Crown of Crystal Flame (40 page)

“Shei’tani,”
he whispered, and he moved without conscious thought, crossing the remaining distance between them to take her hand in his. Her fingers lay cold and limp in his palm. He pressed them to his face, his lips, as if mere contact and desperate love could breathe warmth back into her flesh. On the threads of their bond, sent with a warming wave of his own essence, he called,
«Ke sha taris, Ellysetta. Ke sha eva vo.»
I am here. I am with you.

Ellysetta gave no response.

He glanced up at the
shei’dalins
and Fey crowded around. “She is alive.” He said it almost as a challenge, as if daring them to contradict him.

“Barely, I’m afraid. And only because we will not let her go.” The
shei’dalin
closest to him threw back her veil.

Rain found himself staring into the sympathetic face of Jisera v’En Arran, the dainty but indomitable truemate of the Massan’s Air master, Eimar v’En Arran. “Jisera
falla,
you should not be here,” he chided. “What is your
shei’tan
thinking? “

Jisera arched a slender blue-black brow. “What every right-minded Fey in the Fading Lands should be thinking,
kem’Feyreisen.
That if we lose this war, there’s no hope for any of us. So it’s best to go out fighting for what we know is right.” Her dark brown eyes were usually soft as a doe’s, but at the moment, they glittered like polished stones. As tiny and slight as she was, and despite her deeply empathic nature, like that of all the strongest
shei’dalins,
Jisera v’En Arran had a spine of steel.

As quickly as possible, she caught him up. “More
shei’dalins
will be coming—they stayed behind to see those villagers you sent to the Garreval safely through the Mists. Those children… so many children.…” Her throat moved on a convulsive swallow. “Some of them looked Fey. There was a little girl…” Her eyes grew moist, and she blinked rapidly. “I commanded the warriors at Chatok and Chakai to let them through and told them if Tenn objected he could just come to Orest and discuss it.”

Rain bowed his head, humbled by her bravery and unswerving support.
“Beylah vo, kem’falla,
and thank you for everything you’ve done for my
shei’tani.”

“Aiyah,
well, don’t thank me for that until she comes back to us.”

The mere suggestion of any other outcome sparked an instant, involuntary swell of fear and Rage. The Shadar horn went hot against his arm, and as the horn released is potent Elvish magic, he could swear he felt Ellysetta’s fingers twitch in his palm.

“Call to her, Rain,” Jisera urged. “You share the strongest bond. Perhaps she will respond better to you than she has to the rest of us.”

Rain nodded and leaned closer to Ellysetta. Closing his eyes, he began to call to her along the threads of their bond. Behind him, her head once more poking in under the side of the tent, her blue eyes whirling and glowing like stars, Steli added her voice to his.

Three bells later, Rain’s hope was beginning to falter. In addition to the calls of a
shei’tan
to his mate, the calls of Ellysetta’s
lu’tan,
and the calls of the
shei’dalin,
he and Steli had tried every tairen song they could think of. Rain’s song. Steli’s song. Pride song, kin song, mate song, mother song. Nothing had worked. Nothing had roused even the slightest response.

“Do not lose hope,” Jisera said. “The Feyreisa is stronger than any
shei’dalin
I’ve ever known. To kill a Mharog.” She shook her head. The top layer of her hair was plaited in a net of tiny black braids, joined together with tiny gold and crystal beads that shimmered in the candlelight. “No other
shei’dalin
could have survived it.”

“She is a Tairen Soul,” Rain said, his eyes closed, his head resting on Ellysetta’s hip.

“With a heart as bright and as strong as the sun,” Tajik added in low voice. “In that respect, she is much like my—” His voice broke off abruptly, and Rain opened his eyes in time to see him glance at Gil, who casually shifted to take the heel of his boot off Tajik’s toe.

The seven of them—Ellysetta, Rain, and all five warriors of her primary quintet—had sworn a Fey oath to Galad Hawksheart not to reveal the truths they’d discovered in Elvia. And though they would each willingly have foresworn their oaths and broken their honor in order to rally the Fey and rescue Shan and Elfeya, the urgency of this war had stopped them. Hawksheart’s secret remained unspoken, and their Fey oaths remained intact.

“Like your what, Tajik?” Jisera asked.

Tajik cast a defiant glower at Gil and completed his remark, “Like my sister. The Feyreisa’s courage and strength remind me of my sister, Elfeya.”

