XI: The Grasp of the Madroch

Raian, styled na Drogh, twirled his stylus end over end over end, from one finger to another in one direction, then back, in smooth circles of distraction; when that failed to produce inspiration, he changed hands. On the desk before him, neatly inscribed in dark wax, lay his working of Sfane Mórlos’ derivation of latitude from the length of day, one of the proofs so gracefully presented in the mosaics of his home. Only a short while ago, working it through for the third tedious time, comprehension had dawned in radiant glory: its intricate elegance lit up his mind, amazed him with unexpected beauty, ignited pride in his own intellectual power. He had turned, physically turned in his seat, to share the prize by explaining it over again to Rothric.

After she had left him wedged in the tree, the burn of wounded pride drove him home, leaving her to tread her lonely pilgrimage and him to scorn all womankind as pigheaded fuddlebrains. That had lasted a day or two. Then he decided she had been too distressed to hear any other counsel but flight; but when he would have followed after, he could find no trace, either owing to her queerly light tread or having fallen in another Uissig stream. He had some impression that she was heading south; but she had never said where, still less why. To blunt the fangs of frustration and fear, he had flung himself into the studies in which she had caught him short, till he almost succeeded in forgetting why the hunter had become the scholar. Till today.

After a while, he flung the stylus down. It bounced up animatedly and, as if making a break for it, cartwheeled out the open window. From the garden two floors below came a skirl of girlish shrieks:

“Eek!”

“Cena, it flew in your hair!”

“Eeew, a bug!”

Raian made a break for the street.

The heat of the long summer day, beaten into the stones of the city by Great Areolin’s golden hammer, flowed back out into the sunset-shadowed air, mingled with the heady breath of jasmine and gardenia, clematis and rose that embraced all Teginau in green and pliant arms. And the city surrendered, cast off the businesslike dolor of the day, to indulge Summer’s seduction. The chatter on the streets or through enclave-gates took on a lyrical lilt. Gauzy-dressed women rippled out into the rosy sundown glow, and men with flowers spilling from their hands followed laughing after.

Raian stalked alone like one last shard of winter. He passed an inn of the cheaper sort; in its porch lingered other shadows: silent with fatigue, dark in the travel-stained clothes that were probably their last possessions, a group of refugees from the destruction of Fallwdd in the lowlands only a fortnight ago.

Raian slouched past, pretending to take no notice. Then he spun about and marched back, holding himself tall.

“Welcome to Teginau.” He did not smile; their grief was too fresh for that.

The group stirred, shuffled; some reply emerged, murmured too low to be made out. Raian pulled out a palmful of silver coins, Uissigari binta, from his pocket and laid them on the low wall of the porch near the man he took to be their leader—the father, maybe, or eldest uncle.

The man stiffened like one struck, and a small fire kindled in his weary eyes; Raian saw the muscles of his face tauten with hatred of his need for the little silver pile. “We’ll not take that,” he sneered, or tried to. A woman holding a sleeping child turned her face away.

“I am Raian na Drogh, of Raingold,” he pointed back up the street, and then nodded at the coins. “When you are rested, stranger, is time enough to talk about fair exchange.” He made the band a little bow and started to turn away. Uncle grabbed his shoulder and stared at him a moment longer, before thrusting out a scarred and bandaged hand. Raian took it carefully. Uncle took the coins with his free hand. “We’ll be there, Raingold,” he swore huskily. The light of pride recouped that lit the stranger’s face, Raian never after forgot.

He had done it for Rothric: tired, tattered and bewildered, they had reminded him of her. Was she, too, fleeing the conquest of her home? Somehow, that did not seem to fit; there was the wizard she had mentioned—

“Woooo-woo-woo!”

A ring of assailants sprang up around him, with taunting voices and threatening moves. In his preoccupation, Raian had wholly forgotten his usual street caution. He slapped his back to the alley wall beside him and both his dirks leaped to his hands.

His attackers hooted with laughter. “Oh, what is it—dreaming of your girlfriend, na Drogh?” cooed Calion.

“Thinking of sticking me with those, boy?” drawled the Wolfman invitingly.

Raian sighed, half-relieved, half-embarrassed, and slipped his knives back in his sleeves. “Yah, lads, guess you caught me fair!”

