II: Ghosts of
Winter
Two
days into the new year, Dav took a notion to travel up to
Windhome hall, in Sparca. Wintertime survival was the point, he
said: their greatest challenges would come from the wild world, as
few humans would be abroad to contest their path, and those few would
probably also be Runedaur. Juris, Ulflaed, Cobry, Rory, Flick,
Rothesay and Arnaf were particularly invited, and Garrod invited
himself. So did Peridar, “at least as far as the Holywell; I’m
off to Rose House.”
Arnaf
looked up from the map he shared with Rothesay. “That’s over the
Rusannmar—you’re doing winter and mountains ?”
Peridar just grinned.
They
bundled up well, even Rothesay: though she needed little for
herself, she carried extra against her friends’ needs. She was
quite content to carry more, far more, than anyone else, as the
bulkiness began to give her difficulties long before the weight did.
Her fellow students looked askance, as the everyday business about
the hold gave rare occasion for her weird strength to show itself.
Cobry overpacked his own gear, in a hopeless attempt to match her
burden; he wrangled it onto his back, stood up wavering, Dav strode
past and gave his pack a sharp tug that toppled him backwards.
“How
often would you like rescued?” the Master asked innocently. Cobry
grumbled, but he repacked.
Lacie gave
Rothesay a tiny pot of rose-scented ointment “for your lips, so
they don’t get frostburnt, and it’s not even a
colored so it’s not cosmetics which you won’t use anyway”, and
an extra pair of extra-long and thick black foot cloths she finished
knitting just before handing them to her. Rothesay packed them in
with a grin, knowing that one of Lacie’s latest Challenges involved
timeliness. She gave her bunk a last, thoughtful look, sighed, and
added Arngas’ sword to her array. Better to have it and not want
it, than to want it and not have it.
Well-horsed,
they travelled swiftly, the remaining snow being shallow, and gone
entirely before they reached the floodplain of the Holywell. There
Peridar bade them farewell and set off upriver on Cathforrow’s fine
new road; Dav took a boat in Carastloel, the Holywell flowed briskly
with snowmelt, and they disembarked just outside of Andrastir less
than half a week after they had begun.
If it had
snowed here, no sign of it now remained, and they crossed through
Maldan on the old highways at a brisk pace. The Oslorn Road curled
round Andrastir at a league from the walls; the battle of the summer
before had been fought within its circuit, to the great alarm of the
city. Dav followed it, so long as it ran north. Where the roads
from Andrastir intersected it, the winter-beaten fields showed a
rough pattern of long rectangles: all that was left of the small
towns that once thrived there. The Geillari of Wexsa, the clans Dun
Brean and Dun Fearic, did not care to live quite so close to the
Sferan city, yet when the road crested a rise, glimpses of their
holdings and hamlets pricked the western horizon. When the Oslorn
veered east of north, Dav left it for the open fields.
They camped
that night on the far side of a strange barrier. A steep but
climbable slope brought them, fifty feet above the plain, to the back
of a vast serpent of mounded earth. From out of sight away in the
northwest, hundred-yard curves writhed back and forth across an
arrow-straight progression, southeast towards out-of-sight Andrastir.
No one knew who had made it, or why. It could hardly have been a
work of defense; to an advancing army, it would pose at most a
nuisance obstacle, from either side.
“Better
to be uphill fighting down, than otherwise,” Garrod remarked as
they stood on its line in the last of the brief winter sunlight.
“Manned, it could be held, but—” he waved one hand to the flat,
formless, greying east and the other to the nearly as formless west,
“—for what?”
“What,
then? Who knows?” said Dav. “But, ah! today: Wexsa, and
eastern Andras,” he grinned, pointing west and east. “The Vyrni
Serpent at least excuses them from border squabbles. Cross to take
all, or do not bother.”
“Maybe
that’s why whoever built it, built it,” suggested Ulflaed.
Garrod laughed.
“This is
a great lot of work, just to mark a border. But, maybe they thought
it worth the trouble. Come, we’d best get set up for the night. I
mislike these clouds.”
