Magic's Pawn v(lhm-1

by Mercedes Lackey

  Gods. He glanced up at the sun, and winced. That was a Gate. Nothing else feels like that. Oh, I hurt. It's a good thing I was wrapped up in this cloak when I fell over, or I'd have frozen.

  He pushed the pack away, and rolled over onto his stomach. That at least got the sun out of his eyes. He got his knees under him, and pushed himself up off the snow with his arms; he was stiff and cold, but otherwise intact. Only his head hurt, and that in the peculiar "inside" way that meant he'd "bruised" those new senses of his. He knelt where he was for a moment, then pushed his hood back and looked around. It looked as if he'd fallen right over sideways when the shock hit him.

  Guess I'd better get moving. Before I turn into a snow-statue. He pulled himself to his feet with the help of the stump, then stamped around the snow for several moments, trying to get his blood moving again.

  I hope nobody noticed I'm gone. I hope that Gate wasn't somebody out looking for me. I feel enough of a fool as it is.

  He hitched his pack over his shoulder, and took his bearings. All right, let's try again. Center - and ground - and open - and If I find out that Moondance had anything to do with this I'll -

  His head rang again, and he swayed and almost fell, but this time the shock was a clear, urgent, and unmistakable wordless cry for help. It sobered him as quickly as Andrel's bucket of cold water.

  There was no "presence" to the cry, not like any of the Gifted or the Tayledras had; it was just simple and desperate. This was no trained mage or Herald. It could only be an ordinary person in mortal fear.

  Gods! His head swiveled toward the source of the cry as a needle to a lodestone. And without any clear notion of why he was doing so, except that it was a cry for help, and he had to answer it, Vanyel began stumbling toward the source at a clumsy run.

  He had been following a game-trail; now he was right off any path. He ran into a tangle of bushes, and could find no way around it. Driven nearly frantic by the call in his head, he finally shoved his way through it. Then he was in a beech grove; there was little or no growth between the straight, white columns of the trunks, and he picked up his pace until he was at an all-out run.

  But the clear, growth-free area was too soon passed; his breath was burning in his lungs as the forest floor became rougher, liberally strewn with tangles of briar and rocks, and hillier as well. His cloak kept hanging up on things, no matter how hard he tried to keep it close to his body. He tripped; stumbled wildly into the trunk of a tree, and picked himself up only to trip a second time and fall flat in the snow. The breath was knocked out of him for a moment, but that panicked, pleading voice in his "ear within" would not let him give up. He scrambled to his feet, pulled his cloak loose from a bramble, and started running again.

  He must have tripped and fallen a good dozen times over obstacles hidden in the snow, and he surely made enough noise to have warned anything that wasn't deaf of his coming.

  Anything that wasn't deaf - or very busy.

  Winded, floundering blindly, and unable to focus on anything more than a few feet ahead of him, he fell over a root just as he reached the crest of a low hill, and dropped into a thicket of bushes that crowned it.

  He saw the danger before he got up and broke through their protective cover. He froze where he was. The "danger" was too intent on its victims to have paid any attention to the racket he'd been making. Likely an entire cavalry troupe could have come on it unawares.

  This was the very edge of the cleared lands of some smallholder; a fertile river-valley, well-watered, sheltered from the worst of the winter weather and summer storms. Arable land like this could well tempt an enterprising farmer out into the possible perils of the Pelagirs. There had been a stockade around the house and barns to guard against those hazards that could be foreseen.

  But the stockade, of whole tree trunks planted in a ring around the buildings, was flattened and uprooted. It could not have held more than a few moments against what had come at the settlers out of the bright winter morning.

  Vanyel had never seen a colddrake, but he knew what it was from descriptions in far too many songs and tales to count.

  Less like a lizard, and more like a snake with short, stubby legs, it was the largest living creature Vanyel had ever seen. From nose to tail it was easily as long as six carts placed end-to-end. Its equine head was the size of a wine barrel; it had row upon row of silvery needle-sharp spines along its crest and down its back, and more spines formed a frill around its neck. It snarled silently, baring teeth as long as Vanyel's hand, and white and sharp as icicles. Its wickedly curved claws had torn the earth around it. Vanyel knew what those looked like; Moondance had a dagger made from one. Those claws were longer than his hand, and as sharp as the teeth. Huge, deep-purple eyes, like perfect cabochon amethysts, were fixed unwaveringly upon its prey, a young woman and her two children. It was a pure silver-white, like the cleanest of snow, and its scales sparkled in the sunlight; it was at least as beautiful as it was deadly.

  As one mangled body beneath its forefeet testified, the creature knew very well how to use its wickedly sharp claws and teeth.

  But neither tail nor fangs and claws was what held the terrified woman and her two children paralyzed almost within reach. It was the colddrake's primary weapon - the hypnotic power of its eyes.

  It stared at them in complete silence, a silence so absolute that Vanyel could hear the woman panting in fear where he lay. The drake was not moving; it was going to bring its prey to within easy reaching distance of it.

