David Gemmell – Rigante 3 – Ravenheart

‘I shall look forward to it, sir.’

The Wyrd was close to exhaustion. She had travelled far, and her work had barely begun. It was cold now, deep within the Wishing Tree wood, and she shivered and drew her tattered cloak more firmly around her shoulders. Resting her back against the bole of a twisted oak she tried to rest her mind.

There was so little magic left now in Wishing Tree that all her efforts amounted to little more than adding a drop of perfume to a stagnant pond. The analogy annoyed her, for it made her life’s work seem futile. I will not become defeatist, she told herself. I will persevere.

The Seidh were long gone, the land becoming increasingly barren without them. Yet the Seidh alone did not create the magic that once flowered across the land. They merely harnessed it. It lived within the hearts of all living things, but it radiated most from man. Acts of love and unselfishness, heroism and duty, all added to the magic, feeding the earth and the trees, flowing across the mighty mountains, carried in the rivers and streams. A mother singing to her child, a farmer giving thanks for his crops, two lovers, arm in arm by a river bank, a hero standing alone on a wooden bridge, defying the enemy. Thus was the land enhanced.

Sadly the opposite was also true. Acts of selfishness and vengeance, thoughts of greed and avarice, dark deeds of savagery and murder, robbed the land, draining it of harmony. The Varlish were not inherently evil, but their arrogance and their lust for power blinded them to the majesty of their surroundings. The mountains were merely lumps of rock, yielding coal and gold and silver, the forests sources of timber for their ships and buildings. Their furnaces polluted the sky with black smoke, their cities of stone became breeding grounds for disease, and their endless rapacious need for war and conquest brought with it oceans of despair, sorrow and hatred. Like a plague of locusts descending on a cornfield the Varlish ate into the magic of the world, corrupting its soul.

The Wyrd felt anger touch her, and quelled it swiftly. She could not allow their malice to find a place within her own soul. ‘They do not know what they do,’ she whispered. Much like a child running around and stamping on the ants beneath his feet. They have no sense of what they are destroying.

A water rat emerged from a stream close by, and scampered across the clearing, pausing to look at the Wyrd before vanishing beneath a bush. The Wyrd closed her eyes, seeking calm. She rested there for an hour, dozing and dreaming of her youth, and remembering the first day she had met the spirit of Riamfada. She was a seven-year-old gathering herbs for her mother on the edge of the Wishing Tree wood. He had stepped from the trees and spoken to her. He seemed to be just a young clansman, fair-haired and sweet of face. ‘Walk with me,’ he said.

‘We should not enter the woods,’ she told him. ‘It is forbidden.’

‘Not for you and me, Caretha.’

‘Doom will fall upon any mortal who ventures into the wood. Everyone knows that.’

‘Not every mortal. Connavar walked here. Bane walked here. Trust me. Come.’

Looping her herb sack over her shoulder Caretha had taken his hand and walked into the woods. It still surprised her that she had done so. Her mother had warned her of strangers and their dark ways.

Riamfada brought her to a little clearing. A fire was burning, and upon it was a copper pot, hanging from a tripod. Steam was rising from the pot. It filled the clearing with a sweet smell, a perfume she had never forgotten. Riamfada sat by the fire, and plucked a small blue flower from the ground close by. He held it up for her to see. The flower was almost dead, its petals fading and brown at the edges. He closed his hand around it and reached out. The child leaned forward. His hand opened. What he held was no longer dying, but vibrant with colour; the blue of a summer sky at sunset, its centre white as new snow. His fingers curled over it once more. This time when they opened the flower had gone, replaced by a small, silver brooch in the shape of the bloom.

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