Nûd and Eynon
“She’s not answering,” said Eynon as they flew east from the Blue Spiral Tower on the Rhuthro. He almost said Gwal-o-e-a-den for the fifth time, but decided against it. Merry had to have a good reason not to respond.
“Your girlfriend must be busy,” said Nûd. “Damon has a knack for causing trouble and they’re probably both in the middle of it. I hope she can head off his worst impulses.”
“Thanks,” said Eynon. “That’s so reassuring.” He consciously copied the tone Braith used to mock his attempts to be optimistic.
“You don’t understand,” said Nûd. “You’ve only been around Damon for a few days. I’ve been living with him in Melyncárreg for more than a decade. When he’s not running away from problems, he’s creating them.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Eynon’s brain was still whirling with worry, but at least the weather didn’t match the storms of concern roiling in his head. The skies were filled with fluffy clouds—and not the sort that could quickly turn into thunderheads. Rocky seemed to enjoy a chance to stretch his wings for a long flight and happily followed the red ball of solidified sound Eynon projected in front of him. Chee had resumed hanging on to the big wyvern’s neck after finding one of the pillowcases filled with gold rings uncomfortable napping. The raconette had wrapped his tail around one of Rocky’s bony projections, leaned back into the angle of the wyvern’s cervical vertebrae, and fallen asleep.
Nûd and Eynon didn’t speak for a quarter of an hour, watching western Dâron flow below them, before Eynon turned to face Nûd.
“Where are we headed?” Eynon asked.
“Brendinas, of course,” said Nûd. “I thought we’d fly to the capital, then follow the Brenavon south to locate the Bifurlanders.”
Eynon thought about his lessons from Euclid’s Elements. Nûd had described taking two sides of a right triangle.
“Wouldn’t it be faster to follow the hypotenuse?”
“What?” asked Nûd.
“You know,” said Eynon, sketching something vaguely triangular in the air with one hand. “Why can’t we cut off the corner?”
“Oh,” said Nûd. “That’s easy. That won’t help, because we don’t know exactly where the dragonship armada is on the river.”
“But…”
“And I don’t know how to get to the lower Brenavon from here.”
“That makes more sense,” said Eynon.
“If we don’t fly east to Tyford, then a bit southeast to Brendinas, I’m not sure I can find the Brenavon.”
“Isn’t it a big river? Almost as big as the Moravon?”
“It’s not that big, but it gets wide south of the capital, according to the maps I’ve seen back in Melyncárreg,” said Nûd.
“That’s what I remember, too,” said Eynon. “Even though I was only in the Map Room once. Why can’t we start flying southeast now, cross the Moravon south of Tyford and its crossbowmen, avoid the capital, and come up on the Bifurlanders from the rear, where they won’t expect us?”
“Not a bad thought, but we don’t know how far the dragonship raiders have traveled up the river. What if they’re too far ahead of us?”
“Then we’ll spot the smoke from them burning estates downriver from Brendinas,” said Eynon.
“I expect the people living on those estates would be happier if we could bribe the Bifurlanders to turn around before their homes and barns were torched.”
“You have a point,” said Eynon. “I know I would.”
“Good,” said Nûd. “For a minute there I thought you were being as callous as a Clan Lander.”
Eynon shook his head slowly. People in the Coombe had been dealing with Clan Land attacks and skirmishes for generations. They weren’t something to joke about.
“Maybe we can angle just a little bit southeast,” Eynon suggested. “We could still bypass Brendinas, but hit the Brenavon not far below the capital.”
Nûd smiled over at Eynon.
“I understand now,” he said. “You overheard Damon telling me about the Conclave testing you and want to avoid them.”
“Uh huh,” said Eynon. “At least until I know more about what the testing involves—and we’ve paid off the Bifurlanders.”
“I can’t fault your logic there,” said Nûd. “Bifurlanders first, then the Conclave. It’s a matter of priorities. Start Rocky heading slightly southeast now, and we’ll see where we hit the Brenavon.”
