At last, after an untellable length of time, Nevyn saw what he was expecting. Far away to the east, a cluster of Wildfolk appeared, circling around a central point as if they were curiously watching a visitor to their plane. All at once they vanished—either out of terror, or because they’d been banished by someone who knew how to dispel them. Nevyn summoned the Wildfolk who knew him and sent them off to distract the possible enemy, (though with a warning to keep their distance), then followed. The ruse worked; he was quite close before the enemy saw him coming.
And an enemy he was. No one but a dark dweomerman would have fashioned such a showy and pretentious body of light: a figure cloaked in a black, hooded robe, hung about with sigils and signs, and belted with a strip of darkness from which hung two severed heads. The figure retreated a few paces, then hovered uncertainly. Nevyn could make out a face inside the hood, two eyes that glowed with the life of the soul inside the simulacrum, and a mouth that worked constantly, forming soundless words. Wherever his body was, it was talking automatically and relaying information to a listener.
“An apprentice, are you?” Nevyn sent out the thought to his consciousness. “Was your master too much of a coward to risk facing me?”
The figure flew away from him, but as Nevyn started after, it held steady. From the terror in the apprentice’s eyes, Nevyn could guess that his master was forcing him to stay and face the enemy.
“Who are you?” The apprentice sent out a tremulous thought.
Nevyn debated, then decided that the truth might be the best stick he had for driving these hounds away.
“Tell your master that in this plane I’m known as the Master of Aethyr, but on the physical, I’m no one at all.”
Nevyn saw the mouth working; then the apprentice sent out a thought wave of sheer terror. The simulacrum swooped to one side, tumbled back, then began to break up, the black robe shredding and dissolving as the hood fell away. Thrashing desperately before him was the simple etheric double of a young man, and the silver cord that should have bound him to his body was broken, dangling from his navel. The master had killed his apprentice rather than risk letting Nevyn follow him back to their hiding place.
“You poor little fool!” Nevyn thought to him. “Do you see now what kind of master you trusted? You have one last chance to repent. I beg you, call on the Light and forswear the Dark Path now!”
In a thought sending of pure rage, the apprentice raced away, swooping, tumbling, but rising ever higher into the billows of the blue light. Nevyn let him go, but sorrowfully. He would have liked to have redeemed that soul, but soon enough, the Lords of Wyrd would catch the apprentice and drag him, kicking and screaming, to the hall of light. How they called judgment upon him was no longer Nevyn’s concern.
Nevyn followed the silver cord back to his body and slipped in, slapping his hand thrice on the ground to close the working. When he sat up, Aderyn leaned close, listening carefully as he told the story.
“I think me that our enemy is someone who knows you well,” Aderyn said.
“So it seems. Well, that apprentice of his is better off dead. He won’t be getting himself deeper into that black muck.”
“True spoken. Huh. If the master is that terrified of you, I doubt if he’ll come sniffing around here again tonight.”
“He won’t be able to. Losing an apprentice is a hard blow for one of the dark ones. The masters feed off their vitality, you see, with an etheric link. I’ll wager he’s sick and shaking right now. Good.”
Aderyn shuddered. Like most dweomerfolk in the kingdom, he’d had little contact with the masters of the dark art. But Nevyn was Master of the Aethyr, set like a guard on the border of the kingdom’s soul, on constant watch against unclean things that few of those he guarded knew existed. He stood up and began brushing the leaves and dirt off his clothes.
“Let’s get back to camp. I want to set a special seal over Rhodry’s aura.”
Some miles away, Loddlaen lay in his tent and tried to sleep. He twisted this way and that, silently cursed the men making noise outside, and even considered drinking himself blind with mead. He was so exhausted that his body felt like a sack of stones, but every time he drifted off, some thought or image would jerk his mind awake. Finally he surrendered and tried to summon the darkness. He imagined the point of black in his mind, then willed it to swell and spread. It merely vanished. Although he tried for hours, the blackness never came to him.
• • •
“We’re going to have to let the men spend a day in camp,” Sligyn said. “All there is to it, eh? Yesterday’s scrap tore the heart out of this army.”
