Star of the Morning

by Lynn Kurland

  They would think her mad.

  She realized, with a start, that she probably should be considering the same thing. Was the blade calling to her? She hadn’t realized until that moment that indeed it was.

  Glines came to squat down next to her. “Are you feeling better? You look pale.”

  Morgan swallowed with difficulty. “I am well,” she managed. She would have to keep thoughts of the knife out of her head or she would go mad in truth.

  “Can you eat?”

  “I daren’t,” she said honestly. “I think I might have a little walk, though, just to see what’s left of me.”

  “Do you wish for company?”

  “Nay, Glines, thank you just the same,” she said, but she let him help her up to her feet. She swayed in an appalling manner and it took her far longer than she would have liked to feel steady. She managed, finally, to look at him without her eyes crossing of their own accord. “I will be well,” she said firmly.

  “I suggest you stay off boats in the future,” he said.

  Morgan couldn’t have agreed more, but now was not the time to think on it. She leaned in toward him. “I suggest you be careful with Adhémar,” she said under her breath.

  “Why?”

  “Did you smell those herbs? The man can’t tell decent ones from enspelled ones; who knows what else he can’t tell.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Glines said. Then he paused. “Morgan, about those herbs ...”

  “Aye?”

  “How did you know they were more than they seemed?” He paused and looked at her warily, as if he expected her to draw a dagger and poke him with it at any moment. “That they were . . . magical?”

  “I just did,” she said, but she was beginning to wonder herself. First Nicholas’s blade, then the herbs.

  These were very unsettling events.

  “I just did,” she repeated, “but it was nothing. I need to go.” She brushed unsteadily past Glines, ignoring his offer of an arm. She managed to make it to a tree at the edge of the firelight before she had to stop and take hold of something to steady herself.

  No more boats.

  The next one might just do her in.

  By the next morning she was not much more herself, but she had no more time to devote to lying about uselessly. She heaved herself upright and remained there through sheer willpower alone.

  Paien leaped to his feet, looking years younger than his normal self, and greeted the world by ingesting a breakfast that just the sight of made her ill. She contented herself with tea she made from things Nicholas’s very unmagical cook had very unmagically stowed in her pack.

  “North?” Camid asked as they prepared to break camp.

  “North,” she repeated firmly.

  “Skirt the edge of Istaur,” Paien advised. “It isn’t a friendly place and we would be well off to avoid any unnecessary encounters with the locals in our present states.”

  “I feel fine,” Morgan said, hoping they would mistake the weakness of her tone for discretionary quiet.

  Camid grunted, and shouldered his pack. “Well, we have to make at least a brief detour to the docks.”

  “Why?” Morgan asked.

  “We’ve baggage to put on a ship back to Bere,” he said, pointing at the baggage.

  Morgan recognized the uncomfortable lad who had been shadowing them at the tavern in Bere, only now he looked different. Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that he was bound hand and foot and gagged as well. “Who is that?”

  Glines pulled back the lad’s hood and Morgan lifted an eyebrow in surprise.

  “One of Harding’s sons,” she noted. “Not the youngest, for he is at the university. Which one is this?”

  “Fletcher,” Glines said. “He is the eighth, I believe.”

  The boy would have answered, but again, he was wearing cloth tied about his mouth that prevented him from expressing any opinion on the matter.

  Morgan looked at him and for some reason she hesitated. She wasn’t one to have pity on souls who should have been safely tucked into bed each night, but she did feel for the lad and his desire for adventure.

  “Can he wield a sword?” she asked.

  Fletcher nodded enthusiastically.

  “Not well, if memory serves,” Paien said. “Don’t you remember him, gel? He snuck into our camp that one night and spent half an hour trying to merely draw it as he begged us to take him on?”

  Morgan looked at the lad. She recognized the desperation in his eye. If she’d had a heart, it would have gone out to him. To be eighth in a line of eleven lads belonging to a man who seemed determined to live forever and spend all his gold so his sons saw none of it—perhaps he was merely burning to escape his unpromising destiny.

  “Well,” she said, “why not?”

  Camid looked at her blankly. “Why not what?”

  “Why not take him along?” she clarified. Then she frowned. Had she said that, or had something unruly taken over her mouth? Things were going downhill for her rapidly. First her fine form, then her wits. “Perhaps he deserves a chance.”

  Camid looked as surprised as she’d ever seen him. “But,” he spluttered, “what will we do with him?”

  “Train him,” she said, then she looked at Camid, openmouthed. If she could have turned around to look at herself, she would have.

  Paien laughed heartily. “What did you put in those herbs, Adhémar? She’s gone soft.”

  Morgan would have agreed, but she was distracted by the sight of Fletcher suddenly freed of his bonds by Glines and kneeling at her feet.

  “Thank you, my lady,” he said, clasping his hands and looking up at her with tears streaming down his face. “You will have my everlasting gratitude and I vow I will do all you tell me—”

  “Then stand up and cease blubbering,” Morgan said in irritation. She wasn’t altogether certain at whom she was more irritated: herself for being a soft-hearted fool or Fletcher for looking at her as if she’d saved him from a life of torment.

