by Diane Duane
Seventy-four trees, in eight circles, the outermost one with many places still left unfilled; they stand there by the little stream Nalash that waters the Orsmernin meadow on its way down to the Arlid. None of the trees have ever died, though some of them have gone green-rotten at the heart. Seventy-four trees: but there have been seventy-five rulers of Arlen.
There was a man standing under one of the outermost trees that morning. Nearby, his two horses were drinking leisurely from a pool of the Nalash stream, but the man’s attention was turned away from them, inward, toward the Grove. The early sun struck slantwise through the leaves, which had gone that tired green that many trees acquire toward the end of summer. Only the tallest of them, Berlemetir, reared up out of the whispering canopy and showed its topmost leaves had gone golden. The warmth in the air, and the heat of even this early sun, said summer: but the tree knew the truth.
Freelorn looked at the slight mound in the grass before him. Off to his left was Fréol’s tree. He remembered the day Ferrant had planted it, a handsome young whitestave sapling about three years old. Now it was well along in growth, some forty feet tall after twenty years—whitestaves didn’t waste their time getting their height. There was no tree on the slight rise of ground in front of Lorn, however. There had been no one around, after they buried Ferrant, who was entitled to plant it.
There will be shortly, though, Freelorn thought, and looked toward the walls of Prydon. He walked away from the Grove, clucking to the horses.
*
At the gates of Prydon, the usual guard was mounted. The day had dawned bright and clear, hot already and promising to be hotter still. Such weather was common enough just before the harvest, but the oddity was that the town, for a change, was not full of country people having their last big fling before going out to the townlands and beginning the serious work of getting the crops in. Things were quiet that morning.
One of the guards looked at the other as a horseman passed through, and a woman carrying a basket of eggs. “You smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“Smelled like rain for a moment. It was cool.”
“Send it over here,” said the other guard, fanning himself and looking the other way.
The first guard yawned and looked down toward the river, where the engineers were making their third attempt of the morning to get a bridge of lashed-together boats to hold against the rush of water. The boats broke away again, and one string of them went wavering downstream, like a string of weed in the fierce flow of the water. The guard’s counterpart looked over suddenly and said, “Hey, I felt that just then.”
“Nice,” the first guard said, luxuriating in the breeze as it went by him and through the gates into the city, smelling of wheatfields under rain, and of cool stone with a cool wind over it....
*
Herewiss peered out the back window of the boarding house, most cautiously.
“Come on, you,” Segnbora said from behind him: “eat your breakfast, do. You’ll ruin the rest of the day.”
Herewiss said nothing, since he held out no great hopes for the day as things stood at the moment. Sunspark had not completely destroyed the Darthene Embassy last night—most of the walls were still standing, and some of the upstairs rooms had been spared. The banquet hall, though, was a dead loss—rather like the Bridge, Herewiss thought with a spark of satisfaction—and Andaethen had suggested to him that it might be more politic for him to make himself scarce. Herewiss, therefore, had betaken himself privily off to the boarding-house near the second wall, with Sunspark in tow, and had found Segnbora already there.
Or rather, he had found her less there than he expected. When dealing with the annoyed old man who ran the house, or with his suspicious staff, she looked quite normal. “It’d be a poor sort of day that I couldn’t manage to keep an illusion in place,” she said to Herewiss, with good-natured scorn, when he first came up to the suite of rooms she had engaged. But for one who could see through such things, though Segnbora was there enough to support her clothes, her face and hands and anything else of flesh that showed were more like a pale thin stained glass than muscle and bone. One thing was new: she now wore a front-and-back tabard of the shed black dragonhide that she had been working on when Herewiss saw her last. Herewiss almost coveted it, and Segnbora was pleased enough with it on her own part, for reasons that had nothing to do with the gemmy beauty of it. The dragonmail would turn any sword that hit it, and blunt anything else, arrow, dart or spear.
