The Druid Queen

by Douglas Niles

  Feeling a growing sense of urgency, Tristan stalked from the house, taking only the time to latch the door behind him.

  “Newt!” he called. “Let’s go!” Looking toward the barn, the king saw a number of brown shapes lumbering eagerly into a pasture.

  “The hay was too heavy,” Newt explained, “so I let them into the grass instead.”

  “Good idea.” Tristan praised him sincerely. “It doesn’t look like these folks are going to be back anytime soon.” In fact, the hastily abandoned house had sent a real jolt of alarm through him. For the first time, the fact became glaringly apparent—something was terribly amiss in his kingdom. His bemused reaction thus far now struck him as a shameful lapse of rulership.

  Climbing back into the saddle, he cursed the awkwardness caused by his missing hand. Quickly the High King urged Shallot into a trot, and the horse paced like an eager colt along a path through the increasingly open woodland. The hounds coursed nearby, no longer ranging through the woods. They, too, sensed their master’s tension, responding protectively.

  Only Newt remained unaffected. “I don’t smell any fish yet,” he discoursed petulantly. “How much farther do you think it is, anyway?”

  When Tristan continued to ignore his prattle, however, even the flighty serpent began to sense that something had changed. He ceased his noisemaking and raised himself high on the pommel, sniffing the air and peering around like a watchful sentinel.

  Then they reached another farmstead, like the previous settlement except that this one was more than abandoned. It was destroyed. Grim fury took hold of Tristan as Shallot cantered past a smoking ruin that had once been a large house. Dead cattle, many cruelly gutted, lay outside what had once been a barn. That structure, like the house, was now a smoking pile of charred timbers.

  Yet the heat was not so great that it held Tristan or the dogs at bay, so he deduced that the damage had been done the previous day.

  “Go!” the king cried suddenly, kicking Shallot sharply in the ribs. Anything he could do now, he knew, he couldn’t do here.

  The great war-horse sprang into a gallop, swiftly carrying the king back onto the track that had grown into a narrow forest road. The hounds flew along at the horse’s heels, tongues flapping and legs pumping from the effort to keep up. Newt, after bouncing off the pommel several times, took to the air, arrowing along with his wings buzzing frantically a foot or two over Tristan’s head. He was too busy flying even to talk.

  A scent came to Tristan that he well recognized—the salt air of the sea. Then forest opened away from them, breaking into scattered clumps of trees dotting a broad expanse of pasture and grainfields. Before them, they caught sight of a gleaming surface through the trees, and the High King knew that at last they approached the Strait of Oman.

  Then something closer caught his attention as the hounds flew past the horse in a frenzy of barking and snarling. The dogs leaped into a thicket lying directly beside Tristan’s path, and the king immediately heard deeper, more unnatural snarls.

  In another moment, several large shapes sprang from the underbrush, sending the steady war-horse rearing backward in fright. They were already too close for his lance, so the king discarded the long shaft and grimly his sword, facing the onslaught of no less than a dozen trolls.

  * * * * *

  The Princess of Moonshae finally approached the two enclosing peninsulas, preparing to depart Codsbay—admittedly somewhat less gracefully than she had entered. Nevertheless, Thurgol and his firbolgs had finally begun to, if not master, at least comprehend the art of propelling the sleek vessel through the water.

  Also, the giant chieftain had thought of another precaution, one that gave him a somewhat smug sense of satisfaction. Before they sailed from the harbor, he had ordered his crew of giants to paddle to each of the fishing boats floating in the placid bay. They had kicked several planks out of each hull, so by the time they reached the mouth of the bay, every ship of the tiny fleet rested on the bottom.

  With the threat of pursuit thus minimized, Thurgol concentrated on getting his villagemates to propel the longship with some modicum of control. By limiting the oarsmen to a pair on each side, the chieftain found that the giant-kin could row with a reasonable chance of striking the same cadence—at least, a good part of the time.

  Thurgol himself stood in the stern, holding the long rudder pole. At first, he had tried to help by swinging this pole back and forth, but he soon concluded that the ship progressed better if he just let the rudder trail into the water behind them. It was a lot less work that way, too.

