Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (25 page)

Tir tugged impatiently at his mother's hair and cried, “Ad!” He pointed, as Tad the herdkid and a vast gaggle of the Keep orphans went skipping past. Since Tir's concealment among them, the orphans had accepted the heir of the Realm as one of themselves; even Winna, their guardian, had knitted Tir a little stocking cap, such as she had given to all the others as their gifts at the Feast. For his part, Tir was quite happy to be included in that mongrel gang, and Alde turned him over to them. A few moments later, they could be seen out on the meadow, engaged in a wild game of frisbee… It was shocking, Gil had once remarked, how much cultural pollution had been going on lately.

Hand in hand, Rudy and Alde plunged into the confusion of the Feast.

The joy of the Winter Feast was the renewal of life; even the terror of the Dark and the crumbling of civilization could not wholly eradicate the celebrations of the return of the midwinter sun. In the meadow that lay between the arms of the vast V of booths, a makeshift band was playing, surrounded by eternally shifting patterns of dancers moving ankle-deep in half-frozen slush. The air was bright with the voices of children and rank with smoke; Gil would have recognized the colorful medley as a scene straight from Breughel, but Rudy felt merely a kind of awed delight in such gay chaos. Among the booths themselves, a tangled latticework of shadows lay over the faces of those who wandered there, and a babble of voices cried whatever wares could be sold for whatever the market would bear.

Resources at the Keep were slim, but with forage parties making regular raids on all the ruined settlements of the flooded river valleys, some surprising articles had turned up. There was honey enough to make sufficient candy to sicken every child in the Keep; some dried fruits had been unearthed and small quantities of sweets. There was little wine, but Melantrys and her company of Guards had been stationed at the Keep for almost a year before the Dark had risen—enough time to make enormous amounts of Blue Ruin gin, which they were hawking in their own booth. The tangled warren of pine-bough booths boasted other entertainments as well; such as a wheel of fortune, under the auspices of Impie Stooft, the stout blond widow of the late unlamented Bendle Stooft. Blid, the Penambran Soothsayer, was telling fortunes, and Dakis the Minstrel was playing his lute.

Everyone in the Keep seemed to have turned out for the festivities—Penambrans, outlanders, and refugees from Gae and Karst. The Alketch soldiery kept to their own camp, by order of Commander Vair. Rudy had the suspicion that the disappearance of Ambassador Stiarth was more responsible for this than any consideration of peace between the allies. No sign of the missing Imperial Nephew had yet turned up, and Alwir, following his rather trying evening in the Corps common room, had evidently spent the rest of the night trying to soothe and resist Vair's outraged demands that the Keep doors be opened and a search party be sent. This, of course, was impossible. Even had Keep Law been broached, which Alde would never have allowed, there were precious few men in the Keep who would have risked their lives to look for the svelte, young Ambassador's bones.

It had done nothing for relations between the allies, but Rudy was just as glad not to have to worry about a riot breaking out between Keep and southern troops.

The day was too beautiful, the last afternoon of peace too precious, to allow that.

So Rudy and Alde wandered at peace through this winter chaos, drinking hot gin and water and eating honey candy like a couple of greedy youngsters. It was the custom to give gifts to children at the Feast, and Alde was forever being stopped by small acquaintances showing off their new toys. Even among the Penambrans, who had escaped the Dark with no more than the rags on their backs, the custom had been kept, with gifts as small as painted walnuts or rag-and-root dolls. After considerable deliberation, Rudy had presented Tir with his motorcycle keys to the child's blissful delight. Rudy knew that he would never use them again.

They wandered down to the frozen stream to watch the footraces held on its surface and laughed as heartily as the rest of the crowd at the slithering antics of the contestants. Blid told Aide's fortune, amid a crowd of interested onlookers—that she would be twice wedded, the second time to a foreign man, and that she would pass through fire and peril to win both love and power. A. respectable and unsurprising fortune, Rudy thought, considering what everybody in the Keep must know.

The sight of the cards troubled him, for he knew a little of their meaning: the Tower crossed by the Rose of Death; the austere sneer of the King of Swords; and the chancy promise of the impetuous Knight of Wands. But by that time both of them had imbibed enough alcohol to find deep significance in the tiniest of matters.

