Shan sagged in his chains as the torment enveloped him in a hazy cloud of mind-numbing pain. He clung to consciousness and sanity by a thread, the words he’d just cried so defiantly repeating in his mind again and again, punctuated by the sound of Elfeya’s quiet weeping.
An icy breath blew across his face, soft and taunting. “You will rot in darkness, Fey, while your mate serves my pleasure and your daughter surrenders her soul.”
The mad sentience in Shan’s soul roared with fury. Across the link that bound him to his child, her own beast screamed back in wild Rage. The next moment, a vast bolus of power blasted across the link, rushing into his broken body, searing him with a painful jolt. His beast seized the power, using it to feed his Rage. Shan’s vision turned to black shadow lit with vengeful red sparks. “Not if I rip you limb from limb and feast on your bloody bones, Eld maggot.” He lunged for the Mage, teeth bared as he cried, “Ve sha Desriel!”
He saw the war hammer swinging from the corner of his eye. The Mage cried, “Don’t kill him, you idiot!” Pain smashed into his skull. Shan’s body went limp as consciousness fled.
Sol clutched his daughter’s body, rocking her as he had so many times in the past, singing the songs that had soothed her as a child. Blazing twenty-five-fold weaves of power formed a visible dome of magic around them. A five-fold weave had done almost nothing to ease her suffering, but the twenty-five-fold weave had at least dulled the pain enough that she was no longer screaming and convulsing.
Marissya didn’t know how to heal her. The pain, whatever it was, was not coming from any wound to her body, and whenever Marissya tried to probe, Ellysetta’s tairen roused with a vengeance, fierce and furious over any hint ofshei’dalinintrusion into her mind. Rain, whom Ellysetta trusted, could not touch her without causing further pain. And Gaelen, who had suggested he spin the forbidden soul magic Azrahn to see what he could detect, had been unanimously shouted down.
Suddenly Ellysetta’s spine went stiff again and her eyes flew open wide. “K’shareth na pearson sh’verre korbay!” she cried, her voice a ragged scrape of sound, hoarse and broken and several octaves lower than her normal tones. “K’shafair na selltemorra sh’verre dagorren! K’shadure a daynalle pear coda la cresses! K’shafay! Shaysan lowcha! Liesse chakai!” She shouted the last wild words, then collapsed in Sol’s arms. Her head lolled back, and she began to mutter the same unintelligible phrases over and over again.
Sol raised stricken eyes to the Fey, who were standing around him in shocked silence. “All you Fey with all your power, can you do nothing? Was Laurie right about this being demons after all?”
Bel swallowed. “Only if the demon possessing her is the spirit of a Fey warrior.”
“What do you mean?” Sol demanded.
“We mean she is speaking Feyan,” Rain said.
“Feyan? Then what is she saying?” Sol asked.
Rain answered, his face a blank mask. “She said, ‘I am the steel no enemy can shatter.’” One by one, Bel, Dax, and Gaelen added their voices to his until they were all repeating the words together. “‘I am the magic no dark power can defeat. I am the rock upon which evil breaks like waves. I am Fey, warrior of honor, champion of Light.’”
“It is the warrior’s creed,” Gaelen said, “taught to every Fey boy who enters the Warriors’ Academy to begin his training in the Cha Baruk.”
With a sudden, fierce scowl, Rain knelt beside Sol Baristani and seized Ellysetta by the shoulders. “Nal?” he demanded. “Nal ve sha?Who are you? What is your name?”
Her head lolled limp on her neck. He caught her face between his hands. “Tell me!” The muted pain of her unseen injuries tore at his senses. Within his soul, Rain’s tairen roused, hissing, power licking at his limbs and lunging against its restraints.
He felt the sudden wild surge as Ellysetta’s own tairen leapt in answer. Her eyes flew open and fixed upon his face. The threads of their bond blazed to life. His tairen, Eras, roared with fury, sensing something else—someone else—there in her soul with them. Before he could react to the threat, Ellysetta’s body flared bright with sudden power, and Rain’s limbs went abruptly weak. Her pupils widened until no hint of green iris showed, and Rain reared back in instinctive shock and horror as, for one brief instant, her eyes shone pure black, filled with whirling red sparks.
“Ve sha Desriel!” she cried. The combined power left her on a rush. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped, unconscious, in her father’s arms.
“What in the Seven Hells just happened?” Dax demanded. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” Rain snapped. “Something was there, inside her, something besides her tairen. I don’t know what—maybe aMage, maybe a demon. Whatever it was nearly brought out her tairen, and she can’t control it yet. We need to get her to the Fading Lands. Right now.” He spun a shout across the common Fey thread.«Fey! Prepare for departure!»
“Rain,” Marissya protested. “You can’t mean to send her through the Mists now. We have no idea how they’ll react to her Mage Marks, and if that seizure nearly brought out the tairen, the Mists may well finish the job.”
“Marissya’s right, Rain,” Bel agreed. “The Mists can brutalize a Fey. She needs time to recover, to rebuild her inner barriers to keep the tairen in check.”
Rain turned hard, furious eyes on the pair of them. “We don’t have time. I don’t know what attacked her just now, but I’ll be scorched if we’re going to stay around here one bell longer and give it a chance to come back. Marissya, the chime she wakes, weave peace on her. Bel, Gaelen, you two help her build what barriers she needs to keep the tairen caged and protect herself against whatever the Mists might try to do to her.”
“Rain?” Sol Baristani interrupted. The woodcarver was still holding his daughter’s unconscious body, stroking her hair and rocking her as he had so many times since her earliest childhood. “‘Vaysha Dezrielle.’ She’s said that before during her seizures. Is it also Feyan? Do you know what it means?”
Rain’s mouth pressed into a grim line. “It means ‘I am Death.’”
Teleon was a flurry of activity as the Fey rushed to prepare for departure. As Rain had commanded, the moment Ellysetta regained consciousness, Marissya began weaving peace on her, while Bel and Gaelen helped her rebuild the internal barriers her seizure had shredded. As soon as they had finished, the Fey began marching out of Teleon.
Ellysetta, still pale and wan from her seizure, desperately tried to hold back her tears as she knelt on the shining, silver-blue steps of Teleon to clasp the twins in yet another fierce hug. She didn’twant to let them go, didn’t want to think of waking up to a morning when she would not see their sweet, smiling faces. But her seizure and her duty to the tairen left her no choice.
“I will miss you both,” she told the twins, pulling back to press kisses on their soft cheeks and rosy lips. “I’ll think about you every day—and miss you every chime. I love you so very much.”
Lillis and Lorelle were crying as much as she was. “Don’t go, Ellie. Stay here with us.”
“Oh, kitlings, if only I could.” She gave her father a pleading glance.«Won’t you reconsider, Papa? Come with us. You’ll all be safer in the Fading Lands.»
