A Time of Exile
Author: Katharine Kerr
Date: 2010-08-10T18:30:00+00:00
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Rights: Copyright © 1992 by Keith Parkinson

REBELLION

“My Lord! Look back!”

With Odyl there to guard his flank, Danry could turn his head for a look just as a plume of dust began to rise among the trees, and a new set of horns and shouts broke out. The rest of the Deverry army was battling up the other side of the rise. Doubtless they’d merely been trying to hit the rebel army from the rear, but all at once Danry realized that they were getting themselves a splendid prize indeed.

“The king!” he screamed. “Odyl!”

Screaming and cursing, they tried to turn their horses and rally the rest of their men, but the Deverrians were all over them….

“No one does real, live, gritty Celtic fantasy better than Katharine Kerr.”

—Judith Tarr, author of The Dagger and the Cross

BY KATHARINE KERR

Her novels of Deverry and the Westlands

THE BRISTLING WOOD
THE DRAGON REVENANT
A TIME OF EXILE
A TIME OF OMENS
DAGGERSPELL
DAYS OF BLOOD AND FIRE
DAYS OF AIR AND DARKNESS
DARKSPELL
THE RED WYVERN
THE BLACK RAVEN
THE FIRE DRAGON

Table of Contents

Cover

Rebellion

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue: The Eldidd Border 1096

Part One: Deverry and Eldidd 718

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Part Two: The Elven Border 719–915

Chapter 3

Part Three: Eldidd 918

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epilogue: The Elven Border Summer 1096

Appendices

Glossary

About the Author

A Special Preview of A Time of Omens

Copyright

DEDICATION
tibi, Dea, nominis pro gloria tuae

A NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION
OF DEVERRY WORDS

The language spoken in Deverry is a member of the P-Celtic family. Although closely related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, it is by no means identical to any of these actual languages and should never be taken as such.

Vowels are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.

A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in far, when short.

O as in bone when long; as in pot when short.

W as the oo in spook when long; as in roof when short.

Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short.

E as in pen.

I as in pin.

U as in pun.

Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long whether that syllable is stressed or not.

THE PRONUNCIATION OF DEVERRY WORDS

Diphthongs generally have one consistent pronunciation.

AE as the a in mane.

AI as in aisle.

AU as the ow in how.

EO as a combination of eh and oh.

EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.

IE as in pier.

OE as the oy in boy.

UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee. Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in carnoic (KAR-noh-ik).

Consonants are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:

C is always hard as in cat.

G is always hard as in get.

DD is the voiced th as in thin or breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound as in th or breath. (This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)

R is heavily rolled.

RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr in Deverry proper. In Eldidd, the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from R.

DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in Gwendolen or twit.

Y is never a consonant.

I before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending -ion, pronounced yawn.

Doubled consonants are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that DD is a single letter, not a doubled consonant.

Accent is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place names are often an exception to this rule.

This is, of course, the same system of transcription used in the earlier volumes of these chronicles—a fact that may surprise some few readers. I refer to those scholars of Elvish, as well as one well-known Elvish scholar, who have taken time better employed elsewhere to criticize my decision to dispense with the vast apparatus of diacritical marks with which they attempt to render on paper that most nuanced of languages. No reader of popular fiction wants or needs to wade his or her way through a page where long names bristle with peculiar typefaces like some sort of verbal porcupines. In my approximations I have as before relied upon native speakers of Elvish in difficult or ambiguous cases; I trust that their judgment will eventually carry the day even in academic circles and that this tedious debate in the back pages of various linguistic journals will at last be put to rest.

PROLOGUE

THE ELDIDD BORDER
1096

“As thrifty as a dwarf” is a common catchphrase, and one that the Mountain People take for a compliment. Although they see no reason to waste anything, whether it’s a scrap of cloth or the heel of a loaf, they keep a particularly good watch over their gem-stones and metals, though they never tell anyone outside their kin and clan just how they do it. Otho, the silver daggers’ smith down in Dun Mannannan, was no different than any other dwarven craftsman, unless he was perhaps more cautious than most. His usual customer was some hotheaded young lad who’d dishonored himself badly enough to be forced to join the silver daggers, and you have to admit that a wandering swordsman who fights only for coin, not honor, isn’t the sort you can truly trust with either dwarven silver or magical secrets.

During his long years among humans in the kingdom of Deverry, Otho taught a few other smiths how to smelt the rare alloy for the daggers, an extremely complicated process with a number of peculiar steps, such as words to be chanted and hand gestures to be made just so. Otho would always refuse to answer questions, saying only that if his students wanted the formula to come out right, they could follow his orders, and if they didn’t, they could get out of his forge right then and spare everyone trouble. All the apprentices shut their mouths and stayed; they were bright enough to realize that they were being taught magic of some sort, even if they weren’t being told what the spells accomplished. Once they opened shops of their own, they went on repeating Otho’s procedures in the exact way they’d been taught, so that every dagger made of dwarven silver in Deverry carried two kinds of dweomer.

One spell Otho would acknowledge, especially to someone that he liked and trusted; the other he would have hidden from his own brother. The first produced in the metal itself an antipathy to the auric vibrations of the elven race, so that the dagger glowed brightly the moment an elf came within a few feet of it. The other, the secret spell, was its necessary opposite, producing an affinity, in this case to the dagger’s true owner, so that if lost or stolen, sooner or later the magical currents of the universe would float that dagger home. The thing was, by “true owner” Otho meant himself, which meant that any lost dagger would eventually come home to him, no matter who had actually made it or how much its interim owner had paid for it. Otho justified all of this by thinking of the purchase price as mere rent, a trifling detail that he never mentioned to his customers.

Once and only once had Otho produced an exception, and that was by accident. Round about 1044, he made a dagger for Cullyn of Cerrmor, one of the few human beings he truly admired. In the course of things, that blade passed to Rhodry Maelwaedd, a young lord who was forced by political exile to join the silver daggers. As soon as Rhodry laid his hand on the dagger, it was obvious that his blood was a little rarer than merely noble—the blade blazed up and accused him of being half an elf at least. Grudgingly, and only as a favor for Cullyn of Cerrmor’s daughter, Otho took off the denouncing spell. What Otho didn’t realize, since his dweomer was a thing of rote memory rather than real understanding, was that he’d weakened the complementary magic as well. The dagger now saw Rhodry, not the dwarf, as its one true owner.

A silver dagger’s life is never easy, and Rhodry’s time on the long road was worse than most, and by one thing and another he managed to lose the blade good and proper, for away in the Bardekian archipelago across the Southern Sea, round about the year 1064. At the same time as Rhodry was killing the man who’d stolen it, the dagger itself fetched up in the marketplace of a little mountain town called Ganjalo, where it stayed for several years, stubbornly unsold. The merchant couldn’t understand—here was this beautiful and exotic item, reasonably priced, that no one ever seemed to want to buy. Finally it did catch the eye of an itinerant tinker, who knew of a rich man who collected unusual knives of all sorts. Since this rich man lived in a seaport, the dagger allowed itself to be installed in the collection. Again, some years passed, until the collector died and his sons divided up the various blades. The youngest, who happened to be a ship’s captain, felt drawn to the dagger for some irrational reason and traded another brother an entire set of pearl-handled fish knives for it. The next time this captain went to sea, the dagger went with him.

But not to Deverry. The captain sailed back and forth from Bardek proper to the off-lying islands of Orystinna, a lucrative run, and he saw no reason to consider making the dangerous crossing to the distant barbarian kingdoms. After some years of this futile east-west travel, the dagger changed owners. While gambling, the captain had an inexplicable run of bad luck and ended up handing the dagger over to a friend to pay off his debt. The friend took it to a northern seaport and on a sudden whim sold it to another marketplace jeweler, who bought it on the same kind of impulse. There it lay again, until a young merchant passed by and happened to linger for a moment to look over the jeweler’s stock. Since this Londalo traded with Deverry on a regular basis, he was always in need of little gifts to smooth his way with customs officials and minor lords. The dagger had a barbarian look, and he bought it to take along on his next trading run.

Of course, poor Londalo didn’t realize that in Deverry offering a silver dagger as a gift was a horrible insult. He found out quick enough in the Eldidd town of Abernaudd, where his ill-considered gesture cost him a trading pact. As he bemoaned his bad luck in a tavern, a kindly stranger explained the problem, and Londalo nearly threw the dagger onto the nearest dungheap then and there, which was more or less what the dagger had in mind. Yet, because he also knew a lesson when he saw one, he ended up keeping it as a reminder to never take other people’s customs for granted again. If silver could have feelings, the dagger would have been livid with rage. Back and forth it went between Bardek and the Deverry coast for some years more, while a richer, older Londalo became a respected and important member of his merchant guild, until finally, in the spring of the year 1096, he and the dagger turned up in Aberwyn, where Rhodry Maelwaedd now ruled as gwerbret. The magical currents around the dagger thickened, swirled, and grew so strong that Londalo actually felt them, as a prick of something much like anxiety.

On the morning that he was due to visit the gwerbret, Londalo stood in his chamber in the best inn Aberwyn had to offer and irritably applied his clan markings. Normally a trained slave would have painted on the pale blue stripes and red diamonds that marked him as a member of House Ondono, but it was very unwise for a thrifty man to bring his slaves when he visited the kingdom of Deverry. Surrounded by barbarians with a peculiar idea of property rights, slaves were known to take their chance at freedom and disappear. When they did, the barbarian authorities became uncooperative at best and hostile at worst. Londalo held his hand mirror at various angles to examine the paint on his pale brown skin and finally decided that his amateur job would have to do. After all, the barbarians, even an important one like the lord he was about to visit, knew nothing of the niceties of the art. Yet the anxiety remained. Something was wrong; he could just plain feel it.

There was a knock at the door, and Harmon, his young assistant, entered with a respectful bob of his head.

“Are you ready to leave, sir?”

“Yes. I see you have the proposed trade agreements with you. Good, good.”

With a brief smile Harmon patted the heavy leather roll of a document case that he carried tucked under one arm.

As they walked through the streets of Aberwyn, Londalo noticed his young partner looking this way and that in distaste; occasionally he lifted a perfumed handkerchief to his nose as they passed a particularly ripe dungheap. There was no doubt that visiting Deverry was hard on a civilized man, Londalo reflected. The city seemed to have been thrown down around the harbor rather than built according to a plan. All the buildings were round and shaggy with thatch, instead of square and nicely shingled; the streets meandered randomly through and around them like the patterns of spirals and interlace the barbarians favored as a decorative style. Everywhere was confusion: barking dogs, running children, men on horseback trotting through dangerously fast, rumbling wagons, and even the occasional staggering drunk.

“Sir,” Harmon said at last. “Is this really the most important city in Eldidd?”

“I’m afraid so. Now remember, my young friend, this man we’re going to visit will look like a crude barbarian to you, but he has the power to put us both to death if we insult him. The laws are very different here. Every ruler is judge and advocate both as long as he’s in his own lands, and a gwerbret, like our lord here in Aberwyn, is a ruler far more powerful than one of our archons.”

In approximately the center of town lay the palace complex, or dun as the barbarians called it, of the gwerbret. The barbarians all talked about how splendid it was, with its many-towered fortress inside the high stone walls, but the Bardekians found the stonework crude and the effect completely spoiled by the clutter of huts and sheds and pigsties and stables all around it. As they made their way through the bustle of servants, Londalo suddenly realized that he was wearing the silver dagger on his tunic’s leather belt.

“By the Star Goddesses! I must be growing old! I don’t even remember picking this thing up from the table.”

“I don’t suppose it’ll matter, sir. All the men around here are absolutely bristling with knives.”

Although Londalo had never met this particular ruler before, he’d heard that Rhodry Maelwaedd, Gwerbret Aberwyn, was an honest, fair-minded man, somewhat more civilized than most of his kind. Londalo was pleased to notice that the courtyards were reasonably clean, the servants wore decent clothing, and the corpses of hanged criminals were nowhere in sight. At the door of the tallest tower, the broch proper, the aged chamberlain was waiting to greet them. In a hurried whisper Londalo reminded Harmon that a gwerbret’s servitors were all noble-born.

“So mind your manners. No giving orders, and always say thank you when they do something for you.”

The chamberlain ushered them into a vast round room, carpeted with braided rushes and set about with long wooden tables, where at least a hundred men, all of them armed with knife and sword both, were drinking ale and nibbling on chunks of bread, while servant girls wandered around, gossiping or trading smart remarks with the men more than working. Near a carved sandstone hearth to one side, one finer table, made of ebony and polished to a shine, stood alone, the gwerbret’s place of honor. Londalo was well pleased when the chamberlain seated them there and had a boy bring their ale in actual glass stoups. Londalo was also pleased to see that the tapestry he’d sent ahead as a gift was hanging on the wall near the enormous fireplace. As he absently fingered the hilt of the silver dagger, he realized that his strange anxiety had left him. Harmon, however, was nervous, glancing continually at the mob of armed men across the hall.

“Now, now,” Londalo whispered. “The rulers here do keep their men in hand, and besides, everyone honors a guest. No one’s going to kill you on the spot.”

Harmon forced out a smile, had a sip of ale, and nearly choked on the bitter, stinking stuff. Like the true merchant he was, however, he covered over his distaste with a cough and forced himself to try again. In a few minutes, two young men strode into the hall. Since their baggy trousers were woven from one of the garish plaids that marked a Deverry noble, and since the entire warband rose to bow to them, Londalo assumed that they were a pair of the gwerbret’s sons. They looked much alike, with wavy raven-dark hair and cornflower-blue eyes. By barbarian standards they were both handsome men, Londalo supposed, but he was worried about more than their appearance.

“By the Great Wave-father himself! I was told that there was only one son visiting here! We’ll have to do something about getting a gift for the other, no matter what the cost.”

The chamberlain bustled over, motioning for them to rise, so they’d be ready to kneel at the proper moment. Having to kneel to the so-called noble-born vexed Londalo, who was used to voting his rulers into office and voting them out again, too, if they didn’t measure up to his standards. As one of the young men strolled over, the chamberlain cleared his throat.

“Rhodry, Gwerbret Aberwyn, the Maelwaedd, and his son.”

In his confusion, Londalo almost forgot to kneel. Why, this lord could be no more than twenty-five at most! Mentally he cursed the merchant guild for giving him such faulty information for this important mission.

“We are honored to be in your presence, great lord, but you must forgive our intrusion in what must be a time of mourning.”

“Mourning?” The gwerbret frowned, puzzled.

“Well, when we set sail for your most esteemed country, Your Grace, your father was still alive, or so I was told, the elder Rhodry of Aberwyn.”

The gwerbret burst out laughing, waving for them to rise and take their seats again.

“I take it you’ve never seen me before, good merchant. I’ve ruled here for thirty years, and I’m four and fifty years old. I’m not having a jest on you, either.” Absently he looked away, and suddenly his eyes turned dark with a peculiar sadness. “Oh, no jest at all.”

Londalo forgot his protocol enough to stare. Not a trace of gray in the gwerbret’s hair, not one true line in his face—how could he be a man of fifty-four, old back home, ancient indeed for a barbarian warrior? Then the gwerbret turned back to him with a sunny smile.

“But that’s of no consequence. What brings you to me, good sir?”

Londalo cleared his throat to prepare for the important matter of trading Eldidd grain for Bardekian luxuries. Just as he was about to speak, Rhodry leaned forward to stare.

“By the gods, is that a silver dagger you’re carrying? It looks like the usual knobbed pommel.”

“Well, it is, Your Grace.” Mentally Londalo cursed himself all over again for bringing the wretched thing along. “I bought it in the islands many years ago, you see, and I keep it with me because … well, it’s rather a long story …”

“In the islands? May I see it, good merchant, if it’s not too much trouble?”

“Why, no trouble at all, Your Grace.”

Rhodry took it, stared for a long moment at the falcon device engraved on the blade, and burst out laughing.

“Do you realize that this used to be mine? Years and years ago? It was stolen from me when I was in the islands.”

“What? Really? Why, then, Your Grace absolutely must have it back! I insist, truly I do.”

Later that afternoon, once the treaty was signed and merchant on his way, the great hall of Aberwyn fell quiet as the warband went off to exercise their horses. Although normally Rhodry would have gone with them, he lingered at the table of honor and considered the odd twist of luck, the strange coincidence, as he thought of it, that had brought his silver dagger home to him. A few serving lasses wandered around, wiping down tables with rags; a few stable hands sat near the open door and diced for coppers; a few dogs lay in the straw on the floor and snored. In a bit, his eldest son came down to join him. It was hard to believe that the lad was fully grown, with two sons of his own now and the Dun Gwerbyn demesne in his hands. Rhodry could remember how happy he’d been when his first heir was born, how much he’d loved the little lad, and how much Cullyn had loved him. It hurt, now, thinking that his firstborn was beginning to hate him, and all because his father refused to age and die. Not that Cullyn ever said a word, mind; it was just that a coolness was growing between them, and every now and then Rhodry would catch him staring at the various symbols of the gwerbretal rank, the dragon banner, the ceremonial sword of justice, with a wondering sort of greed. Finally Rhodry could stand the silence no longer.

“Things are quiet in the tierynrhyn, then?”

“They are, Father. That’s why I thought I’d ride your way for a visit.”

Rhodry smiled and wondered if he’d come in hopes of finding him ill. He was an ambitious man, Cullyn was, because Rhodry had raised him to be so, had trained him from the time he could talk to rule the vast gwerbretrhyn of Aberwyn and to use well the riches that the growing trade with Bardek brought it. He himself had inherited the rhan half by accident, and he could remember all too well his panicked feeling of drowning in details during the first year of his rule to allow his son to go uneducated.

“That’s an odd thing, Da, that dagger coming home.”

“It was, truly.” Rhodry picked it up off the table and handed it to him. “See the falcon on the blade? That’s the device of the man you were named for.”

“That’s right—he told me the story. Of how he was a silver dagger once, I mean. Ye gods, I still miss Cullyn of Cerrmor, and here he’s been dead many a long year now.”

“I miss him too, truly. You know, I think I’ll carry this dagger again, in his memory, like.”

“Oh here, Da, you can’t do that! It’s a shameful thing!”

“Indeed? And who’s going to dare mock me for it?”

Cullyn looked away in an unpleasant silence, as if any possible mention of social position or standing could spoil the most innocent pleasure. With a sigh he handed the dagger back and picked up his tankard again.

“We could have a game of Carnoic?” Rhodry said.

“We could, at that.” When Cullyn smiled at him, all his old affection shone in his dark blue eyes. “It’s too muggy to go out hunting this afternoon.”

They were well into their third game when Rhodry’s wife, the Lady Aedda, came down to join them at the honor table. She sat down quietly, even timidly, with a slight smile for her son. At forty-seven she had grown quite stout, and there were streaks of gray in her chestnut hair and deep lines round her mouth. Although theirs was a politically arranged marriage, and in its first years a miserable one, over time she and Rhodry had worked out a certain accommodation to each other. He felt a certain fondness for her, a gratitude that she had given him four strong heirs for Aberwyn.

“If my lady wishes,” Rhodry said, “we can end this game.”

“No need, my lord. I can watch.”

And yet, by a common, unspoken consent they brought the game to a close and put the pieces away. Aedda had asked for so little from both of them over the years that they were inclined to give her what small concessions they could. As the afternoon wore on in small talk about the doings of the various vassals in the demesne, Rhodry drank more and more and said less and less. The heat, the long silences, the predictability of his wife’s little remarks all weighed him down until at last he got up and strode out of the hall. No one dared question him or follow.

His private chamber was on the third floor of a half-broch, a richly furnished room with Bardek carpets on the floor and glass in the windows, cushioned chairs at the hearth and a display of five beautifully worked swords on one wall. Rhodry threw open a window and leaned on the sill to look down on the ward and the garden, where the dragon of Aberwyn sported in a marble fountain far below. One old manservant ambled across the lawn on some slow errand; nothing else moved. For a moment Rhodry felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He tossed his head with an oath that was half a keening and turned away.

For over thirty years he had held power, and for most of them he had loved it all: the symbols and pageantry of his rank, the tangible power that he wielded in his court of justice and on the battlefield, the subtle but even greater power he exercised in the intrigues of the High King’s court. As he looked back, he could remember exactly when that love turned sour. He had been at the royal palace in Dun Deverry, and as he entered the great hall, the chamberlain of course announced him. At the words “Rhodry, Gwerbret Aberwyn,” every other noble-born man there turned to look at him, some in envy of one of the king’s favorites, some in subtle calculation of what his presence would mean to their own schemes, others with simple interest in the sight of so powerful a man. All he felt in return was irritation, that they should gawk at him as at a two-headed calf in the market fair. And from that day, some two years earlier, Rhodry had slowly come to wonder when he would die and be rid of everything he once had loved, free and shut of it at last.

He left the window and sat down in a half-round rosewood chair, intricately carved with interlace wound about the dragons of Aberwyn, to draw his newly returned silver dagger and study it. Although the blade looked like silver, it was harder than the best steel, and it gleamed without a trace of tarnish. When he flicked it with a thumbnail it rang.

“Dwarven silver,” he muttered to himself. “Ah, by the lord of hell, I must be going daft, to wish I was out on the long road again!”

He owned another piece of dwarven silver, too, a ring he always wore on the third finger of his right hand, a simple band of elven workmanship, engraved with roses on the outside and a line of elven writing on the in. Just as he held up his hand to look at the ring, a page opened the door.

“Your Grace? Am I disturbing Your Lordship?”

“Not truly.”

“Well, Your Grace, there’s this shabby old herbwoman at the door, and she’s insisting on speaking to you. One of the guards was going to turn her away, but she gave us this look, Your Grace, and I … well, I was frightened of her, so I thought I’d best tell you.”

Rhodry’s heart pounded once.

“Did she give you her name?”

“She did, Your Grace. It’s Jill.”

“I’ll receive her up here.”

The lad frankly stared, then bowed and trotted away.

While he waited for the woman he once had loved more than life itself, Rhodry paced back and forth from window to door. He hadn’t seen Jill in thirty years, not since the night when she left him, simply rode out of his life without a backward glance—or so he assumed—to follow a Wyrd even stranger than his own. At first, he thought of her constantly, wondered if she missed him, wondered if her studies in the strange craft of the dweomer were bringing her the happiness she sought. Yet as the years passed and his wound healed, he let her memory rest except for an idle wondering every now and then if she were well. Although she did come to Aberwyn to tend her dying father, Rhodry was at court in Dun Deverry at the time. Every now and then, some news of her doings came his way, but never in any detail. Now she was here. He was dreading seeing her, because she was only a few years younger than himself, and he hated the thought of seeing her beauty ravaged by age. When he heard her crisp voice thanking the page, his heart pounded once again. The door opened.

“The herbwoman, Your Grace.”

In strode a woman dressed in men’s clothing, a pair of dirty brown brigga and a much-mended linen shirt, stained green in places from medicinal leaves and stems. Her hair, cropped like a lad’s, shone a silvery gray, and crow’s-feet round her blue eyes ran deep, but she seemed neither young nor old, so full of life and vigor that it was impossible to think of her as anything other than handsome. Beautiful she wasn’t, not any longer, but as he stared at the face which coincided with the one belonging to his lovely young lass of past years, he found that it fit her better than the beauty he was remembering. Her sudden smile could move him still.

“Aren’t you going to say one word to me?” she said with a laugh.

“My apologies. It’s just a bit of a shock, having you turn up like this.”

“No doubt. You’re in for a worse shock than that, I’m afraid.”

Without waiting to be asked she sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth. He took the other facing, and for a few moments the silence deepened around them. Then he remembered that his silver dagger must have been coming home at the same time as she was riding into Aberwyn, and he shuddered, feeling a cold touch of Wyrd that made the hairs on the nape of his neck bristle.

“And what is this shock?”

“Well, for starters, Nevyn’s dead.”

Rhodry grunted as if at a blow. He’d known Nevyn, her teacher and master in the craft of magic, very well indeed—in fact, Rhodry owed him his life and his rhan both.

“May the gods give him rest in the Otherlands, then. Somehow I thought the dweomer would keep the old man alive forever.”

“He was beginning to wonder himself.” She grinned so broadly that it seemed inappropriate. “He was glad to go, when the time came.”

“How did it happen? Was he ill, or was there an accident?”

“What? Oh, naught of that sort. It was time, and he went. He made his goodbyes to all of us and lay down on his bed and died. That’s all.” Her smile faded. “I’ll miss him, though. Every hour of every day.”

“My heart aches for you, truly.”

As if to share his sympathy Wildfolk came, sprite and sylph and gnome, materializing like the fall of silent drops of rain to float down and stand around them. When a skinny gray fellow climbed into Jill’s lap and reached up to pat her cheek, she smiled again, shoving the mourning away. The sight of the Wildfolk reminded Rhodry of his own problems. Whatever else Jill might have been to him, she was a dweomermaster now, the possessor of strange powers and even stranger lore.

“I’ve got a question for you,” he said. “How long does an elven half-breed like me live, anyway?”

