Stormqueen!

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “I said upon the day of our wedding,” she said, looking up from the instrument, “that I hoped we might live in peace and make songs, not war. Alas for that hope! But even in the shadow of war, my dearest, there can still be songs for us.”

  He took the thin fingers in his hands and kissed them.

  “So far, at least, the gods have been good to us,” he said.

  “It is so still, Allart! They might have all gone away in the night, it is so quiet below!”

  “I would that I knew what Damon-Rafael was doing,” Allart said, roused to new unquiet. “I do not think he will be content to sit there at the bottom of the hill, without throwing some new weapon into the gap.”

  “It would be easy for you to find out,” she hazarded, but Allart shook his head.

  “I will not use laran in this war unless I am forced to do so. Only to defend us from certain catastrophe. Damon-Rafael shall not make of me the excuse to bring his frightful kind of war to this country.”

  About midnight the sky suddenly began to clear, the fog first thinning, then blowing away in little wisps and ragged shreds. Overhead three of the four moons floated, brilliant and serene. Violet Liriel was near the zenith, full and brilliant. Blue Kyrrdis and green Idriel hung near the western edge of the mountains. Cassandra was sleeping, had been sleeping for hours, but Allart, seized by strange unease, slid quietly from bed and into his clothes. Hurrying down the hallway, he saw Dorilys in her long white chamber-robe, her hair hanging loose down her back. She was barefoot, her snub-nosed face a pale oval in the dimness.

  “Dorilys? What is Margali thinking of to let you wander like this in your night-garb at this hour?”

  “I could not sleep, Dom Allart, and I was uneasy,” the girl said. “I am going down to join Donal near the outwall. I suddenly woke and felt that he was in danger.”

  “If he is truly in danger, chiya, the last place he would want you is beside him.”

  “He is my husband,” the child said adamantly, raising her face to Allart. “My place is at his side, sir.”

  Paralyzed by the strength of her obsession, Allart could do nothing. After all, this was the only thing she could share with Donal. Since Allart himself had been reunited with Cassandra, he had been highly sensitized to loneliness. It struck him at that moment that Dorilys was almost wholly alone. She had left the society of children irrevocably. Yet among the adults she was still treated as a child. He did not protest, but began to move toward the outer stairs, hearing her behind him. After a moment he felt her small dry hand, a child’s hand and warm like a little animal’s paw, slide into his. He clasped it, and they hurried together across the courtyard to Donal’s post at the outwalls.

  Outside, the night had grown bright and cloudless, with only a single low bank of cloud hanging at the horizon. The moons floated high and clear, in a sky so brilliantly lighted that no single star was visible anywhere in the sky. Donal was standing, arms folded, atop the outwall, but as Allart hurried toward him, someone spoke in a low, reproachful voice.

  “Master Donal, I beg you to come off the wall. You are all too good a target standing there,” and Donal slid down off the wall.

  Not too soon; an arrow came whistling out of the darkness, harmlessly flying past where Donal had just been standing. Dorilys ran and caught him around the waist.

  “You must not stand there like that, Donal. Promise me you will never do so again!”

  He laughed noiselessly, bending to kiss her, a light brotherly peck, on the forehead. “Oh, I am in no danger. I wanted to see if anyone was still down there and awake, after all, or if they had all gone away; as in that quiet and fog it seemed they might well have done.”

  It had been Allan’s own thought—that they were too quiet, that some devilry was afoot. He asked Donal, “Did the fog lift of itself?”

  “I am not sure. They have more than one laranzu down there, and it lifted, indeed, all too quickly,” Donal said, wrinkling up his forehead. “But at this season the fog does blow away sometimes, exactly like that. I cannot tell.”

  Suddenly, to Allart, the air was filled with cries and exploding fire. “Donal! Call the watch!” he cried. Almost before the words escaped his lips, an air-car flashed by overhead, and several small shapes fell slowly toward the ground, almost lazily, like snowflakes, falling open as they moved and pouring liquid streaks of fire toward the castle roofs and the court.

