But he had recovered and riposted, and scored a mortal blow. With his free hand, Tay Aillig held fast the man’s weapon arm, by the wrist, and as he let the dead man fall away, he pulled from that wrist a copper cuff, set with a pale orange stone, spangled in purple. Almost immediately upon taking the item, Tay Aillig had sensed its power, a power so similar to the blessings the witches placed upon their crystalline spear tips.
He had broke that small amethyst-studded sunstone from the larger bracelet and hidden it away, and still kept it secret these five years later.
Without thinking, his free hand moved toward the little pocket he had stitched into his breeches, just in front of his right hip.
He wished that strange stone could ease his pain now, but no, these were the fires of burned wood, not the magical flames of a crystal-created fireball.
Mairen whistled a second time, and the witches turned about and began to sing. The warriors of the raiding party looked to Tay Aillig, and he met their desperate stares with a wicked smile.
He closed his hand tighter on the crystal he held, and refused to so much as grimace at the pain, so much was he enjoying the pleading stares, the begging, from the other warriors.
Finally, he nodded, and the men ran to the buckets of water on the outer perimeter and plunged in their burned hands and the hot crystals. Tay Aillig, though, took his time, walking calmly to his pail and dropping in the crystal from on high. Then he paused and looked around, smiling against the burning pain and letting everyone see him before finally plunging in his hand.
He was the first to leave the comfort of the cool water, too, moving to his spear to set the blessed crystalline tip. He fixed his judgmental stare on any lagging warrior; the witches would not heal the burns of any warrior until every spear was completed.
Finally, it was done, and so the raid was considered blessed. The warriors moved to their assigned witch for healing, Tay Aillig alone to the Usgar-righinn. He pointedly did not look her in the eye when she cast her healing magic upon his burned hand. He refused to acknowledge her at all, and moved off into the shadows with his war party.
They could have set off right then, but Tay Aillig held them to watch the ending of the ceremony. A whistle from the darkness brought forth the tribe’s dozen slaves, the uamhas, the monsters with misshapen heads.
* * *
Aoleyn wrapped her arm around the crone’s leg and pulled herself closer. She didn’t want to look at these ugly creatures, but she couldn’t turn her eyes away. They were mostly human in appearance, entirely so, actually, except for their strangely bent or stretched skulls. Several had grossly elongated heads, huge and conical. Three others were even worse, with skulls that protruded upward both left and right, like blunted, hairy horns—this trio of young uamhas had been captured the previous year, from one of the most celebrated raids in Usgar memory. Another, the youngest, wasn’t older than Aoleyn, and was cursed with a forehead that rose up far too high and bent sharply to the right.
The uamhas collected armloads of kindling comprised of mostly thin, long branches, and rushed to drop them just outside the perimeter of the dying bonfire. Then they scrambled away into the darkness, toward the pine grove that housed them in the summer months, chased by the hateful glares of the tribe.
The witches stepped forward, encircling the low-burning fire once more, and collected the kindling as the Usgar-righinn produced her mighty scepter, a crystalline cylinder that appeared to be made of starlight, with a line of red shot through it within. Mairen closed her eyes and hugged the scepter close, and began to glow, her body encased in a divine shroud of white light. She stepped onto the bonfire, ignoring the flares of flame caused by her bare feet. Unbothered, she curled down into a ball.
The witches lay their kindling atop her and all about her and stepped back, and began again their swaying, hypnotic dance and quiet song.
Aoleyn heard the Usgar-righinn’s chant from under the pile, and so she shouldn’t have been surprised. But she still jumped when the bonfire exploded, flames engulfing the new kindling immediately and lifting mightily into the night sky with a sudden roar and a wave of heat that washed over everyone in the encampment.
The witches danced wildly again, chanting with full throat. This time, they were singing their goodbyes to the warriors. Little Aoleyn had been promised that she would learn this song soon, and many other songs, and that perhaps she would be strong enough to join this part of the ritual in a few years’ time, as many outside the ring of witches were also singing. The girl jumped again when Mairen stood up suddenly amidst the flames, her arms lifted to the heavens, her scepter glowing with fiery reflection. She floated up into the air above the fire!
