The Black Raven

‘And with her there shall be no death, Verro. I have seen her country, and I have seen her miracles. I do more than know these things, I ken them, I tell you. They be the deepest truth that ever a woman could see.’

‘Here, think you that she’d show them to me?’

‘Ah, that’s the bitter thing. She has withdrawn to her own true country, and she shows herself not to men or –’ She hesitated, stumbling on some word, ‘or to women either.’

The doubt rose up strong. Daft! he told himself. What if she’s gone daft?

‘My love, ponder this.’ Raena leaned forward, suddenly urgent. ‘In the past, when we did study witchlore together, could I call down the silver light and invoke mighty spirits?’

‘Truly, you couldn’t. And I do wonder, Rae, just where you might have learned it.’

‘No doubt! It was Alshandra. She did teach me, she did lay her hands upon me, and she did give me freely of her power, that I might work magicks in the world. And those that will see them, well, then, they will believe what I say, that Alshandra is a goddess who blesses her worshippers. Where else might I have learned these things, Verro? Do you know a teacher somewhere in the Rhiddaer where I might have studied?’

‘I don’t.’

‘And would I lie to you, the man I love second only to her?’

Verrarc was tempted to say that after all, she’d lied to him often enough before. But this time she was looking him straight in the face, her eyes focused on his, as if she were wishing she could show him her goddess by forcing the image into his mind. What if, just what if this were true, that her goddess would give him magical power beyond any he’d hoped to have? And if there would be no death –

‘If only I could take you to her,’ Raena said, and her voice stumbled in sheer urgency, ‘if only you could see her!’

‘Truly, I do wish I could. Why has she –’

‘I know not.’ Raena’s voice shook, and she looked away.

There she was indeed lying; he recognized all the signs from past experience. Paradoxically, however, this lie brought home the truth of what she’d said before, just by the contrast in her telling.

‘It be the reason that forces me to summon Lord Havoc,’ Raena went on, staring at the far wall. ‘There be a need on me to find out. Never have I felt such a desperation, Verro! It be like – well, it be like I were an orphan child, starving on the streets, and she were the wife of a rich guildmaster. And she did take me up and bring me to her home. She did feed me, and she did teach me a craft so that never again would I be poor and starving. But then, somewhat did anger her, and she cast me out again.’ Tears sprang up in her eyes. ‘And here I be, wailing and alone.’ The tears ran, but silently, and she made no move to wipe them away.

‘Ah,’ Verrarc said. ‘Then it were somewhat you did that did drive her away?’

‘Somewhat I did not, that I should have done.’ The truth sprang out, as sudden as the tears. ‘She did lay upon me a sacred charge, and I did fail in it. Ah ye gods, that I should have been so weak and unworthy of her love!’

Verrarc moved to sit down with her on the bed. She turned into his arms and sobbed, while he stroked her hair and whispered ‘there, there’ over and over again. At last she quieted, but she clung to him.

‘Well, now,’ Verrarc said, ‘this charge be best done, then, and mayhap she’ll return to you.’

‘So I do hope, though it be not such an easy task. It were about a thing that had been stolen from her, you see, and it does lie now in the midst of her enemies. She did ask me to restore it to her.’

‘What might this thing be?’

She looked up, and he could feel her trembling in his arms.

‘That I can never tell you, Verro,’ she whispered. ‘I beg you, demand not that from me. My secrets you shall have, when the time be ripe for the telling of them. But it were a blasphemy were I to tell you her secrets.’

For a long moment he studied her face. Was she lying or not? He simply couldn’t tell.

‘Well and good then,’ Verrarc said at last. ‘What lies between you and your goddess be not mine to meddle in, anyway.’

Once, long ago, in some immeasurably ancient time, Evandar and his people, Alshandra among them, had dwelt between the stars as beings of pure energy and no form. Somehow, when the Light birthed the vast panoply of worlds, they had been ‘left behind’, as Evandar put it to himself. How or why, he could no longer remember. Yet, since they had been born to follow the path that all souls must take into the physical plane and the world of matter, they had longed for a solid existence in the beauty of a world. To sate their hunger for life he had built that area of the etheric plane he called the Lands, a perfect illusion of the world of Annwn, with its grassy meadows and rivers, its forests and hills – a shadow world so lovely that they had spurned the real world waiting for them on the physical plane.

He had woven them bodies, too, out of the astral substance, modelling them on the elven race he had come to love. Over the aeons Evandar’s dweomer had grown so immensely powerful that he had for a time thought himself as powerful as a god, until the destruction of the Seven Cities of the Far West had stripped him of his arrogance. No matter how much raw dweomer power he expended, no matter how hard he fought with every sort of weapon, in the end the Hordes had won and destroyed every beauty of the elven world. The lesson lived with him still, that as soon as he left his own lands, he too was a slave of change and death, even though his own being seemed immune to both.