  “Row!” he called, his bass voice rumbling across the smooth-watered bay. “Row again!” In this way, he tried to synchronize the pace of the oarsmen. Once these laboring giant-kin had learned to lift the blades out of the water on the return strokes, they actually made pretty good progress.

  As the proud longship emerged from the bay, the haze of the strait parted as if by magic. There before them, breathtaking in its majesty, sweeping above the lowlands with snow-covered peak and jagged, rocky slopes, loomed the Icepeak. Though the mist still cloaked the bulk of Oman’s Isle, the mountain summit itself stood out in clear relief, outlined by the late afternoon sun into patches of shadow and stupendous, rose-tinted light.

  “It seems so close,” Garisa said. The old shaman sat upon the stern platform, resting her weary bones, the Silverhaft Axe across her lap. Now that they had seized a ship and embarked onto the water, the withered hag felt a sense of profound wonder.

  “Won’t get there before dark, though,” Thurgol mused, with a rough approximation of their speed thus far. “Row … row again!” he shouted as a pair of oarsmen clanked their bladed shafts together.

  “But we’ll get there,” the shaman declared, her tone soft with amazement.

  “Didn’t you know that?” Thurgol asked, surprised. After all, this had been her idea.

  “There was a time when I wasn’t so sure,” Garisa admitted. Of course, she well remembered her incantation in Cambro, designed to draw the band out of that dwarven stronghold before disaster struck. At the time, she hadn’t really considered the goal of the Icepeak an attainable one, practically speaking, but now good fortune, perhaps even the will of the gods, had set her misgivings aside.

  “Baatlrap won’t be happy,” the chieftain remarked with a deep chuckle. Then he shook his head in regret. “Still, I only wish he’d stay dead. When we get back, he’ll be trouble.”

  Garisa looked intently at the sturdy firbolg who was the chieftain of her lifelong village. He still seemed a callow youth in some ways, but she had to admit that his leadership had been steady and forthright in bringing them this far. She honestly liked Thurgol—liked him enough that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she didn’t think they’d ever be going home again.

  That feeling had been growing steadily in her mind, solidifying, it seemed, with each night’s sleep, each day’s progress in their march to the north. It wasn’t a feeling that she sought or desired. More to the point, as they had left Myrloch Vale behind, she had been possessed by a sense of melancholy, as if a powerful voice within told her that she looked on the trees and blossoms of that favored place for the last time.

  Now, as the coastline of Gwynneth itself fell away, as she took the first waterborne voyage of her life, Garisa couldn’t suppress this wistful conclusion. Of course, if she was right, that meant that Baatlrap wouldn’t be a problem for them at any time in the foreseeable future, and that was a fact she could welcome with something like genuine enthusiasm.

  “Trolls are no good for us anyway. More trouble than they’re worth,” she observed. “They make the humans too mad. You wait. Soon comes an army to chase them down.”

  “What army?” growled Thurgol, looking at the shore behind them. He had begun to assume that his force was the greatest army in the Moonshaes, but Garisa’s reminder made him remember that was not the case.

  “King’s army, probably. Maybe dwarves. Who knows?” Garisa
said with a shrug.

  “Northmen, too,” observed Thurgol. For the first time, he wondered about the odd chance that had brought the crew of this vessel to the aid of Codscove. Twenty years earlier, the firbolgs had allied themselves with the long-haired raiders of the sea, both groups waging war against the Ffolk. Yet here were the sons of those same men, sailing up to a battle and joining in on the side of their former enemies against their allies of that same campaign!

  “Northmen come after us,” Garisa suggested. “We got their ship. They won’t like it.”

  “Yup,” Thurgol agreed.

  He wondered what kinds of men—what nature of enemy—they would find upon Oman’s Isle. Looking forward, he saw that the sunset now cloaked the Icepeak in a mantle of rich purple light, while the lands below it and the sea around them had all fallen into shadow.

