III: Teginau

At fourteen, he stood upon the threshold of manhood: his Proving would be that very Midsummer. That ancient danger-laced ritual was an occasion of high drama for a community, and often of terror for the boy; Raian had years ago decided for himself that there was greater glory in making the Proving an anticlimax. Wolf and bear skins of his own providing made his bed at home, and he had given as gifts falcon eggs and fist-sized crystals, won from the barren peaks of the Uissig, to both his father’s chieftain and his mother’s prince. Scars of tooth and fire decorated his young skin already, and his once-fine nose crooked aside. The black of his left eyebrow made a sharp jag where a wildcat’s claw almost took his sight a year ago, and an upturned crescent moon at the base of his throat marked where a wolf once laid bare the living veins. No, there would be little the priests of Kavin could offer to challenge his mettle at Midsummer.

Restless always, he had left the city two nights before, this time burning with the fire of a queer dream, a vision he was strangely reluctant to put before even the High Priestess of Night. No explanations were forthcoming out here, either, only rain and huge old trees who kept their ancient wisdoms hoarded deep in their silent hearts. He savored his vision alone.

There had been a bit of excitement yesterday, when the small boy-pack that followed him like dogs discovered his absence and came tracking him. He had led them a merry chase, for a while, a short while, till the fun of it evaporated like mist in the blaze of his dream, and he let their unabated enthusiasm carry them farther and farther from the rocks where he sat still and stony, outwaiting their impatience, before he too ran off, away from all paths and the tamed world. He feared no Piper, for he had found no greater mentor.

Another rain rolled in that evening. Shortly before he settled in under a ledge of rock, he cast a last glance around and saw, not ten yards off, a hound, tall, slim, and white as moonlight, seeming almost to glow in the green-misted twilight. He stared, agape and breathless, but before he could frame even a thought to move, she turned, elegant and queenly, and sprang away into the rain-veiled woods. He shook himself; but there was neither profit nor sport in hunting blind in the dim wet, so he wrapped himself in cloak and dry leaves, to sleep, though he stared out often even after the gloom blinded him utterly. Night and dreams brought no repeat of the previous night’s terrible exhilaration, nor any explanation nor afterthought, despite his day’s fast; and he woke in the dawn cooler than yestermorn, schooled himself to patience, and set to the serious business of tracking the white hound.

No trace of a print could he find between the trees where she had stood. Had he dreamed early? He moved on, puzzled and pensive, after the way he thought she had gone. Then gazing ahead, he glimpsed down the glen something that looked in the dawn light like a walking tree-branch. He watched till he was sure that it, at least, was no phantom; then, leaving aside the dream-hound, he crept down after this new interest.

The quarry trod lightly. Maybe it was elvish: that would be a rare prize! It had an eldritch look. The rain wore steadily away at its traces, but the soft and soggy earth yielded even to a delicate step.

All too soon, it—or he: Raian had had a fair view of the stranger across a crooked gorge a while back—had discovered the pursuit, and moved with an eerie lightness over the sodden mould. Raian too followed more warily, watchful, when the dark larch woods grew still, against ambush; but this spoor excited him, this joy burned bright and new: he had never before hunted a man. He closed slowly, the rain despite.

Waterfalls, small but urgent, thundered white through the dark, craggy land. A cold wind blew, sucking the warmth from him; he shivered, and snarled at himself for weakness, and thought fiercely on his prey. And then the tracks vanished.

Astonished first, he cast further and further about. Here the bones of the Tre-Uissig lay in vast sheets, sloping down toward the broken Caiar Glen like a roof over some subterranean city, and leaf and needle lay thin, or not at all. In growing rage and disappointment, he lost even his last clear trace of the trespasser, and stood finally, silent and sullen, listening to the mocking laugh of rain upon the stones.

Shuddering with cold, he huddled into his dripping cloak and thought now of shelter, and fire. He knew this area well, at least. Here on the shoulder of the Catrocks stood a grove of ancient fir down against the cliff-wall, that should surely be dry, deep within. He jogged for it, hugging himself, stamping for warmth. The dark bulk of the great old fir his people called the Elder Pendiu, more than four ells thick in the bole, loomed up through the veiling rain.

Something flapped wildly out at him, a great greenish moth—or a winged tree-branch. He leaped aside, groped without thinking for a stone and flicked it sharply after the fleeing creature, striking it solidly in the head. The moth-man dropped with the stone. Raian eased up, forgetting rain or chill.

A long slender object, or two together, maybe, well-wrapped in dark rags poked up beneath the stranger’s pack, higher than his hooded head. Raian noted it incuriously, and rolled his victim over with a cautious foot.

