LADY OF LIGHT
The castle beguiled Karigan, drew her to explore
beyond the chamber they’d entered, so she tucked the feather into
her braid as she’d seen Graelalea do and limped across the chamber,
leaving behind the sound of groundmites pounding on the doors and
Grant whimpering against the wall. He’d curled into himself, folded
into a compact ball. She left behind Yates and Ard, and the
Eletians who sat in vigil around Graelalea’s shrouded body. No one
stopped her or asked where she was going.
Somehow she was
supposed to help the Sleepers and she needed to step away to think,
to retreat from the noise, and from the emotions each one of her
remaining companions projected, their confusion, sorrow, fear, and
anger. She felt all those things, too, and did not need them
augmented by the others. At least they were safe from the
groundmites, if not from their noise. Ealdaen said they’d never be
able to force their way into the castle.
She followed a
winding corridor out of the chamber, her feet raising layers of
dust, the bonewood tapping on marble. The curve of the corridor
tantalized her—she wanted to see what was hidden around the
bend—but around and around she went, and though she had a sense of
spiraling inward, the curves grew no tighter, at least not in any
way she could perceive. Her idea of a seashell, like one of the
large conch shells her father’d collected from the Cloud Islands,
remained apt, the smooth pearlescent walls scrolling inward to its
core. What would she find when she reached it?
Very soon she had
her answer. The corridor opened into a vast, round chamber that
soared upward like the other tower, but unlike the other, it
contained no stairs winding to the top, and no bridges crossing its
heights.
Upon pedestals stood
four statues of winged Eletians, each perfect in form, the feathers
of their wings as delicate and airy as the real thing, not at all
resembling the stone they were carved from. The statues aspired to
flight and the tower was high enough. Somehow Karigan knew that
only the open sky would free them, and she felt the conflict of
yearning to ascend with them, but of being Earthbound.
On the floor were
several clumps of bones, faded fabric, and shards of steel
weaponry. A spider, a normal-sized house spider, spun a web in the
rib cage of a nearby skeleton. There was no other evidence of
creatures living or dead, not even mouse tracks in the
dust.
The dust caused the
floor to appear a dull gray, but when she scraped her boot across
it, the floor shone obsidian underneath. More investigation
revealed some pattern inlaid in crystalline quartz too large to
uncover entirely. She thought she would move on and continue her
exploration, to find out what other parts of the castle would be
revealed, when she heard the sound of footsteps behind
her.
She turned to find
Ard emerging from the corridor with bow and nocked arrow pointed
directly at her.
“Ard—what?”
“My true mission,”
he said, “is to see that you don’t survive yours. I kept hoping
something else might take you so I wouldn’t have to do this, but
you kept surviving.”
At first Karigan
could only gape, but then it dawned on her. “You ... you were
there,” she said, her voice barely rising above a whisper, but
carrying easily across the cavernous room. “You were really there,
weren’t you, when I was caught in that creature’s
web.”
Ard nodded. “I
thought those monsters would finish you. No luck, so here I am. I
regret this, but I’ve no choice.”
“But why? At least
tell me that. What have I ever done to you?” Karigan stepped back,
her heel nudging a pile of bones that rattled. A leg bone rolled
away.
“Duty to my clan,”
he replied. “To protect the marriage of my lady to the king. You
are a threat, and anything that threatens my lady must be
destroyed.”
Karigan’s heart
thudded. Others knew of her feelings for the king? Someone high up
thought her enough of a threat to murder her? The captain had
warned her that with her knighthood she’d entered the thorny world
of the royal court, but this went beyond politics! Or maybe she was
just being naive.
Ard tautened the bow
string. “I do this for my lady, and with her blessing.” He loosed
the arrow, but it flew wild, hitting the wall behind her. Ard’s
knees folded and he crumpled to the floor, a white Eletian arrow
piercing his throat. Karigan’s own knees went weak.
Ealdaen appeared
from the corridor with bow in hand, and he glanced briefly at Ard
before stepping over the forester’s body.
“I saw him follow
you out,” Ealdaen said. “He had an interest in you all along, but
not knowing the ways of your people, I could not discern his
intent. Until now.”
Karigan’s grip on
the bonewood was clammy. It was too much betrayal to sort out all
at once. Ard as murderer, with Estora’s blessing. Estora, who had
been her friend.
And now she was
alone with Ealdaen who’d once tried to kill her. He strode toward
her.
“Did you kill Ard so
you could finish me off yourself?” She extended the bonewood to
staff length with a shake and stood in a defensive
position.
Ealdaen paused, a
bemused expression on his face. “You are truly difficult to
understand at times, you and your people. I am not here to kill
you, Galadheon, but to aid you. The reason for hunting you in the
past no longer exists. You are free of the tainted wild
magic.”
Karigan released a
long breath and relaxed her stance.