  The moving scene seemed heavy with promise, certainly magical in its potential. The picture lingered before his eyes for almost another hour, until the last rays of sunlight vanished from the world, and the outline of the Icepeak was silhouetted only by the stars.

  * * * * *

  Once more Robyn stood atop the high tower of Corwell, watching the stars break into the clear night sky. She longed to take wing, to fly across the isle and find her husband. His strange quest had unsettled her more with each passing day, until she could hardly stand to think about it.

  Yet she had to content herself with the knowledge that Alicia and Keane rode on the king’s trail, and the hope that they would reach him in time for … in time for what?

  In time to save his life. A flicker of guilt rose within her as she realized that Tristan’s life did loom as the most important thing. Her husband, her daughters, the people, and the cantrevs—these were the true joys of life. All of them, but most strongly her own family, formed for the queen the boundaries of her life, the factors that caused her joy and gave her purpose.

  Yet there was still that guilt. Couldn’t she serve her goddess and serve a family as well? She tried to tell herself that it was so, but then came the memory of that rampage in Myrloch Vale—an attack she hadn’t sensed, that hadn’t caused her the faintest inkling of trouble. Did she serve her goddess poorly? Had her life become too focused on people, not attentive enough to the will of her goddess?

  That was just one more thing she didn’t know. Robyn tried, with minimal success, to tell herself that her ignorance of Tristan and his enemies was the result of distance. She thought of the enigma dwelling in the very castle below her, and realized that it was not her husband who should now be the source of her greatest concern.

  In fact, Deirdre’s health now seemed as vibrant as ever. Though the princess refused any attempts to discuss her condition, she ate regular meals, apparently slept through the nights—at least, Robyn hadn’t heard evidence of the nightmare in more than a week.

  Deirdre, however, had taken to sleeping with her door bolted, so the queen had had little chance to observe her slumber. She could have entered the apartment by invoking the power of the goddess, of course—say, in the body of a mouse or a swallow—but Robyn didn’t feel justified in such intrusive behavior.

  At least, not yet. Still, she found it hard to put her finger on exactly what disturbed her about the dark-haired young woman. Was it Deirdre’s total nonchalance, the ease with which she now treated all aspects of life? She had never been a cheerful or outgoing person, but now she seemed infused with a new serenity, a placid acceptance of daily things that took Robyn quite by surprise.

  At the same time, the High Queen saw something sinister, a bit frightening, in her daughter’s rapid transformation. She recalled as well as her husband the slivers of the enchanted mirror slicing into Deirdre’s skin, then vanishing and leaving no wounds. What would be the effect if such a talisman, fusing itself into the young sorceress, actually had become a part of her?

  It was a question that Robyn was afraid to answer, and so for the last week, she had simply passed the time in the castle, knowing that her daughter avoided her company but not at all sure what to do about it.

  Yet tonight, as the sun had vanished into the west and the multitudinous stars had broken through the mantle of the sky, all her calm emotions, all her serenity, seemed to the queen like a cruel masquerade. She didn’t know what to fear, yet she felt that something was powerfully amiss. Though her unease could perhaps have been caused by fear for her husband or for her eldest daughter, she knew this wasn’t the case. By the time full darkness had claimed the heavens, she knew that she had to descend from the tower and confront Deirdre.

  Never had the spiraling stairway seemed so long as it did to Robyn Kendrick on that unseasonably chill summer night. She pulled her woolen cape more tightly about her, though the stonework of the tower walls effectively blocked any trespassing hint of a breeze. Torches flickered from wall sconces, only a pair of them to light the long descent, so the queen still had to watch her step carefully.

  Reaching the door to the keep, she hesitated, restrained by unnamed fear. Finally she entered the upper hallway, striding purposefully into the royal apartments, across the foyer to the door blocking access to Deirdre’s chamber.

  Here Robyn stopped again, but only for a moment. Drawing a deep breath, she raised her hand and knocked firmly on the solid wooden portal.

  The sharp sound rang eerily through the silence of the keep. It seemed that even the normally bustling kitchen was quiet. She could hear nothing else in the wide halls, the empty and open great room below.

