The Soprano Sorceress: The First Book of the Spellsong Cycle

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “All right,” she said, turning her head toward Daffyd, who was blotting his sweating face. “You can tune the viola. I’m just about ready to try this.”

  “That’s good. I’m hot.”

  “So am I.” Her back was soaked where the shirt and tunic had rested against her skin.

  As Anna brushed off her trousers, and began to tune the lutar, and Daffyd the viola, Spirda rode back toward the ford, not more than fifty yards, before announcing loudly. “There’s no one coming.”

  Although the sorceress felt like telling Spirda that such announcements were unnecessary, that she could see that herself, she just nodded and finished tuning the lutar. Then she cleared her throat and ran through a set of vocalises. Her throat was dry, and she stopped for more water before resuming.

  Finally, she turned to Daffyd again, catching him wiping his forehead. “Here’s the song.” She hummed the round, once, then again. “Can you do that?”

  “Of course. It’s a simple tune.”

  “I won’t be playing the same thing,” she pointed out. “The chords are harmony.”

  Daffyd nodded again, and fiddled with his bow.

  The sorceress looked toward the river, cleared her throat, nodded to Daffyd, and began.

  “Cut, cut, cut your bed

  deeply through the ground

  easily, easily, easily,

  with water yet unfound.

  “Leave, leave, leave the road

  covered by the ground …

  “Carve, carve, carve

  deep beneath the ground …”

  Despite the support of Daffyd’s playing, by the time she strummed the last chord, Anna had to sit down—abruptly—on the dusty clay of the road, her head swimming, and her skull throbbing. The lutar lay beside her, and stars flashed across her eyes.

  A low rumbling, or groaning, filtered up through the ground, and little puffs of dust burst upward along the road.

  “Are you all right?” asked Daffyd, kneeling beside her.

  “I need something to eat,” she admitted. “And drink.”

  Fhurgen eased his mount back as Daffyd rummaged through the saddlebags of his mare before returning to Anna with a chunk of bread and her water bottle.

  “Here.”

  First, she drank, and then began to chew the stale bread.

  Spirda rode slowly back to the two. Even through the sparkles of her intermittent vision, Anna could see the subofficer was pale.

  “The river’s gone. It’s just gone. What did you do?”

  “It’s working for us,” she answered, her mouth partly full. She took another long swallow of warm water. It still tasted good. She broke off another piece of bread and put it in her mouth.

  The ground trembled once more. Anna smiled faintly.

  “Now what, Lady Anna?” asked Spirda.

  “We wait awhile.” The images in front of her eyes still sparkled, and she turned to Daffyd. “I need more bread and some cheese.”

  He nodded and went back to the saddlebags.

  Anna kept eating, as more small puffs of dust rose along the line of the road.

  Daffyd’s mare whinnied, and Farinelli sidestepped, drawing the reins held by Fhurgen tight. The other armsmen rode in tight circles on edgy mounts. Daffyd glanced from Anna to the armsmen and back to Anna. She had to force herself to finish all the bread and cheese. She felt like a hog. Was that the way anorexics felt—as though normal nourishment were stuffing them? Yet her dietary needs were far from normal, and she could tell she was too thin—but how on Erde could she keep eating all the time?

  “You keep it up or you’ll die, either from starvation or because you can’t do sorcery,” she mumbled to herself.

  Spirda rode back and forth, to look at the river, then back to survey the sorceress and the player, then back to the river. While he rode, and Daffyd fidgeted, Anna made her way through almost another half loaf of bread before the sparkling motes before her eyes died away. She had to have been hungrier than she’d thought—either that or her spellcasting involved a great deal more than she had considered. She felt ready to retch before she felt strong enough to stand.

  The faint groaning and the dust puffs continued.

  In time, when she felt matters had proceeded long enough—and she had no way of knowing, but had to trust her feelings—Anna finished the water bottle and stood, lifting the lutar. Her fingers touched the gut strings once more. She nodded and looked at the younger player. “We need to do it again.”

  Daffyd raised both eyebrows, but extracted his viola and bow from their case.

