He turned her round to face him, and cupped her face in his hands.
“Leagh, were you trying to hurt me by doing that? If so, then you succeeded. I thought you were dead.”
She tried to drop her eyes, but Zared lifted her head so he could meet them. “Leagh, were you trying to hurt –”
“You lied to me!” she spat. “You have hurt me ten times more than I you!”
He winced. “I simply did not tell you my plans to –”
“You said we would ride to Severin and marry! Instead you drag me about with your army like a harlot!”
“I intend to marry you, Leagh! I –”
“And what is it makes you sure I still consent to marry you?” she said softly, and wrenched out of his hands.
To her anger, he roared with laughter. “Leagh! Look at us! Here we stand companionably naked, and after a week of sharing a bed and a passion. Do you think you have any choice?”
“If I say my shame was the product of rape,” she said, pronouncing every word clearly, “then I would have every choice. My honour would be restored, yours tarnished. I would still have my choice of husband –”
“Even with your belly swelling with my child?”
“If it swells. And after the shock of that river crossing I have no doubt that I will lose any child conceived to this point. Any child conceived after this point can still be –”
“No! Leagh, I cannot believe you say this! Damn it, we love each other! How can you stand there and talk so calmly of ridding yourself of our child?”
“Because I doubt that you do indeed love me, Zared. Now I wonder if it is my lands you lust after more.”
“How dare you say that to me?” he roared, and then cursed himself as he saw her flinch. He reached out for her, hugging her stiff body to his. “Leagh, I am sorry…but I could not believe you said that. Listen to me, as soon as I can find a notary we will marry.”
She did not reply, and Zared rubbed his hands over her body, trying to arouse her. “Leagh, I know you enjoy my touch…why deny that?”
Again she did not answer.
“Leagh…” he murmured, kissing her hair, her cheek, her neck. “Be my wife. Do not punish me for the actions I have been forced to take to wive you. Did I not say that I would fight for you? Well, if I march at the head of an army now it is only for love of you. It was the only way I knew I could have you.”
Leagh began to weaken, confused. Was that right? Was this all just for her? To convince Caelum to approve their marriage?
Or was there something else?
She murmured, trying to pull away from him, but again, as on their first night, he was too strong, and he pulled her down to the floor before the fire.
As he made love to her, Leagh thought she would choose to believe him. He had been rash and foolhardy, but he did love her, didn’t he? And perhaps over the next few days she could gently persuade him to forget his crazed idea of taking Kastaleon and march back north. They could quietly marry in Severin, and there they would weather Caelum’s certain anger.
Yes, she would persuade him to return to Severin. Once they were there, both Caelum and Askam would accept the inevitable.
29
The Ancient Barrows
Drago moved faster now that he knew where he needed to go. Sometimes he took food from an Avar camp. Not much, just whatever he needed to feed himself for a day or two. No-one ever spotted him – he moved like a night-shadow itself – and if it hadn’t been for the doe following him, Drago believed he would have passed through Minstrelsea completely unnoticed.
The doe, Faraday, still worried him. He rarely saw her, but occasionally he heard a faint footfall behind him, or the rustle of a shrub as she passed. Two or three times he tried to shoo her away, and when he did that she disappeared for a while, but the next day he would again become aware of her presence.
He was still worried about Zenith, partly because the doe remained behind him. Was Zenith well…or consumed? He’d hated to leave her like that, but he hadn’t the skills to help her, and just maybe StarDrifter or the priestesses on the island did.
Drago hoped StarDrifter would indeed be there to catch Zenith.
But if thoughts of the doe and Zenith ate at him, his dreams comforted him. Night after night he rode to the hunt, riding his great horse, the hawks to the side and ahead of him, and they sometimes slithered along the ground, sometimes flew through the air, but they always found their quarry. Drago grew to anticipate the final confrontation with his always nameless and faceless quarry. It would cower on the ground before him, and he would raise his sword, and plunge it down, and always at that point he would wake with an almost orgasmic ecstasy consuming him. He would lie awake for perhaps an hour, reliving every part of the hunt, remembering the thrill as the sword pierced the heart of his quarry, the ecstasy of its death.
