His discovery and the crisp snap as his backhand cut struck the young Alban’s ribs were almost simultaneous. Aldric cried out and dropped both swords. Oak clattered on pine as they fell to
En Sohra’s
deck. The
eijo’s
face had gone stark white; as white as the shirt now disfigured by a wet, dark-red blotch spreading all over its left side. Aldric put the flat of one hand to where he hurt, trying not to breathe. “You said there were no ribs broken,” he said thickly, trying to sound dryly amused. Something like a piece of splintered wood pressed into his palm through the shirt and his senses swam. “I think… there’s definitely one… gone… now…” He swayed, feeling giddy, then with no other warning than a little sigh followed his swords to the deck. Soft-edged dark outlines crossed the blue sky above him, bent over him, lifted him gently. The galion was pitching alarmingly and it was getting very dark…
“This time he’s staying in bed if I have to tie him down,” said a voice, half-angry and half-concerned.
“Don’t be so drastic,” said a second voice. “I doubt if he’ll want to move about much anyway.”
“You thought that last night too, didn’t you?”
“I was wrong; I’m sorry.”
“Still, forget the ropes. This ship’s medicine-chest holds enough soporific drugs to make him sleep for a week. Satisfied?”
“Where did you learn how to use things like that?”
“Misuse them, my dear. The Imperial Court in Drak-kesborg opened my eyes to a lot of…”
Aldric did not learn what Dewan had found out in Drakkesborg. The words he heard slurred into a buzzing noise and thence to a silence as absolute as the blackness clouding his vision beyond his leaden eyelids.
Aldric’s eyelids snapped back and he was awake at once, with no intervening period of drowsiness. He stared straight ahead, not daring to look right or left in case it brought back the dark. There was a flat surface above him, dark planks criss-crossed by adzed red-oak beams. A ceiling… ? Not the honey-coloured pine of his cabin, though, and his bed had a proper quilt now, not those foolish sheets. Rain pattered gently on the small panes of a draped window. There was somebody else nearby; he could hear the rustle of a book’s pages being turned.
With teeth clenched against any pain which might accompany the movement, Aldric sat up. There was nothing wrong at all; he might as well be waking from a refreshing night’s sleep. And there were no bandages either…
“Good morning, Aldric,” said a familiar voice.
The
eijo’s
head jerked round. “
Altrou
!” he gasped in disbelief. Gemmel nodded, smiling, and after marking his place set down the book and closed it. “But how did you get here? And where is here anyway?”
“Just as before—questions, always questions. I should have expected it and let someone else wait for you to wake up. Still…” The enchanter got to his feet, crossed to the window and opened its curtains. “I came here with your king—having rightly assumed after that epi-sode at Erdhaven Festival that he’d appreciate a word with me—” the old man chuckled; “which he did to the tune of three hours’ talking without a rest. And this is the port of Kerys, in Cerenau.”
“What happened to me,
altrou
?”
“From what I gather, you were being stupid again,” the wizard said without rancour. “Trying
dyutayn
with any sort of injury is foolish enough, but with a damaged side of all things, it plumbs the depths of utter idiocy. Fairly typical behaviour, really. Ar Korentin— who knows more than seems quite proper about drugs— kept you asleep until the ship docked, knowing that there would be better doctors ashore. He was right. I was here.”
“And you healed me?”
“Of course. A simple enough process with the right equipment—which I had the good sense not to leave behind on this occasion. Now, what about the Dragon-wand? I gather you had some small difficulty from various sources.”
“Your understatements are showing,
altrou”
Aldric grinned. “Yes, we did have some trouble—though none of it was connected with
them”
Gemmel nodded, knowing quite well who
they
were. “I can’t understand why, because they found me easily enough in Erdhaven.”
“Don’t look for reasons—just consider yourself lucky. By the way… how do you find talking to firedrakes?”
Aldric made a face. “Hard—very hard. They don’t have much in the way of small talk. I’m glad you taught me what you did, because Ymareth doesn’t seem like a being that would listen to excuses.”
“It isn’t. Where is Ykraith now?”
“I gave it to Dewan—he has a sheaf of javelins on his saddle, and the Dragonwand’s hidden amongst them. How are the horses, by the way?”
