The Dragonswarm (7 page)

She jerked her head in another nod, and her fingers closed more tightly still.

"I need to leave," I said, but the last word was not out before she shut my mouth with a kiss. She threw herself up on her toes and knotted her fingers in my shirt. She kissed me with all the heat and passion I had seen in the glow of her lifeblood. She kissed me breathless.

It seemed to last a very long time. Still, it was done too soon. She stepped away from me, eyes wide, lips slightly parted. My heartbeat hammered in my ears. It hammered louder. Then I recognized the furious pounding on the outer door. Othin bellowed from the hall, "Isabelle, open the door. By order of the king."

"He's found his ax," she said. I saw terror in her eyes.

"Stall him if you can," I said. I reached out my will, and the wardrobe's doors fell closed. I bound them together again to give him something to do. "But do not provoke him. He is a dangerous man."

"Be safe," she said. "I'll come for you soon."

I flew to the window and flung it wide. It took three breaths before I could catch my wizard's sight again. When I did, I saw the fire of life outside, motion in the night, but none was close enough to see my escape. Aching muscles screamed their protest, but fear gave me strength enough to slither through the deep stone window. I hung for a heartbeat by my fingertips, Isabelle's face framed in the window above me.

She touched my hand, and I felt her warmth. Then there came a great crash as the outer door slammed open. I dropped into the darkness.

I fell into a roll when I hit the hard cobblestones of the stable's courtyard. I made the move less gracefully than I'd have liked, but I did it without breaking bones. I heard the
snick
of Isabelle closing the window above me as I stumbled to my feet, and I dared not delay. I passed the stable at a lurch, wishing there was time to steal a horse.

I knew Othin would not have left this escape entirely unguarded. There was no one directly outside the window, but the reason was clear enough: the high-walled stableyard offered only two escapes—an arched gate onto the town square, and a door back into the master's house. I flew toward the gate, flitting through deepest shadows, then stopped beneath the great stone wall to stretch my awareness on ahead.

Twelve men were gathered there, ten of them shining with the silver lines of worked steel. Ten soldiers, silent and still. Waiting there for me. The other two surprised me. They shone with a different power—a backlight of perfect white, a halo behind their lifeblood—with a shine that reached out to light the darkness around them. I stared at them, bewildered. My heart pounded more loudly than any other sound in the night.

Then I heard a frustrated groan, and Themmichus's voice. "I told you, this is a waste of time. If he were hiding in the house, my father would have found him by now."

Themmichus. And then I understood. That was the glow of authority. Power over reality. Those two were wizards, capable of the same sight that showed them so clearly to me. Sweat stood cold on my skin, and I trembled. Then the other wizard answered Themm, "Be still!" harsh and vicious, and the strength went out of my legs.

I caught myself on one knee. It was Master Seriphenes, the man who had tormented me in my brief stay at the Academy. "You have your instructions," he went on, bored and condescending. "Now watch the yard. Or shall I inform Lhorus you are
still
unable to do as you are told?"

"That won't be necessary," Themmichus said, with none of the sniveling apology his father had stooped to. I saw the shift in his energies as he turned. I saw a flare in the sharp white light behind him as his attention passed over me. "But I assure you—" he was saying, but he cut short. I knew exactly what had stopped him. He had seen me hiding here.

Seriphenes must have known it, too, because I saw the same flash of his attention. "What—" he started to ask.

I did not wait to hear his exclamation. I threw myself into a sprint. Two paces brought me to the gate, and I saw them arrayed there just as I had expected. Three on the right, three on the left, with four more spread in a half-circle between to block the way completely.

I heard shouts of surprise. Seriphenes cried his orders, warning, but the words were lost in the alarm from the soldiers. I heard Themm shouting as well, apparently in panic, but it seemed he was deliberately confusing the Master Wizard's commands.

The two wizards stood together off to the left, so I angled right. I aimed for the gap between two of the soldiers in the half-circle, but it was not room enough to slip through. I was all too aware of the glowing lines of the swords in their hands—solid steel fashioned with a power my strange magic could not touch. But I remembered a trick I'd used before. I reached out to the earth before me, even as I sprinted forward, and whipped it with my will so it roiled beneath the feet of those two guards.

