The Sacred Hunt Duology (127 page)

What had happened?

“Kallandras!”

It was not Meralonne's voice that he wished to hear, but it was the only one that carried; he opened his eyes to meet the gaunt, gray gaze of the mage.

“Call the wind back! Call it, or you will do the work of the kin!”

The kin were no part of his song, and no part of his desire. They were—but, yes, they were a part of this, for they served side by side with the dead, the Allasakari who were the Lady's show of mercy. And he had fought against the Allasakari—he fought—

Eyes wide, he looked at the ring upon his finger, at its brilliance, at the vortex that spun in its center. Curling that hand into a fist, he met Meralonne's gaze across the divide. His nod, slight but distinct, was his salute.

• • •

He watched as Kallandras closed his eyes, planting his feet apart in the wind's hollows as if he were standing upon firm ground. Air was not his element, but no more was earth, water, or fire; he was a creature of light and shadow, touched on all sides by the weakest of wildness and its stirrings.

And he sought to deny what he had unleashed.

Beauty was found in such unusual places; not for the canvas or the sculpture, the song or the poem, was such a moment. This, this was why wars were fought, and had been fought, for as long as he could remember. Close to death, life yielded its finest moments, its best.

Meralonne flinched as Kallandras cried out in pain, breaking the delicate image. The Kovaschaii were trained to silence; it was either the bard who spoke—or the intensity of the pain. The ring was pulsing as the gale grew; the wind's voice was now like the God's.

Storm-called, ring-wielded, the elemental air was in its glory; Meralonne smiled grimly and bitterly as he, too, bent his strength—what little remained of it—to the bard's aid. And what way, what other way, was there to fight?

Opening more than his arms, Meralonne let the wildness in.

• • •

Struggling through a forest made of moving wind and debris, Gilliam listened for the roar that moved counter to the wind. The Lord of the Hunt was not canny; He made no attempt to hide His presence from His follower. Gilliam's smile was grim. Why should He? For years upon end, this
was
His day; He was not victim but victor, not hunted, but Hunter.

At his side, a man struggled through the gale toward him, speaking—shouting—in Essalieyanese. It was the court tongue, but not the Hunter's tongue, and Gilliam almost brushed him off in anger. But he did not, and because he did
not, the man drew close enough that Gilliam might recognize him. Devon ATerafin.

His face was bloodied by a grazed forehead; the set of his jaw was grim, and his pallor was gray. He was a court noble, but he offered no finery and no fine words, and in his expression, Gilliam saw the hunted.

“Lord Elseth!
Lord Elseth!
”

The Hunter roared.

“What?”

“The beast is at our flank.” He opened his mouth to say more, but the words fell away as Gilliam's expression made his understanding clear.

“Get out,” he shouted. “All of you, get out!”

“We can't,” the ATerafin shouted back. “The wind blocks the exits—we've lost four mages against it.”

“Then stop the wind!”

Devon's brow furrowed in confusion and then grim understanding. He offered a ragged bow as Gilliam waved him back and struggled forward again.

• • •

He was empty, empty, empty.

His brothers were lost.

The Lady was a glimmer of past power and undying anger. An oath had been given, and an oath broken; the life that he had built had been shattered against it, and no service, no act of contrition, would build it anew.

Essalieyan was his home, and within it, Averalaan. He had grown accustomed to the foibles of the men and women whose company he could not avoid, and over time, he had grown fond of them in his fashion. The ache and the anger had dulled; he had been lulled into a false sense of self, an uneasy compromise between the past and the present.

Evayne's coming had broken that, rupturing the mask of self-deception he had placed across his drama. Even that he could bear. But his shield was riven, and to remake it was the work of decades; without its protection he was vulnerable in ways that no other mage could comprehend.

And without it, he faced the wild winds, hollowing himself into a tempting vessel, whispering the promises of open sky and ancient sacrifice. The smell of singed flesh swirled briefly past his upturned face.

He opened his eyes, wondering when he had closed them; Kallandras was yards away, his curled hand the only difference between their stances.
The fight will kill him
, he thought dispassionately. It didn't matter.

No?

