“Witch!” Hazad warned, his eyes bulging.
Kian guessed she must be an inept hedge witch, to be sitting out on the frosty street instead of within one of the nearby hovels. If not quite beautiful, she was handsome. Her only flaw was a pink scar running diagonally over her neck to the spot where her ear should have been. Her eyes bored into him, poking and prying, and he realized the recognition he had seen was for him alone.
When it became obvious she would not speak first, Kian said, “We seek Hya. If you would, please direct us to her shop.”
She answered in a straining hiss. “And long years have I have sought the man who put the blade to my throat, yet still I have not found him. Why should your search be easier?”
“Hya is a pyromancer,” Kian persisted irritably. After this night, his patience was exhausted. “She keeps her shop on this street. If you know the woman and the way, point it out.”
The witch smiled with small white teeth, and her eyes glinted with knowing amusement. “I have seen you in my sleep, Izutarian, every night over this past season. You come to destroy the Life Giver, but that way is a road of pain and failure. A new age has been born … an age of unending night.”
Kian struggled to keep his face placid. “Who are you?”
The witch’s smile vanished as if it had never been. Without answering, she leaned over her now bubbling pot, and began muttering in some guttural tongue. Her hands crawled over the implements of her craft. She broke off a cluster of withered flowers and tossed it into the pot. Smoke billowed, spreading quickly. In moments, as if in testament to her unnatural power, a reeking fog shrouded the entire street.
Kian and the others leaned forward with a collective gasp.
Sweat now dotted the witch’s reddened cheeks and brow. Strands of silvery hair hung in listless ribbons from her skull. Her chants became a peculiar, one-sided conversation, as she rocked forward and back … back and forward. Something dark leaked from her flaring nostrils. Tears fell from eyes alive with the fire’s weak flames, eyes gone black through and through. Suddenly her utterings climbed to a wordless wail, and she arched her back and faced the heavens. Something writhed under her skin, then a vaporous darkness began oozing from her pores.
“Mahk’lar!” Kian warned, drawing his sword.
Before anyone could react, the inky substance pouring from the witch’s skin coalesced into a vaguely human shape and flew at Kian. The specter knocked him from the saddle, left him wallowing in the street. By the time he clambered to his feet, the demonic apparition was gone.
As the demon’s for began to lift, Hazad and Azuri spun their horses in tight circles, searching the shadows. Ellonlef vaulted out of the saddle and ran to Kian, who was scrubbing his palms over his arms in disgust. It felt as though someone had sloshed a bucket of living eels over him. Ellonlef grasped his hands in hers, stilling his frantic motions. Her touch, no matter how ridiculous the notion, seemed to cleanse him. She pushed up his sleeves, but found nothing amiss. Then she looked into his eyes.
“I was wrong to urge you to come here,” she said quietly, urgently. “I beg you, leave. We must all of us leave. Ammathor, I now know, was lost even before Varis took into himself the power of the gods. And should you perish to preserve this wretched place, the world will grow darker all the sooner.”
Despite her forbidding words, Kian’s heart swelled. Azuri had suggested he might be smitten with Ellonlef, and he had avoided answering. In truth, no matter how unlikely it was, he loved this woman before him … but Varis was all he could afford to focus on. Not even a mahk’lar could shift him from his purpose.
“I cannot turn aside,” he said for her ears alone. “Whether you urged me to come or not, whether Aradan is more depraved than all other kingdoms or not, I must face Varis.”
Ellonlef dropped her gaze. “You are right … but I wish it were not so.”
“Let us find Hya,” Kian said, yearning in his heart that he could flee with Ellonlef and his friends, but knowing he could not.
Chapter 35
The foursome again searched down the silent street and back up the other side, before Ellonlef finally spotted a familiar sign that she had previously missed. A little way down a dead-end alley, hanging from loops of frayed rope, was a sign of rough wood, upon which was painted a licking flame held in an open palm. While she had seen the sign before, its location was different.
Ellonlef bade Kian and the others to wait as she dismounted. She looked up down the street, seeking but finding no immediate danger. A cold if gentle breeze brought to her ears the sound of distant music and bursts of laughter. The Street of Witches might be asleep at this hour, but the rest of the Chalice never rested and, moreover, seemed indifferent to the devastation that had befallen the world. She could almost imagine that all she had seen was a terrible dream. Her steaming breath gave proof of that lie, as well as the queer stars overhead.
She cast a furtive glance at Kian, remembering his lips on hers, a warming recollection that seemed distant and dreamlike, and yet clear as if that kiss had just passed. Her face flushed at the memory, as it always did. She had not known how much she wanted to kiss him until he had acted first. And then she had not wanted him to stop, no matter that Hazad and Azuri had been watching intently. In truth, the future husband Mother Eulari had chosen for her, the comely fisherman Sadrin Corron, could have been present, and Ellonlef would have been untroubled. At that moment, the entire world could have ringed them about, and she would have been overjoyed that all knew the truth of her heart … a truth she had hidden from herself since the moment she saw him come out of the darkness to fend off the bloodthirsty Bashye.
And now, here you stand, at the stoop of the woman with knowledge that will surely lead the man you love to certain death. Ellonlef had advocated that Kian face Varis, shamed him to it, in truth, which meant that if she lost him, then the blame fell to her. Yet, had he refused, then they never would have kissed in the first place, and the memory of him would have been only a fancy she seldom, if ever, considered. Had she let him go his way, she would have done her best to pass on the word of Varis’s intentions to any who would heed her, and then been away to Rida, where she would have lived out her life, for good or ill, with Sadrin Corron….
Ellonlef abruptly pushed the thoughts away. She could go round and round the rest of her life, and never find a perfect balance between what could have been and what was. All that mattered was that Kian would face Varis, and she must do all she could to ensure that Kian survived that battle. If she failed in that-
Ellonlef swallowed, but could not dislodge the sudden knot in her chest. Forcing herself to focus on the task at hand, lest misery overwhelm her, she moved to the rickety door under the swaying sign.
Hya’s new shop had been built onto the back end of a charred mud-brick building that tickled her memory. After a moment she recalled that the burned-out building had served the old woman the first time Ellonlef had met her. Thinking on that past meeting, she hesitated before knocking.
Nearly ten years had passed since she came to Hya, a meeting ordered by Mother Eulari. The old woman had not welcomed Ellonlef as a Sister of Najihar, but rather as an irritation that needed to be addressed, if only to be rid of her all the sooner. Ellonlef and Hya had both known why Mother Eulari sent her: Sisters of Najihar did not remain in any one place longer than the customary ten years, yet Hya’s stay far exceeded that, and by her own admission she had no intention of ever leaving. Mother Eulari wanted to know the why of Hya’s resistance.