The Silver Mage

by Katharine Kerr

  In a considerably better mood, Rori headed south, but he’d not gone more than a few miles when he saw Arzosah, flying north in the last of the long summer daylight to join him. They circled round each other in greeting, then flew back toward the army together. That night they made a lair on a long ledge of rock tucked into the side of a hill. Below, at a good distance, they could see the campfires of the Horsekin army spread out along a stream.

  “I spoke with Dallandra in Cerr Cawnen,” Arzosah said. “But I suppose you realized that I would.”

  Rori winced and braced himself for a tirade. None came.

  “She says Laz Moj has that book,” Arzosah went on. “She doesn’t know if she can work the dweomer in it or not because she’s yet to read it.” She paused to consider him with narrowed eyes. “But Dallandra also told me that she can’t reverse the transformation unless I help her.”

  “That settles that, then,” Rori said. “I’ll be staying in dragon form.”

  “And I suppose you’ll fly off and sulk for a hundred years, leaving me all alone.”

  “No. Why would I do that?”

  “To punish me, of course.”

  “For what? Wanting my company?”

  Arzosah sighed and crossed her front paws. For some while she stared off into the gathering night.

  “Do you remember Evandar’s silver ring?” Arzosah said abruptly.

  “Of course. It’s the beginning of everything between us.”

  “I like the evasive way you say that. You’re beginning to speak like a dragon, Rori. Are you sure you want to turn into a despicable, two-legged, earth-bound creature again?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Think back! You threw me that ring, and I ate it, and I was free of its spell over me. You set me free when I might have been your slave. Why wouldn’t I do the same for you?”

  Hope sprang up in his heart. Slowly, Rori swung his head her way. She uncrossed her paws and held one up, curling it to contemplate her claws.

  “You’ll help Dalla?” he said.

  “If you want me to. Say so, and I will.”

  “I don’t want to lose you and your company forever.”

  “Why would you? You were Rhodry Dragonfriend before, and you’ll be Rhodry Dragonfriend again.”

  He felt his eyes, those traitorous human eyes, fill with tears. “When Evandar was going to work the change upon me, there in Cerr Cawnen, Dallandra warned me that I’d be throwing my human soul away. That’s what I wanted, then. I remembered too many evil things, and I wanted to forget them all.”

  “Your soul seems a rather high price to pay to purge some evil memories.”

  “Oh, I never paid it. Dalla was wrong. I’ve never been able to rid myself of that human soul, and now it’s calling me back.”

  “Back to your true form?”

  “Back to my true home.”

  Arzosah lifted her wings as if she were about to spread them, then let them fall to her sides in a rustle like the wind in a thousand oaks. “So be it,” she said. “We’ll fly to Haen Marn together.”

  “My thanks.” His voice broke, and he laid his head upon the hard rock. He heard her scales scrape on the ledge as she moved close to lick his face, comforting him as she’d done so often before.

  “But do one last thing for me while you have wings,” she said. “Bid farewell to our son.”

  Rori hesitated, thinking back to his other, mostly human sons. He’d never said farewell to them because he could never have told them why he was leaving without disinheriting them. This son, at least, could hear the truth.

  “When the time comes, I will,” he said aloud. “In the morning, let’s fly to our lair. I’d like him to help guard the evacuation, anyway. Part of his heritage comes from the Westfolk, and part from Aberwyn, as well. He needs to become a friend to both.”

  “So he does, and that’s the one doubt I have about your leaving us. How will he know whom he may trust and whom he should despise?”

  “Ebañy will be here. He wants to repair the old watchtower, he tells me, to live in. He’ll teach Devar while he studies more dweomer.”

  “Oh, fires and fumes! You mean I’ll be afflicted with that chattering elf for years to come?”

  “Would you rather he stayed away? Or you could find a new lair away from the tower.”

  Arzosah growled and turned her head away. He waited while she thought the matter through.

