But no, she realized somewhere deep inside, some tiny flicker of recognition. No, this wasn’t Usgar, not the god himself, at least, but it was one of the magical manifestations.
Wedstone.
The flecks in the crystal crushing her throat.
Aoleyn’s eyes popped open wide, but she hardly looked at the crazed, magically empowered woman choking the life out of her. No, she continued to look inside, to hear the song, to reach out for the vibrations of those gray flecks within the pressing crystal.
She found the magic and she threw it, hard, with all her strength, into the mind and soul of Connebragh.
The woman staggered. The only press on her neck then was from the simple weight of the leaning, stunned witch.
Aoleyn rolled her shoulders, driving her hand across, grabbing the crystal and pulling it out wide, then yanking it from Connebragh’s hands, and without that support, the stunned witch fell forward.
Both hands on the crystal now, Aoleyn swung back violently, cracking Connebragh across the face as she slumped.
That shook Connebragh from the mental stupor, and she sat up straight, then cried out and came back.
But now Aoleyn had the crystal before her like a knife, and she stabbed out, driving the dull end into the woman’s face. She heard the crunch of Connebragh’s nose, saw the almost immediate flood of blood gushing forth.
Aoleyn struck again. She squirmed and thrashed. She began pounding at Connebragh’s head as if she held a hammer, doing little damage, but keeping the woman at bay, even forcing her to rise up a bit to get out of range and to get her own arms in close to try to catch the crystal.
Aoleyn curled, one leg in tight, drove her foot up into Connebragh’s crotch, and pressed with all her strength.
The dazed witch fell aside and Aoleyn tucked and rolled over backward, coming to her feet, holding the bloody crystal out before her with one hand like a weapon, bringing her other hand to her aching, bruised throat.
“Enough!” declared Mairen, aiming her words as much at Connebragh, who had recovered by then and seemed ready to leap back in to pummel the poor girl.
The Usgar-righinn held her hand out toward Aoleyn, toward the crystal.
But Aoleyn wasn’t handing it over just then. She reached into the magic again, this time aiming the effects at herself, at her injured throat.
She felt the magical vibrations wash through her, and they seemed to realign her own being to harmony, thus healing her. She tried to hurry, expecting Mairen to yank the crystal away, or even to strike her with some other magic to stop her, but no, the Usgar-righinn stood there, seeming patient, and let Aoleyn finish.
Then Mairen motioned with her fingers for the crystal, and Aoleyn wisely handed it over.
Aoleyn held her breath, unsure of what would happen next, and she was surprised to see Mairen and Connebragh exchange looks that seemed more complimentary to Aoleyn than threatening.
“We saved your life this night, child,” Mairen said to Aoleyn. “Perhaps it was worth saving.”
Aoleyn could only stare, dumbfounded.
“You will have no more time near Seonagh,” Mairen explained. “Bid her farewell now, if you must. Tomorrow we travel th’Way, and you will come with us, Aoleyn. You will see this.”
“See this?” Aoleyn asked, to no response.
The next morning, she came to understand. The path out of the winter encampment that traveled between the lines of slave caves, then up the mountain to the highest peak and plateau of Fireach Speuer, was known as th’Way among the witches of the Coven. It was a fairly difficult climb, even this early into the season.
Mairen led the procession, which included several warriors and all thirteen Coven witches. Four of those men bore a litter, upon which lay Seonagh. They took great care with her, more than any man had shown her in life.
Aoleyn noted that areas of this hike had been worked and smoothed, some even with steps cut in to help with passage. Still, there was ice now, and areas without any such crafted aids, and so it took the better part of the morning to make the hike. The climb culminated in a treeless lea of stone and dirt and brown grass, centered by a chasm Aoleyn knew, a chasm out of which she had magically floated: Craos’a’diad.
Aoleyn understood. She wanted to scream out in denial, to scold Mairen, to call her so many names, most especially “murderess!”
But Mairen and the others had anticipated this, obviously, for Tay Aillig and another powerful warrior flanked Aoleyn as soon as Seonagh’s litter was placed down before the chasm. They loomed over her, ready to grab her, ready to …
To do what, Aoleyn wondered? To pummel her, perhaps. Or choke her with their hands. She didn’t have a wedstone handy this time.
