A scream of pain, followed by gagging, rent the air outside the carriage window. Melisande grabbed for the knife, still embedded in the hand, and dragged the hilt downward, slashing open flesh and muscle and covering herself and Gerald Owen in pulsing blood. “I said leave me alone!” she screamed. “I’ll cut your bloody fingers off if you touch me again!”
The carriage shuddered violently as horse and rider impacted the side. Then it lurched up in the air with another sickening thud, a scream trailing away behind it, and smashed down in the forest roadway, rocking sickeningly before falling with a jolt onto its right side, all of the contents shaken loose and landing on top of the stunned passengers. Woozily, Melisande struggled to right herself. She was aware of the sounds of strife outside the carriage still, but her attention was turned at the moment to Gerald Owen, who was lying in a heap at the bottom of the carriage, a gash over one eye. “Gerald—”
“Go, child,” the elderly chamberlain whispered. “Get away from—here if you can.”
The little girl looked around wildly, then reached above her head and pushed the door open. She climbed up slowly, using the door for cover, and looked around. A gray mountain horse was standing across the forest road, its tack tangled and saddle bindings broken, but otherwise uninjured. Farther back in the roadway behind them a crumpled body lay in a twisted heap, marks from the wheels of the carriage scoring it. The hand was extended lifelessly on the ground, slashed open in a pool of blood. The body of her coachman lay off to the side of the road farther back.
Farther away still she could see the two soldiers in her escort engaged in combat on horseback with four men in similar uniform; she could only distinguish between them by the color of their mounts. Melisande shuddered; shock was threatening to close in on her. She hoisted herself up by her arms out of the toppled carriage and looked behind her. The footman with the crossbow was lying on the ground in front of the carriage, pinned beneath the broken doubletree, moaning incoherently. Before him one of the horses was pinned as well, the other dancing nervously in its hitchings. Melisande went cold; she glanced around and, seeing no one else, crept over the collapsed coach to the footman. She tried to lift the doubletree off him, but it was too heavy. He was gray in the face, sweat pouring from him, but he did manage to meet her eyes.
“Fly, m’lady,” he said. Then he shuddered and fell unconscious. Practicality descended. Melisande contemplated taking the mountain horse but discarded the thought, realizing she had no knowledge of the animal and that it was ill-suited to taking on forest paths. When she believed the soldiers were too engaged to see her, she hurried to the roans, and with small nimble fingers and speed born of much practice, she unbuckled the one standing and mounted it, pulling herself up easily. It was a horse she knew well; it recognized her and did not bolt She kicked the horse and leaned forward over its neck as it started, then broke into a fast trot, a faster canter, and finally a smooth gallop down the forest road. She kept up the gallop for the better part of half a league, then slowed to a trot again. The forest road was dwindling to little more than a footpath, and the night sky was giving way to the gray of predawn. By the time the clouds grew rosy she had left the road altogether, traveling north, as best as she could figure, spurred on by panic and an inner call to flight born of the horror she had witnessed.
When the sun finally crested the horizon, filling the frosty woods with diffuse light, making the trees shine silver and white in its radiance, Melisande finally came to a halt. She listened, but heard nothing behind her except the sounds of the forest, of ice creaking on the boughs of trees, the rustle of the pine needles in the morning wind, and the calls of winterbirds that were just beginning to wake.
She had absolutely no idea where she was, except utterly lost. Finally able to breathe, she dismounted and looked around, then the sensations that had shut down in her fight for survival came roaring back. Even through her boots and heavy woolen stockings her feet were chilled; she was shivering with cold and trembling with fear, and hungry, but without any supplies or provisions except the waterskin at her side and the knife in her boot.
She looked around at the endless greenwood, realizing she was not even sure where the path was now. The Circle should be north of here, she reasoned, or perhaps west. Her chin quivered, but she willed it to stop. Then she straightened her back, took hold of the horse’s bridle, and started off toward the north.
She had gone a thousand paces when grief overwhelmed her. Melisande sat down on the rough ground beneath a towering shag bark hickory tree and began to sob as if her heart would break.
After a few moments, calm restored, she stood up, got back on the horse, and started off into the forest in search of the Circle and Gavin.
16
While those who dwelt in the upworld would not consider the sort of sleep that Dhracians experienced real slumber, it was for their race the closest equivalent, a time of cessation of thought and activity, a drowsiness that allowed their bodies to rest and recharge, as every other living thing did, a panacea of revitalization required of all creatures with a beating heart. Even the near immortality bequeathed to them being sons of the wind, born at the beginning of history, did not spare them the need for rest.
