Prisoner of Haven

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  “Please have them sent around to my house,” she asked, counting out the price of the fruit from the coins in the silken pouch at her girdle. She gave him directions. The man knew her at once and fumbled some words of sympathy as he assured her the fruit would be in her kitchen before she herself was at her front door.

  At the end of the day, in the failing light, Usha and Aline walked side by side in silence, enjoying the cooling air. When they’d gone so far as to see the roofs of Rose Hall, Usha asked the question that had gone unanswered after the cascade of falling peaches interrupted their conversation.

  “Aline, do your people in Qui-thonas have any news about the plans of the dark knights, or perhaps of Beryl herself?”

  Aline walked on, her head tilted, as though she were thinking. Then she stopped and when she turned, Usha saw deep sorrow in her friend’s eyes.

  “There is no Qui-thonas.” Aline’s voice dropped low, though nothing moved on the street but shadows. “Not anymore. No elves have come out of Qualinesti for some time now. I don’t know what’s happening there. No one does. I used to hear by various ways how they fared in the forest. No more. It’s as though a door has been shut and nailed tight. I can’t send my people to rescue elves who aren’t there. The departed gods help Qualinesti now. We cannot.”

  The sky tinted to deeper blue in the east. Over the river the sun hung low.

  “Tell me, Usha, how is Palin? Is he well?”

  “As far as anyone knows.”

  Aline glanced at her sideways. If she drew conclusions from the undertone of bitterness in Usha’s voice, she said nothing more. The two went on in silence, and at the door of Rose Hall Aline said, “Can I send you back to the High Hand in my carriage?”

  “Thank you, but no. The tavern is no great distance, and I enjoy a walk in the evening. But…Aline, don’t disband Qui-thonas yet. Don’t send them all away.”

  “Not yet,” Aline agreed. “I’m in touch with them, but we’ve let the safehouses go back to being mere homes. The secret ways from the river to the city are no more than deer tracks now.”

  They spoke for a little while longer, but not of refugees or threats. Aline did not mention Palin, and Usha did not ask about Madoc.

  A motion in the shadows gathering between the houses caught Usha’s eye.

  “Dunbrae,” Aline said to Usha. “You’ve met.”

  Usha shook her head. “Better to say we’ve seen each other.”

  “Good, then. Qui-thonas will see you home. Good night, Usha. Come and see me tomorrow and we’ll talk among the roses while Dezra finishes her business.”

  “I will.”

  When the two parted no sound came from the shadows, not the scuff of a boot on cobblestone, nor the slightest breath indrawn. But like a shadow himself, Usha sensed the presence of the dwarf Dunbrae as he followed her through the streets of Haven, a silent, unseen watcher to see her safely to the door of the High Hand.

  “Look,” Dezra said, thumping her boot heel onto the bench at the opposite side of the scarred plank table. “I know what I’m talking about.”

  Usha glanced at the dusty boot and resisted the impulse to tug her skirt away. But for an uninterested barkeeper and the eternally distracted gully dwarf who emptied spittoons, they were alone in the common room of the High Hand. Many of the inn’s rooms were taken—they’d been glad that the landlord had kept one for Dezra—but the mood of the place was quiet, people gathering only at meal times and then drifting back to their rooms. It had been so for three days, and each morning Usha was glad to leave the place, to go walking in the city or by the river, alone or with Aline. Walking, Usha tried to unravel the painful knot of frustrations that had driven her from Solace and her empty house. She had little success. None, if she were being honest with herself. The old questions about Palin, about their increasingly arid marriage, haunted her. She could not drive them off with anger or by ignoring them, nor could she hide from them behind pleasant diversions.

  Since the morning she’d awakened to find Palin gone, Usha had found no comfort in Solace, and in Haven no refuge from her doubts.

  Each evening, Dez would return, kicking her own frustration into the nearly empty common room ahead of her, no closer to fulfilling her mission of ordering supplies for her family’s inn.

  “I’m telling you, Usha, something’s wrong.”

