Quinn made a face, then smiled. “Idril isn’t a witch, although she was positively magical when the moon glinted on her silver hair…” His words trailed to a stop, and with a nervous glance back toward Deo, he gave a little cough and continued. “It doesn’t matter what you and I think about Lady Idril. She is evidently promised to Deo, although why he let her go with Lord Israel to confront Jalas in Abet is beyond me. I don’t trust her father further than I can throw a bumblepig. Does it matter that I think we should have descended on Abet as a group to take care of the whole Tribe of Jalas? No. I am but a humble servant to those who hold my talisman, and since Hallow hasn’t seen fit to release us from my bond to him, we must do as we are ordered.”
Dexia grimaced and returned to her journal. “I’m happy to be well away from the white-haired one, although I would have liked to taste the Tribe.”
“I think we’ll have our hands full here. And speaking of full hands…” Quinn waggled his eyebrows, brushed off his jerkin, and squared his shoulders. “I believe I shall go see if Ella wants me to tell her about Genora and the Starborn.”
He moved off toward the cabins.
Thorn eyed Dexia. “What was Hallow thinking, letting Israel and Idril face Jalas alone? It’s not like him to turn away from a battle. Far from it. He was always too quick to run to the aid of anyone who needed it. He is Master of Kelos now, leader of the arcanists, and not some mercenary soldier for hire.”
“How long until we land?” Dexia asked one of the sailors who bustled by with a pail and scrub brush.
“Another two hours, possibly three if the wind continues as it is,” the sailor answered.
“Has there been any sign of the Eidolon?” she asked, standing and tucking away her journal before stretching.
“Eidolon?” Thorn asked, astounded. “What is this? The Eidolon are confined in the crypts beneath Kelos. They do not roam Genora.”
“None, thank the goddess,” the sailor answered, using the hand holding the brush to sketch a sign made up of the moon and three stars. “Mayhap the captain is wrong about them roaming the land looking for men to prey on.”
“Perhaps,” Dexia allowed, watching while the sailor dumped the water overboard before disappearing into the hold. She turned and looked past Thorn to the shore. “Then again, perhaps they are waiting.”
“For what?” Thorn demanded to know, his mind awhirl with all that had happened since his physical form had been destroyed. It seemed to him that everything that could possibly go wrong had done just that.
“Allegria and Hallow,” Dexia said. Thorn turned to see them emerge from their cabin, their cheeks rosy, identical sated expressions plastered all over their faces. Hallow lifted a hand in acknowledgement of Dexia, and followed Allegria to where she stood at the rail, staring at the shoreline.
Thorn watched them with a growing sense of disquiet. Just what in the name of the moon and stars was going on?
Chapter 2
“Why aren’t any spirits attacking us? Shouldn’t there be spirits attacking us? I was told there were going to be spirits everywhere, blighting the land and slaying the living, and yet all I have seen that was even remotely threatening was a one-legged harlot who seemed to feel you owed her money for services rendered several years ago.”
Hallow, riding next to Deo, looked first askance at his companion, then over his shoulder to where Allegria, the light of his life and fire in his loins, rode chatting with the red-headed Shadowborn woman she had taken under her wing. Allegria hadn’t been all too pleased when the harlot had accused him of partaking of her wares and slipping out without paying—which Hallow had not done, since he had always been very scrupulous about such things—and now he sensed a bit of frostiness lingering in his wife’s gaze when it rested on him. “Yes, well, I think the less mentioned about the lady in Bellwether, the better. As for the Eidolon…”
His words trailed away as a growing sense of unease prickled along his spine. He rubbed the back of his neck, eyeing again the thick copse of trees lining either side of the road that led eastward, toward Kelos. There was no sign that anything was amiss, but he felt as if his nerves were twitching a warning that danger lay all around them, ready to spring upon the unwary.
“They certainly aren’t the threat I was promised,” Deo grumbled, looking dissatisfied.
“You are the only man I know who gets snappish when someone isn’t trying to kill him,” Hallow commented with a wry sense of humor that he knew Deo would ignore. Allegria would have appreciated it, though. He glanced back to smile at her, hoping that her partiality to him would thaw any remaining coldness regarding their landing at Bellwether, but even as he caught her eye, a flicker of movement to the side had him suddenly filled with rage.
Arcany pricked his palms as he pulled on the light of the stars that sat behind the sun, but the chaos magic within him rode high, filling him with a red-hot anger that threatened to spill out at the potential threat to his beloved.
A man emerged from the woods with a basket of fallen branches strapped to his back. He watched the company ride by for a few seconds before lifting his hand in greeting and turning to march off to what was no doubt his home.
“Hallow?” Allegria pressed her heels into her mule, pushing between his horse, Penn, and Deo’s massive black charger. “What’s wrong? Why have your runes lit up like a lantern? Do you sense something? Is it the Eidolon? Ella,” she turned in her saddle and called back to the Shadowborn woman, “tighten your bowstring, and make sure your quiver is at hand.”
“At last!” Deo said, his voice full of satisfaction. He pulled his sword from his back scabbard, glancing around quickly. “Where are they, Hallow? I see naught. Are they visible only to your eyes? That will make it a bit more difficult to smite them, but if you tell me where they are, I will take care of them.”
“There’s nothing,” Hallow said quickly, subduing the various magics that twisted inside him in what seemed to be an endless dance. The arcane power that he pulled easily from the sky even when Bellias Starsong was hidden, as she was now, was as natural to him as breathing. The blood magic that he’d gained during his visit to Eris was a little less natural, its complexity shifting and changing even as the chaos magic roared to life, drenching him with a hot, burning need. The runes etched in silver and bound to his wrists and ankles kept the chaos from overwhelming him, but lately, as his body learned to cope with the three different types of magic dwelling within, the chaos magic’s rush of red power had shifted from the urge to destroy to one much less lethal.
Although certainly more embarrassing.
“Allegria,” he said, his voice husky with desire. The need to slake suddenly overwhelming urges on her body rode high when the chaos magic chose that outlet for its power. There was a plea in his voice for her to move away from him, to give him the space he needed whenever the chaos took over his emotions.
Not that he often had been successful in quelling its demands by such means. Usually, he just hustled her off to whatever bedchamber had been assigned to them and indulged his desires, leaving them both boneless and sated. And although Allegria had said she understood the situation, and never blamed him when he interrupted