“Yah, that we did!” agreed squeaky little Fraoch, coquetting up against him like some hussy girl. Startled and uncomprehending, Raian shoved him away.

“Question is, how?” Wolfman chuckled darkly. “What’s on your mind, dream-boy?”

“His long-lost sweetie, no doubt,” chimed in Brahald. “Thinking back on those—” he thrust a dramatic hand deep into his blond curls and struck a harlot’s pose, and in throaty accents finished, “nights of wild passion.”

Wolfman glowered, mostly as a tease, but there was real question in his face as well: “My boy went and got himself made a man, and without a word—not one word—to me? Tch, tch, tch.”

“What??”

“Don’t be coy, boy. Your precious Rothric—or was it,” his voice trilled into falsetto, “Rothrica?”

Raian was stunned. “What are—you—talking about?”

They stared back, momentarily silenced. Wolfman recovered first, with a wild howl of disbelieving laughter. “You mean—you didn’t—didn’t you know—woo-hoo-hoo!”

The others brayed, and struck up a chorus: “Rothric is a gir-ull! Rothric is a gir-ull!”

“And you slept with her!”

“Three nights!”

“Or was it four?”

Raian struck for the Wolfman’s bushy beard, his left sleeve and right knee. Though Wolfman was a good head taller, two years older, and a fair enough street fighter, he was no match for his young leader, especially not in this mood. In a few fierce moments, Raian had him pinned to the alley cobbles.

“I knew Rothric was a girl,” he grated savagely. “I also knew she didn’t want that known—and tried to respect that! What I’m trying to ask, you great rug, is: how do you come to know that—and why now?”

Calion held out his hand. In the alley’s shadow, the three coins looked like little moons in his palm. Raian leaped up, releasing the Wolfman. In a moment, all four boys were displaying their silver booty: twelve coins, twice what he had given the refugees, and not binta at all.

“And those mean—?”

“This fellow’s in town,” Wolfman began.

“Looking for this girl,” Fraoch interrupted, with a glare at Wolfman. “I see him at the East Guardhouse, showing this picture—charcoal or something, sketched on parchment, looks like Rothric. Only he says Rossathay or something, and asks if anyone’s seen ‘her,’ says she’s dressed so and so and so, like a boy, and I say, I saw her, and he gives me one.” Fraoch held up one for display. “So I play dumb—”

“Acting natural,” murmured Brahald.

“And coax two more out of him, and think: why not look out for my brothers?” He gestured expansively to the other three, who all pulled heroic poses. “I say, go find Calion—he knows more.”

“And I said Brahald knew her better—”

“Who sent him on to me,” Wolfman intervened. Brahald smacked the side of his head. “I told him you saw her last.”

Raian scowled. “Who is ‘he’?”

Wolfman licked his square teeth. “Foreigner—I mean foreign, not just Lowland! Oily sort,” he went on thoughtfully, “sort of a vampire, you ask me.” He grinned hugely, savagely, and stretched out his twined hands to crack his furry knuckles. “I think we ought to show him the dark side of Highland hospitality—if you take my meaning. After you collect yours, lord-to-be.”

At that, Raian looked ruefully down at himself. Lightsolstice was little more than a week off; he was wearing the white short tunic, vestlike falca, and leggings that marked him as one of the youths awaiting the Proving on that holy day. Traditional garb, meant to symbolize stainless honor and strength in purity, its chief function, he believed, was to announce to every tedious old gaffer in the country or the city that they had one last month in which to inflict their opinions on the youths thus glaringly set apart; he had studied in his rooms ever longer and harder as this month of white wore on.

Stainless and pure he was no longer, nor even quite whole: his tussle with the Wolfman left him more dapple-grey than white, a sleeve dangled loose, and one knee had ripped out and blood stained the shin.

“Your nanny’s going to blister you for that!” Fraoch laughed.

“Her last chance. Where’s this foreigner?”

