The Alaunt gave a short, sharp bark in reply, and Azhure smiled. “Good. Well, Sicarius, shall we go see your former master?”
Azhure placed one hand firmly on the stair rail and with the other gathered up the skirts of the loose lavender gown she wore. She pictured WolfStar in her mind, the beautiful and powerful face, the copper curls, the golden wings.
“Take me to WolfStar SunSoar,” she said, and began to climb.
With his power and experience, WolfStar felt Azhure move through the maze that was Spiredore, heard her call his name. He smiled in surprise, yet with deep pride, at her grasp of Spiredore’s power. Nevertheless, WolfStar knew that it would be a disaster if she came to him in his present location, so he moved quickly to meet his daughter before she transferred out of Spiredore.
Azhure was finding the climb difficult and, as she grew more and more breathless, she wondered if she had understood WolfStar’s words correctly. Surely even her climb to the rooftop had not taken her this long?
Beside her Sicarius climbed easily, his paws silent on the wooden treads.
“Stars, Sicarius,” Azhure panted, pausing and resting her head on the railing. “I do not think even WolfStar is worth all this trouble.”
“Then I am sorry for the effort I have caused you,” a rich voice said above her, and Azhure started so violently she would have fallen had not WolfStar reached down a hand and steadied her.
“Come,” he said, smiling, “there is a comfortable chamber just above. Two or three more steps and we are there.”
Azhure blinked and looked past WolfStar. She could have sworn that before she had rested her head the stairway spiralled up into infinity, but now it ended in a landing not two or three steps ahead. Beyond this the door to a chamber stood invitingly open.
“Come,” her father repeated, and Azhure let him lead her into the chamber. She sank down into a comfortable couch, richly embroidered and cushioned, and WolfStar, after patting and murmuring to the hound, walked to the window to stare over the Grail Lake towards Carlon while Azhure caught her breath.
She studied him curiously. He was as beautiful as she remembered, and she wondered why she had inherited none of his colouring or his Icarii bone structure.
“You know that I am your father?” WolfStar asked as he turned back into the chamber.
Azhure remembered their kiss, but she felt no shame. “I know that you are WolfStar SunSoar, come back through the Star Gate, and I know that you are my father. I know my mother’s name was Niah, and that she was a Priestess in the Temple of the Stars.” Azhure’s voice became harsher as bitter resentments bubbled to the surface. “I know you got Niah pregnant and then abandoned her to her death. I know you thought so little of me that you let me linger under the appalling care of Hagen. I know you murdered MorningStar.”
WolfStar stepped into the centre of the room, his face tight with anger.
Azhure, angry herself, ignored the danger. “And I know that you are the Traitor who will betray Axis to Gorgrael—you probably already have.”
“You know nothing! You have guessed my identity, and you have surmised that I came back through the Star Gate. You realise that I am your father, but the rest…bah!”
Azhure held his stare. She had not meant to accuse him so quickly, but she was tired and she was heartsick and here was the birdman who was at the root of all their problems. Did he think that she would fall into his arms weeping for joy once she had gleaned his identity?
“Then tell me why it is,” she said, “that Niah and I were left to fend for ourselves. Niah died horribly, WolfStar—but perhaps you don’t care about that—and I suffered many long years, lost, alone, despairing. Tell me why I should not accuse you?”
His eyes softened. “There are so many things that I cannot yet speak of, Azhure, and Niah’s death and your life in Smyrton is one of them.”
She turned her face away from him, tears of anger springing to her eyes.
“Azhure,” he said, and she felt him sit down by her side. “You are my daughter and I think you know that I love you.” He picked up her hand. “I did not willingly abandon either of you to…oh! By the Light of the Stars, Azhure! What is this you wear?”
His voice sounded tortured, and Azhure whipped her head about. WolfStar was staring at the ring on her finger, and he was trembling so badly that Azhure’s arm also shook.
“WolfStar?”
“What is that you wear?” he whispered, his face colourless. He raised his great violet eyes to her own.
“It is the ring of the Enchantress, or so I am told. WolfStar? Why do you tremble so?”
“The Enchantress’ ring,” he said, his voice still soft. “I thought never to see this again. Azhure, how did you get this?”
His distress was catching, and Azhure had to lick her suddenly dry lips before continuing.
“Axis gave it to me. He was given it by the Ferryman, Orr.” In the past days Axis had told her much of what had happened to him in the waterways. “And Orr said that—”
“That I gave it to him.”
“Yes.”
WolfStar took a deep breath and composed himself. He’d been driven by a powerful but little understood need to conceive Azhure with Niah, but until this moment he’d not realised the precise nature of what he’d seeded. Hesitantly he touched the ring.
“This ring is representative of great and unimaginable power.” Reluctantly he let Azhure’s hand go. He looked up and tried to smile but it was an abysmal failure. “When I gave it to Orr I thought never to see it again. To find it now on the finger of my own daughter is almost beyond my comprehension.”
“Should I fear it, WolfStar?”
