“What is it you wish me to say?” he asked.
Tilting her pale face, she raised one dark eyebrow. “Answer the questions I’ve been asking since the night you showed up in Calm Seatt. Why did you drag Leanâlhâm—let alone Osha—all the way here and into the middle of this? What made you take the girl from her own home? And why are she and Osha both so ... different now?”
Magiere waited, though Brot’ân’duivé remained silent, calculating his options.
“What have you done?” she demanded.
Brot’ân’duivé looked back out the cutway’s mouth at all of the ships in the bay. Which one might hold a way out of this place? And which one, either present or coming, held those he wanted close enough to kill?
One more ... and then another ... until the last.
Magiere wanted simple answers to seemingly simple questions. Nothing in all of this was simple.
“For what little I understand of Osha’s or Leanâlhâm’s transformations,” he began, “I must go back to your story, to how this all started ... because of Wynn Hygeorht.”
Magiere studied him for a long moment. “Wynn? It’s over two years since she came to your territory with Leesil, Chap, and me.”
Yet the inquisitive young sage had been the unwitting catalyst for everything, just the same. After Magiere, Léshil, Chap, and Wynn had left the an’Cróan territories, under the guardianship of Osha and the most honorable anmaglâhk, Sgäilsheilleache, they had managed to procure what Brot’ân’duivé now knew as the anchor—the orb—of Water. They had found it hidden away in an icebound castle amid the Pock Peaks, the highest point of that continent. But the orb’s retrieval had not ended that venture.
A select team of anmaglâhk had followed Magiere and her companions even as they fled that forgotten castle for their own homeland. Before they reached home, a direct conflict and one—no, two—tragic deaths had occurred.
Sgäilsheilleache and another anmaglâhk, a greimasg’äh—a shadow-gripper named Hkuan’duv—had killed each other over Magiere and that unknown recovered “artifact.”
In the end Magiere, Wynn, Chap, and Léshil had reached the coast in hope of catching a ship to this central continent, likely to take the orb beyond the reach of Aoishenis-Ahâre—Most Aged Father. But before they had left on this new journey, Osha had departed to return to his own people, bearing the ashes of his teacher, Sgäilsheilleache.
At the dawn on which Osha departed, Wynn Hygeorht had followed him. She had given him a journal of her writings to deliver himself to Brot’ân’duivé.
That journal had started everything. After a thousand years of safe seclusion, it had brought war among the an’Cróan.
The weight of the past year and a half’s events drove Brot’ân’duivé into weariness. He longed to close his eyes, but Magiere stood watching him. As his thoughts wandered into the past, he carefully kept his expression unreadable. Of course back then he had known nothing of the tragic events surrounding that first orb. While those had played out, he had been unwittingly ignorant within the northern reaches of his people’s land.
When had the upturning of his world begun? Did he remember the exact day?
Yes.
As he stood there with Magiere, his thoughts rolled back in time ... to several moons after Sgäilsheilleache and Osha had left with Magiere and her companions to locate what he now knew as the first orb. He had heard nothing of the orbs then, knew nothing, as he had walked through his people’s forest toward the central enclave of the Coilehkrotall clan....
Sunlight broke through the forest canopy in scattered rays as Brot’ân’duivé headed silently toward the home of Sgäilsheilleache, Leanâlhâm, and his old friend Gleannéohkân’thva. It was a moment of rare peace until one subtle rustle of leaves above him did not match those made by the light breeze.
Brot’ân’duivé’s soft gait did not falter. He turned in between the branches of a fir tree and became one with its shadows. All conscious thought vanished, his mind as empty and hidden as his flesh, while he slipped one hand up an opposing sleeve for a stiletto.
Most Aged Father’s spies moved everywhere in these days. The ancient patriarch’s suspicions had grown since the day Brot’ân’duivé had defended Magiere in a trial to the death before the people’s council of clan elders. But as he gazed upward, searching the canopy for a single leaf or needle that moved the wrong way against the breeze, he found no sign of his own kind perched above.
There was only a glimpse of white feathers. Something small but much too large to be a mere bird hid between the leaves.
It—she—had arms and legs. A leafy branch pushed aside, and she flexed her long, folded wings as she peered down, perhaps looking for where he had vanished from sight.
When unfurled, her wingspan would have been about five times her height, though she could not have been even half as tall as he was. Those wings remained folded behind a narrow, slight-boned torso of subtle curves akin to a young girl’s. From pinion feathers to the downy covering on her body and face, she was a mottled gray-white. Instead of hair, larger feathers were combed back as if part of a headdress, matched by the same on her forearms and lower legs.
Brot’ân’duivé returned the stiletto to its sheath and stepped from the shadows.
She flinched, lurching backward into hiding in the tree. Then her head tentatively pushed out through the leaves. She looked down at him, as if perhaps she knew him but was still uncertain.
Her two huge oval eyes were like black river stones at first. When she wriggled farther out of the leaves above, cocking her head like a crow, a streak of sunlight washed her face. Her eyes sparked with red like those of a dove.
The séyilf—one of the “wind-blown”—stared fixedly at Brot’ân’duivé.
Despite the thinness of the branch on which she perched, it barely bent under her weight. Her mouth suddenly opened wide, and something fell from it to the forest floor.
Brot’ân’duivé was seldom startled. He glanced down in reflex and then quickly up again.
The séyilf was gone. When he lowered his eyes to what she had dropped, he saw a round dark stone and crouched to retrieve it.
Smooth like her eyes and still glistening with her spittle, its whole oblong was covered in etchings. He wiped it dry on the pants of his forest gray attire and rolled it in his hand.
These were not the scratches of delicate séyilf talons, such as he had seen on the cave walls of their high mountain aeries. These deeper, short marks were made by harder and smaller claws—made by the fingertips of the Chein’âs, the Burning Ones.
The stone was a summons.
The Chein’âs lived in the lava-heated depths of the mountains that bordered his people’s southern territories. By an ancient alliance, they made all Anmaglâhk weapons and equipment requiring the rare white metal only they could find and shape in the earth’s hottest depths. Once a young anmaglâhk initiate completed basic training and received approval by a caste elder, word was sent to the Chein’âs, and when the new weapons were completed, they would send a stone—a summons—to the caste. A caste elder would accompany the initiate on a journey to the fiery caves to receive those precious gifts. Upon returning, the initiate had to find a jeóin—“assentor” and mentor—among the caste who agreed to complete final training.
Few had ever seen such a stone with markings. Even fewer ever learned to read them—only greimasg’äh and caste elders. Brot’ân’duivé found one discernable Chein’âs word on the stone. In his own tongue, it meant “a sudden breeze.”
All of his people’s names, those given at birth and the true ones chosen during name-taking before their ancestors’ spirits, had a meaning.