"They destroyed our village, too," I said. "And everything between there and here. And they are far from finished. They intend to take the country from High King Guin."
"How do you know that?" Wyntan repeated for his brother.
"I dreamed of it," I admitted. "I saw them talking."
"So you are a witch." Daltorn said quietly, his attention turned to his meal.
"And the daughter of a witch," Selas added, with a smirk. "Her mother is Bevin of Berowalt." The two younger men nodded, obviously having heard of my mother. I was surprised, but held my peace, not wanting to look foolish for knowing so little of my own parent. How widely was she known? She had had many visitors from outside our village, but as a child I had assumed they were from the next village over or the one next to that at the farthest. The gifts they had brought in exchange for my mother's Sight had been our main source of income during her life.
"And how much can you trust a witch?" asked Goskia. "Everyone knows we witches are a chancy lot!" She chuckled to herself.
"You women are a chancy lot," Selas muttered. "Witch or no." Goskia settled her sharp eye on him, her gnarled fingers stroking her thin beard.
"So, two by two and two, you've all gathered here. Two weeks ago, I was here alone. Now I've got six guests. What comes next?" The old woman looked at me.
"Dera will stay, as you wish. She'll be safe here. The rest of us, if Wyntan and Daltorn are with us, maybe a month, while Iceblade decides what his next move is," I said. It sounded good to me. After all, what real help would three men, a witch, and a wounded young woman be to the High King's soldiers? I had a swift flash of a hundred people deep in a forest, fires flickering at their feet. "We should take this time to train."
"All of us?" Wyntan asked with an eyebrow raised. "Three men and you?"
"Samar will be ready soon," I said. "And not me so much as you. Selas knows what must be done to prepare you. My training will come from a different corner."
"Samar is the young woman, the survivor Ada found in one of the villages between here and Berowalt," Goskia explained. "She is sleeping now."
"What are we training for?" Daltorn asked.
"Don't you want to fight?" Selas snapped. I held up my hand, and almost gaped in surprise when Selas subsided.
"We train, so you can train the others, who gather in Reckonwood."
Wyntan unobtrusively made the sign of Evil Warded.
"No good can wait for us in Reckonwood," his brother protested. "It's a place of ghosts and evil winds. No sane man awaits us there."
"We will find refugees hidden from the sight of Iceblade's mage, and his aunt the Seeress," I told them. "Reckonwood will be the last place to hide for the simple folk of Dragon's Tooth. Dagar himself would not enter Reckonwood."
Both brothers made the sign of Evil Warded at the mention of the Dark God's name. Selas scowled.
"This is little time for superstition," he snapped. "Are you yourselves sane men? There is nothing in any wood that a man may not defend himself against with the steel of his own blade!" Goskia and I seemed to mutually decide to keep silent. It was not up to us to change Selas' mind, if it could be changed. His practicality would serve the two brothers and Samar well in their training. And he was right. It was no time for superstition, even if we had all heard ghost stories of Reckonwood in our childhood. Even if we all heard the stories as adults, told by first hand witnesses.
I lay on the floor, near the fire. The brothers made sure I had the best spot, obviously determined to protect me in my frail femininity. Their gesture was sorely welcome, I had not been treated with a male's kindness in some time. Those who courted my mother so hopefully and yet with no chance of success used to be very courteous to me, but since her time that kindness had faded.
It was a long time before I fell asleep. Once a gaunt man had come to Berowalt,in the spring a few years after my mother's death. He knew no one in our village and carried no belongings. With no kin nearby, he had slept in the village green. I remember thinking he was too frail to sleep outside so early in the year, but he refused my offer of a place to sleep in my cottage, saying he never slept in an enclosed place anymore. No one else seemed inclined to invite him in, either, as if his refusal of my hospitality made theirs unnecessary. We had no inn in Berowalt, there was not enough traffic to merit one.
