THREADS
She was seized by an all-encompassing pain.
Darkness peeled back to reveal the heavens full of stars that seared her mind’s eye, and the weaving of threads. Great threads of sizzling light beamed through the well of darkness surging infinitely onward, and fine spun threads cut intricate patterns against a backdrop of deep midnight blue that was spangled by the pulsations of distant suns. She knew these to be the strands of lives and worlds, of time and place, as she had once seen through the faceplate of a looking mask, the shard of which remained in her right eye.
A thread of light impaled her chest, shredding the illusion of a life where her mother had lived. It showed her the reality, her mother on her deathbed, her father and aunts collected around her as she breathed her last.
Karigan screamed, but the sound was lost to the vastness of the universe. The whisperers tried to rein her in, to sing to her, to bring her peace, their voices taking on a note of urgency, but cold fire burned through her veins.
More threads intersected or ended, or snagged and tore loose. Others continued their weavings, warp and weft, all in good order: The colonel slain, blood drips from a Raider’s blade. The Riders save the colonel. The colonel is held captive aboard a ship. Estora in labor, beads of perspiration on her brow.
A peaceful stream burbles in a mossy glade.
A terrible battle, a great dark host on the horizon advances. Zachary sits proud and brave on his warhorse, his army thronged behind him.
Karigan lifts the hem of her white linen gown to step into the stream. Icy water sends a chill through her body.
Screams of the wounded, the clash of blades, the song of arrows soaring through the air.
It is cold, Karigan says as she places her foot into the stream. Enver holds her hand to steady her. It will bring you peace, he says, painless slumber and healing.
Swords slash and lancers try to hold back the terrible horde, the monsters of Blackveil. Fire in the sky. Zachary raises a great shield emblazoned with a flying dragon toward the inferno that rains down on him.
It will not feel so cold once you grow accustomed to it, Enver says.
Hooves pound and pennants snap in the wind. The stench of gore.
She settles into a pool formed by the stream. It is clear, perfect, with mossy boulders to either side of her. I will always keep watch, Enver says. I will keep you safe. You will never be alone.
Corpses of horses and defenders are strewn about the battlefield. The foul avians of Blackveil feast on the dead.
She submerges all the way into the pool. Currents flow along her body in whorls. She need not breathe, just sleep. She is at peace and without pain, and Enver will keep watch.
Zachary reigns victorious. Zachary is cut down by arrows. Sacor City shines in the setting sun as the realm enters a golden era of peace and prosperity led by the descendants of Zachary and Estora. The dark host swarms across the battlefield and invades the city. Its citizens are slain or enslaved. All is decay and walls crumble. The stain of darkness and defeat spreads across Sacoridia and all the free lands.
The flight of arrows. Always the arrows.
The beat of a god’s wings surrounded her, and she was cast back into her body.
She burned. Cold fire scalded her veins, her scream echoed by those of the whisperers. Duncan shouted at her, and Nyssa, too. Far away in a copse of trees near the mountains, Enver cried out. Their voices, all the rage, the fear, the pain, punched through her to the pith of her existence.
She snapped into a sitting position and threw off a gauzy shroud that had been spread over her. The whisperers stepped away in consternation, and her winged horse brooch slipped from the fingers of one who had been examining it. It thumped to the white ground, raising a fine puff of dust. Their faces were not beautiful at all, but bloodless and misshapen with oozing pustules and deep seams that contorted their features in an inhuman lack of symmetry. The nearest hissed and flicked its tongue at her.
“Get up! Get up!” Duncan yelled.
Stupid, Greenie, Nyssa said, don’t just sit there!
She half fell off a stone slab that looked like an altar or a coffin rest, and staggered a few steps before falling to her knees. Her legs and feet were numb, her mind so terribly muddled.
“Get up!” Duncan cried. “They are stealing me!”
A whisperer held a large, polished stone of green tourmaline in its hands, Duncan’s tempes stone, and what looked like a human thigh bone tucked under its arm.
Get the sword! Nyssa shouted in her mind.