With camp
made and supper done, Rothesay ventured back to the lower flanks of
the Serpent. Some three or four yards upslope she stopped, and tried
out her story-spell.
They were
people who built it, humans and no tribe of the Ceidha, a very, very
long time ago. And it was a border—not military, but magical,
though what lay on either side, or was thought to lie there, her
spell did not reveal. Yet it was also a road, meant not for men but
for gods. Mostly, though, it was an umbilicus, connecting something
nascent on one end with some womb or wellspring on the other. And
though it did not represent a serpent, the resemblance somehow
mattered deeply. The images twined together, each implying and
implied by the others; she blinked, shook her head, and decided not
to try conveying any of it to her companions: it’s a kind of
not-snake god-road border between Here and There except it’s an
umbilicus. . . .
That night
the Gulf Rhostial reminded them that Winter reigned. Wind howled
over the land, bearing a torrent of snow that lay a foot thick by
dawn. They posted watches, mostly to keep the roof of the tent
beaten clean of the snow-burden, breakfasted on hot soup and bannock,
packed up and plowed on in the teeth of the gale. The horses would
have liked a nice barn instead, but preferred moving to huddling,
however well-blanketed. Stand-in-grass, as far as Rothesay could
make out, thought he was out wandering in search of where the green
grass under a hot sun had got to; just over the horizon, no doubt.
Dav guided
them with a dark green tourmaline, as long as his hand and three
fingers thick, mined from the caves at Windhome. If turned so that
one end pointed towards its place of origin, a bright, pallid
sea-green streak shot through its length; turned crosswise, all its
mass darkened to black. The Windhome sailors kept at least one in
every ship, and claimed that no distance weakened the crystal power.
Kahan had
gone on one of those ships. Rothesay hoped his ship’s crystal
worked as promised; and wondered with a leaping heart if he would
have returned yet, and be awaiting them there.
In the grey
midday, they called at an Andreisi villa. It was
uncharacteristically warded by a ten-foot-high wall of fairly recent
building; and, not unreasonably, given the weather—the snow had
stopped, but the wind raged on—the gate, locked and barred within,
had been left untended. Undaunted, the party climbed the wall and
startled the household when they knocked at the front door of the
main house, but they were welcomed, if warily. They enjoyed a fine
hot day-meal, and then pressed on, and knew as they left that their
mad reputation had just been given another bit of polish.
“The
ferry will not be running, not in this weather,” the lady of the
house warned them at parting, but there was no conviction in her
voice. And an hour later, on the banks of the Llanfeill, there lay
the ferry-boat snugged to its pier and both under a foot and a half
of untouched snow. Dav set the students to shoveling both clear,
while he and Garrod beat upon the ferryman’s door.
The
red-faced, sturdy young man who followed the Master down to the pier
shook his head in gloom. In vain he argued the weather, still
threatening more snow; in vain his protests that he only ran upriver
to Talerial-at-the-lakes or downstream to Marshtown, and never
across, “For all that’s barbarian land now, all the way to the
Low Country.” The Runedaur meant to go, and go they would, with
him or without; if he wanted his boat back without having to swim for
it, go he must also.
“And we
will remember this in friendship,” Garrod encouraged him. Politely
the ferryman thanked him but, Rothesay thought, in two minds about
it. A demon could gift one handsomely; but what price to the soul,
to accept such gifting? She wondered if she was amused or not.
The far
landing, unused for a hundred years or so the boatman claimed, proved
still serviceable. On they rode, deep into the Geillan kingdom of
Sixebroth, home to Dun Hildr and Dunamblach, the Brean’s allies in
the battle before Andrastir. They would no doubt remember that the
Runedaur had fought for the city then, and while many barbarians
freely called a man ‘friend’ who had been a foe before, as the
tides of alliance shifted, still many cherished an enmity for
generations. Dav led his little band attentively.
