The first vision showed her the forest called Mielikki’s Garden. The conjoined powers flowing outward from the Elder Spires rose through the trunks of the oaks. Branches sprouted acorns in a matter of moments, and hungry squirrels came bounding shortly thereafter.
Similar visions followed. Silvanus was the Forest Father, and whatever the celebrants had intended, the magic quickened the wild places first. Fortunately, plenty remained to revitalize plowed fields and orchards as well. Barley and beans sprouted and grew tall in fenced squares of mud and weed that peasants had abandoned in despair. Blossoms burst forth from apple and cherry trees, then fell in blizzards of petals as fruit supplanted them.
Umara sensed that Stedd had been correct: The other Chosen couldn’t have brought forth this bounty without him. The druids could summon the vitality and fertility Silvanus embodied. They could even direct it to farmlands that under normal circumstances were the province of Chauntea the Earthmother. But to flourish, the wheat and rye, the carrots and peas, the peaches and strawberries also needed an infusion of the sunlight the cloud cover had so long denied them.
Fingers closed around Umara’s wrist and pulled her hand away from the treant’s. “Look!” Anton said.
She did and caught her breath. Stedd was on fire!
No, she realized an instant later, he wasn’t. But the radiance shining from his body had brightened from a dawn-like glow to a blaze. Squinting, she could barely make out the human form inside the light or even stand to look at it directly.
“Is that the way it should be?” Anton asked.
For the most part, Umara still didn’t comprehend the inner workings of the ritual. But she feared she could guess the answer to the pirate’s question. “He may be channeling more power than he can handle.”
“Then this ends.” Anton started forward.
Umara caught him by the forearm. “You can’t,” she said.
“I touched the tree man’s hand again, too. I saw there are already new crops in the fields.”
“Still, if you interrupt the ritual, the change may not stick. And Stedd wouldn’t want that, no matter what.”
“To the Hells with what he’d want,” Anton answered. But he didn’t try to pull away.
The ritual seemed to stretch on endlessly. Umara supposed that was because her wonder and curiosity had given way to apprehension.
Finally, Shadowmoon shouted, “It’s done!”
The celebrants stopped chanting, singing, drawing shrill harmonies from beating transparent wings, or making any other sort of sound. The enormous glowing design on the ground vanished.
Stedd’s corona winked out at the same moment. Its departure left his body looking utterly emaciated, as though the magic had melted every ounce of fat and most of the muscle, too. He turned to Anton and Umara, tried to smile, and then pitched forward onto his face.
Evendur Highcastle sensed that elsewhere the rain had fallen with exceptional fury for part of the day and then subsided to what, in these times of perpetual rain, was normal. But on Pirate Isle, the storm had changed in certain respects but raged on even more violently than before.
Thunder boomed, and lightning repeatedly struck the highlands above Immurk’s Hold. Avalanches spilled down the mountainsides, and wildfires burned. Surveying the scene from the battlements atop Umberlee’s temple, his vestments flapping around his spongy flesh, Evendur speculated that it was the wind that kept the fires going in defiance of the rain. The same screaming gale burled huge waves at the island to maul and toss ships at anchor, crash against the rocks, and fling spray high into the air. It tore the thatched roofs off huts and taverns or knocked them down entirely and tumbled the wreckage away.
The wind was also a voice, though Evendur suspected he was the only one who understood it. It had called him forth to stand in the tempest and attend his deity.
Umberlee kept him waiting long enough to watch a galley pound itself and the dock to which it was moored to pieces, and the handsome old house called Teldar’s Rest slowly list until it toppled. Then, finally, she deigned to appear to him, although he felt her anger like a hammer blow before he actually recognized her countenance for what it was.
Her face was the sea. The entire sea, or at last as much of it as he could see from his perch. Two faraway lighter patches were her glaring eyes, while the breakers defined her snarling mouth. Somehow, her features maintained their fundamental constancy even though the water was in constant storm-tossed upheaval.
The instincts of a Chosen told Evendur the Queen of the Depths came to him in this guise because no lesser form could contain or express her wrath. An instant later, the sheer force of that anger shattered the walkway under his feet and much of the temple facade beneath it. He and countless shards of blue-green stone fell down the cliff face toward the waves below. He slammed into an outcropping, bounced off, and smashed down partly on and partly off a boulder protruding from the foaming surf.
“I warned you,” she told him. Louder now, deafening, her voice was both the roar of the wind and the hiss of the waves, and it held gloating laughter as well as rage. Perhaps he should have expected as much. She was the drowner of sailors and the breaker of ships, and every opportunity to torment and destroy excited her.
Instinct prompted him to try to drag himself all the way up onto the rock. He couldn’t. He was still aware and undead but as incapable of movement as any ordinary corpse.
The alternating push and suck of the waves shifted his center of gravity and tipped more of his body into the water, immersing his legs up past the knees. He kept slipping a bit at a time until he slid wholly into the water.
The waves bumped him into the waving seaweed on the side of the boulder. Then a riptide seized him and dragged him away from shore.
He wondered what Umberlee had in mind. She could feed him to sea creatures willing to eat carrion, or scrape him through corral reefs and cut and pull him apart a bit at a time. But he suspected she meant to dump him back where she’d found his drowned corpse to deliver a more protracted initial torment. Whatever punishment she intended, it could only be because she’d decided he’d failed her yet again.
Previously, Evendur had deemed it wise to remain mute in the face of her rage. But he sensed that tactic would no longer serve. His only hope was to convince her he could still achieve her ends.
But how? He sensed his paralysis was no impediment. Linked to him as she was, she could still hear his voice if she condescended to do so. But what was he to say? He struggled to frame some sort of argument, and finally, the words came to him.
“Fine!” he snarled. “Cast me away! Surrender!”
He felt the pressure of the rip current diminish for a moment, as though his insolence had startled her. Then it swept him onward.
“I know what your holy books say,” he continued. “The mighty Queen of the Depths never surrenders. But maybe it isn’t true. Because I’m still your champion, and if you take me out of the contest now, you’re abandoning the Inner Sea to Lathander.”
The racing current tumbled him.
“Leave me in place,” he pleaded, “and I can still win! I’ll bring together every iota of the church’s might into a great armada and lead it against the boy and any who dare to stand with him. Whatever miracle he’s worked, I’ll unmake it. Whatever hopes his magic and preaching have raised, I’ll dash them. And when I’ve done all that, and drowned him in your name, no one will doubt your supremacy any longer!”
Suddenly-and rather to Evendur’s surprise-the riptide ebbed away to nothing. He felt something in his upper back grinding together, and strength surged back into his hulking frame.
“Kill everyone,” Umberlee hissed. “Everyone but those who grovel before me. Turn the green sea red if that is what it takes.”