He tossed his head, shaking loose his plastered hair. When you catch a wolf, you kill it, skin it, take its teeth and claws; he belatedly realized he had no idea what to do with a successfully-bagged man. Boy, he amended, studying the slack face, and an unfortunately pretty one at that: one could almost see him as just an inordinately tall girl. He grinned at the idea of a girl taller even than his father Wylfric, then stepped back as the dark lashes fluttered, and wished he had brought his spear. His dream seemed far from him.

Rothesay jerked to her feet, and grabbed at her splitting head to hold it whole. She glared darkly at the figure before her, dismissed the obvious child as too small and young, and human, to be the demon that pursued her, and spun about, groping in the downpour for some glimpse of the hunter, even as something began to waken in a dim corner of her mind.

Raian, for all his great-sized spirit still bodily small for his age, knew that kind of dismissal all too well. With a roar that cracked humiliatingly into a squeak, he hurled himself at the back of the stranger’s knees.

Rothesay leaped, and discovered why she leaped as she floundered to miss the boy beneath her. He somersaulted away and bounded to a ready crouch, shoving back his overlarge hood with an oath. Then his war-scowl faded slowly to disbelief, and finally to reluctant mirth. “What ara doing, lad?” he demanded, fighting not to laugh.

She cut short her slow backstepping, stopped fumbling, one hand at the back of her head on the blade of—must be the barrow-blade, she could feel the scabbard through the blanket—the other hand up behind her back trying for the hilts of the Meredale sword. Her thoughts tumbled: a fool’s way to carry a weapon! . . . I haven’t heard a voice in . . . What am I doing—lad? . . . voice in a long . . . ‘lad’? Oh. Right.

Raian sized up his prize swiftly: an adventuresome idiot, messenger possibly—looked like Geillan bard’s hair, though cloak and clothes were green; old enough to have got bone but no meat, say sixteen. No obvious clan token. “Who arta?”

“A stranger,” she began, and Raian spat and laughed.

“Ya would be that,” he mocked complaint. It was a grave crime against hospitality, to ‘bag’ one who claimed a stranger’s place: so much for the hunter’s glory this time! “Eci, have I nothing fora, stranger, so, little point then in your claiming. Though I’d offer meat and mead at once, had I them.” He clenched his teeth against chattering, steeled himself against shivering as excitement chilled, and glanced back at the firs.

“Dry—uh, dry enough in there,” Rothesay pointed out, trying to pitch her voice low enough to support the boy’s error. Raian’s quick ears caught the change, and he flashed the ‘lad’ a wry, understanding grin. She decided that a laconic manner was the way of wisdom, till she figured out how best to play this game.

They sheltered together among the roots of the Elder Pendiu, as magnificent a lord of the forest as Rothesay had ever heard tell of. Padriag should hear about this one. Its bole stood as the pillar of a great circular hall, thirty or forty yards across, roofed with great limbs that drooped at their ends to form low-hanging eaves that were almost walls. The floor was dry, and soft with fine needles that lay ages thick. Resinous spice blent with the rain-smell, sweeter than Padriag’s incense.

Raian swelled under her admiration for this treasure of Tre-Uissig, and told her tales as they munched on her sweetcakes, of councils held beneath it that were unmatched in wisdom; and spells, wrought here by priest or bard, that were yet unbroken; and lovers’ trysts that bore uncanny fruit.

“Like you?” she asked, hearing a smugness in his tone; and he grinned, and winked.

Well he might, she thought, still trying to make sense of what she saw, and heard. Black hair—as best she could tell in the wet—and violet eyes: by legend the coloring of the High Sferan born, though she recalled no mention of freckles. His green cloak was circular, as the edgelings made it, though they now wore roundels on the shoulders that were only inoffensive decoration, where Raian’s were bold blazons of his House—or Houses, maybe: the two were unalike. A circlet of fine wire, twisted and braided with meticulous Sferan skill, bound his brow, though his sodden bangs had escaped its command. But his baggy tunic rioted in big checks of red, yellow, green and blue, green-fringed at hem and elbow; his yellow leggings, now thoroughly grubby, were cross-gartered by many-colored leather bands. His torque and arm braces, like his circlet, were copper, the mark of a younger son of an obviously wealthy family; but a family of what race? A young Geillan noble might be proud of such a broken nose, or that white crescent at his throat—she shuddered at the thought of how close he must have come to a grim death—but surely the old imperials did not prize blemishes, however honorably won? He addressed her in what seemed a kind of stew of both the Geillan and High Sferan, that wanted all her concentration to untangle.