“Quite healthy. Lyard’s probably a better sailor than you, by all accounts.”
“Not very difficult. Gemmel… I’m always asking questions and now I’ve got two more. Important ones. What does the Dragonwand do? And how do you plan to use it? I’d like a proper answer to each, please.”
Gemmel combed his beard with his fingers, neatening it, then stood up and bowed with mock-politeness. “Of course, my lord,” he said. “But not at once, my lord— because I’m telling King Rynert and part of his High Council almost exactly what you want to know, and if you’re at the meeting you will find out. Of course, since you’re still in bed…”
“Not for long. I shall want a bath and something to eat before… what time is it, anyway?”
“Dawn, on a wet, windy, thoroughly miserable midsummer day. Well, it’s not actually midsummer, but the alliteration pleases me.”
“Oh Heaven,” Aldric moaned in feigned horror, “what you do to our language is probably illegal.”
“Come on, Bladebearer Deathbringer—Rynert expressed a particular desire to see you, and if he doesn’t you will be in more hot water than your bath can hold. But afterwards you and I shall have a private little talk concerning the spellstone of Echainon. Good morning once again.” He turned and left the room.
“What was that you called me?” Aldric asked an instant too late. Then he shrugged, yawned, stretched and slithered out of bed, shivering in the unaccustomed cold air. As the young man wriggled hastily into a robe he glanced out of the window at the wet rooftops, grimacing as a gust of wind slapped raindrops against the glass. “Fine summer weather,” he muttered, and turned away.
He did not notice the crow huddling for shelter under the eaves of an opposite house, even when the bird’s head lifted with a jerk as he appeared at the window. Its beady eyes fastened on his face, and its pickaxe beak opened to utter a croak of surprise even as it shuffled further into the shadows. Once Aldric had gone, the crow gurgled to itself in a most uncrowlike fashion and performed a triumphant little dance on the narrow ledge. Then it launched itself into the rain-slashed air on wide black wings and glided silently off across Kerys, heading north-north-west for Dunrath six hundred miles away.
As the crow flies.
Lord Endwar
Ilauem-arluth
Santon reined in his charger atop the same ridge where Aldric had once sat and, like the younger man before him, gazed at the brooding might of Dunrath-hold. There was an army camped before the fortress, six thousand men in a ring of steel through which nothing passed unchallenged. Santon dismounted and went to sit on a camp-stool under the shade of his blue and purple standards with their white lettering. Not that he needed shade, even though the sun shone brightly from a cloudless sky; there was no warmth from it at all and the wind which tugged the snapping banners overhead was icy cold.
Endwar-arluth took off his helmet and scowled. It had taken eight days’ hard marching to bring his legion up from Erdhaven; two hundred-odd miles, and somewhere along the road they had passed from one season to another, leaving the Spring Festival far, far behind. Santon had seen with his own eyes a brief but unmistakable scudding of snowflakes across the open moorland. Snow— and summer air like the breath of an underground crypt. He shivered with more than the cold.
Dunrath had been grey when last he saw it, blue-grey stone from the Blue Mountains under a blue-grey autumn sky as he rode to young Aldric’s
Eskorrethen
ceremony. Now, perhaps by some trick of the light, the fortress was red. Red with the rustling vermeil silk of Kalarr cu Ruruc’s war-flags hoisted over every wall, and red too as if every stone, every tower and every turret had been dipped in some great pool of blood. The crimson hue shifted and changed like the folds of a shaken cloth and only one thing remained constant: the ominous, glistening scarlet of the citadel’s donjon, which drew and held the gaze with an awful fascination. It reminded Santon of an Imperial prison he had once seen in the city of Egisburg, the sinister Red Tower whose gates had never yet released a living prisoner.
The lord drank wine offered him by an armed retainer and wondered how long it would be before King Rynert and the other legions joined his leaguer. The men he commanded here were not—save for two thousand foot—regular troops, but levied vassals,
kailinin
of lesser clans who owed him service for their lands and those warriors of his household who had come with him to Erdhaven. Four thousands of foot and two of horse— not enough to take the fortress by either siege or storm, but quite sufficient to bottle up its occupants behind the high, strong walls and put all thought of open battle from their minds.
