The Mirror of the Moon (Revenant Wyrd Book 2) Page 23

  “We risk the chance of whatever we call being corrupted by this new wyrd,” Angelica pointed out. “Maybe we are thinking of the wrong way around this?”

  “So then what? We can’t stand around here until the fog clears. Dear Goddess, Fog Month just started! We surely would be dead by the time it ended, or possibly something worse than dead. We can’t stand around here indefinitely,” Grace said heatedly.

  “I know! We throw caution to the wind and charge headlong into all the glowing balls we see!” Jovian said.

  “You can’t be serious?” Grace said.

  “Why not? It beats standing around here, and there is a good chance that the next gathering of orbs we see will not be the ones we are planning for. After all, we have been seeing the good ones this whole trip.”

  “Maybe good ones,” Grace pointed out. “And we don’t know if they really were good because we never came in contact with them.”

  “That is not completely true,” Maeven said. “We were surrounded by them that night, and they never harmed us.”

  Grace rubbed her forehead in frustration. If they were all in agreement about this, she was grossly outnumbered and had no choice but to go along. “So am I to believe that you would be willing to do the affirmed charging?”

  “If it gets us moving again then yes, I would,” Jovian said.

  “I don’t like this,” Angelica warned as they readied to leave.

  “What choice do we have?” Jovian asked. “We can’t just wait, not with all that is at stake now,” and mentally he said, Besides, she has never led us astray yet. What would make us believe she would now?

  “What if we get lost?” Maeven asked.

  “Then we wander around until we stumble across those orbs,” Jovian said.

  When they did spot the orbs some six days after discussing them, they rode up to them in caution, lest they find that it was again not what they sought. This time, however, the orbs stayed in one general spot. The fog was thick enough that gray evening to make the orbs look less like separate objects and more like a singular glowing beyond a veil that separated the group and their potential salvation, or demise—which one it was had not been decided yet.

  “If that is help, then it might just be the luckiest thing that has happened to us so far this journey,” Jovian commented.

  But it wasn’t help that he walked straight into. He figured he had a better chance of getting out of a dangerous situation if he rode Methos in, barring the horse stumbling and breaking a leg.

  Jovian knew instantly that he made a mistake. He could not turn back. They had already surrounded him, their glowing changing from white to angry red in an instant as they began buzzing around him like a swarm of large angry bees intent on exterminating that which threatened their hive.

  The only sign of a problem the rest of them saw was the change in color.

  Noise drifted to them, muffled by the fog. A buzzing that sounded as angry and intent on human flesh as the glowing portrayed. Jovian screaming glow enveloped him. Methos whinnied, and there was a loud splash.

  Jovian’s dappled stallion came racing out of the fog toward them as if Chaos itself were fast on his trail, and if not for Maeven’s quick reflexes and strong arm that caught the reigns, jerking down hard on them to halt Methos, the horse would have bolted from the spot, most likely never to be seen again.

  The splashing told them that Jovian had, in fact, found a body of water and that he was struggling with something, possibly to swim, or possibly warding off the Lanterns. They didn’t know, and that was a fact that scared them more than they had been when faced with the Hecklin.

  Through her terror of what might be happening to Jovian, Grace could not help her mind trying to recall bodies of water in the Sacred Forest.

  “What’s happening?” Angelica asked.

  “They will nettle him until they drive him to deeper water where they will drown him if their burning touch does not force him below water before then,” Maeven reported.

  “Well do something!” Angelica insisted.

  “I am thinking!” Maeven snapped. She had never heard Maeven angry before.

  “We are close to our destination,” Grace told them. “There is only one large body of water in the Sacred Forest and that is this one which is close to the Lunimara,” she said with sudden energy.

  “Thank you for the completely useless deduction of where, precisely, Jovian is going to drown. I am sure we will not be able to find any pretty horses to bring him back this time,” Maeven said scathingly.

