Dockalfar (58 page)

He concentrated, trying to discern what had alerted her to the change in direction and found, only vaguely, a trace of tingling unease emanating from the land below.

His foot slipped once and slid a few paces down the slope. That minuscule distance, a matter of a few feet, was enough to triple the feeling of discomfort.

He regained his former level hastily, sweat on his brow. Mother Earth. If two feet did that, what might ten feet or ten yards do to the state of the mind? He had no desire to find out.

A large outcropping of rock loomed before them. It jutted out of the earth like an accusing finger, pointing up towards the ridge of the valley. Moss covered it liberally, almost obscuring all signs that it was a rock at all and not merely an abnormal projection of earth. Neira’sha stopped before it, her head barely reaching the boulder’s top. She stared at it intently, reached out a hand and almost touched it. But not quite. Okar thought he saw places where the moss grew darker.

Indentions in the stone’s surface that formed patterns.

Runes. This then, was a ward stone.

A ward stone that had grown out of the earth itself. Not been placed there by living hands. He stepped back from it in reverence, even as Neira’sha inched forward and settled herself on the ground before it. She crossed her legs, put her hands on her bony knees and remained just so. She did not move, or speak, or use any magic that Okar could discern. And soon his own stance began to ache and he moved up slope a bit and sat down amid the leaves and pine needles.

After a long while, Neira’sha unexpectedly rose. She looked back at him expectantly and began her hike around the perimeter of the valley once more. He hastily followed after, and once the ward stone was out of sight, dared to question.

“What happened?”

“I let it know who I was. It did not remember. Not surprising. It has been a very, very long time. We’ll try the next one.”

They found the next Stone. They seemed to be placed in a level pattern about the valley. Neira’sha sat before this one and after a time sighed and rose with just a bit more stiffness to her movements.

“The next,” she said.

He did not ask her what might happen if none of the wards responded to her pleas. He knew. It would mean flight past this valley, with the host on their heels and no place to hide.

They came to the third ward and she repeated the ritual. He sat on a stump behind her and listened to the night sounds. Crickets aplenty. The beat of an owl’s wing as it took flight. The rustle of some small animal hurriedly fleeing the winged predator. Only the mildest of moonlight breached the cover of trees. Its blue glow was faint, reflecting off the moisture of the rock, the paleness of Neira’sha’s hair and skin. The color of his own hands. And then, there was a speck of light from the darkness past the Ward. A tiny flicker of illumination that winked off and on erratically. Then another of a different hue. He recognized them for what they were.

Spites. A dozen of them. A hundred.

Wavering and dodging trees on their journey up the slope. He rose, not knowing whether to be alarmed or delighted. He wondered if Neira’sha saw them and what she might make of their approach from the warded valley.

After a moment, there was no need to ponder if she knew or not, for the swarm of them fluttered around the wardstone, dancing and bobbing in general sprite mindlessness. They flocked about Neira’sha, touching the point of her ear, the strands of her hair, her lips, the skin of her hands. A few of them darted about Okar curiously. He let them have their way, more interested in the swarm around Neira’sha.

How had they gotten past the ward in the first place? Small as it might be, sprites did have intellect and it seemed that these wards repelled anything with half a thought in it’s head.

“They’ve always lived here,”

Neira’sha answered and whether she had picked the question out of his mind, or merely guessed that he wondered he could not know. She turned to look at him, her face illuminated by the glow of sprite light. Her grin was entirely triumphant.

