by DAVID B. COE
“Do you still believe that Theron and the Unsettled are involved?”
“I’m not certain anymore,” Baden replied. “Orris’s treachery must be connected in some way with the attacks—that may be why, at the end of the Gathering, when Jessamyn decided to create this delegation, he suddenly seemed so anxious to join it. But I can’t imagine why the Unsettled would need the help of a mage in carrying out their plan.”
Sartol pretended to consider this. “Well,” he said at length, “if not the Unsettled, then who?”
Baden shrugged helplessly. “I have no idea. I guess that’s why I feel that we’ve accomplished so little. At least before, I had a theory; it may have been wrong, but it provided a starting point. Now, I don’t even have that.” Sartol said nothing, and Baden went on. “For the past day or so I’ve been going over the attacks in my mind, trying to discern some pattern, either in their timing or their locations.”
“An interesting idea. Have you come up with anything?”
“Not yet,” Baden answered, staring absently at the ground again. “The locations, at least, seem pretty random. There have been minor incidents in almost every part of Tobyn-Ser: both the Upper and Lower Horns have been hit; there have been several attacks in Tobyn’s Wood, two in Leora’s Forest, even one in the Great Desert. This spring there were the murders at Sern—on the island in South Shelter—and then, more recently, the attacks on the Northern Plain and Tobyn’s Plain.”
Sartol started to respond, but at the same time, Baden looked up at him as if he planned to say more. Both of them stopped, and Sartol gave a small, awkward laugh. “I didn’t mean to cut you off,” he apologized.
“Not at all,” Baden remarked a little strangely. “What were you going to say?”
“Just that I saw your point: there’s no obvious pattern there. With the incidents at Taima and Kaera, it appears that no portion of the land has been spared.”
Baden nodded, his pale eyes fixed on Sartol’s face. “Right,” he agreed absently, as if preoccupied with other thoughts.
There was something in the Owl-Master’s manner that abruptly made Sartol feel uncomfortable. “What about the timing?” Sartol asked, hoping to keep the conversation moving.
“Excuse me?”
“The timing of the attacks. Do you see any patterns there?”
“Oh, um . . . no. Nothing there, either,” Baden said falteringly. His thin face had turned pale.
“Is something wrong, Baden?” Sartol didn’t bother to conceal his concern. “You don’t look well.”
Baden smiled stiffly. “I’m fine,” he assured Sartol. “I’m just . . . worn out, and, again, I apologize for being so distracted. I think that all the riding, combined with what happened at the grove, has left me a bit scattered. I can reflect on the past attacks all I want, but if I’m overtired, I’m not going to learn anything new, am I?”
“No, of course not,” Sartol agreed. “We should sleep. We have another long day ahead of us.”
“Indeed, we do,” Baden said, lying back on the grass. “Thank you for drawing me out of my shell, Sartol. I found our talk very helpful.”
“Good,” Sartol replied, finding a place where he, too, could lie down. “I’m glad you were willing to share your thoughts with me. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Sartol closed his eyes, but he did not let himself sleep. Instead, he directed his attention to Baden’s breathing. Something had troubled the Owl-Master. Maybe, as he claimed, it was merely fatigue and the difficulty of the past few days, in which case he would probably fall asleep quickly. But Sartol feared that it might be more, that perhaps Baden had remembered a detail from the night by the grove that would in some way implicate him, or that he had gleaned something from tonight’s discussion. So Sartol lay in the grass and listened. He did not have to wait long. Within just a few minutes, the rise and fall of Baden’s chest slowed and deepened into the regular rhythm of a peaceful sleep. And Sartol, knowing a moment of overwhelming relief, grinned in the dark. He would have to maintain his composure, he thought, chastising himself for growing so alarmed with no cause, and he would have to stop looking for crises where they did not exist. Baden’s weakness lay in his honesty, in his lack of deviousness, and in his inability to recognize such qualities in others. The Owl-Master believed him, that was obvious; and as long as Sartol watched him closely, he had nothing to fear. He suddenly felt giddy: in a matter of days, with Baden’s support, he would become Owl-Sage. After that, Tobyn-Ser was his.
Stretched out on the grass, feigning sleep, Baden struggled to control the cold panic that had gripped him only a few minutes before. His mind was reeling with the possible implications of his conversation with Sartol. It was such a small matter, and yet it loomed so very large.
