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Desora wanted to urge the others to hurry. The monster, aloft in its sorcered myst, covered ground quickly. On horseback, they might catch up to it before it reached the village.
She didn’t think they would catch it before it reached the outlying farmholds and cottages.
Granny Riding’s cottage was closest to the Wilding. When she visited Granny, Desora walked most of the morning to reach the cottage, just beyond a coppiced wood. The monster would cross the distance from mountain to cottage quickly.
Granny had power for healing. If she had more power than that, Desora had never seen it. Over the years, she had gathered that others considered Granny on the level of a wizard, but the old woman had never wielded any spell-based wizardry. Had she elemental power, over the years surely Desora would have seen hints of it. A light sphere where none should be, sparked by the element Fire. Water dropping from the sky in the midst of drought. A wind blowing through, carrying away the thick smoke from a burned barn, whose fire had not been extinguished by a timely rain cloud.
No, she doubted Granny had any elemental power.
Yet the old woman was canny. She may have learned, years ago, to reserve her power for dire situations. Candles provided good light. A band of storms eventually broke droughts before people and animals died of thirst and hunger. The winds never came in short, power-filled bursts, never formed a barrier against the storms that sometimes ripped limbs from trees and tore off roofs. Canny or not, even an old woman hiding her power would try to avoid such obvious rescues.
Granny had done none of that.
Desora had never sensed any other power in the entire valley. When she stepped into the Wilding or into Bermarck’s forest, the power there rushed out to welcome hers, entwine with it. In the early days, before she learned to guard against it, Desora had shaken with the strength of the power in those two lands. Now she expected it, ignored it as an essence of the place, like the green of the trees in summer, the freshness of air in spring, the fiery colors in autumn, and the utter ice of winter.
The rangers had spread out to check for changes in the High Meadow. She, Brax, and Challoch were the only ones still mounted. To keep from pressing for action, Desora closed her lips tightly and turned her face to the sky.
The blue remained the deep color of early morning, without the heat haze of later in the day. The sky seemed endless, reaching up and up. Far to the east were the bordering trees of Bermarck, controlled by the Lucent Fae Maorn Harte. At this distance, the trees were merely a band of green against the blue. In the middle distance was Mulgrum with its cluster of houses around the central byway of shops and the town’s longhouse at the end. Only its cluster of chimneys and the higher roof with earthen-red tiles distinguished that long hall.
The corner of her right eye caught movement. That was to the north. In the distance, the Claws of Weorth reached up, mighty grey-stone talons backed by the jagged mountains of Weorth. Yet the Claws hadn’t caught her eye. A yellow-sooty cloud had. In the vastness of the sky, that single cloud didn’t look large. It scudded east to west, soaring between the High Meadow and the Claws.
East to west. The wind blew west to east, a steady breeze from the green trees of Bermarck in the west. That cloud flew into the wind.
Strange.
Desora squinted. It looked like something flew inside the cloud. Not the monster although this vapor was like that one, yellowish and ash, like smoke from a hot fire.
“Brax,” she said, the oddness of the cloud worrying her.
Then the cloud soared closer, and the yellowed myst no longer concealed what it had veiled. Dark birds flew rapidly within the cloud. They kept within the vapor. Clustered together in a mass, they gave that yellow myst its sooty cast.
Brax said it before she could. “Birds. Raptors, I’d say.”
“Black birds are buzzards,” Challoch added.
Buzzards. Scavengers. Eaters of the dead. In a yellow-green vapor similar to the one that concealed the monster. A vapor created by a sorcerer.
Aye, she thought, then intuition argued No.
The mid-morning sun’s glare hid the birds more than the cloud did, but gradually she distinguished them, more from their shape and their thin piping whistles. Their tails were forked. Long wings lifted above their bodies as they soared. “Kites. Not buzzards. Kites. Still scavengers. Flying fast.”
“Rangers!” Brax called, and the four men came running.
The flock had neared, angling from the northernmost tip of the Wilding toward the valley. The birds flew without varying their direction or speed, ignoring anything on the ground, any of the smaller birds flapping madly to avoid their route. The flock’s direction beneath the sun tilted, revealing reddish brown wings with black wingtips.
The kites drew past the High Meadow. The birds shifted. The yellow-green vapor billowed then split, and the flock split into three, the vapor dividing with them. Two parts continued on to the valley. One lifted higher, the birds obviously aiming for a farther distance. The third part began a slow wheel, their tail feathers shifting as they turned. Then the directional change ended. The third part aimed for the meadow.
A score of kites. As they neared, their piping whistles became louder, piercing. The buff feathers on the undersides of their wings showed against their rufous bodies. And eldritch green glowed in their eyes.
“Oh no,” Desora moaned. She never wanted birds to be an enemy. “No, no, no, no.”
“What is it?”
“Their eyes.”
“Sorcery,” Challoch breathed.
The forked tails flicked, and the birds dropped lower in the sky as they neared the High Meadow.
The rangers twisted their bows around and quickly nocked arrows, aiming high.
No, no, no, no. Yet an attack was imminent. Kites had sharp, hooked beaks and sharper talons. No human stood a chance against them.