The next
day all the flat white land blazed and burned the sight under a clear
sky and a brilliant sun. Everyone donned masks of soft black leather
with little more than slits to peek through; they looked more rakish
than ever and the students grinned in secret delight at one another.
As they
began to consider where to take their day-meal, they glimpsed a
silhouette on the horizon and, making for it, found a ruined Sferan
town. A few miles east across the plain, a cluster of Geillan
holdings stood, and no tracks marred the snow between them: they
should be untroubled from that quarter, at least. They ate a hot
meal blessedly out of the incessant wind, Dav promised them a rest
and a bath that night once they reached Uthune and the land of House
Listas, and they packed up with a will.
From the
door of their impromptu hall, Garrod nodded back to Dav who in
accents unchanged from his brusque advice on the packing, informed
them that they were not alone in the ruins, that their unknown
neighbors knew it, were plainly not welcome in the holdings yonder
even in a snowstorm and were therefore probably outlaws of some
stripe, and that all weapons should be loosened and ready. Rothesay
appreciated her forethought for her sword, and all but shivered for
sheer nerves. She did not want to kill anyone, and also would much
rather save her friends than be saved by them, and fervently hoped
not to embarrass herself.
“If they
ask for hospitality,” said Dav, “of course we will give it.
Regrettably, if they were of a heart to ask, they would more than
likely be safe home now and not sheltering among ghosts.”
Ghosts
there were, but few and most of them old; Rothesay had concluded that
the town had been emptied more by flight than by slaying, to her
relief. Still, a good half-dozen echoes of old bitterness wandered
the snow-filled streets, bitterness aimed at Geillari, and maybe some
of the more witch-sighted among these mysterious ‘neighbors’ of
Dav’s might perceive them. It would indeed make for uncomfortable
berthing.
When the
Runedaur walked out into the ambush, they did so knowing their
enemies’ numbers and positions, and presumed them all to be at full
strength and power. This last proved a useful overcorrection, and
the nine Runedaur swiftly undid their dozen attackers even though
Flick, Juris, Cobry and Arnaf managed little more than shouting and
waving wildly; Rothesay, thanks to Arngas, decapitated one before
dissolving into shouting and waving as well. Last in motion was Dav,
poised for a deadly backhand at the one remaining bandit. That one,
a young brownbearded barrel, realizing his game was lost, dropped to
his knees in the snow and begged for his life as he let his own sword
fall.
Dav paused.
As once before, he asked, quizzically, “Why?”
The man’s
jaw fell open. Twice he blinked, as though the black-garbed spectre
before him, asking a primally foolish question, must surely be
snow-madness or the delusions of hunger. Then a strange,
reciprocally-foolish expression crept over his face, and he began to
laugh. “Hells, don’t know! Just habit, I guess!”
Dav
grinned, and lowered his sword, and gave the baffled man a hand back
to his feet.
Rothesay
was so dumbfounded by the whole exchange that her stomach forgot to
revolt over her slain foe, and when she did remember later, that
amoral organ no longer cared but wanted fed, now. She refused it,
feeling vaguely derelict of some unnamed duty, and wondered, is this
what becoming evil is like? Once, she might have asked, would surely
have asked, Padriag; now, she had no one whose guidance she trusted,
and she drew closer in on herself.
Derglad,
their new comrade’s name, outcast from Dunamblach for refusing to
be warrior, bard, smith or farmer, they learned as he rode along with
them. The outlaws had had one horse, now his; Rothesay wondered what
Dav would have done with him if there had been no convenient mount
for him. They had delayed long enough to bury the one man among the
band whom Derglad regarded as anything like a friend, but the Master
meant haste.
He pushed
on after sunset, and they all drew their cloaks and hoods tighter
about them; even Rothesay began to sense the chill. They crossed the
Low Country, now-frozen marshland between the plains of Sixebroth and
the hills of Uthune that grew ever higher in the northeastern sky.
And at last, halfway to midnight, they passed a new half-built
fortification and cried for hospitality at the home of the mayor of
the little town beyond.
