Sinner

  Drago woke, shaking and sweating. What was it that he hunted with? Their names and the very concept of them lurked just out of reach. He should know, he should, but he didn’t, and Drago almost cried with the frustration of it.

  He shifted more comfortably against the tree and drifted back to sleep, and while his sleep was troubled by dreams, they were dreams of Zenith and his childhood, and no more did he ride to the hunt that night.

  The further south he moved, the more vivid grew the dreams of the hunt. Drago did not fear the dreams; rather, he found them intriguing. What were they telling him…that he should hunt down those who hunted him? At that thought Drago would invariably smile, or even laugh. He was not entirely sure the combined forces of Tencendor would cower to the ground in fear if he appeared, waving his sack over his head!

  Nevertheless, Drago found he spent the days longing for the nights, longing for the dream where for once he was the one to hunt, he was the one with the power, he was the one who said, “Yes, you shall live, and, yes, you shall die.”

  And, although Drago often killed in these dreams, he never saw who it was he killed.

  Sometimes Drago came close to tears as he stumbled along the paths of Minstrelsea. He thought of all he had lost. He had, apparently, been one of the most powerful Enchanters ever birthed – even WolfStar had said so. His name, DragonStar, had reflected that power. And yet his future had been destroyed so early.

  But his mother hadn’t actually destroyed his power, had she? She’d only reversed his blood order so that his human blood was dominant – except for Isfrael, all SunSoar children carried equal amounts of Icarii and human blood. That meant that somewhere within him still existed the Icarii Enchanter potential.

  The day that Drago realised this his footsteps had dragged to a halt and he stood, thinking. Drago had thought he’d accepted his lot in life years ago…but now he was not so sure. What if he could retrieve his heritage, his potential?

  What would it be like to live the life of an Icarii Enchanter?

  As the dreams grew stronger, so the beasts that hunted for him grew more substantial in his mind, and so Drago’s thoughts about regaining his Icarii power grew ever more dominant.

  One night, tired, hungry, and cold, he curled about the sack and wished himself into dream.

  He hunted, the horse striding powerfully beneath him. Before him ranged…ranged…Drago twisted and moaned. They were so close, he could almost see them. They hunted, they obeyed his every wish, and they were…

  Hawks.

  Drago relaxed in his sleep, and smiled. Yes, that was it. They were not hounds at all, but they were hunting falcons, hawks.

  Enchanted hawks.

  Whispering. Whispering…revenge.

  Drago woke into a clear-eyed clarity. He knew who these hawks were now. It was so obvious. So right. He should have realised days ago.

  They were the children whom WolfStar had cast into the Star Gate. Roaming the interstellar wastes, crying out for revenge.

  Looking for someone to direct them.

  Was he that someone? Drago lay there and considered the matter. They were so much like him. Condemned to death before they’d had a chance to live. Condemned by WolfStar. And the more that Drago thought about it, the more he wondered if WolfStar had constructed the vision of RiverStar’s murder that had condemned him.

  WolfStar – they could all hunt WolfStar.

  All the children needed was someone to bring them back through the Star Gate.

  All they needed was a leader. Someone to direct them on the hunt.

  Drago‘s mouth curled. Back through the Star Gate? He would die the instant he stepped through.

  Maybe, but somewhere deep inside him was the blood of DragonStar, and maybe that would protect him.

  Maybe once he stepped through the Star Gate, Azhure’s curse would shatter and his blood order would be righted. He would regain his heritage!

  “And this will surely protect me!” Drago said, his hands opening and closing about the object within the sack.

  His eyes were alive with hope. He would get his revenge, and these hawks would be the ones to accomplish it for him.

  Drago did not realise that what he guarded so jealously in the sack was manipulating his mind. It desperately wanted to get through the Star Gate, and it wanted Drago to go through as well. To this end it had been veiling Drago from the eyes of the farflight scouts for weeks, and over the past days had been speeding his feet along enchanted paths deep within the forest. Drago was moving faster than any human or Icarii had a right to move.