Karigan crawled toward where the colonel’s sword had been discarded, dragging her left arm which was completely useless and trailed blood. When she reached the sword, she drew it from its scabbard and used it to help her stand. She lurched after the whisperer that was carrying away the tempes stone and bone, and putting all the fire of burning pain into pursuing it, she caught up and ran it through with the saber. The creature fell, the stone and bone thudding to the ground. The other whisperers closed in around her and walled her in with a thick mist. To her horror, tentacles snaked out from beneath their shrouds, reached for her.
“Come closer at your peril,” she warned them. She did not wait, but jumped at them and cut off the closest tentacle, then pivoted and struck down another whisperer. That was all it took. The rest screamed away into the mist and the cloud that had surrounded her evaporated until there was no trace of it.
“Thank the gods,” Duncan said, hovering nearby.
She used the tip of her sword to prod the shroud of the whisperer crumpled at her feet, but the creature itself was gone. No blood, no corpse, it had vanished like the mist. She raised the saber, noting with some surprise, that she had actually used a sword and it had not hurt. Then she saw herself reflected in the blade. No eyepatch there, just her mirror eye reflecting infinitely into the blade and back. She shook her head and turned to find all the Riders and their horses scattered about the white landscape as if dead. She dropped to her knees.
“They are not dead,” Duncan said hastily. “Just asleep. The whisper wraiths weren’t as interested in them as they were in you and me, though they would have gotten to them eventually. You saved all of us. Though, I might add, it took you long enough.” He chuckled. “I do not think they’ve ever had a victim fight back before.”
She wiped cold perspiration from her brow and then collapsed into the darkness of oblivion, this time without the whispers in her mind.
“Drink this, Karigan.”
Cold water moistened her lips. A damp cloth was applied to her face.
“Drink in little sips,” Connly advised her, supporting her and holding the waterskin to her lips.
Karigan obeyed and slowly began to feel her senses return. The numbness had vanished from her body except for her left arm, and her mirror eye throbbed with pain. When she looked up, twenty Green Riders looked down at her, and a number of horses, too.
“Put this on.” He helped her place her eyepatch over her mirror eye. Any Riders who had not known about it, that it was more than just a simple injury, did now. “I explained it to them,” he said, guessing her thoughts.
It was kept secret, as much as possible, by Zachary and the colonel, to protect her from those who would covet its power, and those who despised all magic and magic users. Fortunately, the Riders knew how to keep secrets, but she couldn’t help but think that it was one more thing that made her strange, and a stranger, to them.
“What . . . what happened?”
“Duncan said you saved us,” Connly replied, “for which we are grateful.” His statement was followed by murmurs of agreement from the others. “What do you remember?”
Her memory was vague about what had happened. “Trying to escape the mist, then peacefulness.” Several Riders nodded as if their experiences had been the same. Much of the rest was like a jumbled, half-remembered dream. “Visions of my childhood and my life, but it wasn’t really my life. An alternate life.” Suddenly she was overcome by sobs realizing anew that her mother was gone and had been for many years, and that the husband and children she had loved hadn’t been real. When she calmed down and made use of a handkerchief Connly provided, she said, “I lived a whole other lifetime.” After a pause, she added, “They must have looked into my mirror eye because I had all sorts of visions.”
“They did,” Duncan said. “They very much wanted what is in your eye, and it threw them when the magic worked on them. Who can say what sorts of things they might have seen, but it was ultimately their undoing and they lost control of you.”
“It woke me,” she said. “They were after the mirror shard in my eye?”
“The wraiths wanted the magic. They are parasites that prey on magic and siphon it, sometimes keeping their victims alive for long years to do so.”
Karigan was appalled to think that might have been her fate.
“They were intrigued not only by your eye,” Duncan continued, “but by your particular ability. I fear you will never be safe in the Blanding again. They will hunt you down.”
A good reason for her to never return. She tried to lift the waterskin for another sip, but her left hand and arm remained lifeless. She glanced down and found her wrist bandaged and stained with a spot of blood. Purplish-black striations ran up the inside of her arm from the wound.
