“Well, that was one mighty bright comment,” the first brother said, sneering.
“Think you can come up with another?” Brother Two followed his sib’s witty jab with a verbal lunge of his own.
Rel hid a sigh. As the brothers shuffled with many side glances to what they considered the commanding positions in the small room, Rel had noted several things: the two might be hotheads but they had no training; the first one was wild-eyed in his belligerence, but the second one’s wide eyes and huge pupils betrayed fear underneath his bravado; the old man withdrawing quietly to a corner to fuss with his pack.
Three years ago, Rel would have felt obliged to fight, and he’d despised himself afterwards for the damage he caused foolish people. He’d learned since that brute strength was not always necessary.
“I’ll try,” Rel said, standing up.
His left hand scratched his head, his right gestured emptily, elbow slightly out as he appeared to stumble against the table. Another step, and Ow!, Whoog!, his elbow collided with one Brother One’s midsection, making breathing into an operation that took intense concentration, and his dropping left hand thumped against Brother Two’s nose, causing tears of pain to blind that fellow.
“Oh, pardon! I didn’t see—here, want a hand?” In Rel’s clumsy efforts to help, somehow Brother Two got his elbow knocked against the table in just the wrong place, sending agony zapping up his arm into his already aching head, and Brother One’s shin collided with a chair.
“Here—so sorry, please, I’ll have you steady in a trice—”
“No!” Brother One gasped.
“Heegh,” Brother Two whuffled.
They retired to sit on their beds, and the older man slid something back into his pack, and he sat down, smiling. “Traveling far?”
Rel saw the smile of congratulation, the speculation in that steady blue gaze, and said, “Around. Pa wants to retire, wants mountains at his back, that being a habit.”
“Retire here, in Oneh Kaer?” the man asked with a skeptical smile.
Rel gave a shrug. “Nobody’s ever heard of it. Sounds just about right to Pa. He said he wants somewhere boring, a place no one ever hears about, with mountains at the back that no one ever crosses. He having a constitutional dislike for waking up to surprises.”
“Ah,” the man said, nodding. “Come from a military background, do you?”
Rel shrugged. “Pa spent a life guarding the coast o’ Khanerenth against pirates. Me, I like to travel. Usually work as a caravan guard.”
Comprehension cleared the old man’s brow. Khanerenth—famous for its military school—fighting pirates—border guard—it all added up to training but no trouble.
The still-groaning brothers had also registered the same information, and Rel saw the signs that they had decided to retire honorably from the list.
“Well, you could tell your pa here’s the place, then,” the man said. “There is the old road up behind town, but no one’s been over from it since before my grandfather’s day.”
“Where’s it lead to?” Rel asked.
The old man sighed. “That was once Sartor over there. You’ve heard of Sartor,” he added.
Rel nodded. “Gran used to tell us old stories about it.”
“And don’t forget ’em.” The man shook his head, pain furrowing his brow. “Bad times, we live in. But we all make our way, and never forget the better days.”
Rel said, “Anyone ever been over that back road, just to see what’s what?”
“Sure. Every generation some hothead has to go, and they never come back. Some sort o’ bad magic traps a-layin’ for the unwary, I hear,” the man said. “But at least whatever’s beyond it don’t come back over this way. Road’s probably grown over long since. Sartor is gone from history, except in memory.” He shook his head. “Well, I’m for bed. Long, soggy ride for the coast, come morning, looks like.”
“Good night,” Rel said.
The brothers were already in bed. Rel leaned over to extinguish the lamp.
o0o
The next morning, Merewen sat up, rubbed her eyes, and sighed with relief.
Lilah sat up with a snort. “Something wrong?”
“I had a terrible dream,” Merewen exclaimed.
Their voices roused Atan, who blinked tired eyes. “Danger last night.” Her voice came out hoarse. She cleared her throat. “I didn’t fall asleep until the sun began to rise.”
Shocked and dismayed, Lilah and Merewen listened to Atan’s story as they walked to the edge of the river.