  “Clingfire!” Donal leaped for an alarm bell, but already several of the wooden roofs were blazing up and fire was lighting the whole courtyard. Men poured into the court, only to be stopped, screaming, by the streams of unquenchable fire. One or two went up like human torches, shrieking all the time, until the howls died away and they lay, their corpses still smoking and flaming, lifeless on the stone. Donal leaped to push Dorilys under an overhanging stone cave, but drops of the liquid fire rolled off and caught her chamber-robe, which blazed up wildly. She screamed in terror and pain, as Donal dragged her toward a tub of water and literally flung her into it. Her dress sizzled and went out, but a drop of the stuff had fallen on her skin and was burning, burning inward. She kept shrieking, a wild, almost inhuman sound, maddened with the pain.

  “Keep back! Keep in the lee of the building,” Donal yelled. “There are more of them overhead!”

  Dorilys was screaming and struggling between his hands, maddened with agony. Overhead, thunder suddenly crackled and flared, lightnings seared and struck here, there… Abruptly one of the air-cars overhead went up in a great burst of fire and fell, a flaming ruin, into the valley. Another great bolt struck a second air-car in midair, exploding it into showers of fire. Rain sliced down hard, drenching Allart to the skin. Donal had fallen back from Dorilys in terror. Screaming, maddened, the child was shaking her fist at the sky, striking with great sizzling bolts here, there, everywhere. A final air-car split with a huge explosion and fell apart over the attacking camp below, sending forth shrieks and howls of pain as the clingfire fell back on its launchers. Then silence, except for the heavy, continuing rumble of the rain, and Dorilys’s stabbing screams of pain as the clingfire continued to eat inward on her wrist, penetrating to the bone.

  “Let me take her,” Renata said, running up barefoot in her nightgown. The girl sobbed and cried out and tried vainly to push her away. “No, darling, no. Don’t struggle! This must be done or it will burn your arm away. Hold her, Donal.”

  Dorilys screamed again with pain as Renata scraped away the last remnants of the clingfire from the burned flesh, then collapsed against Donal. All around the courtyard men were gathering, silent, awed. Renata tore Dorilys’s charred chamber-robe to bandage her arm. Donal held her against him, soothingly, rocking her.

  “You saved us all,” he whispered. “Had you not struck at them, so much clingfire could have burned Aldaran over all our heads!”

  Indeed, Allart thought. Damon-Rafael and Scathfell had thought to take Aldaran unawares, unprepared for this kind of attack. Had the contents of three air-cars all carrying clingfire struck them, all of Castle Aldaran would have been burned to the ground. Had they exhausted their arsenal, then, hoping to win at one stroke? Had Dorilys decisively defeated them, then, in this one stroke? He looked at the child, weeping now in Renata’s arms with the pain of her burns.

  She had saved them all, as she had saved him, before, from Damon-Rafael’s evil bird-weapon.

  But he did not think this would be the end.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  « ^ »

  There were still fires to be put out, where the clingfire had set buildings alight. Five men were dead, and a sixth died as Renata knelt to look at him. Four more had clingfire burns deep enough that even Allart knew they would not live out the day, and a dozen more had minor burns which must be treated and every scrap of the terrible stuff scraped away, disregarding screams and pleas for mercy. Cassandra came and took Dorilys away to be put to bed, her bandages soaked in oil. But when all had been done, Donal and Allart st
ood on the outwall, looking down at the camp of the besiegers where fires still raged and flared.

  The rain had subsided as soon as Dorilys was calm, and in any case it would take long, heavy soaking rain to put out clingfire blazes. Now Donal had no fear of arrows out of darkness. He said, stepping down from the wall, “Scathfell and his folks will have more than enough to do this night in their own camp. I will leave a small watch, but no more. Unless I am gravely mistaken, they will have no leisure to mount another attack for a day or so!”

  He set a few picked men as guards, and went to see how Dorilys fared. He found her abed, restless, her eyes bright and feverish, her arm freshly bandaged. She reached with her free arm for his hand and pulled him down at her side.

