The Spirit Stone

by Katharine Kerr

  ‘Cal, go inside.’ Daralanteriel pointed to the tent. ‘Men, you keep him there. Wise one, come with me, would you please?’

  Daralanteriel led her a little ways off to a reasonably quiet spot on the edge of the encampment. The prince hooked his thumbs over his belt and stared off to the north, where the forest hung like dark clouds in the last of the sunlight.

  ‘I may be the prince,’ Dar said abruptly. ‘But Cal has as much authority as I do. More, maybe.’

  ‘Not more, but as much, certainly.’

  ‘Which means you’re the only person who can do something about his fits of jealousy,’ Dar went on, ‘and I don’t envy you the job. Meranaldar, on the other hand—I owe him my protection.’

  ‘That’s very true.’

  ‘At the last council, I realized something. If we’re going to keep from being swallowed up by the Roundears, we need more people. Oh, Prince Voran means well, and as far as I know, no one along the western border of Deverry wishes us the least bit of harm, but in the end, numbers will tell.’ Daralanteriel turned to her with a tight smile. ‘I’m sending Meranaldar back south to gather more Islanders. There’s just time this summer for a trip across, if we get back to Mandra soon, anyway.’

  ‘I can tell Valandario to make sure a ship waits.’

  ‘Good.’ Dar sighed and shook his head. ‘This is what it comes down to, isn’t it? Swelling our ranks. As many people as want to settle here with us, I’ll welcome. We’re going to have to assign them land, just like the Roundears do, and set up town councils like they do in the Rhiddaer. The swallowing’s already begun, Dalla. All we can do is slow it down.’

  ‘You’re right, aren’t you? Only time will tell if it’s a disaster or a triumph.’

  ‘Is that one of your omens?’

  ‘No. Just common sense.’

  They shared a grim smile.

  ‘These new people will need a Wise One of their one,’ Dallandra went on. ‘Gavantar should return to the grasslands with them. I’ll send a letter with Meranaldar.’

  ‘Who? I’ve forgotten—’

  ‘Aderyn’s last apprentice. He went to the Isles years ago, to study or so he said, but really it was out of deference to me. It’s time he came home.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Does Meranaldar want to go back?’

  ‘Probably not, but after what just happened, he’ll agree. He’s only tormenting himself, anyway, hanging around you without a hope.’

  ‘What?’ Dallandra felt herself gape like a village lackwit. ‘Are you saying he’s in love with me?’

  ‘You hadn’t noticed?’

  ‘No, I honestly hadn’t noticed.’ Her face burned with a blush. ‘Oh ye gods, the poor man! No wonder Cal—not that it excuses what he did—but—oh ye gods! I’ll do my best to avoid Meranaldar till we get back to Mandra.’

  ‘Good. I recommend it.’

  ‘I’d better go calm Cal down.’ Dallandra started to turn away, but the prince called her back.

  ‘One more thing,’ Daralanteriel said. ‘Tonight, after everyone’s eaten, I want to talk with Pir—do I have his name right?’

  ‘The horse mage?’ Dallandra said. ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  ‘Good. I want to see if it’s possible for him to work with our warhorses. If they learn to trust dragons, and the Horsekin mounts don’t, we’ll have another advantage over them.’ He paused for emphasis. ‘One that doesn’t depend on dwarven devices.’

  ‘That’s a huge favour to ask him.’

  ‘I know. We’ll have to offer him something huge in return. Will you talk with him when I do?’

  ‘Of course. But now I’d better go talk with Cal.’

  When Dallandra returned to her tent, the three men on guard were more than glad to leave her alone with the banadar. She ducked inside, then created a gold dweomer light and tossed it to the roof, where it stuck near the smokehole. Calonderiel was lying on his back on their blankets, his arms still militantly crossed over his chest. With a sigh she sat down next to him.

  ‘Did you seriously think I’d be interested in that tedious milksop?’ she said. ‘I’m insulted!’

  Calonderiel smiled, uncrossed his arms, and sat up. ‘I’ve made a fool of myself again, haven’t I?’ he said.

  ‘No. You merely terrified me and everyone around us.’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to do, now that I think of it. Dalla, do you really love me? Sometimes I don’t see how you could.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder myself, but I do.’

