Harvest of Dreams (The Gods' Dream Trilogy) (31 page)

~ ~ ~

When the door crashed open, Sadie had instinctively reacted by leaping back and bringing up her sword. But when Philan stormed inside, his features twisted into a mask of rage, he didn’t even glance in her direction, so focused was the soldier on Tharon.

Sadie watched in horror as he attacked, and the two men began to battle. The clang of their swords rang in her ears, the familiar sound made sharper by the reality of the fight.

Tharon sparred defensively.

With a sudden leap of fear, she realized he had no intention of harming the Seagem man. But Philan was too full of emotion, his thrusts wild and strong. If Tharon didn’t fight offensively, Philan would kill him.

Goddess…Goddesses, please guard him!

As the men moved toward the middle of the floor, Sadie dashed toward the armory, praying her sword was still there. She flung open the door, and to her relief saw that the room remained untouched. She set the sword she carried on the floor and lifted hers off the wall.

This time, she didn’t wait to experience the sword’s awakening. As she raced into the main part of the salle, the sword sang. The blue light brightened the colorless stones in the hilt and pommel, and energy poured through her body as
Ganawen
forged a connection with her.

“Goddess Guinheld! Goddess Withea!” Sadie cried, the names a prayer and a demand.

With a rush, the Deities answered.

Power surged through her. Her sword sparked with swirls of Withea’s green energy and Guinheld’s orange.

Sadie positioned herself next to the battling men, just beyond the reach of their blades. “Stop!” she yelled.

The power of the Goddesses reached through the word, freezing Philan mid-swing, and forcing Tharon to hold the block he’d just thrown up.

Sadie thrust her sword between them and held it there—a wall between the two men. “Step back and lower your swords,” she commanded, the words backed by the will of the Goddesses.

The men obeyed.

Philan glared at her.

The orange energy swirling around the sword vanished. The green energy remained, pulsing with power. Sadie pointed the sword at Philan. “The Goddess Withea commands you attend Her.” The vibration of her tone left no doubt that Sadie had become the conduit of the Deity.

Philan shot a hard look at Tharon. Although the Seagem man lowered his sword slightly, the tip was aimed in the direction of the man he obviously considered an enemy. He glanced at Sadie’s sword. “Who’s this Goddess Withea? I’ve never heard of her.”

I am the Goddess of the desert-that-no-longer-is-a-desert.

Sadie heard the words in her head, and from the startled expressions on Tharon and Philan’s faces, so did they.

Leave off your enmity with Tharon, Philan, and come to me now.

“Tharon?” Philan spoke to the air.

Tharon looked at Sadie and half lifted a hand in an appeal, an agonized expression in his gold eyes.

What’s wrong?
She started to go to him, to take his hand.

Philan swung his attention back to Tharon. “You! She means
you
. You changed your name, hoping to hide who you are. You’re not Tharon. You’re
Thaddis the destroyer
!”

Sadie’s body turned to ice. Philan’s words rang in her ears.
Thaddis the Destroyer, Thaddis the Destroyer.
My Tharon is the Hitler of this world.

Nausea rose in her throat. She spun and ran into the hidden room, grabbed the sheath containing her knife, then dashed into the salon. Without looking at either man, she raced out of the room.

~ ~ ~

Pasinae stood in the cavern, buffeted by the oven-like heat. From numerous trips, one every two days, she’d become familiar enough with the otherworldly beauty of the giant crystals and had explored a considerable amount of the cavern searching for the right prisms. Twice, she’d found the correct shape she needed. But each time, when she touched the surface, the energy hadn’t meshed with Ontarem’s.

Every day the crystals set into the mountains and beaming at Yadarius lost a little more power, and the SeaGod grew stronger. Ontarem became impatient with the need to provide her energy, becoming stingy with the power she desperately needed. The struggles of the SeaGod to free Himself, and the time spent in the furnace heat of the cavern, had whittled Pasinae’s body to gauntness and drained her othersense. She’d never been so exhausted. But she pushed herself to endure.

