“What’s excitin’ ye so?” Rhiannon replied, trying to calm the girl. “Might it be Lennard? Has the lad found his walking legs?”
“No, not Lennard. Not yet,” Siana puffed, fighting to find her breath.
“What then?”
“It is Bryan!” Siana shouted. “He is alive!”
“Has he come across?” Rhiannon gasped, unable to hide the eagerness on her face. She, like so many others, badly wanted to meet the half-elven hero.
“No,” replied Siana. “But another family, a woman and her two children, came into the camp just a few minutes ago, looking for me. She brought news of Bryan; ’twas he who saved her and her children.”
Rhiannon, though obviously disappointed, was far from surprised. “Suren that one’s making a name that will live on through the centuries,” she remarked, a twinkle of admiration in her bright eyes.
“He is making a name with the talons, too!” laughed Siana. “They call him the ’ghost fighter’ and greatly fear him.”
“As well they should,” Rhiannon replied. “Me hopes and heart’s out to the lad; so much good he has done. Come now, take me to this woman. I’m wishing to hear another tale of Bryan of Corning. Never will I tire of them!”
Later that evening, Rhiannon attended to the young boy and his infant sister, mostly cleaning their scrapes and washing the grime of their ordeal from their bodies and their thoughts, while the woman recounted the exploits of her rescuer.
“He saved me and mine,” she kept saying, her eyes rimmed with tears. “I try not to think of what the talons would have done to us if they …” She couldn’t complete the thought, and Rhiannon did not want her to.
“Rest easy,” said the witch’s daughter. “Yer children are fine, and the thoughts of their troubles will soon fall far behind. What ye all be needin’ now is sleep. She left the tent with Siana close behind. Jolsen stayed on awhile, talking to Lennard.
Siana started off to the north, toward the Calvan encampment, but Rhiannon took her by the arm and steered her toward the riverbank instead. Rhiannon did not like going to the army camp, with its grim reminders of the soldiers’ true purpose in being here.
“Let us go and see the river,” she said. “Her song’ll put us far from this place.”
Siana readily agreed and followed Rhiannon down to the water’s edge, slumping down in the grass beside her friend. Rhiannon clutched her knees up close to her chest and let the notes of the flowing water fill her ears.
Siana sat in silence, respecting the privacy of Rhiannon’s thoughts. And soon Siana, too, fell under the calming spell of the rhythmic roll of the wide river, and time slipped by both of them without notice and without care.
But then suddenly Rhiannon sprang up, her eyes wide in surprise as she stared at the river.
“What is it?” Siana pressed, amazed at her friend’s distress. Unlike Rhiannon, so attuned to the voice of the natural world, Siana did not hear the discordant notes of the river’s song.
“Not to me knowing,” Rhiannon answered, equally perplexed. She had heard the river’s lament, clearly and undeniably, just as surely as she had understood the truth of the talon force and their dark leader back when she and the rangers had arrived in Corning. She stepped down to the water and knelt, putting her hands into the flow.
“Is something wrong?” Siana asked, moving down beside her. “What did you see?”
“Hear,” Rhiannon corrected, still examining the water.
“Then what did you hear?” Siana asked.
“Sadness,” Rhiannon answered, unable to explain, for she did not fully understand it herself. The river had called to her, its normally impassive voice suddenly filled with sorrow.
A moment later, when a horn drifted into the young woman’s hands, she came to understand. She jumped to her feet, unblinking, her chest heaving in a fight to find her breath.
“What?” Siana pleaded, trying desperately to help her friend.
Rhiannon gasped and held out the horn. “Andovar’s horn,” she managed to stammer.
“Your ranger friend?” Siana asked. “But how did it get in the river?”
Rhiannon knew. The river had told her, and now the horn, verily vibrating with the drama of Andovar’s final moments of life and with the residual emanations of the unnatural, un-dead thing that had slain him, painted the horrible picture all too clearly.
“Me friend is dead,” Rhiannon replied, hardly believing the words even as she spoke them. “In the river.”