“You’re right enough,” Rhodry said. “But it aches my heart to just sit here when Corbyn’s so close, and we’ve got Jill.”
“The morrow will see the end to it,” Peredyr broke in. “Corbyn can’t move any more than we can. His losses were worse than ours.”
In the cool, gray dawn, the noble-born were having a council of war over their breakfast. Aderyn had told them that Corbyn’s dispirited troops were camped some five miles to the north, just an easy ride away, but Rhodry knew that Sligyn was right.
When the council broke up, Rhodry had the grim job of composing a letter to go home with Lord Daumyr’s body. His men, and all the others, were already buried out on the field where they’d fallen. When he took the letter over to Daumyr’s manservant, who would accompany the body, he found the men from Daumyr’s warband waiting for him. Their captain, Maer, knelt before him.
“A boon, lord cadvridoc,” Maer said. “By rights, we should go home with our lord. Let us stay. We want vengeance, my lord.”
Rhodry hesitated, debating. Technically these men now rode for Daumyr’s nine-year-old son, who should have been consulted over such a breach of custom.
“Please, my lord,” Maer went on. “Dweomer killed our lord, and we want to help the dweomer put an end to Corbyn. I know you’re thinking about our lord’s lad, but what son wouldn’t want his father avenged?”
“True spoken. Granted, then. Ride with me and my men, and you’ll be riding straight for Corbyn.”
The men spontaneously cheered him.
After he saw Daumyr’s body with its spare honor guard of two wounded men on its way, Rhodry headed for his tent to look in on Cullyn. On the way, he met Nevyn, whose arms were full of medical supplies.
“I’m just going to change the dressings on Cullyn’s wounds,” Nevyn said. “You’ll have to wait if you want a word with him. Here, lad. I don’t want you telling him what Jill’s up to. He’s too weak to hear it.”
“Well and good, then. By the gods, I hadn’t truly thought of what he might think about all this.”
“Indeed? His lordship might spend a moment or two thinking every now and then.”
“But here, what’s Cullyn going to say when he asks for her on the day of the battle and finds her gone?”
“Oh, he’s taken care of that himself. The man’s as stubborn as a bear, I swear it. When he woke this morning, he was as grateful as ever a man could be to see her, and in the next breath he’s ordering her to go straight back to Cannobaen so she wouldn’t be in danger.”
“Well, that’s honorable of him. After all, he loves his daughter.”
“So he does.” And Nevyn, oddly enough, looked troubled. “Oh, truly, so he does.”
Rhodry followed Nevyn over to the tent in the hopes that Jill would take the chance to get herself some breakfast, and indeed, she came out a few minutes after Nevyn went in. They went first to the supply wagons, where Rhodry drew rations for her, then walked away from camp to an open spot in the sunny meadow. When they sat down together, Rhodry was thinking that he’d never wanted a woman as much as he wanted Jill. Every now and then, she smiled at him in a way that gave him hope.
“You know, Jill,” Rhodry said at last, “you truly are a falcon, and my heart’s just like a little bird, caught in your claws.”
“Oh, here, my lord, you hardly know me.”
“And how long does it take a falcon to stoop and capture?”
Jill stared at him as if she couldn’t believe her ears. Rhodry smiled and moved a little closer.
“Well, come now. You must know how beautiful you are. I’ll wager that all along the long road men sighed when you wandered on your way.”
“If they did, they wouldn’t have dared tell me about it. Da made sure of that. Besides, if I’ve had men sighing over me, which I doubt from the bottom of my heart, you’ve had a few lasses do the same over you. What about the soapmaker’s daughter?”
“Oh, by the hells, how do you know about her?”
“Your lady mother made a point of telling me when I was at Cannobaen.”
“Curse her! What—why—”
“She pointed out that was I beautiful, too, and I think me that she knows his lordship very well. I may be a silver dagger, my lord, but there’s only one way I earn my hire.”
Rhodry felt himself blush.
“Oh, ye gods,” he said at last. “You must despise me.”