They strode off, Raian at the center of the square of boys and brooding on Wolfman’s epithet. For now, the others treated the nobleman’s son with barely more respect than each other; they were all boys together—Wolfman’s legal manhood notwithstanding. In a short while, though, when the priests of holy Kavin were done with him, Raian would be indeed a lord, to be revered, even feared, by them. Of course, once they too were men before the law, he could, and would, award them places in his house and guard, especially as he was a younger son and no one would be too particular about his choice of friends. But there was still an awkwardness to get over till then: that loyal little bantam Fraoch, nobly born himself, had two more years of childhood yet to go. Raian wondered if it would work, to make him a kind of page for the time.

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When they reached a low tavern in the Teamsters’ Quarter, it was all but full dark: a ribbon of purple over the western horizon glowed like a dragon’s eye, the spear-point of Saclir Feith Mountain black as its pupil. Raian stared back at it unblinking.

“He’s in there,” said Wolfman, peering through a broken shutter. “I’ll go get him.”

“No, stay here. In fact, all of you, get out of sight,” Raian ordered. “I’m going in.”

“Dagn’s Hounds you will, boy. ‘Men only,’ in the Cock’s Comb. You walk in there—especially dressed for Proving!—and they’ll Prove you, all right: one of those ‘how far can he fly?’ proofs.”

“That’s the idea. Stay out of sight. And don’t come to my rescue: let him do that.”

Raian na Drogh proved to fly less far than a cock, and a little further than a corn sack of similar size. He hit the cobbles rolling easily, but feigned hurt till the dark foreigner feigned compassion, and came hurrying out to him: Wolfman had described his liegeman well, and Raian had made a loud scene in the smoky inn. He let the stranger help him to his feet.

“Ra Iann a Drog?” the man inquired presently.

Raian remembered to be surprised. “You know me?”

“Boys, they say: so big, so dark, dressed white.” He cast a critical eye over Raian’s tattered clothes, and grinned. “Hey, it was, yes? Look, I’m looking for a girl, pretty girl, very pretty girl, but dressed like a boy. Here.”

He handed over a scrap of parchment; Raian turned it to the Cock’s Comb’s lamps. It was not charcoal. He tried to smudge an edge of the sketched hair, with little success, and wondered what made the mark. As for the sketch itself, it was a fair enough likeness.

“A girl? Dressed like a boy? What for?”

The man shrugged. “She’s scared. She’s running. She maybe thinks it’s a disguise.”

“Running from what?”

“Family enemies,” he said smoothly. “We want to find her first.”

“Before her family does?”

The foreigner shot him an evil look, then decided to treat it as a joke. “You’re funny. I am paid by Eirenseld, to take her home to Eirenseld—her mother’s people.”

Eirenseld. Raian had heard the name, but little more. One of the older clans of Daria, he thought. He was also sure this weasel-like lordling spoke the truth; he wondered why it sounded like an unpleasant truth for Rothric.

“What’s her name?”

“Your friends say she calls herself Rothric.” Raian stared patiently. Presently the foreigner pulled out one of his silver coins—they’re Darian, then, Raian thought—and pressed it into the boy’s palm. “I must hurry.” When Raian still made no reply, he added a second, and, finally, grudgingly, a third. Raian rolled them thoughtfully in his hand.

“They’re pulling your leg,” he said suddenly, coolly. “Or, rather, they’re pulling mine: they’ve been teasing me about girls one way or another for weeks.” He plucked at his formerly-white silk in explanation. “I can’t help you.” He made the man a bow and strode back into the night.

A block later, his ‘men’ rejoined him, celebrated his duplicity, admired his information-collection (which evolved into full-blown interrogation by the time they neared Raingold Enclave), and stared in surprise as he approached a lone woman nursing an infant in a dark inn-porch.

“I found these—in a gutter,” he said, giving her the Darian coins. “Uthaar the moneychanger in Silver Street’s the best.”

She looked down at them as if she would cry. “Your mother shall be very proud of you,” she murmured in a rich Lowland brogue. Raian bowed and hurried away; and only too late wondered why she had said ‘shall be.’

For his part, the Darian Haukur knew he had been lied to, but that rather pleased than annoyed him. He knew where this naive child lived; shadowing him for a few days should reveal a great deal, and it was even possible that he was hiding the girl somewhere nearby. The quest might prove far shorter than he feared. He ambled back in to the Cock’s Comb, bought a round for all, and listened to yet another account of the wild, failed attempt to burn a vagabond back in the spring.