“A good long while, though not so long as a true elf. I’d say you’ve got a hundred years ahead, easily, my friend. When I’m buried and gone, you’ll still look like a lad of twenty.”

“By all the ice in all the hells! That can’t happen! How long will it be before all of Aberwyn figures out that I’m no true Maelwaedd, then?”

“Not very, truly. The common folk are already whispering about you, wondering about dweomer and suchlike. Soon enough the noble-born will, too, and they’ll come to you with a few hard questions about exactly how much elven blood there is in the Maelwaedd clan, and whether or no those old rumors about elves living forever are true. If someone found out who your true father was, it would be a nasty blow to your clan’s honor.”

“There’s a cursed sight more at stake than the honor of the Maelwaedds. Can’t you see, Jill? My sons disinherited, and civil war in the rhan, and—”

“Of course I see!” She held her hand up flat for silence. “That’s the other reason I’ve come.”

He felt the cold again, rippling down his back. Thirty years since he’d seen her, and yet they still at times shared thoughts.

“I had an omen,” she went on. “It was right after we buried Nevyn—me and the folk in the village where we lived, that is—and I went walking out to a little lake near our home, where there’s a stand of rushes out in the water. It was just at sunset, and there were some clouds in the sky. You know how easy it is to see pictures in sunset clouds. So I saw a cloud shape that looked just like a falcon catching a little dragon in her claws. Oho, think I, that’s me and Rhodry! And the minute I thought it, I felt the dweomer cold, and I knew that it was true. And here I am.”

“That simple, is it? You think of me, and here you are?”

“Well, I had to ride to Aberwyn like anyone else.”

“Not what I meant. Why did the omen in the clouds make you come here?”

“Oh, that! None of your affair.”

He started to probe, but her expression stopped him: unsmiling, a little cool, like the cover of a book abruptly slammed shut. He could remember Nevyn turning that same blank stare on questioners who pried into things they weren’t meant to know. Gwerbret or not, he would only be wasting his time if he should ask more.

“I don’t suppose you could cast some dweomer on me to make me age.”

“You’re still a ready man with a jest, aren’t you? I can’t, and I wouldn’t if I could. The way out’s obvious, anyway. You’ll have to turn the rhan over to your eldest lad and leave Eldidd.”

“What? That’s a hard thing for a man of my rank to do.”

“If you give up the rhan, your son will keep it. If you try to keep it, your son will lose it.”

“It’s not just the blasted rhan! You’re asking me to leave blood kin behind. Jill, by the gods, I’ve got grandsons.”

“Do you want to see them murdered to wipe out the last traces of a bastard line?”

With a groan he buried his face in his hands. Her voice went on remorselessly.

“Once the first whispers go round that you might not be a trueborn Maelwaedd, you’ll have to settle them by the sword, and honor duels have led to wars before, especially with a rich prize like Aberwyn at stake. If you lose the civil war, your enemies will hunt down every child who could even remotely be considered your heir, even Rhodda’s lad.”

“Oh, hold your tongue! I know that as well as you do.”

“Well, then?”

He looked up to find her watching him with a calm sort of wondering. For a moment he hated her.

“It’s all well and good to talk of me leaving Eldidd, but I’m not an exile or a shiftless younger son anymore. If I present a petition to the king to allow me to abdicate, the rumors will pile up like horse dung in a winter stable. Besides, what if our liege asks me my reasons outright? I could try to lie, but I doubt me that I’d be convincing. The king knows me cursed well.”

She frowned at the hearth while she considered.

“You’re right, aren’t you? I’ll have to think about that.” Abruptly she rose. “If anyone asks you why I came here, tell them I wanted to tell you about Nevyn, because that’s true enough in its own way. I’ll see you again, and soon.”

Then she was gone, out and shutting the door before Rhodry could rise from his chair. For a while he tried to convince himself that he’d been having a strange, drunken dream, but the elven ring gleamed on his finger to remind him of the truth, that he would have to leave his clan behind for the sake of his love for it. Besides, the dweomer had saved his life several times over in the past, and he knew, with a sudden cold certainty, that the time had come to repay his debt.

Bred and born to rule, carefully trained to impose his will on others while following every nicety of courtesy, Cullyn Maelwaedd was unused to feeling guilt, and he hated this constant nag of conscience. Every time he looked at his father, it bit deep and gnawed him that at times he wished that Rhodry were … not dead, no, never that, but perhaps showing some signs that he might indeed die at some point. In a way, his dilemma was unique. Because Rhodry had refused to send Cullyn into fosterage as custom demanded and had taken the unheard-of step of raising his son himself, Cullyn was one of the few noble lords in Deverry who honestly loved his father. Every time he caught himself wondering if he’d ever actually inherit Aberwyn and felt the accompanying bite of guilt, he saw the wisdom of fosterage in a world where a son’s power depends on his father’s death.

Cullyn also was fairly certain that his father suspected him of wishing him gone. After the first few days of his visit, Rhodry became more and more withdrawn, spending long hours alone either riding through the demesne or shut up brooding in his private chamber. Cullyn considered simply going home, but since he’d said that he’d stay for ten days, he was afraid that leaving ahead of schedule would seem suspicious. On the fifth morning he came down for breakfast only to find that Rhodry had already left the dun. He went out to the stable to question the groom, but the gwerbret hadn’t said a word about where he was going. As he made his way through the clutter of sheds behind the broch, he noticed two serving lasses gossiping furiously about something, an activity that would have meant nothing if they hadn’t suddenly fallen silent at the very sight of him. He walked on past, tormenting himself by wondering if even the wretched common-born servants knew his secret.

Later, as he was going up to his chamber in the broch, a similar thing happened, two pages, this time, who stopped talking the moment they saw him. Cullyn grabbed one of them by the shirt collar.

“And just what are you saying that’s unfit for my ears?”

The two boys went dead white and looked as it they wanted to run, but whether or not he would ever be gwerbret, Cullyn was a powerful lord and no man to argue with.

“Begging your pardon, my lord, please, it was naught.”

“Indeed? Then why have you gone as white as milk?”

The second page was older and obviously a bit wiser. He stepped forward with a passable bow.

“My lord, we mean no offense. We were talking over this strange rumor. Maybe you should know about it, my lord. Then you can stop people from repeating it.”

“Indeed? And just what have the townsfolk been saying?”

“Well, you know, my lord, how the gwerbret looks so young? We heard an old woman in the marketplace saying it was all because of dweomer. She said some old wizard cast this spell on him years and years ago, that he’d never get old, but then he’d have to die all of a sudden, like, to pay back the spell. The old woman said there’s a gerthddyn in town spreading the tale. He heard it up north or somewhere.” He paused, sincerely troubled. “My lord, that’s not true, is it? His grace is splendid, and I don’t want to see him die.”

“Here, that can’t be true, indeed. Don’t you bother your heart with it.”

Yet he hesitated, troubled himself, remembering all the tales whispered among his clan that Rhodry’s life had been touched more than once by dweomer. And what if this strange story were true? Although by that time most people in Deverry knew that magic existed, few knew much about its true powers and capabilities, so Cullyn was ready enough to believe that it could keep his father unnaturally young. He summoned four men from his warband as an escort, then went into the town. By asking round in the market square he found out that the gerthddyn had been staying at the Green Goose, the best inn in Aberwyn, but when he went there, the tavernman told him that the gerthddyn had ridden out that very morning.

“I’ll wager, my lord, that he knew he couldn’t stay here long, what with him spreading them nasty tales about your father. There’s not a vain bone in the gwerbret’s body, my lord. Why would he be making pacts with sorcerers just to keep his looks?”

“Well spoken, truly. What was this fellow like?”

“His name was Salamander, my lord, and he was a skinny sort of fellow with yellow hair. Oh, he was a splendid talker, my lord, when he was telling his tales, so it’s no wonder this wretched rumor’s spreading itself around. Now, wait, my lord.” He paused to suck his brown stumps of teeth in thought. “Salamander didn’t rightly say the rumor was true, like. He said he heard it up in Belglaedd and asked if we thought there was any truth in it.”

“I see. Well, he’s gone and no more trouble to us, then.”

When Cullyn returned to the great hall, Rhodry was sitting at the head of the table of honor and drinking alone. He waved his son over with a smile that made him look more his normal self than he had in days.

“There you are, lad. I’ve been thinking. Shall we go hunting on the morrow? I rode out to the forest preserve today, and the gamekeeper tells me we’ve got a pair of young stags. We could cull one easily and help the old stag keep his dominion for another spring.”

“Gladly, Father.”

Cullyn motioned a page over to pour him ale. As they talked about the hunt to come, he forgot all about strange rumors in the normality of the moment.

Just at dawn on the morrow, Cullyn joined his father and the kennelmaster in the courtyard, where the well-trained dogs lay still but excited, ears pricked, tails thumping the cobbles. When the men mounted for the ride to the forest, the dogs leapt up and swarmed round the kennelmaster, who trotted along with them on foot as the party set out. In the brightening day the hunt left Aberwyn behind and went north along the bank of the river Gwyn, which churned white and swollen with the spring runoff. About eight miles on they reached the preserve, a smallish stand of timber compared with the vast gwerbretal hunting park at Belglaedd farther north. While they ate a cold breakfast and let the dogs rest, Alban the gamekeeper appeared out of the forest and sat down with them, a gnarled and wind-chapped man as tough as an oak root. Since he was nearly as shy as the deer themselves, it took him a long time to bring out the various scraps of news he had for the gwerbret; he would say one thing, then withdraw into himself before he brought out the next. Rhodry listened with an amazing patience.

Since Cullyn loved the hunt, he was almost as excited as the dogs by the time they finally got underway. So early in the year the trees were only just leafing out, and the bracken and ferns still low. Ducking and dodging the occasional branch, they rode through the widely spaced oaks behind the kennelmaster and his pack. The deerhounds coursed this way and that, sniffed the wind more than the ground, then suddenly broke, baying off to the left. With a laugh Rhodry spurred his horse after them, and Cullyn followed, catching up with the hounds, who turned abruptly and headed off in the general direction of the river.

All at once, Cullyn’s horse stumbled slightly, forcing him to let it slow to regain its balance and calm down. When he headed after the hunt, it was a good ways ahead of him. He could just see them through the trees. Then he heard the barks turn to yelps of terror, and the kennelmaster scream. Spear at the ready, he kicked his horse hard, dodged through at a dangerous gallop, and burst into a clearing to see a wild boar, flushed by accident but furious nonetheless, making a straight charge at the pack. Dogs scattered and the kennelmaster yanked himself into a tree barely in time. Cullyn found himself swearing with every foul oath he knew.

They had no boarhounds—worse yet, no boar spears with the essential guards on the haft. Already his horse was tossing its head in fear as the massive, reeking boar charged one of the hounds. As Cullyn kicked his horse forward, Rhodry appeared, raced between the boar and the dog, and stabbed down at it as he passed. Enraged, the boar swung after him and let the dogs be. With a battle cry Cullyn charged after as Rhodry led the boar along. He could see what his father had in mind—keep sticking the slower-moving boar, keep it running and bleeding until they wore the thing out and could make a safe kill. Since by its snarls he could tell that the boar was deep in rut, he knew they had a long, hard fight ahead.

But they had forgotten about the river. Just as Cullyn caught up, their strange hunt burst out of the forest to the cleared roadway along the riverbank. Yelling for Cullyn to stay back, Rhodry tried to turn his horse, but the mount got a good look at the boar following and reared—then slipped and went down. Rhodry rolled clear easily, unhurt, but the boar was turning and charging.

“Da!” Cullyn’s voice was the shriek of a child. “Da!”

Half to his feet, Rhodry threw himself to one side and rolled straight into the river. Blind with fury, the boar hurled itself in after him. Cullyn could never remember dismounting, nor could he remember stripping off his hunting leathers; all he knew was that suddenly he was in the river and swimming, desperately coursing from bank to bank, letting the current carry him downstream until at last, utterly exhausted, he heard Alban screaming at him from the bank.

“To shore, my lord! I beg you, come ashore!”

With the last of his strength Cullyn fought the current to the bank and grabbed the butt of the spear that Alban was holding out. It took both their strengths to haul him up onto land.

“I never saw them,” Cullyn gasped.

“No more did I, Your Grace.”

The sound of that honorific knocked the last bit of breath out of him. When he looked up, he saw the gamekeeper’s face streaming tears, and the sight made him burst out sobbing, half keening, half choking as he gasped for breath. All his suspicions, all his envy and his fears were at last at an end, but he would have spent a year in the hells just to have his father back again.

•  •  •

“By every god and his wife,” Salamander whispered, and his face was white with fear. “I never dreamt your lad would try to fetch you out again like that.”

“No more did I, or I’d never have agreed to this daft scheme!” Rhodry felt like hitting him. “Aberwyn could have lost two gwerbrets in one misbegotten day! Ye gods, did you have to make that cursed boar so terrifying? I never knew you could make an illusion smell like that.”

“You don’t understand, O brother of mine.” Salamander passed the back of his hand over his sweaty forehead. “That boar was none of my work. It was real, a solid, corporeal, existent, and utterly unplanned accident.”

Rhodry felt the color drain from his own face. He was about to say something particularly foul when Jill came crawling back into their hiding place, a bracken-filled ditch on the other side of the river.

“He’s safe,” she whispered. “The gamekeeper and the kennelmaster are with him, and all the dogs, too. They’ve gotten the horses under control, and no doubt they’ll be riding home soon. We’d best get out of here before every man in your warband comes out to search for your corpse.”

“They’re not my men anymore.”

“Well, true enough, and we’ve got only the grace of the gods to thank that they ride for your eldest son and not the second.” She turned on Salamander. “You and your wretched, blasted, rotten, and foul elaborate schemes!”

“You were the one who insisted there be witnesses, and you agreed to this scheme at the time. Berate me not, O princess of powers perilous, for I put not that stinking boar in their path.”

Although Jill growled under her breath, she let the matter drop. For some minutes they lay there, waiting until the remnant of the hunting party should leave. While Salamander’s dweomer could turn one man invisible as he crawled out of a river, he couldn’t hide a party of three horsemen, a mule, and two packhorses. Now that he knew Cullyn was safely on land, Rhodry felt heart-wrung and numb, hating the irony of it, that he would find out how much his son loved him when he’d never see the lad again.

Eventually the hunting party gave up their last futile search and rode back to Aberwyn, leaving them in sole possession of the woods. Rhodry was more than glad to change out of his damp clothes into the things he’d smuggled out in readiness: a pair of plain gray brigga, an old linen shirt with no blazons, a cheap belt with his silver dagger on it.

“So here I am, a silver dagger again, am I?”

“Not for long,” Salamander said. “We’ll be in the elven lands soon enough.”

“Provided no one catches us.”

“Don’t fret about that,” Jill broke in. “Salamander can make sure no one recognizes you, even if they’re staring right at you.”

“Well and good, then. We’d best be off.”

“Just that. Our father should be waiting near the border.”

“And that’s going to be a strange thing, meeting my true father after all these years, and him a bard at that.”

“Mam, I tried to save him, truly I did.” Cullyn sounded like a little boy again.

Aedda caught his hands in hers and squeezed them gently.

“Of course you did. I know you did.”

For his sake, out of pain for his pain, she managed to do the proper thing and weep, but there was no mourning in it. For years she had tried very hard not to blame Rhodry; after all, she wasn’t the first lass in Deverry who’d been given away to cement a treaty, and she wouldn’t be the last. Yet still, he had taken her maidenhead, her youth, her life, truly, while keeping her always to one side of his affairs, and then, the final bitter thing, he had taken her sons from her, too. They always loved you more than they loved me, she thought. By every fiend in hell, I’m glad you’re dead.

Although they never found the gwerbret’s body, they did put up a stone to mark his passing, out in the sacred grove where his ancestors lay. On it they carved this englyn:

This grave marks Aberwyn’s grief.
A wild wolf in the battle-strife,
Rhodry laughed when he took your life.

And that was the first death of Rhodry Maelwaedd and the vindication of the old hermit who, years and years before, had told him he would die twice over.

Keeping to country lanes and open lands, buying food from farmers and shunning the duns of the noble-born, Rhodry, Salamander, and Jill traveled west and south for ten days until they reached the large stream or small river known as Y Brog, marking what most human beings considered the Eldidd border, since only elves lived beyond it. During Rhodry’s rule, the Westfolk, as Eldidd people called the elves, had started becoming a little friendlier than they’d been in times past. Every now and then a trading party would show up in the border towns of Cannobaen or Cernmeton to offer their beautiful horses in return for ironwork and glasswares; even more rarely, an embassy would appear in Aberwyn itself with tokens of friendship and alliance for the gwerbret. Yet they were still strange and alien, still frightening to most people. It was one of Rhodry’s regrets that he’d never been able to make his subjects welcome the Westfolk in the rhan. Since he’d always raised his sons to like and admire them, he could at least hope that they would continue to be welcome in the dun.

“I suppose I’ll get word now and then of how things fare in Aberwyn,” he remarked one evening. “Especially if Calonderiel goes to pay his respects to the new gwerbret.”

“Of course he’s going.” Salamander was kneeling by their campfire and feeding in sticks. “That was part of the scheme. He’ll be waiting to have a chat with us, and then he’ll head east. What’s wrong? Worried about your holdings? Well, your former or late lamented holdings, I should say.”

“It’s strange, truly. I can’t stop thinking about Aberwyn. I keep drafting mental orders, you see, about the way things should be run, and every now and then I actually find myself turning round to call a page or suchlike to carry a command for me.”

“You’ll get over it in time. Think of rulership as a fever. It’ll pass off as your health returns.”

“Well and good, then. Maybe I need some strengthening herb water or suchlike.”

They shared a grin. Although they were only half brothers, they looked a good bit alike in everything but coloring. Salamander’s hair was as ash-blond pale as Rhodry’s was dark, but they had the strong jut of their jaw and the deep set of their eyes in common, as well as a certain sharpness about the ears that marked them as half-breeds.

“Where’s Jill, anyway?” Salamander stopped fussing with the fire and came to sit down beside him.

“I don’t know. Off meditating or whatever it is you sorcerers do, I suppose.”

“Do I hear a sour note marring your dulcet tones? A touch of pique, a nettlement, if indeed such a word exists, a certain jealousy or resentment of our demanding craft, or mayhap a …”

“Will you hold your tongue, you chattering bastard?”

“Ah, I was right. I did.”

At that moment Jill appeared on the other side of the fire. They were camped near a little copse, and in the uncertain light it seemed she materialized right out of the trees like one of the Wildfolk.

“You two look as startled as a pair of caught burglars. Talking about me?”

“Your ears were burning, were they?” Salamander said with a grin. “Actually, we were just wondering where you were, and lo, our question is answered, our difficulty solved. Come sit down.”

Smiling, but only a little, Jill did so.

“We should be at the ruined dun on the morrow,” she remarked. “That’s where the others are meeting us. Do you remember it, Rhodry? The place where Lord Corbyn’s men tried to trap you during that rebellion.”

“Ye gods, that was years and years ago, but remember it I do, and that dun will always be dear to my heart, because it was there that I first saw you.”

“You chatter like your wretched brother, don’t you?” She got up and walked away, disappearing noiselessly back into the copse and gone.

Rhodry winced and stared into the fire.

“I think, O brother of mine, that there’s somewhat you don’t quite understand.” Salamander paused for dramatic effect. “Jill’s beyond you now. Beyond us both, truly, for I’ll admit that there was a time or brief season in my life when I was madly in love with her myself—without the slightest result, let me hasten to add, but a cold and most cruel rejection, a sundering of my heart and the smashing to little bits of my hopes.”

“Oh. Who is he, then?”

“Not who, O jealousy personified. What. The dweomer. It takes some people that way. Why, by every god in the sky, do you think she left you in the first place? Because a love of dweomer is a burning twice stronger than lust or even sentiment, which it ofttimes overpowers.”

Rhodry and Jill had parted so long ago that Rhodry quite simply couldn’t remember its details, but he could remember all too well his bitterness.

“I didn’t understand then and I don’t understand now, and cursed if I even want to.”

“Then there’s naught I can say about it, is there? But I warn you, don’t let yourself fall in love with her again.”

Rhodry merely shrugged, wondering if the warning were coming too late.

On the morrow morn they splashed across Y Brog and left the settled lands behind. All that day they rode through fallow grasslands, dotted here and there with copses or crossed with tiny streamlets; that night they camped in green emptiness. Yet early on the next day Rhodry saw rising on the horizon a broken tower, as lonely in the endless grass as a cairn marking a warrior’s grave—which, he supposed, it might well have been.

“Did this dun fall to the sword?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Jill said. “Calonderiel might know.”

The elf in question, an old friend and a warleader among his people, was waiting for them near the empty gap in the outer walls that once had held wooden gates. They saw his horse first, a splendid golden gelding with a silvery mane and tail, tethered at his leisure out in the grass. Calonderiel himself was pacing idly back and forth in the ward, where grass grew round the last few cobbles and a profusion of ivy was sieging the broch itself. A tall man but slender, as most of his people were, the warleader had dark purple eyes, slit vertically like a cat’s, moonbeam-pale hair, and, of course, ears as long and delicately pointed as a seashell.

“So there you are!” he sang out in Deverrian. “I thought Salamander had gone and gotten you all lost.”

“Spare me the implied insults, if you please.” Salamander made him a sketch of a bow. “You must have been talking with my father, if you’d think so ill of me. Which reminds me. Where is the esteemed parent? I thought he’d be eager for a first look at this other son of his.”

“No doubt he will, when he finds out you’ve ridden west.” Calonderiel turned to Rhodry. “My apologies, but Devaberiel’s gone off north somewhere with one of the alarli. I’ve got my men out riding, passing the word along and looking for him. He’ll turn up.”

“Blast and curse it all!” Jill got in before Rhodry could say a word. “I wanted to speak with him before I rode on, and now I’ll have to sit around here and wait.”

“Impatient, isn’t she?” Calonderiel was grinning. “You should be used to elven ways by now, Jill. Things happen when they happen, and not a moment before.”

“Well,” Rhodry said. “I’ll admit to being a bit disappointed myself.”

“And you must admit, Cal,” Salamander broke in, “that my father can take his sweet time about things. He calls his progresses stately or measured; I call them dilatory, tardy, lackadaisical, or just plain slow.”

“Well, you’ve got a point.” The warleader glanced Jill’s way. “Aderyn’s at the encampment.”

“That’ll make the waiting easier, truly. How far away is everybody?”

Not very far at all, as it turned out. A couple of miles to the west the camp sprawled along a stream: some twenty brightly colored round tents, a vast herd of horses, a small flock of sheep, a neat stack of travois poles, all scattered through the tall grass in a tidy sort of confusion. As they rode up, a rush of children and dogs came yelling and yapping to meet them; about thirty adults strolled more slowly after.

Over the years Rhodry had picked up a fair amount of Elvish, more than enough to greet everyone and to understand the various speeches of welcome that came his way. He smiled and bowed and repeated names that he forgot a moment later. When Calonderiel insisted that the two brothers share his tent, there were plenty of willing hands to carry their gear and to take their horses. Skins of mead and bowls of food appeared as the camp settled in around the main fire for a celebration. Everyone wanted to meet Devaberiel’s son and tell him about the major feast planned for the evening, too. In all the confusion it was some hours before Rhodry realized that he’d tost track of Jill.

About half a mile away from the main camp, Aderyn’s weathered tent stood alone near a stand of willows at the stream edge. It was mercifully quiet there, except for the trill of birds in the willows. Jill tethered her horse out with Aderyn’s small herd, then carried her gear round to the tent flap. Just as she was wondering whether to call out a greeting, the flap rustled open, and Aderyn’s new apprentice, a pale-eyed young elf named Gavantar, crawled out. He was even more slender than most of his people, and pale-haired, too, so that Jill found herself thinking of him as more a spirit than a man. But his hands were strong enough as he snatched her burdens from her.

“Let me carry that gear for you, O Wise One of the East. You might have let me tend your horse.”

“I’m not some withered old woman, lad, not yet, anyway. Is your master here?”

“Of course, and waiting for you.”

Although the day was warm, the tent was dim and cool, the air sparkling from the rush and bustle of elemental spirits that always surrounded Aderyn. Wildfolk crouched or lounged all over the tent, sprawling on the floor, clinging to the walls, perching on the many-colored tent bags hanging from the poles. A small fire smoldered under the smoke hole in the center, and the dweomerman himself was sitting cross-legged nearby on a pile of leather cushions. He was a small man, fully human, with enormous dark eyes in his slender, wrinkled face, and dead-white hair, which swept up from his forehead in two peaks like the horns of an owl. When he saw Jill, he grinned in honest delight and rose to catch her hands in his.

“Ah, it’s good to see you in the actual flesh! Come sit down. Can I offer you some mead?”

“None for me, thanks. I don’t have your head for the stuff. I wouldn’t mind a cup of that spiced honey water the Westfolk make, though.”

