THE HIDDEN STARS.

THE RUNE OF UNMAKING.

MADELINE HOWARD.

BOOK ONE.

1.

On the great isle of Thaerie, there is a region north of the Siobhagh River where the barley fields and apple orchards of the south, the prosperous farms and the ancient many-towered cities, gleaming white and gold, give way to bleak dun-colored moorland, sullen hills, and rocky upland valleys. They call this country the Mointeach. Long ago, it was a land much plagued by warlocks, black bards, and cunning-men, but many perished at the Changing of the World, and many more fled at the coming of the High King. His allies were the mighty wizards of Leal, whose powers were far too great for these rustic necromancers and petty spellcasters to withstand-and there were still, in those days, many wild, uncivilized places in the world where those who made their living raising ghosts and cursing cattle might flourish unmolested. Yet they left a number of strange customs and beliefs behind them on the Mointeach, and there was hardly a house to be found there without a rune-wand or a bundle of bones buried under the doorsill, some half-understood charm scratched upon the hearthstone.

The land remained much as it had always been. Villages were few, and divided by vast tracts of wilderness, while the little stormy bays and inlets were treacherous and difficult to navigate. No visitor ever came there traveling for pleasure, and few of any sort came there at all.

Yet it happened, one dreary day on the cusp of winter, in the time of the High King, that a trio of wizards trudged through the Mointeach. They were on their way to witness a birth and (it might be) a death, and a great sense of urgency and dread was on them.

For hours they walked through country wild and trackless, while a lonely wind whistled in the rocky defiles, and hawks and gulls circled overhead. Late in the day, they finally came upon a road. Little more than a footpath it was, and very rough and stony, but quite unmistakable, cut deep into the earth and running on for mile upon mile. They had seen no other signs of human habitation since landing their boat on one of the pebbly beaches to the northeast, and it seemed to the wizard Faolein and his two companions that this road must lead to the town of Cuirglaes. They decided to follow it.

After skirting the hills for an hour or two, the track began to climb. The wizards kilted up their long robes and continued on. The road wound uphill between shadowy stands of pine and spruce. Every now and then the forest grew thinner, and Faolein could see all the way to the top of the hill, could just make out in the failing light a huddle of ancient buildings made of stacked stone.

Could this be Cuirglaes? he asked himself. They had been expecting a town of moderate size, at the very least a great seaside fortress, not this tiny isolated settlement. Sudden panic clutched at his throat. If they had missed their true road, gone somehow astray- A scattering of big wet snowflakes drifted down, melting as soon as they touched the ground. Faolein tripped over a knotted root, barked his shin on a tree stump, righted himself, and continued on, trying to ignore the sting where his skin had been sc.r.a.ped raw. Clumsy. Clumsy he was and always had been, especially when he allowed his thoughts to wander, when he failed to use all six senses to observe his surroundings.

The forest closed in again. Under the trees the air was damp and cool, heavy with the sharp scent of pine.

He considered the possibility that a mistake had been made. The sky had been overcast since morning, with not a single gleam of sunlight the whole grey day. Nevertheless, his own sense of direction was good, and eireamhoine's was even better. He thought: If we've gone astray, it is the curse at work. It must be. Mother and child will both die, and with them all our hope.

Another bend in the road brought the village back into view, this time from the west. And now, partly screened from the road by a ragged line of beanpoles and skeletal dried cornstalks, Faolein spotted a cl.u.s.ter of buildings larger and more solidly built than the rest, and in their midst, thrusting upward, a round tower some thirty or forty feet high, with narrow windows set into the thickness of the walls.

"Perhaps Cuirglaes after all," said eireamhoine. His pale, perfect face was impa.s.sive in the gathering gloom, the deep-set dark eyes without expression; only his words betrayed his fear. "May the Fates grant that we come in time to save two lives and foil our enemy's schemes."

Even as he spoke, the wind came up and scattered the clouds. The stone buildings on the summit stood silhouetted against a b.l.o.o.d.y sunset sky and the immense yellow moon, like a rotten pumpkin, just then rising behind the tor. As one man, the three wizards stopped where they stood, and Curoide flung up his yew-wood staff like a barrier against the ill omen, muttering a beanath, a charm of blessing, under his breath.

Then, carried on the wind, thin but unmistakable, came the anguished cries of a woman suffering a difficult labor.

It was eireamhoine who first shook off the fey mood that held them rooted in place. He left the track and the shelter of the trees for a more direct route: up an uneven slope of gravelly shingle, then across a dry streambed. Recovering, Faolein and Curoide scrambled up the scarp behind him, then pushed their way through a mazy thicket of th.o.r.n.y cat's-whiskers and yorrel growing between outcrops of weathered granite.

