysetta's body flung itself into a fresh series of violent convulsions. Gaelen and Bel both leapt to catch and hold him when he lunged for Ellysetta.

"Do not," Bel hissed. "You are truemates. Touch her, and even without a completed bond, you'll feel it as strongly as she does."

A tortured scream tore from her throat, ending on a groaning rattle as the convulsions worsened, then blessedly tapered off. Ellysetta collapsed against the flagstones, trembling and gasping for air. Rain broke free of Bel's and Gaelen's grips and dropped to his knees beside her, scooping her limp body up in his arms.
"Shei'tani."

Her head rolled back in the crook of his arm. Her eyes opened, the pupils lengthened to catlike slits, the green irises radiant and glowing. "Rain." Her hand clutched his arm and then began to shove at him in frantic desperation as she tried to wriggle free of his hold. "Let me go. Quickly, before it starts again."

"I won't. Whatever this is, I won't just stand here while it tortures you." He would not release her, and no matter how hard she tried to break free, her slender body was no match for his strength.

"Teska,
Rain! Please." Already the pain was back, another brutal lash of it. Her body went rigid. Her jaw flexed, and her neck strained so hard each breath was a victory. This was going to be as bad as any seizure she'd ever had. And with Rain touching her skin to skin, he would feel her shattered emotions as if they were his own.

Rain's jaw clenched like an iron vise, the tendons in his neck standing out. "Tairen's scorching fire!" The backlash of his pain redoubled her own, and she screamed.

Gaelen and Bel dove towards them in a desperate effort to pull them apart.

"Let go, Rain, scorch you!" Gaelen snarled as Rain fought him off. "You're only making it worse—can't you see that? She's feeling your pain too. You're building a harmonic. Marissya!"

His sister spun a compulsion weave and thrust it into Rain's mind while Gaelen and Bel worked to pry Ellysetta free of Rain's arms. The weave reached enough of him that his grip loosened for an instant. Bel yanked Ellysetta free, and Gaelen wrestled Rain to the ground, pinning him there until some measure of sanity returned to his wild eyes.

The moment it did, Rain shoved Gaelen away and scrambled to his knees, crawling to Ellysetta's side. Her eyes were wide and frightened, her body shaking violently.

"Get…Papa." Each word was a hard-won fight. "He knows…what… to … do …
ahhh!"
The last word died in a wail as fire ripped through her and the world dissolved once more into shrieking agony.

Eld
~
Boura Fell

Muscles bulged in the burly Eld guard's back and thick arms as he swung the heavy
sel'dor
war hammer he called Boraz, the Bone Grinder. The hammer strike landed with a meaty thud and the loud crack of breaking bone.

Hanging from chains attached to the barbed
sel'dor
shackles clamped around his wrists, Shannisorran v'En Celay gave a guttural roar of pain as his right hip shattered. His body writhed, and the tremors sent arrows of fire shooting through him as splinters of bone tore through bruised muscle. The pain was devastating. Already it had gone far beyond his ability to contain. He'd felt great, searing arrows of it blast down the link the Mage's evil magic had unwittingly forged between Shan and Ellysetta Baristani, the daughter he'd not seen since her birth.

"How did you do it?" Across the room, High Mage Vadim Maur watched Shan's torture with icy eyes. "How did you and our lovely Elfeya manage to hide your daughter's magic from me?"

Shan sucked air into his lungs as he struggled to separate himself from the agony engulfing his body. He coughed and groaned as a fresh bout of pain racked him. His torture had begun with a simple but brutal pummeling before advancing to the hammer blows. Several of his ribs were broken, and with every breath, blood pooled in his mouth. He spat a mouthful of it on the ground.

"I know you engineered her escape, and I know you somehow bound her magic so I would not detect it."

Shan tossed back the strands of matted black hair covering his eyes. The guard had shattered Shan's ankles first, then his kneecaps, and now the first of his hips. He still had seven major joints to go, and he knew Maur wouldn't leave one of them whole whether he answered or not. He lifted his chin in a gesture that Elfeya had always bemoaned as a sure sign of his intractability and fixed unblinking eyes—a predator's stare—on the High Mage.

