“Here.” Moondance, a crease of worry between his brows, was back in a few moments with a towel and what looked like folded clothing; green, like his own. “You shall have to care for yourself, I fear. There is trouble, and I have been called to deal with it. Starwind and Savil will be with you shortly.” He hesitated a moment, visibly torn. “Forgive me, I must go.”
He put his burdens down on the pool edge and ran back out the doorway before Vanyel could do more than blink.
Gods - I feel like somebody in a tale, going to sleep and waking up a hundred years later. It seems so hard to think - like I’m still half asleep.
He dressed slowly, trying to collect his thoughts, and making heavy work of it. He did remember - vaguely - Savil telling him that he was too ill for Andrel to help; and he definitely remembered - despite the fog of drugs about the words - being told that she was going to take him to some friends of hers. He hadn’t much cared what was happening at that point. He’d either been too drugged to care, or been hurting too much.
Presumably Moondance, and the absent Starwind, were the friends she meant. They were fully as strange as those weird masks of beads and feathers that Savil had on her wall. As was this place. Wherever it was.
He pulled the deep green tunic over his head, and suddenly realized something. He wasn’t drugged - and he wasn’t hurting, either. Those places in his mind that had burned - he could still feel them, but they weren’t giving him pain.
Moondance said he Healed me. Is that why it feels like I halfway know him? Tayledras. Didn’t Aunt Savil tell us stories about them? I thought that was all those were - stories. Not real. He looked around at the strange room, half-structure, half-natural, each half fitting into the other so well he could scarcely tell where the hand of nature left off and the hand of man began. Real. Gods, if I were to describe this place, nobody would ever believe me. This - II ‘s all so different. I even feel different.
He could sense some kind of barrier around him, around his thoughts. At first it made him wary, but he tested it, tentatively, and found that it was a barrier that he could control. When he thinned it, he became aware of presences, what must be minds, out beyond the limits of this room. Animals, surely, and birds, for their thoughts were dim and here-centered. Then two close together - very bright, but opaque and unreadable. One “felt” like Savil and the other must be the mysterious Starwind. Then two more; just as bright, just as opaque - but one he recognized by the “feel” as being Yfandes. Then a scattering of others…
Yfandes. A Companion. My Companion.
So - it was no hallucination, then. He had somehow gotten Herald-Gifts and a Companion.
Gifts I never wanted, at a cost I never thought I’d pay. I’d trade them and half my life to have - him - back again.
That hit like a blow to the gut. He descended from the level of the uppermost pool to the floor and sat heavily on one of the stone benches around the edge of the room, too tired and depressed to move.
Oh, ‘Lendel… gods, he thought, bleak despair overcoming him. What am I doing here? Why didn’t they just let me die?
:Do you hate me, Chosen?: said a bright, reproachful voice in his mind, :Do you hate me for wishing you to live?:
:Yfandes?: He remembered what Savil had said, about how his Companion would pine herself to death if he died, and sagged with guilt. :Oh, gods, Yfandes, no - no, I’m sorry - I just - :
He’d been able to not-think about it when he’d been drugged. He’d been able to concentrate on nothing more complicated than the next moment. Now - now his mind was only too clear. He couldn’t ignore the reality of Tylendel being gone, and there were no drugs to keep him in a vague fog of forgetting.
:You miss him.: she replied, gently. :You need him, and you miss him. :
:Like my arm. Like my heart. I just can’t imagine going on without him. I don’t know what to do with myself; where to go, what to do next.:
If Yfandes had a reply, he never heard it; just at that moment Savil and a second Tayledras, this one in white breeches, soft, low boots and jerkin, entered the room. Vanyel started to stand; Savil motioned for him to stay where he was. She and the stranger walked slowly across the stone floor and took places on the bench beside him.
Vanyel was shocked at her appearance. Although her hair had always been a pure silvery white, she’d never looked old before. Now she did; she looked every year of her age and more. He recalled what Moondance had said about Tylendel’s death being as hard on her as it was on Vanyel. Now he believed it.
“Aunt Savil,” he said, hesitantly, as she and the stranger arranged themselves comfortably beside him. “Are you all right? I mean - “
“Looking particularly haglike, am I?” she asked dryly. “No, don’t bother to apologize; I’ve got a mirror. I don’t bounce back from strain the way I used to.”
He flushed, embarrassed, and feeling guilty.
“Van, this is Starwind k’Treva,” she continued. “He and Moondance are the Tayledras Adepts I told you younglings about a time or two. This,” she waved her hand around her, “is his, mostly, being as he’s k’Treva Speaker.’’
“In so much as any Tayledras can own the land,” Star-wind noted with one raised eyebrow, his voice calling up images of ancient rocks and deep, still water. “It would be as correct, Wingsister, to say that this place owns me.”
“Point taken. This is k’Treva’s voorthayshen - that’s - how would you translate that, shayana?”
The Tayledras at her side had a triangular face, and his long hair was arranged with two plaits at each temple, instead of one, like Moondance - and he felt older, somehow. At least, that was how he felt to Vanyel.
“Clan Keep, I think would be closest,” Starwind said, “Although k’Treva is not a clan as your people know the meaning of the word. It is closer to the Shin’a’in notion of ‘Clan.’ “
His voice was a little deeper in pitch than Moondance’s and after a moment Vanyel recognized the “feel” of him as being the same as the “blue-green music” in his dreams.
“My lord,” Vanyel began hesitantly.
“There are no ‘lords,’ here, young Vanyel,” the Adept replied. “I speak for k’Treva, but each k’Treva rises or falls on his own.”
Vanyel nodded awkwardly. “Why am I here, sir?” he asked - then added, apprehensively, ‘ ‘What did you do to me? I - forgive me for being rude, but I know you did something. I feel - different.”
“You are here because you have very powerful Mage-Gifts, awakened painfully, awakened late, and out of control,” the Adept replied. His expression was calm, but grave, and held just a hint of worry. “Your aunt decided, and rightly, that there was no way in which you could be taught by the Heralds that would not pose a danger to you and those about you. Moondance and I are used to containing dangerous magics; we do this constantly, it is part of what we do. We can keep you contained, and Savil believes we can teach you effectively. And if we cannot teach you control, then she knows that we can and will contain you in such a way that you will pose no danger to others.”
Moondance had not looked like this - so impersonal, so implacable. Vanyel shivered at the detached calm in Starwind’s eyes; he wasn’t certain what the Adept meant by “containing” him, but he wasn’t eager to find out.
“As to what we have done with you - Moondance Healed your channels, which are the conduits through which you direct energy. And I have taught you, a little, while you were in Healing trance. I could not teach you a great deal in trance, but what I have given you is very important, and will go a great way toward making you safe around others. I have taught you where your center is, how to ground yourself, and how to shield. So that now, at least, you are no longer out of balance, and you may guard yourself against outside thoughts and keep your own inside your mind where they belong. And there will be no more shaking of the earth because of dreams.”
So that was what had happened - with the music, the colors - and this new barricade around his mind.
Star wind leaned forward a little, and his expression became far more human; concerned, and earnest. “Young Vanyel, we, Moondance and I, we are perfectly pleased to have you with us, to help you. But that is all we can do; to help you. You must learn control; we cannot force it upon you. You must learn the use of your Gifts, or most assuredly they will use you. Magic is that kind of force; I beg you to believe me, for I know this to be true. If you do not use it, it will use you. And if it begins to use you,” his eyes grew very cold, “it must be dealt with.”
Vanyel shrank back from that chill.
“But this is neither the place nor the time to speak of such things,” Starwind concluded, rising. “We have you under shield, and you are too drained to cause any problems for the nonce. Youngling, can you walk? If you can, you would do well with exercise and air, and I would take you to a vantage to show you our home, and tell you a little of what we do here.”
Vanyel nodded, not eager to be left to his aching memories again; he found on rising that he was feeling considerably stronger than he had thought. He couldn’t move very fast, but as long as Starwind and Savil stayed at a slow walk, he could keep up with them.
They went from the bathing room back through the bedroom; it looked even more like a natural grotto than the bathing room had. Vanyel almost couldn’t distinguish the real foliage from the fabric around the bed, and the “furniture,” irregularly shaped chairs, benches and tables with thick green cushions and frames of bent branches, fitted in with the plants so well as to frequently seem part of them. There was a curtained alcove (with more of those leaf-mimicking curtains) that seemed to be a wardrobe, for the curtains had been drawn back at one side enough to display a bit of clothing.
From there they passed into a third, most peculiar room. There was no furniture, and in the center of it, growing up from the stone floor, was the living trunk of a tree, one a dozen people could not have encircled with their arms. Attached to the trunk was a kind of spiral staircase. They climbed this - Vanyel feeling weak at the knees and clinging to the railing for most of the climb-to a kind of covered balcony that gave them a vantage point to see all of Starwind’s little kingdom.
This was a valley - no, a canyon; the walls were nearly perpendicular - of hot springs; Vanyel saw steam rising from the lush growth in more places than he could count. Although there was snow rimming the lip of the canyon high above, vegetation within the bowl ran riot.
“K’Treva,” Starwind said, indicating the entire valley with a wave of his hand. “Though mostly only Moondance and I dwell here-below. Beneath, the living-spaces for the hertasi and those who do not wish the trees.”
Vanyel looked over the edge of the balcony; below him was a collection of rooms, mostly windowless, but with skylights, the whole too random to be called a “house.”
“There are other living places above - which is where most of us dwell,” Starwind continued, with an ironic smile. “Moondance is not Tayledras enough to be comfortable above the ground. The hertasi you may or may not see; they serve us, we protect them and allow them to dwell here. They are shy of strangers - even of Tayledras; really, only Moondance is a friend to all of them. They are something like a large lizard, but they are full human in wit. If you should see one, I pray you strive not to frighten it. And although you may go where you will here-below, pray do not come here-above without invitation.”
Vanyel looked up, but couldn’t see any sign of these “living places” - only the staircase spiraling farther up the trunk and vanishing into the branches. The very thought of being up that high was dizzying, and he thought it was likely to take a great deal more than an invitation to get him to climb above.
“Tchah - I stand on Moondance’s side,” Savil replied. “I remember the first time I was here, and you made me try to sleep up in one of your perches. Never again, my friend.”
“You have no sense of adventure,” Starwind countered, putting his palms down on the rail and leaning forward a little. “The last thing, one that you may sense, so that you know it is indeed there - the barrier about the vale. It protects us from that which we would not have pass within and it keeps the vale always warm and sheltered. So - this is k’Treva. What we do here - two things. Firstly, we make places where the magic creatures of the Pelagirs may live in peace. Secondly, we take the magic out of those places where they do not live, making the land safe for man. We use the magic we take to make boundaries about the places of refuge, so that none may pass who do not belong. That is what the k’Varda, the Mage-Clans of the Tayledras, do. We guard the Pelagirs from despoilers as our cousins, the Shin’a’in, guard the Dhorisha Plains.”
“As I keep saying, you’re like we are. You guard the Pelagirs as the Heralds guard Valdemar,” Savil said.
Starwind nodded, his braids swaying. “Aye, save that your Heralds concern themselves with the people, and the Tayledras with the land.”
“Valdemar is the people; we could pack up and flee again, as we did at the founding, and still be Valdemar. I suspect the same would be true of you, if you’d only admit it.”
“Na, the Tayledras are bound to the land, cannot live outside the Pelagirs; we must - “ Starwind was interrupted by the scream of a hawk somewhere above his head. He threw up his forearm, and a large, white raptor plunged down out of the canopy of leaves to land on Starwind’s arm. Vanyel winced, then saw that the Tayledras wore white leather forearm guards, which served to keep the wicked talons from his flesh.
It was a gyrefalcon; its wings beat the air for a moment before it settled, its golden eyes fixed on Starwind’s face.
The Tayledras smoothed its head with one finger, then stared into the hawk’s eyes for a long, long time, seeming to be reading something there.
Then, without warning, he flung up his arm, launching it back into the air from his wrist. The falcon’s wings beat against the thick, damp air, then it gained height and vanished back up into the tree branches.
“Bad news?” Savil asked.
“Nay - good. The situation is not so evil as we feared. Moondance is wearied, but he shall return by sunrise.”
“I’m glad to hear something is going right for someone,” Savil replied, sighing.
“Indeed,” the Adept replied, turning those strange, unreadable eyes on Vanyel. “Indeed. Young Vanyel, I would advise you to walk about, regain your health, eat and rest. When Moondance returns and is at full strength, your schooling will begin.”
So he did as he was told to do; exploring what Starwind called “the vale” from one end to the other. It was shaped like a teardrop, and smaller than it seemed; there were so many pools and springs, waterfalls and geysers, and all cloaked in incredible greenery that effectively hid paths that came within whispering distance of each other, that it gave the illusion of being an endless wilderland.
It kept him occupied, at least. The vale was so exotic, so strange, that he could lose himself in it for hours - and forget, in watching the brightly colored birds and fish, how very much alone he was.
Half of him longed for the time - before Tylendel. The isolation of that dream-scape. The other half shrank from it. He no longer knew what he wanted, anymore, or what he was.
He certainly didn’t know what to do about Yfandes; he needed her, he loved her, but that very affection was a point of vulnerability, another place waiting to be hurt. She seemed to sense his confusion, and kept herself nearby, but not at hand, Mindspeaking only when he initiated the contact.
Savil was staying clear of him, which helped. When Moondance finally made an appearance, he made some friendly overtures, but didn’t go beyond them; Vanyel was perfectly content to leave things that way.
When he asked, the younger Tayledras acted as a kind of guide around the vale, pointing out things Vanyel had missed, explaining how the mage-barrier kept the cold - and other things - out of the vale.
The elusive hertasi never appeared, although their handiwork was everywhere. Clothing vanished and returned cleaned and mended, food appeared at regular intervals, rooms seemed to sweep themselves.
When the vale became too familiar, Vanyel tried to catch a glimpse of them. Anything to keep from thinking.
Then he was given something else to think about.
:You fail,: Starwind said in clear Mindspeech. He was seated cross-legged on the rock of the floor beyond the glowing blue-green barrier, imperturbable as a glacier. -.Again, youngling. :
:But - : Vanyel protested from the midst of the barrier-circle the Adept had cast around him, .I - : He was having a hard time shaping his thoughts into Mindspeech.
