A Guile of Dragons (31 page)

She sat beneath a maple that had lost almost half its leaves. They lay beneath it, a blood-bright carpet exactly the color of her cloak. Sitting with her back to the trunk, she looked on the fallen leaves as a flat reflection, in golden dying grass, of the real tree. Buried among them, then, would be an image of herself, Noreê. To that reflective Noreê the ground would be a kind of sky: troubled but beautiful with green and stretches of gold and black-brown veins of storm cloud. The ground beneath the reflective Noreê, though, would be a bright blue, faulted by the red-flecked branch-roots of the tree. She could survey the sky as if it were bounded earth, or let her gaze penetrate deeply into it.

A long time later there were deep piles of white leaves gathering on the bright blue ground. They blew into bright-veined gray drifts, and more collected about them. They piled higher and deeper/lower. Concentrating on them, but not really concentrating at all, reflective and actual Noreê vanished in the unconscious apprehension of the purity of the broken silence, the absolute emptiness of the air surrounding them.

At some indefinable point there was a release. There was no division of Noreê into reflective and actual. She was one. Her soul remained where it was, resident always of itself. Her body remained where it was, beneath the wondrous beauty of the dying tree. But her tal, the link between them, the agency by which the spirit works on the body and the medium by which the body communicates with the spirit, was set free. There was no separation. Their union persisted, soul/tal/body—metaphysical triangle circumscribing physical life, but it extended through space. Unburdened of the need to consciously control her body, Noreê's mind leapt directly into the sky, through the window of her own tal.

The sensation of visionary flight, if it can be called sensation, is difficult to describe. Often, in memory, the flight becomes wholly visual, random bits of colorless data striking light like sparks in the sensorium, whereas they were of a different order of perception in experience. As an adept, Noreê found it best to interpret the flight in a way that would not overwhelm her in the explosion of lines and colors that the mind generates to give form to an incomprehensible experience. She concentrated rather on the perception of motion—a partly visual, partly tactile sense. There were other senses involved, too: in the profoundest flight of her vision she could bend her awareness downward to hear the sap flowing in the veins of a tree, and the slow persistent thoughts that guided its growth.

So it was now, as she swept east from the Healing Wood over the Hunting Wood, she saw the swift forms of horses struggling slowly through heavy still underbrush. Over one was the dim deliberate shape of a hunting cat lying along a bough. Its thoughts (which, in the instant of her overflight, were clear to her) precisely matched its motions as it stretched its limbs in preparation for the kill. Not far off, sweeping through the underbrush like a vagrant breeze, were the swift, contradictory thoughts/motions of Jordel. She read as heat his bright but fading satisfaction at having freed seven horses from their dangerous predicament.

Killing, by a law that predated human occupancy in the Westhold, was permitted in the Hunting Wood, but not in the Healing Wood. The horses, though, were creatures of the plain; they knew nothing of the forest's laws. So it was not unusual for one of the half-wild band of horses that belonged to Three Hills to become trapped in a romp through the Hunting Wood and have several of its members killed. Most often it was because they were pursuing a unicorn that had come down from the mountains.

Noreê instantly understood that Jordel (and Illion, whom she perceived close at hand) were involved in a struggle to free the horses after just such a venture. She understood, but (circling over the scene) she felt no impulse to conclude her vision and go to aid them. She was not even conscious of making a choice. Understanding and volition were strangely altered in the rapture of vision. The flight, as the seer's axiom had it, must take its course. Noreê's awareness vaulted over Illion as he sprang between the hunting cat and its prey. She arced east and north and upward, facing the mountains that thrust through the broken roof of clouds.

She perceived the exquisite stillness of the mountains, for stillness itself is a relation of motions. She ascended beyond them and prepared to perceive the Northhold.

An awareness brushed against hers. It was a gentle motion, but shudderingly powerful. Noreê had no time to decide what this meant. Suddenly she ceased moving and also fell endlessly downward. The contradiction of motion/stillness was profoundly painful to embrace. She recognized in it the cruelly abrupt end of her vision. As flames leapt up around her awareness, she realized she was a prisoner.

Aloê was watching the night sky from the window-ledge of her room when Naevros entered. She knew, without turning, that it was him: by the rhythm of his footfalls, the fact that he did not knock, a certain feeling she had had before he entered . . . a number of things. She said, without turning, “The sky is marvelously clear.”

He came up and leaned against the window frame opposite her. “Yes,” he said. “More than likely it will be cloudy again tomorrow. That's a familiar pattern up here.”

Naevros fit in everywhere, but it was hard to think of him as a Northholder, used to weather even colder than this, a mountaineer, a mushroom, speaking a vocabulary thick with Dwarvish slang—when he bothered to speak. No, he did not fit the image. Perhaps that was why he had come south and joined the Graith, so many years ago. His parents were Westholders who settled in the north after it came under the Guard. That much Aloê knew, but she knew little else. Naevros seldom visited them and never spoke of them.

“Have you met your peers before?” Naevros asked.

“You mean Baran and Thea?” They were the thains-attendant on Jordel and Noreê respectively. “Yes, we know each other well. I've been wondering . . .”

