The Dreaming Hunt (55 page)

The silence around them was expansive, interrupted only by the wind in the trees. Which was maybe why the voices were worse than ever tonight, whispering to her on the chilly winds of coming winter. As they walked through the day, she heard only snippets of voices in her head, but when they made camp, the whispers became deafening roars inside her head.

She sat by the fire one evening, frowning in concentration as she tried to make out words and meaning within the shouted syllables.

Rynn sat down next to her, bowl in hand, to eat. He asked around a mouthful of rabbit stew, compliments of Sha'Li's hunting skill, “Are you all right?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I sense your disquiet. And you've been distracted all day.”

She glanced sidelong at the paxan. “How much can you sense?”

He shrugged. “Waking minds are guarded against my talents much more than sleeping ones.”

“Does that mean you can poke around in our minds at will while we sleep?”

“It is not that simple. Nor is such practice ethical.”

“Ethics matter to you, then?”

He turned his head to stare coolly at her. “You need to ask?” He sounded almost offended.

“No. I do not. I'm sorry. I'm just on edge tonight.”

“I noticed,” he commented dryly. “Why?”

She remembered his calming influence the day she'd heard the stones talking to her inside that cliff. In for a copper, in for a gold. She murmured, “The voices are starting to get the best of me.”

“Tell me about them. What are they saying?”

“I cannot make out words. It's as if a great crowd of people is shouting all at once, making me unable to hear any of them.”

“Echoes,” he stated confidently.

Now that he mentioned it, that was a good description of the sound. “Yes. Exactly.”

He nodded soberly. “For some reason, you have the ability to hear spirits that once were. Scholars among my kind argue over whether echoes linger from the past as disembodied things or whether they emanate from living beings as echoes of those people's pasts.”

“I'm not sure I care which it is, if I can just find a way to make them be quiet.”

“Do you mind if I take a look inside your mind? I might be able to do something to quiet them, if only temporarily.”

“By all means.”

He set his bowl down and placed his big, warm hands on either side of her head, his fingers threading through her hair to rest directly against her scalp. His touch was soothing, and her eyelids drifted closed.

Rynn's presence inside her mind was confident. Comfortable. She was in good hands. “
Let's have a look at these echoes, shall we?
” he projected into her consciousness.

Experimentally, she thought back to him, “
Yes. Let's
.”

“
Show them to me
.”

She stilled her thoughts and opened her awareness to the night around her, the same way she would if she were about to summon a large quantity of magic. The stars were cold pinpricks of light, the dew gathering on the grass chilly. There. The whispers were coming close again. She tensed.

“
Don't fight them,
” Rynn directed. “
Let them pass through you
.”

“
Easy for you to say. They make me crazy after a while
.”

“
Just for a minute or two while I take a look at them and trace their source
.”

The voices retreated sharply from her mind at the suggestion that he was going to find where they came from. But gradually, she relaxed and the voices came back. It wasn't so bad with Rynn's warm, calming presence inside her mind to act as a buffer against the battering noise.

After a minute or so, his hands slipped away, and she opened her eyes. He was staring down at her thoughtfully. “Where does your magic come from?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“When you summon magic, where does it come from?”

“I don't know. It just comes.”

“Would you mind summoning some while I watch?”

“You mean to watch from inside my mind?”

“Correct.”

“If it will help with the voices,” she replied.

His hands came up to encompass her head once more.

It felt incredibly intimate calling magic to herself while someone else watched like this, from inside her mind. She summoned magic to each of her hands individually, holding them out to her sides so she wouldn't harm him where he sat directly in front of her, his muscular arms encircling her.

“Ahh,” he sighed inside her mind. His satisfaction was palpable, flowing through her like a soothing bath.

His hands lifted away from her head. She looked up at him, abruptly aware of him as a person and not just a big, forbidding bodyguard.

“So here's the thing, Raina. Your magical energy comes from the same place as those echoes. I do not know if the echoes come attached to the energy or if, by summoning magic, you open a doorway that lets the voices through. But either way, the voices and your magic are linked.”

“Why do other spirit magic casters not hear these voices, then?” She raised her voice and called across the clearing to where Rosana sat with Will, hands linked and foreheads touching. “Rosie, do you ever hear whispers of people speaking inside your head, particularly when you're casting spirit magic?”

The gypsy looked away from Will and frowned. “No. Why do you ask?”

“See?” Raina turned back to Rynn. “It's just me.”

“Yes, but you summon extraordinary amounts of magic. It may be that the echoes do not become audible until you pull forth a great deal of magic from whence it derives.”

“I haven't been casting much magic for a while, though. There's been no need for it out here with just the six of us.”

“I doubt that the correlation between use and volume of the voices is direct. You have opened a gate wide within yourself. It remains open at all times, the magic accessible whenever you have need of it. The more magic you know how to draw to yourself, the louder the voices in your head become.”

“I don't know if I can stand hearing them all the time. What if they truly make me insane?”

“You can do exercises to calm your mind. I could teach you how to meditate. If we cannot silence the voices, mayhap you can make peace with them.”

She nodded doubtfully.

He glanced over at Rosana. “It might behoove you to meditate with Raina and me, also, in case this phenomenon of spirit echoes begins to affect you, as well.”

Will asked jokingly, “Would meditation shut up Bloodroot inside my noggin?”

“Perhaps,” Rynn answered seriously. The paxan turned his gaze on Eben next. “And a bit of meditation would not hurt you, either, my tense friend.”

Sha'Li announced forcefully, “Meditation I need not. Stand guard I shall while songs you sing and happy thoughts think.”

Rynn grinned broadly at her. “You, my dear girl, do not need my services. Your mind is pure in thought and clear in purpose.”

