A Guile of Dragons (33 page)

After the last toast (the traditional “Maintain the Guard!”) had been drunk at supper, Aloê was guided back to her rooms by Illion. She was glad to have a guide. Three Hills was by no means a maze, but it was a large and rambling house, built differently than any she had seen.

“It's dwarvish work,” he said, when she asked him about it. “This is the third house my family has had at Three Hills. The first collapsed in a year of heavy rains, and the second was destroyed by lightning. So the head of the family hired the dwarves of Thrymhaiam to build a house that would last.”

“It must have been expensive.”

“The cost was not so great as some other difficulties,” he said, smiling. “The north was not then under the Guard, and the Graith was quite suspicious of Three Hills and its family for a time. And the dwarves are difficult workmen: too brilliant to be guided, too proud to explain.”

They reached Aloê's door, and Illion bid her good night. Aloê went inside and took a heavy cloak from her pack. Footsteps approached her door outside, then halted. Aloê returned to the door and stood, listening. The pace had not been Naevros', and she did not think it had been Illion's.

She opened the door. Jordel was standing, indecisively, in the hall outside.

“Thea,” said Aloê pointedly, “is not here.”

Jordel laughed. “If she were, I wouldn't be.”

Aloê finally realized how things stood. “That's not true,” she noted. “You broke into our conversation before supper.”

“You're right. ‘Wherever you go, I'll follow, in—'”

“You will
not
,” said Aloê, alarmed.

“I'm just quoting a poem which—”

“I'm not.”

He looked at her appraisingly. “Is there something between you and Naevros, then? He said there wasn't. But you talk like a married woman, as if you didn't have to give a reason to say no—”

Stung, she cried out, “You forget yourself! I need no reasons! If I did there would be plenty in the thousand men like you I've known—”

Jordel smiled angrily. “Really, Aloê, what a confession—”

She would not be interrupted, went on shouting “—thousands like you, gentry of the estates, with rings on their fingers, swarming like flies around the women on Dancing Days, with kisses and compliments and sugarstick cruelty . . .” Anger choked off her speech.

Jordel was still smiling tensely. “Did you realize I have no name?”

“Nonsense.”

“No, no name at all, at least no surname. I am Jordel, my brother is Baran, and that is that. Our mother was a peasant, you see, and so, by aristocratic tradition, our father might have been
anybody
. So we have no surname. If I had been born on one of your estates in the south, I never would have been allowed to come to your Dancing Day . . . except to serve the food, or mix the wine, or help the gentry into their gilded dungcarts after a hard night's prancing—”

“You mean—”

“I mean that
you
forget yourself. I was not born on an estate (thanks, Creator!) and you are not heir to one. I am a peasant still, I suppose. But I didn't become the rest of the things that I am by being indirect, or overmodest.”

“I don't care about that,” she said impatiently. “Be clever. Be . . . proud of your humble origins. But leave me alone. No. Say nothing. Go!”

Jordel shrugged and went, with an infuriatingly loose-limbed stride that spoke loud his absolute unconcern. Aloê threw the cloak she held over her shoulders and ran off to meet Naevros. He was not in the entry hall. She ran by without waiting for him. She ran into the darkness outside, toward the steeper hills north of the Three. She ran until she no longer had a thought in her head or a feeling in her heart. She did not return to the house until long after every person inside it was asleep.

The next morning, Aloê awoke late with the morning sun shining through the western window. She arose and washed in a tense unmeditative calm. She went down to the dining hall in the same spirit, deliberately not thinking.

She met Naevros in the corridor leading to the dining hall. They greeted each other without words; neither did they touch. The rapport between them was tense, intimate, eternal. What had happened last night . . . what had, in fact, not happened . . . that changed nothing. She was relieved. In a way, anyway, she was relieved. They went toward the open hall, together, without touching.

All the other Guardians except Noreê were there. They rose in greeting. Naevros and Aloê took places at the table.

