The Door into Shadow (34 page)

“
Dragons heal fast,” Hasai said from behind her.

A quiet joy like nothing she had ever heard sang around his words. She knew how he felt.

“
Sehé’rae, mdaha,” she said, and went out.

***

She opened her eyes on a dawn she could taste as well as see. When she stood up to stretch, she saw the Moon, three days past third quarter, the phase under which she had been born, hanging halfway up the water-blue sky like a smile with a secret behind it.

Picking her way back toward the camp, she came across someone waiting for her with his back to the rising Sun. His long black shadow stretched out toward her, the stones within it outlined brightly by the Fire of the sword he leaned upon.

“
Welcome back,” Herewiss said as she approached.

Skádhwë was struck into a nearby rock: not the one where she had left it. Segnbora raised a questioning eyebrow at Herewiss as she plucked it out and resheathed it.

“
I didn’t need to touch Skádhwë,” he said. “I asked it politely, and we reached an accommodation.”

“
Thank you,” she said.

Then Segnbora glanced down at the cracked and broken links of her chainmail. “This was all a setup.” she said. “You knew the nightmare was here. You knew twenty miles away. You couldn’t
not
have known.”

He caught the amusement in her voice, and grinned. “I’m on other business than just Lorn’s and Eftgan’s,” he said. “There’s all kinds of power in this world, looking to be freed. I do what I can.”

“
I could have died of what it said to me,” Segnbora said. “I understood it, it spoke the truth, and yet I killed it anyway. The despair could have finished me.”

“
I know,” Herewiss said. “It wasn’t a decision I made lightly. If you hadn’t been strong enough…yes, you would have died. And I would have taken responsibility for it.”

Segnbora looked at him, pitying and loving him, both at once. “Thanks,” she said.

“
I didn’t do much of anything,” he said, half-bowing. “You seem to have found your own solutions.”

He looked past Segnbora with great interest. Turning, she was just as interested to see the long-necked, long-bodied, short-legged Dracon shadow that lay behind her. It was positioned as if the creature that cast it were standing on her hind legs. Experimentally Segnbora pointed a finger, and saw the shadow of the forewing barb cock outward.

“
Is it true,” Herewiss asked with an amused look, “what they say about Dragons and maidens?”

She turned back and shrugged slightly. “You’ll have to ask someone who’d know,” she said. “I’m not a maiden anymore….”

She started back toward camp to saddle Steelsheen, and hummed a chord.

***

…
the Goddess could not spend all Her time persuading the Kings and Queens of the world of the idiocy of war. Therefore She invented tacticians…

(source unknown)

As they topped the crest of yet another line of foothills, Freelorn’s people paused, silent in the dusk, and looked down upon ancient history. Forest patches lay scattered among the wrinkled fells and hollows of the land below. Although it was just two nights before Midsummer, the wind ran chill over the land, rustling trees and grass so that the earth seemed to shudder like the flank of a troubled beast.

South of their position the foothills became rougher, their bare stones turning brown, red, and hot gray in the fading light. Farther south still rose the Highpeaks. Off into the crimson distance they marched, mountain after mountain. At their forefront, frozen like a white wave of stone about to break, stood Mount Nómion, which overshadowed Bluepeak.

“
The weather’s changing,” Freelorn said.

He was looking uneasily at the filmy banner of windblown snow that stretched southward over the Peaks from Nómion’s major summit. It had a distinct downward curve to it that indicated a south wind was fighting to get past the mountains and slide under the warmer northland air. “Storm tomorrow, loved,” Freelorn said. “Can’t you do something?”

Herewiss’s eyes were elsewhere—searching the country west of them for any sign of the Darthenes. Eftgan’s last message had said that she and her troops would bivouac a league-and-a-half west of the mouth of Bluepeak valley two nights before Midsummer, well out of the sight of the Reavers encamped in Britfell fields around the town. But the land beneath them had a trampled look, and was empty.

“
I could,” Herewiss said, reaching over his shoulder for Khávrinen to better sense what had been happening there. “It would be unwise, though. Eftgan may already have done something.”