Then why was he drifting forward, why was he extending himself, daring the storm and the wind's rage? Bitterly he realized that his facade was not entirely self-deception; in inhospitable soil, the mask had grown roots.

Brother
, he said again. But this time he listened to his own voice and understood why Kallandras had turned, blindly, toward it. Knew, uttering it this second time, that Kallandras would not ignore it. Lifting a fine-boned, empty hand, Meralonne reached out.

Kallandras mirrored his movement, lifting his left hand, his curled, burned, ring hand, toward the mage. He tried to open his fist; the fingers shuddered, but would not unlock. Meralonne could see the blistered, reddened skin before he reached out to cover the knuckles with the palm of his hand.

Contact.

T
HE KINGS' MEN WERE DYING.
Against the gale, they had some protection, but against the beast, none. Gilliam of Elseth cursed the wind, the dirt, and the dead; he cursed the kin. He could not reach the Hunter in time to stop the slaughter—the Hunter Lord was hungry, and in hunger, merciless.

It should not have been his concern, but it was; Stephen's ghost rode him harder in these few moments than he had at any time other than his dying. Was he never to be free of the conscience, the responsibility, the distraction? Was the full depth of the Hunt never to be his again?

Calm returned to him, and a sadness.

He would never be the same again, because to be the same was to deny Stephen of Elseth—the best huntbrother that Breodanir had ever known—his due. No one would grant it, if Gilliam did not.

Stephen of Elseth was responsibility personified. Stephen of Elseth was willing—
had
—given his life to the only death that he had truly feared, so that these strangers, these foreign nobles and their kin, might live. No, he thought, grimacing; it was not so that
they
could live.

I would not have taken your oath. I would not have accepted your death in my stead. But I am alive, Stephen—and I promise your death will mean something.

He knew, then, what he must do. Wondered why he hadn't thought of it earlier, and knew at the same time.

Gilliam stopped his struggle against the wind. As Stephen had done, he stood his ground, although he overcame no terror to do so. Holding the Spear upright with his left hand, he reached into his vest with the right. Cold and smooth, the Hunter's Horn came to his hand.

They practiced their calls together. All huntbrothers did. Although the calls for the huntbrother were different than those the Hunter employed, no Hunter escaped his early training without learning both. Tilting the Horn to his lips as if it were a flask, he raised it, inhaled, and blew the three notes; they were as wild, as raw, as the voice of the beast.

Would He come? Would the call of the Hunter, and not the brother, invoke the ancient oaths?

• • •

They could not be together, but having joined hands, they could not be separated; they were not brothers, but they were more than comrades.

“Its voice—” Kallandras said, his own a croak.

“I know,” the mage replied gravely. “Hold tight, little brother. Hold long. The wind is about to realize that it is angry.”

“Meralonne,” Kallandras continued, swinging his uninjured right hand over Meralonne's and holding there, “I don't know how to let it go—I don't
want
to lose it—”
Because I did not miss them. I did not remember
.

False words came to the mage, and false words died before they left his lips. “I know,” he said. “But we are fated to have and to lose, you and I. Walk the path bravely.” He brought his left hand to Kallandras' right, bracing the arm with what remained of his mage-power. It hurt, but there was worse pain. There had always been worse.

Together, they began to call back the gale.

But the wild wind was not a mage's breeze, to be called and lightly dismissed; it had a will of its own, and in a fashion, a mind; the skirmish that had begun with Myrddion's ring became a battle. Meralonne brought the wildness home, containing it as he could; he spoke its name with a voice that no one—not even the bard—could hear. The breeze that had been warm and soft was chill and biting in its fury, for it knew betrayal.

Accuse me
, Meralonne snarled into the wind.
Accuse me—you will not be the first.
But Kallandras cried out in denial, wordless; he offered no anger, and the wind struggled harder for the lack, seeking purchase in guilt and pain that anger did not allow.

As if they were two points on a wheel whose center was their joined hands, Meralonne and Kallandras began to spin. The earth rose to greet them in a deadly rush, peeling away at the last moment as the mage brought his will to bear. His grip on Kallandras tightened; their fingers twined; around their hands grew a halo of sparking light.

