The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) Read online

The teacher shook her head that she didn't know. "Most likely."

  She rushed them out the window, and into the dark of the night.

  There was a point that Pi thought they would make it. Her heart was racing wildly, deafening out all other noise in a liquid pumping of blood through her head. She was breathing harder than she had ever breathed before, the cold night biting through the wool of her dress. She wasn’t prepared for this; she wasn’t prepared for living out of doors. Maybe they could just wait it out until the attack was over.

  Lightning flashed by her ear, nearly hitting Flora, but instead splitting a tree in half not far from them.

  Flora turned and let loose a red bolt of lightning, scorching the ground as it crawled its way toward their attacker. The man stepped out of the way, and the lightning went past him.

  Black lightning flashed from his fingers, his bald head shining in the darkened light of his wyrd. He snarled as the lightning found its mark, striking the shields around Flora. There was a flash of black lightning on her red-wyrded shield. Sparks showered around them in a display of light.

  Clara held up her hands, which were already glowing yellow with the limited amount of wyrd one could work before going through their trials. She let out a fizzle of a spark, which spiraled its way to the man, snapping into a yellow shower at the end of his nose. It didn’t hurt him, but it was enough to distract him.

  The shield flung back his lightning attack, sending errant bolts around the man in a circle, burning the ground where they touched. Red fire blasted from Flora’s hands, but the man was faster, weaving a shield of his own around his body before the fire could reach him. When her wyrded flames licked against the space his shields occupied, the air around him became like shadows.

  “It’s no use!” Pi said, readying wyrd of her own. “There’s no way to break his shields. We will fight until we are all tired, or he gets help.”

  Another groan came from the academy, and Pi looked up as windows blasted into a glittering shower from the upper stories, and the tower itself seemed to turn, teeter. She grabbed Clara and stepped back. If the tower came down in their direction, they were still close enough to get crushed under it.

  But there was a growl to the right, and from the darkness of the night a black panther bounded. The red fire stopped abruptly as the panther took the other wyrder by the throat — unconcerned about shieldings, the panther knocked him to the ground. Blood spurted up out of his throat, painting the charred ground with crimson rivers. The man let out a gurgled scream, then fell silent, his legs twitching as the panther tore his neck and throat to ribbons.

  The panther stalked toward them, blood dripping out of its mouth.

  “Thank-you, Devenstar,” Flora gasped. “I can feel the corruption of the well trickling in with every casting I do.”

  The panther nodded. The only part of him that resembled Devenstar was the blue eyes.

  “Come on,” Clara said to her brother, now in cat form, and they raced off toward the trees again, the panther picking up a stack of neatly folded clothes on its way.

  When they reached the edge of the trees, they saw the end of the southern hall blast out into the night, creating a swath of light across the ground. There was screaming and fire. A blast of blood showered against one of the windows on the ground level, and Pi shrieked.

  Her scream was drowned out by a thundering moan from overhead. Their attention was drawn up in time to see the top of the central tower puff out debris. Then, as if an invisible line had been cut around the tower, it shifted, and then toppled. Slowly, but gaining speed with every horrifying second, the tower crashed down on the eastern hall, crushing the roof under its immense weight.

  They all backed away, watching as more stragglers raced from the school, only to be cut down. Pi looked around them to see if anyone else had made it, but they were the only ones.

  “Come,” Flora said, her eye on the school, but her hands pushing her students away from the destruction.

  “Where are we going?” Pi asked, pulling her brother tighter to her.

  “Anywhere but here,” Flora told her.

  Two weeks had passed already. Grace found they were only now able to see the floor through the debris, apart from where the roof had caved in. Moving the large blocks of the fallen ceiling was a chore they were sure wouldn’t be accomplished without the use of Dalah’s wyrd. Grace was ever hesitant about letting any of them use their wyrd, which now included without a doubt Rose’s integral ability to look into the past or future. Every time the redhead’s glazed eyes glanced off in a direction where there was nothing to see, Grace accosted her with questions, chores, or just idle banter to distract her from her scrying.

