Winged Magic

Epilogue

The following year proved another turning point in the history of the Dark Horse Clans. Bards marked its events in the Tale of Years; clanspeople talked about it for seasons afterward. It became known as the time of the Return of the Dead Clan.

That summer, a season marked by plentiful rains both north and south of the Altai, Sayyed and Rafnir decided to go to the clan gathering and take their people with them. They were one of the last groups to arrive, but they had planned that deliberately to honor their chieftain, Lady Helmar, and the three hundred and eighty-two members of the Clannad that would attend a clan gathering for the first time in over two hundred years.

The other clans crowded along the rivers and on the hillsides to watch them come. The Khulinin waited near the big council tent. Lady Gabria sat on Nara and felt the tears stream down her face, but she didn’t bother to wipe them off. She thought of her father and her brothers and the other Corins who had died twenty-eight years ago. She wished fervently they could have been there to watch the return of the Clannad.

The first riders came over the distant hill from the north, and Gabria recognized Kelene, who rode with her baby daughter bundled in a carrier on her chest, and Rafnir. Behind them rode Sayyed close beside his wife, Helmar, on her star-white mare. Just to their right, bouncing along like a puppy on stilts, was Marron’s month-old colt, a handsome baby Hunnuli with a black coat, the white lightning mark and, like an omen from the gods, a white mane and tail.

Then came the others, in a trailing column of carts, horses, and excited people—each and every one of them wearing the red cloak of Clan Corin.

The main body of the clan rode to the old Corin campsite along the Isin River, but Helmar, Sayyed, Rafnir, and Kelene trotted their Hunnuli to the council grove and greeted the other eleven clan chiefs.

Lord Bendinor stepped forward and spoke so all could hear. “Do you, Lady Gabria, as last surviving heir to Lord Dathlar and the line of Corin, acknowledge these people to be descendants of Lady Jeneve, daughter of Lord Magar of Clan Corin?”

Gabria looked up into Helmar’s shining face. “I acknowledge them with all my heart.”

Bendinor nodded to several people by the tent and, as Gabria watched through her tears, the scarlet banner of the Corin clan was raised for the first time since the massacre and took its rightful place among the twelve clans of Valorian.