He lifted his hand and softly touched her cheek, wonder in his eyes. “No. No. The ring has chosen you, it has come home to you.” By the Stars!, he thought, the Circle has completed itself in my daughter! “That is an unimaginable honour. Unimaginable. You need not fear it.” Now his mouth did curl slightly, wonderingly. “It makes me fear you, though.”
Azhure felt herself succumbing to WolfStar’s immense appeal as he stroked her cheek and smiled into her eyes. She knew she should be angry with him, she knew she should hate him for abandoning Niah and herself to Hagen, but her anger was fading with every stroke of his fingers. Again she understood why her mother must have yielded to him.
But while her anger faded, her curiosity and her desperation for answers still flared bright. “Who was the Enchantress, WolfStar, what power does her ring contain? And why did you tremble so when you spied it on my finger?”
“So many questions, Azhure.”
A touch of determination hardened her voice. “I have almost thirty years of questions, WolfStar. These three will do to start with.”
He sighed and dropped his hand. These three questions would not be the worst she would ask him.
“What do you know of the Enchantress? No, wait,” he said quickly as he saw Azhure gesture in irritation. “I only ask this so that I do not repeat what you already know.”
“That she was the mother from whom both Charonite and Icarii races sprang. That she was very powerful, the first of all the Enchanters. That this ring, which was hers, holds unknown powers. She used her power differently to other Enchanters—or Charonite mages, for all I know.”
“The Enchantress was the Mother of Nations, yes.”
Azhure blinked. The Ferryman had called her that when she had travelled with the Icarii and Raum to Talon Spike via the ancient Waterways.
“Not much is known about her. All we have now are legends…and this ring. She was a remarkable woman, and many of her powers and magic she passed on to her two youngest sons.”
“Her youngest sons?”
WolfStar grinned. “The Enchantress did not favour her eldest son at all; it was he who fathered the Acharite race.”
Azhure’s mouth dropped open. “Do you mean that the Icarii, the Charonites and the Acharites all sprang from the one mother?”
WolfStar’s grin
became more feral. “The children of her unfavoured eldest son became the toilers of the soil, while the children of those sons she did favour grew to hunt the mysteries of the universe.”
Azhure wondered how the Acharites would react if they realised they sprang from the same source as the Icarii and Charonites. “Are the Avar descended from her as well?”
“No. The Avar come from different stock altogether. Now, this ring. Again, like the Enchantress herself, what knowledge we have of this ring is ancient and riddled with mystery because of it.” WolfStar knew far more than that about the ring, but it was not his place to tell Azhure. That right belonged to the…others. “It does not so much contain power itself as it represents power—unimaginable power. For many thousands of years it has manipulated as it sees fit to achieve its own ends, that is why I trembled so when I saw it on your finger. I, too, have been manipulated by this ring.”
He was silent a moment. “You have, no doubt, heard the Icarii tell of my reign as Enchanter-Talon.”
“Yes,” Azhure whispered. Her father had hurled hundreds of innocent children to their deaths through the Star Gate in an effort to understand its mysteries. Eventually WolfStar’s younger brother, CloudBurst, had assassinated him before WolfStar could murder the entire Icarii race. Of course, no-one among the Icarii—or any other race that knew the story—had counted on WolfStar coming back through the Star Gate.
“My fascination was not only with the Star Gate, Azhure,” and WolfStar’s voice took on the quality of confession, “but also with this ring that my forebears had guarded for so many thousands of years. I know I cannot excuse what I did to those children, but the ring had haunted my dreams from childhood, and it drove me to maniacal deeds. It was the ring that whispered to me that I needed to sacrifice those children into the Star Gate…it was the ring that whispered to me that it wanted to be taken to the waterways, there to wait until it decided to move on again.”
And was it the ring that sent me to Niah? WolfStar wondered. And whispered to me the name of the child she was to conceive?
Azhure’s mind told her not to believe WolfStar, that he was merely using the ring as an excuse for his own inexcusable behaviour, but her heart told her that he spoke the truth.
“Then it will only seek to use me,” she said, horrified, twisting the ring off her hand. “It will use me and force me to do its will!”
“No!” WolfStar cried and clasped her hands between his to stop her pulling off the ring. “No! Legends said that one day the ring would seek out the hand of one who was fit to wear it—even the Enchantress was only a custodian, the ring was not truly hers. It has taken tens of thousands of years, but the ring has finally come home. Azhure, I trembled not only because I feared the power the ring represents, but also because I suddenly realised that I ought to fear you more.”
Azhure was silent, staring at her father with great smoky eyes. Her entire body was still, her breathing so shallow that her breasts scarcely rose.
“Azhure, the ring has chosen you…and it is now subservient to you. It has chosen you as its home.”
“But I do not know how to use it, or this power you say it represents,” she said. “WolfStar, one of the reasons I came here today was to ask you how I can use my powers. You must teach me! Axis needs me!”
“One day I will teach you what I can, Azhure, but that day is not yet here.” And what I can teach you is going to be little indeed, Azhure-heart.
“Damn you!” Azhure cried, and tore her hands from his. “I need to know!”
“Azhure, listen to me. This is not the time nor the place. No! Listen to me! I will not teach you, nor will any others, while you are pregnant with those twins—there are secrets you will learn that those babies should not know.”
