Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) (21 page)

For a time Teia put aside all that troubled her and wrapped herself up in the warmth of family, but eventually the evening had to end. Tevira had a pair of sleepy-eyed boys to take home and Ailis a young husband to attend. Whilst Ana busied herself with clearing bowls and cups, Teir took up a pitchwood torch to light her way back to Drwyn.

‘I don’t need a light, Da,’ Teia said, settling her coat around her shoulders. ‘I can make my own now.’

A thread of power was all she needed to spin a globe of pale yellow and set it hovering above her shoulder. Ytha would no doubt have words to say about that come the morning, but with a spike of defiance she decided that was for the morning to worry about. Its gentle glow chased a look of consternation across Teir’s face. ‘Macha’s ears, girl, give me some warning!’

Teia stifled a giggle. ‘Sorry. I told you I have powers.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Teir blew out his moustaches, thumping the torch back into its ring on the wall. ‘I just did not expect to see them in my own home.’

He reached out one long finger and cautiously stroked the surface of the globe. It swung around his fingertip and over the back of his hand, clinging like a soap bubble, slick as a fish. It reflected in his dark eyes like a miniature sun.

‘My own daughter,’ he murmured. ‘I never imagined this fate for you, Teisha. A home, a husband, children to gladden your heart, but not this. Gifted with powers I cannot begin to comprehend.’ He scrubbed his hand on his trews. ‘It tingles.’

Teia picked up the rest of her things. Tevira had given her some sturdy winter clothes her sons had outgrown, which made quite a bundle, and there were a few of Ana’s sweet mooncakes wrapped up in a cloth.

Arms full, she watched her father staring at the little yellow globe between them. Its light was not kind to the lines on his face, and he had more grey in his hair now, too, she noticed. When had that happened? In the space of a season her father had become an old man, his hair the colour of burned bones.

Premonition yawned its black maw in the rear of her mind, threatening to swallow her completely. Clutching her thread of power she flung herself away from the abyss. The yellow orb flared painfully bright for a moment, then resumed its steady glow. Behind her eyes, the void closed again.

Teia let out a shaky breath. Sunk in the bundle of children’s clothes, her fingers unclenched. Relief flooded her like the blood coming back to her cramped fingers. Just for a moment she had imagined some terrible future lay ahead for her family and she could not bear to see it. Not tonight. She would behold it eventually, of that there was no doubt, but please by all the stars, not tonight.

‘Does he still hurt you, Teisha?’

‘No, Da.’

He did not look at her. ‘I will never forgive him for that. He is the chief and I am his liegeman as I was his father’s, for whatever that is worth, but I cannot forgive him.’

‘He knows no other way,’ she said softly. ‘“When you must bed down in the same cave as an ice-bear, you learn how not to wake him.”’

Her mother had used that old proverb many a time about her father. Recognition brought a ghost of a smile to lift the ends of Teir’s moustaches. ‘So wise, little Teisha.’

Finally he dragged his eyes away from the globe and fixed them on her face. He pitched his voice low, though there was no one but Ana to hear and she was singing to herself over the dishes.

‘I spoke to some of the men, on the hunt. They are uneasy about Drwyn’s ambitions, for much the same reasons as you. But they think they are too few and that Ytha has so filled his ears with promises of glory that he could not hear them, even if he wanted to listen. I dare not bring them all together to strengthen their voices.’ Teir rested his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them. ‘I tried, sweetling, but they are too fearful of the Speaker to say a word against her.’

She dipped her head to press her cheek against his hand. She had known as soon as she saw his expression that he had no good news. It had been a small hope to begin with, so it was no great disappointment to see it wither and die. She had always known that in the end, it would come down to her. She simply wished she knew what she was supposed to do. Her dreams had shown her nothing new for a week or more, though the Hound had leaped silently through her mind twice more since that first lesson with Ytha. Each time she saw it, she was convinced it was gaining ground.

‘I’ll think of something, Da. Don’t worry.’

