Firebrand

  The avatar stopped struggling and seemed to gaze up at her through slits in the visor of the winged helm. More sparks erupted as the knots rubbed against the protections. The symbols appeared to be wounded, slowing their glide across steel. Some of the knots were successfully seeping into the armor, and the avatar shuddered.

  “Yes,” Grandmother continued, “I know who you are. When I am through with you, you will loose an army of the dead upon the lands at my command, and it won’t be only the realm of Sacoridia that falls to the empire, but all of them.”

  Another knot sank into the armor and the avatar spasmed.

  Grandmother was delighted. “And, with you, there is something else that has come into my possession.”

  She bent and pried yarn away from the avatar’s helm. The yarn had turned pliant, sticky. She jerked her hand back when a knot sparked. She was not sure if she should touch the armor, but her spell should have neutralized its power enough to prevent her harm. In the end, she was too curious not to. She lifted the visor. But for some burning of her fingers, the steel did not injure her, and she stepped back to get a better view.

  “Well, Karigan G’ladheon,” she murmured, “we meet again.”

  A soft glow shone from around the avatar’s face. Starlight, moonlight, Grandmother did not know, for the avatar moved partly in the realm of the living, and partly in the heavens, or so the chronicles of her people claimed, and she felt the truth of it in her bones. A patch of fine star steel mesh covered the mirror eye. The avatar’s normal eye wasn’t quite . . . normal. It was a dark, dusky blue, and fixed Grandmother with a raptor’s cutting gaze, Westrion watching through the avatar’s eye.

  So this was her dark angel, trapped in strands of yarn, and now hers to control. There were more sparks, more knots burrowing into the armor, the avatar’s face showing strain.

  “Now, let us see your other eye.”

  Was it her imagination, or did the avatar’s lips tighten with the hint of a smile? Undeterred, Grandmother tore the patch off and beheld the mirror eye. It was not just the iris or pupil that had turned silver, but the whole of the eye that gleamed and reflected, exactly as Immerez had described. Grandmother stared at the reflection of her own face with its wrinkled skin, the drooping eyelids, and sunken cheeks.

  “The Mirari truly exist,” she murmured, “and you are one. I have never seen the like.”

  She wanted the eye for herself, and her fingers twitched by her belt knife. But if she cut it out, would it still allow her to look across time? To envision the weaving of the world?

  Even now, an image formed in the eye, and Grandmother bent closer. She gazed into a tumult of flurries, flurries cascading down in dizzying patterns. Snow, and nothing more. She stepped back, disappointed as the eye returned to its cold, silver gleam.

  “Is that all? Snow? If I want to see snow, I just have to step outside.”

  The avatar smiled her tight smile.

  In the chamber, it began to snow.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  The wind pushed her back and back until she hit the wall. Through the blizzard she discerned a figure striding toward her. It was blocky, humanlike, but not fully formed. It was made of ice and had only vague features.

  “Aureas slee,” she murmured in realization. The elemental she had summoned to her service so long ago.

  “You are the one,” it said. It pointed an icicle finger at her. “You are the one that forced me out into the world, subjected me to pain, humiliation, and defeat. You.”

  Grandmother put her hands up, palms outward, as though to stem its advance. “I simply called you, requested aid.”

  “You forced me from my domain, witch, and it has been the ruin of me. And now I will break the binding.”

  “No, no. Please, let us come to some accommodation.” She fumbled in her pouch for any stray bit of yarn she could lay her fingers on, but another fierce gust blew it out of her hands. “We can help one another!” Her lips were numb, her cheeks burning from the cold.

  “Enough!” The chamber seemed to shake with the aureas slee’s voice. Its hand grew into a long sword of ice, and it thrust the blade into her gut, and twisted.

  Grandmother looked down at herself as the ice blade, smeared with her own blood, was withdrawn from her midsection. She was more aghast than anything that it should all end this way. She had been so close to using the avatar’s command of the dead and mirror eye to defeat the lands for Second Empire. As everything went cold inside her and she spilled to the chamber’s floor, she wondered how her people would go on without her, who would make sure Lala buttoned up her coat on cold winter days, who would lead her people?

  Blood, hot in contrast to everything else, flowed over her fingers splayed over her wound. She could not hold in the blood. She saw only melting puddles of snow, and that the aureas slee had already left.

  Help, she tried to say, but no word came out. She tried reaching for the slaves across the chamber, but she could not lift her hand.

  As her sight dimmed, she saw that her descent into death had weakened the spell that bound the avatar. The avatar forced herself to her feet and shredded the strands of magic, and freed herself. She regained her sword, pushed her visor back in place, and staggered to where Grandmother lay and stared down at her.

  “You cannot hurt me,” Grandmother whispered.

  The avatar did not speak, but even as Grandmother’s world faded away, she heard the unmistakable downbeats of Westrion’s wings.

  No! You are not my god!

  When her spirit left her body, the avatar loomed large and bright and winged before her, beautiful and terrible, truly the dark angel. The sword of silver fire pointed at the Aeon Iire, the seal that covered the portal to the deepest, most malignant of hells in the theology of the Sacoridians, reserved for the worst of the worst.

