Ruthless, efficient, they rifled through her mind, examining every memory. Her childhood in Hartslea, the seizures, the priests’ declaration that she was demon possessed. Her first exorcism and the howling, bloody, violent rage that had swept through her eight-year-old mind when the long, shining needles of the exorcists had plunged into her body. They saw what she’d been thinking, knew how she’d dreamed of rending those exorcists limb from limb and dancing in the shower of their blood.
Ellie wept in shame and horror at her own evil thoughts. When she’d shared the awful truth of her childhood with Rain, he had offered acceptance and loving, healing forgiveness. These shei’dalins were not so compassionate. They dissected without mercy and left her writhing in an agony of self-loathing.
The tairen hissed a furious warning, its claws beginning to shred the last of her control.
“Please,” she begged. “Please stop.”
The shei’dalins only dug deeper, finding the memories of how she’d restored Gaelen’s soul, the devastating recollection of the black Mage Mark lying like a shadow over her heart. They summoned the ghastly, shocking moment in the Grand Cathedral of Light when the Eld blade sliced and Mama’s head rolled free of her body.
Heat bloomed. The first warning flare of Rage. They hurt us.
“Stop!” she cried, fearing what would happen if they didn’t. Anger was growing inside her.
They found the memories of that terrible nightmare when she’d stood amid a field of corpses and seen herself leading the armies of darkness, slaughtering all who stood in her way. The vile, mocking claim of the Shadow Man rang in her ears: You’ll kill them, girl. You’ll kill them all. It’s what you were born for.
Within Ellysetta, the coiling power gave a terrible hiss. Her muscles grew taut. Her skin burned and strained as pressure built within. Vengeance on those who hurt us…vengeance for what they did…
The shei’dalins summoned more visions, every foul, horrifying nightmare of war and death she’d ever had. Bodies torn and shredded, blood running in scarlet rivers. Only this time all the dead wore the faces of those she loved: Mama, Papa, Lillis, Lorelle, Bel, Selianne, and, everywhere she turned, Rain. In every face, she saw Rain. Rain dead. Rain dying. Rain split asunder, burning, bleeding his life out. Screaming in defiance as Mage Fire consumed him.
“Nei! Do not!” she cried, the words both a warning for the shei’dalins and a command to the destructive wildness gathering inside her.
«Ellysetta!» The sound of Rain’s voice rang out across the Mists in speech and Spirit and tairen song, calling out simultaneously in her mind and her soul. Her heart raced, and the threads of their bond flared to life, tingling with a sudden surge of magic in response to the desperate command and raging fear in his call.
The tairen fury building inside her coalesced with sudden focus. Her hands clenched. Her eyes flamed. They dared use her to torment her mate? Ellysetta’s power rose up in wild, angry waves, bright and hot.
«Rain!» She shouted his name on every pathway he’d used to call her, her voice vibrating with the incendiary roar of her tairen. «I am here!» Her call pierced the Mists, finding him instantly, seizing him with a searing rope of fire that blazed a path back to her.
Suddenly he was there, fierce and furious, his roar a deafening boom. Flames boiled around them with savage fury as Rain’s tairen rushed to defend its mate. The avenue of trees, the shei’dalins, the gathering of cold-eyed Fey, all dissolved in a wall of tairen flame.
The roar rocked Taloth’Liera like a cry from the gods themselves.
One whole section of the Mists turned bright orange, then exploded in a boiling cloud of tairen fire that sent Fey warriors stumbling back. Steel clattered on stone. A great, blazing ball of light hurtled out of the dense flames. The warriors standing on the crenellated wall crossing Taloth’Liera shouted in surprise as it rocketed past.
The light plunged towards earth like a falling star. Bel raised a hand to shield his eyes and caught a glimpse of a shadowy tairen wing at the periphery of the light. His heart rose up in his throat when he realized he was watching Rain streaking across the sky, gouts of flame spewing from his muzzle—and that blaze of blinding light on his back was Ellysetta.
They landed half a mile beyond the Warriors’ Wall, dust billowing up in clouds around them. Gaelen and Bel ran towards them. Marissya and Dax sprinted close on their heels, followed by Tajik and the rest of the Fey.
