“Almost ready, Papa.” Magnus picked up a cloak and held it out.
Elidor stepped over; Magnus dropped it over his shoulders.
“God save Your Majesty.” Rod bowed. “I take it Magnus has informed you of our invitation?”
“Aye, and with right good heart do I accept! But why art thou willing to take me from mine uncle’s halls?”
“Because my sons have taken a liking to you.” You couldn’t exactly tell a King that he triggered every paternal response you had. “If you’re ready, we shouldn’t linger.”
“Ready I am!.” The King clapped a hat on and headed for the door. Rod bowed him through, and waited as Magnus stepped through behind him.
He found Elidor staring at the snoring guard. “Magnus had told me of it,” the boy whispered, “but I scarce could credit it.”
“You’re moving in magic circles.” Rod gave him a firm nudge on the shoulder. “And if you don’t keep moving, we’ll wind up back where we started.”
Elidor paced on forward, pausing for a bow to answer Gwen and Cordelia’s curtseys. Rod took the opportunity to dodge on ahead.
Magnus stepped up beside him, as pilot, and they padded silently through dim, torch-lit halls. Whenever Magnus stopped and nodded to Cordelia, she skipped on ahead, singing, to engage whatever unsuspecting person happened to be walking the halls at this late hour, in conversation, until Magnus could knock them out. After the fifth guardsman, Rod noticed the man was twitching in his sleep. “Getting tired, son?”
Magnus nodded.
So did Rod. “I’ll take over for a while.”
Fortunately, there weren’t too many more; the old-fashioned method is a little risky.
Elidor just followed along, his eyes getting wider and wider till they seemed to take up half his face.
Finally they crossed the outer bailey—it was really the only one; the castle had grown till it absorbed the inner. Rod’s commando tactics couldn’t do much about the sentries on the wall, so Magnus padded along, alert and ready; but the sentries were watching the outside, so they came to the main gatehouse without incident.
There they stopped, and Gwen gathered them into a huddle. “Here’s a pretty problem,” she whispered. “A sentry stands on each tower, a porter by the winch, and six guardsmen in the wardroom—and thou art wearied, my son.”
Magnus was looking a little frayed around the edges. “I can still answer for two, Mama, mayhap three.”
“That leaves six.” Rod frowned. “What’re they armed with, Gwen?”
Gwen gazed off into space for a moment. “All bear pikes, save the Captain; he wears a sword.”
“Could you and Cordelia bop them with their own pike-butts?”
“Aye, but they wear their helmets.”
“So.” Rod rubbed his chin. “The problem is, getting them to take off their helmets.”
“Why, that can I do!” Elidor declared, and marched off towards the guardroom before anyone could stop him.
Rod looked up after him, startled, glanced back at Gwen, then turned and sprinted after Elidor. What was the kid trying to do, blow the whole escape?
But the boy moved fast, and he was hammering on the door before Rod could catch him. It swung open, and Rod ducked into the nearest shadow and froze. He could see through the open door, though, as Elidor marched in.
The guardsmen scrambled to their feet. “Majesty!” The Captain inclined his head. “What dost thou abroad so late o’ night?”
Elidor frowned. “I am thy King! Art thou so ill-bred as not to know the proper form of greeting? Uncover, knaves, and bow!”
Rod held his breath.
The soldiers glanced at the Captain, whose eyes were locked with Elidor’s. But the boy-King held his chin high, glance not wavering an inch. Finally, the Captain nodded.
The guardsmen slowly removed their helmets and bowed.
Their pikes leaped to life, slamming down on the backs of their heads with the flats of their blades. They slumped to the floor with a clatter.
All except the Captain; he didn’t have a pike near. He snapped upright, terror filling his face as he stared at his men.
Then the terror turned to rage.
Rod leaped forward.
“Why, what sorcery is this?” the Captain snarled, coming for Elidor and drawing his sword.
The boy stepped back, paling—and Rod shot through the door and slammed into the Captain. He went down with a clatter and a “ whuff,” the wind knocked out of him; but his sword writhed around, the point dancing in Rod’s face. Rod yanked the sword to one side, rolling the man half-over, and dived in behind him, arm snaking around the Captain’s throat. He caught the larynx in his elbow, and squeezed. The Captain kicked and struggled, but Rod had a knee in his back, so all he could do was thrash about.
