A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) (4 page)

Annbell held open her arms, and he groaned. She smiled.

"None of that; we have to see what Sara thinks of this," she told him. He stepped into her embrace and screwed his eyes tight against the suffocating embrace of the Realm of Earth.

Sara's feeble hands skimmed back and forth over the chunk of wood resting on her knees. Her eyes were unfocused and her head cocked to the side as if she was listening to something Maeven couldn't hear. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, steadying herself. Then, with great effort, she clasped the wood in her right hand, and trembled.

Quickly she released it. Her eyes fluttered open to rest on her sister's face.

"Well?" Annbell asked, setting her cup of tea down. "What do you think?"

Sara picked up the wood with a grimace and placed it on her desk, where it sat, a relic of darkness on the cool surface. It might have been Maeven’s imagination, but the length of wood seemed to radiate a cold gloom. He shivered, wrapping his arms tightly around his chest.

"I don't think it was a caustic attack," Sara confirmed what Headmaster Farrack and apparently Guardian Azra had been saying.

"What do you think it is?" Annbell asked, leaning back in her chair opposite her sister.

Sara looked off toward the west. Maeven tried to follow her gaze, but saw nothing but the wall of her office. Whatever she looked at was beyond the walls of the keep.

"I don't want to say that it’s this rising darkness Azra keeps talking about, but something
is
happening. Chaotic wyrd." She nearly whispered the last, gazing down at the wood.

"Alarist?" Annbell asked, seemingly without the aversion to the word everyone else displayed.

Sara gave a slight nod. "I don't know what else it could be."

"Why are they stirring?" Annbell asked. "After so long, weren't they all killed off?"

"Apparently not," Sara said. "Probably went into hiding. Who knows what they've been doing; maybe even recruiting more."

Maeven shuddered, imagining those wyrders sworn to Arael gathering strength once more. He hadn't been alive to see the Splitting of the World, but he knew that alarists had played a big role in the rise of darkness and the fall of the angel Pharoh LaFaye. If they were on the rise again, it couldn't mean anything good.

"But who knows," Sara said. "Maybe this was an isolated incident, and it won't happen again."

“Clara,” Devenstar whispered, dropping to the bottom step at the end of Kelpie Way. Cianna gazed back at the expanse of the jade bridge stretching the length of the Realm of Water. The swampy land it traversed ended a few miles back, to be replaced by lush, green fields. Behind her the fields tapered off into desert.

“We can’t leave her!” Pi said, addressing Flora directly. “We have to look for her.”

“How would you suggest we do that?” their teacher responded.

“Go in there!” Pi said, her desperate desire to find her girlfriend evident in her voice.

Cianna sat beside Devenstar and rubbed his shoulder. Clara was his sister. Cianna tried to imagine what it would be like to lose a loved one. Maybe her mind was distorted by her gift, though. She could never think of a person as completely gone when she saw ghosts all day long.

“No one ever truly leaves us,” Cianna said to him by way of comfort. “They are always with us.”

“And you know because you’re a necromancer,” Pi said, overhearing Cianna.

“That’s the consensus.” Cianna nodded.

“Can you feel her? Can you sense her?” Pi pressed, and Devenstar shook his head, a moan escaping his lips.

Cianna stood, gathered Flora and Pi to her, and took them a ways away from where the blond man slumped at the base of the jade bridge, his hands cradling his head and knotted in his long hair.

“I have spent every night since we lost her looking for her soul among the kelpies, and I’ve found no trace of her.”

“But you wouldn’t,” Flora cut in. “If she had already crossed over, you wouldn’t feel her.”

Cianna wasn’t sure if that was true or not. She’d never taken the time to sit and think if the souls that were coming to her were from the earthly plane, or from some distant afterlife. She imagined that they were earthbound; after all, why would they come to her from a different realm?

“So there’s a chance she’s still alive?” Pi asked.

“Why are we even discussing this?” Cianna asked, watching the young, dark-haired boy, Chy, trying to comfort Deven. “Isn’t she a sorceress? Can’t we just wait for her to meet us here?”

“We haven’t seen her go through her trials,” Flora said, as if that meant something specific to Cianna.

“But sorcerers are immortal, correct?” Cianna asked.

“Only
after
their trials,” Pi told her. “She hasn’t been through those yet. Believe me, I would know.”

“Doesn’t it happen during their twenty-first year?” Cianna asked.

“
Yes
,” Pi said impatiently. “She is still twenty-one.”

“We would have known. The trials take a while, and she hadn’t gone through them before we left the academy,” Flora agreed with Pi.