Rain saw Gil’s tense shoulder relax. Tajik both told the truth and yet honored his oath to Hawksheart. Fey loved passionately, and mourned deeply, even centuries after the loss of a loved one, so Jisera would not think it odd in the least that Tajik’s sister remained in his thoughts.

She reached out to grasp Tajik’s hand. Golden light glowed about their clasped hands and her eyes took on an amber glow as she wove peace on Tajik. “I never knew Elfeya
-falla,
but if she was anything like the Feyreisa, then she was very special indeed.”

More special than Jisera knew. More special than any of them had suspected before Hawksheart’s revelations.

Rain wondered bitterly what Tenn v’En Eilan, the leader of the Massan, would do when he found out that Ellysetta, the woman Tenn had reviled and cast out of the protection of the Fading Lands, was the daughter of the greatest warrior and most renowned
shei’dalin
born in the last fifty thousand years—perhaps longer. Rain’s Rage flared at the memory of Tenn’s betrayal and the way he’d intentionally laid a trap to catch Ellysetta weaving Azrahn so he could banish her. He’d known about her Mage Marks, known what terrible danger she’d be in outside the safety of the Faering Mists. And still, Tenn had done it.

The Shadar horn burned as it drained the heat from Rain’s veins and dulled the sharp edge of his Rage.

In his hand, Ellysetta’s fingers twitched again.

Rain stared at the slender fingers with sudden suspicion. Her hand was motionless once more, but he had not imagined the small flinch.

“The Shadar horn consumed the poison of the Mharog blade that struck me, correct?” he asked.

“Aiyah,”
Jisera confirmed. “So the hearth witch, Sheyl, informed me.”

“Then is it not possible the horn’s magic could cure what ails Ellysetta as well?”

Jisera frowned at him. It didn’t take a Spirit weave to know what he was thinking—or to see how those thoughts alarmed her. “The horn is the only thing keeping you from madness.”

“So cut it in half. Use half for me, half for Ellysetta.”

“We don’t know that half a horn is any use at all.”

“We don’t know that it isn’t,” he countered. “Hawksheart gave the Shadar horn to me for a reason. I doubt that reason was so I could live to go mad when Ellysetta dies. If Ellysetta doesn’t recover, I’m dead anyway. This, at least, gives us a chance.”

Jisera crossed her arms. Slight and sweet though she appeared, she was also stubborn as a rock. And she’d never been one to take unnecessary risks—especially when it came to the safety of the lives in her care. “It’s too dangerous, Rain.”

He sighed and ran his good hand through his hair. “Jisera, war is here, and I’m the Tairen Soul. If I don’t fight, the Eld will win. I can’t fight with this strapped to my arm.” Rain gestured to the bulky horn strapped to his arm. “And I can’t fight with my mate hovering on the cusp of death. You’re going to have to graft the Shadar horn to my bones anyways. So why not start by grafting just half and giving the rest to Ellysetta?”

“Even if we tried that, there’s no guarantee the horn will help her.”

“It better, because we’ve tried everything else.”

Jisera set her jaw. Then after a look at the other
shei’dalins
—and, Rain suspected, a private word with them—Eimar’s mate gave a curt nod.
“Bas’ka.
We’ll need a table. And you’ll need to agree to be strapped down and rendered unconscious. I don’t want you Raging on us while we’re trying to do this.”

“Agreed,” Rain accepted. He signaled to Ellysetta’s quintet. Rijonn wove a second table, complete with metal restraining straps. When he was done, Rain got on, lay down, and let Bel and the others strap him in.
“Beylah vo,”
he said as Jisera and the
shei’dalins
gathered around him.

“Don’t thank me unless this works.” Her eyes turned amber and began to glow.

Ellysetta lay trapped in a sea of black ice. She couldn’t move, couldn’t feel, couldn’t speak, and yet every part of her being was writhing in agony, burning from a fire she could not quench, screaming until her throat was raw and her ears were ringing.

Rain was dead. She’d seen the red Fey’cha pierce his throat. She’d plunged her own blade into the rotting heart of the Mharog in wild fury. Only she hadn’t died as she’d expected. Instead, the undiluted evil of the Mharog had seized her and pumped its foul corruption into her soul. The howling torment of every life destroyed by the Mharog bombarded her senses, as did the Mharog’s fiendish pleasure each time he’d drained a soul of its Light.

