Fionavar 1 (30 page)

Sorcha had slain an eltor doe that was carrying young. An accident, the hunters agreed at the gathering: the buck he'd slashed had fallen freakishly into the path of the doe beside it. The doe had stumbled over him and broken her neck. When the hunters came up, they had seen that she was bearing.

An accident, which let Ivor make it exile and not death. He could not do more. No Chieftain could rise above the Laws and hold his people. Exile, then, for Sorcha; a lonely, dark fate, to be driven from the Plain. The next morning they had found Meisse, his wife, dead by her own hand.

Tore, at eleven, only child, had been left doubly scarred by tragedy.

He had been named by Gereint that summer, the same summer as Levon. Barely twelve, he had found his animal and had remained ever after a loner on the fringes of the tribe. As good a hunter as any of Ivor's people, as good even, honesty made Ivor concede, as Levon. Or perhaps not quite, not quite as good.

The Chieftan smiled to himself in the dark. That, he thought, was self-indulgent. Tore was his son as well, the whole tribe were his children. He liked the dark man, too, though Tore could be difficult; he also trusted him. Tore was discreet and competent with tasks like the one tonight.

Awake beside Leith, his people all about him in the camp, the horses shut in for the night, Ivor felt better knowing Tore was out there in the dark with the boys. He turned on his side to try to sleep.

After a moment, the Chieftain recognized a muffled sound, and realized that someone else was awake in the house. He could hear Tabor's stifled sobbing from the room he shared with Levon.

It was hard for the boy, he knew; fourteen was late not to be named, especially for the Chieftain's son, for Levon's brother.

He would have comforted his younger son, but knew it was wiser to leave the boy alone. It was not a bad thing to learn what hurt meant, and mastering it alone helped engender self-respect.

Tabor would be all right.

In a little while the crying stopped. Eventually Ivor, too, fell asleep, though first he did
Page 115

something he'd not done for a long time.

He left the warmth of his bed, of Leith sound asleep beside him, and went to look in on his children. First the boys; fair, uncomplicated Levon, nut-brown, wiry Tabor; and then he walked into Liane's room.

Cordeliane, his daughter. With a bemused pride he gazed at her dark brown hair, at the long lashes of her closed eyes, the upturned nose, laughing mouth . . . even in sleep she smiled.

How had he, stocky, square, plain Ivor, come to have such handsome sons, a daughter so fair?

All of the third tribe were his children, but these, these.

Tore had been having a bad night. First the two idiots who had come to fast had managed to end up, totally oblivious, within twenty feet of each other on precisely opposite sides of a clump of bushes in the wood. It was ridiculous. What sort of babies were they sending out these days?

He had managed, with a series of snuffling grunts that really were rather unnerving, to scare one of them into moving a quarter of a mile away. It was an interference with the ritual, he supposed, but the fast had barely begun, and in any case, the babies needed all the help they could get: the man smell in those bushes had been so strong they'd have likely ended up finding only each other for totem animals.

That, he thought, was funny. Tore didn't find many things funny, but the image of two fasting thirteen-year-olds becoming each other's sacred beasts made him smile in the dark.

He stopped smiling when his sweep of the grove turned up a spoor he didn't recognize. After a moment, though, he realized that it had to be an urgach, which was worse than bad. Svart alfar would not have disturbed him unless there were a great many. He had seen small numbers of them on his solitary forays westward towards Pendaran. He'd also found the trail of a very large band, with wolves among them. It had been a week before, and they were moving south fairly quickly. It had not been a pleasant thing to find, and he'd reported it to Ivor, and to Levon as leader of the hunt, but it was, for the time being, no direct concern of theirs.

This was. He'd never seen one of the urgach, no one in the tribe had, but there were legends enough and night stories to make him very cautious indeed. He remembered the tales very well, from before the bad time, when he'd been only a child in the third tribe, a child like all the others, shivering with pleasurable fear by the fire, dreading his mother's summons to bed, while the old ones told their stories.

Kneeling over the spoor, Tore's lean face was grim. This was not Pendaran Wood, where creatures of Darkness were known to walk. An urgach, or more than one in Faelinn Grove, the lucky wood of the third tribe, was serious. It was more than serious: there were two babies fasting tonight.