  Dezra shifted in her seat, her frown deepening to a scowl. She moved to slip her dagger from its sheath, then caught the barkeeper’s eye and resisted the impulse to mar the table more. She reminded many people of her infamous aunt, the dragon highlord Kitiara. Golden of hair and skin where Kitiara had been dark and pale, still Dez recalled the fabled highlord in face and form. Caramon, her father, didn’t like to think so, but Dezra had grown up on stories of Kitiara uth Matar, Caramon’s half-sister. The warrior had ruled nearly half the continent of Ansalon before the War of the Lance ended. It was not in Dezra’s nature to seek or embrace the darkness as Kitiara had, but no one doubted that Dez had inherited her aunt’s fierce and restless spirit.

  Across the room Banlath the barkeeper sent the gully dwarf to clean the kitchen while he continued wiping the gleaming oak bar, polishing the wood till it shone. He whistled tunelessly through gapped front teeth and did not seem to be paying attention to the two women sitting alone and talking. Still, Dez lowered her voice and dropped her foot from the bench to lean closer to Usha.

  “I come here every year. You know that.”

  Usha nodded as she finished the last of her supper, a plump patty of flaked fish seasoned with spices and herbs.

  “Every year,” Dez said, “I go to Rinn Gallan’s uncle to order the hops, and I go to Varal Kamer for the wine from his own vineyards—even the white my father says isn’t as good as the elven stuff.” She snorted. “But who can get elven wine these days? Probably not even elves.”

  “And dwarf spirits,” Usha said. She’d heard the litany before. “I know, Dez. So, what’s wrong?”

  “No one has any. Rinn’s uncle knew I was coming from the first day I arrived. From what Rinn said when he saw us, we were expected and welcome. But now—and suddenly, if you ask me—no one has anything. No hops, no wine, and for some reason, in this city where hill dwarves have lived for gods only know how long—” Again, Dez’s boot heel thumped on the bench—“not a drop of dwarf spirits to be found. Or,” she said, darkly, “none to sell. Whatever farmers are selling in the market, the serious merchants seem to have nothing.”

  “All your suppliers?”

  “Not just mine. Everyone’s! You can’t buy flour in any great quantity, nor grain or seed either. The poulterers aren’t killing their chickens, and shepherds aren’t bringing their flocks in from the hills.”

  Listening to Dez was like watching shadows begin to coalesce into an ominous image. “They’re stockpiling. Aline says they’ve been edgy here all summer. We’ve seen that since we arrived. Who wouldn’t be with the air full of rumors about Beryl moving dark knights around? But edgy is one thing…”

  Dez nodded. “Stockpiling is another.”

  Usha looked over her shoulder at the barman and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Aline tells me Qui-thonas has heard nothing about an impending attack, but… people decide to hoard for two reasons, don’t they? Either they’re afraid. Really afraid. Or they’re hoping to make a tidy pile of coin once a shortage sets in.”

  “Or both.”

  Outside the sky had gone dark enough for stars to shine. They heard the cry of a watchman on the city wall, faint and distant. Closer, the clop of a horse’s hooves and the murmur of its rider as they passed by the tavern door.

  “Usha, let’s get out of here. Something’s up. Something’s going to happen.”

  Usha felt it, a creeping sense of doom like the stillness before a storm.

  “First thing tomorrow,” she said. “We can come back later—or find what we need somewhere else and let people remember this as the year the ale wasn’t as good as usual at your fathe
r’s inn. Much better than remembering it as the year we went for a trip to Haven and never came home.”

  It did not take them long to pack, and Usha paid the landlord his due while Dez saw that their horses were fed an extra measure of oats. They would not take time for those things in the morning. They wanted to be at the gates when the sun rose over the river.

  Seated high upon the back of his black dragon, Sir Radulf Eigerson, the knight known as Red Wolf, took his talon of dragons across the night sky. The Qualinesti Forest was a vast darkness below until, surging lower over the White-rage River, they left the elf kingdom and entered the Free Realm of Abanasinia. At Sir Radulf’s command, with the moon behind them, the six red dragons dropped over the river and followed its gleaming waters through Darken Wood until the walled city of Haven came into view.