As they entered the village, a door at the base of the tower flew open, and a tall woman appeared backlit on the threshold, beckoning them on.

"We had almost given up hope," she said, at the wizards' approach. Ushering them inside, into a low, round, firelit chamber, she closed the door behind them. "But the Princess sensed you were drawing near; she has that much power left to her at least."

From a room up above came a despairing wail. Momentarily distracted, the woman stood with her hand still on the door, frowning up at the rough plank ceiling. She turned back toward the wizards just as they began to remove their cloaks.

"But you are none of you healers!" she protested, taking in at a glance their long woolen robes: deep purple for eireamhoine and Faolein, sage-green for Curoide.

"There were no healers to send. As here on Thaerie, so it is on Leal," said eireamhoine. "When we left the Scholia, the healers were all bedridden-without strength, without power, many of them almost lifeless."

"But then what good are you?" the woman asked bitterly. Her dark hair was disheveled and her face deeply marked with signs of weariness and strain. Into the mind of Faolein, who had a gift for names, came one that seemed to belong to that face: Rionnagh.

Her thin, nervous hands clasped and unclasped. "Why have you even come here?"

"We believe," said Faolein gently, "it can be no coincidence: our healers all helpless just when the Princess has such need of them. It is Ouriana's doing-her malice made manifest."

Rionnagh made a sign to ward off evil. Her hard grey eyes traveled to each of their faces in turn, challenging them. She knew, as they knew, how hopeless it all was.

eireamhoine bowed his head; the other men did likewise. "We will try once more to remove the aniffath."

Left to themselves in the firelit room a short while later, the wizards set their wards with runes of protection, secrecy, and silence; they sketched a magic circle on the packed-earth floor. Stepping inside the circle, eireamhoine began to trace a glimmering figure on the air. Shaping energies like filaments of starlight, he drew them out with his lean, strong hands, forming an image of the vast, complicated pattern of time and chance and circ.u.mstance that was the aniffath-the Empress Ouriana's curse on the woman upstairs.

Taking seats by the fire, on two stools and a chair they had previously arranged facing north, west, and east around the central hearthstone, the three wizards closed their eyes and began to chant.

The magic came, as it always did for Faolein, like liquid fire, like molten gold running through his veins. It burned through him, consuming, refining, reducing thought and intention to a pure, vital essence. Then came the familiar disorientation, a spinning vertigo as mind separated from body. He felt himself sailing, bodiless, through infinite regions of wind and darkness.

Suddenly, he was there: within the aniffath. It surrounded him on all sides, a silvery network so intricate and involved that it bewildered him. The thing had been growing in complexity over the years. How could it be the product of a single mind? He began to fear that there were other forces at work here, beyond the one he knew.

Somewhere in the distance, someone was speaking, reciting a spell in a harsh, grinding voice. It filled him with dismay, that voice, it was so pitiless, so impersonal, like stones rubbing together under the earth, like cold water seeping down and down, eating away at the roots of mountains. It was, he realized, a Hymn of Unmaking, the Dark whispering to the Dark; if he listened to it very long, he would go mad.

With the greatest care, Faolein began to explore the patterns of the curse, moving from thread to thread as delicately as a spider traversing her web, following each glittering strand to its ultimate conclusion. From path to path he followed, as one possibility led to the next. But in every situation, in every circ.u.mstance, the end was the same: Death.

Faolein came slowly back to an awareness of who he was, and where and when.

With his eyes still closed, the otherworldly image lingered behind his eyelids. He took a deep breath, then released it. At the same time, he felt the power flow out of him like water from a cracked jar, leaving him dull and heavy, mired in the flesh, a creature subject to the eight elements rather than their master. There was a stabbing pain in his right shoulder, an ache in the small of his back, and a cramp in his left foot.

He opened his eyes and glanced around the shadowy chamber. He was alone. The others, wiser than he, or perhaps less patient, had abandoned the attempt long before Faolein was willing to admit defeat, and had apparently gone upstairs to pay their last respects to the dying Princess.

Flexing muscles grown stiff after so many hours in one position, the wizard rose from his uncomfortable seat. The room was chilly and damp; the fire had burned down to a handful of glowing embers. Bending with an effort, Faolein selected a block of dried peat from a pile on the floor near the hearth, placed it on the ashes, and spoke a simple spell: "Hanemh fealen, perifehlim ema uli."