“Yes?”

Aloê said slowly, “Since he became a vocate, Jordel has never chosen Baran as attendant.”

“They're brothers. There would be difficulties—that hint of patronage.”

“Yes. But he has chosen him now, to come here.”

Naevros nodded. “There is a chance, Aloê, that we may face danger here in the north. Illion thinks so, at any rate, and he is a fair judge. And this is bad news, of course. But for thains every danger is an opportunity.”

“So you have all brought your particular protégés,” Aloê observed. “Except Illion.”

Naevros smiled briefly in turn. “In a sense, Illion's protégé is far north of here already.”

“You don't mean Earno?”

There was no light except starlight in the room; the window faced south, away from the major moons. But, turning to look at Naevros as they talked, she could see his face harden at the mention of the summoner. “No,” he said. “But Earno's attendant was commended to him by Illion. You bore him the message, you know.”

“Was that it? I didn't read it, you know.”

“Oh. Well, Earno's attendant is young Ambrosius.”

“Young Ambrosius,” Aloê repeated. She could not imagine Earno having an Ambrosius as his attendant. And Merlin was supposed to have been the last of them, anyway.

“The one they call Morlock syr Theorn.”

“
That
mushroom.”

Naevros laughed, understanding her private slang without trouble.

“But,” said Aloê, “I made my first tour of A Thousand Towers with him. He never said a word as the senior thain took us by Ambrose. Surely it belongs to him now.”

“Ah, so you were particular friends.”

“Oh, no. But we were stationed at A Thousand Towers at the same time a few years ago.”

“I remember. I almost thought to sponsor him at one time.”

“You're joking?”

“By no means. It would have given Earno something to think about. But he never had . . . your subtlety, your instinct for situations. He will never be a great swordsman, either.”

“Neither will I.”

“For different reasons. He . . . well, you knew him.”

“They call him Crookback.”

“Not you, I hope.”

“No. Why does Illion favor him?”

“Oh, he's by no means stupid. They say he is already a gifted maker. I suppose we both remember a few times when he displayed power as a seer. And . . . the very thing I mentioned, that may look different to some. Such an inability resembles a kind of integrity.”

That gave her something to think about. If the absence of an ability resembled integrity, then the presence of the ability might indicate lack of integrity . . . at least to “some.” Was Naevros warning her that Illion had reservations about her character? Or . . . Naevros' statements, however simple in themselves, often carried implications that were intolerably complex.

As she thought, she twisted her fingers idly in her hair. She was about to turn and look back out into the night when she noticed that he was unnaturally still. With her intense understanding of his nature, she realized that he was giving rapt and unguarded attention to her fingers moving in her hair. In turn, of course, he recognized that she had noted his attention. But he went on watching as if he could not help it.

Her breathing quickened. She knew, of course, that Naevros thought she was beautiful, nor was he the only one. She, in turn, found him attractive: he was tall, dark-haired, deliberate and graceful. She supposed he knew how she felt. The mutual attraction was a powerful element—perhaps the essential element, the sustaining one—in their rapport.

But one of the reasons that Naevros appealed to her so strongly was that he could recognize and acknowledge her beauty with a certain subtlety. He noticed everything and she knew it, but he did not clutter his conversation with compliments. He had the courage not to express the inexpressible, knowing she would understand. This implicit understanding was precious to her.

Still . . . love (was this love?) had to move from implicit understanding to explicit acts. And she hated men like that, the way they looked at you, their faces greasy with anticipation. If Naevros turned to her that way, what would she do? Then again, he might never turn to her. What would she do then? Would it make a difference? Did she need a man to become who she was meant to be? She didn't see why. But need and want were different things. . . .

The silence, the stillness, had gone on too long. No one was turning toward or away from anyone here. Abruptly, Aloê realized that she was tense, angry and bored. But something was about to happen, or had been about to happen. In deference to that she felt she could not move. She could not be the one to spoil things, to make things impossible. But things were already impossible. When a knock came at the door she rolled off the window ledge and moved readily toward the door.

But suddenly Naevros reached out and touched her arm, restraining her for a moment. “Meet me in the entryway after supper,” he said. “We will talk.”

She nodded, a little disturbed by the explicitness of the request. She went to answer the door. A housekeeper was standing in the corridor outside; he had come to tell them that supper was ready.

The vocate Jordel was almost a parody of the typical Westholder. He was improbably tall, lightly built, and his hair was a tangled mop of fair brown curls. He moved with a wiry comic grace and he was always in motion. And: he talked.

His brother Baran was almost as tall, but very different. His light brown hair was close-cropped, and he was of a heavier build and a quieter demeanor than Jordel. He moved slowly when he moved, but “strong as Baran” was already a proverb in the village where he had grown up. Jordel, in his opinion, never had grown up.

“Stop bleeding on me,” he growled as Jordel's bandaged hand swung out in a grand sweeping gesture. Jordel took no more notice of his brother's modest exaggeration than a river does of the occasional raindrop.

“So I
leapt
through the screen of branches,” cried Jordel, his every limb starting at the word
leapt.
“On the other side, what should I—”