The Silver Mage (24 page)

Hwilli stretched out her arms to Rhodorix, who refused to look at her.

“You heard him,” he said. “Follow his orders.”

He wants me to go,
she thought.
He doesn’t want me here.
The thought was a spear of ice, stabbing her to the heart. Her defeat tasted like a death, a cold emptiness that chilled her mind and her soul. She got to her feet, gave Rhodorix’s sullen back one last glance, and let Jantalaber lead her away.

By the gates the other refugees had drawn up in reasonable order with a squad of archers. At the rear, behind the servants and handcarts, Gerontos sat on his chestnut warhorse.

“Hwilli!” he called out to her. “Come here! You can ride behind me.”

Understanding broke through Hwilli’s grief. Rhodorix had handed her over to his brother, just as if she were a horse he no longer wanted to ride. For a moment the courtyard seemed to move under her feet. Master Jantalaber caught her by the shoulder and steadied her.

“Go ride with him,” he said. “The child you’re carrying could suffer, if you’re forced to walk the entire way.”

For the sake of Rhodorix’s child, Hwilli went to Gerontos. He dismounted, helped her climb up behind the saddle then mounted again. As they rode off, she glanced back to see Rhodorix still kneeling before the prince.
Very well,
she thought.
I’ll do as you say, but I’ll always be faithful to you in my heart and soul.

With a sigh that was more a gasp of surrender, she slipped her arms around Gerontos’ waist to steady herself as the column began to move. He turned his head to glance her way. Despite the awkward angle, she caught a glimpse of a well-pleased smile.

R
hodorix kept silent by iron self-control as Hwilli and Gerontos rode off to catch up with the refugees, most of whom had already filed through the gates. He listened to the sound of the chains grinding through the winches as the gates closed with a rumble like thunder. Under the cover of that sound he allowed himself one long keen. Tears ran down his face; he wiped them roughly away on the back of his hand. The prince, with his hands on his hips, watched him.

“So!” Ranadar said. “You did love that woman. Did you want her to stay?”

“I wanted her to go, Your Highness, but only for her sake. For mine I wish she could have stayed, but I’ll hope and pray that she lives a long life and finds a little joy in it as well.”

“The thought becomes you. I doubt me if you and I will do either.”

“The only joy I can see myself finding, Your Highness, is dying before you do.”

“That’s a boon the gods will probably grant you.” Ranadar paused, looking up at the cloud-strewn sky. “One way or the other.”

The reflection in the mirror is not your actual face. No more is the world you see the world.

I
GOT
MY WISH.
I
died long before the prince did.

The silver dragon spread his wings, contemplated flight, then closed them again. A wind came up, whining through the broken towers, murmuring in the trees. A dust demon whirled across the shattered paving stones of the courtyard by the long-gone gates.

“I thought I’d die here in Garangvah,” Rori said aloud, “but I didn’t. We lived through the siege, and then I followed Ranadar when he began raiding. It was all that was left to us, raiding. We stole their horses, we killed as many of their men as we could.” He laughed with a long rumble of satisfaction, remembering the kills. “It was my wyrd, when I died on one of those raids. Was it an arrow?” He considered one of Garangvah’s broken towers, as if perhaps it had heard and might answer. “I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s a new war now.”

With a rustle of wings the silver dragon leaped into the air and flew, heading east. He laired that night on one of the foothills, then set out again in the morning. Late in the afternoon he reached the fortress he’d seen a-building. Although he’d flown over the area a number of times, he’d never examined it carefully. In the slanted light of the aging day, he saw marks upon the ground he’d not noticed before, places where the scrubby grass grew thicker or thinner. As if they were shadows thrown by Time itself, the marks displayed a pattern of long lines enclosing areas that might have been fields and little circles the size and shape of farmers’ huts. Yet nothing remained on the ground to explain them.

The fortress itself presented a further surprise. In the midst of flat scrubland, it stood on a hill of sorts—very much of sorts, he realized. He flew up high and glided in a lazy loop, studying the hill and the half-finished buildings, all of wood, that stood behind a wooden palisade. Despite the clutter, he could see enough to discern a crucial truth.

Like a long sausage, the ridge rose in an oddly symmetrical shape. A circular depression marked each end, as if the earth had settled over some kind of construction underneath. In the center, where the new buildings stood, he could only guess at the ground underneath, but it seemed oddly uneven, as if boulders or some sort of loose rock underlay the soil. At least part of the ridge, then, was no natural feature, but an ancient structure, perhaps even an enormous barrow joined to shrines at either end.