The rooms she had taken at the top of the boarding-house were large, for Segnbora had anticipated the possibility of guests: there were three bedrooms and a sitting room. But they weren’t large enough to keep Herewiss from pacing, and looking worriedly at her, and out the window onto the back garden. All the roses were in bloom in a riot of gold and red, but Herewiss’s attention was mostly for the view over the garden wall. The white dome of Lionhall was visible there, over many intervening roofs.
Herewiss leaned against the frame of the hinged iron window in the whitewashed wall, looking over toward the dome, eyeing the hard, hot blue sky. “Where’s Hasai?” he said.
“Over on the coast,” Segnbora said, sitting down by the couch on which Sunspark was dozing in its young-woman shape. “He keeps coming real suddenly, the past few days... he can’t control it. When I came into town, I told him to keep himself nearby and out of sight. The first night I was here, he tried to sneak in, and almost wrecked the whole back wall.” Segnbora looked amused, but worried. “His physicality is getting assertive....”
“And yours unassertive.”
Segnbora would not meet his eyes. She breathed out, looked over at Sunspark and carefully stroked a stray bit of that fiercely red hair out of the handsome young woman’s face. “She’s resting a lot, isn’t she. He. It.”
Herewiss nodded. Hooves rang in the archway under the window: someone coming into the innyard.”
“It wasn’t this bad after Midsummer,” Segnbora said. “Only a few hours, it took, before it was back to normal.... ”
Herewiss nodded, his eyes on the newcomer. Scraggly-looking man, bearded—some kind of tradesman, just in from the countryside, from the look of him. The man glanced up at the courtyard windows in the sunlight, a cool, cautious look—
Herewiss froze.
My Goddess—!!
Only the kind of discipline that adepts learn kept him still. “‘Berend,” he said.
Her eyes widened as she caught his thought, even through his heart-mail of Fire. “Lorn—?!”
Herewiss was suffering such a rush of relief and terror and desire and confusion that his legs simply gave out on him, and he sat down hard on the wooden stool by the window. Segnbora looked abstracted for a moment, then got up and strolled over to the window, glanced out it casually. “He knows,” she said. “Give him a while to sort out his room and deal with the householder. After that, I can hold the protection for all our minds for a while.” She turned back to him and smiled. “I think you could use a few hours off.”
It was a harder fifteen minutes, in many ways, than those Herewiss had spent dueling with Rian and the Shadow last night. When the door finally creaked softly open, he hardly knew what he did—
How long they held each other, he had no idea. He held Lorn away from him, and looked at him; but Lorn, after a moment of standing with his head scrunched down against Herewiss’s shoulder, was looking around the room. That cautious expression again. “Where’s Segnbora?” he said.
Herewiss glanced around and saw that she had slipped into the next room. “And Spark,” Freelorn said. “No one else here?”
“Moris is still up with Andaethen,” Herewiss said. “Dritt got here earlier: he has a room of his own downstairs. Harald is elsewhere in town—he’ll be along tonight. The rest are with Eftgan’s levies. Lorn, the Embassy—”
“I heard,” Freelorn said, looking with a tight, amused expression at the sleeping Sunspark. “Neither sorcery nor Fire could have done a job quite
that way.” He looked at Herewiss.
Herewiss was shocked. Freelorn was radiating certainty, and a sort of solid fierceness that Herewiss had never seen in him before. “Oh, I missed you,” Freelorn said: but even that longing had an edge and a hunger to it that Herewiss hadn’t ever heard. It was a joy to hear... and rather frightening.
“Lorn,” Herewiss said, holding him away, “for Goddess’s sake, how did you get in here? What happened to the seeming Eftgan put on you? How did you just walk in?”
“I have a lot to tell you,” Freelorn said. “As for the walking in—” He smiled. “I may have a trick or two to show you, once we’ve been in Lionhall.” His glance went out the window, to that high dome shining against the blue. “Tomorrow night, aye?”
Herewiss nodded.
