by Ed Greenwood
He concentrated on ducking and weaving as best he could, to avoid shattering every branch, and kept his mouth shut, even when Taeauna lost her balance and sat back hard on his shin and the boot below. She patted his knee by way of apology, and towed Rod on into the night, leaving him smiling at nothing and thinking about how he'd been alone and quite happy about it three nights ago, and now couldn't properly recall how he'd never had Taeauna the Aumrarr in his life.
He blinked. He didn't even know her last name. If she even had one. No, he hadn't ever given the Aumrarr surnames, had he?
Or to put it more honestly, he'd never even thought about it.
Quite suddenly, they came out of the woods, and over a low stone wall made up of boulders and smaller stones, all heaped together in an overgrown ridge, and into a field that was like a bright blanket of silver under the moon.
And there, halfway across it, was a haystack.
It was a heap of hay bigger than some of the cottages they'd walked past, leaving Hollowtree. Taeauna took firm hold of Rod's hand, pointed down and gestured until he understood what she was indicating. He was to walk between the rows of whatever crop had been sown here, following her lead.
There was even a ladder waiting for them, leaning against the huge, shaggy mound. Taeauna stopped him, shaped the haystack with her hands, then moved one hand to indicate that the stack was hollowed out like a bowl on its top. Then she mimed sleeping, her head on her hands. Right, they'd sleep up there. Then she pointed at Rod, at the ladder, and then up.
He shook his head, pointed at her, and then up the ladder. Ladies first.
She repeated her gestures more firmly, frowning at him.
He shook his head, and repeated his gestures.
She shrugged, waved one hand in a contemptuous "whatever" gesture, and went up the ladder. Rod noticed she carried her sword ready in her hand, something he certainly couldn't have done without falling off the ladder.
As Taeauna reached the top of the ladder and clambered forward into the bowl of the stack's summit, there was a sudden commotion.
This particular haystack, it seemed, was occupied.
As ROD STARED up into the moonlight, fear growing in his throat again, Taeauna's elbows thrust ' up into view, one after the other, one of her feet kicked, and...
A Dark Helm, helmless and trailing blood from his stabbed face, came hurtling forward off the top of the stack and crashed headfirst into the field right beside Rod. His neck broke with a loud and horrible splintering crack, he convulsed for a flailing moment, and then lay still.
There was a grunt of effort from atop the stack, a gasp, and another Dark Helm fell into view, sagging over the edge of the stack with his arms dangling. And more blood spattered down from his fingertips and then from the rest of him. His throat had been opened like a slaughtered hog's.
Taeauna grunted, high and sharp, and then her bloody face appeared over the edge of the stack so she could order Rod curtly, "Get out of the way."
He stepped back, taking care to keep in the rows, and she shoved the dangling Dark Helm, and then a third one, off the stack to crash down in front of Rod. Then she came back down the ladder, dug into the side of the haystack, and started thrusting the bodies in, crawling atop them and tugging at them unconcernedly.
She didn't move as if she'd been hurt, but Rod asked her anyway, when she'd finished shoving the last boot out of sight beneath the gently tumbling hay. The stack hadn't taken kindly to all her tunneling, and now sagged a bit on the ladder side.
Taeauna pointed at her sliced and streaming forehead. "Just that. One of them had his dagger out to cut his nails."
Rod solemnly drew his dagger, sliced the palm of his hand, and held it out to her.
She swallowed. "Lord, waste not your power. We may both soon need so much more."
"Stop being so cheerful," Rod growled, "and drink up. You think it's easy for me to just cut myself open?"
She thanked him with her eyes, bent, and sucked.
Rod watched the blue fire lighting her hollowed cheeks from within, felt desire stirring in him again, and... the moment passed. She was healed, his wound was gone, and she gave him a grateful smile and started up the ladder again.
Rod rose from his knees before he realized he had even sunk down on them. "Where are you...?"
"We're sleeping up here, as I told you."
"B-but with them down here, lying dead right underneath us?"
She stared at him blankly for a moment, and then shrugged. "Yes. Why not?"
