Before the Mask

Chapter 1

The winter of the old man's warning came even more quickly than she had expected, collapsing the autumn of that peaceful year into a matter of days, freezing the unfallen leaves to their branches.

This day, from her sheltering cavern, L'Indasha Yman kept vigil with the rising new storm. Harsh winds from the west-from Taman Busuk-whipped through the Khalkist Mountains, bringing dark, churning clouds and the faint, watery smell of winter lightning.

The druidess peered deeply into a bucket of cinder-clouded ice, rapt in her winter auguries. Somewhere out in the mountain passes-somewhere north and west, she could tell by the smoky crazing of the ice-someone was trudging through the biting snow, through the plunging cold and the rising night.

Darkness would soon overtake him, whoever he was. And with the darkness, the infamous Breath of Neraka- the murderous mountain night winds. On nights such as this, the Breath of Neraka was cruel… merciless. Horses froze in midstride. Trails vanished in sudden avalanches. Once, not long after she had moved here, the high winds had sealed an entire party of bandits in an impenetrable shell of ice.

And that was part of it, too-part of L'Indasha Yman's unsettled vigil in the oncoming night. Between the cold and the brigands, this was deadly country, these mountains between Neraka and the plains of Estwilde, mountains that encircled the shrines of the ancient gods.

What was it the old texts had said?

Forbidding. Impossible passage.

And yet someone was trying to pass.

The wind switched directions near the entrance to the cave. Dry snow whirled in thin columns, spiraling upward into the darkness as two icy gusts seemed to war for the waning light. Then one gave way to the other, and the snow began to settle and drift as total darkness sealed over the Nerakan passes.

L'Indasha pored over the ice. It was her particular divination-the old word for it something like geletnancy, something about the memory within ice. She kept the bucket of clean water by the mouth of the cave, and on cold nights, when it glazed over, it captured the past and the present in glittering strata. Tonight the ice was difficult to read. The sudden wind had brought ashes from old fires, the obscuring haze of cinders and burning. The black particles had gathered and settled in the ice to hide the greater part of the vision, and they were melting it very quickly.

Carefully the druidess brushed at the blemished sur face of the ice, and she saw two broad paths through the mountains-one from Estwilde, the other from Gargath. Nothing else. And even that vision was fading, the ice now etched and buoyant.

He is nearby. He is almost here. I know it, she told herself. Ah. More than one of them, I think. L'Indasha's fingertips tingled and pricked. She drew up her shawl and bent lower over the bucket to see more clearly. Half a mile from the Nerakan road, wandering aimlessly north through the barren trees and the knee-deep snow, a man lurched into view.

Solamnic. She could tell by the insignia. Cloaked thinly against the terrible weather, dressed in useless armor. He was wandering, clearly lost, just far enough from the trail to be very near her cave.

The wind ripped through his robes. His beard, his gloves, and the leather lacings of his breastplate were crusted and stiff with ice, as though he had been carved from the mountain or born of the winter sky.

Solamnic, the druidess repeated to herself, lifting her eyes from the oracular ice. Probably searching for bandits. Following the sword and that pitiful code of his-bloody vows of honor and life. Let him go. She was no fool to meddle in the workings of pride and vainglory.

As she watched, the knight passed into shadow and cloud, lost at the edge of her auguries.

Let him go. Let him freeze in foolhardiness, along with his troops and followers….

Followers. Almost at once, she dismissed her scorn and resentment. No matter his foolishness and Solamnic vanities, she thought, it is a merciless night for them.

Then, as though her compassion itself had summoned them, the other two staggered into her view. Two smaller forms desperately followed the knight, their gilded, embroidered clothing already tattered by the rending wind. Then the ice abruptly cleared, the cinders dropped to the bottom of the bucket, and the vision went black.

The druidess reached for her cloak and, with a brief pass of her hand and an ancient, dry mutter, deftly lighted a torch. The green light flashed and rose and steadied in her grasp. It was a dim fire, scarcely a guide on a night like this, but the magic would keep it aglow in the terrible wind.

Daeghrefn turned to see where they were. The wind struck him full in the face, stinging the back of his throat and leaving him breathless.

