Oath and the Measure (17 page)

“Like a spider indeed,” Mara said with a nod. “You see the plan, do you not? Well, know it for what it was—a foolhardy risk. As it has done for thousands of years, love sent the unwise heart to sorcerers. To Master Calotte went Cyren, in the darkest part of the forest, where Waylorn’s Tower lies gray and windowless, its shadow mingling with the shades of willow and aspen until all light, whether moon or sun, is blocked by leaf and branch and turret. They say the butterflies are black there, and that the squirrels have gone blind because it is so dark that they steer by smell and hearing alone, their eyes grown useless through the generations.”

Sturm hid a smile. It sounded fanciful to him, this dark place of the mage. But he listened as Mara unfolded the sad end of the story.

Under the guise of helpfulness, it seems, Master Calotte had hidden his own passion for Mara. An old elf, and to hear the girl tell it, unspeakably hideous, he held no more hope of winning her than she had in the sincerity of Cyren’s courtship. Nor would enchantment avail for old Calotte, for the House of Mystics had ways to tell when a creature was charmed or drawn or otherwise magicked, and the Silvanesti refused to honor a conjured marriage. But all things seemed possible if the old mage were crafty and circumspect.

“It was simple,” Mara explained angrily as she and Sturm settled for the afternoon on a rocky knoll in the midst of the grasslands. “Simple to fool a trusting Cyren, who came to him in desperation. Simple, when someone is ready and
willing, to transform him into any creature the mind can fancy or memory bring forth. Simple for Cyren it was to clamber up the side of the Tower of Stars, to the window where I sat waiting.”

Mara smiled, stretching her legs on the hard ground. Sturm stood above her, staring out over the Solamnic plains, where deep in the eastern distances, he thought he saw the haze and shimmer of water. Were they near the Vingaard, or were these the mirages travelers reported from Thelgaard Keep to the City of Lost Names?

“I was startled at first. If a spider twice your size perched on your windowsill, gibbering and beckoning you outside, you would be cautious, too.”

Sturm nodded. “Cautious” hadn’t been the word that occurred to him.

“But quickly Cyren made it known to me that he was no ordinary spider, but my true love transformed.”

“How did he do
that?
” Sturm asked with a muffled smile, imagining the creature serenading in its shrill, inhuman voice, or weaving Mara’s name into the strands of its web.

“Spun a ladder of sorts, he did. A scaffolding web, the druids call it, for upon it, the creatures raise web from tree to tree, the intricate spokes and spirals that draw down their quarry from the air. But it was only a ladder, this scaffolding. It dropped down the side of the tower sixty, seventy feet, from my window down into the dark of the branches below it.

“By Branchala, I was frightened!” she laughed. “The moons were dark that night, so I could descend unseen, but it made me unseeing as well. Set one foot below the next as if I was wading into vipers, I did, but the next thing I know, my feet touch the grass of the forest floor and Cyren is rushing west toward Waylorn’s Tower, and stopping, and turning about, and spinning a strand of web behind him that I take up and follow like … like your mare following the rein.

“So we passed through the woods, and eye saw me not,
nor did ear hear me as we crossed the Thon-Thalas and made our way through a part of the forest I knew not, to a clearing at the foot of the tower.”

She shuddered as the memory passed over her.

“The moment I saw that the spellcraft was the doing of Master Calotte,” she said, “I feared for us—especially for poor Cyren. For I had seen this one look at me, too, with a look that made my blood crawl, and I feared that his aid had come at a dreadful cost. Nor was it a moment before we learned what we had to pay.”

Mara stood up and, taking Luin’s reins, gestured to Sturm that the rest had ended, that the time had come to recommence the journey. Down from the knoll they walked, Luin stepping gingerly behind them, the spider a rustling, muttering presence in the high grass as the elf maiden unveiled the last and darkest part of the story.

“As you can certainly guess, Solamnic, the wizard refused to restore Cyren. He sat there, lodged in the notch of a forked oak, black and rotten and shadowed as his own heart.

“ ‘Mara,’ he says, ‘sweet Mara. You know well how Prince Cyren can recover that form in which you so delight, and you know full well the cost.’ ”

“Scoundrel,” Sturm muttered.

“Cyren would have attacked him then and there!” Mara exclaimed. “Would have torn him apart and dripped cold poison into his wounds, had I not restrained him. But the death of Master Calotte, as far as we knew, would imprison poor Cyren forever in the form in which you see him today.”

Sturm looked back at the elf maiden skeptically. Having grappled with Cyren himself, having seen the creature blubber and slink off into the woods, he wondered how truly difficult it had been for Mara to restrain the avenging creature.

“Now,” Mara said, “we know better. But then we left Silvanesti as a place no longer safe for either of us: I, after all, had defied the will of the House Royal. So had poor
Cyren, and his lot was worse, for his newfound form would make him prey to any hunter from the Hedge to the Bay of Balifor.

“We wandered a year and another, in search of a way to lift the spell of Master Calotte. To sorcerers and shamans we traveled, as far south as the Icewall, west to the Tower of Wayreth in Qualinesti, then back again along a different and difficult path, through Bloten and Zhakar and Khurikhan, where elves are as unwelcome as spiders. Our third year found us on the plains of Abanasinia, where we took up for a while with a band of Plainsmen, whose seeress was a mere girl, a chieftain’s daughter of the Que-Shu tribe, subject to the falling sickness and deep trances, in which the grasslands sang to her and the stars reconfigured above her in the shapes of helix and harp.”