  Sir Radulf pumped his fist twice, and the talon separated into three parts, sailing out ahead of him. A word of command leaped from his mind to that of Ebon, his great black dragon. The beast’s spiny crest rose—dark, killing joy gleamed in her eyes. With a powerful thrust of her wings, Ebon flew higher and circled the city in wide loops. From this height, Sir Radulf watched as his six knights took their red dragons into a long-practiced maneuver. Two at the north end of the city, two at the south, and the third pair soaring over the center of Haven, the dark knights set their dragons to work.

  Great gouts of fire poured from enormous, fanged jaws. Mounted upon high-backed, tall-fronted saddles hung with weapons and chased with silver, encased in armor as black as the hide of the talon’s leader, a half dozen knights guided their beasts in carefully coordinated flight, igniting roofs, destroying a tall-masted ship moored at the riverside and setting the wooden piers alight.

  Tracing the brilliant line of flames racing along the waterfront as the piers burnt, Sir Radulf urged Ebon lower, the better to watch his talon at work. The red dragons’ wide, leathery wings beat the air with a sound like thunder.

  Connected one to the other in heart and mind, the knight felt Ebon’s wild surge of bloodlust, her fierce urge to be with her comrades at the killing. He had some sympathy for the dragon’s feelings, but Sir Radulf held the beast back. He would not give in to that kind of thing himself nor allow it in his knights; he would not permit it in the dragon. Savagery was for foot soldiers, draconians, goblins, brutes, and those humans who hadn’t the skill or wit to be more than battle fodder.

  Over the river, one red broke ranks with his partner. The lady knight Mearah sent her dragon lower to set alight a line of piers on the side of the river where the tall houses of Haven’s wealthy sat upon brooding clifftops. She was a fierce one, Lady Mearah, the daughter of an old Solamnic family who’d found her warrior spirit needed the kind of fire that had become nothing but ember and ash among Solamnics. Lady Mearah warmed herself at grim fires and rumor said her kin referred to Lady Mearah as the fallen child. In her hands, the operation she and Sir Radulf had so perfectly envisioned and planned was now being faultlessly executed. It would win the praise of their masters in Neraka, perhaps the approval of the green dragon herself.

  And so Sir Radulf would allow nothing to interfere in its execution. To him, smiling thinly behind the black mask of his helm, the sounds of terror drifting up from the ground were not a call to join in a slaughter. They simply meant that all was going as planned.

  3

  Usha woke suddenly, Dezra’s voice cutting through the haze of sleep. “Get up, Usha! Fire! Get up!”

  She scrambled out of bed and dragged on her clothes. She heard screaming from the street and smelled smoke. It came in through the window on a choking gust of night wind, and it came from under the door as well. Someone pounded on the door, yelling, “Get up! Get out!” and ran on to hammer the same warning at another door, then another.

  A woman ran screaming down the corridor. “Oh, gods! The roof is on fire!”

  Dez flung herself away from the window, eyes glittering, face pale in the moonlight. “Dragons!”

  “Come on, Dez!” Heart pounding, eyes streaming tears from the smoke, Usha yanked open the door. More smoke poured in. There was another floor of rooms above them. She heard the crackling of fire up there but saw none on this floor yet.

  Dez had already grabbed her bow and quiver. She belted on her sword running. All else they would leave behind.

  Eyes stinging, they plunged out into the dark corridor. They tried to find the crossing passages that led one out to the garden and the common room. A young woman bolting out of her room collided with Usha, shoved her aside and ran on. Someone else dragged Usha up to her feet and thrust her forward, urging her to follow the people only dimly seen ahead.

  “Usha!” Dez shouted, far behind.

  Usha turned, but she could not see Dezra and the terrified people in the hall swept her onward.

  “Go to the garden, Usha! Don’t go—!”

  But she had no choice of where to go. The panicking people swept her along, pushing her to the crossway and into the passage to the common room. She heard the first screams when she stumbled across the threshold, and the stench of burning flesh came in a sickening wave on a billow of smoke. A keg of volatile dwarf spirits behind the bar had ignited. Flames flashed to candles and stacked firewood, then to chairs and tables. The common room became an inferno.

  A howling figure staggered across the floor of the wide room, clothing aflame, hair afire. A woman ahead of Usha screamed, a child wailed in terror, and Usha turned from the sight.