But Elidor was loose. He darted over to pluck the Captain’s helmet, yanked his dagger out, and clubbed down with all his strength, just the way he’d seen Rod do. The Captain heaved, and relaxed with a sigh.
Rod let go and scrambled out. “Well done, Your Majesty! You’ve got the makings of a King, all right.”
“There’s more to that than battle,” the boy said, frowning.
“Yes, such as wisdom, and knowledge. But a lot of it’s the ability to think fast, and the willingness to act, and you’ve got those. And style and courage—and you’ve just demonstrated those, too.” Rod clapped him on the shoulder, and the boy seemed to visibly expand. “Come on, Your Majesty. I wouldn’t say the rest of our party is dying to find out what happened, but they’ll be vastly reassured to actually see us intact.” He ushered the boy out the door.
“Six down and three to go,” he whispered as they came up to Gwen and the children in the alcove.
Gwen nodded. “ ‘Twas well thou followed Elidor. Well, if thou wilt hide thee near the porter, I think I can distract him for thee.”
Rod set his palms against his buttocks and leaned back, stretching. “Okay, but give me a minute. I’m beginning to feel it, too.”
A few minutes later, he waited just outside the doorway leading to the giant windlass that controlled the drawbridge. The porter paced the floor inside, humming to himself—trying to stay awake, probably.
Suddenly the rope that held the windlass slipped loose, and the ratchet chattered as the great drum began to turn.
The porter shouted and leaped for the crank-handle.
Rod leaped for the porter, plucked off his helmet, and clubbed him.
A few minutes later, he rejoined Gwen. “All secure. I take it I should run back there and drop the bridge.”
“Aye, and raise the portcullis. Yet attend a moment.” She turned to Magnus. “Son?”
Magnus was gazing off into space. A few seconds later, he relaxed and turned to her. “The sentries on the towers are asleep.”
Gwen nodded at Rod.
He sighed, and trudged back to the windlass. Being a telepath must certainly save a lot of hiking.
The portcullis rose, the drawbridge fell, and Rod almost did, too. He straightened up, aching in every joint; it was getting to be a long day.
“My lord?” Gwen’s head poked around the doorway. “Wilt thou join us?”
“Coming,” he grumbled, and shuffled toward the doorway. How could she still look so fresh and cheery?
They went across the drawbridge, as fast as Geoffrey and Rod could manage. Fifty feet from the castle, Gwen stopped the party, and shooed them into the shadow of a big rock. She ducked her head around it, staring back at the castle. Curious, Rod peeked around the other side. He saw the drawbridge slowly rise.
Startled, he darted a glance at Gwen. A wrinkle showed between her eyebrows; her lower lip was caught between her teeth. She was showing the strain—and so she should! That slab of wood had to weigh half a ton!
Cordelia was watching alertly, glancing from Gwen to the drawbridge and back. Finally, Gwen nodded, and Cordelia’s face screwed up tight for a second. Then Gwen relaxed with a sigh. “Well done; thou
hast indeed secured the winch. Now slip the ratchet on the portcullis, sweeting—yet not altogether; thou dost not wish it to come a-crashing down.”
Cordelia frowned darkly for a few minutes, staring at the castle; then Rod heard a muted, deep-toned clang. Cordelia looked up at her mother, and nodded. “ ‘Tis down.”
“Well done.” Gwen patted Cordelia’s shoulder, and the little girl beamed. Mama turned to Magnus. “Now wake the sentries, that they may think they’ve only dozed, and that nothing is amiss.”
Magnus gazed off into space a moment—it was a long moment, for he was tiring—then looked up at Gwen and nodded.
“Well enough.” Gwen nodded, satisfied. “ ‘Twill be at least an hour ere the others awake, and we’ll be long gone; let them search.” She turned to Rod. “Yet we had best lose no time.”
“Agreed,” Rod affirmed. “Make sure the sentries are looking the other way for a few minutes, will you? Otherwise, they can’t help seeing us on this slope.”