It was a strange meal, almost silent, but not uncommunicative. Aloê sat next to Thea and took something from her hands to pass to Jordel. Thea did not quite smile as their eyes met—but Jordel nodded to her, quite amiably. Then, glancing around the table, taking in expressions, Aloê guessed that there was little she had said or done in the past half-day that was not known to everyone present.

For a moment she was almost horrified. She was accustomed to thinking of her life and her actions as her own, her property—not shared goods, like well water or open fields. Then something opened up within her, like a fist unclenching.

As she sat there among the warm domestic smells—the slices of ham, the warm bread, the steam from the great clay teapot at the center of the table—she felt it wasn't such a terrible thing to have part of her life belong to others. Her friendship with Naevros was indestructible; she knew that now. Thea, who might have been merely a rival, was now also a friend. Jordel, mindful of his rejection, might be less of a predator and more of a man for a time. Baran, at least, had been roundly entertained. And Illion—

Looking up, she met Illion's eye as he raised his bowl of tea. She had the sense that her own knowledge was being embraced by his. The world would never be perfect. But it could be better than it was, if the best gave their best for it. She raised her own bowl to acknowledge his toast.

“I drink to the Guard,” said her host, half smiling. “May it be maintained forever!”

“Maintain the Guard!” they said together, raising their drinks. It was the seal of their common intimacy.

“There is no Guard,” said a cold clear voice.

In the doorway stood Noreê. Her iron-gray hair was wildly disordered. Her skin was as pale as old ice. Her blue eyes held the suffering look of someone called from rapture. But her face was calm and sane.

“There is no Guard,” she repeated to the thunderstruck Guardians. “A guile of dragons has broken through the Wards and invaded the north. The summoner Lernaion and his companions are all killed or taken captive. The summoner Earno is bound in dragonspell. Whole valleys of the Guarded have been laid waste, and the citadel of Thrymhaiam is under siege. There is no Guard in the north.
The Guard is not maintained!
”

As the other Guardians stood up and cried out their disbelief and dismay, Illion drank off his toast and put down the bowl. He frowned thoughtfully. Aloê, seeing this, wondered what he was thinking.

In fact, he was thinking of Morlock. But just then he said nothing.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Tunglskin

T
he red light of late afternoon was falling on Tunglskin, the Hill of Storms. Morlock struck a final blow at the planking before him. The wood splintered and fell; a wide breach had been opened in the wooden wall surrounding the hill. He turned away and walked over to the tree where he had left the horse. He untied the reins he had knotted around a low branch.

He looked the horse in the eye. There had never been any affection between them. But he had never mistreated the horse, nor did he do so now. “Go home,” he said, and added a word of Westhold dialect, resonant with power. The horse turned and ran along the wooden wall toward the Rangan outpost.

Morlock climbed through the breach in the wall and walked a little way up the slope. He sat down on a convenient rock and waited.

It was not long before the Arbiter and one of her servants appeared at the break in the fence. They peered through and immediately saw Morlock on the hill. Having given them, in his own way, fair warning, he stood and walked up the slope. Presently he heard the sound of hammers on wood, sealing him in like a corpse in a coffin. He walked on.

He came across an ascending stairway of stone steps set into the Hill. They were very weathered; a path had been worn down through the middle of each step, as if many feet had passed there. The carvings on them were difficult to discern in the failing light, but Morlock knew better than to examine Coranian carvings too closely at dusk. There were stories about that. There were stories about everything, here.

The stair passed by a cave. The cheerful light of a fire was flickering across the threshold, incongruous against the dark hillside. Morlock clenched his teeth and stood indecisively in the dusk. He had heard about this place. . . . Finally he left the stairway and entered the cave.

Inside, Merlin rose to greet him.

It was a Merlin a thousand years younger than Morlock's father, without even a gray streak in his black hair and beard. It was a Merlin who wore the red cloak of a vocate on his crooked shoulders, the black-and-white shield of Ambrosius on his arm (the same shield, barring a millennium of aging and of careful repair, slung now across Morlock's shoulder). It was a Merlin who was not yet known as the master of all makers, one who was yet establishing his first reputation as a hero.