Age of Myth (The Legends of the First Empire #1)

The bones were excellent…for a chicken.

Suri would have preferred a crow or, better yet, a raven. Gods frequently chose them to be messengers and spirits often inhabited their bodies. Not that Suri would dare kill one to get at its bones. The divine rarely appreciated the murder of a faithful servant. And of course there was always the risk of actually wringing the neck of a spirit in bird form, and that was just a bad day for everyone involved. The chicken bones would work even if the connection through the veil was hazy and intermittent. At least she wouldn’t fear offending anyone. No god, goddess, or spirit would ever inhabit or employ a chicken.

Suri planned to call on Mari. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but Mari, the goddess of wisdom, was the patron of Persephone’s home, and so Suri figured Mari would be the best overall choice. Suri was outside the palisade on the western side of the dahl, the highest point she could find. Minna lay quietly on the hill a few feet away, giving her space. The wolf was considerate that way. The mystic built her little fire and waited for the sun to descend. It was best to begin a reading at dusk, when the doors between the worlds were open the widest. They wouldn’t remain open long. While waiting, she divided the bones into groups. Those taken from the right side of the chicken referred to the “us,” the ones on whose behalf she performed the reading. Bones from the left represented the “others,” those in opposition.

As the sun dipped behind the distant trees, Suri dropped the two sets of bones into the flames. She waited as the black line of forest trees swallowed up the giant orange ball. She didn’t count or use any physical measurements. Suri was an instinctive augur. She performed her rituals by feel. Tura had taught Suri everything the old mystic had known, but she admitted no one could teach interpretation. You were either born with the talent or not.

Suri had the gift.

Tura had spotted it right away. The old mystic told Suri how she had called songbirds as a toddler. After placing the child in a clearing of daisies, violets, and bluebells, Tura would hide in the nearby forest eaves. Before long, Suri would be surrounded by a flock of birds—a multicolored gathering of unrelated songsters: goldfinches, red-winged blackbirds, blue jays, magpies, yellow-and black-throated warblers, bay wrens, robins, mockingbirds, and song sparrows. Suri would sit among them, delighting in their symphony. Gathering birds wasn’t her only talent; she also talked to fire spirits, knew when it would rain, and could predict the arrival of the first hard frost. Suri had the gift, but Tura gave her the tools to use it.

As the sky shifted hue from orange to purple, Suri felt the moment and doused the fire. Fire spirits hated water. All the children of the fire god, Outha, did. This one was no different, and it hissed at her.

“Sorry,” she told it, and wished she knew its name. She wasn’t even certain all spirits had names. The most important ones did. Wogan, the spirit of the Crescent Forest, for example, and Fribble-bibble the spirit of the High Stream, whose name she loved saying. The little fire spirits were like the rock and breeze spirits, too many to keep track of. She wondered if Elan bothered to name them all.

Gathering the bones, Suri laid them on a woven mat and began looking for the fire-born cracks and tiny holes. The way Tura had explained it, searching for truth in bones was a lot like guessing a person’s intent from the tone of his or her voice. In this case, it would be the voice of Mari, and the language was that of the divine. As such, much was left to interpretation. Still, Suri had a knack for divination that wasn’t restricted to just reading bones.

Tura had marveled at Suri’s ability to find her way in the forest. Initially, the older mystic attributed this skill to an excellent memory, but tossed that idea aside when Suri demonstrated the ability to find places she hadn’t been to before. After more than fifty years in the Crescent, Tura had discovered two of the underground rooms—the ones Malcolm had called Dherg rols. Suri found the other three in a week.

But communing with fire spirits is where Suri excelled the most. By the age of eight, her game of talking to fires and making the flames dance and change color had grown into something more. While watching Tura struggle to light kindling by spinning a stick with a bow, Suri ignited her own pile of wood with a few words.

“How did you do that?” Tura had asked.

Suri shrugged. “I asked a fire spirit to come, and it did. Isn’t that right?”

Tura nodded, but Suri had seen the confusion in the old woman’s face along with apprehension and maybe even a little fear. Tura began talking about malkins after that and mentioned how Suri might have come from the land of crimbals.

Suri stared at the bones, reading them as best she could in the fading light. That was always a problem with sunset readings. Such things needed the light of day to decipher, and it faded so fast. As the sun set and the night took hold of the world, Suri read a number of things. They weren’t the answers she was looking for, nothing about the men and why they had attacked, but what she saw was even more important.

Suri finished studying the patterns on the right leg. The holes were close together and near the top, indicating the forecast would be impending rather than concerning some distant future. Looking at the cracks, she saw there were two lines, which suggested two separate tales.

First and foremost, the chicken was flooded with bad omens in the same overwhelming manner that Suri had seen just before coming to Persephone. Little had changed on that score. Looking deeper, searching for specifics, she saw that all the bones agreed that the full moon would be the time of reckoning—the pivotal moment. The bones didn’t say how because the bones didn’t know, most likely because she was reading a chicken. They only showed a convergence of powers that, depending on the outcome, would change the world. Three of the bones told of a terrible danger to both the “us” and the “them.” One of the bones fascinated Suri because it suggested that a great secret was hidden in the forest and guarded by a bear. That bone also said this secret would play a significant role in the conflict to come. But it was the last bone that shocked her more than any other. The largest and clearest, only its tip had been marred by the fire. This bone declared that a monster was coming to Dahl Rhen to kill them all.

Suri cursed the fading light as she stared at the cracks and smudges. She would have guessed the monster referred to the Fhrey, but no. The marks indicated a single creature rather than a host of enemies. And the markings were so clear that Suri knew the monster’s name. More came after that but was lost to charring. It didn’t matter; Suri had all the hints she needed.

“Grin,” she said aloud.

A moment later, a bear roared in the distance, startling a flock of dark birds. They flew away toward the setting sun—toward the west.

Minna’s head came up, her eyes peering at the forest.

She whispered to Minna, “That’s not good.”





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Into the West




So many of our words originally came from either the Dherg or the Fhrey. The Fhrey word for “primitive” being Rhune, it became their word for humans. Rhulyn then means “Land of Rhune.” Avrlyn means “Land of Green.” And dahl was the Fhrey word for “wall.” The suffix -ydd, in Fhrey, translates to “new.” Which is why on the map I have named this region Rhenydd.

—THE BOOK OF BRIN