Marissya healed those whom the Mists had treated unkindly, while Bel and Gaelen walked the wall, waiting with mounting concern for Rain and Ellysetta to appear. Chimes turned to bells. The Great Sun began its descent towards the western horizon. When the last of the Fey warriors finally cleared the Mists and staggered towards the gates, Gaelen and Bel exchanged openly worried glances. The skies above the pass were clear.
Rain and Ellysetta were nowhere in sight.
Within the Mists, surrounded by a thick cloud of whiteness, Ellysetta had lost all sense of direction, all vision, all touch. She could not see even a finger’s span into the dense, suffocating whiteness. She could not feel the saddle beneath her or the tufts of tairen fur clutched in her hands. Fear exploded in her belly, robbing her lungs of breath. «Rain!»
«I am here, Ellysetta. I am with you.»
«I can’t see you! I can’t feel you!»
«Peace, Ellysetta. The Mists were made to confuse and isolate those who dare enter. You cannot detect me with your senses, but you can feel me through our bond. Talk to me. It makes the passing less frightening.»
She couldn’t imagine talking would make this better. A coldness had begun to creep over her. The white mist seemed to be growing darker, and she began to hear voices: whispers at first, a soft rumble of disquiet that grew louder as they flew. She couldn’t make out what the voices were saying, but the sounds carried an undercurrent of tension, like the muffled tones of an argument heard through thick walls.
«Rain, do you hear that?»
«Hear what, Ellysetta?»
«The voices. People talking.»
He was silent for a moment.
«The Fey are with us in the Mists. Could they be the ones you hear?»
She strained her ears, trying to discern where the voices were coming from. They sounded so near, yet she couldn’t pinpoint a source. The sound seemed to come from every direction, all at once. «I don’t think so,» she said. Her heart beat a little faster. «Whoever it is sounds angry.»
The mists grew darker still, deepening to a thick morass of shadow in which the agitated murmur of voices became a sharp exchange. She could make out a smattering of words, all spoken in Feyan.
Shei’dalin…Mage claimed…Nei!…tainted…bright…unwelcome…truemate…murderer…enemy!
Dread curled in her belly. «Rain…I think they’re arguing about me.»
«I will fly faster, shei’tani.» The grim tone in his Spirit voice frightened her. Whatever those voices were, apparently they weren’t good.
She tried to tighten her grip. She couldn’t feel the wind on her face or see Rain’s tairen body beneath hers. If he was flying faster—if they were even flying at all—she couldn’t tell.
Now the Mists were almost black, and streaks of what looked like lightning ripped the darkness all around her, as if she and Rain had flown into the heart of a violent thunderstorm.
The sound of the accusing voices grew louder and louder. Traitor! Shadowfolk! Each condemning word was a crashing boom reverberating in her skull. Tainted! Murderer!
«Rain!» Terrified, she screamed for him, but even in her own mind, she could barely hear her own cry above the din.
Mage claimed!
Dark soul!
ENEMY! “No!” she cried. “I’m not dark; I’m not the enemy!” She felt a terrible pressure in her chest, as if a heavy weight were settling over her. Icy cold invaded her body. “Please!” she begged. “You must believe me!”
The mist began to thin, and for a moment, Ellysetta dared hope they had passed through the worst the Mists had to offer. Then she saw what lay before her, and her tiny flicker of hope went out.
Images emerged from the mist, solidifying into a wide, green lane. Tall, majestic trees lined the avenue, and beneath the shadow of their arching branches, grim-faced Fey warriors stood with blades drawn in silent menace. They were looking at her in a way no Fey had since that first day when she’d called Rain from the sky: like death longing to slip its leash.
«Rain?» Ellysetta glanced around in sudden panic. She was no longer on his back. She was standing on her own feet in the middle of the lane. She spun in a frantic circle, searching for him, but he was nowhere to be seen. “Rain!”
“The accused stands alone for judgment,” a cold voice declared. A woman’s voice, rich with power.
Ellysetta’s heart sank into the pit of her stomach, and fear shuddered through her. Slowly, she turned back around.