In the swirl of snow and shadow behind him, he could see his family barely outlined-woman and boy, shadows against the dark sky. Abelaard was struggling bravely, of course. He guided the woman, coaxing and urging her, but the stiff wind staggered them both, and the woman stumbled, pulling the lad backward into the snow. A strange, cold peace passed over Daeghrefn as the wind switched directions, as the stragglers labored to their feet.

The woman is weakening. Upright or fallen, she is nothing to me now. If the gods will that she survive the storm, she will do so. But my son walks beside her, and he will live through this night. By Oath and Measure, that much is true. I shall see to it with the last of my own strength.

Daeghrefn tried to double his fists, but his frozen gloves would not crease. The screaming wind switched direction again-this time from due east, lancing from the top of the range down mountainside and foothill, rattling branches in the desolate Nerakan Forest and plunging straight into the path of the dazed and snow-baffled knight. He gasped and cursed, staggered again in the snow.

And then the torchlit form was in front of him, a dark outline of human or goblin or…

Clumsy as an old, besotted man, he groped with useless and disobedient fingers for his sword.

"No," said the voice at the heart of the shadow. "Come to shelter."

It was the voice of a woman, unfamiliar and young, strangely accented with the sharp, fluid music of Lemish.

"Begone!" the knight shouted.

"Don't be a fool!" the shadow urged, gesturing sweep-ingly in the blinding snow. Now she was motioning him somewhere… somewhere to the south… to shelter…

"No!" Daeghrefn roared. "He'll not have this victory as well!"

"Don't be a fool," repeated the shadow.

She extended her hand toward the struggling knight.

Again, Daeghrefn's hand grappled for the ice-crusted hilt of his sword. "Begone!" he hissed, the exclamation lost in the roar of the wind. He grunted and shouted as he tried to draw the blade, but the sword hung frozen at his belt, sealed to the sheath by an absurdly thick layer of ice.

He would have struggled there forever, until the snow took him or the shadow descended, had not Abelaard called to him over the clamoring storm.

"May we stop, Father?" the lad shouted, his voice thin and uncertain. "May we stop? We're very tired and cold."

It was a druidess, of course, who led them out of the blinding snow and into the warmth and shadow and dodging light of a nearby cavern. The heat from the fire smarted on Daeghrefn's storm-burned skin. Blinking stupidly in the sudden brightness, he glanced from wall to cavern wall, where cascades of dried lavender and rosemary hung amid comfrey and foxglove, alongside mush rooms as gnarled and black as severed hands. Two cats, lean and ancient, wrestled solemnly in a shadowy corner. The place smelled of forest, of the deep glades of Lemish and elf country.

He should have known the woman was a druidess, Daeghrefn told himself. Celebrant of the dead gods and the dead year. Instantly his caution magnified. If druidess she was, there was danger in her. They were never what they seemed, with their woodsense and muttering and their irritating mysteries. He had heard they stole babies. Now there was a thought.

"Why?" asked the druidess L'Indasha Yman, shaking the snow from her robes. She was younger than he expected. Quite lovely, for that matter-auburn-haired and tall and dark-eyed as well. The cave light did not reveal the finer details of her face, and his eyes were too frost- and wind-burned to study her clearly.

He crouched by the fire and extended his hands, regarding the druidess warily. His eyes played over the soft, dark skin of her neck, the purple pendant at her throat that filtered the firelight as stained glass catches the sun. He would not trust beauty such as this. It was entangling, beguiling…

L'Indasha noticed the stormcrow brooch, ice-encrusted, that held the man's cape uncertainly about his throat.

"You are Daeghrefn of Nidus," she noted, drawing a small iron kettle from a shadowy nook in the rocks. "The dayraven. The stormcrow. Your castle is not far from here. Why? Why do you travel on a night such as this? Where did you think you were?"

The woman cried out softly to Abelaard. The boy helped her closer to the fire.

Daeghrefn ignored them, his eyes fixed on the druidess. "You know already who and why and where," he muttered, "and you've augury enough to know more. Why ask?"