Rath closed his eyes as he contemplated this, lulled by the thundering of the wind around him as he took shelter in the lee of a grassy hillock. While the primal elemental power of their race and those like it, known as the Firstborn in the nomenclature of the human world, exempted them from many of the limitations that those races that came later were hobbled by, there was something inescapable in the need for rest, even as they traveled the upworld in endless pursuit of their prey. He wondered sometimes idly if death or damnation would be preferable to the endless vigilance required of him and his fellows, the obsessive, interminable need that drowned out all other reason for life, the bloodlust for the destruction of the demons of fire known as the F’dor. Certainly it would be easier. But preferable or not, easier or not, it didn’t matter. It was inescapable. As he drifted off into the state of relaxation, Rath was haunted by what passed for dreams, the same sorts of images and memories that filled his mind each night when the last of Ms kirai had been expended, when he no longer tasted the wind actively for traces of the F’dor stench, when his duty was delayed for a few brief hours while the rest of the world slept. Like those others of his race, he had trod one time or another each of the seven continents, crossed each of the seven seas, had traveled almost every footpath, every byway, had wandered through parts of the world seen only by the birds and inhabited only by mountain goats, all in the endless search for what had escaped, and still eluded them. It was an unforgiving hunt, an endless quest, and all the centuries that had passed had served to leave little memory of anything good. Rath rolled to one side in his slumber. In spite of all the visions his eyes had beheld of the world, there was still within his memory a clear recollection of another place that he had not seen in thousands of years. As his breathing deepened and slowed, he visited that place yet again as he had each night since leaving it. From the recesses of his mind came forth thoughts of a time in the world long before humans had spawned and propagated the planet, when but five races held sway, his own being one of them. His mother race, what men called the Kith, believed the stories of the creation of the world told to them by one of the only other races that had preceded them on it, the Seren. The Seren Singers told of the birth of the Earth as a piece of the star that broke off from its mother and sailed across the universe, coming to rest in orbit around that blazing entity that had given it life. The rock had continued to burn, the Seren said, with flames of worldly fire, the first element unique to the Earth. Finally, when it seemed that the flames would consume the new planet, they receded and sank into the core of the new world, where they continued to burn, hot and pure. The new planet was said then to be covered with the element of water, and the living sea spread to all corners of the globe, teeming with the beginnings of life. It was then that the awareness of his race began. The legend said that the wind rose from the stirrings of the sea, blowing back the waves to reveal finally the land, the last of the elemental lores. From this wind came the beings known as the Kith; Rath remembered clearly the tales told him in darkness of what the world had been like at that time, when the sons of the wind were free to walk the world unfettered, unencumbered by any duties, sworn or unsworn. They were a harsh race, uninterested in alliance or commonality with the beings that emerged from each of those other elements—the tall, thin golden creatures that were said to have been born of the element of starlight, ether, known as the Seren; the elusive, membranous beings known as the Mythlin whose skin was porous, their flesh almost gelatinous, as they spread across the seas from which they had sprung; the Wyrmril, or dragons in the tongue of man, serpentine beasts that chose a form other than the model that had been provided by the Creator, who jealously guarded the Earth from which they had been formed, nascent with the traces of each of the other elements that had touched it. The Kith, more than any of the other races, were loners, happiest when free to roam about the wide world in the arms of the wind. But that had been before Rath’s time. Long before he had been born, there had been an intense battle in which four of the primordial races had become uneasy allies, banding together for the purpose of sparing the world from the destruction of the first of the worldly elements to be born, the destructive and all-consuming element of fire. For while fire had had a natural beginning, some forms of it had become tainted and perverted very early in the life of the world, serving not the power of Creation, but rather that of destruction, of Void, the antithesis of life. The beings that had sprung from fire, and had twisted its purposes to destruction, were the ephemeral spirits known as the F’dor, the race he and his brother hunters now sought. As always, Rath’s breathing became labored as the cycle of his memory recounted the image of the Vault in which the F’dor had been sealed away within the depths of the earth by the four races of the Alliance. It had been outside of that very vault where he had been born and come to awareness, the child of two Dhracian parents, the tribe of Kith that pledge to serve as the jailers of the F’dor, standing endless vigil at the doors of the Vault of the Underworld. Rath and those of his tribe were even more harsh, more emotionless than the rest of his kin, largely owing to the bleakness of the earth and passageways in the darkness in which they dwelt. To be Dhracian was to be born into a form of endless agony, a perversion of nature, a child of the wind locked away from all vestiges of air or freedom, instead doomed by the promise of generations before to stand guard in endless darkness trapped in the earth for all eternity. Or at least it would have been that way, had it not been for the intervention of the Sleeping Child. Rath’s heartbeat began to race, as it did each time he slept, each time he dreamt of the day in his memory when the falling star crashed to earth, exploding the dome of the Vault. It was a cataclysm that defied words, a shattering of the tunnels and hallway in and around the prison of Living Stone that contained the most destructive force the universe had ever given birth to, in screams of agony from the jailers and ecstasy from the captives as they roared forth, into the world, dispersing like milkweed down on the wind. Rath had been young then, but he still remembered the taste of salt water in his mouth, the burning in his nose as the sea roared in, the terror of his fellow Dhracians as they drowned within it, not at the imminence of their own deaths, but in the knowledge that the world they had served to guard was no longer safe. His mother had been one such to die. He was still haunted by the sound of the laughter, thundering in his ears, burning his eardrums, and, even worse, the diminution of it as the voices drifted away, falling silent as the demons dissipated into the world. As one of the surviving jailers, he had partaken with grim glee in battling the remaining demons back into the Vault, had helped in the rush to seal that Vault again, containing them within the earth once more. It gave him some satisfaction to remember the howls of fury, the harsh voices disappearing into their tomb of Living Stone, but he had had enough of a glimpse of the inside to know that it was only a temporary containment. Those that had escaped had a single purpose outside of the destruction of all that lived. To free those that had not been lucky enough to make it out the first time. The sleeping Dhracian twitched, remembering in his dreams the glimpse he had of Bloodthorn, a tree not unlike the ones that grew in each of the places where Time began, but brutal and twisted, a perverse abomination, not plant as much as living entity, with branches and limbs of writhing thorns lashing out like the tentacles of the sea creature seeking prey. It had impaled and swallowed a number of his surviving kin before the Vault was resealed; Rath’s soul still pounded in pain recalling the sounds of their screams. His father had been one of them. He woke with a start, as he often did, bathed in sweat that quickly dried in the cool breath of the wind. The dream was gone, as was his repose, but it served to remind him of why the Hunt was necessary, of why the needles that ran in his veins were an essential measure to safeguard the world from that which would see it in flames again, as it had once been at the beginning of creation. It was a grim reminder, but an indispensable one, and it gave him the ability to go on living one more day, to continue in his pursuit of that which hid from the wind itself, formless and ephemeral, and purely destructive.