“But it can wait,” Freelorn said.
*
Very much later, Freelorn turned over and stretched, and said: “What about Rian?”
Herewiss lay on the bed in a mixed state: satisfaction, and worry, and exhaustion—the sudden tiredness had hit him after the first flush of their lovemaking. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to feel any working of his mind since last night. Possibly he feels the same way I do... “
“But it’s unsafe to assume that,” Freelorn said.Herewiss nodded. “I told you about his seeming immunity to backlash. His linkage to the Shadow—it seems almost to be a conscious thing, a being in its own right—all the backlash hits that and seems to be absorbed.” He thought about that a moment. “I have a feeling that it may become Rian’s own death, personified, if he slips.”
“Or ours,” Lorn muttered, “if he doesn’t.”
Herewiss rolled over. “Yes, I thought about that. The connection of Iriv the Mad, at Bluepeak, to the Gnorn—not precisely the Shadow Itself, but a creation made out of Iriv’s mortality, and insanity: an attempt to harness that power. But it didn’t work too well, and caused the uprising of the Lion and Eagle.... so that the Shadow failed badly. Now we have this new sort of linkage... something different, more controllable, or so the Shadow thinks. Rian, providing the connection to human calculation, and righteousness, and blindness... “
“And power.”
Herewiss nodded, though reluctantly. It still chafed him that he had not been able to do anything about Rian, even something so simple and unsubtle as killing him.
“Stop that,” Freelorn said, sounding gentle, but exasperated. “It’s not helping you work out what to do next... and that’s what we’d better be concentrating on.” Lorn sighed. “A sorcerer whose backlash is being stored... “
“Bind enough energy in one place for long enough,” Herewiss said, “and it’ll start to ‘wake up’ the matter or other matrix it’s bound into. A pattern of energy will do well enough for such a matrix. So would a sorcery, if it were complex enough, and strong enough to hold the energy in question....” He thought about that for a moment. “The backlash of all Rian’s sorceries... his weather magics, and whatever else he’s been doing... all directed into this ‘being’, and stored for some use later. Against what?”
“You,” Lorn said. “Eftgan. Me.”
“But why hasn’t Rian used it already?” Herewiss said, sitting up, pulling the pillow out from behind him, and trying to punch it into a more comfortable shape. “Why wait?”
Lorn looked at Herewiss. “Because he’s waiting for a particularly large infusion of backlash, to fuel a particularly effective manifestation... an appearance of the Shadow Itself, the way the Lion and Eagle were an appearance of the Goddess’s other Lover.” Lorn raised his eyebrows. “You could get an infusion like that from the workings of a lot of other sorcerers.”
“Such as would be provided by the outbreak of a war,” Herewiss said. “By the first few battles....”
They looked at each other dubiously.
‘Berend, Herewiss said. Could we trouble you?
Are you decent? she said.
“No,” Freelorn said, “but come on in anyway!”
There was a sound of muffled snickering from outside. A moment later Segnbora opened the door and stepped in, carrying a plate and some linen napkins, and gnawing on a chicken bone. She put the plate down on the bed for them—the rest of the roasted chicken—and sat herself down on the window-seat.
There were a few minutes consisting of nothing but muffled exclamations at scorched fingers. Then Herewiss said, “When’s the last time Hasai was up on the wing?”
“A couple of hours ago.”
“What are the Arlenes doing?”
“Oh, they’re moving,” Segnbora said, “but not quickly. They still haven’t been able to bridge Arlid near the city, and they’re having to do all their crossings at Daharba and Anish. About two thousand mercenaries and a thousand regulars are on the east side of the river now, and some of them are moving down the Road, but only about a thousand so far. Supply trains haven’t caught up with the others yet, and they’re refusing to move until they do.”
Herewiss smiled at that. Those soldiers who had spent a hungry tenday sitting outside Prydon with only bread and water to sustain them were not willing to put up with such treatment just before a battle. “Well enough,” he said. “How fast are the forces on the east side moving?”
