Warautumn (3 page)

“And this ‘jumping’?”

“Simply stated: the ability to disappear in one place and reappear more or less instantly in another, using the power of the gems—which suck heat from anything alive nearby when they are used thusly. It actually happened a few times at the Battle of Storms, but most people missed it.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s enough for now.”

“Indeed,” Tryffon echoed. “Which brings us back to Merryn.”

Vorinn nodded. “So I was thinking. And that, in turn, presents two scenarios. Either Merryn has not yet hidden the regalia, in which case—should Avall have jumped to where she is—they should indeed be back here very soon; or else she
has
hidden it, and they will have to retrieve it. And in the
latter
case, they could either jump to the hiding place quickly—which I doubt, because of the number of people involved, but which could have them back here by sunrise, since Avall will know about the ultimatum—or else they will have to proceed afoot—which will take who-knows-how-long.”

Tryffon looked troubled indeed. “So we basically have to contrive three plans: one in case Avall returns before dawn with the regalia, one in case he returns without it, and one in which he does
not
return.”

Vorinn regarded him solemnly. “Correct.”

“At least the balance has shifted,” Veen offered. “Two hands ago Zeff had two major bargaining points: He had the King, and he had the master gem. Now he has neither. If we move in the morning, we could very well force his hand, even without the regalia. Why, if Avall can do all this jumping, there’s nothing to keep him from jumping into the hold itself and settling matters there without us even being involved.”

Tryffon looked startled. “That’s true. It would also be just like him.”

“Two good points,” Vorinn conceded. “Which I think mean we’ve decided that the least we do at dawn is remain where we are.”

Tryffon grinned through his whiskers. “A siege is still a siege, eh, boy? And even without magic on our side, we’re stronger.”

“But they’ve got blackmail on their side,” Veen warned. “Avall was the King, but he was only one man. There are still a thousand innocent people in that hold. Who’s to say who Zeff will serve up on a tabletop next?”

“The subchiefs of War and Ferr, I’d be willing to bet,” Tryffon growled. “Or Crim herself.”

“Or all the chiefs,” Preedor suggested. “That’s what I’d do, if I was ruthless.”

“Maybe even Rrath,” Tryffon took up again. “To show they would even sacrifice their own.”

Vorinn snorted. “
Rrath?
Well, they probably do consider him a traitor, so he’d be expendable in that regard. On the other hand, he was unconscious the last we heard of him. Besides which, they don’t dare kill him, because—conscious—he knows more about the gems than anyone else they’ve got to hand.”

Veen cleared her throat. “Speaking of Rrath, has anyone told Esshill about all this? He’ll have heard anyway, by now; but I think we owe it to him.”

Vorinn scratched his chin. “No, and I suppose we ought to.” He glanced up at the squire. “Do you know where—?”

The girl nodded and darted out—only to return an instant later with a spare, tired-looking young man of twenty, dressed in plain Argen-a livery, for all he was not Argen-a. His eyes were grim, his mouth a thin, hard line.

“He was on his way here,” the squire explained. “We met in transit.”

“And I can imagine why,” Vorinn murmured, motioning Esshill to one of the spare seats they always kept open in the Council Tent. “You are Rrath syn Garnill’s bond-brother, is that correct?”

Esshill nodded glumly. “I am,” he added after a breath, for courtesy.

“And you are no doubt aware that affairs have changed, as far as the King’s captivity is concerned?”

Esshill looked uncomfortable. “I know that Avall disappeared from the arcade at Gem-Hold, that Kylin might have been involved, and that they may have returned here, and vanished again, with half the Regency Council.”

Vorinn nodded in turn. “And what you want to know is whether this in any way involved Rrath?”

Esshill tensed, but would not look at anyone. “I’m grateful anyone remembered him,” he said harshly—“and surprised.”

“He’s a prisoner the same as everyone else in the hold,” Vorinn replied with forced calm. “We’ve as much concern for him as for anyone—except the King, of course—and you have to understand that.”

