Twenty horsemen looked like an army on that narrow route. Their armor in the silvery morning light glinted, little flashes of lightning before a storm. At their fore rode three who wreathed their steel in silk, a blood-red shimmer encrusted with silver stars shaping the constellation of the Scythe; and the first of those wore a crown.
His lank black hair hung past his shoulders, framing a hollow, pocked face; the deep-set eyes were grey and keen as the spears at his back; but not old, not more than twenty-five, perhaps; his thin lips set in a perpetual smile of cynicism. He could have been nice-looking with a real smile, Rothesay thought, but she was distracted more by the tiny silver bells dangling in the ends of his hair by no power that she could discern.
“Good morning, Master,” he drawled softly. “Leaving my fair city so soon?” His voice trembled with a sorrow that his cold smile mocked, and he eased his great black horse closer, and closer again.
“Yes,” said Dav.
Treskiel na Cathforrow colored slightly, confused as the Master’s straightforward reply offered nothing, not insolence nor challenge nor uncertainty, no opening at all for sparring with words. He cast again. With a nod to his ranked horsemen, “Do you mean to pass us?” He veiled the threat with a further smile.
“I don’t know. Do you mean to stand there?”
The prince liked this reply no better than the first one. This was one of the prime reasons he disliked dealing with the Runedaur: it was like boxing with ghosts. Then his glance caught the ragtag scarecrow clinging to Dav’s cloak-hem, that eyed him with familiar unease. He pressed his own horse still closer; though the Runedaur did not move, his new postulant tried to melt into the horse’s flank. Treskiel reached out with his long silver-wrapped whip to tap Rothesay under the chin; rubies on his gaunt hand burned like red stars. The Runedaur master straightened; but Treskiel’s delight in having provoked the man faded at once: the look on the Master’s face was the anticipation of rare entertainment. Suspicious, he withdrew his whip; but not his tongue.
“Recruiting from the turnip-eaters? No doubt you find them readier to your hand.” He watched the ragtag sidelong to see how his hook had set.
“This one’s Darian.”
Treskiel’s grey eyes flashed to Dav’s in surprise, and irritation at having lost the fish again. “Darian, now? You ought to train more closely to home, Master; has the Order given no thought to sharing her knowledge with her own race? Had we all your legendary prowess at the sword, we might yet be masters of our own land!”
Even Rothesay could not mistake the steely bitterness of an old and widely-cherished grievance. But Dav only inclined his regal head. “You are always welcome at my hall, Cathforrow,” he said mildly, “and any time you care to seek our tutelage, we shall be pleased to teach you all that you may wish to learn.”
If Rothesay heard the offer, Treskiel heard the rebuke. Cold fire blazed in his deep eyes, as it had so often the night before; but he sat taller in his saddle, straight and kingly, and wafted one languid hand towards his men. As smartly as a troupe of horsed chain-dancers, the soldiers parted, and Dav nodded graciously once again to the Prince of Ristover, and departed up the dark way between them. Rothesay hurried after, only too glad to be gone, and they passed on unhindered, out of Carastloel into the fir-clad silence of the great southern hills.
This land had known no other masters than the Folk of the Dragon, and seemed now little perturbed by the troubles of the north. No one here would be mocked as an edgeling, and “pig-man” would mean the blond barbarian, who ate turnips, instead of the dark imperial, who loved acorns. Padriag had always been amused that the two clashing races each relished what the other considered only fit for swine; Rothesay resented “pig” as a pejorative either way, as she had better friends among the Harrowater livestock than she did among their keepers.
The road, the best-kept she had seen since Teginau, followed the valley of the foaming Daorlas. Neat little towns dotted the way, with mills to put the busy river to work, and only hedges for walls against the wolves of the mountains.
Her ears pricked up at the southern accent all about her. Teginau-Sferan seemed clipped and lilted; this speech lolled and almost slurred. What did the voices of Anstrede sound like to men of these lands, who heard not the guttural tongue of the invader?