How glorious she seemed! How powerful! Above the fires and above them all!
Mairen held that pose, floating in the air above the fire, for a long while, until the song drifted away and melted into the night like the Usgar warriors.
“Will they bring things back?” asked the entranced girl, turning to the crone.
“Oh yes, child, they will bring back many things,” answered the crone. “Darker days close in, and we’ll be needing to last through the cold blow.”
The girl nodded silently. She was young, but she already knew to fear winter up here on the great mountain. She looked around at the village, a few dozen structures of conical tents that had been fashioned of a thin, angled pine skeleton overlaid with elk hide, sticking up from the already snow-covered ground. She understood what was coming next, though she didn’t really remember it from the previous year and only knew because the old crone had reminded her many times over. The Usgar tribe would not sit idly while the raiding party left the mountain in the hunt for supplies to last through the brutal cold. Before the raiders returned, the village would be moved from the summer camp to the sacred winter plateau.
A shiver ran down the girl’s back just thinking about that place. Not a shiver of fear, nor of cold, but of excitement. Despite its location high on the side of the mountain, the sacred plateau was always warm, even in the midst of the fiercest of blizzards. Two open pits tunneled into the depths of the mountain, and the heat radiating from them made fires unnecessary, other than for light or cooking. A stream burbled past, unfrozen, clean and fresh, to the edge of the plateau. The girl had peeked over that edge the previous winter, expecting to see a waterfall; instead, she saw the water turn to cold white ice as soon as it crossed the edge of the plateau, frozen almost instantly in a spray of snowy crystal flakes.
She had found that thoroughly enchanting.
But even anticipation of these magical trappings did not fully explain the child’s giddiness. Something about that winter home simply resonated with her, made her hair stand on end in the best possible way.
“Why can’t we live on the winter plateau all year long?” she asked.
The crone laughed her grating, wheezing snicker, one that mocked all questioners with its surety. “’Tis a sacred place,” she explained, and not for the first time with the precocious Aoleyn. “One mustn’t stay there too long, or sure you’ll be driven mad.”
“But the Usgar-forfach lives there,” the never-satisfied child protested.
“Aye, and so the Elder’s quite mad, he is!” the crone said. She burst out snickering and chortling again, but the laugh quickly faded into a cough.
Her demeanor changed instantly, and the crone cast a stern look at Aoleyn. “Do’no repeat that,” she warned harshly. She extended a gnarled finger at the girl menacingly. “Do’no e’er repeat that!”
Aoleyn nodded her assent, but found herself more curious than afraid of the woman’s sudden demeanor change.
The crone looked as if she was about to speak again, probably to repeat her warning, but a low chanting filled the air, and the old woman fell silent.
Aoleyn looked back to the roaring bonfire, where the gathered witches had stopped dancing. Then, as Mairen floated from above the blazing fire and slowly lowered to the ground, the witches began si
nging the last of the sacred chants, this one in the old tongue. Aoleyn knew these sounds well, but not the words, for the old tongue was the sole province of the Coven and was not typically spoken except in these few public rituals.
“Nach’s e agam am fialach oir geamrah a’buan a’m nhitheas fuaraich easbhui annad.”
The crone, who knew the old tongue well, although she had never been in the Coven, translated. “‘Return to me with bounty, for the winter’s long and sure I’ll grow cold without you.’”
Two dozen warriors of the tribe set off down the mountain, the final and most important raid before the deep snows closed the high passes. The chanting of the thirteen witches continued long after the men were out of sight, but the other men and women witnessing the event scurried about as soon as their warriors were lost to the darkness, breaking down the pine and hide tents, preparing them for the litters that would be dragged up the mountainside and off to the north a bit, to the sacred winter home of the Usgar.
The Usgar-righinn called out above the song, and from the shadows came the primary litter bearers, the uamhas with their oddly shaped heads.