“I do—in theory. That is, my head does. My heart doesn’t. My
heart
says that Rrath has been used over and over—and I’ve had to suffer through it at least as badly as Rann has suffered because of Avall.”

“Agreed,” Tryffon rumbled. “But you must in turn concede that Rrath is very smart, for all he might also be a fool. But in either case, it was his choice to cast his lot with the Ninth Face—of which decision, so I am aware, you were not informed.”

“I wasn’t,” Esshill retorted. “And believe me, I
will
have an accounting of him for that if he ever regains consciousness. Until then”—he looked down again, eyes bright with tears—“it would—Forgive me, Lords, but I must say this—It would be nice if I had any sense at all that even one of you cared a broken stone about my bond-mate’s fate.”

“If you have strong words to say,” Tryffon broke in, “you would be wise to say them now. I’d rather we knew where we stood with you than have you suddenly go rogue and betray us.”

Esshill looked up sharply. “I’m no traitor,” he snapped. “Never to my Kingdom, and only to my clan when they moved without me. For his part, I have no choice but to respect
Avall for doing everything he could for my bond-brother. But you must be aware that Rrath’s in danger in there. He knows as much about the gems as anyone, and that information is valuable. Unconscious, he’s safe. But they’ll want to revive him, and since he’s already betrayed them, they’ll have no reason to go easy on him. Which is why I pray every moment that he doesn’t revive.”

“So do we,” Vorinn agreed.

“Is there—I don’t suppose there’s any chance that he got out when Avall did, or as part of that?”

Vorinn shook his head, grateful that he didn’t have to explain about jumping—and that Esshill seemed to have kept silent about it as well; they didn’t want the whole army knowing. “Not that we’re aware of. From what little we’ve been able to piece together, when one jumps with the master gem, one generally takes any human one is touching along with one, together with whatever clothes and accoutrements he or she is wearing. Depending on circumstances—and this would seem to involve two people jumping together—it also appears to take whatever easily portable objects are in the vicinity: a rug one might be standing on, for instance; but not something otherwise fixed, like the tabletop to which Avall was clamped. That’s the only way we can explain how Avall and Rrath jumped away with all that gear that was in Rrath’s caravan when we were back at the Face’s citadel on the day they both got captured: because both of them were in the bond, and those two minds were strong enough to … attract their immediate environment.”

He broke off, because Esshill’s face had gone cold again. “Damn him for that, too.”

“I think it took them both by surprise,” Vorinn responded. “I can’t imagine that Avall would have tried to jump into the Ninth Face’s citadel, and certainly not with Rrath. We’re all but certain that he was seeking information and the whole affair went out of control.”

“Bond-brother as exploitable resource,” Esshill growled.
“That’s another one Avall and I will have to work out between ourselves.”

“As is your right,” Vorinn conceded. “But that assumes much and in any case is for later. For now, we wanted you to know that we
are
aware of your situation and that we’re doing as much as we can—but that there are a great many variables at work here which
no one
has ever faced before. In the meantime, consider yourself at liberty. You can fight if you want; you can be a squire if you want; you can sleep all day if you want. The only constraint is that you must remain in camp. We don’t dare risk your doing something brave and foolish like Kylin did. It appears they underrated him. They won’t repeat that error, especially now that matters have shifted in our favor.”

Esshill looked up again, his face not one whit warmer. “I appreciate the intent,” he said formally. “Now, if you have no further need of me—”

“Not now,” Vorinn replied. “You may let yourself out.”

“Lord,” Esshill acknowledged stiffly—and with that he rose and departed.

“We’ll have to watch that one,” Tryffon opined, when a hand of breaths had expired. “He’s balanced on the knife edge between loyalty to Priest-Clan and to us. More importantly, he’s balanced between love of his bond-brother and anyone who can ensure that brother’s survival, and hatred of anyone who threatens him—either of which, depending on circumstances, could be us.”