  Drago did not know it, but he was being guided by a power far older and stranger than Icarii magic.

  Behind Drago, day after day, trailed the red doe, pulled as much by the object in the sack as she was by worry about what Drago was doing.

  She had been instrumental in its creation, and it had witnessed her death.

  And, wrapped about its head, were still the remnants of the gown she had been wearing the day when Gorgrael had torn her apart.

  So she trailed after Drago, fretting, not knowing what to do, who to tell, if to tell, wondering what he was doing, where he was going.

  Pulled by the Rainbow Sceptre.

  27

  Niah Triumphant

  StarDrifter had laid Zenith on the bed in the spare chamber in the priestesses’ quarters on Temple Mount, and then sat and waited. Zenith slept for two nights and three days. For most of that time she sweated and tossed, attended only by two of the priestesses and StarDrifter himself, but on the third day she calmed and slept soundly.

  That evening she woke.

  StarDrifter sat forward and took her hand. “Zenith?”

  Her eyes fluttered, then opened, and she smiled at him. “You must be StarDrifter.”

  Something very cold and nauseating coiled about his belly. “Zenith?” he said, more hesitatingly this time.

  “If you like,” the woman who looked like Zenith said, and sat up in bed.

  Automatically StarDrifter’s hand reached to help her, but he pulled it back before he touched her.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “In the priestesses’ quarters on Temple Mount.”

  Her entire face lit up. “I’m home! Oh, StarDrifter, I’m home!”

  He tried to smile for her, but couldn’t. This had been Niah’s home, not…“You are not Zenith.”

  She eased by the bed and walked a little unsteadily to the window. “Look! There are the lavender gardens. Oh, StarDrifter, I have dreamed of being able to walk through those lavender gardens again!”

  She turned back to face the Enchanter, and almost overbalanced as her wings caught against the windowsill. “Oh! I shall have to get used to these.”

  “You are Niah,” StarDrifter said tonelessly. Somewhere a great anger was building, but at whom or what he did not know.

  She paused in her inspection of her wings, and sent him a sweet smile. “StarDrifter, I know this must seem strange. Here I am, in what you perceive as your granddaughter’s body. But,” she walked over and knelt before him, taking his hands in hers, “I have always been here. What Zenith loved was because I had loved it first. Her dreams were but borrowings of mine. Her words and laughter were generated by my soul. Her –”

  “I understand!” StarDrifter said, and pulled his hands from hers. He was angry at her, he realised. At Niah, not Zenith. But had Zenith ever existed?

  “StarDrifter, do not mourn Zenith,” the woman said gently. “She was but a shell waiting to acknowledge me.”

  StarDrifter’s anger threatened to break forth, and he averted his eyes from the woman. “What am I to call you?”

  “Call me…Niah. My death at Hagen’s hands was but an interruption in my life. Niah is my name. And,” her hands spread over her belly and a smile lit her face, “I am pregnant with WolfStar’s child again. I am blessed.”

  StarDrifter stared at her. “He raped Zenith. How can you –”

  “No,” Niah said, an
d now her eyes were hard and determined. “No. Only Zenith perceived that as rape. I did not. WolfStar lay with me with my full consent and encouragement.”

  “Then you raped Zenith as much as WolfStar did!” StarDrifter shouted and stalked over to the door.

  “Zenith was dying even then,” Niah said. “If she felt pain, it was for her own death.”

  StarDrifter slammed the door behind him.

  He walked to the southern cliffs of the Mount and stared at the wild seas beyond.

  Was she right? Had Zenith never existed?

  No, he could not believe that. He might not have seen Zenith much in recent years, but he’d known her well as a child and teenager. The Niah woman waiting back in that room had shown expressions and emotions that StarDrifter had never seen cross Zenith’s face. No, there had been a Zenith. A different woman to the one who now used her body.