Hatred, malevolence, the unquenchable lust for pain and destruction: the Dark emotions feasted on her Light. They ate away at her
shei’dalin
mercy, her compassion and gentleness, her hope, dissolving layer after layer of civility and restraint until they reached the dangerous, equally Dark monster that lived at the core of Ellysetta’s soul.

And when the foul malignancy of the Mharog touched that, the beast roared to life. A vast, Raging Darkness that dwarfed the Mharog’s by magnitudes.
Her
Darkness. Every bit as powerful and potently evil as her Light was good.

In terror, she’d done the only thing she could. She raised barriers around her mind and fortified them with a containing weave that mimicked the binding spell Galad Hawks-heart had once used on her. The weave used the beast’s magic against it, so that the more it Raged, the stronger its bonds became.

And there Ellysetta lay in torment, locked inside her mind with the horror that lived in her soul.

Ellysetta.
A voice called her name—Rain’s voice, infused with the vibrant notes of tairen song. The sound sliced through the deafening roars of the beast and her own endless screams.

In the icy darkness of her self-imposed prison, the notes of his song didn’t just glimmer—they blazed bright as the Great Sun.

Come back to me, shei’tani.

Shei’tani.
Her battered mind latched onto the word like a talisman.
Rain? Is that you?
Hesitant, afraid this might be some trick of the Mharog, she reached for his Light… then wept as it enveloped her in fierce, familiar flows of heat and strength.

Ke sha taris, kem’reisa. Ke sha eva vo.

His Light burned through the layers of dark ice and fanned the dim, nearly extinguished flickers of her own Light back to fiery brightness. With a roar of cold rage, the beast retreated into his lair, and the powerful weaves of her self-imposed prison faded.

Ellysetta’s eyes opened, and Rain was there, his face pale, his expression taut with worry, but whole and unharmed.
Alive.
Before she could even open her mouth to speak, he dragged her into his arms, kissed her soundly, then clutched her so tightly to his chest she could hardly move.

“Beylah sallan,”
he whispered against her skin. “I thought I’d lost you when you stabbed that Mharog,
shei’tani.
Don’t ever scare me like that again.” Fine tremors shivered through his entire body and the hands stroking her hair were trembling.

“I thought
I’d
lost
you,”
she told him in a broken voice. “You nearly did.”

“I don’t understand.” She squirmed in his arms, needing to see his face, touch him to ensure he was real. “You died. I saw that Mharog kill you. He drove his red Fey’cha into your throat.” For a moment she wondered if she’d dreamed that, but when she reached up to touch the spot where the Mharog blade had pierced his throat, she discovered that Rain’s previously unblemished Fey skin now bore a faint, vertical scar, proof of his near-death encounter with the Mharog. “How is this possible?”

“Aiyah,
well…” Rain grimaced. “Much as I hate to admit it, I’m in Hawksheart’s debt. That Shadar horn he gave me saved my life—and yours.”

Ellysetta pressed her lips against the faint scar and whispered a prayer of thanks. “Bright Lord bless him.”

Someone cleared a throat. Ellysetta glanced around and blushed to discover she and Rain were not alone. They were lying on a raised table in the center of a tent. Her quintet and six veiled
shei’dalins
were gathered around them. “My friends… thank you. Gaelen…” She reached for his hands.
«You and your dahl’reisen friends saved our lives, kem’maresk. There aren’t words enough to thank you.»

Another throat cleared—well, rumbled impatiently was more like it—and Ellysetta’s attention shifted to the side of the tent, where one entire fabric wall had been ripped free of its mooring stakes. The unmoored side of the tent lay draped like a rumpled scarf across a very large white tairen head.

“Steli!” Ellysetta swung her legs over the edge of the table, ignoring the protesting voices that told her she was too weak and needed to rest. She
was
weak. Her knees started to give way as soon as she stood. But Rain was there to catch her, and with his arm around her waist to hold her steady, she crossed the floor to Steli. She leaned against the strong, furred jaw, closing her eyes against a sudden swell of tears.

“I am so glad to see you, my pride-mother,” she whispered in a choked voice.

«Steli’s heart sings to see you safe, kitling. Steli was…»
Steli gave up Fey words for tairen speech with which she spun an image of a tairen mother, crying mournfully over the body of a listless kitling.
«Ellysetta-kitling must not give Steli such sadness again.»