Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [22]
The fox warrior shrugged, indifferent to the fact now that the barb had missed its mark. He turned in his saddle and spent a long moment staring at the horizon, where the bloody-colored light fumed and roiled. It seemed that the smoke was stretching higher, sending long red fingers toward the horizon.
“What have you done to the Lands? Hah?” His voice at times barked like a fox’s as well. “You’ve done somewhat, you bastard swine, you scum of all the stars. We can feel it. We can see it. The Lands are shrinking and fading. My court sickens.”
“What makes you think that’s my doing?”
“It’s always your doing, what happens to the Lands.” He stared at the ground, grudging each word. “You made them, you shaped them. Doesn’t Time feed in your pasture as well?”
“And what does the flow of days have to do with one wretched thing?”
“Don’t you see? The turning of the wheel brings decay, and Time runs like a galloping horse these days. You’re the only one who can grab its reins. Make it slow, brother, for the sake of all of us, my court as well as yours.”
For an answer Evandar merely laughed. A weapon flashed in his brother’s hand, a silver sword held high and ready. Evandar unhooked his leg, leaned forward in the saddle, stared into the black, glittering eyes, and stared him down. The fox warrior snarled, but the weapon swung into its sheath.
“You won’t kill me, younger brother,” Evandar said, but quietly, lest a grin or a laugh be taken as mockery. “Because you don’t know what will happen to you if I die. Neither do I, for that matter, but I’ll wager it would be naught good.”
The fox warrior shrugged the statement away.
“What have you done to the Lands?” he repeated. “Tell me.”
“Tell me your name, and I’ll tell you.”
“No! Never! Not that!”
“Then I’ll say naught in return.”
For a long moment the fox warrior hesitated, his lips half-parted as if he would speak; then he snarled with a jerk of his reins, swung his horse’s head round, and kicked him hard. As he galloped away in a rise of dust, Evandar watched, smiling faintly.
“You stupid fool,” he said aloud. “It should be obvious what’s happening to the Lands. They’re dying.”
He turned his horse and jogged off, heading for the green refuge along the last river, where his magic, the enchantments that had carved kingdoms out of the shifting stuff of the etheric plane, still held.
Although he most certainly wasn’t the god Meer thought him, Evandar held enormous power, drawn straight from the currents of the upper astral, which shapes the etheric the way that the etheric shapes the physical. He knew how to weave—with enormous effort—the shifting astral light and twine it into forms that seemed, at least, as solid as matter, though he’d also had to master the art of constantly channeling energy into those forms to keep them alive. In the thousands of years of his existence, which he’d spent trapped in a backwash, a killing eddy of the river of Time, he’d had plenty of leisure to learn.
Unthinkably long ago, in the morning light of the universe when Evandar and his people were struck, sparks from immortal fire as all souls are, they’d been meant to take up the burden of incarnation, to ride with all other souls the turning wheels of Life and Death, but somehow, in some way that not even they could remember, they had, as they put it, “stayed behind” and never been born into physical bodies. Without the discipline of the worlds of form, they were doomed. One by one, they would wink out and die, sparks flown too far from the fire—or so he’d been told, and so he believed, simply because he loved the woman who’d told him the tale and for no other reason of intellect or logic.
After Evandar left the dead moor behind, he came to a forest, half green trees and burgeoning ferns, half dead wood and twisted thorns. At its edge stood an enormous tree, half of which thrived