“I don’t, but I don’t want one of your bastards.”
Rhodry flopped onto his stomach and studied the grass, which had suddenly become profoundly interesting.
“When we ride out,” Jill said, “Nevyn told me to camp with Aderyn, and I’m following his orders.”
“You’ve made your cursed point. Don’t pour vinegar into my wounds, will you?”
Rhodry heard her get up and walk away. For a long time he lay in the grass and wondered at himself, that he would be so close to tears over a lass he barely knew.
Nevyn was walking back to the wagons after tending the wounded when he heard Jill hail him. As he waited for her to catch up, he noticed that all the men in camp looked up when she passed by. Some rose to bow to her; others called out her name like a prayer. They saw her as a dweomer talisman, he realized, and one that at last, after so many terrifying things, they could understand. He also realized that if he did try to keep her out of the battle, as he was sorely tempted to do, Rhodry would have a mutiny on his hands. If only Calonderiel or Jennantar had trained with a sword, he thought bitterly. But he knew that neither of those two archers stood a chance against a warrior lord like Corbyn, for all that a sword in an elven hand would have slashed Loddlean’s prophecy to shreds, and there was no time to send west for an elven swordsman.
“Did you want to speak with me, child?” Nevyn said to Jill when she came up. “Is somewhat wrong with your father?”
“Naught, truly, or well, naught’s changed for the worse. I just wanted a private word with you.”
They strolled past the wagons and out into the meadowland, where there was no one around to overhear. Jill looked badly troubled, and she stood in silence, staring at the ground, for a long time before she finally blurted out what she had to say.
“Do you remember how I knew that Da had been wounded? Well, I saw the whole cursed thing in a vision, and it came on me from nowhere.”
Nevyn caught his breath in surprise; he’d been assuming that she’d just had a sudden intuitive knowledge of his danger.
“Will I keep doing things like that?” she went on, and her voice was shaking. “I don’t want to. I don’t want the dweomer. It’s haunted me all my wretched life, but I never asked for it. It’s all very well for such as you, but I don’t want it.”
“No one can force you to take the dweomer.” Nevyn hated every bitter truth he spoke, but vows forced him to tell them. “You have raw talent, certainly, but if you don’t train it, it’ll simply fade away, much as your legs would wither if you never walked.”
She smiled in an evident relief that wrung his heart, then let the smile fade.
“But what about the Wildfolk? Will I stop seeing them, too?”
“Oh, no doubt. You know, many children can see the Wildfolk, but they lose the talent by the time they’re ten or so. It’s odd that you still can, truly, without having been trained.”
“I don’t want to lose them. They were the only friends I had on the long road.”
Her voice ached with remembered loneliness, and at that moment, she looked as much a lass as a woman, caught on the edge of her childhood.
“Well, Jill, it’s your choice. No one can make it for you, not your da, not me.”
She nodded, scuffing at the grass with the toe of her riding boot, then suddenly turned and raced back to camp. As he watched her go, Nevyn cursed her and his Wyrd both. Sharply he reminded himself that she was just a young lass, overwhelmed by the strangeness of this irruption of dweomer into her life. Although his vows forbade him to argue or plead, he could become her friend, and in time, she would see that the dweomer was in its own way perfectly natural—or he could hope she would. He felt profoundly weary as he walked back to camp, wondering if he’d ever pay back the debt he owed her by bringing her to the dweomer and her true Wyrd. For her sake more than his own, he wished that he could make her see that she would never be truly happy unless she used the talents that were her birthright.
Then, as he reached the camp, he saw her sitting with Jennantar and Calonderiel. If she would turn instinctively for comfort to a pair of elves, he had no reason to despair. Half laughing at himself, he went to look for Aderyn.
Determined to put her talk with Nevyn out of her mind, Jill watched as Jennantar and Calonderiel played a complicated game, something like dice. The pieces were tiny wooden pyramids, painted a different color on each side, which they shook by the handful, then strewed out in a rough line. The order in which the colors appeared and how many there were of each determined who won the round. Finally Jennantar swept them up into a leather pouch.