  She put her back to the doorway, thrust her arms out before her and cried, “Stop! Go back!”

  Her voice, clear and sharp, halted the boy who’d been behind her. His father stumbled into him and tried to reach over him to shove Usha aside. She grabbed his wrist before he could grab her shoulder.

  “Stop! Look!”

  He didn’t have to look. The agonized howling and the stench of burning flesh told him everything. His eyes went wide, shocked and comprehending. Behind him others staggered. Some stumbled and fell.

  “We have to go back!” Usha said, raising her voice to be heard, striving for calm and grateful that she’d at least managed to keep her voice firm. She put the hand on the boy’s shoulder and looked past him to those milling behind, clogging the corridor, elbowing each other and cursing; all frightened by the roar of fire. “Go back to the garden!”

  A man she couldn’t see shouted, “There’s dragons out there! I saw ’em from the window. Hundreds! I saw ’em in the sky!”

  Panic rose to near hysteria, cries of fear became screams of horror at the thought of hundreds of dragons over Haven. Waves of heat rolled past her, over her, and Usha shouted him down. “There can’t be hundreds! There is fire in here! Go back into the garden! Go!”

  They turned, first those farthest from her, now closest to safety. Turning, they became the same kind of force that had carried her along the passage to the common room, strong and terrified and almost without mind. The father and son nearest her, once first were now last and they shoved and pushed to get to the garden. Usha went in their wake, and it wasn’t long before she felt the cooler air of outdoors. She tumbled out the door and staggered into the bricked courtyard that framed the inn’s garden. Long wooden tables and benches filled the space. No one stopped to rest. All flowed out of the broad gates into the street. Next door, the inn’s stable rang with the clatter of hooves, the screams of panicking horses, the shouts of men and boys trying to get them into the streets and away from the fire.

  Usha ran for the gates, but a hard hand caught her elbow, holding her. She pulled away, then stopped when she recognized the dwarf Dunbrae. He pointed up to the dark space of sky between the inn and the stable. Smoke hid the moon, erasing the stars. Between one rolling billow and another, Usha saw broad swathes of flame as two red-scaled dragons soared above Haven.

  Sight of them sent icy terror rushing through her. She stiffened her knees, not permitting them to tremble or buckle. “How many?”

  He shook his head, lips twis
ting into a wry, humorless grin. “Enough. Come with me.”

  Usha shook her head, looking around wildly for Dez. “I’m not alone! I have to find—”

  Dunbrae pointed across the garden. Near the gates Dez stood, shifting from foot to foot, scanning the faces of the people running by her. The dwarf whistled sharply, and Dez turned, her face alight with relief.

  Dunbrae gave Usha a forceful push. “Now let’s go.”

  As they ran, the two women following Dunbrae along streets Usha didn’t know, they heard the sound of Haven’s fall—the roaring of dragons, the screams of terror, the bellowing of fire leaping from roof to roof. Somewhere, Usha had lost her shoes. Her naked feet hurt when she ran. She stumbled on the hem of her skirt then clenched the material in her hands out of her way. She fled beside Dez, running behind Dunbrae down alleys so dark the way could be found by few but a dwarf whose eyesight had been for generations bred beneath the mountains. Once, at the end of a narrow, dank alley, they stopped to catch their breath. Gasping, leaning against a cold, wet wall, Usha saw the river. It ran like a torrent of fire as it reflected the burning ship and the flaming piers.

  It’s all gone, Usha thought, her stomach turning. She looked at Dez and saw a stunned look that must surely mirror her own expression. In one night, Haven is gone!

  Aline put a cup of tea on the table beside Usha. The steam rising smelled faintly of apples and lavender, but the soothing fragrance didn’t draw Usha from the window. She’d been there much of the night, hardly moving from the cushioned seat since Dunbrae had brought her and Dez to Rose Hall. Though Aline had made bedrooms ready for them, neither Usha nor Dez had taken advantage of them. With Aline, they’d spent the rest of the night in a high room, watching the taking of Haven, ready to flee if they must and hoping that the battle would not come sweeping down on them.