:You,: Starwind nodded. .-Exactly so. Only you. Until you match your barrier and merge it with mine, mine will remain. And while mine remains, you cannot pass it, and I will not take you from this room. :
Vanyel drooped with weariness; it seemed that the Tayledras mage had been schooling him, without pause or pity, for days, not mere hours. This was the seventh - or was it eighth? - such test the Adept had put him to. Starwind would go into his head, somehow, show him what was to be done. Once. Then Vanyel fumbled his way through whatever it was. As quickly as Vanyel mastered something, the Adept sprang a trial of it on him.
There was no sign of exit or entrance in this barren, rock-walled room where he’d been taken, and no clue as to where in the complex of ground-level rooms it was. There was only Starwind, his pointed face as expressionless as the rock walls.
Vanyel didn’t know what to think anymore. These new senses of his - they told him things he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. For instance - there was something in this valley. A power - a living power. It throbbed in his mind, in time with his own pulse. He had told Savil, thinking he must be ill and imagining it. She had just nodded and told him not to worry about it.
He hadn’t asked her much, or gone to her often. If I don’t touch, I can’t be hurt again. The half-unconscious litany was the same, but the meaning was different. I’II don’t open myself, I won’t be open to loss either.
The Tayledras, Starwind and Moondance, alternately frightened and fascinated him. They were like no one he’d ever known before, and he couldn’t read them. Starwind in particular was an enigma. Moondance seemed easier to reach.
But there was always that danger. Don’t reach; don’t touch, whispered the part of him that still hurt. Don’t try.
There had been a point back at Haven when he’d tried to reach out, first to Savil, then to Lissa. He’d wanted someone to depend on, to tell him what to do, but the moment he’d tried to get them to make his decisions for him, they’d pushed him gently away.
Now - no more; all he wanted was to be left alone.
It seemed, however, that the Tayledras had other plans.
Savil had come to get him in the morning, after several days of wandering about on his own, reminding him of what Starwind had said about being schooled in controlling these unwanted powers of his. He’d followed her through three or four rooms he hadn’t seen before into -
- something -
He wasn’t sure what it was; it had felt a little like a Gate, but there was no portal, just a spot marked on the floor. He’d stumbled across it, whatever it was, and found himself on the floor of this room, a room with no doorways.
Savil had appeared behind him, but before he could say anything, she’d just given him a troubled look, said to Starwind, “Don’t hurt him, shayana,” and left. Stepped into thin air and was gone. Left him alone with this - this madman. This unpredictable creature who’d been forcing him all morning to do things he didn’t understand, using the powers he hadn’t even come to terms with possessing, much less comprehending.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he cried, ready to weep with weariness. Starwind ignored the words as if they had never been spoken.
:Mindspeech, Chosen,: came Yfandes’ calm thought, -.That is part of his testing. Use Mindspeech.:
He braced himself, sharpened his thoughts into a kind of dagger, and flung them at Starwind’s mind.
:Why are you DOING this to me?:
.-Gently,: came the unruffled reply. .-Gently, or I shall not answer you. :
Well, that was more than he’d gotten out of the Adept in hours. :Why?: he pleaded.
:You are a heap of dry tinder,: Starwind replied serenely. :You are a danger to yourself and those around you. It requires only a spark to send you into an uncontrolled blaze. I teach you control, so that the fires in you come when you will and where you will.: He stared at Vanyel across the shimmering mage-barrier. :Would you have this again?:
He flung into Vanyel’s face memories that could only have come from Savil - a clutch of Herald-trainees weeping hysterically, infected with his grief; Mardic flying through the air, hitting the wall, and sliding down it to land in an unconscious heap; the very foundations of the Palace shaking -
:No - : he shuddered.
.-There could be worse - : Starwind showed him what he meant by “worse.” A vivid picture of Withen dead - crushed like a beetle beneath a boot - by the powers Vanyel did not yet comprehend and could not direct.
:NO!: He tried to deny the very possibility that he could do anything of the kind, rejecting the image with a violence that -
- that made the floor beneath him tremble.
.-You see?: Starwind said, still unperturbed. :You see? Without control, without understanding, you can - and will - kill, without ever meaning to. Now - :
Vanyel hung his head, and wearily tried to match the barrier one more time.
Savil ran for the pass-through, in response to Starwind’s urgent summons, Moondance a bare pace behind her. She hit the permanent set-spell, a kind of low-power Gate, at a run; there was the usual eyeblink of vertigo, and she stumbled onto the slate floor of Starwind’s Work Room and right into the middle of a royal mess.
Starwind was only now picking himself up off the floor behind her; there was a smell of scorched rock and the acrid taint of ozone in the air. And small wonder; the area around all around Vanyel in the center of the Work Room was burned black.
Lying sprawled at one side of the burned area was the boy himself, scorched and unconscious.
Moondance popped through the pass-through, glanced from one fallen body to the other, and made for the boy as needing him the most. That left Starwind to Savil.
She gave him her hands and helped him to his feet; he shook his head to clear it, then pulled his hair back over his shoulders. “God of my fathers,” he said, passing his hand over his brow. “I feel as if I have been kicked across a river.’’
Savil ran a quick check over him, noted a channel-pulse and cleared it for him. “What happened?” she asked urgently, keeping one hand on his elbow to steady him. “It looks like a mage-war in here.”
“I believe I badly frightened the boy,” Starwind said, unhappily, checking his hands for damage. “I intended to frighten him a little, but not so badly as I did. He was supposed to be calling lightning and he was balking. He plainly refused to use the power he had called. I grew impatient with him - and I cast the image of wyrsa at him. He panicked; and not only threw his own power, he pulled power from the valley-node. Then he realized what he had done and aborted it the only way he could at that point, pulling it back on himself.” Starwind gave her a reproachful glance. “You told me he could sense the node, but you did not tell me he could pull from it.”
“I didn’t know he could, myself. Great good gods - shayana, it was wyrsa that his shay ‘kreth ‘ashke called down on his enemies, didn’t I tell you?” Savil’s gut went cold; she bit her lip, and looked over her shoulder at Moondance and his patient. The Healer-Adept was kneeling beside the boy with both hands held just above his brow. “Lord and Lady, no wonder he nearly blew the place apart!”
Starwind looked stricken to the heart, as Moondance took his hands away from the boy’s forehead and put his arm under Vanyel’s shoulder to pick him up and support him in a half-sitting position. “You told me - but I had forgotten. Goddess of my mothers, what did I do to the poor child?”
“Ashke, what did you do?” Moondance called worriedly, one hand now on Vanyel’s forehead, the other arm holding him. “The child’s mind is in shock.”
“Only the worst possible,” Starwind groaned. “I threw at him an image of the things his love called for vengeance.”
“Shethka. Well, no help for it; what is done cannot be unmade. Ashke, I will put him to bed, and call his Companion, and we will deal with him. We will see what comes of this.” He picked the boy up, and strode through the pass-through without a backward glance.
“Ah, gods - this was going well, until this moment,” Starwind mourned. “He was gaining true control. Gods, how could I have been so stupid?”
“It happens,” Savil sighed, “And with Van more so than with anyone else, it seems. He almost seems to attract ill luck. Shayana, why did you throw anything at him, much less wyrsa?”
“He finally is willing enough to learn the controls, the defensive exercises, but not the offensive.” Starwind put his palms to his temples and massaged for a moment, a pain-crease between his eyebrows. “And if he does not master the offensive - “
“The offensive magics will remain without control,” Savil said grimly, the smell of scorched rock still strong about her. “Like Tylendel. I couldn’t get past his trauma to get those magics fully under conscious lock. I should have brought him to you.”
“Wingsister, hindsight is ever perfect,” Starwind spared a moment to send a thread of wordless compassion her way, and she smiled wanly. “The thing with this boy - I told you, he had the lightnings in his hand, I could see him holding them, but he would not cast them. I thought to frighten him into taking the offense.” He lowered his hands and looked helplessly at Savil. “He is a puzzle to me; I cannot fathom why he will not fully utilize his powers.”
“Because he still doesn’t understand why he should, I suppose,” Savil brooded, rocking back and forth on her heels. “He can’t see any reason to use those powers. He doesn’t want to help anyone, all he wants now is to be left alone.”
Starwind looked aghast. “But - so strong - how can he not - ‘‘
“He hasn’t got the hunger yet, shayana, or if he’s got it, everything else he’s feeling has so overwhelmed him that all he can register is his own pain.” Savil shook her head. “That, mostly, would be my guess. Maybe it’s that he hasn’t ever seen a reason to care for anyone he doesn’t personally know. Maybe it’s that right now he has no energy to care for anyone but himself. Kellan tells me Yfandes would go through fire and flood for him, so there has to be something there. Maybe Moondance can get through to him.”
“Only if he survives what we do to him,” Starwind replied, motioning her to precede him into the pass-through, and sunk in gloom.
Vanyel woke with an ache in his heart and tears on his face; the image of the wyrsa had called up everything he wanted most to forget.
He could tell that he was lying on his bed, still clothed, but his hands and forearms felt like they’d been bandaged and the skin of his face hurt and felt hot and tight.
The full moon sent silver light down through the skylight above his head. He saw the white rondel of it clearly through the fronds of the ferns. His head hurt, and his burned hands, but not so much as the empty place inside him, or the guilt - the terrible guilt.
‘Lendel, ‘Lendel - my fault.
He heard someone breathing beside him; a Mindtouch confirmed that it was Moondance. He did not want to talk with anyone right now; he just wanted to be left aJone. He started to turn his face to the wall, when the soft, oddly young-sounding voice froze him in place.
“I would tell you of a thing - “
Vanyel wet his lips, and turned his head on the pillow to look at the argent-and-black figure seated beside him on one of the strange “chairs” he favored.
Moondance might have been a statue; a silvered god sitting with one leg curled beneath him, resting his crossed arms on his upraised knee, face tilted up to the moon. Moonlight flowed over him in a flood of liquid silver.
“There was a boy,” Moondance said, quietly. “His name was Tallo. His parents were farmers, simple people, good people in their way, really. Very tied to their ways, to their land, to the cycle of the seasons. This Tallo… was not. He felt things inside him that were at odds with the life they had. They did not understand their son, who wanted more than just the fields and the harvests. They did love him, though. They tried to understand. They got him learning, as best they could; they tried to interest the priest in him. They didn’t know that what the boy felt inside himself was something other than a vocation. It was power, but power of another sort than the priest’s. The boy learned at last from the books that the priest found for him that what he had was what was commonly called magic, and from those few books and the tales he heard, he tried to learn what to do with it. This made him - very different from his former friends, and he began to walk alone. His parents did not understand this need for solitude, they did not understand the strange paths he had begun to walk, and they tried to force him back to the ways of his fathers. There were - arguments. Anger, a great deal of it, on both sides. And there was another thing. They wished him to wed and begin a family. But the boy Tallo had no yearning toward young women - but young men - that was another tale.”
Moondance sighed, and in the moonlight Vanyel saw something glittering wetly on his eyelashes. “Then, the summer of the worst of the arguments, there came a troupe of gleemen to the village. And there was a young man among them, a very handsome young man, and the boy Tallo found that he was not the only young man in the world who had yearnings for his own sex. They quickly became lovers - Tallo thought he had never been so happy. He planned to leave with the gleemen, to run away and join them when they left his village, and his lover encouraged this. But it happened that they were found together. The parents, the priest, the entire village was most wroth, for such a thing as shay’a’chern was forbidden even to speak of, much less to be. They - beat Tallo, very badly; they beat the young gleeman, then they cast Tallo and his lover out of the village. Then it was that the young gleeman spurned Tallo, said in anger and in pain what he did not truly mean, that he wanted nothing of him. And Tallo became wild with rage. He, too, was in pain; he had suffered for this lover, been cast out of home and family for his sake, and now he had been rejected - and he called the lightning down with his half-learned magic. He did not mean to do anything more than frighten the young man - but that was not what happened. He killed him; struck him dead with the power that he could not control.”
Moonlight sparkled silver on the tears that slowly crept down Moondance’s face.
“Tallo had heard his lover’s thoughts, and knew that the young man had not meant in truth the hurtful things he had said. Tallo had wanted only for the boy to say with words what he had heard in the other’s mind. So he called the lightning to frighten him, but he learned that the lightning would not obey him when called by anger, and not by skill. And he heard the boy crying out his name as he died. Crying out in fear and terrible pain, and Tallo unable to save him. Tallo could not live with what he had done. With the dagger from his lover’s belt, he slashed his own wrist and waited to die, for he felt that only with his own death could he atone for murdering his love.”
Moondance raised his left arm to push some of his heavy hair back from his face, and the moon picked out the white scar that ran from his wrist halfway to his elbow.
“There was, however, a stranger on the road; an out-lander who had sensed the surge of power and read the signs and knew that it was uncontrolled. She came as quickly as she could - though not quickly enough to save both. She found the young men, one dead, one nearly - she saved the one she could, and brought him to a friend who she thought might understand.”
Moondance was so silent and for so long, that Vanyel thought he was through speaking. He stared up at the moon, eyes and cheeks shining wetly, like a marble statue in the rain.
Then he spoke again, and every syllable carried with it a sense of terrible pain. “So here is the paradox. If the boy Tallo had not misused his fledgling powers and struck down his lover, they would have gone off together, and, in time, parted. Tallo would likely have been found by a Mage and taught, or - who knows? - gotten as far as Valdemar and been taken by a Companion. Those with the power are not left long to themselves. It might even have been that the Mage that found him was a dark one, and Tallo might have turned for a time or for all time to evil. But that is not what happened. The boy killed - murdered in ignorance - and was brought to k’Treva. And in k’Treva he found forgiveness, and the learning he needed as the seed needs the spring rain - and one thing more. He found his shay’kreth’ashke. In your tongue, that means ‘lifebonded.’ “
Vanyel started. Moondance nodded without turning to look at him. “You see? Paradox. Had things not fallen as they did, Tallo would never have met with Starwind. The Tayledras are very secretive and Wingsister Savil is one of the first to see one of us, much less to see k’Treva, in years beyond counting. The two meant to be life-bonded would never have found each other. There would be no Healer-Adept in k’Treva, and much Tayledras work would have gone undone because of that. So - much good has come of this, and much love - but it has its roots in murder. Murder unintentional, but murder all the same.”