The witches began to sing and dance about the unconscious form of Seonagh. For a long while, they spun and they dipped in perfect harmony, a truly beautiful sight to behold.
When the dance ended, the twelve lesser witches joined hands and formed a semicircle around Seonagh, the witch on either end near to the chasm lip. Inside that line stood Mairen, chanting and holding a crystal up before her.
Aoleyn tried to get a better view between the forms of the witches, but she couldn’t make out much of Mairen’s actions. She did, however, see Seonagh float up from the litter, rising into the air. The witches sang more fervently, as if in some orgiastic frenzy so suddenly, and before them Mairen danced and held her crystal up over her head.
Then the dance stopped and the song went soft and somber. With a casual flick of her hand, Mairen pushed the weightless Seonagh, who floated out over the chasm.
“No!” Aoleyn cried, leaping forward, or trying to, until Tay Aillig caught her by the upper arm with his iron grip.
The cruel man was barely stifling his amusement when he ordered his companion to help. They hoisted Aoleyn off the ground, she kicking her feet futilely, and carried her over to the side enough so that she could see past the semicircle of witches, and to Seonagh, hanging limply, helplessly, over Craos’a’diad.
The music stopped.
The witches bowed as one.
Seonagh plummeted from sight.
“No,” Aoleyn whispered, and she slumped, tears flooding from her black eyes. She would have fallen to the ground, wanted to throw herself into the pit, but Tay Aillig and his powerful companion held her tight and tried to keep her upright.
She could only cry, couldn’t even find the voice for a proper protest, instead simply wailing and screaming an occasional denial.
No one reacted. No one cared.
The witches took up a song once more, a marching song, and Mairen began again the procession back down th’Way to the winter encampment.
Tay Aillig and the other warrior carried the sobbing, defeated Aoleyn all the way.
* * *
“Down the cove. Down the cove,” Talmadge serenaded, using the cadence of the song to keep the rhythm of his paddling.
Sitting and leaning with her back against the higher prow of the canoe, Khotai had stopped singing, and was just letting the serenity of the place wash over her. The sun was rising behind Talmadge, before her, casting long reflections across this southwestern corner of Loch Beag, tickling the water, which responded with wisps of stream.
“And there I’ll find my lady fair, who’ll kick my ass and mess my hair!” the oarsman improvised, drawing a laugh.
“True enough, and don’t you be forgetting it,” Khotai warned. Her expression changed, though, and she pointed off to her right, toward the southern shore of the lake and a cove that flowed back to where it became thick with the morning fog, and then seemed to wrap around farther to the right and out of sight. But there, on the land it rounded, Khotai saw smoke.
“Carrachan Shoal,” Talmadge explained. “Breakfast fires.”
“Not the village you told me about?”
“No, that’s Fasach Crann, and we’ve a long way yet to go. We’ll not be there before twilight.”
“And we’ll not stop here for a b
it of food and rest?”
Talmadge snorted. “The folk of Carrachan Shoal are the least friendly of the lake tribes. Or might I should say, the most suspicious. They’d not openly welcome me traveling with you. The three towns—this one, Fasach Crann, and the one beyond that—are the most careful of the seven about the lake, because they’re deepest in the shadow of the mountain.”
“And the shadow of the Usgar,” Khotai reasoned.
“Aye.”
“But you said that Fasach Crann was your favorite of all.”
“It took them years of seeing my ugly face in these parts, and the word of the neighboring tribes, for them to trust me,” Talmadge explained, and he shrugged then and gave a self-deprecating chuckle. “I don’t know why I’ve grown so fond of them. It might be because I find their heads the least off-putting!”
“They’ve got the long skulls,” said Khotai.
“Aye, just a single cone, and covered in hair for most. They don’t look much different than women of the Wilderlands with long hair, who tie it up in great buns as they go about their chores.” He gave another self-deprecating chuckle and shrug. “It’s funny to admit it, but they probably accept me more because I’m feeling easier around them. More than once is the time I’ve seen a villager with two humps on his head, and with odd hair to make the bumps clearer, and I’ve gasped in surprise—even now, after all these years of coming here.”
