The Silver Mage (65 page)

I
t had taken Berwynna some days to realize that Mirryn considered himself to be in love with her. Since they hardly knew each other, she doubted if he actually did love her, but he followed her around the dun, took her riding, ate with her at meals, smiled whenever he saw her, and in general made a nuisance of himself. She took to staying in the women’s hall as a refuge, where Lady Solla, who was finding the stairs leading to the great hall more and more difficult thanks to her advanced pregnancy, tended to join her.

Usually, the tieryn’s widowed daughter, Adranna, sat with them, although sadly enough she rarely spoke. Generally, Adranna sat in a chair by the window and sewed upon an elaborate embroidered coverlet for her daughter’s dower chest. At times tears filled her eyes; she would brush them away and bend to her needlework as if her life depended on filling up the wolves drawn into the pattern with scarlet thread.
Will I end up like her?
Wynni would think.
Mourning Dougie all my life?

Now and then, Solla tried to draw Adranna into the conversation, but generally the lady answered briefly and withdrew into herself again. Berwynna and Solla had taken to sitting at the other side of the chamber where their talk wouldn’t disturb her.

“About Mirryn now,” Wynni asked Solla one afternoon. “Know you if he does realize that I were betrothed to another man?”

“He does,” Solla said. “But it doesn’t matter to him, and for that I honor him. Gerro asked him outright, you see, and told him that you needed time to mourn.”

“That be true spoken! Not a night does go by when I do fail to dream about Dougie. My thanks to your lord, truly.”

“He’s a good man, Gerro.” Solla hesitated briefly. “But so is Mirryn, in his way. You’ll not always be mourning your Douglas.”

“That be true as well. I do know it be so. Yet it be like a knife in my heart to be thinking I might forget him.”

“Nah nah nah, never that!” Solla smiled at her. “That’s not what I meant. You’ll never forget him, but you’ll find room in your heart for a second love. You’re too sensible a lass not to.”

Berwynna managed to smile. “My thanks, and I think me you have the right of it.”

That night at the evening meal Berwynna found herself looking at Mirryn in a new way. When his father died, he’d be lord of the Red Wolf dun, right there on the border near the Westfolk, part of a wider world than Haen Marn could ever offer. If she stayed on the island, whom would she meet to marry someday, she wondered, if Solla were right and her heart healed? One of the Mountain Folk and live underground all her life? The thought made her shudder.

“Is somewhat wrong?” Mirryn said.

“Naught, my apologies,” Wynni said. “Just thinking of a painful thing.”

“I realize, my lady, that there’s been much pain in your young life.” Mirryn sounded as if he were reciting a bit of bard lore that he’d got off by heart. “I only hope that someday all such trouble will be behind you.”

She glanced at Gerran, who sat across the table from them. He’d probably told Mirryn what to say, judging from his approving smile. When a servant girl put baskets of bread upon the table, Mirryn took one. He drew his table dagger and cut a chunk off the loaf before passing it across. He tore it in two and offered half to Berwynna, who took it from him, had a bite, then laid the rest on the wooden trencher they were sharing.

“What be the thing you truly hope for, Mirryn?” Wynni said. “I do wonder if somewhat lies behind those fancy words.”

Mirryn blushed scarlet. Wynni rested her chin on her hand and smiled at him until the blush receded.

“Well, I’m hoping you’ll favor me, of course,” he said. “Surely that’s obvious.”

“It be so, which is why I did want to drag that fox out of his hole.”

“Now that you have, does the color of his fur please you?”

“In some small way. I think me that with much time the day will come when such things do please me greatly once again.”

“When that day comes, I hope with all my heart that it’s a wolf that pleases you, not a fox.”

“A red wolf, it be a fine sight, truly, yet none of us know what wyrd the gods have in store for us.”

“That’s so, and wisely said.”