Moondance sighed again. “So what is the boy Tallo to think? Starwind’s solution was to declare the boy Tallo dead by his own hand, a fitting expiation for his guilt, and to bring to life a new person altogether, one Moondance k’Treva. So there is no more Tallo, and there is one that magic has changed into a man so like Tayledras that he might have been born to the blood. But sometimes the boy Tallo stirs in the heart of Moondance - and he wonders - and he weeps - and he mourns for the wrongs he has done.”
He turned his head, then, and held out his hand to Vanyel. “Ke’chara, would you share grief with Tallo? Weeping alone brings no comfort, and your heart is as sore as mine.”
Vanyel started to reach for that hand, then hesitated.
If I don’t touch -
“If you do not touch,” said Moondance, as if he read Vanyel’s thought, “You do not live. If you seal yourself away inside your barriers, you seal out the love with the pain. And though love sometimes brings pain, you have no way of knowing if the pain you feel now might not bring you to love again.”
“Tylendel’s dead.” There; he’d said it, said it out loud. It was real - and couldn’t be changed. The tight, burned skin on his face hurt as he held back tears. “Nothing is going to bring him back. I’ll never be anything but alone.”
Moondance nodded, slowly, and left his hand resting on the edge of the bed; Vanyel couldn’t see his face, shadowed as it was by the white wing of his hair.
“The great love is gone. There are still little loves-friend to friend, brother to sister, student to teacher. Will you deny yourself comfort at the hearthfire of a cottage because you may no longer sit by the fireplace of a palace? Will you deny yourself to those who reach out to you in hopes of warming themselves at your hearthfire? That is cruel, and I had not thought you to be cruel, Vanyel. And what of Yfandes? She loves you with all her being. Would you lock her out of your regard as well? That is something more than cruel.”
“Why are you telling me, asking me this?” The words were torn out of him, unwilling.
“Because I nearly followed the road you are walking.” The Tayledras shifted slightly in his chair and Vanyel heard the wood creak a little. “Better, I thought, not to touch at all than to touch and bring hurt upon myself and others. Better to do nothing than to make a move and have it be the wrong one. But even deciding to not touch or to be nothing is a decision, Vanyel, and by deciding not to touch, so as to avoid hurt, I then hurt those who tried to touch me.” He waited, but Vanyel could not bring himself to answer him.
Moondance’s expression grew alien, unreadable, and he shrugged again. “It is your decision; it is your life. A Healer cannot live so; it may be that you can.”
He uncoiled himself from his chair and in a kind of seamless motion was standing on his feet, shaking back his hair. The tears were gone from his eyes, and his expression was as serene as if they had never been there as he looked down on Vanyel. “If you are in pain, Mind-call, and I shall come.”
Before Vanyel could blink, he was gone.
Morning came - but the expected summons to Star-wind’s Work Room did not. The sun rose, he wandered from room to empty room, in the small area that he knew, without finding anyone. He began to wonder if his rejection of Moondance last night had led them all to abandon him here.
Finally he found a way out into the valley itself, and stood by the rock-arch of the doorway, blinking a little at the bright sunlight, unfiltered by the tinted skylight. There were ferns the size of a small room, bushes and small trees with leaves he could have used as a rain shelter, and the larger trees, while not matching the one growing up through the middle of the “house” in girth, were still large enough that it would take five people to encircle their trunks with their arms.
:Yfandes?: he Mindcalled tentatively. He wasn’t at all sure he’d get a reply.
But he did. :Here,: she said - and a few moments later, she came frisking through the undergrowth, tail and spirits held banner-high. She nuzzled his cheek. :Are your hands better?:
He had unwrapped them this morning from their bandages, and aside from a little soreness, they seemed fine - certainly nothing near as painful as they had been last night.
.I think so.: He rested his forehead against her neck. It was incredibly comforting just to be in her presence, and hard to remember to barricade himself around her. :Where is everybody?:
:Savil is up above, in Starwind’s place.: She gave him a mental picture of a kind of many-windowed room perched in the limbs of what could only be the tree growing up through the center of the “house.” :She doesn’t much care for it, and having her up there makes Kellan nervy, but he was upset over the accident yesterday and he feels happier up in the boughs. They’re talking.:
.-With the other k’Treva?:
:I think perhaps. :
:Where’s Moondance?:
:By himself. Thinking,: Yfandes said.
: ‘Fandes - did I - : He swallowed. :Did I do something wrong last night?:
She looked at him reproachfully. :Yes. I think you ought to talk to him. You hurt him more deeply last night than he showed. He’s never told that story to anyone; Savil and Starwind know it, but he never told them. And he’s never even told Starwind how badly he still feels. It cost him a great deal to tell it to you.:
His first reaction was guilt. His second was anger.
By his own admission, Moondance’s tragic affair had been nothing more than that - an affair doomed to be brief. How could he even begin to compare his hurt with Vanyel’s? Moondance wasn’t alone -
Moondance hadn’t murdered Starwind - just some stupid gleeman, who would have passed out of his life in a few weeks. A common player, and no great love.
Moondance still had Starwind. Would always have Starwind. Vanyel would be alone forever. So how could Moondance compare the two of them?
Yfandes seemed to sense something of what was going on in his mind; she pulled away from him, a little, and looked - or was it felt? - offended.
That only made him angrier.
Without another word, spoken or thought, he turned on his heel and ran - away from her, away from the Tayledras - away from all of them. Ran to a little corner at the end of the vale, a sullen grove of dark, fleshy-leaved trees and ferns, where very little light ever came. He pushed his way in among them, and curled up around his misery and his anger, his stomach churning, his eyes stinging.
They don’t give a damn about me - just about what I can do. They don’t care how much I hurt, all they want is for me to do what I’m told. Savil just wants to see me tricked into being a Herald, that’s all. They don’t any of them understand! They don’t any of them know how much - I- -
He began crying silently. ‘Lendel, ‘Lendel, they don’t know how much of me died with you. All I want is to be left alone. Why can’t they leave me alone? Why can’t they stop trying to make me do what they want? They’re all alike, dammit, they’re just like Father, the only thing different is what they want out of me! Oh ‘Lendel - I need you so much -
He stayed there, crying off and on, until full dark-then crept as silently as he could back to the building-part of him hoping to find them waiting for him.
Only to find it as vacant as when he’d left it. In fact, only the night-lamps were burning, and those were only left for the benefit of any of the Tayledras who might care to come down to the ground during the night. It didn’t even look as if he’d been missed.
They don’t care, he thought forlornly, surveying the empty, ill-lit rooms. They really don’t care. Oh, gods -
His stomach knotted up into a hard, squirming ball.
No one cares. No one ever did except ‘Lendel. And no one ever will again.
His shoulders slumped, and a second hard lump clogged his throat. He made another circuit of the rooms, but they stayed achingly, echoingly empty. No sign of anyone. No sign anyone would ever come back.
After pacing through the place until the echoes of his own footsteps were about to drive him into tears, he finally crawled into bed.
And cried himself to sleep.
Leareth laughed; his icy laughter echoed off the cliffs as he held up one hand and made the simplest of gestures. A mage-storm swirled into being precisely at the edge of Vanyel’s defenses. Vanyel poured power into his shielding; this was the last, the very last of his protections. He was drained, the energy-sources were drained, and he himself had taken far more damage in the duel than he would allow Leareth to know.
He was no match for the scouring blast that peeled his shields away faster than he could replace them. Leareth smiled behind his mage-storm, as if he knew that Vanyel was weakening by the moment. Sweat ran into his eyes and started to freeze there; he went to his knees, still fighting, and knowing he was going to lose. Leareth seemed not even wearied.
A final blast struck down the last of his protections. Vanyel screamed as agony such as he’d never known before arced through his body -
Vanyel woke up; the bed was soaking with sweat, and he was shaking so hard the ferns over his head quivered. He was afraid that he had screamed out loud.
But when no one came running into the room, he knew that he hadn’t; that everything had been in the dream. At least this time he hadn’t awakened anyone, and hadn’t been trapped in the dream.
Dream. Oh, gods, it isn’t just a dream. He shivered, despite the warmth of the room, and stared up through the fern fronds at the descending moon. The nightmare had him in a grasp of iron claws and would not let him go.
This is going to be real, it feels real. It’s ForeSight. It has to be. Leareth calls me ‘ ‘Herald-Mage Vanyel,’’ and I’m in Whites. I’m dreaming my own death. This is what is going to happen to me, how I’m going to die, if I become a Herald. Alone. In terrible pain, and all alone, fighting a doomed battle.
He shivered harder, chilled by the cold of the dream, chilled even more with fear. He finally threw the covers back, grabbed his robe, and padded into the room with the hot pools, finding his way by moonlight and habit.
For this was not the first time he’d awakened in the middle of the night, dream-chilled and needing warmth. This was just the first time since he’d arrived here that the dream had been clear enough to remember.
He climbed into the uppermost pool, easing himself down into the hot water with a sigh and a shiver. Oh, gods. I don’t want to die like that. They can’t want me to have to face that, can they? If they knew about this dream, would they still want me to be a Herald? Gods, I know the answer to that -
He eased a little farther down into the hot water, until it lapped at his chin. He was fighting blind, unreasoning panic, and losing. What am I going to do? Oh, gods - I can’t think -
I have to get away. I can’t stay here. If I do, they ‘II try and talk me around. Where can I go? I don’t even know where “home” is from here. But I can’t stay - I’II just go, I’ll just pack up and go, and hope something turns up, it’s all I can do. It means leaving Yfandes -
For a moment that thought was more than he could bear. But - fear was stronger. It’s lose her, or lose my life. No. I can’t. I can’t face an end like that. Besides, he choked on a sob, she just wants me to be a Herald, too -
He looked up, judging the hour by the moon. I’ve got a few hours until dawn. I can be out of the valley and well away before they even start looking for me. And they might not - Starwind still isn’t ready to deal with me again; they might just think I’ve gone off somewhere to be alone, especially if I block Yfandes out now and keep her out.
He climbed out of the pool and dried himself with his robe; he knew exactly where the clothing he’d arrived in was hung - the far end of Moondance’s closet. He pulled it on as quickly as he could, taking the heavy cloak and draping it over one arm. One of the packs was in there, too, the one with the rest of his winter clothes. They were too warm to wear in the valley, so he’d never unpacked them, wearing instead Moondance’s outgrown things. There was always food out in the room beside the one with the staircase; Tayledras sometimes kept odd hours. He niched enough bread and cheese to last several days and stuffed it into the pack with his clothing.
It took him most of a candlemark to reach the entrance to the valley. If it hadn’t been snowing, he might have turned back at that moment - but it was, lightly, enough to cover his tracks. He swung the heavy cloak over his shoulders, braced himself for the shock of the temperature change, and stepped out into the dark and cold, remembering just in time to put up a shield so that he could not be tracked by his own aura.
“Two steps forward, one step back,” Moondance’s voice drifted up the ladder - Savil refused to call anything that steep a “staircase” - to Starwind’s ekele; it was a good three breaths before Moondance himself appeared. His head poked through the hatchway in the gleaming wooden floor just as a gust of wind made the whole tree sway and creak.
Savil gulped, and gripped the arms of her low chair, looking resolutely away from the windows and their view of the birds flying by below them. Starwind never would tell her what it was they used in those windows instead of glass - which wouldn’t have lasted ten breaths in a high wind. It was the same thing they used for the skylights, only thinner. Some kind of tough, flexible, transparent membrane - and Savil could not bring herself to believe that it would hold if you fell against it. The ekele creaked again, and she shuddered as she saw the window-stuff ripple a little with the warping of the window frames.
“Would you mind explaining that cryptic remark?” she asked, as the rest of Moondance emerged from the “entrance.”
“Oh, thy pupil, Wingsister,” he said, at his most formal, closing the hatchway against another gust of chill air. The ladder was sheltered, but not entirely enclosed - that would have been impractical - and Starwind couldn’t see wasting a mage-barrier on the entrance to his “nest” when the hatchway served perfectly well most of the time. “Bright the day, Master-ashke. “
“Wind to thy wings,” Starwind replied automatically, turning away from the window, his gloom brightening a little. “Shay’kreth’ashke, there is no ‘Master’ here for thee.”
“Nay, till the day thy wings bear thee upwards, thou’rt my Master.’’ Moondance glided across the unsteady floor to Starwind’s side, as surefooted as a sailor on a moving deck.
“Enough, I’m drowning,” Savil groaned. “Gods, life-bonded - it’s enough to make me celibate. What about my pupil? And will you please come away from that window? I keep thinking the next gust is going to pitch you out.”
“The window would hold. Besides, no Tayledras has fallen from his ekele in years beyond counting, Wingsister,” Starwind said, turning his back to the window and leaning on the ledge.
“So the time is long past for it to happen, and I don’t want it to be you, all right?” Another gust made the whole tree groan, and she clutched at the arms of the chair, her knuckles going white.
“Very well,” Starwind was actually smiling as he stepped away from the window and folded himself bone-lessly into one of the chairs bolted to the floor of his ekele. He got a certain amount of pleasure out of teasing Savil about her acrophobia.
Each ekele was something like an elaborate treehouse; there was one for each major branch of the King Tree, some twenty in all. Not all were tenanted, and they were mostly used for meditation, sleeping, teaching, and recreation. For everything else, the “place below” served far better. But when a Tayledras needed to think, he frequently retreated to his ekele, sometimes for weeks, touching foot to ground only when he needed to.
An ekele consisted of a single windowed room, varying in size, made of polished wood so light in color that it was almost white, and furnished at most with a few chairs bolted to the floor, a table likewise bolted, and rolled pads stored in one corner for sleeping. Starwind’s was one of the highest, hence, one of the smallest. The view was majestic. It was wasted on Savil.
Moondance took a third chair, and sat in it sideways, legs draped over the arms. “Well?” Savil demanded. “Are you going to explain yourself?”
“Your pupil. First, we strive to bring him to not depend upon others. So - then he pulls in upon himself, confiding not even in his Companion, hiding his pain within. Then I try to bring him to confess the pain, to share it, to reach out - “
“So?”
Moondance shrugged, and Savil sensed he hadn’t told everything.
“What did you tell him?”
Moondance’s moods could be read from his eyes; they were a murky gray-blue. “I - told him of myself. I thought if he could see that he is not the only soul in the world that feels pain, he might be brought to share it.”
Savil’s eyes narrowed; Moondance was unhappy. “Shayana, did he hurt you? If he did - “
“Na, the only one who hurt me was myself.” His eyes cleared, and he gave her a wry smile. “He only pushed me away, is all. So, he hides all day, and this morning he is hiding again. His bed is empty, the hertasi say he went to the end of the vale, and his Companion says he has blocked her out entirely. To put it rudely, Wingsister, he is sulking.”
