Dockalfar (64 page)

Red streaks radiated from the core of the bruise. He put fingers to the ribs tentatively and felt bone give. Dusk spasmed, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes.

Damned inconvenience. “Son of a bitch! This is all I need.”

“I can ride.” Strained, hoarse, which was to be expected after some fool had just shifted your ribs about.

“Shut up!” Alex snapped, then on second thought, “For how long, damn it!”

Dusk’s eyes flashed sudden anger at him. “As long as need be.”

“Bull shit!” He whirled about and looked for Bashru. Found the spriggan looking highly entertained by the exchange and barked, “Find something to bind his damned ribs with.” And when Dusk started to argue, stabbed a finger at him and glowered. “Just let him do it, because if I have to it’s gonna hurt like hell.”

It was clear Bashru did not appreciate playing nurse and it really could not have hurt worse if Alex had bandaged Dusk himself, even if he’d tried. But he could not bring himself to lay hands on the assassin again.

They rode out once more, a miserable, aching, unhappy collection. They broke briefly for supper late that afternoon. Alex chewing on tough jerky while Bashru happily consumed his kill.

Dusk refused anything but water.

The way turned east finally, after over a days travel out of their way. Bashru seemed sure of the path. Alex had no choice but to trust him. The storm seemed to get worse as they traveled. The blackened stumps of recently lightening struck trees became more and more frequent. The forest floor was a suckling mire under their horse’s hooves. After two days of it the spriggan began to mutter obscenities.

“Too long. Too long,” he complained. “It never rains in these parts for so long.”

Alex gnawed his lip in worry and cast anxious glances at the hidden sky. It was there. If he put his mind to it, he could barely sense the oddness. The storm was a rolling bank of raw power, but behind it there was something else. Something not connected with the fury of nature. He snapped his mouth shut on the desire to blurt out the niggling hunch. It was too damned likely his mind was playing tricks on him. Too likely he misinterpreted the nature of this world’s weather patterns.

Before he could dwell on his discovery they ran into the first of the Unseelie bands to cross their path. The assassin sensed them first. He straightened up a bit in his saddle and stared intently into the wood a moment before declaring, “Riders.”

Alex and Bashru jerked their horses to a halt and stared at him in alarm.

“Where?” the spriggan demanded. The assassin nodded to the south.

They wheeled their horses about in the other direction, the spriggan in the fore. Alex put every bit of power he possessed into the shield and miraculously it seemed to be enough, for they reached the shelter of a think fringe of vine in time to glimpse a troupe of mounted sidhe winding through the wood. Armor glinted in the dull, rain refracted light. A half dozen sidhe at least, and twice that many bendithy huntsmen.

His woodcraft was inconsequential compared to this companions, but still Alex looked to them in warning, somehow feeling that neither of them might take Unseelie interference as strongly as he.

But that was nonsense, of course. They had more to lose, now that he had dragged them into his plans. The spriggan, his life, with no more thought than the sidhe might extinguish a flame. For the assassin a return to the endless torments the sidhe could devise. Alex could only imagine what retribution would come his way in payment for his rebellion. He had certainly made returning to the court an impossibility.

The hunting party passed. The spriggan climbed down from his mount, eyes white rimmed, mouth a tight line.

With one knobby knuckled finger to his lips he scurried off into the wood.

Alex glanced to the drooping assassin, who merely sat, head down, lashes closed over eyes. His breathing was labored, painful. Alex did not say a word. Just shut his own mouth with a grinding of teeth and concentrated on his shield. They had to be close. Had to be if the Unseelies were patrolling the forest.

A slight shuffling of wet leaves and Alex’s hand went for his sword. He gathered power for defense or attack, whatever might be more appropriate. The assassin whispered to him, without lifting his head.

“The spriggan.”

Before Alex had the time to relax his guard the little man slid through the dripping foliage and stood at his stirrup. A glower soured his features even more than usual.

“There’s more of ‘em,” he hissed.

“Huntsmen and goblins. Crawlin’ all over the wood to the south.”