“Do—h’r’m, er, got a name?”

“Raian na Drogh,” he replied promptly, mingling races in his name as well: ‘drogha’ was Geillan for ‘black.’ “And you—?”

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“Ro—uhh, Rothric.” She blushed at this deception; but still more at the indelicacy of being young, female, and unescorted. Padriag might not understand; Raian surely would.

The violet eyes regarded her intelligently. “Uh-huh. Strong name, Rothric. What’s your House?”

She faltered again, unwilling to say Dunhaldring and waken any association with queer news from the north. Orthunder? She almost grinned, dourly: true it might be, but she suspected she owed them no loyalty. She opened her mouth to give Padriag’s affiliation, and suddenly realized that she did not know it, had never known it, nor ever wondered: the wizard seemed a sovereignty in his own person. “I am a student of the wizard Padriag,” she offered lamely.

Raian nodded. “Heard there’s a school of wizards, requires you to forswear birth-hall and bloodright. Like that? I’m Kinnaith and Dunwyrding.” He displayed the roundels on his cloak, one bearing a black dragon rising, twisting against a field of green; the other showing a spray of wheat against a constellation of stars—Neis the Swan.

‘Kinnaith and Dunwyrding’: a marriage not just of one adventuresome couple, but a couple of adventuresome tribes? She brimmed with wonder; Raian grinned, and told another tale.

Almost two centuries before, three extraordinary men met.

Anlaf, proud young king of the doughty Dunkerring, crossed the Saddle from the Carolanth and looked down into the broad meads and fens of Merthow Astrad, that he had planned to take for his people. He looked, and scratched at his fair beard, and turned his eyes south, south and west, where the rugged uplands of Tre-Uissig rose, dark and green. Perhaps he thought the highlands a challenge, and so more glorious in the conquest; and if it was difficult to take, then what a stronghold it would be in turn, unlike the fat defenseless fields below. Perhaps he had heard tales of the dreadful fen-wights, bodiless emanations of the swamps, and thought it wiser not to arouse their cold malice. Perhaps he cast the eagle feather from Dunkerring’s lofty crest and saw how Kavin bore it towards the mountains. But though many songs told and still tell of the terrible midges of the Merthow fens, no tale says how Anlaf hated them.

He turned his army to the highlands, and such was his force of character, and the love his people bore for him, that they embraced this challenge with all the fire of their fierce desire.

Word came to Inriall, prince of the House of Kinnaith, of the barbarian threat. Then in the long Glen Westhial, as the white mist thinned at the rising of the sun, two bitter lines scarred the tender grass: one drawn with geometric precision in green silk and burnished bronze; one, three times thicker, a restless braid of checkered wools and blood-lust. Inriall looked out from under bushy brows.

Suddenly he handed down his banner to his young page and, right hand held high for parley, spurred his great horse to the middle of the glen, and waited. Surprised, but not to be outdone, Anlaf went to meet him, but on foot, for he felt his own mount, stout and sturdy pony that he was, shamed by the magnificent white stallion of the Dragon-lord.

To Anlaf’s further surprise, Inriall too dismounted, and sent his horse back to his lines riderless.

They were much of a height, Sferath and Geillath, and their hair shone, Anlaf’s like the young sun, but Inriall’s like moonlit snow. Anlaf bore the Sferath’s quizzical study with wary fortitude, while his own gaze devoured Inriall’s shining cuirass, cast to the likeness of powerful muscles, and the lapped bronze plates like the belly-scales of a dragon, all engraved with fine and elaborate tattoos and studded with emeralds.

His attention flickered further to the silent Sferan ranks behind, every man of them helmed and armored, if none so bright as their master. Little like were they to the retreating fragments of House Morag he had routed last summer in Erodonica, after Ollaf of the Dunbrandeing died. At his own back he had three times their number, that chafed noisily against this delay of slaughter; but he began to sense that the uncanny stillness of the foeman was not want of fortitude.

“Your people wrestle?” Inriall asked suddenly, without preamble.

Anlaf stared: the Dragon-lord spoke his tongue, lilting strangely. It was a fool’s question, though: wrestling was a man’s art, without which he could scarcely be called a man at all. He nodded cautiously.

“Good,” the Sferath grunted. “I’ve a mind to take your measure, son, before we do business,” he indicated the ranked warriors with a sharp nod that tossed his white forelock. “And show you mine,” he added, stripping off his articulated gauntlets and tossing them idly into the grass.

Anlaf narrowed his eyes. “You jest.”

Inriall rubbed the side of his nose and peered at Anlaf shrewdly. “Umph. I dare say, jest. I am reputed odd. Odd,” he repeated meditatively. “Yet I mean what I say: we shall wrestle, you and I, and know one another.”