  Which meant that, if she hadn’t been completely destroyed, Zenith was still alive somewhere.

  Trapped. Lost.

  StarDrifter felt two emotions coursing through him. One, a desperate need to help Zenith. But the second was far more destructive. StarDrifter needed someone to blame.

  WolfStar, certainly, for it was his machinations that had seen Zenith possessed by the spirit of the dead Niah. But in a vague and as yet undefined way, StarDrifter also blamed Azhure. Azhure had bred this trouble – but hadn’t Azhure been bred by WolfStar and Niah?

  StarDrifter stood at the lip of the cliffs and wondered what he could do.

  After a while he realised he was crying.

  28

  River Crossing

  The wind blew cold at Leagh’s back, and the last of the Skelder birds had flown overhead two days ago. Now there was nothing but high grey cloud scudding above her, the thin sunlight shimmering on the weapons of the men who surrounded her, and the man who had lied to her by her side night and day.

  He’d told her that he, Herme and Theod were making a point.

  If Leagh wasn’t so heartsick she would have smiled at that. Did Zared call seizing a castle “making a point”? What was he doing? Surely this would end in war?

  She didn’t understand his reasoning, and didn’t understand his own sense of betrayal at the new taxes imposed by Caelum. And Leagh certainly didn’t understand what Herme and Theod – and some eight thousand of their men – were doing here, either.

  But most of all Leagh did not understand how Zared could have lied to her. “Come to Severin and be my wife,” he had said, and then pulled her into his bed.

  But they weren’t travelling to Severin at all, they never had been, and she was not sure when they would happen across a public notary who could legalise her shame.

  I feel like an army whore, she thought, keeping her face expressionless and her eyes dead ahead, travelling with a man who throws me apples in return for the use of my body.

  Except that her body was worth a trifle more than that of the average army whore, wasn’t it? Did he love her, or did he love the inheritance implanted in her womb?

  For three days they had ridden south-west from the small valley where Zared had led her to view his…his army. There was no other word for it. It had been a military march, no comforts, no quarter given. They’d camped at night under the hard stars on equally hard ground, and the only reason she consented to lie wrapped in Zared’s blankets was for the added warmth his body gave her.

  At least that’s what she told herself.

  They’d risen each day before dawn, broken their fast on dry bread, warmed gruel and tea, and then mounted and ridden until mid-morning, when Zared had ordered an hour’s halt. Then on to mid-afternoon, when they’d halt again, then ride until the stars came out and it was time to make yet another cheerless camp.

  At least Leagh had been cheerless, but the men about her had seemed remarkably high-spirited.

  What is it about war that makes men smile so? she asked herself each evening about the camp fire. What is it about war that causes men to lust so?

  She could find no answer.

  Now they were approaching the Azle again after its great sweep west, and here they would have to cross into Aldeni. From there, Leagh supposed, they would ride due south and then east until they reached Kastaleon.

  It was noon, and Zared decided they could accomplish the fording before dark. And then a day’s rest the other side, he said, for this crossing would tax men and beasts.

  At this point the Azle was still wide, but its waters had deepened and were muddy and turbulent. Leagh sat her mare to one side as Zared had waved the majority of his men across – and with Herme’s and Theod’s men that must have amounted to at least fourteen thousand.

  They struggled across slowly. Occasionally a horse and its rider would slip and be cast into the muddy waters. Both would disappear, then reappear twenty or thirty paces downstream, battling the current, battling for their lives.

  All of those who fell managed to achieve the other bank – eventually.

  All this Leagh sat and watched impassively, hunching further inside her cloak as the northerly wind grew sharper, wondering if even the Azle conspired against Askam.

  Zared broke her reverie eventually, riding up to her and pushing the hood back from her face so he could see her eyes.

  “Leagh? We will wait the night this side of the river. It is too late now to try and cross, and the river will be quieter in the morning.”