“I like that plan better,” said Eynon. Something that had been tight in his chest relaxed a few degrees. The thought of dealing with the Conclave—especially without Damon’s guidance—had been weighing on his mind, along with Merry’s unresponsiveness.
“It’s too bad we couldn’t have detoured back to the Coombe,” said Nûd. “I would have appreciated a more substantial snack.”
“You just wanted to see my sister again.”
“That too,” said Nûd.
“I’m not hungry enough to turn around,” said Eynon. “And there are estates south of us depending on our speedy arrival.”
“Along with the entire population of the capital,” added Nûd.
He smiled at Eynon hanging on beside him.
“Prepare for double-time,” said Eynon, accelerating the ball of solidified sound Rocky was chasing. “Let’s see how fast Rocky can fly.”
Wind streamed past them, ruffling their hair and making their cloaks and jackets rattle. Eynon created small lenses of solidified sound over their eyes to serve as goggles. He even made a tiny pair for Chee. It wasn’t long before they saw a broad river threading between newly-planted fields like a blue ribbon. Nûd pointed.
“Is that the Moravon?” asked Eynon. “I think I can see the walls of Tyford off to the north.”
“It must be,” said Nûd. “We’re on course, I think. Turn a bit to the south so we’ll miss the capital.”
“Turning,” said Eynon as he moved the ball of solidified sound to the right. Rocky tracked it with a jaunty tilt of his rapidly beating wings.
The fields below them were changing from long, narrow strips that hugged the undulating ground west of the Moravon to large squares and rectangles on the comparatively flat lands east of it. Some fields were green with sprouting wheat, oats, or barley. Others showed rich, newly turned dark earth waiting to be sown with flax and peas and beans.
“I guess farms are larger closer to Brendinas,” said Eynon.
Nûd nodded. “Some of that is the Duke of Tyford’s land,” said the big man. “The Duchess of Whitrose has her holdings up ahead and the Duke of Blûddau’s estates are south of hers, according to a book full of maps I studied in Damon’s library. They need big estates to support all the knights they owe the crown.”
His baron back in Caercadel in the southern part of the Coombe only had a dozen knights, Eynon considered, though they did drink a lot. It probably took quite a bit of barley to keep them in beer.
“How many dukes and duchesses are there?” Eynon asked.
“Twelve,” answered Nûd. “Plus twenty-four earls or countesses—and who knows how many barons.”
“That’s a lot of nobles,” said Eynon.
“Dâron is a big kingdom,” Nûd replied.
“We hardly ever see nobles in the Coombe.”
“From what Damon’s told me, you should count yourself lucky on that score. The greater the noble, the greater the ego, he says.”
“Is that going to be in his next volume of epigrams?” asked Eynon.
“If I remind him to write it down,” said Nûd. “But I don’t plan to continue being Master Mage Ealdamon’s servant any longer.”
Eynon was pleased to hear the certainty in Nûd’s voice.
Nûd should have had his wander year five or six years ago, Eynon guessed. Maybe his friend would take time to travel before deciding what he wanted to do next?
Eynon calculated that Rocky was flying high enough to look more like a large hawk from the ground than a wyvern
. He could barely make out men and women below him as tiny figures herding cattle and tending fields. Very few looked up.
There were more people in the lands they were flying over than back in the Coombe, however. They must have flown over a hundred villages and a dozen fortified manor houses. Eynon had seen three sizable castles along their path and thought he’d seen another off to the northeast. They seemed at least as big as the earl’s fortress at Rhuthro Keep.
The weather was changing, too. The sun was still shining, but additional clouds were clustering in the sky around them, more densely packed above like the villages below. Rocky descended slightly to stay beneath them, following Eynon’s tasty ball of solidified sound.
“Do you think it’s much farther to the Brenavon?” asked Eynon, straining to look ahead.
“Not much farther at all,” said Nûd. “I can see it in the distance. We’re almost there.”
“Where?” asked Eynon. He remembered the far-seeing spell he’d used when they were collecting gold earlier and called on his blue magestone to generate the appropriate lenses.