“You cannot know that,” Siana argued, rushing to hold Rhiannon’s trembling form. “Even if this is Andovar’s horn—”
“It is his,” Rhiannon insisted.
“And a hundred answers could tell why it is now in the river,” reasoned Siana. “You cannot assume that he is dead just because—”
Rhiannon stopped her with a look. The young witch put her gaze directly into Siana’s eyes, an expression so sorrow-filled that Siana could not remember the remaining words of her argument.
“He is dead,” Rhiannon said again. “I wish it were not so, but I cannot …” She couldn’t find the strength to finish; all the energy just slipped out of her body, out on the tears that now streamed freely down her cheeks.
“May I enter?”
The morning light filtering through the tent flap found the young woman sitting on a small stool, still clutching her legs close to her chest, as she had on the grass beside the river the night before.
Rhiannon hesitated at the unexpected intrusion, then nodded slightly. The King was on his way into her tent anyway.
“Your friend told me of your discovery,” Benador explained, and he glanced around the little tent and saw the horn lying on the single table. “Is that it?” he asked.
Again Rhiannon nodded.
Benador went over to inspect the find. “It does appear to be Andovar’s,” he conceded.
“It was,” Rhiannon said, not a hint of doubt in her shaky voice.
“Many years I spent in the company of Andovar, and all the rangers,” the King remarked. “When Ungden held the throne, it was they who sheltered me and prepared me for the day when Pallendara would be restored to the rightful line, the day when I would be king.”
“Andovar told me the tale on the road south,” Rhiannon replied. “In his heart, he was yer friend.”
“He is my friend,” Benador corrected.
“Was,” Rhiannon replied, undaunted, though another line of tears inevitably began making their way down her face.
“Can you be so certain?” Benador asked her.
Rhiannon’s look told him that she, at least, sincerely believed in the truth of her words. “It was Andovar’s horn,” she said, a chill in her voice. “And Andovar was wearing it when he died.”
“My lady—” Benador began, still doubting.
“Ye know who I am?” Rhiannon asked before he could continue his disputing logic.
“Your mother is Brielle of Avalon.”
“Then ye should know to trust me words,” Rhiannon interrupted. “Andovar died in the river. And there he remains, and there he’ll e’er remain.”
Benador’s mouth still hung open, but he found no words to fill it. She was the witch’s daughter, a witch herself, if everything that Belexus and Andovar had told him was true. And while Benador was King of all Calva, he was, in the end, just a mortal man, and he could not begin to understand the powers that this young woman possessed, and could not refute her claims.
“I meant to come and visit you sooner,” he began, changing the subject. “But my duty has kept me busy in the camp.”
“Ye need not apologize, good King,” Rhiannon answered.
“We owe you our thanks.”
“No more than mine is owed to yerself,” said Rhiannon, and she looked the man in the eye. “I’ve helped as much as I might, but ’tis yerself and yer men who hold back the tide of blackness. Without ye, all the world would have fallen to the likes of the Black Warlock and his filthy minions.
”
Benador accepted the compliment with a smile. “Your own value cannot be underestimated,” he said. “You have saved many a life, and have made things easier for many more still. When all of this is ended, Rhiannon, the daughter of the Emerald Witch, will not be left out of the tales.”
“Would that the tales could begin,” said Rhiannon. “And that the fighting and dying were through.”
“True enough,” said Benador. “But we have stopped them here, and we will push them back. My army gathers from every corner of Calva, and help will come from the north, from the elves of Illuma and the Rangers of Avalon.
“But Andovar will not be among them,” Rhiannon put in.
“Are you so sure?” Benador asked softly but firmly, moving to her side. He put a comforting arm on her shoulder. “Perhaps you are wrong,” he offered. “Might it be that Belexus and Andovar fought beside the river and Andovar was only wounded? Even now he might be in the care of your mother, back in Avalon.”
Rhiannon shook her head helplessly. “The rangers will return,” she whispered. “But with them they’re sure to bring the tidings I’ve already given ye.”