“Hmf.” Gwen frowned. “I had forgot that. Well…” She held the frown for a few minutes, then nodded. “They think they hear voices calling, towards the north. Lose no time.”
Rod nodded, and darted out across the slope, swinging Geoffrey up to his shoulders. The family followed. A hundred yards farther on and fifty feet lower, they stopped, panting, in the shade of a huge oak tree, sentinel for a crop of woodland.
“Whither away?” Gwen demanded.
Rod caught his breath and pointed southwest. “That way, toward the grove where we came in. After all that talk about the High Warlock’s holdout in the northeast, they’ll expect us to head for him. They won’t think we’ve got any reason for going back.”
“Have we?”
Rod shrugged. “Not that I know of—except that I don’t like travelling in totally unfamiliar territory at night, especially when I’m on the run.”
Gwen nodded. “ ‘Tis as wise a course as aught else. Follow Father, children.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Father Al clung to the broomstick for dear life, knuckles white and forearms aching with the strain. At first, flight on so slender a craft had been a heady, delightful thing, almost like flying under his own power; but the sun had risen, and he’d happened to glance down. The world whizzed by below, treetops reaching up to snag at his robe. His stomach had turned over, then done its best to shinny up his backbone to safety. Since then, the ride had been a qualified nightmare. He just hoped the tears in his eyes were due only to the wind.
“Yon, ”the girl called back to him, “ahead, and below!”
He craned his neck to see over her shoulder. About a hundred meters ahead, a large cottage nestled within a grove, a half-timbered house with a thatched roof, and two outbuildings behind it. Then the ground was rushing up at them, and Father Al clung to the broomstick as he clung to his hope of Heaven, commanding his body to relax. His body didn’t listen. The world rolled upward past them, then suddenly rolled back down. He clamped his jaw and swallowed, hard, just barely managing to keep his stomach from using his tongue as a springboard.
Then, incredibly, they had stopped, and solid earth jarred upward against his soles.
“We are come.” The witch-girl smiled back at him over her shoulder. Then her brows knit in concern. “Art thou well?”
“Oh, most excellent! Or I will be, soon.” Father Al swung his leg over the broomstick and tottered up to her. “A singular experience, maiden, and one I’ll value till the end of my days! I thank thee greatly!” He turned, looking about him for a change of subject. “Now. Where shall I find the High Warlock?”
“Oh, within.” The girl pointed at the cottage. “Or if he is not, surely his wife will know when he may return. Shall I make thee acquainted with them?”
“Dost thou know them, then?” Father Al asked in surprise.
“Indeed; most all the witchfolk do.” She dismounted, picked up her broomstick, and led him toward the house. “They are gentle souls, and most modest; one would scarcely think that they were numbered ‘mongst the Powers of the land.” They were almost to the door, which was flanked by two flowering bushes. “Their bairns, though, are somewhat mischiev…”
“Hold!” one of the bushes barked. “Who seeks to pass? ”
Father Al swung round to the bush in astonishment. Then, remembering what the girl had been saying, he realized one of the children was probably hiding inside the leaves, playing a prank. “Good morn,” he said, bowing. “I am Father Aloysius Uwell, come hither to call upon the High Warlock and his family.”
“Come hither, then, that I may best examine thee,” the voice demanded. Rather deep voice, for a child; but the witch-girl was giggling behind him, so Father Al abided by his earlier guess—one of the children. And important to play along with the prank, therefore—nothing endears one to a parent like being cordial to the child. He sighed, and stepped closer to the bush.
“Why dost thou linger?” the voice barked. “Come hither to me now, I say!”
It was coming from behind him.
Father Al turned about, reassessing the situation—there were at least two children involved. “Why, so I do—if thou wilt hold thy place.”
The girl giggled again.
“Am I to blame if thine eyes art so beclouded that thou mistakest quite my place of biding?” The voice was coming out of a bush a little to Father Al’s left, farther from the house. “Come now, I say!”
Father Al sighed, and stepped toward the bush.
“Nay, here!” the voice cried from another bush, farther off to his left. “Besotted shave-pate, canst thou not tell my bearing?”
“I would, if I could see thee,” Father Al muttered, and ambled patiently toward the new bush. Giggling, the girl moved with him.
