Ian, she thought. Ian must have come. Mages cannot see mages, in fire, water, stone, unless they consent to be seen. Goddess of Earth, let it be that I can’t see now because Ian has come.
Ian was already a good enough healer that it might be just possible for him to save a man’s life. To stop bleeding, anyway; to keep the lungs drawing air. To keep the cold of shock from reaching the heart. John would have forbidden him to follow, but knowing Ian there was a good chance that he had.
She closed her eyes, trying to breathe, trying to abate the shaking that racked her flesh. God of the Earth, help him …
Voices came to her through the window behind her head. Soldiers in the courtyard. “By the gods, I thought he had us last night.” “Not a chance.” A southerner’s voice, one of the surviving dozen of the twenty-five who’d ridden with her from the Skepping Hills. “He’s just a robber, when all’s said.”
But he wasn’t. Or more properly, someone in his band was more than just a robber’s follower. And it was abundantly clear that John’s information concerning the band’s numbers—and capabilities—was far more accurate than Rocklys’. Well, the southerners would learn—if they lived long enough.
Smoke from breakfast fires stung Jenny’s nostrils, reminding her of her hunger. They had been at Palmorgin, the largest of the new fortified manors in the deeps of the Wyrwoods, when Balgodorus turned and attacked. Fortunately there had been surplus grain in the storerooms. That probably had a good deal to do with the bandit’s choice of target, though Jenny wasn’t sure. They’d have to have known she was following them, and their goal, it was clear, was to eliminate her; to knock magic from John’s—and Rocklys’—armory of resources. Then, too, the fine southern swordblades, arrowheads, and spears stored at Palmorgin made it a target. Early summer—before the harvest was in—was a hard time for bandits as for everyone else. The families from the outlying farms had managed to bring in the remnants of last year’s oats and barley, and a handful had rescued pigs, cows, and chickens, but Palmorgin’s lord Pellanor had nevertheless confiscated the lot and put everything under armed guard. After a week of siege, and no help in sight, Jenny was glad the elderly baron had taken this precaution.
Things were bad enough without starvation.
With her mind she walked from the storeroom where she slept down the corridor, past the guard and out onto the parapet that ran around the whole of the manor’s outer wall. Testing and listening, smelling at every mark of ward and guard she had put on the place, to see if counterspells had probed them in her few hours of sleep since last night’s attack. She’d have to make the walk in person as soon as she got up, but this probing had on a dozen occasions alerted her to trouble spots that she might not have reached for an hour or more: fires starting in the stables or under the kitchen roof, spells of sleep or inattention muttering to the guards.
Balgodorus’ witch was good.
And under her mental probes, Jenny heard other voices. Women in the kitchen, chatting of commonplaces or gossiping of those not present—“She’s been carrying on with Eamon like a common whore …” “Well, what do you suppose her mother was? And Eamon’s wife with child!” None of them dared to speak of what filled all their minds: What if Balgodorus breaks the gate?
There were women in the eastern villages, women who had been through Balgodorus’ raids, who still wore masks and would do so until they died. Those were the ones who had been deemed not pretty enough or strong enough to be sold as slaves in the far southeast.
Somewhere a child laughed, and a small girl patiently explained to a playmate the only correct rules for Hide-the-Bacon. Many bandit troops killed children as a matter of course: too expensive to feed. Balgodorus’ was one of these.
Ian …
Jenny forced herself to concentrate.
Walls, kitchen, barracks. “Three years sweating it out in this godsforsaken wilderness, build this wall and clear that field and drink that cow-piss they call wine hereabouts.” A man’s voice, almost certainly one of the conscripts sent north from the King’s lands in Greenhythe or Belmarie. “And for what? If the folk here had the sense Sister Illis gave to goats they’d have moved out a hundred years ago …”
Jenny sighed. Sister Illis was the southern name they gave to the Many-Colored Goddess. As for the sentiment, it was a common one among serfs who’d been uprooted from their villages and forcibly relocated. There were things that ending happily ever after did not address, and one of them was how everything got paid for.
“One of them’s got to have gotten through.” Very clearly she heard the Baron Pellanor’s scratchy voice. At the same time she saw him in her mind, a tall, stringy, graying man of about her own age wearing serviceable back and breast-plate armor and a cloak of red wool, the color of the House of Uwanë.
