The Coral Kingdom - Douglas Niles [9]
The prince's eyes swept the horizon wistfully, as if he expected that proud longship, sunk by the tempest of Talos the Stormbringer, to come sailing toward them. Alicia knew that one of Brandon's countrymen had willingly given him use of the Coho, but the love he had felt for his own vessel was clearly lacking with the new longship.
"Your mother will arrive soon?" inquired Earl Randolph, drawing Alicia's attention.
"Yes. She rides the wind now, as she did when she was younger. The love of the Earthmother, I think, is the only thing that lifts her spirits."
"And your sister?" inquired Randolph, with a meaningful look along the hull of the longship. The rest of the crew, longhaired northmen sailors to the last unshaven face, stared back. It was quite obvious that Princess Deirdre was not present.
"She, too, arrives under powers other than sail," Alicia said, mildly irritated at the thought of Deirdre's icy arrogance when she had declined Brandon's invitation to sail on the Coho. Her younger sister's dalliance with magic seemed to Alicia to be a vexing pastime. It annoyed her that Deirdre planned to teleport from Alaron to Gwynneth. Still, Alicia had trouble understanding the stark concern that others, notably Keane and Robyn, had expressed about Deirdre's mysterious powers.
"Many of the lords have gathered," noted the earl, pointing to the field full of colorful tents that lay between the town and the castle. Different banners flew from many, and at first glance, Alicia saw the boar of Lord Koart and the unicorn of Dynnatt, two of the local cantrevs. Farther away streamed the white banner of King Truac of Snowdown. Soon all the lords and kings of the Ffolk would be gathered for the High Queen's court.
And above the field rose Caer Corwell, with its partially completed stone wall joining the wooden palisade. The towers of the keep rose beyond the wall, and the whole structure crowded the steep-sided knoll that placed it in command of all the ground for miles in every direction.
Suddenly the little castle seemed like home to her-a home she missed very much. Though she had spent most of her life living in Caer Callidyrr, her time in Corwell had included many idyllic summers. Now, as that season came once again to the Moonshaes, she wanted nothing quite so much as to pass through those great doors and enter the cooling shelter of the family hall.
* * * * *
Talos the Stormbringer, god of maelstrom and cyclone, deity of destruction and chaos, brooded malevolently as he pondered his lust for revenge. A monstrously powerful god, Talos was not used to frustration, yet a short while ago, when he had thought that he stood at the brink of his mightiest accomplishment, he had instead suffered the greatest defeat in a long and combative existence.
The crux of his hatred, and his defeat, was the island group called the Moonshaes and the people known as the Ffolk. These enchanted isles were places of sublime and ancient power, but power that had of late drifted in a vacuum. A yawning space had beckoned the Destructor like a bottomless pit, urging his own claim to the lands and seas.
And so Talos had sent Coss-Axell-Sinioth, his most trusted servant, a vile being of corrupt origins and deepest evil, to plant the seeds of war in the land. Talos also enlisted the aid of undersea minions, the sahuagin-ravenous predators, ever eager to serve his cause. The most faithful of these was the king of the fishmen, Sythissal.
Aided by the fierce and bloodthirsty sahuagin, the forces of evil had assailed the Moonshaes. Talos quickly neared complete mastery of the isles. Only the tattered remnants of a dying faith and a dead goddess had stood in his path.
But then those remnants had flared to life. The goddess Earthmother, hallowed mistress of the Moonshaes, surged into the world from an absence that had been perilously near, but not quite, permanent. The goddess reborn infused the land with vitality, and Sinioth, the agent of Talos, had been