  “So, you have come to see me. Renata was not being cruel to me, Donal. I know it now; she was scraping away the fire so that it would not burn my arm to the bone. It nearly did, you know,” she said. “Cassandra showed me. She has a scar almost exactly like mine will be, and from clingfire, too.”

  “So you, too, will bear an honorable scar of warfare from the defense of our home,” Donal said. “You saved us all.”

  “I know.” Her eyes flickered, and he could see the pain in them. Far away he could hear a distant rumble of thunder. He sat beside her, holding the small hand that stuck out below the heavy bandage.

  “Donal,” she said, “now that I am a woman, when shall I be really your wife?”

  Donal turned his eyes away, grateful that Dorilys was still a very erratic telepath. “This is no time to speak of that, chiya, when we are all fighting for survival. And you are still very young.”

  “I am not so young as all that,” she insisted. “I am old enough to work in a matrix circle as I did with Allart and the others, and old enough to fight against those who are attacking us.”

  “But, my child—”

  “Don’t call me that! I am not a child!” she said with a small, imperious flare of anger; then laid her head against his arm, with a sigh that was not, indeed, childlike. “Now that we are entangled in this war, Donal, there should be an heir to Aldaran. My father is old, old, and this war ages him day by day. And today—” Suddenly her voice began to shake uncontrollably. “I don’t think I had ever thought of this before, but suddenly I knew you could die—or I could die, Donal, young as I am. If I should die before you, never having borne you a child, you could be driven forth from Aldaran, since you are not blood-kin. Or if—if you should die, and I had never had your child, I could be flung into some stranger’s bed for the dower of Aldaran. Donal, I am afraid of that.”

  Donal held her small hand in his. All this was true, he thought. Dorilys might be the only way he could hold this castle which had been his only home from childhood. It was not even as if she were unwilling. He, too, after the long days of battle and siege, was all too aware of the vulnerability of his own body. He had seen men blaze up like living flames, seen them die fast and slow, but die nonetheless. And Dorilys was his, legally given in marriage with the consent of her father. She was young, but she was moving quickly, quickly, into womanhood… His hand tightened on hers.

  “We shall see, Dorilys,” he said, drawing her close for a minute. “When Cassandra tells me that you are old enough to bear a child without danger, then, if you still wish for it, Dorilys, it shall be as you desire.”

  He bent down and would have kissed her on the forehead, but she clung to him with surprising strength, pulling him down so that their lips met, with passion that was not at all childlike. When at last she released him Donal was dizzy. He straightened up and left the room quickly, but not before Dorilys, with her erratic telepathic sense, still unreliable, had picked up his thought, No, Dorilys is a child no more.

  Quiet. Quiet. All was silent in Castle Aldaran… all was silent in the camp of the besiegers below. All day the dreadful silence hung over the land. Allart, high in the watchtower, setting again a binding-spell on the castle walls, wondered what new devilry this quiet presaged. So sensitized had he become by this prolonged warfare by matrix that he could almost feel them plotting—or was it an illusion?—and his laran continued to present pictures of the castle falling in ruins, the very world trembling. Toward midday, all over the castle, all at once, men began shrieking and crying out, with nothing visible the matter with them. Allart, in the tower room with Renata, Cassandra, and the old sorceress Margali—Dorilys had kept her bed, for her arm still throbbed with pain, and Margali had given her a strong sleeping draft—had his first warning when Margali raised her hands to her head and began to weep aloud.

  “Oh, my baby, my little one, my poor lamb,” she cried. “I must go to her!” She ran out of the room, and almost at the same moment Renata caught her hands against her breast, as if struck by an arrow there, and cried out, “Ah! He is dead!” While Allart stared at her in amazement, at the slammed door still quivering behind Margali, he heard Cassandra screaming. All at once it seemed to him that she was gone, that the world grew dark, that somewhere behind a locked door she fought a deathly battle with his brother, that he must go to her and protect her. He had actually risen and taken a step to the door on a mad dash to rescue Cassandra from the ravisher, when he saw her across the room, kneeling, swaying in anguish and tearing at herself, keening as if she knelt above a corpse.

