Before the Dawn (25 page)

Raven seemed to have forgotten that he had
argued with them both earlier, or he was just very good at
pretending he had forgotten, because his face was smooth and
unreadable once more when they finally stood before him. His
mother, though, regarded them with a sharp watchfulness, her amber
eyes glowing with power.

"Those were my brothers," Raven told them.
"They are marching towards Benwyr's castle with their soldiers and
they expect me to join them by twilight. We need to make our plans
now because we would not be able to do so once we are in their
company." He waited for them to nod in assent before he continued
talking. "You will travel with us and I will tell them that you are
my servants or some such nonsense that will explain your presence.
You will stay with me at all times, especially when we break
through Benwyr's defenses and enter his castle. I had hoped my
mother could get us in, but my brother has apparently closed all
doorways leading to Silverhaven. So we need to actually walk or
ride there now. We will find Aline and your other friends, and then
my mother will ignite the silver leaf she once buried within Aline
and let's all hope your friend heeded her advice and remembered
something of her old self. You will need it to convince her to go
back to your world. My mother will take you back home while Trevor
and I stay till the battle's finish and Benwyr's execution. It's a
simple, straightforward plan that should have all the chances of
succeeding—unless you have reservations about going into my
brother's domain when he is fully prepared to kill anyone who is
not on his side."

They were silent for a moment, then Meran
said, "If it's the only way, it's the only way. Though why do we
have to go before Benwyr's dead? If he dies, shouldn't his spell
dissolve or something?"

"The magic he worked upon your friends would
be undone upon his death, yes," Raven responded, suddenly somber,
"but we will not have an easy time killing him. He's a seventh son.
The only one more powerful is the King, and that is only because he
has had more time to refine his skill. In terms of pure power,
Benwyr outstrips him though he has yet to gain full mastery of
magic. It's going to be a very bloody battle, of that I have no
doubt. So, on the possibility that it would take us a few days to
kill him, we need to follow an alternative plan of breaking the
spell binding your friends, and that is to get them away from the
Court before the dawn of the next day. This is the last chance we
have, or they will be bound again for another seven years if Benwyr
survives. Or," he shrugged, "it could be worse for them."

"If he survives and Aline refuses to go,
what's going to happen that would be worse?" Trevor asked.

"She stays under the spell, war will break
out, and we'll all likely die. But you must understand one thing,"
Raven's voice had hardened. "My mother and I are committing treason
by disobeying the King's command to destroy everyone in Benwyr's
Court. We will help you get your people back, but if we are
discovered doing this, we will be put to death. So this is the best
and only opportunity you will have to rescue your friends. If you
don't get them back to your world, even if Benwyr survives and
holds out against any siege, they will all still be under the
King's sentence of death. Any second they remain in the
Strangelands leaves them vulnerable to the King's subjects who will
not hesitate to kill them."

"I will kill them myself rather than be
exposed as a traitor," Raven's mother declared. "My son is being
extremely foolish in his desire to help you, and it is only to
ensure his safety and his succession to the throne that I have
agreed to assist him in this scheme. If his right to the Kingship
is threatened in any way by his association with you, I will slit
your throats." Maybe it was because she spoke in a very
matter-of-fact, even pleasant tone, but her words made the two
humans gulp in sudden nervousness.

"Mother, please," Raven said, sounding weary.
"You've already gotten what you wanted. There is no need to
threaten them in this manner."

"Once you have been named as the Crown
Prince, then I will consider I have gotten what I wanted," she
replied. "Until that time, I will answer any danger to you with
death." She smiled coldly at the mortals then gave Raven a little
nod. "I go to awaken our soldiers." She turned and vanished.

Meran crossed her arms and glared at Raven.
"Your mother's a bitch," she said flatly.

He barely managed to suppress a sigh. "She is
of an older age," he told them. "If you think the people of the
Strangelands in this time are amoral hedonists, be thankful you
were not alive when she was young. Her people hunted down and
killed humans for sport."

"I don't really see that as being much
different from enchanting young girls and trapping them to dance
until their feet bleed," she retorted. "It's all still a sport to
you, right?"

He stared at her for a moment before
answering. "Yes, it is all still a sport," he said slowly. "But at
least we don't eat humans anymore." When she made a revolted noise,
he smiled quite nastily.

"Okay, that's enough." Trevor stepped between
the two of them. "The two of you can work out this strange, tense
whatever it is after we accomplish what we came here to do." He
looked at Raven. "Is there anything else we need to know before we
get caught up in a battle of superpowers?"

There turned out to be quite a lot. Maybe
Raven was still smarting from their accusations during their
argument, but he had suddenly become incredibly candid with them.
He answered all their questions easily and honestly. For instance,
when Meran wondered why Raven's mother had buried a silver leaf
within Aline, he gave them a frank explanation and an uncomfortable
insight into his mother's character.

"She is always on the lookout for any
advantage she can have over others," he said. "So when it became
clear that Benwyr was about to win Aline, she made sure that he
would not be able to completely possess her. It served to frustrate
him and drive him even madder than he already was, which was a good
thing as far as my mother was concerned because it weakened his
standing in the eyes of the Courts. So, please, do not give her any
cause to think that you might be an enemy, or that she can gain
something by exploiting a weakness of yours. Just keep your
distance from her as best as you can manage."

"Okay, this bears repeating then," Meran
stated. "Your mother's a bitch."

Trevor flashed her a look that warned her to
stop it. He then asked Raven for more details about the battle they
were going to fight.

They, meaning Meran and Trevor, would not be
fighting or going anywhere near the fighting as much as possible,
Raven told them. He would shield them as well as he could while he
and his brothers would batter at Benwyr's protective spells around
Silverhaven. Then, when Trevor could no longer contain his
curiosity and asked for more information about the Strangelands and
the Courts, Raven gave them a brief history lesson about magic and
his people.