Rothesay
wallowed in the promised bath, nor minded that she shared it with
Juris, and the stone-floored washroom with three other tubs
containing Arnaf and Rory, Ulflaed and Cobry, and Garrod and Flick.
Dav still sat over wine with the mayor. She had also given up
minding that the women of the house would not meet her eyes and
avoided the contamination of her touch. They might think she was a
slut, bedding with all these males; the males themselves, some of
them openly disappointed in her chastity—if she thought Juris far
too young to be caring about it, she knew better than to say so, as
neither he nor anyone else thought so—would have laughed, none too
merrily.
And they
slept late the next morning, soaked up heat from hearth and porridge,
but they rode hard then, skirting the western Uthune foothills to the
head of Orroset Bay. There they took ship again, their Geillan
outlaw still with them, and under heavy cloud and the wind rushing
into the north, chopped and bounced their way across the wild,
slate-grey water.
Arnaf and
Ulflaed puked over the side; Rory sat grimly amidships with Flick at
his feet, slowly working their way through a bag of dry biscuit.
Derglad the Geillath stood in the bows, heedless of the spray,
grinning with delight; he and Rothesay shouted to one another their
mutual appreciation of each tumultuous bound and crash.
The
Listeisi sailors would not take them out of the bay, sullenly
protesting that their little vessel was not built for the challenge
of the open Gulf. The travellers were set down then upon a little
spit of land, only just early enough for the building of a decent
camp. Rothesay tended to the horses, all of them annoyed and
unnerved by the bay-crossing, and who needed to stamp all around on
the sandy ground to feel assured that it would not be tossing them
about like that other place.
More snow
chased them up the coast, but they travelled well on the firm sand
between the dunes and the sea. Inland, beyond the dunes, lay the
marshes and fens of Merthow, and what Geillan holdings there were.
Many streams trickled out through the sand, and a couple of rivers,
but a few hours’ wait till the tide ebbed left them with passage
enough. Only at Merthow Astras, a town still Sferan as the Geillari
seemed not to want it, was there river enough to want bridge or
ferry, and this time the ferryman seemed well pleased to carry them.
When he bade them carry his greetings on to Windhome, they guessed
that he had been well-served by the Order not so long since.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Dav
laughed. “See how rich we become, by giving wealth away?”
“You—we—stole
stuff, from Floodholding last year,” Rothesay pointed out
stubbornly. Dav only grinned his wolf’s grin.
“Perhaps
when you learn to tell one occasion from another, you will give over
trying to force a right-handed rule onto a left-handed cause!” And
with that she had to be content.
The
mysterious dark mass of Sparca rose steadily as they drove north. At
last they rode in under the gate-arch of what once had been
Luckow-on-the-Malbra, now controlled and half-occupied by the Dun
Nedmered, where they were given a stranger’s place with great
formality. Apparently Windhome had been enforcing Runedaur
reputation here, in the usual unsettling mix of threat and cheer.
The clan even accepted Dav’s bronze tokens, with the understanding
that Windhome would redeem them for goods; they seemed familiar with
the bronze bits, though they would never have borne an attempt at
taxation even from the Order.
The night
was livened by three of the young bloods, urged to tell their tales
of venturing north into the Ghost-lands.
“I
thought I could hear them, when I went in a house,” said one, the
boldest, a veteran of three such expeditions. “Whispers, like,
with words in.” Nobly born, he spoke not in his own tongue but in
the imperial speech, and that quite well, with little accent: it was
not lack of learning that barred his power to recognize what he
heard.
“Perhaps
only the wind?” Garrod suggested tactfully, but the young man
sneered.
“No, sir.
It has—” he frowned, and waved his hand, searching for a word
that should exist. “Rhythm?” he ventured at last, but unhappily,
adding in the Geillan, “.”
“Ah—it
had the flow as of speech,” said Geilla-Dav, and the young man
raised a fist acknowledging comprehension. “Are you
witch-sighted?” The youth admitted proudly that he was. “And
you?” he asked one of the other intrepid venturers.