‘Now who seeks to pit her powers against the Elder Gods?’ He chuckled and tweaked her chin to make her smile, the way he used to when she was small.

‘There’s a long way to go before I’m ready for that.’

‘Is she giving you lessons?’

‘Every day. Simple things, like these lights – she doesn’t share her secrets freely, but I’m learning everything she shows me.’

‘Is it difficult? Doing this?’ He gestured at the globe.

‘No. Once she’s shown me how to do something, it’s as if I’ve always known the trick of it and only needed to be reminded. The hardest part is not letting her know how easy it is.’

Teir leaned forward to press a kiss to her brow. His eyes were grave; the creases in his leathery face looked deeper, or maybe that was just the light. ‘Have a care, Teisha. I mistrust what she has planned for you.’

‘So do I.’

She kissed her father’s cheek, called farewell to her mother. Ana scurried out to hug her with wet hands, apologised for them and then hugged her again regardless. With many smiles and promises to visit again as soon as she could, Teia walked away from her parents and into the dark.

The falcon shape fluttered apart and the Leahn youth stretched back into human form, sprawled panting in the snow. Blood from a wound to his neck had soaked his shirt collar; the salt-sweet metallic smell tickled the snow leopard’s nostrils. Savin felt its hunger leap, the claws tighten, even without him willing it.

Another day he would have let himself relax and ride the great cat’s will as it tore into its prey, but he was here for answers, not appetite. He had to learn what this shivering pup knew, and neither of them had the time to waste with questions. The cat bared its teeth, lips curling back with resentment at being reined in – always a risk with predator species, that concentration would slip and allow the hot red tide of instinct to take over – and the boy gagged, trying to turn his head away from the beast’s foul breath.

Savin lifted one huge silvery paw and placed it carefully just below Gair’s throat, leaned in a little to make the point that the cat had more than enough speed and strength to overpower a wounded human. Through the animal’s pads he felt the boy’s heartbeat race.

‘What do you want, Savin?’ Gair gasped.

Such a happy accident, running into him here, well outside the span of the Western Isles’ wards, alone and unprepared. It was almost too easy.

You
.

He reached for the Leahn’s thoughts. Saw the frantic shapes skittering beneath the shifting colours, and met no resistance. Still only half-trained – what were the Guardians teaching their apprentices these days?

This
.

The boy scrambled for the Song to throw up some kind of defence, but Savin shouldered through it as easily as one of those Arkadian paper screens. A gasp of indrawn breath. Eyes flying wide with the sudden cold shock of violation – grey, Savin noted, fringed with those extravagant lashes some young men had that women spent hours with cosmetics and combs trying to achieve.

Colours enfolded him, a hundred shifting shades of them in a gauzy tangle. Shoals of thought eddied through them and flashed their silver sides, like yellowtails fleeing a shark. Pleased by the imagery he chuckled to himself, and with a hooked claw of will sliced his way into Gair’s memories.

The boy screamed.

A variation on the ward for silence muted the noise before it could grate on Savin’s nerves too badly. He paid no attention to the gaping mouth, the corded neck; his attention was bent inwards, on the trove of curiosities he had exposed.

First, a place to start. He twisted the claw into the memories and pulled. They spilled out in a great colourful mess, each one glinting and glittering like sunlight refracting off a thick hoar frost, like the dust from a trapped moth’s wings. Thousands of tiny instants of colour and sound and taste, constantly turning; quite beautiful, really, in the scattering, maddening way of a kaleidoscope. Sifting through them, he found the heart of a pattern, touched it.

A boy, nine or ten summers old, lay on his back on a flat rock warmed by summer sunshine. The drowsy drone of bees wafted to and fro on the upland breeze. He had a hand raised above his face to shield it from the sun’s glare as he studied something far overhead.

Savin traced the slow turn of the pattern outwards. An eagle in flight, hanging motionless in the blue upturned bowl of a northern sky; an idle murmur of music becoming a full-throated cry; another eagle perched on the rock, flapping red-gold wings like a fledgling trying his strength on the edge of the nest.