  Vanyel hadn't reshielded since he'd first been impaled upon that dreadful dagger of the woman's fear. He could still sense her thoughts - incoherent, hysteric, and hopeless. Her mind wailed and scratched at the walls that the colddrake's violet gaze had set up around it. She was trapped, they were trapped, their wills gone, their bodies no longer obeying them.

  That was how her husband, the children's father, had died; walking right into the creature's grasp, his body obedient to its will, not his own. The beast was slow, that was the true horror of it - if they could just distract it for a crucial moment, break its gaze, they could escape it.

  Vanyel could "hear" other minds, too - out there on the opposite side of the clearing. The rest of the extended family - there must have been dozens of them - had made it past the slow-moving drake to the safety and shelter of the woods. Only these four had not; the woman, burdened with her toddlers, and the man, staying to protect them. He could "hear" bits of their anguish, like a chorus wailing beneath the woman's keening fear.

  Vanyel stared at the trapped three, just as paralyzed as they were. His mouth was dry, and his heart hammered with fear. He couldn't seem to think; it was as if those violet eyes were holding him captive, too.

  There was movement at the edge of his field of vision.

  No - not all had fled to the woods. From around the corner of the barn came a man; limping, painfully, slowly, but moving so quietly that the snow didn't even creak beneath his boots. He was stalking the drake. A new set of thoughts invaded Vanyel's mind, fragmentary, but enough to tell him what the man was about.

  : - get close enough to stick 'im - :

  It was an old man, a tired, old man; it was the woman's grandfather. He'd been caught in the barn when the thing attacked and knocked the stockade flat, and he'd seen his granddaughter's husband walk into the thing's jaws. He'd recognized the drake for what it was, and he'd armed himself with the only weapon he could find. A pitchfork. Ridiculous against a colddrake.

  : - get them eyes off 'er an' she kin run fer it - :

  The colddrake was paying no attention to anything except the prey right before it. The old man crept up behind it without it ever noticing he was there.

  The old man knew, with calm certainty, that he was going to die. He knew that his attack was never going to do anything more than anger the creature. But it would break the thing's concentration; it would make it turn its head away for one crucial moment.

  His attack was suicidal, but it would give hi
s granddaughter and her children a chance to live.

  He came within an arm's length of the colddrake - he poised the pitchfork as casually as if he were about to stab a haybale - and he struck, burying the pitchfork tines in the colddrake's side with a sound like a knife burying itself to the hilt in a block of wood.

  The drake screamed; its whistling shriek shattered the dreadful silence, and nearly shattered Vanyel's eardrums. It whipped its head around on its long, snaky neck, and it seized the old man before he even let go of the pitchfork. With a snap of its jaws that echoed even above its shrill screeching, it bit the old man's head neatly off his shoulders.

  Vanyel screamed as he felt the old man die - and the oldster's desperate courage proved to be too much of a goad for him to resist.

  Anger, fear, other emotions he couldn't even name, all caught him up, raised him to his feet, drove him out into the open and exploded out of him with a force that dwarfed the explosion he'd caused when Starwind had tried to make him call lightning.

  He was thinking just enough to throw up a shield around the woman and her children with one shouted word. Then he hit the drake with everything he had in him. The blast of raw power caught the drake in the side and sent it hurtling up over the roof of the house - high into the sky - and held it suspended there for one agonizing moment while Vanyel's insides felt as if they were tearing loose.

  Then the power ran out, and it fell to the earth, bleeding in a hundred places, every bone in its body shattered.

  And Vanyel dropped to his knees, then his hands, then collapsed completely, to lie spent in the open field under the pale winter sun, gasping for breath and wondering what he had done.

  Savil surveyed the last of the colddrake carcasses, and turned to Starwind, biting her lip in anxiety. "Where's the queen-drake?''

  "No sign of her," he replied, shortly, holding to his feet with pure will. He'd taken the brunt of the attack, and he was dizzy and weak from the effort of holding the center while Savil and Moondance closed the jaws of the trap about the colddrake swarm.

  "I have not seen her, either," Moondance called up the hill. He was checking each carcass in case one should prove to be an immature queen. It was unlikely to see a swarm with a juvenile queen, but it wasn't unheard of, either.

  Yfandes had consented to carry the Tayledras double - the need to get to the place where the drake swarm was before the swarm reached inhabited areas was too great for any other consideration. Starwind had then served as the "bait" afoot, while Moondance on Yfandes and Savil on Kellan had been the arms of the trap.

  "No queens," he said, flatly, having checked the sixth and final body.

  The fight had stripped the snow from the hilltop, exposing the blackened slope. The six drakes lay upon the scorched turf in twisted silver heaps, like the baroque silver ornaments of a careless giantess strewn across black velvet.

  "Ashke, are you well?" Moondance asked anxiously, leaving the last of the bodies and climbing the hill with a certain amount of haste. Starwind looked as if his legs were going to give out on him at any moment, and Yfandes had moved up to lend him her shoulder as support. He leaned on it with a murmur of gratitude as the Healer-Adept reached his side.

  "I will do well enough, once I have a chance to breathe," the elder Tayledras replied, as Moondance added his support to Yfandes'. "I am more worried that we did not find the queen."