At the end of the lane stood dozens of red-veiled shei’dalins, backed by twice as many fearsome, red-leather-clad Fey lords. Each Fey lord had unsheathed one of his seyani longswords and gripped it, point down, before him. The naked steel glinted with unmistakable threat.
The thick veils of the tallest shei’dalin rippled, and the female voice spoke again, stern and commanding. “The accused will approach and be judged.”
A powerful compulsion urged Ellysetta to walk towards the veiled women. Terrified, she fought the command. Though Rain and the Fey had declared her one of their own, her fear of how a shei’dalin could strip a person’s soul bare had not waned. Marissya she trusted, but she wasn’t about to submit herself to these unfamiliar shei’dalins, with their hard-edged voices. Though her body trembled from the effort it took to resist, she managed not to move.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “What is this? And what have you done with Rain?”
A roar sounded overhead, and a cloud of warm air enveloped her, rich with the scent of magic and tairen. Ellie looked up and gasped with a mix of fear and awe. The sky above was filled with tairen. Jets of flame scorched the air in great, boiling orange clouds.
One of the tairen—a magnificent, pure black creature with golden eyes and wings that gleamed with an iridescent sheen—circled behind her and swooped down in a sudden rushing dive. The great cat’s mouth was open in a fierce roar, its massive fangs bared and dripping venom, its sharp, curving claws fully extended and menacing.
Her heart stopped beating. The predator was diving in for the kill, and she was its prey. For one terrified moment, every muscle in her body was frozen into place. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move a muscle even to save her own life.
Then the tairen roared again, and the fearsome blast of sound snapped her out of her paralysis. Instinct took over.
Ellie screamed and ran.
Straight into the arms of the waiting shei’dalins. “No!” She cried out a protest and spun around, desperately seeking escape, but the women had moved too quickly. She was surrounded, drowning in a sea of scarlet robes. Pale, shining hands reached out. “No!” The shei’dalins’ hands made contact. Their fingers closed in tight, unyielding grips around her wrists, her hands, her arms and shoulders. “Nei, please, teska. Let me go!” She tugged and writhed but could not break free.
“All who enter will be judged.” The tall one who had spoken earlier took Ellie’s face in her hands. “You will submit,” she commanded, and Ellie went instantly and utterly still.
The woman flung back her veil, revealing a face of devastating beauty and eyes that burned like firebrands. All around, the other shei’dalins followed suit. Their power—nothing like the gentle care Marissya had always shown her—invaded her, relentless and unyielding.
Her own consciousness fought back instinctively, strengthening her protective inner weaves, trying desperately to barricade her mind against them. But they were too many, and the pressure too great. Their insistence beat at her as if the weight of all the oceans of the world were bearing down upon her, battering her shields like wild waves battering a seawall.
“Do not fight us,” commanded the one who had spoken before. “You cannot win. In the end, we will have what we seek.”
“Nei!” Only to Rain had she ever confessed the terrible, frightening, dark thoughts that sometimes consumed her. And she would not—could not—fling open those black, violent places to these shei’dalins. She was terrified of what they would find. Terrified of what might happen??
?to her, to them, to Rain—if they unleashed the wild, angry power that lived inside her.
“Surrender to us,” the woman insisted.
The pressure grew, multiplied, became unbearable. Within Ellie’s mind, the internal protective weaves Bel had helped her to rebuild—barriers to keep her thoughts private from even intentional Fey intrusion—stretched and grew thin. Behind them, the tairen shifted and hissed a warning.
“Surrender,” all the shei’dalins commanded. “Submit and be judged.” There were dozens of them, too many, and their magic was braided in a multi-ply weave of staggering power.
The first thread in Ellie’s barriers snapped. The remaining threads stretched and shrieked beneath the relentless push of the shei’dalins’ insistent will.
“Stop! Stop! You don’t know what you’re doing! Rain!” She screamed his name in a desperate cry.
Her internal barriers shattered.
Merciless shei’dalin minds poured in through the breach.
The howl of battle swept around Rain like a maelstrom, battering his senses. Screams and shrieks of the dead and dying, hot gouts of blood splashing over his face, fire, smoke, the burn of sel’dor peppering his flesh. His swords flashed—bright steel, stained with blood, spinning in lethal arcs. Eld, Merellians, Feraz: All fell beneath the merciless onslaught of his blades.