The apprentice put the saddlebags down and hurried out again, heading for the main camp to fetch a skin of the drink in question. Aderyn and Jill sat down facing each other, and she began pulling some cloth-wrapped bundles out of her gear. A gaggle of gnomes clustered round to watch, including the small gray fellow that followed Jill everywhere.

“Nevyn wanted you to have these books.” She handed Aderyn a pair of ancient folios with crumbling leather bindings. “Though what you’re going to do with a matched set of Prince Mael’s writings, I don’t know.”

“Lug them around with all due honor and respect, I suppose. Actually, these particular volumes mean somewhat to me. The man who gave them to Nevyn was someone I much admired.” He ran slender fingers over the stamped decorations, flecked here and there with the remains of gold leaf, a roundel enclosing a pair of grappling badgers, and under it a motto: “We hold on.” “But fancy him remembering that, after all these years! I’m quite surprised that I do, actually.”

“And here’s a trinket from Brin Toraedic. He said to tell you that since it was older than both of you put together, it was a marvel indeed.”

Aderyn laughed and held up the golden cup, made of beaten metal and decorated with a ridged pattern utterly unlike any made by human or elf. Jill found herself studying the old man; he seemed no older, no weaker than he ever had, but still she worried. He picked up her thought.

“My time won’t be for a little while yet. I have Gavantar to train, and he’s just begun his studies.”

“Ah. I just … well, wondered.”

“Things have been hard for you with Nevyn gone.” It was not a question.

“They have. It’s not just the missing of him, though that’s bad enough. I feel so wretchedly inadequate, little-more than an apprentice myself, truly, and not fit to be the Master of the Aethyr.”

“Oh, here, we all go through that! You’ll grow into the job. It’s like becoming captain of a warband, I suppose. All that responsibility at first—why, it must overwhelm a man, thinking of all those lives that depend on his decisions.”

“True-spoken. But I’ve got Nevyn’s work to finish. I keep feeling that I’ve absolutely got to do it right for his sake.”

“Wait a moment now! It’s not his work, any more than it’s your work. Don’t let that kind of vanity enter in or you’ll find yourself worrying indeed. It’s all our work, and the work and will of the Great Ones. Think of it as an enormous tapestry. We each weave a little piece, what small amount we’re capable of, then hand the grand design on to the next worker. No one soul could possibly finish the entire thing by himself.”

“You’re right enough, aren’t you?” Jill smiled, feeling her dark mood lift. “I’ll drink to that! Here comes your Gavantar now.”

Carrying a leather bottle that was dripping wet and smelling of Bardek cinnamon and cloves, Gavantar ducked through the flap and joined them. Once the drink was poured round, he sat down by the door on guard, and with a shy duck of his head refused to move closer even when Aderyn invited him. He was new to the dweomer, Jill supposed, and still in awe of what he considered strange and mighty powers. Soon enough, when he came to see how natural in their way Aderyn’s magicks were, he would begin to feel at ease.

“Is Rhodry still with Calonderiel?” she asked.

“He is, O Wise One. The whole camp wants to meet him.”

“Good. Then he’ll stay out of trouble for a few hours, anyway.” She turned back to Aderyn. “Rhodry is one of the things that are vexing me.”

“Ah. He’s still in love with you?”

“That, too, I suppose, but that’s not the important thing. I wonder what’s going to happen to him now, mostly. No, I worry about him, worry badly. We’ve snatched him away from everything he knows and loves, which is harsh enough, and then beyond that, there’s his Wyrd. For so long his whole life was ruled by that prophecy, and now he’s fulfilled it, and well, what’s going to become of him?”

“Prophecy?”

“The one Nevyn received all those years ago. Don’t you remember it? Rhodry’s Wyrd is Eldidd’s Wyrd, it ran.”

“Oh, that! Of course—he became gwerbret in the nick of time, didn’t he?”

“You seem to take it all blasted lightly, but so he did. Look, there would have been a long and ghastly war in Eldidd if Rhodry hadn’t been there to inherit the rhan.”

Aderyn merely nodded. Jill supposed that he was so old, and had seen so many wars, that one more conflict would have meant nothing to him.

“And then there’s the rose ring, too,” she went on. “I’ve been vexing myself about that bit of jewelry for months now. That’s why I want to talk to Devaberiel, you see, to ask him about it and that rather odd being who gave it to him. I’ll wager he wasn’t an ordinary elf.”

“You’re right about that.” Aderyn’s voice had gone tense and strange. “I’ve got my own ideas about who that mysterious benefactor was.”

“I want to hear them. And what about that wretched inscription? If we knew what it meant, we might be able to unravel the entire mystery.”

Although she was expecting him to tell her his ideas or at least acknowledge that she’d spoken, Aderyn sat for a long time merely staring out into space. At last, though, he spoke in a voice that was half a whisper, half a sigh.

“The ring—that cursed ring! Dwarven work, and it had a life of its own, just like their trinkets always do. Stranger than most, this one, and I’ll wager its work isn’t over yet.” He shook his head, then went on in a normal voice. “But, oh yes, the prophecy … so a man of elven blood finally ruled in Eldidd! Fancy that!”

“Well, you know, his son has a good dollop of elven blood in his veins, too. Young Cullyn.” Jill had to smile at his expression. “Here, Aderyn, you look shocked to the very heart!”

The old man shrugged and looked away, and at that moment the weight and sadness of all his long years seemed to press him down. Wildfolk clustered round, patting his hands, climbing into his lap, glaring at Jill as if accusing her of causing their friend pain. In spite of his shyness Gavantar inched himself closer, looking back and forth between the two masters of his craft with a worried little frown.

“Well, the land did belong to the People once,” Jill went on. “I’d like to see them welcome there again. Or is it a wrong thing for men and elves to mix their blood like this?”

“Not in the least.” Aderyn threw off the mood and half the Wildfolk with a shrug and a wave of one hand. “And it would be splendid, in my opinion, anyway, for the People to have some say in ruling Eldidd, too. It’s just hard for me to believe when I remember some of the things that have happened over the years. There’s been a lot of bad feeling, Jill, just a terrible lot of bad feeling between my two tribes. That’s how I always think of elves and men, you see, as both mine now, though once, truly, I hated thinking that I might still be a human being. Of course, Rhodry’s the one who’s really caught between the two worlds, isn’t he? It’s not going to be easy for him, either. I can testify to that, from my own experience.” He paused for a long moment. “Well, it’s going to be much worse for him, truly. There are things that have happened to him in other lives that are bound to come to a head now. That’s one reason I made sure to be here on the border when he came.”

“Indeed? What sort of things?”

“Well, it’s a long and winding tale, truly, and one that runs hundreds of years, all told, though I think me that we’re about to get to the end of it at last. You do remember, don’t you, that his soul in another body was my father?” The old man grinned. “If anyone can remember that far, way back in the mists of time when I was born.”

Jill smiled with him, but she felt a touch of dweomer eerie run down her back. She had, after all, in another body been his mother. Aderyn was too courteous to mention the point.

“But Gweran—my father, that is, and Rhodry in another flesh—was the most human man I’ve ever seen.”

“But he was a bard. You’re forgetting that. There’s a touch of … well, what? madness? the Wildlands? … somewhat strange and magical and crazed and inspired, all at once, in the soul of every bard.”

“Well, so there is. I hadn’t truly thought of it that way before. Wyrd and the tangles of Wyrd! They always say that no man can know the truth of it.”

“Or woman either, but we’ve all got to try to untangle our own.”

“Just so, and we were speaking of other people’s work earlier, weren’t we? But Rhodry might well be my work now—no need for you to bother and all—though I might end up needing your help one fine day. After Gweran died, I doubt me if you were involved in much of this.” He thought hard, chin in hand. “You’ve always belonged to the human race, Jill, not to the Elcyion Lacar like I do—not that Rhodry’s soul was ever supposed to be so mixed up with the elves, either, truly, bard or not. It’s an odd thing, how tangled a man’s Wyrd can become, and all through muddles and blunders. But you don’t need to trouble your heart over it. Truly, I don’t think you were involved, except in the most casual way.”

And in spite of herself Jill was vexed that there was some deep part of Rhodry’s soul and Rhodry’s Wyrd that had nothing to do with her.

PART ONE

DEVERRY AND ELDIDD
718

In the cold gray morning, when the mists rose from the surface of Loc Tamig, one could understand why the local farmers thought it haunted. All Aderyn could see of the lake surface was a few patches of rippled water, broken by a drowned tree and four steel-gray rocks, while on the far shore the pine-black mountains rose up in peaks and shadows. The sound of a hundred waterfalls chattered and murmured through the mists like spirit voices. At the moment, though, Aderyn was more worried about the coming rain than possible ghosts. He was, of course, still a young man then, with his hair a nondescript brown and always hanging in an untidy lock over his forehead rather than swept up in the owl shape it would later assume, and he was even skinnier, too, because half the time he forgot to eat when he was deep in his dweomer studies. That particular morning he was down on his knees in the tall spring grass, digging up valerian roots with a small silver spade.

Wildfolk clustered round to watch him work—two small gray gnomes, skinny and long-nosed, three blue-green sprites with pointed teeth and pretty faces. Just like children, they crowded close, pointed mute questions, and generally got in the way. Aderyn named everything they pointed at and worked fast with one eye on the lowering clouds. Just as he was finishing, a gnome picked up a clod and threw it at his fellow. Snarling and baring their teeth, the sprites joined in a full-scale dirt fight.

“Stop it! Your great lords would find this most discourteous!”

One sprite pinched him on the arm. All the Wildfolk vanished with little puffs of air and dust and a gust of smell like clean leaf mold. Aderyn gathered up his things and ran for shelter in the spattering rain. Down among a stand of trees was the round stone hut he shared with his master in the dweomercraft. Two years before, he and Nevyn had built the hut with their own hands and made a small stable for their horses and mules. Out in back was their garden, where practical beans and cabbages grew as well as exotic cultivated herbs, and a flock of chickens had their own little house. Most of their food, though, came from the farming villages at the north end of the lake, where the local people were glad to trade supplies for medicine.

When Aderyn dashed into the single round room, he found Nevyn sitting by the fire circle in the center and watching the play of flame. A tall man, with a thick thatch of white hair and deep-set blue eyes, Nevyn was close to a hundred years old, but he had more vigor than most men of twenty, a striding walk and the erect carriage of the great prince of the realm that once he had been.

“Back just in time, you are. Here comes the storm.”

A gust of wind eddied smoke through the drafty hut as the drops began pattering on the roof. Nevyn got up and helped Aderyn lay the valerian to dry on clean cloths. The roots had to be sliced thin with a small silver knife, a nose-wrinkling smell, and they had to wear fine leather gloves, too, lest the strong juices poison them.

“Nevyn? Will we be leaving Loc Tamig soon?”

“You will.”

Aderyn sat back on his heels and stared at him.

“It’s time for you to go off on your own. I’ve taught you all I know, and your Wyrd runs different than mine.”

Even though he’d always known this day would come, Aderyn felt close to tears. Nevyn laid down one last slice of root and turned to look at him, his piercing blue eyes unusually gentle.

“It’ll ache my heart to see you go. I’ll miss you, lad. But it’s time. You’ve reached the third nine of your years now, and that age marks a turning point for everybody. Come now, you know it, too. You’ve got your herbcraft to feed and clothe yourself, and I’ve opened the gates of the dweomer for you as far as I can. Now you have to walk through those gates and take up your own Wyrd.”

“But what will my Wyrd be?”

“Oh, that’s not for me to say. No man can see another’s Wyrd. You have the keys to open that door. It’s time for you to work a ritual and use them. The Lords of Wyrd will reveal what you need to know—and not a jot more, doubtless.”

On the morrow, when the rain stopped, Nevyn took his horse and two pack mules and rode off to the villages to buy food. He told Aderyn that he would stay away three days to leave him alone for the working, but as to what that working would be, he said nothing at all. Only then did the apprentice realize that the most important moment of his life was strictly in his own hands. He would have to draw on all his knowledge and practice to devise a ritual that would open his Wyrd and put him in contact, at least for a few brief moments, with his secret and undying soul, the true core of his being that had invented and formed the young man known as Aderyn for this lifetime the way a potter takes clay and makes a bowl. As he stood in the doorway and watched Nevyn ride away, Aderyn felt a panic tinged with excitement, an exultation touched with dread. It was time, and he felt ready.

That first day, while Aderyn did his usual chores in the garden and hut, he kept thinking about the task ahead. He had at his disposal a vast amount of ritual lore—tables of correspondences, salutations to the gods, invocations and mighty calls to the spirit world, signs, sigils, and gestures to set in motion streams of force and direct inner energies. In his excitement, his first thought was to use them all, or at least as many as possible, to create a ritual that would sum up and climax all rituals, as elaborately decorated, braided, laced, and spiraled as a beautiful brooch fit to give a king. While he weeded cabbages, his mind raced this way and that, adding a symbol here, a prayer there, trying to fit twenty years of work into a single mighty pattern. All at once he saw the irony: here he was, grubbing in the dirt like a bondsman and making grandiose plans. He laughed aloud and contemplated his mud-stained fingers, callused with years of menial work such as this. The Great Ones had always accepted his humble status and lowly sacrifices before. No doubt a simple ritual would be best now. With the insight came a feeling of peace, because he’d passed the first test.

But just as with a simple meal or a simple garden, every element would have to be perfect of its kind and perfectly placed. The second day, Aderyn worked furiously all morning to finish his chores by noon. He ate a light meal, then went outside to sit under a willow tree by the shore of the lake, sparkling in the soft spring sun. On the far shore the stony, hard mountains rose dark against a blue sky. He looked at them and thought over his lore, rigorously pruning instead of proliferating it. A simple approach to a central symbol—he looked at the peaks and smiled to himself. For the rest of the day he practiced every word and gesture he would use, mixing up the order so no true power would run through them. In the evening, by firelight he prepared his magical weapons—the wand, cup, dagger, and pentacle that he had made and consecrated years before. He polished each one, then performed the simple rituals of consecration again to renew their power.

On the third day, he was quiet as he went through his work. His mind seemed as still as a deep-running river, only rarely disturbed by what most men would call a thought. Yet in his heart he renewed, over and over, the basic vows that open the secret of the dweomer: I want to know to help the world. He was remembering many things, sick children he’d helped heal, children who died because they were beyond the help of herbs, bent-back farmers who saw the best of their harvests taken by noble lords, the noble lords themselves, whose greed and power-lusts drove them like spurs and made them suffer, though they called the suffering glory. Someday, far in the future, at the end of the ages of ages, all this darkness would be transmuted into light. Until that end, he would fight the darkness where he found it. The first place he would always find darkness would be in his own soul. Until the light shone there, he could do little to help other souls. For the sake of that help, he begged for the light.

At sunset, he put his magical weapons in a plain cloth sack and set off for the shore of the lake. In the twilight, he made his place of working, not a rich temple glittering with golden signs and perfumed with incenses, but a stretch of grassy ground. He used the dagger to cut a circle deosil into the turf, then laid his cloth sack down for an altar in the middle. On the sack he laid the dagger, the wand, and the pentacle, then took the cup and filled it with lake water. He set the cup down among the other objects and knelt in front of the sack to face the mountains. Slowly the twilight deepened, then faded as the first few stars came out, only to fade in turn as the full moon rose, bloated and huge on a misty horizon. Aderyn sat back on his heels and raised his hands, palms flat upward, about shoulder high. As he concentrated his will, it seemed the moonlight streamed to him, tangible light for building. He thrust his hands forward and saw to the east of his rough altar two great pillars of light, one all pure moon-silver, the other as dark as black fire shining in the star-strewn night. When he lowered his hands, the pillars lived apart from his will. The temple was open.

One at a time, he picked up each weapon, the dagger for the east, the wand for the south, the cup for the west, and the pentacle for the north, and used it to trace at each cardinal point of the circle a five-pointed star. Above and below him he finished the sphere, using his human mind alone to trace the last two stars, the reconcilers of the others. When he knelt upon the ground, he saw the temple glowing with power beyond his ability to call it forth. The Lords of Light were coming to meet him. Aderyn rose and raised his hands to the east between the pillars. Utterly calm, his mind as sharp as the dagger’s point and deep as the cup, he made light gather above him, then felt and saw it descend, piercing him through like an arrow and rooting itself in the ground. His arms flung out as he felt the cross shaft pierce him from side to side. It seemed he grew huge, towering through the universe, his head among the stars, his feet on a tiny whirling sphere of earth far below, enormous, exalted, but helpless, pinned to the cross of light, unmoving and spraddled, at the mercy of the Great Ones.

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere.

“Why do you want knowledge?”

“Only to serve. For myself, naught.”

With a rush like cold wind, with a dizzying spin and fall, he felt himself shrink back until he stood on the damp grass and saw the temple around him, the pillars glowing, the magical weapons streaming borrowed light, the great pent-angles pulsing at their stations. He nearly fell to his knees, but he steadied himself and raised his hands in front of him. In his mind he built up the vision between the pillars—a high mountain covered with dark trees and streaked with pale rock under a sunswept sky—until it lived apart from his mind and hung there like a painted screen. Calling on the Lords of Light, he walked forward and passed through the veil.

Pale sun glinted on flinty rock. The path wound steeply between dead shrubs, twisted through leafless trees, and over everything hung the choking smell of dust. Aderyn stumbled and bruised himself on rock, but he kept climbing, his lungs burning in the thin cold air. At last he reached the top, where huge boulders pushed out from gray soil like the bones of a long-dead animal. He was afraid. He had never expected this barrenness, this smell of death as thick as the dust. Although the wind was cold, he began to sweat in great drops down his back. It seemed that little eyes peered out at him from every rock; little voices snarled in cold laughter. He could feel their hatred as they watched him.

“Would you serve here?” the voice said.

Aderyn had to force the words from his lips.

“I will. I can see there’s need of me.”

There was a sound—three great claps of thunder booming among the dead rocks. As they died away, the eyes and the voices died with them. The mountaintop was lush with green grass; flowers grew, as vivid as jewels; the sun was warm.

“Look down,” the voice said. “Look west.”

Aderyn climbed to the top of a boulder and looked out, where it seemed the sun was setting on a smooth-flowing wide river. Oak forest stretched on the far bank.

“West. Your Wyrd lies west. Go there and heal. Go there and find those you will serve. Make restitution.”

As Aderyn watched, the sun set over the river. The forest went dark, disappearing under vast shadows. Yet he could hear the water flowing. With a start he realized he was kneeling in the dew-soaked grass and hearing the hundred water-voices of Loc Tamig. In the west, the moon was setting. He rose and walked back between the pillars, then knelt again before the altar to raise his hands and prayed aloud in thanks to the Lords of Light. As he finished, the pillars disappeared, winking out like blown candles. He withdrew the five-pointed stars into himself and erased the magic circles.

“And any spirits bound by this ceremony, go free! It is over. It is finished.”

From the lake came three hollow claps of thunder in answer. Aderyn stood and stamped three times upon the ground, then fell to his knees, sweating with exhaustion, trembling so hard from the spent forces that he could do nothing but kneel and shake until the first pale gray of dawn cracked in the east and brought him some of his strength back with the sunlight. He gathered up his magical weapons, put them in the sack, then rose to see Nevyn striding across the grass toward him.

“Oh, here! Have you been close by all this time?”

“Did you truly think I’d leave you to face this alone? You’ve done well, lad.”

“I heard the voices of the Great Ones. I’ll never forget this.”

“Don’t. It would go hard with you if you did. You’ve had your great vision, but there will be plenty of other little ones. Never forget this, either: you’ve just begun.”

Aderyn slept all that day and through most of the night. When he woke, a few hours before dawn, he knew that the hour had come for him to leave. As he lay in darkness and considered routes west, he was calm, knowing, without knowing how he knew, that he would see Nevyn again, many times, no doubt, over the years ahead. His grief at leaving his beloved master was only another test; he’d had to believe that he would lose Nevyn in order to see if he would ride out even in grief. You’re not an apprentice anymore, he thought, not a master, either, mind—but the journeyman is ready to go look for his work.

In the center of the hut, a fire flared, revealing Nevyn beside it.

“I figured you were awake,” the old man said. “Shall we have one last meal together before you go?”

“We will. I know I don’t need to, but I wish I could pour my heart out in thanks for all you’ve done for me.”

“You were always a nicely spoken lad. Well, then, in thanks, do one last thing that I charge you: go say farewell to your family before you head west. I took you from them, after all, and I feel I should send you back one last time.”

All of Aderyn’s new confidence dissolved in a sudden stab of anxiety. Nevyn grinned at him as if he knew exactly what was happening.

“Oh, I’ll do it!” Aderyn snapped. “But I’d hoped to spare them that.”

“Spare yourself, you mean. And how can you handle the mighty forces of the universe if you can’t even face your own father?”

After they ate, Aderyn saddled his riding horse and loaded up his mule. He had only a few things of his own—a bedroll, a spare shirt, a cloak, his magical weapons, the cooking pots and implements he needed for camping by the edge of the road—but he did have a great store of herbs, roots, salves, and other such medicines, all of which needed to be carefully stowed in the canvas panniers. Nevyn also insisted on dividing their small store of coins and giving him half.

“You’ve earned it as much as I have. Ride out in the light. We’ll meet again one of these days, and if the need is great, we can scry each other out through the fire.”

“Well, so we can.” Aderyn felt a definite lump in his throat. “But I’ll miss you anyway.”

As he rode out, leading his mule, Aderyn turned in the saddle and looked back. Nevyn was standing by the door of the hut and watching. He waved once, then turned back inside.

On a day warm with the promise of coming summer, Aderyn reached the village of Blaeddbyr and Lord Maroic’s dun, where his father, Gweran the bard, served the White Wolf clan and where Aderyn had been born and raised. To his surprise, the ward and the familiar buildings seemed much smaller than he’d remembered them. Near the broch tower he dismounted and looked round the dusty ward. A few curious servants stopped to look him over; a couple of the riders came strolling over as if to ask him his business there. All at once he heard a woman’s voice.

“Ado, Ado, thank the gods!”

It was his mother, Lyssa, laughing and weeping at the same time as she threw herself into his arms. Close to tears himself, Aderyn hugged her tight, then set his hands on her shoulders and smiled at her. She’d grown stout but was still beautiful, her raven-dark hair barely touched with gray, her wide blue eyes bright, her cheeks barely marked with wrinkles.

“It’s so good to see you,” Lyssa said. “Truly, I was wondering if we would ever see you again. Can you stay with us a while?”

“I will, if Lord Maroic allows. But, Mam, this is the last visit I’ll ever make. I want you to know that now.”

Lyssa caught her breath sharply, but he knew there would be no tears or recriminations. In a sweep of laughter, the rest of his family came running from the broch and clustered around him—his younger brother, Acern, training to take his father’s place as bard, his sister, Araena, married to the captain of Maroic’s guard and with a baby of her own, and finally his father, Gweran, as tall and imposing as always with his blond hair heavily laced with silver. In a chattering crowd they escorted him inside, where the aging Lord Maroic rose from his carved chair and announced that Aderyn was going to take his meat and mead for as long as he wanted to stay. The dailiness, the cheer, the mundanity of the visit broke over Aderyn like a wave, as if the dweomer were only some dream he’d once had. Being surrounded by his family made him realize why he had a lonely road ahead: the strange lore that mattered to him could never be shared. It set him apart like walls even as he talked and gossiped and shared heavy meal after heavy meal with them all in the long drowsy days of his visit.

Gweran went out of his way to spend time with Aderyn, much more than usual. Aderyn supposed that Lyssa had told him that his firstborn son would never ride home again. She’d always been the link between them, keeping them at peace, telling them things that they could never voice themselves. There was good reason for their distance. Looking at his father’s silvery hair, his straight, almost regal bearing, his rich clothing that he wore like the honor it was, Aderyn found it hard to remember that Gweran was a murderer who had used the very law itself as a weapon. At times he wondered if Gweran even remembered the young rider, Tanyc, whom he’d so cleverly trapped twenty years before. Perhaps he did, because even though their talks rambled through Aderyn’s childhood, every time they came close to Aderyn’s seventh year, when the murder had happened, Gweran would shy away and find a distant topic to discuss. Aderyn was more than willing to let the subject stay closed. Even though he’d only been a child and spoken in all innocence, still he felt he shared his father’s blood guilt. Seven years old or not, he’d blurted out the information that had sent Gweran hunting revenge. “Tanyc’s always looking at Mam, Da.” Even at this lapse of years, he could hear his small boy’s voice pronouncing an unwitting death sentence.

Since he’d done much meditation work to heal that old wound, Aderyn was surprised the way the murder rose to haunt him. Doubtless it came from being in the dun, whose walls had once displayed his private horror. He remembered it vividly: climbing out of bed on a sunny morning, throwing open the shutters at the window, and seeing, just down below his tower room, Tanyc’s body hanging by the neck from the ramparts. He was bound hand and foot, his head flopping like a rag doll’s, and already the ravens were wheeling in the sky. Aderyn could only think there’d been some ghastly accident. He started screaming for his mother, who ran to him, looked out the window, and in a moment of horrified honesty, blurted out, “Your da’s killed him!” Later, she tried to recant, but by then Aderyn knew that his father had goaded the young warrior into drawing a sword against him, a bard, a capital crime under Deverry laws. In his child’s way, he knew his mother had told him the truth that first time.