And so he moved south.
It should have taken him many weeks, maybe even months, to reach his destination, but Drago found himself spotting landmarks that astounded him with the speed of their appearance. The Minaret Peaks (those he skirted as best he could, avoiding the tens of thousands of Icarii that thronged there), then the trading city of Arcen, just beyond the forest’s western border.
Drago had no idea why he was moving so fast – or why the Avar or Isfrael hadn’t confronted him yet.
Perhaps Caelum had decided to let him go. Drago’s mouth quirked at that particular thought. “Caelum would be more likely to make love to Gorgrael’s corpse,” he muttered, grinning, “than let me pass unhindered.”
Maybe his power wasn’t trapped so deep, after all. Or perhaps his powers were resurfacing the further he moved from his family?
Drago shrugged. It didn’t matter, he was free, he had a purpose, and here on these green trails no-one spat at him.
Always the Sceptre rode under his arm, safe in its sack.
And so, finally, some three weeks after he had fled Sigholt, Drago approached the Ancient Barrows. Here was where the ancient Enchanter-Talons had been buried so they could make their eventual way down to the Star Gate which existed beneath the tombs. Each barrow was an entranceway into the Star Gate itself, but Drago knew there were other passages secreted about these parts, passages more accessible than trying to dig down into one of the huge Barrows.
But where? And how well were they guarded?
Although Drago knew of the Star Gate, and had heard it described countless times, he had never seen it himself. Only Icarii Enchanters were allowed near its lip to reap the rewards of gazing into its depths. Drago had been kept well away.
But if Drago had not actually seen the Star Gate, nor knew the exact location of its entrances, then he’d heard rumours, and he’d heard Caelum and other Enchanters talking from time to time. And Zenith had occasionally chatted to him about the times she’d been down.
No, he could find it, but not tonight. Drago glanced at the faint stars twinkling through the forest canopy. Fifty paces before him the forest ended, for Faraday had planted around the Ancient Barrows to leave them easily accessible, but Drago ignored the call of the open spaces and crawled deeper back into the forest.
The lure of the dream beckoned.
The lure of the hunt.
Unknown to Drago, the doe curled up beside him as he slept, as she had curled up every night for the past week. She shared some of the dream, and shook, for she had good reason to fear the hunt.
But at least this time she was not the quarry.
She garnered from the man’s dreams some of the memories that embittered him, and she sorrowed. This man was Axis and Azhure’s child, and she loved both of them. Azhure as a beloved sister, Axis as…well, as a former lover. No longer did she harbour a passion for him, but he was a dear man to her and he and his concerned her.
Even if she rarely saw Axis or Azhure any more.
She knew why. They, like her, now travelled their own magical existence, and they rarely came back to the forest to see her. Azhure had once often
come, but it had now been many seasons since Faraday had seen her. True, sometimes all the Star Gods came to dance in Niah’s Grove, but Faraday did not approach on those occasions.
This man was their son. Faraday remembered that Azhure had been pregnant with Drago and RiverStar when Faraday had first met her. Even then Faraday had an inkling of the trouble these two babes would cause, and she’d later heard of Drago’s crime against his brother.
And here he was, running through the forest, blind to its beauties, and with the Rainbow Sceptre clasped beneath his arm.
That troubled Faraday. Axis had used the Rainbow Sceptre to kill Gorgrael –
but not to save her
– and had then secreted it within Sigholt, intending to study it at more leisure one day. Faraday nuzzled the sack, dreaming and remembering. The five Sentinels, Jack and Zeherah, the seductive Yr, and the irrepressible brothers Ogden and Veremund, had stolen the virulent, strangely corrupting power from the hidden Repositories beneath the waters of the Sacred Lakes to create this Sceptre. They had also given their lives. Faraday recalled that when Axis had wielded the Sceptre, she’d heard echoes of the Sentinels’ laughter in its flaring light – were their spirits still embedded in the Sceptre?