And all the speech about her now was courteous: as they climbed into the southern foothills, respect for the Master of Colderwild grew with every turn into something bordering reverence. Not in these lands the superstitious fear of the Geillari, nor the frosty resentment of Ristover; not here, where the influence of the mother-house of Runedaur ran like water underground from her high hill, unseen yet mastering. Rothesay began to reappraise her companion. In all their travel together, the Master had been permitting her the most outrageous familiarity in her address, till she had quite forgotten his due. Though unused to speaking to anyone of rank, she hoped she knew what was proper; but after the first day or so of forgetting her place, letting her tongue slip, and cringing from reproof that never came, she had fallen full into the habit of speaking to him as if to old Padriag, all forgetting that he was anything but damnably irritating.
Captain Dacharion, and Prince Cathforrow and his troops, had begun to remind her. When they stopped to take their noon meal in a beautiful little town that was rich enough to sport gold balls on the pillars of its gates and gold shingles on the rooftrees of its great houses and gold oak-leaf-shaped doorhandles at its inns, and the celioner, the master of the town, all dressed in rich robes stood quietly by while Dav ate, and even poured him his wine, it came fully home: if there was no longer a high king, the Master of Runedaur, at least, remained.
She followed more shyly in the afternoon, abashed to accompany one who could, and probably did, treat with kings and potentates of distant lands, Isorchia, Rodrantir, Inkirth, Mór Feria and beyond, one who could summon armies—or dismiss them, as at Carastloel. She found it hard to breathe, and she dared not look up at him.
Or rather, she tried to follow shyly, and to feel abashed by the great lord’s presence. It remained that Dav of Colderwild was damnably irritating, and it was difficult to feel reverential toward one whose morning urination in the wild woods had been for many days one’s first firm wake-up call. Moreover, she still held the moral high ground. Runedaur behaved treacherously, and their Master thought no shame of it. Dav had praised her that morning, and she had felt pleased; and yet of what worth was such praise?
“Was it really?” she asked out of nowhere, a little chill in her voice. “Lord,” she added, perfunctorily.
“Beg pardon?”
“You said my performance this morning was well done. But you admitted yesterday that Runedaur can’t be trusted. So why should I believe you? Maybe I just made a stupid idiot of myself there.”
“We can be trusted.” There was laughter in his. When she looked up dubiously, he grinned wickedly. “Of course, that hangs on precisely what it is you trust us to do.”
Her look of silent suspicion was query enough. “Why should I lie to you about your, ah, performance?” he went on.
“I have no idea.”
“Obviously; then you have no idea why I should be truthful with you, either.”
“Right.”
“Is it possible that I might have reasons or purposes for either truth or falsehood?”
“Yes; at least, I’d hope you’d have reason!”
“Then do you suppose if you could learn my purposes, you might then know what you could and could not trust me to do?”
She stared up at him, stepped into the gutter that bordered the road, flailed like a windmill to recover. Then she stumped along sullenly, working the wrench out of her ankle. “People should be honest because it is right to be honest.”
“It would make life easier,” the Master conceded. “Is easier better?”
“It’s not about being easier,” she said scornfully. “It’s about right for its own sake.”
“My apologies; I go too fast for you. There are men who are true and trustworthy because they please to be; is it so?”
“Yes; they’re called ‘good men,’” she drawled.
“And there are men who are not, because they do not please to be, yes?”
She bit her tongue on ‘like you’ and said only, “Yes, there are.”
“How do you tell one from the other?”
“What?” She started as the question ambushed her.
“Before you place your trust, of course.”
Her thoughts scattered like so many chickens. A quarter of a mile later, she finally sighed, “I cannot. And that is why men should be honest, so that one isn’t always having to wonder who can be trusted.”
“It would make life easier,” he returned blandly. “Prince Treskiel, now: do you think he can be trusted?”