“Then it will be a sad day in Calva,” said Benador.
Rhiannon looked out the open tent flap to the Calvan camp, already astir in morning duties, already beginning their daily preparations for battle.
“One of many,” the young witch assured him.
Rhiannon spent the better part of that morning in tormented solitude, wandering through the empty streets of Rivertown. Beyond her grief for Andovar, disturbing questions of her responsibilities haunted and nagged at her. No longer could she deny who she was and what her power meant to her allies in the war that the Black Warlock had thrust upon them.
She took comfort in memories of her healing; a hundred men would have died without her aid. But how many more, Rhiannon had to wonder, would have been spared, and would be spared in the coming days, if she fought openly to drive the darkness back from the Calvan fields?
Again Rhiannon found herself down by the riverbank, staring across to the vast talon encampment. She thought of her first view of the region, before the darkness had fallen over the land, with Andovar telling her of all the strange names and legends. She remembered the tingling anticipation she and her friends had felt on their way to holiday in Corning.
And then had come the war. And now Andovar, her dear Andovar, was no more.
Rhiannon had never known such a loss before, had never felt so helpless. She wanted to change the events, to turn things back and somehow, some way, prevent the death of that man who had become so precious to her. She wanted to wake up from it all and discover it was only a nightmare. She wanted to go back to that fateful morning and ride out to the north with Andovar and Belexus, to shield them and fight beside them when the darkness came.
But she could do nothing. Nothing.
Just sit here and wish impossible wishes.
“And will it happen again?” she asked herself. “Who else will be finding this sorrow? Meself again?” It seemed so inevitable, so unstoppable. Rhiannon could heal the wounds of some, but the swords of the talons and the powers of the Black Warlock could inflict the wounds on so many more.
Too many more.
They had to be stopped, Rhiannon decided. This madness, this war, had to be brought to a swift end. Rhiannon looked to the north, at the bridges and the soldiers. Brave soldiers. So willing to die in defense of their homes. And across the river went her gaze, to the distant peaks of the Baerendel Mountains. Bryan of Corning was out there, and probably many more heroes, risking their lives every day and doing all they could, whatever the cost, to fight back against the evil invaders.
And all the while she sat here waiting for the lucky few wounded who managed to survive long enough to get to her tent.
Still, she could not deny the importance of her role to those few.
Rhiannon closed her eyes and looked into herself. Finding no answers, she lay back on the grass and called out to the earth. It had told her of the coming of Thalasi, had given her the strength to hold off the talon cavalry and to heal mortal wounds. It had told her of the death of Andovar. Now Rhiannon needed more from the earth.
When the sun passed the midpoint of its daily travels, the young witch had her answer.
* * *
“What is troubling you so?” Siana asked when Rhiannon entered the large healing tent a short time later. She was standing beside a cot, its linen freshly stained with the blood of the war’s latest victim.
“Weary I be and nothing more,” Rhiannon replied. She looked at the soldier on the cot.
“He took an arrow,” Siana explained. “They just brought him in. I did what I could: cleaned and dressed the wound.” Rhiannon moved in to inspect the girl’s work.
“I hope it is correct,” Siana said nervously. “I watched you do it before. I just could not let him lie there and suffer.”
Rhiannon’s smile when she looked back at Siana comforted the girl. “Ye did a fine job,” she said. “Yer heart was in the work.”
“It is but a minor wound,” the soldier said, bending his head over to take a measure of it. “Lucky shot. But no matter, with your help I can be back on the field this very day.”
Rhiannon looked at Siana. “Ye’ll get him back on the field,” she said.
Siana’s face twisted in surprise and confusion, as did the soldier’s.
“Will you not help me, then, Mistress Rhiannon?” he pleaded. “So many have told of—”
Rhiannon stopped him with an outstretched hand and a comforting smile. “Not to be fearing,” she said. “Siana’ll fix ye up right away.” She turned to the perplexed girl and handed her a single rose, its stem a vibrant green and its petals glowing a soft blue.