“
Or Someone else might have,” Segnbora said. She was as troubled as Lorn, for different reasons. Her undersenses clearly brought her a feeling of haste and disruption from the land below, as if plans had gone awry and many minds down there had recently been in turmoil. Worse were Hasai’s memories, and those of some of the
mdeihei
who knew this area well. Something dark and threatening lurked under this land, ready to rise up in menace.

She shuddered, as did the
mdeihei
inside her. Herewiss was sitting still with Khávrinen flaming in his lap, its Fire subdued.

“
Someone else
has
been meddling, I think,” he said, glancing over at Freelorn. “There’s will behind this weather, and I’d sooner not probe it more closely than that, since I’d be leaving myself open to be probed back. Better to stay low for the moment.” He looked down at the Bluepeak highlands. “Eftgan came at this site from the north a day and a half ago—”

“
Were they driven back by Arlenes?” Freelorn said, anxious. Cillmod had been raiding across the Arlene-Darthene border for nearly a year now, in violation of the Oath. It was unlikely that he would allow a Darthene incursion into his territory to go unchallenged.

“
No. Reavers—and they were here first. Eftgan had a skirmish with them and went north again. The Reavers went west. No sign of Arlenes; they must not have received word that Eftgan’s in the vicinity.”

Dritt looked confused. “Eftgan’s a Rodmistress, though. Shouldn’t she have been able to sense that the Reavers were here, and avoid them?”

Herewiss nodded.

There was uneasy shifting among Freelorn’s followers. Lorn himself was bewildered. “How can a Rodmistress’s scrying go wrong?”

Herewiss swung down from Sunspark and began loosening the girths of its saddle. “The same way mine can, I imagine,” he said. Segnbora could feel the great effort he was making to conceal the trouble in his mind. “I can’t feel where she is—my range has been steadily diminishing for the past day. Something’s settling down over this whole area. Power.” No one had to ask Whose.

Sunspark looked sideways at Herewiss. (I’ll find her,) it said. There was unease in its thought over Herewiss’s sudden anxiety.

Herewiss laid a hand on its burning shoulder, where the fiery mane hung down. “Go, loved. But burn low. Don’t advertise us.”

Sunspark tossed its head and was gone in an oven-breath of wind, leaving only wisps of smoke to mark where it had stood.

Segnbora dismounted from Steelsheen in silence, thinking that the tai-Enraesi house luck was certainly working as usual.
Of all the places where I never wanted to be in a battle, this heads the list!
Since Earn and Héalhra had first set the Bindings here a thousand years before, this land had slept uneasily. It was steeped in Power—not beneficent power like the Morrowfane’s, but a dangerous potency that could be manipulated easily by whatever lesser force moved there. Sorcerers and those with the Fire stayed away from Bluepeak, afraid to trigger unwelcome influences. Yet here they all were, merrily riding into this unstable land with the clear intention of arousing those influences in order to bind them. Segnbora would sooner have kicked a sleeping lion awake, then tried to tie it up.

“
How far from Nómion would you say we are?” Herewiss asked his loved.

“
Eight miles, maybe.” Freelorn was chewing his mustache absently, an old nervous mannerism. “We’ll be there by tonight if we push the horses a little.”

They stood together, Herewiss playing with Khávrinen’s hilt, Freelorn looking out over the darkening land toward a remote ridge that stood away from the foothills in front of Nómion. That ridge was Britfell, the White Height, which partially hid the mouth of Bluepeak valley.

There was nothing white about the fell this time of year. Its barren curved ridge was a brown wave rising over the green land below it. Here and there it was dotted with blackthorn that had managed to take root in its sheer stones.

On the hidden southern side of that ridge, within Bluepeak valley, the tiny combined force of the Arlenes and Darthenes had a thousand years before been hunted up against the cliffs of Britfell’s inner side by Fyrd. Seeing them trapped there, the Shadow had taken a hand, climbing down out of the Peaks in the shape of the Gnorn, a form so fearsome that just the sight of it would kill.

Earn and Healhra, trapped together on a height near Britfell’s end, faced with the slaughter of all their people, took the option offered them by the Goddess. They sacrificed their mortality to undergo that Transformation by which mortals become gods. Together, as White Eagle and White Lion, they attacked the Gnorn and destroyed it—slaying the Shadow and being slain, and leaving their people free to move north and found Arlen and Darthen.