They all skidded to a halt when the tairen screamed and rose up on his haunches. Black wings spread wide in a show of ferocious might, and boiling jets of flame geysered into the air in warning.
When the Fey made no move to come closer, he settled back onto all four paws. Growls rumbled dangerously in his chest, and several more small bursts of flame hissed from his muzzle. The radiant figure of Ellysetta slid from his back and leaned against his foreleg. Her blinding aura began slowly to dim. Rain remained in tairen form, his tail twitching, his ears laid back on his head.
“What in the Seven Hells is going on?” Tajik demanded.
“Did the Mists grant passage, or did the Tairen Soul and his mate just burn their way through?” Suspicion filled Tajik’s flame blue eyes, and though his hands didn’t reach for steel, Bel saw the unmistakable signs of tension gathering.
“Las, Taj,” Bel said. “This was Rain’s first time through the Mists. None of us were sure what to expect. Clearly, he had a bad time of it, but he’s through, and that’s what matters.”
Tajik wasn’t general of the eastern army because he was a trusting man. His eyes pierced Bel as mercilessly as Tajik’s blades had impaled countless enemy soldiers over the centuries. “The Tairen Soul wasn’t the only one to blast through with magic blazing.” He nodded at the still blindingly bright figure of Ellysetta. “What stains could a shei’dalin bear on her soul that would set the Mists against her?”
“The Feyreisa’s power is vast,” Marissya interrupted, drawing the general’s intent blue gaze to herself, “but she never summons it on her own behalf. Whatever torments Rain suffered no doubt roused her tairen’s protective instincts. I have not seen her like this since her mother was murdered before her eyes.”
The hard intensity of Tajik’s gaze faltered. Outside the bonds of truemating, there was no stronger Fey instinct than the warriors’ need to protect their women from harm, and the image of a Fey maiden shattered by the loss of a beloved mother roused that ingrained protectiveness with a vengeance.
“Rain will not calm until she does.” Marissya edged closer. Ellysetta turned her head, piercing Marissya with a look that made the shei’dalin gasp and stop in her tracks. Ellysetta’s eyes were pupil-less, whirling kaleidoscopes, blazing with tairen power. The shei’dalin’s body went stiff, and for an instant an aura of bright light flamed around her.
Dax lunged toward his truemate, but Gaelen clapped a swift, hard arm around his bond brother’s chest, holding him back. “Don’t be a fool, Dax. Ellysetta won’t hurt Marissya.”
A moment later, the light around Marissya winked out. Dax broke free of Gaelen’s hold and caught her as she stumbled.
Marissya took a deep breath and steadied herself before waving him off. “Las, shei’tan. I am unharmed.” Never taking her eyes off Ellysetta, she wiped the sheen of perspiration from her upper lip. The Feyreisa hadn’t hurt her, it was true, but Marissya felt as if her entire being—body and soul—had been seized, ripped open, and scoured by a merciless inquisitor.
The sensation was one Marissya knew all too well, though she’d never been on the receiving end of it. At least, never such a ruthless and brutally efficient weave of it.
Ellysetta had just Truthspoken the most powerful shei’dalin in the Fading Lands.
And not kindly.
Marissya blew out a breath. No wonder Ellysetta feared shei’dalins so much. A few chimes of that ravaging scrutiny, and even Marissya would have collapsed in a boneless puddle of shattered will and weeping helplessness. And Ellysetta hadn’t even needed to l
ay a hand upon her to do it.
Whatever the Feyreisa had discovered—or found absent—inside Marissya apparently satisfied her, because when the shei’dalin stepped forward a second time, Ellysetta allowed her approach without protest.
Half-afraid that if she dared too much, Ellysetta’s wild power might rouse again, Marissya quickly healed the physical effects of stress and shock and did what she could to help mend the barriers in Ellysetta’s mind. The Mists had not been gentle with her. Each moment of the healing, while Marissya’s consciousness was tied to Ellysetta, she was aware of the hot, angry hissing of the tairen, a violent sentience seething just below the surface.
Marissya had no desire to feel the full brunt of that power unleashed upon her.