  Anna waited until he nodded, and then she cleared her throat and repeated the second version of the song that had started as a nursery-rhyme round.

  “Leave, leave, leave the road

  covered by the ground …

  “Hold, hold, hold the road

  firm above the ground …”

  Spirda eased his mount back toward the road cut to the ford, watching until after Anna and Daffyd had finished. Then he rode back to the waiting squad—and to Daffyd and Anna.

  “The river’s back, but it’s even muddier,” announced the subofficer.

  “It may be for a while,” Anna conceded. “It may be.” She felt exhausted, and hoped she was up for the long ride back toward Pamr. Slowly, she walked toward Farinelli, and even more laboriously, fastened the lutar and case in place, then mounted.

  “What did you do?”

  “Enough, enough.” She hoped it had been enough, and that it would hold, and that Eladdrin would indeed follow the course of apparent common sense. So much was based on hope, and so often hope was disappointed.

  Anna took a deep breath and turned Farinelli back toward the ford and the still-shallower and-muddier Chean River. She’d have to eat again, before long, and she hoped the churning of her overstressed stomach would subside by then.

  75

  Looking ahead to the bridge across the river, Anna reflected that the Chean River wasn’t even a river, but more like the Platte in August—a thin stream lost in wide banks cloaked in browning vegetation. Because of all the irrigation in the river valley, the Chean carried less water than it had at Sorprat.

  The sorceress had not slept well the night before, perhaps because they had stopped short of Pamr and bedded down in an abandoned barn, perhaps because her digestive system was having trouble coping with all the food her sorcery demanded, or perhaps because she continued to worry about her sorcery itself. She was relying on what she felt, and after her failure to scry Mario in the mirror, she’d begun to wonder. Was sorcery as reliable as it had seemed? Had she accomplished what she had tried with the river bluffs—or was she deceiving herself? Had her earlier successes been based on her ability? Or had she been lucky? Or was sorcery just unreliable in trying to view an earth based on technology? That didn’t even deal with what she knew about people. Too many in authority—like Avery or Behlem—demanded proof for others to justify their actions, while conveniently ignoring it for their own. Proof that Virkan was abusing people, proof that Delor would have kept trying to kill her—and the only proof of that would have been her death.

  There remained so much she did not know. She took a long, slow breath, and let it out equally slowly, trying to settle her churning stomach. Her eyes drifted northward, drawn by … something. She squinted as the morning sun caught the corner of her eye, but despite the glare she could see a line of armed horsemen waiting silently on the low hill above the green fields of some sort of beans.

  “Lady …” said Spirda softly. “To our right …”

  “I see them. Let’s keep riding.” The bridge wasn’t that far ahead.

  Anna glanced to the bridge, then back to the hill. A single rider rode slowly downhill at an angle, so that he would cross the meadow ahead to Anna’s right and meet them on the road.

  “One rider,” said Daffyd.

  “They want something,” affirmed Spirda.

  Again, Anna wanted to strangle them both for stating
the obvious as though she had no brains at all. Instead, she contented herself with a single word. “Obviously.”

  A low guffaw came from one of the armsmen riding behind. Fhurgen? Or one of the others—Hirreno, perhaps? She couldn’t tell without looking, and she didn’t need to, since whoever it was happened to be laughing at the self-officiousness of Daffyd and Spirda.

  She checked the larger body of riders motionless on the hill beyond the irrigated bean field. They had not moved. By now, Anna, Daffyd, and the squad of armsmen were closer to the stone bridge across the Chean than to the armed riders. As they neared the mown meadow, the single rider, wearing a blue sash and bearing a white banner, trotted toward the squad.

  “What is your pleasure, lady?” asked Spirda.

  Anna studied the weathered but thin face of the man who rode ever closer. Except for reins and banner staff, his hands were empty.

  “Let him close enough to speak.”

  The rider, clearly unsure of his reception, reined up a good twenty yards from Anna and her group.

  “I bear a message for the lady Anna.”

  Anna eased Farinelli away from the others only slightly. “I’m Anna.”

