Grannine did not release me until we summited the stairs. My heart fluttered in my throat, and I wavered on the uppermost step, feeling as though I might fall. “Mariead,” Grannine said, at my side. I flinched to the left, and She pursued, placing a hand around my shoulders. “Easy, now. Breathe.” “I should have […]
By the final Tec of Winter, the once-grand halls of Raven Lake had become warm and familiar, almost cozy—no longer a place of vast strangeness and unknowable secrets, but a sanctuary for myself and Eris, to Aidan and the Lunanin. With each day this home of ours seemed smaller and less able to contain my ruminations. […]
When the night had gone, I found my thoughts restless, stirred up from beneath by some cold and meandering current of unease. It was not as though the druids were celibate. Far from it, in fact—now and again I had stumbled across some pair of our hosts…or upon one memorable occasion, more than two—and […]
“Who is…Anat?” “My friend,” Hope said, as though I ought have known this. “We play together. Biddy says you were a Sister in the South.” “That’s…right.” Hope was watching me again, but I could no longer tell what was passing behind her young features. “Biddy Callend?” Hope nodded. “She says she saw you in Dawnfire […]
The Hall of Whispers was small by the standards of Raven Lake. Its stone ceiling was low, and there were no grand structures herein; only low-slung curbs of wood that demarcated regular spaces throughout the chamber. Here, far from the fires of the Ix-akad, the air was cooler, and rush mats served to cushion not […]
I wept. To capture the bounds of this emotion with time was impossible. I wept for a decade, a lifetime. I was blind with tears. Feeble as a fresh colt, I could not have said for the life of me whether I clung to Eris, to Rina, or even to the implacable Elder Gafed. Perhaps […]
“Mariead.” I moved before I understood the action, pushing Eris back. I could not say by what evidence She had known—the sound of a footfall, the parting of the air before a blade—but when I wheeled around, Eris had fallen into a snowdrift, and I faced another Church soldier. He was only a man. Furious, […]
Eris smiled. There were tears in her eyes. “No apology,” she said. She kissed my hand. “Never that.” We turned to face the Church together. Sir Duncan and his men were true believers. Their faith was carried in their eyes, in the set of their jaws. They knew for a certainty that Elysium was theirs. […]
I stood in a vast and empty space. A cavern. A gulf. A cathedral. Once it had lived and breathed the Holy Writ, animated by the fire of light through stained glass. Now all that remained of its architecture was a span of broken cobblestone and the base of a fractured pulpit. At my feet, […]
The sun ascended inch by inch into the thick and snow-heavy clouds of the receding storm, and the shadow of that passing blizzard fell over the shores of Raven Lake like a funeral shroud. The golden fog began to wane even as we broke from the trees, the main part of our forces emerging from the […]
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