“Omens and
prophecies are not set in stone,” Ealdaen continued. “A river will
change course. You’ve a particular unpredictability, Galadheon, one
that all the prophecies of the crown prince cannot pin
down.”
“Maybe Eletians are
too set in their ways,” Karigan replied, not so ready to forgive
one who almost killed her based on the unreliability of
prophecy.
He bowed his head
accepting her words without recrimination. “It is clear that you’ve
a purpose here, which I’m only just beginning to understand.
Graelalea must have known something of it for she passed to you one
of her feathers. And you are Laurelyn-touched.”
He was right, she
was here for a purpose, drawn by an apparition she’d seen one snowy
night along the Arrowdale Road. Why she hadn’t remembered that
purpose before, she did not know, but it galled her to learn that
yet once again other forces were directing her life. She’d work out
her feelings about that later—she’d more pressing concerns
now.
“I am here to help
the Sleepers,” she said. “I was told this.”
“By
whom?”
“A woman in the
light.” Karigan thought her words wouldn’t have made sense to
anyone else or under different circumstances.
“I find it
interesting that you found your way to this chamber of your own
accord.”
“Why?”
Ealdaen produced his
moonstone and strode to the center of the chamber. The shadows cast
by the moonstone shifted as he walked, making the statues seem to
follow him with their gazes, their wings flexing for flight. Walls
of translucent light rose from the quartz in the
floor.
“You saw a small
version of this in Telavalieth,” Ealdaen said. “You called it a
moondial. This is Castle Argenthyne’s moondial.” He glanced at the
skeleton near his feet. “I knew the defenders of this tower. They
stayed to the last. Alas, the castle did fall.” He gazed around the
chamber some more. “The gnomon is missing. Just like in
Telavalieth.”
The phases of the
moon shone in the light that bathed the floor, and the stars, too,
transforming the floor into a celestial map. Beneath them, in the
very center of the chamber, was a large round piece of quartz that
had the shading and subtlety of a silvery full moon. It was, by
magnitudes, larger than the moondial in Telavalieth.
“How would you
awaken the Sleepers?” Karigan asked.
Ealdaen lowered his
moonstone and there was that disconcerting sense of the world
shifting with the light.
“We would sing to
them,” he replied.
“That’s
all?”
“There is a certain
song, and a certain way of singing it. A calling it is. The
Sleepers choose to heed or ignore it. But yes, that is
all.”
Before Karigan could
question him further, another light coalesced in the chamber, a
liquid column of light just like the one she had seen that night in
Arrowdale. But the figure within was clearer this time: a woman
with hair flowing about her shoulders and her gown touched by no
earthly breeze.
Ealdaen fell
immediately to his knee and bowed his head. Every song and tale of
Argenthyne Karigan ever heard flowed through her mind and this time
she knew immediately who stood before her—Laurelyn, Laurelyn the
Moondreamer; Laurelyn, the queen of lost Argenthyne, sweet
Silvermind.
Ealdaen, the woman of light said, rise.
Ealdaen did so,
though at first hesitant; he slowly raised his face to meet her
gaze. “I thought never to look upon you again, my
queen.”
Nor I, you, but it heartens me to see you here now for
this unfolding.
They spoke at length
in Eletian and although Karigan could not understand the
conversation, she felt grief and anguish in their words. There was
a shared history between the two, a history Ealdaen was reliving by
having come home.
Excluded by their
language and conversation, Karigan thought to leave them to give
them privacy, but she was caught by surprise when Ealdaen spoke
again in the common tongue.
“I am here to redeem
myself,” he said.
So be it, Laurelyn replied. She turned her gaze
upon Karigan, and Karigan was arrested by the queen’s eyes of
midnight blue, her appearance far, far clearer than that night in
Arrowdale.
Daughter of Kariny, you are here at last. My influence is
stronger here, but still it wanes, and soon it will vanish
entirely. The powers of the forest have striven to vanquish me
altogether. I still fight, and here within the castle I am a little
protected.
“How do you expect
me to help the Sleepers?” Karigan demanded. “Why me?”
You can cross thresholds, the liminal line, and by doing
so, you will lead the Sleepers to safety. Daughter of Kariny, you
can step through layers of the world.
Karigan could not
remember ever being told this, and yet she knew it as if someone
had explained it all to her before. Her ability to fade was really
the ability to stand on that threshold, but her ability was meager,
even with her brooch augmenting it. It took some additional force
to push her across, like the wild magic that had once allowed her
to pass through the ages to the time of the First
Rider.
“I do not know what
to do,” Karigan said.
I will tell you, Laurelyn replied.
Just then, the other
Eletians, along with Yates, Lynx, and Grant, filed into the
chamber. Their eyes grew wide as they took in Ard’s body and the
lady of light. The Eletians dropped to their knees as Ealdaen
had.
Laurelyn swept her
arm up and pointed, the light sparking with anger around her. Grant
cowered away, hid behind Lynx. That
one, she declared, brings evil into
this place.