  “The lord Jecks begs your indulgence and would like a word with you.” The rider bowed.

  “Should you?” asked Spirda. “He hasn’t declared his allegiance to the Prophet.”

  “That might be a good reason to meet him. I talked with him before, briefly, and he seemed honest.”

  “Seemings are not always truths.”

  “I’ll risk it.” Anna turned to the messenger. “I’ll meet him on the open meadow there. Alone. Everyone else must stay well away from us.”

  “No arms,” hissed Spirda, behind Anna.

  “I will bear no arms, except my knife, and I trust that Lord Jecks will also bear no arms.”

  “He will be alone.” The messenger nodded. “Without his blade or bow.”

  “He is keeping his armsmen well beyond bow range,” said Spirda. “He must want to speak with you badly.”

  “Very badly,” added Daffyd.

  Anna watched as the messenger urged his mount up the low hill and as a single rider eased away from the mounted armsmen there. As Jecks rode downhill, Anna eased Farinelli into the middle of the meadow and reined up.

  The stocky white-haired rider drew up a few yards from Anna, keeping his bare hands in plain view.

  Farinelli whuffled, then sidestepped.

  “Easy … easy …” Anna patted his shoulder.

  “Lady Anna.” The white-haired man inclined his head. “I took this risk in the hopes that you would not employ your sorcery to destroy me. It is a risk, from what I hear, but at my age, you discover that everything is a risk.”

  “What you do want?” Anna asked. “I’m sorry if I’m too blunt, but I know little about you, except that we spoke briefly before the battle of the Sand Pass, and that you seemed honest. The few common people who knew you thought you kept your word.”

  Jecks smiled briefly, an open smile that Anna liked, although she kept her distance, her eyes occasionally checking the horsemen on the ridge. Spirda had said they were well out of bow-shot, and she hoped he was correct.

  “I have heard the same about you, and also that you are a sorceress who has great power, and dislikes using that power.”

  He wouldn’t have said that if he’d been around Falcor lately, thought Anna. “The situation here seems designed to force me to employ everything that I know,” she admitted aloud. And much that I don’t, she added to herself. It isn’t Kansas, Dorothy, or even Ames, Iowa.

  After a puzzled look, Jecks added, “You, and Lord Brill, served Lord Barjim in trying to stop the dark ones. You may recall that my daughter was his consort.”

  “I recall.” Anna had liked Alasia, certainly a point in Jecks’ favor.

  Jecks nodded. “I managed to recover half my forces from the battle. The dark ones were reluctant to pursue after your efforts. Instead of returning directly to Elhi, I rode to Falcor and escorted my grandson from the liedstadt to his ancestral home—where he now remains.”

  Anna could feel her forehead knitting in puzzlement. “What do you want from. me?”

  “Might I ask why you have chosen to serve the Prophet Behlem? If you would not mind telling me?” Jecks offered another wry smile, looking much younger than the silverwhite hair initially had indicated.

  The sorceress pursed her lips for a moment, scanning the horizon again, but neither her squad nor Jecks’ horsemen had moved. “I didn’t see anyone else trying to stop the dark ones. After that battle, I felt someone had to. Those people are … They’re evil,” she concluded, much as she hated to pin that label on anyone.

  “Why do you feel you must fight them?” Jecks asked. “Humor me, please, with these questions. I am an old man, trying to protect his only grandson.”

  Jecks, for all the white hair, didn’t look that old, probably not any older than Anna was, and he was stocky, muscular, and doubtless quite a fighter. In fact, Anna concluded to herself, he was a lot more attractive than any of the men she’d seen so far—clean-shaven, honorable, and willing to stand up for what he believed in. Plus … he seemed to have a wry sense of humor, or something like it.

  “I saw terrible things in my world, and they only got worse because no one would stand up to stop them. There, because magic was different, I could do nothing. Here I can.” She laughed, not quite harshly. “You might say that life has called my bluff.”

