Aoleyn squinted against the glare of the low sun, shining from across Loch Beag and nearly touching the mountains behind the lake’s left-hand bank. She noted some sparkles about the ground, and a flat stone, glistening red, reminding her that the Blood Moon would soon rise.
She scanned more intently, and noted something in the tall grass beside the stone. At first she thought it a fallen branch, but then realized it was something else, something that answered both her questions.
“The red stone,” she breathed.
“Red with the blood and brains of Gavina,” Mairen explained without sympathy.
Aoleyn gasped and stepped back, turning on the Crystal Maven, who merely shrugged.
“You have my crystal of levitation,” Mairen said. “It is pure, its song strong. Do you think you can scale down into the ravine with it?”
Aoleyn looked at the crystal and concentrated on it just long enough to hear its song. A little smile came to her as she realized that, as strong as this crystal might be, its notes sounded tinny and distant compared with the roar of the malachite stone set in her belly ring.
“Yes,” she answered, and she was sure that she could, even with just Mairen’s crystal.
“Then go,” Mairen instructed. “Gavina fell with crystals. Retrieve them.”
“And her?”
Mairen’s face screwed up weirdly. “Yes, dear,” she answered with dripping sarcasm. “I am sure that you will be quite strong enough to carry up a woman half again your weight.”
Aoleyn held up her hands innocently.
Mairen cuffed her on the ear, a stinging slap. “Get the crystals, you idiot.”
Aoleyn quickly turned about and stepped off the ledge, drawing a gasp from Mairen, who obviously had thought she would call upon the magic first to test it before plunging! For confident Aoleyn, though, so tied into the Usgar song through the wedstone piercing, it was no worry, and she was floating before she had ever really begun to fall.
She started to turn over, thinking to use her moonstone to swoop down instead of just a floating descent, but she wisely deferred, for Mairen, watching from above, didn’t even know she had a moonstone.
She came down right beside the tall pine, across from the red-stained stone, and quickly moved around. She knew it was getting late and worried that Tay Aillig would be gone before she returned, but she stopped abruptly anyway when she came in sight of that stone.
Aoleyn had seen garish wounds, had seen injured warriors returning from a raid or a sidhe battle, had seen a man writhing in pain with his chest and belly torn wide by the swipe of a bear, but none of that could prepare her for the sight before her now. Gavina had hit headfirst, she understood, and the mess on the stone was more lumps of brain than simple blood.
It took her many heartbeats to steady herself and begin moving again, and even then, every step came with great tension, as she saw more and more of the truly broken woman. Gavina’s right arm was behind her back in a manner in which an arm should not be able to bend. The shoulder had fully shattered and the upper arm was straight across to the other shoulder, the lower arm hooked limped over Gavina’s left side.
The woman lay on her belly—Aoleyn could not have called it facedown, for she had no face, nor anything remaining that resembled a head. Her skull had exploded on impact, and just the stem of her backbone and brain remained.
On a branch just above and beyond the dead woman, Aoleyn spotted a crow with an eyeball dangling from its beak.
“Find your strength,” Aoleyn whispered, closing her eyes. “Bahdlahn,” she then repeated many times, reminding herself of the possible consequences of Tay Aillig’s plan, whatever that plan might be.
She took a deep breath, then moved stridently, searching about the stone to collect a couple of crystals. She glanced up at Mairen, and seeing that the woman wasn’t looking over at that time, she tugged her ear and activated her garnet, using it to guide her to any nearby magic.
One crystal had shattered fully, its flecks scattered about.
None seemed potent, so Aoleyn left them, not wanting to tip off the rest of the witches to the truth she had uncovered about Usgar’s magic, that it was the stones, just the stones, and not the crystals, that sang. So when she found the last crystal, half broken and revealing its contents, that, too, she not only left, but threw far aside.
To the west, the sun began to set.
Aoleyn rushed to the cliff and glanced back one time to dead Gavina. Despite Mairen’s slap, Aoleyn found that she hadn’t the heart to leave the poor woman to the carrion birds.
