Mara played, and a silver light shone in her hair. For a moment, Sturm thought she was glowing, then gradually he noticed the same light spreading over his arms and shoulders, over Acorn’s neck and the chestnut flanks of Luin behind them. White Solinari had broken through the thick mask of clouds, and the road behind him and before him was as clear and dazzling as midday.
“As I feared,” Mara said, the song over and the clouds returning. “We’ve listed a bit to the south. We’ll strike the river again if we keep on as we’re going.”
“How … how did you do that?” Sturm asked, turning Acorn forcefully from the trail that the stubborn little mare insisted on following.
“Gilean mode,” Mara said quietly, “with the High Mode of Paladine placed in its silences. When you combine them, it’s a song … of revealing. It dispels clouds and night, stills waters so you can look to the bottom of pond and river. In the hands of the great bards, it unmasks the dissembling heart.”
She smiled at Sturm, who caught his breath at the depths of her hazel eyes.
“But I am no great bard,” the elf concluded quietly. “With my music, we are lucky to see a momentary change in the weather.”
Sturm blushed and nodded, yanking once more at Acorn’s reins.
“Well, the clouds parted long enough,” Mara said, pointing due east. “There’s our direction. That way lies the Darkwoods.”
“But where on the woods’ edge can we find Dun Ringhill?” Sturm asked. “The stars don’t tell us that. If only we had Jack Derry here!”
“Ah, but Jack is lost or upriver or … elsewhere,” Mara said. “Leaving us alive if no wiser.”
“He believed I could find the way,” Sturm muttered disconsolately. “He trusted that I was my father’s son, that I am more resourceful than I feel.”
“My dear boy,” Mara said with a crooked smile, “what in the name of the Seven makes you think that?”
“He told me,” Sturm said, “that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. What else could that be but talk of fathers and sons?”
“Perhaps something a bit more … arboreal?” Mara asked. “Or a simple riddle that your thoughts of fathers have kept covered? After all, Jack couldn’t give you directions to Dun Ringhill. Bandits have ears, after all, and would follow us like hounds.”
Sturm nodded. It made sense. Jack was, after all, a man of concealments and riddles. Seated on the increasingly unruly mare, Sturm mined his knowledge of tree lore, of gardening, of the mythical ancient calendar of the dryads that supposedly followed a symbolism of trees. None of it helped. He felt as though he were back in the maze of Castle di Caela or in the thickest reaches of the Green Man’s fog.
The mare wrenched once more, and he tugged furiously at her reins. “By the gods, Acorn!” he snapped. “If you don’t—”
He paused at the sound of Mara’s laughter.
“Now what?” he exclaimed, but the elf laughed even more.
“Let go of the reins, Sturm Brightblade,” she said, recovering her breath.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Think about it, Sturm. Who among us knows the way to the village of Dun Ringhill?”
Slowly, reluctantly, Sturm opened his hand. The reins dropped limply over Acorn’s withers, and sensing the new freedom, the little mare turned about and walked steadily east, then south, then east again. Mara resumed the music, this time singing the old song from Qualinost, adding to it equally ancient words.
“The sun,
the splendid eye
of all our heavens,
dives from the day
“and leaves
the dozing sky
spangled with fireflies,
deepening in gray.
“The leaves
give off cold fire,
they blaze into ash
at the end of the year,
“and birds
coast on the winds
and wheel to the north
when autumn ends.
“The day grows dark,
the seasons bare,
but we
await the sun’s
green fire upon
the trees.”
Ahead of them, green footprints sprouted and grew among the dingy ground cover. Acorn leaned forward, grazed softly on one of them, and began her slow progress on the new trail. Luin followed, browsing at the footprints, too, eating the trail behind them. At a farther distance, the high bushes tilted and switched, a sign that the spider Cyren followed, as always obscurely and furtively.
They hadn’t traveled twenty yards before the music arose in front of them, too. A fluid, beautiful descant joined with Mara’s singing, and Sturm closed his eyes and saw liquid silver passing like a magical stream before his inner vision.
