To Light A Candle

cavern, but Kellen knew why his command was here and not in the front lines. Redhelwar was taking every possible precaution against a repeat of the feint against the camp and the attack upon Ysterialpoerin.

He could feel the army around him, waiting. Above the clouds, Jermayan and Ancaladar circled. A light snow was falling; the Wildmages had been willing at dire need to shift the heaviest of the weather a league or so westward, but warned that the lull would only be a day at most, followed by a brutal storm.

Kellen knew, without actually seeing it, the moment that the moon rose above the mountain and Athan began his spell.

Imagination and spell-sight showed him what his own eyes could not: Athan kneeling at his small brazier, his Great Grey Owl perched upon his shoulder; Athan casting the dried herbs upon the coals and calling upon the Wild Magic. Kellen knew from what Idalia had told him beforehand that Athan had asked for no aid to his spell: whatever price the Gods of the Wild Magic asked, Athan would bear the whole cost of the spell and the Casting alone.

Now the price had been asked and agreed to, and Athan’s Calling began, though only the Wildmages gathered here could sense it. Still there was nothing but silence and darkness and the faint moaning of the wind.

Kellen felt, rather than heard, a flicker of movement, and looked up. Athan’s owl glided by in utter silence overhead, a keystone clutched in its talons. The keystone was brilliant with power to Kellen’s spell-sight.

It must be the focus of the Calling spell. Wherever it is, that’s where the Shadowed Elves will try to get to.

Athan still had not moved. The Wildmage stood alone, armored and ready, just below where the path leading up to the cavern opening began.

With a sinking sense of dread, Kellen suspected he knew what the price of Athan’s spell had been: not suicide—for the Gods of the Wild Magic did not ask for things like that—but to offer his life by being the first to meet the Shadowed Elves’ attack. He was a Wildmage, and, standing in the open, he would be an irresistible target for any Tainted creature. For those who fought the Calling spell, his mere presence could serve to draw them out.

He might well survive. There was a chance. And there was no rule that said Athan could not defend himself. But the Mageprice Athan had accepted— had probably accepted, Kellen reminded himself, for he did not know for sure— carried with it a terrible peril.

Still there was silence and an eerie tranquility. Despite the fact that two-thirds of the Elven army shared these woods with him, Kellen could hear nothing, nor did he see anything beyond the men and mounts of his own troop. The moon was the faintest shine in the clouds overhead, casting no light on the snow below.

He felt his stomach knotting again, and his hands were clenched inside his gauntlets. Let Athan’s spell have worked. Let it have worked. If it hasn’t, we’ll have to go in, and if we fight on their ground, they’ll have all the advantages.

Suddenly the false peace of the night shattered. He heard distant shouts— the ring of steel on steel—and a moment later, the entire forest was full-moon bright, as balls of Coldfire appeared over the heads of every Elven Knight.

But he felt Athan die in that same moment, a shining beacon that existed only in his mind, extinguished between one breath and the next.

“There’s more than one exit from the cavern. Be ready.” Jermayan’s voice spoke as if in his ear.

“They’re out,” Kellen said to his troop, grimly. “There are multiple exits from the cavern. Let’s go.”

He could “see” the battlefield nearly as well as Jermayan and Ancaladar could. As Redhelwar had hoped, the sight of their Elven enemy drove the Shadowed Elves to attack recklessly. They swarmed from their cavern like hornets from a nest—and not just from the exit the Elves and Vestakia had first identified. They were burrowing up out of holes concealed by ice high on the mountain as well, attacking the defenders there.

But Redhelwar did not want to contain them or push them back. He wanted as many of them to come out as would come. So the Elves offered little resistance to the attack of their foes, falling back before them.

In Redhelwar’s tent, it had seemed a simple plan, with little that could complicate it.

Kellen’s first hint that things were about to go badly was the arrival of the Deathwings. They’d never flown at night before but suddenly an enormous flock of them appeared.

Half of them went after Ancaladar. The other half swept in low over the army, through the areas of heaviest fighting, but in a few moments it became clear that to attack the Elves was not their purpose.

Again and again they swooped down, snatching up the Shadowed Elves by ones and twos and bearing them over the Elven lines and away. Ancaladar could do nothing to stop them; he and Jermayan had their own battle to fight. Any archer not actively engaged in combat shot at the ghostly targets—aiming for the Shadowed Elves, rather than the Deathwings, as the Shadowed Elves were easier to kill—but it didn’t seem to help. If they managed to kill or wound one of the Shadowed Elves, the Deathwing simply dropped its burden and went back for another. And the