The pimpled youth cut through the tavern tables with all the assurance of a man with an armoured guard troop behind him. He offered a folded, unsealed leaf of parchment to Kusint with the briefest of words.
‘What does it say?’ Corrain ignored the youth who was already leaving, with men twice his age and a head taller hurriedly drawing their booted feet out of his path.
‘That we are summoned to attend Gaveren Raso, wizard of the fifth order of Fornet.’ Kusint spoke loudly enough for his words to reach those in the tavern now looking inquisitively at the pair of them. ‘At once.’
Corrain was already heading for the door. ‘Come on.’
Outside the gusting wind was now driving off the rain clouds. Only a spatter of cold drops struck their faces as they headed towards the castle.
It was a massive fortification, claiming a rise in the land which forced the river around in a wide muddy loop. The stepped battlements of a great square keep were just visible above the top of a curtain wall taller than any Corrain had seen. That outermost defence was guarded by numerous towers, each one substantial enough in its own right to withstand an army’s attack. Though any enemy would be a fool to try an assault and would be a dead foe shortly thereafter. Corrain could see how each tower was well placed to give archers and crossbowmen a clear field of fire over all the fortifications that flanked it.
On this side of the castle, the turrets watched over the bridge crossing the river. Stone arches marched across dark water carrying a road wide enough for two wagons to pass abreast. The river was rising now with the season’s rains but still flowed well below the high water stains on the pillars and the line of trees on the far bank that marked a safe foothold for saplings in all but the wettest years.
Lord Pastiss’s boar’s head crest was carved on massive stone shields above each span and the tusked beasts snarled on pillars at either end of the bridge. Barges anchored in the broad pool on the downstream side were disgorging their cargos to fill the wagons and to burden the mules waiting to head east and west along the road while the narrower boats able to shoot the bridge’s spans waited to carry their share further upstream.
Corrain skirted a rutted puddle in the earthen track cutting between the low thatched dwellings. Wooden doors and shutters over glassless windows stood open to reveal Soluran craftsmen in their workshops even so late in the day. Goodwives and children too young to be put to work were busy in the yards behind. The yards in turn were flanked by buildings where scents of cooking here and laundry there suggested kitchens and other such domestic necessities. At the far end of each long plot reaching back from the road, Corrain could glimpse vegetable gardens, chicken coops, pig sties and here and there a house cow’s byre.
It was as unlike a Caladhrian village or the good order of Halferan Manor as he could possibly imagine. He still felt a longing for home twist beneath his breastbone.
Corrain thrust that thought away, turning instead to something that irritated him like a burr beneath a horse’s girth.
So much fine stonework evident in the castle and the bridge. So much trade filling this noble lord’s coffers with dues and tariffs which he could see being collected by the bridge reeve and his lackeys in their livery. Yet the Solurans couldn’t so much as lay some cobbles in their roadway to save themselves from the season’s mud.
Corrain did his best to skirt the worst of the mire as he and Kusint crossed over the market place facing the bridge and hurried up the slope beyond. The pimpled envoy had already reached the outer gate of the brooding barbican.
Corrain braced himself for yet another delay. How better for this Gaveren Raso to prove that he was not subject to Hadrumal’s Archmage than by keeping them waiting at the castle’s very threshold?
To his surprise, when the young envoy waved towards them, the grimly-bearded guard signalled his men to raise the outer portcullis. He beckoned them on beneath the first iron-toothed lattice, hanging ready in its slot to drop and trap attackers foolhardy enough to charge across this first threshold in hopes of overwhelming the gatehouse.
Corrain noted the holes in the roof as they walked beneath the long vault separating that outer defence from the castle’s inner ward. Any such trapped attackers could expect sharpened bolts fresh from the blacksmith’s forge, scalding water or worse to come dropping on their heads.
‘This way.’ A lackey was waiting for them on the far side of the inner portcullis.
