Darkened path, forsaken path,
Hide from fear and sorrow.
Lonely path, empty path,
Save me from the ‘morrow.
Dahl’reisen’s Plea,
a song of prayer, by Varian vel Chera
Celieria ~ Dahl’reisen Village
Ellysetta stared with burning eyes at the sister Mama had loved and believed long dead. “I… I don’t know what to say.”
The woman named Bess clasped her hands before her waist. “Sheyl explained to me about your mother. Clearly, I must be that Bess your mother loved, but I don’t remember anything from that life before.”
“Of course, you don’t. You were a baby… a precious baby who should never have been thrown away because of your gift.” She remembered the sadness in Papa’s eyes when he’d told her the story and told her how that one moment, that one loss, had changed Mama’s life forever.
She gulped past the growing knot in her throat. “You should know that my mother found me in the forest of Great-wood,” she told Bess. “My birth parents had put a glamour on me to make me look mortal. So when she found me, she assumed I’d been winded like you, for some dreadful, dangerous magic. She knew I was magic—she feared it more than she feared anything else in the world—but she took me in anyway and loved me in spite of her fear. She did that because of you… because she couldn’t bear the thought of what had happened to you happening to another child.” Ellysetta blinked back tears. “You don’t remember her, but she never forgot you. She would want you to know that. She would want you to know she loved you very much.”
“She must have been a very special woman,” Bess said. “She was.” Tears welled in her eyes as the memory of her mother’s death and the horrible ache of her loss punched deep. The grief was still too fresh—never more than a memory away. “I loved her very much, and I miss her every day.”
Bess’s eyes softened with compassion. “I’m sorry for your loss. All of us here in the village know what it’s like to lose someone you love.”
“Thank you.” Ellysetta wiped away her tears, but more just took their place. “I know she’s just a stranger to you, but may I—may I… share her with you?” She held out her hands, palms up.
Bessinita hesitated, then placed her hands in Ellysetta’s.
Ellysetta’s mouth curved in a trembling smile. “Her name was Lauriana. She married a man named Sol Baristani—my papa—a woodcarver and a wonderful man whom she loved very much. They have two other daughters. Twins named Lillis and Lorelle…”
Through the touch of their joined hands, she gave Bess the memories of her mother and their family and the deep love they had shared. Little scenes of their life that Ellysetta treasured. Mama laughing over some silly joke. Mama holding Ellie close… kneeling beside her bed to say evening devotions. Mama delivering a stern lecture when the twins got into some sort of mischief, and Papa teasing her out of a mood with kisses and a pot of tea by the fire. Mama could be stern and fierce, but, like the tairen defending her kits, that fierceness was her way of protecting her young—of protecting Ellie and the twins the way she hadn’t been able to protect her sister Bess.
When she was done, Bess had tears in her eyes as well, and a melancholy smile on her face.“Beylah vo.Thank you for giving me this gift.”
“Nei,it’s you who’ve given me the gift. Sometimes it’s hard to remember all the good in the world in the face of so much bad.” Ellysetta stepped back and reached for Rain’s hand, squeezing tight and letting the vast comfort of his love wash away her remnant sorrow. All this time, Mama’s sister had been alive… saved by thedahl’reisen… raised by them…lovedby them. How coulddahl’reisenwalk the Shadowed Path yet still have wrought such obvious good?
The white-haired hearth witch cleared her throat. “There’s something else I have to show you and a favor I must ask of you, before I take you to Farel. Would you both, please, come this way?” Sheyl walked to the door Bess had come through. “We are a private people. Our survival has depended on our discretion and our ability to keep our existence a secret, but the time for that has passed.” Sheyl lifted the latch and pulled open the door to reveal a long, curving room that wound around the giant tree trunk.
The room was filled with children, at least sixty of them, ranging in age from tiny infants to five-year-olds. A dozen village women tended the tiniest of their charges, while the older children gathered in groups supervised by one or two adults. Noisy, childish chatter and the tiny cries of babies demanding maternal attention filled the air, muted from the outside world by a privacy weave tied to the room’s floor, ceiling, and walls.
“These are our children. And this is our greatest secret.”
“Oh, Rain…” Ellysetta reached for Rain’s hand.«So many children, shei’tan.»
Rain stood frozen in the doorway and let the noise wash over him. He’d known there were children. He’d seen a number of them yesterday when he’d entered the village. But he hadn’t realized the true enormity of what he’d seen. He forced himself to breathe as he scanned the room, seeing the bright glow of Fey magic shining from child after child. More than half of the children were Fey. Even before the Mage Wars had left the women of the Fading Lands barren, it was rare for thirty children to be born in a village this size in twenty years, let alone four or five.
A chill, too-sweet odor made his hands reach instinctively for his missing blades and he spun in the half crouch of a warrior, his eyes scanning the room for the person spinning the forbidden magic. A woman at the far end of the room held a spiral of Azrahn in her palm. At her feet, a semicircle of children held their own, less organized spirals of the black magic.
Horror sapped all moisture from his mouth. “You teach them to weave the forbidden magic?”
Sheyl glanced back at the children in question, then returned her wary gaze to him. “Azrahn is not forbidden here. I know the Fey believe otherwise. You banish your strongest warriors if they dare to weave it.” The corner of her mouth curled up. “Your customs aren’t so different from the villagers who cast out their children and abandon them to die. You just wind your children at an older age.”
Rain’s head snapped back as if she’d slapped him. “The customs are nothing alike. Azrahn is the evil tool of the Mages.” But even as he said it, he remembered Ellysetta saving the tairen with Azrahn, himself saving her, the warriors and civilians who would have died without Gaelen’s weaving Azrahn so Ellysetta could hold dying souls to life, the countless lives Gaelen had saved by detecting the Mage claimed hiding among the allies.
“Azrahn is just magic, a mystic like Spirit. Is Fire or Spirit evil?Nei,though, the manner of their use can be. It is no different with Azrahn. Which is why we teach our children from a very early age how to weave their magic—more importantly, how to control it. The ones with Mage Marks do not spin it, of course, but the rest of us do.”
“Some of these children are Mage-claimed?” Rain asked. “Marked, not claimed. And, yes, some are. Thedahl’reisensave the ones they can and bring them here, where we can protect them and give them some semblance of a free life, safe from the Eld.