“There,” said Nûd, pointing to the right. “There are hundreds of dragonships on the water. I can see their sails.”
Eynon guided Rocky in a slow turn to the right so he could see what Nûd had seen. Ships with colorful square sails and pointed prows and sterns filled the Brenavon from bank to bank. With his magically aided vision, Eynon could see round shields along the sides of the ships and oars moving rhythmically, moving the vessels upriver. The largest dragonship was three ranks back. It had a white sail with a wide gold stripe down the center and some sort of animal—a beaver, Eynon realized—painted in black on the stripe. A crown was outlined in black above the beaver.
That must be King Bjarni’s ship, thought Eynon.
He yawned—which made sense given how little sleep he’d had the previous night—and tried to put thoughts of Merry and the Conclave aside while he focused on the negotiations ahead, hoping Nûd would take the lead in dealing with the king of the Bifurlanders. Then any hope of gaining focus shattered like ice sliding off a slate roof onto cobblestones.
A dozen gold blurs descended from the clouds above them, some slapping at Rocky, Nûd, and Eynon with pointed tails. Others were snapping at them with heads filled with sharp teeth on the ends of long necks. Chee leaped down and landed on Eynon’s head, distracting him and slowing his response to the attack. The raconette crawled around so his belly was in Eynon’s face and held on to Eynon’s ears with his tiny claws digging into unprotected flesh.
Rocky twisted and turned, trying to escape his tormentors, without success. There were too many of them and they wheeled about in intricate attack patterns, bumping the wyvern’s head, neck and wings with their bodies. Eynon and Nûd had to concentrate on hanging on to the scarf tied to bony protrusions on Rocky’s upper back. They were hanging upside down more than once, a thousand feet in the air, before the wyvern rotated back to his usual orientation for flight.
There were lots of screams causing pain for the inside of Eynon’s ears like Chee’s claws were hurting their exteriors. Eynon knew he wasn’t screaming. Chee’s belly fur covered his nose and mouth so he could barely breathe. Rocky was trumpeting his distress with a deep basso bugle, but the screams were high-pitched—like a horde of children playing tag on the village square in Haywall.
Eynon could feel more bumps as something or a group of somethings smacked against Rocky’s sides behind him. Rocky rose, suddenly lighter, and Eynon managed to push Chee around so the raconette was clutching the back of his head, not the front. Thus liberated, Eynon leaned up and tried to determine exactly who or what was attacking him.
He saw a dozen small, gold-scaled dragons, each the size of a wisent, wheeling up and away back into the clouds above him. They were carrying riders with long yellow braids who seemed to be children, not fully grown. That explains the high-pitched screaming, thought Eynon. And they had the pillowcases filled with gold. Blast!
Eynon turned to his friend to see why the big man had been uncharacteristically quiet during the attack, but didn’t see him.
Nûd was gone.
Chapter 17
Merry
“Why don’t we ask him ourselves?” asked Queen Carys. She frowned and looked at the ceiling for a moment. Her tone had shifted from comfortable great-grandmother to unhappy sovereign.
Astrí said nothing and seemed to retreat into a hood she was no longer wearing.
“Damon left Brendinas forty years ago and hasn’t returned,” continued the queen. “He won’t even talk to Fercha and she’s…”
“…his favorite student,” said Astrí, finding her voice. “They can’t stand to be in the same room together and haven’t spoken in two decades.”
“What happened?” asked Merry.
“Fercha made choices Damon disagreed with,” said Queen Carys. “She followed her own path and stumbled on the way. Damon never let her forget it.”
“Aren’t apprentices supposed to become masters and seek their own course?” asked Merry. “They make their own mistakes and learn from them. That is the natural order of things, isn’t it?”
“Their particular situation was more complex,” said Astrí. “And they could both teach stubborn to a bull wisent.”
Merry smiled.
“I’ve only been Fercha’s apprentice for a short while, but that was obvious from the start. Damon seems to be cut from the same cloth.”
“They were like two flathorns clashing antlers,” said Astrí. Her eyes were unfocused, staring at a distant corner of the room, like her thoughts were drifting back to somewhere long ago and far away.