It was enough to throw them from their feet. It felled me, too. Weakness stabbed into my legs, and I faltered. I scraped my hands on hard cobblestones and struck with a shoulder to save my jaw. I kept my legs moving, kicking, and found strength to heave with my arms. I made it to my feet again as I scraped through the gap I'd made, and then I was pelting down the silent street away from them.

I stretched back with my awareness and nearly fell again when I clipped a cobblestone with my left foot. I kept moving, though, and turned my attention to Seriphenes. Even as I did, I saw the noonday blaze of his focus, and it flashed toward me. He shouted to the soldiers, "I have him!" In the same instant I felt bonds of air clamp tight around me. I slammed to a hard stop within their grasp. I grunted and looked down at bonds I knew too well. The wizard's apprentice Archus had used them against me once before to march me to my death.

I was no longer the boy I'd been then. Though they were crafted of invisible air, I could see the bonds around me clearly in the wizard's sight. I could see the way he had bent wind to serve his will. How he had convinced this bit of air to pretend it were hard as steel. He had told reality a lie and enforced it by his will.

Another wizard might have challenged his construct, might have forced reality back into its proper shape, pitting his own will against that of Seriphenes. But I was no wizard. I was something else. Instead of changing the false air around me, I caught at its true heart—at the fragile threads of contorted energy—and waved the air aside as though I were lifting back a curtain.

And that easily the bonds dissolved. It cost me less than the trick with the earth, too, for air was easier to move. In all, Seriphenes's spell might have brought me short for ten seconds, and then I was moving again. I heard him curse behind me, heard the bafflement and the first trace of fear in his voice as he screamed, "After him! You fools!"

But I was already far ahead. I heard them pounding after me, and without turning I cast my wizard's sight back. Seriphenes was among them, ahead of them even. Old and spindly though he was, the dark-eyed villain sprinted just as hard as I did, and already I could see the gathering glow of his next spell.

I slowed just enough to gather my focus. I touched the earth beneath me, borrowed enough from the cobblestones at my feet to shape a ball of stone the size of my fist. Then I turned in place, between one pace and the next, and threw the stone in his direction. I hadn't the strength or the vision within the night to hit him so far away, but I put the ball in the air and then turned and continued on my flight.

But I focused my will on the wizard's sight. I caught the heavy stone within my mind and flung it straight and true into the heart of that blazing golden glow. Master Seriphenes gave an undignified grunt far behind me. I heard the rustle and thud as he fell to the stone. I watched in my wizard's sight as he skidded five paces along the earth before at last he fell still.

The fiery dance of his lifeblood barely faltered, but the glow of his magical will faded, faded, and was gone.

I felt a moment's thrill of victory. It evaporated quickly. I placed a foot wrong and fell. I scrambled to my feet again. Ten armed men still chased after me, and they were gaining ground. I was tired. I tried throwing another stone, and I dropped one of the guards behind me, but this time I felt the cost. I felt myself growing slower. Perhaps I could have dropped nine of them, but I'd have collapsed asleep in the tenth one's arms. I turned and ran again instead, but once more I stumbled, and my flailing hand barely caught the ground to stop my fall.

The true reality revealed by wizard's sight was not the same as the reality of man. I couldn't run while looking with that sight; I couldn't see the subtle shape of the terrain, just the weight of it. Facades fell away, but right now I needed them. I couldn't afford to miss a little nuance like the lip of a paving stone or a tiny patch of loose mortar.

So I abandoned the wizard's sight, drank deeply of my fear, and turned all my mind to the desperate sprint for safety. I had one advantage. Six weeks in the town had taught me its twisting streets. I left the main way and darted down the alley between Duncan's and the blacksmith's shop. I led them on a chase through narrow back streets, and at last I stopped in the black-shadowed yard behind Thomas Wheelwright's house. I watched seven men go thundering by, all that remained now of my first pursuers, and I used my wizard's sight to confirm no more were waiting nearby.

