Wizardborn (59 page)

I know not which to fear most
—
the asp's poison, the wight's touch, or my wife's wrath.

—King Da'verry Morgaine

Borenson stared by starlight at Myrrima's right hand. The knuckles and middle three fingers were icy and almost as white as the hoarfrost that blasted the ground for fifty yards in every direction.

He touched her flesh, found it so bitter cold that it felt hot. Her teeth were chattering, and she trembled from the chill.

The Toth wight had cast some sort of spell on her.

“Damn,” he swore. Her fingers were as good as gone. She'd lose them for sure—maybe the whole hand.

Borenson's heart was still pumping frantically. The wight's dying scream echoed endlessly in his mind. His thoughts were racing. His wife had banished a wight.
That
couldn't happen. Only a powerful mage might have done it. And it looked as if she would lose her hand.

She did it for me, he realized. She stood over me and fought the monster, just as she fought the reavers near Mangan's Rock.

He couldn't think clearly. He breathed on her hand, trying to heat it.

“Let's wrap it and try to keep it warm,” he offered, pulling off his own cloak. He gingerly bundled the cloak around the injured hand.

“There's no warmth left in it,” Myrrima said. “The cold is spreading.”

The touch of the air around him was surprisingly bitter, as if this place might not thaw in a week. Ice clung to his beard. The very air felt as brittle as the crust of ice at his feet.

A fire? he considered. But his fire kit was in his saddlebags. He looked down the road. The horses had both run off. With a wight on their tails, they'd probably keep running until dawn.

“Can you walk?” Borenson asked. “Fenraven can't be far.”

“I can walk,” Myrrima said through chattering teeth. “But can you keep up with me?” She was a Runelord now, with more endowments of brawn and metabolism than he, and endowments of stamina to boot. She could run farther and faster than he.

“No,” he said. “There's bound to be a healer in Fenraven, a midwife at least. Maybe you should go ahead.”

Myrrima climbed shakily to her feet. Even with all of her endowments, the effort seemed to drain her. She grabbed her bow, used it as a staff, and began to hobble forward. In his mind, Borenson recalled how Hoswell had fled the battlefield only hours ago using the same bow in just such a manner. He'd not survived.

Borenson jogged along beside her.

She looked down the road determinedly. “We've got to find the horses,” Myrrima said between chattering teeth. “I put some of Binnesman's healing salve in my saddlebags.”

Passing out of the blasted area was a relief. The warm night air seemed to surge around Borenson. He felt refreshed by it, more hopeful. He realized that moments before he'd felt… depleted of some vital essence. He hoped that Myrrima would feel it too.

Starlight shone overhead, a powder in the heavens that barely pierced the gauzy clouds. Soon they topped a small rise, and he looked eagerly along the road ahead. Night
vapors spread over the muddy trail in patches. Black trees raked the sky with leafless limbs.

He could see no cheering lights for miles ahead, and no sign of his horses.

It looked like a good patch of road in which to find another wight.

There is a rider ahead of us, he recalled. Most likely he is an assassin out of Muyyatin.

Borenson had few endowments. His warhammer remained sheathed on his horse's back. His only weapon was the long knife strapped to his leg.

Myrrima took a look at the horizon, groaned in despair. “How big is Fenraven?” she asked as she stood panting.

“Not big,” he said. He'd never been there, but knew it by reputation.

“So, maybe—maybe we just can't see its lights. It could be close ahead.”

Borenson knew that Fenraven was situated just beyond the bogs on a small island. The flowing water around it was a bane to wraiths, but the people of Fenraven also kept lanterns outside every doorway, to make doubly sure.

If we were even close, he knew, we'd see those lights, or smoke rising from the town. But there was nothing. “You could be right,” he lied, trying to offer some comfort. “It could be anywhere.”

Myrrima nodded, hobbled on.

For nearly half an hour he jogged to keep pace with her. He pulled off his armor, threw it to the ground, along with his helm.

Myrrima's breath came in quick, shallow gasps. She held her wounded arm cupped against her chest like a claw, Borenson's cloak wrapped around it. He could tell that she was in great pain.

They ran through the fog-shrouded woods, and Borenson listened for the sounds of danger or for his horses. Water dripped from tree limbs, landing in the mud with sucking sounds. The wind blew softly, making leaves skitter nervously. Borenson recalled the elemental of the Darkling
Glory that had attacked Gaborn's camp earlier in the day, and the gale that had raced ahead of them inexplicably this afternoon.

Was this some kind of vengeance? he wondered. Myrrima had done the creature great harm, after all. He only wished that she could have killed it.

Myrrima slowed and began to move erratically after the first half hour, scampering forward in little starts and stops. He could walk as fast as she could by then.

He was winded. He figured that they had covered nearly three miles. He felt numb all over. He kept watching her. She seemed more drained with each passing moment. He feared that she would collapse with nearly every step.

They reached another hillock, looked down the road below. Stars fell, as if to empty the heavens.

The hills were rising, becoming a bit taller. The fog lay thicker in the folds beneath. Finally, a horned moon began to climb above the horizon, limning it with light. In the distance to the south, he could make out the jagged white peaks of the Alcairs. No sign of horses, no sign of town.

He glanced at Myrrima, and what he saw made chills lance through him. Her face had a deathly pallor and she breathed roughly, shallowly. With every breath, fog rolled out of her mouth and hung round her face in a little cloud.

Yet it was not so cold that
his
breath did so.

The Bright Ones protect her! he swore inwardly.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Weakly, she shook her head no.

“Let's have a look at that hand,” he said.