He had thin white hair and a full, long beard that hung to his sunken stomach. Fierce grey eyes that were not quite rational, and one gnarled hand, the other arm ending in a stump. He said that he had lost the hand in a battle with the ghosts of Reckonwood. He had been traveling in a bad storm, as a young man, and been forced to seek shelter within Reckonwood. In the night, he whispered, as he sat unable to sleep, a green light had climbed his body, and sunk into his hand, turning his own limb against him. He'd had to kneel on it in order to hack it off with his axe in his good hand. Something deep in the wood had been laughing at him as he fought himself. Then he blacked out. When he woke up the next morning, he was laying on the border of the Wood, on the opposite side from which he had camped, his black hair had turned white overnight. The stump had been seared shut by some unknown flame.
As insane as he might have been, few enough seemed to doubt his tale. The elders had whispered amongst themselves, retelling other stories they had heard, nodding grey heads and pursing wrinkled lips. Many of the younger folk came to me for my opinion on this aberration, and I duly repeated stories I had learned from my mother. Reckonwood was a bewitched place, far better to sleep unsheltered in a blizzard than seek shelter there.
Of course, Selas had been disbelieving and critical. "Why didn't you just leave the Wood when your hand acted up?" he asked, his thin lip curled. "Surely if you were bewitched by ghosts of the Wood, you'd have been fine outside it." The old man had stared at Selas, then repeated his tale in a hoarse whisper. Selas had been patently unconvinced.
What did I believe? I didn't know. Not wanting to delve into the old stories as I lay there in the dark, I chose a different thought.
Selas.
I knew he hadn't been born in Berowalt. He had no family there, had never taken a wife. My mother told me he had come to stay the summer before I was born, though he sometimes left for a year or more at a time, and there was a time when I wondered if he was my father. Without having to ask my mother, I had come to know he wasn't. I never asked who my father was. This vital subject had been unspoken between us. If she wanted me to know, she would have told me. Surely she intended to someday, when I was older and better able to understand. There had been no time to ask on her deathbed, I was so focused on the baby and trying to save him. My mother had lost so much blood, I knew in my heart she would not recover, but the child might have, I had to fight for him.
Again I was thinking thoughts I'd rather not. I squeezed my eyes shut.
I was in a room with yellow stone walls hung with heavy tapestries. There was a window with a ledge wide enough to sit on comfortably, through the window came the odor and tang of salt water. Candles flickered on tables made of satiny wood, a large bed with red hangings stood in the center of the room. A fire rippled on a massive hearth to my right. My spirit drifted forward, away from the oaken door I perceived behind me. I moved around the bed, its hangings closed, to the side nearest the window. On this side, the curtains were open. On the bed lay Tirk, the Iceblade, in silent slumber.
Against my own will I moved closer, drinking in his features. From the narrow, handsome face, not so cold in sleep as when he was awake, to the long black hair, finally focusing on his finely shaped mouth.
His eyes opened. For the barest moment I thought he saw me. He sat up, swung his bare legs over the edge of the bed. Unclad, he stood and moved to the window. I knew he was watching the movements of the guard in the city below him, his guard, his soldiers, his sacked city. Restively, he pushed his hair back, then turned to a small cabinet and withdrew a bottle of wine and a mug. This was my enemy, naked, fearless, beautiful, filling his mug as if this were rightfully his house,
his wine, his mug. He threw back his head and drained the mug with one swig.
"Are you here, spirit?" His raspy voice broke the silence. I started. He laughed to himself, half muttering. "Shall I call up Vankyar and see what she says?" He laughed again, stalked back to the bed, passing so near me he almost went through me. "If I wanted to hear her voice telling me anything." Sitting naked on his bed, he poured another mug of wine. "If you are here, why don't you speak?" he whispered, smiling, as if he knew how close I was. "Because if I heard you speak, I'd be as insane as Vankyar. Bad enough that I'm talking to myself!" He drained the second mug.
Soon he dressed himself in a loose shirt and black leather leggings, then opened his door and ordered someone on the other side to bring him Edwald. There was no need for him to tell his lackey to hurry, there was enough menace inherent in his voice to make that order clear.
