“The prince is beginning to think that the best we can hope for is to fall back to Rinbaladelan eventually,” Jantalaber continued speaking, “and help defend the city, but no one’s ready for that move yet. Still, who knows? With luck and the favor of the gods, I may see you all again in Rinbaladelan one fine day.”
No one spoke. Only a few of the apprentices so much as moved in their chairs or glanced around. Hwilli felt as if a north wind had swept into the refectory and laid a coating of dirty gray frost over everything in it.
When they finished eating, Hwilli helped Nalla fold her clothing and place it into two leather sacks for the travel ahead. Her few other possessions—combs, a silver brooch, a pair of blue ribands—Nalla tucked into a small pouch that she’d carry on her belt. Neither of them spoke until they’d finished.
“Hwilli, this is horrible,” Nalla said. “The prince believes he’ll lose the war, doesn’t he?”
Hwilli tried to speak, but tears clogged her voice.
“You see it, too,” Nalla continued. “And your family—ai! they live outside the walls.”
The tears spilled and ran. Nalla threw her arms around Hwilli and held her, just for a moment, before drawing back. Hwilli tried to speak, then hurried to the door before she wept again.
“I’ll pray I see you in the spring,” Nalla called after her.
Hwilli ran down the corridor and took refuge in her chamber. The last of the sunlight gleamed through the window, a distant gold. She flung herself onto her bed and fought down her tears. This is no time for weeping, she told herself. We all have to be strong. Perhaps if she pleaded with Master Jantalaber, he could convince the prince to allow her mother to come into the relative safety of the fortress. Perhaps.
“Beloved?” Rhodorix opened the door and stepped into the chamber. “Have your heard the news?”
“That the healers are leaving?” Hwilli sat up and turned on the bed to sit facing him.
“Not just the healers.” He paused to shut the door. “The prince is sending all the farm folk with them. The Vale of Roses isn’t a safe haven anymore, the captain told me. Tomorrow our warband’s going to strip every bit of food they don’t need for the journey south.”
“I hadn’t heard that.” How like a man of the People, even Master Jantalaber, to forget to tell me! What does he care about the slaves outside?
Rhodorix sat down next to her and caught her hand between both of his. “Do your bloodkin still live out there?” he said.
“Only my mother. She’ll be safe, then, for a little while. Well, if she doesn’t starve at the gates of Rinbaladelan, anyway.”
“The prince won’t let his people starve.”
“Our prince wouldn’t, true. I know naught about the prince of Rinbaladelan.”
Rhodorix started to speak, sighed instead, and drew her into his arms. His lovemaking gave her more comfort than any words could have done.
In a gray dawn turned cold by a drizzle of rain, the healers led out their expedition from the fortress. Hwilli walked with them down to the valley, where the farm folk waited for them in a mob of weeping humans, bleating goats, and lowing cattle. The farmers pushed wheelbarrows and handcarts, laden with pitifully small bundles of household goods. Hwilli worked her way through until she found her mother, Gertha, a big-boned woman who wore her long gray hair bound back into a single braid. In one hand she held the halter ropes of two milk goats, who were complaining softly and rubbing up against their human’s hips.
“Mama!” Hwilli threw an arm around her shoulders. “I’ve brought you a cloak and some extra food.”
“Well, thank you.” Gertha’s smile displayed the few brown cracked teeth left to her. “I was thinking I was going to have a cold walk of it.”
Hwilli laid the cloth-wrapped bundle of bread at her mother’s feet, shoved a curious goat away with one foot, then took off her cloak and placed it around her mother’s shoulders. She pinned it at the neck with a bronze pin. She’d considered giving her the golden bird brooch, but she knew that someone would only steal it along the way if she did. Gertha stroked the cloak with her free hand.
“Very nice wool,” she said, “but don’t you need it?”
“No. Master Jantalaber will give me another one.” She picked up the bundle again and handed it over. “Bread and cheese. Eat it first, before the overseers take it.”
“I will. It’s kind of you to remember me. I wondered if you did, up there in the palace and all.”
“Mama, how could I ever forget you?”