  “Thank you, Lady Anna.” Jecks bowed his head. “I would beg your leave to talk with you again. The Prophet sent a messenger, but I would reply first through you. You may tell the lord Behlem that while I will not join his forces, I will not fight him, and I will do all that I can to hold back the dark ones.” The older lord offered a more wintry, but still open smile. “Florenda, the player Liende, and Albero wish to be remembered to you. It was their idea that I speak with you, and I am glad I heeded it. A good trip back to Falcor to you, Lady Anna.”

  “I will tell the Prophet, and I will do my best to persuade him of your goodwill.”

  “I would not deceive you, lady. I bear neither goodwill nor evil will for Lord Behlem. I wish to save Defalk.” Jecks inclined his head, then turned his mount toward the east.

  What was that last bit all about? wondered Anna. She shook her head as she eased Farinelli back toward her squad.

  “Will you destroy them?” asked Spirda as Anna reined up Farinelli.

  “No. He had a message for the Prophet, and the Prophet should hear that message and make his own decision.” Anna reached for her water bottle. Suddenly, her throat was dry, and she was thirsty. Since Jecks had agreed to fight the dark ones, she didn’t believe that Behlem had so many armsmen that he could afford to spurn the offer. Still, she wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t about to blurt it out.

  “The Prophet may not be pleased.”

  Anna finished drinking and eased the water bottle into the straps, then nudged Farinelli enough to start the gelding on their interrupted course toward the bridge. “The Prophet has requested allegiance, and Lord Jecks has asked me to deliver his reply. The Prophet should make his own judgment on Lord Jecks.” And he’d be a fool to take on a fight he doesn’t need to right now.

  Spirda rode silently beside Anna, frowning. The sorceress ignored his displeasure, wishing the subofficer would grow up. Then, she reminded herself, Spirda had not seen or felt that dark massed power of the Ebrans, and some people learned only from what they experienced personally. Was she like that? She hoped not, but self-delusion was the easiest of all deceptions.

  76

  ESARIA, NESEREA

  The raven-haired woman leans forward, stopping short of where the top of the low-cut pale green gown would reveal too much to the officer in the maroon uniform of a lancer of Mansuur. “You have followed the dispatches from Falcor?”

  “Yes, my lady Cyndyth.” The officer remains erect, his voice polite, formal.

  “Is
it true that this sorceress who has joined the Prophet killed many of the darksingers at the battle for the Sand Pass?” Cyndyth leans back in the dark polished wooden armchair that is not quite a throne, her green eyes the same shade as the brocade trim of the chair’s head-high upholstery.

  “So it is said, my lady.”

  “And she has joined the Prophet’s forces in Falcor?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Cyndyth lifts the crystal goblet, sips the pale red wine, then replaces it on the silver tray that sits upon the table to her right. Long slender fingers lift a candied almond from the silver dish on the tray. “Is she beautiful?”

  “She is said to be young and blonde.” The lancer’s forehead crinkles ever so slightly as he adds, “Yet it is also said that she has children as old as you are, my lady.”

  “Does she have scars, great gashes on her skin?” asks Cyndyth. “I heard the dark ones nearly killed her.”

  “The dark ones seek her, or so says the counselor Menares, and she was thrown from the walls by their attack. Yet she lives.”

  “You do serve the Liedfuhr, do you not?”

  “As I must, Lady Cyndyth. As my family has ever.” A faint sheen of perspiration coats the officer’s forehead.

  “And you know that my father is ever vigilant?”

  “The vigilance of the Liedfuhr is legendary.”

  Cyndyth laughs, softly, throatily, and lifts the goblet for another sip of the wine. “It is legendary. You are so comic, Nubara. So formal. So careful.”

  “I understand my duties, lady, and do my best to fulfill them.”

  “So you do.” Cyndyth’s voice turns lazy, slow, as she continues. “A sorceress who is young and blonde … a battle against the dark ones that must be won … and after that?” She shrugs and a smooth-skinned shoulder is momentarily uncovered. “Once the mighty Eladdrin is vanquished, will the Prophet need a sorceress? Will the Liedfuhr?” She straightens in the chair and reaches for another almond. “Oh, you might wish to inform my sire that we will be departing for Falcor.”