L'Indasha glared at him and stalked into the darkness, returning with the kettle brimful of water. "It would take more than augury to sound this foolishness," she said, soothing the man's wife with a soft brush of her hand. "Out in the Khalkists on the worst of winter nights, your wife and small son behind you like a straggling infantry. What could have…?" Like the melting of ice or the settling of ashes, a slow awareness seeped into LTndasha's mind. She tried to hide her face when the truth came to her, but Daeghrefn saw it.

"Ah," she breathed. "You've been cuckolded, haven't-" The druidess glanced down at the woman. The thin cloak had fallen and now revealed the source of the woman's crying. She was about to give birth.

L'Indasha didn't finish the sentence. Daeghrefn lurched up angrily with a clatter of breastplate and greaves.

"It is not your concern, druidess," he growled. He wished for a secret blade, for a sudden lapse of the Oath, and surprised himself with his own edged and ready anger. "Nose into your vegetation and your failed gods if you want," he murmured, his voice deep and menacing. "Pry into the heart of the oak and the phases of the moon, into whatever mysteries and omens you consult when your wits fail you. But keep out of my affairs."

The druidess stared at him darkly.

Brown, he thought absently as the wind outside whistled and eddied. Her eyes are brown…

His wife cried out again in Abelaard's small arms. "Too soon!" she wailed, her long scream rising in pitch and volume until it became deafening, as chilling as the wind in the mountain passes below.

Daeghrefn covered his ears as L'Indasha rushed to attend the woman. And then, as suddenly as it began, the scream cut off. One of the cats yawned in the cave's far corner.

L'Indasha's face was grim. The woman's pulse fluttered and faded, then surged again as she cried out in agony. Reaching for the kettle, for soothing herbs-for anything-the druidess cast her eyes on the bucket by the mouth of the cave.

The last of the moonlight played almost cruelly over the ice. On the glazed surface of the water, the light took the form of thick stone, the snow like white robes swirling around a distant childbed…

Another child. Another child was being born tonight. It was the other face, the brother to this bastard child. Somewhere, in some warm and nurturing country. But this poor woman lay moaning in an icy cavern, her first son young and helpless, her husband unbalanced and venomous… L'Indasha Yman fought down her anger and bent to the work of the night.

Huma's kin were being born.

Somewhat later, in the uncanny silence, something in the depths of the cavern stirred from its hibernation with a stifled, painful cry. Daeghrefn strained to make out the distant sound as the creature scuttled deeper into the cave, where its cry echoed and redoubled back.

"… and you have all but killed her! The child was not ready. It is turned about wrong and cannot come forth!"

He startled. It was L'Indasha Yman shouting in his ear. | How long had she been there railing at him-some gibberish about the woman, about the child she was bearing? Daeghrefn closed his ears to the wailing, to the druidess's words. He turned toward the mouth of the cave, put his back to his son and the two women, and reckoned out an old impartial calendar.

Too soon. The wretch had said too soon. Yes, it was. He had found her out much too soon. She had thought to fool him, but "I need your help!" the druidess shouted, penetrating his icy wall of silence, her voice colder still.

"Ask your gods," Daeghrefn insisted, his back to her.

The druidess sighed. Daeghrefn seated himself at the cave's entrance. Silent, unmoved by her incessant pleas for help in the lifting and pushing, by the rustle and clamor of Abelaard's clumsy assistance, the knight drew his sword and stared into the wheeling snow. The moonlight broke fitfully through the mountainous clouds, silver on red, and for a moment, he thought he saw the strange black magelight of Nuitari.

An hour passed, or more.

Finally the cry of the infant broke in the stormy air. It was muted, desperate, as though the newborn child had fallen into the depths of the cave.

"You have a son," the haggard druidess announced coldly, holding a swaddled thing toward the fire for warmth.

"I have a son?" Daeghrefn replied sardonically. "That is no news. He followed me to this cavern. He served you bravely, where even a midwife would have faltered."

There was a long silence.

"What will you name this child?" the druidess asked.

Daeghrefn stared more deeply, more intently, into the storm. Name the child? He turned the sword over in his palm. Why should he even keep it, let alone name it?

Triumphant, exhausted, Abelaard took the baby from L'Indasha and presented it to Daeghrefn. "He's beautiful, don't you think, Father? What will you call him?"

