“It is my concern, lord, as your contracted adviser and as a fellow member of the lighthouse cabal. Eventually we must and will discuss it. For now, for the Danae’s safety and our need for understanding, I’ll fulfill our bargain.”
I knelt and touched my hands to earth. At first I sensed nothing beyond the scrape of snow crystals on my wrists and cold grit under my palms. A momentary panic struck me that Saverian’s medallion had left my bent useless. But she had insisted that it should not, and as distasteful as her arrogance might be, she had convinced me of her competence.
I closed my eyes and filled my lungs with the cold air, imagining its pungent clarity sweeping aside all worries of Elene and Osriel, of lost souls and abducted children, of familial lies, gravid warnings, and looming birthdays. My fingers prickled and warmed, and I swept my mind across the frozen ground.
Beneath the wind-crusted snow lay a mat of yellowed grass and dormant roots, clotted with damp soil and stones. Sheep had grazed here along with deer, elk, and horned goats come down from the mountains. The beasts left a threadwork of trails down to the willow brakes and fens of the Kay. Human hunters, trappers, and other travelers had beaten two paths across the meadow—one leading down the valley toward villages, abbeys, and cities, the other up the bald rocky prominence to the thick-walled castle men named Fortress Groult. At the conjunction of these paths lingered the faint warm residue of sorcery.
Not much magical structure remained of my illusion—a knotty stump magically inflated from an astelas vine, meant to convince Gram and Stearc that I could read my grandfather’s book of maps. Yet two months ago that cheat’s ploy had spanned the barrier between true life and myth, between the realm of men and Aeginea. On a meadow with naught growing taller than my knee, I had glimpsed an oak tree with a trunk the breadth of my armspan and a canopy that could shelter a small village, and my companions and I had encountered a Dané female with moth wings on her breasts. I had yet to understand how I’d managed such a feat, but I hoped to repeat it.
My magic enveloped the spot of warmth. Recalling the great tree’s particular shape and the wonder I had felt upon seeing it, I sought some trace of a Danae presence upon the land, some evidence of the juncture of two planes that existed here.
The frozen world, the whickering horses, my companions, and my fears receded, and my mind filled with an abundance of the familiar and mundane—the paths of ancient sledges drawn up the hill to build the fortress, the remnants of siege engines and destroying raids, the blood and pain humans left everywhere they walked. Sounds, smells, tastes echoed the richness of the land and its history. Trees had once populated these terraced meadows: maples and oaks, spruce and fir, white-trunked birch. I concentrated, stretched, delved deeper…
…and came near drowning in music. A legion of musicians must have walked here, leaving behind songs in varied voices…a pipe, a harp, a vielle, some instruments unknown to me…everywhere random snips of melody that on another day would fascinate and delight. But on this day the pervasive music distracted me, and I pushed past it…deeper yet…until I felt the weight of the land, the slow-moving rivers of the deeps, the impenetrable roots of the mountains.
Puzzled and anxious, I reminded myself to breathe amid such ponderous life. Yet I sensed more in the deeps: heat…circling movement…stone dissolved in eternal fire…
I backed away quickly. No beings left traces so deep as this. No presence I’d a mind to encounter. I retreated to the veils of music, each melody as rich and holy as plainsong, of marvelous variety, yet not intruding one upon the other, as if designed—
Understanding blossomed like an unfolding lily. Brother Sebastian had taught me that plainsong was a medium of prayer—bearing the petitions we would submit to the gods—and also a mode of prayer—a state of mind that exalted the soul and opened our thoughts to heaven. I focused my inner eyes and ears upon the music as if squinting to see differently or angling my head to pick up fainter sounds, and I began to see and hear and feel what I had previously gleaned in random glimpses and snippets. As blue sigils upon smooth flesh, traces more numerous than the paths of deer had been drawn on the land’s music, circling, dividing, rejoining. The earth’s music served as the favored medium of the earth’s guardians—their paint and canvas, their clay—opening the mind and senses to the deepest truths of the world. Danae shaped paths of music, imposing harmony…patterns…where they walked. No single thread laid across the landscape, but many silver threads that joined and divided and crossed one another. And now the path lay before me, I, Janus de Cartamandua’s son, could surely walk it.
I jumped to my feet. “Follow me.”
Mesmerized, I strode across the snow-clad meadow toward a spreading oak that had not yet shed its russet leaves. When at last I touched its bark, I marveled that the great bole’s rugged solidity did not waver or vanish. Laughing as would a man freed from the gallows, I pressed my back to the trunk and peered at the hazy blue sky beyond the spreading canopy—no longer winter evening, but autumn afternoon. The chill that nipped my skin tasted of fruit and wine. Then was my attention captured by the prospect beyond the shaded circle.
Earth’s Holy Mistress… Bathed in the steep-angled sunlight, the land fell away in the familiar giant’s steps to the river valley far below. But here, the grass was not crushed with early snow. Rather it rippled in golden, ankle-high luxuriance. The great forests of the Kay, thicker, taller, stretched well beyond the boundaries I knew, so that swaths of red-leaved maples, of deep green spruce and fir and russet oak lapped even these upland slopes and spilled onto these grassy meads. A kite screeched and dived from the deepening sky, only to soar upward in an arc of such exultant grace as to bring a lump to my chest.
No evidence of the human travelers’ road scarred the autumn landscape. No warriors’ refuge had been hacked from the rocky pinnacle where Fortress Groult had loomed only moments before. I spun in my tracks. No human work existed anywhere within my sight, nor did any prince, warrior, physician, or beast.
“Lord Prince!” I called, hurriedly retracing my path toward the gorge, out from under the tree…back from golden afternoon to indigo evening and snow. When Osriel and Voushanti came back into view, standing not twenty paces from the barren crossroads, I grinned and beckoned, shouting as the wind billowed my cloak. “You’d best stay close!”
Osriel’s eyes gleamed as hard as garnet. The deep twilight left Saverian, the soldiers, and the horses as anonymous smudges by the broken pillars of the bridge approach. “You’ve found your way, then? We lost sight of you.”
“Ah, lord, it is a wonder…” Osriel’s somber visage stilled my desire to babble of music and sunlight. As did Elene, I feared his soul already lay beyond the rock gate without hope of heaven.
Reversing course toward the oak, I walked more slowly this time, relishing the passage, feeling the land and light shift all around me. I sensed a strip of woodland to my left before I could see it, smelled the intoxicating air of Aeginea while human paths yet lay beneath my feet. Voushanti’s mumbling told me he saw the tree well after it had come into my view.
When we reached the tree, Osriel touched the craggy bark, and his gaze explored the spreading canopy. It grieved me that I could read no wonder in him.
“I would venture the opinion that we stand in Danae lands, Lord Prince,” I said softly, as the dry leaves rustled in the breeze, a few drifting from the branches above us, “and that the meeting you have sought is at hand.” For indeed another marvel awaited us.
Striding upslope from the valley were five Danae, their elongated shadows gliding across the rippling grass as if they flew. A big, well-muscled male led the party, his ageless face reflecting unbounded hauteur. A wreath of autumn leaves rested on a cascade of rust-colored hair that fell below his slender waist. A female walked alongside him. Though taller than most human women, she appeared but a wisp beside his imposing height and sculpted sinews. The skin beneath her blue sigils glowed the softest hue of sunrise, and a cap of scarlet curls framed her delicately pointed face. Her lean body spoke of naught but strength.