With sword, with fang, with claw and fiery tairen breath, he killed and killed, and with each death, a layer of heavy coldness fell upon him. Layer after layer until he was encased in ice. Still, his blades slashed and his fire burned. Still, he slaughtered.
Then it wasn’t only enemies falling beneath his rain of death, but allies as well. Celierians, Elves, Danae. His own brother Fey. He saw their faces, the shock and betrayal, the disbelief. The pleas for mercy that never came.
All around, amid the gore and violence, stood the pale gray shadows of the dead, watching him with unblinking black eyes. Their bloodless mouths were open and moving, lips forming sluggish words. Mottled arms lifted. Dead fingers pointed. At him.
And then he heard the whispers. A murmur of sound cutting across the howl of battle, a low hum vibrating across his senses, felt more than heard.
Murderer. Destroyer. Thief of life.
Bringer of destruction.
He howled a denial, and the fields of accusing dead winked out.
When he could see again, he was flying over a barren, scorched land. Below him, the city of Dharsa lay in ruins, its gleaming white towers and golden spires heaps of smoldering rubble. He spun away, raced back across the sky, heading northeast to the great volcanic mountain of Fey’Bahren, home to the last living tairen pride. But when he reached it, he found fiery, glowing rivers of molten lava pouring down the mountain’s sides like great fountains of blood gushing from a mortal wound. The nesting lair—the networked maze of caverns and tunnels that had been his home for most of the last thousand years—was destroyed.
Desperate, disbelieving, he flew from one end of the Fading Lands to another. Nothing living remained. Not a single blade of grass, not the smallest twig, not even the tiniest insect had survived. The Fading Lands were dead, as were the tairen and the Fey who had called this once-beautiful part of the world home.
“It’s your fault, you know,” a soft voice accused.
His eyes closed. He recognized that voice. He turned slowly, knowing who stood behind him, fearing what image from her life or death the beings of the Mists might have chosen to torment him with.
Sariel stood before him, slender, luminous, clad in a translucent gown of delicate dusky blue. She was so beautiful. Even among the exquisite comeliness of other Fey women, she had always been a flower beyond compare. Ebony hair spilled over her shoulders like skeins of silk, and eyes of deep, drowning blue watched him with sorrow and regret.
The sight of her didn’t rip at his heart the way it always had before Ellysetta. Now, her image only filled him with sadness for the beautiful Fey maiden whose millennia of life had been cut so short. He had loved her with every fiber of his youthful being, but that love owned his heart no longer. Rain, the mate of Sariel, had died a thousand years ago on a bloody battlefield just north of Teleon. A different Rain had risen from the ashes, born the day Ellysetta Baristani’s soul had called out and his had answered. From that moment on, no other—not even the woman for whom he’d once scorched the world—could lay claim to any portion of Rain’s heart or soul.
“You brought evil into the Mists,” Sariel accused. “You damned us all.” Her voice was soft, and throbbing with shame and recrimination. Tears filled her eyes, spilled down luminous alabaster cheeks.
“I bring no evil. I bring our salvation,” he replied. “And if you meant to torment me, you chose the wrong form. Rain, the mate of Sariel, is no more. Now there is only Rainier-Eras, truemate of Ellysetta Feyreisa.”
The Mists must have realized their error. Sariel’s beautiful face wavered. Her body stretched and split, re-forming as a man and woman. A tall man, fierce-eyed, black-haired, unsmiling. A woman, slender and shining. Beautiful. Beloved. His parents: Rajahl vel’En Daris and his e’tani, Kiaria.
They were no more real than Sariel had been, but the sight of them was like a knife to his heart. The blade twisted painfully when the two of them spoke.
“You are a Tairen Soul of the Fey’Bahren pride,” his father said, “sworn to defend our lands against those who wish us harm, yet you have betrayed us all.” Rajahl wore an expression of stern disapproval and, worse, disappointment—a look Rajahl had directed at Rain only once or perhaps twice in his entire life, because that look cut Rain so deeply he’d done everything in his power to ensure that his father never regarded him that way again.
