Crown of Crystal Flame by C L Wilson

Author:C L Wilson [Wilson, C L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-16T23:42:02.016000+00:00

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Mage Wars had left the women of the Fading Lands barren, it was rare for thirty children to be born in a village this size in twenty years, let alone four or five.

A chill, too-sweet odor made his hands reach instinctively for his missing blades and he spun in the half crouch of a warrior, his eyes scanning the room for the person spinning the forbidden magic. A woman at the far end of the room held a spiral of Azrahn in her palm. At her feet, a semicircle of children held their own, less organized spirals of the black magic.

Horror sapped all moisture from his mouth. “You teach them to weave the forbidden magic?”

Sheyl glanced back at the children in question, then returned her wary gaze to him. “Azrahn is not forbidden here. I know the Fey believe otherwise. You banish your strongest warriors if they dare to weave it.” The corner of her mouth curled up. “Your customs aren’t so different from the villagers who cast out their children and abandon them to die. You just wind your children at an older age.”

Rain’s head snapped back as if she’d slapped him. “The customs are nothing alike. Azrahn is the evil tool of the Mages.” But even as said it, he remembered Ellysetta saving the tairen with Azrahn, himself saving her, the warriors and civilians who would have died without Gaelen’s weaving Azrahn so Ellysetta could hold dying souls to life, the countless lives Gaelen had saved by detecting the Mage claimed hiding among the allies.

“Azrahn is just magic, a mystic like Spirit. Is Fire or Spirit evil? Nei, though, the manner of their use can be. It is no different with Azrahn. Which is why we teach our children from a very early age how to weave their magic—more importantly, how to control it. The ones with Mage Marks do not spin it, of course, but the rest of us do.”

“Some of these children are Mage-claimed?” Rain asked “Marked, not claimed. And, yes, some are.

The dahl’reisen save the ones they can and bring them here, where we can protect them and give them some semblance of a free life, safe from the Eld.

“It is Azrahn that lets us offer them that haven,” she added. “We spin it in our shield weaves to hide our presence from the Mages. We use it to detect Mage Marks and know who is a real danger to us, and who is not. Most of us here in the village possess at least some ability to spin the soul magic, and we are not evil.” She gestured to the room at large. “These children are not evil.”

“Why would Gaelen not tell us about you?” Ellysetta asked, her stunned gaze roving over all the little faces.

“All of us have sworn a blood-oath never to reveal information about our village and our children. The Eld would slaughter us. The Celierians would burn us out. The Fey would never accept

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