  Through the laughter and merriment there was an underlying fear that Grace would lose one or both of her friends. It was not something that Grace would take well, for even though they had come here of their own will, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had forced them to come here by being so overbearing. Granted, Dalah wouldn’t die, but there were worse things than death when dealing with corrupt wyrd. Grace remembered all too well the caustics.

  All of that was forgotten for the moment as they all sat down to dinner. Food was something that was hard come by; even the stores of salted meats and other preserved goods had long since gone bad. However, Porillon had been human, which meant that, though she would not die of starvation, she had to eat as any other human to keep her strength. It took some searching, but they eventually found where she had kept her food supplies.

  It had even taken Grace a long time to find stores of ale and wine that weren’t sour or rife with sediment.

  “So what tomorrow?” Dalah asked as they all sat down with their mugs of ale after dinner, Rosalee nursing a glass of wine.

  “You’re too much of a lady,” Grace commented, staring at Rose’s glass of wine.

  “Oh, Grace, you are manly enough for both of us. In fact, at times I think under your robes you might even have a—”

  “Ladies?” Dalah cut in, turning the conversation back to her question.

  Grace smirked.

  “We have to raise the ceiling sometime,” Rosalee said and took a sip of her wine.

  “I really don’t want you to use your wyrd for that,” Grace said. There was a note of submission in her voice.

  “Well, I’m open for ideas. I personally don’t like the pain of using wyrd either. However, unless you are an accomplished mason who can restore the ceiling to its proper placement, then I think there is no alternative.”

  Grace gave in. “Yes then, tomorrow we restore the ceiling to where it’s supposed to be.”

  “Think of it this way,” Rose said, gesturing vaguely, her mind seemingly somewhere other than the current conversation, “At least now we won’t have to worry about the cold draft it’s letting in, or cleaning up rainwater before we get to work cleaning the rest of the room.”

  “That’s true,” Grace said, reaching into her pockets for her pipe and finding several pieces of paper. One she knew, and laid on the table. That particular piece of parchment had the list of dead nymphs’ names on it, the nymphs that Porillon had slain in Betikhan Valley what seemed like ages ago now. The faun Orilyn had said there was a message in the names, but Grace had not been able to find it.

  She filled her pipe and lit it, nursing her ale. Conversation tonight, it seemed, was not going to be the normal joyous affair, for tomorrow they were going to attempt something that they had not attempted in some time. Dalah was going to use a massive amount of wyrd — or, as she suggested lightly before, maybe given the current state of wyrd she would only have to expend a little amount and the job would be done. Her wyrd might over-calculate and do more than it was intended to. Grace worried that maybe the wyrd would shoot the debris right out of the hole in the ceiling and scatter it for miles around the forest, in which case they would never find it. The small consolation was that at least the floor would be clear for the ritual to access the Well of Wyrding … they didn
’t exactly need the ceiling repaired.

  The night, needless to say, passed in near silence, and before they knew it they were making their way to the northern tower of the Mirror of the Moon, where they had set up beds. The sounds of night heavy outside their windows lulled them into restful sleep.

  Lately Grace had taken to sleeping like the dead, given to physical strain of what they were doing and the emotional stress they were being put under. Normally they took the reliving of their past with ease and a laugh, for those were good times, but digging through so many memories inevitably brought up the end of those happy times, and the starting of The Age of Sorrows, the day the world had split and their angelic leaders had fallen from grace.

  Grace woke that morning with an acute beam of light blinding her. With her normal groan of disgust at the light of day she rolled over, noticing that Dalah was sprawled out on her cushions, snoring. Rosalee was lying flat on her back with a smile on her face. In fact it looked as though Rosalee had not moved all night, her hair still tucked neatly behind her head as it had been when she fell asleep.