  He leaped to his feet enthusiastically. “Now?” he asked, in a fashion not unlike an over-friendly pup. “Now what shall I do?”

  Morgan looked at Camid, but he shook his head. She turned to Glines. He managed to find something quite interesting about the sky. Adhémar only folded his arms over his chest and scowled. She turned to Paien.

  “Oh, nay,” he said, holding out his hands. “If you want him, you must train him.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Try beginning with obedience,” Paien suggested.

  “If I whip him like a disobedient pup often enough, will he learn, do you suppose?” she asked.

  Fletcher gulped, but did not flinch.

  Not overmuch.

  Paien looked at her, no doubt to try to discover where she’d stowed her wits, then sighed and put his hand around the back of Fletcher’s neck. “I will take him for a few days and teach him how not to aggravate you. You can work on his training then.”

  “I’m saving us a trip to the docks,” Morgan reminded him.

  Paien snorted. “Considering how just the sight of a boat might render you useless for the day, I daresay that is a self-serving sacrifice. What you have saddled us with, though, may turn out to be more trouble.”

  “Perhaps,” Morgan said, but she could not erase the memory of the desperate look in the lad’s eye. It wasn’t her habit to aid lads who should have known better than to mix with mercenaries, but that look . . .

  She cursed and shouldered her pack, stumbling to catch her balance as she did so. She glared at Fletcher.

  “Keep up or we’ll leave you behind,” she snapped.

  The lad nodded vigorously.

  Morgan forced herself to walk away without swaying. She took each step carefully and did all she could to not do anything besides look at the ground in front of her.

  She did pause, only once, to look back over her shoulder as they traveled along the road that rose up out of Istaur. It was ea
sy to see the quay with the ships bobbing there so innocently.

  Nay, there was no return there.

  She spared a brief thought for Nicholas and ignored the pang that stabbed into her heart when she realized that she would never see him again. Perhaps after she accomplished the delivery of the blade to the king she would find someone traveling to Melksham and have word sent to him. It was all she could do.

  She resolutely refused to think of that blissfully soft bed and those delightfully warm coverings.

  Or of the generous man who had provided them for her.

  The next afternoon Morgan found herself walking along wearily behind Adhémar, struggling to focus on her surroundings. Each footstep was an effort and she felt as if she were wading through deep water. A pity the physical effort wasn’t enough to keep her mind from wandering to topics it should have left alone.

  How did you know those herbs were magical?

  How indeed. She wanted to believe it came from her years with Weger during which she learned to shun at all costs anything to do with finger waggling and spells muttered under the breath. She wanted to believe that such training had made her especially sensitive to anything that might resemble in the slightest that unmanly art.

  She suspected, with growing horror, that it might rather have something to do with something untoward perched in her family tree.

  It wasn’t possible, was it?

  She considered that for a time. Perhaps she would, after her present task was finished, contemplate searching for the mercenaries who had taken her in as a wee girl. Nicholas had said they hadn’t given him any tidings of substance in regard to her parentage, but she supposed the lads hadn’t been all that interested in chitchat while they’d been trying to force a furious, spitting, snarling gel of twelve summers inside Nicholas’s gates against her will.

  Nay, she would have to make a search and hope that some of those lads were still alive. It was for certain that she couldn’t brave another sea voyage in order to question Nicholas on the matter—

  The twang of a bowstring broke the relative silence of the late afternoon.

  Morgan heard Fletcher cry out. She hardly had the wherewithal to get the boy behind her, an arrow sticking out of his upper arm, before a wave of something came crashing out from the trees. Morgan fumbled with her sword as she drew it, which cost her a moment or two but she managed to kill several things before she realized they weren’t precisely men. They died like men, though, and that was enough for her.

  The battle was not brief, for the enemies were numerous and she was not at her best. She fought, but not well. Added to her burden was the responsibility she felt toward Fletcher. He was not doing poorly, but it was quite obvious to her that this was his first battle that didn’t involve his brothers and pretend harm. A brief glance at his face told her that he was sick with fear. She imagined he would be quite sick with his own gorge later. That he managed to keep it where it should have been for the moment was a promising sign.

  She found it necessary to rest several times. At one point, she drove her sword into the ground and leaned heavily upon it, panting in a manner that made her wish that all the events around her could be frozen until she had regained her strength. She watched, gasping for breath, as Camid, Paien, and Glines went about their own work.

  Camid was, as usual, an enthusiastic wielder of his very lethal axe. Paien was very vocal in his taunts, but his sword spoke just as forcefully. Glines said little but killed with a very businesslike efficiency that Morgan generally admired, but now envied.

  Fletcher made little squeaks of terror, as if he hoped to do nothing more than survive. Morgan looked briefly at the arrow. Was it poisoned? She considered that for a time, allowing herself the unheard of luxury of a bit more rest. When Fletcher began to look faint, though, she knew her respite was over. She turned him about to face her and looked at him sternly.

  “This will hurt.”

  “What—”

  She jerked the arrow out of his shoulder. Predictably, he shrieked. She slapped him smartly across the face. “Put your hand over the wound and stay behind me.”

