Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

“Mother Samele’s tits!” Sitting back on my heels, I laughed aloud at ignorant fools and their earnest blindness.

“Spirits of night, lunatic, will you be quiet?” Voushanti would have throttled me if he’d not been doubled up by a spreading beech, his lungs wheezing like a smith’s bellows. “Never knew a man could move so fast in such cursed weather and still have breath to cackle like a gamecock.”

I pressed my wet, filthy sleeve across my mouth to contain the hilarity that simple sense could not. Bound up in pureblood sorcery and earth-borne mystery, it had never crossed my mind to look up for guidance. The owl’s dark wingspan ruffled against the starry night.

As I pleaded with my aching legs to unbend and bear my weight again, I watched the kindly bird preening. Thus I caught the glimmer of sapphire brilliance in the leafless branches of a giant beech nearby. I held breath and dared not blink. From the snarl of twigs and branches, an arm scribed with blue fire reached out to host the wing-spread owl’s claws for a few heartbeats before the bird took flight. My heart came near stopping.

Twice in the past few days I’d believed us irretrievably blocked, facing the choice to be overrun by our pursuers or reverse course and meet them head-on. In both instances escape had come by seeming chance. A falling rock, dislodged by some scuttering animal, had exposed a stairlike descent of an impossibly sheer scarp. A bolting fox had revealed an unlikely passage through an avalanche slide the size of half a mountain. Now I wondered. Chance had never been my ally.

We could not linger. But I touched the earth once more and sent my whispered gratitude into the roots and rock, hoping that the one who aided us would hear. Would he have a dragon scribed on his face? Were his eyes the color of autumn aspen? Was that arm the same that had offered me refuge in an aspen grove as I fled Gillarine? Earth’s Mother, how I longed to know.

Of course, the Danae despised humankind. How could they not, when the Harrowers’ grotesque rites poisoned them? Yes, they had driven my grandfather mad, but he had stolen something precious from them. Danae were the essence of magic, the gift of beauty and grace below heaven. Even angels brought down the god’s righteous fury on sinners.

We ran. Onward. Downward. Slipping and sliding on wooded banks. The owl arrowed southward ahead of us, as if scribing the path across inked vellum, and my fatigued mind gratefully relinquished the guide thread it had gripped for eight unrelenting days.

Soon the trees thinned, and a flat wilderness of mottled white spread out before us. Darker patches marred the starlit landscape as if unseen trees cast shadows on the snow. Clouds burgeoned behind the ridge we’d just descended, hiding Escalor and her companion stars. Wind gusts brought flakes drifting from the heights. We had to hurry. If any of our pursuers were yet mounted, flat ground would be our end.

The owl glided in a circle above our heads, then soared serenely toward the heart of the wilderness. Instinct affirmed that refuge was near, though perhaps not so directly across the flats.

“This way,” I said to the three who had just arrived at my elbow heaving and coughing, their collected breath enfolding us in fog. I pointed to the wing-spread owl. “She’ll lead us to safety.”

I slid down the last few quercae of the steep embankment and struck out across the flats. In our weakened condition, a shorter distance likely outweighed the increased danger of exposure. Voushanti and the others trudged after, well behind me.

Fifty paces into the wilderness, I heard…or perhaps only felt…an unsettling noise beneath my feet. Instinct screamed warning. I motioned the others to halt so my dulled senses might register the sound, and I cupped my lifeless fingers over my nose and mouth, breathing out my last warmth to thaw my nostrils. Then I inhaled slowly, felt, tasted, and listened, as my father and grandfather had tried to teach me when I was small.

Water. Mud. Rot.

Appalled, I dropped to my knees and speared my hands through the snow and into the cold muck that lay just below. Dead trees. Rotted marsh grass. Burrowed frogs, cold and still. Old droppings and tufts of animal hair caught on buried willows. A harper’s distant song…Ever so faintly, the sounds, the smells, and the land’s retained memory seeped through the winter’s blanket. And nowhere did I find my guide thread. Fool! Blasted mindless idiot!

Dulled with cold and yearning for finer magic, I had forsaken my own path to follow the owl. And the Danae, who had no use for humankind, had brought us here.

“Stop! Go back!” I shouted hoarsely, peering at the treacherous landscape through the darkening night. I knew exactly where we were. How could my sense of distance be so far askew? It seemed impossible we could be so far south, but I had traveled here before. “Step not one quat outside our tracks. This is bogland.”

“What of you?” shouted Voushanti, wind blunting the edges of his words. “We have ropes—”

“I’ll be all right. Go around, stay on the side slope, head straight southward…that way. Only two quellae to Gillarine. Hurry!”

Thank all gods, the three were in no mind to argue. Voushanti’s beard and eyebrows were frosted pure white as if he had aged fifty years in an hour, and Philo and Melkire might have been but four glazed eyes in unfleshed skulls. They were in no state to fight anyone.

I watched until they had made it back to solid ground safely and vanished in the thickening snowfall. Then I shoved magic through my buried fingers and sought a path deeper into the bog. The trickster owl had vanished, leaving me no choice but to twist its vicious cleverness to my own purpose.

The route fixed firmly in my mind, I wiped my frozen, muddy hands, bundled them in my cloak, and set out across the snow-draped fens. The falling snow would blur my footsteps and mask the inadequacies of my spellworking long enough to close the trap—a snare I believed had been set for every human abroad this night, pursuers and pursued.

An irregular mound, well into the heart of the bogland, provided enough substance and variety for my purposes: a leafless willow, a sheep’s leg bone, a rotted branch, a charred stick. I structured two spells, one to serve deception, one to serve fear. Then I waited, stomping my sore feet and flapping my aching arms to keep my blood moving. Dawn was near—as much of it as I was like to see with the weather closing in.

As the moments slid by in abject silence, fear nagged that I had miscalculated yet again. I could scarce muster the strength to shake the clinging snow from my cloak. While I became another stupid beast rotting in the bog, the Harrowers would follow Voushanti straight to my friends.

“Aaaagh!” I yelled in inarticulate fury, yanking my hair to force blood to my head. “Come find me! Any of you…come do what you will! Show me your face if you dare!”

My grandfather had warned me. Such torment as the Danae had wrought on him displayed a cruelty colder than this cursed winter. So whence came my sentimental folly that because they were beautiful and magical and caused my knees to grow weak with unfounded yearning, they had a benevolent interest in me? Perhaps the one writ with dragons had invited me into the aspen grove the better to destroy my mind.

Anger kept me living. I shivered and coughed and honed my spells, determined they would be sufficient to end this wretched journey.

They came in the purple gloom that passed for sunrise. Harrowers flowed over the ridge like a tidal surge, cries hoarse with triumph and fury when they spotted me in the open. I noted with grim satisfaction that they had dropped at least a quarter of their numbers since I’d seen them last. At their head rode the dog-faced man, his orange scarf flying, the glow of his hands like a bilious sun leading their way.