Sudden tears ran down Gertha’s face. Hwilli hugged her again and wept with her. The horse soldiers were riding up and down the line, yelling at everyone to get ready to move. Whips cracked, the horses tossed their heads and snorted. Hwilli gave her mother one last embrace, then turned away, half-blind with tears. She worked her way free of the mob just as the villagers began to walk away. Some turned for a last look at Reaching Mountain, the huge slabs of rock that had loomed over them every summer of their lives. Most concentrated on pushing their belongings ahead of them down the rocky path.
Hwilli stood on the first terrace and watched until the last figure, the last wisp of dust, had faded from sight. By the time she returned to the fortress, she’d managed to stop weeping.
A few nights after the refugees had started their trek to Rinbaladelan, the first snow fell, but it stayed up high on the mountains. The fortress itself received an icy rain that froze only in the deepest shadows. As soon as the sun climbed halfway to zenith, the frost melted again, but winter had arrived in a swirl of north wind as cruel as thrown knives. Hwilli worried about her mother and Nalla incessantly. Not even Rhodorix could lift her spirits.
“I feel an evil wyrd coming,” Hwilli told him one night. “I don’t know what, but I can feel it deep in my heart.”
He said nothing, merely stroked her hair, twining it lightly around his fingers then releasing it.
“Do you feel it, too?” Hwilli said.
“I don’t.” He smiled at her. “In the spring, now, when the Meradan are on the move again, then mayhap I will. But we’ll have a winter here first.”
For his sake she voiced nothing and let his kisses distract her. The spring will come too soon, she thought. Far, far too soon.
With Nalla gone, Master Jantalaber took over the task of teaching Hwilli her first lessons in dweomer craft, which amounted to her learning proper words and definitions. The universe, it turned out, encompassed far more than the world Hwilli had always seen, and each of these worlds contained their own proper order of beings and creatures. At times, the lesson over, Jantalaber would talk of his dream of building a place of healing as well, particularly when Paraberiel joined them.
“I’d thought of building it of stone in the usual way,” Jantalaber said one evening. “Down by the Lake of the Leaping Trout, I thought.”
“That’s a lovely place,” Paraberiel put in. “Very restful, if someone was ill.”
“And close enough to a forest for the wood to send our failures on to their new life.” The master smiled with a wry twist of his mouth. “But it’s so far away, all the way on the other side of the grasslands.”
“I was thinking it would be safe, therefore,” Paraberiel said.
“No place is safe any more, not with these horse beasts carrying our enemies.”
“It’s too bad you couldn’t build a refuge that could move,” Hwilli said, smiling. “We could use the horses to pull big sledges or some such thing.”
The men both laughed at her jest; then Jantalaber fell silent, looking away from his two apprentices at a pair of sprites, hovering in the air. Par seemed unaware of them. Both apprentices waited, unspeaking, until the master remembered their presence.
“My apologies,” Jantalaber said. “But, Hwilli, you’ve given me an idea. Not sledges, no, but I wonder—” He got up from his chair. “I need to go consult with Maral. I wonder—”
Murmuring to himself, he hurried out of the room. Hwilli felt a cold shu
dder of awe that the master could just go to Maraladario without sending a message first. Even Paraberiel seemed surprised into better manners than usual.
“I’ll help you finish hanging those bundles of herbs,” he said.
“My thanks,” Hwilli said. “There’s a lot of them.”
Although the work took them most of the evening, Jantalaber never returned. She could imagine that the two dweomermasters talked deep into the night about arcane matters indeed, far beyond her understanding.
From that night on, Maraladario took to coming to the herbroom in the evenings. She would sit on the high stool and idly watch the two apprentices work while she chatted with Jantalaber about their proposed place of healing. Hwilli understood very little of what they were saying, and while Paraberiel pretended he understood, he never could explain it to her when she asked. Now and then she did recognize phrases, but others, such as forced convolution of the astral light, ensouling the egregore, and sigils of evocation, slipped through her mind like fingerlings through a wide-meshed fishnet.
