Wizard of the Grove (36 page)

The slope was not as smooth as it had appeared from the pass.

The sleigh bounced over a hillock. Jago threw his weight in the opposite direction and the airborne runner slammed back onto the snow.

A sudden drop caused Crystal and the sleigh to part company for an instant. She bit back a shriek and hung on tighter.
I should've
—
ouch
—
walked!
She thought, as Raulin howled something wordless into the wind.

The sleigh moved off crust and onto granular snow. The roar of the runners softened, but they lost no speed. The forest began to approach very quickly.

Crystal clutched at Raulin's arm. “How do we stop?” she yelled.

A shrug and a wild laugh was the only answer she got.

The forest separated into individual trees.

The sleigh lunged into the air. When it landed, Jago yanked back hard on the brakes and they slowed. A little. Not enough.

This far north, at this time of the year, little or no underbrush filled in the spaces between the trees. The trees still grew too close together to allow the sleigh to pass.

Crystal gathered the power she'd need to stop them before the forest did.

Jago reached forward over the crossbar and slapped Raulin on the left shoulder. Raulin nodded and leaned hard to the right, pulling Crystal over with him. The snow passed as a white blur, distressingly close. As the left runner ran up a ridge, Jago released the left brake and yanked down hard on the right.

“Mother-creator . . .” Crystal felt the sleigh twist beneath her . . .

 . . . a strap broke . . .

 . . . Raulin's hands on her waist . . .

 . . . wind . . .

 . . . air . . .

 . . . cold . . .

 . . . and the sudden shock of impact.

White. All she could see was white. Slowly, checking to make sure everything still worked, Crystal pulled her face out of the snowbank and turned. The sleigh lay on its side, half its contents fanned out over the snow. Raulin, she realized, had tossed her free. Raulin, who now roared with laughter and clapped his brother on the shoulder in congratulations. They'd dumped the sleigh on purpose! And they knew they would have to dump it right from the beginning! Her eyes narrowed as she dug snow out of her ears. Why those two . . .

The first snowball took Raulin just above the elbow. The second clipped Jago on the thigh. The third hit the edge of the runner now up in the air and sprayed wet white powder over both of them.

They turned, startled; and two lovely large handfuls caught both of them in the face.

“Oh, so that's the way it's going to be, is it?” Raulin yelled, scraping his face clean. He ducked another missile, scooped up a double fistful of snow and began returning fire.

Crystal twisted nimbly out of the way. “You'll have to do better than that,” she taunted, tossing her hair back behind her shoulders. She bent to pick up more snow and Jago, who'd crept around the other end of the sleigh, scored a direct hit.

For the next little while the air was white as snowballs flew thick and fast. Sometimes two against one—and not always the same two—and sometimes all of them for themselves, but it soon became obvious that Crystal got hit far less often than the other two.

“I think,” Jago shouted to his brother, currently an ally sharing the dubious shelter behind the sleigh, “she cheats.”

“Does she now . . .” Raulin drawled. A snowball chose that moment to curve around their barrier and smack him in the side of the head. “Well, cheaters,” he grinned, “never prosper.” He jerked a thumb up and Jago nodded. Together they swarmed over the sleigh. Raulin hit her high. Jago hit her low.

Howling with laughter, in a tangle of arms and legs and great fur coats and flying silver hair, they rolled the last twenty feet to the forest
and thudded up against the trunk of a young pine. The tree rocked, shook, and dumped its entire load of snow on their heads.

*   *   *

Lord Death stood quietly and watched the camp take shape just inside the shelter of the forest. Although he could not have been seen, he kept to shadow. It suited his mood.

“I am tired of watching,” he said softly to the wind. It whirled about him, unable to offer comfort, and a clump of snow blew from a branch above. He held out his hand and the snow passed through it, in no way affected by his presence.

“I am tired of watching,” he said again, his eyes on the silver-haired woman by the fire. “But I don't know what else I can do.”

*   *   *

“What I want to know,” Jago unwound the copper wire securing the end of one braid, “is how you got to be such a deadly aim with a snowball.”