The ward had responded to her.

~~~

The rumble of ogre voices mutilated the serenity of the forest. Their smell was too pugnacious for mere winds to blow away. The wood, where the majority of them had set up camp, was turning rapidly into a trampled, foul strip of dying land.

One wondered if the deserts and rocky mountains where ogres generally made their homes had started off lushly planted and fertile. Even to a spriggan, to whom cleanliness was never an important matter, the stench of a multitude of ogres was overbearing.

Bashru weeded his way though the sporadic camps, glowering at no one in particular, clutching in his gnarled fingers a dispatch, that he had written at the prompting of an illiterate ogre captain that was bound for the sidhe commander of the troop. The spriggan did not appreciate playing messenger. The spriggan would have much liked to be roaming the safe forests of the north, looking for a likely spriggan wench to couple with, instead of accompanying a high sidhe hunt out to war with their fellow high sidhe. A bit of inventive marauding here and there was one thing, but this conflict hinted at a great deal of invested time and possibly a great deal of losses where the sidhe’s underlings were concerned. He had personally seen the corpses of over a hundred ogres and half that many goblins left to feed the scavengers in the forest surrounding the Seelie keep. He had no wish to test Seelie defenses, even if they were on the run.

Sooner or later, he knew the troops would be called out again, and this period of lull would be over. The Mistress of the Hunt had taken off with half the host the previous afternoon, while the rest of the court made good use of the keep the Seelies had abandoned. That lady would find trouble.

She had a nose for sniffing it out. And she would come back and the troops would reform and the sidhe would throw them at their enemies. And this time, he might not be able to hide in the background.

He padded through the inner gardens of the keep and approached the main entrance. Bendithy servants warded those portals. He gave his dispatch to them to deliver and strode away. But as soon as he was out of sight he veered to circle the keep’s white walls. The goblins had been looting. They had been gloating over their prizes in camp. Fighting over the best of them. He had overheard them claim that an unguarded entrance lay on the eastern side. Curiosity and no small amount of greed prompted him to stroll past and see just how unguarded. He passed a garden whose protective hedges had been trampled, and sneered at the delicacy of the design. Leave it to a sidhe to take the weakest of nature’s bounty and set it aside for show. One never saw creeping vines or thorn bushes in their gardens. The garden was not unoccupied. As he passed by, a figure on a bench formed out of the low lying limb of a willow tree, looked up at his movement. The spriggan cursed his ill luck and quickly thought up an excuse for lurking around this side of the keep, where no camps had been sat up.

Then Bashru cursed even more, for it was not a sidhe in the garden, but the damnable human. And he had spotted the spriggan and was looking at him with furious eyes. Bashru decided he did not need an excuse for the human and started to make his escape, vowing to explore the possibilities of looting later that night.

The human called out to him and he pretended ignorance. Then a grip of power reached out and encircled his thoughts. For a moment he forgot where he was going. His steps faltered. It took a second to realize that magic was being used on him, and with a determined effort of will he shook the offending spell off. A sidhe would have insisted and punished him for the rebellion. The human graciously let his magical fingers slide off. Bashru tossed a snarl over his shoulder as the man approached.

“Wha’dya want?” he hissed, indignant.

“What are you doing here?”

“Planning a garden,” the spriggan retorted. “What do you think?”

The human stared at him, some small bit of accusation in his eyes. There was deep running anger below the surface emotions. Bashru was clever enough to see that. He wondered what had set the human off. For that matter he wondered what the human was doing here. Last the spriggan had heard, he had been back at the keep with Azeral’s daughter.

“What else?” he snapped, and the man shook his head silently. There was something there that Bashru did not understand. He did not care to take the effort to figure it out. With one last glare, he scurried off towards the wood. But despite his attempts, he could not shake the feeling that something was very much wrong in this keep and with that human and somehow, some way he was going to find himself involved.

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There was a break in the darkness. A pinpoint of light that pierced the shields of her eyelids. It was an uncomfortable physical sensation that Victoria would have been more than happy to go without.

She had been quite content in her oblivion.