“A Norsundrian,” Lilah whispered, looking fearfully around. “Has to be! Did he threaten you?”
“He wanted to take me away, so he must know who I am. That means someone knows I’m here. But I used the ring. The light is very powerful. It made my own vision go dark for a time. I think it might have blinded that man, for he took it full in his face. He rode away.”
“Then let’s put some distance between us and him. We can go faster without any food weighing us down,” Lilah said doubtfully, as she watched Merewen’s small hands divide the last of the journey bread. “My guess is, Norsunder knows the spell got broken. Or a spell, or whatever it was you said.”
“One spell was broken,” Atan said. “But the enchantment still binds.”
“I thought ‘enchantment’ was a fancy word for spells.” And at Atan’s surprise, “Big ones?”
Atan leaned forward, hands tightly clasped. “An enchantment is more than one spell, bound together for a purpose. The binding spell requires a key to hold it all together. That key can be a time, or a thing, or a person—just about anything.”
“So we broke one spell. What does that actually mean?” Lilah asked, hoping the answer would be, No more danger. “Why would they bother with a lot of little spells, anyway?”
“Cruelty, in part,” Atan said. “From what we know of the final defeat, the Norsundrian in charge, an Old Sartoran known only as Detlev, bound the time-enchantment onto us Landises.”
“Ugh,” Lilah said.
“In front of my father.”
“Eugh!”
“Right before he was killed. Saying that only the Landises could free Sartor, and the last of them was about to die. In other words, he let my father know that all of his children were dead before they killed him.”
Lilah shrank down into a hunched knot. “That,” she muttered with heartfelt horror, “is really, really nasty.”
“It was calculated to be as cruel as possible.” Atan shivered. “Perhaps we should wait to talk about these things until we are safely in Shendoral. If we are out of journey bread, I trust we will see it before too long.”
Merewen smiled. “We are very near.”
“You can see it?” Lilah asked, squinting into the distant gray haze that looked to her exactly the same as always.
“No. But I feel it.” Merewen laid her hand over her heart. “I feel it is close—maybe today, if we hurry.”
“Can you lead us?” Atan asked, hope banishing her tiredness.
Merewen faced west, her eyes closed. “It’s all along there.” She opened her eyes, her hand pointing to the northwest.
“Then we have to leave the road,” Atan said. “Because it seems to be bending to the south.”
Fear was a better fuel than the dry remnants of their bread. Ignoring hunger, and then growing thirst, the girls sped through the gently undulating landscape to the west. Late in the day, a black line began to emerge through the smeary gray haze, resolving into sharp definition just as the light faded. From beyond the tangled brambles and dusty hedgerows and occasional copses of autumn-scraggly trees emerged the sky-sweeping green of tall conifers and pine, stippled here and there by the flash of scarlet and gold of just-turned leaves. The brambles gradually gave way to withered blackberry shrubs and sharp-leaved hazel.
The air smelled different. It smelled green, Lilah thought. To Atan it smelled like life, and to Merewen it was home.
o0o
Ke
ssler recovered his vision with the dawn, and though the headache still lingered, he returned to where he’d left the girls.
There was no sign on the aged, hard ground of their having left the road, which continued to bend southward around Shendoral. He wasted the morning following the road until he came to a shallow valley at the bottom of which the gradual accumulation of dust revealed that no living thing had come this way for uncounted years.
He wasted the rest of the afternoon riding back again to that last campsite, and then searching in widening circles until he discovered three sets of prints along the bottom of a dried stream-bed. The prints vanished in the tall, scrubby grass, but their northwestward direction was enough to give him a vector.
He knew their destination. He also knew Shendoral’s reputation. Were it true, and were the girls to reach the boundary of the purported magic, he would be forced to ignore the second part of Zydes’s orders, a matter that left him indifferent: Shendoral’s magic was said to visit any violence onto the perpetrator. Kessler did not want to test whether that was truth or myth, so he would ignore the order to kill the maidservants. But it might make grabbing his target a little more difficult.