When she was done, she pulled her hands back quickly and didn’t protest when Dax snatched her up and hauled her several steps away from Rain and his truemate.
“Is she well?” Tajik stood tense, staring at the still-radiant, flame-haired woman standing so fearlessly beside the great black tairen, her pale, gleaming hand stroking its pelt.
“She is fine,” Marissya assured him. “I was right. The Mists roused her tairen, but she is calming now.”
The Change swirled about Rain, and the sudden burst of magic made Tajik fall instinctively into a warrior’s slightly crouched attack stance, his hands on red steel.
Ellysetta’s head jerked around, her eyes blazing at the perceived threat, and Tajik’s body went rigid, his spine poker straight. A fierce consciousness invaded his own, spearing past all his shields straight to his core.
«Aiyah, you should fear us. We are fierce.» The voice, so soft, rang in his mind with the force of a gong, leaving him trembling in its wake. «Do not threaten us.»
She released him from his stunned paralysis, turning to face the tall, black-haired Fey beside her. Rain’s eyes were blazing, power sparking around him like fairy flies. His arms caught her around the waist, and his mouth swooped down to capture hers. Unmindful of the gathered Fey looking on, he kissed her with a passion that nearly set their onlookers aflame.
«Shei’tani…Ellysetta…» His voice sang to hers in vibrant tones, shimmering down the threads of their bond and the new, fiercely blazing connection between them that hummed with wild, raw power.
Rain did not know what had happened to them in the Mists, nor at the moment could he bring himself to care. Whatever the Mists had done, whatever their reasons for it, they had brought both his tairen and hers to savage life, and in that moment of primitive wildness, when her soul and her tairen had screamed in rage and reached for him and his, the power and fury of their tairen had arced between them like searing flames shot straight from the heart of the Great Sun. Or, rather, like savage jets of tairen flame, the fire that burned all things. That thread of pure, intense power had pierced the wildest depths of his soul and anchored there.
The fiery bond thread was still there, neither extinguished nor dimmed, untamed by the others, yet braided so tight the three had nearly become one.
When the fierce radiance of their power and the wild fury of their tairen at last began to subside, the Feyreisa released her mate and turned to face the Fey. Tajik’s breath caught in his throat once more. The menace of the tairen was gone, leaving only luminous, golden beauty. To look upon the unveiled countenance of any shei’dalin was to know the face of love, but with the Feyreisa, the effect was overwhelming. When her gaze fell upon him, her eyes like radiant suns, it was as if the gods themselves shone a light straight into his heart.
“She is…is…” He swallowed hard. “I have no words.”
Bel clapped a sympathetic hand on his cradle friend’s shoulder. “I told you she was bright.”
Tajik took two trembling steps forward and fell to one knee, bowing his head. When he rose again, he fixed glowing eyes on the Feyreisa’s face and gave the greeting he should have offered her from the start. “Meiveli, kem’Feyreisa. Welcome to the Fading Lands.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Eld ~ Boura Fell
Vadim Maur’s left hand was trembling.
The High Mage glared at the betraying tremors, then curled his fingers in a fist until the shaking stopped. His visit to Shannisorran v’En Celay’s cell earlier today had wearied him far more than it should have. If not for the war hammer slamming into the Fey lord’s skull, the blast of power that had surged from him would have caught Vadim full bore rather than glancing off his left arm. The weak shield he’d thrown up had not been enough to rob the blast of its impact, and his hand had been twitching ever since.
He should have known better than to go to v’En Celay’s cell weary. And the last six days he’d spent claiming the Celierian Den Brodson’s soul had wearied him. Most Mages who did not have the standard six years to claim a soul settled for a weaker hold on their umagi, but Vadim had never done things by halves. He’d taken the full power of a claiming normally spread out across six years and concentrated it into six days.
Such a reckless expense of power was not his wisest decision, but losing Ellysetta Baristani when she’d been all but his had driven him into a fury. He’d wanted a productive outlet for his rage, and Brodson’s screams had been a balm to his soul. He’d also wanted complete and irrevocable control over the Celierian before using him, and since Kolis had tipped his hand in Celieria, time was quickly becoming a luxury rather than a tool at his disposal.
