“Then … then …” Sturm tried to answer, but the clearing swam away from him, and he staggered and fell to his knees.
Vaguely Ragnell clutched at the lad’s tunic, but he tore himself from her grasp.
Ragnell smiled beautifully, incredulously. “Well, then,” she said softly, casting her hand across the roiling waters. “If I am a temptation, let us see the terms of tempting.”
At her touch, the pool stilled, and framed in the white moonlight, Sturm saw his reflection strangely transformed to a dark lad all in green, leafed and vined, his hair entangled with dew and crowned with holly and laurel.
“By Huma!” he swore. “It’s Jack Derry!”
“Not Jack Derry but you,” the druidess proclaimed. “ ’Tis your own self translated, Sturm Brightblade. Beyond Oath and Measure, into the depths of your being.”
“Another druidic dream!” Sturm replied scornfully, turning his head from the reflection.
The pool still lay in front of him, and his face was still looking back—serene, sylvan, unchanged. He knelt before the tranquil pool, and the reflection knelt to face him.
“Does … does that lie in the depths of me?” Sturm asked.
Ragnell set her hand on his shoulder. Her reflection appeared in the water, bent and greatly ancient above his kneeling arboreal image.
“That and much more, Sturm Brightblade,” she said. “A great wisdom beneath Measure and Oath. Yours is the choice, however. I can remove the thorn, or … I can change it to music.”
“To music?”
The druidess nodded. “An inner music that will pierce and unite your divided heart like a tailor’s needle, stitching it together to a wholeness past damage. The music will stay with you for the rest of your life, and it will change you utterly. Or I can remove the thorn.”
She leaned forward and stirred the waters of the pool. “Either way, the choice is yours,” she urged.
Sturm swallowed.
“Choose,” the druidess urged. She pointed to the wound in his shoulder. While she had spoken, the thorn had worked its way still deeper into Sturm’s flesh. It lay between muscle and bone now; Sturm could barely move his arm. It was green to the elbow now, and the color spread slowly upward.
“ ’Twill go deeper and do deadly work,” Ragnell announced. “Fear not the music. Soon, Sturm Brightblade, you will be part of the woods and the great green of midsummer.”
“No!” Sturm shouted. Around him, he heard the sharp, startled shrieks of rousted birds. “Remove the thorn, Ragnell!”
“If I do,” the druidess threatened, “you will never see your father.” She turned away from him and walked toward the edge of the clearing.
She is lying, Sturm thought, following her. She is lying, just as Caramon and Raistlin were not at the Tower of High Sorcery, and Vertumnus was not at the walls of the Knight’s Spur. She is a dream, and she is lying, and all this reading of dreams is only foolishness, and what I should do is …
“Ragnell!” he shouted. Beyond her, deep in the thick blue aeterna, something scurried and rushed away. “Remove this thorn from my shoulder!”
“No.” Her reply was soft, uncertain.
“I can choose,” Sturm said triumphantly. The words passed through him surely and swiftly, and they were so certain that for a moment, he thought they were not his own. “To the last of this and anything,” he said, “I can choose.”
“So you can, Sturm Brightblade,” the druidess agreed after a long pause. The flute song gave way to the lonely sound of a solitary lark, and in a moment, that music, too, had faded. “Take your sword then, and your Oath and Measure.”
She turned to him, and with a strangely sorrowful look, reached to his shoulder and removed the thorn.
“The strength will return at once,” she declared as all of them—thorn and druidess, pool and clearing—began to fade before the lad’s astonished eyes.
“And you will never have to choose again.”
Mara carried the body of the spider to a little knoll at the edge of the forest, where the trees gave way to grass and stone and moonlight, and where, if you looked west through the rapidly thinning foliage, you could see the village fires of Dun Ringhill.
For such a large and spindle-shanked creature, Cyren was surprisingly light. It was as though the spider’s departing life had left a thin, papery husk behind it, like a broken cocoon or a locust shell.
Already his legs were dry and brittle.