  “I can’t just stand here and let him die,” Angelica said near tears. When she found her footing and tried to run, Maeven caught her up in his strong arms, losing his grip on one of the horses, a grip that Grace quickly took up. Angelica screeched at being held back, and as Jovian continued screaming she began crying. “Let me GO!” she screamed.

  “That will do us no good. We have to think of something. Now CALM down and THINK!” Maeven ordered, and for the first time Angelica noticed the frustration, despair, and worry in his voice that mirrored so well her own.

  “This is not happening,” Jovian said, gasping for air as he surfaced only to have the Hobbedy’s Lanterns start buzzing his head. With each touch of their glowing lights Jovian was left with a welt the size of a gold coin. Quickly he learned to cover his head and face, but this caused him greater disorientation than the fog ever could. He was spinning in every direction; his head covered trying to be free of a monster he could not see. He yelled and screamed, but the more he stumbled and flailed, the further it seemed he was getting away from shore.

  Water lapped his chest now, no longer around his waist, and it was then, with the cool water washing over his skin, that he realized the water was soothing to the welts the Lanterns caused. Soon he was splashing water over his arms and face, trying to trace his way back to the shore, but not sure, exactly, what direction that was. The Lanterns still buzzed him, but now with more vigor as if they were intent to bring welts to every surface of his body that they could reach, which was increasingly getting less and less.

  “How could I have been so stupid?” he berated himself and then dunked his head under water to sooth the burns. “How could I have charged in here without thought to how I would get out?”

  The water on his face, running in rivulets over the welts, worked for a moment, but the Hobbedy’s Lanterns seemed to be hungered more by the water than mere flesh and they began nettling him more and more. At first he thought it was the water that was attracting them, but he soon figured that it was not the water, only his growing proximity to the shore.

  There was one thing he was grateful for: over this lake the fog was less, so he could, at times when the Lanterns were thin enough in parts, see the fog banks beyond where the lake stopped and the forest started. As he could see the forest before him, and nothing but water behind him and to his sides, he figured that the trees were where he needed to go, where he had just come from, and so he tried making his way there.

  A slick rock under the water, however, had different plans, and Jovian twisted his ankle, and in another grand splash he was submerged. He tried to surface, but the Hobbedy’s Lanterns were having none of that as they created a barrier between the water and the air his aching lungs so craved.

  He had to surface, and when he did it felt as though his head was on fire as the Lanterns teemed around him, welting his skin mercilessly. He flailed at them, but that did no good for they were quick and either dodged out of his way, or succeeded in scorching him further.

  Somehow he had gotten turned around, and he was once more disorientated, stumbling through ever deepening water to be rid of the pestilence that would not desist.

  Many more times he stumbled, going beneath the water. The last time he knew what was waiting for him above the surface. It reminded him of the tales he had heard of long ago when his forebears, before the founding of the Great Realms, had fished for food, and the fish made of a jelly substance would light a fire b
elow their feet, stinging them more than burning them, but at the same time bringing pain all the same. This was what the Hobbedy’s Lanterns felt like for even though they burned his skin, leaving it reddened and welted, it was not like fire, but akin to the lightning Porillon had caused to course through his body.

  The splashing in the water beyond their sight was almost more than Angelica, and Maeven’s hold on her, could bear. However, when they heard another splash and no struggling after that, there was no way Maeven could keep hold of Angelica. He tried to hold her back, but she touched him once, and in her frantic state her wyrd must have flared because where she touched him his skin burned worse than as if it had succumb to flames.

  He cussed and let her go, and she flew through the fog to where her brother could no longer be heard.

  He didn’t want to surface. Jovian refused to surface. The water felt so good on his burned skin that he desired nothing more to stay below the water instead of above where the blood red glowing could sting him.