Interesting.

The earth fell away and the pattern branched apart into a riot of others, clustering like flowers on a dog rose. Savin flicked through them faster now, disregarding the failures, the shapes that wouldn’t hold, until he came to another efflorescence, each bright whorl a subtly different shade. New shapes. Spotted owl. Finch. Eagle. Wolf. Eagle again. Back to the wolf, and there the memories tangled, twining together, woven around a single scintillant point.

He touched it, and felt the warm summer-raindrop burst of a kiss. Sudden confusion, shot through with pleasure: a first kiss, then. How sweet. A trawl of the myriad branches of the pattern brought him the woman’s face. Startlingly blue eyes, short, silky hair, skin the colour of cinnamon. Archly pretty in the clever, confident way of a cat. Even more interesting.

Arrested by a sudden adolescent prurience, Savin lingered there in the roil of the boy’s recollections. Wanting to see where that kiss led, to lift the veil on the boy’s fevered dreams and know his most intimate secrets. It led to another kiss, this one burning with the red heat of desire long banked now erupting into flame. Dizzying, falling. Savin shivered as remembered sensation washed over him. Skin and curve and wet silk enfolding, lifting and crashing over and down into peace, and then, only then—

Bowed shins. Twisted ankles. The blurry brown-yellow thumbprints of old bruises. The coiling urgency in his own belly stilled.

Really? He waved away the ward; he had to know.

You have feelings for her? A cripple?

‘Please . . .’ The boy found his voice, a rasping wreck of a thing. He twisted weakly under the snow leopard’s paw, fresh scarlet seeping into the churned snow around him.

Apparently he did have feelings for her. How bizarre.

Move on. Discard the woman for now, return to the start of this particular branch of the pattern. Lessons. Masters, some familiar, some not. Sift their words for meaning, hints. Nothing. Alderan, then; a new pattern. Skip back to the start of it. Snatches of conversation echoed in the vault of the boy’s head.

—have tremendous potential, Gair, but there is work to do to unlock it—

Wasn’t there just? His gift was rough as unplaned timber.

—all that preserves the Veil between the worlds—

Yes, yes, so you keep saying.

—what you showed me on the
Kittiwake
I have absolutely no doubt that you’re up to the task—

What task would that be? Savin followed the threads, fast as thought; tried to piece together the tumbled fragments but found nothing. His stretched concentration began to fray.

What has he told you?
he demanded.
What?

No answer. The boy’s face had drained of all colour with shock, or maybe just the cold. His eyelids fluttered, lips stretched wide in a rictus of pain. A frown stitched itself across Savin’s forehead and the cat hissed, perplexed by alien emotion. He’d best finish this, whilst there was still time.

Deeper into the patterns, then. Seek out what was buried. Perhaps Alderan had some new trick, or a long-held skill he’d kept secret; something that would enable him to hide who knew what in the folds of a living mind. Savin knew him well, better than almost anyone, but that didn’t mean the old bastard hadn’t concealed something from him.

Old grievances stung anew. Renewed fury began to lap around his mind like a sea of flames. It would be just typical. The Guardian had always tried to thwart him, to control him; Savin’s earliest memories were of
no
and
can’t
and
must not
. From his parents, from his teachers, always trying to make him into something he was not and never allowing him to be what he was.

Back he raced through the boy’s memory, tracing the twists and turns down, down into the very heart of the web. The images were less complex there, surrounded by simpler emotions. Pleasure at learning to sail a dinghy along a craggy, crumpled coastline. Sleepy satisfaction after a long day in the sun and sea air. Still nothing. Further back, skimming through childish joys: an eagle feather, a pebble with a hole in it, becoming progressively simpler as the spiral narrowed, funnelling down to a first startled breath, to sleep, back to a blessed darkness and the all-consuming rhythm of a mother’s pulse.