Aderyn wondered if Lyssa felt she shared their guilt. After all, Gweran and Tanyc had been fighting over her. During the visit, Lyssa said little, merely listened to him and his father talk while she watched Gweran with a patient devotion. Her man was a good husband who still loved her; he was famous, with young disciples clamoring to study with him; his skill kept her in comfort. Perhaps she’d carefully forgotten that he’d murdered a man for her sake. Perhaps.

On the last day of the visit, Aderyn and Lyssa walked down to the Nerraver as they’d so often done when he was a child. The river ran full between lush green banks and sparkled in the sun with little fish-scale ripples of silver. When they sat down for a rest, Lyssa hunted through the grass and picked a few daisies like a young girl.

“Ado? Do you remember the year of the Great Drought?”

“I do.” That was the year of the murder, too. “Did you know it was Nevyn’s dweomer that set it right?”

“Of course. It was one reason I let you go as his apprentice.”

“And do you regret that decision now?”

“Well.” Lyssa looked at her daisies. “If a mother is any kind of mother at all, she knows her sons will leave her. I have your sister and her babies nearby.”

“Well and good, but, Mam, truly I’ll miss you.”

Lyssa shrugged, turning the flowers this way and that between her fingers, fighting to keep back tears.

“Do you think you’ll ever marry on this strange road of yours?” she said at last.

“I doubt it. It wouldn’t be much of a life for a woman, living out of a mule’s pack and sleeping by the road.”

“True enough, but here—don’t tell me the dweomer lets a man carry on with tavern lasses and suchlike.”

“It doesn’t, but then I’ve got no intentions of doing anything of the sort.”

Lyssa considered him, her head a bit to one side.

“You don’t care much for women, do you, Ado?”

“Care? Of course I do. Truly, Mam, I prefer their company and talk to that of men most of the time.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

When he understood, Aderyn felt distinctly squeamish—after all, she was his mother.

“Well, I don’t, not in that way. But, Mam, don’t trouble your heart over it. I don’t care for other lads or suchlike.”

“That wouldn’t have bothered me. It’s just that I’ve always felt you didn’t have much of a taste for that sort of thing with anyone. Do you feel you can’t trust us women?”

“And why would you think that?”

“Oh, you saw a bit too much, maybe, when you were a lad.”

Aderyn hesitated, then decided it was time for the truth.

“You mean Tanyc.”

“Just that.” Lyssa was studying the daisies. “He died because of me, no matter whose fault it was.” She looked up sharply. “I’ll swear it to you, Ado. I never gave him a word of hope or encouragement.”

“I never thought you did. But it’s not that, Mam. It’s the dweomer. It’s taken my whole life. Everything I would have given to a woman I’ve spent on the dweomer, heart and soul both.”

Lyssa sighed in honest relief, as if she’d been blaming herself for her son’s celibacy. Later, when he was alone, Aderyn wondered if in one way her fear was justified. He’d never blamed her, the woman in the case, for one wrong thing, but the murder had left him with doubts about being a man. To become obsessed with a woman the way Tanyc was seemed to lead to death; to love a woman the way his father did seemed to tempt crime. He decided that he’d better meditate on the subject and untangle this knot in his mind. It might interfere with his work.

All that summer, Aderyn made his way west, going from village to village, supporting himself nicely by selling his herbs—or nicely by his standards, since he was content with two spare meals a day and the occasional tankard of ale in a clean tavern. At times he settled for a week or two to gather fresh herbs or to tend to some long illness, but always he moved on, leaving grateful farmers and villagers behind. Every night when he performed his ritual meditations, he would brood on his Wyrd and wonder where it lay. Gradually his intuition grew that he should turn southwest in his wanderings, but no other signs or hints came to him, at least not in any simple way. When the first clue was given, it took him a long time to unravel it.

Near the western border of the kingdom was one last river, the Vicaver, where Aderyn went simply to take a look at it. Rather than the oak forests of his visions, however, he found the river bordered by farms, pastures, and the occasional stand of willow trees. Aderyn crossed it and rode to the village of Ladotyn, a straggle of some fifty houses scattered among poplar trees, though it did have a proper inn. The innkeeper told him that they got merchant caravans coming through the town, on their way to and from the kingdom of Eldidd to the west.

“And if you’re thinking of riding west through those mountains, good sir, you’d best see if you can join some other travelers. Those louse-ridden savages up in the hills are always causing trouble.”

“Well, I don’t intend to stay here all winter, caravan or no.”

“It’s your burying, not mine—well, if you even get a burial in the ground and not in their stomachs, if you take my meaning, like.”

Although a caravan did indeed appear at the inn, it turned out that it was coming home to Deverry from Eldidd, and the caravan master, Lillyc, doubted very much if Aderyn would see one going the opposite way so late in the season. As they stood talking together out in the innyard, Lillyc remarked that he’d been trading in some towns that lay on a river called the El.

“Now that’s a strange name,” Aderyn remarked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”

“No doubt.” Lillyc gave him the grin of a man with a secret joke. “It’s not a Deverry word, nor an Eldidd one, either. The name comes from the Westfolk. They live off to the west of Eldidd, you see. Used to range farther east, but now the place is getting properly settled.”

“Indeed? Are they some of the Old Ones, then?”

“If you mean the squinty-eyed, dark-haired bondsfolk, that they aren’t. Oh, the Westfolk are a different lot altogether, and a strange bunch. They won’t settle in proper farms and towns. They wander around with their horses and sheep, just where the fancy takes them.” Lillyc paused for a small frown. “But they’ve helped me and many a merchant make his fortune. They love iron goods—can’t work the stuff themselves, I suppose. How could you, riding around with never a proper forge? They trade us horses. Look.”

At that moment one of Lillyc’s men walked by leading a pair of the most beautiful horses Aderyn had ever seen. They were both mares, but they stood sixteen hands easily, and their wide, deep chests and slender legs bespoke good wind and good speed both. The most amazing thing, however, was their color, a dark rich gold like fresh clay dug from a riverbank while their manes and tails were as silvery pale as moonbeams.

“Gorgeous, good sir!” Aderyn said. “I’ll wager any noble lord in Deverry would give you a small fortune for breeding stock like that.”

“Just so, just so. But I had to spend most of a small fortune to get them, let me tell you.”

A strange folk, then, these Westfolk, and perhaps with strange lore to match. The very thought made a cold shudder run down Aderyn’s back as he wondered if they were in some way linked to his Wyrd.

“Here, I’m determined to go west. Think the weather will hold up in the mountains for a few more weeks?”

“It’s not the weather you’ve got to worry about, it’s the savages. If I were you, lad, I’d wait. A herbman’s a valuable sort of man to have around. We’d all hate to lose you, like.”

Aderyn merely smiled. Waiting was not one of his strong points.

Since he was going to be traveling farther than he’d previously planned, Aderyn decided that he’d best consult with Nevyn. That night, he went up to his chamber and built himself a small fire in the hearth. When he called upon his old master, the image built up fast, Nevyn’s face floating in the flames and scowling at him.

“So, you deigned to contact me, did you? I’ve been worrying myself sick.”

“My humble apologies, but truly, everything’s been fine.”

“Good. Well, now that you’ve made the first link, I can contact you again without wounding your dignity, I suppose, but kindly don’t let me brood about you for months at a time, will you?”

“Of course not. And you have my heartfelt apologies.”

“That’s enough humility for now, please. What have you been doing with yourself?”

Aderyn told him what little there was of interest in his summer’s wanderings, then turned to his plan of traveling to Eldidd. As the old intimacy between them reestablished itself, Nevyn’s image grew in the fire, until it seemed that they were standing face to face, meeting in gray void swirled with violet mists.

“Well, it seems that Eldidd would be as good a place to go as any,” Nevyn said at last.

“Do you know of any others of our kind there?”

“I don’t, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. Keep your eyes open, lad, and see what you find. Remember what I’ve always told you: in these things, there’s no need for hurry.”

“What do you think about this strange tribe, the Westfolk?”

“Very little, because I’ve never heard of them before. If naught else, this is all very interesting.”

At that time Eldidd was an independent kingdom, whose rulers were ultimately descended from the legendary warriors known as the Hippogriff and the Dragon, the two foster brothers of King Bran himself who joined him for the Great Migration. In the year 297, after a bitter struggle over the kingship of Deverry, Cynaeval and Cynvaenan, their descendants and the current leaders of the two clans of the Dragon and the Hippogriff, with all their allies, kinsmen, supporters, and dependents, left Deverry to sail west and found their own throne and royal city. For years, the small colonies eked out a precarious existence along the seacoast, but in time the Hippogriff’s people flourished and spread up the great river valleys of the Dilbrae and the El, while the Dragon clan spread north from their town of Aberwyn up the Gwyn and the strangely named Delonderiel. In the year when Aderyn crossed the mountains of the Belaegyrys range into Eldidd, the kingdom boasted a respectable two hundred thousand people.

Because he needed to gather more medicines, Aderyn avoided the sandy coast road and chose the easy northern pass through the mountains. On the western side, he reached rolling hills, brown and scruffy with frostbitten grass, and there he stumbled upon a tiny village in a secluded valley. The small square huts, roofed with dirty thatch, were made of rough-hewn wood packed with mud to keep out the chill. Grazing on the brown and stubbled grass were goats and a few cows. The village belonged to some of the Old Ones, those unfortunate folk who’d lived in the land before the bloodthirsty Deverrians had ridden their way to seize it from them. Dark-haired, on the slender side, they had their own immensely complex language, or rather a mutually incomprehensible group of them, which in the settled parts of Deverry and Eldidd were forbidden by the laws of their conquerors but were kept alive by stealth. When Aderyn rode up to the huts, the folk came running out to stare at him and his fine horse and mule. In a group, the eight men of the village advanced upon him with their rough spears at the ready, but when Aderyn spoke in their language and explained that he was a herbman, they lowered the weapons. Dressed in a long brown tunic, a man of about forty stepped forward and introduced himself as Wargal, the headman.

“You’ll forgive our greeting, but we have great reason to fear these days.”

“Indeed? Are the men of Eldidd close by?”

“The despicable blue-eyed ones are always too close by.”

For a moment they contemplated each other in an uneasy silence. Wargal’s eyes flicked back and forth between his folk and the stranger. He had a secret, Aderyn supposed, and he could guess it: the village was sheltering a runaway bondsman.

“Are there any sick in your village?” Aderyn said. “I have many herbs, and I’ll gladly help anyone who needs them in return for some fresh milk and a night’s shelter.”

“Any stranger is welcome to milk from my flock. But if you can spare some medicine, one of our women has a bad case of boils.”

The villagers tended Aderyn’s horse and mule while Wargal took him to his own home, which had no furniture except for three big pottery jars near the tiny hearth and the straw mattress he shared with his wife. Hanging on the wall were a few bronze pots, a couple of knives of the same metal, and some rough cloth sacks. Aderyn sat down next to Wargal in the place of honor by the hearth while villagers crowded in for a look at this amazing event, a stranger in their village. After some polite conversation over bowls of goat’s milk, the woman with boils was duly treated in the midst of the curious crowd. Other villagers came forward to look over the herbs and ask shy questions, but most were beyond his help, because the real plague in this village was malnutrition. Driven by fear of the Eldidd lords, they eked out a miserable living on land so poor that no one else wanted it.

Although Aderyn would have preferred to eat his own food and spare theirs, Wargal insisted that he join him and his wife in their dinner of goat’s-milk cheese and thin cracker bread.

“I’m surprised you don’t have your winter crops in yet,” Aderyn remarked.

“Well, we won’t be here to harvest them. We had a long council a few days ago, and we’re going to move north. The cursed Blue-eyes get closer every day. What if one of their headmen decides to build one of those forts along the road?”

“And decides you should be slaves to farm for him? Leaving’s the wise thing to do.”

“There’s plenty of open land farther north, I suppose. Ah, it’s so hard to leave the pastures of your ancestors! There’s a god in the spring nearby, too, and I only hope he won’t be angry with us for leaving him.” He hesitated for a moment. “We thought of leaving last spring, but it was too much of a wrench, especially for the women. Now we have another reason.”

“Indeed?”

Wargal considered him, studying Aderyn’s face in the flickering firelight.

“You seem like a good man,” Wargal said at last. “I don’t suppose you have any herbs to take a brand off a man’s face?”

“I only wish I did. If you’re harboring a runaway, you’d best move fast in case his lord comes looking for him.”

“So I told the others. We were thinking of packing tomorrow.” Wargal glanced around the hut. “We don’t have much to pack or much to lose by leaving—well, except the god in the spring, of course.”

Aderyn felt a sudden cold shudder of dweomer down his back. His words burned in his mouth, an undeniable warning that forced itself into sound.

“You must leave tomorrow. Please, believe me—I have magic, and you must leave tomorrow and travel as fast as you can. I’ll come with you on the road a ways.”

His face pale, Wargal stared at him, then crossed two fingers to ward off the evil eye, in case Aderyn had that, too.

On the morrow, leaving took far longer than Aderyn wanted. Although the village’s few possessions were easily packed onto bovine and human backs, the goats had to be rounded up. Finally a ragged group of refugees, about eight families with some twenty children among them, the cows, the herd of goats, and six little brown dogs to keep the stock in line, went to the holy spring and made one last sacrifice of cheese to the god while Aderyn kept a fretful watch on the path behind them. By the time they moved out of the valley, it was well after noon, and the smaller children were already tired and crying from the smell of trouble in the air. Aderyn piled the littlest ones into his saddle and walked, leading the horse. Wargal and a young man, Ibretin, fell in beside him. On Ibretin’s cheek was the brand that marked him as a lord’s property.

“If you think they’ll catch us, O Wise One,” Ibretin said to Aderyn. “I’ll go back and let them kill me. If they find us, they’ll take the whole tribe back with them.”

“There’s no need for that yet,” Wargal snapped.

“There never will be if I can help it,” Aderyn said. “I’d be twice cursed before I’d let a man be killed for taking the freedom that the gods gave him. I think my magic might make us harder to find.”

Both men smiled, reassured by Aderyn’s lie. Although he could control his aura well enough to pass unnoticed and thus practically invisible, Aderyn couldn’t make an entire village disappear.

For two days they went north, keeping to the rolling hills and making a bare twelve miles a day. The more Aderyn opened his mind to the omens, the more clearly he knew that they were being pursued. On the third night, he scried into a campfire and saw the ruins of the old village, burned to the ground. Only a lord’s warband would have destroyed it, and that warband would have to be blind to miss the trail of so many goats and people. He left the campfire and went to look for Ibretin, who was taking his turn at watching the goats out in the pasture.

“You’ve called me Wise One. Do you truly think I have magic?”

“I can only hope so. Wargal thinks so.”

It was too dark under the starry sky to see Ibretin’s face. Aderyn raised his hand and made the blue light gather in his fingers like a cool-burning torch. Ibretin gasped aloud and stepped back.

“Now you know instead of hoping. Listen, the men chasing you are close by. Sooner or later, they’ll catch us. You offered to die to save your friends. How about helping me with a little scheme instead?”

At dawn on the morrow, while Wargal rounded up the villagers and got them moving north, Aderyn and Ibretin headed south. Although Aderyn rode, he had Ibretin walk, leading his pack mule as if they’d been traveling together for some time as servant and master. About an hour’s ride brought them to the inevitable warband. They were just breaking their night’s camp, the horses saddled and ready to ride, the men standing idly around waiting for their lord’s orders. The lord himself, a tall young man in blue-and-gray-plaid brigga, with oak leaves embroidered as a blazon on his shirt, was kicking dirt over a dying campfire. When Aderyn and Ibretin came up, the men shouted, running to gather round them. Aderyn could see Ibretin shaking in terror.

“Oh, here,” a man called out. “This peddler’s found our flown chicken! Lord Degedd will reward you for this, my friend.”

“Indeed?” Aderyn said. “Well, I’m not sure I want a reward.”

With a signal to Ibretin to stay well back, Aderyn swung down from his horse just as Degedd came pushing his way through his men. Aderyn made a bow to him, which the lord acknowledged with a brief nod.

“I’ve indeed found your runaway bondsman, but I want to buy him from you, my lord. He’s a useful man with a mule, and I need a servant.”

Caught utterly off guard, Degedd stared for a moment, then blinked and rubbed his chin with his hand.

“I’m not sure I want to sell. I’d rather have the fun of taking the skin off his cursed back.”

“That would be a most unwise pleasure.”

“And who are you to tell me what to do?”

Since Aderyn was not very tall, the lord towered over him with six feet of solid muscle. Aderyn set his hands on his hips and looked up at him.

“Your men called me a peddler, but I’m nothing of the sort. I’m a herbman, traveling in your country, and one who knows the laws of the gods. Do you care to question me further?”

“I do. I don’t give a pig’s fart whether you’re a learned man or not, and anyway, for all I know, you lie.”

“Then let me give you a sample of my learning. Enslaving free men to work your land is an impious thing. The gods have decreed that only criminals and debtors shall be bondsmen. That law held for a thousand years, back in the Homeland, and it held for hundreds here, until greedy men like you chose to break it.”

When his men began muttering, shamefaced among themselves at the truth of the herbman’s words, the lord’s face turned purple with rage. He drew his sword, the steel glittering in the sun.

“Hold your ugly lying tongue and give me back that bondsman! Be on your way or die right here, you scholarly swine!”

With a gentle smile, Aderyn raised his hand and called upon the spirits of fire. They came, bursting into manifestation with a roar and crackle of bright flame on the sword blade. Howling, Degedd struggled to hold on to the hilt, then cursed and flung the flesh-branding metal to the ground. Aderyn turned the flames to illusions and swung around, scattering bright but harmless blue fire into the warband. Yelling, shoving each other, they fell back and ran away to let their lord face Aderyn alone.

“Now then, I’ll give you two copper pieces for him. That’s a generous price, my lord.”

His face dead white, Degedd tried to speak, failed, then simply nodded his agreement. Aderyn untied his coin pouch and counted the coppers into the lord’s broad but shaking left hand, as the right seemed to pain him.

“Your chamberlain will doubtless think you’ve made a fine bargain. And, of course, if you and your men return straight to your lands, there’s no need for anyone to ever hear this tale.”

Degedd forced out a tight sour smile. Doubtless he didn’t care to be mocked in every tavern in Eldidd by the story of how one herbman had bested him on the road, especially since no one would believe that the herbman had done it with magic. With a cheery wave, Aderyn mounted his horse and rode away, with Ibretin and the mule hurrying after. About a mile on, they looked back to see Lord Degedd and his warband trotting fast—away back south. Aderyn tested the dweomer warnings and felt that indeed, all danger was over. At that he laughed aloud.

“If nothing else,” he told Ibretin, “that was the best jest I’ve had in a long time.”

Ibretin tried to smile but burst into tears instead. He wept all the way back.

That night there was as much of a celebration in the camp as their meager provisions would allow. Aderyn sat at the biggest fire with Wargal and his wife while the rest of the villagers squatted close by and stared at him as if he were a god.

“We have to let the goats rest a day or they’ll stop giving milk,” Wargal said. “Is that safe, Wise One?”

“Oh, I think so. But you’d best travel a long ways north before you find a place to settle down.”

“We intend to. We were hoping you’d come with us.”

“I will for a while, but my destiny lies in the west, and I have to go where my magic tells me.”

After three more days of slow, straggling marching, the luck of Wargal’s tribe turned for the better. One afternoon they crested a high hill to see huts of their own kind spread out along a stream, prosperous fields, and pastures full of goats. When they came up to the village, the folk ran to meet them. There were only seven huts in the village, but land enough for many families. After a hasty tribal council, their headman, Ufel, told Wargal that he and his folk were welcome to settle there if they chose.

“The more of us, the better,” Ufel said. “Our young men are learning a thing or two from the cursed Blue-eyes. Someday we’ll fight and keep our lands.”

Wargal tossed back his head and howled a war cry.

Their journey over, the refugees camped that night along the streambank. The villagers brought food and settled in for talks to get to know their new neighbors. At Ufel the headman’s fire, Wargal and Aderyn drank thin beer from wooden cups.

“I take it your folk have lived here for some time,” Aderyn said. “May you always live in peace.”

“So I hope. We have a powerful god in our valley, and so far he’s protected us. If you’d like, I’ll show you his tree on the morrow.”

“My thanks, I would.” Aderyn had a cautious sip of the beer and found it suitably weak. “I don’t suppose any of the Blue-eyes live near you?”

“They don’t. And I pray that our god will always keep them away. Very few folk of any kind come through here—one of the People every now and then, that’s all.”

“The who?”

“The People. The Blue-eyes call them the Westfolk, but their own name for themselves is the People. We don’t see many of them anymore. When I was a little child, they brought their horses through every now and then, but not recently. Probably the demon-spawn Blue-eyes have tried to enslave them, too, but I’m willing to bet that they found it a very hard job.”

“From what I’ve heard, the Eldidd men have some kind of trade with them—iron goods for horses.”

“Iron goods? The idiot Blue-eyes give the People iron?” Ufel rose and paced a few steps away from the fire. “Trouble and twice trouble over that, then!”

“What? I don’t understand. The Westfolk seem to want the iron and …”

“I can’t explain. For a Blue-eye you’re a good man, but telling you would be breaking geis.”

“Never would I ask you to do such a thing. I’ll say no more about it.”

On the morrow, Aderyn rose before dawn and slipped away before the village was truly awake to spare everyone a sad farewell. He followed an ancient trail that wound through the barren pine-stubbled mountains without seeing a soul, either good or bad, until he rejoined the road. Even though the fields were plowed and ready for the fall planting, and orchards stood along the road, the houses were few and far between, and villages rare, unlike in Deverry. As he came closer to the river El, the real spine of the country, the houses grew thicker, clustering in proper villages. Finally, after six days on the road, he reached Elrydd, a proper town where he found an inn, not a cheap place, but it was clean, with fresh straw on the tavern-room floor.

Aderyn paid over a few of his precious coins for the lodging, then stowed his gear in a wedge-shaped chamber on the upper story. The innkeep, Wenlyn, served a generous dinner of thick beef stew and fresh bread, topped off with apple slices in honey. He also knew of the Westfolk.

“A strange tongue they speak. Break your jaw, it would. A jolly sort of folk, good with a jest, but when they come through here, they don’t stay at my inn. Don’t trust ’em, I don’t. They steal, I’m cursed sure of it, and lie all the time. Can’t trust people who won’t stay put in proper villages. Why are they always riding on if they don’t have somewhat to hide, eh?” Wenlyn paused to refill Aderyn’s tankard. “And they’ve got no honor around women. Why, there’s a lass in our very own town who’s got a bastard by one of them.”

“Now here, plenty of Eldidd men sire bastards, too. Don’t judge the whole herd by one horse.”

“Easy enough to say, good sir, and doubtless wise. But there’s just somewhat about these lads. The lasses go for them like cats do for catmint, I swear it. Makes a man nervous, it does, wondering what the lasses see in a bunch of foreigners. Huh. Women have got no sense, and that’s all there is to that.”

Aderyn smiled in bare politeness while Wenlyn sucked his teeth and sighed for the folly of lasses.

“Tell me, good sir,” Aderyn said at last. “If I ride straight west on the king’s road, will I eventually meet up with some of these folk?”

“Oh, no doubt, but what do you want to do that for? If you do, be cursed careful of your mule and horse. They might take a fancy to them, like. But as to where, let’s think—never been there myself—but Cernmeton, that region, that’s where our merchants go to trade.”

“My thanks. I’ll be leaving on the morrow, then. I’ve just got a fancy to take a look at these folk.”

Wenlyn stared at him as if he were daft, then left Aderyn to finish his meal in peace. As he sopped up the last of his stew with a bit of bread, Aderyn was wondering at himself. He felt something calling him west, and he knew he’d better hurry.

Out on the grasslands the seasons change more slowly than they do in the mountains. At about the time when Aderyn was seeing omens of autumn up in the Eldidd hills, far to the west the golden sunlight still lay hazy on the endless-seeming expanse of green. When the alar rode past a small copse of alders clustered around a spring, the trees stood motionless and dusty in the windless heat, as if summer would linger there forever. Dallandra turned in her saddle and looked at Nananna, riding beside her on a golden gelding with a white mane and tail. The elder elven woman seemed exhausted, her face as pale as parchment under her crown of white braids, her wrinkled lids drooping over her violet eyes.

“Do you want to rest at the spring, Wise One?”

“No need, child. I can wait till we reach the stream.”

“If you’re sure—”

“Now don’t fuss over me! I may be old, but I still have the wit to tell you if I need to rest.”