“They poisoned you,” Tegan said.
“Not enough to kill,” Duncan said, “but enough to keep you under their power. Captain Connly eliminated much of the poison.”
Karigan looked up at him, wondering if he’d acquired a new special ability. He smiled. “I got it out the same way as I would snake venom. Sucked it out. My uncle taught me how. There were timber rattlers in the woods by his farm, so it was a necessary skill.”
“Oh!” She inquired after the others, and to a one they were unharmed, though some remained drowsy. Their dreams had been pleasant and peaceful, too, but they’d not been subjected to the same horror as Karigan.
“You rest while we get ready to ride again,” Connly said. “Drink some water. Best we don’t stick around in case those wraiths get brave and come after us again.”
He and the rest of the Riders returned to their horses to prepare to leave.
Karigan turned to Duncan. “I remember something about a bone. A human bone.”
Duncan actually blushed, which seemed an odd thing for a “projection” to do. “That is, er, my leg bone, and having others see it is a little like being naked. When a great mage dies, their bones are supposed to be burned to ashes because they contain power that can be misused, but the eagles don’t use fire, so mine were never destroyed. As a result, I am not just confined to being a projection. With the power of my bones intact, I can travel the outside world and do some small magic. The bone has to be with my tempes stone, of course. The wraiths almost had a great prize in both of us.” He shuddered. “I would like to hear about how you are Mirare sometime.”
Karigan touched her eyepatch. She didn’t feel prepared to go into that just now. “Do you have, er, the rest of your bones?”
“They are at Snowcloud Eyrie. Yes, all of them. They are too heavy for Softfeather to carry all at once along with the tempes stone, too, and it is safer this way. I hate to think of the wraiths or anyone else in possession of them all. I’d appreciate you not telling anyone about them.”
The water they’d filled skins with from the Fountain of Winthorpe helped Karigan feel much better. There was even some tingling in her arm and hand after a short while. Tegan came over to help her with her coat—winged horse brooch once more pinned to it. Karigan touched the feather, and it grounded her more than anything else as she remembered who had given it to her. Tegan then helped buckle her cuirass back on and girded the swordbelt around her waist.
“I’m glad my ability just helps me predict the weather,” Tegan said with a smile. “It keeps me out of trouble, unlike you and yours.” She then gave Karigan a leg up onto Loon’s saddle, and handed her Duncan’s pouch.
“If you ever want to trade,” Karigan said.
Tegan laughed and returned to her horse.
As the Riders continued on their journey, Karigan tried to shake off the residue of the spell the whisper wraiths had put her under. Briefly her mind strayed, drifted, ranged across the white world on ragged wings, seeking peace and painless sleep . . .
Yes, come to us, the wraiths whispered in her mind. We will take care of you, bring you peace.
She started to rein Loon away from the others.
“Snap out of it,” Duncan said in her ear.
Idiot Greenie, Nyssa chimed in, inviting it in.
“Problem?” Connly asked, urging Will closer to Loon’s side.
Karigan shook herself to wake up fully.
“What’s left of the venom is still holding sway over her,” Duncan said. “We’ll have to keep an eye on her.”
“Smack me if I seem to drift away,” she told Connly. “Really. Smack me hard. What they offer is tempting.”
“Oblivion, humph,” Duncan said. “You are better than that, stronger than them. You must not give in to temptation.”
Karigan was not sure she would be strong enough if the wraiths came for her again. There was only so much pain, so many trials, one person could endure. What the wraiths offered was an escape from that. Not that she wanted to be the body they fed off for long years, but the allure remained.
Do not be seduced by the easy way out, Nyssa told her.
Why do you care? Karigan had a dim recollection of Nyssa trying to wake her up from the grip of the wraiths’ spell. Why did you help?
Because you are mine, and mine alone. Your giving in would have been a disappointing end to our dance.
And, Karigan surmised, it would have ended Nyssa’s own existence, whatever kind of existence it was. She sighed, wishing that everyone would just stay out of her head.