Authors: Kristen Britain

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #fantasy, #Epic

Blackveil (86 page)

BOOK: Blackveil

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Grandmother closed her eyes and centered herself. Quite a while ago, she had sensed the forest being distracted and God had told her to awaken the Sleepers before the “others.” Now she could feel that those others were here threatening everything she’d worked for.

Gubba snuffled.
“Yelt,”
she said, her eyes wide, showing fear.

Yelt?
Did she mean the Elt? Eletians were here? It certainly explained the forest’s interest and God’s ardent command. She concentrated more deeply and sensed the bright spirits not far from the castle.

“They must be killed,” Grandmother said, but before she could plan an organized assault, Gubba shouted something and her groundmites took up their weapons. Hooting and yelling, they charged in a disorderly pack deeper into the grove.

This would not do, Grandmother fumed, but it was already done. Her men came to her side.

“What’re they after this time?” Griz asked.

“They are hunting Eletians.”

“Eletians! What are those unholy creatures doing here?”

“Perhaps the same as we.”

Griz suddenly crumpled, the shaft of a white arrow jutting from his chest. Another dropped one of the groundmites that had remained with Gubba.

“Take cover!” Grandmother cried.

How did the Eletian arrows find them through the trees like that? There could not be a straight line of sight. Deglin and Cole rushed her behind the bole of one of the huge trees with Min and Sarat. Lala calmly sat at their feet.

One thing was now for certain: Grandmother would have her blood.

LADY OF LIGHT

T
he castle beguiled Karigan, drew her to explore beyond the chamber they’d entered, so she tucked the feather into her braid as she’d seen Graelalea do and limped across the chamber, leaving behind the sound of groundmites pounding on the doors and Grant whimpering against the wall. He’d curled into himself, folded into a compact ball. She left behind Yates and Ard, and the Eletians who sat in vigil around Graelalea’s shrouded body. No one stopped her or asked where she was going.

Somehow she was supposed to help the Sleepers and she needed to step away to think, to retreat from the noise, and from the emotions each one of her remaining companions projected, their confusion, sorrow, fear, and anger. She felt all those things, too, and did not need them augmented by the others. At least they were safe from the groundmites, if not from their noise. Ealdaen said they’d never be able to force their way into the castle.

She followed a winding corridor out of the chamber, her feet raising layers of dust, the bonewood tapping on marble. The curve of the corridor tantalized her—she wanted to see what was hidden around the bend—but around and around she went, and though she had a sense of spiraling inward, the curves grew no tighter, at least not in any way she could perceive. Her idea of a seashell, like one of the large conch shells her father’d collected from the Cloud Islands, remained apt, the smooth pearlescent walls scrolling inward to its core. What would she find when she reached it?

Very soon she had her answer. The corridor opened into a vast, round chamber that soared upward like the other tower, but unlike the other, it contained no stairs winding to the top, and no bridges crossing its heights.

Upon pedestals stood four statues of winged Eletians, each perfect in form, the feathers of their wings as delicate and airy as the real thing, not at all resembling the stone they were carved from. The statues aspired to flight and the tower was high enough. Somehow Karigan knew that only the open sky would free them, and she felt the conflict of yearning to ascend with them, but of being Earthbound.

On the floor were several clumps of bones, faded fabric, and shards of steel weaponry. A spider, a normal-sized house spider, spun a web in the rib cage of a nearby skeleton. There was no other evidence of creatures living or dead, not even mouse tracks in the dust.

The dust caused the floor to appear a dull gray, but when she scraped her boot across it, the floor shone obsidian underneath. More investigation revealed some pattern inlaid in crystalline quartz too large to uncover entirely. She thought she would move on and continue her exploration, to find out what other parts of the castle would be revealed, when she heard the sound of footsteps behind her.

She turned to find Ard emerging from the corridor with bow and nocked arrow pointed directly at her.

“Ard—what?”

“My true mission,” he said, “is to see that you don’t survive yours. I kept hoping something else might take you so I wouldn’t have to do this, but you kept surviving.”

At first Karigan could only gape, but then it dawned on her. “You ... you were there,” she said, her voice barely rising above a whisper, but carrying easily across the cavernous room. “You were really there, weren’t you, when I was caught in that creature’s web.”

Ard nodded. “I thought those monsters would finish you. No luck, so here I am. I regret this, but I’ve no choice.”

“But why? At least tell me that. What have I ever done to you?” Karigan stepped back, her heel nudging a pile of bones that rattled. A leg bone rolled away.

“Duty to my clan,” he replied. “To protect the marriage of my lady to the king. You are a threat, and anything that threatens my lady must be destroyed.”

Karigan’s heart thudded. Others knew of her feelings for the king? Someone high up thought her enough of a threat to murder her? The captain had warned her that with her knighthood she’d entered the thorny world of the royal court, but this went beyond politics! Or maybe she was just being naive.

Ard tautened the bow string. “I do this for my lady, and with her blessing.” He loosed the arrow, but it flew wild, hitting the wall behind her. Ard’s knees folded and he crumpled to the floor, a white Eletian arrow piercing his throat. Karigan’s own knees went weak.

Ealdaen appeared from the corridor with bow in hand, and he glanced briefly at Ard before stepping over the forester’s body.