Savil sighed, forgetting to clutch the arms of the chair. “Gods, what are we to do with him?”
Starwind’s expression sobered again, and he began to answer - but was interrupted. Both Tayledras snapped to attention; their heads swung to face the window as if a single string had pulled them in that direction.
Two birds shot up from below and hovered there, just outside that window; the white gyrefalcon, and a second, of normal plumage. Starwind leaped out of his chair and flung the window open; the birds swirled in on the blast of wind that entered, and he slammed the window shut again.
Moondance had jumped to his feet, holding both arms out, ready for the birds, the moment Starwind went for the window. The falcons homed for him unerringly and were settling on the leather guards on his forearms before Starwind had finished latching the window closed.
The elder Tayledras held out his arm, and the burl falcon lofted to his forearm with a flutter of pinions, settling immediately.
Both Tayledras stared into their birds’ eyes in silent communion. Savil kept as still as she could; while the bond between Hawkbrother and his birds was a strong one, and the magic-bred birds were considerably more than their wild brethren, their minds were something less than that of a very young child, perhaps a trifle superior to a cat, and it didn’t take much to distract them.
The white falcon mantled; the buff cried. The Tayledras’ eyes refocused, and Savil read “trouble” in the grim lines of their mouths.
“What?” she asked.
“First - tampering, as you had reported it to us, but this time on our grounu and not on k’Vala,” Starwind said, soothing his bird by stroking its breast-feathers. “A clutch of colddrakes, from the look of it. Something has made them move, so when we deal with the drakes, we shall have to look farther afield; there are folk settled in that direction under k’Treva protection. This is the first time we have caught the culprit in the act, and I do not intend to take this lightly.’’
“I hope you’re counting me in that ‘we’; a clutch of drakes needs every mage you can muster,” she said, getting carefully to her feet and bracing herself against the sway of the ekele.
“If you would - you would be welcome.” Starwind looked relieved. “But Vanyel - “
“If he’s hiding, he’ll only come out when he’s ready.
He’s not going to come to any harm while he’s in the vale. How far are these monsters, anyway?”
“Haifa day’s footpace; perhaps less,” Moondance replied, “The which I do not like. It speaks for them being harried, or even Gated. In which case, why and who?”
“Good questions, both of them,” Savil agreed. “Who can we count on?’’
“Nothing under an Adept, not with drakes; not even Journeymen should handle drake-swarms, at least not to my mind. Shethka. “
“Don’t tell me, we’re the only three in any shape to take them on, right?”
“Sunsong is still recovering from moving the firebirds to sanctuary, Brightwind is too old to travel, Stormwing is pregnant.”
“Lord and Lady - lock her up!” Savil exclaimed.
“No fear, she’s steadied since she reached Adept. No more headlong races into danger just for the thrill. So - Rainstar is out already, with another call from the kyree, as is Fireflight. And that is the total of k’Treva Adepts.” Starwind grimaced. “If this were summer…”
“If this were summer, it wouldn’t be colddrakes, ashke, “ Moondance reminded him. “We work with what we have, and grateful that Wingsister Savil is with us.”
“Let’s get on with it,” Savil said, steadying herself for the long climb down, as the Tayledras transferred their birds from forearm to shoulder for the descent. “So far as I’m concerned, I’ll take a colddrake over your bedamned ladder any time!’’
The snow cleared just before dawn, and the sun rose, pale and glorious, shining through the bare branches of the trees. The forest was filled with light; with the light came a resurgence of Vanyel’s good sense.
He sat down on a stump, tired and winded, and suddenly seemed to wake out of the hold of his nightmare. What am I doing out here? he thought, panting. I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get there, I have no idea where I am! I just - hared off into nowhere, like a complete idiot!
He put his pack down at his feet and scooped up some of the new snow in his mitten and ate it; it numbed his tongue, but it didn’t do much for his thirst. I can’t believe I did anything this stupid.
He wrapped his cloak tighter, and tucked his knees up under his chin, staring at the delicate tracery of white branches against the painfully blue sky. He began to think things through, slowly; one small, painful step at a time.
He flushed with shame. I can’t believe I did this. Dammit, I know how much Savil loves me, I’ve felt it - and Yfandes, and - damn, I am a rotten fool. Moondance was just trying to say that it’s - easier to have other people around who hurt when you hurt, not that he thought he hurt worse than me. I hurt him by pushing him away.
His blush deepened. Worst of it is, he’ll likely forgive me without my asking. They didn’t abandon me yesterday; they were busy - probably over my welfare. They gave me exactly what I wanted; to be left alone. I should have been knocked up against a wall.
He brooded, watching the birch branches swaying in the breeze. He was alone, completely alone, as he had not been since he left Forst Reach. The only thing breaking the silence was the whisper of the breeze and the occasional call of a winter bird. It was the kind of solitude he had sought - and not found - in the ice-dream. And now that he had it, he didn’t want it.
Not that this place wasn’t peaceful - but a sanctuary, as he had discovered with his little hideaway at the keep, could all too easily become a prison.
When you lock things out, he thought slowly, you lock yourself in. I think maybe that was what Moondance was trying to tell me.
He stared at the white branches, not seeing them, and not really thinking; just letting things turn over in the back of his mind. There was a half-formed thought back there, an important one. But it wasn’t quite ready to come out yet.
Finally he sighed, and turned his thoughts back to his own stupidity. Even if that dream is ForeSight, there’s probably ways around it. Nobody’s going to force me into being a Herald. I could probably stay here if I asked to. There was no reason to go running off into the wilderness with nothing but what I could carry and no weapons. Gods, what a fool I am!
He swiveled around to look down his backtrail. Even as he watched, the brisk breeze was filling in the last of his tracks with the light, powdery snow.
He groaned aloud. Oh, fine. Just fine. I probably won’t be able to find my way back now! I don’t need teachers, I need nursemaids!
Then he blinked, caught in sudden astonishment at the tone of his own thoughts. He sat up a little straighter and took stock of himself, and found that he was - feeling alive again. Feeling ready to be alive.
It’s like I’ve been sick, fevered, and the fever just broke. Like I’ve been broken inside, somehow, and I’m finally starting to feel healed. I haven’t felt this - good - since Tylendel - died -
He closed his eyes, expecting pain at that thought. There was pain, but not the debilitating agony of loss it had been.
‘Lendel, he thought with a tinge of wonder, I still miss you. It still hurts, you not being here. But I guess Moon-dance was right. I have to get on with my life, even though you aren’t here to share it.
He opened his eyes on the snow-sparkling forest, and actually managed a weak smile at his own folly. “I really am an idiot, a right royal moon calf. And you’d have been the first to laugh at me, wouldn’t you, ‘Lendel?” He shook his head at himself. “All right, I guess I’d better figure out how to find my way back without a trail to follow.”
Then the answer came to him, and he laughed at his own stupidity. “Lord and Lady, it’s a good thing you take care of fools. All I have to do is look for mages. It’s not like there’s too many enclaves of mages out here, after all! The power should be there for even a dunderhead like me to see.”
He closed his eyes again, and took a deep breath of the cold, crisp air. Center - ground - and open - well, just like I figured, there they are -
The surge of Gate-energy hit him with a shock, knocking him senseless.
* * *
When Vanyel came to again, the sun was high overhead, shining down on his cheek; it was noon, or nearly. He was lying where he’d fallen, on his side, braced between his pack and the stump. He’d curled up around the pack, and the roots from the stump were digging into his side and leg. His ears were ringing - or was it his head? Whatever; it felt as if he’d been graced with one of Jervis’ better efforts.
Gods. He glanced up at the sun, and winced. That was a Gate. Nothing else feels like that. Oh, I hurt. It’s a good thing I was wrapped up in this cloak when I fell over, or I’d have frozen.
He pushed the pack away, and rolled over onto his stomach. That at least got the sun out of his eyes. He got his knees under him, and pushed himself up off the snow with his arms; he was stiff and cold, but otherwise intact. Only his head hurt, and that in the peculiar “inside” way that meant he’d “bruised” those new senses of his. He knelt where he was for a moment, then pushed his hood back and looked around. It looked as if he’d fallen right over sideways when the shock hit him.
Guess I’d better get moving. Before I turn into a snow-statue. He pulled himself to his feet with the help of the stump, then stamped around the snow for several moments, trying to get his blood moving again.
I hope nobody noticed I’m gone. I hope that Gate wasn’t somebody out looking for me. I feel enough of a fool as it is.
He hitched his pack over his shoulder, and took his bearings. All right, let’s try again. Center - and ground - and open - and If I find out that Moondance had anything to do with this I’ll -
His head rang again, and he swayed and almost fell, but this time the shock was a clear, urgent, and unmistakable wordless cry for help. It sobered him as quickly as Andrel’s bucket of cold water.
There was no “presence” to the cry, not like any of the Gifted or the Tayledras had; it was just simple and desperate. This was no trained mage or Herald. It could only be an ordinary person in mortal fear.
Gods! His head swiveled toward the source of the cry as a needle to a lodestone. And without any clear notion of why he was doing so, except that it was a cry for help, and he had to answer it, Vanyel began stumbling toward the source at a clumsy run.
He had been following a game-trail; now he was right off any path. He ran into a tangle of bushes, and could find no way around it. Driven nearly frantic by the call in his head, he finally shoved his way through it. Then he was in a beech grove; there was little or no growth between the straight, white columns of the trunks, and he picked up his pace until he was at an all-out run.
But the clear, growth-free area was too soon passed; his breath was burning in his lungs as the forest floor became rougher, liberally strewn with tangles of briar and rocks, and hillier as well. His cloak kept hanging up on things, no matter how hard he tried to keep it close to his body. He tripped; stumbled wildly into the trunk of a tree, and picked himself up only to trip a second time and fall flat in the snow. The breath was knocked out of him for a moment, but that panicked, pleading voice in his “ear within” would not let him give up. He scrambled to his feet, pulled his cloak loose from a bramble, and started running again.
He must have tripped and fallen a good dozen times over obstacles hidden in the snow, and he surely made enough noise to have warned anything that wasn’t deaf of his coming.
Anything that wasn’t deaf - or very busy.
Winded, floundering blindly, and unable to focus on anything more than a few feet ahead of him, he fell over a root just as he reached the crest of a low hill, and dropped into a thicket of bushes that crowned it.
He saw the danger before he got up and broke through their protective cover. He froze where he was. The “danger” was too intent on its victims to have paid any attention to the racket he’d been making. Likely an entire cavalry troupe could have come on it unawares.
This was the very edge of the cleared lands of some smallholder; a fertile river-valley, well-watered, sheltered from the worst of the winter weather and summer storms. Arable land like this could well tempt an enterprising farmer out into the possible perils of the Pelagirs. There had been a stockade around the house and barns to guard against those hazards that could be foreseen.
But the stockade, of whole tree trunks planted in a ring around the buildings, was flattened and uprooted. It could not have held more than a few moments against what had come at the settlers out of the bright winter morning.
Vanyel had never seen a colddrake, but he knew what it was from descriptions in far too many songs and tales to count.
Less like a lizard, and more like a snake with short, stubby legs, it was the largest living creature Vanyel had ever seen. From nose to tail it was easily as long as six carts placed end-to-end. Its equine head was the size of a wine barrel; it had row upon row of silvery needle-sharp spines along its crest and down its back, and more spines formed a frill around its neck. It snarled silently, baring teeth as long as Vanyel’s hand, and white and sharp as icicles. Its wickedly curved claws had torn the earth around it. Vanyel knew what those looked like; Moondance had a dagger made from one. Those claws were longer than his hand, and as sharp as the teeth. Huge, deep-purple eyes, like perfect cabochon amethysts, were fixed unwaveringly upon its prey, a young woman and her two children. It was a pure silver-white, like the cleanest of snow, and its scales sparkled in the sunlight; it was at least as beautiful as it was deadly.
As one mangled body beneath its forefeet testified, the creature knew very well how to use its wickedly sharp claws and teeth.
But neither tail nor fangs and claws was what held the terrified woman and her two children paralyzed almost within reach. It was the colddrake’s primary weapon - the hypnotic power of its eyes.
It stared at them in complete silence, a silence so absolute that Vanyel could hear the woman panting in fear where he lay. The drake was not moving; it was going to bring its prey to within easy reaching distance of it.
Vanyel hadn’t reshielded since he’d first been impaled upon that dreadful dagger of the woman’s fear. He could still sense her thoughts - incoherent, hysteric, and hopeless. Her mind wailed and scratched at the walls that the colddrake’s violet gaze had set up around it. She was trapped, they were trapped, their wills gone, their bodies no longer obeying them.
That was how her husband, the children’s father, had died; walking right into the creature’s grasp, his body obedient to its will, not his own. The beast was slow, that was the true horror of it - if they could just distract it for a crucial moment, break its gaze, they could escape it.
Vanyel could “hear” other minds, too - out there on the opposite side of the clearing. The rest of the extended family - there must have been dozens of them - had made it past the slow-moving drake to the safety and shelter of the woods. Only these four had not; the woman, burdened with her toddlers, and the man, staying to protect them. He could “hear” bits of their anguish, like a chorus wailing beneath the woman’s keening fear.
Vanyel stared at the trapped three, just as paralyzed as they were. His mouth was dry, and his heart hammered with fear. He couldn’t seem to think; it was as if those violet eyes were holding him captive, too.
There was movement at the edge of his field of vision.
No - not all had fled to the woods. From around the corner of the barn came a man; limping, painfully, slowly, but moving so quietly that the snow didn’t even creak beneath his boots. He was stalking the drake. A new set of thoughts invaded Vanyel’s mind, fragmentary, but enough to tell him what the man was about.
: - get close enough to stick ‘im - :
It was an old man, a tired, old man; it was the woman’s grandfather. He’d been caught in the barn when the thing attacked and knocked the stockade flat, and he’d seen his granddaughter’s husband walk into the thing’s jaws. He’d recognized the drake for what it was, and he’d armed himself with the only weapon he could find. A pitchfork. Ridiculous against a colddrake.
: - get them eyes off ‘er an’ she kin run fer it - :
The colddrake was paying no attention to anything except the prey right before it. The old man crept up behind it without it ever noticing he was there.