  Grace felt a moment of disgust that they were still sleeping. No matter how much she hated the morning, she was the first to rise, and so made her way down to the kitchens where she prepared coffee and breakfast.

  Through the time that they had been here, they had cleaned a lot. In fact, the temple was beginning to resemble some of its old splendor, apart from the main worship hall where the battle between Porillon and the two LaFayes happened.

  The kitchen was warm and lulled Grace into something like a trance as she continued her morning ritual, enveloped in the lovely aromas and warmth of the hearth.

  As if the end of her preparations were a bell the other two stretched their way into the room with yawns and groans as they fell into chairs and began stuffing their faces with eggs and bacon — no toast, since the bread was all bad and there was no time to make any.

  As if it were an unspoken rule, they didn’t normally talk until after a large amount of coffee was running through their systems. In fact, they normally didn’t even grunt “good morning” to one another until after they had finished their coffee.

  “Well,” Dalah said as she made her way to the bathing room off the kitchen. That seemed all they needed to hear to spur Rosalee and Grace into tidying up. Once Dalah emerged apparently ready for the day in a brown robe, Rose and Grace took their turns dressing in their normal work clothes before they all headed to the temple room.

  “How should we do this?” Dalah asked as they gathered around the fallen stones of the roof in the center of the temple room.

  “I’m not the sorceress,” Grace commented. “Just do your thing.” she waved her hands as if that indicated precisely what Dalah was supposed to do to put the ceiling back in place.

  “I would imagine it would be easier one piece at a time, like a puzzle?” Rose said.

  “It won’t work that way, I would have to be tapped into my wyrd far too long to sort out all the pieces and where they go.” Dalah peered up at the hole in contemplation. Grace, recognizing the look of intense concentration that sometimes came with wyrding, stepped back and didn’t interrupt Dalah in her work. Often Grace forgot that all the constructing wyrd that had gone into Fairview Heights had been worked by Dalah, one casting at a time.

  Dalah made several passes around the rubble, talking to herself and gesturing slightly as if dismissing ideas before she stopped suddenly and turned to them, saying, “Rose is right, I will take them one at a time.” She pointed to the stones in the middle of the floor. “I will have to touch each of them separately to get a feel for their wyrd so while I’m doing that I will move them away. Once I have them all moved into place I will be able to lift them one at a time commanding them back to their original homes. Then I will seal it up with wyrd.” This made little sense to Grace and she thought it was an awfully long time to be in touch with one’s wyrd, but she only nodded in response. Rosalee said nothing.

  “That’s too long to be tapped into your wyrd.” Grace crossed her arms over her chest.

  “There’s no other option,” Dalah said. “I wouldn’t do it this way if there was another option.”

  “What do you need us to do?” Rosalee asked, cutting Grace off as she took another breath to argue.

  Grace scowled at the redhead.

  “It would be best if you two stand outside while I do this, and don’t interrupt.” Grace and Rosalee took this as their dismissal and stepped out the door.

  Dalah walked the floor several more times, gazing at the stones and whispering to them. Occasionally she would bend down and touch one, and it would shift slightly. If there was any struggle in touching her wyrd she was not showing it — however, if she were trying to use it and the stones were barely moving then there would be a problem.

  Dalah stopped suddenly and flung her arms wide, and in response several stones of varying sizes were tossed into the air and scattered around the ground, forming what appeared to be the perimeter of the hole. They soared through the air and settled gently into their spots. Occasionally they were slightly off the mark, but Dalah walked around again, either nudging them with her shoe or pointing to where they were supposed to be, and like obedient children the stones would roll, teeter, or hop into the spot she indicated. There was one sluggish one that she had to nudge several times before a curse and a stern point prodded it into reluctant movement.

  Dalah stopped then. She spread her arms out, her hands splayed open, and closed her eyes. Another look of extreme concentration came to her face and they could see her struggling. Before long there was a sound like tumbling rocks as they all clanked together, and finally a grinding noise as the separate stones solidified into one large slab.