  She tightened her hands about the reins, and booted her mare viciously in the flanks. “No!” she cried as the mare bolted for the river. “I will go now!”

  Even as the horse plunged into the icy water Leagh was wondering why she’d done such a stupid thing. It was her way, she supposed, of hurting him when he’d hurt her so badly.

  “Leagh!” she heard him scream, and then she had no thought for anything else but the swirling, hungry river.

  The horse sank to her belly almost immediately, half swimming, half plunging. Leagh was soaked to her waist as waves smashed against them. Gods! Why so strong this time of the year?

  The mare struggled and snorted, plunging gamely forward, her neck outstretched, her eyes rolling, seeking the far bank.

  They had fought perhaps halfway across when the riverbed fell away beneath them and both horse and rider were instantly submerged. Leagh felt herself being swept away from the mare and, her eyes tightly shut underwater, she struck out with a hand, grabbing a handful of mane.

  The next instant both surfaced, spluttering, instinctively striking out. Leagh kept a firm grip on the horse, knowing that if she were swept away from the mare’s strength she wouldn’t be able to survive for long.

  Was that Zared shouting? Or her imagination? Leagh could vaguely see men lining the far bank, but her eyes were blurred with the water and the cold and her own fear, and she did not know if they could help her.

  She became aware that her grip on the horse’s mane was slipping, and so she tried to wrap her fingers more securely, but they were cold, so cold, and they only fumbled ineffectively. Dimly Leagh was aware that she was sliding down the mare’s body. She grabbed at the reins, and missed. She grabbed at the stirrup leather as it floated past her face, and missed. Her hands slid along the mare’s rump until they finally tangled in the horse’s tail, and she hung on with all her might.

  Leagh might have made the far bank safely at that point, save that the mare, in her panic, kicked out, and one of her hind hooves struck Leagh in the rib cage.

  Shocked by the blow, and then the flaring pain which made it impossible for her to breathe, Leagh let go, and was swept away by the waters.

  Over and over she tumbled, the cold now as devastating and cruel as the waters, and Leagh – somewhere in a part of her mind that was still functioning – knew she was dying.

  In her own way, she was happy. Better she die here than betray her brother and Caelum.

  But then something grasped her hair, and then her waist. She tried to cry out, for whoever had her was paining her bruised ribs, but
she choked instead, and that was so loathsome that she began to struggle…struggle against the man who held her and against the water that was trying to kill her.

  Suddenly her head was out of the water and she heaved in a huge breath, then gagged as she coughed up gouts of muddy water. The man who had her now had found his feet, and was dragging her through waist-deep water, cursing with each step that she only hung limply on his arm, and then other hands had her, stretched her out on grass, and then rolled her onto her stomach and were pounding her back in an effort to make her cough up as much water as possible.

  “Leagh?”

  It was Zared’s voice, and Leagh rolled over weakly. He was on his knees beside her, as soaked as she, and the wetness running down his cheeks was not all due to the Azle.

  “Do you want to die that badly?” he asked, his voice hoarse, and she shook her head slightly.

  “No,” she whispered, and realised that she meant it.

  That night the army camped a half-hour’s ride south of the river, next to four or five small hills. Nestling among these hills was a shepherd’s summer hut, deserted now, and there Zared carried Leagh to spend the night.

  He dismissed those concerned men who hovered about, laying Leagh on a rough bed by one wall. Then he built a fire in the hearth, and set some food and wine to warm.

  And then he came over to her, not talking, and stripped both her and himself of their wet clothes.

  She protested, for the air was chill, but Zared took no notice, and once they were both naked he led her to the fire and rubbed them down with a blanket one of the men had left.

  “Gods,” he muttered as his fingers traced the bruise left by the mare’s hoof, but found the ribs themselves relatively undamaged. To her shame, he then conducted a careful examination of her body, looking for other hurts, until he was satisfied that the bruise on her ribs was the extent of it.