The peat ignited with a white flash, and the flames rose high momentarily, illuminating the entire room with an unnatural brightness until the fire died back again.

But in that moment of uncanny clarity, the wizard had spotted a childish figure, huddled disconsolately on a low rough bench in a niche in the wall. Drawing his stool up closer to the fire, he sat down, tugged at his beard, and nodded in her direction. "Sinderian, is that you?"

"Yes, Father," a small voice answered.

"Then come here, my child, and let me look at you."

With a sigh, she pulled herself up from the bench and crossed the floor with a dragging step. Though he knew what to expect, her waxen pallor and alarming thinness shocked him. He reached out with a trembling hand to stroke her long dark hair. "You have grown so tall, so womanly. How many years has it been? One year? Two?"

"Almost three," she answered softly.

He made a swift mental calculation: she would be eleven, no, twelve years old-tall for her age, as he had already noted, growing swiftly, he supposed, and changing from day to day. And he, Faolein, had missed it all. Old fool, he thought, old fool-did you think she would stay a child forever? You ought to know by now, they never do.

"I asked after you when I arrived. They told me you were sleeping. As indeed you should be," he added, groping for the proper note of paternal authority. "You ought to be resting."

Sinderian blinked back tears, shrugged a thin, angular shoulder under her gown of apprentice healer's russet. "How could I sleep, when I could hear her screaming? And she needs me, Father. Why won't they allow me to go to her?"

Faolein ran his fingers through his neat black beard, obscurely embarra.s.sed. A woman would know what to say, how to comfort her, but the women were all occupied in the room above.

"There is nothing that you can do. If there were anything, you would certainly be there," he managed at last. "As it is, there are far too many in attendance already-too much noise, too much confusion. It's always so at a royal birth, I am afraid, even when all goes well."

"But the Princess is in pain, terrible pain."

He nodded solemnly. "But pain is a natural part of childbirth. Our philosophers say that is the price we pay for a new life."

"But she ought not to suffer like this," said Sinderian, as he drew her down to sit on his bony knees. "I know, Father. Something is very, very wrong. Will the Princess die?"

Again he hesitated. But, after all, Sinderian was no ordinary little girl. She was wizard-born and showed promise of extraordinary talents. These three years just past, she had been training as a healer, under the guidance of the Princess Nimenoe. Still too young to work the greater spells of mending and healing even before this mysterious malady sapped her strength, she could no doubt make a simple sleep charm, or dull the edge of pain-which meant that her work would often take her to the bedsides of the dying, that she would be called upon again and again to ease the pa.s.sing of those too ill or injured for the older healers to save.

It was a harsh beginning young healers experienced, harder than anything faced by apprentice wizards in the other disciplines, but it was necessary. Healers must be strong, or the work would break them; any weakness was best discovered early. Faolein could only imagine the things she had seen, the heartbreak she had witnessed. Yet how to explain to this child-as precocious as she was-that her friend, her teacher, her foster mother, the most powerful healer on Thaerie-perhaps the most powerful healer anywhere, ever-was dying in childbed?

Surely not, her father decided, by any evasion of the truth, by an attempt to conceal from her things that Sinderian probably understood a great deal better than he did.

"There is something wrong with the way the infant is placed; the midwives tried to shift it, but without success. A healer might have done it with magic; the Princess herself might have done this thing, at any other time; but you know that all of the healers on Thaerie and Leal, from the Princess on down to the youngest apprentice, are helpless and ill, many of them unable to rise from their beds. They may yet recover, just as you seem to be recovering, but it will be too late to help Nimenoe."

Sinderian brushed away tears with the back of her hand. "I heard someone say-one of the midwives-the Princess is under a curse."

"An aniffath, yes. There is a prophecy, which has come again and again to our seers: 'Not by the will of any wizard of Leal, or by the hand of any warrior of Thaerie, shall the Dark Lady of Phaorax be driven from her throne and her temple, but only by the power of one who comes of her own house and blood.' The wording changes, but the meaning is always the same. It's Ouriana's plan to twist this prophecy to her own uses by crowning her son Guindeluc as her successor during her own lifetime. But she fears above all that a child or a grandchild of her sister will someday grow powerful enough to challenge and defeat her. And so, when Nimenoe and Eldori were wed, Ouriana cursed their union. That was before the old Queen, Prince Eldori's kinswoman, died and her magic ring pa.s.sed to the Princess," Faolein explained. "Had Nimenoe been wearing the ivory ring at the time, the curse would never have touched her. As it was, the Princess was barren for many, many years. When she finally conceived, she thought, we all thought-we who knew of it-that the curse had been lifted. But we were wrong: Ouriana's spell had merely a.s.sumed another shape. First it took Eldori, and now it is taking the Princess."