However, the fatigue made her more vulnerable to the hallucinations caused by the intense heat of the cavern. Her parents, whose faces she’d never remembered before, now appeared regularly. Kokam, too, looked as alive as when she’d last seen her brother. The first time she’d seen a vision of him, the sight had startled her into losing her balance. Only a quick grab from Vaptor had saved her from falling into a deep crack.

The hallucinations cracked open a trove of memories, locked away when Ontarem’s priests had seize the triplets from their parents. Pasinae remembered the love and closeness the family had shared; how Ontarem had to numb her feelings of loss before she could turn to Him and make him her everything. She’d wondered if her parents were still alive.

Her unsteady emotions ran the gamut from joy to grief. Sometimes she had to blink away tears to continue her search.

Today, despite the desperation pushing her to hurry, Pasinae knew better than to move recklessly. She eyed the slick surface of the cavern floor before she placed each step.

Movement from the corner of her eye made Pasinae turn her head to the left, where she saw Kokam beckoning her to follow him. She shook her head and turned toward the area she intended to explore, but the hallucination of her brother appeared directly before her, blocking the way. Sighing, she gave in and signaled to Vaptor the direction she intended to take.

Vaptor jerked his thumb, telling her he was leaving. Dorent, her next protector, stepped up to take his place.

Pasinae ducked under an angled column, then swerved around a clump of prisms, her breathing heavy.

Still, Kokam moved on toward the back left of the interior.

Pasinae had to climb between a V-shaped crystal, then over a smaller one, lying sideways across her path.

Vaptor touched her elbow and signaled it was time to return to the outside.

She nodded, but stopped to give one more sweeping glance over the area.

Kokam pointed to a cluster of three crystals with a single root.

Gasping for air, not daring to hope, Pasinae trudged closer, pulling on Ontarem’s othersense power to give her the energy to move.

The God grudgingly gave a small push.

Up close, each of the three crystals looked similar in size and shape, and weren’t too big to transport out of the cavern and up the mountains. More importantly, all three ended in a perfect point.

Please, please, please!
Slowly, Pasinae reached out and laid her palm on the nearest one. Power pulsed from the crystal through her and to Ontarem, augmenting her failing energy.

I’ve found them!

She looked up and met Kokam’s eyes. “Thank you, brother. With these, we’ll keep Yadarius prisoner.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Philan let his anger propel him through the streets of Seagem toward the temple of Yadarius. In the months since the destruction, he’d never walked through the desolation of this once beautiful city without his body heating and vibrating with hate for Thaddis of Ocean’s Glory. Over and over, he’d vowed to kill the king, no matter if it meant his own death. Only the even stronger need to protect the small remnant of Seagem’s population had held him back from tracking down the destroyer when Thaddis had left to search for Princess Daria.

As Philan stalked through the streets, he wanted to explode from the rage and bitterness churning inside him.
How could I not have recognized Thaddis?
The boy he’d been, who’d hero-worshiped the older prince from Ocean’s Glory, would never have recognized the white-haired man who’d stood before him today.

He and Seagem’s princes, along with Daria, had ranked as the king’s elite fighters. He’d been honored to serve as King Iceros personal bodyguard. In a soft moment, Micfal had once commented that with practice and experience, Philan would become good enough to best even him, the weaponsmaster.
But today, I failed him.
His ears almost burned with the sound of his grandsire’s reproofs.

When he’d realized his enemy lay within his grasp, he’d lost his head. Fought like a novice. The shame of that reaction churned in his gut.

But Micfal’s sharpest criticism couldn’t cut more than the realization he’d failed to kill Thaddis when he had a chance—the man would have lain dead at his feet if Philan had fought with all his skill. And then to be stopped by an unknown Goddess….

I’ll have another opportunity. As soon as I’m finished with this Goddess, I’ll hunt him down.