She snorted. “Not as far as I could kick him!”
“Which implies more trust than it used, I fancy!” Dav laughed, and she sighed, disgusted. “Still, you misjudge him; perhaps you confuse courteousness with goodness? Treskiel of Ristover, rakehell or not, will die rather than betray his own given word: such is his pride. But you would be wise to note that he is not above goading you into error, into being the first to break trust—and freeing him to do what he will.”
She glanced up. “Is that why you kept your temper so well?”
“Kept my temper? The likes of Cathforrow have no power over my temper, chit; I have no desire for what he imagines is bait! But that is matter for another lesson. As for trust, now—why do I trust Cathforrow?”
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“Er—you know something of his, um, purposes?”
Dav reined up and dismounted, standing to lock her eyes with his. “Aye,” he said softly, “I know him well. And you will trust me—or not—by knowing me. By knowing: not by blind expectation that I will do as I ought—or that I won’t, if you’ve a cynical turn.” He fell silent; the silence awaited her reply.
“That’s—that isn’t easy . . . .”
“Worse than that, chit. When you succeed, it breaks your heart.” And he turned and walked on up the valley.
Areolin’s light failed early in the deepening vale, and the young moon followed hard behind. Under the starlight, the pale stones of the road laid a dim ribbon between dark mossy banks. A cold air flowed down, and a steam rose from the churning Daorlas. Still Dav walked on till, hours later, a dark bridge leaped the foaming river to carry the road to the eastern bank. A massive stone house shouldered this western end of the bridge, large enough to host a small army, but it stood silent now and empty.
He sent her into what seemed to be a caretaker’s quarters with orders to start up a fire, while he settled Winddancer in the stable behind. She was forced to make a magelight to discover where in the interior blackness she was supposed to do that, and was startled to find within all that she needed: a bundle of kindling, wood neatly stacked, several small tin boxes with flints and striking-steels, even candles. When she had a bright blaze going in the firepit, Dav came in with a bucket of water from the river, and the clay pot with the stew that an old woman in the last town had pressed upon them for their supper. He poured each into fine bronze pots to hang above the fire, and Rothesay came to the slow conclusion that the house was not an abandoned ruin.
Before she could ask more about it, the Runedaur lit a candle in her fire and went into a small side room. Altar furnishings glimmered; Dav knelt with the candle before a cabinet beneath, and rattled the fastening.
“Ah! Who changed the lock, now?” he murmured to himself. Curiously pleased, or at least amused, by this event, he set about defeating it, first with dagger-tip, then, when that failed, with an evilly slender bodkin hidden in his boot, and whistled a soft tune to his work. At length the cupboard opened and he withdrew a golden bowl, a gold-and-ivory tray, a shimmering blue-green cloth, a few more small but rich-looking objects like fire-colored stars in the candlelight.
Remembering the rope in Floodholding, “Er, misplacing stuff again?” she inquired cautiously.
He shot her a sidelong glance, but grinned. “This is,” he began, and paused to weigh words, “here for my use.”
“It was locked,” she challenged, and he laughed aloud.
“Of course!”
Carrying the booty to the fireside, he knelt and began an elegant, unfamiliar ritual. The silk koli draped his shoulders and hooded his head with aquamarine shot with gold; a few of the small objects were gold rings blazing with fire opals, which he set upon his fingers. He filled the bowl with wine that the celioner had given him at midday, held his hands above it, and chanted softly; she recognized the Old High Sferan, but she could not translate quickly enough to follow the meaning, though she caught mention of several of the Great Ones. Lastly he took a pinch of what was certainly salt from a tiny crystal dish, and sprinkled it in, and breathed upon it, and she gasped as the dark wine cleared and turned as blue as the koli on his head.
“The witches don’t have all the tricks,” he chuckled, and stood up with the bowl and a bit of cake on the tray, and headed for the door. “Coming?” he invited.
