She would have cried out, but events were crowding so fast upon her she did not have the luxury of that time to waste. Smacked by a furious gust of wind and a splattering of rain like icy stones, the tree leaned farther than it had yet. Tremors ripped down through the rotten trunk. She felt it give and knew it had cracked somewhere below the canopy of the other trees. It was going to topple.
Maeben was aloft again, beating the air as she tried to get at Mena, lashing with her beak, her talons reaching. Mena yanked the hook from her leg and hurled it at the eagle’s face. Her aim was off. It sailed past the raptor, over her shoulder. It hung there for a moment, a still line having missed its mark. The great bird kept flapping her wings, intent on her prey, gauging the moment of attack, ignoring the import of the tree’s slow motion. It seemed an endless moment.
Then the pull of the falling tree sped up so rapidly it broke the pause. Mena felt herself recede from the bird. She was descending with the tree, but she did not take her eyes off the eagle. She saw the rope tighten, saw how the far end, which had started to fall on the other side of the eagle, began to be pulled down with the tree. The line snapped taut. The rope cut into the wing, dragged over the feathers and bone until the hooks caught in the bird’s flesh at the shoulder joint. The rope-the far end of which was knotted in the limbs of the falling giant-yanked Maeben downward with a force the bird clearly could not fathom. Her beak opened in disbelief, wings flattened behind her body, eyes, for once, filled with terror.
Mena had seen enough. She pushed herself away from the toppling tree, turned in midair and, with her arms outstretched as if she too could fly, faced the canopy rushing toward her.
End of Book Two
Book Three
CHAPTER
Hanish lay a long time without moving, aware every second of the body pressed against his. He did not want to wake her, to have to talk and smile and begin the day with a lover’s platitudes. At least that was how he explained it to himself. Better to minimize how good it was to feel her naked contours in the places they touched. Better not to fully admit how right it felt to have the curls of her hair entwined in his fingers. He knew that traces of her would cling to him in many ways. This pleased him, but it was better not to acknowledge that at some level he held still so that he could absorb more and more of her into his skin. He would taste her all day on his tongue, in the corners of his mouth, as a scent off his own body that he would catch in the air as he turned his head. He would have liked not to have thought about all these things, but he could think of nothing else.
No woman before Corinn Akaran had thrust herself so deeply into every conscious moment of his existence. Since that night at Calfa Ven she was never truly out of his mind. He refused to put a word to the emotion he felt for her, but this did not mean he didn’t sense the word-vague and sentimental as it was-lurking in the air between them. She had been shy that first night, unsure of herself, coy with her body and all the more attractive for it. Her reticence was short-lived, though. It seemed that if she was going to give herself, she wanted to do so completely, with abandon. Her mouth in kissing him was driven by a hunger that stunned him, her lips and tongue and teeth all devouring him at once. It almost felt like she had conquered him, instead of the other way around. A disquieting thought.
It was remarkable how much it elated him to have her near. When she was not near, he either actively thought of her or moved around nagged by a feeling of unease. He was neglecting his companions. He knew that they felt slighted. Considering their fragile egos, he should not go long without finding ways to praise and acknowledge them, but the very thought of it seemed tiresome. Nobody else seemed as interesting as Corinn. No other face gave him such a feeling of well-being to look upon. No one listened to him as she did. With nobody else did such mundane pastimes as archery, which they spent hours at, become sure pleasures. She was so much better at it than he was. For some reason this fact tickled him like a joke of his own devising.
What had he been thinking when he began this? He’d said he would keep the princess close, to watch over her and make sure she was there if the Tunishnevre needed her. So when did that effort become this swirl of emotion? It was dangerous; he knew that. His thoughts were not focused and clear as they had always been before. Just the day previous, he had been stunned to realize he’d been asked a question that he had not heard at all. A circle of faces stared at him, concern and surprise on their features. He was not fully himself, right down to the fact that he would not and could not do away with the thing that weakened him. He should shove her back into her place. He should cut the affection between them with public, bladed wit. Corinn was, after all, easy to insult. She was quick to rile. A few comments poking fun at her now would send her into flaming anger, which would be a better thing than the situation he now found himself in.
But he simply could not. Why should he have to? Consider all the things he’d accomplished in his life. All the gains he’d won for his people. He’d conquered the Known World! Even now the Tunishnevre wound down from the Methalian Rim, only weeks away from their deliverance. It was his successes that made it possible for Maeander to push his search for the other Akaran girl out to Vumu. If he found her, they’d have the blood they needed from a second source. Corinn need not bleed, need not die. Considering all these things, why should he deny himself love?
Oh. There was that word! The very fact that he formed such a sentence in his head prompted him to rise. He peeled himself away from the princess, really not wanting to wake her now, not wishing to have to speak. It took ages to pull his arm, clammy with their mingled moisture, from under her neck.
Dressed a little later, straight backed in a thalba and looking perfectly at home within his icy composure, Hanish read the letters his secretaries brought him in his office. The first was from the log Haleeven kept. He was meticulous in his entries, detailed and rigorous and honest. Because he received such correspondence at least twice a week, Hanish had followed every step of the Tunishnevre transport. Not one of those steps had been easy. Just getting them out of their burial slots had been an ordeal. The chamber had been built to house them indefinitely. The original architects had not considered that the ancestors might someday be removed. They were crammed in close together, stacked high in honeycombed alcoves.
Haleeven had all manner of ramps and pulleys set up. It was an awkward business in the small space. It would not have been easy in the best of circumstances to wring from the workers the necessary level of care and precision, but it was especially hard with the lot of them nervous about the seething, incorporeal presence all around them. One night nearly fifty of the conscripted laborers fled from their makeshift camp outside the gates of Tahalian. Each and every one of them had to be hunted down. They were then punished in ways that served as considerable deterrents to any others with similar notions.
Keeping the workers in line; wrapping, housing, and transporting the ancestors; flattering the priests; maintaining roads softened to mush by the spring thaw; driving forward through swarms of ravenous insects; negotiating the steep descent from the Rim down to the Eilavan Woodlands: each task provided myriad challenges to Haleeven’s abilities. Now, at last, they were making their way through the woodlands and into the farmlands that would lead them to the coast. The hardest portion was behind them, although in his dispatch Haleeven cautioned that the going would be slow. They were on paved roads now, but they could hardly move any faster for fear of the jarring effects on the ancestors. Their frailty required gentle handling, as much so now as ever.