  As he held himself below the water, his vision blurred even as his head became light, as if it would drift away from his body. He could feel his heart beating harder in his ears, could see splotches of blackness invading his sight. At first he thought the blackness he stared at was the Hobbedy’s Lanterns clearing, content that he was not going to resurface. But soon he began to realize, as something else intruded on his vision, that he was not so lucky as to see them leave. Instead he was sinking into unconsciousness.

  There was a flickering through the blackness that intruded on his vision, a flicker of white like fog blooming in the night—distant, yet corrupting his vision of the pristine nothingness that he felt growing in his mind.

  In a moment the whiteness faded, and when it appeared anew it was closer to him, close enough that it almost had a shape, had character, definition but before he could figure out what it was, the vision was lost to him again.

  When it appeared the last time it terrified him more than anything he had ever seen. The Pale Horse leered before him, corrupting his mind, staring into his soul as if weighing his worth with its coal black eyes that seemed to drink in even the most absolute black that surrounded them.

  He knew without a doubt what was happening. The Goddess did not condone the taking of one’s life. The vision of the Black Lady and the Pale Horse he had before was telling him one of two things: that he could die and be accepted into the mysteries of the Goddess, represented by the Key of Knowledge the Black Lady pressed to her lips, or he could kill himself and be corrupted by the Otherworld, born through the Black Gates on the back of the Pale Horse.

  That was not going to happen. After all he had gone through already; he refused to be subjugated to the Otherworld.

  But here it was, the Pale Horse, looming before him, its lips spread as if in a macabre smile; its cracked, ancient teeth stained with the blood of the Goddess Damned that it had carried to the Otherworld and to Chaos.

  It happened so fast that Jovian didn’t know what had occurred until it was done. Several things, in fact, happened in that one instance. Jovian tapped into something primal within him, something that needed and consumed and was darker than anything he had ever known. If there was ever a balance to anything in life, Jovian knew that he was tapping into that which sought to tip the scales. He touched a wyrd so dark that it could only have come from Chaos. Before he knew it, the vision of the Pale Horse before him was wavering like steam from a boiling pot. Jovian didn’t realize it at the time, but upon further reflection over the next few days on the wyrd he had worked he would have come to one realization: Jovian LaFaye had tapped into, and drew into himself, the essence of the Pale Horse.

  In that moment he and the horse were linked in a way that he could not explain.

  As he drew in the power of the Pale Horse, his head broke the surface of the water, and he gasped for air even as hundreds of Hobbedy’s Lanterns lanced down on him, stinging him relentlessly, trying to drive him back under the water.

  The world above the water seemed somehow foreign to him after the blankness of his thoughts below the surface and the silence that came with it. The buzzing of the Lanterns in his ears was nearly as deafening as the silence had been.

  He felt wyrd coursing through him at that time, thundering through his body like blood shot powerfully out of his heart, streaming through his veins, warming his flesh to the point of near burning.

  In one scream of pain Jovian lanced his hands out like talons bent on tearing the Lanterns from existence, and in that moment the coals of the Hobbedy’s Lanterns went cold and dark. With the sound of hundreds upon hundreds of Hobbedy’s Lanterns hitting the water, Jovian looked around and saw through the clearing air and splashing water what he had done.

  He had single-handedly wielded the wyrd of the Pale Horse conscribing all the Hobbedy’s Lanterns that had threatened his life to the Otherworld. From the look on the face of the woman who stood at the edge of the lake, her mouth slacken, Jovian had also scared the wits out of Angelica.

  “What are we?” Angelica asked.

  “I guess that proves I am anything but normal, huh?” Jovian asked with an ironically wading through the lake thick with unseen bodies and lanterns. “The power that I had, though, it felt like necromancy, or at least what I imagine necromancy feels like.”

  “As I am not a sorceress, I think you are not a necromancer. Besides, I don’t think that is possible for you to be a necromancer. Cianna is the necromancer this generation, and Grace said there was only ever one of them,” Angelica pointed out.