Pi was silent, the wind tugging at the long lengths of her black hair and ruffling the folds of her green dress. Cianna looked back toward the marshes, where she could feel the kelpies.

Cianna took a deep breath. “All we can do is look. But I doubt we’ll be able to find where she went over, anyway. The kelpies probably won’t let us through.”

“They’re spirits — can’t you control them?” Pi asked.

Cianna remembered the kelpies responding to her energy, but she’d never truly felt as though she controlled them; maybe more like she’d kept them in check. She
had
ordered them to consume their enemies, but that wasn’t really controlling them, just giving their desire to kill a direction.

“There’s no telling. They aren’t exactly spirits any longer, but some residue of the soul left behind and changed by the ages,” Cianna mumbled.

“All we can do is try,” Flora said. “Pi, gather your brother. I will check on Devenstar.”

Cianna knew they wouldn’t be able to make it all the way back to the place where Clara had gone over, but she hoped they could make it close enough that maybe she could feel something of the girl, if distance was a factor.

She stood alone, staring out into the grass swaying in the breeze, thinking that in the mountains she called home snow was probably starting to stick. She hated the cold, but that’s all she had to remind her of home; and now, here, surrounded by near-summer temperatures, she missed the snow. She missed the twins.

Cianna closed her eyes and sent out a mental call to Clara. Normally she would feel a stirring in the spirit world, as if each ghost was looking around them to see if anyone recognized the call. This time she didn’t feel that.

She opened her eyes as the others joined her. A single thought plagued her, one that she wouldn’t voice and give false hope to Pi and Deven: Clara wasn’t among the dead. Clara lived. And if she lived, that meant they had to find her.

Sara leaned back in her chair, staring out the large office window at the snow falling steadily outside. The first week of snowfall in the mountains was always the worst, falling as hard and as resolute as any rainstorm. She seldom thought it was pretty; more a battering of the frozen elements, jamming up traffic, slowing commerce, and nearly shutting down everything in the northern half of the Realm of Earth until it stopped and was able to be cleared away.

Hours ago it had tapered off to a light snowfall with big, lazy flakes. The kind of pretty snow that made her want to slip into bed, not into the Orb of Aldaras that rested on the table before her, glowing softly with a light of its own.

She was getting a headache again; in fact, she was waiting for Vanparaness to bring her tea before she tried for what she needed now.

Annbell said there was a sickness in the realm, one that Sara couldn’t feel. While either of them could have used the Orb of Aldaras, Annbell chose instead to divine through more natural means. To her twin, the orb fell within the realm of sorcery and wyrd; less
natural
than her druidic wisdom. How wyrd could ever be anything other than natural, Sara didn’t know.

She sighed and straightened herself. She couldn’t wait for Van any longer. At this rate she would be prostrate on her bed by the time he brought the tea, and like every other day lately, she would be fast asleep before the afternoon Senate session. With a flick of her hand the office door locked, and the lights dimmed to the point that the orb was the main illumination, other than the overcast light filtering through her windows.

Sara slipped her fingers around the sphere, cool and smooth beneath her hands. She shivered; it was strange how the orb could remain so cool despite the temperature of the room she sat in. She pressed her fingertips to the glass harder, like talons trying to cleave their way into it. With a disjointed sense of vertigo, Sara’s mind came free and plunged into the orb.

Normally the Orb of Aldaras was only used to commune with the provinces and races of the Realm of Earth, but she had also found that through the relic she was able to attune herself with the realm itself, as if the orb was some extension of the realm’s spirit. If a realm had a spirit.

She closed her eyes as her spirit merged with the orb, and she was no longer aware of the office, but instead surrounded by the filmy, misty interior of the Orb of Aldaras. Sara focused all of her wyrd on the realm, on the sickness within the realm, and wondered fleetingly if it was the chaos dwarves making the realm ill. If it was, could she then wipe their race from the realms without repercussion?

The feeling inside the orb became hostile, and Sara took that as her answer that, no, she couldn’t commit genocide.

“Show me the sickness,” Sara told the mist around her. It swirled for a moment, as if it didn’t know what she was talking about. “There’s sickness in the realm, show it to me. What ails the Realm of Earth?”

The mist swirled again. Sara had a moment of dizziness, and then she was standing outside the Guardian’s Keep, looking on the snow-covered courtyard. The snowfall had created havoc, and even now servants bustled about, trying to clean up as much of it as they could, fruitless against the onslaught of yet more flakes.

She was about to ask another question when mist invaded the scene and she felt another shifting of space, a relocation to somewhere else, someplace that felt miles from the Guardians’ Keep.