Corrain thought again. Everyone else he could see was armoured and surcoated like that first pimpled envoy. This lad wore a plain dun homespun tunic with no armour beneath it. His long sleeves were neatly bound with cuffs of scarlet broadcloth though the hem and the neck were only roughly sewn with coarse yarn. He didn’t look like a household servant for a noble as mighty as Lord Pastiss.
Nor a man at arms and there were plenty of those to be seen by way of comparison. All but one of the castle’s towers had a contingent of armoured men outside it. Some were honing their skills with swords and polearms, heedless of the spitting rain. Others were wrestling for wooden daggers, cheered on by their comrades sat mending gear and harness at trestle tables or on each tower’s steps. All wore Pastamar livery except for one company in the plain flax cloth breeches and buff tunics which Corrain recognised from their earlier encounter with Lord Pastiss’s mercenaries; men and outlandish as it seemed, some women, handsomely paid to risk their lives venturing across the river into the Great Forest to hunt down enemy scouts and spies.
The boy was leading the way across the grassy expanse of the castle’s outer ward. He might be a within a year of Kusint’s own age but his dark-haired head would barely reach the Forest lad’s shoulder. He was a skinny youth too; whatever he was learning here, it wasn’t sword play or anything else to put muscle on his bones.
Kusint gestured at the vast space. ‘When the Mandarkin attack, everyone from the town takes shelter in here.’
Corrain nodded. He had guessed as much.
Their silent guide raised a hand as they arrived before the only tower lacking an armoured company outside it. The door at the top of the steps ahead opened obediently though there was no sign of a door ward. The boy stopped at the foot of the stone stair with a gesture indicating they should continue.
Corrain nodded and went on. He didn’t speak. Either the lad was mute, so most likely he was also deaf. Or these wizards were trying to overawe the two of them, in which case that rune had two sides. Corrain could stay silent too.
The entrance led into a single round room taking up the entire lower floor of the tower. Lit only by narrow slit windows, Corrain would have expected it to be swathed in gloom as the autumn sun was setting. Instead it was filled with some radiance that had no obvious source.
Men and women, from those as young as their silent guide to a handful as old as Fitrel sat on stools and benches around tables little different from the tavern’s furniture. Except these tables held books, inkstands, leaves of parchment and countless other trifles and trinkets presumably with some wizardly usefulness.
With all eyes on the pair of them, Corrain studied these unknown mages with equal frankness. All wore the same dun tunic as the lad who’d brought them here. Their sleeves were all bound with the different colours which Corrain knew denoted wizardry. Most had cloth of a second hue ringing the hem of their shapeless garment and a good few had a third colour neatly sewn to finish the neckline.
An inner door stood ajar to reveal a stair spiralling upwards. A woman rose from her seat close beside it. Corrain recognised Selista. She wore all four colours of magecraft, the last as a scarlet leather strap belting her tunic over a long black skirt reaching down to soft leather half-boots.
‘Follow me.’
Though her words were calm Corrain felt the open expectation in the room harden into anticipation.
So he made sure to keep his expression as bland as Selista’s words. He was pleased to see Kusint do the same.
‘Thank you.’
Selista went ahead up the spiral stair. Corrain followed with Kusint close behind him. The next floor up offered another vast room though this one had the comforts of a broad fireplace built into the outward face and cushioned seats in the deep, wide windows on the inner side overlooking the castle’s enclosure.
Seven cross-framed chairs made a half circle in the middle of the room. Four men and three women sat seated turn by turn. Corrain had no doubt that all were wizards, and evidently they had sufficient rank to shed those brown tunics for fur-trimmed mantles over costly robes and gowns in styles reminiscent of those favoured by the Caladhrian parliament’s oldest barons and their ladies.
He followed Selista into the room. Kusint came after to stand at his side.
The wizard in the seat closest to a window raised a hand to the magewoman. ‘You may leave us.’
‘Sir.’ Selista nodded briefly and turned back for the stair.
Corrain couldn’t read any clue on her face. He wondered briefly where Orul and Espilan might be. He hadn’t seen either of them below and there was no one else in this room.