Riding straight in the saddle for all her five hundred years, Nananna slapped her horse with the reins and pulled a little ahead. With her second sight, Dallandra could see the energy pouring around her, great silver streams and pulses in her aura, almost too much power for her frail body to bear. Soon Nananna would have to die. Every day Dallandra’s heart ached at the thought of losing her mistress in the craft of magic, but there was no denying the truth.

Their companions followed automatically as they rode on. Earlier that morning, their alar had hurried ahead with the flocks and herds and left them a small escort of others who needed to move slowly. Enabrilia came first, leading the packhorse that dragged the heavy wooden travois with the tents. Her husband, Wylenteriel, their baby in a leather pack on his back, rode some distance behind and kept the brood mares with their young colts moving at a slow but steady pace. His brother, Talbrennon, rode point off to one side. In the middle of the afternoon Nananna finally admitted that she was tired, and they made camp near a scattering of willow trees. Normally, since they were only stopping for one night, they wouldn’t have bothered to unpack the tents, but Dallandra wanted to raise one for Nananna.

“No need,” Nananna said.

“Now here, Wise One,” Wylenteriel said. “Me and Tal can have it up in no time at all.”

“Oh, children, children, it’s not time for me to leave you yet, and when it’s time, you can fuss all you like, but it won’t give me one extra hour.”

“I know that’s true,” Dallandra said. “But—”

“No buts, child. If you know it, act on it.”

Wylenteriel, however, insisted on a compromise: he and Tal set up a small lean-to to keep the night damp off and unpacked cushions from the travois to lay on the canvas ground cloth. Dallandra helped Nananna settle herself, then knelt and pulled off the old woman’s boots. Nananna watched with a faint smile, her thin, gnarled hands resting on her frail knees.

“I’ll admit I could use a bit of a nap before dinner.”

Dallandra covered her with a light blanket, then went to help set up the camp. The men were already watering the horses at the stream; Enabrilia was sitting on the ground by a pile of dumped gear and nursing Farendar, who whimpered and fussed at her breast. He was only a year old, still practically a newborn by elven standards. Dallandra wandered downstream, driven by a sudden stab of omens. Even in the bright sunlight she felt cold, knowing that warnings were trying to reach her like slivers of ice piercing the edge of her mind, an image of winter, when something would tear her life in half and change her irrevocably. Nananna’s death, probably. With a shudder she ran back to the safe company of friends.

That night, while the others sat around a small campfire, Dallandra went to the lean-to. Nananna made a large ball of golden light and hung it on the ridgepole, then rummaged through her saddlebags for the small silver casket that guarded her scrying stones. There were five of these jewels, each set in a small silver disk graved with symbols: ruby for fire, topaz for air, sapphire for water, emerald for earth, and finally, the largest of them all, an amethyst for aethyr. Nananna laid the disks on a cushion and frowned at them for a moment.

“I had a dream while I was napping, and I need to see a bit more. Hum, the amethyst will do.”

Carefully Nananna wrapped the other jewels up in bits of fine silk cloth, then laid the amethyst disk in the palm of her right hand. Dallandra knelt beside her and looked into the stone, where a small beam of light gleamed in the dead center, then swelled to a smoky void—or so it seemed to Dallandra. Nananna, however, watched intently, nodding her head every now and then at some detail. Finally she spoke the ritual word that cleared the stone of vision.

“Now that’s interesting,” Nananna said. “What do you think of it?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t see.”

“A man of magic is coming to us from the east. His destiny lies here, and I’m to take him in.”

“Not one of those smelly Round-ears?”

“Any man who serves the Light is welcome in my tent.”

“Of course, Wise One, but I didn’t think a Round-ear would have the wits for magic.”

“Now, now! Harsh words and prejudice don’t suit a student of the Light.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t like the Round-ears much either, mind. But I’m trying. Do your best to try, too.”

In the middle of the next afternoon, they rode into the alardan, the great camp where the People meet at the end of the summer after a long season’s wandering with their flocks and herds. That year the banadars of the scattered tribes had chosen the Lake of the Leaping Trout, the most southerly of a chain of lakes along a wide river which the Eldidd men, with a characteristic lack of imagination, called simply Aver Peddroloc, the four-lake river. To the south stood a vast oak forest, tangled and primeval, that was a burying ground held sacred by the People for a thousand years. From the north shore spread an open meadow, where now hundreds of brightly painted tents rose like flowers in the grass. Out beyond were flocks of sheep and herds of horses, watched over by a ring of horsemen.

As their little group rode up, Talbrennon peeled off to drive their stock into the communal herds. Dallandra led the others down to the lakeshore and found an open spot to set up camp. As they dismounted, ten men came running to do the heavy work for the Wise One and her apprentice. Dallandra led Nananna away from the bustle and helped her sit down in the grass, where Enabrilia and the baby joined them. Farendar was awake, looking up at his mother with a wide toothless grin.

“Look, sweetie, look at the camp. Isn’t it nice? There’ll be music tonight, and you can listen.”

Farendar gurgled, a pretty baby, with big violet eyes, a soft crown of blond hair, and delicate ears, long and tightly furled, as all babies’ ears were. They would begin to loosen when he was three or so.

“Give your aunt Dalla a kiss.” Enabrilia held him up. “Malamala’s sweetest love.”

Obligingly Dallandra kissed a soft pink cheek. There was a definite odor about the child.

“He’s dirty again.”

“Oh, naughty one!”

Enabrilia knelt down in the grass and pulled up his little tunic to unlace the leather diaper and pull it off. The diaper was stuffed with long grass, definitely well used; Enabrilia shook it out and began to pull clean. All the while she kept up a running stream of sweet chatter that vaguely turned Dallandra’s stomach. Her friend gushed over the baby no matter what he did, whether soiling his diapers or blowing his snotty little nose. At times it was hard for Dallandra to believe that this was the same girl who used to train for an archer and race her horse ahead of the alar across the grasslands, who used to camp alone in the forest with Dallandra, just the two of them. Every child, of course, was more precious than gold and twice as rare among the People; every elf knew that, and Dallandra reminded herself of it often. When Enabrilia started to put the grass-filled diaper back on, Farendar proceeded to urinate all over himself and her hand, but his mother just laughed as if he’d done something clever.

“I think I’ll walk back to the camp,” Dallandra said. “See if the tent is ready.”

The tents were indeed standing, and Halaberiel the banadar was waiting in front of Nananna’s with four members of his warband. Louts, Dallandra considered the young men, with their long Eldidd swords at their sides and their swaggering walk. Halaberiel himself, however, was a different matter, a farseeing man and a skilled judge for the alarli under his jurisdiction. When Dallandra held up her hands palm outward, he acknowledged the gesture of respect with a small firm nod.

“I’m glad to see you, Wise One. I trust Nananna is well.”

“A bit tired. She’s down by the lakeshore.”

“I’ll go speak with her.” Halaberiel glanced at his escort. “You all stay here.”

The four of them obligingly sat down in front of the tent. The worst four, Dallandra thought. Calonderiel, Jezryaladar, Elbannodanter, and Albaral—they were all staring, hungry-eyed and smiling. She felt like kicking dirt in their faces. As she followed the banadar, Calonderiel got up and ran after, catching her arm and bobbing his head to her.

“Please, Dalla, won’t you take a little stroll with me? Oh, by the gods who live in the moon, I’ve dreamt about you every night for weeks.”

“Have you?” Dallandra shook her arm free. “Then maybe you’ve been drinking too much Eldidd mead before you go to bed. Try taking a herbal purgative.”

“How can one so lovely be so cruel? I’d die for you. I’ll do anything you say, fight a thousand Round-ears or ride alone to hunt down the fiercest boar! Please, won’t you give me some quest? Something dangerous, and I’ll do it or die all for your sake.”

“What a lardhead you can be!”

“If I talk like a madman, it’s because I’m mad all for the love of you. Haven’t I loved you for years? Have I ever looked at another woman in all that time? Haven’t I brought you gifts from down in Eldidd? Please, won’t you walk with me a little ways? If I die for lack of your kisses, my blood will be on your head.”

“And if I get a headache from listening to you babble, then the pain will be in my head, too. Cal, the alardan’s full of prettier women than me. Go find one and seduce her, will you?”

“Oh, by the gods!” Calonderiel tossed his head, his violet eyes flashing with something like rage. “Doesn’t love mean anything to you?”

“About as much as meat means to a deer, but I don’t like to see you unhappy. We’ve been friends for ever so long, since we were children, truly.”

Just seventy that year, Calonderiel was a handsome man, tall even for one of the People, towering a full head above her, his hair so pale it seemed white in the summer sun and his eyes as deep-set as a dark pool among shade trees. Yet Dallandra found the thought of him kissing her—or worse yet, caressing her—as repellent as the thought of biting into meat and finding a maggot.

“Besides,” she went on, “how would your pack of friends take it if I chose you?”

“They’d have to take it. We threw knucklebones to see who’d get the first chance to court you, and I won.”

“You what?” Dallandra slapped him so hard across the face that he reeled back. “You beast! You gut-sucking sheep worm! Am I supposed to be flattered by that?”

“Of course you are. I mean, aren’t you glad to have four men all ready to die for you?”

“Not if they dice over me first like a piece of Eldidd ironware.”

“I didn’t mean it like that!”

“Horse turds.”

When Dallandra started to walk away, he grabbed her arm again, bobbing his head and ducking before her like a bird drinking from a stream.

“Please, wait! At least tell me this: is there someone you love more than me? If there is, then I’ll ride off with a broken heart, but I’ll ride.”

“Since I don’t love you at all, it wouldn’t be hard to find someone I loved more, but actually, I haven’t even looked. Why don’t you believe me, you cloudbrain? I don’t love you. I don’t love anyone. I don’t want to get myself a man. Plain truth. No more to say. There you are.”

Rage flared in his eyes.

“I don’t believe it. Come on, tell me: what can I do to make you love me?”

She was about to swear at him, then had a better idea.

“I’ll never love any man who isn’t my match in magic.”

“What a rotten thing to say! What man’s ever going to match you? That’s a woman’s art.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” Dallandra gave him a small smile. “A man could learn it, too—if he had the guts, and most of you don’t.”

This time, when Dallandra shook free and walked on, Cal stayed behind, savagely kicking at a tuft of grass with the toe of his boot. She hurried on to the lakeshore, where Nananna and Halaberiel were sitting in the long grass in the shade of a willow tree, their heads together and talking urgently.

“I’ve asked the banadar to do us a small favor,” Nananna said. “Concerning yesterday’s vision.”

“Of course I’ll go look for this man, Wise One. I’ll take my escort with me, too.” He thought for a moment. “Let’s see—the last of the Round-ear merchants is still here. I could ask him if he’s seen anything of a stranger.”

“No,” Nananna said. “I know this is only making your task harder, Banadar, but I’d prefer that you speak to the Round-ears as little as possible.”

Halaberiel shot her a troubled glance, then nodded his agreement.

“Take Cal with you, will you?” Dallandra broke in. “I want him out of my sight.”

“Oh, now now.” Halaberiel gave her an infuriatingly paternal smile. “He’s a decent boy, really, if you’d only give him a chance.”

When Dallandra crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him, Halaberiel hastily looked away and made the sign against the evil eye with his fingers. Although the evil eye was only a myth, most dweomerfolk found it a useful one.

“Very well, Cal will ride with me,” Halaberiel said. “Now, about this Round-ear we’re fetching, can you give me a sign to look for, O Wise One?”

“Come to my tent after dark. I’ll give you a riddle to ask him, too, just to make sure you’ve cut the horse out of the herd of cows.”

“Good.” Halaberiel rose, bobbing his head at her. “Shall I escort you to your tent?”

“No, but thank you. I think I’ll take a bit of sun.”

Nananna waited until the banadar was out of earshot before she spoke.

“And why are you breaking poor Cal’s heart?”

“I don’t love him.”

“Very well, then, but there’s nothing wrong with your finding a nice young man to keep you warm in the winter.”

Dallandra wrinkled her nose and shuddered. Nananna laughed, patting Dallandra gently on the arm with one frail hand.

“Whatever you want, child. But a cold heart may find it hard to work magic as it grows older and more chill.”

“Oh, maybe so, but I hate it when they hang around me, yapping like dogs around a bitch in heat! Sometimes I wish I’d been born ugly.”

“It might have been easier, but the Goddess of the Clouds gave you beauty, and doubtless for some reason of her own. I wouldn’t argue with her now that you have it.”

That night was the first in what promised to be a long series of feasts. Each alar made up a huge quantity of a single dish and set it out in front of their tents—Dallandra stewed up a vast pot of dried vegetables heavily spiced with Bardek curries—and the People drifted from one alar to another, sampling each dish, stopping to talk with old friends, then moving on to the next. Dallandra took a wooden bowl and trotted back and forth from alar to alar to fetch a selection of favorite treats for Nananna, who sat regally on a pile of cushions by a campfire and received visitors while she ate. By the end of the alardan she would have seen everyone at the meeting and dispensed wise advice, too, for most of their problems. Someday this role of wise woman would be Dallandra’s, but she was filled with the dread that she was too young, not ready, nowhere near Nananna’s equal. Her worst fear was that she would somehow betray her people’s trust in her.

Slowly the night darkened; a full moon rose bloated on the far empty horizon. Here and there, music broke out in the camp, as harpers and flute players took out their instruments and started the traditional songs. Singing, or at least humming along under their breath, the People drifted back and forth through the light from a hundred campfires. Just as the moon was rising high in the sky, the Round-ear merchant came to pay his respects to Nananna. Since she was supposed to be polishing her knowledge of the Eldidd tongue, Dallandra moved close to listen as Namydd of Aberwyn and his son, Daen, made Nananna low bows in the Round-ear fashion and sat down at her feet. The merchant was a portly sort, graying and paunchy, and his thin wisps of hair made his round ears painfully obvious. Daen, however, was nice-looking for one of his kind, with a thick shock of blond hair to cover what Dallandra thought of as his deformity.

“I’m most grateful you’d speak with me, O Wise One,” Namydd said in his barbarous-sounding speech. “I’ve brought you a little gift, just as a token of my respect.”

Daen promptly handed over a cloth-wrapped parcel, which his father presented to Nananna with as much of a bow as he could manage sitting down. With a small regal smile, Nananna unwrapped it, then held up two beautiful steel skinning knives with carved bone handles.

“How lovely! My thanks, good merchants. Here, Dallandra, you may choose which one you want.”

Eagerly Dallandra took the knives and studied them in the firelight. One knife was decorated purely with interlacements and spirals; the other had a picture of a running horse in the clumsy Eldidd style. She chose the abstract one and handed the other back to Nananna.

“My thanks, good merchants,” Dallandra said. “This is a truly fine thing.”

“Not half as fine as you deserve,” Daen broke in.

Dallandra realized that he was staring at her with a besotted smile. Oh no, not him, too! she thought. She rose, made a polite bob, then hurried to the tent on the excuse of putting the new knives away.

By the time the moon was at her zenith, Nananna was tired. Dallandra shooed the last visitors away, then escorted Nananna to their tent and helped her to settle into bed. In the soft glow of the magical light, Nananna seemed as frail as a tiny child as she lay wrapped in her dark blue blanket, but her violet eyes were still full of life, sparkling like a lass’s.

“I do love an alardan,” Nananna said. “You can go watch the dancing if you’d like, child.”

“Are you sure you won’t need me for anything?”

“Not while I sleep, no. Oh—I forgot all about Halaberiel. Here, go find him and tell him I’ll speak to him in the morning.”

Shortly after dawn on the morrow, Halaberiel appeared at their tent with the four young men who were to ride with him. They all sat on the floor of the tent while Nananna described the young Round-ear she’d seen in her vision—a slender man, much shorter than one of the People, with dark hair and big eyes like an owl. He was traveling with a mule and earning his living as a herbman.

“So he shouldn’t be too hard to find,” Nananna finished up. “When I scried him out, he was leaving Elrydd and making his way west. Now, the rest of you leave us while I tell the banadar the secret riddle.”

Carefully avoiding Calonderiel, Dallandra left the tent along with the men and went over to Enabrilia’s tent, which stood nearby. Enabrilia was cooking soda bread of Eldidd flour on a griddle while Wylenteriel changed the baby. Enabrilia broke off a bit of warm bread and handed it to Dallandra.

“I’ve got something to show you later,” Enabrilia said. “We traded a pair of geldings for some marvelous things yesterday. A big iron kettle and yards and yards of linen.”

“Wonderful! I should take some of our extra horses over to the Round-eyes, too.”

The Eldidd merchants left the alardan the next day, taking away fine horses and jewelry and leaving behind a vast motley assortment of iron goods, cloth, and mead. The alardan settled down to its real business—trading goods among itself, and sorting out the riding orders for the long trips ahead to the various winter camps. Just at twilight, Dallandra took an Eldidd-made ax and walked about a mile to a stand of oaks where she’d spotted a dead tree earlier. In the blue shadows under the old trees, all tangled with underbrush, it was cool and quiet—too quiet, without even the song of a bird. Suddenly she was aware of someone watching her. She raised the ax to a weapon posture.

“All right,” Dallandra barked. “Come out.”

As quietly as a spirit materializing, a man of the People stepped forward. Dressed in clothes pieced out of animal skins, he carried a long spear with a chipped stone blade, the shaft striped with colored earths and decorated with feathers and ceramic beads. Round his neck on a thong hung a small leather pouch, also elaborately decorated. One of the Forest Folk, come so close to a gathering—Dallandra lowered the ax and stared in sheer surprise. His smile was more a sneer as he looked her over.

“You have magic,” he said at last.

“Yes, I do. Do you need my help for anything?”

“Your help?” The words dripped sarcasm. “Impious bitch! As if I needed your help for one little thing. That axhead is made of iron.”

Dallandra sighed in sudden understanding. The Forest Folk clung to ancient taboos along with ancient ways—or so the People saw it.

“Yes, it is, but it hasn’t hurt me or my friends. Honest. No harm’s come to us at all.”

“That’s not the issue. The Guardians are angry. You drive the Guardians away with your stinking filthy iron.”

To Dallandra the Guardians were a religious principle, not any sort of real being, but there was no use in arguing philosophy with the Forest Folk.

“Have you come to warn us? I thank you for your concern, and I shall pray for forgiveness.”

“Don’t you mock me! Don’t you think I can tell you despise us? Don’t you dare speak to me as if I were a child, or I’ll—”

When he stepped forward, raising the spear, Dallandra threw up one hand and summoned the Wildfolk of Aethyr. Blazing blue fire plumed from her fingers with a roaring hiss. The man shrieked and fell onto his knees.

“Now,” she said calmly. “What do you want? If you just want to lecture me, I’m too busy at the moment.”

“I want nothing, Wise One.” He was shaking, his fingers tight on the spear shaft for comfort. “I brought someone who does need your help.”

When he called out, a human man crept forward from the underbrush. His dark hair was matted; his tattered brown rags were filthy. He fell to his knees in front of her and looked up with desperate eyes. He was so thin that she could see every bone in the hands he raised to her.

“Please help me,” he stammered out in the Eldidd tongue.

Dallandra stared at his dirty face. On his left cheek was a brand, bitten deep into his flesh, the mark of some Round-ear lord. A bondsman—fleeing for freedom and his life.

“Of course we’ll help you,” Dallandra said. “Come with me. Let’s get you fed first.” She turned to the spearman. “You have my sincere thanks. Do you want to eat with us, too?”

For an answer he rose and ran, slipping back into the forest like a deer. Weeping a low animal mutter under his breath, the Round-ear staggered to his feet. When they reached the alar, the People clustered round with shouts and oaths. Wylenteriel pressed a chunk of bread into the man’s filthy hands and got him a bowl of ewe’s milk to drink—the roast lamb and spiced food would have only made him vomit.

“One of the Forest Folk brought him in,” Dallandra said. “They must have been waiting for the merchants to leave.”

“I heard your people help such as us,” the bondsman stammered. “Oh, please, I can’t bear it anymore. My lord’s a harsh man. His overseer flogs us half to death whenever it suits him.”

“This lord is probably coming after him, too,” Dallandra said to the crowd in Elvish. “I wish Halaberiel were here, but we’ll have to work something out without him.”

“My alar’s riding west.” Gannobrennon stepped forward. “We’ll take him with us, and we’ll leave tonight.”

“Good, but what if the Round-ears ride in looking for him?” Elbaladar said. “We’d better break up the alardan.”

At this a round of arguments, suggestions, a babble of good advice and drawbacks, broke out. Slowly Nananna came out from the tent and walked over. At the sight of her, everyone fell silent.

“Elbaladar is right,” Nananna said. “We’d better break camp tonight. I can contact Halaberiel through my stones and tell him the news.” She paused, looking around at the assembled people. “I need four or five young men to join my alar. We can’t ride fast, and so the Round-ears might catch up with us.”

Quickly the news spread through the alardan: they were rescuing a Round-ear slave, and the Wise One had given her orders. The People gobbled down the feast, then packed up gear and struck tents by firelight and the rising moon. A few at a time, the alarli cut their stock out of the common herds and disappeared, moving on fast into the silent dark grasslands, until the vast meadow stood empty with only the crushed grass and various leavings to show where the alardan stood. Just after midnight four young men brought their stock and their possessions over to join the Wise One’s group, the last two tents left of hundreds.

“I can ride for a few hours tonight,” Nananna said. “I want to turn back east. If the Round-ear lord finds anyone, it had best be me.”

They made a hasty, sparse camp two hours later on the banks of the river that flows out of the Lake of the Leaping Trout. In the morning they forded the river and turned dead south through the grasslands. Enabrilia and Dallandra led the travois horses while Wylenteriel, Talbrennon, and one of their new recruits herded the stock in the rear. The other three rode in front, hands on sword hilts, eyes constantly sweeping the horizon, ready to ride between any Round-ear and Nananna. Toward noon, the trouble came. Dallandra saw a puff of dust heading toward them that soon resolved itself into six horsemen, trotting fast over the grasslands.

“Good,” Nananna said. “Let’s pull up and let them catch us. Dalla, you do the talking.”

Dallandra handed her the rope of the travois horse and rode up to the head of the line. The horsemen shouted and turned their horses, galloping the last half mile up to the alar. At their head was a heavyset blond man in the plaid brigga that marked him as an Eldidd lord; behind him were five of his warband, all armed and ready. The lord checked his men some twenty feet away from the alar and rode on alone to face Dallandra. He looked sourly over the small party; she could see him noting well the armed men—six of them, counting young Talbrennon.

“My lord! Shall we charge?”

“Hold your tongue!” the lord yelled. “Can’t you see the women with them? And one of them’s old at that.”

Dallandra relaxed slightly; so he had a bit of his kind of honor. The lord edged his horse up close to hers.

“Now, can any of you speak my language?”

Dallandra gave him a wide-eyed stupid stare.

“Eldidd.” He sighed and pointed to himself. “I’m a lord. I lost a bondsman. Have you seen him?”

“Bondsman?” Dallandra said slowly. “What is bondsman? Oh—farmer.”

“That’s right.” The lord raised his voice, as if she would understand if only he shouted. “A kind of farmer. He has a brand here.” He pointed to his cheek. “A mark. He’s my property, and he ran away.”

Dallandra nodded slowly, as if considering all of this.

“He’s a young man, wearing brown clothes,” the lord bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Have you seen him?”

“That I not. No see farmers.”

The lord sighed and looked doubtfully at the alar’s gear, as if a bondsman wrapped in blankets might be hidden on a travois.

“Which way have your people ridden? North? South?” He pointed out the various directions. “Do you understand? Where have you come from?”

“North. No see farmers. No farmers in north grass.”

“Well, you would have seen him out in those dismal plains.”

“The dis … what?”

“Oh, never mind.” The lord made a vague bow in her direction, then turned and yelled at his warband. “All right, men, we’re riding east. The bastard must have doubled back.”

As soon as the warband was out of sight, the alar burst into howls and cackles. Dallandra leaned into her saddle peak and laughed till her sides ached.

“Oh, a splendid jest,” Wylenteriel gasped with his perfect Eldidd accent. “No see farmer! By those hells of theirs, Dalla!”

“No speak good. Me simple elf. Hard of hearing, too.”

On a wave of laughter the alar rearranged their riding order and continued their slow trip south.

About four days’ ride west of Elrydd, Aderyn came to a tiny lake fringed with willow trees. In a nearby farming village were a woman ill with shaking fever and a man with a jaw abscessed from bad teeth. Aderyn made a camp on the lakeshore with a proper fire circle of stones, a canvas lean-to for covering his gear, and a neat stack of firewood donated by the grateful villagers, and rode daily into the village to care for his new patients. Once they were out of danger, he lingered to gather and dry wild herbs. On his tenth night there, as he was eating bread and cheese by his fire, he heard his horse whinny a nicker of greeting to some other horse, but one he couldn’t see or hear. When the mule joined in, Aderyn felt profoundly uneasy. He was a good two miles from the village, far away from help if he should need it.