Berwynna suddenly realized that Lady Galla was leaning so sharply their way, desperate to hear in the noisy great hall, that she looked as if she might be feeling faint. In his seat at the foot of the table, Uncle Mic was struggling not to laugh. Mirryn had noticed his mother’s angle as well.

“I hear that Lord Pedrys is planning on holding a tourney,” he said, a trifle loudly. “I think mayhap I’ll ride to it. Gerro, are you up for a little sport?”

“Depends,” Gerran said. “On how my lady fares. I don’t want to be away from the dun when she’s delivered of the child.”

Conversation, and Lady Galla’s posture, returned to normal.

Berwynna had barely finished her dinner when she heard drum-beats thrumming through the sky. With a murmured apology to Mirryn, she got up and left the table to run to a window and look out. By then, the rest of the great hall had heard the sound as well. Everyone stopped talking to listen as it came closer.

“Is that your father, Wynni?” Galla called out.

“It be not so, but my stepsister.” Wynni saw a flash of green and gold circling the dun. “I think me I’d best go meet her.”

Uncle Mic joined her as she left the great hall. In the warm summer twilight, they hurried down the path to the meadow by the dun, where Medea was drinking from the stream. She lifted her head in a scatter of drops and rumbled in greeting. Strapped to the tallest spikes on her neck was a leather pouch.

“Messages for the tieryn!” Medea sang out. “And one for you, Wynni, though that one’s not in the pouch. I’m here to take you and Mic back to Haen Marn.”

“Oh, ye gods!” Mic muttered. “Another wretched, sick-making ride through the air!”

“It be too far to walk, Uncle Mic,” Wynni said. “My thanks, stepsister! My heart does long to see my mother again.”

“I assumed it would, truly,” Medea said. “Mic, will you untie this itchy pouch and get it off me?”

“I will, and I’ll take it up to the tieryn as well.”

Carrying the messages, Mic hurried off, but Berwynna lingered to ask her stepsister for news of Rori. “He’s in splendid form,” Medea began, “so, now that the war’s over—”

“The war be over? Wait, go not so fast in your telling! I knew that not.”

“My apologies. Here I was thinking you’d have dweomer, so you’d know.”

“Our sister Mara has all of that on my side of the family. I have none, and truly, I be glad of it.”

Berwynna sat down in the grass. She stayed in the meadow for some time, listening to Medea’s report of the destruction of the Horsekin army, while the twilight slowly faded into night. Above them in the clear sky the stars came out and seemed to hang close to earth, as if they too rejoiced in the death of so many enemies.

Eventually Berwynna heard someone calling her name. Medea stopped talking and swung her head toward the sound. A gleam from a lantern, held in someone’s hand, bobbed down the path toward them.

“Uncle Mic?” Berwynna called out.

“It’s not.” Mirryn answered her. “It’s Mirro. I thought you might be glad of the light and an escort back to the dun.”

He had used the familiar form of the second person, “ti,” she realized, perhaps as a token of friendship, perhaps in hope of something more. She hesitated, then decided that it would be ungracious to deny him that hope.

“It does gladden my heart,” she said. “My thanks i ti.” “To you,” again in the familiar form.

As he walked up to join her, he was smiling so softly that Berwynna made a decision.

“We’ll be leaving you on the morrow,” she said, “Uncle Mic and me. My heart does ache to see my mother again.”

Mirryn’s smiled disappeared. “Ah, well,” he said. “I can understand that.”

“But if my stepsister be willing to be so kind,” Berwynna continued, “mayhap she’ll come to the island to fetch me here again in the spring.”

“Of course I will,” Medea said.

“Then I’ll look forward to the spring doubly this winter.” Mirryn made as much of a bow as he could without swinging the lantern so hard that the candle went out. “My thanks to you, fair ladies both.”

“Most welcome, I’m sure,” Medea said. “Wynni, Dallandra asked me to tell you that Laz Moj has returned to the island with the missing book.”

Berwynna let out a whoop of pure joy that made Mirryn jump back a step. She laughed as she apologized to him.