The old man knew, with calm certainty, that he was going to die. He knew that his attack was never going to do anything more than anger the creature. But it would break the thing’s concentration; it would make it turn its head away for one crucial moment.
His attack was suicidal, but it would give his granddaughter and her children a chance to live.
He came within an arm’s length of the colddrake - he poised the pitchfork as casually as if he were about to stab a haybale - and he struck, burying the pitchfork tines in the colddrake’s side with a sound like a knife burying itself to the hilt in a block of wood.
The drake screamed; its whistling shriek shattered the dreadful silence, and nearly shattered Vanyel’s eardrums. It whipped its head around on its long, snaky neck, and it seized the old man before he even let go of the pitchfork. With a snap of its jaws that echoed even above its shrill screeching, it bit the old man’s head neatly off his shoulders.
Vanyel screamed as he felt the old man die - and the oldster’s desperate courage proved to be too much of a goad for him to resist.
Anger, fear, other emotions he couldn’t even name, all caught him up, raised him to his feet, drove him out into the open and exploded out of him with a force that dwarfed the explosion he’d caused when Starwind had tried to make him call lightning.
He was thinking just enough to throw up a shield around the woman and her children with one shouted word. Then he hit the drake with everything he had in him. The blast of raw power caught the drake in the side and sent it hurtling up over the roof of the house - high into the sky - and held it suspended there for one agonizing moment while Vanyel’s insides felt as if they were tearing loose.
Then the power ran out, and it fell to the earth, bleeding in a hundred places, every bone in its body shattered.
And Vanyel dropped to his knees, then his hands, then collapsed completely, to lie spent in the open field under the pale winter sun, gasping for breath and wondering what he had done.
Savil surveyed the last of the colddrake carcasses, and turned to Starwind, biting her lip in anxiety. “Where’s the queen-drake?’’
“No sign of her,” he replied, shortly, holding to his feet with pure will. He’d taken the brunt of the attack, and he was dizzy and weak from the effort of holding the center while Savil and Moondance closed the jaws of the trap about the colddrake swarm.
“I have not seen her, either,” Moondance called up the hill. He was checking each carcass in case one should prove to be an immature queen. It was unlikely to see a swarm with a juvenile queen, but it wasn’t unheard of, either.
Yfandes had consented to carry the Tayledras double - the need to get to the place where the drake swarm was before the swarm reached inhabited areas was too great for any other consideration. Starwind had then served as the “bait” afoot, while Moondance on Yfandes and Savil on Kellan had been the arms of the trap.
“No queens,” he said, flatly, having checked the sixth and final body.
The fight had stripped the snow from the hilltop, exposing the blackened slope. The six drakes lay upon the scorched turf in twisted silver heaps, like the baroque silver ornaments of a careless giantess strewn across black velvet.
“Ashke, are you well?” Moondance asked anxiously, leaving the last of the bodies and climbing the hill with a certain amount of haste. Starwind looked as if his legs were going to give out on him at any moment, and Yfandes had moved up to lend him her shoulder as support. He leaned on it with a murmur of gratitude as the Healer-Adept reached his side.
“I will do well enough, once I have a chance to breathe,” the elder Tayledras replied, as Moondance added his support to Yfandes’. “I am more worried that we did not find the queen.”
“Do you suppose,” Savil began -
Then all three of them felt an incredible surge of raw, wild power - and it had Vanyel’s “presence” laced through it.
“M’lord?”
Someone was tugging at his shoulder. Vanyel lifted his head from his arms; that was just about the limit of his capabilities right now.
“Gods,” he said, dazedly, as the stocky young cloak-shrouded woman at his side tried to get him to sit up. “Oh, please - just - don’t do that right now.”
“M’lord? Ye be hurt?” she asked, thick brows knitting with concern. “Ye bain’t hurt, best ye get inside fore ‘nother them things comes.”
“Aren’t… anymore,” he replied heavily, giving in to her urging and hauling himself into a sitting position. The sun seemed very bright and and just on the verge of being painful to his watering eyes.
Gods, it’s one of the holders. She’s going to lay into me for not coming sooner, he thought, squinting at her, and already wincing in anticipation of harsh words. She’s going to want to know why I didn’t save the old man, or come in time to save the young one. What can I tell her? How can I tell her it was because I was too scared to move until the old man threw himself at the thing?
“Ye saved us, m’lord,” she said, brown eyes wide, the awe in her voice plain even to Vanyel’s exhausted ears. “Ye came t’ save us, I dunno how ye knew, but, m’lord, I bain’t got no way t’ thank ye.”
He stared at her in amazement. “But - “
“Be ye with the bird-lords, m’lord? Ye bain’t their look, but they be the only mages abaht that give a bent nail fer folks’ good.’’
“Bird-lords?” he repeated stupidly.
“Tchah, Menfree,’tis only a boy an’ he’s flat paid out!” The newcomer was an older woman, a bit wrinkled and weathered, but with a kindly, if careworn, face. She bunched her cloak around her arms and bent over him. “Na, lad, ye come in, ye get warm an’ less a’muddled, an’ then ye tell yer tale, hrom?”
She took Vanyel’s elbow, and he perforce had to get up, or else pull her down beside him. The next thing he knew, he was being guided across the ruts of the plowed field, past the carcass of the colddrake (he shuddered as he saw the size of it up close) up to the battered porch of the house and into the shadowed doorway.
He was not only confused with exhaustion, but he was feeling more than a little awkward and out of place. These were the kind of people he had most tried to avoid at home - those mysterious, inscrutable peasant-farmers, whose needs and ways he did not understand.
Surely they would turn on him in a moment for not being there when they needed help.
But they didn’t.
The older woman pushed him down onto a stool beside the enormous fireplace at the heart of the kitchen, the younger took his cloak and pack, and a boy brought him hot, sweetened tea. When one of the bearded, dark-clad men started to question him, the older woman shooed him away, pulling off her own dun cloak and throwing it over a bench.
“Ye leave th’ boy be fer a bit, Magnus; I seen this b’fore with one a’ them bird-laddies. They does the magickin’, then they’s a-maundered a whiles.” She patted Vanyel on the head, in a rather proprietary sort of fashion. “He said there ain’t no more critters, so ye git on with takin’ care a’ poor old Kern an’ Tansy’s man an’ let this lad get hisself sorted.”
Vanyel huddled on the stool and watched them, blinking in the half-dark of the kitchen, as they got their lives put back together with a minimum of fuss. Someone went to deal with the bodies, someone saw to the hysterical young mother, someone else planned of rites. Yes, they were mourning the deaths; simply and sincerely, without any of the kind of hysterics he’d half feared. But they were not allowing their grief to get in the way of getting on with their lives, not were they allowing it to cripple their efforts at getting their protections back in place.
Their simple courage made him, somehow feel very ashamed of himself.
It was in that introspective mood that the others found him.
* * *
“ - I know it was a stupid thing to do, to run off like that, but - “ Vanyel shrugged. “I won’t make any excuses. I’ve been doing a lot of stupid things lately. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. Foresight dreams have a way of doing that to people,” Savil said, crossing her legs and settling back on her stool beside the hearth. “They tend to get you on the boil and then lock up your ability to think. You wouldn’t be the first to go charging off in some wild-hare direction after waking up with one, and you probably won’t be the last. No, thank you, Megan,” she said to the wide-eyed child who offered her tea. “We’re fine.”
If the settlers had been awed by Vanyel, they’d been struck near speechless by the sight of the Tayledras. They didn’t know a Herald from a birch tree, but they knew who and what the Hawkbrothers were, and had accorded them the deference due a crowned head.
All three of the adults were weary, and relief at finding both that Vanyel was intact and that the queen-drake was indisputably deceased had them just about ready to collapse. So they’d taken the settlers’ hospitality with gratitude; settling in beside the hearth and accepting tea and shelter without demur.
Vanyel had waited just long enough for them to get settled before launching into a full confession.
“So when I finally managed to acquire some sense,” he continued, “I figured the best way to find my way back would be to look for where all the mage-energy was. I did everything like you told me, Master Starwind, and I opened up - and the next thing I knew it was nearly noon. Somebody’d opened up a Gate - I think somewhere nearby - and it knocked me put cold.”
“Ha - I told you those things were Gated in!” Savil exclaimed. “Sorry, lad, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Then what?”
“Well, I didn’t think there was anyone around here but Tayledras, so I thought one of them had done it. I started to open up again to find the vale, and I heard a call for help. I got here, and when I saw that colddrake - kill the old man - I just - I just couldn’t stand by and not do anything. I didn’t even think about it. I wish I had, I think I overdid it.”
“With a colddrake, particularly a queen, better overkill,” Savil replied, exchanging a look of veiled satisfaction with Starwind. “You may have acted a fool, but it put you in the right place at the right time, and I am not going to berate you for it.”
“Aunt Savil, I,” he flushed, and hunched himself up a little, “I got here before the old man came out. I didn’t do anything until he - I mean - I was just hiding in the bushes. I guess,” he said, in a very small voice, “I guess Father’s right. I am a coward. I could have saved him, and I didn’t.”
“Did you know you could have saved him?” Moondance asked, quietly, his square face still. “Did you know that your mage-powers would work against the drake?’’
“Well - no.”
“You ran toward the danger when you Mindheard the call for help, right?” Savil asked. “Not away?”
“Well - yes.”
“And you simply froze when you saw the strange monster. You did not flee?” Starwind raised one long eyebrow.
“I guess that’s what happened.”
“I think perhaps you have mistaken inexperience for cowardice, young Vanyel,” Starwind said with conviction. “A coward would have run away from a plea for help. A coward would have fled at the first glimpse of the drake. You were indecisive - but you remained. It is experience that makes one decisive, and you have precious little of that.”
“M’lord Starwind?” One of the homespun-clad men of the settlement was standing diffidently at the Tayle-dras’ elbow.
“Phellip, I wish you would not call me ‘lord,’ “ Starwind sighed, shaking his head. “You hold your lands under our protection, yes, but it is a simple matter of barter, foodstuffs for guardianship, and no more than that.”
“Aye, m’ - Master Starwind. Master, this drake - she just be chance-come, or be there anythin’ more to it?”
Starwind turned to look at him more closely, and with some interest. “Why do you ask that?”
Phellip coughed, and flushed. “Well, m’lord, I was born ‘n’ bred west a’ here. M’people held land a’ Mage-lord Grenvis - he were all right, but - well, when ‘is neighbors had a notion t’ play war, they useta bring in drakes an’ th’ like aforehand.”
“And you think something of the sort might be in the offing? Phellip, I congratulate you on your foresight. The thought had only just occurred to me - “
“Da?” One of the boys couldn’t contain himself any longer, and bounced up beside his father. “Da, there gonna be a war? With fightin’ an’ magic an’ - “
Phellip grabbed the loose cloth of the boy’s tunic and pulled him close. “Jo - I want ye t’ lissen t’ what m’lord Starwind is gonna tell ye - m’lord, you tell ‘im; ‘e don’ believe ‘is of man that fightin’ ain’t good fer nothin’ but fillin’ up graveyards.”
“Young man,” Starwind fixed the boy with an earnest stare. “There is nothing ‘fine’ about warfare. There is nothing ‘glorious’ about battle. All that a war means to such as you and I is that people we know and love will die, probably senselessly; others will be crippled for life - and the fools who began it all will sit back in their high castles and plot a way to get back what they lost. If there were to be a war - which, trust me, Phellip, I shall try most earnestly to prevent - the very best you could hope for, young man, would be to see these lovely fields around you put to the torch so that you would face a very hungry winter. That is what warfare is all about. The only justifiable fight is a defensive one, and in any fight it is the innocents who ultimately suffer the most.”
The boy didn’t look convinced.
Vanyel cleared his throat, and the boy shot a look at him. “Pretty exciting, the way that drake just nipped off that fool old man’s head, wasn’t it, Starwind?” he drawled, in exaggerated imitation of some of the young courtiers of his own circle.
The boy paled, then reddened - but before he could burst into either tears or angry words, Vanyel looked him straight in the eyes so fiercely that he could not look away.
“That’s what you’ll see in a war, Jo,” he said, harshly. “Not people in tales getting killed - your people getting killed. Younglings, oldsters - everybody. And some fool at the rear crowing about how exciting it all is. That’s what it’s about.”
Now Jo looked stricken - and, perhaps, convinced. Out of the corner of his eye Vanyel saw the farmer nodding in approval.
Out of nowhere, Vanyel felt a sudden rush of kindred feeling for these people. Suddenly they weren’t faceless, inscrutable monoliths anymore - suddenly they were people. People who were in some ways a great deal more like him than his own relatives were. They had lives - and loves and cares.
Their outlook on warfare was certainly closer to his than that of any of his blood relations.
They aren’t that much different than me. Except - except that I can do something they can’t. I can - I can protect them when they can’t protect themselves. And they can do things I can’t. But I could learn to grow a carrot if I had to. It probably wouldn’t be a very good carrot, but I could grow one. They won’t ever be able to blast a colddrake.
What does that mean, really? What does that say about my life? Why can I do these things, and not someone else - and what about the people out there who - who send drake-swarms out to eat Helpless farmers? If I can protect people like this from people like them - doesn’t that mean - that I really have to?
He looked up and saw his aunt’s eyes; she was watching the children at their chores, cleaning and chopping vegetables for a stew. Her expression was at once protective and worried.
It’s the way Savil feels - it’s got to be. That’s why she’s a Herald.
And suddenly Tylenders words came back to him; so clearly that it seemed for a moment as if Tylendel were sitting beside him again, murmuring into his ear.
“… it’s a kind of hunger. I can’t help it. I’ve got these abilities, these Gifts, and I can’t not use them. I couldn’t sit here, knowing that there were people out there who need exactly the kind of help I can give them and not make the effort to find them and take care of them.’’ Now he understood those words. Oh, the irony of it; this part of Tylendel that he had never been able to comprehend - now it was clear. Now that Tylendel was gone - now he understood. Oh, godsHe closed his eyes against the sting of tears. Oh, yes - now he understood. Because now he felt that way, too. Too late to share it.
:Well?: To all appearances, Savil was asleep beside the settlers’ stone hearth as she Mindspoke Starwind in Private-mode. In actuality, despite her weariness she was anything but sleepy, and was watching the fire through half-slitted eyes as she waited for the opportunity to confer with him. Her single word contained a world of overtones that she was fairly certain he’d pick up.
:Interesting, on several levels,: he replied. He was lying on his back, arms beneath his head, his eyes also closed.