She went over and grabbed Gavina by the back of her torn clothes, then called upon the green stone set in her belly ring and sent its magic out to the dead woman. With one hand, Aoleyn easily lifted her, and carried her back to the cliff. Then she called upon the green stone more forcefully, and upon the blue-white moonstone, as well, using both and her free hand to run her up the cliff.
As she neared the ledge, though, she found her power beginning to wane, and a level of exhaustion she had not anticipated beginning to seep throughout her body.
She gave one last push, both magically and with her hand, and managed to grab the ledge, then to heave Gavina over … almost.
She had to let go, and the dead woman fell once more, bouncing off the cliff in her tumbling descent and flying so far out that she crashed into the pine, disappearing into its boughs and not, to Aoleyn’s notice, falling through.
Aoleyn gasped in horror, then grabbed the ledge with both hands, demanding one last push of magical energy to get her somewhat over, where Mairen grabbed her by the back of her shirt and helped tug her onto solid ground.
Huffing and puffing, when Aoleyn finally managed to turn over and regard the Usgar-righinn, she found Mairen chuckling derisively and shaking her head.
“Well, that should make it interesting for the warriors who will be sent to retrieve Gavina tomorrow,” Mairen remarked. She turned to look Aoleyn in the eye. “You simply couldn’t resist the chance to prove me wrong, now could you?” She snorted again, shook her head again, every sound, every movement tormenting Aoleyn for her failure.
She reached down and roughly helped Aoleyn to her feet, pointedly bringing the young woman in close so that their eyes were only a finger’s breadth apart. “You know not your place. Your time in the Coven will be short, I fear,” Mairen warned, “and will be the death of you.”
She roughly took her own crystal and those Aoleyn had retrieved, then shoved Aoleyn ahead of her, back toward the camp.
Aoleyn led at a swift pace, for night was falling.
And the Blood Moon was rising.
* * *
It hurt.
It knew only that it hurt. It always hurt, and it always knew. Most of the time, it was a dull pain, throughout its body, claws to tail, like the background noise of a distant song. Sometimes, though, that song rang clearer, the notes of Usgar, and the pain responded, eliciting fury in the fossa, making it leap all about, throwing rotted flesh and bones, raking the walls of its filthy death pit.
All it needed was to make the pain stop!
It did not need food. It did not need water. It did not need anything, except that: to make the pain stop.
The fossa didn’t sleep, but remembered sleep, and tried to sleep to forget its pain. But no, it could not, even when the song was far, far away.
The song vibrated through the stones of the den this night, lighting fires of agony on the tormented creature, like a thousand thousand stinging insects crawling on it, biting away. It leaped about in a frenzy to escape the pain, but of course the pain followed.
It let out a roar, loud and long and fearsome, and the sheer exertion dulled the pain for a moment. But just for a moment.
It raked at the walls of its den, its little stone cave. The stone was hard, but its claws dug in, such was its fury. New gouges creased in the stone, beside the cuts the demon creature had made the last time it hurt like this.
It did not remember the previous pain.
It did not remember the previous day. It did not remember at all with regards to time, for time had no meaning to the eternal creature.
It only hurt.
It paced in a circle, angry and pained. It stopped to let out another roar, but when that did not reduce the pain, it returned to its pacing.
Outside, the sunlight had faded. The full moon rose, and scant light passed through the thick brush that covered the entrance to its den, but even that was vanishing, replaced with a dark umber. This night, the light was different, the fossa sensed from the blackness of its bone-filled pit.
This night, the moon was red.
Again the song of Usgar assailed the beast, and now it found familiarity. It had heard this song before. It recognized the speaker.
A speaker the fossa had vowed to kill.
And the moon was red.
A great leap launched the monster from the pit to the ledge, where it belly-crawled across the sloped stone, under the low roof, and into the tunnel that led to the entry cave.
The pain stung it, but the moon was red, and the demon was not driven back as it approached the open air.
