Recovered equanimity told me when we passed beyond the boundaries of my mother’s poisoned resting place. The gloom lightened a bit. I could sense the sun nearing the zenith behind the layered cloud. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was feeling a bit useless earlier and should not have taken it out on you.”
“We could both use a real bed.” Save for a fleeting smile, her expression was etched with determination. What drove her? Never had I known a woman so complicated. Strong, though. And honest. I could understand why Osriel trusted her with his life—and why he valued her prickly company.
“You never told me what you learned of Llio’s curse.”
She hitched her cloak about her shoulders. “It’s difficult to know what to believe. Picus swallows every tale and grinds it in the mill of his faith. Simply stated, Llio broke the world. Somehow. Picus says that Danae speak of four sacred places, the first sianous where the first four of their kind were born of the Everlasting, brought to life and given bodily form. These four are the Mountain, the Plain, the Sea, and the Well.”
As always, the mention of sianou joining made my skin creep. “My mother’s Well.”
“Exactly so. The guardians of the Four are always exceptional dancers. Llio, the halfbreed son of a Dané named Vento and a human woman, became the chosen of the Plain. Among his many couplings—it seems most Danae are not singular in such matters—Llio mated with a human woman named Calyna, and got her with child.”
Saverian warmed to her storytelling, as we ascended the terraced foothills that would lead us to the Sentinel Oak. The snow swirled thicker, and the wind blustered as we came out of the valley.
“On the spring equinox, Llio attacked another Dané during the dancing of the Canon, and in the ensuing struggle, Llio died. From that hour the Plain was lost to the Canon. Picus does not know why or how—he babbled about human legends and the lost city of Askeron. But the Danae blame Llio’s half-human temper for this great breaking and their decline in fertility that followed. They vowed that no halfbreed would ever dance the Canon.”
“Thus they break our knees.”
“That’s only the beginning of the deviltry.” Saverian double stepped to catch up with me again, and I tried to slow my pace to accommodate her. “Llio’s father, Vento, held Calyna captive until the child was born, then drove the mother from Aeginea, while keeping the infant. But Calyna knew of the Danae’s weakness—this bleeding rite they call the Scourge—and she bled some poor human to poison Vento’s sianou when he took his sleeping season. As it happened, Vento also had a full-blooded Danae elder son, none other than Tuari, the present archon. Tuari used the child to trick Calyna to fall off a cliff! He claimed he did it to prevent Calyna telling other humans about the Scourge. But Stian, who was archon, believed Tuari did the murder from shame and vengeance, and he condemned Tuari to take beast form every summer until Llio’s child reached maturity.”
“So Llio and Tuari were half-brothers,” I said, astonishment stopping me in my muddy tracks. “Saints and angels, no wonder Tuari has no use for human folk. Or for Stian’s family either.”
Saverian bobbed her head in a most satisfied manner. “Humans are not the only fools who cripple themselves with lust. Sin begets sin. And did you guess? The child of Llio the halfbreed and poor murdered Calyna was the same crippled halfbreed girl Ronila who stained Picus’s virtue!”
“Gods!”
As all these threads raveled and unraveled, our urgency redoubled. We hurried through the chilly gloom, wondering what it meant that the Danae had now lost two of their four holiest places. And we speculated about Ronila’s evidence that had driven Picus to such extremity as deserting Eodward and living out his life in penance. Saverian said the monk had refused to discuss the woman.
At last, weary beyond bearing, we dragged ourselves up the last steep rise. Across the rock-laced meadow stood the Sentinel Oak. Saverian leaned heavily on my arm, no longer reluctant to accept help. “Too much to hope that Osriel is camped at Caedmon’s Bridge,” I said.
“He told me he intended to return to Renna straightaway from Aeginea. But then again, he didn’t mention he planned to leave you tied to a tree with broken knees. Damnable prick.”
Smiling at her vehemence, I knelt and touched earth. I needed only my Cartamandua bent to find my way back to the human realm from here.
The patterns of the Danae were scribed everywhere upon this land—the fine sprays of silver, whorls and roundels, ovals, spirals, and multiple sets of straight lines that crossed to form gridlike shapes. What marvelous patterns must radiate from the four great sianous, the oldest, the first.
Though, for the first time, I felt close to answers, I’d no time to consider the earth’s mysteries. We needed to find our prince and prevent him using whatever grant he had bargained from the Danae, lest the backlash of Tuari Archon’s hatred make our problems worse. Magic flowed through my fingertips as I held in mind Caedmon’s Bridge…the grim verges of Evanore…the snow-buried barrens we had left behind…every edge and sweep etched on my memory. And instinct led my eye to one bright track leading into a thicker night and deeper winter—into human lands.
“Valen!” Saverian’s tense whisper brought my head up. She crouched beside me, pointing to the Sentinel Oak. From beneath its bare canopy three Danae moved deliberately toward us. Likely it was my imagination that told me two of them carried wooden clubs.
I grabbed Saverian’s hand and bolted. The guide thread led us straight toward the spot where Caedmon’s Bridge should span the Kay, and I dared not deviate from it in hopes I could take us to the human realm some other way.
The Danae changed course to intercept us. We had no hope of outracing them, and naught would prevent them following us into the human plane. I needed to shift us far from this place.
As we sped across the hillside, I focused on the great rocky pinnacle that overlooked this mead and recalled another rocky peak that overlooked a barren hillside. Both of them should house a fortress. “Physician,” I said, breathless. “Pin your eyes straight ahead. Yell at me the instant you glimpse Caedmon’s Bridge.”
She jerked her head. The blood pounding in my ears near deafened me, as I concentrated on the fortress rock and the thick straight walls I knew existed atop it in the human realm. At the same time, I built the image of the second fortress: its rarefied air, its looming mountain neighbors, its thick, safe stone, the smell of warriors’ piss along the inner walls, the welcoming fire of torches and the boom of the sonnivar, pitched to match no other in any world. Not at all a subtle leap.
The Danae cut a swath of sapphire through the snowy night. Moth wings gleamed upon a female’s breast and brow. I gritted my teeth and dragged Saverian faster, gripping the dual images of the fortress. This would be enough. It had to be.
“The bridge!” gasped Saverian at the same time a killing frost enveloped us.
Trusting her word that we had entered the human plane, I shifted course abruptly, angling back across the hill toward the rocky summit of Fortress Groult, putting us directly on a course for the closing Danae. Then I reached into the blue fire that raged from my own breast and drew forth magic…
Harsh breath crackled and froze the hairs in my nose. My bare feet skidded on a patch of ice, and as Saverian and I crashed to earth, I whooped in exultation. We lay tangled in a heap at Renna’s gates, and the Danae were nowhere to be seen.
Even the blinding pain in my head and the wrenching spasms in my empty gut could not damp my good humor. I had seen across the boundaries of Aeginea clearly enough to build the shift—a work of the senses that Kol had said was impossible for his kind. My every instinct insisted gleefully that I could have worked the shift directly, before we had even crossed the physical boundary between Aeginea and Navronne.
Arms and elbows dug in my gut. Boots scraped my legs. My throbbing head slammed abruptly into the frozen ground. “Gods, woman”—I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth to hold back the surging bile—“give me a moment’s peace.”