So Grand John Alyn must have been, she thought, once upon a long-ago time. Another king had sent that ten-times removed ancestor north to govern and protect those who dwelled between the Gray Mountains and the bitter river Eld. A prosperous land it had been in those days. Caerdinn had told her of a land of rich barley and oats, of sheep and shaggy-coated cattle; a land of endlessly argumentative scholars, of strange heresies that sprang up among the silver miners in the Gray Mountains and the Skepping Hills; of ingenious weavers and bards and workers in silver and steel. That ancient king had told Grand John Alyn, Hold the land, defend the law, protect my people with your life.
And King Uriens—or rather Prince Gareth, who ruled in his father’s mental absence—had given charge of these lands in the southeastern Wyrwoods to Pellanor, a minor cadet of the Lords of Grampyn, after twenty-seven years’ service in arms.
“I don’t know, m’lord,” said a man-at-arms. “The bandits got men all through the forest. They got Kannid and Borin …”
Jenny saw Pellanor lift a hand and turn his face away. Borin had been sent for help four days ago. Yesterday his burned and emasculated body had been dumped in the open ground sixty feet from the gates. It was a difficult shot with an arrow, but after ten or twelve tries one of the men-at-arms had finally been able to kill him.
“Can’t that witch-lady get a word to the Commander at Corflyn?” another soldier asked the baron. “With a talking bird, like in the stories?”
The Baron sighed. “Well, Ront, I’m sure if Mistress Jenny could do such a thing she would have, days ago. Wizards can get word to one another, but as far as I know there aren’t any other wizards at Corflyn now.”
There aren’t any other wizards, Jenny thought wearily, in the whole of the Winterlands. Nor have there been for many years. Only herself. And Ian, not yet sufficiently versed in power to speak through crystal or fire.
And this woman in Balgodorus’ band.
It was time to get up.
She opened her eyes. The fire had burned down low in the brazier, a jewel-box huddle of ember and coal. The heat seemed suddenly unbearable—she whispered the rush of it aside, dissolved with a Word that mimicked the echoes of youth.
John, she thought, staring again into the blaze’s blue-glowing core. John.
The ruined walls of Cair Dhû formed themselves once more before her, sharp and tiny as the reflections in a diamond. Fumes of smoldering heather veiled her sight. John lay close to the broken mess of acid-scorched wall. The warhorse Battle-hammer, bleeding from flanks and sides, stood over him, head down, favoring his right hind leg when he moved.
No dragon remained. Nor was there any sign of what had happened to it, neither bones nor tracks of dragging. But John wounded it, she thought, baffled. Wounded it unto death.
Somehow it had prevailed. It had won.
Then she saw Battlehammer raise his head, and from smoke and ruin Sergeant Muffle appeared, glancing warily about him, ax at his belt and his big hammer in hand, his own mount and a packhorse led by the reins.
Four years ago Cair Corflyn had been only a circle of broken walls, a stronghold for whatever bandit troop was powerful enough to hold it. In the twenty-two years he’d
been Thane of the Winterlands, John Aversin had led three attacks against it, and it was there that his father had been killed.
The inhabitants of the current gaggle of thatch-roofed taverns, bordellos, shops, and shacks that circled Corflyn’s new gates didn’t take much notice of John and Muffle. Having left Battlehammer at Alyn Hold to recuperate (“You’re the one who should be recuperating!” Muffle had scolded), he was mounted on his second-string warhorse, Jughead, a skillful animal in battle or ambush but hairy-footed, bony as a withy fence, and of a color unfashionable in the ballads. John’s scuffed and mended gear, iron-plated here and there and with jangling bits of chain-mail protecting his joints, was stained and old, and the plaids over it frayed. And Sergeant Muffle looked exactly what he was: a fat backcountry blacksmith.
The guards at the gate recognized them, though. “You did it, didn’t you?” asked a hard-faced boy of not too many more than Ian’s years. John had heard they recruited them as young as sixteen off the docks and taverns of Claekith, and drunk out of the slums. “Killed the dragon that cut up the Beck post so bad? Killed it by yourself? They say you did.”