  “For Devar’s sake, I can put up with your brother,” Arzosah said eventually. “Medea’s fond of his antics, and I suppose Mezza will be, too, once she sees his silly tricks and the like.”

  “As long as you won’t see him as some kind of affliction.”

  “I won’t, no.” All at once she rumbled with laughter. “Let me think about this new wretched annoyance! Somehow or other, it must be Evandar’s fault.”

  Dallandra woke long before daylight. She fed Hildie’s son Frei, dressed, and wandered outside to look down at the town below. The lake mists were beginning to clear in a soft rising wind, and she could see in the windows of every house the gleam of candles and cooking fires. The town had woken early as well. She turned to the east and saw in the dark gray sky a sliver of pink dawn just breaking. When she turned her mind to Dari, she saw her daughter just waking in her hanging cradle. Nearby, Sidro sat up and rolled free of her blankets without waking Pir to tend the baby. Dallandra smiled at them all, then broke the vision. Soon she’d see them all again in the flesh.

  As the sky brightened, she returned to Jahdo’s house and found it awake. The servants were setting out the last of the food while the family and guests stood around the table to eat rather than sit. Few people spoke, no one smiled. The farewell to their beloved city had begun. Dallandra took a chunk of bread and beckoned to Niffa and Salamander, who followed her out to the morning light.

  They walked round the back of the house. Below, they could see the ruins of the old temple and, beyond that, down the steep hill, tangled brush and shrubs. The slope led down to the lake, where black rocks raised jagged heads out of the water. As the morning sun gathered strength, the mists began to clear away, revealing the turquoise water.

  “This be a beautiful sight,” Niffa said. “It does break my heart to think I’ll not see it again.”

  “I know you love it,” Salamander said, “despite the fiery earth-blood under your feet, but truly, it’s a dangerous spot.”

  “It did be our home for so long.” Niffa paused to wipe a few tears from her eyes. “Still, better to leave than stay. I be well-pleased that our citizens did make the better choice.”

  “I am, too,” Dallandra said. “I was terrified that they’d choose to stay.”

  “So was I.” Salamander looked off to the north. “The Horsekin aren’t coming with a real army. It’s a mob, a horde, a howling crowd that’s only barely under the control of its officers. If they conquered the town with the people in it, the slaughter and rape would be horrifying, worse even than what your usual army would perpetrate. They’re Children of Fire, after all. Their rage escapes the control of their will and flares up like burning grass.”

  Niffa shuddered profoundly. “I do pray that we might get far enough away before they do reach our gates and find us gone.”

  From their perch, they could see the council barge crossing the lake toward the north commons. Niffa pointed it out.

  “The load it carries, that be the mule packs. My brother, he does keep his mules over there. His men will load them up and take them round to the south gate. I think me it be time for us to ready ourselves to ride.”

  With the morning, Rori and Arzosah took wing. They made one disrupting pass over the Horsekin army, then headed north to their lair above the ruined tower. On their way they saw a flock of wild sheep, grazing on a grassy hillside, descendants of animals that had once grown wool for Tanbalapalim or Bravelmelim. The dragons wheeled round in the sky, stooped, and killed a sheep each to take to the lair. When they landed on the ledge, the three young dra
gons slithered out of the cave mouth, all talking at once in Dragonish to greet Arzosah. She made a maternal clucking noise and licked each of their faces in greeting.

  “I’ll be sending you south to guard the Prince of the Westlands and his friends,” Arzosah told them. “So eat up while I tell you why and how.”

  “Devar,” Rhodry said, “I want you to listen especially carefully. You and your sisters have a very important job to do, guarding the Prince of the Westlands. I want you to fly now and join them. Someday, when you’re grown and the Prince of Dragonkind, Prince Dar will be your ally, someone you can count on to help you. So you need to help him now.”

  “I will, Da. I promise.”

  “Good lad! Now you can have your breakfast.”

  While her young ate mutton, Arzosah repeated her instructions several times, just to make sure, as she put it, that they’d heard her.