“No,
lord. Nor I don’t want to be; I don’t want to hear whispers in
empty houses!”
The Dun
Nedmered suffered two minds about Sparca. First, it was uncanny—had
always been, they thought, but now more than ever—and inhospitable
to the living. But secondly, it was empty of folk and full of
wealth: timber, game, houses and fields lying now all untouched.
They stayed up late this night brooding comfortably over the familiar
dilemma that in any case could hardly be approached till spring.
Privately, later, Dav gave it two years before these folk, at least,
crossed the Wall; two years, barring some accident to drive them one
way or another.
“So, what
are we doing about it?” Ulflaed demanded over folded arms.
Rothesay wondered whether he wanted his Geillan kin to take it, or
the Sferiari to retake it; or if, perhaps, he had no concern for
either anymore, his whole allegiance given to his new
black-and-silver clan.
Dav
shrugged. “Like what?”
Ulflaed
hesitated, and then shrugged likewise. “But maybe you’d thought
of something.”
Rothesay
translated this for Derglad, whom she had been tutoring in the Sferan
speech. He had some already, as the lesser folk in his clan picked
up what they could, not to let their betters get so very much better.
Sparca’s tale of vanished people was known to him; as recently as
the annual bardic competition, he had still been embraced by his
clan, and he had heard the story on their return. The idea that they
would soon cross into the haunted land seemed to exhilarate rather
than daunt him.
At that,
and though the hour was late, Dav attacked him, tumbled him about
their quarters, bruised him, let him stand; and attacked again, and
again, while the students merely stood back out of the way, content
that this time the one being educated was not them. At last when
Derglad lay writhing, trying to suck air back into his stunned chest,
the Master said mildly, “Bold is good. Rash is bad. If you will
seek adventure, go prepared to die for it.”
“I
thought I did,” Derglad gasped at length.
“Will you
be delighted to die in Sparca?” Derglad did not answer. Dav
explained, “You wish to go, though who knows but that it might kill
you to do so. Will that death have been worth it?”
“What
about you?” Derglad retorted instead of answering.
“Am I one
eager to challenge Sparca’s mystery? And yet I might wander there,
once my business at Windhome is settled; I am as curious as any.
Sparca might kill me for it—but in that, she is no different from
anywhere else I might pass. If you will seek adventure, go prepared
to die for it, by being prepared to die at any moment, for nothing at
all.”
Derglad
fell silent.
Next day
they crossed the Malbra, a confusion of cascades unlike the sleepier
streams before, on a bridge of huge grey and red stones, and turned
east to seek the coast again, skirting a ridge of steep-sided hills.
As they approached land’s end, where the last hill thrust a
buttress towards the Gulf, a dark line came into view, snaking up the
hillside from the beach and keeping a hundred yards or so below the
ridge as it disappeared westward: Dorrocan’s Wall. A stubby tower
surmounted the nearest hill; manned for centuries, it stood abandoned
and dark now. Its brother warded the rocky beach itself, and waves
crashed twenty feet up its base. Once again they awaited low tide
and, with care, picked a way for themselves and their horses through
the shingle. They were in Sparca.
The light
waned as they made camp again. Everyone worked in silence, listening
for any hint of whispers, but only sea and air spoke about them.
Rothesay
would have liked to look for peeries, but Onions and the others had
simply shown up of their own volition; she had no idea how to begin
to seek them, barring going back to the hill in Andrastir. She shook
her head. Well, then, go to Andrastir she must, one of these days.
And, she thought more cheerfully, at least she had some teachers who
were not of the Order. That must be a good thing, if she were not to
become wholly lost into it.
However,
even she could tell without their aid that the Otherworld lay closer
here, that the stuff of this world thinned somehow, thinned
perilously. Sitting in her blankets in the tent, she tried to
remember how she had followed Onions ‘into’ the apple tree, and
again into Sparca straight from Andrastir.
The world
fell away. Hastily she focused on herself, hands, feet, arms; and
there were her sleeping companions, and Rory pacing on watch outside:
she was aware of the tent, but it seemed strangely irrelevant.