Azhure opened her mouth automatically to defend her twins, but closed it again as she remembered their continued antagonism to her and Axis. She rested a hand on her belly.
“And this is not the place to teach you,” WolfStar continued. “There is one place that you can learn quickly and easily, a place where others can be involved in your teaching, a place where power is more likely to flare into life.”
“The Island of Mist and Memory. Temple Mount.”
“Yes. How did you know that?”
“Niah told me to go to Temple Mount…as she lay dying.”
WolfStar ignored the hard edge of the last phrase, and his eyes dimmed in memory. “Ah…Niah.” Perhaps Niah had known what WolfStar had only just come to understand. But then, she had been First, and perhaps the First was more intimately aware of the secrets of the gods than even he.
“Please,” Azhure began. “Explain to me now why you treated us as you did.”
“I cannot, Azhure,” he said. “There are many things that must be explained, but I will need to wait until you are alone—” she knew he meant after she had given birth, “—and you are on the Island of Mist and Memory.”
For some time Azhure sat half turned away from him. She had wanted to learn so much more from this meeting.
“All I have done has been for a purpose,” WolfStar said eventually, understanding her hurt. “One day the reasons will become clear. But this I will tell you.”
Azhure turned her eyes back to her father.
“I am not the Traitor that many think. The third verse of the Prophecy speaks of a Traitor, but I am not he.”
“You seem to know your way about the Prophecy very well,” Azhure said sharply.
“The Traitor has already made his move, Azhure. Fear not the people about either you or Axis. The Traitor is already with his master. He has already made his decision to betray, although he has not yet committed the final betrayal.”
Azhure stared at WolfStar. Who was the Traitor? But WolfStar would not answer this unspoken query. He lifted his fingertips to her cheek again, the touch so light that Azhure could hardly feel it.
“Be assured, Azhure. You will find the answers you need to know on the Island. You think that you need to be by Axis’ side, that you need to be there to fight for him, but the greatest service you can do for him now, as for yourself, is to spend time alone to accept and develop your power.”
She nodded slightly, reluctantly. “I feel pulled in so many different directions. So many people, demanding different things from me. I do need time alone.”
He leaned down and scratched Sicarius under the muzzle, then glanced back at Azhure. “You look very much like your mother, Azhure, and she was very, very desirable.”
Later, as WolfStar sat huddled under the stars, he thought on the afternoon’s encounter with his daughter. First Gorgrael and his Gryphon, then Artor, and now the Enchantress’ ring resurfaces. Were things moving beyond his control?
Perhaps, but the fact that the ring had chosen Azhure gave him great hope for the future. Suddenly neither Artor nor a sky blackened with Gryphon seemed such an insurmountable threat.
9
JERVOIS LANDING
For the past ten or eleven days an icy nightmare had closed about Jervois Landing. Nothing Jorge had seen before—not even the appalling conditions at Gorkenfort or the weather that Gorgrael had thrown their way last winter—had been this bad. The storm front, if such a mild expression could possibly describe what had descended on them, had moved into the town in an unbelievable two minutes. One minute it had been cool and blustery, the clouds heavy with the promise of snow, the next…the next blew a wind so severe that only the strongest stone houses in the town were left standing. The wind carried with it ice and death, and everyone caught exposed to it had died; Jorge had lost over two thousand men in five minutes. The four Icarii scouts just returning to the town had fallen from the sky frozen solid.
When they hit the streets their bodies were shattered into such tiny pieces they were scattered away within moments.
Day after day Jorge and the remnants of his command had huddled by fires. No-one was left manning the defences of Jervois Landing—the system of canals that Borneheld had caused to
be built—for none could survive in the open. And what defences anyway? Jorge thought. The canals must have frozen within minutes of the storm’s arrival. He grimaced under his blanket and crept an inch or two closer to the fire. Jervois Landing did not have defences any more.
The six thousand remaining men were, to the best of Jorge’s knowledge, scattered throughout the town. He no longer sent men out into the streets to gather information, for that was far too cruel in this weather, so Jorge frankly had no idea about the state of his command.
The remaining eight Icarii were the most miserable of all. The Wing had arrived the day before the weather closed in, and now four of them were dead and the others cramped about what warmth the fires provided.
Jorge knew that his men all expected to die, because when he moved from group to group, trying to revive spirits, he found men praying, preparing their souls for the inevitable journey to the AfterLife. Some, but only a few, prayed to Artor. The Icarii prayed to their Star Gods, the few Ravensbund men in his command prayed to their own mysterious deities. But, to his surprise, Jorge found many men praying to Axis, the StarMan, invoking his name as a god. Some even prayed to Azhure, the woman who had ridden with Axis and whose reputation with the bow was almost as legendary as the Wolven itself and the ghost hounds that ran at her back.
Jorge had backed away, sickened, when he first heard a group of three soldiers praying in a low monotone to Axis. Had these men gone mad? Axis was a man like any other, was he not? Did a string of military victories qualify one for god-like status? Jorge had returned to his spot by the fire and sat for many hours, his thoughts in turmoil. Somehow this disturbed him even more than the Gorgrael-driven storm outside.