Now it welcomed the pain, this pain, for the sharpness of it whetted its mind and its hunger.
Out into the night, it went, lit by the red face of Iseabal.
The fossa hunted.
* * *
Following tips offered by a woman working the central bonfire, Aoleyn found the cave below the uamhas tents. They had been here, Tay Aillig had been here, and recently. She found some clues: a drawing in the dirt, a spent torch, and, surprisingly, seven of the weapons she had blessed a few nights earlier, including all four of the long spears.
She found a sack, a rucksack unlike anything she had ever seen. It was not of Usgar make or design, its corners sealed with metal rivets.
Aoleyn tried to make sense of it all.
Did Tay Aillig have a prisoner?
Aoleyn knew she didn’t have time to sit there and try to decipher it all. She exited and used her magic to scale the mountainside up to the top of the ridge behind the uamhas grove, and from there, she called upon her cat’s-eye magic to give her night vision, and surveyed the land spreading wide below her.
Even in the nighttime, mountains seemed deceptive when looking down at them, the viewer’s height disguising the sheer breadth and scope of the monstrous mound. Seeming not so far away, Aoleyn noted a small tree-filled expanse, a shadowy place showing a dusting of snow beneath, which made the trees stand out.
Aoleyn knew better, knew the tricks a mountain could play. She had crisscrossed these slopes many times, some on foot, but mostly in the air, and she understood the scope of the task before her, the many hidden ravines, the long, rolling terrain that appeared small and flatter from up high.
Even with her night sight and ability to soar down the mountain, finding Tay Aillig and the others, if they were even out there, would be near to impossible!
She had to try, though.
“Bahdlahn,” she whispered, and she threw herself from the height and stretched out her arms, riding the wind.
* * *
“Iseabal,” Aghmor breathed. The four warriors knew that it would be a Blood Moon this night, of course, but seeing the orb hanging over Fireach Speuer behind them took Aghmor’s breath away.
Ralid’s, too, although Egard gave a sinister snort and kicked the prisoner for good measure, and Tay Aillig merely smiled.
“That branch,” Tay Aillig instructed, and Egard roughly dragged the brutalized Talmadge over to the spot, while Ralid readied a cord. They soon had the cord looped up high, and had one end fastened to the prisoner’s wrists, which were bound tightly behind his back. On the other end of the cord, Egard pulled hard, yanking the man’s arms up high behind him, drawing a gasp and cry of pain from Talmadge.
Egard pulled more, bringing the poor man right to his tiptoes and beyond, and with Ralid’s help, they tied it off around the tree right there, keeping poor Talmadge hanging free as much as getting his toes to the ground. He kept moving his feet, desperately looking for some patch of higher ground that he could better set his feet, or even one foot, to take some of the pressure off his aching arms.
Tay Aillig came up before him, holding forth a crystal, one he had bade Connebragh to bless after Mairen had unexpectedly taken Aoleyn from the camp. He stuffed the crystal down the front of Talmadge’s shirt, patting it to make sure the man wouldn’t shake it free.
Not that it would matter, anyway, he believed. All the crystal had to do was attract the fossa. Whether it was on the prisoner or at his feet would matter not at all. Tay Aillig didn’t even care if the demon creature killed the man.
“Should we start a fire?” Aghmor asked, trying to keep the fear out of his voice.
Tay Aillig shot him a glare that silenced him. He led his three hunters to a patch of brush in a tangle of birch. He set one man watching each direction, with him staring back at the strung-up prisoner. “We must see the demon first,” he warned them.
Then he pulled forth his amethyst-crusted sunstone, and didn’t wait to call upon its magic, hoping that it would effectively blind the fossa to him and those around him.
Or to him, at least. He had little hope that all three of his fellow hunters would return with him to the Usgar camp that night.
* * *
She kept hoping that Tay Aillig’s band would light a fire. She stayed low to the ground in her glide, near the tops of the trees, but there was simply too much ground to cover! And with her silhouette against the starlit sky, Aoleyn rightly feared that Tay Aillig and his warriors would see her before she saw them.