Off among the willows a twig snapped; then silence. Aderyn spun around and stared into the darkness. He thought he saw something moving—too slender for a deer—no, nothing but tree branches. Now here, he told himself, you’re letting your nerves run away with you. But in the distance he heard another sound—a footfall, a twig. He retreated close to the fire and picked up the only weapon he had, a table dagger.

The five men materialized out of the willow trees and stepped quietly into the pool of firelight. While he gawked, too frightened to speak, they ringed him round, cutting off any escape. All five of them had pale blond hair, like moonlight in the fire-thrown shadows, and they shared a certain delicate kind of good looks, too, so that Aderyn’s first muddled thought was that they were brothers. They were dressed differently than Eldidd men, in tight leather trousers instead of baggy brigga and loose dark blue tunics, heavily embroidered, instead of overshirts, but they all carried long Eldidd swords.

“Good evening,” one of them said politely. “Are you the herbman the villagers told us about? Aderyn, the name was.”

“I am. Do you need my help? Is someone sick?”

The fellow smiled and came closer. With a twitch of surprise Aderyn noticed his ears, long, delicately pointed and curled like a seashell, and his enormous eyes were slit vertically like a cat’s.

“My name is Halaberiel. Answer me a riddle, good herbman: where have you seen the sun rise when you see with your other eyes?”

“At midnight, but that’s a strange riddle for a man to know.”

“It was told me by a woman, actually. Well, good herbman, we truly do require your aid. Will you ride west with us?”

“And do I have any choice about that?”

“None.” Halaberiel gave him a pleasant smile. “But I assure you, we mean you not the least harm. There’s a woman among my people with great power in what you Round-ears call dweomer. She wants to speak with you. She didn’t tell me why, mind, but I do what Nananna wants.” He turned to one of the others. “Calonderiel, go fetch his horse and mule. Jezry, bring our horses.”

The two melted away into the darkness with hardly a sound.

“I take it we’re leaving tonight,” Aderyn said.

“As long as you’re rested, but we won’t go far. I just want to put a little distance between us and the village. The villagers might go running to their lord with tales of Westfolk prowling around.” Suddenly he laughed. “After all, we are actually thieving tonight, stealing the herbman away.”

“Well, the herbman is curious enough to come with you on his own. I’m more than willing to speak to anyone who has dweomer.”

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that. It would have ached my heart to tie you up, but we couldn’t have you taking wing and flying away the minute our backs were turned.”

“Flying? Not quite, but I have ways of moving in the dark, true enough.”

“Ah, you’re only an apprentice, then. Well, no doubt Nananna can teach you a thing or two.”

Halaberiel spoke so matter-of-factly that the implication was unmistakable. Could this Nananna fly? Did all the dweomermasters of the Westfolk have a power that was only a wistful dream for those of the human sort? Aderyn’s heart started pounding in sheer greed. If Halaberiel had somehow changed his mind and tried to keep Aderyn away, he would have had a nasty fight on his hands. Aderyn’s kidnappers-cum-escort saddled his horse, loaded up his mule, then put out and buried his fire for him. As the horses picked their way across the dark meadow, Halaberiel rode beside Aderyn.

“I’ll tell Nananna tonight that we’ve found you.”

“You can scry, I take it.”

“I can’t. She’ll come to me in a dream, and I can tell her then.”

Just after midnight, Halaberiel ordered his men to make a rough camp by a riverbank. Aderyn judged they’d gone about ten miles. In the darkness, he could see nothing, but in the morning, he woke to the sight of a swift-flowing, broad river and, beyond on the farther bank, a primeval oak forest. He jumped up and ran to the water’s edge. It had to be—he knew it deep in his heart—it was the river of his vision. With a little yelp of sheer joy he jigged a few dancing steps there on the riverbank.

“Is somewhat wrong?” Halaberiel came up beside him.

“Not in the least. Quite the contrary, in fact. You don’t need to worry about me trying to escape or suchlike, believe me.”

After a meal they forded the river and walked the horses slowly into the forest, which soon turned so thick and tangled that they had to dismount and lead their mounts along a deer track. In a few miles the trail disappeared, leaving them to thread their own way through the trees. For three agonizing hours they picked their way west, stopping often to urge on the balky horses or deliberate on the best way to go. Finally, just when Aderyn was ready to give up in frustration, they came to a road: a proper, hard-packed, level dirt road about ten feet across, running straight as a spear through the forest.

“Here we are,” Halaberiel remarked. “Few of the Round-ears would push on long enough to find this, you see.”

“I take it you don’t trust my kind.”

“And how should I?” Halaberiel considered him with cool violet eyes. “No offense, good sir, to you as a man, but first we gave the Round-ears the coast; then they started pushing up the rivers; now I see them breeding like rats and swarming all over the country. Everywhere they go, they make slaves out of the Old Ones who were here before them. Where will they stop? Anywhere? Or will they keep on pushing north and west, plowing up the grasslands for their fields and killing the grass for our horses? Are they going to look at us and covet us for slaves one fine day? They’ve already broken at least one treaty with my kind that I know of. Trust them? I think not, good sir. I think not.”

“I assure you, those of us who serve the dweomer hate slavery as much as you do. If I could free every bondsman in the kingdom, I would.”

“No doubt, but you can’t, can you?” With an irritable shrug, Halaberiel turned away and called to his men. “Let’s get on the road. We can rest the horses when we come to the big spring.”

The spring turned out to be some two miles farther west, a stone pond with a stone culvert that led the overflow down to a stream among the trees. Inside the stone wall water welled up clear and noiselessly from the sandy bottom. Before anyone drank, Halaberiel raised his hands over the water and called out a short prayer in a soft musical language to thank the god of the spring. Then they unsaddled their horses, let them roll, and watered them before sitting down to their own meal of smoked fish and soft ewe’s-milk cheese. Aderyn was beginning to be able to tell the young men apart: Calonderiel, taller than the rest; Elbannodanter, as delicately handsome as a lass; Jezryaladar with a quick flash of a grin; and Albaral, who said very little and ate a lot.

“Banadar?” Calonderiel said. “Has Nananna told you where she is?”

“Not far beyond the forest. She and her escort met up with a couple of big alarli yesterday, and they’re all camping together by the haunted pool. The rest of our warband’s on the way to join them, too. We’ll all move down to the winter camp together.”

When he finished eating, Aderyn went for a closer look at the spring. The stonework was carved with looping vines and flowers, and peering out from among them were the little faces of the Wildfolk.

“Halaberiel?” Aderyn said. “Your people do beautiful stonework.”

“Well, they used to. This is over eight hundred years old. There’s not a man or woman alive now who could do as well.”

“Indeed? Here, your men call you banadar. Is that like a lord or prince?”

“In a way, but only in a way. We’ll have to start teaching you our speech, Aderyn. Most of us here in the east know a bit of the Eldidd tongue, at least, but farther west the People don’t care for the barbarous languages.”

Late in the afternoon they followed a little stream out of the forest into the grasslands and made their night’s camp. As he was unloading his mule, Aderyn realized that he was completely lost, cut off from Eldidd and everything he’d ever known. Perhaps he might have been able to find his way back through the forest to the river on his own—perhaps. Later, when the others were asleep in their bedrolls, Aderyn sat by the dying campfire and thought of Nevyn. The old man’s image built up instantly, smiling at him.

“Did I wake you?” Aderyn thought to him.

“Not at all. I was just sitting here wondering about you. Where are you? Still in Eldidd?”

“I’m not. Strange things have been happening.”

Carefully and in some detail Aderyn told him about his forced trip to see Nananna. His eyes thoughtful, Nevyn’s image grew stronger above the fire.

“Strange things indeed. Now fancy that—I never knew another race lived to the west. I think me that King Bran and Cadwallon the Druid led their folk to a stranger place than ever they could have guessed. I’ll have to meditate on this, but from what you say, I think that these elves originate in a different part of the Inner Lands than men do.”

“So it would seem. I truly wonder what kind of dweomer they have.”

“So do I. I trust you’ll tell me when you find out. It seems the Lords of Light have warned this Nananna of your coming. Interesting, all of it.”

“I truly wish you were here to see for yourself.”

“Well, who knows? Maybe someday I’ll ride west. Until then, be careful, will you? Don’t go rushing into anything unwise just out of lust for secret lore.”

Then he was gone, the contact broken and cold.

Toward noon on the next day they reached the camp. They came to the sheep first, a huge flock, watched over by dogs and mounted shepherds, one of whom was a woman, dressed in the same leather trousers and dark blue tunic as the men, but with long hair in one thick braid hanging down to her waist. About an hour’s ride on they reached a herd of some sixty horses on long tethers, among them the rich yellow-golds with silvery manes and tails so highly prized by Eldidd men. Just beyond the herds were the tents, along a stream and among the willow trees there. Each was a swirl and splash of bright color—animals, birds, leaves, tendrils—all intertwined but so solid and realistically painted that it seemed the birds would fly away. Out in the middle was a big cooking fire, where men and women both were working, cutting up lamb, stirring something in a big iron kettle. Other elves stood round, talking idly. When Halaberiel called out, the folk came running, all talking at once. Aderyn heard his name mentioned several times, and some of the folk openly stared at him. In a flood of laughter and talk, the men began to help them unsaddle their horses.

Off to one side Aderyn noticed a young woman whose hair, as pale as silver, hung to her waist in two long braids. Her face was a perfect oval; her enormous eyes were as dark and gray as storm clouds; her mouth was as delicate as a child’s. When she walked over to speak to him, he felt his heart pounding like a dancing drum.

“Aderyn? My name is Dallandra, Nananna’s apprentice. My mistress is resting, but I’ll take you to her later. My thanks for coming to us.”

“Most welcome, but the banadar didn’t give me much choice.”

“What?” Dallandra turned on the banadar. “What did you do, kidnap him like a lot of Round-ear bandits?”

Although Halaberiel laughed, he stepped back a pace from her anger. She’s splendid, Aderyn thought, and by every god, she must have a dweomer, too! All at once he was aware of Calonderiel watching him narrow-eyed, his arms folded over his chest. Aderyn’s heart sank; he should have known that a woman like this would be long spoken for. Then he caught himself. What was he doing, him of all people, acting like some stupid young lad bent on courting? Hastily he recovered his dignity and made Dallandra a bow.

“There’s no need to chide the banadar. I’d gladly travel a thousand miles for the sake of the dweomer. In fact, I already have.”

She smiled, well pleased by his answer.

“Where shall we put you? You don’t have a tent of your own.”

“I’ll take him with me,” Halaberiel said. “Truly, good Aderyn, my tent is yours if it pleases you.”

The banadar’s tent, a blue-and-purple monster some thirty feet across, stood at the edge of the camp. Lying around on the floor were piles of blankets and saddlebags. Halaberiel found a bare spot near the door and gestured to Aderyn to lay down his bedroll.

“The unmarried men in my warband shelter with me, but I promise you’ll find them better-mannered than a Round-ear lord’s warriors.”

Jezryaladar brought in Aderyn’s mule packs and dumped them unceremoniously on the ground near his bedroll. Apparently the elves considered this all the unpacking that was necessary; Halaberiel took his arm and led Aderyn outside to introduce him to the crowd round the cooking fire. A young woman, carrying a baby on her back in a leather-and-wood pack, handed Aderyn a wooden bowl of stewed vegetables and a wooden spoon, then served the banadar. They stood up to eat off to one side of the fire and watched as the young men of the warband lined up for their share.

“That lamb will be done later, I suppose,” Halaberiel said vaguely.

“Oh, this is fine. I don’t eat much meat, anyway.”

As the afternoon wore on, everyone was perfectly friendly, and most of the people spoke the Eldidd tongue, but on the whole, Aderyn was ignored or, rather, taken for granted in a way that made him feel slightly dizzy. After they ate, Halaberiel sat down on the ground in front of one of the tents and started an urgent conversation in Elvish with two men. Aderyn wandered through the camp, looking at the paintings on the tents, and watched what the people were doing in a vain attempt to fit into their pattern. The People strolled around, talking to whomever they met, or perhaps taking up some task, only to drop it if they felt like it. Aderyn saw Jezryaladar and another young man bringing a big kettle of water up from the stream to the fire; it sat there for a long time before Calonderiel put it on the iron tripod to heat; then it sat some more until a pair of the lads got around to washing up about half of the wooden bowls. When Aderyn wandered off, he found a young woman sitting on the ground behind one of the tents and talking to a pair of sleek brown dogs; she lay down, fell asleep, and the dogs lay down with her. Later, when he strolled back that way, they were gone.

Finally, toward twilight, the roast lamb was done. Two of the men took it off the spit and slung it down on a long wooden plank, while others kicked the various dogs away. Everyone gathered round and cut off hunks of meat, which most of them ate right there, standing up and talking. Aderyn saw Dallandra putting a few choice slices on a wooden plate and taking them away to a tent painted with vines of roses in a long, looping design.

“Nananna must be awake,” Halaberiel said with his mouth full. “She’s very old, you see, and needs her rest.”

Privately Aderyn wondered if it might be days before Nananna got around to remembering she’d had him brought here. As it grew dark, some of the elves built a second fire, then sat around it with wooden harps that looked somewhat like the ones in Deverry but which turned out to be tuned in quarter tones; they had long wooden flutes, too, that gave out a wailing, almost unpleasant sound for a drone. They played for a few minutes, then began to sing to the harps, an intricate melody in the most peculiar harmonies Aderyn had ever heard. As he listened, trying to figure them out, Dallandra appeared.

“She’s ready to see you. Follow me.”

They went together to the rose-painted tent. Dallandra raised the flap and motioned him to go in. When he crawled through, Aderyn came out into a soft golden light from dweomer globes hanging at the ridgepoles. All around were the Wildfolk: gnomes curled up like cats or wandering around, sprites clinging to the tent poles, sylphs like crystal thickenings of the air. On the far side, perched like a bird on a pile of leather cushions, was a slender old woman, her head crowned with stark-white braids. Aderyn could feel the power flowing from her like a breath of cool wind hitting his face, a snap and crackle in the air to match the life snapping in her violet eyes. When she gestured to him to sit down by her feet, he knelt in honest respect. Even when Dallandra joined her mistress, Aderyn couldn’t take his eyes from Nananna’s face. When she spoke, her voice was as strong and melodious as a lass’s.

“So, you’re the dweomerman from the east, are you?”

“Well, I’m a dweomerman from the east. I take it you had some warning of my coming.”

“I saw somewhat in my stone.” Nananna paused, leisurely studying his face. “In truth, I asked for you.”

Dallandra caught her breath with a small gasp.

“I’ll die soon,” Nananna went on. “It is time, and Dallandra will have my tent, my horses, and my place among our folk.” She laid a bony, pale hand on the lass’s shoulder. “But I leave her a bitter legacy along with the sweet. I am old, Aderyn, and I speak bluntly. I do not like your people. I fear their greed and what it will do to us.”

“I fear it, too. Please believe me—I’d stop them if I could.”

Nananna’s eyes bored deep into his. Aderyn looked back unflinchingly and let her read the truth of what he said.

“I have heard of the dweomer of the east,” she said after a moment. “It seems to serve the Light I serve, only after its own manner.”

“There is only one Light, but a rainbow of a thousand colors.”

Pleased by the answer, Nananna smiled, a thin twitch of bluish lips.

“But one of those colors is the red of blood,” she said. “Tell me somewhat: will your people kill mine for their land?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. They’ve killed others for theirs—or enslaved them.”

“No one will ever enslave an elf,” Dallandra broke in. “We’d die first, every last one of us.”

“Hush, child!” Nananna paused, thinking. “Tell me, Aderyn. What sent you to us?”

“Just this spring I left my master and received my vision. In it I saw a river, far to the west. When Halaberiel brought me to you, I crossed that river.”

“And do you want to go back across it to your own kind? I can have the banadar escort you.”

“Wise One, there are some rivers that can never be recrossed.”

The old woman smiled, nodding her agreement. Aderyn felt cold with excitement, a sweet troublement. He could hear the distant singing, drifting in from the night with the wailing of flutes.

“If you asked for me, and if I’ve been sent to you,” Aderyn said, “what work do you want me to do?”

“I’m not truly sure yet, but I do want Dallandra to have a man of your people at her side who understands your ways as she understands ours. I see blood on the grasslands, and I hear swords and shouting. It would be a shameful thing if I didn’t even try to stop it. Will you ride with us for a while?”

“Gladly. How can I stand by and let my folk do a murdering thing to haunt their Wyrd forever?”

“Nicely spoken. Tell me, Dalla—can you work with this man?”

Dallandra turned her storm-cloud gaze Aderyn’s way and considered him for so long that his heart began pounding.

“Well,” she said at last, “I’d work with the Dark Fiends themselves if it would help my people. He’ll do.”

“Well and good, then, as your folk would say.” Nananna raised a frail hand in blessing. “Ride south with us, young Aderyn, and we’ll see what all our gods have in store.”

The cold autumn rains slashed down over the town of Cernmeton and sent water sheeting across the cobbles and pooling in the gutters. Wrapped in his heavy winter cloak of dark blue wool, Cinvan rode fast through the twisting streets and left it up to the few townsfolk abroad to get out of his horse’s way. He clattered through the gates of the tieryn’s dun, a walled compound centered round a stone broch, rode round to the back stables, and yelled for a groom. A stable boy came running.

“So you’re back, are you? How was your visit home?”

“As good as it needed to be. Did I miss any excitement?”

“You didn’t, unless you count getting drunk in our lord’s hall as excitement.” He sighed in a melancholy way. “We’ve got a tournament going on Carnoic. So far Edyl’s ahead by six games.”

“I’ll see if I can give him a run for his coin, then.”

In the great hall smoke from the two huge hearths drifted in blue wisps across the round room. On one side the warband of thirty-five men was sitting and drinking at their tables. Up by the honor hearth, Tieryn Melaudd was slouched in his carved chair and drinking with his two sons, Waldyn and Dovyn. The tieryn was a florid-faced, raven-haired man, heavy with middle age but still capable of swinging steel. Of the sons, Waldyn, the elder, had the blond hair he’d inherited from his Deverry mother, but the younger looked much like a slender version of his father. Everyone knew that Dovyn was his father’s favorite son, too—a pity, since under the new laws he could never inherit a share of the demesne. Cinvan knelt before the tieryn, who gave him leave to speak with a wave of his hand.

“I’ve returned to your service as I pledged you, my lord. A thousand humble thanks for giving me leave.”

“Welcome, lad. And how fares your kin?”

“They’re doing well, my lord.” Cinvan was lying, but he saw no need to burden the tieryn with a problem he could do nothing about.

“Good, good. Get yourself some ale and join your comrades.”

Cinvan rose, bowed, and made his escape from the awesome presence of the noble-born. He dipped himself a tankard of ale from the open barrel in the curve of the wall, then strolled over to join the warband. Most of the men were watching Edyl and Peddyc play Carnoic, a board game where the players moved black or white stones along a pattern of triangles in attempts to capture each other’s men. Every move the two of them made was slow, studied, and accompanied by either cheers or oaths from the rest of the warband. As Cinvan stood watching them, Garedd came over and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“So our falcon’s flown back to the nest, has he? Pity—I was hoping you’d drown on the road.”

Cinvan threw a mock punch his way.

“Bastard! Anything happen while I was gone?”

“Naught. And how was Elrydd?”

“As well as it needed to be.”

Garedd shot him a look of honest sympathy. They took their tankards and sat down at a table far from the crowd around the game.

“And your sister?” Garedd said.

“That’s the cursed worst thing of all. By the hells, I was minded to beat her black and blue. First she has to go and get herself a bastard, and now she’s given it up.”

“She what?”

“Gave the babe up. To her rotten cat-eyed man. He rides in and wants the little lass—because she’ll only be a burden on our Dewigga, or so he says, and so she up and lets him take her away.” Cinvan slammed the tankard down on the table. “And Da was too cursed drunk to know or care. Ah, horseshit!”

“Now here, maybe it’s for the best. Your sister’s got a chance at a decent marriage someday now.”

“Ah, that’s what she said, blast her! But the shame of it, my own niece, one of my blood kin, riding with the Westfolk! What’s her da going to do, I says to Dewigga, teach her to steal? And she’s got the gall to slap me across the face and tell me to hold my tongue! Women!”

Garedd nodded in silent sympathy. Cinvan drew his dagger and began fiddling with it, just for comfort. On the hilt was graved his personal mark, the striking falcon that had earned him his nickname in the warband. He ran a heavily callused thumb over the mark and had thoughts of slitting this Gaverenteriel’s throat for him one sweet day.

“And you know what else Dewigga had the gall to say? She’s always known her man was going to take the babe when she was old enough. ‘You’re cursed lucky you didn’t let me know,’ says I. ‘Why do you think I held my tongue?’ says she. ‘Cursed good thing,’ says I, and she slaps me again.”

“Why didn’t you beat her black and blue?” Garedd said.

Cinvan shrugged, laying the dagger down on the table and picking up his tankard. The truth was too bitter to tell: he’d seen too much of that already, with his father beating his mother half to death every time she looked at the old man wrong. Her sobs still echoed through his dreams.

“Ah, wouldn’t be worth the trouble,” Cinvan said. “I just tell her that if she has another bastard, don’t come running to me for coin for the midwife this time, and she flounces out of the room like a highborn lady with her nose in the air.”

“Good for you. Women need to be kept in their place.”

“Cursed right.”

They finished their ale in silence. At the far table, Edyl’s howl of rage—he always was a rotten loser—announced that Peddyc had won the game. Amid laughter and jests, coin changed hands all around the warband.

“And here’s our falcon back,” Ynryc called out, pocketing a silver piece from the defeated side. “Come on, Cinvan—give Peddyc here a game. You’ve got a good hand with the stones.”

“Maybe I will, if he’ll take me on.”

“Oh, I’m always game,” Peddyc said, grinning. “Let’s see if I can keep my winnings.”

Edyl rose from his place at the board.

“Welcome back, falcon. And has your sister given you a nephew yet? But with proper ears this time?”

The world went red. Cinvan stepped forward, hit Edyl hard in the stomach with his right, and swung up to clip his jaw with his left. Edyl went down like a sack of grain as the hall exploded in shouting. Cinvan felt men grabbing his arms, heard Garedd yelling at him to calm down. Abruptly the red fog cleared. Cinvan knelt to his lord in a cold, shaking sweat.

“And what’s all this? By the hells, you haven’t been back for one wretched hour, Cinvan.”

Cinvan nodded in dumb agreement. He was so sure that he was in for a flogging that he could already feel the whip on his back. Young Dovyn caught his father’s arm and whispered something to him.

“Oh.” Melaudd turned to Peddyc. “Did Edyl make remarks about Cinvan’s sister?”

“He did, my lord.”

“Well, then, he’s gotten what he deserved. Tell him I said so when you bring him round. But here, Cinvan, try to keep peace in my hall, will you? If you’d only ignore these stupid foul jests, they’d stop making them after a while.”

“True-spoken, my lord, and my apologies.”

Later that day, when Melaudd and Waldyn’s wives and their serving women came down from the women’s hall to sit with the noble lords at the table of honor, Dovyn came to drink with his father’s warband. Cinvan wondered if he felt more at home with the men now that his brother had an infant son, another heir between him and Cernmeton.

“Good to see you back, falcon.”

“My thanks, my lord. For a lot of things.”

“Most welcome, truly. I’ve got somewhat to ask you. I’ll be riding down to Aberwyn soon. My father’s given me leave to take some of his men along for an escort. I was thinking of you, Garedd, Peddyc, and Tauryn. Are you game for a wet ride?”

“Gladly, my lord. Your father’s a generous man with his ale, but time hangs heavy in winter.”

“Just that.” Dovyn gave him a grin. “We might have a bit of sport in the spring, though. Here, I’ll tell you the news. I’m riding to Aberwyn to lay claim to some of that empty land up by the Peddroloc. If I can gather the farmers and suchlike, by the gods, why shouldn’t I have land and a dun of my own?”

“Why not?” Cinvan pledged him with his tankard. “Good for you, my lord. I take it your father’s sponsoring you.”

“Just that.” Dovyn’s smile was full of boyish hopes and pride. “He says he’ll back me with the warband if any of the cursed Westfolk try to argue about it. I can fancy myself spreading the Bear clan’s name a little farther west.”

“And your clan’s glory.” Cinvan had a swallow of ale. “May the Bear roam where he will.”

Two days later, when the storm broke, Lord Dovyn and his escort set out for Aberwyn. All along the way, Melaudd’s personal vassals and allies gave them a roof over their heads and ale to drink, which was all that mattered to Cinvan. Dovyn was full of his plans, chattering about them in a most unlordly manner. Since the Old Ones had already fled this part of the country, his new demesne would have to be tilled by free farmers, but there were plenty of younger sons among the Eldidd freemen. Among the commoners, a freeman could divide his property up among his heirs when he died, but who would settle for some part of a farm when he could win a whole one? With a noble lord and his warband to protect them against the Westfolk, they would be glad to move and break new land, which would become theirs in freehold in return for dues. (Back in the Homeland, the noble-born had always divided their property, too, but here in the new and hostile country, with empty land all around them, they preferred to keep holdings strong by passing them intact to one heir.) Lord Dovyn would be a poor lord at first, but his wealthy father was willing to tide him over with cattle and extra horses until the crops—and the taxes—began coming in.