Trahn had warned him repeatedly about Sartol’s deceptive nature, but though Baden had listened, he had not really taken those warnings to heart. Sartol’s version of what happened by Theron’s Grove had seemed entirely plausible, and Baden had found no reason to doubt that Orris had betrayed the Order and the land. Until tonight.
Just now, Baden had mentioned the attack on Tobyn’s Plain, and then, remembering that Sartol could not have known of the most recent incident at Kaera, he had started to explain. But there had been no need: somehow, Sartol already had heard of that attack. Baden thought back to the company’s one, chaotic night by Theron’s Grove, trying to reconstruct the events. As Trahn and he had finished sheltering the horses, Orris had confronted them with his news of the razing of Kaera. Then Orris had stalked off to find Jessamyn. The sage’s scream came just moments later. By Sartol’s own account, he did not come across Orris until the Hawk-Mage was chasing Jaryd and Alayna; and certainly Sartol and Orris did not discuss the incident while they were trying to destroy each other. When they found Sartol, Baden and Trahn informed him that an attack had taken place, but as far as Baden could remember, they never told him where. Baden knew that he had not mentioned the attack again until tonight. Sartol could have learned of it from Trahn, but when? The two mages did not spend any time alone together before Baden and Sartol departed the following morning. If Trahn had said something about it, Baden would have heard. And if Sartol had learned of the incident on his own, during their journey to the grove, he would have told everyone. News of such importance had to be shared.
There was, though, one other possibility: perhaps Sartol had prior knowledge of the attack, because Sartol had betrayed the Order to whoever had committed it. Trahn, my friend, you may have been right all along, Baden thought with alarm and regret. Then another sorrow, deeper, more frightening: Orris, whose guilt Baden had already accepted, was probably dead, murdered, quite possibly, by the true renegade, who expected to be chosen as Owl-Sage in less than a fortnight.
Baden considered his options, finding none that were terribly attractive. He knew that Sartol was very strong. Indeed, if Sartol had murdered the sage and the first and defeated Orris, all in the span of a few moments, the Owl-Master would probably be too powerful for Baden as well. And in a test of physical strength against the tall, athletic mage, Baden would find himself equally overmatched. Any attempt on his part to stop the Owl-Master from reaching Amarid would probably result in his own death. Besides, he could offer no solid proof of Sartol’s guilt. There was a chance, however remote, that Orris or Trahn had told Sartol of the incident at Kaera. And despite his hopes to the contrary, Baden had to recognize the probability that all those who witnessed the murders, including not just Orris but also Jaryd and Alayna, had died three nights ago. If the young mages had entered Theron’s Grove, they just might have survived. But, he realized with anguish, it had been Sartol who told them of Jaryd and Alayna’s flight into the grove. If the Owl-Master had betrayed the Order and murdered the others, he would have had no compunction about slaying the young ones as well, and lying about their fates. In all probability, Jaryd and Alayna were dead.
The recognition of that likelihood paralyzed Baden with s
orrow. It made him think of Bernel and Drina, and how the loss of their younger son would devastate them. It flooded his mind with visions of the young mage. He could see Jaryd as a small child that first time he had visited Bernel in Accalia, when he had first sensed the boy’s potential. He recalled, with an image so vivid it took his breath away, his reunion with Jaryd on a rainy day this past spring, and the look of wonder in the young man’s pale eyes as they stared at Baden from beneath the thick swoop of light brown hair, when the Owl-Master told him that he would someday become a powerful mage. Even then, Baden had not fully grasped the extent to which that prediction would prove prophetic. Yes, he knew the boy would be strong, but not so strong, and not so quickly. He had not known that Jaryd would be chosen by Amarid’s Hawk until he spotted Ishalla following them through the Parneshome Range. Only then had he begun to fathom just how deep the boy’s potential ran. And now, Jaryd was probably gone, in large part because Baden had insisted that he be included in the delegation.
Baden tried to close his mind to such thoughts. He could not blame himself, and he could not let himself be debilitated by mourning. Instead, he needed to focus on how to deal with his suspicions of Sartol. Unfortunately, given that he had no evidence with which to back up his claims against the Owl-Master, he could only wait and watch, and hope that either the others had survived the night or that Sartol would make a second, more incriminating error. Neither seemed very likely. His despair deepening, Baden tried, with little success, to make himself sleep.