Neither peeries nor lost Rhyllandari could she see; on reflection, if
the Rhyllands time in this place resembled that of the outer world,
everyone would be home asleep in bed anyway.
Did peeries
sleep?
A moment
she endured the vertigo, and then sought her place in the outer
world—just as Juris, sharing her blankets, rose up on his elbows
and made a faint magelight. He scowled, sleep-bewildered, at her.
Of course: he must have felt her vanish. If he waked enough to note
her complete absence, he would probably have assumed a full bladder,
but she did not care to give the least hint of any further uncanny
powers. She curled down beside him, and soon slept as well.
Early
afternoon brought them to a pretty city at the head of a small, rocky
bay. Blue sky, clear sun, dark waters reflecting white-clad hills
and green pines and spruces blown clean of snow-burden: the beauty
might have been all theirs, except for a powerful feeling that they
rode among a throng like a market-day. Their eyes darted about,
heads turned sharply as if they glimpsed a movement, heard a cry or
call, but wherever they looked, they saw only the smooth unbroken
snow and heard only the wind. Dav ventured into the town’s high
court but came out at once frowning and chuckling. “I keep begging
pardon for bumping into no one,” he laughed. “Or for passing
straight through them. Not that they seem to mind,” he grinned,
mocking himself, “but so I find yet another old habit exercise
itself without my intent!”
The rest
laughed, rather dutifully apart from Garrod who seemed to enjoy the
joke entirely, and Derglad, who had not yet learned about habits and
intentions and Runedaur. Everyone, though, seemed happier to cross
through old Inismath-town, and take the day meal at the bridgehouse
beyond, in the sunlight against a dark stone wall.
Rory shared
a tin of stew with Rothesay. “You know, Sugar, I think our man
really does think it’s funny, saying ‘Excuse me’ to what a’n’t
there. But he bothered to say it on purpose.”
“Don’t
people who say something usually say it on purpose? I mean, who just
blurts out rhetorical arguments or bits of conversation?”
“No, I
mean he said it for us. Said it like that, for us.” Rory seemed
to be working this out even as he spoke, and scratched thoughtfully
at his young beard. No one had shaved since leaving home; their new
face coverings had begun to look less circumstantial and more
intentional. Dav, bearded, appeared more like a farmer than a
terrible master of terrible warriors, to her secret amusement.
Garrod looked ten years older, as did Ulflaed. Rory just looked
hairy.
“See,
we’re following him, right? Not just down the road, I mean, but in
the way we do and all. So he goes through old Ghost-town here and
laughs. And—so do we. Or at least, we ease up about it. Arnaf’s
going to choke his horse, if he don’t ease up, and Juris a’n’t
much better.” He eyed her keenly. “You like ghosts, you said
once.”
She
squinted about, wondering how much to say. “It’s not, well,
ghosts, here. Ghosts are—loose? Leftover bits of something that’s
gone now, and sometimes they look for something to attach to, or
someone. This—” she waved a hand back towards the city, and up
at the hills, and groped for words.
“All of a
piece?” he guessed. “Why a’n’t it ghosts, though? The whole
country’s one big ghost. Eh?”
“Well,
they’re not dead, for one.”
“Like I
can tell? You can, though?”
She glanced
at him and quickly looked away, and wished hard for a friend she
could tell just anything to. She missed Padriag bitterly.
“Come on,
we’re packing up,” Rory said softly to her back. She turned
abruptly and hugged him, to his surprise; she did like him so
greatly, after all. He hugged back and added in offhand kindness,
“Hey, no hurry, Sugar,” and she bent hastily to tidying up.
They waded
through the deep snow on the bridge to cross a staircase of frothing
cascades even steeper and wilder than the Malbra’s, then beyond the
next ridge, stopped for the night in an old way-house. No one sensed
any invisible presences here. If the Rhyllandari ghosts, or whatever
they were, inhabited the ghosts of their homes as they had done in
life, then it seemed that the travellers on the Outerworld highway
had no fellow-travellers on the Other.
