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Dannine stood upon the roof of the world, watching the storm approach, and felt like shrieking into the howling wind.
I knew the weather was too bad to fly. I knew, and I came anyway. Cold tears tracked down her cheeks. She stilled their source as soon as she noticed, but the fear and anguish remained.
She retreated further into the gap between two bare cliffs, the only place she had been able to find for shelter. The quetzals flew high, and this was the highest part of Svanlyn, the roof above all other things, the great temples of craggy black rock where nothing grew and no men lived. Farther down the mountain, there were sandstone caverns, hollows carved out by the elements, offering dry ground for a fire and protection from the scouring wind. But all around her now there was nothing but black basalt, cliff edges carved into serrated blades and shelves of bare rock. Before Dannine’s feet, a sad covering of yellow grass stood as the only living thing for miles about; not even the stunted mountain bushes grew up here. Behind her, in the gap, the quetzal lay heaving, trembling in the teeth of the wind, which was now blowing flurries of snowflakes before it. The storm was nigh.
The quetzals were not made for this kind of weather. Arran had discovered them long ago on an island he named as Wyndlis, a place that was windswept and barren yet warm all year round. Somewhere there upon the Sea of Calms, Dannine knew, her father had had his first home. She did not know much of his past beyond that.
Arran had quickly learned how to control the quetzals, had flown the great lizard-birds from island to island upon the Sea of Calms, and over time he had bound them to him, breeding them selectively for flight and endurance and culling those that were too weak, or too independent of will to be controlled. Yet nothing could change their basic nature: they were made for flights over the warm salt sea and desert isles, eaters of fish and gulls. Their large, flexible-shelled eggs needed some amount of moisture in the air to hatch and thrive, and the females would return every year to the marshy islands, building secret nests in the bogs and watching over their hatchlings.
Dannine cast an eye towards the shivering quetzal that had carried her to this forsaken place, a young female. She wondered whether it felt that pull even now, the urge to surrender herself to the wild mating ritual on some forsaken desert rock, then the long flight to the nesting grounds, draining her reserves as she bore a clutch of eggs. Whether it felt the strange pull of motherhood. Dannine never had; the blood sorcery had rendered her barren for the rest of her life, but it was never something she would regret. No matter what other hurts were inflicted upon her body, she would never know the humiliation of pregnancy, the danger of childbirth. That much was a relief.
The quetzals had no experience of frost and snow, and would die if they lost too much heat. Dannine had not been able to fly all the way to Taunus’s stronghold because of that. With the temperature rapidly dropping as she flew, her quetzal had slowed and slowed until they were tracking across the landscape barely faster than a leaf blown aloft by a lazy wind. No matter how she cajoled and threatened and tormented, the creature could not fly faster. It simply was not possible. At last its reactions had slackened to reptilian sluggishness even as Dannine could smell the snow, and she had allowed it to land just before they fell from the sky.
Now she had to use precious stores of magic just to keep the creature alive. She had managed to persuade it to crawl inside a narrow chimney of rock, just big enough for it to lie with wings folded, protected from the worst of the wind, but still it needed protection from the cold. There was no brushwood up here, no way for her to start a fire nor keep it going, so the only thing she could do was to weave her magic into a dense cocoon around the creature, sealing it off from the weather. The quetzal was unable to retain its own stores of body heat, and so she had to keep on feeding energy from her own reserves into the cocoon.
She knew, watching the billowing snowflakes, that soon she would have to retreat into the cocoon herself, for even the native, fur-enveloped creatures would soon freeze to death in the onslaught that was approaching. For now, however, she paced up and down before the cliffs, fidgeting, cursing silently, resisting the temptation to give the quetzal a few well-placed mental jabs. It would do her no good; tormenting the creature would accomplish nothing but to drain her own energy, and if it froze to death, Dannine had no illusions of how long she would last up here, alone, with nothing but a ten-thousand-foot walk back down to the plains of Vailana.
She worried about her reserves; they had not been high to start with. She had been tired, barely sleeping, and cold. She was supposed to be scrying on the necromes she had left behind, but didn’t dare. She didn’t have the energy to spare. Fear rose up in her throat again, and she pushed it back down. Survive this, she told herself. Survive this, and then we will see about those necromes, and Deryck, and Father. Survive this. She was tired, though. She had been surviving for the better part of her twenty-two years. Surviving alone.
Unbidden, a memory came to her mind. Dannine did not like to dwell on memories, but the ultimate loneliness of this place left her no choice. She was eleven again, her little brother Deryck no older than eight. He was quick and strong and the palace armsmaster often paired them against each other, since Dannine was small for her age and light on her feet. There was one training day when she was particularly desperate to show her skill, the progress she had made. But she lost her footing at a critical time, and the wooden practise-sword instinctively came up and cracked Deryck right across the face.
Dannine fidgeted. She did not want to remember this. Even though it was just a broken nose, the thought of hurting Deryck had filled her with such horror that she had sobbed for days afterwards. Why had she been so upset? By that age, neither she nor Deryck were strangers to bloodshed. He had been half a soldier already, his magical abilities had developed so early.
Yet all Dannine’s being congealed in that memory, the crack of the practice-sword as it hit his face, the way he had fallen backwards, crying in pain, blood spurting from between his fingers as he clutched at his nose.
She had never wanted to hurt her brother, and yet the pain when he ran away, three years later, had been worse than any anguish Dannine had ever experienced on his behalf. He had hurt her far more than she had ever hurt him, accidentally or otherwise.
The wind blew ice into Dannine’s face, and she wound her scarf around her head, covering everything except her eyes. The barren cliffside was a freezing black hole in a maelstrom of white. She could not see the further peaks anymore; the whole landscape appeared to be swathed in wool. The wind was shrieking through the rocky chimneys and hurling itself from the ice-slick cliffs like an animal that wanted to die.
Dannine kept the heat of her inner fire going, feeding it with thoughts of revenge, stoking it with anger. I am stronger than this, she told herself. I am stronger than my weakness. Stronger than these feelings. I flinched from hurting Deryck when I loved him, but now I would find his torment more pleasurable than the sensation of flying. I am no longer the sweet, weak girl I was then. How many have died at my hand? How many Morgein soldiers have died in pain, screaming for their mothers? I have made them fear me, and I need not fear the coming of the storm!
She spread her arms wide, tasted snow melting through her scarf, felt her spirit soar on the violence of the winds. And for just a moment, facing the righteous rage of the gods of Svanlyn, Dannine Sylvaissen forgot about fear and revenge and regret, and wished only to live.