He could not remember ever having seen Alde so beautiful, with her dark hair escaping from its heavy braid to tumble about her face in wisps like the wings of butterflies, and the blue depths of her eyes, like the endless promise of summer pleasures, laughing into his. She had left her cloak somewhere, and the brilliant colors of the eagle on her painted vest flamed against the cherry-red velvet of her skirt.

In the meadow, the band skirled into a wild romp, and the dancers of a crazy quadrille swung back into the arms of their original partners, while all those who watched yelled, “Kiss 'em! Kiss your partners!” The men claimed this customary forfeit from tousled and blushing women.

Rudy saw Gil standing on the sidelines, watching with amusement in her eyes, and he saw the Icefalcon pause to exchange insults with her. It occurred to him that the Icefalcon had added to his collection of bones. They were all braided into the white-blond hair, Raider-style; there seemed to be about twice as many as there had been when the man had returned to the Keep. Some of them, Rudy thought uneasily, although boiled and cleaned, looked pretty fresh.

Bok the carpenter scraped experimentally on his fiddle and tightened a peg; Janus, his Guard's uniform brightened with a woman's gauze scarf knotted over his sword hilt, tortured another gargling moan out of his bagpipes. Alde tugged, laughing, at Rudy's arm. “Let's dance!”

“I can't dance!” he protested.

“Of course you can!” she replied, her cheeks bright with punch and cold. “Listen, they're going to play my favorite…”

All around the slushy dancing ground, men and women were forming groups of twelve, here and there yelling, “Set! Set! We need more couples!”

Rudy saw Ingold come up beside Gil, who shook her head, her sharp cheekbones reddening. He caught the drift of that mild, scratchy voice inquiring, “You aren't going to turn down my first proposal to dance with anyone in fifteen years, are you?”

She burst into unexpected giggles. It was astonishing, Rudy thought, how Gil could shift from a mean and steel-hard combination of violence and intellect to the gawkiness and fragility of a girl. Ingold draped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her, blushing, into the circle of the dance floor. Alde put her arm through Rudy's. “Come on!”

The Icefalcon led one of his numerous girlfriends into the set; a moment later, they were joined by Maia of Penambra, leading the silent, red-haired witchchild Ilea by the hand.

“Come on!” Alde insisted, and Rudy allowed himself to be dragged into the line. She waved her hand and called out, “One more couple!” Tomec Tirkenson, looming suddenly out of the crowd like Godzilla emerging from Tokyo
Bay, put an arm around Kara of Ippit's waist and drew her, startled and stammering, into position.

Rudy sighed. “What the hell. You'll have to tell me what to do.”

“Oh, don't be such a wet goose. It's easy.”

It was not easy.

Rudy yelled over his shoulder, “You lied to me!” But he was swept through stars and figures of eight while Aide, swinging in the crook of Ingold's powerful arm, laughed at him with her eyes.

“I'm sorry!” she gasped as he released Gil and caught her hand in one flashing figure, and then she was gone.

People were yelling to him, “Right hand! Right hand! Your other right hand!” He went flinging off through a grand right-and-left that reminded him vaguely of a Marx Brothers movie, with the women weaving like a chain of bright ribbon among the laughing men. The music, or maybe the gin, flamed around and through him, sharpening his awareness and altering his time sense; he found himself half in love with all the women—with Kara, who moved with such surprising grace in the brief circle of his arm, and with this startlingly pink-cheeked and giggling Gil. Brief, confused visual impressions tangled in the springing flood of the music. The Icefalcon reminded him of a cheetah, cold and precise; Ingold plunged through the mazes of the game with an agility and an abandon that were alike surprising; and Tomec Tirkenson swung the tall Kara effortlessly off her feet in a frothing skirl of tattered petticoats.

The smell of snow and pines was as intoxicating as the vast quantities of gin he'd consumed; the slurp of the muddy ground underfoot was a delight. Hands caught at his—long hands, scarred hands, fine, dainty hands, or bony ones. Blond and red and black hair tangled in the whirlpool of the music, faster and faster, while the crowd laughed and cheered and faces familiar and half-familiar swirled by in passing.