“Will the warriors bring any more slaves?” Aoleyn asked the crone.
“If the blessing’s pure enough, aye,” she answered. “We’re always needing more slaves!”
* * *
The icy-cold, crystal clear water of Loch Beag swirled around Huana’kal’s feet, numbing him to midcalf. Northwest, across the great lake, the morning sun caught the top of the mountains, shining brilliantly off the snow-covered peaks, but Kal remained in shade, for the sun hadn’t risen enough yet to get past the wall of the great mountain looming dark behind him.
The shadows of Fireach Speuer often darkened the lake town of Fasach Crann, the Wilderpine, both literally and figuratively.
Kal dipped his ceramic jug into the water, sending silver streaks of minnows darting. Were it leaner times, these minnows would be an important food source, and Kal was quite practiced at catching them, but for now he let them be.
Kal savored the feel of the frigid waters against his legs. Autumn was on in full, and here on the high plateau, that season often meant storms and snow. Today promised to be bright and glorious, though, and it was already quite warm. And Kal had been walking since before the dawn, back and forth from his home to the food shed, to the market, to the lake. To wherever his wife, Innevah, had asked. Her belly swelled with their first child, due at the onset of winter, and that child, boy or girl, would be tall and strong, Kal knew. His anticipation gnawed at him—he couldn’t wait to tightly swaddle his child’s head, to stretch its skull to the heavens.
He poured a bit of the cold water over his own head to rinse off the sweat. He poured a bit down his throat as well. He started to turn for home, but paused simply to enjoy the peaceful moment, the village waking up around him. Innevah wouldn’t notice he’d delayed. He took a deep gulp of the water, savoring the soft morning air.
Loch Beag’s mood this fine day was glassy and bright. A gentle breeze pushed ripples across the surface, but not enough to cloud the water—and not just here in the shallows, Kal knew. Like every other adult in the village, he had spent many hours out on the deep waters, sometimes a mile from shore or more. Loch Beag was a mountain lake, wholly surrounded by the towering peaks of the Surgruag Monadh, the Snowhaired Mountains, and nearly a mile above the flat sands of Fasail Dubh’clach, the Desert of Black Stones, to the east. The waters were very deep, deeper than any lines the fishermen dared fashion to drop into them. For in the depths of Loch Beag lurked dangerous hunters, and one monster in particular that the people of the tribes living all about the lakeshore knew all too well.
Visibility down into the water often meant the difference between life and death out on the ways of Loch Beag, for when the shadow of the beast passed far below, the fishermen knew to take up their oars and unfurl their small square sails and get fast to the shallows. Even boats of the other tribes, often rivals, would raise their flags of warning to the other villages, and calls of “row!” would echo about the waters.
And when the lake’s mood shifted, when the streams that fed Loch Beag ran fast with the spring melt or with heavy rains and so stirred the lake bed into clouds, or when the warm southern winds excited a fog, the lakemen knew to be fast off the deep waters.
For the monster knew those days, too, and too often hunted well the slowest boat.
There had been a lot of fog this season, and so the supplies of Fasach Crann were running lower than desired with winter coming on fast.
Kal looked down at the pretty dace again and nodded.
The young man took another deep drink from his jug, dipped it into the shallow water to refill it, and splashed back to shore, heading for home and his very pregnant wife. He noted a pair of elderly men sitting on low chairs woven of treated white birch bark tied about a pine frame, a very common sight down here by the lake this time of morning.
“Over in the cove, they’ve not been hit in years,” one was saying as Kal walked by. “Might be their turn.” Though he was anxious to get home, Kal paused, intrigued. The winter neared, after all, and that meant the demon gods who lived on the mountain would almost certainly be out hunting soon.
“Nor the village in the cleft,” said another.
“Plenty o’ easy pickings there, if I’m to be asked,” said the first.
“The Usgar aren’t asking,” the other said, and both nodded resignedly. “The demon gods take as the demon gods see.”