The settlers - Savil had learned before the evening was over that they were calling their lands “Garthhold,” and that there were seven loosely-related families in the group - had offered the Tayledras and their friends unlimited hospitality. All four of them were bone-tired even after rest and tea, and it was agreed among the three adults that it would be no bad thing to take them up on it. They refused, however, to put anyone out of his bed. So after a dinner of bread and stew, they made it plain that they intended to sleep by the fireside. The four of them were currently rolled up in their cloaks, on sacks of straw to keep them off the stone of the floor, beside the glowing coals of the kitchen hearth.
Vanyel was genuinely asleep. Savil wasn’t certain of Moondance; he was curled on his side, his face to the fire, as peaceful and serene as a child’s.
By all rights, he should really be asleep. There’d been several injuries related to the colddrake’s attack and the hasty escapes, and Moondance had had his hands full Healing them. Then he had delegated himself magical assistant to getting the stockade back up. It had saved the Garthholders no end of effort to have the logs spell-raised back into place. He should have been exhausted.
So Savil thought, until he Mindspoke both of them. :May I enter the conversation? I assume there is one.:
So much for Moondance being weary.
:Be welcome, but keep it in private,: she replied, :Among other things, we’re discussing the boy. Starwind, go on please. :
:From the small things to the great - I think perhaps you may cease to fear for the boy. I think he now feels the hunger you spoke of, and understanding has been attained. Herein the question is if the boy can conquer his fears.:
.I wondered about that. He’s been wearing a very odd look on his face this evening, and I’ve never known him to be as friendly with common folk as he was tonight.: She opened her eyes wide and stared at the glowing embers of the hearth without really seeing them. -.Poor Van. If that dream of his is ForeSight - that’s a hell of a burden to carry around.:
:It still may never come to be,: Moondance reminded them, and the straw of his bedding crackled as he shifted. :We still See only the thing most likely at this moment. And the moment is always changing. I would change the subject. We have a more urgent consideration. Those colddrakes were Gated here. That speaks of - :
: - great trouble to come,: Starwind replied, his mind-voice dark and grim. ‘.There is no doubt in my mind at this moment that the drakes were sent to harry this area in advance of a fighting force.: The fire popped once. :This has gone beyond tampering. There was a village to the west of here under tacit k ‘Treva protection. I can no longer sense it; it is under a foreign shield.:
:Someone moved in and took it over, hmm?: Savil brooded on that a moment. :What would you say to us organizing a little surprise for whoever sent those drakes? I doubt anyone is expecting k ‘Treva response this soon. By rights, dividing the swarm should have kept us busy for a week.:
Starwind’s mind-voice was troubled. .I would say that you are not k’Treva - :
:And I would reply that I am Wingsister, which makes me just as much k ‘Treva as Moondance. I would say also that two mages tampering in this area is a very unlikely coincidence, ft is far more likely that this is the same mage who was hired by the Leshara of Valdemar. Which makes it the more my fight.:
More straw rustled, and Savil moved her head slightly; just enough to see Starwind’s ironic gaze bent on her for a long moment.
:And I,: Moondance put in, .-would say that my shay’kreth’ashke is unlikely to win a battle of wills with such a stubborn one as I know the Wingsister to be. I would also say that three Adepts are better in this than two.:
Starwind sighed. .I fear I am defeated ere I begin. What do we do with the boy, then? We cannot leave him here, and I mislike taking the time to take him back to the vale. That will lose us the element of surprise.:
:He may prove useful,: Moondance said unexpectedly. :He did defeat the queen-drake. :
:We bring him, I suppose,: Savil agreed, though with some misgiving. :Surely Yfandes can be counted on to keep him out of serious trouble.:
:I cannot like it, but I must agree,: Starwind replied reluctantly. :This is a great deal of danger to be taking one so untested and so newly-healed into.:
.I know,: Savil said, wishing the coals burning in the fireplace didn’t look so much like a burning town. .’Believe me, I know. :
It had been snowing all day, not heavily, but steadily. The air felt almost warm. The Companions moved like white spirits through the drifts of flurries, each carrying double. White horses, white riders - all but one; the one riding pillion behind the second Companion was in smoky black and dark gray, a shadow to a ghost.
“You all look like Heralds,” Vanyel said, from the pillion-pad behind Moondance. “Everyone does except me.”
“How so?” Moondance asked, somewhat surprised.
“It’s your white outfits,” Savil supplied, as Kellan lagged a little so that she could reply without having to turn her head. “Heralds always wear white uniforms when they’re on duty.”
“Ah - youngling, Tayledras always wear the colors best suited to blend into the treetops. In winter - white. In summer, obviously, green.” Moondance was carefully plaiting a new bowstring using both hands; he wasn’t even bothering with the reins, he had those looped up on the pommel of the saddle. Vanyel didn’t much care for riding pillion, but it wasn’t bad behind Moondance; the younger Tayledras didn’t mind talking to him. As Vanyel had suspected, he had forgiven Vanyel even before he made his apology to the Tayledras. Which he had done as soon as he could get Moondance alone; it only seemed right. Now it was as if the incident had never occurred; Moondance even seemed to welcome his questions and encouraged him to ask them.
They’d talked about Vanyel’s Gifts, mostly. Vanyel hadn’t actually talked about them to anyone; Savil hadn’t had much opportunity to do so, and Starwind had just gone directly into his head, showed him what to do, and then expected him to do it.
“So, what were we up to?” Moondance asked.
“ForeSight.” Vanyel shivered. “Moondance, I don’t like it. I don’t want to know what’s going to happen. Is there any way I can block it?”
“Now that it is active? Not to my knowledge. But you must not let it cripple you, ke’chara. You are not seeing the irrevocable future, you see the future as it may be if nothing changes. The most likely at this moment. These things may change; you can change them.”
“I can?” Vanyel perked up at this.
“Assuredly. But it may be that the cost of such a change is to dissolve a friendship or a love you would not willingly forgo. You may feel such a bond is worth the price.” He smiled crookedly back over his shoulder. “If I were to have the certain knowledge that my lifebond to Starwind would send me to my death tomorrow, I would go willingly to that fate. But I would not tell Starwind of my foreknowledge. Think on that, if you will.”
Vanyel did brood on that for several furlongs.
It was Moondance in Yfandes’ saddle and not Vanyel, because if they were surprised by an attack, Vanyel had been ordered to drop off the pillion pad and stay out of the fight.
It was humiliating - but sensible. Vanyel was rather more acutely interested in “sensible” than in “humiliating” at the moment. If an attack came, he’d obey those orders. He’d learned his lesson with the colddrake.
“Well, are there no more questions, ke’chara?”
Vanyel shook his head.
“Then I have one for you. Starwind has said that when you were frightened in practice you pulled power from the valley-node. Is this true?”
“What’s the valley-node?”
“Savil did not tell you?” Moondance made a face. “No patience, that one. You surely have felt that all things have energy about them, yes?”
“Even rocks - “
“Ge’teva, if you sense that, then your Mage-Gift is a most strong one! Even I have some difficulty with seeing that. So; have you seen that this energy flows along lines, as rainwater to streams?”
Vanyel hadn’t, but when he closed his eyes and extended he could see that Moondance was right.
“I do now.”
“Then follow a stream to the place where it meets another.’’
He did. There was a kind of - knot. A concentration of power. He told Moondance so.
“That is a node.” Moondance nodded. “Tayledras can direct the course of these streams on occasion, which is how we take the magic from places where the wars left it and move it to a place where it is useful. We build our strongholds over places where two or more powerful streams meet; nodes. The energy of the node is such that all of us can use it, but we have found that a-many out-land mages not only cannot sense the streams, they cannot sense nor use the nodes. This may be something only those outsiders at the level of our Adepts do well; I think it is perhaps unique to the Tayledras that all of us, from the time we start to feel our Gifts awaken, manipulate this energy as easily as a child plays with building bricks. There was a time - very long ago - when the Tayledras adopted outlanders very commonly, and it is said that these outlanders changed even as I have. I think that the key to change is using this magic under the direction of Tayledras born. So; of outland Adepts we have known, only Wingsister Savil can link into the nodes as well as Tayledras; her Gift is very strong. So, it seems, is yours.
Vanyel was confused as to where all this was leading. “But what does that mean, Moondance?”
“For now - you exhausted yourself when you killed the colddrake. That is something you need not do quite so quickly, if you remember that you can pull from the life-energy nodes within your sensing range. When they are drained - then you use your own strength.”
:That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,: Yfandes said unexpectedly in his mind.
That gave him food for thought for several more candlemarks.
They’d journeyed westward from Garthhold with the rising of the sun, stopping three times on the way to question folk Starwind knew. The first had been a fur trapper, who’d told them of rumors of a renegade wizard, who was half-human, half-Pelagir changeling and had sorcerous skills and a taste for worldly power. The second was a kyree, a wolflike creature with a mind fully the equal of any human. He stopped them; Mindspeaking to warn them of of the same wizard, but his stories were more than mere rumors; to his certain knowledge the changeling was planning to carve himself a realm of his own as quickly as he could, and had already begun that task.
The third had been one of k’Treva’s border-guards - not Tayledras herself, but another of the Pelagir changelings, a tervardi, a kind of flightless bird-woman.
She was no longer among the living.
When Starwind had been unable to Mindcall her, they had detoured to the grove of trees that held her ekele. There was no sign of a struggle, but they found the fragile, white-plumaged wraith in her ekele, dead, without a mark upon her, but with her bow in her hand, bowstring snapped, and her empty, glazed eyes wide with what Vanyel assumed was fear.
Starwind spent some moments beside the body, working some kind of subtle magic. Vanyel could feel things stirring, even if he couldn’t yet read them. What it was Starwind found, he would not tell Vanyel, but the three adults grew very grim - and Moondance took the bow and its arrows when they left.
They had been riding all day, cutting cross-country at the ground-eating pace only a Companion could maintain; it was nearing sunset when they slowed, on coming to what looked to be a fairly well-traveled road.
Savil and Kellan halted while they were still within the cover of the forest, and Yfandes came up beside them as silently as it was possible for something the size and weight of a Companion to do. The snow-laden branches of an enormous evergreen shielded them from the view of anyone on that road, although the road itself looked deserted. There didn’t seem to be any new tracks on it, and all the old ones had been softened with a layer of new, undisturbed snow. The road was lined on both sides by a row of these evergreens, though, and anything could lie in wait undetected behind them.
“The village of Covia lies a few furlongs up that road,” Starwind whispered, as the sun sank in sullen glory ahead of them. “There is still a shield upon it, and I do not like the feel of the power behind that shield. I do not, however, sense that the power is presently in the village.”
“Nor I,” replied Savil, after a moment.
:Nothing,: Yfandes said to Vanyel.
“ ‘Fandes says she doesn’t feel anything either,” he reported, feeling rather in the way.
“My thought is to enter the village and see how much is amiss - and what the people know. Then - Vanyel, it is in my mind to leave you with the villagers. You have enough mage-training to be some protection to them, and they may be of some physical protection to you.”
“I - yes, Master Starwind,” he replied, not much liking the idea, but not seeing any other choice. “What about ‘Fandes?”
:I don’t like it, but I’ll go with them,: Yfandes said reluctantly. :If you need me, I’ll know, and they need a second mount.:
Vanyel reported Yfandes’ words with a sinking heart. Starwind nodded. “I think she has the right of it; we can cover more ground mounted. Well.” He peered up the road through the gathering evening gloom. “I think it is time to see the handiwork of our enemy.”
Vanyel was doing his best not to be sick. Again. He’d already lost control over his stomach once, just outside of Covia, when they’d found the wizard’s - warn-off.
It was well after sundown, and pitchy dark outside of the village square. The entire population of the village, upwards of seventy people, was jammed into the tiny square. Many of them had brought lanterns and torches. They were crowding about the four strangers and two Companions, like baby chicks seeking the shelter of the hen’s wings - although they were paying scant attention to Savil and less than that to Vanyel and the Companions. The Herald was a dubious and unknown quantity, and the boy and the “horses” were being dismissed out of hand.
The party had made a kind of impromptu dais out of the low porch of the Temple, which was barely large enough to hold the four humans; the Companions were serving as living barricades on either side, to keep them from being totally overwhelmed. As it was it was getting a little cramped, behind the two Tayledras. But Vanyel was beginning to be rather glad he was being ignored. Between the tales the villagers were telling Starwind - and the physical evidences they were displaying in the flickering of the torchlight to substantiate those stories-it wasn’t easy for Vanyel to control his nausea.
This had been a pleasant little village, as safe as any place inside the Pelagirs. People could feel comfortable about raising children; had time for celebrations now and again.
It was no longer pleasant, nor safe. It was now a place under siege, with no way out.
Two weeks ago a stranger had come to the village, mounted on something that was not a horse, and accompanied by a retinue of some of the Pelagirs’ least attractive denizens. He had announced that the town and its inhabitants were now his, and had helped himself to whatever he wanted. After one demonstration of his power had left a heap of ash where the village inn had once stood, these folk had more sense than to resist - but they had attempted to send for help. The remains of their messenger were found the next morning, impaled on a stake in the middle of the outbound road. The frozen corpse was still there; the Companions had passed it on the way in. From the look of the man, simple impalement had come as a relief.
He had come back about every other night, each time taking both goods and victims. The villagers told Starwind that they had been praying for help; they assumed he was the answer to those prayers. He seemed, to Vanyel at least, to be agreeing with that assumption.
Vanyel was just grateful that the fitful torchlight wasn’t bright enough for him to see much of the details of what had been done to some of the wizard’s victims. He was equally grateful that he was in the dark at the back of the porch, behind Savil.
“ - this’s the last, Master Starwind,” the swarthy, unshaven headman said, wearily, his red-rimmed eyes those of one who had seen far too much of horror in the past few days. “This girl.”
He pushed a mousy blonde female right up onto the porch, where Vanyel couldn’t avoid looking at her. The young woman would still have been attractive - if she hadn’t been vacant-eyed and drooling. She was filthy, her hair matted and hanging in lank snarls. Starwind flinched at the sight of her, but Moondance fearlessly took her face in both his slender hands and gazed into her blank brown eyes for a long time.