Rudy found Alde in his arms once again, the light strength of her body against his, and the music circled to its close. Someone was yelling, laughing, and pressing a bottle of spiced Blue Ruin and water upon them, and Rudy took a long drink of it between his gasps for breath. Yells broke out. “Kiss 'em, men! They've earned it!”

He looked down, laughing at the girl leaning in the crook of his arm, her black hair undone and streaming over the bright colors of her painted vest. She dared him with her eyes, and he caught her tight against him, tasting the gin and candied apples on her lips and the kindling sweetness of possession. Her hands slid up around his neck, tangling in his hair. The crowd applauded in delight, and for an endless second there was nothing, no one, but the fire of the dance in his blood and the warmth of the girl in his arms.

And then there was sudden, utter silence.

Rudy looked up, startled. He saw that the crowd around them had parted. Standing out alone in its forefront was the dark, starved face and steel-gray eyes of the man he had last seen in the Nest of the Dark!

Rudy was so startled to see him there that he wondered for a moment if he could be mistaken. But a second glance showed him that the prisoner of the Dark must have just come up from the road to the valleys below. Rudy had a momentary confused impression of a skull-gaunt face and dark wolf eyes, a shaggy gray mare's-tail of dirty hair, and filthy black rags of clothing.

And glittering under the muck of those rags were the torn remnants of a gold eagle embroidered on the breast of his filthy surcoat, like the one Rudy had painted on Aide's vest.

The eagle of the House of Dare.

All this Rudy absorbed in a few confused seconds, while he felt Alde turn to stone in his arms. Then someone pushed past him. Ingold fell to one knee before the stranger, bending his head as Rudy had never seen him do homage to anyone.

The stranger reached out stiffly to touch Ingold's shoulder. But the burning eyes did not lower to him. They shifted, chill as a mad wolf's, over the crowd, the Keep, and Minalde— seeing all things as a stranger. Ingold rose and took the man's hands in his. “Eldor,” he whispered.

The Faceless King

“Is he himself?” Rudy asked.

Ingold did not answer at once. In the black mists that now filled the Vale like a sea of clouds, all sounds were changed; some were muffled, and others were thrown into a curious distinctness, so that the clink of a single bridle bit or the sharp chuff! of a horse's blown breath sounded louder than the murmur of the ranks drawn up in the meadow below them, invisible in the fog.

“Do you mean, are the Dark using him as they used Lohiro?” The wizard shook his head slowly. “No. Nor is he mad in the usual sense of the word.”

Rudy shivered. He had seen the High King's eyes at the Winter Feast and again yesterday, in that terrible turmoil of reshuffled allegiances, unspoken accusations, and oaths of problematical fidelity. And one thing he knew: whatever else he was, King Elder Andarion was not sane.

No surprise
. The hideous, clammy darkness of the Nest returned to him, as it had in dreams past counting; he shuddered, trying to realize what it would be like to be trapped there, without hope of rescue… The fear of it had ridden his pillow through sleepless nights, ever since he himself had seen the Nest. It lurked in Ingold's eyes always, and Rudy heard it now in the disembodied voice.

“He say how he busted out?”

The hooded, shapeless head turned toward him; in the shadows between the drawn-down cowl and the gray muffler, he caught a silver glint of eyes. “He said he followed you, Rudy. He knew his way around the Nest fairly well by that time—he'd been there nearly four months.”

Like a troop of ghosts, the Wizards' Corps was assembling around them in silence, cloaked and hooded as best they could manage against the wet, bitter morning. Far off in the black trees, Rudy thought he could discern the creak of leather and mail and the shrill scrunch of boots in the snow as the Army of Alketch marched down from the caves. Some distance away, before the doors of the Keep, torches burned, woolly slurs of dirty yellow in the mist.

Ingold went on quietly. “We had left the rope, of course. I don't know why no one suspected it. No one ever saw his body. By all accounts, the Icefalcon and his company rescued only half of those taken by the Dark from the final battle. The finding of Eldor's sword in the hand of a corpse was really very poor evidence, when you think on it.”

“Maybe everyone preferred to think him dead rather than—than where he was.”

The hooded form nodded. “I did.” Ingold spoke slowly, his words slurred, like a man tired to death. It was the first time Rudy had seen or spoken to the old man since that hideous afternoon and he doubted whether Ingold had found sleep or rest in all that time.