He loitered all next day near Raingold’s main gate on the steep-falling Street of the Emeralds, but the boy never appeared. Haukur wiped a snarl from his lips. If the brat had been confined as punishment for spoiling his pretty clothes, he would have to find some other approach. At last, querying a servant, he learned that, far from being confined, Raian had stayed the night with his friend Fraoch, and had not come home at all.

Fraoch was at home at Treestone Enclave, at his supper, said a servant. Raian, he thought, had left a few hours before, as far as could be told in the tide of boys that surged in and out under the law of no moon. Where to? Anywhere was likely with that band!

The next day no one claimed to have seen Raian at all, and no one but the tutor Thornac cared: the boy was known to wander for days at a time. Haukur worried that his mark had given him the slip, after all, till he learned about the impending ceremony of manhood that the ruined white clothes had portended. He resigned himself to the wait, took his ease in Teginau’s inns, paid several courtesy calls to the sacred courtesans in the Fane of Night, and generally spent Hautiger’s money in the best comfort he had had since leaving a Geste.

Days passed. Raingold grew uneasy, then angry, with the truant. Then, three days before Lightsolstice, the morning Raian’s vigil was to begin, the household panicked: their man-to-be was gone. Haukur cursed the boy, the inns, the courtesans, Rothesay and all Eirenseld, but none of them inspired him with where to go next.

So Cúrullan, having dogged him as far south as he felt warranted, dressed as a Raingold servant and nudged him towards Aellicia, Floodholding, and, with any luck, Colderwild.

On a cool and misty dawn early in Dannin, Raian na Drogh woke in his sweet spruce-bough nest, rolled to his feet, and shivered into clothes still damp from swimming the Nanfeill the night before. For a moment he stood, listening to the wakening woods. Then he planted an ungentle foot on the blanketed mound beside him and shoved enthusiastically.

“Rise and greet the blushing Maiden of the Dawn, sluggard!”

The blankets growled. Raian shoved again. A dark and furry head appeared and Wolfman pried open one dawn-despising eye. “Madman!” he swore, not for the first time. “How did I ever let you bewitch me into this?”

“You’re stupid?” Raian suggested. Wolfman erupted from the blankets like a vengeful ghoul from its grave. Raian dodged, rolled, and came up flinging their smaller cookpot at his friend’s naked belly. “Go get us some water, man, and I’ll start a fire.”

“Suppose I just piss in it?”

“You mean you don’t? What the devil do you do to the oatmeal, then?”

Wolfman swatted him and grumbled off to his task, leaving his own clothes till after his swim.

“Otterman, I should call you,” Raian observed as his friend dressed at last after having used the washing-up as an excuse for one last swim.

Wolfman grunted and laced his boot savagely. “Can’t call you ‘man’ anything, boy. Tell me again why it was so monstrously urgent that we go, right then, not even stay for your own holy Proving.”

“Because he’s a killer, Wolf. I have to find her first.”

Wolfman flicked an ant off his knee. “You think that was her they meant last night?” He jerked his head riverward, signifying Floodholding, their three days’ interrogation of its inhabitants, and one last tavern even scummier than the Cock’s Comb.

“How many tall skinny raggedy idiots can there be this side of the Myrinine?”

“That idiot sounds like she can use those swords you mentioned—”

“Against a Darian assassin? And now maybe the Runedaur have taken her. . . . Do you know anything about the Order, Wolf?”

Wolfman licked his teeth. “Only what they do to people who can answer ‘yes’ to a question like that,” he retorted. “My boy-man, I’ll eat Darian assassins for breakfast, and pick my teeth with berserker’s bones, but I never counted on tangling with the Death-knights. Not that.”

Raian looked down at him soberly. “Do you want to go home?”

Wolfman glared up, turned his head and spat. “Madman,” he growled, hoisted up with his pack, and struck off southward.

A mile or so later, the heavy mist (“‘Blushing,’ my fat fettucas,” the Wolfman snarled) was slashed by the lion-scream of war pipes from high in the eastern air. Answering pipes from the west howled their defiance. A roar as of a wind rising to smash the very hills rolled up the valley. The two friends’ eyes met: battle! Needing no word between them, they scrambled down the deepening glen to catch a glimpse of the contest, and fought to attain both speed and silence.