His mother wept. “Oh, my son, my son, better you had died than come to this.”
Even the illusion of their censure seared him. He wanted to cry out in protest, but he did not. He shoved his feelings aside. Illusion gained strength only when one believed it.
“Show your true face!” he challenged the pair standing before him. “I know my parents do not live in these Mists any more than Sariel did.”
“We wear the faces of those whose counsel you once sought,” his mother said. “We wear the faces we hope will make you see reason. Listen to us, my son.”
But even as she spoke, her image shimmered. Both she and Rajahl faded, and then it was Johr vel Eilan who stood there, the Tairen Soul who had been king when Rain first found his wings. Johr, the fearsome, granite-jawed warrior who had led the Fading Lands for eight hundred years.
When Johr had sat upon the Tairen Throne, the Fading Lands had been strong. He had been a king worthy of his crown: strong, decisive, unwavering, fierce. Not some untried Feyreisen who’d been handed the crown simply because there was no other to take it, but a Tairen Soul who had trained for centuries in military tactics, diplomacy, leadership. A man who had earned the right to lead both in times of peace and prosperity as well as the grimmer years of blood and battle.
To see Johr—a true and rightful Defender of the Fey—roused all of Rain’s most bitter self-doubts. He knew he was not the king the Fading Lands deserved.
The Mists knew it too. “You cast a shadow on the Tairen Throne, Rainier vel’En Daris. You are not worthy of your crown.”
Rain gave a bitter laugh. “That much I will grant you. My soul is black with the deaths of those millions I slew in the Wars. But if you banish me, who will be the Tairen Soul?”
“You know of what I speak—and of whom. You know whose dark hand lies upon her. She will cement the destruction of both the tairen and the Fey. Yet still you bring her. Because you choose self over duty.”
Johr’s jaw flexed, and his green-gold eyes flared with a sudden, angry burst of power. “This is not the choice of a king, Tairen Soul. You shame your crown, your steel, and the line of your forebears. She brings death to our world.”
For one dreadful moment, Rain remembered Ellysetta’s seizure and her black, Azrahn-filled eyes and her low, hoarse voi
ce shouting, “I am Death.”
Almost as soon as the doubt arose, he shook it off. Nei. Nei, he wouldn’t believe that. The only death associated with Ellysetta was the foul Eld evil that stalked her, the dread reason the gods had fashioned a tairen for her mate.
He thrust out a clenched jaw. “Ellysetta is bright and shining. She is the one the Eye of Truth sent me to find—because she brings life to the Fey, not death. She is a shei’dalin and a Tairen Soul and my truemate. You will not speak against her.”
“And when the evil she bears comes into bloom? What will you do then, Rainier vel’En Daris? How will you defend the Fey against this serpent you clasp to your breast?”
“She will not fall. We will complete our bond, and the Mage whose Marks she bears will lose all power over her.” He clung to that hope, because without it he had nothing.
“What else should I have done, if not bring her here? Left her out there in the world, unprotected? I did what any Fey—what any shei’tan—would have done. I brought her to safety.”
“And endangered us all.”
Rain stiffened his spine and lifted a clenched jaw. “The tairen do not agree. Sybharukai, makai of the Fey’Bahren pride, does not agree. Tairen do not abandon their kin. Tairen defend the pride.”
A cold smile curled the edges of Johr’s mouth. “Tairen also honor Challenge, for the health of the pride.”
Sudden cold swept over Rain, leaving his flesh clammy and his heart stuttering with fear.
“Where is Ellysetta?” he demanded. “What have you done to her?” He spun away from the image of Johr and cried, «Ellysetta!»
Ellysetta screamed until she thought her throat would burst. With none of the gentleness and compassion Marissya had always shown her, the shei’dalins of the Mists plundered her mind, tearing into private thoughts and memories, prying loose even her most closely guarded secrets and deepest fears. She tried to rally a defense, but each time she managed to focus her will against them, they would turn those fearsome eyes upon her and her thoughts would scatter like hapless leaves in the wind.