He could see the glow of their cerylls in the distance, two tiny, moving points of light, one yellow, the other orange, shining amid the blackness of the plain. He judged that they could be no more than a half-mile in front of him, and, in spite of the painful burns on his shoulder and side, Orris grinned. He had not thought that he would catch up with them so quickly. They had started north only a few hours ahead of him, but, with his injuries, he had feared that he might not have the stamina to exceed or even match their pace. And, with Pordath dead, he had been unable to increase the light from his ceryll enough to see clearly at night. The Shadow Forest had slowed him, and he had been forced to cross through much of the Southern Swamp in the dark of night, something he hoped never to do again. But he had grown up on Tobyn’s Plain; he had ridden this terrain throughout his childhood and well into his adult years. Except, perhaps, for Trahn, no member of the Order could keep up with him here. Even without brightening his ceryll, he was able to make up ground on his quarry well past sunset. Besides, the two Owl-Masters in front of him had betrayed the Order and plotted to assassinate Jessamyn. He would have pursued them even if he had been blind.
The lights ahead of him suddenly stopped moving and grew dimmer, and Orris could tell from the way the glowing cerylls suddenly arced downward that Baden and Sartol had dismounted. Immediately, he stopped riding as well, unwilling to risk that they might hear his horse’s hooves drumming on the sun-baked prairie soil. At some point, before they reached Amarid, he would find an opportunity to creep closer to them. For now, though, he would be patient.
The Owl-Masters appeared to be settling in for the night, which suited Orris just fine. He pulled some dried fruit from his saddlebag, and, lying down on the tall, cool grass of the plain, tried to relax his sore muscles, and to ignore the throbbing of his wounds. And with the effort, of course, came once again the grief and the loss. For nine years he had been bound to his hawk. She had been his first binding, and he missed her presence in his mind the way he would miss a newly severed limb. Every time he reached for the connection and realized that she was not there—every time he strained to see in the dark, or grew conscious of his burns, and tried to draw upon his powers, only to find himself powerless—he felt the pain of losing her as if for the first time. He had not experienced loneliness for nearly a decade. But here, alone on the plain, hurt and unbound, he felt more isolated than he ever had before. While he could not blame Sartol’s owl for Pordath’s death, for no familiar could refuse her mage’s command, Orris could not help but hope that one day Sartol would feel as he did now; that before Orris killed him, the Owl-Master would know this aching loss.
He would not destroy Sartol’s bird himself, though, not even out of revenge. It was not a thing he could bring himself to do. On the other hand, he would have no trouble killing the Owl-Master—both Owl-Masters, he amended; surely Baden had earned his death as completely as Sartol had earned his.
Baden’s treachery had surprised him. True, he and the lanky mage had never gotten along, but Orris had respected him, at least more than he had Sartol and the other Owl-Masters. Baden seemed different from them: more trustworthy than Sartol, and more concerned with the people of Tobyn-Ser than Odinan, Niall, and the rest of the older mages. Moreover, Trahn liked him, which, in Orris’s view, indicated that he must have possessed more than a few redeeming qualities. But either Trahn had been duped or he, too, had betrayed the Order. Orris had chosen to believe the former.
When he had come across the bodies of Jessamyn and Peredur, and then confronted Sartol as the Owl-Master chased the young ones into Theron’s Grove, Orris had guessed that Sartol alone had deceived them all. The Owl-Master had been unthinkably strong; Orris had never imagined that a mage could wield that much power. He had hoped to destroy Sartol, or subdue him, but he soon realized that he would do well merely to escape with his life, and to rescue Jaryd and Alayna. In the end, he could not even do that much. He saved himself, barely, but lost Pordath. He had not been able to do anything for the young mages. So he had started back toward the camp, hoping to find Baden and Trahn in order to enlist their help. And he had been shocked to see the three of them together, apparently plotting their next move. He could not hear what they said, but he watched them, hiding in the dark, and soon learned that at least one of them—Trahn, he assumed—was not a part of the conspiracy.