Rod grimly started to climb the ladder. "In Falconfar," he growled aloud, "I guess you—uh, that'd be I—can get used to anything. I hope."
"LORD, DAERN AND his men are missing from their posts! I—"
"I know," came the cold reply. "They are elsewhere at my command."
The burly seneschal in the doorway swallowed a startled curse. "Lord?"
Baron Murlstag sighed, his yellow eyes gleaming a warning of rising irritation, and turned from his lamplit desk and the ledgers spread open on it. "If you must know, Authren, I sent them to the Arvale border. To a haystack."
"A haystack?"
"Seneschal, I do not take it unto myself to question His orders, and I suggest you also refrain from doing so. They are to intercept two travelers, a wingless Aumrarr and a man walking with her, and bring them here. If you are wiser than I was, you will not ask why. If you are a fool and ask anyway, rest assured I cannot give you an answer; I was furnished with none except a promise to take my life from me slowly and painfully, if I dared ask again."
"Oh," the seneschal of Morngard told the floor in front of his boots gruffly. "One of those matters."
Baron Murlstag nodded. "One of those."
ROD'S EYES FELT as if someone had poured sand into them, his mouth was as dry as a clay kiln, and his throat itched. Inside.
Something very bright was trying to leak in, all around his eyelids, and something else was pinching his left earlobe repeatedly. He brushed whatever was pinching away, or tried to; it seemed to be made of unyielding, unmoving stone.
"Come down," shouted an unfamiliar voice—a rough, mature man's voice—from somewhere nearby, "or we'll loose our bows!"
Whatever it was pinched Rod's ear again.
He yielded, rising into wakefulness with an irritated swat at that something. Which caught his hand in an iron-strong grip and announced firmly, in Taeauna's voice, "Stop flailing around, lord, or I'll throw you off this haystack."
Haystack? Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh, shit.
Rod sat up suddenly, blinking in the bright morning sun. He could barely see over the edges of the untidy bowl of hay he and Taeauna had slept in. At least, he presumed they'd slept; he remembered nothing at all after lying down on his back and turning his head slowly to stare up at the full canopy of unfamiliar stars overhead.
The haystack was surrounded by unfriendly faces, of armsmen in chainmail and helms, with loaded and aimed crossbows in their hands. Aimed at Rod, now.
Only one man in the ring didn't have a bow; he was the one on a horse, with a drawn sword in his magnificent gauntlets. He glared at Rod as if sleeping on a haystack was a torturing-to-death offense. He was a broad-shouldered, burly sort, with a jaw-fringe-with-little-point beard, and he wore a golden gorget and the largest gauntlets Rod had ever seen, even including all the more fanciful sword-and-sorcery illustrations that adorned the covers of his books and everyone else's shelved in the same section of the bookstores.
This was the boss, obviously, of somewhere. Probably here.
Then the man's face changed, for the better, and Rod became aware that Taeauna had sat up in one smooth, sinuous motion.
Then he became aware of something else. She'd removed her clothing down to the waist. And was preening.
"Taya!" the bearded man on the horse grinned. Then his face darkened again. "What happened to your wings?"
"Dark Helms cut them off," Taeauna called calmly, starting to dress again.
"These three?"
"No, but those three came within reach so I slew them instead."
The man grinned again. "Ah, lass, lass! Who's your... friend?"
"He is no danger."
"Good to hear," the man called, "but you should know that you are both in danger, every moment you tarry up there. Things are much changed in Galath, and lorn fly over my lands at will. Come down, and let me take you to Wrathgard!"
"Wrathgard?" Rod said slowly. "Is this... Lord Darl Tindror?"
Taeauna nodded, crawling across crackling hay to the top of the ladder. "Not a lovely name, is it?"
Rod winced. "Best I could come up with at the time. I was in a hurry."
They climbed down, armsmen moving forward to offer the Aumrarr a hand down from the ladder. She thanked them, smiling.
"Good greetings, lads. I've not forgotten your kindnesses."
When Rod reached the ground beside her—no hands reached out to assist him—she indicated the man on the horse and then waved at the armsmen, and announced, "Lord Tindror and his personal bodyguard."