From the
coast road they saw several villas next day, though they did not
venture off to them; and since in the midafternoon another way-house
presented itself, they broke their travel early to take advantage of
it.
Pushing on
early and fast the next day, they arrived in another empty city,
Inisteill, at nightfall. Garrod led them to an inn he used to
frequent, and apologized that the service had fallen off sadly since
his last stay. Arnaf nodded silently, his face white; Flick looked
sick. Rory grumbled.
“It a’n’t
scared I feel,” he groused. “Only, I’ve been training a long
time, to know what’s coming up behind me, and I’m getting all the
clues and there’s nothing there, there’s just nothing there. I
don’t want to lose my edge; but I’m damned tired of being ready
for what can’t touch me!”
Garrod
smiled. “Aye, that’s the further step. All the clues, you say;
bar one.”
Rory
snapped his fingers. “Intent.”
“Quite.
Whether here, or in Andrastiri markets, you’ll exhaust yourself,
heeding presence alone. Reach for the intentions of those around
you. These do not see us at all,” he waved his spoon gracefully
about the echoing, empty inn, “and so can have no intention towards
us. Hence my own abominable placidity.” He chuckled.
“Fine,”
muttered Juris. “How do I get someone’s intentions, who’s
coming up behind me or something?”
“Still
yourself, to receive another’s turbulence. And you’ve a dozen
devices for stillness, if you’ve learned anything at all.”
Juris
sighed, and took the hint, and curled up by their fire to practice.
Beyond
Inisteill, the coast grew rockier than ever, and their road wound and
twisted, higher and higher upon the slopes, above the great plumes
where Rhostial hurled blue-black waves into the scarry black crags.
Ice coated the snow, and the horses trod uneasily.
“Ah, at
least that’s still standing,” Dav remarked as they approached a
particularly sharp switchback. A marble pillar, mantled in ice,
marked the seaward edge of the curve. He dismounted, and stepped
forward stealthily, and leaned to peer under the long-reaching arms
of a spruce on the near side of the bend. “There.”
He pointed,
and the students clustered up to see, but careful to keep themselves
out of view of whatever it was that made their master hide. Several
miles off and five hundred feet higher, another ridge ran towards the
Gulf in ragged black teeth, till the last one’s slopes plummeted
out of view beyond the trees just ahead.
“You note
the white glint at the easternmost peak?” he said, from behind
them. “Here, at this pillar, is Windhome’s first view of anyone
approaching on this road. The lookout there is not part of the keep
proper, but it is always manned.”
“But we
don’t mind if they see us, do we?” Rothesay asked.
“They
will be disappointed if we make it too easy for them, and they will
make us pay for our least inattention!” Dav laughed.
“In
summer or on foot, we have many paths overland,” said Garrod. “In
this ice, with the horses, I suggest we simply send them a flare, and
go ahead as we will.”
“I
suggest we try their watchfulness,” Dav retorted.
Then each
horse must be blanketed, and snow heaped upon it, and one by one they
crept, agonizingly slowly, round the bend and pressed up against the
wall of trees on the far side.
“What
about intention?” Juris grumbled, half to himself.
“They’ll
see yours,” said Dav.
Presently
the peak slipped from view from the road, and therefore they from
its, and they travelled more easily. Then twice more they played the
camouflage game; at the third, as Arnaf, next to last to pass, edged
round the bend, a streak shot from the little tower and exploded
above the road in a sun-white fireball that burned nothing but one’s
sight. Garrod, their last man, stepped openly onto the road and shot
back a red one.
“Not
bad,” said Dav, as they rode on. “We did well. I should have
liked them to have done a little better; but no doubt all this
emptiness does try one’s watchfulness. I shall stand watch myself,
to understand.”
The sun
stood halfway down the western sky when their road turned straight
into the east and headed for a cleft below a small tower white with
the marble of its making as well as its snow mantle. No watchers
were in evidence; none were expected to be. Dav predicted an ambush
by students, and told his own what to expect. Snowballs and ice
balls proved to be the weapons of the day and they fought to a draw.