When he heard the boy's voice, Daeghrefn sheathed the sword. Abelaard was here. He could not kill the baby. But he would find a way to leave it with this sorceress-good payment for her trouble, he mused. So now was the time for omens, for auguries of his own, for the naming was Daeghrefn's by the Measure, no matter who was the child's father. Its mother was, still and all, his wife. And, more importantly, Abelaard's mother.

Daeghrefn set down the sword and steepled his hands, still stiff and red from the cold.

Yes, now was the time for names. A time to answer his wife in kind for her cruelty and betrayals. He thought of ice, of loneliness, of forbidding passage…

Winterheart? Hiddukel?

He smiled spitefully at the second of the names. God of injustice. The broken balance.

But, no. There was a certain evil grandeur to the names of the dark gods. He would confer no grandeur on this child.

As if it had been summoned, a large tomcat, lean and ragged, slinked out of the inclement darkness, snow spangling its half-frozen fur. Daeghrefn regarded the creature in horrified fascination. This is the omen, he thought. The name is about to come to me. The cat carried something large and limp in its mouth-a dripping entanglement of matted fur and dirt and torn flesh.

A winter kill. A rat or a mole, perhaps. Something tunneling blindly beneath the snow, scratched from the hard earth, chittering and scrabbling in its dark nest.

Daeghrefn closed his eyes, warmed by his bloody imaginings. "Verminaard," he announced proudly. "The child's name is Verminaard. For he is vermin, dwelling in darkness and filth like his damned father."

L'Indasha's eyes widened in amazement. Quietly she mpved to Abelaard's side. A shriek from Daeghrefn's wife pierced through the hush, through the knight's pronouncements and curses.

"Ah, no!" The druidess turned sharply, a new trouble in her voice.

Daeghrefn sat silently, his eyes closed. From the commotion, from the druidess's whispered instructions to the lad, the knight imagined the scene unfolding behind him.

The druidess knelt above the woman, her ministrations frantic and swift. But soon, inevitably, she sighed, her hands slowing, her touch more benediction than healing. Sorrowfully she pushed the boy and the baby away, gesturing toward a straw mattress in a candlelit alcove off the main cavern.

Abelaard lingered above his dying mother for a moment, his eyes dull and unreadable. A well-schooled Solamnic youth, he did as he was told, his emotions veiled behind the stern tutelage of his masters. And yet he was only a child, and for a moment, he bent low, his stubby fingers cradling the head of his newborn brother, and reached down to touch his mother's whitened cheek with the back of his hand. Then, with a soft and nonsensical whisper, he carried the baby to the alcove and settled onto the straw, wrapping a thin wool blanket about the both of them. Soon the infant nestled against his brother and slept deeply and silently.

"She's dead," L'Indasha announced scarcely an hour later. " 'Gone to Huma's breast,' as your Order says. What will you do now?"

Daeghrefn sniffed disgustedly, his eyes fixed on the wintry landscape beyond the cave entrance. The storm was swelling, the wind rising. The red moon Lunitari peeked from behind the racing clouds, flooding the snow with a staining crimson light.

The knight turned slowly, the side of his face bathed in the hovering torchlight. For a moment, he looked like a skeletal wraith, like the Death Knight of the old legends, through whose hands had slipped the power to turn back the Cataclysm.

"And who are you to question me, idolater?" he mur mured, his voice low and menacing, like the humming of distant bees or the high whirring sound of the rocks over Godshome. "You have no claim on me or on my son." He gestured vaguely toward Abelaard, his sword waving grotesquely in the mingling light of the fire and the spinning moons. "You have no claim on any of us. Not even that dead harlot's get," he concluded venomously and stepped suddenly toward the fire, brushing the snow from his mantle.

L'Indasha inwardly shrank from the knight. Instinct told her to fly, to scatter elusive magic and escape in the confusion, to burrow into the sheltering dark… But she squarely faced the knight and fought back with words calculated to wound.

"This child will eclipse your own darkness," she proclaimed, holding the baby above the firelight, holding him out to Daeghrefn. Her voice rang in the ancient inflections of druidic prophecy and sheer rage. "And his hand will strike your name. But I will not tell you the rest."

