Light spiraled through his arms, twisted around his chest. He felt his skin dissolve, his body unraveling into tendrils of radiance as he floated, hovering above the water in a cave that was more than a cave. It was a body, a womb, a heart.
He looked down to the water that shone like a mirror, at the fish that was a constellation of stars. He saw his reflection as fluid as smoke, as luminescent as moonlight. It glimmered like a thousand dancing fireflies.
It changed.
The face that stared back was no longer his. The waters now showed a boy his age, a boy with burnt hair and rings in his lower lip. His eyes breathed galaxies, a thousand suns whirling like the lights that swam across the water’s surface.
Tenn reached out to touch the boy and felt the entire earth hum with need. Find him, find him, and for a moment, he forgot himself, why he’d come there, all of it replaced by the one need to reach out and touch this boy he had never seen. But that movement caused the water to ripple, and the boy’s face vanished in the dust of stars.
How do I find him? Tenn asked, or thought he asked.
The lights kept moving, tracing patterns over the water, tracing a pattern that burned into his mind. Over and over the lights moved, the runes glowing so bright it was blinding. Nearly a dozen of them, each thick with meaning but becoming so much more in sequence. He could barely keep up with them. Could barely figure out their meaning as they flashed over and over—he caught only whispers, only traces of meaning, and he prayed that recognition was enough. They filled him, burst through his senses—the rush of vertigo, the thunder of hoofbeats, the exhilaration of wind in his hair and the horizon opening, opening, expanding and contracting as he sped to meet the rising sun. The sun burned through him, the runes seared to memory. Light was everything, everything, light and movement and an ecstatic, shimmering truth.
Find him, the spirits sang. Find him and be whole. Find him and make the world whole.
Then he felt the drumbeat change.
He didn’t hear it, but he felt it. It tugged at his bones, pulled him up by the scruff of his neck. Like a puppet on a string, the drumbeat dragged him away, light fading as the tunnel reappeared, whirling around him in shadows and tremors of sound. All of it vibrating, vibrating, a second heart to echo his own. The tunnel went dark. And, like a diver bursting from the tide, Tenn broke back into the world of firelight and sound.
He sucked in a deep mouthful of air, his whole back arched as though possessed. One inhalation, and he fell back to the earth. His body was weak, spent, like it had been inhabited by something else, something that had used him up and left him lying in the dirt beside the fire. But he felt good. Ecstatic. The power was faint, but the light of the cave still hummed in his veins.
The drumming shook and fell apart, cascaded into a cavalcade of beats that faded to the hiss of rattles. Then silence. The crackle of fire.
Mara was at his side, one hand on his shoulder, the other holding a rattle of bone and rawhide. Her eyes were shadowed, expectant. He could only lie there, staring up at a sky that was uncannily clear, the stars above mirroring the cosmos in his mind.
“Welcome home,” she said. Then she stood.
Tenn couldn’t pay attention to the words she spoke next, only caught snippets of “thanks” and “gratitude.” He spun with ecstasy, weighted to the world that slipped and swam beneath him. Holding on to the memory of the vision was harder than holding fast to a dream. Like the fish, it slipped between his fingertips, shining and beckoning and impossible to grasp.
The rest of the Witches dispersed. He knew it, dimly. But he was too busy spinning in the vision. The runes. And the boy. And the need.
“What did you see?” Dreya asked. When had she knelt beside him?
“Runes,” he whispered. “For travel. They need Earth and Air to work, but they will take us...” He almost said to Jarrett but faltered. “They’ll take us to Leanna. To wherever we need to go.”
“That is all?” Dreya asked. She almost sounded disappointed.
He nodded. For some reason, he didn’t want to mention the boy. Not out of shame or fear, but because something about the vision felt intensely private. Not even he understood it, and voicing it to the world felt sacrilegious. Besides, he already had a guy to search for. Jarrett was out there. Waiting for him.
“Then we should be off soon,” Dreya said. “If you are strong enough.”
“I have to be,” Tenn said. He pushed himself to standing and did his best not to waver. “We leave tonight.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THEY WERE READY within the hour. There wasn’t much to pack—just extra rations and layers of clothing. Tenn sat by the fire for most of the preparations, staring into the flames and watching the runes flash over and over again in his mind. With every trace, he felt his understanding shift deeper, as though it were slowly sifting away layers of confusion. He knew the runes would transport them wherever they desired. He knew they needed Earth for grounding, Air for speed. And he knew they were a power the world hadn’t seen in hundreds of years, a language the gods had long ago stopped speaking. The weight of that knowledge settled on his shoulders with every crackle of the bonfire. Once more, he was entrusted with something he had no right to possess. What made him worthy of this knowledge? Why was he the one the spirits or gods were entrusting with their secrets?
And perhaps most important, would it be enough to save Jarrett?
One must be godlike...
At the moment, he felt terribly small.
“How does this work?” Dreya asked when they were ready. She had a small bag on her back, and wore a necklace with the symbol he’d seen above Rhiannon’s door, the seven-pointed star within a horned moon. He didn’t ask how she’d come across it.
Dreya’s was a question he barely had an answer to. Each of the dozen or so runes and symbols from the vision had a meaning. Each layered atop each other to create a sentence, a spell. In a way, he had whispers of meaning from each rune. But he didn’t know the individual powers, just as he didn’t fully grasp the individual meanings of the runes he used in the protection circles. He just knew they worked as a whole.
Until he had time to experiment, that would have to be enough.
Thankfully, his time in the vision, or whatever it was, gave him enough of a hunch on how to use the runes.
“I need you to channel Air into the runes. Each of you. It will only carry someone using the magic that fuels it. That’s it.”
They nodded.
“Ready?”
Another nod. That was enough for him.