“Godspeed, Sevirym,” he shouted into the wind. “Mind the ice!”
Hector descended from the wall as well. “I suppose we should put an hour or so into reinforcing the sandbags,” he said, brushing the grit from his hands. “The burlap is long gone, but we can continue spading and packing around the base of the—” His words choked off as his eyes came to rest on the two shadows that hovered at the edge of the darkness behind them.
A woman was standing at the far end of the wharf that bordered the town, clutching the remains of a tattered shawl around her thin shoulders. More wraith than human, she said nothing, but stared out into the fog with hollow eyes.
Beside her was a child, a boy, it appeared, long of hair and slight, young enough to still warrant the holding of his hand, though he stood alone. Like his mother his eyes were large and appeared dark in the light of the brand, but unlike her he still showed signs of life behind those eyes.
The firelight flashed for a moment as Jarmon’s hand quivered.
“Aw,no, ” he muttered. “No.”
For a moment the only sound at the edge of the pier was the ever-present howling of the wind. A spattering of icy rain blew across the deserted wharf, stinging as it fell. Then Hector turned to the others, angrily brushing the hair from his eyes.
“Jarmon, Cantha—find me a longboat. There must be something still around here, a rowboat, a fisherman’s skiff, something—”
“Hector—” Anais said quietly.
“Give me the brand,” said Hector frantically, motioning to Jarmon. “I’ll row them out quickly. The ship will see the light—”
“Stop it, Hector,” Anais said more firmly.
The young knight’s eyes held the bright gleam of desperation in the fireshadows.
“For God’s sake, find me a bloodyboat —”
“Cease,” said Cantha. Her voice cut through the wind. The others turned to see her face impassive, her eyes glinting either from sympathy or, more likely, from the rivulets of cold water that were now insistently strafing her eyelashes. “Get them out of the rain.”
The companions watched their leader silently, intently, oblivious to their increasingly sodden clothes and heads. Hector bent over at the waist and put his hands on his knees, as if suddenly winded. He stood thus for a long moment, then nodded, gulping for air.
“We will take shelter in the livery stable until the storm passes,” Anais said, squeezing Hector’s shoulder as he passed on his way to the woman and the child. “It’s the only building left with most of a roof.”
Hector nodded, still bent over.
“We will take them with us to the inn at the crossroads for the night,” he said when he could speak again.
The woman did not move as Anais approached, but the child’s eyes widened in fear and he dashed behind her. The Liringlas soldier stopped, then turned back to the others.
“Hector, you had best deal with this,” he said, his voice flat in the wind. “I don’t think he has seen one of my race before.”
Hector straightened and shook the rain from his shoulders and head.
“I am part Liringlas too, Anais.”
Anais gestured impatiently. “Aye, but you look more human, because youare . Come over here.”
Hector exhaled deeply, then walked quickly to Anais’s side. “Come with us,” he said to the woman, but she did not appear to be listening; if she was not standing erect, he would have believed that the life had already fled her body. He crouched down and put out his hand to the child.
“Come with me,” he said in the same tone he had used to coax his own son, only a year or so older than this one. “We will take you where it is dry.”
The child stared out from behind the woman, water dripping from his hair.
Hector beckoned to him with his hand. “Come along,” he said again.
The boy considered a moment more, then took the woman’s hand and led her, still clutching her now sodden shawl, to where the men stood.
With a sizzle, the brand in Jarmon’s hand extinguished in the rain.
The child slept all the way to the crossroads, leaning against Hector, sitting before him in the saddle. The woman, who rode behind Anais, slept as well, or at least seemed to; her hollow eyes remained open, glassy, and unfocused, but her breathing took on a more even rhythm after a mile or so.
Neither had spoken a word the entire time the six people had huddled in the livery. The insistent rainshower had given way quickly to a full-blown storm, tempestuous and drenching; the sheets of rain rattled what remained of the stable’s roof and poured in small waterfalls through the openings.
