Chapter Three #3
“Get . . . Papa.” Each word was a hard-won fight. “He knows . . . what . . . to . . . do . . . ahhh!” The last word died in a wail as fire ripped through her and the world dissolved once more into shrieking agony.
Eld ~ Boura Fell
Muscles bulged in the burly Eld guard’s back and thick arms as he swung the heavy sel’dor war hammer he called Boraz, the Bone Grinder. The hammer strike landed with a meaty thud and the loud crack of breaking bone.
Hanging from chains attached to the barbed sel’dor shackles clamped around his wrists, Shannisorran v’En Celay gave a guttural roar of pain as his right hip shattered.
His body writhed, and the tremors sent arrows of fire shooting through him as splinters of bone tore through bruised muscle.
The pain was devastating. Already it had gone far beyond his ability to contain.
He’d felt great, searing arrows of it blast down the link the Mage’s evil magic had unwittingly forged between Shan and Ellysetta Baristani, the daughter he’d not seen since her birth.
“How did you do it?” Across the room, High Mage Vadim Maur watched Shan’s torture with icy eyes. “How did you and our lovely
Elfeya manage to hide your daughter’s magic from me?”
Shan sucked air into his lungs as he struggled to separate himself from the agony engulfing his body. He coughed and groaned
as a fresh bout of pain racked him. His torture had begun with a simple but brutal pummeling before advancing to the hammer
blows. Several of his ribs were broken, and with every breath, blood pooled in his mouth. He spat a mouthful of it on the
ground.
“I know you engineered her escape, and I know you somehow bound her magic so I would not detect it.”
Shan tossed back the strands of matted black hair covering his eyes. The guard had shattered Shan’s ankles first, then his
kneecaps, and now the first of his hips. He still had seven major joints to go, and he knew Maur wouldn’t leave one of them
whole whether he answered or not. He lifted his chin in a gesture that Elfeya had always bemoaned as a sure sign of his intractability
and fixed unblinking eyes—a predator’s stare—on the High Mage.
Maur’s teeth clenched for a moment. Then he gave a cold smile. “Lord Death.” He sneered the nickname Shan had earned many
centuries ago, before finding his truemate, when he’d been the deadliest Fey warrior ever to walk the Fading Lands. “So arrogant,
even now. I have not forgotten how the pair of you tried to help her escape my Mark in the Solarus. You failed, you know—I
Marked her again—but you’ll still spend the next thousand years begging me for death as a reward for your efforts. You and
Elfeya both.” He gave a short nod.
The guard swung his war hammer again.
The chains rattled as Shan’s body jerked and shuddered from the force of the blow. His scream echoed off the black stone walls.
Pain is life, he reminded himself, silently reciting the litany he had taught his chadin at the Academy in Tehlas. Fey eat pain for breakfast. We jaff it on a cold night just to keep warm.
“Strip the flesh from his back,” Maur ordered coldly. “Use the Fire whip. I don’t want him bleeding to death, just close enough
to it to make his mate eager to please me.”
Shan’s vision blurred as the guard circled around him, the Mage’s favorite Fire-tipped whip clutched in his meaty hand.
The first blow seared him to his soul. He writhed as flesh ripped and scorched. He reeled as the shattered bones in his legs
scraped and shredded his flesh from the inside out. Ah, gods have mercy. Maur just might break him this time.
?Shei’tan.? Elfeya’s voice, warm as a summer sun on the shores of Tairen’s Bay, washed over him. ?I am here, beloved. I am with you. Together, we are strong.?
With an ease that would have driven Vadim Maur wild with rage had he known of it, Elfeya slipped into Shan’s mind, circumventing
all the dark weaves and sel’dor and black witchery the High Mage had employed to keep them isolated. She was there, with Shan as she had been since the day
of their bonding, an inextricable part of his soul. His strength, his blessing, his greatest weakness. ?Leave me, Elfeya. Shield yourself. I cannot bear for you to suffer.?
?Nei, never. I will not let him break us. You are Shannisorran v’En Celay, the greatest champion the Fading Lands has ever
known. You are a warrior of the Fey, and I am your truemate, a shei’dalin of great power. This Mage may hold our bodies, but
he has no command over our souls.?
The second whipstroke shredded the flesh off his back. He flung his head back and screamed himself hoarse.
?Shan! Stay with me. Focus on the sound of my voice, beloved.? When he didn’t respond, her tone grew sharp as the Mage’s whip. ?Speak to me, Fey!? she barked. ?Who are you??
She’d spent too many years of their life together eavesdropping in his mind as he drove his chadins to the end of their strength, then commanded them to eke out more.
She was such a fierce, brave blade in her own right, his equal in every way.
And she was right: Fey did not surrender, not to fear, not to pain, not to despair.
They fought until their hearts burst in their chests. ?I am warrior,? he gasped. ?I am Fey.?
?Kabei! And what is a warrior of the Fey? Tell me! Shout it out!?
The whip ripped a third stripe off his back, but this time his choked scream was not a mindless howl. This time it was a declaration
of defiance ripped from his aching throat, each word a rasping challenge. “I am the steel no enemy can shatter.” He thrust
his chin out, met Maur’s vile silver gaze, and snarled through gritted teeth, “I am the magic no dark power can defeat.”
The High Mage smiled.
As the fourth lash fell, pain blinded him. He focused his mind on Elfeya’s warmth and forced the cry from his burning lungs.
“I am the rock upon which evil breaks like waves. I am Fey! Warrior of honor! Champion of Light!”
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 of shei’dalin intrusion 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