  “Hatchlings, you obey Medea,” Arzosah finished up. “She’s the eldest, and she knows how to be cautious. Now lick your faces clean, everyone. It’s time for us to fly.”

  Once they saw Mezzalina, Medea, and Devar well on their way, Rori and Arzosah flew east. For Cerr Cawnen’s sake, they spent one last day harrying the Horsekin army. First, Rori would swoop down upon them from one side; then, as he flew up, Arzosah would attack from the other. They would both retreat, allow the army to gather itself again, then repeat the attacks. Finally, when the sun had reached zenith, the army came to a narrowing of the valley where the western hills rose in steep, stony cliffs. It huddled against the cliffs and made camp, barricading the horses between cliffs and a line of wagons. Rori and Arzosah flew off, well pleased at the delay, but by then, the army was a scant twelve miles from the town.

  That night the two dragons laired in the empty town, up on Citadel’s highest peak. Rori could remember Cerr Cawnen as a lively, noisy place—children laughing and playing, market vendors crying, the men of the militia joking together, their weapons and armor clanging and jingling as they went about their rounds on the town walls. Now silence lay over everything as thick as the mist rising from the lake.

  “It gripes my soul,” Rori said, “to think of those white savages taking over the town.”

  “Mine, too,” Arzosah said. “You know, we can’t stop them from taking it, but we don’t have to let them keep it.”

  “What? We could summon every dragon in the Northlands, and we still wouldn’t have the strength to drive these hairy rats out of their hole.”

  “Quite true. But I can turn the place into an oven and bake them. Don’t you remember what I told Dallandra, all those years ago when you’d been stabbed?”

  “The fire mountain!”

  “Exactly that! Cerr Cawnen’s lake is fed by springs deep, deep under the land. What heats the springs? An ancient fire mountain, worn down by its own erupting, but still alive, deep inside the earth. It’s a sullen creature, that fire mountain, hateful and ready to snarl and spit hot earth-blood from its crumbling mouth.” Arzosah raised her head and stared at the starry horizon. Her eyes gleamed in the faint light. “I’ll teach you the insults and curses that will wake it again, and together we’ll call forth its fire.”

  Rori found himself remembering the day he’d met her, when she’d looked much the same, grand and dweomer-proud. He realized that consorting with him had diminished her, made her petty and demanding.

  “You need to be free of me,” he said, “as much as I need to be free of this body.”

  She turned toward him with a clack of fangs, as if she were about to argue, but she hesitated, then sighed.

  “True spoken,” she said. “I hate to admit it, but true spoken.”

  They looked out at the town in silence while the moon rose, a few nights past its full, but still bright in the sky. The silver light lay over the silent houses and gleamed on a chimney there, a glass window here. At its final mooring the council barge bobbed by a rickety wooden pier over on the northern shore.

  “If we burn the town,” Rori said eventually, “I don’t want the fire spreading. Can you keep it within the walls?

  “I can’t, but the water meadows will. The ground all round here was a swamp years and years ago. The Rhiddaer folk drained it a few stretches at a time. But once the fire comes, and the walls tumble down, then the water will burst free.”

  With the first light of dawn they woke. Arzosah announced that she had preparations to make and sent Rori off to scout the Horsekin column. He found it breaking camp where they’d left it, some ten miles away. Even though he glided far above it, he could see the thousand glints of dawn on metal that meant the warriors were arming. Apparently, they’d sent out no scouts of their own to discover that the townsfolk had fled.

  Despite the desertions over the Alshandra sighting, the army still presented a formidable enemy. Horse warriors, of course, a thousand of those left, he estimated, along with about five hundred spearmen, and archers, more archers than he’d ever seen with one of their armies, maybe a hundred in all. They must have stripped their cities of their best soldiers for this attack. Scurrying around, packing supplies, saddling horses, and the like were menservants—slaves, he supposed, and he pitied them, but only briefly.