As he strode up the hill to the temple, Philan’s calves burned, another feeling that made him angry. In these last months, he should have pushed himself harder. In the old days, he regularly sprinted up this hill as a way to keep in top form.

He reached the temple and didn’t stop to look at the view of the city. His appreciation for the vista had shattered the day the invaders sailed unscathed through the rocky girdle surrounding Seagem.

He entered the courtyard and paused, seeing the activity centered around the pool, as people attempted to right the statue of Yadarius. Most wore white robes, citizens from Zacatlan, he supposed. Some black-clad soldiers, wearing in the uniform of Ocean’s Glory and hauling on the chains, made him clench his fists.

The sight flashed Philan back to when the seascum had sailed away from the city, taking his people as slaves and leaving behind only ruins. Only days after the battle, despite the protest of his healer, Philan had risen from his sickbed and climbed the hill to the temple in search of survivors and in a faint hope that somehow he’d find the SeaGod’s presence.

He’d been crazy with grief and still in pain from his wound, couldn’t see right with only one eye, kept tripping and falling. But he clawed the determination from within to do the duty that remained to him. But he’d found only bodies—pitiful remains of the priests and priestesses and the people who’d sought refuge in the temple. He couldn’t execute the sea ceremony for the slain, so Philan had built and lit a fire in the vast pit in the mourning place on the ocean side edge of the hill and said the words that would accompany the souls of the dead to the Halls of Yadarius. He’d never returned to the temple…nor had anyone else—all were unable to bear the pain of the empty building.

A touch on his arm brought him back to the present, and he looked down, blinking to focus his eye. “Wenda?” The priestess was a friend since childhood when they’d been part of a group that included the princess. The children would race through the halls of the palace playing hide and tag—looked upon, for the most part, with indulgence by the king, although the servants often swatted them out of the way with a broom or wooden spoon or cleaning rag. Even Daria hadn’t been immune. “Wenda,” he said again. “Have you been in Zacatlan all this time?”

Wenda gazed at him with tears in her eyes. She nodded, evidently too overcome to speak.

Philan remembered how her blue eyes had always sparkled with mischief, although she’d become somewhat more staid when she became a priestess. “I never thought to ask Zacatlan for help. Didn’t remember the country existed.”

Wenda reached up and gently touched the scar on his face. “My dear friend.” Her whisper vibrated with emotion. “I rejoice that you are alive. But your eye…” her voice faltered.

“I’m
alive
, Wenda.” He caught her hand and squeezed. “But more importantly, so are you, friend of my childhood. You are well?”

One tear dripped down her face. “My body is well. My heart....” She shook her head.

“Our hearts will never be well.” Philan hardened his voice. “Thaddis is here, Wenda. I just fought him. The girl with him stopped me from killing him. But I would have. I still will.”

She gripped his arm. “I know. Guinheld healed Thaddis. Freed him from Ontarem’s chains. We are forbidden to harm him.”

“Ontarem? What chains?” Philan ground out. “Why would the Goddess side with the destroyer of Seagem?”

“There’s more to our world than we ever knew, Philan. First of all, we have six Gods and Goddess.”

“
Six?
”

Wenda briefly filled him in on the Deities, then told him the story of Ontarem and Thaddis.

Even though Philan heard her words, their meaning couldn’t sink into his mind. The idea of Thaddis as the evil destroyer was too deeply imbedded in his brain. He impatiently shrugged off her words. “That girl with him said I was summoned to Withea.”

Wenda lifted that determined chin of hers. “Then you must obey.” She waved a graceful hand to a far wall, tiled in iridescent mosaics, which he’d never paid attention to before, and saw the faint outline of an arched door. “That leads to Withea’s shrine. Go,” she said. “I’ll see you when you return.”

He clasped her hand, before striding toward the door, determined to make this interview with the Goddess as brief as possible. As he raised a hand to touch the tile, the entrance slid aside. He peered inside but couldn’t seem to make his eye focus enough to see what was there.