Kal grunted an acknowledgement as he walked by. These two old fisherfolk, one bald, the other with gray wisps of hair scattered about his head, were too infirm to work on the boats, and so had become mainstays near the lake bank, sitting back in their chairs, sometimes picking at the dace bones and always full of chatter, mostly complaining, predicting the weather, the fishing fortunes, offering dire warnings of Usgar raiders, or of the lake monster. Still, despite their often growly demeanor, they had become something of friends to Kal in these last months, as he had remained ashore, as custom demanded, to help Innevah. The men and women of the lake villages both worked equally, and Innevah was herself a fisherwoman of no small repute. Indeed, she and Kal had begun their relationship on a fishing boat, or rather on two fishing boats, when they had collided while jostling for position over a school of sunfish.
Surely Innevah wanted to be back out there on the waters as much as Kal did, but in the village, as in most of the settlements about the lake, when a woman became pregnant, both she and her chosen mate were compelled to stay off the boats until the child was born. Life here on the Ayamharas Plateau was dangerous, life on the lake even more so, and children were the most precious gifts that could be given to the tribe.
All that, however, didn’t stop these two particular old-timers from giving Kal a lot of grief during his somewhat idle days wandering about the village. “Ack, but we’re old and brittle,” they usually greeted him, “and we’ve not the balance to stand in a boat. And our fingers are no more for pointing straight. What’s your own excuse, boy?”
They began that very litany as Kal walked away, but they paused, as did he, when a third man strode in from the other direction, heading with purpose for the elders. Kal turned about as the man passed him by with a gruff nod, one returned by Kal for he hardly knew this man, a trader with a skull that had not been shaped by wrapping, who had come from across the lake, and from lands far away. The tall and lanky man’s appearance unsettled Kal; with his unshaped head he was masquerading as a god—and not a god of blessing, like those that gave the fruits and the fish, but a demon god, an Usgar.
The lakemen of Loch Beag would never think to allow themselves to resemble those awful demons of Fireach Speuer!
“What tidings, then, Talmadge of the East?” the old gray-hair asked.
“Same grumbles as this morn?” the bald-headed elder added.
“I am telling you plainly,” Talmadge replied. “I have looked through my fortune glass and I have see
n them. The mountain men are soon coming down from their high perch.”
“You’re needing magic to tell you that?” the gray-hair answered with a snort. “Could’ve put my finger up in the winterly wind and told you the same.”
Talmadge winced—it seemed to Kal as if he was in pain—as he brought his right arm up to hold aloft a strange item, a brass ring with a clear crystal set in the middle, like some kind of lens—except that it was not concave like a lens, and it did not focus the sunlight shining upon it, but rather threw the light about into a thousand sparkles.
“I thought you should know,” he said. “My fear is that they’ll come straight down the mountain to Fasach Crann,” he said, which alarmed Kal until the two old men scoffed at the notion.
“We’re always the closest to the deamhain,” said the bald-headed man. “But we’re the hardest to strike!”
“I’ve looked through your ‘fortune glass,’ too, and do you know what I seen?” the gray-hair added. “I seen whatever’s on the other side, and that’s all, but a bit stretched and blurry!”
He and his friend sniggered at that. “Seven villages on the lake and we’re the strongest,” he went on. “The deamhain are mean, I’ll be giving you that much, but they’re a bit mortal, at least, and they try to stay alive, aye? They got easier pickings north and south. You’re sure to see it, too, aye, Water-stilt?”
It took Kal a moment to realize that the old man was addressing him, and to further realize that he wasn’t even trying to hide his eavesdropping. He flushed red, a bit embarrassed to be caught so off guard, then nodded sharply.
“He’s just trying to sell you that magic fortune glass,” Kal said, dripping the word “magic” with sarcasm.
But Talmadge was shaking his head before Kal even finished. “Nay, it is not for sale,” he said flatly.
“’Course it’s not,” said the gray-haired old-timer. “Not for sale unless we’re to make the right thick offer.”