  A tiny shred of rationality struggled for what felt like hours inside Allart. Cassandra is in no need of rescue, if yonder she sits wailing as if the one she loved best lay dead before her… . Yet within his mind it still seemed that he heard screams of terror and anguish, that she was calling to him, crying out.

  Allart! Allart! Why do you not come to me? Allart, come come quickly… and a long, terrified shriek of desperate anguish.

  Renata had risen, and was making her way on faltering feet to the door. Allart caught her around the waist.

  “No,” he said. “No, kinswoman, you must not go. This is bewitchment. We must fight it; we must set the binding-spell.”

  She fought and struggled in his arms like a mad thing, kicking, scratching at his face with her nails as if he were not Allart at all but some enemy bent on murder or rape, her eyes rolled inward in some wholly interior terror, and Allart knew she neither saw nor heard him.

  “No, no, let me go! It’s the baby! They’re murdering our baby! Can’t you see where they have him there, ready to fling him from the wall? Ah, merciful Avarra… let me go, you murdering devils! Take me first!”

  Icy chills chased themselves up and down Allart’s spine as he realized that Renata, too, fought against some wholly internal fear, that she saw Donal, or the child who was not yet even born, in deadly danger…

  Even while he held her he struggled against the conviction that, somewhere, Cassandra was screaming his name, weeping, pleading, begging him to come to her… Allart knew that if he did not quickly still this he would succumb also and run wildly down the stairs seeking her in every room of the castle, even though his mind told him she knelt there across the room, wholly caught up into some such internal ritual of terror as held Renata.

  He snatched out his matrix, focused into it.

  Truth, truth, let me see truth… earth and air and water and fire… let Nature prevail free of illusion… earth and air and water and fire… He had no strength for anything but this, the most basic of spells, the first of prayers. He strove to drive out the nonexistent, dying sound of Cassandra’s screams for mercy in his ears, the terrible guilt that he lingered here while she struggled somewhere with a ravisher…

  Quiet spread through his mind, the silence of the healing-spell, the silence of the chapel at Nevarsin. He entered into the silence and, for a timeless moment, was healed. Now he saw only what was there in the room, the two women in the grip of terrifying illusion. He focused first on Renata, willing her to quiet with the pulse of the healing-spell. Slowly, slowly, he felt it enter her mind, calm her, so that she stopped struggling, stared around her with a great amazement.

  “But none of it was true,” she said
in a whisper. “Donal— Donal is not dead. Our child—our child is not even born. Yet I saw Allart, I saw where they held them and I could not reach them.”

  “A spell of terror,” Allart said. “I think everyone saw what he or she most feared. Come quickly—help me to break it!”

  Shaken, but strong again, Renata took her matrix, and at once they focused on Cassandra. After a moment her smothered cries of terror stopped, and she looked at them, dazed with dread, then blinked, realizing what had happened. Now with three minds and three matrixes focused, they sent the healing-spell beating out through all the castle, and from cellar to attic and everywhere in the crowded courtyard, servants and soldiers and guardsmen and stableboys came out of the dazed trance wherein each had heard the cries of whoever he loved best and fought blindly to rescue that one from the hands of a nameless enemy.

  At last all the castle lay under the rhythm of the healing-spell, but now Allart was shaking in dread. Not, this time, the dread of nameless persecution, but something all too real and frightful.

  If they have begun to fight us this way, how can we hold them at bay? Here within the castle Allart had only the two women, old Margali, the still older Dom Mikhail, and Donal, if he could dare to take him from the defense of the castle against attackers who were all too tangible. In fact, Allart feared that this was just the tactic they would use—to distract the fighting men while they attacked, under cover of the great fear they could project. He hurried in search of Dom Mikhail, for a council of war.

  “You know what we have had to fight,” he said. The old lord nodded, his face grim, his eyes hawk-bright, menacing.