Edwald seemed familiar, like a painting of High King Guin, but much older. He had the strange eyes of the royal family, turquoise blue. His manner was that of one accustomed to obedience, and I could tell it rankled him to be ordered about by this much younger upstart.
Tirk seated Edwald in a velvet upholstered chair near the fireplace, with a modicum of respect. He himself paced a circle behind the older man.
"You are a man of science, I know," Tirk said finally. "Can science empty the room of a watching spirit, should one exist?"
Edwald considered in silence, stroking his beard. I saw something clearly, but I did not understand it. Braided within Edwald's grey beard was a lock of white-blonde hair that did not belong to him. Moving closer to inspect it, I gave an involuntary shudder. Whatever that lock of hair meant, it was wicked. Finally Edwald spoke.
"I have the means to do such a thing," he said. "Send a man for my instruments." Iceblade nodded briskly, opening his door and speaking with someone on the other side.
Before long Edwald had his instruments. He carefully pulled them out of a black case and arranged the odd-looking things on the bed with the air of an old sorcerer. Mysterious, deeply wise, lost in a chain of thought unknowable to regular mortals. He picked up a certain incense and burned it in a tiny brass cup hanging from a stick. He walked around the room, waving smoke into every corner.
"This is a special concoction," Edwald said gravely. Tirk held his sleeve over his nose. "It alters the balance of humors in the room, making it impossible for any spirit outside a physical body to remain. I'm going to leave some here for you, in case the spirit returns to vex you." Interested, I looked closer at the little brass cup and the smoke issuing from it. I felt no alteration in my state. The smoke did not even make me uncomfortable.
"So, there was a spirit," Tirk said, his hoarse voice muffled behind his arm. Edwald looked chagrined.
"I didn't check," he offered imperiously some moments later.
Iceblade's eyes hardened. "You simply assumed my imagination had run away with me," he said.
Edwald didn't return his look, didn't bother answering. He rummaged around in his instruments with one hand, still holding the brass cup, hanging by its stick. The old man held up a pane of glass in an iron holder, strange figures were engraved on the holder. Edwald held the glass up over his eyes, it covered his face from the tip of his nose to his eyebrows. The glass itself had a smoky yellow tinge. "I see nothing now. I'll leave this glass with you as well. If you feel the spirit has returned, just look through the glass. It has been specially treated to show things invisible to the physical eye. Really, it is the latest mode of science."
Tirk took the thing reluctantly, then peered through it himself. He looked right at me several times, then, satisfied, set the glass on a bedside table. He glanced at Edwald, his violet eyes inscrutable. After a moment the old man spoke.
"I leave with Wandis in two days. We will make our way north, through Remanil city and then up to Bentun. We will bewitch the royal families in those cities. You take Remanil and the kingdom of Banbrigg will fall. With Bentun, Osgood is yours. Neither can stand without its heart-city or royal family."
"Will you kill the families yourself?" Tirk rasped.
"I won't have to. They will be unable to defend themselves after they are bewitched. They won't even fight when your people put them under the blade. We can take out the whole castle this way, in both cases. And we will move so quickly, no word of Remanil's fall will precede us to Bentun."
"And as the High King's own uncle, you will be welcomed in with open arms. How will you explain Wandis?"
"She has the fair hair of our High Queen, and her features are recognizably similar. I will tell them the truth, Wandis is High Queen Hyndla's niece. All will be glad to welcome her."
"And once within the castles, she will cast her spell, entrancing them." Suddenly I understood exactly whom the mage was. The High Queen's niece. I knew little enough about the extended members of the High Family, but at least now I could put a name to the destruction at the keep in the wood. Tirk's voice caught me again. "And she will offer no resistance of her own?"
Edwald smiled in answer. It was an evil smile, and required no comment.
