Wild Blood (Book 7) (5 page)

“Now if you want to go on and sulk, go ahead, if you want somebody to be angry at, though, come to Sharl or me, not Cyril. We’re the ones to blame, if you like.”

Lady Rivkah’s exit from the room was quickly followed by the entrance of a bevy of serving maids bringing a box for Ria’s clothes. Ria fled to the kitchen, where she found to her disgust that a similar state of chaos reigned. Even the cellars, which Ria had always disliked because of their dark, close atmosphere, were too crowded and bustling to give her sanctuary. At last there was nowhere to go but back to the stable, where thankfully the horses were not inclined to irritate her further.

Ria picked up one of the stable boy’s brushes and began grooming one of the horses, comforted by the huge, gentle presence of the animal. Lord Sharl and Lady Rivkah had told Ria that her mother could hear animals’ thoughts, speak to them in the same way, even see through their eyes. Ria had tried and tried and tried, but although she could befriend the most ill-tempered dog in the keep and coax the most feral of the barn cats to eat tidbits from her hand, that appeared to be the extent of it. Ria had been inconsolable when she’d realized that, like magery, such a gift didn’t seem to be a matter of trying; one either had it or one didn’t, and it appeared that Ria simply didn’t. She’d have given—well, just about anything in the world to fly with a bird the way her mother had.

She’d been so looking forward to the trip to Allanmere, the prospect of escaping the monotony of Lord Emaril’s country keep. Now it seemed, however, as if Ria was walking into a cage even smaller and far less escapable—marriage.

Oh, to be a bird, to fly high above the cage walls that closed more tightly around her every moment.

Ria froze where she was.

Yes, a bird could soar over cage walls.

But a mouse, small and insignificant and nearly invisible, might very well slip through the bars.

Chapter Two—Valann

Valann could only cough weakly now, his eyes burning, the thick smoke choking him so that he wavered in and out of consciousness. Sweat ran down his body in rivulets, but he was too weak to raise his hands to wipe it away. In a moment he would surely die, his aching lungs no longer able to draw even a little air to sustain him from the roiling smoke. He almost reached for the cord fastening the tent flap; then he let his hand drop back. He
would
die, and gladly, before he’d fail his passage trials.

The fire was dying as the smoke choked it, too. Val’s body was weakened by the burning herbs and powders, but not his gift; he inched his hand toward the brazier. Almost before he focused on the dying flames, they flared anew. Val had just enough consciousness left to be dimly surprised at how effortlessly he prodded the flames to burn higher. Just as Dusk had said, the fasting and the rigors of his passage trials strengthened the spirit.

It seemed forever, but likely it was only a short time before the tent flap opened, admitting a wonderful rush of cool, clear air. Dusk leaned in.

“Are you ready to come out?” he asked gently.

Valann tried to answer but could only cough weakly, wheezing helplessly.

“Yes. I think you are.” Dusk slid his hands under Val’s shoulders and pulled him carefully from the tent, then leaned back in to pour a dipperful of water over the smoking brazier. Dusk gently wiped Val’s face with a moist cloth, nodding sympathetically while Val coughed and retched. When Val was finally able to breathe quietly again, Dusk gave him water, heavily laced with medicinal herbs, a tiny sip at a time.

“You are almost ready,” Dusk said gently. “Perhaps I put too much dreamweed on the brazier, a poor thing for a Gifted One to do. Did you dream in the smoke? Some say the dreams of passage trials are visions of the future.”

“No.” Val shook his head. His voice was a hoarse rasp. “No dreams.”

“I dreamt.” Dusk’s eyes had that pale, faraway look that meant that his mind had drifted away to that distant place it sometimes went. Sometimes his mind brought back visions, too, from that place.

“What?” Val wanted to question Dusk as he’d seen his heart-mother Rowan do, gently leading the Gifted One through the mists of his thoughts to bring the vision into the light, but he had no breath, no voice to do it. Each word was a scratching torment on his throat, and he couldn’t seem to concentrate.

“I felt your sister walking unseen in the wood,” Dusk said, his eyes fixed on some point just beyond Val’s face. “I saw a legion of humans clad in furs, carrying fire and steel, their hands red with blood, their feet trampling the forest. They came behind your sister, far behind, like a great dark storm cloud rising over the forest, a storm bound to rend the trees from the earth, and she was a small light against that darkness, bright and pure, her brilliance piercing the great cloud like a single golden ray of sunlight. And you walked to meet her, holding out a precious gift in your hands, a gift of freedom.”

Rowan had always said that Dusk’s visions were important, but Val only half understood what Dusk was saying, his head spun so dizzily from the potent herb smoke and the potion Dusk had given him. He was weak, too, from hunger; he’d fasted for four days while cleansing potions and ritual baths purged his body of all impurities, while ritual chants and meditation exercises cleansed his spirit. He forced himself up to a sitting position, shaking his head to clear it.