Crystal smiled and poked at the fire. Behind the shields Zarsheiy stirred and the blaze flared up, but as the fire goddess seemed content to merely vent her frustration, Crystal ignored her. “The centaurs,” she explained. “They live on the great plains. No hills but lots of snow. They seemed to think it would improve my coordination.”

“Seems like too much fun for a centaur to approve of.”

“They'll approve of anything, as long as there's a lesson in it.”

Jago snorted and shook his head. Free of the braids, his hair fell to his waist in a rippling golden mass. “Doesn't sound like much of a childhood,” he said, beginning to comb it.

The wizard shrugged. “It wasn't so bad.”

“I suppose. Still, it sounds . . . HEY!” He whirled and swung at his brother's legs, but Raulin had already backed out of reach. “He's jealous,” Jago told Crystal, rubbing his head where Raulin had plucked out a hair. “Just because he's losing his . . .”

“Ha!” Raulin stepped over the log they were using as a bench and dropped down onto it. He reached for the blackened metal teapot and
poured himself a cup. “Your vanity is going to get your ass in trouble someday. Should've had that whole mess chopped off years ago.”

“Mess?” Jago turned, his hair glowing gold in the firelight, the wooden comb pointing at Raulin's face. “I'll cut my hair when you get rid of that growth on your upper lip.”

“I'll see you in Chaos first.”

“More than likely.”

Their words held the cadence of a litany and Crystal relaxed, savoring the heat of the fire, the sweet strength of the tea, and the comfort of companionship. Just for an instant, she thought she saw something move in the darkness under the trees. She dropped her gaze into her mug, losing the image in its contents. The darkness was Nashawryn's realm and she had no intention of loosing that dread goddess again.

*   *   *

Out under the trees, Lord Death sighed. Once, she would have looked for him, but she didn't need him now. Still, she was happy. He'd never heard her laugh the way she had that afternoon. Wasn't that what he wanted? Wasn't it?

*   *   *

Raulin settled his forearms on his knees and watched his brother and the wizard. They looked, he thought, like the sun and the moon come down to share his fire. He had a sudden vision of the two of them entwined, great lengths of gold and silver hair wrapping about them and the rush of desire that accompanied it left him momentarily weak. As though aware of his thoughts, Jago turned to look at him and Raulin raised his mug in a slow and silent toast. Jago grinned, raised both brows, and returned to freeing a tangle. Coincidence, Raulin decided. Although the love between them was the strongest and best thing in both their lives, it had never expressed itself as mind-reading. Not even when they'd been children and could've used it. . . .

With his attention apparently on his hair, Jago managed to keep both Crystal and his brother within sight. He had a sudden urge to
shout, “Would you two get it over with so I can figure out where I fit in!” but he held his peace. Would talking to Raulin do any good? He doubted it; his brother never welcomed interference in his love life—Jago smiled at memories—as much as he'd always needed it. . . .

Crystal stared into the fire, acutely conscious of the man to either side of her. They were so much the same in so many ways and yet she reacted completely differently to each. She wished she'd learned more about men in her twelve years of wandering. Twelve years. The fire danced with visions of the battle on the Tage Plateau, with the pyramids of bodies Kraydak had built across half the world. Kraydak and his armies. Kraydak's Horde. The men of the Empire.

“Raulin, how old are you?” she asked softly, because she daren't ask the other question, the question that naturally followed her line of thought.

Raulin sighed. “Thirty-seven. Jago is thirty-three.”

“Then you were . . .”

“Part of Kraydak's armies?” He shifted, snagged the pot, and poured more tea. He'd wondered, off and on, how long it would take her to make that connection. “I was. Jago wasn't.”

She turned over a number of responses in her mind, sure of how she felt but unsure of how to express it. Jago broke into the silence before she got the chance.