Gradually, however, she began to build up an understanding of the general scheme. The two dweomermasters planned to build up an illusion of a place with so much dweomer energy behind it that in ordinary times it would look and feel and behave exactly like a real place. Yet it would have some extraordinary properties, since it would be only an illusion. As a nod to the troubled times, Maral wanted to give the site the power to move itself away from threatening danger. That mysterious egregore, it turned out, meant a body of knowledge about healing that would exist in a sort of bubble out on the astral plane. Any dweomerworker with the necessary skills would be able to learn the knowledge without the intermediary of a teacher.
“Someone extraordinarily talented,” Maral remarked one evening, “could even get to it from the Gatelands of Sleep.”
“Mistress?” Paraberiel asked. “Does that mean in dreams?”
“Dreams of a sort, a very special sort.” Maral frowned at the far wall. “I wish Nalla hadn’t been sent away. She showed promise in that area of the work.”
“Could she perhaps come back, Mistress?” Hwilli said. “In the spring, if it’s safe.”
“Perhaps so. I’ll speak to the prince about it.”
“I’d like to have her join us, too,” Jantalaber said. “Well, we’ll see. Now, I think your idea of placing our site on an island is a good one. The ocean’s too violent, but a lake, a good-sized lake like the Lake of the Leaping Trout, that would be ideal.” He turned and looked at Hwilli. “Why a lake?”
Hwilli gulped and forced her scattered thoughts calm. “The vibrations of the water veil?” she said at last. “They’d be like sticks and stones to build with.”
“Very good!” Maral raised a surprised eyebrow. “You have an affinity for this working, Hwilli. Excellent!”
Hwilli ducked her head and forced out a modest smile, but she felt like shouting in glee, that Maraladario had praised her.
One evening, Jantalaber took his two apprentices to visit Maral in her chambers. He made a silver dweomer light to float ahead of them as they crossed a courtyard glittering with hard frost. Dark clouds hung low in the sky, and the very air itself breathed out cold. The stairway in the Tower of the Sages seemed almost warm by contrast, as did Maral’s chambers when they reached them.
As the head of the dweomermasters, Maral had a brazier in her reception room and the charcoal to fuel it. Spirits of the air hovered round to whisk any fumes away through a tiny vent in a nearby window. Maral, however, had draped herself in two cloaks. As the servant ushered them in, through an open doorway they could see her pacing back and forth in an inner chamber.
“She feels the cold badly,” her servant murmured. “Master Jantalaber, do you think she’s ill?”
“No,” Jantalaber said. “At her age, we all feel the cold.”
At the sound of his voice Maral came hurrying to greet them. Once they’d all sat down, and wine had been offered and refused, the servant bowed and took his leave.
“My thanks for coming here,” Maral said to Jantalaber. “The frost bothers me, and I didn’t care to go outside.”
“Of course,” Jantalaber said. “It’s never a burden to visit you.”
She smiled briefly then leaned back in her chair. “I’ve heard from the southern mages,” she said. “Now, you children—” she glanced at Par and Hwilli, “—don’t know the beginning of this tale. Some days ago your master and I decided to contact the mages of Rinbaladelan and ask them to join our project of forming a place of healing. We’ve been waiting for an answer.”
“It finally came?” Jantalaber broke in.
“Oh, yes, but you won’t like it. The head of their guild told me they simply couldn’t expend any dweomer force on our project because they had their immensely important secret work on hand. He did wish us luck with it.”
“How kind of him.” Jantalaber seemed to be about to say more, then set his lips tightly together.
“Their secret work, Mistress?” Par said.
“It’s a puzzle they’ve been working on for hundreds of years,” Maral said. “I’m truly tempted to tell you what it is, too. I never swore any vow not to tell.”
“Oh go ahead.” Jantalaber suddenly grinned. “It will serve them right.”
“No bruiting this about, mind.” Maral paused to return his smile. “They’re trying to discover what language was spoken in the Blessed Lands, the earthly paradise where the gods created the People.”
“What? That’s daft!” Hwilli blurted without thinking. “My apologies, Mistress!”