Dunrath was widely regarded as the mightiest fortress in all Alba; true, it was not so large as
Leyruz-arluth’s
citadel at Datherga, nor as modern and complex as San-ton’s own hold of Segelin, which he called a “castle” after the Drusalan word—but Dunrath had never fallen to any foe in war. It had changed hands twice during the Clan Wars, leaving and returning to Talvalin possession within the space of two months, but both occasions had been by treachery. And now it had been taken by treachery again. Santon drained his cup and rose, glaring towards the blood-red tower. Why was it so cold? he wondered silently, rapping his commander’s baton against one armoured leg. What purpose did it serve? And was the answer one a wise man would want to hear… ?
After a leisurely bath and a meal which by its size deserved a better title than merely breakfast, Aldric walked back to his room to collect his weapons and put on the only formal
elyu-dlas
he owned. Custom and protocol required that he wear only a
taipan
shortsword with the Colour-Robe, but in the circumstances he felt a
taiken
of Widowmaker’s lineage would make an acceptable substitute.
It would have to serve.
The building, indeed the whole town, seemed aswarm with
kailinin
, lesser lords and legion officers, and Aldric had bowed or saluted more often since leaving his bed an hour before than he had done during the previous fortnight. He had also been the source of considerable speculation—the anomaly of a young, short-haired
venjens-eijo
in combat leathers, who yet wore a high-clan crest-collar at his throat and the colours of Talvalin on his
tsepan
, had caused more than one dignified head to swivel in a most undignified manner.
Then Aldric turned a corner and stopped with one eyebrow arching quizzically. Tehal Kyrin was standing a little way from his bedroom door, holding a letter in the fingertips of one hand as if it was a noxious insect, with a distracted expression on her face and her lower lip nipped between her teeth. When she saw the Alban she started slightly, made as if to say something and then instead twisted the letter into an untidy cylinder which she pushed through her belt.
“You look rather better than when I last saw you,” she said, venturing a smile which fell rather short of the mark. Aldric failed to notice anything wrong even when he tried to embrace her and found her slipping nervously aside.
“It’s surprising what hot food, hot water and a sharp razor can do,” he grinned. “Have you eaten yet?” She nodded, toying with the rolled-up letter, and seemed once again on the point of telling him something important when he continued talking. “It looks as if I’m finally going to get some answers out of Gemmel about the Dragonwand. Usually he listens politely to every question you ask and then equally politely avoids giving a reply.”
“Sounds familiar,” the girl murmured. Aldric let her comment pass.
“He called me Bladebearer Deathbringer. Why? I don’t like the title.”
“You’ll have to get used to it.
En Sohra’s
gone, but her crew did a lot of talking during the few hours they spent in harbour. You’re quite a hero.”
“Hero!” Aldric laughed without much humour. “I’ve heard some unlikely things in my life, but that really—” He stopped and reached out one hand to the girl’s face, turning it towards the wan daylight from the window at the end of the corridor. “Why are you crying, Kyrin… ?”
She pulled away from him, wiping her face with the back of one hand, and with the other drew the letter from her belt and pushed it at him. Aldric unrolled the parchment and scanned it quickly, his gaze flicking once or twice from the writing to her face and back again. Then he took several deep breaths before trusting himself to speak.
“The characters are Alban—but the language is Val-hollan, yes?” Kyrin nodded her head sadly. “And this name, Sijord—”
“Seorth,” she corrected.
“Seorth, then. That’s the man who was to marry you?” Another nod. “I can’t read this, but let me guess; Seorth has come looking for you, am I right? And you will go with him, of course.” This was not really a question, more a statement.
Kyrin studied her lover’s face for a long time before she replied, gently touching the white scar under his eye with her fingertips.
“Yes, I will, as I think you expected all along. I’ve tried to tell you often enough… But it’s not a duty— I do have the right to choose—”
“And you choose the man you’ve known for longer than two weeks. I can’t blame you.” The look in his dark eyes said differently and Kyrin knew it.
“You put a great deal of living into those two weeks, Aldric,” she said. “I’ve come to know you very well and like you very much—but I have loved Seorth since I was little more than a child, and from this it seems he loves me too. That’s why I’m going. Believe me,
Aldric-ain
, you will understand… eventually.”