Myrrima shook her head no, pulled back, but he took her gingerly. Her right arm would not move. It felt as if it were frozen at the elbow. He began gently unwinding his cloak from around her arm. The folds of cloth had frozen to her flesh.

He got it off, and found that more than her knuckles and fingers were white now. The ice reached all the way up her arm, and was spreading to her shoulder.

It was as if death crept through her flesh.

He stared at her, stricken with horror.

Myrrima nodded, as if the sight only gave her visual confirmation of how she felt.

“It will kill me,” she said.

Borenson looked about, bewildered. There was no fighting otherworldly powers. He was no sorcerer, had no weapons.

“Maybe … if we cut it off…” The very notion horrified him. He had never performed an amputation. He had no bandages, nothing that would relieve her pain. And from the look of it, the arm would have to come off at the shoulder. He wouldn't be able to control the bleeding.

Myrrima shook her head. “I don't… I don't think it will work.”

“Here,” he said, “lean against me for a moment.” He still wore the padding that he'd had beneath his armor, and his sweat was slick beneath it. He unlaced the front of it, along with his tunic, then put her arm against his side. Her touch was like bitter ice, and he wondered for a moment if the wight's curse would take him too.

He no longer cared if it did.

Early in the morning, he'd asked Gaborn what more he might be required to give. Borenson had already lost his manhood, and his virtue. Now he realized that he was about to lose something more, something so precious he had never even guessed at its worth: his wife.

Myrrima leaned against him heavily, as if to steady herself, as her breath came quick and frightened.

This isn't how it was supposed to be, he thought. When he'd left Castle Sylvarresta four nights ago, he'd imagined that he was leaving Myrrima forever.

I was the one taking the road to Inkarra. I was the one who was never supposed to return.

He'd been protecting himself from that knowledge. He'd refused to give himself to her in hopes that he would protect her too. He saw that now, all in flash. Myrrima was right.

He'd tried to divorce himself from any feeling for her. But he'd loved her from the moment he saw her.

He began to suspect that he
knew
what that meant. He'd stood at Gaborn's back as he studied in the House of Understanding. Borenson had never been a student, had kept his eyes and ears open for danger. But he had learned some things.

Now, he tried to recall something he'd heard once while Gaborn listened to a lecture in the Room of the Heart. The memories came slowly, and Borenson wondered at that. Perhaps they came slowly because he'd lost endowments of wit when Raj Ahten destroyed the Blue Tower. Perhaps they came slowly because he'd never paid much attention to Hearthmaster Jorlis. Who could take a man seriously who spent his whole life thinking about emotions?

In the Room of the Heart, Hearthmaster Jorlis had taught that every man has two minds, the “scant mind” and the “deep mind.”

Jorlis had said that the scant mind was cold, logical, and rational. It knew little of love. It was the part of the mind that fretted about numbers and accounts.

But Jorlis said that every man has another mind, a deep mind. It was the part of the brain that dreamed and struggled to comprehend the world. It was the creative mind that made unexpected insights. It was the part of the mind that assured you when you'd made a right choice, or that warned against danger by sending feelings of uncertainty or fear.

Borenson had always felt skeptical of such teachings. After all, Jorlis was a bit of a pansy—a big-boned man with red cheeks and soft flesh.

But Jorlis claimed that the deep mind would ponder problems for weeks or months, independent of the scant mind, until it discovered solutions that the scant mind could never fathom. Thus, he believed that the deep mind was far wiser than the scant mind.

Jorlis had said that when a man fell in love with a woman at first sight, it was a warning from the deep mind that the woman before him matched his vision of an ideal mate.

The deep mind created that image. It told a man that his
perfect love would have the kindness of his aunt, and the eyes of his mother. She might treat children as tenderly as a neighbor did, and have his father's sense of humor. All of these traits were then bound into an image, woven from borrowed threads into a crude tapestry.

“The recognition you feel when you meet the woman of your dreams, that rush of dizziness and thrill of discovery,” Jorlis had taught, “is merely the deep mind speaking to you. It is warning you that it recognizes in someone some virtues that you've long sought. The deep mind is not always right, but it is always worth listening to.”

Nonsense, Borenson had thought. Jorlis had always seemed to be a touch off.

But with Myrrima, everything that she had done was beginning to convince Borenson that in his case, the deep mind was right.

She was everything that he'd ever hoped for in a woman. She was full of warmth and compassion and endless devotion. All his life, he'd felt as if he were but half a man.

Myrrima completed him.

So he held her.

The cold of her wound seeped into his side, and if his attempt to warm her did any good, he could not tell. He bore it for long minutes, as her face went pale and her trembling increased. The fog around her mouth came out thicker with every breath.

“Hold my hand,” she begged weakly, through chattering teeth. He took her frozen right hand in his, but she shook her head. “Not that one. I can't feel anything.”

He gripped it anyway, took her left hand too. The cold from her right hand was like a fire, burning up his arm. It could not easily be borne.

He wondered if he could divert the cold, let himself become a conduit for her death.

Take me, he begged of the Powers. Take me instead.

She leaned against him heavily, her head resting against his shoulder.

“I love you,” he whispered into her ear.

She nodded slightly. “I know.”

In the distance, a lone wolf howled at the rising moon out in the woods, while stars streaked through the night sky.

He kissed her brow, and Myrrima fell into him, a dead weight. He held her up for a moment. She was breathing still, but he could not guess how much longer she might hold on.

It was late, past midnight, he figured. He felt hungry and exhausted. He had few endowments to help him, none of stamina, and he had no idea how far Fenraven might be. Miles, he suspected.