  He did so. Silently.

  Finding that to be something of an improvement, Morgan turned to see what was left for her to do. A brief and unfamiliar wish that all would be taken care of washed over her, but that was quickly replaced by astonishment over what she was seeing. Suddenly rising up before her were two creatures who looked as if they had been spat up from the depths of hell. Misshapen, drooling, limping but rushing toward her as if they had come for just such a purpose.

  She fought the first one, because he left her no choice. While that might have been welcome on any normal day, today it was not. It took an alarming amount of energy to stay on her feet and continue to fight. She found that when she finally managed to get her sword thrust into the creature’s chest, she simply did not have the energy to pull it back out. Either that, or it was embedded in a body that was not made of the usual stuff.

  She stood there with her hands hanging down at her sides and watched, breathing hard, as Adhémar took on the other, a creature even larger and faster, if possible, than the one she’d fought. Camid, Paien, and Glines stood to one side, watching impassively, though Camid was rubbing his nose thoughtfully as if he contemplated why these creatures should find themselves anywhere but tucked safely in a nightmare where they belonged.

  Adhémar did not fight poorly; even she had to admit that. He had obviously had some sort of training. He was strong, which helped him, and determined, which aided him as well. But somehow, he seemed to be counting on an extra bit of skill that simply was not there. She was almost unsurprised when the creature reached out, grasped Adhémar by his tunic, and flung him across the glade.

  “Damn it,” Adhémar bellowed. “Not again!”

  Morgan watched him dispassionately. Well, at least he managed to hold on to his sword. Or, rather, he did until he dashed his head against a rock.

  He groaned, then slumped sideways, senseless.

  Morgan stumbled across the twenty paces that separated them. It was too late to try to rouse him. The best she could do was protect him. She grasped his sword that lay on the ground, ignored the fact that the sword did not seem to want to be in her hand, then swung it up in an arc as she spun to face the creature bearing down on her.

  The world made a great rending noise as she did so.

  And then the sword blazed with a bloodred light.

  She would have dropped it in surprise, but she didn’t have a chance. The creature behind her shrieked in rage and leaped toward her. Its eyes locked on the sword.

  It fell upon it as if forced.

  It died with a gurgle.

  Morgan wrenched the sword out of the creature’s chest and looked at it in complete astonishment. It glowed with an unworldly light, a fiery red that seemed to pulse right along with her own heartbeat. For a moment she wasn’t sure what appalled her more, that the sword was magical or that she hadn’t wielded it past just holding it in the right place and watching her enemy impale himself on it of his own volition.

  She decided she would think about that later, when her heart had stopped beating at such an appalling rate and her head had stopped spinning. She turned to Adhémar.

  He was unconscious and drooling. Apparently that was his usual state of being where she and swords were concerned. She jammed his sword into the ground at his side and released it as if it burned her.

  The red light disappeared, as if it had been a candle suddenly snuffed out.

  Morgan backed away until she tripped over a body behind her. She turned to catch her balance, then found herself facing her comrades. They were looking at her with varying degrees of astonishment.

  Well, except Fletcher, who was leaning back against a tree, clutching his arm and looking very pasty.

  Paien was the first to break the silence.

  “There’s an inn ahead,” he said briskly. “Let us be about getting ourselves there.” He paused.
“Morgan?”

  She wondered if she looked as horrified as she felt. “Do not speak of this,” she begged. “Not to anyone.”

  Paien, Camid, and Glines nodded as one. She didn’t bother with Fletcher. He had now begun to retch and she suspected that he hadn’t seen the business with Adhémar’s sword.

  She wished she hadn’t seen it either. “I’ll return for my sword,” she said hoarsely, then she turned and stumbled away. She had no intention of losing the pitiful meal she’d had that day, but she had every intention of trying to escape what she’d just seen.

  She flung herself into a stumbling run. It was Weger’s favorite way to clear the head.

  She suspected she might have to run all the way to Tor Neroche before she managed to clear hers.

  Dusk had fallen by the time she returned from her run to the scene of the battle. There was a mound of the slain, which she fell into almost before she realized what she was doing, and the ground was soaked and unsteady beneath her feet.

  Her sword was still buried to the hilt in the chest of that something that wasn’t at all human. The creature was, however, quite dead, which was somehow very reassuring. Morgan pulled her blade free, after a ferocious struggle and an enormous amount of energy expended. She frowned. What had she killed? And why had Adhémar’s sword thrust in so easily where hers had not?

  She could still see that damned sword glowing with a red that burned like hellfire. Yet it had been a glow that was not evil, that much she could say with certainty. Indeed, now that she could look at it with a bit of detachment, she could say that it had been a rather welcoming light—much like a campfire after a hard day’s march.

  Unfortunately, it had been fire she had apparently called.

  She jerked herself away from her thoughts and resheathed her sword. It was an aberration, it was behind her, it was forgotten. She would move on.

  She slowly and wearily limped onto the road. She wanted to credit the weakness to aftereffects of sea travel. She wanted to believe it would pass. She almost couldn’t bring herself to consider what her future might hold if it didn’t.