“Well, at least the horses got out,” Jarmon had observed sourly, shifting to avoid a new leak.
“Something to be grateful for,” Anais had said. Hector had said nothing.
After the worst of the storm had passed, leaving great clouds of mist blanketing the cold ground, the travelers had taken to the road leading east out of Kingston, through the broken city archway that had once been an architectural marvel but now lay in pieces in the roadway. In the dark the destruction was not as apparent as it was by day, and once the city was behind them there was little indication that anything at all was wrong with the world on this rainy night. The horses trotted easily over the muddy roadway, seemingly invigorated, perhaps relieved to be away from the cleansing pyres and out in the cool mist of rolling fields again.
An hour’s ride put them at the crossroads, where the legendary inn stood, abandoned and empty of most of its furnishings. The Crossroads Inn had been a place of historical impact beyond any a building should have a right to possess; a critical meeting place and refuge of blessed ground in the Seren War two centuries before and even after it, famous for its hospitality, safety, and the vast stone hearth where the fire was never extinguished. Now it was dark, hollow as the woman’s eyes. Its door, once gilded with a golden griffin and said to be the talisman by which the inn remained untouched even in the times when enemies occupied the westlands, was missing, taken over the sea with the First Fleet. Its entrance yawned open like a dark cave.
The inn’s hospitality may have been intrinsic, because it remained in the place even now, shell that it was. It was their favorite resting place, a refuge still, even in the absence of innkeeper, barkeep, household spirits, or door.
Jarmon dismounted, lit a brand, and went inside, scouting to ascertain whether anything had come to call since the last time they had been here. While he quickly checked the empty tavern and rooms, Cantha assisted Hector and Anais from their horses with their human cargo.
“Where did they come from?” Hector asked as the boy sleepily wound his thin arms around the knight’s neck.
“From the market, I’d wager,” said Anais, helping the woman down from the saddle.
“How could we have missed them?”
His friend shrugged. “I don’t know that we did. They might have walked from east of the Great River, or a village along the river itself. We can’t save everyone, Hector, though you certainly insist upon trying. Surely you must know that by now.”
Hector passed his hand gently over the sleeping boy’s back, thinking of another child like him. “I do, Anais.”
Cantha strode off into the darkness; both men took note of her passing but did not comment. They had become accustomed to her nightly disappearances as she went to commune, as all members of her race did, with the wind.
“Clear inside,” Jarmon called from within the flickering light of the inn.
“Good. Get a fire going, Jarmon. Anais, go below to the stores and bring up victuals if there are any left.” He stepped through the dark opening and into the cold tavern.
Anais, following behind, nodded. “There should be, unless the vermin got to them. Sevirym laid in an estimable supply down there.” He led the woman inside, then released her hand and crossed to the stairway, starting down to the hidden passage where the food was kept, chuckling softly. He turned in the dark on the stairs, his silver eyes twin
kling. “Remember how he’d say that there was no point in surviving a cataclysm only to starve to death?”
Hector smiled slightly in return. “Yes.”
“It was a good thing you did, sending him with theStormrider , Hector,” Anais called over his shoulder as he headed down the steps.
“I’m glad you think so, Anais,” said Hector.
“Aye,” agreed Jarmon sourly as he blew on the sparks of the hearth flame. “Now we can at least die in peace.”
The boy woke when the tendrils of smoke that carried the scent of ham reached his nostrils; he was eating greedily in the flickering firelight by the time Cantha returned.
Anais ceased chewing long enough to prod her.
“Well, what does the wind have to say this night, Cantha?” he asked jokingly, pushing the plate they had saved for her nearer on the heavy table board. He waited for the withering stare that he alone in the group relished.
“Much,” Cantha replied flatly, tossing her vest onto the hearth to dry and sitting down beside it. “None of it clear.”
The eyes of the three men locked onto her as she picked up her plate and settled in to eating. They waited in pensive, almost tense silence to hear her elaborate, but the Kith woman merely finished her supper and took a deep draught of Sevirym’s prized cider.