When he finally released her, his face and voice were tight with anger. “I think that Brightwind may be able to bring her mind back,” he said, slowly and carefully, as if he was trying to keep from saying something he had rather not speak aloud. “It will require many months - and she will never be able to bear the touch of a man; she has been too far hurt within. Even so, all those channels meant for pleasure have been warped, and now can only carry pain. I do not know if even I can Heal that. I do not think that anything will be able to Heal her heart and soul of what was done to her; not entirely. It may be it is better not to try; it may be that it is better to wipe all away and begin with her as with a small child.”
The balding headman nodded as if that was what he had expected to hear. “She was one of the first he took,” he said heavily, “Her and her mother. Her father was the messenger we sent - we never found anything of her mother.’’
“And he grows stronger, this Krebain, with every person he takes?” Starwind asked.
The torches wavered in the wind, casting weird shadows across the man’s hollow-cheeked face as he nodded. Vanyel could scent the coming of more snow in that wind. “He seems to. Seems to me he’s doing blood-magic, wouldn’t you say, Master Starwind?”
Starwind nodded, and narrowed his eyes in thought. “Aye, Gallen; you know your lore well, I think. So. This Krebain has retreated to whatever place he has made for a fastness, and it is bound to be somewhere near; I think we shall continue with my original plan. Gallen, I shall leave young Vanyel here with you. He knows something of material strategy and warfare; he is also Mage-Gifted.”
Vanyel shivered at the thought of being left alone here. The headman cast one doubtful look at him and ventured a protest; Vanyel didn’t much blame him. “Master Starwind - I beg you - this is only a boy - “
“He destroyed a queen colddrake, alone and unaided,” Moondance said quietly, pushing Vanyel forward and putting one hand on Vanyel’s shoulder. “It is in my mind that he could deal with more than you would reckon.”
“He did?” This time the look Headman Gallen gave him was a little less doubtful, but it was still not overly confident.
“Gallen, I do not expect Vanyel to have to defend you from this Krebain,” Starwind said patiently. “He could never be a match for a blood-bound Adept, and I would not expect it of him. I expect him to have to deal with some of this renegade’s creatures at worst. My thought is that the three of us shall find Krebain and deal with him - and that when his control over his slaves is gone, some of them may think to attack here. I see no reason why, among you, you folk and Vanyel could not defend yourselves against such lesser dangers. Does that content you?’’
It didn’t - that was obvious. But it was all that Headman Gallen was going to get, and he well knew it. Vanyel attempted to put himself into the mindset of a warleader. He didn’t feel particularly successful at it.
“Van, see what you can do about organizing these folk,” Savil said quietly. “You know most of those old ballads by heart, and there’s lots of good advice in them; that’s why we make you learn them. I don’t want you to try anything more than a token defense if something does come at you that you can’t handle. Just call Yfandes for help and delay things as long as you can. For the rest - the creatures they’ve described are strong, but not particularly bright. Barricades across the road and fire should keep most of them at bay. You took that queen colddrake; remember that. You can take just about anything else except this Krebain himself so long as it isn’t a small army.”
Vanyel gulped, and tried to look competent and brave. This is what it all comes down to, doesn’t it? This is what I have to do; I have to, like ‘Lendel said. Because these people need me. “Yes, Aunt,” he said carefully. “Barricades and fire.”
Savil looked worried and preoccupied. “Do your best, lad. Remember that ‘voice’ I used to stop you and ‘Lendel fighting? It makes people listen; goes right to their guts. Imitate that if you can.” She mounted Kellan from the porch; Starwind took Yfandes’ saddle, but Moon-dance hesitated a moment before taking the pillion behind him.
“Vanyel, ke’chara, remember what I told you about the nodes. Use them. There are - “ he paused, and his eyes unfocused for a moment. “There are three that I can sense that you should be able to use. I wish you could reach the valley-node as we can, but I think it is beyond your strength for now. None of the three nearby are as strong as the valley-node, but taken together they should serve.” He took Vanyel’s face between his hands and kissed him on the forehead. “Gods be with you, youngling. With fortune, this will be no more than an interesting exercise for you.”
He mounted behind Starwind, and the crowd of villagers parted to let them through. Vanyel watched them vanish into the darkness with a heavy heart.
If he hadn’t been so frightened himself, he’d have lost his temper a dozen times over. He had to keep explaining to these people, time and time again, exactly what he wanted of them and why he wanted it - and would turn his back on one group, thinking that he had finally gotten through to them, only to return to find they’d abandoned the project and were staring apprehensively off into the darkness.
It wasn’t that they were stupid; it was that they were so completely without hope. They couldn’t see any chance of holding off anything, and so they had abandoned any thought of being able to do so. After all, their best efforts hadn’t done anything but get folks killed. Vanyel, who was counting on them to be as much protection for him as he would be for them, was nearly frantic. It took hours before he was finally able to get them going under their own power.
Then there was the matter of defense.
When dawn came and he asked for their weaponry, he got as ill-used and motley an assortment of near-junk as he’d ever seen, and there wasn’t a one of them who knew how to use any of it. These were farmers born and farmers bred; most of them off lands held of lords or mage-lords who were bound to protect them. The k’Treva had bartered protection for made-stuffs and foodstuffs, and they had never thought they’d need to raise a blade in their own defense.
So Vanyel was faced with the task of showing rank amateurs the way of the sword. Forget teaching them point-work; forget the finer points of defense. In the end he padded them to the eyebrows and set them to bashing at each other. Teach them to hold something long and poke with it, or hold something heavy and smash with it - and if it was something with an edge, hope that the edge, rather than the flat, connected.
By the second day of this he was tired to the bone, half-mad with frustration, and frantic with the fear he dared not show. So when Veth, Gallen’s half-grown son, came at him wide open for the hundredth time, he lost his temper completely and hit him with a full force blow he had not consciously intended to deliver. And tried to pull it too late to do any good.
He knocked the boy halfway across the square.
Veth landed sprawled on his back - and didn’t move -
And Vanyel’s heart stopped -
And in his mind he saw - Jervis - standing over him -
Oh, gods!
Vanyel’s sword went flying; his helm followed it as he ran to kneel at Veth’s side in the cold dust of the square.
Oh, gods - oh, gods - I’ve done to him what Jervis did to me. Oh, please, gods, please don’t let me have hurt him -
He unlaced the boy’s helm and pulled it off; about then Veth blinked up at him and started to sit up of himself, and Vanyel nearly cried with relief.
“Veth - please, Veth, I’m sorry, I - I lost my temper - I didn’t mean it - “
The boy looked at him with bewilderment. “Eh, Master Van, I be all right. I been kicked by our old mule worse nor this - just let me get a bit of a drink, eh?”
Vanyel sagged back on his heels, shutting his eyes against the harsh sunlight, limp with relief. The boy got gingerly to his feet.
Oh, gods. I - I’m as bad as Jervis. I’m worse than Jervis; I know better. Oh, gods -
“Vanyel, young sir - “
He looked up; it was Reva, Veth’s mother, her tired face anxious. He winced, and waited for her to give him the tongue-lashing he deserved.
It didn’t come. If you’ll forgive me for being an interfering old hen,” she said, with a little quirk of her mouth, “I think you’ve about worn yourself into uselessness, young sir. I know you haven’t eaten since last night. Now here - “
She offered him her hand; astounded, he took it, and to his utter befuddlement she hauled him to his feet. “Now,” she put one arm around his shoulders, the other about Veth’s, “I think it’s time you both got a bit of food in you. The time it takes to eat won’t make Veth a better fighter, nor you a better teacher.” She hugged them both, as if they were both her sons, then released them.
The words he had thrown into Withen’s face - was it only a year ago? - came back to shame him further.
“Let every man that must go to battle fight within his talents, and not be forced to any one school.”
I’ve been treating them exactly the way Jervis treated me. Forcing them to use things they don’t know, to go outside of their talents. I am a complete and incompetent fool.
Vanyel blushed. And stammered. “I - I’m no kind of a teacher, Mistress Reva, or I’d not have chosen what I did to teach.” He raised his voice so the rest of those practicing in the square could hear him. “This is getting us nowhere. It’s like you trying to teach me to - to plow and spin, for a Midsummer contest a week away. We haven’t the time, and I’m a fool. Now, please, what are your real weapons? Any of you know the use of bow? Or sling? Boar-spear, maybe?”
It was not his imagination; there were looks of real relief all across the square - and the beginnings of smiles.
But in the end, all his preparations were in vain.
The villagers willing to fight were on the barricades; there were really only two blockades - there was only one road going through the village, and it led directly through the pounded-dirt square. The square itself was fairly defensible now; not even a colddrake would have been able to get past the buildings. The folk too frightened or unable to defend themselves had faded away into the shadows as they did every night to scatter and hide in the cellars and attics of the buildings around the square. Headman Gallen had by now come to the conclusion that Vanyel knew something of what he was about; he and two or three of the other folk not too cowed to take a stand (including the old herb-witch, who took a dim view of this young upstart wizard taking over her village) were having a hasty conference with Vanyel on supplies - when a surge of Gate-energy invoked practically under Vanyel’s nose knocked him to his knees and very nearly knocked him out.
The only thing that saved him from unconsciousness this time was that he was completely under shield. He found himself gasping for breath, and completely disoriented for a moment. His eyes had flashing lights in front of them, and he shook his head to try and clear it. That was a mistake; his head reacted poorly to the abrupt movement.
He could hardly think, much less see. Gods - what in -
“What do we have here?”
The clear, musical tenor voice sounded amused - and Vanyel froze. The voice carried clearly; the petrified silence in the square was as deltas the Nine Pits.
He looked up when his eyes cleared, and found that all he could see were the backs of people. The members of his erstwhile war-council were standing huddled together as if to keep him hidden in the shadows behind them. Vanyel got hold of the splintery side of the storehouse and pulled himself cautiously to his feet, ducking his head behind Gallen’s and standing on tiptoe to peek over the shoulders of the men in front of him. His gut went cold when he saw the flamboyantly dressed stranger in the middle of the cleared square.
This could only be the wizard Krebain.
The torches falling from the hands of the stunned villagers were unneeded; the wizard had brought his own mage-light with him. It hung over his head, a tiny green-yellow sun. People were slowly backing away until they ran into the walls and the barricades, leaving the stranger standing in arrogant isolation in the exact center of the dusty square.
The wizard was a gaudy sight; he wore scarlet and gold; skin-tight breeches, close-cut gold-embroidered velvet tunic, scarlet cloak with cloth-of-gold lining. Even his boots and velvet gloves were scarlet. He had a scarlet helm that was more than half mask, ornamented with a preposterous crest of a rampant dragon in gold. With one hand on his hip, he tapped at his chin with a gloved finger as he turned to survey the people surrounding the square.
“A rebellion - I do believe this is a rebellion! How droll!” He laughed; it had a nasty sound to it.
He was graceful, slim, and very tall. White-blond hair tumbled from beneath the helm in wavy, shining cascades. What could be seen of his face was like elegantly sculptured marble. Vanyel found himself caught by the wizard’s sheer charismatic beauty. None of the villagers had said anything about that.
Vanyel felt almost sick. Evil such as had been described to him shouldn’t be - beautiful!
But then he thought, Artificial - that really is what he is. He’s changed himself, I’m sure of it, like - painting his face, only more so. If I had a lot of power and didn’t care how I used it, I suppose I’d make myself beautiful, too.
“I wonder what could have roused you worms to think to stand against me?” Krebain mused aloud. “None of you had half an ounce of courage before this. But then - none of you smelled of the mage-born before this, either, other than that foolish old witch of yours over there.” He smiled slyly. “I think I detect a stranger among you - hmm? Now where have you hidden him?”
Ice crawled up Vanyel’s spine. All they have to do is point a finger at me - and even if they don’t, if I call Yfandes for help, he ‘II know where I am. Oh, gods, can I hide? I can’t challenge him! They can’t expect it of me - I’m no match for him!
But to his surprise, not a single one of those remaining in the square answered the wizard’s question. In fact, the men standing in front of Vanyel moved closer together, as if to shield him from the wizard’s chance sight.
The wizard’s voice sharpened with impatience. “I grow weary, curs. Where is the stranger I sensed?”
Silence.
Except for the herb-witch, who whispered back at Vanyel, with the merest breath - “Stay quiet, boy. You’re no fit opponent for him, and we know it. Won’t do any of us any good for you to get caught, and he just may take us apart for spite even if he gets you. Maybe if he gets bored, he’ll go away.”
“I said, I want to know where the stranger is.” The wizard looked about him, both hands on his hips now, and anger in his pose. “Very well. I see it’s time you learned another lesson.” He turned slightly, so that he was staring right at the group clustered in front of Vanyel, and raised his left hand. “You - Gallen.” He made a little summoning motion. “Come here…”
Gallen made a staggering step, then another. He was fighting the wizard with his will, but losing. Sweat popped out all over his brow, and he made a whimpering noise in the back of his throat.
Behind him, the group closed ranks, still shielding Vanyel from view. Before him, the wizard grinned sadistically. “You really haven’t a hope of fighting me, you know,” he said pleasantly. “It’s like a babe challenging an armed warrior. Come along, there’s a good dog.”
Gallen ran the last few steps, coming to a trembling halt at the wizard’s side. Krebain strolled around him, looking him over carefully. The mage-light followed in faithful attendance above his head. “Let’s see - I believe you have a wife.’’ He swept his gaze over the rest of the villagers. “Yes, indeed - and there she is. Reva - my goodness. A would-be sword-lady, are you? Come here, my dear.”
He crooked his finger, and dusky Reva stumbled out of the group at the barricade on the west road, still clutching her improvised pike of a knife strapped to the end of a staff. Her face was strained, white - and a mask of despair.
Krebain shook his head. “Really, my dear, you have no use for a weapon like that. Take it from her, Gallen.”
Gallen did not move; sweat poured down his face, glistening in the mage-light.
“I said, take it. “ Krebain’s voice sharpened with command, and Gallen’s gnarled hands slowly reached forward to take the pike from his wife.
“Now - just rest the point of that wicked little knife on her stomach, why don’t you.” Gallen his face reflecting his agony, lowered the pike until the point of the blade touched his wife’s stomach. He whimpered again as Krebain’s will made him brace it. Krebain’s smile grew broader. “Of course, Reva, it would be very painful if you were to walk forward just now - “
Vanyel couldn’t bear it. He gathered what little there was of his courage, and shouted, his voice breaking.
“Stop it!”
He pushed his protectors aside and walked out from behind them to stand in the open, a pace or two in front of them.