So Vertumnus had joined in the music again. Sturm sat back in the saddle, resigning himself to Acorn’s direction and the melody all around him. Though the Green Man’s song invariably led to … challenges, it also led toward the Southern Darkwoods. And despite the challenge and the peril, that was the goal of his journey.
On they traveled, and even though the night was thick about them, Sturm’s heart was much lighter. Jack Derry’s riddle had been a little thing, not much compared to the mysteries that lay ahead. But solving one thing gave hope to solving another. The road ahead of him looked less daunting now, and as the lights of Dun Ringhill shone dimly before him, Sturm imagined the smithy, the sword reforged, Vertumnus faced down and beaten on the first day of spring.
It all seemed possible, even likely. He felt the crisp exhilaration of adventure, of swords and riding and mystery and beautiful females. He sat back in the saddle, brushing against the sleeping Mara, who mumbled and tightened her grip about his waist. For a moment, the journey seemed something he was born to do.
He didn’t notice the men until they rose like fog from the high grass, sudden and quick and quietly efficient. The man in the forefront, a brown, wizened little character, smiled and raised his hand.
“Good even, Sturm Brightblade!” he called out, his common speech fluent but thick with the accents of Lemish.
Good old Jack Derry, Sturm thought admiringly. As quick in travel as he is with the sword. “Ho, there!” he called out, dismounting from the horse. And then, more formally and Solamnically: “Whom have I the honor of addressing?”
“Captain Duir of the Dun Ringhill Militia, sir!” the weathered little man announced, standing at comical attention. “Assigned to protect the western approaches.”
Sturm looked back in amusement at Mara, who was rubbing her eyes and straightening herself in the saddle.
Sturm stepped forward, removed his glove, and offered his hand in the traditional Solamnic gesture. Shyly, awkwardly, Captain Duir extended his own hand, and the two men exchanged greetings as equals.
Sturm nodded and smiled at the peasant soldier, who slowly smiled back, his blue eyes narrowed now with a new and strange amusement.
“Master Sturm Brightblade of Solamnia,” the captain announced, his grip tightening on the young man’s hand, “I arrest you as an invader, in the name of the Druidess Ragnell!”
Chapter 13
A Ride Back in Memory
———
He could return to the Tower now.
Boniface watched Sturm’s arrest from the topmost branches of a distant vallenwood. The spyglass he carried with him was cloudy but good. He saw the boy offer his hand, saw the captain take it, saw the gestures of friendship stiffen and sour, and saw the militia take them all—the horses, the elven mistress, and Brightblade—off toward the town of Dun Ringhill, where the old druidess sat at the head of an angry tribunal.
The finest swordsman in Solamnia wrapped his dark cloak about him tightly and shivered with pleasure. From a distance, framed in the menacing red moonlight, he looked like a huge raven or some unspeakable bat-winged creature, huddled in the height of the enormous tree. The spring wind died at the foot of the vallenwood, and in the upper branches,
it was ultimate winter, dead and still, the steam of Boniface’s breath rising like a specter into the midnight air.
Let the old witch have the boy, he thought. He shinnied down the tree like a spider.
Let them hang him, or boil him, or do whatever they do in the barbaric villages of Lemish. In its own way, it would be perfectly legal.
Why, it might even jog the council from their notorious sleep back in the Tower, where the Oath and Measure rust in the closets. The death of his ward might be enough to stir Gunthar Uth Wistan southward to invasions long overdue. Then the people of Dun Ringhill, of the Darkwoods, of all of Lemish and later Throt and Neraka, would know what it meant to transgress the Order and Measure.
But even if Lord Gunthar did not budge from the Tower, if the boy went unavenged and Lemish untouched, if this night marked the end of the matter, Boniface was still satisfied. For the long wars of a decade would be over at last.
Lord Boniface of Foghaven leapt into the saddle of his black stallion. Swiftly, with the grace born of fighting from horseback at close quarters, he wheeled the beast about and rode toward the Vingaard River at full gallop, his mind rehearsing the oldest of his pains.