Outside, the moving air gusted towards a breeze. Death’s high priest clutched at the delicate koli several times on his way out upon the bridge before turning to Rothesay with an unsacerdotal oath: “Here, you wear the damned thing!”
In the middle of the span, he faced upstream, and with several more chants, spilled the wine and crumbled the biscuit into the white-fringed darkness below. Returning, he explained, “I’m expected to invoke amity between the Silent One and the Lord of Waters, to keep Daorlas tame between his banks, when I pass this way. I don’t usually bother—not in full, anyway—when it’s just us.”
Surmising that ‘us’ meant Runedaur, and that the pronoun now included her, she asked, “Why did you now, then?”
“Because, chit, I no longer know what I know—thanks to you and your manthare, Arngas. Spare me the deeper inquiry,” he warded off her budding questions with an upraised palm, “I have no answer for you yet. Is the stew hot?”
She stifled one set of questions, as well as her dismay at the priest’s admitted neglect of duty, by trying another. Over supper, she asked, “What is this place? Why is it stocked, if no one lives here?”
“There used to be a resident keeper, and longer ago, a small permanent garrison as well. Now it’s only left in order for convoys that pass, far less frequently than they used.”
“Convoys of what?”
“What is the name of the river yonder?”
“Daorlas—er, ‘gold-water’?”
“Have you marked the use of gilt in the towns we’ve passed? and how every town has a stronghold in its square? Daorlas has his springs in the richest of the empire’s mines, and this is the Gold Road to Andrastir.”
The second Perians came down from the mountains of the south, where their remote grandfathers had been masters of snow-craft; but that was no longer remembered, only hinted at by folk-tales of the deeds of ice giants. Instead they said they were descended from the Kinstrife of Isorchia, when seven great princes fought one another for twenty-one years, till the gods themselves intervened lest they destroy the world. And Mór, Knowledge, held forth seven tokens of fate, and the prince who drew the Ship set sail with all his clan, coming to Peria, where the far-travelling Callemórine traders had told them the land was fair and the streams filled with gold.
O Maolin, First-smith, maker of the foundation of the universe!
Holy is thy Hammer, mighty are thy fists of stone.
You raised the mountains from the deep places,
You burned the darkness in your forge and made it stone to bear the weight of all-that-is.
You lifted the land up to the light of heaven.
You are the maker of gold and richness,
You filled the dark and the hidden places with treasure:
Starlight you bent and forged into silver,
Your hammer sang and sunlight became gold,
And you cast it like grain in the high holy waters of the world
Dav did not cross the river the next morning, but left the road for the wilderness once more. The new-leafing trees, oak, ash, and beech, of this hilly forest were huge pillars of antiquity, and the floor thick with moss between their massive roots was clear and open, so that Rothesay felt that she walked in a vast green-lighted, green-carpeted temple. The temple held another stone circle of the fairy folk, this one surrounding a spring in a deep, silent pool; Dav looked down at her thoughtfully.
“What do these mean?” he asked, and she could only shrug. He continued to stare, his blue eyes burning and remote as if he might make her a glass through which he could see to time long past, and the answer he desired. She felt first vaguely derelict of her scholastic duty; and then suddenly, wrenchingly, bereft: these were hers, and yet by ignorance no more hers than his, whose blood bore no kinship here. She spun away, teeth sinking hard and unnoticed into her knuckled fist. The Master raised an eyebrow, and moved on in silence.
They had one brief adventure in the afternoon before they reached the Runedaur hall, an encounter Rothesay considered wholly avoidable. Dav, catching a whiff of a cooking-fire, discovered a small band of ruffianly fellows, half a dozen or so, and, without a word to her, spurred Dark Walking to full gallop through their midst, himself standing on the horse’s rump and wailing like fourteen ghosts. Turning to find the men had not the good sense to flee but grabbed for their axes and their clubs, he returned as he had come, sword drawn. Halfway back, he dismounted in a flashing somersault into a knot of them, and the horse, rearing, laid into others with hooves and teeth. The abandoned Rothesay danced on the edge of the clearing in shock and surprise and then, without thinking, swept out the sword of Arngas and charged in after.
