‘There.’ Aurora turned on Taku. ‘Now see what you’ve done.’
‘I have done what I intended to do. What I had to do.’ His voice was implacable, and his stare as level as her own. ‘This meeting was no accident, sister. This was fate at work. I have no idea how we can bring such a thing about, but I have a feeling that the days of both Ghabal and Hellorin as threats to the world are numbered, and that their power is finally about to meet its match.’
‘You’d risk everything on a feeling—’ Aurora began.
Corisand cut her short. ‘Please, stop this. Surely we should all be on the same side. The two of you can dispute this until the end of time, but that won’t get us anywhere. Whatever Taku may have done, however he may have manipulated me, I am here now, and I want to make the most of it.’ She paused. ‘One thing puzzles me, however.’ All at once, there was a new edge, hard and cold, to her voice. ‘Why do you need to involve me in this? If you Evanesar are such an ancient, powerful race - strong enough, even, to set bounds on the ambitions of the Phaerie - why can’t you take the Stone for yourselves?’
‘When the Phaerie and the Moldai were creating the Fialan, the same thought occurred to them.’ Taku’s voice was a low, angry growl. ‘No matter how they planned to cheat one another, they were absolutely united on one thing: the Evanesar must never get control of the Stone. So between them they set a ward upon it. If one of the Evanesar so much as touches the Fialan, it would not only destroy itself, but the violent implosion of forces would destroy both worlds.’
‘Fools!’ Aurora said. ‘For their Guardian Magic cannot be undone - it is part of the very form and structure of the crystal. And now that the stone has fallen into unsafe hands, we are powerless to intervene.’
‘As you will always be powerless against me and mine.’
The voice was like a blade being turned in Corisand’s guts. ‘Hellorin!’ She spun to see the Forest Lord standing on the apex of her own bridge. Anger blazed up within her to consume the terror. How dare he set his filthy, treacherous feet on her beautiful construct? How dare he sully the shining purity of her first magic with his foul touch?
‘So. We have a new Windeye.’ His voice was soft with menace. ‘I might have guessed it would be you. You were always stubborn, recalcitrant and disobedient. Always the rebel.’ He smiled, and the cold, cruel contempt in his eyes sent chills crawling through her body. ‘But as I am sure you recall, I mastered you then. And I can master you now.’
Corisand gritted her teeth, gladly embracing the anger that burned within her. Taking care to keep any sign of it from her face, she half-turned away with a dismissive shrug. ‘That was in another time, another world. Things are different here. In your own realm, you mastered a dumb, powerless animal. Are you so proud of that? It’s not much of an achievement. Not much to brag about.’
Hellorin’s face paled with anger. ‘You delude yourself if you think that anything has changed. Despite your current guise, you are still nothing more than an animal, spawned of a primitive, barbaric race.’ His voice dropped into a snarl. ‘Human or equine, when I have finished with you, your body will go to feed my hounds, and your hide will make a fetching carpet for my floor.’ As the last words left his mouth he struck at her, his body suddenly towering high overhead, a bolt of dark lightning sizzling from his outstretched hand.
Everything happened at once. Taku flung a vast wall of ice between Corisand and the Forest Lord. Aurora swept down a wing, and the Windeye was shielded by a many-hued curtain of energy. And Corisand herself, acting on some bone-deep instinct, created an illusion of herself as a vast colossus and stepped into that image, so that she grew as tall as her foe. At the same time, she formed the air into a shining, mirrored shield and threw it in front of her, so that she reflected Hellorin’s magic back at him. With a vicious curse, the Forest Lord vanished, and Corisand felt triumph swell within her. The first blow had gone to her.
The serpent and the eagle, however, did not drop their shields. ‘It is time to send you home, little sister,’ Aurora said softly. ‘Hellorin will soon be back, and this time he will be prepared. You are not ready to face him yet.’
Corisand’s heart plummeted. ‘But I don’t want to go back,’ she protested. ‘I can learn more, do more, help more if I stay here, in this body. I’m only just getting started.’
‘You can always return,’ Taku said kindly. ‘We will bring you back when it is safe, and Hellorin’s attention is elsewhere. Then there will be time to help and teach you.’
‘But how can I come back? You said yourself it was only the coincidence of the portal opening that allowed you to bring me here in the first place.’
‘Now that you are here, however,’ Taku told her, ‘we can create a link that will let us bring you here whenever it is safe.’ With alarming speed, he struck with his fangs at the edge of the glacier. Chips and shards of the glittering blue ice flew up, and Corisand reflexively put out a hand and caught a piece. About the size of a walnut, it glistened on her palm like a jewel, and she could feel the intense cold beat against her skin.
‘When you get back to your own world,’ Taku told her, ‘the ice will go with you. Swallow it quickly, before it melts, and that will provide the link between us. Three times you will be able to come; three times the spell will last. And remember this: time runs differently in this world, it swirls and flows like a river. At this moment we cannot say how soon we will be able to bring you back, but do not fear. As soon as it is possible, we shall send out the summons.’
The serpent dipped his head to her. ‘Farewell, Windeye. Go with our blessing.’
Aurora spread wide her wings as if to embrace Corisand, sending veils of colour rippling across the sky. ‘Farewell, little sister. We have faith in you.’
Then there was that sudden slippage, that same sideways jolt as before. Corisand found herself back in her stable, on four feet instead of two, the glorious fire of her magic nothing but inert ashes. Her mind was a dreamlike world of bright impressions filled with colours that were no longer clear to her eyes, and she fought in vain to recapture that clarity and complexity of thought that had come so easily to her human form. She shook her head, no longer certain whether the events of that other world had been reality or a dream.
Then her eye caught sight of something glinting, down at her feet in the straw. Her heart leapt. The ice! Taku’s ice, and in this world, it was melting fast. Quickly she bent her head and licked it up, together with dust and bits of straw from the stable floor, and swallowed the cold, hard fragment.
All at once, it was as if a window had opened, and she caught a brief glimpse of Taku’s glistening form, and Aurora’s colours glimmering and shifting as her wings stretched out across the sky. Joy flooded her entire being with light. Not imagination, then. Not a dream. And she would see them again. She had their promise. Sooner or later, she would go back to that world of magic and miracles and deepest peril, to set about reclaiming her birthright as Windeye of the Xandim.
8
SIGNS OF PERIL
Hellorin lay, magnificent and motionless as the carven figure on a king’s stone tomb, his strong, handsome features blurred and silvered by the eldritch glimmer of the time spell. Aelwen, to her surprise, found herself groping for Cordain’s hand, in search of comfort.