For a long time the only sound in the cavernous inn was that of the crackling fire. Finally Hector handed the boy his mother’s untouched supper and silently urged him to convince her to eat.
“Cantha,” he said, watching the woman take a piece of hard cheese from her plate and stare at it in her hand, “what did the winds say?”
Backlit by the hearth fire, Cantha’s eyes were blacker than the darkness that surrounded them. The chestnut skin of her thin face glowed orange in the reflected light of the flames.
“Something comes,” she said simply.
“What?” demanded Jarmon. “What comes?”
Cantha shook her head. “When the winds speak, most times they speak as one,” she said, her raspy voice clear.
Then it changed, scratching against all of their ears. In it was the howling of many toneless voices, a cacophony of shrieks, rising and falling in intermittent discord.
“Now, they do not,” she said, speaking in the discordant sound of the wind. “They moan wildly, as if in terror. What they say is like a maelstrom; unclear. But whatever is coming, the winds fear it.”
The men exchanged a glance. In Cantha’s voice they could hear the wail of sea winds, the rumblings of thunder, the nightmarish cadence of destruction as gusts in a gale battered buildings to their ruin. It was almost like the sound of battle, the confusion, the shouting, the utter sense of being lost in the fury of war. The wind was foretelling something dire, but that was not unexpected.
Anais wanted her to give voice to it anyway.
“So what, then, do you believe is coming?” he asked.
“The end,” Cantha said.
Once the chill of emptiness had been driven from the great rooms of the inn by the steady hearth fire, the travelers began dropping off to sleep one by one. Jarmon first; as a lifelong member of the King’s Guard, he had learned to stay awake and watchful for days on end, and thereby had learned to take his repose the instant it was offered him. His bedroll lay behind what had once been the tavernkeeper’s bar as a courtesy to the others; Anais had once complained that Jarmon’s prodigious snoring was causing his bow to warp and his sword to rust.
The woman, who still had not responded to a single salutation, had drifted off into unconsciousness soon after Jarmon. The boy had played a merry game of mumblety-peg with Anais and had spent more than an hour on Hector’s lap, taking turns making shadow puppets on the wall in the firelight before finally curling up beside her under Hector’s cloak.
Cantha eventually took her place near the open doorway where the wind could wash over her in her slumber, standing a watch of a sort, though there was little chance that even the brigands that still remained in the doomed land would approach the inn. Its reputation as a refuge of good and a bastion of those who defended it had survived the evacuation into these latter days.
After the others had fallen asleep, the two childhood friends passed a skin of wine between them, musing in mutual silence. Finally Anais looked up at Hector, who was staring pensively into the fire, and leaned forward, his silver eyes bright but solemn.
“A girl, then,” he said softly.
Hector nodded.
“The twins must be happy with that,” Anais said, thinking of his own daughters. “They were a mite put out when your Aidan turned out to be a boy.”
“The three of them made fine playmates nonetheless,” Hector said, leaning back and crossing his feet on the hearthstones. “It gives me comfort to know that our friendship has been passed along to another generation.”
“What is her name? Flynt said you would know it.”
Hector nodded again. “We agreed if the child were to be born a girl, and Talthea did not sense after seeing her that it was a misnomer, she would be named Elsynore.”
Anais took another swig from the wineskin.
“A fine namesake,” he said, lifting the skin in a comical toast in the direction of the fire. “Elsynore of Briarwood. A fine Seren role model.”
“Yes, but that is not the only thought behind the name,” said Hector, watching the flames dance and pulse over gleaming coals in the old hearth. “The wyrm who opened her lands to the king and the refugees—”
“Ah, of course, Elynsynos, yes? You named your daughter to honor her.”
“With the aid of a Liringlas Namer. We gave the child both names we had chosen, male and female, so that it could be named before birth.”
Anais chuckled. “Were you expecting that giving her a name similar to the wyrm’s own would give the dragon pause about eating her?”