“Does it matter?” His voice was flat. “He didn't have a choice, Crystal. When they took you, you went. Or you died. They never came for me. That's the only difference. He didn't fight for anything he believed in. He only fought to stay alive. When you destroyed Kraydak, you freed Raulin as much as you freed countries under Kraydak's yoke. Does that make him the enemy now?” His face remained expressionless as he stared at her, but in his heart he prayed for her to say no, to not tear down the delicate friendship that had begun to grow among the three of them.

Crystal raised her head and Jago fell into the brilliant green of her eyes.

You've always hurt for him, haven't you?

He felt the question, knew it hadn't been spoken aloud. He felt her take his answer. Across the bond that stretched between them, across the bond woven of bits and pieces pulled from both their lives, he felt her say:
I
hurt for all of them.

He felt her pain and knew she meant every life that Kraydak had touched.

And he felt how it cut and tore when they wouldn't let her help but ran in fear and suspicion because she came of the same race Kraydak did. Felt her despair and burned with shame that he had considered even for an instant she would forget who the real enemy had been.

Then he again sat beside the fire, looking into a crystal tear that ran down the curve of an ivory cheek. His face grew hot and he tried to turn away, but she laid a hand along his cheek and stopped him.

“We carry the pain,” she said softly, “because it is all that we can do.”

The why, made up for both of guilt and doubt and caring, they didn't have to speak of.

A second tear joined the first. “I never realized before that I wasn't carrying it alone.”

Jago turned his head, not taking his eyes from her, and softly kissed the palm that held him. She smiled, a little tremulously, and drew the hand away to wipe the tears dry with the place his lips had touched.

The bond between them strengthened, for only one thing was stronger than pain shared for love's sake and that was love shared for the same reason.

Raulin watched the only two people in the world who meant anything to him, and nodded. They'd worked it out. He wasn't sure how and he didn't care. He could leave it there, but though he knew what her answer would be, he needed her to tell him as well.

“Am I the enemy, Crystal?” he asked.

She turned to face him, pushing her hair back off her face as she moved, the warmth of her smile reaching across the distance. “You never were.”

There had been only one enemy in that war and Crystal knew that better than anyone. But he still released a breath he didn't remember
holding as her words dissolved a bitter doubt he hadn't known he had. He returned her smile with an equal warmth and then tried to calm his pulse when she flushed and looked away. He wondered how Jago would feel about looking for more firewood.

Off in the distance, a wolf howled, the lonely sound filling the night and giving all three a chance to regain a little composure. Raulin threw another log on the fire, Jago began rebraiding his hair, and Crystal began to sing.

It started as a formless kind of a hum, an outlet for the emotions that threatened to overflow. She stared off at nothing as the music began to form patterns and then the pattern evolved into a song. It was an old song, from before the Age of Wizards, a ballad of how the last of the air elementals fell in love with a mortal woman.

Jago's fingers began to move to the rhythm of the song. He remembered the last time he'd heard it; his mother sitting in their one comfortable chair with her old worn mandolin in her lap, Raulin sprawled on the hearth replacing the leather strapping around the handle of his dagger—replacing it with a strip torn from one of
his
vests if Jago remembered correctly. That had been about the last night they'd shared as a family. Soon after, Raulin had been taken and he'd been gone barely a month when their mother had died. The mandolin had been sold to pay for her pyre. He smiled as he wound off the braid, holding only the memory of that last night, letting the others go.

The centaurs had taught Crystal to sing as a means of focusing her power. She went one step beyond on her own.

Raulin's jaw dropped as, in the air over the camp, the song came to life. In a tiny patch of clear blue sky, Laur-anthonel swooped and dove and raced the wind. His hair was the color of sunshine, his eyes a storm-cloud gray. From the stunned expression on his brother's face, Raulin assumed Jago saw the same. An arm's reach away from the reality of woodsmoke and trampled snow, Laur-anthonel exalted in his freedom as the song named him more than mortal and less than god; he ruled the winds, no one ruled him. For once more aware of the wizard than the woman, Raulin relaxed and let the music take him.

Crystal sang on, oblivious to anything but the song. The goddesses, with no weakness to give them opening and no calling to their aspects, remained quiet.