About halfway through the trip, they stayed with Tieryn Braur of Belglaedd, who greeted Dovyn warmly and made sure his men had shelter in the barracks instead of the stables. At dinner that night, the four Bear riders were given decent seats at a table near the fire and all the meat and mead they wanted, though Cinvan drank little. Up at the table of honor, the young lord was talking with his host and a pretty young woman who seemed to be the tieryn’s daughter. From their long distance away, Garedd watched them with a sentimental smile.

“I think our Dovyn’s picked out the lady of this new demesne.”

“Huh?” Cinvan said. “Who?”

“The daughter, you dolt! Look.”

Obligingly Cinvan looked. Dovyn and the lass were smiling at each other’s every word.

“Now, that warms a man’s heart.” Garedd paused to belch. “What do you wager he had no chance of winning her before? But now he’ll have land to offer.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I am, but so what? It’s just like somewhat in a bard’s tale. He’ll win the land and all for her sake.”

Cinvan ignored him and had another swallow of mead.

Since the men of the Bear were direct personal vassals of the princes of Aberwyn, Dovyn and his escort sheltered in the royal dun itself, a vast many-towered broch in the middle of Aberwyn. At meals, the Bearsmen sat at one side of an enormous great hall that had room enough to seat two hundred and watched their lord, far away at the other side near a hearth made of fine pale stone, all carved with the princely dragons of the rhan. During the day, they had leave to wander round the town, which with its twenty-thousand inhabitants was the biggest place Cinvan had ever seen. Every morning he and Garedd walked down to the harbor, where the prince’s four war galleys rode at anchor and merchant ships came and went. In the afternoon they would go to one of the taverns that the prince’s men recommended and pick up a couple of cheap whores, or sometimes only one to spare the extra cost. As Garedd remarked one day, life in Aberwyn was a cursed sight more amusing than playing Carnoic in Melaudd’s hall or badgering a kitchen maid into taking a tumble with them out in the hayloft.

Unfortunately, every earthly paradise comes to an end sooner or later. On their last day in Aberwyn, Cinvan and Garedd went down to their favorite tavern to say a sentimental farewell to the lasses there. As they were sitting over a couple of tankards, a stout gray-haired fellow in red-and-white-checked brigga came into the room. Uneasily he threw his fur-lined cloak back from his shoulders and looked with disdain at the chipped tables, straw-strewn floor, and blowsy wenches.

“Now, what’s he doing in here?” Garedd said.

“Looking for us. See? Here he comes.”

The merchant strode over to their table with a friendly, if somewhat fixed smile.

“My name’s Namydd. I see you ride for the Bear clan.”

“Well, so we do,” Garedd said, and he was the one who went on talking to the merchant while Cinvan sat and glowered. “And what can we do for you, good sir?”

Namydd brushed off the wooden bench with the side of his hand, then sat down and ordered ale all round. When the wench brought it, he inspected the rim of his tankard and wiped it on his sleeve before he drank.

“Now, I’ve heard an interesting piece of news about your Lord Dovyn. Some of my connections in the prince’s court tell me he’s filed a claim to land around the Four Lakes.”

“He has. What’s it to you?”

“A matter of great profit and one to your lord as well. I’m a merchant, you see, and I’d be willing to pay him for the rights to have a trading depot in his village.”

“Well, he doesn’t have a village yet, good sir. But he’ll probably need the coin.”

“Most lords in his position do. Now, I’d like to approach him about this, but I wanted to have a word with one or two of his men first. Tell me, is your lord the approachable sort?”

“He is. As decent a young man as you could ask for.”

“Splendid! How soon will he be making his move on the land?”

“Oh, sometime in the summer. As far as I understand these things, anyway, they’ve got all sorts of legal matters to tend to first. Why don’t you ride to Cernmeton later in the winter? Doubtless he can tell you more then.”

“I will, I will.”

Namydd smiled all round, but Cinvan kept on scowling. Although he couldn’t say why, he was sure this merchant had some game of his own afoot, and one that might not be to his lordship’s advantage.

For some weeks the elves drifted south, heading for the warmer seacoast and the winter camps. Although Aderyn slept in Halaberiel’s tent, he rode with Nananna and Dallandra, ate with them at meals, and spent most evenings, too, at the Wise One’s side. Starting at first principles, they compared their two systems of magic a piece at a time—or, to be exact, Aderyn had a system of magic, while Nananna had a body of lore. Her dweomer was all of the greatest power, mind, and in line with the true principles of the universe, but there was no doubt that it was a thing of pieces and fragments. For instance, she knew nothing about astrology and only scraps of information about the levels of the universe beyond the astral. When it came to walking the secret paths, her lore was all jumbled, based only on the raw experience of her teacher and herself. He finally realized, in fact, that Nananna’s teacher had discovered the technique very late in her life and almost by accident. One evening, using every bit of tact he possessed, he asked Nananna if she realized that the fabric of her magic was a bit frayed. Rather than being offended, she laughed with an earthy good humor.

“Frayed, young Aderyn? Shredded and full of holes, more like, I’d say. It’s because of the Great Burning, of course. We lost all our books then, and along with them such niceties as tracts on the motions of the stars and long tables of ritual correspondences.”

“Burning? Did someone just burn all the magical books?”

“A bit more than the books. Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know about that, would you?” She paused for a long moment, and grief bit deep into her face. “Maybe my broken dweomer suits us, because the People, young Aderyn, are naught but a remnant themselves. Long, long ago we lived in cities, the seven cities of the far mountains, ruled over by a council of seven kings. There were paved streets and big houses, beautiful temples and libraries filled with books that everyone was allowed to read, or so I’ve been told—I’ve never seen such things myself, mind. Old as I am, it was before my time, a good eight hundred years ago now when the Hordes came. They were demons, some say, ugly, squat, hairy creatures with fangs and big noses. I suspect they were real flesh and blood myself. Be that as it may, they came by the hundreds of thousands, fleeing south from the northern forests for some reason of their own, and as they came they burned and looted and killed. They destroyed the cities in a few short years, and all that’s left of the People is this remnant, wandering the grasslands. We’re the children of those who managed to get away in time, you see, and our families were all country people, farmers, most of them, or we never would have survived at all. Two women learned in magic managed to escape the burning of the cities and reach the grasslands, where the other refugees took them in, but they didn’t bring any books and so on with them. They were lucky to escape with their heads still on their shoulders, and they didn’t have time to pack properly, you might say, before they left.”

“Two? That’s all?”

“That’s all, out of all the grand schools and the temples. They did their best to pass on what they knew, but among us, as among you, talented sorcerers aren’t exactly as common as sheep in a fold. One of them was old, too, and died soon, worn out by the horrors she’d seen. My teacher studied with the other.”

“But these Hordes—why? Why did they just destroy everything?”

“I only wish I knew. No one does.”

“Uh, you said somewhat about these Hordes taking heads. I, er, well, wonder, er, does anyone remember what they looked like exactly?”

Nananna laughed, a bitter mutter under her breath.

“They may not have been actual demons, but they weren’t your people, young Aderyn, so rest your heart about that. All the old tales agree that they only had three fingers on each hand, for one thing, and that their faces, especially round the jaws, were all swollen and deformed, for another. Now, when I was a lass I heard one of the elders talk about those deformed faces, and he said it looked to him like they were actually covered with scar tissue in some kind of ritual pattern, maybe with some charcoal powder added in, like, to make the scars more prominent. I’ve never heard of a Deverry man doing such a thing.”

“And we all have five fingers, too. I can’t tell you how happy I am—for a moment I was sure that we were all somehow to blame.”

“Indeed? Why? Your folk’s general nature?”

“Well, that, too, but when I had my vision, I heard a voice telling me to go west. And it said, ‘Make restitution.’ So I thought, well, maybe we owed you somewhat.”

“Eldidd men owe us a great deal, but not because of the Burning, not as far as I know, anyway.” Nananna paused abruptly. “What’s all that noise out there?”

Aderyn heard urgent voices and footsteps. Just as Dallandra rose to go look, Halaberiel pushed open the tent flap.

“Wise One, my apologies for disturbing you, but Namydd the merchant is here with talk of trouble.”

When Dallandra spoke in Elvish, Nananna made an impatient wave in her direction.

“Aderyn has to understand this, too. Speak in his tongue. If you would, Banadar, bring Namydd to me.”

In a few minutes Halaberiel returned with a paunchy graying man in the checked brigga and elaborate shirt of a merchant. He was obviously exhausted, his eyes dazed, his movements stiff as he bowed to Nananna.

“My thanks for seeing me, Wise One,” Namydd said. “I’ve brought you some gifts, just tokens of my respect, but my son is still unloading our horses. We’ve ridden night and day to reach you.”

“Then sit down and rest. Dalla, fetch the poor man some mead. Banadar, stay with us. Now, what brings you here in such a hurry?”

“Great trouble, O Wise One,” Namydd said. “One of the northern lords, Dovyn of the Bear by name, is laying a formal claim to the lands by Loc Cyrtaer—the very place where we meet to trade every fall.”

“Oh, is he now?” Halaberiel broke in. “And does he think he’s going to cut the trees on our death-ground, too?”

“I know these lands are sacred to your people.” Namydd paused to take a wooden bowl of mead from Dallandra. “The merchant guild of Aberwyn is totally on your side. We tried to intervene with the prince, but all he’d say is that you’ll have to come to his court and file a legal counterclaim.”

When Halaberiel swore in Elvish, Nananna scowled him into silence.

“Then we shall do just that,” Nananna said. “I’m sure the prince will agree when he sees the justice of the thing. Now here, Namydd, has this lord chosen the death-ground itself?”

“Land that’s very close, but I think—I hope and pray—that the prince will listen to reason about such a sacred thing. Now, the guild sent me here with offers of aid. Your people can shelter with us if you come to Aberwyn. We have a man trained in our laws to act as your counsel—all at our expense, of course.”

“My thanks,” Nananna said with one of her wry smiles. “I forget sometimes how rich trading with us has made you.”

Namydd winced.

“Well, so it has. The Wise One is wise enough to know that when a man’s self-interest is at stake, he’s most trustworthy. If the banadar agrees, I think he’d be the best one to ride to Aberwyn. Our people have a great respect for those of high standing.”

“So they do,” Aderyn put in. “And even greater respect for those of royal blood. Hal, you wouldn’t happen to be descended from the kings of the seven cities, would you?” He glanced at Nananna. “There were seven, didn’t you say?”

“There were.” Halaberiel forgot himself enough to interrupt the Wise One. “Ye gods, you must have a grand sort of magic if you could see that in me! For what it’s worth, I am indeed—a pitiful sort of inheritance, but mine.”

“Then if you’ll listen to my humble council, I think you’d best travel as a prince—in the fullest sense of the word.”

Halaberiel looked briefly puzzled, then grinned.

“It might be amusing to try a bit of the pomp and mincing that pleases the Blue-eyes,” Halaberiel said. “What does the Wise One think?”

“Oh, I agree. Banadar? Take poor Namydd to your tent so he can get some sleep. Then return to me so we can plan things out. Namydd, you and your guild have my deep and heartfelt thanks.”

Namydd bowed, nearly fell from weariness, then let Halaberiel lead him away. Once they were gone, Nananna turned to Aderyn.

“Will you ride with the banadar?” Nananna said. “I’d be grateful if you would. I can give you a scrying stone so you can send me news, and I think it would be wise to have a man who understands the Light along on this little matter.”

“Gladly, Wise One.”

“But let me give you a warning. You can never truly desert your own kind, no matter how much loyalty you give to us. You must be scrupulously fair, not partisan. Do you understand? If the Lords of Light had wanted you to be an elf, you would have been born in an elven body.”

“I do understand that, O Wise One, and I’ll think well about what you say.”

Almost against his will, Aderyn glanced at Dallandra. Her storm-gray eyes were distant, cool, judging him, as if she were wondering if he could truly live up to his fine words. Aderyn vowed to do the best he could, and all for her sake.

By morning, the news was all over the camp. Young men and women hefted weapons and swore bloody vengeance if the Round-ears so much as touched the death-ground. The older members of the group flocked round Halaberiel and offered advice, warnings, and general opinions. Every man and woman who owned horses had a right to speak out about such an important matter, but finally, by nightfall, they reached a decision. The camp went through its material goods and donated twenty-one matched golden horses, twenty-one fancy saddles and bridles, a heap of new clothes and all the jewelry they owned to make Prince Halaberiel and his escort look as rich as the Dragon Throne itself. Halaberiel himself owned a gem that impressed even Aderyn, an enormous sapphire as blue as the winter sea, set in a pendant of reddish gold some three inches across and ornamented with golden roses in bas-relief. When the warband saw him wearing it, they fell silent; Jezryaladar even held up his hands and nodded to the pendant in a sign of respect.

“It belonged to my grandfather, Ranadar of the High Mountain,” Halaberiel said to Aderyn. “For all the good it ever did him.”

As a last touch, Aderyn took the warband aside and instructed them in the courtesies that a Round-ear warband would show a man of royal blood. Finally they chose some packhorses—duns and roans, these—and a couple of young men to come along and pretend to be servants. Since Aderyn himself would be the prince’s councillor, he too got fancy clothes but a silvery-gray horse to ride.

On his last night in camp, Aderyn and Dallandra wrapped themselves in heavy cloaks and walked a little ways away through the silent grasslands. The night was clear, streaked with moonlight, and so cold that their breath puffed as they walked.

“Be careful, won’t you, Aderyn?” Dallandra said abruptly. “I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this.”

“A dweomer warning?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it that. Just a bad feeling. I’m sorry, but I just don’t trust your people.”

“I can’t say I blame you. Ye gods, it makes me sick, thinking about how much you’ve all lost already, and now my folk come riding in trying to take away what little you’ve got left.”

“There’s plenty of land for all of us, though. That’s the sad thing. There truly is plenty for all, if the Round-ears would only see that. The grasslands stretch way far away to the west, and way up north, too, before you come to the mountains.”

“How far away were the seven cities?”

She shrugged, thinking hard.

“I have no idea. Months’ worth of riding, I guess. We never go there anymore.”

“Why not? Are the ruins haunted or suchlike?”

“Most like, but that’s not why. Wait—I heard some old tale about a plague—that’s right! At the end, it was plague that destroyed the Hordes, and the bards say that their corpses choked the gutters and paved the streets. If you want to know about all that old stuff, you should ask a bard at the winter meetings. They keep the lore alive.”

“You don’t seem to care much about it, do you?”

“Ye gods, I grew up hearing about the Burning till I was sick of it. So we lived in splendor once! Who cares? The past is dead, say I, and we’ve got to make the best of what we’ve got now.”

Yet her voice cracked with bitterness and regret.

Since Lord Dovyn and his escort left Aberwyn before the merchant guild sent its representatives to the prince, they rode back home thinking that the matter of Dovyn’s new lands was settled. Life for Cinvan and the warband settled into a drowsy autumn routine: exercising their horses in good weather, and in bad, gathering in the great hall to drink ale and keep the Carnoic tournament going, which by then was a close and heated affair. Garedd marked one of his silver pieces and kept a record of its progress through the wagers—sure enough, every time he lost it, it eventually came back to him. Cinvan took up the battle in earnest and fought his way to the front rank of contenders. He liked the cold pure strategy of the game, where a single mistake was fatal, and had put in long hours studying the various moves and tactics. Often on the long afternoons, while the wives were up doing whatever it was that women did in the women’s hall, Melaudd, Waldyn, and Dovyn would stroll over, tankards in hand, to watch the games and lay an occasional wager themselves.

When the message arrived, they were all gathered at the riders’ side of the hall. Cinvan was playing a particularly difficult game with Peddyc, who was almost his equal. He was debating whether to sacrifice one of his stones in order to jump and capture two of Peddyc’s when there was a bustle at the door. The gatekeeper came running in with an exhausted rider, his cloak pinned with the dragon brooch of Aberwyn.

“My lord Dovyn, an urgent message for you.”

Swearing under their breath, Peddyc and Cinvan stopped their game. A servant hurried off to find the scribe, who duly appeared to take the piece of parchment and read it aloud. The warband clustered round to hear.

“To Dovyn, lesser lord of the Bears, newly designated lord of Loc Cyrtaer, I, Addryc, prince of Aberwyn by the grace of his highness, Waryn, king of Eldidd, send greetings,” the scribe began. “My lord, a matter of great difficulty has been set before me by Prince Halaberiel, son of Berenaladar, son of Ranadar, a king of the Westfolk. The land on which you laid recent claim in my court is under prior claim to said Halaberiel as part of his royal hunting preserve. Certain sections of said land have also served as tribal burial ground for the ancestors of the Westfolk since time immemorial. I most urgently summon and request you to appear in my palace so that this matter may be discussed and settled in my court of law under my personal arbitration. Under my seal and mark, Addryc, prince of Aberwyn.”

“Oh, by the asses of the gods!” Dovyn burst out. “Those cursed Westfolk! The gall! Prince, is he? I’ll just wager!” He turned to his father in mute appeal.

“Whether he’s a prince or not, Addryc’s a prince for sure,” Melaudd said. “We’d best ride south and take a look at this.”

Dovyn began pacing restlessly back and forth.

“Why didn’t this cursed horse herder come forward before? The rotten gall! This is going to delay everything.”

“Maybe it will, maybe it won’t,” Waldyn put in. “Now calm yourself, brother. No need to draw steel and strike sparks until you see how the prince’s judgment goes.”

“Just so.” Melaudd turned to the messenger. “Did this Halaberiel ride in with an armed escort?”

“He did, my lord. Twenty men.”

“Well and good. Then we’ll take twenty of mine and leave the rest with Waldyn.”

Much to their delight, Cinvan and Garedd were chosen to be part of the escort and have another chance at the marvels of life in Aberwyn. At the meal that night, while the men who were going to be left behind grumbled, swore, and generally cursed the others for their good fortune, Cinvan and Garedd pumped the messenger for every scrap of news he had, which, as a common rider like themselves, was little enough.

“Well, here,” Garedd said at last. “Do you think this Hala what’s-it is truly a prince?”

“Well, now, I know this isn’t a friendly sort of thing to say, but I wouldn’t doubt it. I’ve never seen so many jewels on a lord! And this escort of his is always bowing and scraping around him, saying ‘my prince this’ and ‘my prince that,’ fetching him mead and bringing him cushions. You know, there’s one good thing you’ve got to say about the Westfolk—they blasted well can hold their mead. I’ve never seen a man drink the way this prince can.”

“I’m more interested in how they hold their swords,” Cinvan said.

“Now listen, lad.” The messenger shot him a sharp glance. “Naught’s going to come to bloodshed in Aberwyn’s court. A man who draws steel there gets twenty-five lashes, and if he’s still alive when they’re done with him, they throw him out of the warband onto the roads to starve.”

“I know that as well as you do,” Cinvan snapped. “I was just wondering if things would come to a war.”

“Now here,” Garedd broke in. “That’s for the lords to decide. If Dovyn takes the judgment, then he’ll be looking for land elsewhere, that’s all. God knows, there’s enough of it, out to the west.”

Cinvan turned to look across the hall to the table of honor, where Melaudd and Dovyn were talking urgently, heads together, and Melaudd’s lady watched, shredding a piece of bread with frightened fingers.

Halaberiel and his retinue had been gone three days before Nananna heard from Aderyn. Impressively enough, he could reach her mind directly, rather than wait for a dream. One evening Dallandra was adding a few twigs and chips of wood to their tiny fire when the old woman suddenly went still and stared off into midair.

“Everything’s going smoothly so far,” Nananna said at last. “They crossed into Round-ear territory with no trouble, and now they’re about a day and half’s ride from the city itself.”

“Is Aderyn all right?”

“Of course, or he could hardly contact me, could he?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just so worried, thinking they’ll be poisoned or ambushed or murdered by the Round-ears one way or another.”

“Have you had a true dream or a vision?”

“No, it’s just my fears talking to me. I even know it, but I can’t seem to stop.”

“Don’t try to stop. Let the voices talk, but ignore them.” Nananna tilted her head to one side to study her apprentice. “You’re coming to like Aderyn, aren’t you?”

“Oh, he’s nice enough.” She kept her voice casual. “For a Round-ear. No, that’s mean of me. He’s been a good friend so far, and whether or not he’s a Round-ear has nothing to do with it.”

“That’s better, yes. I like him myself, but even more to the point, he’s willing to help us beyond measure. He has knowledge that’s been lost to the People for eight hundred years, and he’s willing to share it for the asking. I call that admirable myself.”

“So do I, Wise One. Maybe I’ve misjudged the Round-ears. Let’s just hope that there’s more men like Aderyn in Eldidd.”

On the trip south, Melaudd kept the warband riding fast from dun to dun of his allies and vassals. Everywhere they stopped, the lords offered encouragement and support. The consensus seemed to be that these blasted Westfolk had caused enough trouble, and the sooner they were shoved back to open land, the better. But when they reached Aberwyn, they had a nasty surprise waiting for them. They would, of course, be staying in the dun of the Dragon Prince, but so, it turned out, was this prince of the Westfolk and his escort. Out of simple fairness, Addryc had offered Halaberiel his shelter and protection. Every man in the warband saw this courtesy as a betrayal. Dovyn was furious enough to talk openly in front of the men.

“What do you wager those cursed merchants are behind this? Piss-poor coin polishers!”

“Now here, lad,” Melaudd said, and sharply. “Trade’s important to Aberwyn. I’m as angry as you are, but you have to understand his highness’s position. Watch your tongue while we’re here.”

“How can you insult our prince, Father? Do you really think he values coin more than honor?”

“I said, hold your tongue! You’re a young cub yet and not quite licked into shape, so you leave all the talking to me.”

When the Bear’s warband came into the hall for dinner, they found their rivals there ahead of them, seated as far across the riders’ side of the hall as possible and surrounded by Aberwyn’s men. Another portion of Addryc’s warband surrounded the Bears—in the friendliest possible way, of course—and sat them down. Cinvan accepted a tankard of ale from a servant girl and peered across the vast smoky hall to the honor hearth, where the noble-born and their guests were drinking mead. Prince Addryc was seated at the head of the table with Melaudd and Dovyn to his left and the elven leader at his right. The fellow was tall, even for one of the Westfolk, and he certainly looked like a prince; it wasn’t just his finery, Cinvan decided, it was the way he moved and talked with the ease of someone who’s used to being obeyed. Next to him sat a slender young man, quite human-looking, with untidy brown hair and dark eyes, who seemed to be included in whatever important conversation was going on. Cinvan tapped one of the Aberwyn men on the shoulder.

“Who’s that next to that Halaberiel fellow?” Cinvan said. “The skinny fellow swimming in his fancy shirt.”

“The prince’s councillor, Aderyn. Everyone says he’s got dweomer.”

“Ah, horseshit. Old wives’ tale.”

“Oh, is it now? I wouldn’t be so sure, lad.”

Cinvan turned to Garedd, who merely shrugged in suspended judgment. Cinvan felt a small cold fear at the very possibility of dweomer. It was as if he should remember something, or know something, or take some warning—he simply couldn’t understand his own thoughts. Fortunately the servants came to the table with roast beef and bread to distract him from the unfamiliar and painful process of introspection.

Later that night, though, Cinvan came face to face with this mysterious young councillor. He went out to the ward to relieve himself of some of the prince’s ale, and as he was coming back in, he met Aderyn going out, doubtless for the same reason. Just in case this unprepossessing lad did have some kind of magic, Cinvan made him a civil bow and stepped aside. Aderyn nodded pleasantly, then stopped to look him full in the face. As he stared into those owl-dark eyes, Cinvan turned cold. He felt pierced and pinned to the wall behind him like a rabbit skin stretched out to dry. At last Aderyn smiled and released him.

“Here, good sir,” Cinvan stammered, “do I know you from somewhere?”

“Oh, you do indeed, but you won’t remember.”

Aderyn walked on, leaving Cinvan shaking behind him. Cinvan hurried back to the table and the comfort of Garedd’s company. He picked up his tankard and drank a good bit of it straight off.

“What did the councillor say to you?” Garedd said. “There at the door, I mean.”

“Oh, naught that counted for much, but he’s got dweomer, sure enough.”

Dinner that night at the prince’s table was a tense affair, with conversation not likely to help one’s digestion. With the roast pork Addryc demanded and got statements from both claimants, then let them glare at each other while he considered the matter. With the baked apples he remarked that he was sure that some treaty or another could be worked out, once he’d consulted the priests on the laws.

“A treaty, Your Highness?” Halaberiel remarked. “We’ve had experience of your treaties before, I’m afraid.”

“And what do you mean by that, my prince?” Addryc said in a smooth and level voice.

“The matter of the lands beyond that village of yours, the one called Cannobaen.”

Addryc winced and considered his apple, swimming in cream in a silver bowl.