“That was my reaction, too, actually,” Maral said. “No need to apologize. The guild head was not pleased with me for it, either.”
“I can well imagine,” Jantalaber said. “With the northern princedoms crumbling around us, how can they justify—”
“They say that if they can learn the language, then they can ask the gods to intervene.” Maral suddenly laughed, an unpleasant nervous chuckle. “They have their reasons, actually. If they could talk to the gods, they could circumvent the priests and their stargazing and their silly sacrifices.”
Jantalaber gave Hwilli and Par each a look as sharp as a dagger point. “Never ever breathe a word of this outside this chamber,” he said. “Do you understand? It could cost a great many people their lives.”
Both of them murmured their agreement. Hwilli could barely speak, thinking of such an impiety.
“It’s not just daft.” Jantalaber turned back to Maral. “It’s extremely dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” Maral said. “Indeed. The guild in Rinbaladelan lives for itself alone, and I think the isolation has really and truly driven them mad.”
For a moment Hwilli wondered if she might be sick and disgrace herself. She took several deep breaths and fought her fear under control. They won’t be helping us with anything, then, she thought. No matter how bad things get here in the north.
Every morning, Rhodorix and Andariel walked through the stables. By that time the guards had captured a hundred and seven warhorses and trained a hundred riders. Each guardsman stood beside his horse while Rhodorix examined the horse itself to ensure that it was well cared for, and Andariel looked over the man’s gear for the same purpose. Usually they found a couple of slackers who ended up doing whatever unpleasant work needed doing that day. On this particular morning, however, they cut their inspection short when an out-of-breath servant lad came to fetch them.
“Prince Ranadar is outside,” he said. “He wants to talk with you both.”
They followed him out into the courtyard, white and glistening with the first real snowfall, and picked their way over the slippery cobblestones. Wrapped in a scarlet cloak, Prince Ranadar stood in the shelter of the doorway that led into the watchtower. When they started to kneel, he stopped them with a quick wave of one hand.
“It’s too cold for that,” the prince said. “The mages have brought me some grim news. Lin Rej has fallen to the Meradan.”
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Andariel turned pale and took a sharp step back, which nearly cost him his balance on the slippery footing. Rhodorix flung out one arm to steady him, lest the captain faint and fall. So many unusual names had flooded Rhodorix’s mind in his few months in Garangbeltangim that it took him a moment to remember what Lin Rej was: a city of people who were usually called “Mountain Folk,” though Hwilli tended to call them “Children of Earth,” whatever that may have meant.
“Your Highness?” Rhodorix said. “Isn’t their city underground?”
“It was,” Ranadar said. “But there were stairways leading up to gardens on the surface. I heard that Meradan breached the upper walls and broke in through those doors.”
“There must have been a cursed lot of them.” Andariel had steadied himself. “Your Highness, I’m surprised that anyone could get past Mountain axemen, especially in those narrow tunnels. The Meradani losses—”
“—must have been high, yes, but take no comfort in it. The mages tell me that the Meradan have reinforcements. The Children of Aethyr have risen in revolt. They’ve deserted the farms around the northern cities and joined up with the Hordes.”
Andariel swore under his breath. Both men glanced at Rhodorix, then quickly looked away.
“Does Your Highness doubt my loyalty?” Rhodorix said.
“Of course not!” Ranadar frowned at him, then smoothed the expression away. “Though I can see why you’d ask. Have no fear on that score, Horsemaster.”
“My humble thanks, then.”
The silence hung between them like smoke, acrid and choking.
“Your Highness?” Andariel broke it at last. “Were there any survivors from Lin Rej?”
“A few.” Ranadar paused briefly, his face slack with perceived horror. “They’re on their way here. I want you and your men to ride out to meet them, just in case there are any stray Meradani patrols riding around looking for prey. The Mountain Folk are traveling on the Tanbalapalim Road. They left some of their fighting men behind to winter in the fortress there. The rest and some women are heading our way.”
“We’ll fetch them, Your Highness,” Andariel glanced at Rhodorix. “Horsemaster, how will the horses fare in the snow?”