There was hardly a child in the Kingdoms who hadn’t played at Lion-and-Eagle and fought that battle with sticks down dusty village streets or out in empty fields. Segnbora had done so herself, usually insisting (for loyalty’s sake) on being the Eagle to someone else’s Lion. For Freelorn and Herewiss
,
the game would have been a little different: its inventors had been the founders of their houses, their Fathers many times removed

“
Goddess help us if the Reavers are holding the mouth of the valley,” Freelorn said

“
Probably they are.”

Lorn looked sidewise at his loved. “You should have let me buy those mercenaries, dammit.”

“
Lorn, the point of this excursion is winning back your throne,
not
having battles. And buying yourself mercenaries
guarantees
you’ll have battles. Everybody in the neighborhood assumes you’re going to start something with them, so they start something first. Besides,” he said, smiling wryly at Freelorn’s exasperated look, “it seems there aren’t enough mercenaries available right now to make a difference. Someone else has been hiring. Cillmod.”

Freelorn shrugged, still chewing his mustache. “You miss my point. What I mean is, I’m going to have a hard time getting into the valley to enact the Royal Binding. That is, unless we try something obvious, like using Sunspark.”

“
Where did you have in mind to do it?”

“
Lionheugh.” That was the little island-height at the end of Britfell’s curve, well inside the valley’s mouth. “Since the Transformation took place there, it’s favorable ground. Every place else has too much blood.”

Herewiss looked grimly amused. “So all we have to do is get you past a whole army of Reavers, and probably Fyrd,” he said.
And keep you alive aflerward.

Segnbora caught his worried thought, but Freelorn merely raised his eyebrows. “Problems?”

“
I think we’ll work something out,” Herewiss said in his lazy northern drawl. Under his hands Khávrinen swirled momentarily with a confident brilliance of Flame, then died down .

A hot whirlpool of air set dried grass smoldering nearby on the ridge where they stood. The vortex darkened as if with smoke, spread horizontally and solidified into Sunspark’s blood-roan shape. Herewiss reached up to lay a hand against its cheek. “Well?”

(I found Eftgan’s soldiers busy with more of those Reaverfolk we had trouble with at Barachael,) it said, pawing the ground modestly, and leaving a scorched place. (They’re busy no more. I drove them back down into the valley to play with the rest of their people.)

“
Oh, no!” Herewiss covered his face with one hand. “Loved, I thought I told you to be circumspect!”

Its burning eyes were merry. (So I was. I don’t need to show fire to burn something. Things just became, should I say, too hot for them?)

Segnbora couldn’t suppress a chuckle, at which Sunspark beamed.

“
Don’t encourage him,” Herewiss said as he bent to pick up the saddle again.

(I did have a little trouble,) Sunspark added, in a tone of thought that said it was making light of the problem. (For some reason I wasn’t able to make things burn as easily as usual. Something there was slowing me down.)

Herewiss nodded, and kept his voice equally light. “We’ll keep an eye on it. Well done, loved. Did the Queen have any word for me?”

(Yes indeed,) Sunspark replied, and said one.

Segnbora exchanged amused glances with Lang, who stood beside her. It was not a word one usually associated with Queens.

Herewiss looked sternly at Sunspark. “Did you burn
her?”

(Oh…just a little…)

Fastening the girths of the saddle, Herewiss kneed the elemental good-naturedly in the belly. Sunspark’s eyes went wide, and a searing hot breath went out of
—whoof!
Herewiss pulled the girth tight.

“
You and I,” he said, “are going to have a talk later. Meanwhile,” he mounted up, “let’s join Eftgan before the Reavers figure out that the, ah, heat’s off…”

***

The camp seen from above looked much like other bivouacs Segnbora had seen: squares set out with tents at their centers, picket lines of horses tethered nearby, men and women sprawled around campfires tending to their weapons or their dinners. Britfell rose up a mile south, a looming blackness from which the occasional hunting owl came floating down in search of small game disturbed by the activity thereabouts.