She swooped down over one outcrop of stone and called upon her moonstone to lift her as she approached some trees, touching down lightly among the high boughs. There she held and tried to sort out her dilemma. Mairen’s diversion had cost Aoleyn dearly, and likely, had cost Bahdlahn everything.
Not for the first time, Aoleyn thought she should go to Bahdlahn and flee with him. She could help him down the mountain, though not as easily as she had imagined, she realized, given her failure with the body of Gavina. She found flying and gliding fairly easy, but carrying Gavina had quickly exhausted her.
Still, if she couldn’t find Tay Aillig, she knew that she might have to flee with Bahdlahn. Perhaps she could keep him far enough ahead of the pursuing hunters—hunters who would also be using the levitational powers of the green flecks to speed their way.
Aoleyn took a deep breath and tried to think clearly about the task at hand: finding Tay Aillig. He was after the fossa, and had spoken with Raibert, confirming what Aoleyn, too, had come to believe: that the creature heard the song of magic.
He hadn’t gone to Craos’a’diad, she supposed, for he had left too late to make that climb this night, and with only the one magical spear tip.
Why had they taken that one item? Why just a dagger? Why hadn’t they taken the other seven weapons?
It hit her, then, a sudden epiphany, one so obvious that she couldn’t believe she had wasted so much time gliding and flying about the mountain relatively blindly.
She kept her cat’s-eye earring engaged, but touched and called upon the other one as well, the one that allowed her to hear the song of Usgar.
Off she leaped, flying away and staying low, as much running and leaping almost weightlessly from tree to tree as staying aloft.
She watched with her eyes, but she listened through the garnet, and soon enough she heard the song of Usgar. She paused and considered the direction, determining that it was nowhere near the Usgar encampment.
“Tay Aillig,” she whispered with some confidence, and off she went.
* * *
The demon fossa loped easily, crossing past the entrance to the caverns full with the symphony of Usgar. It turned and growled, but the pain was too acute and it could not stay. Down it went, past the region and back around toward the fire where the witches danced.
It heard the song from that distant camp, as alway
s, and circled near, wanting nothing more than to go in and destroy them all!
But the demon creature knew better. So many singers of the magic altogether would find its weakness, it feared, and with so many warriors about, that could lead to its demise.
So it circled, listening, thinking that it might well go in anyway, quickly, for that one kill, to murder the human witch who had so tormented it with her magic that one night when the fossa could not come forth from its cave.
Wait. It did hear the song!
But not from the camp. Lower on the mountain, and around to the east, far away.
Off went the fossa, silent and swift toward the kill.
* * *
He didn’t want to keep his wits about him, but he feared succumbing to the pain and weariness. Blood dripped from the gash on his head, obscuring his vision, and Talmadge was hardly aware of the approach of one of his brutish Usgar captors.
It was the big one, he realized when the figure stopped right before him, grabbing him by the hair, and roughly yanking his head up to look him in the eye.
To Talmadge, he seemed just a blurry blob.
“Still alive?” the warrior growled. “Good. It does not hunt the dead. The demon wishes to eat you while you are alive to feel the pain.”
Talmadge had no answer.
To his surprise, the man wiped his sleeve across Talmadge’s face, and while he was glad to be able to see again, even if only a little bit, the movement made his poor arms send fires of agony coursing through him.
The scene before him was bathed in a dull, reddish tint, and for a moment, Talmadge thought it to be the blood. But a shadow crept across the clearing, and the red light vanished, and he realized it was the moonlight.
Something he had learned in the villages came back to him then, about the monster, the demon fossa. He thought of standing beside Khotai in Sellad Tulach, watching the commotion on the mountain under a similar red moon. Yes, he took himself there, back to Khotai’s soft embrace and passionate lovemaking.
“Fables,” he whispered, to himself, for his tormentor didn’t seem to care.
“It wants more than magic,” the large warrior said. “Blood. It wants the taste of blood.”