Her next awareness was of an awful stillness, in which the rapid whisper of her breath in her nostrils seemed to fill the world. A man lay at her feet, staring at the budding leaves with pale eyes that did not see them. He was not a pretty bit of humanity; but then, ugliness was nothing to be killed for. She wondered hollowly who his mother was, and how pretty a baby he had been, how long ago.
Dav appeared silently at her elbow and picked her sword up out of the loam. Taking it, she followed him wordlessly to a mossy spot a little way off, out of sight of the camp, and accepted a rag to clean the blade. She wiped it swiftly but thoroughly, before marching smartly into the trees to relieve her revolted stomach. When she returned, white and shaking, Dav handed her what she thought was the water flask; the strange stuff burned wonderfully down her throat and stung her nose with a wild, sweet fragrance like a whole forest of cedar in the sunshine, and the world disappeared in a bright crystal glitter as her eyes filled with tears. A blessed warmth spread inside her.
“Varajeyas,” Dav grunted, answering the question she was not yet capable of asking, as she fought not to cough. “Tie this.”
She wiped her eyes and looked, to find him binding a ruddy cloth about his bloody forearm; his satin sleeve hung in tatters. She obeyed promptly, for the time forgetting her horror. They exchanged no word beyond one or two working comments on the bandaging; then Dav cleaned his own blade, and called the horse, still restless and fretting, to him. He stroked and patted Winddancer’s satiny hide and murmured unintelligibly. Rothesay envied the beast, feeling in need of more than a little patting and murmuring herself. She turned and gazed off through the trees, finding a fleeting oblivion in the yellow sunlight that slanted in, unchanged, unstained.
The Master of Runedaur, slightly tattered and bandaged but otherwise unruffled, squatted abruptly in front of her. “What,” he asked levelly, “by the Blood of the Moon Lady prompted you to do that?”
“What?”
“Yes.” When she continued to stare, Dav went on with acid exasperation. “You will learn not to act without reason; I am hoping that on this occasion, if reason is too much to ask, you have at least an explanation.”
What confounded Rothesay most was that the Master perceived any question at all. “But, you’re the teacher!”
Dav in his turn stared back for a long time. “So it seems,” he agreed softly. “Thank you; that is—most revealing. Your man back there,” he said, changing the subject abruptly with a jerk of his head towards the clearing, “is—was—one Jerrast, twenty-five or twenty-six, a vicious cutthroat my countryside is well rid of, though a fair hand with horses and dogs. He had a bit of family in Leinne Hythe—a sister or so, a wife, and his mother, of course.”
Here Rothesay realized hotly how much she hated this sovereign bastard. “Oh, thank you!” she snapped, fighting sudden tears and renewed sickness both. “Why tell me? I can’t do anything about it now—unless you count feeling miserable. . . .” She broke off, unwilling to be any more revealing.
His eyes flashed with sudden heat. “I do count it,” he replied in a low voice. “Jerrast and his kind kill without troubling to know or care who their victims might be; the Order will not bear murderers of that kind in her circles. If you will kill, you will pay the price of understanding what you do.” He stood and, looking down at her, shrugged elaborately. “Feeling miserable is not the response to understanding that I would choose—it is demoralizing, and a drain on the spirit—but it is assuredly better than nothing.” He swung to his saddle as lightly as ever, and at once resumed their journey, giving her no opportunity to prove his understanding, nor his response of choice. She did manage to bawl out a question about burial, but his answer was a brief, scornful glance. How she hated him!
Later she would come to know that the Perian underworld had learned long ago that the sudden, personal interest of Runedaur was a surer harbinger of death than a royal warrant; and if anyone had escaped them, he had not been so foolish as to advertise the fact.