Others, however, were less impressive. Moments after we lost sight of the troll among rock and evergreen, Alfric came shambling up behind us, covered with mud and excuses. We all learned, to our great surprise, that another troll had been sneaking up on us back up the road, and that Alfric had met him single-handedly… and faced him down.
Alfric stared dramatically at Dannelle as he gave gruesome account of the combat that supposedly took place in our absence. She gave him rein, marveling at the wildness of the story, and cut him off only when he offered to show us all where his sword had entered the troll by touching corresponding parts of Dannelle's anatomy.
I recognized Alfric's strategy myself, having, at various times in my squirehood, stopped an army of satyrs, a giant, three goblins, and a dragon. Combat is easier against invented foes on a battlefield safe from the eyes of others.
Ramiro looked at me and smiled, remembering summers past, no doubt.
I, on the other hand, was not smiling as I hauled my brother by the arm away from his amorous diagrams, for the Pathwardens had scarcely conducted themselves with honor. While my brother tunneled from sight, I had fumbled with horse and sword and dignity until a child and a girl came to my rescue.
Disconsolate, I seated myself in the mud and rested my face in my hands. When I looked up, Ramiro was mounting his horse, hoisted into the saddle by Dannelle and two straining squires. He had donned his helmet, its gray ostrich plume drooped foolishly in the evening drizzle, and his sword was drawn, as though a struggle was in the offing.
"To horse, Galen!" the big man cried out triumphantly. "It hasn't had the chance to distance us yet!"
"'It,' Ramiro? Just what is 'it,' if you'd be so kind?"
"The troll, of course!" Ramiro exclaimed. "There's an hour of light left us, as I figure it, and I've never known the animal who could outrun this stallion."
"I don't…" I began, unsure of what I would say next. But the big Knight had wheeled his horse about, and the two of them crashed through the water-black undergrowth that marked the edge of the woods. Off on a jaunt, they were, on a troll hunt, and those of us left behind were expected to gather ourselves and follow.
Sausages trailed from the saddlebags of the questing hero.
At once, Oliver was in the saddle, headed off after his protector. Alfric and Dannelle watched him blend into the trees, then looked at me warily.
"Do we have to go after the troll, Brother?" Alfric whined, and instantly I felt anger rising-anger at his cowardice, at my own lack of gumption that had allowed Ramiro to guide our exploits whenever he damn well pleased, and at Dannelle for standing there with a mysterious, disapproving look on her face.
"Your brother is right, Galen," she said. "This troll hunt is a foolhardy business."
But I was sure that what she meant was that she felt unsafe in the woods with her only guardians an incompetent Knight and his fainthearted squire.
I was tired of them all-of Father and Sir Robert, of Elazar and Fernando and Gileandos, of Ramiro, who was crashing through foliage in search of danger, and of Oliver and Alfric, who were no doubt thinking of disparaging things. Whatever I did and however I did it was subject to second guesses and blame and whispered calls of Weasel, Weasel.
Dannelle di Caela, it seemed, believed those whispers and the past they summoned. It would take high drama to show her otherwise.
"No, Dannelle!" I pronounced, the counterfeit strength and assurance in my voice almost making me think I believed what I was saying. "Foolhardy it may seem to the two of you, but it is Solamnic business, and by the gods, we shall pursue it!"
I turned to my horse, ignoring the girl's nervous snicker. Ducking under a hanging vallenwood branch, I guided Lily into the green and dripping dark, Alfric and Dannelle riding close behind me.
The woods that cover the foothills of the Vingaards are surprisingly thick and baffling and vine-entangled. Certainly they are more passable than swamps I have seen and traveled, but when you keep looking over your shoulder for pursuers, the way can be tricky and even downright confounding.
So it was that Oliver seemed to shout on two sides of us, Ramiro on another. We kept moving, however-moving away from the last sound we had heard, and keeping the campfire to our backs as best as we could manage, given the rising night and the shifting shadows of the foliage. It was an hour of rapid traveling and foraging, probably in circles. My eyes were half on the ground in front of me, half searching for the firelight to which I fully intended to return when Ramiro's energies-and with them, the hunt-subsided.