“What?” he asked groggily.

Dusk’s eyes cleared suddenly, and he smiled sympathetically at Val.

“Too much dreamweed on the brazier,” Dusk said again. “You have a little time to rest before the sun sets, but remember that you must not sleep yet. Come, you can lie down and Lahti will stay with you. When I left Rowan after mixing the potion, the other elders were still arguing.”

Val was miserably glad to crawl to the furs Dusk had spread on the ground and lie down, closing his eyes so he would not have to watch the dizzy spin of the world around him. Oh, for only one hour’s peaceful sleep. But he was forbidden sleep until his dreaming time came at sunset. Val grimly forced his eyes open again.

Lahti appeared at his side as if by magic, her long brown braid tickling his face until she flipped it back over her shoulder. Her warm brown eyes, usually sparkling with mischief, were now wide with worry.

“I’ve brought you some cold minted water,” she said, easing her forearm under Val’s shoulders, “Dusk said it would ease your stomach.” She lifted him with some difficulty; although she was tall for her age and her clan, like most of the elves in Inner Heart she was small compared to Valann. Val helped as best he could, and Lahti was able to support him in a half-sitting position and hold the wooden cup to his lips.

His senses almost painfully heightened, Val breathed in Lahti’s scent, a mixture of the leather of her clothing, the pungent odor of the herbs she’d bathed in to purify herself so she could assist Dusk and be with Val during the rituals, her own slightly musky scent—but over it all, the sharp tang of her fear. She was terribly afraid for him, as he knew Dusk and Rowan were despite their seeming calm—no elf, to anyone’s knowledge, had ever taken the trials of passage into adulthood so young. And there had never been, to anyone’s knowledge, a youth of only part elven blood to face the trials at all.

“Dusk said the elders were still arguing,” Val rasped painfully.

“Still.” Lahti smiled a little. “Don’t make that fierce scowl, my friend. The elders are only concerned for you, so young and your blood not pure. What if the potion poisoned you, like the mushrooms you ate three years ago that almost killed you? Even Dusk can’t be certain, and he’s tended you all your life. And what if your spirit isn’t old and strong enough to make the journey to the Mother Forest and back? Some have failed on their first journey; some have even died, or been spirit-lost and worse than dead. I have two decades and five years, and I’ve trained with Dusk for years, and my spirit still hasn’t called for the journey. How can your spirit be ready almost a decade sooner?”

As always, Lahti’s touch, her scent, were almost as much a torment as they were soothing. He fumbled for her hand, held it over his heart where the springy black curls had grown, so that she felt the quickened beat of his blood.

“My spirit is ready,” he whispered.

“I know.” Lahti glanced around her, then smiled mischievously and ran her fingers up the inside of his thigh, making Val gasp involuntarily. Then she took pity on him and stopped. “I feel your body calling. I wish mine could answer. I wish I could be the one to come to your hut after you return from the Mother Forest.”

“I wish that, too.” Val shivered as a new wave of nausea washed through him, banishing his arousal as abruptly as it had come. “But for now I only want this all to be done. It seems like forever since I last had a mouthful of meat, since I last slept.”

“It can’t be rushed. Without the trials to strengthen your spirit, you might not return safely from your journey.” Lahti lowered Val back to the furs and glanced around again. This time she laid one small, callused palm on Val’s forehead, the other over his heart, and Val felt her healing power flow into him as smoothly as the sunlight flowed down through the leafy canopy. Immediately his stomach eased and his reeling head settled in a wave of cool well-being. Val caught at Lahti’s hands, pulled them away from his body.

“You shouldn’t do that,” he whispered.

“No tradition says you must be left to suffer,” Lahti whispered back. “Rest now until Dusk returns.”

Val sighed and relaxed, his head cradled on Lahti’s lap, for the moment as at peace from his desire as he was from his dizziness and nausea. So skilled already, her gift, although—or perhaps because—she still ran with the child-pack. There were always plenty of bruises, scrapes, and even broken bones for her to practice on, plus the occasional more seriously wounded animal. Her gift of healing had shown itself so early that Dusk had perforce been training her in its use for years. Now he was teaching her the use of herbs and other materials to supplement her natural gift.

Healing—the most welcome of all the old gifts. Nobody saw in Lahti’s gift, in her very flesh, an unpleasant reminder of the devastation of their world. But even the children had run, at first, from Val’s gift of fire.

And some of his own people—or as much his own people as they could ever be—argued even now to deny him his most fundamental right, his passage into adulthood. Would he be more acceptable, more harmless to them if he could somehow be frozen in childhood? But there was no holding back the change of seasons of his body; the Mother Forest had come months ago in a dream of Lahti to waken his flesh, as She came to all children in their time. Only the doubts of some of the elders in Inner Heart—surely it could not be his true waking dream, not when he was hardly more than a decade and a half old!—had prevented his passage ritual from being conducted immediately. But his body knew beyond any doubt that he was done with childhood.