Mara scarcely knew where she carried him, and even less why she did so. Around her, the forest was loud and menacing, a dark landscape of grunts and whistles and snapping underbrush. She climbed over a felled maple, then through a thicket of briars that scratched her and clung to her clothing.
Once in a great while, there was moonlight through the branches, and Mara could look up to unobstructed sky, to the deepening violet of the heavens above her, and the neighborless stars.
It was as though the forest had turned against her, and everything in her elven blood was fearful and poised. Time and again, there were harsh, unfamiliar rumblings in the underbrush, something gobbling and wounded and angry. Then soon after would come a brief silvery outburst of a flute nearby, so beautiful and ominous she thought she had imagined the song. More than once, she longed to leave dead Cyren behind her, to rush toward the open and light and cool breezes, to scale a vallenwood and clamber to the top of the forest, where the sky would reveal itself.
Through all of this, she wept.
“Enchantments!” she muttered bitterly, tugging the creature around a squat outcropping of rocks. “It is not supposed to be this way. Princes and kings are trapped in the guise of frog or bird, or they are turned to stone or doomed to a century of sleep. The old stories lied to us, for a stone or frog or bird can become a prince as well, it seems. I was in love with Calotte’s enchantments.”
Suddenly the whole thing struck her as funny. Laughing bleakly, she seated herself on one of the stones, looked long into the dull, multiple eyes of the spider, and laughed until the tears fell again.
Then, by incredible chance, she caught a whiff of woodsmoke from somewhere to her right, so faint that she might well have imagined it, and again she hoisted Cyren’s body, growing heavier the longer she traveled, and plodded off in the direction of the smell.
The spider hoisted over her shoulders, she scrambled up a rise, pulling herself the last few steep yards by bracing her feet against the thin trunk of a sapling willow. Then it was light, fresh air, and the windswept clearing above the dwindling forest.
Tenderly she set the spider down. She knelt on the top of the hill and drew forth her knife. Intently, almost reverently, she began to dig a grave in the rocky soil. As she did, she sang a mourning song from the west, learned in her travels with the creature she buried.
“Always before, you could explain
The turning darkness of the earth,
And how the dark embraced the rain
And gave the ferns and flowers birth.
“Already I forget those things,
And how a vein of gold survives
The mining of a thousand springs,
The seasons of a thousand lives.
“Now winter is my memory,
Now autumn, now the summer light—
So every spring from now will be
Another season into night.”
So she dug and sang the song again, until a horse nickered behind her and a shadow passed over her. Jack Derry approached and knelt beside her. Silently, with that healthy confidence she had grown to trust in their travels together, and also with an unaccustomed seriousness, the gardener drew forth his knife and joined in the digging.
By midnight, the creature had been placed solemnly in a bed of leaves, then covered over by Jack as Mara played an ancient elven air, sweet and elegiac in the purple night. She played, and slowly, incredibly, the red moon Lunitari rose from behind a stand of poplars and joined white Solinari overhead.
Astonished, Mara look
ed beyond the surprising intersection of the moons to the high and cloudless sky above Lemish. There the bright helix of Mishakal shone, blue and white in the earliest morning. Jack smiled.
It was later that morning, or a morning soon after, when Sturm awoke in the midst of the forest. Dressed in full armor, he lay beside a slow, moss-clogged brook in a strange, solitary place he had never seen. Vines and tendrils and briars grew thick about him, and all around the foliage was undisturbed, as though he had been dropped onto this spot softly from a great height.
He rubbed his eyes and rose up. It was a moment before he noticed the change in his movement, the renewed strength in his arm and the vigor in his legs. Amazed, he looked at his hands, which were ruddy and familiar, rid of the green that had haunted his veins and his dreams.
“Dreams …” he murmured, and felt his shoulder. The skin was smooth, unscarred, and his arm was limber, completely restored.
“Where do the dreams leave off?” he asked himself, and crashed clumsily through the thicket.