“We’re being awfully rude to Jill.”
“Hah!” Calonderiel said. “You’re losing and you know it, but truly, Jill, it’s good to have a word with you. How’s your father this morn?”
“As well as he can be. Nevyn says he’s doing better than he’d expected.”
“Then that’s splendid news,” Jennantar said. “I only wish I could have gotten within bowshot faster than I did.”
Jill nodded miserably, wondering how she could bear to lie to her father when he lay wounded, even if she’d never wanted anything more in her life than this chance to ride to war.
“Huh,” Calonderiel said. “Here comes our round-eared cadvridoc. I’ll wager it’s not us he wants a word with.”
Jill looked as Rhodry strolled up to them—in truth, it was her that he was watching with one of his soft smiles on his handsome face. At times Jill hated him for being so handsome; here was a man that she couldn’t simply dismiss. Although she and Jennantar got to their feet, Calonderiel lounged insolently on the grass. Rhodry turned to him with the smile gone.
“When the cadvridoc speaks to you, you stand.”
“Oh, do I now?” Calonderiel said. “What makes you think I ride at your orders?”
“You ride at my orders, or you leave the army.”
Slowly and deliberately Calonderiel rose, but he set his hands on his hips in a gesture far from respectful.
“Listen, lad. Save your Eldidd arrogance for others of your stinking kind. I came here with the Wise One of the West, and for no other reason than he asked me to.”
“I don’t give a pig’s fart why you came. You’re here now, and you follow my orders or leave.”
Jennantar sighed in irritation, then muttered something in Elvish, which Calonderiel ignored. Rhodry and the elf were staring each other down, both of them unblinking and tense. Jill thought of trying to say something conciliatory, but she suddenly knew, in a wordless way that ached with dweomer, that it was crucial for Rhodry to have Calonderiel’s respect, and for more reasons than simple army discipline.
“If you have a bone to pick with me, Round-ear,” Calonderiel said at last, “then let’s pick it clean between us—and now.”
“Now, here!” Jennatar stepped forward. “He doesn’t know how men duel in our lands.”
“Oh, don’t I, now?” Rhodry said, and he
had a twisted little grin. “My uncle made Westfolk welcome at his court, and I’ve seen your folk before. You’re on, then, Cal.”
In the middle of a growing crowd they stripped off their shirts and faced off, Calonderiel with his knife, and Rhodry with Jennantar’s, since his dagger blade was unfairly short. Jill’s heart was pounding; she could see the livid bruises up and down Rhodry’s back, and she knew the injuries would slow him down.
Calonderiel began to circle, and Rhodry moved with him, both of them dropped to a crouch, circling in dead silence. Rhodry feinted in; Calonderiel sprang and slashed; Rhodry twisted out of the way barely in time. Again they circled, slowly, eyes locked, until Calonderiel feinted in. Rhodry stepped back smoothly, then sprang from the side. Calonderiel struck up from below, but Rhodry’s left hand moved so fast that Jill could barely see it and caught the elf’s dagger hand under the wrist, forcing it up, while the knife in his right flashed in the sun—then darkened with blood. Calonderiel leapt back with a thin red cut dripping along his ribs.
“Do you ride at my orders?” Rhodry snarled.
“I do.” Calonderiel lowered his knife. “Lord cadvridoc.”
To the cheers of his men, Rhodry wiped the knife off on his brigga leg, handed it to Jennantar, then grabbed his shirt from the ground and strode off. As she watched him go, Jill realized that for all she liked Calonderiel, she was glad that Rhodry had won, that seeing him defeated would have ached her heart. She felt strangely guilty when she turned back to the elf, who was staunching the wound with his shirt while Jennantar watched sourly.
“Our young lord’s quick for a Round-ear,” Calonderiel remarked.
“So he is,” Jennantar snapped. “And now maybe you’ll hold your ugly tongue. Aderyn warned us that he wanted no trouble, or have you forgotten that?”
“I hadn’t, but I can’t ride under a man who can’t best me in a fight.”
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