  When he held out his hand, she took it in both of hers. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ she said. ‘I’m pregnant.’

  He smiled, a slow, deep grin of utter satisfaction. ‘Are you happy about it?’ he said.

  ‘Very, now that the war’s over.’

  He let the smile fade and looked away.

  ‘It is over, isn’t it?’ Dallandra said. ‘Cal—’

  ‘It’s over for now. That’s the best I can offer you.’

  ‘For now. How long—’

  ‘I don’t know. You’re the dweomermaster, not me.’

  ‘Well, that’s true.’ Dallandra let go of his hand. ‘For now. That will have to do, won’t it?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’ He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. ‘Forgive me for being jealous? Don’t forget, I loved you in vain for five hundred years. Sometimes I just can’t believe that the wait’s over.’

  ‘The wait?’

  ‘Oh, I knew you’d give in eventually. I just didn’t think it would take so long.’

  ‘You really are an arrogant bastard.’

  ‘Have I ever denied it?’

  She started to laugh, laughed until he kissed her into silence. Yet even in his arms she felt a cold wind blowing, coming from a future that lay too clouded for her to see.

  Sidro and Pir had taken to eating with the men of the Westfolk, as she’d learned to call them. She’d feared Lijik men for too many years to find it easy to be around them, despite the way that Gerran had saved her from the silver wyrm. She’d observed, as well, that Lijik men had woven a vast web of courtesies around themselves, customs that neither she nor Pir understood, while the Westfolk treated such things lightly and with laughter. Vandar’s spawn, she would think. They called them evil Vandar’s spawn, and we believed them. At moments she would shake with rage, remembering the lies.

  Pir had even found himself interested in Westfolk music. Both of them loved to listen to the singing in the evenings, but the Westfolk harp especially fascinated him. ‘It’s got such a clear pure sound,’ he said. ‘It’s a pity I can’t sing.’

  ‘Here!’ Sidro grinned at him. ‘I never knew you wanted to be a bard.’

  ‘I didn’t when it meant losing my eyes to the point of a knife. Besides, the gods marked me for something else.’ He frowned, thinking. ‘Or something marked me, anyway.’

  One of the harpers, Adariel, was showing Pir how to hold the harp when Prince Daralanteriel strode up to their campfire. No one leapt to their feet; no one knelt. Adariel, however, did fall silent and set the harp aside.

  ‘Pir, the Wise One and I would like to speak with you,’ Daralanteriel said. ‘Sidro, by all means come along too, if you’d like.’

  The prince led them to the tent that Dallandra shared with the banadar. Calonderiel terrified Sidro. He always seemed to be standing, or sitting in this case, at the edge of things, arms crossed, glaring at someone in barely controlled rage. He did offer Pir mead like a host, but his purple eyes were as cold and bleak as always. Fortunately, during the discussion that followed he merely listened as Prince Dar talked, using the Lijik language.

  ‘Pir,’ Dar said, ‘you and your woman are welcome to stay here among us as long as you’d like. I was wondering if that pleased you.’

  ‘It does, your highness,’ Pir said. ‘We do have no other place to go except among the Red Reivers, and truly, there we’d rather not go. Exalted Mother Grallezar be an exile here, too, as be my men. If you will shelter
us all, you will have Gel da’ Thae to consult about your enemies’ ways.’

  ‘True spoken, and all of you are welcome. I have a task to offer you alone, however. You’re a horse mage. We’ve heard of such, here in the Westlands. We know that your gifts are rare and immensely valuable—’ He paused, noticing Pir’s puzzled frown. ‘—of great worth, that means.’

  Pir nodded with a brief twitch of smile.

  ‘Do you think you could teach our horses to accept the presence, the nearness that is, of dragons? If so, we’d reward you highly.’

  ‘And with those horses, you then do wish to slaughter more of my people?’ Pir said.

  Daralanteriel looked away, but not quickly enough to hide his grimace of guilt.

  ‘So I thought,’ Pir went on. ‘An exile I be, but not yet a traitor to my kind.’ He paused, visibly thinking something through. ‘Though truly, I be Gel da’ Thae, not a savage tribesman of the north, and it be the northerners who did ravage our cities and put their false goddess above all others. To them I be an enemy.’

  ‘We also are their enemies,’ Daralanteriel said.