I could hear a hue and cry going up in the town behind me, though. I glanced back and saw the distant, angry flicker of torchlight gathering in the town square. They would organize a full search, and I could not hope to escape from that.

I gave myself no more than half a minute to catch my breath, then forced myself up off the wall and stumbling down the alley again. I had led them within a hundred paces of the eastern gate, and I stopped in another shadow just long enough to check that there was no one but the baron's guards watching that escape.

I trusted my life to him. I hit the broad street at a full sprint and saw the flash of recognition in the gate guard's eyes. I saw them widen in confusion even as I came abreast of him. Then he heard the shouts in the town square. He turned his eyes that direction, making the connection, but I was already past him.

He had a crossbow at his station. I didn't slow. I ran on, a hundred paces down the road, but I did not hear the strained
twang
of a crossbow firing. I did not feel the searing heat of a crossbow bolt tearing flesh. There was sufficient other pain to bring me down, but for my life—and for the lives of everyone in Isabelle's house—I had to win free. So I ran on, grateful to the guard who had not done his duty.

A hundred paces down the way the road turned south and I kept on straight. I hopped the split-timber fence of old Bredgeman's fallow fields, and kept straight on until there was no glow of fire or life to light the night behind me.

I kept running as long as I could, and when my burning lungs and aching legs forced me to stop, I collapsed in the dirt by the side of a strangled little stream. I gulped desperate drinks of moss-slick water, and fought to catch my breath. For several minutes I lay panting, but then I forced myself up again, forced myself to trudge on.

I turned south, making my best guess by the light of the stars. I'd meant to head for the ruins, and that would have been quite a long way on foot even sticking to the road. But now I had no choice. I was far enough from the path to avoid detection, but it would not be safe to return to the road for days yet.

So I forged a path through fields of cold-shocked wheat and unharvested corn, and I left Teelevon behind. I didn't think—I was far too tired to think—only kept moving. South and east, I learned when the moon finally rose to trace its arc across the sky. I bent my path more perfectly south and tried to guess how I might find my way to the fortress.

But that would not matter for most of a day. First I needed to find my way to somewhere safe. I needed rest. I needed refuge. For three years now I'd been a fugitive from the king's justice, but that night beneath the stars I felt like one for the first time. That thought drove me on, far beyond all reason. That thought gave me strength long after my legs should have given out.

I moved cross-country in the darkness, climbing up hills and fording streams and pressing on as though drawn by a magnet. When dawn broke I was still walking, still searching for some bolthole where I could be sure the king's hunters would not find me. I ignored the pain in my feet and legs, ignored the weariness that kept trying to drag my eyes shut. I scoured every slope, every visible bit of land, and at last I found some suitable cover.

It was a spill of stones on the edge of an empty field, probably hauled there and piled up by some farmer's overtaxed mule. Some of them were as much as a pace tall, most considerably smaller, but all together they formed a pile six paces long and three paces tall at its highest. Bracken grew thick across it, and tall grass crowded around it.

I fell automatically into the wizard's sight as I approached it. I could carve myself a space within. Not now, of course. I would need rest first. But I could make a shelter none but me might find. I searched out the shape of its structure, making certain it would work, even as I trudged slowly in a circle around it, scanning with my mundane senses. For now, I needed only a shadowy corner to catch some rest. Two hours, perhaps three, and then I could have the strength needed to make a more secure lodging.

I saw darkness where no darkness should have been: in my wizard's sight. It lay long and low in the lee of the piled stones. Mind fuzzy from the long exertion, I mistook it for an ordinary shadow and stepped toward it automatically. I stretched out a hand to brush the tall grass aside, and then the shadow moved. Too late, I understood.

It was a drake, scarcely larger than the one I'd decapitated in the ruins of the fortress. This one was the brown and orange shades of autumn leaves, but my eyes fixed on the teeth, the great fangs as long as my hand, and the three-inch claws on its forelegs that were sharp enough to score stone. Those were white but stained with blood. I thought of the farmer who had piled these stones. I hoped the blood had been the mule's.