And in the moment when Krebain turned to face him, licking his lips, he Mindcalled with all his strength -
:Yfandes! The mage - he’s here! ‘Fandes - :
“That’s enough, child.”
Vanyel felt a barrier close down around the village, a barrier that allowed no thought to escape, and no further call for help.
He raised his chin with the same bleak defiance that had served him against his father.
“Let them alone, wizard,” he said, his voice trembling despite his efforts to keep it steady. He could feel sweat trickling coldly down the back of his neck and his mouth was dry and sour with fear. “I’m the one you wanted.”
Krebain made a dismissing gesture, and Reva and Gallen staggered as his hold over them was released. Gallen threw down the pike and seized her shoulders, and together they melted into the crowd at Krebain’s back.
“Come where I can see you,” the wizard said, mildly.
Vanyel walked, with slow and hesitant steps, into the area where the mage-light was striking.
“What a pleasant surprise - “
Unless Krebain was feigning it - which was possible - he was surprised.
And - pleased.
If Vanyel could keep him in that mood, maybe he could keep them all safe a little longer. He began to feel a tiny stirring of hope.
“What a truly pleasant surprise. My would-be enemy is a beautiful young man. What is your name, lovely one?”
Vanyel saw no reason not to answer him. If nothing else - if Yfandes had heard him, he’d be buying time for help to arrive. He allowed himself a moment to hope a little more, then replied, “Vanyel Ashkevron.”
“Vanyel - I do not believe this - Vanyel Ashkevron?” The wizard laughed, throwing back his head. “What a joke! What a magnificent jest! I come a-hunting you, and you walk unarmed into my very hand!”
Vanyel shook his head, bewildered.
The wizard grinned. “Dear, lovely boy. You have enemies, you know, enemies with no appreciation of beauty and a great deal of coin to spend. Wester Leshara holds you to blame for the death of his cousin Evan, didn’t you know that? He sent me an additional commission to deal with you as I had with young Staven Frelennye. I had thought to attend to my own pursuits a while here, then deal with you at my leisure, allowing matters to cool first. But - now I don’t know that I am going to oblige him by killing you. Not when you turn out to be so very beautiful. Come closer, would you?”
Vanyel felt no magical coercion, which rather surprised him. “If you don’t mind,” he said carefully, “I’d really rather not.’’
This time Krebain’s smile held a hint of real humor. “Then I shall have to come to you, beautiful Vanyel.”
He paced gracefully across the pounded dirt of the village square, taking each step as though he walked on a carpet of petals strewn especially for his benefit. The mage-light continued to follow him faithfully. He strolled around Vanyel as he had walked around Gallen, but his expression this time was less cruelly cheerful and more acquisitive. His path was an inward-turning spiral, with Vanyel as the center, so that he completed his circuit facing Vanyel and less than a handspan away. He reached out with one crimson-gloved hand, ignoring the presence of everyone in the square as if he and Vanyel were alone together, and laid it along Vanyel’s cheek. Vanyel looked steadily into his blue-black eyes within the shadowed eyeholes of the helm-mask and did not flinch away. Those eyes were the first indication he had seen that the wizard was something other than human. Those dark and frightening eyes were slitted like a cat’s - and under the velvet of the glove, Vanyel could feel something very sharp and talonlike resting on his cheek.
“My goodness,” Krebain breathed, “Silver eyes. Rare and beautiful, Vanyel Ashkevron. How wonderful, and how strange, that you should be here, at this moment. And I wonder, now - given what I know of Tylendel Frelennye - were you only the friend of Tylendel, or were you something more than friend?”
Still ignoring everyone else, he leaned forward and kissed Vanyel passionately and deeply.
Vanyel trembled with an unexpected reaction comprised of both revulsion and desire.
Half of him wanted to pull away and strike at this creature who could casually force a man to stab his own wife, who could regard the villagers about them so lightly as to totally ignore them at this moment.
The other half of him wanted to melt into the wizard’s arms.
He fought the temptation to yield. This - dammit, it’s nothing but sex, that’s all it is. I know what real love feels like - and this - isn’t - close.
He closed his eyes, as his knees went to water.
A dream-flash -
“Surrender to me, Herald-Mage Vanyel, “ Leareth said. ‘ ‘Take my darkness to you.’’
Had that dream been, not Foresight, but a warning?
He fought to think clearly, battling silently, but daring to give no outward sign of his struggle. It was at that moment that he realized that whatever other powers this wizard had, he did not share Vanyel’s Mind-Gifts. Like -
Thought-sensing, for instance. The shield over the village was spellcast, not mindcast. Which meant that Vanyel should be able to read the wizard, without Krebain knowing he was being read.
Krebain finally brought an end to the kiss, pulling away slowly and reluctantly, taking his hand from Vanyel’s cheek with a tender caress of his velvet-clad fingers.
“Oh,” he whispered, his eyes half-shut, the slits in them narrowed to near-invisibility. “Oh, beautiful and rare, lovely Vanyel. Come with me. Come with me, be my love. I can teach you more than you have ever dreamed. I could carve you a kingdom, give you power, pleasure - anything you desired. Name it, and it would be yours.”
The temptation was incredible. And the thought - I could guide him. I could bring him to compassion. He doesn’t have to be this way. I could make him into something better. Couldn’t I? Even if I don’t love him - wouldn’t that be worthwhile? Wouldn’t that be a worthy goal? And I don’t love him - but I could care for him, I think. There’s a mutual need - isn’t that enough?
His heart raced. I have to know - what is Krebain truly made of? If there’s something there to work with - something I can influence -
Krebain smiled. “I could even,” he whispered, “grant you the finest revenge upon Wester Leshara the world has ever witnessed. A revenge so complete that it would even satisfy Tylendel’s lover.”
The wizard’s mind was open to Vanyel’s at that crucial instant; completely open and unguarded.
Vanyel saw how Krebain had gotten his power; how - and from what - he had learned it. And the uses he had put it to. And how he had enjoyed what he had done. There was nothing there that was human or humane.
Gods! Never - never would I give myself to that!
Utter revulsion killed all trace of desire - and now Vanyel flinched away, his nausea plain for anyone to read.
Krebain stepped back an involuntary pace, his face flushed. He frowned with anger, and his expression hardened. “I will have you, Vanyel Ashkevron - with or without a mind.”
Vanyel had that much warning to get a shield up; had that much warning to scream “Run - “ at the villagers.
At least, he thought he screamed that warning at them. They certainly scattered as quickly as if he had, scrambling up and over the barricades that they had built to keep the menace out, leaving him alone with the wizard.
Who called the lightnings down on him.
Vanyel’s body screamed with pain, despite the shielding; his hair stood on end, and fire ran along his nerves. He went to his knees beneath the onslaught; reinforced his shielding and felt it weakening - and then remembered what Moondance had said about the power-nodes.
He reached, desperately; found them, tapped into them, and felt their power flowing into him, giving him a heady surge of strength, driving out the pain and renewing the will to fight this monster in human guise.
He staggered to his feet, backed up a pace, and deflected Krebain’s own lightnings back into his face.
The fires arced across the square and the wizard retreated, getting his own shields up just in time. Vanyel did not give him a chance to recover from his surprise, but launched an attack of his own; not lightnings this time, but a vise of power, a glowing shroud that he closed around the wizard and began tightening.
But Krebain broke it after a moment’s struggle, and countered with a circle of flame that roared up about him and began eating its way inward. Vanyel could smell his boot-soles scorching, and his skin tightened and hurt.
Vanyel in his turn, sweating with the heat, and his fear and effort, called upon the dust of the square to rise and snuff the flames.
This time Krebain gave him no chance to invoke a counterattack, but summoned a mage-storm like the one in Vanyel’s dream. It howled down out of the night sky and surrounded him in a cloud of wind and energy, crackling with it, screaming with it.
And like the one in Vanyel’s dream, this one ate away at his shields as fast as he could bring them up.
The whirlwind howled and raged, obscuring sight - he couldn’t see - couldn’t see anything anymore, just the flickering storm of power shrieking around him, coming closer by the moment.
One by one the nodes went drained and dead; now there was only his own strength left.
He went to his knees, holding the last of his shields up with little more than desperation left to sustain him -
- and a final hammer-blow blew the storm away and smashed him to the earth.
Vanyel lay stunned in the sudden silence of the square, broken and bleeding.
He was sprawled half on his back, and the silence howled in his ears as the storm had. The square was deserted now, but for the silent scarlet figure of the wizard.
Vanyel was utterly spent, and everything hurt so much he could hardly think. He coughed, and tasted blood, and when he tried to breathe, he felt stabbing pains in his chest and back.
He was oddly conscious of little things, of a pebble digging into his cheek, of his ankle bending the wrong way, of a strand of hair tickling his nose, of blood running into his eyes - of a single flake of snow spiraling down into the mage-light.
His vision began to darken as Krebain strode toward him from across the square; he seemed to be seeing things through a shadowy mist.
The wizard stood over him.
And strangely, he felt like laughing. Gods. All that being afraid of that dream, for nothing. He saw the wizard’s expression, and sobered. So. This is what it comes to. This is how it ends. At least - he looks a little tired. At least I put up some kind of a fight.
He thought he heard someone, something, whimper. Please, gods - let those people have gotten away. Don’t let this have been for nothing. Let the others come in time to save them.
“I told you, Vanyel Ashkevron, that I would have you with or without a mind,” Krebain said softly. “But I would rather you were mine wholly, and of your own will. You see? I can be merciful. I can be kind to those I love. I give you another chance, beautiful Vanyel. Surrender to me, and I will heal your hurts, and give you all that I promised you. Will you come with me now?”
No. Not ever. Not at the cost of my life. He looked up at those inhuman, chillingly cold eyes. And it will be at the cost of my life. But - gods - I can’t let it cost more lives than my own!
He reached, as far as he could, hoping for a tiny bit of energy left in the power-nodes - hoping to find another node, undrained -
- and touched the valley-node instead.
Gods - it isn’t possible!
For a moment he thought he saw a way out, not only for the villagers, but for himself. But when he assessed his own capabilities, he saw that to use the raw, elemental force of the vale would surely kill him. He no longer had the strength to control it. The effect would be like what he had done to himself in practice with Starwind - only a hundred times worse.
He could die painlessly, letting the wizard destroy his mind and soul - or he could die in agony, saving the people of Covia.
I was willing to die before, for ‘Lendel - why would I be afraid of pain and dying now? he thought, with a catch in his throat. I surely owe a price for not stopping ‘Lendel. All right. Gods, let this be my expiation. Give me this last strength to stop him.
“No,” he breathed. “Never.”
The wizard’s face twisted with anger, and he stepped back to deliver the final blow. Vanyel closed his eyes and reached -
In this last moment, peace came to him. A strange and heart-tight inner stillness, born of total acceptance that what he was about to do would kill him without Moon-dance near to heal what he would do to himself. With a feeling oddly like the lifting of his heart, he opened himself to the valley-node - and focused -
And the raw power poured through him and blasted from his eyes.
He screamed in agony, but his own cry was lost in the shriek Krebain made as the bolt of power caught him unshielded, in the face.
Then Vanyel fell, into true peace, and darkness. “Oh, ‘Lendel, wherever you are, I’m coming. Please, please be there -
Dear Withen; I think you would be very proud of your son today -
A faint sound from the fern-canopied bed beside her made Savil set down her pen and paper beside her chair, unwrap herself from her cloak, rise, and draw the silky hangings aside.
Vanyel - bandaged, splinted and bruised, and looking very pale against the dark green of Moondance’s bedding - moved his head again on the pillow, and opened dazed eyes.
Savil swallowed hard; he looked so battered, so bewildered.
Oh, my little love, we so nearly lost you this time - so close, so close. I half expect you to ask me to let you stay here, sheltered and safe. And the gods know, you’ve earned it.
He blinked, as if he didn’t quite believe what he sdw.
“Aunt - Savil?” he said faintly. “Are you - real?”
She sat carefully on the edge of the bed, and touched his cheek, giving him a faint smile. “That real enough for you?”
He nodded, and blinked again. “The people - the villagers - Gallen and Reva - are they all right?”
“They’re fine, ke’chara, “ she replied, her heart filling with pride and love at the question. His first thought - for others. There’s no doubt; Starwind was right. There is no doubt of him. ‘ ‘We got there just in time for Moondance to keep you from getting away from us. Gods - it’s a good thing that bastard wasn’t still alive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so angry in my life, and Yfandes was white-hot with rage. There wasn’t much left for us to do. Basically all I did was make a Gate to get us all back to k’Treva so Moondance could put you back together again.”
“Then everyone’s all right?” he asked insistently, as if he didn’t quite dare to believe her. “Are they protected now? Are you and Starwind and Moondance all right, too? That wizard - he was the one Leshara hired - he told me so. He told me - “
“Later,” she soothed. “Tell me all that later. We’re all fine. K’Treva sent out some of the Journeyman Tayledras to help get Covia back on its collective feet and give the region a little more in the way of protections. You’re the only one who sustained any damage, love.” She glanced up at the skylight to gauge the time. “I expect Moondance will be along any moment to give you another Healing.”
He sighed, and made a tiny choking sound. She looked down, and saw to her confusion that he was crying.
“Vanyel,” she asked, bewildered by the tears, and the strange, lost look in his eyes, “Van, what’s wrong?”
“I - “ he choked hopelessly. “I - after ‘Lendel - they won’t want me. The Heralds - they won’t want me - “
“Oh, Van - “ She closed her eyes against a surge of tears of her own, but these were born of joy. Child - oh, child, you rise above my expectations. That was the very last thing I ever thought I’d hear from your lips right now. “‘tan - ke’chara - the Heralds will want you. How can they not want you? You are a Herald already.’’
“I - am? I am?” He stared at her, bewildered, clearly unable to believe her.
She reached over to the chair and pulled her white cloak from it, draping it carefully over him. He clutched it, his eyes wide, his face reflecting all of his changing emotions, as he moved from hopelessness through surprise, to a joy that equaled her own.
“ - there. There’s your Whites to prove it. You have a bit more to learn; we’ll be staying here for a few moons yet while Starwind teaches you - but Vanyel, what makes a Herald is the heart. A caring heart, that cares for others before itself. And you are a Herald.”
He smiled then, a smile so sweet and so happy that it stopped her breath, and closed his eyes in absolute contentment, falling asleep with one hand still clutching the cloak to him.
- yes, Withen. You would be very proud. I know I am.