Blood trailed from the bard's lip up the side of his cheek, tracing his fine features. He was prepared enough for pain that he did not surrender to it. Fingers gripped and knotted his hair, pulling it back; his throat, pale and unadorned, was exposed a moment before he could free himself. Two arm's lengths away, Meralonne's eyes widened a moment in surprise as Myrddion's ring seared his flesh. But he did not release Kallandras.

It was the bard as much as the assassin who saw the pale-skinned, platinum-haired mage, his eyes shining as brightly as—or more brightly than—the ring,
his expression taut and pale. In seeming he was no longer old and wise and learned; his power was youth's power, youth's certain belief in immortality.

It was the wind's power.

The two—wind and mage—seemed inextricably linked, the binding between them no less pervasive, no less necessary, than the binding that held the Kovaschaii together. Kallandras sang with the wind's voice; Meralonne
was
the wind.

Pain brought him back to himself; pain and determination. Lifting his chin, he sang, his voice the bard's voice, a counter to the wind's anger. Myrddion's ring burned at his flesh; the air reddened his cheeks with chill. Again, the ground rushed up, and again it stopped, but his shadow was inches from his cheek before he righted himself. Or was righted. His toes brushed the earth and remained there.

Meralonne's face was twisted, his lips thin; the pain that was writ across his features looked as if it might never leave, it was etched so deep. He held fast to Kallandras, and in the light of his eyes, the bard saw a glimmering. If they were tears, the mage would not let them fall.

The tenor of the wind changed abruptly; the storm ceased its buffeting chill. Curls flattened against forehead by sweat and blood were lifted again, ruffled; the sweet smell of open sky teased his nostrils. He could see, more clearly than the death and the darkness, the perfection of sun across a crimson horizon, the whisper of nodding leaves, stalks of grass; he could feel the caress of feathered wings along his forehead.

In the wind, innocence, wild joy, perfect beauty. A place where pain and loss had no meaning, and never would.

It hurt him, to deny it.

But he had already denied so much for the sake of this battle, it came naturally to him. As if the things he could have, rather than the things he could not, were the illusion or the trap. What had Meralonne said? To have and to lose.

He sang the wind home, and the wind, crying, came.

• • •

Silence.

• • •

Meralonne caught Kallandras as his grip slackened and he fell. Had there been no breath, no pulse, he would not have been surprised; the bard weighed no more than a child, albeit an older one; his cheeks were hollowed as if by long years of privation, his eyes ringed darkly. His hand—the hand that had borne, and still bore, Myrddion's ring—was blistered, and in two places blackened to bone. Without the aid of a powerful healer, the talent for which Kallandras was known would fail him; no hands so injured could bridge the strings of a lute.

And the other hurts, time would heal. Or nothing.

As the mage cradled the bard's limp form, the air returned—gently—to earth the things that should have remained upon it: bodies; the weapons and armor of
the fallen; jagged rocks and other fragments of what had once been altars, columns, and arches.

I hear you
, Meralonne told the wind.
I know what you desire. But it is not the time, not the place; you have done damage enough with what little freedom you were granted.

He received no answer, but expected none. Long ago, he would not have spoken. Grimacing, he realized that even in this, time had changed him.

At his back, he heard the roar of the beast; it was distant enough for the moment that he did not seek to flee it in desperation. Instead, he turned in its direction, cradling the bard to his chest as if his weight were negligible. Remembering that his arm, braced by magic, would suffer the weight only so long, and not longer.

The beast was in its fury; beneath its open jaws, the savaged corpse of a dead soldier lay sprawled at an angle that even in death should have been impossible. He could not think of this creature as a God; such a primal force had its roots in things older and wilder than the Lords of man. Yet it was compelling in its rage and hunger, and beautiful in the way that creatures of power are. Like the elemental air. Yes, very like it.

The Kings—he could see their standards, broken and twisted by wind, now raised by the shadowy lattice of magical hands—were alive; their soldiers, what remained of them, regrouped around their monarchs. The standards of the Exalted were likewise borne, but the daughter of the Mother was busy; the healers had been left in the streets where the fighting could not destroy them and no one sought to summon them yet.