  “That is not my hell,” Grandmother the spirit said. “I deserve paradise for all I have done for my people. I do not believe in your—”

  “Go.”

  The avatar’s voice was both terrifying and majestic, and its power forced Grandmother toward the seal. Her will was no longer her own.

  “Go,” the avatar commanded once more. “You are judged. May that which you inflicted upon others be visited upon you with no end. I sentence you to an eternity of torment for your crimes. Go.”

  Grandmother felt her incorporeal self dragged and sucked through the iire. Darkness scrabbled around her and shrieked its shrill delight.

  RAGE

  After the attack of the demons, Zachary observed that something had changed in the attitude of Second Empire’s forces. Despite having the advantage of cover in the keep, their defense crumbled. Now that the demons harried them no longer, the soldiers of the River Unit swarmed through breaks in the curtain wall, Fiori with them. Other combatants fought in small clutches before the main entrance of the curtain wall, Zachary among them. He eagerly traded blows with one of the better swordsmen.

  “I know you,” his opponent said breathlessly. “You’re the—”

  Zachary slashed through his neck before he could say more, almost beheading him. He turned to take on another enemy, but they were few, and they were engaged. He stood there in the snow squall, his heart pounding, his blood singing in readiness for more slaughter, but all else—the din of battle, the storm, the stench of blood—fell away, grew remote, slowed down. Snowflakes hung in the air.

  The avatar and her stallion reappeared. They gleamed of starshine and silver fire, the stallion’s muscles rippling like ebon silk as he tossed his head and pawed at the snow. Flurries gyred gently around them, did not touch them.

  And then, as though Zachary lost time, the stallion was simply no longer there, and the avatar stood upon the ground. Her armor, he saw, had been breached and silver-green luminescence bled through perforations in the steel. She tilted her head back and shed
radiance—pure and cold and searing—as first her helm disintegrated in a cloud of coruscating particles, and then her armor, leaving behind his Green Rider.

  Karigan? Karigan was the avatar? But of course she was.

  The brilliant light faded at last, and normal time resumed, the snow falling furiously, and she stood there unarmed and wavering. He started to go to her, but someone launched out of the dark and grabbed her, held a weapon against her throat. Zachary ran forward, his sword ready in his hand.

  “No closer!” Immerez shouted. It was his hook, sharpened to a cruel point, that he dug into Karigan’s flesh. “If you come any closer, I’ll rip her throat out.”

  The rage surged through Zachary so that he trembled in the effort to control himself, to keep himself from leaping across the space between them. Normally, he knew, Karigan would have defended herself if she could, but she was still weak from her wounds, and who knew what being the avatar might have done to her.

  “You can’t escape,” Zachary shouted.

  “I can and I will.” Immerez jerked Karigan along as he backed away. Her soft cry made Zachary’s heart pound harder. He was only peripherally aware of another standing by his side. “I will take her and—”

  There was the softest whisper of an arrow being loosed. It carved through the squall, flurries swirling in eddies behind the trailing edges of its feathers. White against white, an Eletian arrow.

  Immerez fell into the snow with the arrow lodged in his chest, and Karigan staggered away. Zachary launched across the space between them. Immerez’s mouth worked as though he tried to speak, but Zachary’s blood roared in his ears and his vision narrowed. He held his sword hilt in both hands and drove the blade down into Immerez again and again and again, venting the full of his fury, all the anger and fear and hatred he’d held inside during his captivity and torment, and for all that had been done to Karigan, too.

  “Enough! He’s dead!” The words came as though from a distance. He raised his sword to impale Immerez yet again when someone grabbed his arm to stop him. He whirled sword first.

  “Sire—!”

  The blade careened toward her neck.

  “Zachary!”

  Karigan. He cried out and let go the hilt before the blade could strike and it spun through the air landing somewhere well beyond her. All at once the fury drained from him. The force that had maddened him, that had made his blood run hot, faded and now he shivered with the cold. He sank to his knees in the snow before her, a supplicant, and she knelt with him. He labored to catch his breath. He trembled, and trembled more when she placed her hands on either side of his face. Her touch warmed him, but not with fury as before, only peace. The sound of battle faded.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I almost killed you,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  “But you did not.”

  “So close . . . I was—I was not myself. My rage, it blinded me. I am so sorry.”

  She pressed his head to her shoulder, put her arms around him.

  “So sorry,” he murmured into her coat. “Not myself.”

  “I know,” she said.

  They stayed like that for a time, as if by some grace they were separate from the rest of the world and its battles, snow falling softly on them. He reveled at their closeness, she holding him, he calmed by her scent and warmth, while guilt and fear of what could have been cut him up inside.

  “Sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore.”

  She shook with quiet laughter. “Believe it or not, I can kind of understand.”

  He raised his head from her shoulder so he could gaze at her, so close. Snowflakes melted on her cheeks, caught in her eyelashes, and he realized the patch was gone and he could see himself in the silver of her mirror eye. Images began to unfold so rapidly he could not follow. He glimpsed a child—was it himself, or one of his own? A man he somehow knew to be Cade Harlowe appeared. He was . . . he was making love to Karigan, her hair splayed across a pillow. There were brief images of Estora and Laren, a blur of battle and arrows in flight, and . . . The images layered over so quickly he was not sure what he saw, only that he could not stop looking until Karigan gasped and turned away, her hand clasped over her eye.