“That’s the way we’re going.”

The spriggan glared up at him. “It is. There’s no safe way through. Best to turn tail and make for the north.”

“No. We’ll just have to be careful.”

“Stupid, round-eared fool! You may want to visit Annwn, but I’ve no such notion. I tell you the way is swarming with goblins and their ilk. There’s no passing.”

Alex set his chin and glared back.

Glanced to Dusk, for he was the master of getting places he was not supposed to be, but the assassin was in no wise contributing to the conversation. Back to the spriggan in frustration. “No. We’ve got to get through.”

Bashru sneered in derision. Cursed under his breath and finally hissed. “Fool!

Son of a fool! You want to get past, then you’d damn well better go to ground and wait for them to settle down. Trying to pass while they’re still surrounding the vale and all over the wood is a wish for disaster.”

“All right.” He could live with that.

Barely. “You find us a hole somewhere and we’ll lay low… for a while.”

~~~

Okar sloshed through water up to his ankles, his hand firmly attached to Ashara’s as he led her to the worst of the flooding. He had not yet grown accustomed to her being safely within his reach again to let her too far from his sight just yet. The sky railed at them from above while the surrounding hills dumped streams of water from once harmless brooks. The main little stream that fed the valley had swelled to three times its normal size. It swept limbs and debris with it as it plunged into the vale. The water collected past the main cluster of structures and gathered in a dark, turbulent lake that was growing with alarming speed.

They stared at it from an elevation only slightly higher than the newly formed lake itself. Lightening and thunder clashed and the whole of the evening turned brilliantly, blindingly white. Ashara stood beside him, quiet and still. Her face was a mask of pale flesh.

“Damn him to Annwn,” she whispered, the words forced out between tightly compressed lips. Her gaze went skyward. She blinked back rain, contesting the sky its might. Her power flailed uselessly against the rolling bank of clouds. It was so easy to call a storm.

Impossible to dispel one until it had spent all its natural fury. And the sidhe atop the hill were calling storms with all their might.

“There will be standing water inside the buildings by nightfall,” he said quietly.

“It cannot last forever.” He felt no hope as he said it.

She turned tired eyes on him. Said nothing. Merely pulled her hand from his and trudged back towards the buildings.

He closed his eyes against the rain and the sight of her slumped shoulders. He could not shut out the guilt. The blaring self accusation that if he had followed her wishes in the first place none of this would be. What was unbearable was that he knew she felt the same, yet chose not to throw the fault at his feet.

~~~

There was a fire going inside the greatest of the still functional buildings. It was crackling atop what might have been a stone altar, protected from the dampness of the floor. Even though it threw off tongues of light, it gave little in the way of heat. So everyone huddled in damp cloaks and silently, despairingly found private niches to settle. The active power was like a flare, for any sensitive enough to sense it. Almost everyone that could, was expending energy holding back the worst of the storm from the vale. It was a moot effort, for even if the center was not focused directly above the vale, the circled close and the ground soaked up the water and delivered it to the underground streams that eventually fed it into the valley anyway.

It was frustrating that something so common and elemental as a storm might be their downfall. Victoria found it hard to convince herself that it could not be simply magicked away. She had willed one up, why not send one on its way? But to her dismay, wave after wave of her power sent against it did nothing more than change the formation of the clouds.

Neira’sha showed her how to channel the winds to keep the worst of it away.

They might have blown it far enough off course that it presented no harm, but for the winds being summoned on the other side of the rune wards.

Even though the storm was the battering ram, it was essentially a war of magic. And essentially the Dockalfar outnumbered and outpowered them. And Victoria felt weak. Her body felt defeated.

She was sore and tired despite all the self healing she had managed. Even though she had furthered the healing of the sidhe, knowing her body better than they, the after image of the wound still haunted her.

It was, she was told, a normal occurrence after a serious wound. Though magic could heal the flesh, the body still reflexively reserved energy to heal a wound that was no longer in evidence.