“Really?” Sha'Li asked, sounding as startled as she ever did. The lizardman girl puffed up her chest a little and squared her shoulders as she strode off through the grass toward the latest seep Eben had found for them.

Rynn announced, “It is not too late for a lesson now in the basics of meditation. Close your eyes and do as I say.”

Raina was so relaxed she was on the edge of going to sleep when Sha'Li's urgent whisper interrupted her meditation. “Something moves in the dark—”

It was all that Sha'Li got out before an arrow tip protruded through her throat and she pitched forward into the dirt at Raina's feet. Stunned, Raina dropped to her friend's side. Working frantically, she broke the fletching off the arrow, rolled the lizardman girl onto her side, and wrenched the arrow the rest of the way through her throat. A gush of hot blood went all over Raina's hands, and she steeled herself against panic at the sight of her friend bleeding out.

Shouts erupted all around her, and the party sprang into action as one.

She called life-renewing magic and slammed it into Sha'Li all in one movement. The telltale gasp of returning life came, and Raina hit her friend with another blast of healing. Leaping to her feet, the lizardman girl dived back into the fray, while Raina whirled to face desperate combat all around her.

Her impulse was to save her friends first. It wasn't noble, and it wasn't in the spirit of her colors. Except she knew and loved them. And besides, they were closest to her. It was not her sworn purpose to prevent her friends from defending themselves, merely to keep their foes from dying once the fight was concluded.

Her friends were directly in front of her for the most part. She would have to force her way past them to even be able to reach the assailants. She did halfheartedly lob a healing spell at one of the Dominion attackers lying on the ground. It hit the fellow but did not appear to have any effect. He must have been dead or dying. She made a mental note to check on him in a few minutes if the fight was not concluded by then.

Black-and-red Dominion tabards announced who their attackers were. But this time it was not a scouting party of five overconfident warriors. This time it was a squad of at least twenty, with a magic caster and an alchemist to boot. Her friends were quickly being backed into the fire, and she kicked dirt over it frantically lest they end up roasted as well as dead.

She hated feeling this helpless. Back in Dupree, Lenora had cast the rituals to remove all of Raina's damaging spells from her memory at Raina's request. It was not required of White Heart members to do that, but given the amount of mana she possessed, she'd felt it prudent to take the precaution. She felt a momentary stab of regret now that she could not blast everyone in the clearing.

The party was hard-pressed by multiple attackers. Gashes and blood sprang up on Will and Eben's tabards, and even Rynn had three horizontal gashes across one of his shoulders from the swipe of a clawed paw. She cast healing at each one of them.

The party healed for the moment, she cast sleep spells at the nearest Dominion fighters, who dropped to the ground. Unfortunately, new Dominion attackers stepped over the prone forms and took up the attack where their companions had left off.

Without warning, a burst of magic rippled across her skin. Thankfully, she had up a magical shield of her own to absorb what felt like a silence spell. Without being able to incant aloud, she would not be able to shape magical energy into specific spells.

Quickly, she cast another magic shield upon herself, but in the meantime, Eben staggered and went down under a barrage of blows from at least four attackers. She threw a ball of magic at him and managed to hit his leg. He lurched back to consciousness, his health restored.

But her healing only prolonged the inevitable. No sooner had he regained consciousness than the changelings around him hacked into him viciously. Lying on the ground as he was, he had no means of protecting himself.

“Stop!” she screamed at his attackers. But they ignored her. She frantically cast healing at all her friends, flinging magic as fast as she could. But to no avail. No matter how fast she healed her friends, the attackers were able to slice them to bits again faster. There were just too many Dominion fighters. Too many weapons. No matter how well her companions fought, they were going to lose.

Three blasts of magic flew at her in quick succession. The first two she was able to protect herself against, but the third one froze her entire body in place, arm raised to cast magic at Rynn, whose bloody form had just been buried in a pile of Dominion tabards, his fists and feet still flailing grimly.

At least half their attackers were down on the ground, and several more were upright but badly wounded. She tried to talk, but her jaw was as immobile as the rest of her. She'd been paralyzed somehow. As she watched on in helpless horror, her remaining friends fell one by one, hacked and gutted into barely recognizable human forms.

Last to go down, Will cut loose with an impressive blast of magic that took out all four of the attackers on top of him, flinging them back, blackened and dead. But he did not get up from where he fell. A pack of Dominion beasts leaped upon his prostrate form and tore at it like hyenas feeding. She would have turned her head away from the gory sight, but she could not even close her eyes to stop herself from witnessing the terrible deaths of her friends.

Her terror was such that she had trouble forming thoughts. What would the Dominion do to her when this magical paralysis wore off? Would it be worse than the nightmare she'd already witnessed? If only she had a means of killing herself. A dagger lay on the ground a dozen feet away from her. Mayhap she could dive on it and stab her heart with it before the attackers did their worst to her. But the blade was probably too far away to reach before the creatures fell upon her. She gazed around frantically for some other weapon to kill herself with.

The thought vaguely passed through her mind that defending all life included her own life. Except she was already dead. Her attackers just hadn't gotten around to finishing her off yet. She was merely choosing a less violent and terrible means of accomplishing her demise.

Rosana was on the ground, but Raina could see her breathing deeply and evenly. Had she been magically slept, maybe? Was it possible that the gypsy would rouse and save their friends in a few minutes? Not that Raina would be alive to see it. Given the rabid way the beasts were starting to eye her, she would not live one more minute.

If only her captors would turn her loose, she would happily heal everyone. Surely, they knew that it was her duty as a White Heart member to do so. She watched in dismay as her friends' corpses were methodically searched and disarmed of all their weapons. No healing was given to them. The internal clock in her head that counted out how long everyone had been dead was ticking along at light speed. If they did not let her out of this paralysis soon, her friends and a good number of the Dominion would die.