And now Time was pursuing him, it seemed, determined to force the lesson home another time. After untold centuries of a perfect spring, the Lands lay besieged by winter. Evandar returned to find his meadows frosted white, his streams frozen, his trees stripped bare, and his people huddled miserably together by the bank of a silver river. When they saw him they cried out.

‘Bring back the spring! Give us summer!’

‘I did that before, and the winter returned to us anyway. Mayhap we’d best just ride the winter out.’

In a screaming pack they rushed forward and surrounded him, yelling, begging, weeping all at once. Evandar raised his arms and shouted for silence. Slowly the babble died.

‘Well and good, then,’ Evandar said. ‘Spring you shall have.’

In his mind he visualized a gigantic silver horn, and in the Lands what Evandar saw appeared for all to see. His folk gasped and moved back to give him room as the horn floated into the air, an apparition the size of a horse and wagon. Through it Evandar called down the astral light. He saw it as a golden surge of raw power that flowed through the horn’s tip and spread out across the meadowlands and into the river. Suddenly the air turned warm; the grass sprang up green; the trees burst into full leaf. On the river bank a cloth-of-gold pavilion sprang into existence.

‘Let us feast,’ Evandar cried out. ‘Let us have music!’

The crowd laughed, calling out his name and cheering him. Yet once they were settled at their feasting, Evandar slipped out of the pavilion. He ran a few steps across the grass, let his elven form dissolve, and as a red hawk he sprang into the air. As he flew in a vast spiral over the river and meadows, he called down the astral light in a hawk’s harsh voice.

Below him snow melted, and grass sprang up, green and lush. Flowers bloomed in an instant, dotting the lawns with white and yellow. In every direction, as far as he could see with a hawk’s long sight, Spring returned, laughing. The hawk cried out once, then broke from his spiral and flew steadily toward the forest at the meeting of the worlds. Shaetano was hiding somewhere, most likely in the part of the Lands that had once been his. Evandar intended to find him.

Down in Deverry, the same storm that was casting its etheric shadow over Evandar’s Lands raged over the northern territories. For three days snow trapped Dun Cengarn in a cage of white. The gwerbret’s men spent their days in the great hall near the two huge hearths and their ever-burning fires, though they made brief forays into the stables to tend their horses. Some even brought their blankets from the barracks and slept on the straw with the servants.

Rhodry stayed mostly among the company of Prince Daralanteriel’s escort of ten elven archers, the last of the large troop he’d assembled for the past summer’s war. With provisions so scarce at Cengarn, the prince had sent the rest of them home long before. Even though his kingdom lay in ruins in the mountains of the far west, by Deverry standards royal blood still ran in Dar’s veins, and he ate and sat at the honour table with Gwerbret Cadmar. Protocol, however, seated his men among the warband, under the captaincy of a pale-haired archer named Vantalaber.

Since the cold draughts bothered the Westfolk men less than it did the human members of Gwerbret Cadmar’s warband, they took the table nearest the back door – they were farther from the human stink that way, too, as the archers often remarked. Just like the human men, they diced to pass their time, although the elven game was a fair bit more complex. Each player took a handful of brightly-coloured wood pieces – cubes and pyramids both – shook them hard, then strewed them in a rough line. Counting the points amounted to another game in itself, with a lot of argument and token cursing from the other players. At times during these sessions one or another man from the warband would stroll over to the elven tables and watch their game, but they never asked to join, and no one invited them, either.

Every now and then a servant girl would come to the table to pour the men ale from a dented flagon or set out a meagre basket of bread. One particular evening, Rhodry realized that it was always the same girl, a buxom little blonde, when she stopped for a moment to chat with one of the archers, Melimaladar, a dark-haired fellow whose eyes were a smoky sort of green, unusual even for one of the People. They whispered together, head to head, until something he said made her giggle, and she trotted off, still smiling to herself.

Vantalaber took a sip of the ale she’d brought and nearly spat it out.

‘Ye gods, it’s watered!’ the captain snarled, but in Elvish. ‘Thin as swill!’

‘The dun’s running out,’ Rhodry said in the same language. ‘Soon enough the steward will be breaking out the vinegar.’

‘What? Why would anyone drink vinegar?’

‘You don’t drink the stuff for itself. You just put a dollop in a tankard of well water. To make it safe, like.’

‘Well, the way these people live in filth, I’m not surprised. But I don’t mean to insult all of humankind. Gwerbret Cadmar’s a fine man in his way.’

‘He is that,’ Rhodry said. ‘Though I worry about his health. He doesn’t have a son to inherit the rhan, and the last thing the Northlands can afford is a cursed feud over rulership.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense. What about his daughters?’

‘Van, they can’t inherit. They’re women. If Cadmar were only a tieryn or a lord, maybe his vassals would back a daughter, but she could never rule as gwerbret.’

Vantalaber rolled his eyes in disgust. Melimaladar, who’d been watching his blonde as she served other tables, leaned forward to join the conversation.