“They’re lyin’, though.” John slid painfully from Jughead’s back and clung for a moment to the saddle-bow until the grayness retreated from his vision. “God knows where the thing is now.”
Commander Rocklys was waiting for him; he was shown directly in.
“Thunder of Heaven, man, you shouldn’t even be on your feet!“She crossed from the window and caught his arm in her heavy grip, to get him to a chair. ”They say you slew the dragon of Cair Dhû …”
“So everybody’s tellin’ me.” He sank into the carved seat, annoyed with the way his legs shook and how his ribs stabbed him under the plaster dressing every time he so much as turned his head. His breath was shallow from the pain. “But it’s a filthy lie. I don’t know where the beast is, nor if it’ll be back.”
A middle-aged chamberlain brought them watered southern wine in painted cups. With her back to the window that overlooked the camp parade ground it was hard to read Rocklys’ expression, but when John was finished she said, “A wizard. Damn. Another wizard. A man … You’re sure?”
“No,” said John. “No, I’m not sure. I was far gone, and the very earth around me smoking, and some of what I saw I know wasn’t real. Or if it was, then me dad sure fooled the lot of us at his funeral.” Rocklys frowned. Like his sons, she disapproved on principle of frivolity under duress. “But Muffle tells me he saw no dragon when he reached the place an hour later and found me out colder than a sailor after a spree.”
“And your son?”
John’s jaw tightened. “Well,” he said, and said nothing more. The Commander shoved away from the wall with her shoulders and went to a cupboard: She took out a silver flask and poured a quantity of brandy into his empty wine cup. John drank and looked out past her for a time, at two soldiers in the blue cloaks of auxiliaries arguing in the parade ground. Father Anmos and the cult flute player emerged from the shrine of the Lord of War, heads shrouded in the all-covering crimson hoods designed to blot out any sight or sound detrimental to the god’s worship. Raised in the heresy of the Old God, John wondered who the god of dragons would be, and if he prayed for the return of his son whether it would do any good. He felt as if barbed iron was lodged somewhere inside him.
“Muffle doesn’t know. I don’t know. Ian …”
He took a deep breath and raised his head again to meet her eyes. “Adric—me other boy, you know—tells me Ian set off just after midnight for Jenny’s house to get death-spells to lay on the dragon; somethin’ I’d forbade him to do.” He forced himself to sound matter-of-fact. ”By the tracks next mornin’—or so says Jen’s second cousin Gniffy, and he’s a hunter—there’d been someone at the house, a man in new boots that looked like city work, who went off with Ian. Gniffy lost the tracks over the moors, but it’s pretty clear where they ended up.”
His jaw tightened, and he looked down into the cup, trying not to remember the look in Ian’s eyes.
“Ian’s powers aren’t great. At least that’s what Jen tells me. For me, anybody who can light a candle by just lookin’ at the wick is far and away a marvel, and I wish I could do it. She says he’ll never be one of the great ones, never one of those that can scry the wind or shift his shape or call down the magic of the stars. Which is no reason, she says, why he can’t be a truly fine middlin’-strong wizard.”
“Of course not.” Rocklys set down the flask. “And by the Twelve, the world has more use for a well-trained and competent mediocrity than for half a cohort of brilliant fools. Which is why,” she added gently, “I wish you had left your boy here.”
“Well, be that as it may,” sighed John. “Even if he’d been here, Ian would have stolen a horse and run away home at first word of the dragon, so it would all have come out the same.” He ran his fingers through his hair. The red ribbon was still braided in it, faded and stained with blood. “But who this is, or if he’s in league with Balgodorus as well … I take it you’ve no word from Jen?”
The Commander shook her head. Her eyes were troubled, resting on John’s face. He must, he thought, look worse than he supposed.
“I got one message two weeks ago: Balgodorus seemed to be heading for the mountains. He has a stronghold there. I’ve sent search parties in that direction but they’ve found nothing, and frankly, in the Wyrwoods, unless you know what you’re looking for you’re not going to find it. You know those woods. Thickets that have been growing in on themselves since before the founding of the Realm; ranges of hills we’ve never heard of, swallowed in trees. They may be untrained scum, but they know the land, and they’re rebellious, tricky, stopping at nothing …”
Her face suddenly set, grim anger in her eyes. “And some of the southern lords are as bad, or nearly so. Barons, they call themselves, or nobles—wolves tearing at the fabric of the Realm for their own purposes. Well”—she shook her head—“at least the likes of Balgodorus don’t pretend allegiance and then make deals behind the Regent’s back.”
