The Bonds of Blood (44 page)

“
Flip it over,” Grace
instructed, pulling out her silver dagger and handing it to
Maeven.

“I have a dagger,” he said reaching for
his own.

“Yes, I know you do, but this one is
made of silver; it must be silver as that is the Goddess’ ore.”
Maeven rolled his eyes at her but took the blade anyway. “Flip the
stone over, and on the opposite side inscribe ‘meit,’ which means
death in the ceremonial language.”

Maeven started to scrape the words on
the stone using Grace’s silver dagger.

This time when the earth quivered it
was not that of trying to be free of something; instead it was the
quivering of trying to accept something back. The quiver was almost
one of love; it was deep, low, and gentle. It made Jovian’s body
shiver, but this time he did not have to fight to stand. He turned
back to see the same grass that had entwined Angelica slowly wrap
itself around the Golem. If it was possible the Golem seemed to be
shrinking.

“There,” Maeven said, and as he
finished inscribing the last of the word “meit” on the tablet the
earth completely consumed the last of the Golem so completely that
there was no trace that it had ever been there.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR

_“W
hat happened here?” Jovian
asked as
they reined their horses in early
the next afternoon at the edge of the Chaundebar Plains.

From the look on her face, Grace was
asking herself the same question. Her eyebrows knitted together in
consternation, and the only answer that Jovian received was a
slight shaking of her head before she nudged her black mare
forward.

For the most part the field looked like
any other field except than it was filled with tall wisps of blue
grass instead of hay. The Chaundebar Plains spread as far as the
eye could see until off in the distance it joined with the pristine
silver blue of the Mountains of Nependier reaching like monoliths
into the puffy white clouds.

It was not the large expanse of grass
the color of the sea that caused them wonder, but instead off to
the left rose smoke from the smoldering black land where blue grass
should have been, as if the field had been put under some foul
torch and only that part burned.

A little ways ahead large flowers
swayed languidly in a slight breeze that rippled the grass, causing
it to look even more like the sea it could have passed for. The
flowers looked sad, as if they mourned what happened to the
blackened land.

They were no more than ten yards into
the Chaundebar Plains when Grace pulled Holly up short and waved a
hand at all of them to be silent. At first they didn’t hear
anything, and Jovian began to grow anxious at their delay; in fact,
he was about to voice this concern when finally he heard it
too.

Over the popping and hissing of the
charred land to their left, which still seemed to smolder in an
invisible fire, came the sound of hundreds of children weeping. The
weeping was not the sound of total despair, but the sound of lament
that had lasted for a long time, tears that were drawing to a
close, but the pain that caused it refused to let the mourning end.
The stifled cries came softly to their ears, as if they were from
far off, both slight, and yet echoing at the same time.

“So it is true what they say about
these plains?” Grace asked herself, wiping tears from her ancient
blue eyes; none of them could bring themselves to ask what was true
about these plains, for they were all stricken with remorse for the
weeping children somewhere off in the tall blue grass that swayed
peacefully as if not wanting to disturb, but seeking to comfort
those who cried.

Angelica, who was versed in lore and
legends, knew all too well what Grace thought about these plains.
It was said to be home to nature spirits, spirits that looked much
like human children. Unlike most nature spirits, like fairies and
elves and the like, sprites were really just that—spirits of fey
children. Sprets were their own race, but they did not take
corporeal form. All the same, there were ways to kill a
sprite.

Sprites were nature spirits that were
born with a specific flower. When the flower came to life, so too
did the sprite, never fading as long as the flower lived. It was
uncommon for sprites to bond to flowers that died each season, and
instead they were thought to populate the Chaundebar Plains where
the flowers came back year after year. During the time the flowers
slept, so did the sprites; but when the flower finally died, so
would the fey creature. However, natural death was a thing of
religion, the way of the physical vessel, and they were mourned for
their departed loved ones like humans mourned. Unnatural death, on
the other hand, like being burned alive, was one of the most
horrific things that could happen to such loving
spirits.

In horror Angelica looked to her left,
tears blurring the image of the black smoke curling from the
ground. It seemed sacrilegious to have killed such beings, as they
were the Goddess’ children. Having no parents in the strictest
sense, sprites were given life from the earth, one of the Goddess’
bodies.

Suddenly she knew the reason why the
sprites wept.

“No,” she moaned helplessly. All the
flowers had been burned. Angelica tried not to let herself think of
the ghost-like children that must have stood by watching as their
lives in this land were destroyed under the brutal fire. Unable to
do anything to save themselves, their family watching in horror
just as helpless to avert the disaster that was befalling their
loved ones.

Angelica turned her head away as more
tears burned her cheeks, and she wiped at her nose, which was
already starting to swell with repressed tears.

Then they came.

At first when they saw them it was only
as an outline. Slight and indistinct as the hollow weeping that
drifted through the smoke clouding their vision. Then, as if a fog
was being burned off by the morning sun, the smoke drifted away,
and the image of hundreds of children marching across the field
toward the charred land was all they could see.

The sprites trudged across the field,
heads bowed, fat tears rolling from their eyes, and while they were
all of varying shapes and sizes, one thing was true about all of
them: none of them looked any older than three years of
age.