It was this rushing about, this hysterical wandering, that brought us to a clearing I had not seen before. Suddenly the foliage around me dropped away, and I found myself standing on high ground. The grass beneath me was dry and wiry, bathed in red moonlight as was the whole clearing itself, and the wash of scarlet and deep green was broken only by the shadow that spread underneath the single small oak tree in its center.
It seemed like a good place to stop. My legs were tired from gripping the flanks of the horse, my face whipped and welted by vines and branches. But somewhere around us, Ramiro was plunging through marshy woodland in search of a dangerous quarry, following the fine tradition of Solamnic Knighthood: Serenely confident that you alone are in the right, you corner evil and do away with it, regardless of whatever or whomever else you injure.
It was a messy business, this breakneck pursuit. But Ramiro was my companion and, in a sense, my charge. I had no time for breath and speculation. I had to locate him before something vile happened to him at the hands of the troll.
Alone, bowed and cloaked against the soft rain, I waited for Dannelle and Alfric to reach the clearing. Together, the three of us waited as the faint halooing and the rustle and crack of branches told us Ramiro was headed our way.
The huge Knight splashed into the clearing shortly, dirty and bedraggled and cursing the cleverness of the troll. Oliver followed in the big man's wake, a dismal lump of mud on horseback.
Our party reassembled and stood together in the gloom, each one of us with his own sullen thoughts. The waters had risen over the hooves of the horses. If we tarried any longer, we would face not only the dangers of trolls by night but also slippery, unsteady blind footing.
"But there isn't a star to steer by," Ramiro complained.
Not that a galaxy would have availed a man with his lack of bearings. To Ramiro, all directions were the same, the trees identical, the ground of one level, and the paths wound in circles. Now, in the midst of nowhere, he gave over command gladly.
"Which way should we go, Galen?" he asked quietly and urgently, drawing his sword as though a weapon in his hand could guide him through the green, entangling labyrinth in which we found ourselves.
"First of all, I intend to lead us out of this marsh," I declared and, dismounting into ankle-deep water, turned toward the single oak at the center of the clearing.
"He can do it, too!" Alfric insisted. "I have seen him navigate swamps before! Swamps worse than this, with satyrs in them!"
I looked back at my brother, who nodded at me encouragingly. As I sloshed through the high grass and water, it struck me that in my concern that others see my changes, I had overlooked those in my brother-how in that heart of meanness something had turned, perhaps indetectably to those who did not know him, but turned nonetheless, surfacing fitfully until now and again, if you looked at Alfric in a certain slant of light and with your eyes squinted in just the right way, you could see promise of squirehood emerging.
There would be time to explore that later. Hoisting myself onto the lowest branch of the tree-a sturdy one, as thick as my waist-I braced myself to climb as high as the thing would allow me. Perhaps from a lofty lookout the woods would open for me and our way back to the road emerge from this maze of greenery.
Clutching the next branch before I set weight on it, I noticed a crack-perhaps a quarter of an inch wide-snaking up the bole of the tree beside me. It often happens when the ground is wet, when the
roots lose purchase in a clay-heavy soil.
Or so I have heard. Where I had heard it, I forgot entirely, for I stood rapt upon the branch, marveling that, despite the twilight and the shade, I could see small things so clearly. It was then I noticed that the opal brooch, pinning the cape beneath my throat, had begun to shine with a warm amber light, bathing the tree with a faint, steady glow.
I clambered down at once, lost footing amid roots, and fell to my knees in the water. Scrambling up, I splashed across the clearing to my comrades, holding the brooch aloft, my cape discarded behind me.
"I was right! I was always right, Ramiro! Look! The opals are on fire!"
"This does not inspire confidence in me, Lady Dannelle," Ramiro replied. I followed his pitying gaze to the brooch in my hand, dark and lifeless now, its magical light gone.