A knock sounded on his office door. “Enter,” he called. The door swung inward, revealing an umagi, who bowed and said, “Fezaiina Zebah Rael has arrived, great one.”
“Send her in.”
Moments later, his office filled with rich, warm, seductive scents as the beautiful, bronze-skinned Feraz witch swept inside in a flurry of colorful silken veils. “Fezai Madia sends you greetings, Chazah Maur.” Zebah’s red lips curved in a sultry smile as she approached his desk, but her sloe eyes were filled with an intelligence far sharper than the lush curves of her enticingly clad body would lead a foolish man to believe. Those eyes were scanning everything, missing nothing. She was the envoy of the most powerful witch in Feraz—Fezai Madia Shah, high priestess of the Blood Chalice—and Vadim knew better than to underestimate her.
“You look weary, great one,” she murmured. The smooth, potent magic of her voice burned across his skin. Feraz women, particularly among the witchfolk, were a dangerous combination of exotic beauty and compelling natural sexual power. Fierce and bloodthirsty as Feraz men might be, their women held the true power.
Vadim eyed the witch coldly, ignoring the tug of her magic, and kept his still-trembling hands out of sight beneath the desk. “I am neither weary nor weak, Fezaiina, and you are wasting your time testing your power on me. As your Fezai learned long ago, I am immune to such persuasions, no matter how attractive the lure.” Sex, though satisfying in many ways and useful under the right circumstances, was a distraction from the one true passion of his life: his quest for magical supremacy.
“In her last communication, the Fezai said she’d made a breakthrough that would please me,” he prompted. Vadim’s long association with the witches of Feraz had proven mutually beneficial in many ways, most especially in the unique spells and powers they had discovered by combining their powers, their bloodlines, and their knowledge of magic.
“Zim.” The Fezaiina left off her attempts to ensnare his senses and produced a black velvet pouch from the folds of her jiba, the wrap she wore loosely draped around her smooth curves in whispering flows of brightly colored silk. “The Fezai sends you this great gift, Chazah Maur.” She opened the drawstring at the top of the bag and drew out a small, pearlescent stone, which she laid upon the parchment-cluttered surface of his desk.
Vadim leaned forward and inspected the stone visually before reaching for it. White, oval, and smoothly rounded, it was roughly the size of a peach pit and the shape of a child’s skipping stone.
“And this is…?”
“Magic, Chazah. Great and powerful magic.”
“What so
rt of magic?” He cupped his hands around the stone and summoned a brief spell, but nothing in the stone responded to his flare of power. “I sense none.”
“Precisely.”
He scowled at her. “Do not waste my time, witch.”
“Watch, great one.” She bent her head, parted her red lips, and whispered a Feraz witchword. A shadow flickered in the heart of the pearly stone, like a larva wriggling in its egg. Beneath the outer layers of stone, a rune began to gleam with a brightening glow.
Vadim’s brows drew together. He recognized the rune and knew its meaning only because of his dealings with long-forgotten Feraz witchcraft.
“Gamorraz?” The rune was beyond ancient, hailing from a forbidden form of witchtongue used in the blackest days of the craft, millennia ago. Gamorraz was a very powerful demon, the father of the four Guardians of the Well of Souls.
“Zim,” Zebah breathed. “An ancient and powerful name to summon an ancient and powerful magic.”
“And the purpose of this stone?”
Zebah smiled. “To open gateways, Chazah. To the Well of Souls.”
He snatched the stone up off the desk and tossed it back to her. She caught it with one, swift snap of her wrist. “This is your Fezai’s great new triumph? The selkahr crystals already do as much.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You dismiss so quickly a gift whose greatness you do not begin to fathom, Chazah. Zim, the stones—which we call chemar—do what your selkahr does, but only in their purpose are chemar and selkahr similar.” Zebah opened her fist and rolled the stone between her fingers. “Selkahr is very precious, we know. How much do you have to spare for such uses as gateways and portals?”
Vadim’s spine stiffened at the directness of her probe. “Enough,” he answered guardedly. Selkahr was made from Tairen’s Eye crystals, and those had been in exceedingly short supply of late.