“True prophecies, then,” Sturm observed.

Mara nodded. “This … this Goldmoon,” she continued, “told us that the spell could be lifted only through music and the convergence of the moons above this very spot in the midst of the Plains of Solamnia.

“So we dwelt here awaiting, Cyren and I. A year and more passed, while I learned to play on the flute the girl had given me, and the moons passed through the sign of Hiddukel, of Kiri-Jolith, of dark Morgion—all pointing to the single night, the crowning night of a five-year cycle, on which the moons converged in the hub of Mishakal and healing and change were possible.”

Mara stopped on the downward path. Sturm paced on for a few heavy steps, the bundle on his shoulders again growing wearisome. He stopped finally and turned about when he could hear neither her voice nor her footsteps.

She stood above him, angry and diminished by the sunlight of the early afternoon. Despair contorted her face, and though her anger at Sturm had somehow passed in the telling of the story, she looked at him again with rising irritation.

“That night,” she said coldly, “that most auspicious night,
when the moons converge and the music plays and the spell is lifted—that night was
last
night!”

Briskly, her thoughts obviously elsewhere, the elf maiden tugged at the reins and resumed her path down the hill. Luin, jarred from drowsiness, snorted and followed her. Ahead of them, Sturm turned back to the journey with an inward grumble.

“Again and again I am visited with my accident,” he muttered. “It was … it was a
reasonable
mistake!”

He looked back at Mara, who seemed not to hear him.

“Rocky plains on foot,” the lad whispered through clenched teeth, “with a two-ton burden and a whining companion, my horse hobbled and a giant poisonous spider lurking somewhere behind us. Tis not a quest for heroes, I’ll wager, but at least the going can get no worse from here.”

The clouds rushed in before anyone noticed, as though a god had stirred the air with a quick wave of his hand. Suddenly the country was heavy and tense, the smell of the wind faint and metallic. Then the first drop struck the bundle on Sturm’s back, and another splashed against the bridge of his nose. Luin whinnied apprehensively, and the skies opened up from the Clerist’s Tower all the way to the Vingaard River, which tilted and boiled in the fierce downpour of rain.

In the Southern Darkwoods, kneeling above the
clear green pool in the midst of the clearing, Vertumnus stirred the waters playfully. His fingers skimmed the surface of the pool, showering droplets over the image of Sturm and Mara trapped in a rainstorm miles away. Evanthe and Diona watched delightedly as the image shivered and dispersed and formed again.

“Drown them!” Evanthe hissed wickedly, her pale hands brushing a lock of hair from the Green Man’s brow.

“Drench and douse them!” urged Diona.

“Only a rain,” Vertumnus laughed and stirred the waters again. “The grass needs watering.”

“Only a rain?” Evanthe whispered. “Only a rain, when you could do such marvels …”

“As the winds would rumor for ages,” Diona coaxed, finishing her sister’s sentence. “The things you could do, Lord Wilderness, had you the mind and the imaginings and … and the
gumption!
”

Vertumnus ignored the dryads, crouched, and breathed on the surface of the waters.

In the pool’s misty reflection, seen from afar, as though they appeared in a crystal ball or a Dragonorb, the young man and the elf maiden huddled together, gray shapes in the driving rain. Suddenly, from the bundled shadows an arm lifted, pointing toward a hillside, a distant shelter. They hastened toward it, their shapes dwindling into the net of rain. Behind them, scuttling and gibbering to itself, a drenched spider followed tamely.

“Rain falls on the just,” Vertumnus murmured, and waved his hand over the pool, “and the unjust.”

The mists parted on the surface of the water, revealing an encampment in a copse—a tattered web between two junipers, and a thatch-covered cabin only recently abandoned. The waters of the pool stilled and settled, and at the edge of the image, a hooded light bobbed from reflected tree to reflected tree—a lantern in the hand of a dark, caped figure.

“Ah,” sighed Lord Wilderness and leaned forward until his face nearly touched the surface of the water. Quietly he whistled something in the magical tenth mode, which the old bards used to look through rock and over distance and sometimes into the future.

The image shivered, and the dark man in the copse lifted the lantern to his own inscrutable face.

“Boniface!” Vertumnus exclaimed. “Of course!”

Quietly, efficiently, the finest swordsman in Solamnia inspected the clearing and encampment. He stepped into the cabin and emerged, almost in one breath, frowning and looking about. Stroking his long, dark mustache, he stood beneath the broken web, apparently lost in thought, and then, as if he had known all along the direction in which his search would take him, wheeled about and vanished from
the clearing, the blue evergreens closing behind him like the water’s surface over a diver.

“Who is he?” Evanthe breathed.

“Yes,” Diona echoed. “Who
is
he? And why does he follow them?”

“Just a shadow in the snow,” Vertumnus replied. “But where is the mistress? For her path will cross with his.”

The dryads looked at one another in disappointment.

“That hag?” Diona asked scornfully. “What would you with her, when the likes of us are here?”

“That old carrion bird,” Evanthe said. “She smells of dark earth and death. No herbs in creation can cover those smells.”

“Where is she?” Vertumnus repeated.

And as he awaited her arrival, he stared at the settling surface of the pool and lifted the flute to his lips.

“This will make a lean-to of sorts,” Sturm sputtered as he spread his cloak between outstretched branches of oak and water maple. A makeshift tent, it was, but already the cloth sagged with the downpour.