“My heart aches with shame over that matter, but there was naught I could do. I forbade the lords in question to settle out beyond the treaty boundary.”

“Then why, pray tell, are they still there?”

“Because they removed themselves from my jurisdiction and bound themselves in personal fealty to my father, the king. I was furious, frankly, but what could I do? Declare war on my own father? That was my only choice.”

Halaberiel raised one eyebrow in polite disbelief, but he did allow the prince to change the subject.

Rather than prolong the agony of having rivals eating at his table, Prince Addryc held malover on the disputed land near Loc Cyrtaer the morning after the Bears’ arrival. They met in a half-round of a room where the dragon banner of Aberwyn and the hippogriff blazon of all Eldidd draped damp stone walls. Bronze charcoal braziers, glowing cherry red against the chill, stood as common as chairs. The prince sat at a narrow writing desk with the ceremonial sword of Aberwyn in front of him and a scribe with pens and parchment at his right hand. Behind him stood two councillors and a priest of Bel, there to advise on the holy laws. In front of him, Aderyn and Halaberiel had chairs to the right while Melaudd and his son sat off to the left. Although the prince was an imposing man, sitting straight and tall, with touches of wisdom’s gray in his raven-dark hair and the snap of command in his dark blue eyes, Aderyn felt sorry for Addryc, who was also intelligent enough to see that any decision he made would be the wrong one, caught as he was between the powerful merchant guild on the one hand and his noble vassals on the other. In hopes of bringing the banadar to a mood to compromise, Aderyn had told him the truth, that if Addryc ruled totally in favor of the Westfolk he would be sowing the seeds of a possible rebellion. The legal councillor for the merchant guild had tried to counsel patience, but Aderyn doubted that the banadar had paid much attention to either of them. As they sat together and waited for the proceedings to begin, Halaberiel’s face was set, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, merely distant. It was impossible to tell what he might be thinking. Melaudd and his son, however, were as open as the meadowlands—a barely controlled fury showed in every line of their faces, that anyone, for any reason at all, should cross their will.

“Very well, my lords,” Addryc said at last. “We discussed this matter extensively last night. I see no need to chew over the stale meat of the case again.”

Halaberiel and the two lords nodded their agreement.

“I have consulted also with his holiness here.” Addryc indicated the priest. “He tells me that it would be a grave and impious thing for any man to settle upon, cut wood upon, or plow a sacred burial ground. No doubt the gods of the Westfolk would join great Bel in cursing such an action.”

When Dovyn began to speak, Melaudd glared him into silence.

“I assure Your Highness and his holiness both that never would my son or I commit such an impiety,” Melaudd said. “If his highness, the prince of the Westfolk, will see to it that the limits of this sacred ground are clearly marked, I will see to it that no man steps upon it unless for some sacred purpose.”

“Well and good, then.” Addryc turned to Halaberiel. “And will his highness so undertake to mark the land?”

“I will,” Halaberiel said. “With swords, if need be.”

Addryc winced. Melaudd rose from his chair.

“And does the prince doubt my word?”

“Never,” Halaberiel said calmly. “But my lord will not live forever, and who knows what men will come after him?”

The moment was saved. Melaudd bowed and sat back. The two Aberwyn councillors sighed in relief. Aderyn himself found that he’d been holding his breath and let it out again.

“Very well, then,” Addryc said. “I shall have a formal writ drawn up, declaring the sanctity of those forests, and posted publicly in both Cernmeton and Elrydd for all to see.”

The scribe dipped a pen in an inkwell and wrote a few notes, the pen scratching painfully loud in the silence.

“Now, to turn to the remainder of the land under dispute,” Addryc said. “My lord Dovyn, the prince has offered you a compromise, land that you may settle upon farther north and east.”

“And why should I compromise?” Dovyn snapped. “Does he claim every bit of land in Eldidd?”

Melaudd forgot himself enough to slap his son on the shoulder, but the damage was done. Halaberiel rose and looked the young lad over.

“My lord, I own nothing,” Halaberiel said, “any more than any noble lord of your people owns the land lent to him by the gods. The only property that either of us may claim with any certainty is the six feet of land that your kin will use to bury you someday, and the single tree that my kin will cut to burn me in that same future. There is, however, land that the People use, and land that we never travel upon. I merely suggest to your arrogant soul that you might take land that’s of no use to other men and thus spare us all a good deal of trouble.”

Dovyn flushed a scarlet red. Halaberiel sat back down and looked the prince’s way.

“My prince Halaberiel.” Addryc shot a nervous glance at Melaudd. “I’ve explained the laws of Eldidd to you. If you wish to make certain your claim to this hunting preserve is honored by our laws, then you must be in residence upon the land for a certain portion of every year. A man who lets land lie unused forfeits all claims to it.”

“I understand, and it’s a sensible ruling in its way. You’ll find me there every spring.”

“Done, then.” Addryc turned to Melaudd. “My lord, there is land for the taking just north of your demesne along the banks of the Gwynaver. May I ask why your son didn’t put in a claim to that empty land?”

“Because he wanted to settle on the lakeshore, Your Highness,” Melaudd said. “There aren’t any settlements on the lakes, and it’s rich land and a strong defensive position.” He shot Halaberiel a daggered glance. “The day may come when Your Highness wishes there were a strong and loyal dun there.”

Addryc blinked twice. The priest looked as if he were silently praying.

“And I’ll say something else, by your leave,” Melaudd went on. “I’ve never heard of Westfolk having kings until we received your message, and I’ll wager you never did either. It strikes me as strange that you’d turn away from the men who’ve served you loyally for so long in favor of a stranger.”

“And have I turned away from you yet?” Addryc said levelly. “I have yet to pronounce my judgment.”

Abashed, Melaudd looked away.

“My prince.” Addryc turned to Halaberiel. “I’m considering asking you to surrender land for Dovyn’s demesne at the lakeshore. In return, I’ll grant you and your people a clear, formal, and indisputable title to the land along the west bank of the Gwynaver. With my seal upon the charter, this matter will never rise again. The burying ground and the north shore of the lake will be yours. The south shore and a dun at the river’s mouth will be Dovyn’s. All the land between the lake and the Gwynaver will be yours to hunt in or to fortify as you think fit.”

“With Bears on the south shore, fortification might be in order,” Halaberiel said. “Your Highness, I realize that this is a difficult judgment for you. You have offered a generous settlement, one which I’m minded to take. On the other hand, I have vassals just as you do. No one among my people will give up the south shore easily—I warn you. You’re sitting there squirming, wondering if your lords will cause you trouble if you favor me. I’m sitting here squirming just as hard, wondering what my people will think of me if I take this bargain. Do you understand?”

It was so high-handed, foreign, and utterly honest that the councillors and priests gasped aloud. Addryc leaned back in his chair and sighed, running his fingers over the hilt of the ornate ceremonial sword—he understood all too well. Halaberiel turned to Aderyn with one pale eyebrow raised.

“And what does my honored councillor advise?” Halaberiel said.

For privacy Aderyn rose, bowed to the prince, and led Halaberiel outside to the hall.

“I think we should take it, Hal. It’s the best we’re going to get, and Nananna will work on keeping down resentment. You’re not truly the kind of prince who has to worry about rebellions, and Addryc is.”

“Poor old Addryc. Well, we’ve saved the death-ground, and truly, that was first in my mind. I don’t trust these Bears, though. How long will it be before they push their greedy snouts northward? That young cub needs to be turned over someone’s knee and spanked.”

“Well, you’re right enough, but if you turn down the judgment, then it’s war. Melaudd can rally the prince’s other vassals against you because you’ve refused the prince’s judgment.”

“Indeed?” Halaberiel considered for a moment. “Well, let me see if I can wring one more concession out of his harried highness.”

They returned to the dead-silent room. Halaberiel bowed, then stayed standing to address his royal counterpart.

“Your Highness, your judgment seems fair to me, except for one small point. Will you guarantee me and my people access to the northern lands from the south? The best ford lies in the land you would give the Bears.”

“I see no reason why you can’t have road rights. The road should be a public one, anyway, so the merchants can use it.”

When Dovyn started to speak, his father laid a warning hand on his arm.

“That seems only just, Your Highness,” Melaudd said. “If the prince will guarantee the good conduct of his people as they pass through. I know they travel with sheep and horses, and farmers can’t afford the loss if stock wanders off into their fields.”

“We shall make a formal pact,” Halaberiel said. “Any trampled grain shall be paid for in mutton and wool.”

Pleased, Melaudd nodded; the prince smiled; the councillors gave Aderyn small nods of satisfaction that reason had prevailed.

“And what about when your people steal mine blind?” Dovyn snapped.

Every seated man in the room rose. The priest of Bel stepped forward, watchful to prevent bloodshed. Halaberiel shook off Aderyn’s restraining hand and strode over to face Dovyn.

“Just what are you calling me?”

“Everyone knows the Westfolk are a pack of thieves. Why shouldn’t you be a prince of thieves?”

With a startled gasp, Melaudd threw himself forward, but too late. Halaberiel slapped Dovyn backhanded across the face so hard that the lad staggered back. Halaberiel turned to the prince in appeal.

“So this is the kind of court you keep in Eldidd,” Halaberiel said. “Where a man who puts himself under your judgment must listen to insults and lies.”

“Naught of the sort,” Addryc said levelly. “Lord Dovyn will tender you a formal apology. I trust his father agrees with me on this.”

“His father does indeed, Your Highness.” Melaudd’s voice shook. “And I’ll tender my own apology first and freely.”

Everyone was watching the two princes, suddenly united against this presumption of a lesser lord. Aderyn felt a cold dweomer touch and turned to see Dovyn sliding his sword free of its sheath.

“Don’t!” Aderyn yelled. “Hal, watch out!”

Halaberiel spun around just as Dovyn drew and swung. Aderyn threw himself forward and took a blow on his left hand—mercifully only a glancing one as Dovyn tried to hold up, or he would have been known as Aderyn One-hand forever after. He heard the crack of breaking bone and stared numbly at a surge of blood as the room exploded—yelling, swearing, scuffling among the onlookers, the princes shouting for order, the priest invoking Bel’s name. Melaudd made a frantic grab at his son, pinned him from behind, and shook him so hard that Dovyn dropped the sword. Halaberiel caught Aderyn’s shoulder, steadied him, and swore at the sight of the wound. The priest of Bel ran forward and grabbed Aderyn’s arm just as the door flew open and the prince’s guard shoved their way in. His face purple with rage, Addryc waved them back, but they stood ready out in the corridor.

“So, Melaudd,” Addryc growled, “is this how you raise your sons—drawing on a man in my hall? My hall? By the name of every god of our people! In my very chamber of justice!”

Melaudd tried to answer, but he was shaking too hard. Dovyn broke free and threw himself down at the prince’s feet.

“I beg your forgiveness, Your Highness. I … I … I just forgot myself.”

Halaberiel left Aderyn to the priest and stepped forward.

“And how soon would you remember his highness’s judgment, then? Your Highness, do you truly expect me to strike a bargain with men like these?”

Aderyn suddenly realized that he was close to fainting, a luxury that he couldn’t afford in this dangerous pass. He staggered to a chair and sat down hard. The priest knelt beside him and tried desperately to stanch the running wound with a scarf that the scribe handed him.

“Look at this!” Addryc’s voice growled with indignation. “He’s wounded a councillor and an unarmed man! Guard! Run and fetch the chirurgeon!”

“I’ll be all right in a minute,” Aderyn gasped.

Although the white scarf was soaking with bright red blood, and his fingers stuck out at an unnatural angle, Aderyn felt no pain. His mind noted his own symptoms from a detached distance: shaking, chills, a dry mouth—oh, he was in shock, all right. He looked up and tried to concentrate on the strange tableau in front of him: Dovyn scarlet with shame at the prince’s feet; Halaberiel frozen with rage: Melaudd pale, his mouth working as if he were praying to the gods to let him wake from what had to be a nightmare.

“Your Highness,” Aderyn whispered, “please don’t make a decision in fury. My prince, that goes for you, too.”

Then he fainted dead away. He seemed to be standing in a swirling dark void, flecked with gold light like fish scales. In the midst of a rushy hiss of noise, he heard someone call his name, and Nananna came striding out of the mists. Here on the inner planes, her image was young and beautiful, her stance that of a warrior.

“What have they done to you? Does the banadar still live?”

“He does. I just fainted, that’s all. The lad who hurt me has been arrested.”

Although Aderyn tried to tell her more, he began floating away, swimming up from the bottom of a dark gold-flecked river. The rushy hiss grew louder and louder; then suddenly he broke the surface and found himself awake, lying on a feather bed. A heavyset man with a blond mustache was bandaging his splinted fingers. Aderyn smelled the clean sharp scent of bruised comfrey root packed in his wound.

“Should heal up fine,” the chirurgeon was saying over his shoulder. “A superficial slice. These things cut a lot of minor blood vessels, looks like the third hell, but nothing dangerous. Now, as for the fingers, he’s got two broken, but it’s a clean fracture.”

“Just so,” Aderyn gasped out. “I need water to restore my humors, too.”

“Aha, you’re awake, are you? They told me you were a physician of sorts.”

The chirurgeon gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder and stood up to make room for Halaberiel, who brought Aderyn water in a silver goblet. He sat down on the bed, slipped one arm under Aderyn’s shoulders, and helped him drink.

“You took the cut intended for me. I’ll never forget this. You’re a friend of the People now and forever.”

“Most welcome.” Aderyn was still too groggy to appreciate the force of that promise. “What did you and the prince determine?”

“Naught yet.” Addryc himself stepped forward. “Prince Halaberiel and I decided to take the last bit of wise advice you gave us. Lord Dovyn is shut up in a chamber under house arrest. His father gave me a personal pledge of security for him. Here, Aderyn, Melaudd is a good man, and he’s truly shattered by his son’s arrogance.”

“No doubt,” Aderyn said. “My heart aches for any father with a son like that.”

Aderyn drank several goblets of water, then lay back exhausted on the pillows. He was in Halaberiel’s luxurious chamber, he realized, and it was full of people. Over by the unglazed windows the other elves were sitting on the floor in grim silence. Two of the prince’s guard were standing in the doorway to wait upon their liege’s orders. At the polished wood table, the chirurgeon was packing up his gear and talking quietly to his young apprentice.

“I’ll make a decision about young Dovyn tonight,” Addryc said. “The chirurgeon tells me you’d better rest for a while, and I want you there to testify as the victim of this outrage.”

“Well and good, Your Highness, but what about the land?”

The prince turned to Halaberiel, who merely shrugged.

“If naught else,” Addryc ventured, “my decree about the sacred burial ground will stand in all perpetuity.”

“Indeed?” Halaberiel turned to Aderyn. “I’ll consider the matter later.”

Addryc nodded in defeat. For a few moments he hovered there uneasily, then took his leave with a gracious bow and a few muttered words about letting Aderyn rest. Once the chirurgeon was gone, too, the other elves got up and moved closer to Aderyn’s bedside, all twenty of them in a disorderly circle.

“I say we ride out of here and go burn Melaudd’s dun,” Calonderiel said. “That blow was intended for the banadar.”

There was a muttered chorus of agreement.

“Oh, hold your tongue, Cal!” Halaberiel snapped. “Since when do we visit the son’s crime on the mother? And there’s more than one woman in that dun.”

“Well, true, but it would have been satisfying, somehow, to see his tents go up in flames.”

“We should just move to the west and let them have the rotten land,” Jezryaladar put in. “Who wants a cursed thing to do with men like this?”

“What?” Albaral snarled. “And let the horse turds win?”

Eight or nine men began talking and arguing at once. Halaberiel shouted them into silence.

“Now listen, I’m minded two ways. It depends on what Addryc does to atone for Dovyn’s crime. If he offers me fair justice, well, then, I say we take the compromise. We’re not doing this just for ourselves. The People need the merchants and their iron and grain, and we have to be able to guard that death-ground. There’s a lot more of the Round-ears than there are of us. They can afford a wretched war a lot better than we can.”

Calonderiel started to speak, then thought better of it. Everyone else nodded in agreement as Halaberiel went on.

“But what we do next depends on what happens with young Dovyn. If I decide to take the compromise, think of it this way: if we control the Gwynaver, we control one of their main routes north. If they want to ride up our river, we can say no and have their prince behind us.”

“That river turns west a ways up north,” Calonderiel expanded the thought. “If we can block a main route west, so much the better.”

“Good, Cal. Now that’s thinking.” He glanced at Aderyn. “You’re dead pale, Councillor.”

“I need to sleep. Take the lads away, will you, but please, by the gods of both our peoples, keep them out of trouble.”

Close to sunset, Aderyn woke from the pain of his wound. He found strong wine in a flagon by his bed, drank some to ease the ache, then lay quiet for a while, watching the late golden sun cast long shadows across the Bardek rugs on the polished floor. He was just considering getting up and trying to light some candles when there was a timid knock at the door.

“Come in.”

Much to his surprise, Cinvan the Bearsman hurried into the room and knelt beside the bed in sincere humility. As he looked down into Cinvan’s hard young face, Aderyn was remembering looking up at this same soul in another body—Tanyc as a seemingly giant young man, and him a small boy of seven. It was a shock to run across Tanyc’s soul at all, and even more of one to find him reborn so soon.

“And what can I do for you, lad?” Aderyn said.

“Well, I don’t truly know. I shouldn’t be here at all, I suppose. Am I tiring you? I can just go away.”

“If you’re troubled enough to come here, then I’ll certainly listen. I take it the news of what happened in the chamber of justice has gotten itself spread around.”

“Just that, but I’ll wager you don’t know the half of it yet. Garedd said I shouldn’t be bothering you like this. Garedd’s somewhat of a friend of mine, you see, and he usually does the thinking for the pair of us, but I had to come ask you. You see, they say Addryc’s as mad as mad at Lord Dovyn, and he wants to have him flogged like a common rider for drawing on you.”

“You’re right—I hadn’t heard that.”

“So, well, you see, our young lord saved me from getting flogged once, and so I thought, well, maybe, you being a councillor and all, you’d see things a bit different than most, and speak up for mercy, like.”

“I usually speak up for mercy whenever I can, so you can put your heart at rest about that. But I’m afraid that the matter’s likely to be out of my hands.”

Cinvan nodded, thinking this over. He was much like Tanyc, Aderyn decided, probably as arrogant in normal circumstances. Yet Aderyn was touched that he would break all protocol to plead for mercy for his young lord.

“How’s that cut?” Cinvan said. “From what I hear it’ll heal up clean, but it ached my heart, to think of my lord dishonoring himself by hurting an unarmed councillor. Uh, well, I mean, I’m sorry you’re hurt, too.”

“My thanks.” Aderyn began to see why this Garedd generally did the thinking for Cinvan. “Well, maybe the prince will think differently about flogging your lord tonight, when his rage has had a chance to cool. He’s not going to want to offend Lord Melaudd, after all.”

And yet it turned that this reasonable statement was overly optimistic. After the evening meal, the prince called a meeting in his chamber of justice. By candlelight they assembled, Aderyn and Halaberiel, Melaudd and Dovyn, the grave gray councillors, the priest of Bel, the nervous young scribe. Addryc laid the ceremonial sword of Aberwyn onto the writing table to open the court. Candlelight sparked on the golden blade and glittered on the jeweled hilt and the hand guard, formed into a dragon shape. Addryc sat down behind the table and motioned to Dovyn to kneel in front of him, a harsh gesture that made Melaudd wince.

“We are here to consider what to do with you, Lord Dovyn. Let me remind you of your fault. Just when the victory you desired was within your grasp, you turned it to defeat. You insulted a man of royal blood. You broke every law of order by drawing your sword in my presence and my dun. In your clumsiness, you wounded not your target, which would have been grave enough, but an unarmed man who had no chance to defend himself. You spilled blood in the prince’s chamber of justice. You have brought a grave shame to your father’s heart. You have disgraced your kin and clan. If your father were to pronounce you exiled, I would put my seal on his decree without a moment’s thought.”

Dovyn slumped almost to the floor, his head bowed, his face drained of all color.

“Do you have anything to say in your own defense?” Addryc said.

“Naught, Your Highness,” Dovyn whispered.

“So I thought. Tieryn Melaudd, do you have aught to say for your own son?”

“Naught, Your Highness, except that I love the young cub.” He paused, honestly baffled, staring around the chamber as if he still couldn’t believe that he was here to witness his son’s disgrace. “Truly, I’ve tried to raise him right. I feel his shame as mine. Freely will I offer to pay the prince the full blood-price for his councillor, just as if my son had killed the man, not just wounded him.”

“You what, my lord?” Halaberiel sat straight up in his chair. “Is it the custom of your country to buy justice, then?”

“My prince, please,” Aderyn said. “You don’t understand the laws of Eldidd. He’s not trying to buy justice, but to fulfill it. Every man has his lwdd, his blood-price. If he’s killed or maimed, the criminal’s kin must pay that price to his clan. Melaudd is being incredibly generous to offer so much without even waiting for the prince’s decree.”

“I see.” Halaberiel turned to Melaudd. “Then my apologies, my lord, for my misunderstanding.”

Melaudd only nodded as if he no longer cared what the prince might or might not do. A faint look of disgust lingered around Halaberiel’s mouth, as if he’d bitten into rotten fruit.

“You’re truly fortunate, my prince,” Addryc said, “to have such a wise man of our people to advise you. But in my heart I agree with you. The lwdd is indeed fit recompense for the wrong done Councillor Aderyn, and in his name, I accept it from you, Melaudd.” He jerked his head at the scribe, who began writing. “But there remains the fact, Lord Dovyn, that you broke geis by drawing steel in my dun. If this offense had happened in the great hall, when you and the prince had been drinking mead, well, then, I’d be minded to mercy. But in cold blood, in perfect sobriety, you drew a blade in the very chamber of justice, and you did so in front of your outraged father’s very eyes.”

Dovyn was slumped so low that his forehead almost touched the floor. Melaudd leaned back in his chair, his hands twisted together, the broad knuckles bloodless.

“Therefore,” Addryc went on, “I demand a recompense for this fault beyond the wounding of Councillor Aderyn. The laws have no lwdd to pay for their bleeding, Tieryn Melaudd. The penalty for this offense is twenty-five lashes in the public ward.”

“Your Highness.” Melaudd rose and flung himself down beside his son in the same smooth motion. “I’ll beg of you, if ever I’ve served you, to spare him the shame of it. Not the lashes so much, Your Highness, but the shame—strung up in the ward like a common rider.”

“I fear he’s comported himself like a common rider, Tieryn Melaudd.”

“Your Highness?” Aderyn rose and bowed. “I, too, will beg for mercy. The lad is very young.”

“Old enough to know the laws. This injury doesn’t concern you, good councillor.”

“Your Highness?” Halaberiel rose and bowed. “Never would I question the wisdom of your judgment, but may I ask one thing?”

“You may, my prince.”

“Is the penalty for this offense death?”

“It’s not.”

“But the lad’s young and might well die from so many lashes.”

“Just so,” Addryc said with a nod. “Very well. I hereby lower the penalty to fifteen. Dovyn, raise your head and look at the man you thought your enemy. He’s brought you mercy.”

Slowly Lord Dovyn raised his head and turned Halaberiel’s way, but his cornflower-blue eyes, blackish in the candlelight, burned with hatred.

Prince Addryc picked up the ceremonial sword and flipped it point upward, holding it high.

“Hear then my decree,” Addryc said. “Tieryn Melaudd will pay the full lwdd for Councillor Aderyn’s wound. Lord Dovyn will receive fifteen lashes in the public ward from my executioner tomorrow at dawn.” He lowered the sword and rapped the pommel three times on the table. “So be it.”

Melaudd began to weep, a little sob under his breath, the rusty tears of a man who hasn’t wept since he was a little lad. At Addryc’s call, two guards stepped in, hauled Dovyn to his feet and marched him out, with Melaudd trailing after. Halaberiel caught Aderyn’s elbow and helped him bow to the prince; then they left Addryc alone with his righteous rage.

“How do you feel, Ado? Well enough to come to my suite for a goblet of mead?”

“I’m not a drinking man, but tonight I will. But I have to go down to the great hall first—there’s someone I need to see.”

In the great hall, they found the various human warbands drinking quietly, free of elven presence, as Halaberiel had told the men of the Westfolk to stay up in their own quarters. Off to one side Aderyn found Cinvan sitting with a beefy blond lad whom he introduced as Garedd.

“I’m sorry, lad,” Aderyn said. “I tried to speak for mercy, but the prince judged otherwise. I’m afraid they’re going to flog your lord tomorrow.”

“So we heard. The guards came out and told us the news. It aches my heart, but I’m no man to question a prince.”

“It aches mine, too,” Garedd said. “Here, sir, is it true that your prince spoke for mercy?”

“It is. It’s thanks to him that the lad will get only fifteen strokes.”

On the morrow, Aderyn stayed in his chamber when the prince’s justice met Dovyn’s bare back. From his refuge up in the main broch, he heard the d