The thought gave Faraday some comfort, but then she tensed as the man moved.
She relaxed slowly – he was only moving deeper into his dream. Running through the forest, hunting, setting…his hawks? What were they? Setting his hawks to the quarry.
What was Drago doing with the Sceptre? Why had he taken it?
Should she do something? Tell someone?
But Faraday let the thought slip away. She so rarely spoke to anyone now. Even the once-constant shadow of the White Stag had faded; at the moment he ran the very upper reaches of the forests in the Avarinheim.
And as for Isfrael…the precious hours she’d spent with her child each year in Niah’s Grove had been too few, and Isfrael had bonded to the Avar rather than her. Now she believed he barely even thought of her let alone sought her out.
Faraday’s thoughts these days were generally vague. Deer-like. She thought about the trails and she thought about the choicest spots to nibble sweet grass and plump berries, but that was largely it. Until Drago had dragged Zenith into Niah’s Grove, for months Faraday’s thoughts hadn’t been directed to anything more than the next grazing spot.
She thought briefly of contacting Axis or Azhure about the Rainbow Sceptre, then let the thought drift away. She snuggled a little closer to the man, appreciating his warmth, and watched as he dreamed.
As he raised his sword to deal the death blow to his quarry, she rose and melted into the shadows.
Drago started out of his dream, breathing heavily, and clutching the Sceptre to himself. He smiled slowly, remembering the satisfaction of his sword driving home to smash bone and cleave heart.
He could almost empathise with his father for spending so long at war. Was this how Axis had felt when he’d driven the Rainbow Sceptre into Gorgrael’s heart?
He lay for a while, then decided he may as well get up and make an early start. He finished the last of the malfari bread he had taken from an Avar encampment two nights previously, then stood up, brushing leaves from his cloak.
For a moment he stood there in the dim light, one hand scratching at his cheeks and chin. He had not washed or changed in weeks, and his face was thick with a new growth of beard.
But would any of that matter beyond the Star Gate?
No. Nothing would matter beyond the Star Gate save that he find the means to regain his heritage.
When I have refound my enchantments, he thought, I shall create for myself an image to suit my potential.
He grinned, and laughed at his vanity, and then he set off to look for a way down to the Star Gate.
In the end the entranceway to one of the tombs was not too difficult to find. There was a small encampment of Icarii within the Ancient Barrows, and Drago simply waited until he spotted two of them wing their way to a spot about two hundred paces to the south of the Barrows themselves.
Drago took his time approaching the spot where they’d landed. Not only did he have to travel on foot, but he had to keep to the edges of the forest as much as he could. Even that proved impossible as the Minstrelsea only extended some hundred and fifty paces south of the Barrows, and he had to cover the last fifty paces virtually crawling on his belly through the thick, knee-high grasses of the Tarantaise plains.
Every three or four paces he glanced at the sky, anxiously scanning for Icarii above.
But again luck was with Drago, and he managed to approach the entranceway to the passage without detection. There was a small mound of dirt, perhaps half as high again as a man, and below that was a black hole. From his hiding spot some fifteen paces from the entrance Drago could see a smooth-floored passageway extending down, torches flickering in its depths.
He wriggled deeper into the grasses and pulled some more over him. Would the Icarii come back out? Or had they gone down to keep guard over the Gate? Drago remembered Caelum sending SpikeFeather to stand watch with Orr, but he may have since placed another guard at the Gate.
Well, he thought, I shall cope with whatever and whoever is there as best I can. I shall –
His thoughts were cut off by a movement in the darkness of the passageway, and an instant later two Icarii stepped out. Drago breathed in relief; they were the two he’d seen go down earlier. Well, whatever they had gone down for, they were obviously not a change of guard.