The naked, transparent children
continued walking across the field toward the charred part of the
Chaundebar Plains. Each one carried a single flower, each one
ghostly and different than the other, and Angelica realized in a
wash of more tears that the flowers they carried were the flowers
of their fallen friends.

In an instant she was filled with a
grief so profound, so deep, that she could not have spoken if she
had tried. She thought about her father, about her home. She wept
for those she left behind, and most of all for Amber. At that
moment, even if it was the only time she had ever felt this way,
she worried that they would never find Amber. She was terrified
that Amber was lost to them forever.

It would not be the last time she felt
that way.

The death march of the sprites began to
draw to an end as they reached their destination, and slowly, one
at a time, each sprite stepped to the barren land that used to be
home to their families, bowed their heads in farewell, and dropped
ghostly flowers onto the smoldering earth.

The flowers never made it and
disappeared in a wisp of silver incandescence to the heavens like
silver candlelight drifting up into the overcast sky.

So it went for hours as the dirge of
the wind and the weeping of the sprites continued.

The weeping stopped at some point, and
the air filled with the sound of muttering. The sprites turned
their attention to the gathered humans.

Grace dismounted and walked toward the
assembled line of hostile looking sprites. In an attempt to show
them that this group meant them no harm, she held her arms out
slightly in front of her, palms cupped and raised to the heavens
above.

Much of what she said to win
their trust was lost to Jovian as his attention was repeatedly
drawn to the smoldering land.
Could this
path really lead to Amber?
The implications
that surrounded this discovery were vast, and all Jovian could
think about was the end to their search, the end of their journey,
and the return home. This charred part of land, which signified
death and destruction for the poor sprites that called it home,
meant so many good things to him and his family. Most of all that
his family would once more be whole:
but
will we be the same after this?

Jovian could not help but
think of what might come after. It was apparent now that his eldest
sisters were both sorceresses. What did that mean exactly besides
that their lives would never again be the same? Would they have to
go away? Would they be able to live on the plantation and continue
lives as normal? Jovian was almost certain that they would not be
able to live as mere mortals ever again once the change took them
both, if it had not already claimed Amber.
Grace did say that the change comes to different people at
different times of their twenty-first year.

As his thoughts wandered over these
contemplations and he studied the path, he slowly began to realize
that the land had not in fact been burned. He was not sure exactly
what had happened to it for it was black, but it was not blackened
earth that he was seeing any longer, it was withered grass. Grass
so withered that it had fallen limp and blackened in death, as if
something had drained the life out of it so completely that it had
also drained its color, leaving it looking like the blackness of
the Otherworld had claimed it while it remained on
earth.

But why then is it
smoking?
Jovian wondered creasing his brows
in thought.
And who could have such power
to do such a thing?

Shaking his head, he reluctantly turned
his attention back to the sprites in time to see them accept
Grace’s hand of trust.

“Dear Mother’s Children, what happened
here?” Grace started, her voice thick and heavy with tears and
grief.

“She took them away,” one in the front
of the line whispered in a mournful tone. The wind carried her
voice to Jovian’s ears and he heard the pain in it, the slight
trace of tears not wept out yet.

“She took them all away,” a smaller
sprite to the right of the first whimpered and her voice, too, was
carried on the wind to them making their responses sound hollow and
distant, yet eerily audible as their mourning had been when the
group first entered the Chaundebar Plains.

“Who took them away?” Grace asked
stepping closer to the assembled spirits.

“We did not see her face …”

“No face …”

“But we felt her power.”

“Such power … hideous
power.”

“And she burned the land?” Grace asked
confused. “Who would do such a thing?”

“Not her, the hideous power killed them
all …”

“Dalua power …”

“Pure dalua,” the one who appeared to
be the leader said.

“Burned them all …”

“Took them all from us …”

“Right to the Black Gates …”

“Straight to the Otherworld …” A
collective shiver seemed to run through the line of sprites at that
time.

Grace turned to look at the charred
land with new eyes, horror written on every age line of her face.
She placed fingers long gone cold to her lips to stifle a sob; the
tears could not be halted however, and burned in stark contrast to
her fingers.

“Who could do this?” she asked again,
but this time the question was not pointed to anyone specific and
therefore went unanswered.

“Excuse me,” Joya said nudging Daisy
forward. “I am sorry for your loss, but were there any others with
this woman?”

“Two others …”

“Two others and a dark force
…”

“Hapless victims …”

“Hapless to the darkness they travel
with …”

“A boy …”

“A boy, and a girl …”

“Ensorcelled …”

“Ensorcelled by the darkness
…”

“But how do we find them?” Joya asked
urgently. It seemed that she was the only one that could find her
tongue with the almost concrete evidence that their sister was
close at hand.

“Follow the …”

“Path you must …”

“To find …”

“To find that which you seek
…”

“We must go then!” Joya
exclaimed.

“Wait, there is something …”

“Something we must tell
you.”

At that point the assembled line turned
their attention to Angelica and Jovian, and the power of the
sprites whispered over their skin like silken flowers being slid
over their flesh.

“Don’t be afraid …” the leader
chimed.

“Don’t be afraid to do that
…”

“That which must be done …”