“You ken not how that news gladdens my heart,” Berwynna said to Mirryn. “I’ll be telling you the tale should you wish.” She turned to Medea again. “Will Dalla be going to the isle to fetch it?”

“She will, and knowing her, I wager she’ll get there before we do.”

L
az had taken to doing what kitchen work he could with his maimed hands. He’d worked out a way to hold a broom reasonably well, and every morning he swept out the kitchen hut while Lonna went outside to toss scraps to the island’s cats. Since the Gel da’Thae relied on ferrets to control the rodents who inevitably attack stored food, Laz had never seen house cats before coming to Haen Marn. In fact, he’d assumed that they were some species of Wildfolk until he’d seen Lonna and Mara feeding and stroking them.

After she tended the cats, Lonna would come back into the kitchen, look at the swept floor, and grunt a brief thanks. The moment was Laz’s chance to fish for information.

“Lonna,” he said that morning, “I heard the name Lin Rej once. Was it a dwarven stronghold?”

“It was,” Lonna said. “And a grand one, or so I heard as a child. It stretched for miles and miles underground, but there were gardens, too, up above. That’s how your folk got in, through the garden stairways, when they were a-burning it and slaughtering my folk.”

“My apologies! I—”

“You weren’t there.” Lonna fixed him with a gaze as sharp as a knifepoint. “My thanks for the sweeping.”

Laz bowed to her for want of anything to say and left the kitchen hut. He found himself wondering if he had been “there,” one of the Horsekin who’d destroyed the dwarven city. If so, it had happened too many lives ago for him to worry about, he decided, especially since he had a more recent set of transgressions to brood over.

Every afternoon Laz spent several hours teaching Mara dweomerlore. The need to organize the material efficiently showed him that his own training had a good many gaps, things that Hazdrubal had never told or shown him. The Bardekian, of course, had expected to be paid for his lore. Most likely he’d held things back in order to get a better price for them later, not that he’d lived to see that “later.” More and more, Laz was coming to agree with Faharn, that Hazdrubal was—not a sham, certainly—but suspect.

Had Hazdrubal studied the legendary dark dweomer? Something had made him flee his home in the islands. Now and then, Hazdrubal had made sharp comments about meddling government officials or cowardly masters of magic who refused to see and take the strange powers available to those who dared to use them. While Faharn had bristled at such talk, Laz had found it oddly familiar, even though he couldn’t place where he’d first heard it.

That life before Lord Tren,
he would think,
the one that Dalla and Ebañy never talked about. What did I do then? What was I?
As the drowsy summer days rolled by on Haen Marn, Laz began to feel that he knew the answers to those questions. His mind merely recoiled every time he tried to voice them.

Yet, in the event, it was neither Ebañy nor Dallandra who forced him to the answer. One hot afternoon, Laz stood under an apple tree, holding out the basket while Kov, up on a ladder, picked the ripest fruits and tossed them down. Flies buzzed, birds sang, a breeze from the lake stirred the air, and Laz was fighting off the urge to sleep where he stood when he saw a lozenge of astral force appear nearby.

His first thought, in fact, was that he slept and dreamt, but Kov had seen the quivering silver shape as well.

“What in the name of Gonn’s hammer is that?” Kov said.

“I’m not sure,” Laz said, “but I’d get down from that rickety ladder if I were you. Something’s made a gate from somewhere, and I’ve got no idea what’s going to come out of it.”

Kov swore aloud and climbed down. Laz set the basket of apples on the ground and watched as the shape began to drift toward them. A bare foot across at first, as it traveled it grew until it was some six feet high and four across. Its color turned from solid silver to a strange bluish-green, spitting and snapping with silver sparks. It stopped some three feet from the two men and hovered briefly, then split open like a pair of double doors.

Dallandra and Branna stepped out of it, both of them laden with packs like peddlers. Dalla turned and snapped her fingers. The lozenge disappeared.

“Good morrow,” she said. “We’ve come to take a look at the island.”