Daeghrefn laughed harshly. It was ridiculous druidic babble. Then her blazing eye caught his.

Her anger was real.

Daeghrefn held her gaze. Dire things passed briefly through his mind, and for a moment, the sword turned in his hand, the melted snow beading ominously on the sheath's carved raven. He would make her retract it. He would bury the blade in…

No. He would send Robert back here to… clean out this cave.

"So?" he said, shaking his head slowly, distractedly, his eye passing over the new child's fair hair and creamy skin. He beckoned for Abelaard. The boy approached him, stopping only to take the baby from the druidess and hold him cautiously in his shivering, thin arms.

"Druidic nonsense," the knight whispered. Then louder, his voice cold and assured, he added, "Put on your cloak, Abelaard, and leave the child." He stared bale-fully at the druidess. "We must be off for Nidus while there's aught of the night to travel. It's still a good walk home, by my reckoning."

The boy put on his garment, but he would not give the baby back to the druidess. "I've looked forward to a brother for so long, Father. Please. We must take care of him."

Daeghrefn could refuse Abelaard nothing short of this request. Nothing short, but not this.

"No," he replied.

The druidess stepped forward and placed her hand on Abelaard's shoulder, an idea forming as she spoke.

"No, Daeghrefn," she began, a dry warning in her voice. "You'll keep this child and keep him well. If you leave him-or worse-all those in your command will know of your cuckolding. And who would follow such a man? You cannot be undone before them, can you?"

Daeghrefn's dark eyes locked onto L'Indasha's, and she knew she had won his undying hatred.

And the baby's life.

"Nidus is ten miles from here," she urged, calmly holding his vacant stare. "You have seen our weather. You have challenged the storm enough for tonight."

Daeghrefn broke his gaze and removed his boots. For a moment, L'Indasha's hopes rose, until she realized he was only drying them by the fire, preparing for the long trek through the mountains.

"You have heard the stories," she began quietly, "about these mountains in the winter."

"I've no time for lore," Daeghrefn objected.

L'Indasha persisted. She told Daeghrefn about the frozen horses, the dozens of travelers irrecoverably lost. She told him of the bandits, sealed in ice like insects in a million years of amber. All the while her touch was light on the shoulder of the boy. Daeghrefn did not listen, but

Abelaard did.

As she knew he would.

And it was enough. When Daeghrefn drew on his boots and walked to the mouth of the cave, Abelaard remained by the fire. "Father?" he asked, his voice thin and uncertain.

Daeghrefn turned to him warily.

"Can't we just wait out the night here?" Abelaard pleaded. "We left Laca's castle ten days ago. We're away from the bad place now. Tomorrow we can all go home. The baby, too. Please, Father."

As he looked into Abelaard's hollow eyes, something in the knight seemed to turn and soften. It was sudden and unforeseen, as a line of troops will break in the midst of a pitched battle. Daeghrefn's shoulders slumped, and slowly he removed his sodden gloves.

"I suppose," he began, "that a night's stay could not altogether harm us, Abelaard. But just one night, mind you. We'll be home at Nidus on the morrow, regardless of storm or cold."

"One night is all you will need," the druidess said, for the lad's encouragement more than Daeghrefn's information. "Storms blow over quickly here, and there will be sun and a clear path come morning."

"We're off to Nidus regardless," the knight insisted, staring into the fire.

L'Indasha buried the dead woman at the far end of a side cavern, deep in the soft clay floor, while Daeghrefn huddled in blankets around the fire and Abelaard fed the newborn something the druidess had mixed and warmed for him.

When she finished singing the funeral prayers, they all slept. Twice in the night L'Indasha stirred-once at the roar of wind across the high plateau/carrying the cry of a dozen lost travelers beyond her help in the hills of Est-wilde, and once when the baby awoke and whimpered. It was the baby's cry that brought her to full waking. It began softly and rose steadily until she heard Abelaard's voice join with it awkwardly, singing a Solamnic lullaby. The child's voice was small and fragile amid the roar of wind tumbling through the surrounding hills.

May. your gods keep you, L'Indasha thought, a modest spell shielding her ears against the plaintive sounds of the children in the center of the cave. If your gods can do anything, may they keep you in the days to come.