"Who are almost all the armsmen I have left," Tindror leaned down from his saddle to mutter urgently. "Mount up behind me, Taya, we must ride!"
"Has Galath become that bad?"
"Worse. The sooner you're safely out of sight inside Wrathgard, the better."
Taeauna sprang into the air as if she still possessed wings, caught hold of the noble's shoulder in midair and turned herself, and landed lightly behind him on the high, arching back of his saddle.
This made the horse snort, buck once, and then toss its head and complain. As the lord held its reins firmly, the Aumrarr settled herself against him, slipping her arms forward and around his chest.
"Your wings!" Tindror said, shaking his head in wincing disbelief. Then he looked down at Rod again, suspiciously.
"This man is under my protection," Taeauna said quickly into his ear. "He's a traveling companion I'm charged to deliver somewhere safely. Nothing more."
Rod gave Lord Tindror a friendly smile and a nod; calculating gray eyes measured him, and then the smile was returned, to the accompaniment of a finger pointing down the row of armsmen. "Mount up with Jarth; he's the smallest of us."
Rod turned his head to look at where Tindror was pointing, and beheld Jarth standing behind the other armsmen, in the shadow of a tree. Grim-faced, a white sword-scar across his cheek, he was holding the reins of all fourteen horses, which between his glove and the horses were wrapped, pulley-style, around the trunk of that tree.
Clever. Rod grinned and started the short walk toward Jarth. By the time he reached his new sad-die-mate, all of the other armsmen had mounted and started to ride, and he and Jarth were standing amid hoof-dust with the last horse. Its nose was gray with age, and it was giving Rod a half-bored, half-suspicious look.
"You and I look at Falconfar the same way, I see," Rod murmured to it. That earned him a real smile from Jarth who had said not a word, and looked likely to keep silent for days to come. He gave Rod a hand up into the saddle.
A snatched breath later, Rod was wincingly remembering why suits of armor all seemed to have such heavy codpieces.
And then they really started to gallop.
"AND DO YOU mean to tell me," Lord Tharlark inquired icily, "that a wingless Aumrarr walked into Arbridge with a wizard at her side, calmly spent the night at our lone inn, the two of them butchered about a dozen men and robbed a tomb in the burial yard in the crown-cobbled center of town, and no one saw where they went?"
"Uh, well, ah, magic, my lord! They took themselves off elsewhere like that! Faster than... uh..."
"Than you can snap your fingers, Gelzund? And how many more times will you have to snap them before the two of them are standing before me in chains? Hey?"
Gelzund's red face went white, but he knew better than to attempt a reply. Not that he could think of one.
Tharlark leaned forward in his high seat and stared around the dark-tapestried great hall of Tabbrar Castle, sterner displeasure than usual riding his hard face, and said coldly, "My dislike of those who work magic should be very well known by now. It is my fond hope that more of the loyal folk of Arvale shall come to share my views, and soon. Wizards are a curse and a bane, who wither and despoil the lands they rule, even as they rule them more harshly than the worst king or lord could ever hope to, no matter how many gibbets and dungeons, swords and flogging-frames he has at his command. This Aumrarr and the wizard with her will be hunted from end to end of this vale, though I suspect they are long gone. Thereafter those who call themselves the Vengeful, and meet masked in shadows, will come before me publicly, and I'll send them outside the vale, to hunt down and slay the two foulnesses who have so casually offended our justice and our peace."
He stared around at the many Arbren in the hall, who all stared back at him mutely.
"I suspect," he added, standing up, "that the two we seek have gone on into Galath, with no magic at all to take them there, just walking by night. The Vengeful will follow them, and find them, and slay them, bringing back the heads here as proof. Whereupon we'll have a feast, and bid minstrels to sing throughout the lands that in Arvale we suffer no wizards to live, and hurl challenge to the Dooms that so many cower in fear of, that they will find no welcome in Arvale, and show their faces here upon pain of fitting death. All Falconfar will then know of Arvale, and admire Arvale, and those who hate wizards as I do will flock here and make us great!"
He paused for applause, staring down at the assembled Arbren, who stared back at him in silence.
"Then we'll have many more feasts!" he thundered, waving a fist in the air.