  Before they could notice him, Rori soared up high. The wind that day was blowing steadily from the south. He tacked into it as if he were sailing a little boat in Aberwyn’s harbor, all those years before when he’d been a boy. Never a hatchling, he thought. Maybe that’s why I can’t be happy like this. With his decision made, he felt oddly calm, at peace despite the war brewing beneath him.

  When he returned to Cerr Cawnen, Arzosah flew up to greet him. She led him off to the west and a hillside several miles from the town, where they could settle and wait.

  “Will they invest the town today?” Arzosah said.

  “Toward sunset,” Rori said.

  “Good. Then they won’t be marching out again right away. We’ll work the spell in the dark of night, when the tide of Earth is flowing. Now listen carefully.”

  Since Dallandra had spent her entire life traveling with the Westfolk flocks and herds, the disorder of the townsfolk’s retreat surprised and appalled her. It took a couple of hours for all the refugees to march out of the town gates. Next came the water meadows, where they had to pick their way through on narrow trails. The mob split up into a myriad of lines and columns. By the time everyone had gotten through to the firm ground of the grasslands to the south, the sun hung close to noon. The entire column seemed to think as one. Without asking their leaders, they stopped to rest and feed their livestock and children.

  Dallandra used the interval to scry for Rori. She saw him just leaving the embattled Horsekin army under the western cliffs, but she had no idea of exactly where that spot was in relation to the town.

  “By the Black Sun herself,” Dallandra said, “we’ve got to get these people moving faster.”

  “I agree,” Calonderiel said. “Let me go talk with Jahdo.”

  Jahdo agreed as well, but the logistics of the move defeated them all. It simply took time to get a mob of civilians ready to move on, more time to get them actually moving, and still more time to deal with wagons, children, dogs, horses, oxen, and the like during the march. Dallandra felt as if they were crawling south on hands and knees. At least the weather would hold clear and dry, or so the Wildfolk assured her. They’d spotted no rainstorms anywhere near.

  A further delay arrived with the young dragons, who appeared in midafternoon, flying high over the refugee column. With Medea leading them, they landed a good half mile ahead and to the east of the vulnerable livestock. Still, everyone stopped walking and paused to watch them, so graceful in the air. Cal, Dar, and Jahdo managed to get the line moving again while Dallandra turned her horse—one of those Pir had accustomed to dragon scent—out of line and trotted over to join them. She dismounted, dropped the reins to make the roan gelding stand, and walked over to Medea.

  “Here we are,” Medea said. “Mama said we’re to help guard
the prince.”

  “And I’m very grateful that you will,” Dallandra said. “Do you know where the Horsekin are?”

  “Not very far from the town, last I saw them.”

  Dallandra swore under her breath.

  “Mama and Rori are planning something,” Medea went on. “I don’t know what, but I know what it means when Mama gets that look in her eye. She told us she’d do something to the Horsekin, and then she and Rori would come south, too.”

  “Splendid! That lifts my spirits considerably.” Dallandra paused, glancing at Mezza and the young silver wyrm. “Is that your half brother?”

  “It is.” Medea turned her head. “Devar, come meet the dweomermaster.”

  Devar was still young and slender enough to move with some grace on the ground. He trotted over, ducked his head in greeting, then looked at his sister as if asking what to say. Rhodry’s son! That reality still had the ability to shock Dallandra, but she smiled and fell back on platitudes.

  “My thanks to you, too, Devar,” Dallandra said. “Your uncle’s riding with us, by the by.”

  “Good! I do like him.” Devar hesitated briefly. “Mama said that you have dweomer.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Will you show us some?”

  “Hush!” Medea snapped. “Mama said you weren’t supposed to bother Dallandra.”

  Devar hung his head, so abashed that Dallandra pitied him, dragon or not. She patted his broad jaw. “I will,” she said, “but I don’t have the time to do it now. We have to keep these refugees moving, or the Horsekin will catch and kill them.”