Moving silently, Tore followed the heavy, almost overpowering spoor and, dismayed, he saw that it led eastward out of the grove. Urgach on the Plain! Dark things were abroad. For the first time, he wondered about the Chieftain's decision to stay in the northwest this summer. They were alone. Far from Celidon, far from any other tribe that might have joined numbers with them against what evils might be moving here. The Children of Peace, the Dalrei were named, but sometimes peace had been hard won.

Tore had no problems with being alone, he had been so all his adult life. Outcast, the young ones called him, in mockery. The Wolf. Stupid babies: wolves ran in packs. When had he ever? The solitude had made for some bitterness, for he was young yet, and the memory of other times was fresh enough to be a wound. It had also given him a certain dour reflectiveness born of long nights in the dark, and an outsider's view of what humans did. Another kind of animal. If he lacked tolerance, it was not a surprising flaw.

He had very quick reflexes.

Page 116

The knife was in his hand, and he was low to the gully and crawling from the trees as soon as he glimpsed the bulky shadow in a brief unsheathing of moonlight. There were clouds, or else he would have seen it earlier. It was very big.

He was downwind, which was good. Moving with honed speed and silence, Tore traversed the open ground towards the figure he'd seen. His bow and sword were on his horse; a stupidity.

Can you kill an urgach with a knife, a part of him wondered.

The rest of him was concentrating. He had moved to within ten feet. The creature hadn't noticed him, but it was obviously angry and it was very large-almost a foot taller than he was, bulking hugely in the shadows of the night.

He decided to wait for moonlight and throw for the head. One didn't stop to talk with creatures from one's nightmares. The size of it made his heart race-tearing fangs on a creature that big?

The moon slanted out; he was ready. He drew back his arm to throw: the dark head was clearly outlined against the silvered plain, looking the other way, north.

"Holy Mother!" the urgach said.

Tore's arm had already begun its descent. With a brutal effort he retained control of the dagger, cutting himself in the process.

Creatures of evil did not invoke the Goddess, not in that voice. Looking again in the bright moonlight, Tore saw that the creature before him was a man; strangely garbed, and very big, but he seemed to be unarmed. Drawing breath, Tore called out in a voice as courteous as the circumstances seemed to permit, "Move slowly and declare yourself."

At the snarled command, Dave's heart hit his throat and jack-knifed back into his rib-cage. Who the hell? Rather than pursue this inquiry, however, he elected to move slowly and declare himself.

Turning toward the voice with his hands outspread and bearing only Evidence notes, he said, as levelly as he could, "My name is Martyniuk. Dave Martyniuk. I don't know where I am, and I'm looking for someone named Loren. He brought me here."

A moment passed. He felt the wind from the north ruffling his hair. He was, he realized, very frightened.

Then a shadow rose from a hollow he hadn't even seen, and moved towards him.

"Silvercloak?" the shadow asked, materializing in the moonlight as a young man, shirtless despite the wind, barefoot, and clad in leggings of black. He carried a long, quite lethal-looking blade in his hand.

Oh, God, Dave thought. What have they done to me? Carefully, his eyes on the knife, he replied,

"Yes, Loren Silvercloak. That's his name." He took a breath, trying to calm down. "Please don't misunderstand anything. I'm here in peace. I don't even want to be here. I got separated . . . we're supposed to be in a place called Paras Derval. Do you know it?"

The other man seemed to relax a little. "I know it. How is it that you don't?"

"Because I'm not from here," Dave exclaimed, frustration hitting his voice. "We crossed from my world. Earth?" he said hopefully, then realized how stupid that was.

"Where is Silvercloak, then?"

"Aren't you listening?" Martyniuk exploded. "I told you, I got separated. I need him to go home.

All

I want to do is get home as fast as I can. Can't you understand that?"

There was another silence.

"Why," the other man asked, "shouldn't I just kill you?"

Dave's breath escaped in a hiss. He hadn't handled this too well, it seemed. God, he wasn't a diplomat. Why hadn't Kevin Laine been separated from the others? Dave considered jumping the other man, but something told him this lean person knew how to use that blade extremely well.