  ‘So we did see.’ Pir glanced at Sidro. ‘What say you to this?’

  ‘Do what you want,’ Sidro said in their own language. ‘It’s your gifts they need, not mine, so I don’t see that I have any right to meddle in your decision either way.’

  ‘Very well, then.’ Pir continued in the Lijik tongue. ‘So, your highness, if I agree, what be this reward you speak of?’

  ‘Your own herd of Western Hunters, I was thinking,’ Dar said. ‘A golden stud, two golden brood mares, four other mares, ten geldings of whatever colour coat you’d like.’

  ‘You do know how to tempt a man.’ Pir thought for a long while before he spoke again. ‘The northerners, they would put both me and Sidro to death, did they catch us. They do hate witchery.’

  ‘We honour it here,’ Dallandra put in.

  ‘So we do see.’ Pir nodded at her, then looked away, staring across the tent as if he were seeing a vision among the tent bags hanging upon its wall. ‘Tell me, Wise One. Do you ken the story of the black stone and Laz Moj?’

  ‘How your raven mazrak disappeared, you mean?’ Dalla said.

  ‘Just that.’ He waited until she nodded a yes, then went on. ‘Have you a thought on where he might have gone?’

  ‘I haven’t. It would gladden my heart to talk with you, Sidro, in fact, about just that, since you were there when it happened.’

  ‘So I was.’ Sidro felt cold grief clutch her heart. ‘It were a terrible thing to see.’

  Pir was watching her, his face carefully expressionless, his scent utterly noncommittal. Everyone else watched him. He fell silent again, thinking things through in his patient way. Finally he sighed and nodded to no one in particular.

  ‘Here then be my price,’ Pir said. ‘If you do help us find Laz, then will I help you with the horses.’

  Sidro gasped aloud, then clasped a hand over her mouth to hide her sudden flare of hope. The prince and the banadar both turned to the Wise One.

  ‘At the moment I’m with child,’ Dallandra said. ‘Once the child is born, then I’ll be able to help. In the meantime, others of our people have dweomer, Ebañy—Evan, that is—among them. There’s also a dweomerwoman named Valandario who very much wants the black pyramid found and destroyed. She knows gem dweomer like no other has ever known it. If anyone can track the pyramid down, it will be Val. And we can hope that finding the pyramid means finding Laz. I can’t promise, but I can hope.’

  ‘And I’ll still give you the horses,’ the prince put in. ‘They’ll give you standing among us. You have the men in your band, and we can give them sheep. Sheep and horses—they’re our gold, out here in the grass.’

  Pir considered, looking away, looking down, nodding now and then. At last he got up and bowed to the prince.

  ‘Done, then,’ Pir said. ‘I do take your bargain. For truly, I do think I be able to teach your warhorses what you wish them to learn. There be a need, though, to have a dragon give me his aid.’

  Solemn-eyed, Daralanteriel rose and held up his right hand, palm out. Pir laid his palm against it. ‘You have my word upon it,’ the prince said. ‘The gods of my people have witnessed it.’

  ‘So have mine.’ Pir seemed unsure of what to say, but the prince nodded in satisfaction. ‘So be it.’

  ‘In the morning come with me,’ Dar continued, ‘and you shall pick out the geldings for your new herd. Once we rejoin the rest of my people and my herds, I give you my word of honour that I’ll provide the stud and the brood mares.’

  ‘Well, truly, your highness, never did I think you’d bring breeding stock along to a war.’

  Pir smiled, everyone else smiled, but only Sidro could smell the bitter tang of sorrow in his scent. She supposed that he felt like a traitor, even as she did, despite their knowing that their own people had turned against them long before they chose exile. And what of me? she wondered. He must know that in my heart I’m Laz’s slave. She found herself remembering the night of Vek’s coming of age ritual. Most Gel da’ Thae women would have taken Pir to their bed right then and there, but she had stayed chaste—like a good slave.

  The men celebrated the bargain with a fair amount of mead, but once they were alone again in their tent, Sidro asked Pir outright why he’d chosen that reward.

  ‘Do you want Laz to come back?’ she said.

  ‘I feel torn in half,’ Pir said. ‘I want him to be safe and well. He’s my friend, after all. He hid me when the mob came after me. He took me with him when he went into exile.’

  ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

  ‘But then there’s you,’ Pir said. ‘I’d rather have you all to myself. Once he comes back, well then, I’ll be settling for the oats at the bottom of his manger.’

  ‘Then why—’

  ‘If you never see him again, you’ll be unhappy, won’t you? And then, sooner or later, you’ll leave me anyway. You’ll want something I can’t give you, and you’ll never find it without finding Laz, but you’ll try.’

  It took Sidro a moment to muster words. She could see herself, suddenly, going from man to man, whether Gel da’ Thae or Westfolk, in a desperation that would grow worse as she aged.

  ‘You know women as well as you know horses,’ she said.

  ‘No, but I do know you. I’d rather be your Second Man than not have you at all. It’s a beggar’s bargain, but that’s what I am. A beggar, I mean, living on Prince Dar’s charity.’

  Once again she smelled the bitter tang in his scent.

  ‘You should have been a great man among our people,’ she said. ‘You would have been, too, if it weren’t for Alshandra’s savages.’

  He made a sound that might have been either agreement or scepticism. ‘Doesn’t matter now, does it?’ he said.

  ‘No. I’m afraid it doesn’t matter at all.’

  The army had crawled towards home at its usual pace for an eightnight before the Mountain Folk announced that they could no longer endure travelling with snails. On a last wave of promises and handshakes, they assembled in the dawn light, ready to march off north at their own quick pace. Dallandra made a last farewell to Kov.

  ‘I’m sorry we couldn’t unravel all the runes on your staff,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, please don’t apologize!’ Kov said. ‘I know a fair bit more about them than I did before, and I’m grateful. Garin will be, too, I’m sure.’

  ‘Do give him my regards when you see him. I remember him from the siege of Cengarn, and I think highly of him.’

  ‘And he’s spoken very well of you to me, Wise One. Perhaps we’ll meet again someday? I’ll hope so.’

  ‘We may well do just that. I’d very much like to talk with Enj about Haen Marn.’ Dallandra laid her hands on her stomach. ‘But it will have to wait for a while, till the child’s born and old enough to travel.’

  A scowling Brel Avro strode over to them.

  ‘I know what you’re goi
ng to say,’ Kov said. ‘Everyone’s ready to leave but me.’

  Dallandra watched the dwarven ranks march off, hauling their carts with them, then walked through the encampment until she found Salamander, who was rolling up his bedroll. The servants had already packed away his tent. She knelt down next to him.

  ‘Ebañy, what are we going to do about Neb and Branna?’ Dallandra said. ‘As decent a soul as Tieryn Cadryc is, his dun is not the right place for learning dweomer.’

  ‘That’s true, oh mistress of mighty magicks. Now, in a few more days, the army will split again. You’ll be heading south to Mandra. I can ride east with the Red Wolf and fetch our two apprentices.’

  ‘That’s assuming they’ll be allowed to go.’

  ‘Fear not!’ Salamander smiled at her. ‘I have a ruse, ploy, or stratagem all planned. Since Meranaldar’s taking ship for the Southern Isles, Prince Dar is going to need a scribe. What better scribe than a Roundear, to celebrate the alliance between our two peoples and to cement our enduring friendship and so on and so forth?’

  Dallandra laughed. ‘There are times,’ she said, ‘when your talent for blather comes in decidedly handy. I suppose Branna will simply have to go where her husband goes.’

  ‘Under Deverry law she has no choice. Do you think our prince will speak to Tieryn Cadryc for me? The invitation will look much more official that way.’

  ‘Oh, I think I can persuade him. As they say in Deverry, done then!’

  When the messengers arrived at the Red Wolf dun, they brought with them the news of Tieryn Gwivyr’s death, along with the deaths of so many other good men. Branna was shocked at her own reaction. While Galla wept, mourning her brother, Branna felt very little beyond sympathy for her aunt. It doesn’t seem real, she thought. Da buried in a foreign land, beside a foreign river. As the days passed, and she found herself still unable to weep, she realized at last that death had taken on an entirely new meaning for her. She happened to be sitting on the window ledge in her chamber and remembering how it felt to fly when she thought of her father one last time. I’ll see him again if I need to, she thought, or if he needs to see me. In some When or another.