  Dalah turned her back to them then and turned her hands over. As if she were a puppeteer and the stone her marionette, she raised her hands, and the slab obeyed. Slowly it rocked back and forth, though with the wyrd she had just worked they all stayed successfully bound together. It took effort, there was no doubting that, and if they were closer they would have seen the sweat as it beaded up on Dalah’s face; if she had not turned from them they would have seen the look of pain and will struggling on her face.

  But they did see her lemniscate glow with wyrd, not blue or silver as was normal, not even the occasional green or yellow for one stronger in air or earth wyrd, but instead it glowed red — malicious, Chaotic red, which writhed on her skin as if it were the very flames of some bloody fire.

  Grace made to gasp, but Rosalee’s hand on her mouth stifled the noise as they both watched Dalah in fear and worry. Rosalee’s hand on her arm stayed Grace’s movements towards their friend. They both knew there was nothing they could do now; this was the only way to get into the Well of Wyrding, but their friend was being corrupted by touching her wyrd, while attempting to get into the very well that corrupted her.

  The stones of the perimeter finally rose to their place in the roof and fused in with another grinding sound of rock on rock. The lines that normally held them apart glowed softly, and when the light vanished there was not even a fissure.

  Dalah smoothed her blonde hair back into its bun and continued on.

  Grace had to turn away, for there was a look coming over Dalah, a pallor that meant no good at all. Dalah was sweating profusely and her hair looked lank and dull. Where she once shone with life, Dalah now looked used up, tired, near catatonia. The wyrd was taking hold of her, and Grace begged the Goddess to keep Dalah going. Grace could not help but think they were lost if Dalah died before they went into the well and fixed the problem, and she cursed herself even as she thought it.

  Finally the tears that had been building up spilled out of her eyes, and Grace had to leave the doorway, leave the image of Dalah’s incredibly fatigued body and angry red lemniscate behind to cry out of earshot.

  And so Grace and Rosalee passed most of the time sitting, staring out a floor-to-ceiling window onto the fog-clotted forest, beyond the met
iculously manicured lawns with their various trees and bushes now becoming skeletal with the approach of autumn.

  When Dalah found them later, they were in the kitchen preparing dinner, which consisted largely of leftover stew. Grace had long since stopped weeping, busying herself with the meal and her tankard of ale. A silence had fallen between the two of them as Rosalee and Grace both came to grips with something they knew before they had started their reconstruction.

  Most likely not all of them were going to make it out of the Well of Wyrding, and if they did they would be forever changed.

  They put on a good front, though, talking about what had happened that day, though Rose and Grace did not mention seeing Dalah’s lemniscate glowing red. Dalah probably had felt it, and there was no point in dwelling on it and upsetting everyone further.

  Dalah looked tired, but nothing more than that. The pallor and the sickness that had plagued her within the temple room was gone, though she remained incredibly weary. Grace figured that could be owed to the amount of wyrd she had just worked.

  “So what’s this?” Rosalee asked as she picked up the parchment with the nymphs’ names on it, which Grace had removed from her pocket the night before. They had just finished cleaning up and were now all nursing various drinks before turning in to sleep, though Dalah looked as though she were very nearly sleeping in the chair at the table, her head lolling over her ale.

  “Eh, that is just a collection of names. We stumbled upon five dead nymphs just outside of Betikhan Valley, right after coming out of the Mountains of Nependier, and there they were laying on a rock, their tongues and eyes removed.”

  “The eyes of a nymph can see the truth of a person, can see their intent, their secrets and wyrd. The eyes would have been removed symbolically, I imagine, as an indication that they would never again see truth. Their tongues, now that’s a little trickier. A nymph can repeat something even after they are dead, as long as what they saw before death was psychic in nature. I imagine they saw the person that killed them, and their tongues were removed so that they would not tell.”