"M-Maybe the fall into the water… extinguished it or something. Maybe…"
"Maybe you're tired, Galen," Dannelle soothed. "You've scarcely recovered from the Night of Reflections, and now there's trolls and all."
"But… but they were afire, damn it!" I insisted, turning and walking away from them in my anger.
The stones began to glimmer again. Cupping the brooch in my palm, I looked into the opals. They showed nothing but a faint, opaque glow at their heart.
Another two steps toward the tree, and the light was detectably brighter.
What had the figure in the vision said to me? In them is the map of my darkness.
That was how, following the light of the stones like a half-mad diviner follows his dowsing rod, I passed through the clearing, beyond the oak, as the light in my hands grew brighter and brighter still. I heard a movement at my side and looked up.
Alfric was standing there, holding his horse's reins and Lily's.
"They are!" he shouted. "By the gods, the Wea-Galen is right! There's a light in the stones!"
Slowly the rest of them dismounted and followed. And as the light in my hands brightened further, so did our hopes.
For a moment, I felt like a genuine Knight, even if I had botched entirely the fight with the troll and let Ramiro lead us on a bootless errand somewhere in the soggy lowlands. For I was off on a journey of rescue, wielding magic at the head of my stalwart little band.
A map of my darkness, the vision had foretold. Though far from their own terrain, in a country hostile to concealment and surprise, they were Plainsmen after all, the handful of warriors who waited for us. We did not see them until they were upon us.
To this day, I am not sure that their intentions were lethal, but Solamnic Knights do not go easily, no matter the terms or the plans. When I felt strong fingers clutch my throat, I turned and, seeing Plainsmen rushing from the trees and undergrowth around us, fell to the soggy ground, breaking the hold of my assailant.
Without hesitation, the man leapt upon me, fingers prying at my clenched fist. Clumsily I reached for my sword and found that, in my haste to follow Ramiro, I had left it somewhere in the clearing where we had fought with the troll. I pummeled the man with my fist once, twice, but the blows were like raindrops against his leathery, heavily muscled ribs.
I struck him again, and this time the blow must have registered. Quickly and with the lean efficiency of a man taught to waste nothing, not even movement, he struck me with the back of his hand. My head rattled against the ground, and for a moment, I was in my boyhood room at the moathouse in Coastlund, it was winter, and a broom was in my hands.
Just as abruptly I regained my faculties to see Ramiro pull the man off me and hurl him through the air into an aeterna bush. I heard branches rending, heard the man cry out in a strange mixture of pain and triumph. Then he stood amidst the blue evergreen branches, his pale hand illumined by the opals in the brooch he was clutching.
I rose to my knees and yelled as Ramiro turned toward the thief in an ungainly, bearlike crouch. At that moment, another Plainsman leapt atop his back, and then another, so that the big man struggled for a moment beneath the weight of two of the enemy.
Whooping again, my attacker spun toward the darkness of the woods, and he might have escaped easily, taking the opals with him. But he gave a final turn and a final shout which gave my brother the chance to act. Hurtling through the air, Alfric wrapped his arms about the stunned Plainsman, and the two of them tumbled into branches and water as suddenly and as heavily as a felled oak.
By now I was standing and, after a brief glance to see that Dannelle was unharmed and attended to, rushed to my brother's aid. The Plainsmen atop Ramiro were getting the worst of it by now, but I could figure on no help from the big man for a least a moment or two.
Hurdling a downed Plainsman and a winded Oliver and skirting an old maple stump, I crashed through the aeterna bush and stumbled into the brawl in front of me…
… just as the Plainsman's knife slipped between my brother's ribs.
Chapter IX
It was midmorning the next I knew. I lay beneath the oak tree in the clearing, its branches drooping heavy with last night's rain. The woods around me were charged in a strange half-light, the unsettled gray of dawn.