Sinderian drew in a long shaky breath. "But if it's a spell, can't you and the other Master Wizards banish it?"

"We have tried. Again and again we have tried. You know that Ouriana claims divinity, that she calls herself a G.o.ddess. It's not true, of course, but there is no denying that her spells are very, very strong. And the fact that she was carrying a child at the time made this particular spell...extraordinarily powerful."

Faolein put an arm around her shoulders, dropped a self-conscious kiss on the top of her head, where the dark hair parted. Thyssop, pennymint, and other bitter herbs, that was what she smelled of, reminding him of his own mother, a notable healer, dead these ninety years.

He was not a demonstrative man, the wizard Faolein, being of a mild disposition and temperate in all things; he had suffered few pangs on parting with his daughter, had been so busy during her absence he had rarely remembered her existence. Yet she was his, the last of his children living, almost certainly the last that he would ever father, and the affection he felt for her, if sometimes awkwardly expressed, was deep and genuine.

Most often, it took the form of a lesson, a lecture, for as he valued knowledge so highly himself, he truly believed it was the best thing he had to offer. He had a dim realization that she needed something more, something his other children had never seemed to lack, being blessed or afflicted with his same placid disposition, but he had lived too many years as he was to change now. He gave her what he could.

"You know how dangerous it is to kill a wizard with magic. It can-it almost certainly will-have unforeseen consequences, unless done very carefully. But an aniffath is not like any other curse or spell. It is more...insidious. It can take years and years to work itself out, it may manifest in entirely unexpected ways, and it can even use natural means to achieve its purpose. Because of all this, and its complexity, a curse of this sort can be difficult to unravel. Three of us, most skilled in these matters, set out to unravel this one, to follow the threads of all the myriad possibilities down through the years, to untie all the knots. We thought that we had succeeded, but we were wrong.

"We tried again tonight," he added under his breath, "and again we failed."

"Will the baby die, too?" asked Sinderian, very low. Slipping off his lap, she sank down by the fire, hugging her knees to her chest, resting one cheek against the thick russet wool of her skirt.

"It is possible. But the Princess has vowed that her child will be born alive. I'm inclined to believe her. Those on the threshold of death sometimes see the future with amazing clarity."

Abandoning his stool, he knelt on the hard earth floor beside her. Reminded of the herbs he carried in a pouch of tooled leather over his left hip, he worked the catch and extracted a handful of dried chamfrey. "There is also this to consider: Ouriana may not even know that the child exists. The Princess has lived in this isolated spot all of these months, concealing her name and rank from the village folk-"

From the room above came a horrible keening, like an animal caught in a trap. Then hurried footsteps crashed across the floor, a babble of voices rose and fell and rose again. At length, there came the shrill but welcome cries of a newborn infant.

In the brief silence that followed, the wizard and Sinderian listened breathlessly. Then one of the midwives spoke. "Lady, you have a daughter. She is perfectly formed: beautiful and strong."

"She must needs be strong," answered the Princess, weakly. "Neither I nor her father will be there to protect her."

"She has powerful kinsmen; they will make it their business to protect her," said eireamhoine, in his deep, resonant voice, and there was a low murmur of a.s.sent.

But even as the other wizard spoke, Faolein felt a shiver of apprehension pa.s.s through his entire body. For a timeless instant he hovered on the brink of some revelation, but the revelation eluded him, and the cold thrill pa.s.sed.

Tossing his handful of herbs into the fire, he peered into its glowing heart, searching for portents. The flames turned from gold to green, figures began to form and to move about: tiny men and women flickering into a brief, bright existence, along with their fiery miniature castles, and cities, and towns, then gone again with another motion of the flames. His eyes must be tired; he could not see any of them clearly enough to know who they were or to guess what they were doing.

Faolein sat back on his heels, looked to his daughter to see her reaction. She had raised her head from her knees and was gazing intently at the changing colors of the fire. Knowing she had gifts in that direction as well, he asked her: "What do you see?"

Her lips moved, but she spoke so softly, he had to lean closer before he could hear her. "A woman in a casket made of ice. An oak with the moon in her branches. What does it mean?"

"It is your vision," said Faolein. "Therefore, it is yours to interpret." Yet again came that pulse of fear.

And he knew, as he sometimes knew things without knowing how he knew them-with a clear sight that owed nothing to the fire, or the crystal, or to any other means of divination-that the destiny of the infant just born would not be here on Thaerie, and not on Leal, the isle of the wizards.