Hector’s eyes lost their warmth and he turned away, watching the shadows twist and writhe in the darkness behind them. He stared at the dark form of Cantha, sleeping on the open threshold, then glanced over to where the child and his mother slept. He could not see Jarmon, but the grinding snore that rose and fell in regular rhythm, almost like a marching cadence, signaled that he slept still.
“I confess that learning my father and the Second Fleet had been diverted to Manosse was heartening news for me,” he said finally. “Manosse is an ocean away from the Wyrmlands; it is a long-civilized nation with a healthy shipping trade, an army, a mercantile—all signs that it is a stable place. Binding them over to his care when we all believed they would end up in uncharted lands beyond the known world, lands that are ruled by an ancient dragon whose hospitality is only attested to by Merithyn, was possibly the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Now at least I know they will be safe.”
“As long as they stay in Manosse,” Anais said seriously. “Each refugee pledged fealty to the king on the horn as they boarded, remember? They are charged with the duty to come should the horn ever sound, generation unto generation. If Gwylliam calls, they will have no choice but to set sail again for the Wyrmlands.” He saw his friend’s shoulders sag somewhat. “But it should reassure you that Merithyn believes the place to be a safe and bountiful paradise. When he set out with the king’s other explorers to find a place for our people to emigrate to, no one had ever broached the Wyrmlands and lived to tell about it. As he was the only one of Gwylliam’s explorers to return, and with a generous offer of asylum at that, I would hazard he knows about which he speaks.”
“Who knows?” Hector said dully. “Who knows whether any of them made it to the Wyrmlands? Flynt said there had been no word whatsoever from the First and Third Fleets. Who knows? But God, the One, the All, has granted us a sweet boon in our final days. We know at least that our own families are safe in Manosse. When they left, I never expected to hear word of them again. And now, as Jarmon is so fond of saying, I can die in peace.”
Anais rose from the hearth and stretched lazily. “Yes, but most likely not ton
ight,” he said. “What are the plans now, Hector? Is there any reason to go back to our guard route? If, as Cantha believes, the end is what is coming, why not spend it here? There is food, and firewood, and shelter, and, above all else, ale. Seems like a good place to spend one’s final days.”
“Yes,” Hector agreed. “I think there is wisdom in that, even though I suspect your love of fine ale might have more than a little to do with the suggestion.” He glanced over at the woman and the boy. “And it would be folly to attempt to ride our regular watch with them. The woman is a walking corpse, and cannot properly care for the child alone. We may as well make them, and ourselves, as comfortable as we can.” He shook out his own camp blanket and laid it, and himself, down before the hearth to sleep.
“And besides, we are close enough to town to do two shifts of sandbag duty daily.”
Anais groaned and rolled over toward the fire.
And so they remained, wrapped in dreams of the World Tree and of faces they would never see again, still asleep before the coals, until the stillness was broken by the harsh metal sound of Cantha unsheathing her sword.
In one fluid movement that belied her age, the ancient Kith soldier rose, drew, and crossed the threshold to the doorstep of the inn, where foredawn had turned the sky to the smoky gray that signals morning is nigh.
“Halt and declare,” she called sharply into the gloom.
The men were behind her a moment later. They peered through the doorway, drawn as she was, searching the semidarkness for the sound that had summoned her attention.
At the crossroads a horse stood, dancing exhaustedly in place. Atop it a rider, bent with strain, was struggling to remain upright in the saddle.
“Help me,” called an old man’s voice. “I am Brann, from the village of Dry Cove on the northern seacoast at Kyrlan de la Mar. I seek the soldiers of the king.”
“Jarmon, bring me a lantern,” Hector ordered.
He stepped out into the cold gray air, watching closely as the rider slid from his mount, took a wobbly step, then collapsed in the center of the roadway. As the rider dropped, the horse took several steps away from him, which Hector took to be a sign of its poor training or the rider’s lack of skill. Once he had the lantern in his hand, he signaled to Anais to wait with the boy and the woman, then beckoned to Cantha and Jarmon to follow him.