Manipulating the different forces that made
up the universe was essentially what magic was all about. How well
one could do that depended on one's bloodline and accumulated
knowledge. The people of the Strangelands were particularly adept
at it because they had been the first ones to learn and experiment
with the skill and, unlike humans, they had never developed
shortcuts such as an overabundance of technology to impose their
will upon the world. "It's harder to learn how to fly than to
create a flying machine," as Raven explained it, "but knowing how
to fly on your own is knowledge that will never fail you. So it's
worth the few centuries of effort at mastering it."

After a few thousand years, the people with
the strongest magicks had waged war on one another until only the
most powerful survived. The victors eventually became the first
kings and queens, and established the different Royal Courts. Their
offspring were born with great powers, too, and a system of royalty
came into being where lineage became an important quality that
determined one's standing. Then, since they were all essentially
immortal, it became the custom for Princes and Princesses to have
their own Courts to rule over when a few heirs and heiresses in the
distant past had decided they could not wait for their progenitors
to die naturally before they proclaimed themselves as monarchs.

With such powerful people, it was natural
that rivalries would continue to fester and small-scale wars would
break out from time to time. But the feuds never attained the same
level of bitterness and destruction of old until the birth of
Raven's great-grandfather. He was the seventh son of a seventh son
and, as he grew, he exhibited an astonishing ability to wield magic
like no other. Soon, the other Courts had banded together to put an
end to the threat he presented, but even their combined powers were
no match for his. Once the battle ended, his own father gave up his
throne and crowned him King, and all the surviving royals of the
other kingdoms watched him warily and never showed any overt
aggression again.

In his turn, he had a seventh son who was
even more powerful than he was, and the fears of his enemies and
rivals grew. When this son grew to manhood and fathered Raven's
sire, also a seventh son unbelievably gifted in magic, those fears
worsened. Finally, when Raven's father had two sons born at the
same time who were seventh in line, talk of assassinations,
rebellions and wars became common not only in other kingdoms but
also within his own Court. Everyone feared the power the two
princes possessed.

"Some courtiers actually suggested to my
father that he should drown one of us," Raven said, sounding amused
as he shared this recollection with them. "We threatened everyone,
and the other Courts were saying that our Kingdom had become too
powerful an enemy and that we all needed to be destroyed. But no
one dared openly attack us, though the assassins never stopped
coming until Benwyr and I grew old enough to know how to defend
ourselves. It was also around that time when my brother and I began
to differentiate ourselves from each other. We had grown up
together, according to our father's decree, and we knew each other
better than anyone else in all the worlds. But we were growing up
as different people in spite of our closeness. Benwyr was the good,
dutiful son while I was the wild, troublesome one, and I had
absolutely no quibble with that. He could be the good one and go on
to be proclaimed the Crown Prince and become the next King for all
I cared. Except that some people still preferred it if only one
seventh son of our generation existed, and they wanted me
dead."

Raven only told them the barest, most
important details but it soon became clear to his two listeners
that he had spent most of his long life being viewed as a threat
and an outsider. This was due to the circumstances that led to his
birth. His mother was a battle maiden, one of the warriors tasked
with protecting the Kingdom. She had taken vows never to lie down
with a man, let alone conceive a child. But then she had seduced
Raven’s father, the King she had sworn to protect, and the Noble
Houses had immediately branded her as an ambitious schemer. Their
contempt for the offence she committed extended to her son, and as
he grew up, Raven’s own reputation wasn't helped by the fact that
he did pretty much as he pleased and that usually meant causing one
kind of mischief or the other.

But circumstances had changed now.

"So when Benwyr dies, you'll be the only
seventh son hanging around, and that means you'll be King?" There
was an odd note in Meran's voice when she asked the question.

"By our Court's traditions, yes," he
confirmed, frowning. "It has been the practice since my
grandfather's time. The strongest gets the crown and that usually
happens to be the seventh son, or sons, as it stands right
now."

"Seriously, you really don't want to be
king?" Trevor was a bit skeptical. "All that power? All yours?"

"I have power enough," Raven retorted. "And
being King would mean having responsibilities I do not care for.
You wouldn't understand."

Meran didn't say anything more after that,
but a distant expression came over her face and she seemed to be
thinking seriously about something. Raven looked a bit concerned by
her silence, but he didn't get to speak whatever was in his mind
because a horn suddenly blasted out a sharp note that cut through
the air.

"My mother comes with our soldiers," he
simply declared and watched as the stones of the floor before them
began moving and sliding back like collapsing cubes. A platform
rose up out of the rectangular hole in the ground, revealing row
upon row of soldiers wearing glittering armor with Raven's mother
at their forefront.

She smiled when she saw the thunderstruck
expressions on the faces of their mortal guests, and looked
completely fearsome as she did so. "I hope you are ready for war,"
she said.

The feminine gown she had been wearing
earlier had been replaced with cruel-looking armor made of black
steel. Sharp little spikes jutted out from the sides of her arms
and her fists. Meanwhile, her dark hair was tied back from her face
and fashioned into small braids. In her left hand, she held a mask
made of silvery metal adorned with raven's feathers while her right
hand rested on the hilt of a sword that seemed too big and heavy
for her to wield, but Trevor had no doubt she could use it with
ease. However, it was not merely the change in her appearance that
unnerved him all of a sudden. It was the presence of the soldiers
at her back.

The armor that covered each soldier's body
was made of dull-looking silver engraved with runes and scarred
with sword strokes. Their helms had no openings that they could see
out of, yet they thrummed with a watchfulness that made Trevor
certain they could move to intercept any violent action he made
without trouble. But what he found particularly unsettling was
their complete stillness. He didn't think they even breathed.