Maur's teeth clenched for a moment. Then he gave a cold smile. "Lord Death." He sneered the nickname Shan had earned many centuries ago, before finding his truemate, when he'd been the deadliest Fey warrior ever to walk the Fading Lands. "So arrogant, even now. I have not forgotten how the pair of you tried to help her escape my Mark in the Solarus. You failed, you know—I Marked her again—but you'll still spend the next thousand years begging me for death as a reward for your efforts. You and Elfeya both." He gave a short nod.

The guard swung his war hammer again.

The chains rattled as Shan's body jerked and shuddered from the force of the blow. His scream echoed off the black stone walls.
Pain is life,
he reminded himself, silently reciting the litany he had taught his
chadin
at the Academy in Tehlas.
Fey eat pain for breakfast. We jaff it on a cold night just to keep warm.

"Strip the flesh from his back," Maur ordered coldly. "Use the Fire whip. I don't want him bleeding to death, just close enough to it to make his mate eager to please me."

Shan's vision blurred as the guard circled around him, the Mage's favorite Fire-tipped whip clutched in his meaty hand.

The first blow seared him to his soul. He writhed as flesh ripped and scorched. He reeled as the shattered bones in his legs scraped and shredded his flesh from the inside out.
Ah, gods have mercy.
Maur just might break him this time.

«Shei'tan.»
Elfeya's voice, warm as a summer sun on the shores of Tairen's Bay, washed over him. «
I am here, beloved, I am with you. Together, we are strong.»

With an ease that would have driven Vadim Maur wild with rage had he known of it, Elfeya slipped into Shan's mind, circumventing all the dark weaves and
sel'dor
and black witchery the High Mage had employed to keep them isolated. She was there, with Shan as she had been since the day of their bonding, an inextricable part of his soul. His strength, his blessing, his greatest weakness. «
Leave me, Elfeya. Shield yourself. I cannot bear for you to suffer.»

«Nei, never. I will not let him break us. You are Shannisorran v'En Celay, the greatest champion the Fading Lands has ever known. You are a warrior of the Fey, and I am your truemate, a shei'dalin of great power. This Mage may hold our bodies, but he has no command over our souls.»

The second whipstroke shredded the flesh off his back. He flung his head back and screamed himself hoarse.

«Shan! Stay with me. Focus on the sound of my voice, beloved.»
When he didn't respond, her tone grew sharp as the Mage's whip. «
Speak to me, Fey!»
she barked. «
Who are you?»

She'd spent too many years of their life together eavesdropping in his mind as he drove his
chadins
to the end of their strength, then commanded them to eke out more. She was such a fierce, brave blade in her own right, his equal in every way. And she was right: Fey did not surrender, not to fear, not to pain, not to despair. They fought until their hearts burst in their chests. «
I am warrior,»
he gasped. «
I am Fey.»

«Kabei! And what is a warrior of the Fey? Tell me! Shout it out!»

The whip ripped a third stripe off his back, but this time his choked scream was not a mindless howl. This time it was a declaration of defiance ripped from his aching throat, each word a rasping challenge. "I am the steel no enemy can shatter." He thrust his chin out, met Maur's vile silver gaze, and snarled through gritted teeth, "I am the magic no dark power can defeat."

The High Mage smiled.

As the fourth lash fell, pain blinded him. He focused his mind on Elfeya's warmth and forced the cry from his burning lungs. "I am the rock upon which evil breaks like waves. I am Fey! Warrior of honor! Champion of Light!"

Shan sagged in his chains as the torment enveloped him in a hazy cloud of mind-numbing pain. He clung to consciousness and sanity by a thread, the words he'd just cried so defiantly repeating in his mind again and again, punctuated by the sound of Elfeya's quiet weeping.

An icy breath blew across his face, soft and taunting. "You will rot in darkness, Fey, while your mate serves my pleasure and your daughter surrenders her soul."

The mad sentience in Shan's soul roared with fury. Across the link that bound him to his child, her own beast screamed back in wild Rage. The next moment, a vast bolus of power blasted across the link, rushing into his broken body, searing him with a painful jolt. His beast seized the power, using it to feed his Rage. Shan's vision turned to black shadow lit with vengeful red sparks. "Not if I rip you limb from limb and feast on your bloody bones, Eld maggot." He lunged for the Mage, teeth bared as he cried,
"Ve sha Desriel!"