“I saw him follow you out,” Ealdaen said. “He had an interest in you all along, but not knowing the ways of your people, I could not discern his intent. Until now.”

Karigan’s grip on the bonewood was clammy. It was too much betrayal to sort out all at once. Ard as murderer, with Estora’s blessing. Estora, who had been her friend.

And now she was alone with Ealdaen who’d once tried to kill her. He strode toward her.

“Did you kill Ard so you could finish me off yourself?” She extended the bonewood to staff length with a shake and stood in a defensive position.

Ealdaen paused, a bemused expression on his face. “You are truly difficult to understand at times, you and your people. I am not here to kill you, Galadheon, but to aid you. The reason for hunting you in the past no longer exists. You are free of the tainted wild magic.”

Karigan released a long breath and relaxed her stance.

“Omens and prophecies are not set in stone,” Ealdaen continued. “A river will change course. You’ve a particular unpredictability, Galadheon, one that all the prophecies of the crown prince cannot pin down.”

“Maybe Eletians are too set in their ways,” Karigan replied, not so ready to forgive one who almost killed her based on the unreliability of prophecy.

He bowed his head accepting her words without recrimination. “It is clear that you’ve a purpose here, which I’m only just beginning to understand. Graelalea must have known something of it for she passed to you one of her feathers. And you are Laurelyn-touched.”

He was right, she was here for a purpose, drawn by an apparition she’d seen one snowy night along the Arrowdale Road. Why she hadn’t remembered that purpose before, she did not know, but it galled her to learn that yet once again other forces were directing her life. She’d work out her feelings about that later—she’d more pressing concerns now.

“I am here to help the Sleepers,” she said. “I was told this.”

“By whom?”

“A woman in the light.” Karigan thought her words wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else or under different circumstances.

“I find it interesting that you found your way to this chamber of your own accord.”

“Why?”

Ealdaen produced his moonstone and strode to the center of the chamber. The shadows cast by the moonstone shifted as he walked, making the statues seem to follow him with their gazes, their wings flexing for flight. Walls of translucent light rose from the quartz in the floor.

“You saw a small version of this in Telavalieth,” Ealdaen said. “You called it a moondial. This is Castle Argenthyne’s moondial.” He glanced at the skeleton near his feet. “I knew the defenders of this tower. They stayed to the last. Alas, the castle did fall.” He gazed around the chamber some more. “The gnomon is missing. Just like in Telavalieth.”

The phases of the moon shone in the light that bathed the floor, and the stars, too, transforming the floor into a celestial map. Beneath them, in the very center of the chamber, was a large round piece of quartz that had the shading and subtlety of a silvery full moon. It was, by magnitudes, larger than the moondial in Telavalieth.

“How would you awaken the Sleepers?” Karigan asked.

Ealdaen lowered his moonstone and there was that disconcerting sense of the world shifting with the light.

“We would sing to them,” he replied.

“That’s all?”

“There is a certain song, and a certain way of singing it. A calling it is. The Sleepers choose to heed or ignore it. But yes, that is all.”

Before Karigan could question him further, another light coalesced in the chamber, a liquid column of light just like the one she had seen that night in Arrowdale. But the figure within was clearer this time: a woman with hair flowing about her shoulders and her gown touched by no earthly breeze.

Ealdaen fell immediately to his knee and bowed his head. Every song and tale of Argenthyne Karigan ever heard flowed through her mind and this time she knew immediately who stood before her—Laurelyn, Laurelyn the Moondreamer; Laurelyn, the queen of lost Argenthyne, sweet Silvermind.

Ealdaen,
the woman of light said,
rise.

Ealdaen did so, though at first hesitant; he slowly raised his face to meet her gaze. “I thought never to look upon you again, my queen.”

Nor I, you, but it heartens me to see you here now for this unfolding.

They spoke at length in Eletian and although Karigan could not understand the conversation, she felt grief and anguish in their words. There was a shared history between the two, a history Ealdaen was reliving by having come home.

Excluded by their language and conversation, Karigan thought to leave them to give them privacy, but she was caught by surprise when Ealdaen spoke again in the common tongue.

“I am here to redeem myself,” he said.

So be it,
Laurelyn replied. She turned her gaze upon Karigan, and Karigan was arrested by the queen’s eyes of midnight blue, her appearance far, far clearer than that night in Arrowdale.

Daughter of Kariny, you are here at last. My influence is stronger here, but still it wanes, and soon it will vanish entirely. The powers of the forest have striven to vanquish me altogether. I still fight, and here within the castle I am a little protected.

“How do you expect me to help the Sleepers?” Karigan demanded. “Why me?”

You can cross thresholds, the liminal line, and by doing so, you will lead the Sleepers to safety. Daughter of Kariny, you can step through layers of the world.

Karigan could not remember ever being told this, and yet she knew it as if someone had explained it all to her before. Her ability to fade was really the ability to stand on that threshold, but her ability was meager, even with her brooch augmenting it. It took some additional force to push her across, like the wild magic that had once allowed her to pass through the ages to the time of the First Rider.

“I do not know what to do,” Karigan said.

I will tell you,
Laurelyn replied.

BOOK: Blackveil

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