He spotted the girls silhouetted on a brief rise just as the sun was setting.
Atan heard the approach of his horse’s hooves on the otherwise silent air, and croaked, “Run!”
Despite dry mouths, aching legs, and gnawing bellies, the girls ran.
Kessler urged his drooping horse into a steady trot, for it would go no faster. Trees blocked the straight chase; the animal wove its way westward through the increasing growth.
Kessler kept watching for signs of magical boundaries, but there were none. As he neared the girls, he scrutinized them, trying to determine which was his target. The blinding magic had not permitted him to see which one was the assailant. All he knew was that the magic had come from some object in or on one’s hand.
It was time for a fast experiment. He pulled one of his throwing knives from a boot top, and, choosing the tallest of the three girls, he threw. The idea was to wing her, and thus stop all three so he could find the one wearing or carrying a magic artifact; untrained civs usually panicked at the first sight of a weapon or wound and stood around wailing and fussing.
The three girls veered just as his knife left his hand, disappearing down a sudden incline.
Then his horse stumbled over an unseen root and almost fell. He reached, touched the sweaty neck, and decided to retrieve his knife and abandon the chase for now. He would rest the animal, and track the girls in daylight.
Lilah had been the one to see the fading light glint on the blade in the man’s hand as he cocked his wrist for the throw.
All three dived flat into a thick growth of ferns a heartbeat before the knife thunked in a great tree trunk where they had been. Wriggling through the ferns, they emerged from the other side and ran until lightning jabbed their sides and their throats burned.
They ran until they realized the galloping they heard was their own heartbeats, until the soft, moist air around them soothed minds as well as tired bodies. They splashed into a running stream, and bent and drank of the sweet, cold water. Then they collapsed on the soft grassy bank, and once their terror had subsided, all three fell straight into exhausted sleep.
SIX
Kessler knew that Norsunder’s commanders doubted his hold on sanity. He didn’t care. Surviving childhood in the deliberate savagery of his uncle’s fortress in Narad, capital of Chwahirsland, had refined in him the ability to live in the moment, detached from any emotion except anger, which lent strength and speed.
But even that had to be rationed, for he’d seen what uncontrolled rage did to his uncle’s plans. Overweening self-indulgence in a taste for vengeance and cruelty for the sake of cruelty had been the direct cause of all of Shnit Sonscarna’s defeats. Though King Shnit’s army was the largest in the world, it was also the worst trained—again because his uncle was afraid of uprisings. There could be no thinker, no leader, but him. And that’s why all the Sonscarnas were dead, except for Kessler’s doddering uncle Kwenz, no threat to anyone, and Kessler, who had escaped.
So he had learned self-control, learned it so well his mind was like a series of locked vaults behind which little but darkness could be descried, even in Norsunder, a realm where mind raids were both common and unheralded.
Here in Shendoral, he sensed the blanketing protection of ancient magic that denied outside access to his mind. He also knew that the magic in Zydes’s scope was not able to penetrate the border of the woodland.
For a brief time, he was free.
But it would be brief. He had no illusions about that.
He let the horse range among the sweet grasses of Shendoral, and he himself sat on a riverbank to indulge in the luxury of solitary thought while not being spied upon.
When night fell, he’d resume his duties. As long as he reappeared at the Base with the Landis girl as ordered, Zydes would not be interested in an exact accounting of his time.
While he sat down with his back to a tree and the morning’s ration of hard biscuit and cheese in his hand, an hour’s brisk walk northwards the three girls roused at last from sleep.
Lilah woke first, looking up at first with non-comprehension and then with pleasure through a ceiling of interlaced broad leaves to blue sky beyond. Blue sky! The pure blue of a cool autumn morning. And below it, crimson, amber, gold, yellow, rust, and myriad shades in-between delighted eyes that had been looking for a seeming eternity on indistinct gray-grown haze.
“Oh,” she breathed.