"Then, I will send out my own men after you. Moving with another spell from Wandis, they will take the two cities, and cut off the borders of Banbrigg and Osgood. No one could move fast enough to stop them. And I will be sending Tirith and his men out to cut off Laidley. We will own half of Dragon's Tooth without the High King even being aware until it is too late. He can't be hustled out of the country, because we will hold the entire base of the peninsula. The only way out is out to sea, and the sea is impassable in the winter." Tirk wasn't smiling, but I could see the satisfaction in his eyes.
"The Seers remaining at the High Court aren't worth a damn. The only Seer of any consequence left decades ago. Guin won't even see it coming." Edwald was smiling his delight at his nephew's predicament. "He'll be ours before he even realizes what's happening."
"He'll be mine," Tirk corrected, his rough voice silky. The smile left Edwald's face, and he nodded. "All this depends on your success, Edwald. I don't anticipate any... disappointment." Edwald didn't answer, but nodded tightly.
I woke up unrefreshed in the morning, but at least I was warm. My trip out to the privy shed proved that the temperature had drastically dropped, my skin felt stiff when I returned to the warmth of the hut. Luckily, Goskia had a chamber pot, and Dera could use this so she would not have to be taken out into the freezing cold to use the privy shed.
Over a breakfast of flatcakes, I outlined my dream to Selas. It was heartening to see his acceptance and belief in what I had seen, despite his natural skepticism.
"If Wandis is the mage, and she is Queen Hyndla's niece, that explains where they got her. The Princess Hyndla traveled more than a thousand miles to marry High King Guin," he said. "Holden is so far away, it is icy all year round."
"Don't they still have dragons in Holden?" Wyntan asked with interest.
Selas shrugged. "Never been there," he muttered. "How would I know?" Something in the way he said it made me suspect he was not telling the truth. I looked at him sharply. His face was deliberately bland, his eyes shuttered. The two young men didn't seem to notice any difference in his expression. The old man would give no information he didn't feel a need to.
"Always meant to travel that way," Daltorn said. "We want to fight a dragon someday."
"Why, I hear there's one on Fragment Mountain, not too far from Zill Mountain," Banning piped up from around my wrist. He accepted a small piece of flatcake from Dera, who sat next to me on the bench at the table. "From what I hear, it is nearly ten feet long!"
"That's not a dragon," Wyntan said, clearly disappointed. "That's just an overgrown lizard."
"It breathes fire," Banning said defensively. The brothers perked up a bit.
"Fragment Mountain is not far," Wyntan said to his brother.
"We could get there walking within days, two weeks at the most," Daltorn agreed.
"We'd need a beast of burden of some type," Wyntan s
aid. "If we had one, we could probably bring the entire body back." He looked at me. "After the coming battle, of course."
Selas cleared his throat. "We can start training after breakfast," he told the younger men. "After we unload and care for all the weapons in my cart." The brothers perked up even more. It was obvious they looked forward to training.
"What about Samar?" I asked, feeling perverse. Why would a woman want to train with weapons? I had little enough interest, and I knew I would need to protect myself when we traveled. Maybe Samar would not even want to come with us.
"She won't be ready for a couple days," Goskia interrupted. "Then, she'll be as whole as Dera can get her."
"Then we'll start her training in a couple days," Selas said in a peevish tone.
"Can you train a woman to fight?" Daltorn asked with some skepticism.
"High King Guin's father, Gorn, was trained by Guin's grandmother," Selas said, finally. "And she herself was trained by the great warrior, Eyeroe. She had her hand in the Inner Kingdom War between Laidley and Kenway, even though she was barely old enough to lift a sword then." I was surprised. I never knew that. Selas looked at me. "Your own mother knew Queen Lyonne, Gorn's mother, though Bevin was little more than a child when Queen Lyonne died," he added. My mouth fell open in shock.
"How?" I whispered. "My mother was from Berowalt. She didn't know anybody."
"Your mother came to Berowalt just before you were born," the old man said after a long pause. Then his face tightened, and I knew I'd get no further information from him.
"Where did she come from?" I asked anyway.
He shrugged. "How should I know?" he replied dourly. Again his face was bland, his eyes blank. He stood up and went to the door. The brothers hopped up in unison and followed him out.
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