For a long morning and afternoon, Sturm Brightblade wandered the Southern Darkwoods, his apprehension rising. He remembered the words of Lord Wilderness at Yuletide: “If you fail to meet me at the appointed place, on the appointed night, your honor is forever forfeit.” And so he searched for Vertumnus’s trail, his eagerness tumbling into bafflement as one path after another emptied him onto the plains of Lemish, north of the smoke and the bunched huts of Dun Ringhill. Like a maze designed by a capricious forester, each trail led him back to the same spot, and each time, Sturm was surprised by his arrival, as the path issuing from the forest appeared to be different.
He spent the night at the wood’s edge. The trees seemed to recoil from his small campfire, and by morning, he discovered that his campsite had moved or the woods had receded, for he lay a good hundred yards from where he had bedded down.
Puzzled, still bleary from sleep, he approached the woods and found that the trail had vanished. Several brief sorties into the borders of the woods led him back to the same spot, and it dawned on him gradually that the forest itself was rejecting him. He could enter the woods forever, but whatever road he took would lead him back out at once.
“The first night of spring has passed,” Sturm said to himself, his despair rising as yet another path into the forest led back to the campsite. “I have missed my appointment with Lord Wilderness, or squandered it in dreaming. I have dishonored my vow.”
And yet he was still alive. The wound in his shoulder had not “blossomed” in some ominous, fatal way. Indeed, he examined his shoulder and found no trace of a wound—nothing except the faintest flutter of discomfort when his fingers pressed too hard against the spot.
Something told him the struggle was not over, that he would meet Lord Wilderness if he kept to the search a little longer. Shielding his eyes, he stared north and south down the thick, impenetrable border of trees and briars, then turned toward Dun Ringhill.
“Of all the places I have been,” he whispered, shouldering his sword like an infantryman’s pike, “I expect I am least welcome in that village, but surely the secret lies there.”
Chapter 21
The Turning Away
———
Long before he reached the outskirts of the village, Sturm lost the smoke and flickering light he had seen from the north. He tried to steer himself by memory, hoped desperately for Vertumnus’s guiding music, but the edge of the forest was featureless, and the only sounds were the occasional calls of the birds. Just when he thought he would never find Dun Ringhill, he stepped over a rise onto its very outskirts.
The place was grotesquely changed, as though something unnamed and large had taken terrible revenge on its outskirts. Hut and hovel tilted crazily, pushed from their foundations by vines, by sprouting trees, and by the constant pressure of encroaching undergrowth. It was green in Dun Ringhill, green to the very rooftops.
Sturm wandered through the jungle of foliage and houses, the fierce buzz of insects in his ears, his sense of smell distracted by the sharp perfume of evergreens, the attar of flowers. From east to west, the greenery had spread, or so it seemed, and the huge central lodge was covered with vines and lifted neatly from its foundations by the great, spreading roots of a two-hundred-foot hackberry.
Sturm weaved through the alleys and side streets quietly, his sword bare as he made his way in a roundabout path toward Weyland’s smithy. Across the overgrown village green he raced, west through a spontaneous surge of grapevines and gourds toward the edge of town where, if his senses had not completely betrayed him, the smithy and the stables lay side by side. His armor clattered through the ivied alleyways, and his hope alternated with fear of discovery.
The streets around Weyland’s establishment were silent and empty. It was as though this part of the village had been abandoned, or the villagers had drawn away for an hour because something momentous and private was happening near the forge and the stables. Though the villagers were distant, their things were near: Daggers, torques, awls, and spindles littered the village green, and more than once Sturm stepped on broken crockery, which crunched beneath his boots like the exoskeletons of enormous insects. A bronze mirror leaned crazily against the door of a house, its surface obscured by verdigris. Not far from it, strangely untouched by all this growth and decay and abandonment, lay a golden veil, its edges embroidered with green roses. Sturm knelt and picked up the garment, holding it sadly up to the sunlight.
He tossed it into the air. The garment rocked in the breeze, billowed and settled on the windowsill of an abandoned cottage. At that very moment, the ring of hammer against anvil sounded through the edge of the village.