  “Oh, gods,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “I’m all right, it’ll pass.”

  He helped her to her feet. She was unsteady. “Your back, is it—? Are you—?”

  “I’ll live,” she replied. “You?”

  “I am all right, because of you.” Then, “We need to get you to some shelter.”

  She brushed snow off the crown of her head and drew her hood up. The storm resurged in intensity, and ice now pelted them. He turned to look for Enver and Donal, and he barely saw their shapes through the wind-driven squall. There was a third person with them who looked neither like Rennard nor Fiori, but was female in form. It appeared they’d kept their distance to allow him a moment with Karigan.

  A whirling cone of snow kicked up in the space between them. Karigan grabbed his arm. “The elemental!”

  His sword—where was it? He’d tossed it and now? And now it was buried somewhere in the snow. He kicked at drifts trying to find it. When the whirl loomed into a rough human shape, he threw himself in front of Karigan.

  HEART OF ICE

  Nari had walked the northlands seeking the aureas slee. It had hidden among the clouds, mending its wounds, out of reach. She thought, perhaps, it would retreat until next winter, but clearly it could not let go of the vengeance it felt it needed to wreak upon Zachary.

  She’d followed it back to the rocky plain between the campsite and the Lone Forest, and she sensed it stalking the soldiers approaching the forest in the night. Zachary, she deduced, was among them.

  Her careful entry into the forest followed, through the snowstorm generated by the Slee. She could move as silently and unobtrusively as any Eletian, and so she remained undetected by the combatants. She tracked Zachary’s clutch of fighters and followed them as they worked their way through the forest.

  She marveled at how brightly Zachary shone as he led his soldiers, how he fought to the front lines. If there was beauty in death, he created it, his gleaming sword arcing with grace through the night, its movement the rhythm of music, the blade a living extension of his arm. He was a burning flame and, in truth, the “firebrand” of his people.

  Then came the attack of the dark ones, and she took up the sword of one of the fallen to defend herself. She could sense the abyss they’d spewed from, a gouting wound in the Earth. The dark ones had preceded the existence of even the Eletians in this world, but an ancient conflict, ancient to even the Eletian people, had cast them into their prisons.

  She was quick, quicker than they, and when the avatar rode by, she was able to pause and look, and see that the great stallion carrying the avatar was so much more than a horse, and immediately she recognized the Galadheon as the vessel of the death god. She’d seen the dark wings about her when they met, and now she knew what they represented.

  The avatar went on to draw away or destroy the dark ones as she passed. Nari had lost track of the slee while she fought, and so looked for Zachary, and found him as bright as ever, once again fighting human foes. She watched and waited, knowing Slee would come for him.

  She found Enver nearby, who also appeared to be keeping watch, but not for Zachary or Slee, she guessed.

  “Nari,” he said, “what are you doing here?”

  “I have followed Slee,” she replied.

  Soon the avatar reappeared, her armor damaged and bleeding silver-green moonlight. It pleased Nari that her sister’s gift, and her own, helped shield the Galadheon even as the armor of the gods failed.

  The stallion vanished, and the Galadheon was once more herself, and when the hook-handed man threatened her, Enver was already in motion, his arrow sa
iling with a whisper just over the Galadheon’s shoulder and into its mark.

  When Zachary and the Galadheon knelt in the snow in one another’s arms, Enver started to move forward, but she stopped him.

  “Let them be,” she murmured. “Remember your discipline, control.”

  He stiffened beside her and she sensed his unhappiness, but she could once again see Zachary’s aura meshing harmoniously with the Galadheon’s.

  Why do they not kiss? she wondered, but then she remembered Zachary was married and the barriers mortals put between themselves, the artificial walls that kept them apart. Of all the strange rules of mortals was the one that dictated with whom they could bond despite what their inner natures craved. So occupied with their bloodlines were the mortals, she thought with distaste. As Zachary and the Galadheon leaned into one another, their feelings clear, she mourned for them, but not for long, for Slee had arrived.

  It grew out of snow and ice and loomed over Zachary and the Galadheon. Zachary placed himself in front of her as a shield.

  “Both of you together,” Slee said. “You will know true pain.”

  “I’ve spent all my arrows,” Enver told Nari.

  Zachary’s guard emerged from the shadows and rushed forward brandishing his sword, but Slee just knocked him aside. Other fighters in the area backed away, unsure of this new threat in their midst. A giant hand formed out of the snow behind the Galadheon and grasped her, lifted her high.

  “No!” Zachary cried, battering at the base of the hand.

  “First you watch this one die,” the slee said. Its own hand grew into a sword of ice.

  Enver ran toward it, unsheathing his sword as he did so, but he, too, was flung aside.

  The ice sword started sliding toward the Galadheon, and Zachary attempted to wrestle it away from the slee, but the slee just knocked him down.

  “Slee!” Nari cried. She was of an elder time, which gave her voice authority.