“Two weeks.” John gazed into the dab of amber fluid at the bottom of his goblet. Two days’ ride from Alyn, with Muffle scolding all the way. Ian had been gone for five days.
Old Caerdinn returned to his mind, as he had on and off since the strange mage’s appearance. A vile old man, John remembered, dirty and obsessed. He had been John’s tutor as well, and a quarter of the books at Alyn Hold had been dug from ruins by that muttering, bearded old bundle of rags, or bargained from any who had even the blackest scraps of paper to sell. He—and John’s mother—were the only other wizards John had ever heard of north of the Wildspae, and they had hated one another cordially.
Had Caerdinn had other pupils? Pupils whose wizardry was stronger than Jenny’s, maybe even stronger than Jenny’s human magic alloyed with the alien powers of dragons? This woman of Balgodorus’, or the person who had taught her. The man with the moonstone in his staff?
Somehow he couldn’t see the gentleman in the purple coat taking instruction from a toothless dribbling old beggar, much less meekly letting Caerdinn beat him, as Jenny had done.
But there were other Lines of magic. Other provenances of teaching handed down in the south, in Belmarie or the Seven Isles. And as Rocklys had said, though their magic was very different from human magic, there were wizards also among the gnomes.
He sighed again and raised his head, to meet Rocklys’ worried gaze. “I have to believe that I saw at least some of what I think I saw,” he said simply. “I was flat on my back for three days after the fight, and it rained during that time. Gniffy had a look round but he said the tracks were so torn up, he couldn’t be sure of anything. But Centhwevir’s gone. And Ian’s gone.”
“Of this Centhwevir I’ve heard nothing.” Rocklys walked to the niche in the wall, where in former centuries commandants had put the closed shrines of the gods. She had a shrine there to the Lord of War, and another to the Lord of Law, but where in the south h
e’d seen little charred basins of incense, and the stains of proffered wine and blood, was only clean-scrubbed marble. The rest of the niche held books, and his eye ran over the titles: Tenantius’ Theory of Laws, Gurgustus’ Essays, The Liever Regulae, and Caecilius’ The Righteous Monarch. On the table before these books was a strongbox of silver pieces, and beside it a small casket containing half a handful of gems. He remembered the complaints that had come to him from the mayors of Far West Riding and Great Toby, how the King’s commissioners demanded more to pay for the garrison than even the greediest thane ever had.
“Of this new wizard …” She shook her head. “Can Jenny have been mistaken? Or might the man you saw have been some kind of … of illusion, as the dragon was?”
“And be really this woman?” John shook his head. “But why? Why go to the trouble to fool me?”
“In any case,” said the Commander, “all of this convinces me—well, I was convinced before—that we must establish this school I’ve spoken of, this academy of wizards, here in Corflyn. I hope now that when she returns, Jenny will agree to come here and teach others. We can’t go on like this.”
“No.”
Save a dragon, slave a dragon… The old granny-rhyme drifted back through his mind, and the bodies he’d found the last time Balgodorus had raided a village.
And as he heard the words again he saw the wizard in his violet coat and embroidered cap mounting Centhwevir’s back, holding out his hand to Ian.
His ribs ached where the boy’s boot toe had driven in.
The Commander turned from the neglected shrines, the books of the Legalist scholars, very real distress on her face. “It isn’t just bandit mages who are the danger. You know that! Look at the gnomes, operating what amount to independent kingdoms at the very heart of the King’s Realm! Buying slaves, too, clean against the King’s Law, no matter what they swear and claim! They have wizards among them, and who knows what or who they teach. Look at lords like the Master of Halnath, and the Prince of Greenhythe, and the merchant princes of the Seven Isles! Look at Tinán of Imperteng, claiming that his ancient title to the lands at the base of the mountains is equal in rank to that of the King himself!”
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