Did the Horsekin realize that they were building upon a supremely unstable foundation? Apparently not. Long barges, anchored side to shore, fringed the nearby river. Each of them held cubical blocks of gray stone. Somewhere upstream the Horsekin were quarrying. Rori could guess that they had learned a hard lesson about dwarven fire the summer before and intended to defend against it as best they could, but he doubted if any master masons were working on this citadel. The city-builders of the Gel da’Thae would have understood another lesson—that stone walls required a firm footing if they were to stand. A peculiar mound like this one would destabilize anything heavy built upon it.

They could perhaps build a stone fortress here if they drove pilings for a foundation, but after they drove the pilings, then what should they do? The more Rori considered the question, the more uncertain of the answer he became. While he could recall his days as Gwerbret Aberwyn, and the long discussions of fort craft he’d held with master craftsmen, the memories were curiously dim and hard to recall, compared with his dweomer memories of old lives and old hatreds.

The hatreds, in particular, burned in his mind. As he floated on the currents of the wind, he counted them: the Horsekin, certainly. Tren. Raena. Alastyr—but, he reminded himself, Alastyr and Tren were one and the same soul. The Bear clan of Eldidd that had tried to undermine his rule as Gwerbret Aberwyn—all of them, too. Most deeply of all, he hated the dark dweomermen of Bardek, who had broken his mind and will back when he’d still been a young man and an exile. Nearly a hundred years old, some of those memories, but the hatreds still smoldered in his soul. At times they flared up, so hot and bitter that they made him uneasy, threatening every shred of mercy and justice he possessed. The years that he’d passed in dragon form were divesting him of everything that had made him a good ruler, a decent lord, a human being.
Dalla was right,
he thought.
I can’t—can’t what? keep living like this?

He shuddered with a vast shiver of extended wings and tried to put the rage out of his mind. His one reliable refuge from his thoughts beckoned: flight. His wings beat the air as he gained height, until the fortress looked like a smear on the earth and naught more. The cool wind soothed his hatreds and blew them among the thin streaks of clouds.

Rori made a wide turn to the north and spotted on the distant horizon the pluming dust that meant the approach of a large number of—something. He dropped down and flew in that direction until he soared over a long column of marching spearmen, followed by a ragtag collection of Horsekin on foot. Behind them trundled loaded wagons, drawn by horses, and oxcarts as well, piled high with lumpy, uneven cargo held down by hides and ropes. A bevy of mounted riders drove herds of horses and cattle, while behind them marched another tidy column of spearmen. Riders brought up the rear. These, some hundreds of them, rode in a straggly column, bunching up, thinning out as they traveled slowly along. Horsekin, then, not Gel da’Thae cavalry—Rori risked swooping down lower, circling the line of march for a better look.

Although he saw chained slaves among those who walked behind the leading contingent of uniformed spearmen, the others in the line of march seemed to be traveling freely enough. Mostly women drove the wagons. Children perched on top of bulky, ill-stowed loads or sat beside the women on the wagon boxes. The rearguard horsemen wore heavy tunics of leather, painted with designs that from his height Rori couldn’t read. Painted shields hung from their saddle peaks. A migration, all right, a full migration of Horsekin tribes. Probably they were planning on settling around the new fortress to raise food and mounts for whatever plans Alshandra’s rakzanir had underway.

As Rori headed south again, he realized that he wasn’t far—not far as dragons reckon distance, at any rate—from the strange village and the wooden bridge that Berwynna had described to him. Any army planning on extending itself through the Northlands would want that bridge. He decided to take a look at it and headed east again. Soon he was soaring high above the Dwrvawr. He turned downriver, spotted the village and the rickety bridge that Berwynna had described, then circled lower for a better look.

Near the village a strip of sandy beach sloped down toward water reeds and what appeared to be shallow water, shaded by a cluster of willows. In deeper water a pair of enormous otters swam back and forth. Rori dropped down a hundred yards or so and circled to confirm that indeed, two otters, roughly six feet long from whiskered snout to graceful tail, were exactly what they were. As he watched, one of them swam to the beach and clambered out. It started chasing its tail like a dog. In a swirl of bluish light the otter disappeared, and a human being, dripping wet and naked, stood in its stead. The other creature paddled toward the bank, flipped onto its back, and, still in otter form, bobbed in the current.

The naked man pointed at the sky and called out—from his height Rori could just hear his voice without understanding the words. Another man stepped out of the trees, a short, stocky fellow clad in a loin wrap. He tipped his head back to look up. They’d spotted the dragon, perhaps, though Rori could assume that he looked like some sort of large bird at his distance. He banked one wing and headed back southwest. Those otters—or shapechangers—or whatever they were! The sooner Dallandra heard about them the better.