Khotai nodded and grinned. “It takes some time to get used to,” she agreed.
“Have you?”
“What?”
“Gotten used to it?”
Khotai laughed loudly. “No!”
“You will, a bit.”
“I still love it here.” She rested back once more then and let her gaze drift off to the south, watching the lines of smoke from the Carrachan Shoal cooking fires drift lazily above the fog while Talmadge went back to his song. She let her arm sling over the side of the boat and lazily ran circles in the water with her finger—and that water felt warm to her, compared with the crisp air this day.
Warmer still a short while later when the wind shifted around to the north, blowing in across the lake, and before Khotai or even Talmadge realized it, the fog began to rise more thickly around them.
“Bloody hell,” Talmadge remarked when the first cold mist blew across the canoe.
“A wintry shift?” Khotai asked.
Talmadge sighed. “Sure to slow us down, and we’ve a long way to go.” He shifted his paddle over to his right, Khotai’s left, and gave a sharp and deliberate pull, turning the canoe discernably.
“It’s not that cold,” Khotai told him. “We can go on. We’ve warmer clothes…” She reached for her pack.
But Talmadge was shaking his head. “You can’no be out on Loch Beag in a fog,” he explained in very grim tones.
Khotai looked at him curiously.
But Talmadge just shook his head back at her, and pulled even harder on his paddle, turning the canoe for shore. When they came around fully, Talmadge sucked in his breath with clear concern, so Khotai glanced over her shoulder.
While Talmadge had kept them running straight to the west, the southern lakeshore had receded in this area, so they were actually quite farther out than they had been, and more, obviously, than Talmadge was comfortable with!
“Take up a paddle,” he said deliberately and calmly. She pulled herself forward and rolled to her knees, reaching for the spare paddle. She had just grabbed it when the canoe rolled suddenly in an unexpected swell, stern to prow.
Khotai froze and looked up at Talmadge, who was also sitting perfectly still then, not moving his paddle, holding one hand up for her to remain silent and in place. The canoe drifted, turning sidelong to the shore as the swell rolled under it and flowed toward shore.
The lake quieted around them and Talmadge nodded slowly. As Khotai eased her way around, the man dipped his paddle gently and pushed.
Khotai lowered her paddle on the other side of the canoe, thinking to do the same, but before it touched water, the fog cleared just enough for her to see a huge shadow passing right under the boat.
She sat up straight, suddenly, and snapped her head as she gulped.
He hadn’t seen it, but he did see her, and his expression widened in shock, telling her that he understood.
Then Talmadge was up above her, lifted high as the back of the craft was pushed from below. He went flying right over her as the prow dipped and swamped, and before she even sorted it out, Khotai found herself in the water. She let go of the paddle and kicked furiously to gain the surface.
And there she heard the roar.
And there she saw the flotsam and jetsam that had been their canoe.
Then she heard Talmadge scream, and saw it then. The lake monster of Loch Beag. A massive, black serpentine neck, the neck of a dragon, she thought, lifting out of the water, through the fog and out of sight.
And then came the beast’s head, sweeping down, with its terrible maw full of teeth as long as daggers.
* * *
Half-drowned, shivering with cold, bleeding badly from the rake of a huge claw across his hip that had peeled leather and cloth and skin with frightening ease, Talmadge pulled himself onto a muddy bank. His lungs ached from too much inhaled water, or from a hit he had taken. Possibly from a tail or a flipper, or a leg.
He could not know for sure. It had all happened so fast, the boat flipping stern over prow, him flying through the air to splash into the water. The splashing, the thrashing, Khotai’s scream—aye, that awful sound rang in his ears still and had chased him all the way to shore.
Talmadge had never really seen their adversary, the monster, other than a wall of darkness that had fallen over him as he thrashed in the water.
But he knew. Of course, he knew.
It took him a long while to gain his footing and his bearings. He looked up and down the shore, then started off to the west, thinking he might gain Carrachan Shoal in a few hours, or, hopefully, that he might find Khotai.