It would be complicated, dangerous: more tangled than a curse.

2.

At malaneos, the hour of utter darkness, the Princess died. From one moment to the next she simply stopped breathing; the white face on the pillow went utterly still.

Yet the death of any great wizard before his or her time is no small event. It shatters the pattern of cause and effect, it alters the flow of time and sends shock after shock through the world of matter, subtly changing all things so they can never again be what they were before. The three wizards standing vigil at Nimenoe's bedside felt her pa.s.sing as a disturbance in the air, a voiceless wind that swept through the chamber, circled the room a dozen times, and then escaped through one of the arrow-slit windows. Over their heads, right under the rugged roof beams, a series of discordant notes split the air like a jangling of harp strings as Nimenoe's bindings broke, one after the other.

But other magicians, in far-distant places, experienced her death, too. In the High King's great house at Pentheirie, the wizard Eliduc felt the marble floor buckling and sliding beneath his feet, as if in an earthquake. At the Scholia on Leal, spells that warded the college fragmented in rainbow bursts of color, startling apprentices, journeymen, and Masters alike. In the underground realm of Nederhemlichreisch, a Dwarf alchemist watched the gold he had spent seven years trans.m.u.ting change back into base metal; and in the groves of a fairy queen, far to the south, all the swallows and starlings she had raised to speak prophecy, as one bird gave a single heartrending shriek, then fell silent forever. Spaewives on Erios, runestone readers on Skyrra, astrologers in Nephuar and Mirizandi, half a world away, paused in the midst of their divinations, dazed, uncertain.

In Apharos on Phaorax, two priests of the Devouring Moon saw the sacred fire on their altar go out as they performed their abominable rites. A violent pulse of energy pa.s.sed through the entire temple edifice, rattling the carven doors, causing hundreds of bra.s.s oil lamps to swing on their chains, but the foundations held. And in her palace across the city, the Empress Ouriana, self-proclaimed G.o.ddess, was shocked out of sleep and into the knowledge that her twin sister was dead. She rolled out of bed and sprang to her feet, sweating and shivering. She had not expected this; the aniffath was more than a decade old, and Nimenoe's death had been no part of her intention.

Moving lightly in her white silk bedgown, she stepped into a pool of wan moonlight, shook back her long, auburn hair, and sent her thoughts questing across the miles, searching for answers: Why and how? But everywhere there was chaos, confusion. Magic mirrors cracked, stone circles danced, enchanted sleepers woke momentarily, looked around them with bewildered eyes, then slid back into slumber.

Running barefoot across cold tiles, Ouriana left her bedchamber, surprising the two sleepy guards keeping watch by her door when she erupted into the corridor. With a Word, she lit a dozen torches in ornate iron sconces along one wall; with another, she roused every slave and servant in the palace. They all came running: with wine, with embroidered slippers, with velvet robes and fur-lined mantles to stop her convulsive shivering. She scarcely noticed. Her mind still reeled with questions, and the answers were nowhere to be found.

But in the tower of Cuirglaes, a thick cloak of silence enveloped the upstairs bedchamber, heavy with portent. Stationed at the foot of the high oak bedstead where the body of the Princess rested, Faolein waited. Beside him, Curoide waited, his fair broad face and his light blue eyes intent, watchful. To their left, eireamhoine stood alert, anxious, listening. For this was the moment, as the soul takes flight, when inspiration descends on those who watch; when prophecies blossom in the mind like rare, brilliant flowers unfurling their petals and revelation strikes like lightning from a clear sky.

Nothing happened. The thoughts of the three wizards remained dark, unenlightened. With a sigh and a small impatient gesture, eireamhoine brought Faolein and Curoide back to the present. Making the sign of the Seven Fates over the body, he began to chant an eirias, a prayer to the Light, and the others joined in.

While the wizards chanted, a pale wraith in an earth-colored gown crept into the room and stationed herself across from eireamhoine. Bending to impress a final kiss on one colorless long-fingered hand, Sinderian dropped bitter tears on the clay-cold flesh, on the linen bedsheets.

As the last mournful phrase trembled in the air, there rose, as if in counterpoint, a high, tuneless wailing from the motherless infant.

"Sinderian," said Faolein gently, "look to your foster sister. She has need of you."

The child nodded, scrubbed at her eyes with one rough woolen sleeve, and turned away from the bed. Crossing to the wicker basket where the swaddled infant lay whimpering, she bent down, lifted the baby in her thin, wiry arms, and cradled it competently against her narrow chest. Her father could not repress a faint smile at her obvious expertise.