When they dropped out from under the roof of fog, silence meant nothing: the air shuddered with the pounding of boots and hooves; roared with the gale of shouted slogans, orders, insults; rang with bronze and the screams of death. Raian swarmed up a tall beech and skinnied out on a limb for a comprehensive view; Wolfman followed but, a stone or so heavier, stayed close to the trunk.

A snow lion and black vulture feathers made the token of the blue-and-yellow easterners; an inverted great-axe and a horse’s tail marked the yellow-and-black westerners. Presently Raian’s quick eyes picked out smaller bands within each army: men of closer kin, most likely, used to drilling together. Watching the monolithic clash, Raian suddenly wished he could reach out and pick up this band and bring them in flanking from over here; shape this group into a wedge to drive through that one. The great-axe men were outnumbered, and the men of the snow lion fought with terrifying ferocity; but the ferocity seemed almost frenzy, and if the Great-axes could only pierce here, and here, and here, draw the Snow-lions into that marshy flat by the stream, gain control of yonder thicket, they could yet tip the balance. Wolfman watched his young friend punch the air or strike the branch, and laughed, thinking he understood the enthusiasm: he himself fought down his first rush of battle fever and an urge to leap down and join in, on either side or none but his own.

The mist lifted, steaming, and Areolin climbed to noon. The warriors of the Snow Lion owned the valley. For a little while, the golden light seemed like a victor’s mantle upon their triumph; and then, stern and pitiless, it burned away the veil of glory to expose glory’s price. After War’s exuberance came Death’s labor, and the survivors turned slowly, weary as the dance of rage stilled in their blood, to gather up the dead and the dying. Deep in the beech’s green shadow, Raian and Wolf sat silent and sick.

Wagons came over the eastern hillside, and horses with litters and sledges, and all through the melting-hot afternoon men gleaned the bloody crop, till only the western dead, despoiled of everything but their yellow-and-black shirts, remained. Soon their great-axe sisters and mothers would race the sunset and the wolves, maybe even a lion of the four-footed kind, to bring their fallen in out of the reach of ghouls and blood-spirits.

Not till the last wagon vanished back over the hill did either youth venture to move. Wolfman slipped down first. Following thoughtfully, suddenly Raian glimpsed movement, to the west, where the little stream emerged from a dark glade.

Under the trees, out of reach of Areolin’s revealing rays, a woman stood half-crouched—or something in woman-shape, for she could not have been less than twelve feet tall, upright. Naked she was, wrapped loosely in the long leafy vines that were her hair. She had been cruelly beaten: ugly bruises and black-oozing gashes mottled her dim green skin from breast to belly to thigh. She reached out with dripping hands twisted like claws towards the battle-clearing, where the stream vanished in the black churned mud and no green herb showed from forest edge to edge. Her black lips drew back in a curl of rage and pain from wolflike teeth, and a pinpoint of red fire flamed in each black eye.

Raian blinked and shook his head, and she was gone. He half-slid, half-fell the rest of the way to the ground.

“You all right?” said the Wolfman, startled.

“Yah. Come on, let’s go.” He led the way around the eastern edge of the clearing, careful to keep under cover of the forest roof, though he felt certain the thing would not cross out into the sunlight.

“I kept wishing I’d had charge of that battle,” he went on quickly, trying not even to think about her. “I just know I could have won it for the other army.”

“Yah, a great strategist now, you are,” Wolfman sneered, out of a habit of mockery, though he was quite prepared to believe Raian could do nearly anything. After a moment he added, “So, what would you have done?”

Raian told him, talking fast, walking fast, eager to be out of the creature’s domain before twilight, eager also to believe that she was only a phantasm of the afternoon’s heat. He fluttered his tunic to fan air over the sweat trickling down his body, to little effect. The linen stuck where it touched.

Wolfman stopped him with a hand on his arm. Alarmed, Raian pulled in return. “Come on, Wolf!”

“Ssh!” Wolfman did not move except only his head, scanning, searching the silent forest. Too silent. Raian’s daggers flicked to his hands and his back met Wolfman’s.