Silence.
Rage rising in him, Tharlark turned, his magnificent new half-cloak swirling, and strode down from the dais his high seat surmounted. At the bottom he turned again to face the silent Arbren, and snapped, "Well? You'll like that, won't you?"
They gave him only more silence.
It deepened, somehow, seeming very heavy on his shoulders, as he marched across the back of the hall to the door that led to his private chambers. Stupid dolts. Couldn't they see?
Or did a wizard already have them in thrall?
THREE BONE-JARRING HILLS later, the hard-riding band's gallop slowed and faltered as the horses struggled up a very steep switchback of a trail to the gates of a tall castle that Rod had no trouble in identifying as Wrathgard, just as he'd described it.
Atop a very steep-sided green hill that was bare of all trees and shrubs stood a frowning, unadorned stone fortress. A simple, massive squared stone tower, tapering slightly as it rose to a crenelated height, soared up out of a semicircle of five slender cylindrical towers. The towers shared a crenelated wall, but only a dry ditch as a moat, and that wall came together to join the window-studded front of the great central tower, so the front gate gave straight into the tower. Crowning the lofty battlements of that huge and baleful tower was a tall, elegantly spired room with windows all around it. Not the best castle to withstand a siege, and more strange than beautiful, all told, but it was quite distinctive. And just the way Rod had written about it.
Yes, this was definitely his Wrathgard. Seat of power for Baron Tindror, at the heart of his meager lands along the eastern border of Galath, which stretched south to Sword Pass, a bandit-haunted, perilous mule-route through the rising Falconspires. A few hills west could be found Tarmorwater, a winding stream that kept widening into little lakes and then narrowing again to crossings that needed only the most modest of bridges or fords.
Before they hastened through the front arch of the castle, Rod looked out from the height they'd gained, but got only a brief glimpse of pleasant green rolling hills, of fields studded with many woodlots. And in the distant sky, rising up above those trees...
"Lorn!" Jarth shouted, as they entered an inner courtyard and grooms bustled to take the reins of all the horses. "Lorn, aloft!"
"Nigh Old Forge?" Lord Tindror called back.
"Aye, lord!"
; The bearded baron merely nodded, looking utterly unsurprised. Pointing at Rod, he said to Jarth, "Show him a garderobe, then see he gets to the map chamber."
Then he was gone with an arm around Taeauna's shoulders and both of them hurrying through a door in less time than it took Rod to blink.
He blinked several more times, just for practice. Since when did everyone in Galath—sorry, in Tindror's demesne, which would be Tarmoral if no one had changed the name he'd given it, back in Broken Blades of Falconfar—do everything in such an all-thundering hurry?
Or was this yet another change that Holdoncorp's games had done to the land? Click, click, whisk, whisk, kingdom felled, time for lunch?
Two narrow, steep stone flights of steps up, and out into a hall. He was grateful for the garderobe which he more than needed, and when Jarth waved at it, Rod thrust aside its curtain thankfully, strode through the archway and around the corner, and froze. Taeauna was standing waiting for him, her face serious.
"Does this feel like your right place?" she whispered.
Rod blinked. "No. Uh... no."
She nodded, slipping out past him. "If you get that feeling, anywhere in Wrathgard, tell me immediately."
Then she was gone. Rod stepped to the seat shaking his head and wondering what Jarth would say when he emerged.
As it happened, the answer to that was: nothing at all. Jarth uncoiled himself from where he was leaning against the wall, scarred face expressionless, and led the way along several passages to a grand and guarded door. The guard there was obviously expecting Rod; he nodded, opened it, and waved Rod inside.
The far side of the room was a row of arched windows looking out over southern Tarmoral, their bottom sills at about waist-level, with bookshelves beneath them. The room was filled with a magnificent, smooth-polished wooden table that could seat forty but was currently in use by only two: Taeauna and Lord Tindror. There was a tall, fat cut-glass decanter of fire-hued liquid between them, its upended stopper beside it, flanked by two half-full glasses. The seat right in front of Rod was pulled out from the table, and an empty glass stood waiting for him on the otherwise bare table in front of it.