  "Do you suppose," Savil began -

  Then all three of them felt an incredible surge of raw, wild power - and it had Vanyel's "presence" laced through it.

  "M'lord?"

  Someone was tugging at his shoulder. Vanyel lifted his head from his arms; that was just about the limit of his capabilities right now.

  "Gods," he said, dazedly, as the stocky young cloak-shrouded woman at his side tried to get him to sit up. "Oh, please - just - don't do that right now."

  "M'lord? Ye be hurt?" she asked, thick brows knitting with concern. "Ye bain't hurt, best ye get inside fore 'nother them things comes."

  "Aren't… anymore," he replied heavily, giving in to her urging and hauling himself into a sitting position. The sun seemed very bright and and just on the verge of being painful to his watering eyes.

  Gods, it's one of the holders. She's going to lay into me for not coming sooner, he thought, squinting at her, and already wincing in anticipation of harsh words. She's going to want to know why I didn't save the old man, or come in time to save the young one. What can I tell her? How can I tell her it was because I was too scared to move until the old man threw himself at the thing?

  "Ye saved us, m'lord," she said, brown eyes wide, the awe in her voice plain even to Vanyel's exhausted ears. "Ye came t' save us, I dunno how ye knew, but, m'lord, I bain't got no way t' thank ye."

  He stared at her in amazement. "But - "

  "Be ye with the bird-lords, m'lord? Ye bain't their look, but they be the only mages abaht that give a bent nail fer folks' good.''

  "Bird-lords?" he repeated stupidly.

  "Tchah, Menfree,'tis only a boy an' he's flat paid out!" The newcomer was an older woman, a bit wrinkled and weathered, but with a kindly, if careworn, face. She bunched her cloak around her arms and bent over him. "Na, lad, ye come in, ye get warm an' less a'muddled, an' then ye tell yer tale, hrom?"

  She took Vanyel's elbow, and he perforce had to get up, or else pull her down beside him. The next thing he knew, he was being guided across the ruts of the plowed field, past the carcass of the colddrake (he shuddered as he saw the size of it up close) up to the battered porch of the house and into the shadowed doorway.

  He was not only confused with exhaustion, but he was feeling more than a little awkward and out of place. These were the kind of people he had most tried to avoid at home - those mysterious, inscrutable peasant-farmers, whose needs and ways he did not understand.

  Surely they would turn on him in a moment for not being there when they needed help.

  But they didn't.

  The older woman pushed him down onto a stool beside the enormous fireplace at the heart of the kitchen, the younger took his cloak and pack, and a boy brought him hot, sweetened tea. When one of the bearded, dark-clad men started to question him, the older woman shooed him away, pulling off her own dun cloak and throwing it over a bench.

  "Ye leave th' boy be fer a bit, Magnus; I seen this b'fore with one a' them bird-laddies. They does the magickin', then they's a-maundered a whiles." She patted Vanyel on the head, in a rather proprietary sort of fashion. "He said there ain't no more critters, so ye git on with takin' care a' poor old Kern an' Tansy's man an' let this lad get hisself sorted."

  Vanyel huddled on the stool and watched them, blinking in the half-dark of the kitchen, as they got their lives put back together with a minimum of fuss. Someone went to deal with the bodies, someone saw to the hysterical young mother, someone else planned of rites. Yes, they were mourning the deaths; simply and sincerely, without any of the kind of hysterics he'd half feared. But they were not allowing their grief to get in the way of getting on with their lives, not were they allowing it to cripple their efforts at getting their protections back in place.

  Their simple courage made him, somehow feel very ashamed of himself.

  It was in that introspective mood that the others found him.

  * * *

  " - I know it was a stupid thing to do, to run off like that, but - " Vanyel shrugged. "I won't make any excuses. I've been doing a lot of stupid things lately. I wasn't thinking."

  "Well, don't be too hard on yourself. Foresight dreams have a way of doing that to people," Savil said, crossing her legs and settling back on her stool beside the hearth. "They tend to get you on the boil and then lock up your ability to think. You wouldn't be the first to go charging off in some wild-hare direction after waking up with one, and you probably won't be the last. No, thank you, Megan," she said to the wide-eyed child who offered her tea. "We're fine."

  If the settlers had been awed by Vanyel, they'd been struck near speechle
ss by the sight of the Tayledras. They didn't know a Herald from a birch tree, but they knew who and what the Hawkbrothers were, and had accorded them the deference due a crowned head.

  All three of the adults were weary, and relief at finding both that Vanyel was intact and that the queen-drake was indisputably deceased had them just about ready to collapse. So they'd taken the settlers' hospitality with gratitude; settling in beside the hearth and accepting tea and shelter without demur.

  Vanyel had waited just long enough for them to get settled before launching into a full confession.

  "So when I finally managed to acquire some sense," he continued, "I figured the best way to find my way back would be to look for where all the mage-energy was. I did everything like you told me, Master Starwind, and I opened up - and the next thing I knew it was nearly noon. Somebody'd opened up a Gate - I think somewhere nearby - and it knocked me put cold."