The wizard gestured again and the door closed obediently without need for anyone’s hand. ‘I am Gaveren Raso, wizard of the fifth order of Fornet,’ he said briefly in fluent Tormalin. ‘We are Wrothar Gardol, sixth order, Takten Mudis, sixth order, Strape Filstarra, seventh order, Peytel Roth, seventh order, Deule Lacrus, eighth order and Copin Eck, eighth order.’
So these were the Elders. Corrain found it disconcerting to see that whatever their rank or title, none of these wizards could be called old. Only the most senior man looked to be within a handful of years of Planir’s age and Gaveren Raso was surely Corrain’s contemporary.
Did Soluran wizards not live long enough to lay old bones on a funeral pyre? Corrain recalled the savagery with which Selista, Orul and Espilan had attacked Anskal in the Forest and the viciousness of the Mandarkin’s retaliation.
‘My humble duty to you all.’ Kusint bowed low from the waist.
Corrain echoed both his words and his obeisance, though he didn’t look away from the wizards. They all had eyes as hard as any battle-scarred warrior whom he had ever encountered. Corrain wouldn’t want to turn his back on any of them.
The most senior of the women chuckled and said something to prompt laughter from the rest. Corrain straightened up warily. That had not been friendly laughter.
She smoothed the velvet of her golden gown. ‘You keep a watch on us all while you offer us your submission.’
Like Gaveren Raso the resident wizard, the woman’s Tormalin was fluent with the accents of Col. Corrain recalled the greybearded Orul saying that the Order had ties with the university in that Ensaimin city.
‘I was taught that a swordsman should always stay alert.’ Corrain decided against explaining that any newly-sworn Halferan lad looking at his own feet as he bowed could expect a punishing slap to the back of the head from Fitrel.
‘So Planir of Hadrumal sends you to us to make his excuses.’ The man granted the accolade of eighth order cupped one cobalt-clad elbow in a hand and rested his chin in the other.
‘I offer no excuses, sir.’ That was how Selista had addressed Gaveren Raso so surely that was sufficient courtesy. ‘Not for myself, nor for the Archmage. He had no knowledge of what I intended,’ Corrain insisted. ‘I never planned on enlisting any Mandarkin’s aid. I came north hoping to find a Soluran wizard willing to lend their magic to defending my home.’
He hesitated, seeing the seated Solurans exchanging glances. Corrain guessed they were recalling whatever Selista and the other two had told them. He pressed on.
‘My country has been ravaged by corsair raiders for this past handful of years. Men, women and children have lost their lives and their livelihoods. Those who survived have seen their homes plundered and burned time and again. If they have not been able to flee, they have been enslaved. They have been stolen away to be sold to the Archipelagans, their lives worth no more than an Aldabreshin’s whim.’
He did his best to swallow his rising anger, brandishing the broken shackle around his own wrist instead.
‘I was chained to a galley oar, flogged and only saved from starvation that I might help the villains attack my own kith and kin. My friends died aboard those ships. Only one survives and he won’t live through another winter, my oath on it. I looked for magic to save him when Kusint told me of Solura’s mages since the Archmage and Hadrumal’s wizards would not help us—’ he hastily corrected himself. ‘They cannot, according to their laws.’
Kusint spoke up. ‘I was also enslaved by the Aldabreshi after being taken prisoner in Lescar’s recent battles. We hoped that a wizard practised in warfare could save more of Caladhria’s people from such a vile fate. The Aldabreshi know nothing of magic and fear it to their very bones. We believed that a single season of seeing their ships sunk by wizardry would leave them too terrified to return to the mainland.’
Out of the corner of his eyes, Corrain could the red-headed lad deathly pale beneath his freckles.
‘I was chained to those same oars. I would have lived and died as a slave if not for Corrain and his sword-mate Hosh. These corsairs are as brutal and as depraved as any Mandarkin.’ Kusint’s voice shook with hatred. ‘When I found myself safe in Caladhria, Hosh’s mother welcomed me as warmly as one of her own blood. I sought to repay her kindness by restoring their lost son, when I told Corrain of Solura’s mages. Such debts cannot be left unsettled.’