The thought shook him from his dying reverie as the memory of Rhapsody’s last words came back to him.
Live, live for me, Anborn. Get word to Ashe about what happened here; tell him, the children, and my Bolg friends that I love them. Remember that I lave you as well.
Whether those words were the inescapable magic of a potent Namer, the command of his sovereign to whom he was sworn, the call of a fellow Kinsman, or the last request of the one woman in the world whose love and friendship he valued, they held power, a power great enough to make him lift his head and shake off the warm and peacefully endless sleep that glowed just beyond the edge of his awareness.
As his eyes cleared, he saw the destruction around him was far more widespread than he had even imagined. Every tree in the forest for as far as he could see was aflame, the fire growing in intensity as it spread north to the Tara’fel River.
He had to get out of the forest and back to where he could summon help.
Anborn braced his hands against the ground and lifted his upper body to look.
It was there still, smoldering quietly beneath him, drawing the destructive power of the flames into itself, sparing his hide from immolation.
Daystar Clarion.
For a moment the General lay and stared at the blade. Gone were the rippling waves of fire that rolled from hilt to tip in Rhapsody’s hand, a sign of the bond between element and Iliachenva’ar. A bright glow of starlight was still imbued in it, but the fire was stilled, taken away by the man that had borne the sword of air. Though he had never seen it, he had heard tales of the weapon, a blade wielded in the old world during the Seren War that preceded the Cymrian exodus.
Tysterisk.
Its power was unmistakable. He could feel it, sense the command that the figure at the end of the road held over the element.
Kinsmen were brothers of the wind; this man could command the wind itself.
Anborn’s mind raced, trapped in his unresponsive body. He thought of Rhapsody, how terrified he knew she must be, though she had put on a brave face for him. The thought of what might be happening to her, or that she might in fact already be dead, caused a surge of relentless rage to build in his heart until it overflowed in a seething flood of anger.
He rolled with great effort onto his side, then reached with hands that trembled with the strain for the elemental sword. He sheathed it with some effort across his back, then extended his arm as far as he could, feeling around on the ground for a root, a living bush, anything with which to gain purchase.
The blackened husk of what had once been a bramble of some kind was just beyond his reach; Anborn pushed forward, his hands in the burning loam, stretching the muscles of his upper body until he seized the husk and, finding it holding firm in the ground, dragged himself a few paces forward, knowing that the fire moved far more quickly than he could.
All conscious thought submerged; he had but one single-minded task, to crawl in any way he could, out of the burning forest and back to the Filidic Circle at the Great White Tree where they had been a few days before. Surely there would be help to send after her.
Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the General stretched and reached, dragging himself by vegetation when he could grasp any, by the strength of his fingers and elbows when he could not, hauling himself with almost imperceptible success through the smoking leaf matter and other burning detritus of the forest floor.
Time passed with a cruel sluggishness. The inferno around him grew hotter, brighter, at the outskirts of his vision, but Anborn paid it no heed, focusing instead on the few handsbreadths of ground before him, pulling himself arduously along, to find himself doing it all over again, and again, moment by brutally painful moment.
After what seemed like forever, he came across the body of the archer who had shot Shrike, a crossbowman with his stonebow still beside him. He took the opportunity to rest and catch his breath for a moment; he rolled onto his side, wincing at the crushing pain in his ribs, and tore off a rag from his shirt to stanch the bleeding in his hands, wrapping them in the makeshift bandage, then looked around again.
Within arm’s reach the burning skeleton of a horse lay, its high-backed saddle melting in the heat. A battered cutlass lay next to it, reflecting the fire. Anborn reached for it with a hand that shook violently, not feeling the pain in his back.
The bodies of all the other attackers must have already been consumed by the fire through which he was crawling; he had been breathing their ashes, inhaling their remains and their souls, on his crawl along the burning forest floor.
Even Shrike’s.
For the first time since entering battle he thought of his friend and mentor, a humble sailor who had served on the crew of the Serelinda-, the last ship to leave the Island before it sank beneath the waves, transformed by the journey across the Prime Meridian into a surly, immortal soldier. He had been a loyal if sometimes reluctant follower of Gwylliam, Anborn’s father, then of Anborn himself, for almost fifteen centuries between them, and had always given a perspective that could only have come with the wisdom of someone who had lived through the death of two worlds.
As he lay on his side, Anborn felt grief creeping in, a grief the likes of which he had not known for centuries. He closed his mind to it, held it at bay; it would only serve to divert him from his overwhelming task.
Once rested, he crawled to the body of the archer and, after spitting in its lifeless face, he seized it by the jaw and dragged it along with him, knowing he would need it for his purposes.
Above his head, the massive limb of a towering tree crashed through the canopy, roaring with flame, then collapsed to the ground nearby. Anborn shielded his nose and mouth from the ash and burning leaves that rose in its wake.
His lungs, already stinging with the caustic cinders he was inhaling, began to burn.
When finally he began to choke, gagging blood from the creosote and fire residue that had thickened the air to the point of being black, Anborn had to acknowledge that if he was alone in his effort, he was not going to succeed.
It was time to give in to the one last lifeline he had.
For a moment the world around him hummed with a destructive static, too loud and full of noise to hear anything. Impatiently he rubbed his ears, cursing his useless legs, and tried to block out all noise, all clamor save for the gentle song of the wind.
It took him a long time to hear it, but finally a tiny breeze picked up, perhaps generated by the fire itself. Anborn listened for the fluctuations in it, the subtle whine as it changed directions, whisding with power.
The General summoned all his strength, lifted his head, inclining it to the west, and spoke the call that he had answered but never put onto die wind himself until this moment.
Leuk, the west wind, the wind of justice, hear me, he rasped in die Ancient Lirin tongue, the only words in the language he knew, his voice thick with smoke and pain. By the star, I will wait, I will watch, I will call and will be heard.
As he spoke the call of die ancient brotherhood of soldiers, he thought back to the last time he had answered it, a clear, soft cry on the wind of a snowy forest in the black of a storm. He had followed the source to discover a woman, shivering in the cold, leading a freezing horse over which an unconscious gladiator was stretched.
A woman who had become the Lirin Queen, the Lady Cymrian.
A gladiator who she had taken into the realm beyond life and death and left there. He had returned to be chosen by the Scales as the Patriarch.
He winced at the irony of it all now.
He had thought then he was rescuing her, rescuing them both, though at the time he had wanted to put the brute to death. When he felt the pull, the intrinsic magic, wrap around him and transport him on the back of the wind to where he was needed, he believed he was going off to save a fellow Kinsman. He knew now that in doing so he had actually rescued himself, been absolved for his crimes in the Cymrian War that had haunted his dreams and his waking moments.