Siana’s eyes opened wide. “What is this?” she asked blankly, for she recognized immediately that there was much more to the apparent simplicity of this gift; she could feel the energy vibrating within the enchanted flower.
“A gift,” Rhiannon explained. “From the earth to meself, and from me to yerself. Take it and use it. Ye may find that it brings ye the strength to do more than clean and dress the wounds.”
Siana took the rose in her trembling hands, then moved, compelled, to the side of the soldier. She needed no instruction; the magic of the flower showed her the way. She pressed her hand against the hole in the man’s shoulder and felt the sting of his pain fly out from his body and up her arm. Siana, ever brave, grimaced through the frightening moment, holding strong to her purpose. And then the pain was gone, to her and to the man.
Wide-eyed, the man started to rise, but Rhiannon held him down. “Get yer rest,” she said. “Ye’ll find the time for fightin’ soon enough.”
Siana looked at Rhiannon, confused again and now more than a little afraid. Behind her, Jolsen and Lennard, on his first day up from his bed, had come over and now looked on in equal awe.
“How?” Siana asked. “I am no witch.”
“You are now,” Lennard remarked, but there was no sarcasm in his voice, just admiration.
“The flower gives ye the power to heal,” Rhiannon explained. “But ye must stay strong, Siana, and accept the pain from the wounds. This was a slight one, but others’ll take the breath right from ye. Hold to yer purpose and trust in yerself. Ye’ll get through it.”
“You speak as if you will not be around to guide her,” said Lennard. “Are you leaving us?”
“I’ve other duties that need attending,” Rhiannon explained. She stroked a comforting hand across Siana’s cheek. “Do no’ be feared, me girl,” she said. “Ye’ve the strength to use the gift.”
Rhiannon walked from the tent then, leaving the three of them staring blankly at each other.
* * *
The night was crisp and unusually chilly for high summer. Rhiannon fumbled through her packs, searching for the gown, gossamer and silk, that she had packed when she set out from Avalon. She paused when she found it, wonderin
g what compulsion had told her to seek the dress. Certainly her tougher leggings would be better fitted to the road she had chosen.
All at once, Rhiannon understood the compulsion. If she was to accept who she was, to allow that frightening power its place within her being, she must look the part.
And then she was out under the stars, floating across the dark fields as if in a dream. A group of soldiers saw her, a ghostly apparition limned in the soft light of the heavens. They stood silent and unblinking, unable to find the words to describe the vision.
Rhiannon moved to the river. She hadn’t even considered how she would cross, for she had no boat. But the River Ne’er Ending was a natural barrier, and nothing of nature would stand against the daughter of the Emerald Witch. Without even realizing the act, Rhiannon merely drifted over the great river, the rolling water not even wetting the trailing edge of her gown.
Across the western fields she went, unconsciously using simple magics to make herself invisible to the eyes of talons. She traveled on throughout the night, toward the black silhouettes of the Baerendels.
The playground of Bryan of Corning.
Chapter 19
Council in Avalon
THE RANGER WANDERED through dark, troubled dreams, alone and directionless in a sunless land. For the second time in a week he was close to death, but this time the horrid wounds inflicted by the wraith of Hollis Mitchell were much more insidious, sending the chill of death straight for his heart.
But this time, too, the witch tending to Belexus was more experienced and knowledgeable of such ills, and he was in Avalon, the purest land in all the world. Brielle worked over him tirelessly, pausing only on those occasions when the Black Warlock launched another of his storms against her domain. Those first few hours after Calamus had snatched the ranger from Mitchell’s undead clutches had been the most critical. The witch had stayed with Belexus until long after the dawn tinted the eastern sky. Cold were the cruel claws of the wraith, but warmer still was the gentle touch of the Emerald Witch. She insinuated herself into the heart and soul of the mighty warrior, lent him the breath of her own life in his struggles. And when Brielle saw into Belexus’ most private thoughts—and into emotions that concerned her and her wood—she was moved. Healing the man became her obsession; one so noble and true as Belexus must not be allowed to die.