And the mind could not forget. And the magic knew too. The power was shy in coming to her. And when it did come, it was tremulous and weak. Neira’sha told her it was part and parcel with the nature of female power. That it ever cycled, like the seasons, going from uncontrollable highs, such as Victoria had already experienced. to lulls, like the one she found herself immersed in now, and in between waxed normal. Sidhe females experienced the same cycle, she was assured, only where Victoria’s magical rotation spanned no more than an earthly month, sidhe women’s lasted more than a decade.

She looked up, as did most of the others, as the drenched figure of their lady appeared in the doorway. Ashara said nothing, merely walked to the fire and stood before it. She should have been sleeping like the rest of the party that had stayed to hold the keep’s last defense. She should have been exhausted by the mad chase through the eastern forest to get here. If she was, she allowed none of it to show. She had to be buffering her strength magically. Victoria knew Neira’sha thought so, and disapproved.

That venerable lady, sitting across the chamber, stared meaningfully at Ashara and exchanged some unspoken word.

Ashara slowly shook her head and walked over to sink onto the floor at Neira’sha’s feet.

Victoria felt a chill. A horrible chill at the apathy in her eyes. Felt a greater one when Okar entered, looking miserable and cold. He found his heartmate with his eyes, shuddered when she refused to return the look, or was perhaps too involved with her own thoughts to notice him. He edged around the perimeter of the room and finally settled on the stone bench next to Victoria. His gaze fixed across the chamber.

“Is she okay?” she asked softly.

His lashes flickered. “She is tired. Scared.”

“This was supposed to be a refuge,”

Victoria murmured. “She has every right. We wouldn’t need it if I…”

“You are not the blame,” he said to her sharply. “Your leaving did nothing more than sadden us. It did not cause this. The presumption to take you from Azeral brought this down upon us. The blame is mine and Aloe’s. More so mine, because she could not have done it without me.”

Victoria stared at him. Shook her head in amazement. “All right. We each blame ourselves. But really it doesn’t matter whose at fault, does it? It matters how we’re going to fix it.”

He laughed at her. “Humans. For mortals everything is so easy.”

“And for immortals it’s too damned complicated. You should try living in my world.”

“I have,” he said simply. “There was a time I loved your realm more than mine. I met her there, you know. Ashara. We were both in human guise. We both thought we were courting human lovers.

She found out before I did. Let me tell you, she was hardly pleased and she holds grudges. Long grudges. It took me nigh a century to win her over and then only, I think, because she was running so hard from…” He trailed off, looking pained.

Looking suddenly like he needed to cry.

She wanted to reach out and touch him, but she did not think he would welcome it. He was dear. And Ashara had been a fool to ever spurn him and Victoria knew without even the benefit of magical spying that he feared his lady was doing the same thing now.

“Running from who?” she asked gently. “Who was she running from?”

He leaned his head back against the cold stone wall. “Azeral. The mate of her soul.”

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All that was visible of the moon was a pale aura of light behind a shield of angry clouds. Lightning demolished even that trace as it made the entirety of the sky a blinding, white canvas. The nighthorses nickered nervously and miserably along their pickets. The bendithy huntsmen moved among them in as much discomfort, while the sidhe huddled inside great tents, protected from the rain, if not the clammy cold of midnight.

Azeral stood at the edge of the largest of the tents and stared out at the storm of his making. Stared down at the blackness that was the Vale of Vohar. The sacred place that hid his prey. Impatience crossed his features. The sky gave all it had and still it was not enough. It would be days before the valley below became uninhabitable. Days of waiting that Azeral the immortal, could not tolerate. He had tried the wards himself earlier and found them as immune to his power as to any other. He had hardly expected less. But he chafed at the inactivity.

A hand touched his back. He glanced back the offender. Neferia looked up at him with curious, mild eyes.

“My lord,” she said softly. “Your thoughts are most surely guarded, for your own daughter has been trying desperately to contact you for some time.”

He lifted a brow at his lady in question. Almost her lips turned in a smile. Almost.