They had grown up together, Angriff and Boniface. In sword and book, in horsemanship and cunning, in their first raids against the ogres of Blode through the border wars with the men of Neraka, there was scarcely a hairs-breadth of difference between one and the other. Only in their allegiance to the Oath and Measure did the two show differences.
For Boniface, the Order was life, and its rules and rituals the breath of that living. Book after book of the Measure, with its elaborate chapters and lists and qualifications and exceptions, he had memorized with reverence, so that his fellows had smiled at him, called him “the next High Justice.”
They smiled because they had admired him. Of that, young Boniface had been sure, and through squirehood and the first lists of knighthood, his assurance had come from the letter, from the laws and restrictions the Order had established since the days that Vinas Solamnus first set pen to paper.
He didn’t understand his friend Angriff, for whom both Code and Measure were more of a game. Sometimes Boniface ached and worried that the time would come when he would have to leave Angriff behind, when his own study and seriousness would blossom in the Rose of true knighthood, and Angriff would be a laughingstock, a cautionary tale for young aspirants that gifts and good looks and a generous spirit did not make you a Knight. He expected it to happen, but Angriff became a squire as well, and then a Knight of the Crown, serving with brilliance in the Fourth Nerakan Campaign.
It would have angered a lesser friend to see that brilliance, those talents, wasted on games and music and poetry, on anything but duty and honor. It would have angered that lesser friend, but Boniface bore with Angriff, hoping against the rising evidence that the heir to the noble Brightblade line, the son of Emelin and grandson of Bayard Brightblade, would turn to discipline and find his joy in fulfilling every action in accordance to the unbending law of the Measure.
Against all evidence, Boniface hoped. That is, until his friend had come back from the east.
Newly wed, Angriff was missing for a month in the wastes of Estwilde, and all but his young bride Ilys gave him up for lost. Boniface himself had stood on the Knight’s Spur with the lovely girl, her eyes red and swollen with a week’s crying, and told her to hold back her tears and assume the green mantle of Solamnic widowhood.
He hadn’t urged her hatefully, of course. It was, after all, a hard time for the Order, and hostile forces assembled far and near. He had simply figured the chances, which were not at all good.
She had nodded dutifully, had ordered the weaving of the mantle. The season had turned from winter to spring as the seamstress rendered the final embroidery, the ancestral sign of the phoenix. Two nights before Ilys donned the ceremonial mantle and became a widow by Code and by Measure, Angriff Brightblade came out of the Plains of Solamnia, riding slowly up the Wings of Habbakuk toward the gates of the High Clerist’s Tower, so muddy and wet that horse and rider were indistinguishable and the first sentries almost drew bow against him, fancying him a centaur.
Ilys hid the mantle at the bottom of her bridal chest—shrouded in cedar, to be drawn forth and worn fifteen years later—and they all rushed to the foregates to greet her husband. The heart of Boniface had been as light as any, his joy as pure and surprising and unlimited …
Until he took the reins from his weary friend and saw the change in his eyes.
Something had happened in the wastes of Estwilde. Angriff never spoke of it, nor of his journey home, but the flippant way in which he treated Oath and Measure horrified Boniface. Law and life, it seemed, were toys to the frivolous Angriff, who from that day forward abided by only the most basic allegiances. He disobeyed superiors when he found their commands foolhardy or merciless, he forgave disobedience readily in his foot soldiers, discouraged trial by combat, and avoided all ceremony because it “no longer interested him.”
Even more, it horrified Boniface that Angriff Brightblade answered neither to authority nor fate. The council turned their head to his misbehavior because his swordsmanship had blossomed. It was the only word for it. Angriff Brightblade did things with a sword that no man had dreamt before him, or since, for that matter. Both he and Boniface had learned from the same master. The movements of their swords were essentially the same, but something happened to a weapon in the hands of Angriff Brightblade. It was as though the sword dictated its own path and Angriff followed it. Something reckless and free had entered his swordplay, and none of Boniface’s time-honored rules and classical movements could answer for it.