They flew off, Drago hiding his face in the dirt and praying they did not spot him. There was a rush of wings, a movement of air high above him, and then there was nothing but the peaceful noise of the wind in the grasses.
Drago kept his head down until he had slowly counted to five hundred, then he cautiously looked about.
Nothing.
Gathering all his courage, and feeling for the first time a knot of fear in his belly, Drago grabbed his sack and ran for the entranceway.
Far behind him, the red doe stepped cautiously out from the shadow of the forest and trotted after him.
30
The Rainbow Sceptre
The tunnel was cool and moist, and Drago pulled his cloak tighter about him. He was still nervous, but now that nervousness was tinged with excitement and a growing sense that he must step through the Star Gate soon, soon, soon…
He set off at a trot. The downhill slope was smooth, but Drago thought he would wind about in the bowels of the soil forever. His legs grew weak, and his breath short, and eventually Drago was forced to rest for some minutes before continuing at a slower pace.
He walked for what he thought was an eternity. Torches spluttered at infrequent intervals along the walls, and Drago wondered why there were not more of them. Surely the entrance into one of the greatest mysteries of Tencendor deserved a flood of glorious light?
He muttered as he stubbed his toe on an exposed rock, and stopped and rubbed it for a moment. Was this the entranceway to the Star Gate, or was it a trap for him? Had Caelum somehow guessed his destination? Had WolfStar spied out his whereabouts? Were there guards waiting around the next curve? Was death waiting around the next curve?
Drago felt his breath grow shorter still, and realised it was due to anxiety rather than effort. He stood a few minutes and deliberately calmed himself. No-one could know where he was. They would have seized him long before this. Neither Caelum nor WolfStar would have left him to wander if they’d known where to find him. No, no-one knew –
A footfall sounded in the tunnel below him and Drago leapt into the shadow of one of the walls, his heart hammering. He stared frantically about, then slithered further down the wall until he reached what shelter one of the wall’s support beams gave him.
Perhaps if he stood very still, and made no sound…but this passageway had nowhere to hide, and even the fitful light of the torches would be enough to reveal him to any but the totally blind.
The tunnel had bee
n carved out of soil and rock, and at the foot of the walls were small piles of rubble that had been left over from its construction. Drago bent down and selected a good-sized rock, feeling sick at the thought of having to use it.
The single footfall now resolved itself into a steady tramping. Just one, Drago thought. Just one. I can handle one if I have to. But his hand was slick with sweat, and he almost dropped the rock.
Whoever approached suddenly began to whistle, startling Drago so much he finally did drop the rock. It was a merry tune – Drago recognised it as a popular ballad often sung at Sigholt.
An Icarii, then?
His question was answered immediately as an Enchanter stepped around the lower curve of the tunnel. Drago knew her by sight and reputation, PaleStar SnapWing.
Stars! he thought, panicking, what am I going to do? She’ll see me any moment! His mind came up with several frenzied excuses to explain his presence – he was on an errand for Caelum, he was looking for Zenith, he’d got lost on an afternoon stroll about Sigholt – but they were so ridiculous that even in his current predicament he had to fight the urge to laugh.
PaleStar would well know of his trial and subsequent escape.
She was almost level with him now, and Drago wondered if he could possibly wrestle her to the ground before she had a chance to use her Enchanter powers, or if she’d pin his back against the tunnel wall like a –
She walked straight past, still whistling, and continued up the tunnel.
Drago could not believe it. He stared after her, completely stunned. How could she have failed to see him? A half-blind old man would have spotted him easily enough, let alone an Icarii Enchanter with magically enhanced vision.
Stars, but he’d been only an arm’s length from her!
Slowly he lowered his gaze to the sack under one arm, finally wondering if the Sceptre had been aiding him all along.
Drago stared at it for a long time, then he eventually resumed his walk down to the Star Gate, no longer attempting to muffle his footsteps.