  She waited for several moments, and when she heard nothing within the room, she knocked again, more firmly. This time it seemed that the echo had an empty, vague quality, a lack of resonance. She knocked again, confirming that the sound was somehow improper.

  The next noise in the keep came from outside the walls, but it filled her with unspeakable terror. “Murder!” came the cry. “Murder on the parapet!”

  The queen stepped to a window and looked along the top of the castle wall. Several guards gathered around a motionless shape—a body, she sensed, as if she could feel the warmth of blood pooling around the form. A body that lay outside the door closest to the royal chambers … closest to Dierdre’s room!

  A sense of urgency infused Robyn Kendrick, and she returned to her daughter’s door. The High Queen placed the palms of her hands flat against the door. She cast a simple enchantment, and the wooden panels flared warm to her touch.

  Magic! Something arcane protected the door, or the room within, and this was enough for the High Queen.

  “Arqueous telemite!” she cried, drawing upon the power of her goddess. Her hands pressed against the wood, seizing the essence of the trees that the Earthmother had grown, taking the firm grain and straight lines and warping those shapes in the name of Robyn’s own magic.

  The spell twisted the solid planks that formed the door, warping them so powerfully that they popped free from the iron bands confining them. With rending shrieks, the hinges tore from the walls of stone, leaving the doorway to the room blocked only by a tangle of twisted wreckage.

  Pulling sharply against the planks, Robyn broke the pieces away with two quick tugs. In another moment, she stepped through the entrance, seeing immediately that Deirdre was not in her bed.

  A glimmer of candlelight in the adjoining parlor caught her eye, and Robyn raced through the bedroom, noticing that her footsteps made no noise even as she kicked pieces of the door out of her path. She understood immediately that Deirdre had concealed the room beneath a magical spell of silence, a fact that only increased her sense of alarm.

  She pushed through the hanging curtain dividing the parlor from the sleeping chamber, and for a moment, she saw Deirdre before her. The queen’s younger daughter sat in a trancelike silence, her eyes closed, her hands clasped on her knees before her. Several pairs of candles flamed about the room, flickering from the wind of Robyn’s entry. Four platters sat on the floor before her—shallow bowls of dark, thick liquid. The pungent smell of fresh blo
od assaulted the High Queen’s nostrils.

  Still, unnaturally, there was no sound. Robyn opened her mouth, demanding Deirdre’s attention, but no words emerged—and the princess remained inert and entranced.

  Then the candles flared brightly, the tiny flames surging upward to illuminate the room with a brightness like sunlight. Robyn felt as though she were mired in mud, watching her daughter’s face, cold and icily aloof, etched in the detail of the clear white light.

  “No!” screamed the queen, the spell of silence swallowing the sound but not the icy fear that gripped her heart.

  In the next instant, Deirdre disappeared.

  * * * * *

  The princess flew, lending herself to the wings of magic and the power of unknown gods. Plunging through the space of ether, she traveled with dizzying speed through a whirl of colors and chaotic noise. She rode the void like the wild wind, feeling the blessings of a multitude of gods, growing steadily in might and power … and ambition.

  The pulse of godhood thundered in her veins, carried through the artifact of Talos, the shards of mirror that had become part of her body and made of her so much more than she had been.

  She felt the hand of a storming god clasping her own, and then those daggers of glass within her flared into light Deirdre glowed like a sky speckled with stars, her flesh the cold night and the gleaming points of light coming from the immortal artifact that had torn into her flesh.

  But not rending her—no, not at all. There had been no wound, no pain, when those fragments had pierced her. Now, for the first time, she understood that it had not been an assault against her.

  In fact, it was the mirror of Talos that had made her whole.

  11

  Trollcleaver

  Tristan’s sword flashed in his hand the instant he saw the springing trolls. Even so, he barely raised the blade as the first of the beasts reached wicked talons toward his leg. Chopping frantically, he hacked at the monster’s wrists, sending it scuttling backward with a shriek of pain.