Page 117

He had a sudden inspiration. "Because," he gambled, "Loren wouldn't like it. I'm his friend; he'll be looking for me." You are too quick to renounce friendship, the mage had said, the night before. Not always, Dave thought, not tonight, boy.

It seemed to work, too. Martyniuk lowered his hands slowly. "I'm unarmed," he said. "I'm lost.

Will you help me, please?"

The other man sheathed his blade at last. "I'll take you to Ivor," he said, "and Gereint. They both know Silvercloak. We'll go to the camp in the morning."

"Why not now?"

"Because," the other said, "I have a job to do, and I suppose you'll have to do it with me now."

"How? What?"

"There are two babies in that wood fasting for their animals. We've got to watch over them, make sure they don't cut themselves or something." He held up a bleeding hand. "Like I did, not killing you. You are among the Dalrei. Ivor's tribe, the third. And lucky for you he is a stubborn man, or the only thing you would find here would be eltor and svart alfar, and the one would flee you and the other kill. My name," he said, "is Tore. Now come."

The babies, as Tore insisted on calling the two thirteen-year-olds, seemed to be all right. If they were lucky, Tore explained, they would each see an animal before dawn. If not, the fast would continue, and he would have to watch another night. They were sitting with their backs against a tree in a small clearing midway between the two boys. Tore's horse, a small dark gray stallion, grazed nearby.

"What are we watching for?" Dave asked, a little nervously. Night forests were not his usual habitat.

"I told you: there are svart alfar around here. Word of them has driven all the other tribes south."

"There was a svart alfar in our world," Dave volunteered. "It followed Loren. Matt Sören killed it.

Loren said they weren't dangerous, and there weren't many of them."

Tore raised his eyebrows. "There are more than there used to be," he said, "and though they may not be dangerous to a mage, they were bred to kill and they do it very well."

Dave had an uncomfortable, prickly feeling suddenly. Tore spoke of killing with disquieting frequency.

"The svarts would be enough to worry about," Tore went on, "but just before I saw you, I found the spoor of an urgach-I took you for it, back there. I was going to kill first and investigate after.

Such creatures have not been seen for hundreds of years. It is very bad that they are back; I don't know what it means."

"What are they?"

Tore made a strange gesture and shook his head. "Not at night," he said. "We shouldn't be talking of them out here." He repeated the gesture.

Dave settled back against the tree. It was late, he supposed he should try to sleep, but he was far too keyed up. Tore no longer seemed to be in a talking mood; that was okay by him.

On the whole, it looked all right. Could have been a lot worse. He appeared to have landed among people who knew the mage. The others couldn't be too far away; it would probably work out, if he didn't get eaten by something in these woods. On the other hand, Tore obviously knew what he was doing. Roll with it, he thought.

After about three-quarters of an hour, Tore rose to check on his babies. He looped east, and came back ten minutes later, nodding his head.

"Barth is all right, and well hidden now, too. Not as stupid as most of them." He continued west to look hi on the other one. A few minutes later, he reappeared again.

"Well-" Tore began, approaching the tree.

Page 118

Only an athlete could have done it. With purest reflex, Dave launched himself at the apparition that had emerged from the trees beside Tore. He hit the hairy, ape-like creature with the hardest cross-body block he could throw, and the sword swinging to decapitate Tore was deflected away.

Sprawled flat with the breath knocked out of him, Dave saw the huge creature's other hand coming down. He managed to parry with his left forearm, and felt a numbing sensation from the contact.

God, he thought, staring into the enraged red eyes of what had to be the urgach, this sucker is strong! He didn't even have time to be afraid: rolling clumsily away from the urgach's short-range sword thrust, he saw a body hurtle past him.

Tore, knife in hand, had hurled himself straight at the creature's head. The urgach dropped its awkward sword, and with a terrifying snarl, easily blocked Tore's arm. Shifting its grip, it threw the

Rider bodily away, to smash into a tree, senseless for a moment.

One on one, Dave thought. Tore's dive had given him time to get to his feet, but everything was moving so fast. Whirling, he fled to where Tore's tethered horse was neighing in terror, and he grabbed the sword resting by the saddle-cloth. A sword? he thought. What the hell do I do with a sword?