There should have been a breeze; a wind across a plain whose silence was the aftermath of waged battle. Some sun, dying light, the flight of birds in the high skies above, waiting. There should have been horns, trumpets, pipes; there should have been heralds, those who told the battle's tale to the families and the countrymen who waited behind the lines the generals had drawn.

There were none of these things.

Instead, all eyes were upon a lone man who stood, Spear to one side, Horn slowly falling from steady hands. Meralonne could see his back; he did not know what expression played across the face of Lord Elseth of the Breodani, but he knew, as the beast's great head swiveled, as it roared again, that the Horn was the Hunter's Horn, and by it the beast had been summoned.

But the beast was canny in a feral way. It did not charge.

Nor did the waiting Lord.

This will decide all.

Meralonne stepped back, carrying Kallandras from the field. To his great surprise, the bard lifted his head; his curls, sticky and matted, clung to his face. He tried to speak, but his voice was a ruin and it formed no words.

“What is it?” Meralonne's voice was gentle.

Reaching out, Kallandras clutched the mage's robe. His lips formed words that his voice could not carry, not yet.

There was a danger here, and Meralonne knew it—but the battle had not yet left his blood. Softly brushing the hair from the dull blue eyes of the younger man, he nodded. He thought that Kallandras might relax, but instead he pulled himself up by the mage's collar until he was almost sitting in the cradle of his arms. His eyes became opaque; he lifted his hands in a shaking, jittery motion that meant nothing to Meralonne. His mouth moved; cracked lips split further as he carefully, delicately, formed thirteen words.

Curiosity was the very heart of the Order of Knowledge, but even so, Meralonne granted Kallandras as much privacy as he could, holding him without watching, allowing him to struggle without superfluous offers of aid.

He knew it was over when Kallandras began to weep, and almost against his will, he held him a while, watching the battle.

• • •

Silence.

No gale, no clashing of arms, no dying cries. It was as if the huntbrother's call had stopped the world; as if the mystical meeting place of Gods and men had been bridged so that the two, Hunter's Death and Hunter, might meet here for the last time. His arm shook as the Horn's final note resonated into stillness.

He wore Hunter green, the dark rich weave that was the emblem of his rank; he bore a sword across his back, a sheathed dagger for the unmaking across his thigh.

Death stalked him, moving across the bloodied, even sand; Death roared twice, an answer to the call of the Horn. The Horn lay at his feet like so much refuse. By it, Stephen had called his death, and Gilliam would not allow it to be winded again while he lived.

The Hunter's movements were graceful, powerful; they spoke of the kill, of the freedom of the kill, of the end to hunger. Waiting, he listened for the third roar—there had been three notes. When it came, he knew that the Hunter's Death would spring on coiled hind legs, cover the distance between them; force him to stand against superior strength, speed, weight. A calm descended on him as the beast raised its head.

At his back, he heard a murmur break the silence, and then, louder than that and sweeter by far, the baying of the dogs. Three. He knew their voices, heard the reproach in them before it gave way to joy, to fear. To the Hunt. He could not stop himself; he caught their eyes, their ears, their noses, shifting his stance subtly as the information became a part of him; as the Hunt became
real
.

He heard his heart beat, felt theirs and, more, felt an inexplicable joy, a perfect well-being. Had he thought, had he even doubted, that he could stand against this creature? Why?

Around him, like columns in an ancient ruin, ghostly trees cast their shadows and offered their cover; he heard the rustle of leaves and undergrowth, the snap of dry twigs and dead branches. This forest was the Hunter's mantle, and Gilliam felt no surprise as it unfolded around him. The Hunt that the Breodani had been given was not a hunt of air and wing, nor of open plain, nor of rocky mountain face; it was a forest Hunt, and in the forest, all things could be hidden.

Stay!
he cried out, as Ashfel howled and pulled away, arrowing toward the beast as if the beast were not his death. He caught Connel and Salas—long-snouted, white-booted pup—before they could join their leader.
You wait
, he told them,
for me
.

There should have been fear. But the dogs did not have it; indeed they might have been chasing a rabbit or a fox for all the caution they showed. He looked at them closely, seeing them through his own eyes—and each other's. Like pups, they bounced on the pads of their feet, anxious to be gone, but willing—barely—to obey.