I looked at the brooch, clutched tightly in my hand, as though all power of memory lay in the dark gems. It is a hard thing when you try to save one brother and lose the other one in the bargain.
I had reached Alfric's side as the Plainsman broke from his grasp and ran off through the trees. Carefully I groped through the shadows and the standing water, finding my brother wet and ruined amidst broken branches and torn cloth and leather.
"Galen, I was not running away. Not this time."
"I know that. Rest now, Alfric. Rest."
The sound of the conflict faded. Ramiro, I found out later, had gained balance and advantage against our attackers. The retreating Plainsmen were no doubt lucky that their pursuer was so large and ungainly, else they would have had too much to answer for there in the night-dappled woods.
"Rest now, Alfric! Ramiro and Dannelle will be over here directly, and so will Oliver with the horses, and then we'll see to patching you up and-"
"This is dreadful, Galen. Dreadful."
"I know," I whispered. The brooch glittered on the wet ground by Alfric's body, saved from the Plainsmen by his reckless heroism. As I spoke to my brother, the light went out of the gems.
"Rest now," I said. "Rest now."
Which is what they tell me I was saying over him when they joined us. Ramiro covered him up in those last moments, so he did not die cold, and Dannelle cradled me like an infant, she said, though she said it with no ridicule but with a deep and brokenhearted pity for me and for Alfric and for this whole botched trip into twilight. She knelt beside me, helping Ramiro, who poured something strong down me from a little flask, something I could not or would not taste, but only felt its warmth passing into me as the tears left me and I slept for a long while, clutching the stones won and made more valuable by my brother's blood.
The sky cleared just as we reached the foothills of the Vingaard Mountains.
The downpour had been so long and so terribly intense that it had virtually drowned the highlands. Shrubbery and small trees lay bent over, and the grass was matted and brown.
I hated to think how things looked down on the plains.
The air that was left behind when the rain lifted was not fresh and cleansed, like you find after a sudden, brief summer thunderstorm that washes away all dust and dirt. Instead, what was left was a cold and dead landscape smelling of rotten vegetation and small drowned things.
It was as though a week of rain had passed us from high summer to the borders of winter.
We climbed, and I looked down and behind me at the road we were leaving. Looked behind me in remorse, for my brother lay somewhere in that rain-washed country, in the makeshift grave we had made for him, under a cairn of stones and under the kind words of Sir Ramiro of the Maw and the singing of Dannelle and of Oliver, whose voice was young and yet to change. Unfathomably, my brother lay in the wet soil, untouched by
light or air or the best of my intentions. He had followed my command, my leadership and visions, which had brought him to that last place below me. Somehow the death of Alfric, which often I had thought would not affect me one way or the other, which sometimes I had thought I would even welcome, had left me nothing but this long ride, these shadows, and a trail that narrowed and narrowed ahead of us as we passed from the highlands into the sparse country of the foothills. It was indeed dreadful.
Dannelle and Ramiro tried, I think, but they were little consolation. My thoughts were not on them or on the journey ahead of us, but on how death had caught Alfric just short of changing. Had he been given one more month, even another week, who knew but that the strange turn of intentions I had seen-those moments of honesty and loyalty so fleeting and faint that I feared I imagined them-might well have amounted to something like knighthood or brotherhood.
As it was, not even my memories of Alfric could fashion him lovely: His blackmails at the moathouse and on the walls of Castle di Caela, the times he had manhandled me in the cellars of my father, strangled me in swamp and topiary garden, strung me up in the dark rooms of Castle di Caela, and nearly drowned me in the moat. How he had broken oaths and fine glassware, started brawls then run from them, lied to Father and Bayard and me and Robert di Caela, tried to seduce Dannelle and Enid and threatened them when his charms had failed. All in all, it was a shadowy history of abusing horse and servant and younger brothers, betraying the trust of comrades and superiors. Still, I found myself searching through memory for something remarkable, something that distinguished and redeemed this brother. I came up with Brithelm's turnips.
Galen Beknighted h2-3 Page 10