“Not very. There have been reports,” she said, with an annoyed look, “of Fyrd over there, quite a few of them.”
Herewiss looked alarmed at that. “Attacking the Arlenes?”
“No. Just spotted by them. But the Arlenes are nervous about it, especially the mercenary troops. Apparently there are quite a few of the bigger kinds of Fyrd prowling around.”
“Rian’s shock troops,” Freelorn said. “I think we’d better force the pace.” He looked out the window at the dome of Lionhall, away across the roofs.
Segnbora followed his glance. “It’s guarded, you know,” she said. “There are about a hundred soldiers around the place already, and there are sorcerers nearby. I think there’ll be more of both, as the time for the battle gets closer.”
“Best not to wait, then,” Lorn said. “And I encourage witnesses... enough of them to spread the word, later, that I did go into Lionhall, and come out again afterwards. Once that happens, the whole tenor of this war changes. There may still be battles, but the question of who’s in the right will have been sorted out for good and all.”
Herewiss swallowed, trying to put his feelings in order. “Lorn,” he said, “I want to have enough of our people handy to make sure we can get you in there. My Power—” He shook his head, and made the admission that had been galling him bitterly since last night: “At the moment, and especially after last night, I’m about as powerful as any given Rodmistress. My breakthrough’s over, and if you’re looking for miracles, you’re going to be disappointed. We’re going to have to make do with strategy and precision instead of overwhelming force.”
Freelorn gazed at him. It was an odd, steady expression that Herewiss wasn’t sure what to make of. “Who else do you think we need?” he said. “Besides yourself and Segnbora and Hasai. I assume we can count on Hasai for this—”
Segnbora laughed softly. “We have at least one miracle on our hands,” she said: “a Dragon who’s itching to do something. I doubt we could keep him out of it.”
“Mori’s with Andaethen. dritt’s here. Where’s Harald again?”
“He’s in the city,” Segnbora said. “I can send him word when you’re ready, Lorn, and he can meet us.”
“It’ll have to be tonight, then,” Lorn said. “No point in letting Cillmod’s people add more guards than necessary: no point in letting Rian have a breathing space, either.”
“Lorn—” Herewiss said. All his fears were standing up inside his head and shouting at him. “Are you sure you’re ready for this—”
Freelorn burst out laughing, and put his arms around Herewiss. “Of course I’m not ready! But I have no choice. Neither do any of us. And this is what I came here for... what Eftgan is coming down the road with tha
t army for. Cillmod may have gone into Lionhall and come out again, but he is not Initiate, and he wasn’t able to make use of the Regalia. If he had been, I wouldn’t have been able to invoke the Great Bindings at Lionheugh. They worked because I was next-best—because I knew the ceremony, and had the Regalia myself, and the Queen of Darthen working in partnership. But it’s not enough any more. Time,” Lorn said, sounding grim, “to resolve this part of the disagreement between the two of us once and for all.”
Herewiss wondered briefly which “two of us” Lorn meant. His insides were in turmoil. He was realizing that though he loved this man, for the first time in many years he did not like him much: this abruptness, directness, was alienating. Herewiss felt the blade go deep, and found his heart made two. And Herewiss realized that there were certain parts of his mind screaming, Don’t trust him, he’s messed it up before, he’ll do it again! He gets these fits of decisiveness, but they don’t last, and then someone is needed to come in and clean everything up.... .
The voice inside him trailed off hurriedly as he looked for its source.
No matter, Herewiss thought, remembering his dream, and the blade with the blood on it, all bright. “Tonight, then,” Herewiss said. “And then what?”
“We get out of the city and join Eftgan.”
Herewiss thought it might be more easily said than done: but Lorn was right. He reached out to Khávrinen, lifted it into his lap, and stroked the edge thoughtfully. It needed sharpening... not a surprise, since it had only rarely been used as a sword.