Merewen hugged herself, knowing that she was home. Surely danger could not follow them in Shendoral! “Savar’s house is not far,” she cried. “There we can find hot food, and bathe, and rest.”
“There are seasons here?” Lilah asked. “I thought time didn’t work right.”
“Well, we have seasons, and I have grown from very small to what I am now,” Merewen answered gesturing down herself to her bare feet. “So time is... time. But not the same in all parts of the forest, so Savar said.”
All day the girls walked toward the northeast bulge of the woodland, where Shendoral ridged the gentle valley that led down to the Arveas Lake. They stopped only to eat. Blackberry bushes grew wild here, as did grapevines, and they found gleanings of nuts everywhere. The berries were not the strange, withered ones they’d found on the periphery of Shendoral. These were sweet and good, evidence of rain and the march of seasons. Munching these foods staved off hunger, but they all looked forward to the good soup that Merewen promised would be waiting.
Hunger, leftover tiredness, and memory of the chase of the night before kept them from talking much. Speed was necessary, they felt—Lilah out of fear, Atan out of the sense of urgency that had driven her since she woke up weeks before and knew that she had to leave the Valley. And Merewen rushed along with the joy one feels at arriving home after a long trip. A favorite dell, here a mossy stone bridge, the carved patterns on the sides worn into blurs over the past thousand years, there a path—
“Just ahead,” she cried at last, when the filtered greenish-gold light was beginning to slant toward afternoon. “Just down this hill, past all those great redwoods.”
Atan forced herself to hurry, though her feet ached and her neck felt tight. Here, at last, was a glimpse of the real Sartor. Wild scents assailed her, scents that she had never in her life smelled, or at least could not identify, except somehow she must have remembered, because it smelled like home. All of it—the mossy bark, the duff underfoot, the tangled vines and shrubs and the great forest trees—she breathed in, her spirit winging between anguish and joy.
“There,” Merewen cried. “Beyond the trees. We should see the chimney in just a moment. Come, come!” She ran, and Lilah stumped after her, thinking of a hot bath and good food.
In fact, she was thinking so hard about them—trying to decide which she wanted first—that she did not see Merewen stop, and consequen
tly she almost ran into her back. She stumbled to a halt beside Merewen, who gazed, her eyes wide and dark with horror, her mouth open, at a great stretch of dark soil.
“It’s not here,” Merewen whispered.
Atan joined on her other side.
All three stared at the ground, through which tiny blades of grass could be seen springing.
“The house. It’s gone,” Merewen said, louder, as though testing the truth of it.
Lilah frowned, staring around. “There wasn’t any fire. I know what burned houses look like. Ours at home got burned in a riot. They don’t all just disappear, and no harm to the things growing next to the walls. What could have happened?”
“Magic,” Atan said. “I can’t tell you what kind.”
Sorrow and grief bent Merewen over, until she sank down onto the ground. Lilah hunched her shoulders up, her hands sliding into her pockets to close around her thief tools. Only how would those defend her against magic?
Atan looked eastward. Do you know, Tsauderei?
But there was no answer. She was in charge—and here were two faces turned toward her, one smeared with tears, the other pale and tense.
“The house is gone, but that does not necessarily mean that Savar is gone as well. He might even have bound it in some spell, if he had something important inside,” she said.
Merewen drew in a ragged breath. “Yes.” She gulped. “That’s right! So we will hope to find him anon.”
Atan nodded, relieved and worried. “Shall we camp, then find something to eat? We’ll keep watch, as well. And tomorrow we’ll plan our trip to the tower.”
Merewen wiped her eyes. “There’s a hot spring not far, and I can go back and see if any of our kitchen garden is left. I saw the grove where the cow lived, but I fear she is gone. Perhaps Heron the wood-gatherer has her.”
“How about later for that?” Lilah asked. “Did you say there was a hot spring?” She scratched her head, gritty from sleeping on dusty ground for so many nights.
Atan exclaimed. “Oh, that does sound good. I think I’ll go into it, clothes and all. I’m one giant itch.”