“Flathorns?” asked Merry.
“Big deer from Melyncárreg,” said Astrí. “Like stags as big as oxen, with huge, flat antlers.”
“That helps explain something about the gate in the pool at the bottom of Fercha’s tower,” said Merry. “I remember her saying, ‘I’m not going back through that gate if the legions of the Eagle People and the royal army of Tamloch are on my doorstep.’”
“I can imagine Fercha saying those very words,” said Queen Carys.
“I’ve heard her say them,” said Astrí. “She set up that gate outside the castle so she could send things to her son.”
“Without Damon interfering,” whispered the queen.
“The tall, dark-haired man with the crossbow?” asked Merry.
“I expect so. Nûd favors that weapon,” said Astrí. “Where did you see him?”
“He was with Damon at the quarry when we fought the Tamloch wizards and soldiers. The last I saw him, he was behind a quarryman’s wagon shooting back at Tamloch archers.”
“That sounds like Nûd,” said the queen.
“He gave it away when he called Fercha Mother,” said Merry.
“And rightly so,” said Astrí, “since she is his mother.”
“He was one of Fercha’s stumbles that Damon was afraid might happen,” said the queen, leaning forward in her chair.
“Nûd seems like quite a nice man, whatever his origins,” said Merry. “He was very brave at the quarry.”
“That’s good to hear,” said Astrí. “He is a nice young man, even if he has spent too much of his life in Melyncárreg.”
Merry was concerned for Eynon. He’d tried to contact her four times using Doethan’s magic ring. She wanted to end this interrogation by two old women who seemed to know when every squirrel dropped a nut in the royal forests along the Rhuthro. Enough was enough, even if one of the inquisitors was the dowager queen of Dâron. Merry had conducted enough subtle questioning sessions of her own to know when one had reached a point of diminishing returns. She hadn’t spent enough time traveling with Damon to have more information to give Carys and Astrí.
“It’s been a pleasure to meet you both,” said Merry, “but I really need to be getting back to the antechamber outside the king’s study, so I can wait for Damon. Perhaps I’ll learn more from him—something the two o
f you don’t know already.”
Merry stood, smiled, and performed another bow and curtsy.
“I told you she was her father’s daughter,” said Queen Carys.
Astrí stood as well. “Help me on with my robes and hood before you leave, please?”
Merry assisted the older wizard and adjusted the folds of her robes so they draped properly. Astrí’s face disappeared under her hood again.
Someone rapped sharply on the door to the chamber.
“Did you summon a servant?” Astrí asked Carys.
“No,” said the queen. “I thought you’d show Merry back.”
Astrí fashioned a thick protective bubble of solidified sound around Queen Carys by adjusting and strengthening the privacy bubble she’d put in place earlier. Once that defensive measure was complete, Astrí stepped past Merry to the door.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“Open up or I’ll have it knocked down,” said a voice that might have been pretty if it didn’t honk out each syllable like an irritated goose.
“Oh, her,” said Queen Carys.
“I’m afraid so,” said Astrí.
“Guard your tongue, dear,” said the queen to Merry, “and count your fingers if you shake her hand. Don’t eat or drink anything she offers you.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” said Merry.
“Go ahead, open it,” said Carys.
Astrí removed the wards and pulled the door open. A woman of medium height with raven hair done up in a tower above her head and wrapped with strings of pearls was standing in the doorway. She wore a low-cut sky-blue satin gown with white vertical stripes under a dark-blue, ermine-trimmed velvet surcoat adorned with pearl buttons. A silver coronet made from twisted wire in knotwork patterns with sparkling diamonds perched above her forehead at the base of the tower of hair. Her nose was sharp, and her face was powdered and rouged to such a degree that she looked like a garish child’s doll, not the mother of a king.
The woman’s face darkened like a thundercloud until she glanced beyond Astrí and spotted Merry.
“There you are,” said the woman. “I’m Princess Gwýnnett, King Dârio’s mother. You may have heard of me.”
The Congruent Wizard Page 11