“Nay, hither!” the voice commanded again, from yet another bush, off to his right and farther from the house. “Wilt thou come, I say!”
About then, Father Al began to get suspicious. The voice was plainly leading them away from the house, and he began to think this was no childish prank, but the work of some guardian who didn’t trust strangers. “Nay, I’ll go no farther! I’ve come where thou hast said, not once, but several times! If thou dost wish that I should move another step, now show thyself, that I may see which way to step!”
“As thou wilt have it,” the voice grumbled; and, suddenly, the form of a broad and portly man rose up and came around the bush. Its head was shaven in the tonsure, and it wore a brown monk’s robe with a small yellow-handled screwdriver in the breast pocket.
Father Al stared.
The girl burst into a peal of laughter.
“Dost thou not know me, fellow?” the monk demanded. “Wilt thou not kneel to the Abbot of thine own Order?”
“Nay, that will I not,” Father Al muttered. Father Cotterson had said the Abbot was on his way back to the monastery, half a kingdom away—what would he be doing here, near a High Warlock’s house, at that? Father Al’s suspicions deepened, especially since he recognized an element out of folklore. So he began to whistle loudly, untied his rope belt, and took off his cassock. The witch-girl gasped and averted her eyes; then she looked back at him, staring.
“Friar!” the Abbot cried, scandalized. “Dost thou disrobe before a woman?!! ?… And what manner of garb is it thou wearest beneath?”
“Why, this?” Father Al sang, improvising a Gregorian chant. “ ‘Tis nought but the coverall all Cathodeans wear, which warms me in winter, and never doth tear.” He went back to whistling, turning his cassock inside-out.
The Abbot’s voice took on a definite tone of menace. “What dost thou mean by this turning of thy coat? Dost thou seek to signify that thou’It side with the King against me?”
Interesting; Father Al hadn’t known the old Church-State conflict was cropping up here. “Why, nay. It means only that…” (he put the monk’s robe on again, wrong side out, and wrapped it about him) “…that I wish to see things as they truly are.”
And before his eyes,
the form of the abbot wavered, thinned, and faded, leaving only a stocky, two-foot-high man with a pug-nosed, berry-brown face, large eyes, brown jerkin, green hose, green cap with a red feather, and a smoldering expression. “Who ha’ told thee, priest?” he growled. His gaze shifted to the witch-girl. “Not thou, surely! The witch-folk ever were my friends!”
The girl shook her head, opening her lips to answer, but Father Al forestalled her. “Nay, hobgoblin. ‘Tis books have taught me, that to dispel glamour, one hath but to whistle or sing, and turn thy coat.”
“Thou’rt remarkably schooled in elfin ways, for one who follows the Crucified one,” the elf said, with grudging respect. “Indeed, I thought that thee and thy fellows scarce did acknowledge our existence!”
“Nor did I.” In fact, Father Al felt rather dizzy—in spite of what Yorick had told him; he was frantically trying to reevaluate all his fundamental assumptions. “Yet did tales of thee and thy kind all fascinate me, so that I strove to learn all that I could, of worlds other than the one I knew.”
“ ‘Worlds?’ ” The elf’s pointed ears pricked up. “Strange turn of phrase; what priest would think that any world existed, but this one about us?”
Somehow, Father Al was sure he’d made a slip. “In Philosophic’s far realms…”
“There is not one word said of things like me, that do defy all reason,” the elf snapped. “Tell me, priest—what is a star?”
“Why, a great, hot ball of gas, that doth…” Father Al caught himself. “Uh, dost thou see, there is writing of seven spheres of crystal that surround the Earth…”
“ ‘Earth?’ Strange term, when thou most assuredly dost mean ‘world.’ Nay, thou didst speak thy true thought at the first, surprised to hear such a question from one like me—and, I doubt not, thou couldst tell me also of other worlds, that do swing about the stars, and heavenly cars that sail between them. Is it not so? I charge thee, priest, to answer truly, by thy cloth—dost thou not believe a lie to be a sin? ”
“Why, so I do,” Father Al admitted, “and therefore must I needs acknowledge the truth whereof thou speakest; I could indeed tell thee of such wonders. But…”
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