Sturm broke into a run, his hopes racing wildly. Of any man in the village, Weyland would know the way to Jack Derry. And Jack would know the way to Vertumnus.
The doors to the stable stood wide open, and though the horse neighed and snorted from the warm, pungent dark, in the window of the smithy was movement and light and an even more welcome noise as a man passed back and forth before the forge, singing softly to himself.
Without hesitating, Sturm paced toward the smithy door and opened it.
Vertumnus stood before him, holding tongs and hammer, smiling expectantly.
He set down his tools and wiped his hands with a rough canvas cloth, while Sturm stood in the doorway, bathed by the forge’s heat and struggling with his memory.
Sturm dropped his sword in astonishment. Suddenly it became almost clear. The dreams and choices seemed to make a dark sense, though Sturm was still hard put to explain them. He started to speak, to assail Vertumnus with a hundred questions, but Lord Wilderness paused and raised his hand for silence.
“You look wayworn and weariful,” he observed, “and I’d be a poor host without offering you bread and drink.”
“No, thank you. I mean, yes. Yes, bread would be good. And water.”
Vertumnus stepped toward the back door and the well, ladle in hand. Sturm followed aimlessly, bumping clumsily against the anvil.
“It’s a green lad you are, Solamnic,” the Green Man said merrily, brushing by Sturm on his way to the pantry and the bread. “Green and stubborn, though there is remedy for both, nor is either altogether bad. Your greenness has kept you from corruption and compromise, and your stubbornness brought you this far.”
“It brought me to failure,” Sturm said angrily, “for the first day of spring has come and gone. You eluded me, Vertumnus, and you win on technicalities!”
“ ’Tis the Solamnic in you that whines at technicalities,” Vertumnus replied merrily. “I recall that I said if you did not meet me at the appointed time, your honor would be forever forfeit.”
Sturm nodded angrily, seating himself clumsily on the smithy bench and accepting the bread and brimming ladle.
“ ’Twas the fault of that druidess,” Sturm maintained. “Ragnell imprisoned me for three days and made me sleep for a week after that, else I’d have met you in plenty of time.”
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Vertumnus seated himself on the floor. “You were safe in that imprisonment. You were followed by a relentless enemy, and when the Lady took you into custody … he gave up pursuit.”
Sturm sniffed angrily. Again this story of conspiracy and Boniface.
“Well?” Vertumnus asked, folding his hands in his lap. He looked like an ancient eastern statue, a symbol of distant serenity. “Well? Do you feel the wound? The loss? The forfeiture?”
“I … I don’t understand,” Sturm protested.
“I would imagine,” Vertumnus persisted, “that your honor is still there, unless you’re bound to lose it over a calendar.… Oh,” he declared, as if he had remembered something suddenly. “I’ve a gift for you.”
Vertumnus rose to his feet and hopped to the smithy shelves, stood on a chair, and brought down a long object wrapped in canvas cloth. Slowly, proudly, he unwrapped the thing and held it before Sturm.
It was a sheath for a sword, the work on its surface intricate and flawless. A dozen faces stared at Sturm, embossed in gleaming silver. Like reflections in a dozen mirrors they were, or like the statuary in Castle di Caela, miles and years away. Each face shared his eyes and expression, and each was bordered in copper leaves and roses intertwined, red and green, so that it seemed on fire—a dozen suns, or sunflowers, or burgeoning plants.
“It’s … it’s magnificent, sir,” Sturm said quietly, his manners overcoming his perplexity. He admired the sheath from a distance, almost afraid to touch it. Absently he sat on the anvil, squinting to regard the skill of the craftsman. “I trust it could only be Weyland’s work.”
“The work of his master,” Vertumnus said quietly. “No man alive could do the likes of it, if I do say so.” Quietly he crouched by the open forge.
“These amenities, Lord Vertumnus, are most welcome to the traveler,” Sturm announced in his most formal and measured manner, turning the scabbard in his hand. “And doubtless they are testament to your honor and breeding, as is this wonderful gift.”
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