Then Dav asked, loudly, if the Windhome troops had not done thus and
such, just as he had said.
“But they
are young,” Garrod interposed in seeming kindliness, “and so have
less experience from which to craft new tactics.”
This had
the effect of embarrassing all the students equally for the shame of
being simple and predictable, compared to their elders, and so gave
them a camaraderie of shared resentment and of targets for revenge,
oh one of these days—! Thus companionably, the nine travellers and
their twelve assailants started down the cliff-road into tiny
Annkirth Bay.
If
Harrowater seemed cut by a plow, Annkirth Cove had been scooped by a
spoon. The black rock ended somewhere inland, under the snow, and
here the stone was ruddy, orange and tawny and streaked through with
cream. Rory looked twenty-five fathoms down to the deep blue water,
and curled his left hand as if he grasped a thick spear-shaft; then
he straightened his thumb. If the hollow of his hand could have been
smooth, like a scooped-out pudding instead of bulging with fingers
and fleshy pads, it had just about the right shape; call it not more
than half a furlong, the straits between the rough-ridged “thumb”
and the “fingertips,” and the cove itself barely a quarter-mile
across. Three slim black ships, one rather smaller than the others,
rode the gentle water at anchor in the middle. A fourth, the match
of the larger pair, snugged to one of the two wooden piers that
jutted from the sloping beach at the foot of the great spiraling keep
of Windhome.
Tall and
slim, cut from the living stone of pale orange and pink, in both
shape and color it resembled the core of a whelk’s shell. The
peak, slightly higher than this road-cleft, bore a gilded acorn cap.
Dav pointed.
“That
cupola is open on the seaward side, and all the walls within are
polished brass. They burn a bright fire in there, always, and so may
seamen in the mouth of the Gulf know where they are.”
Down the
switchback road carved into the side of the bowl of the Cove, they
picked their way till they came at last under the skull-shaped gate
grinning upon the beach and into a merry celebration.
The
Windhome students swiftly freed their counterparts from horse and
baggage and hurried them away to show off their strange home, full of
curving walls and round floors, and many-colored seashells and
mother-of-pearl. Wonderful aromas of steaming fish and sweet
seaweeds—Rothesay found herself back to familiar fare again—filled
the halls, and their hosts explained that, owing to their visit,
today was a feast day. Ah, well, true enough: Windhome celebrated
everything, the standing joke being, “The sun came up !
It’s a feast day!”
The keep
wound in and out of the cliff. On the cove side, many windows let
the shimmering light into spacious pale halls—or they did in good
weather in summer; the students apologized for the relative dimness
now, brought by the oiled silks and canvas stretched to block
winter’s drafts. The travellers did not care to complain: at
least they were out of the wind.
On the
seaward side, the lower halls, at least, were subterranean; above the
sixth floor, some chambers had windows, little more than slits.
Looking out revealed a very rough cliff, an inviting climb for those
who had the skill.
“There’s
a boat hook, and a pretty good-looking rope on it, just below there,”
Rothesay pointed out.
“Oh!”
said a stout young woman in tight brown braids, Merriu. “That’s
where I left it!” And she snaked out the window, kicked and picked
her way down the ice-rimed rock, retrieved her toy and climbed back
in.
“That’s
a mark off, for forgetting,” said one of her hold-mates.
“Yeah,
yeah.” She dropped him with a stunning-spell, and waited with a
dagger at his throat for him to wake. “And this is marks on, for
Ghost.”
Rothesay
yanked her own dagger free, but Rory was swifter, and in a moment sat
on Merriu’s back on the floor, claiming his own Ghost. One of the
Windhome boys tried for Rothesay but he startled her; only he noticed
her uncanny skill and power, as all the rest piled in to a grand
melee. “Yield!” he conceded, and grinned at the mayhem.
“Welcome to Windhome, you-all.”