And just as he’d always felt the need to run twice as fast, climb twice as high, shoot twice as far as any of the rest of the child-pack, he’d been doubly painstaking in his observance of the preparations for his passage. Most young hunters made the bowl for their passage potion from the skull of a deer killed in an ordinary hunt; Val had set out alone with only spear and dagger to kill one of the fierce boars that roamed the Heartwood, and he’d succeeded. He’d prepared the bowl with his own hands, and the meat was likely even now roasting over fires in Inner Heart. He’d traded dearly for the finest, sweetest oil for his purification and had bathed with sweet-smelling herbs twice each day during his passage instead of the required once. Despite her station as the Eldest of the clan, his heart-mother Rowan had chosen the finest, softest hides and taken the time to tan, dye, and bead his ceremonial jerkin and trousers herself, and Val had brought his finest bow and one of the boar’s great curled tusks to leave as his offering to the Mother Forest. Val had fasted for four days instead of the required three, foregoing even the permitted herbal teas. None of the clan elders could fault his preparation, at least. What more could they possibly ask of him? How could they dream of denying him? The sudden surge of anger at that thought surprised Val with its intensity.

Perhaps a frown furrowed his brow. Lahti smoothed her hand gently over his forehead, and Val opened his eyes to her smile.

“Dusk is returning,” she said. “He must have spoken successfully on your behalf. I can smell your dreaming potion in the bowl he carries.”

Val sat up, too fast; his head swam again and he sank back to the furs. Mysteriously Lahti had vanished; this time it was Dusk whose arm supported him. The Gifted One’s face was drawn with concern.

“Come,” he said. “Can you walk? We should hurry. The sun is setting.”

“What?” The world swam around Val again. Dusk’s smooth shoulders were strong under his arm, the scent of the potion strange and heady. Then the scattered stone slabs of the Forest Altars were around them, and Val could feel the sun-warmed hardness of stone under the fur on which he lay like an offering.

Suddenly, despite the Forest Altars around him, despite the certainty of the Mother Forest’s protection in this sacred place where the elves came to worship, he felt frightened, alien, and alone. What if the elders who protested his passage were right? What if the Mother Forest rejected him because of his human blood? What if his spirit was unready for passage into adulthood?

“No doubts,” Dusk said kindly, as if reading his thoughts. “You fear death, and you must in truth die a kind of death. Valann the boy must return to the Mother Forest, and Valann the man will come back to us changed greatly by his journey. But the man is strong enough in spirit to return. I prepared you myself for this journey, and it is a trail I know well. I’ve walked it many times.”

He held the bone bowl to Val’s lips, and Val swallowed thick, bittersweet liquid. Fire poured down his throat and into his vitals, and for a moment Val remembered Lahti’s words and knew terror that this potion might poison him as he had nearly been killed by eating the common white-capped tree mushrooms that every elf ate from childhood. Then the burning passed, left him feeling cold and weak and empty. Could the Mother Forest fill that emptiness when he was not truly a part of it? Alone. So alone.

“We all walk alone in this world,” Dusk seemed to say, or perhaps Val only imagined it. “But in the Mother Forest we never walk alone, and you least of all.”

Val was tired, so very tired. Without opening his eyes, he knew somehow that Dusk had gone. Had the sun set? Despite the warm air he was cold, then hot, then cold again. There were warm furs over him, but somehow they did not fight the chill—was it fear?—that came from somewhere within him.

It seemed that he was sinking slowly into the earth, as softly and comfortably as he might sink into a thick pile of furs to sleep on a cold winter’s night. He slid down along the roots of the trees, digging deep into moist, rich soil fairly bursting with life. But below the roots, he could feel himself approaching an unknown realm where there were no stars to point his way, no trails he knew. What waited there was powerful and hungry and alive, alive, wild and fierce and old and strange—

Your gift is fire,
Dusk had told him during the days of fasting, of purification rituals.
But fire’s not a part of the Mother Forest. Fire is a tool, but a tool of death, not allied with the green growing things. It cannot guide you to the heart of life. You must find another guide. Turn toward the earth and ask for help.

But what help might there be? He had friends, many friends among the child-pack, but they had begun to draw away from him when his body had rushed unexpectedly toward adulthood, when hair began to sprout bizarrely from his arms and legs, his chest, even his chin and upper lip. Already he was almost as tall as most of the adults in the clan, his shoulders broader, his muscles large, ungainly lumps on his body. The children drew away not only because of his strangeness, but because he was no longer one of them; they knew, if the elders did not, that Val had charged headlong into the adult world.