Shock ran through the Windeye as she realised that the landscape was alive. The glacier was a sentient being with a vast, overwhelming aura of power and presence. And then it spoke. Shattering the silence, sounds came from the ice: creaking and grinding and a peculiar popping noise, with every now and then a loud, explosive crack. Corisand could not understand the language, but she had a feeling that she’d be able to learn. Above all things, she wanted to communicate with this entity.
Determinedly, she set off around the lakeside towards the towering frozen wall - and then suddenly, it came to her that she was wasting time. With the burgeoning powers of a Windeye, she should be able to do much better than this, and her instincts told her that the best way to impress this formidable being would be through magic. But how? Looking out across the lake, Corisand relaxed her mind and let the answers come to her. She knew that the knowledge lay within her: concealed, instinctive, waiting to be unearthed and unleashed. Closing her eyes, she let herself sink down through her consciousness, emptying her mind to allow the wisdom that lay buried beneath the surface come rising up and flooding in. Around her, the landscape held its breath. Even the mighty glacier fell silent, as if waiting to see what she might accomplish. She reached down into the very core of her being to the star of shining light that was the dormant seed of her power. And as she touched it, the magic flared up in an incandescent burst of radiance that flooded her heart and mind, tingling through her hands and blazing out through her eyes. The reflection in the lake of her astonished face showed that her pupils had turned a bright, reflective silver. Seen through those silver eyes, the world had changed.
Othersight. The word leapt into her mind. The magical vision of a Windeye that showed her the world in an entirely different way. The waters of the lake gleamed with a crystalline light, and the mountains beyond had become prisms, brilliant with iridescent hues. The trees and grass around her were glittering like jewels. On the glacier itself, the dingy grey streaks of pulverised rock had become drifts of sparkling diamonds, and the patches of that thrilling, incandescent blue had spread to encompass the entire entity, and had taken on a new, almost unbearable intensity.
Most incredible of all, Corisand could see the wind: all the eddies and currents of moving air that swooped and swirled above the surface of the lake and the glacier like glowing rivers. In a flash of revelation, she comprehended at last why the Windeye was so named. But the new understanding went much further than that. All at once, she realised that the winds were her weapons and her tools, a link from the heartspring of her magic to the outer world. In conjunction with her Othersight, she could shape miracles - she was sure of it. Now was the time to put that certainty to the test.
She snatched at the long strands of air as they swirled past, grabbing a handful and twisting them round her fingers. They were fluid to her touch, with a cool, silken feel. Concentrating hard, she poured her Othersight into them, igniting them into streams of blazing silver radiance. These she spun out to form a bridge, which she cast towards the glacier, creating a glowing arc through the air that reached from her feet to the intense blue entity of ice.
A grin spread across the Windeye’s face and a warm glow of pride ignited within her. Not bad for a first attempt, she told herself, although she knew that the true test of her magic was still to come. The graceful arch of her gleaming silver bridge was beautiful indeed, but could she trust it with her life? It was time to find out.
In her heart, Corisand was certain that confidence would count for everything in achieving her objective. Firmly closing her mind to any doubts, she lifted her chin and stepped firmly onto her first creation. The bridge remained firm and steady beneath her feet. The structure she had spun out of nothing more than empty air and a Windeye’s magic looked as fragile and ethereal as moonbeams, but was as firm beneath her feet as any ancient bridge of stone. She took another step forward, noticing as she did so that her feet almost adhered to the surface. This was her own magic, and it seemed that her creation was determined to keep her safe. As the gleaming span took her far out above the cold lake water, she was more than grateful for that.
As the Windeye drew gradually closer to the glacier, the mysterious noises within the ice became louder. Strange as it might seem, she was certain that they held a great deal more meaning than mere random bursts of sound, and as she continued to listen with all her concentration, they began to reverberate through her head and resolve themselves into words whose meaning she could almost grasp, and which became increasingly clear as she drew near to the far side of the lake. She was wondering what she should do when she reached it when the matter was taken out of her hands.
From the top of the glacier where the wall of ice met the lake, the head of a gigantic serpent reared slowly into the sky. Its colossal form, white as the glacier ice, towered high above the stunned Windeye, and it looked down at her through eyes of the same vibrant, translucent blue as the glacier’s heart. ‘I am Taku, Serpent of Ice, Spirit of the Glacier and Master of the Cold Magic.’
6
KINDNESS OF A STRANGER
Tiolani and Corisand were not the only ones who were finding that their circumstances had been radically altered on the night of the ambush. When the Phaerie cut him free of their net, Dael plummeted like a stone into the forest below. His life would have been over had he not fallen into the thick canopy of a huge old chestnut tree. He crashed through the slender upper branches and the sturdier boughs below, and eventually thudded to a halt in a fork between two of the tree’s great limbs, battered, bruised and breathless, in a shower of twigs and bark. Winded, he lay still as a number of prickly green seed cases that had been stubbornly clinging to the tree throughout the winter came bouncing down around him. Everything settled at last and he realised, with a great deal of astonishment, that he was still alive.
It was still a long way to the ground, however. Moving carefully on his precarious perch, he took stock of the damage. His clothes, already in tatters before he’d been captured, were in a worse state than ever, with the bitter wind finding its way through every hole and rent. Violent pain stabbed through his chest when he breathed in - he had at least one broken rib. Blood was running down his face from a deep cut that was perilously close to his eye, and seeping into his pants from a gash in his left thigh. The left sleeve of his shirt had been practically torn off to expose a badly abraded shoulder and an arm bent at an odd angle. When he tried to move it, he felt the grate of broken bone, and was so overwhelmed by pain that it made him nauseous and faint. There was a tender lump on the side of his aching head and, judging by all the other lesser aches and pains, his body must be a mass of bruises and smaller cuts.
He couldn’t believe he had survived.
From the way his captors had been reacting, he knew that the attack on the Forest Lord must have taken place, but what had happened then? And after it was all over, would the Phaerie come back with their terrifying hounds to look for him? Or would they simply assume that the fall had killed him? He had no way of knowing, and he supposed that there was no point in worrying about something he couldn’t affect. He would just have to hope for the best, and get on with the business of trying to survive. Right now, the Phaerie were the least of his problems.