Spheres of greeny Earth might cast out the sorcery. She hoped the elemental power wouldn’t damage them, creatures of nature, feral and unmagicked. Used by sorcery. That angered her more than the coming attack did.
“Hold,” Brax shouted. When she caught his gaze, she knew he had somehow sensed how appalled she was at this fight.
This part of the divided flock wheeled over the meadow. A score of birds, large, whistling, the rush of their wings louder than the wind. Three broke off, came together in a strong dive.
Desora flung a sphere. The greeny Earth power burst over the triad flying closely together. The birds continued to descend—then they lifted away. When they finished a wheeling climb, they aimed for the Wilding.
A few broke from the flock and soared with them.
Three more dropped, then three and three more. The greeny yellow light of sorcery, strong and bright, gleamed in their eyes.
She threw more spheres. Two missed. Those triads lifted away to wheel around. One struck—and the clear green shuddered over the flying birds. The birds broke off their dive then flew south, ascending with each flap of their wings.
“Arrows!”
“With Earth,” Desora added to Brax’s shout.
When four arrows pointed at the birds, she cast Earth over them. Four bowstrings twanged. Four arrowheads pierced ruddy breasts. Four kites dropped from the sky, thudding into the grass.
Only one kite didn’t twist in the air and wing back to the Wilding. It veered to the valley, beating its wings rapidly.
Another arrow flew and hit. The bird tumbled out of the sky.
The rest of the flock was retreating, heading for the Wilding. The myst of sorcery that had veiled them had vanished. The birds gained speed as they neared the wild forest.
The danger gone, Desora turned to find the other two flocks. That sicky yellow-green myst still surrounded the kites. It seemed to glow against the blue sky. The reddish bodies of the kites appeared black.
But more of the raptors had dropped away from those flocks. They circled high above the clouds then caught the west wind and flew back to the Wilding.
They waited, but those birds didn’t approach the meadow. They had split into a score of different directions to re-enter the Wilding, heading for their hunting territories to the south and southeast.
“Sorcery,” a ranger hissed.
“Those flocks are heading for the village,” Brax snapped. “We need to ride.”
The rangers mounted in a flurry, even Dunstan with his injured leg. Desora led them through the boulder archway, out of the High Meadow and onto the trail winding down, to the valley.
First would come the outlying fields, then a couple of pastures for cattle. Then Granny Riding’s cottage, a good distance from Mulgrum. There the road straightened and walked between fields and pastures, past farmholds, all the way to Mulgrum.
The monster had started first, but the kites would outdistance it.
One flock would. She risked a glance to the western sky. The other flock still soared aloft, aiming for a target more distant than the village. Bermarck, a corner of Faeron tucked here in the Northern Reaches.
Monster. Kites, spelled by sorcery.
Which meant the sorcerer and his enslaved wyre were also bound for the valley, Mulgrum in its center.
Lord Horst was on the sorcerer’s heels. She hoped the Kyrgy delayed him.
Mulgrum had few defenses, with none at all against sorcery or strange monsters or bespelled birds. The kites’ attack would warn the villagers. Yet what could the survivors of the kites’ attack do against the monster?
How many would die?
Her horse stumbled on the trail.
A big destrier suddenly pushed past, crowding her gelding to the mountain side of the trail. “Easy,” Brax said. “You won’t help anyone in the village if you tumble down the mountainside. You won’t come out unhurt the way that monster did.”
“We have to hurry.”
“We are. Best we can.”
She bit back a whimper. That tight control stressed her voice. “It’s not enough.”
“We’ll get there, though. Trust that.”
“We won’t get there before it reaches Granny Riding. It’s on a straight line to her.”
“That your friend?”
“She doesn’t wield any power, Brax. She can’t defend herself. All her power is wrapped up in healing balms and salves, in bandages, in experience. She can’t defend herself!”
“Easy. You can’t defend her either if you wind up dead before you get there.”
Desora huffed at him—but he was right. Fleet hooves might gain speed, but the loss of safety on a steep mountain trail was a stupid risk. She stopped pushing the gelding. Brax let her remain in the lead, but he kept the destrier beside her, always on the outside of the trail.
The trail straightened into an easy slope down to the flat. It climbed a little hill then descended to the valley. There, she set her heels to the gelding. Even though the range-runner had traveled all morning and climbed up and down a mountain, it picked up to a trot. With the trail straightening out, only a few curves around thick coppiced trunks, she urged the gelding to a gallop. From the heavy thud of hoofbeats, the others had caught her urgent speed.
She leaned forward over the saddle, the gelding’s mane brushing her face. They wound through the coppice, following the faint trail through the thin branches growing up from axe-cut trunks. They flashed so fast that she almost didn’t see the dun-colored lump on the ground.
Past it, she drew up. “Halt,” Brax shouted before the gelding stopped. The hoofbeats behind her stopped.
She wheeled the gelding around and rode back. Once the horse stopped, she had a clearer view of the lump. A man curled up like a babe. Red splotches covered his back.
Challoch had slid off his warhorse to investigate. His twisted face gave them part of the answer. “Kites” gave them the rest of it.
They were riding before he swung into his saddle.
They reached poles set in the ground to make drying racks, which marked the edge of the coppiced wood.
A high-pitched scream pierced the air.