  “I think where we are concerned impossible is an impossibility. Maybe we should start saying it is not probable?”

  Angelica only sniggered.

  “What are we then?” Jovian asked, mirroring her earlier question. His mood was lightened somehow, as if now knowing that he was different made him feel more complete, more a part of their strange family and the wyrd that flowed through all his siblings—their mother’s wyrd.

  “Welcome to the club. Just remember that I have a monopoly on that question though.”

  When they made their way back to Maeven and Grace, the old lady wore a mask of rage, and Angelica bore the brunt of her anger, or at least she was the main target.

  “We have enough things trying to attack us without you attacking us as well!” she snapped the moment they came into sight, and Jovian looked at Angelica quizzically.

  “I am sorry, Maeven,” Angelica apologized.

  “Sorry?” Grace started. “I would have thought a daughter of Sylvie LaFaye would have more brains than that. And YOU!” she rounded on Jovian. “You shit-for-brains lack wit to go charging into something you don’t know what it is. Great plan to go drowning to lead them away from us. And to think you thought you could lead this little expedition without me.”

  There was little Grace had done in this situation, Jovian and Angelica knew this, and from the look on Maeven’s face he knew it as well. They would not say anything though, for contradicting her now in her already peevish state would be similar to walloping a beehive with a stick when they were already nettled. What was it about Grace that could make them all feel as thought they were five again?

  The mental abuse continued for some time before finally she gave a great sigh and reported in much calmer, if not less clipped, tones: “We are close to the Mirror of the Moon; the only problem we face now is exactly what side of this lake we are on.”

  “What side do we need to be on?” Jovian asked.

  “The Lunimara is on the eastern side. Come here now and let me put this ointment on your face so that it doesn’t heal all scarred.”

  Jovian obeyed.

  “So I guess we scout the land then?” Maeven suggested. They all groaned, for that was precisely what they did not want to do.

  “If only it wasn’t for this damned fog,” Angelica complained. “We would not have to wonder where we have already been and if we are lost or not. At least we would have a little vision to go on, but
with this there is no telling.”

  And there wasn’t any telling either. Jovian thought that by the time they found their way, Fog Month might be over. For endless days they wandered, not even knowing if they were making fruitless circles much less if they were going in the right direction.

  More and more Grace was beginning to think her idea to come to the Mirror of the Moon from the direction they had come was a bad idea, especially given the circumstances the Well of Wyrding was currently in.

  What if the Well of Wyrding, in its current state of flux, was corrupting Joya? Why had she not reached her final trial, the Trial of Fire? Was it due to Grace’s suspicions about the Well, or was there another reason. In her current state, there was no telling if Joya was even still alive.

  She didn’t know if she would be able to neutralize the Well of Wyrding once she got there. Grace had thought Rosalee was behind them, but now she was not sure since she could no longer feel her friends wyrd behind them.

  But even if Rosalee was somehow behind her without her knowledge, there was still the problem of not having a sorcerer that was able or willing to help them. Grace wasn’t sure what was to happen when she made it to the Well of Wyrding, and there was a very real possibility that she would have to go it alone, and die trying to rid it of its current affliction.

  Neither Angelica nor Jovian had told Grace exactly what had happened with the Hobbedy’s Lanterns and instead left her to deduce a lot of it herself. She tried with all her might to wring an answer from them, but this time they eluded her somehow.

  So it was that Grace didn’t notice the warning smells or signs before the singing came. She was so wrapped up in her thoughts and worries that she didn’t realize the trap had been sprung until it was way beyond repairing the situation.

  The singing was like nothing they had ever heard before. It started out low in the trees, and spoke to them in more than words. As they listened to the beautiful tenor, they felt as though their souls had sprouted wings and were being lifted higher than the clouds. They were soaring higher than any bird could think of climbing. The singing spoke to them of home in a way that words could not express. It took all of them back to their childhood, made them no longer yearn for what was past, for it took them there.