Only a few dozen strides along, Talmadge came around a tumble of brush and a fallen tree that forced him back into the ankle-deep water at lake’s edge. He struggled and leaned heavily on the branches and came around the tangle, but then stopped short, seeing a familiar boot.
“Khotai? Khotai!? Khotai!” Talmadge cried, pulling himself around and grabbing the fallen woman by the leg.
Only to realize that, no, this was not Khotai. This was just her leg, severed above the knee.
Talmadge fell down to the side, against the fallen tree, vomited, and sobbed.
He never made it to Carrachan Shoal that day. He went the other way, walking, crawling, until exhaustion overcame him. Then he clawed his way along the next day, and into the next night, half-crazed with grief, weak with hunger and pain.
He woke up in a bed in a warm hut in the village of Fasach Crann, where he was tended through the winter, by the gentle folk he had come to love.
But when the snows left the following spring, Talmadge left the plateau with them, left his friends who had saved him after that awful day, left this village of Fasach Crann that he so loved, vowing never to return.
PART 4
SECRETS
It is natural to fear that which we do not know, that with which we are not familiar. Nature, too, elicits comparisons from each of us on those who look different or act differently—by gender, color, shape of the eyes, religion, even culture. We often crinkle our noses in disgust when we encounter another culture’s cuisine, like the snakes and bugs the To-gai-ru consider delicacies, or the bog petals the Touel’alfar wrap around slugs.
So, too, would a To-gai-ru traveler crinkle her nose at the thought of cooked squid, or would a Doc’alfar visitor cringe at the sight of a cow being slaughtered.
Perhaps that is why the dark elves of Tymwyvenne are more inclined—or were more inclined—to think nothing of throwing a human into their bogs to be resurrected as a zombie slave.
This is the powe
r of unfamiliarity, the ease with which one can look at the discordant and foreign ways or appearance of another sentient person and thus internalize that person as something other, something different, something terrifying. This isn’t just true among the actually different races, between the humans and the alfar, or the powries and the goblins, but among the various human tribes that populate Corona as well. There is little mingling or understanding between the men of Honce-the-Bear, the large and ferocious Alpinadorans, the brown-skinned Behrenese of the desert lands south of the Belt-and-Buckle, and the flat-faced and narrow-eyed warriors of the To-gai steppes. Four distinct tribes, four distinct cultures, four distinct ways of existing in the differing environs from which each hail.
These differences have oft wrought conflict.
Honce-the-Bear was not always a united kingdom despite the similarities of life and appearance and language across the breadth of the kingdom. Many wars have been fought upon her hilltops and through her low valleys pitting armies of folk who could be brothers, sisters, cousins. Similarly, the Alpinadoran tribes have done battle, village against village. But in the history of Corona, the greatest and most vicious and longest-lasting wars have involved a clash of civilizations, not brother against brother, unless one can consider all humans to be brethren.
As one should, I have now come to understand, though my own journey took me through dark valleys of brutal battle.
It is my own journey—without those dark valleys—that I wish every man and woman of Corona might walk.
For I learned to see the world through the almond-shaped eyes of Brynn Dharielle. I witnessed the harmony of movement, the sheer martial beauty of Pagonel of Behren. I have trained with the Touel’alfar, and in the rejoining of the elven races, have come to know the ways of the Doc’alfar. I am better for this knowledge. The world has become smaller and more familiar, and more comfortable around me because I speak out in unjudging curiosity instead of lashing out in fear of the mysterious other.
And this curiosity has commanded my road since my days in the tutelage of the great Touel’alfar leader, Dasslerond, the Lady of Andur’Blough Inninness. Instead of returning to the east, to Honce-the-Bear, where I might have begun training in the Abellican Church of Father Abbot Braumin Herde, who personally invited me, or of traveling south over the mountains to Behr, to the Walk of Clouds to train with the Jhesta tu, as Pagonel implored me, or even to To-gai, to learn of the people who gave to me the gift of Brynn Dharielle, I ventured west instead, to untamed lands filled more with goblins and giants and other such creatures, the children of the beasts of the demon dactyls, than with people.