Cygnus sat reading, perched on the solitary stool in his tiny cell in the vaults below the Temple of Yinze. At least he was trying to read. The wind was still high, and the screeching wail from the spires above could easily penetrate the ells of solid rock that stood between the young physician-priest and the source of the appalling sound. Cygnus groaned, though the sound went unheard against the general background din. Incondor’s accursed Lament! Not only was it interfering with his concentration, but the eerie howls had been setting his teeth on edge for some time. Much more of this, he thought, and I’ll bid fair to lose my mind! Blackest heresy though it might seem, Cygnus wished that the creator of the Temple might have considered the poor priests who had to live below!
Apart from the torture of the Lament, the young physician-priest had too much on his mind to concentrate. The master physician Elster had also attended the Queen in her last illness, and Cygnus knew that she must have recognized the effects of the poison he had used on Flamewing on Blacktalon’s orders. Only Master Elster’s savage glare and her iron grip digging into the bones of his wrist had let slip the fact that she knew what he had done-yet the depth of his respect for his old teacher had prevented him from blurting out the truth and betraying her. It would have meant the death of his aged mentor—Blacktalon’s spies were all over the Citadel, and he had ears in every room. It was Elster who had been responsible for Cygnus eschewing his career as a Temple guard for the Path of Light, as the Winged Folk called the pursuit of the healing arts. With a single act, the physician had changed his life forever. Cygnus, in those days, had been the carefree scion of a prominent family, blessed by a lighthearted spirit and quickness of both mind and body. As was to be expected in the caste-ridden society of the Skyfolk, he joined the Syntagma, the elite warrior guard of the Priesthood, and had prospered—until the day he had almost caused the death of Sunfeather, his closest friend.
The accident took place during a training exercise, in a violent midair collision that was entirely the fault of his own inattention. Cygnus, with the airspace in which to correct his flailing spin, escaped the penalty of his carelessness. Sunfeather, already unconscious from the collision, had plunged straight into the mountainside. Stricken beyond words, Cygnus had joined the somber knot of his cohorts gathered round the victim, in time to see his friend stop breathing. It was then that Master Elster had appeared.
Fragile, aged, and disheveled from her hasty summoning, Elster had briskly cleared a path through the crowd with a few sharp words. Her frowning, fine-boned face was webbed with wrinkles beneath a mass of silken hair that was dramatically streaked in mingled black and white. Her bony, angular figure was cloaked in folded wings with pied and boldly patterned plumage. Cygnus, with an increasing sense of disbelief, watched awestruck as she smote Sunfeather’s chest and breathed into his lungs her own breath of life, until his friend was breathing for himself once more. Sunfeather survived that fall, and to Cygnus it seemed a miracle. Not only had Elster spared him much grief, but she had also freed him from the burden of a lifetime’s guilt. His admiration for the elderly physician was little short of worship. How had she achieved the miracle of bringing the dead back to life? Suddenly, it seemed to Cygnus a far more worthy deed to save lives, rather than to take them, as he had been trained to do.
It had taken longer to convince Elster that he was serious in his newfound ambition. Only when he had resigned his post in the Syntagma and had consequently been cast out by his family, did she finally and grudgingly agree to take him under her wing as her apprentice. She was certain that he would never endure the long years of arduous and complex training. Cygnus had set out to prove her wrong, winning her admiration and affection in the process—until, with the coming of the fell winter, he had abandoned her for another, more sinister mentor.
When the White Death closed its jaws around their mountains, the Winged Folk began to perish. All around the beleaguered Cygnus, the population of Aerillia succumbed to slow, lingering deaths from cold, disease, and privation. The young physician could not defeat the monster—all the arts in which he had taken such pride were powerless against it. Cygnus began to doubt himself and his skills, and the futility of all his actions closed over him, leaving his spirit adrift in a sea of darkness.
Drowning in a morass of bitterness and despair, Cygnus clutched in desperation at the last, faint spark of hope. Blacktalon and his sacrifices. Because he had nothing left to believe in, Cygnus slowly came to accept the notion that if the High Priest could somehow restore the lost Magical powers of the Winged Race, then at last it would be possible to perform the legendary feats of healing described in the ancient annals, Reluctantly at first, but with increasing willingness, he had come to accept Blacktalon’s tenets—and methods of achieving his ends.
It had been some time now since Cygnus had thrown his energies behind Blacktalon’s ruthless, ambitious schemes, but by Yinze, Flamewing’s death had sickened him! She had fought for existence tooth and talon, incurring in her stubbornness much suffering that she might otherwise have been spared. Cygnus remembered her, black-faced and vomiting, choking for air, her limbs twisted and convulsed almost to breaking with her dreadful agony. And yet she had still found strength from some inner depths of endurance to curse Blacktalon with her very last breath. Later that night, in the confusion that attended the death of a Queen, he had slipped away, flying in the snarling face of a newly returned storm, until he was safely far from Aerillia. There, shivering on a lonely pinnacle, he had finally begun to question his involvement with the Priest—yet now, despite the many days that had passed since that terrible night, he still had no answer to the promptings of his conscience.
Cygnus frowned. Despite Blacktalon’s attempts to eradicate it, rumor was always rife within the Citadel. It must have been the guards who had assisted in his capture who had first spread the tale of the captive sorcerer, and his mate who was imprisoned in the Tower of Incondor. Nonetheless, Cygnus had been shocked beyond speech when master Elster, in a tremendous hurry, had appeared in his chambers to tell him he was needed to attend the prisoner.
“I’d go myself,” the old physician added coldly, “But the High Priest has forbidden it.” Her pied wings, with their intricate feathered fan-patterns of crisp white and shimmering blue-green-black, were half raised in anger as she darted the young man a significant glance beneath her shaggy white-streaked brows. “In any case, do what you can…”
Another pointed glare. The young man’s breath had frozen in his throat. Elster’s disapproval was tangible, and it still hurt him to think that he had failed her.
Well, Cygnus had done his best for his old teacher. Squirming under his burden of guilt, he had reported back to Blacktalon that the prisoner’s illness was beyond his own poor skills, and that Elster would be needed. It was the best he could do to ensure her safety, for since the death of the Queen, he had been concerned about her fate. Who knew what might happen to her if she started questioning Flamwings’s demise?
Cygnus jumped as the door to his cell crashed open, and an ashen-faced Temple Guard appeared. “Come quick,” he shouted, dragging the physician off his stool. “The princess… Master Elster needs your urgent assistance!”
Cygnus could have wept when he saw her lying, tiny and frail and so alone, somehow, in the gore-splattered chamber. Her skin had a ghastly pallor, her left forearm bore a ragged, gaping gash. And her wings—oh, Father of Skies—were a crumpled, mangled wreckage of bloody feather and bone. The murderous urge to take hold of the High Pries and twist his scrawny, wrinkled neck overwhelmed Cygnus…