“Why?”

The older man shrugged. “I had a dream.”

This was reason enough to the Geillath; or would have been, had it come from the lips of a kinsman. He did not expect it from any of the Dragon-folk; though for no reason that he could now imagine.

Anlaf won the match, though the sun stood at the noon before he did. Inriall won the Geillath’s respect, and his love. The Dunkerring came to the highlands as invaders and stayed as brothers, and called themselves then the Dunwyrding, for they too were now dragon-folk.

From the reverence in the boy’s voice, thought Rothesay, old Prince Inriall had won Raian’s love as well.

“We still wrestle, to settle dispute,” Raian concluded, and grinned. “Fair chance to watch a good match most any week!”

He talked, not for a garrulous nature, but for the comfort of his stranger. He longed to know more of wider lands, and would have interrogated ‘Rothric’ closely; but though the traveller answered when he asked, the replies were brief, and shadowed with some sorrow or trouble. The long bundle proved to be a pair of swords, a mighty treasure; but so grim was his companion’s mood when they were shown—“Doom and destiny,” he had growled, as if naming them in bitterness—that Raian at once dropped deeper inquiry. At least for now. Maybe later there would be time for friendship, and the opening of hearts, and minds. He was quite certain the name was false; but he was himself fond of being mysterious; and had not the legendary hero Arac Fearnoth travelled under many names? He struggled not to pry, but instead pressed for word of the lands Rothric had seen, and the people there and their ways. When he discovered that Rothric had not merely seen, but actually lived by the ocean, though, he all but forgot tact in his eager envy.

Rothesay paid no heed to his hero-worship. The rush of power that had flooded her when the Meredale bullies backed down, had ebbed swiftly before an unending round of plodding days and solitary nights, and hatred of her weirdness and her predicament blossomed. She glowered at her two swords, emblems of her exile, swathed again to oblivion in her thin blanket like a furled battle-standard for a vagabond. Raian dreamed of travel, and she of home: we are each in the wrong story, she thought.

She peeled off her brogans, a sticky mass of sodden leather and rosemary mash. Her feet were pale, her toes like strange white prunes. “What I would not give to be dry again,” she groused, more to herself than to her companion.

Raian’s heart swelled. This strange wizard-boy, this wide traveller of many mysterious adventures, with neither gold nor jewel but two fine swords instead—and what was most on his mind was being warm and dry. Thornac said that veteran campaigners dreamed more of simple comforts than of wreaths of glory. What more had Rothric seen, that did not pass his lips? Raian’s own accounting of wolf hunts and mountain-daring suddenly seemed small and without consequence, beside his half-formed fancies of Rothric’s bold deeds.

“It is not far to home,” he burst out, then faltered, remembering the miles. “At least, we could be there by. . . ”

“After dark?”

Raian considered. “Yes,” he admitted, slumping. He so wanted a chance to be as great in hospitality as his adventurer was in his dreams.

“Before midnight?”

“Yes, easily,” he snapped, startled, and looked up into a face half-hopeful, half despairing.

“Could we get in?” Harrowater, being remote, seldom locked its gates, or even guarded them; but most towns she knew of did.

A great grin spread over Raian’s pleasant face. “One way or another!”

All the way back, through the narrow glens and rocky passes of the eastern Uissig, Raian debated within himself. There was more sport in climbing the wall, more pride, he thought, in flaunting his reputation at the gate. When the sun set and the rainy darkness blinded them, he made a golden magelight in the air, a lamp with neither wick nor bowl. The wizard’s apprentice made no comment, and Raian made a private promise to learn some more elegant, more impressive variant. He pressed on firmly.

An immense voice spoke a single melodic word that filled all the forest in the night. Rothesay grabbed for her sword-hilts; Raian smacked his lips. “Ah! The Sonthe bell. We are almost home, friend!”

The trees ended before a deep fosse, beyond which an empty slope climbed steeply to the foot of a high wall, as the bell tolled again.

“Bell?”

“Yah. Have your people no such chime?” His question came muffled by wet weeds and loam as he scrabbled about the roots of the trees, searching.

Rather than admit, Yes, it clanks, she only said, “Not so splendid . . . . What are you looking for?”

“Ach, dwch!” he swore. “The rope—we had a rope here! Around here,” he admitted, staring about at the walls of black night that the little magelight held not so very far back. He could not seem to find his finding-spell, either. “For climbing the wall . . . .”

“Can we not?” she suggested hopefully.

Rain rattled. Raian shrugged, and turned to follow the lip of the fosse.