But the light was followed by other bothersome irritations. The scratchy feel of grass under her skin. The cool spray of a light mist that caressed her face. The smell of wood smoke. The soft sound of voices whispering around her.

The voices brought her around. She opened her eyes and stared fuzzily up at what appeared to be a moss covered stone archway. Just beyond it, within her field of vision, was the foliage obscured vista of a pale sky. She blinked back grit and tried to turn her head. The motion hurt.

Her muscles screamed in rebellion. She moaned softly and contemplated closing her eyes again and dropping back into darkness, but curiosity won out and she forced her protesting body into action.

With an effort of pure will she rolled to one side. The motion cost her a blinding stab of pain that ran from her left shoulder down past her ribs and well into her back.

She lay in stunned disbelief, half on her side, her legs curled up to her body as the agony tore through her. Tears pooled in her eyes.

There were people by a fire not too distant from her berth, but they were blurry images at best. Someone noticed her movement, if not her pain, and rose, approaching her. Hands touched her shoulder, pushed her back over in the position she had awakened in.

“You should not yet rise,” a soft female voice advised.

She blinked to clear her eyes and made out the face of the woman leaning over her. Sidhe face. Soft eyes, plaited hair. Vaguely familiar. Victoria could not recall the name.

“What happened?” she whispered, touching a hand gingerly to the center of the pain, a place just below her left clavicle.

“You took an arrow. Rest.”

An arrow! Stunned, she eased onto her back and stared at the stone overhead.

She had been shot. It was an enormity that left her awed. Shakily she lifted a hand and touched the wound once more. She extended that portion of her will that responded to the magic and gently explored the area. Someone had already been at it. There was the feeling of foreign magic in her muscles and flesh. The major damage had been corrected, but healing another was never as easy as healing one’s self. She remembered that lesson plainly. She called in the power and tried to ease the pain. She tried to find the source of the discomfort and mend it more to her liking. Sweat stood out on her brow by the time she had reached a point of comfort. By that time the one sidhe had returned to the fire and her companions, and another was softly walking towards her.

This one she did know. She pushed herself up with less torment and sat on the edge of the moss covered slab as Aloe approached. The sidhe girl stopped several paces from her and stared, great silver eyes narrowed in speculation.

“What happened?” Victoria asked quietly, negligently rubbing her shoulder.

“Where are we?”

A sigh escaped Aloe and she spared a moment to look around herself with clear unease on her face.

“An old place,” she finally said. “A very old place. It’s haven to us now and hopefully to no other.”

Victoria looked out past the fire.

Trees loomed close. A barricade that rose sharply following the line of a sharp hill. The ground about her was covered with stone flagstones. But they were cracked with age and corrupted by weeds and grasses, and much covered by mosses. The slab where she sat was an overturned support of the building that sheltered her. A room stretched back into darkness, shallow and unadorned. It reeked of age.

“They took our home,” Aloe said with the trace of a tremor in her voice.

There was the hint of a twitch to her jaw. Of anger. Of fear? “The filthy ogres trampled our grove.”

Saying she was sorry would be a moot point. Claiming fault would not ease the pain in Aloe’s eyes. She stood with a twinge of pain, and waited until the world stopped swaying before stepping out of the shelter. Leaves rustled under her boots. She moved past the fire, circling the stone ruins. Aloe followed her soundlessly.

Once past the outcropping of her shelter rest of the valley came into view.

They were only on the outskirts of a warren of thick stoned buildings. Slabs of stone were stacked and piled not unlike dominoes to form a haphazardly collection of dwellings. Some were flat, one story affairs, others rose higher, ponderous and ungainly. The whole of it was dark, even with the pale light of morning… afternoon?

She felt uneasy staring at it. She felt uneasy standing close to something so obviously abandoned and ancient.

“It is a place older than any sidhe,” Aloe whispered. “The folk who built it are long gone and no one knows where, not even those oldest of our people who trafficked with them. The magic they used is not one familiar to us.”

Staring at the blocky shapes, Victoria felt some vague familiarity stir. Something about the careless placing of blocks, as if some great hand had strewn them on purpose, struck a note of recognition. The feeling was eerie and unappreciated. She shivered and looked from the ruins to Aloe.

“How long have we been here?”

“Not yet a day. Neira’sha says this valley’s wards will keep our enemies at bay.”