Clearly, the Owl-Masters built funeral pyres to keep up appearances for Trahn, a theory confirmed the next morning when they rode off, leaving Trahn by Theron’s Grove. Obviously, Orris could not be entirely certain of all this. It remained possible that Sartol and Trahn had conspired together, or that Sartol had worked alone. Orris could not be sure. So, later that day, rather than trying to slit Trahn’s throat, or attempting to join forces with the Hawk-Mage, Orris stole a horse and set the others free. That, at least, had given him time to escape from the camp and begin his pursuit of the Owl-Masters.
The more he thought about it, though—the more he considered Baden’s prominent role in setting up this delegation, and Sartol’s actions by the grove—the more certain Orris grew that the two of them had worked together to undermine the Order’s standing with the people, murder Jessamyn and Peredur, and establish themselves as the rulers of Tobyn-Ser. It was funny in a way: it was important to him that Trahn not be involved. He liked the dark mage; along with Ursel, and a couple of the other younger mages, Trahn came as close as anyone in the Order to being Orris’s friend. Orris found himself regretting that he had cut the horses loose rather than approaching Trahn. It would have been helpful to have access to the Mage-Craft, and, he conceded to himself, he would have welcomed the other man’s company. He shook his head. There it was again: that hollow, disjointed feeling that had haunted him since Pordath’s death. He had to find a way to move past it, or at least to control it until he had killed Sartol and Baden. Then he would mourn her.
He could not say when he had decided to kill them. In truth, calling it a “decision” seemed inaccurate. They had slaughtered Jessamyn and Peredur; for all intents and purposes, they had murdered Jaryd and Alayna as well. Indeed, even if they did not commit the attacks themselves, they were also responsible for the murders at Sern and every death in Kaera. Clearly, the Owl-Masters deserved to die. More than that, though, they had to be stopped. Their flight toward Amarid proved beyond a doubt that they planned to install one of them, probably Sartol, as Owl-Sage. Orris could not allow this to happen.
Killing them would be difficult, thou
gh, especially now, possessing, as he did, little more than a residue of his powers. Instinctively, his hand moved to the hilt of his dagger, which he carried, sheathed and hidden, within the folds of his robe. He grinned again, darkly. He still could wield a blade, and he had learned to stalk and kill game in these grasses. The Owl-Masters’ powers would do them little good when the blood from Baden’s throat stained the soil, and Orris’s blade buried itself hilt-deep in Sartol’s skull. He would have to be doubly careful, however. If somehow he failed, and they killed him while he was unbound, he would join the ranks of the Unsettled.
“Arick’s fist upon you, Theron!” he said to the night. “You and your evil curse!”
Theron’s Curse. He had never really given it much thought; it had never seemed that important. Obviously, Pordath would have died eventually, but he saw no reason to worry about the curse while she was alive. And, on some level, he had assumed that his new binding would come quickly, that this time of weakness and uncertainty would last but a few weeks, perhaps a month or two. It had never occurred to him that he would lose his familiar in a battle, or that he would face this much danger without her. Yet, at a time when he needed his strength and his courage more than ever, he found himself not only deprived of his powers, but also stripped of his will. He knew that he had to keep Baden and Sartol from reaching the Great Hall, but, for the first time in his adult life, he felt afraid. Death had never daunted him; eternal unrest did.
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “May the God smite you, Theron,” he said through clenched teeth.
He had heard much talk recently among members of the Order, young and old, about how Theron’s legacy had been ignored and denigrated for too long. The Owl-Master had been as responsible as Amarid for the harnessing of the Mage-Craft and the founding of the Order, these mages argued. He deserved recognition, he deserved to be remembered for more than just his curse. It was not a sentiment Orris shared, particularly now. Any honor that Theron might have earned, he had forfeited when he condemned unbound mages to this kind of dread, and when he sentenced those who died to wander the land ceaselessly. Even before his curse, the First Owl-Master had seen the Mage-Craft as a path to power and wealth, while Amarid had viewed it as an opportunity to serve the land. Orris knew that some mages considered his own advocacy of a greater role for the Order in governing Tobyn-Ser as a turn toward Theron’s philosophy, but he disagreed vehemently. Leadership, he believed, represented one form of service, and, right now, Tobyn-Ser desperately needed leadership. Amarid, Orris believed, would have approved. As for Theron, his approach bred the type of arrogance and corruption embodied in the two Owl-Masters who now threatened to gain control of the Order.