Boniface watched, and envied, and looked for a time and place to match his skills with that of his old friend.
He found it in the Midsummer Tournament, in the three hundred and twenty-third year since the Cataclysm. Two hundred Knights had assembled at Thelgaard Keep, and for the first time, Angriff and Boniface found themselves in the Barriers of the Sword, the contest in swordsmanship that traditionally occurs on the tournament’s second day.
Always before, only one of the three great Solamnic swordsmen would enter the Barriers of the Sword—Angriff one year, Boniface the next, and Gunthar Uth Wistan the third. It was an unspoken agreement, giving a sporting chance to the other Knights and avoiding the rancorous rivalry that can be found at the top level of many endeavors.
Three twenty-three was Angriff’s year. Though many a Knight was surprised, and some outraged, to see Boniface’s name placed in the Barriers, he was entitled by the Measure and as welcome as any man. So protest was silent, and though Gunthar Uth Wistan refused to speak to Boniface at the banquet the night before, Angriff was generous and friendly and joked about the possibility of their meeting in the Barriers on the morrow.
Boniface remained silent. Through the night he slept fitfully, his dreams a flashing of blade and sunlight, and he woke the next morning with his arms already weary, having fought through the night in those dreams.
Angriff, it seemed, slept soundly and strongly, as a great tree slumbers in the depth of winter. He awoke cheerfully, singing an old song about broadswords and beasts, and promptly invited Boniface to his tent to share breakfast. All through the meal, Boniface couldn’t look at Angriff. The movement of his old friend’s hand for a piece of fruit or bread startled him like the sudden rustle of an adder in dried leaves, and that morning, his meditations were shallow and fruitless.
The arena was exactly as tradition described it. The circle in the garden was twenty feet in diameter and free of obstacle and impediment, though the setting itself was overgrown, and a huge olive tree extended its branches over the grounds. It was a peaceful spot, quiet before the afternoon’s clashing of swords, and yet, to Boniface’s ears, the place hummed like a hive, filled with anticipation and an undefined menace.
The first rounds of the Barriers were routine and amiable. Expert swordsmen were mismatched with beginners, who l
eft thankful that the tournament rules called for arms courteous, the blunted, light swords of the summer games.
Boniface’s first opponent almost caught the great Knight napping, scoring a point and then another while his famous adversary scanned the crowd anxiously.
Could it be for Angriff Brightblade? So was the rumor. The Tower was abuzz in the belief that the two would cross swords in the afternoon, and speculation and wagers flew. Would Angriff’s gifts or Boniface’s study prevail? Would the wild inspiration of the mystic win out over the beautiful precision and schooled control of the master?
Boniface returned his attention to the matter at hand, the first of his opponents. With a swift, almost mathematical efficiency, he brought the young man to the ground, the rounded tip of his sword at his helpless opponent’s throat. Swiftly Boniface turned away, dismissing again his thoughts of Angriff Brightblade as he stalked toward a rest he did not need and a wait for his second opponent in the contest.
Ten minutes late for the next match, Gunthar Uth Wistan, Lord Brightblade’s second, waded through the murmuring crowd followed by Angriff himself, who took longer to reach the circle than he did to dispatch his opponent, young Medoc Inverno of Zeriak. It was a maneuver so swift and unexpected it bordered on the foolish. Instead of parrying Sir Medoc’s first, inexpert thrust, Angriff simply stepped to his right out of the path of the blundering lad, shifted his blade to the left hand, and disarmed, tripped, and pinned Medoc in one effortless move.
Angriff stood back and saluted his opponent, who lay on his back, scowling fiercely. Suddenly, overwhelmed by the sheer ease and quickness of it all, Medoc laughed despite himself.
“ ’Tis not the usual Knight,” he said, “so roundly beaten by a master swordsman, who lives to enjoy and tell of it! I have been an uncommon match for you, Lord Angriff!”
Angriff laughed along with him, and with a gesture both gracious and respectful, leaned forward and helped the young Knight to his feet. All around the Circle of the Sword there was murmuring and polite, baffled applause.
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