Vorinn nodded grimly. “Trust me, Uncle, that watch him I shall.”

“Finally!”
Div groaned shamelessly, pointing through curtains of cold gray rain toward a deeper darkness in the canyon wall to their left that
might
indicate a cave in which she, Strynn, one birkit, and two horses could shelter for the night. They had been toiling up this barren, rocky defile for what seemed like days (though it was barely an eighth of one), all the while keeping close watch on the quick mountain stream beside them, lest it rise far enough to constitute a threat. The parent threat—the rain—had caught them out three hands past noon, but the stream—blessedly—still frothed and rumbled half a span below the level stretch of bank that comprised what passed for a path in this particular part of the Wild. The Eight knew there were no actual trails here, three days southwest of War-Hold-Winter, because nobody in their right mind came here; one way was therefore as good as another.

Which was fine, if one were wandering aimlessly about on holiday, but not if one were trying to track someone—
two
someones, actually, since the previous evening. And
that
extra body complicated things, too, because most of their initial progress had come from Strynn knowing Merryn so well she
could second-guess her. But that had been before Merryn had acquired a companion—probably her war-shocked former comrade-in-arms, Krynneth syn Mozz-een, if a few scanty, and somewhat disturbing, clues were any indication.

Now they had to rely mostly on the birkit, because the finding stone Strynn wore on a chain around her neck merely indicated the direction in which Merryn’s matching stone lay, not the distance between them. Unfortunately, even that sketchy information was often rendered useless by cliffs too sheer to climb or rivers too wide to ford, which obliged them to take detour after detour, and required them to recheck their route a dozen times a day, which further slowed their progress.

Nor was Div’s woodcraft of much help, since the ground was too rocky to show prints—though she had spotted scrapes upon the stones that could have been made by horseshoes. The birkit—which mostly tracked by scent—agreed. Indeed, it was that semisapient, bear-sized carnivore that had insisted they turn from the wide alpine meadow they had been traversing, and into this darksome declivity between two fire mountains, one of which was still alive and rumbling. Never had Div been so close to one, nor wanted to be so far away. They would be totally at the beast’s mercy after today, too, because this downpour would erase any other tracks that might be present. That it would also wash away a great deal of scent did not brook contemplation.

Then again, most of what she wanted to contemplate right now centered on being warm, dry, and asleep—for that day’s trek, as no other, had worn both her and Strynn down to the nubs of their endurance, with the result that they were panting heavily, stumbling often, yawning frequently, and having trouble thinking at more than an instinctive level.

“Finally,” Div said again—because she wanted to hear a human voice and Strynn had not responded.

“Finally indeed,” Strynn muttered behind her, sounding tired, miserable, and grouchy, not all of which, Div suspected, could be blamed on fatigue and rain.
Eight deliver her from
pregnant women!
Slogging through the Wild with one seemed to be her lot of late—though whether that was to remind her of the discomfort she no longer had to worry about, barren as she was, or to rub that fact in her face, she had no idea.

They were both walking at present because the horses—Div’s stallion, White Sky; and Strynn’s mare, File—had borne them steadily all afternoon and were overdue for a rest, and the footing thereabouts was problematical anyway. She only hoped there was room for their mounts in the cave, for all that the horses were born to weather storms like this and worse. Misery was misery, regardless of one’s shape or skin.

“Another finger, I think,” Div called back. Her voice rang loud off the rocks, only to be muffled by the rain. It was an odd effect and somewhat eerie. Div shuddered from more than mountain chill.

“I hope,” Strynn retorted. “All that’s keeping me awake is walking.” Without breaking stride, she shrugged her sodden, stone-colored cloak higher on her shoulders so as to shift the edge of her hood farther beyond her face. Div did the same, further blurring the distinctions of class, age, and build that would have marked them as coming from different worlds a year ago, but now made no difference at all, and certainly not in how they got along, which was famously.